American Schools in Crisis

This from Diane Ravitch in the Saturday Evenming Post:

If you read the news magazines or watch TV, you might get the impression that American education is deep in a crisis of historic proportions. The media tell you that other nations have higher test scores than ours and that they are shooting past us in the race for global competitiveness. The pundits say it’s because our public schools are overrun with incompetent, lazy teachers who can’t be fired and have a soft job for life.

Don’t believe it. It’s not true.

Critics have been complaining about the public schools for the past 60 years. In the 1950s, they said that the public schools were failing, Johnny couldn’t read, and the schools were in a downward spiral. In the 1960s, we were told there was a “crisis in the classroom.” For at least the past half-century we have heard the same complaints again and again. Yes, our students’ scores on international tests are only average, but when the first such test was given in 1964, we were 12th out of 12. Our students have never been at the top on those tests.

The critics today would have us believe that our future is in peril because other nations have higher test scores. They said the same thing in 1957 when the Soviet Union sent its Sputnik into orbit and “beat us” by being first. At the time, the media were filled with dire predictions and blamed our public schools for losing the space race. But we’re still here, and the Soviet Union is gone.

Maybe those tests are not good predictors of future economic success or decline. Is it possible that we succeeded not because of test scores but because our society encourages something more important than test scores: the freedom to create, innovate, imagine, and think differently? ...

Ravitch Face-Off with Brill

Steven Brill, the author of Class Warfare and the founder of The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV finds himself in a contentious debate on C-SPAN.


His book tells the story of a coalition of unlikely allies in the fight to change a school system that many parents believe is failing the nation's children.

This story is contested by former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/StevenB

Diane Ravitch, the anti-Michelle Rhee

Michelle Rhee went from DCPS to national crusader.

Along the way, a 72-year old historian became her top critic

This from the Washington City Paper:

In the month of April, Diane Ravitch, the 72-year-old preeminent historian of American education, sent 1,747 tweets, an average of about 58 messages per day, many between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.

On May 20 alone, Ravitch tweeted 99 times to her 13,000 followers. Linking to the news of a D.C. Public Schools investigation into test tampering under former chancellor Michelle Rhee, she asked: “How can teachers be evaluated by student test scores, when the scores are so often manipulated and inaccurate?” Throughout the day, she mused on the shortcomings of standardized tests, whose ubiquity in American schools she has compared—with characteristic hyperbole—to “the Chinese cultural revolution.”

“Life’s problems do not translate into four possible answer[s],” she tweeted...

Snippets

• Ravitch...note[s] that President Obama, whose education policies she opposes, is given more time to prove himself—four years—than the average teacher, who usually gets two or three years to win tenure.
• Somewhat improbably, this former education official from the first Bush administration has emerged as the most media-savvy progressive critic of the reform campaign embraced by everyone from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates—a campaign that, in the public mind, is perhaps most associated with Rhee.
• [H]er 13th book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System...was rejected by 15 publishers [before it] became a best seller.
• Ravitch decided sometime around 2006 that there was actually no evidence that any of those policies improved American education. She now believes that the “corporatist agenda” of school choice, teacher layoffs, and standardized testing has undermined public respect for one of the nation’s most vital institutions, the neighborhood school, and for one of society’s most crucial professions: teaching. The best way to improve American education, the post-epiphany Ravitch argues, is to fight child poverty with health care, jobs, child care, and affordable housing.
• Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter dubbed Ravitch the “Whittaker Chambers of school reform,” declaring her Gates’ “biggest adversary” for speaking out against the Microsoft founder’s efforts to bring corporate efficiency standards to public schools.
• If her late emergence as a liberal hero strikes progressives as ironic, it infuriates the Rhee fans who dominate both the Obama administration and the GOP. Critics call Ravitch a self-promoter, an opportunist, and a scholar who picks evidence to support her conclusions, rather than vice versa—in other words, a lot of the same things Rhee’s critics say about her.
• Ravitch was never purely a creature of the left. As the counterculture took root in the mid-1960s, she was busy with two all-consuming projects—motherhood ... and research on what would become her celebrated 1974 history of the New York City public schools, The Great School Wars. She was attracted to the topic because she was fascinated by the era’s battles between community-control advocates, teachers, administrators, and the United Federation of Teachers. It was black vs. Jew, organized labor vs. New Left. And, in Ravitch’s view, the era also involved too many misguided philanthropists “playing God in the ghetto” by supporting new-fangled identity-politics curricula at the expense of traditional liberal arts. Ravitch’s criticisms of that phenomenon yoked her to the conservative establishment, where right-leaning outfits like the Hoover Institution, the Olin Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute supported her work. She went on to spend 18 months in the first Bush administration and to produce another decade’s worth of policy writing in favor of introducing “competition” to education.
• Ravitch claims she was swayed by peer pressure from the Washington free-market types she worked alongside at the Department of Education and then the Brookings Institution. “Having been immersed in a world of true believers, I was influenced by their ideas,” she writes in Death and Life. “I became persuaded.”
• In 1983 she wrote a New Republic essay called “Scapegoating the Teachers” in which she noted that “it is comforting to blame teachers for the low state of education, because it relieves so many others of their own responsibility for years of educational neglect.”
• Ravitch says she’s particularly offended by the suggestion—implicit in the media’s celebration of Teach for America, the organization that launched Rhee’s career—that perhaps teaching should not be a lifelong profession at all, but a bleeding-heart diversion for elite 20-somethings.
• [T]here should be college loan forgiveness for people who become teachers. “Then you would have so many people applying to join this field that you could select the top 10 or 15 percent,” she says.
• Ravitch became a go-to critic for anyone looking for a contrary opinion. The former DCPS chancellor made things pretty easy, giving Ravitch an opening to blast her for advising far-right governors like Rick Scott of Florida and Chris Christie of New Jersey. “Rhee maintains being bipartisan while being closely affiliated with the Tea Party governors,” Ravitch says. “The bipartisan agenda has become what used to be the GOP platform. I wonder if the Democratic Party will ever regain its sense about the importance of public education and equity.”
• Ravitch was in Argentina in March when USA Today broke the news that half of all D.C. schools had likely corrected students’ mistakes on standardized tests. Nevertheless, she dashed off a column for The Daily Beast (where I am also a contributing writer). Rhee’s policy of tying pay to test scores, Ravitch wrote, had resulted in “cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum…
• [A]n anonymous Twitter feed called “OldDianeRavitch,” opened in April, featuring a steady stream of hyperlinked free-market school reform arguments Ravitch once made, but now disclaims, such as: “NYC schools chancellor should have the power to close schools that consistently fail or engage in corrupt practices” and, “Without testing, there is no consistent way to measure success or failure.” The account was clearly a parody. But Ravitch pushed Twitter to shut it down as a violation of its anti-impersonation policy. The feed soon relaunched with the handle “NOTDianeRavitch.”

Diane Ravitch on NPR's Fresh Air

"The whole purpose of federal law and state law
should be to help schools improve,
not to come in and close them down and say,
'We're going to start with a clean slate,'
because there's no guarantee that the
clean slate's going to be better than the old slate."

---Diane Ravitch

This from NPR:

Listen or Download here.

Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch was once an early advocate of No Child Left Behind, school vouchers and charter schools.

In 2005, she wrote, "We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act. ... All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents' generation."

But four years later, Ravitch changed her mind.

"I came to the conclusion ... that No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools — or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not — because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today."

On the Obama administration's Race to the Top program

"Race to the Top is an extension of No Child Left Behind. It contains all of the punitive features. It encourages states to have more charter schools. It said, when it invited proposals from states, that you needed to have more charter schools, you needed to have merit pay — which is a terrible idea — you needed to judge teachers by test scores, which is even a worse idea. And you need to be prepared to turn around low-performing schools. So this is what many state legislators adopted hoping to get money from Race to the Top. Only 11 states and the District of Columbia did get that money. These were all bad ideas. They were terrible ideas that won't help schools. They're all schools that work on the free-market model that with more incentives and competition, schools will somehow get better. And the turnaround idea is a particularly noxious idea because it usually means close the school, fire the principal, fire the staff, and then it sets off a game of musical chairs where teachers from one low-performing school are hired at another low-performing school."

The Big Idea -- it's bad education policy

Once a proponent of charter schools and other nouveau reform efforts when she served in the George H W Bush administration, Diane Ravitch has changed her mind, repented and now adopts the role of Cassandra in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She warns that schools are not like businesses, yet powerful businessmen create foundations that launch unsuccesful school reforms on little evidence, and contribute greatly to (and probably lead) federal education policy. The book is worth the read. Her recent Op-Ed is a taste.

One simple solution for our schools?

A captivating promise, but a false one.

This from Diane Ravitch in the LA Times:

There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools.

Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea -- a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems.

Education is a slow, arduous process that requires the work of willing students, dedicated teachers and supportive families, as well as a coherent curriculum. As an education historian, I have often warned against the seductive lure of grand ideas to reform education. Our national infatuation with education fads and reforms distracts us from the steady work that must be done.Our era is no different.

We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.Once again, I find myself sounding the alarm that the latest vision of education reform is deeply flawed. But this time my warning carries a personal rebuke. For much of the last two decades, I was among those who jumped aboard the choice and accountability bandwagon. Choice and accountability, I believed, would offer a chance for poor children to escape failing schools.

Testing and accountability, I thought, would cast sunshine on low-performing schools and lead to improvement. It all seemed to make sense, even if there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope.

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform -- codified in its signature Race to the Top program -- that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better...

Ravitch About Face: Calls NCLB “Institutionalized Fraud”

Principled Stand or Savvy Book Promotion?

This from Democracy Now:

Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush and appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton. She is the author of over twenty books, is research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her latest book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education...



AMY GOODMAN: ...Diane Ravitch, welcome to Democracy Now! With this latest news, what is your assessment of where we are going under the Obama administration?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, unfortunately, the Obama administration has adopted and is building on the foundation of No Child Left Behind. And as I explain in this book, I believe that No Child Left Behind has been a failed policy, that it’s dumbed down the curriculum, narrowed the curriculum. Our kids are being denied a full education, because so much time is being spent on test prep and on tests that are really not very good tests and, in some cases, even fraudulent scoring of the test. The kids are getting a worse education as a result of No Child Left Behind.

The Obama administration, however, has bought into this rhetoric of accountability and choice, and they’re actually taking the Bush policies to a greater extreme. There is more support from the administration, this administration, for choice, because they have no opposition in the Congress, because it’s a Democratic president and because they had all this money, this $5 billion, to use as play money with no authorization, no oversight from Congress.

They’ve said to the states in the “Race to the Top,” this competition that was just held, that the requirements to be considered are, first of all, that the states have to be committed to privatizing many, many, many public schools. These are called charter schools. They’re privatized schools. The Bush administration would have never gotten away with that, because Congress would have stopped them.

They’ve also required states to commit to evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, which means that that will put even more emphasis on standardized testing, more drill down of test prep, more emphasis on basic skills. And also, it’s a very unfair measure, because it means that the students who live in poor communities, that they’re likely to get small gains, whereas the kids in the affluent communities will get big gains. And so, we’ll see the third emphasis of the Obama plan, which is close low-performing schools.

And Obama has said that he wants to see 5,000 low-performing schools transformed or closed, as we saw just recently in Rhode Island, where the only high school in a desperately poor community is supposed to fire all the teachers, close the school. And I think this is a terrible thing for public education. And I think we’re going to see a devastation of public education over the next—however long this president is in office, unless he changes course, which I hope he will, and doubt that he will...

JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the things that you’ve pointed out many times is that
the entire testing system of the country right now is rife with corruption and with fraud—

DIANE RAVITCH: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —because you basically have every state deciding its own test
standards, and they keep reporting that their kids are doing better. But then every time the national government does a national assessment test, these same states are not improving.

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, this is the great legacy of No Child Left Behind, is that it has left us with a system of institutionalized fraud. And the institutionalized fraud is that No Child Left Behind has mandated that every child is going to be proficient by the year 2014. Except they’re not, because no state and no nation has ever had 100
percent of the children proficient. Kids have all kinds of problems. And whether it’s poverty or a million things, there’s no such thing as 100 percent proficiency.

But every year we get closer to 2014, the bar goes up, and the states are told, “If you don’t reach that bar, you’re going to be punished. Schools will be closed. They’ll be turned into charter schools.” That’s part of the federal mandate, is that schools will be privatized if they can’t meet that impossible goal. So in order to preserve some semblance of public education, the states have been encouraged to lie, and many of them are lying, and so we see states that are saying, “90 percent of our kids are proficient in reading,” and then when the national test comes out, it’s 25 percent...

Obama and Duncan Launch NCLB 2.0

This from Diane Ravitch at Bridging Differences:

We promised to keep a close watch on what is happening at the federal level, and now it begins to get interesting. And a bit scary, if you care about the future of public education.

The U.S. Department of Education announced its plan to spend at least $3.5 billion to push local officials around the country to close failing schools and reopen them with new teachers and principals. At this time of fiscal crisis and budget cuts, districts are
desperate for federal dollars. To qualify for these dollars, districts must do one of four things: 1) fire the principal and at least half the staff and reopen the school with new staff; 2) turn the school over to a charter operator or other private managers; 3) close the school and send the students to higher-achieving schools in the district; or 4) replace only the principal and take other steps to change the school. Sounds just like the sanctions in NCLB.

The Obama-Duncan plan might as well be called "NCLB 2.0." ...

Is the charter movement up to the challenge? According to a thoughtful report by Tom Toch, the best charter management organizations are already overstretched. They don't have the financial resources to grow (but the federal dollars will solve that problem), but more importantly, they have a high rate of turnover among principals and teachers. Not every teacher can sustain that 60-65 hour work week that is expected of charter teachers. Tom wrote the original report (a draft of which was printed on Dean Millot's blog), but defenders of the charter movement at Ed Sector edited the report so heavily that Tom took his name off the report before it was released. Is the charter movement so fragile that it must muzzle the voice of a friendly critic? ...

The Obama Agenda

When funding is inadequate, excellence and equity are forced to compete. But when funds abound, a president can say "yes" to lots of stuff.

This from Diane Ravitch at Bridging Differences:

The president said that his administration would support whatever works, without regard to whether the ideas are liberal or conservative. He then laid out a vision that heaped goodies on both the liberal Broader, Bolder Agenda (early-childhood education) and the conservative Education Equality Project (more testing, tough accountability, charter schools, merit pay).

This is a politically astute trick. President Obama avoids choosing sides by giving both camps what they want. The left wants more funding: Done! The right wants choice, testing, and merit pay based on test scores: Done!

But let’s look at the vision of where American education is heading. The key here, I think, is the $250 million that the Obama administration will give to states to build longitudinal data systems. These data “warehouses” will collect and track every student’s data from pre-kindergarten through the end of college. Students’ test scores will be linked to individual teachers. Teachers who fail to get test score gains consistently will lose their jobs, while those who do get gains will be rewarded with bonuses or higher salaries. That is one obvious use of the data warehouses.

The assumption here is that the tests we have are excellent; that they are vertically aligned from grade to grade; and that they can safely and reliably be used as the basis for making high-stakes decisions for teachers and students. Many testing experts would challenge each of these assumptions....

Should We Risk a Free Market in Education?

This from Diane Ravitch at Bridging Differences:

...For the past 15 years or more, we have heard a steady drumbeat from the business community and their allies that the schools need a strong dose of businesslike methods. They need choice, competition, accountability.

They need to be more like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King, they need to fight for consumers, they need to be shuttered if they can’t get customers. In short, let’s turn the schools over to the free market. And, of course, we must measure relentlessly, shaming and humiliating those teachers whose students are not constantly getting ever higher test scores. Test scores, I suppose, are the equivalent of a sales target or profit margins.

And of course schools should be deregulated, so that the competition can be as fierce as possible.As the free market lies in shambles around us, bringing down with it many people’s life savings, I wonder if its advocates in the education arena will stop and reconsider whether they are importing free-market chaos and free-market punishments into the lives of children?

And who will stop them before it is too late?

Ravitch, Finn in a 'Clash of the Titans' on Education Policy

This from the New York Sun:

In a sign of how substantially her thinking on school policy has evolved, the education historian Diane Ravitch this week is engaging in an online debate with one of her oldest friends and collaborators, the education policy analyst Chester Finn Jr.

At issue: an emerging divide among education policymakers about the best way to improve America's schools.

Everyone seems to agree that the schools are in dire straits, but there is a divide about how to solve that problem.

On one side are leaders including the schools chancellor, Joel Klein; the Reverend Al Sharpton; the federal education secretary, Margaret Spellings, and the mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, who have started an initiative called the Education Equality Project, endorsing strong accountability measures such as those currently written into No Child Left Behind as well as choice options such as charter schools.

On the other side is a group calling itself the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, which has criticized No Child Left Behind and declared that students need help in more fields than just education to succeed, arguing for improved health care and after-school programs. That group includes the teachers union president Randi Weingarten, the labor economist Lawrence Mishel, and the former Boston school superintendent Thomas Payzant.

The debate between Mr. Finn, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and Ms. Ravitch, a trustee of Fordham, kicked off when Mr. Finn criticized the Broader, Bolder group, whose proposal Ms. Ravitch has signed.

Mr. Finn said in a Web log post that this camp reflects a dangerous move to shift away from an emphasis on academic excellence and toward a sloppier and less meaningful focus on the "whole child" that happens throughout American history.

"It's a darn shame," Mr. Finn wrote. "Yesterday's push for achievement hasn't yet produced the learning gains we need. But it may be starting to do so. The surest way to curb tomorrow's gains is to change the policy focus and ease the pressure."

He added, "As for the AFT's future direction, all I can say is that President Weingarten's early signals do no credit to Al Shanker's legacy."

Ms. Ravitch is fighting back with a counter-post on Fordham's Web site, edexcellence.net, which is billing the debate as a "Clash of the Titans."

"Will it help or harm children's academic achievement — most especially children who are living in poverty — if they have access to good pre-K programs?

Will it help or harm children's academic achievement — most especially the neediest children — if they have access to good medical care, with dental treatment, vision screening, and the like?" she writes.

She also dismisses Mr. Finn's assertion that she is opposing academic standards by criticizing No Child Left Behind, asking how the law can have worked if American students have been falling behind international competitors through its inception.

Mr. Finn's response is that while he believes Ms. Ravitch is not straying from setting high standards, he worries that others are merely searching for diversions.

Scientific Racism, Neo-con style?

"Elite white guilt made it impossible to say that

a lot of black children were going to continue to fail in school

and there’s nothing anybody could do about it."

- Charles Murray

This is one conclusion drawn by Charles Murray in a recent article in The New Criterion, "The age of educational romanticism." He says, "Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better."

With Richard Herrenstein, Murray co-authored the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, the reaction to which had much to do with launching the move toward disaggregating student test scores - the heart of the No Child Left Behind law which Murray now decries.

Murray correctly states that under NCLB,

All means exactly that: everybody, right down to the bottom level of ability. The language of the 2002 law made no provision for any exclusions. The Act requires that this goal be met “not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001–2002 school year.

It is this single fact that undermines what might otherwise make NCLB an effective law (assuming it was fully funded). Better would be to continue collecting data on all subgroups of students, but amend the schools' goals to a more realistic 90% attainment or so. This debate should end there. But it won't.

Some will see Murray's argument simply as a defense of student "tracking." Others will see it much more broadly, as confirmation of the most closely held predjucies. They hope to see Murray portrayed as a brave hero, willing to speak "truth" in the face of "political correctness."

Murray calls out "educational romantics" on both sides of the reform spectrum. And his strawman is tailor made for political commentators. Expect it to catch on.

Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways.

Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education.

Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions...

...the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion.

Over at Bridging Differences, Diane Ravitch isn't having it, largely on historical grounds.

Ravitch's rejection of Murray's notion recalls Alfred Binet, one of the earliest designers of mental tests. Binet disagreed with those who “assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased." He urged educators to "protest and react against this brutal pessimism.”

Ravitch also recalls Carl C. Brigham, a Princeton psychologist who helped to develop the Army inteligence tests used during World War I to select officers.

"The highest scores went to recruits who were native-born and of northern European background, while the lowest scores went to those who were foreign-born, of southern and eastern European background, and black."

Ravitch adds,

One of my intellectual heroes, William Chandler Bagley of Teachers College, punched holes in the theories of the IQ testers. He was literally the only prominent psychologist who took on the leaders of his field. Bagley wrote critical articles and a book ("Determinism in Education") in which he said that the IQ tests were a threat to democracy because they were being used to close the doors of educational opportunity to large numbers of people. Bagley showed that the groups that had the highest scores on the Army tests were those who had had the greatest educational opportunities.

In a coup de grace, he pointed out that the IQ scores of literate northern blacks were higher than those of literate whites in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Since southern whites were the purest “Nordic stock” in the country, Bagley said that Brigham would have to acknowledge that the test scores were the result of education, not racial inheritance.

Murray's persistent desire to discount the powerful effects of racism and oppression on identifiable groups of students - and therefore, their test scores - throws the rest of his "science" into question. Upon inspection, it's not science so much as it is neo-conservative political argument.

In fact Murray's first book, Losing Ground, was promoted as just that. In "The Manhattan Institute: Neoconservatives’s Lab," Paul Labarique reports,

Despite a huge number of obvious nonsense and empirical mistakes pointed out by sociologist Christopher Jencks, economist Robert Greenstein and even Nobel Prize James Tobin, the media turned the pamphlet into a “classic” and made it the central issue on the debates about social assistance in the U.S.

On its side, the Manhattan Institute made an enormous promotion of the book: William Hammet sent 700 copies to journalists, political and “university” personalities in America and hired an expert on public relations to turn the unknown Charles Murray into a “media-related phenomenon”. Its purpose was not selling the book but made it the core of every political debate. Months later, the Institute held a symposium on Losing Ground whose participants,whether they were journalists, public policies experts or social sciences specialists, received between 500 and 1500 dollars.

While much of Murray's argument is correct, acting on its logical extention would lead America to the worst possible place - one that returns us to the days when belief in preordination was used as a rationale for limiting opportunity to certain individuals based on class and race. It is a clear and certain repudiation of the notion that "all men are created equal."

The 2000 census predicted that 38% of the American workforce in 2025 will be people of color. And people of color are - magically, one supposes - overrepresented among the poor. Murray's invitation to give up on those he deems incapable of benefitting from a good education is economically poisionous to all of us.

Say what you will, but a hard-working poor person's best chance to realize the American Dream lies in an education that prepares them for productive citizenship.

The new NAEP data are released. That means it's time to spin the news!

The release this week of national test scores in reading and math has generated a fresh round of conversation about how Kentucky's students are performing.

We have this conversation at least three times a year when the various "yardsticks" (NAEP; CATS; NCLB) trot out their measurement data. Then there's SAT, ACT... EIEIO....

Wouldn't it be great if such data were integrated into a comprehensive value-added system? But I digress.

NAEP scores nationally, and in many individual states, showed modest gains from 2005 to 2007.

As Diane Ravitch explains in today's New York Post,

The federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is known in the education world as the gold standard of testing. In 2002, Congress authorized NAEP testing in every state to serve as a check of the states' own claims about their progress. (Congress rightly worried that individual states would dumb-down tests that they themselves develop and administer.)

And, there is at least reason to be suspicious of Kentucky's "new and improved" test. It appears Kentucky may have joined a number of other states in a race to the bottom by the redefining of proficiency.

Whenever test score data are released the spinning begins. The Kentucky Department of Education has an interest (some might say a duty) in pointing out the progress made by the schools. So they publicly shine a light on the best numbers, and privately express concern for the worst.

It's a little thing called spin. Everybody seems to delight in the practice these days.

In a Tuesday press release, the Kentucky Department of Education said,

"The results of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading and mathematics show that Kentucky's 4th and 8th-graders made gains when compared to the state's performance in previous NAEP assessments..."

True. Gains were made. Kentucky's student achievement, as measured by the NAEP, has trended steadily upward overall. (See charts below.)

So that's KDE's headline; Progress over time.

On the other side of the argument, assessment watchdogs are sniffing out specific areas of concern. Writing for the Bluegrass Institute this week, Richard Innes took issue with KDE's discounting of declines in 8th grade reading.

KDE claims of eighth grade reading since 1998, “Kentucky’s 8th-graders’ scores have remained steady, with minor gains and losses.”

Is that a fair description? Let’s examine the facts.

In the new ... NAEP assessments ... Kentucky had a reading proficiency rate of 30 percent in 1998. That rose to 32 percent in 2002 and went up again to 34 percent in 2003.

Then, things came unglued.

Eighth grade reading proficiency decayed to 31 percent in 2005, and in 2007 it slid again to just 28 percent. The 2007 proficiency rate is statistically significantly lower than both the 2002 and 2003 scores and is clearly six points lower than the 2003 performance. That six point difference isn’t just statistically significant – it’s just plain SIGNIFICANT.

No other state lost more ground in this time frame.

What’s more, during the same time period, the CATS Kentucky Core Content Test reading proficiency rates for eighth graders continuously rose. Do you believe that?
CATS up 10 points while NAEP declined six?

I'll take Dick's word for it that the declines are statistically significant and that Kentucky's decline is the nation's worst. The decline certainly looks significant to me.

We don't generally consider six point drops minor, and more to the point, downward trends are antithetical to progress. If it were me...I think I'd have left the word "minor" out of KDE's statement.

A BETTER ATTACK?

Innes has discovered some bad news, but arguably, not the worst news.

While Kentucky has progressed steadily, so have other states. Growth is a vital factor to consider, but so is excellence. Kentucky's relative standing among the states frequently leaves the state in all too familiar territory.

For example, who do Kentucky students outperform in 4th grade math? (See map below)

New Mexico, Louisiania, Mississippi and Alabama. All other states are roughly equal to (9 states), or exceed (36 states) Kentucky's progress. You're not going to hear that in a KDE headline.

It's a little better at 8th grade. Add California, Nevada, Oklahoma, Tenessee, Hawaii and West Virginia to the list.

Kentucky only outscores eight states in 8th grade reading.

But clearly the best news for Kentucky is in 4th grade reading where Kentucky joins the national leaders and is only outscored by seven states. What happens between 4th grade and 8th grade in reading ought to be of concern.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS

We're less than a week away from KDE's next big announcement of progress. I predict the new CATS assessment will show average performance gains of 7% or so across-the-board and in some places, jumps will be huge based at least partly upon changes...
a) to the test itself
b) to the "cut scores" used to define proficiency

The new test data can not be compared to the previous tests - but it will be. It's the data school folks have.

We discussed the NCLB data situation last night at UK. Without advance comment, I asked a group of graduate students (and future principals) to analyze the NCLB proficiency rates in Kentucky. The general reaction to the sharp increase was "Wow!" One of the students shared her experience working with the assessment company to establish the new cut scores. We discussed changes to the system that might account for the dramatic increases, and how school leaders could "present" the data. That's when one of the students came up with the best spin ever. (Pay attention Lisa. Here's your angle.) The new assessment is a truer reflection of the content actually taught in Kentucky's schools, and therefore the 7-point spike in proficiency levels is a fairer measure of the actual progress Kentucky students have made than under the old test.

Terrific.

Now, if we can only get the NAEP data to bear that out....

We have a fundamental problem in our current accountability system. It's initial purpose was political (to garner the support of the business community for KERA's big price tag). It not focused so much on student achievement and curriculum. The focus was school accountability.

Better, would have been a assessment system that began with content and then folded the data into a value-added system, such as the one used in Tennessee. If CATS had been designed to improve instruction for individual students, it would have looked very different.

To their credit, and after the fact, many educators began to look at interim assessment systems that would help teachers identify learning problems early and intervene quickly. There has been a lot of good work done in the trenches, but the state system has become a hodgepoge under NCLB.

Interpreting test data to the public is a national problem, and "interested" parties will always spin the data to suit their own purposes. What we really need is a "disinterested" assessment/accountability reporting source.

As Ravitch understands, we need...

an independent, nonpartisan, professional audit agency to administer tests and report results to the public.

Such an agency should be staffed by testing professionals without a vested interest in whether the scores go up or down. Right now, when scores go down, the public is told that the test was harder this year - but when scores rise, state officials never speculate that the test might have been easier. Instead, they high-five one another and congratulate the state Board...for their wise policies and programs.

What the public needs are the facts. No spin, no creative explanations, no cherry-picking of data for nuggets of good news.

Just the facts.

I may even know the right folks for the job. I understand Ben Oldham at Georgetown College has recruited Skip Kifer and Tom Guskey to form an assessment center at Gtown. I studied under Ben and Skip and am familiar (along with most of the national academic community) with Tom's work. I can't think of a more valuable state resource to guide a more effective and fair assessment program that the guys at Georgetown.

KENTUCKY SCHOOL DATA from the 2007 NAEP Exam

Student Characteristics
Number enrolled: 679,878
Percent in Title I schools: 60.6%
With Individualized Education Programs (IEP): 16.0%
Percent in limited-English proficiency programs: 1.5%
Percent eligible for free/reduced lunch: 52.4%

School/District Characteristics
Number of school districts: 176
Number of schools: 1,426
Number of charter schools: N/A
Per-pupil expenditures: $7,2541
Pupil/teacher ratio: 16.0
Number of FTE teachers: 42,413

Racial/Ethnic Background
White: 86.3%1
Black: 10.6%1
Hispanic: 2.1%1
Asian/Pacific Islander: 0.9%
American Indian/Alaskan Native: 0.2%

Scale Scores for Mathematics

Kentucky vs. National Public

For more specific data check out NAEP's Data Explorer.

Cross State Comparison

Percent At or Above Proficient

4th Grade Mathematics

Where:
Blue = Kentucky
Green = States above Ky
Yellow = States about the same as Ky
Red = States below Ky

For more specific data check out NAEP's Data Explorer.

Summer Reading suggestions from Diane Ravitch

Prolific education writer, Diane Ravitch, shares her reading interests this summer and suggests a few...for you. She and Deborah Meier co-author the blog Bridging Differences where they disagree with one another - while respecting each other's passion for strong schools.

I am trying to start a new book, so I am reading quite a lot of books about the business model in education and also books about American business. The classic in this genre is Raymond Raymond Callahan's "Education and the Cult of Efficiency.

I am currently reading Larry Cuban's "The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses."

If you want to learn more about the issues that Deborah and I have been debating, you can read our books. For example, Deborah Meier's "The Power of Their Ideas" or my book, "Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform."

Then there's Richard Hofstadter's 1962 classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life.

E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s "The Knowledge Deficit." This book does a fine job of explaining why children's achievement tails off between fourth grade and eighth grade.

And two books from the wonderful Jeanne Chall: "Learning to Read: The Great Debate" and "The Academic Achievement Challenge." If every educator read Chall's book on reading, there would be no more reading wars. Similarly, her last book, which was published shortly after her death, sums up everything she had learned about the research on achievement. Everything she wrote was leavened by her wisdom and common sense.

Ravitch - Former Asst. U S Sec of Edu under G H W Bush, Warns Educators

In her speech titled “The Future of Teacher Education in a Hostile Environment,” Diane Ravitch, the New York University professor and noted education historian spoke about deliberate attempts to cast aside public education.

“Today, we face a situation that can be described as a crisis,” Ravitch told many of the 2,600 American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education conferees. “People in the past did not say public education needs to be dismantled, but today, there are critics who feel the public education system is obsolete.” The “crisis talk,” she added, is “used as a rationale to destroy confidence” and to further the argument for privatizing schools.

Ravitch urged educators to make their voices heard collectively on the No Child Left Behind Act, which is due for reauthorization this year, and to prepare high-quality educators.

See the Education Week article.