K-16 Education Reform and the Unlevel Playing Field

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Adult Learners, College Affordability, College Success, Degree Attainment, Dr. Steve Perry, Economic Inequality, Education Inequality, Employability, First-Generation Students, High-Stakes Testing, Higher Education, K-16 Education Reform, Michelle Rhee, Poor Students, Private Foundations, Student Loans, Students of Color, Teacher Accountability, Two-Tiered System, US Department of Education, Wendy Kopp

President Barack Obama speaking college affordability and a rating system, University of Buffalo (NY), August 22, 2013. (http://sfgate.com).

The shape and direction of education reform in America’s public schools and in US higher education is such that one can only conclude that this is the century in which social mobility will be limited to a precious and lucky few. With high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind on the K-12 side, and the rise of for-profit online institutions in postsecondary education, we’re well on our way to a two-tiered system of education. One tier for the affluent, who will attend private schools and elite colleges, and a much lower tier for the rest of us, who will increasingly receive a watered down public education and have ever more limited higher education options.

The Problem With Mainstream K-16 Reformers:

The problem is, though, most reformers actually believe that their efforts at reform will result in a fairer and more level playing field for our kids and for first-generation college students of every stripe. They have an unwavering desire to make testing the cornerstone of curriculum revisions and the key determinant in measuring teacher effectiveness, and thus, tying future funds to school performance levels. Or, in the case of for-profit online higher education, they believe that financial aid in the form of student loans, accelerated classes with a curriculum strictly geared for current job market trends and lack of academic support is the shape of their river. Leaving vulnerable millions of first-generation students — particularly low-income adult learners (many of whom are of color) — to dropping out of college with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to pay off and with few good career prospects.

Mock Time Magazine cover with Michelle Rhee alleging her full knowledge of cheating scandal in DC Public Schools, April 14, 2013. (By a college student whose mom is a 7th grade teacher -http://www.susanohanian.org/)

These reforms go further in providing an unlevel playing field. One where only a privileged few get to go down Mount Everest in a helicopter. The rest of us, meanwhile, must climb up Everest, ill-equipped for the climate while dodging rock slides, avalanches and other land mines all along the way.

An Unasked Question About K-12 Reform:

That reformers don’t see this is one thing. That they don’t even ask the questions that they should about their reform endgame has been the real problem for years. For example, they don’t ask the simple question, “Will high-stakes testing and teacher effectiveness measures close the achievement gap and make it so that students regardless of race and family income will be well prepared after graduating high school for college or for workforce training?”

The answer to this, of course, is no. High-stakes testing cannot and will not close the achievement gap or lead to students graduating high school better prepared for college and the 21st century working world. Teachers and administrators will continue to devote more of their time and efforts to testing than to other aspects of their jobs, for fear of losing their jobs. Reformers will continue to use the mantra of testing to siphon those precious and limited taxpayer dollars out of state legislatures and school boards to cover the costs of test development and test-based teacher evaluations. And students attending the allegedly worst performing schools will continue to lose good teachers and move from school to school in search of the promise — but not the reality — of a quality K-12 education.

Reformers like Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp and Dr. Steve Perry (not to be confused with Journey’s lead singer) don’t ask this question. They are too busy procuring funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, the Wallace Foundation and the US Department of Education to discuss the shape of their reform river. They are much more interested in proving a strong correlation between teacher effectiveness and student achievement via test scores, because they believe this is the way, truth and life for K-12 reform. And pretty soon, we will know that this correlation either doesn’t exist or is a weak one at best, under some rather ideal circumstances.

An Unasked Question About Higher Education Reform:

Futurama poster “A Mindless Worker Is A Happy Worker,” August 23, 2013. (http://d3.ru)

For-profit institutions involved in online higher education do no better in asking fundamental questions about their endgame. University of Phoenix, Kaplan University and Capella University don’t ask, “Is an accelerated online college format that is highly dependent on underprepared first-generation college students, provides few or no academic support services and is heavily subsidized by federal student loans the best possible postsecondary education for these students?” Of course it isn’t. Over the past 20 years, these institutions have been too busy figuring out ways to increase the enrollment of low-income students to ask this question. They have been more interested in drawing in as much federal student loan aid as possible to cover the costs of student enrollment to ask whether they are providing the best services.

For those not-so-lucky students attending these institutions, they face a great distance between the promises of this new higher education regime and its brutal reality. For-profits promise an online education that is tailor-made for students’ job and career aspirations, one even more alluring because it is an allegedly convenient fit for the demands of any adult lifestyle. For-profits seem to be proud of the fact that fewer than 20 percent of their students complete a degree eight years after they first enroll in one of their courses. For those few students who do manage to complete a degree, many are finding that their narrowly focused degrees don’t match up with their career aspirations.

Irony and Shame:

The irony is that for-profit online higher education has all but moved away from testing at a time when the only thing that matters in K-12 education is testing, from a child’s first week in kindergarten to his or her last day of 12th grade. The ironic shame of it all is that reformers in both K-12 and higher education never ask the question of what we should expect at the end of the reforming rainbow. Their reform efforts are purely about making a profit, for themselves or for others. The rest of us, meanwhile, can’t wait for Superman, with reformers stealing his powers on both ends of the K-16 spectrum, and placing kryptonite for real reform at every turn.

—-

I wrote all this months ago. Now, with President Barack Obama offering a formalized version of accountability for higher education institutions that connects market-relevant degrees and employment to college success, him and his administration are pushing the two-tiered agenda even further. Private elite colleges can easily opt out of this Race to the Top-esque rating system for higher education costs-to-employability ratios, and create their own measures around affordability, degree-attainment and career pathways. Or not, for that matter.

Public institutions — the ones tied most directly to US Department of Education funds — will have little choice but to go down this money-wasting path. One that in the end will do nothing for first-generation students, students of color, older students, heck, any student who comes from a humble background. “It’s a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say.

We Called Him Mr. Lewis

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Arne Duncan, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chemistry, Cigarettes, Disllusionment, ExxonMobil, Family Income, High-Stakes Testing, Humanities, Low-Income Students, Michelle Rhee, New York State Regents Exam, Nicotine, Organic Chemistry, Politics of Education, Poverty, Steve Perry, Students of Color, Teacher Effectiveness, Tenth Grade, US Department of Education, Wendy Kopp

Screenshot from To Sir, with Love (1967), December 3, 2012. (http://movies.tvguide.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – pic’s low resolution/subject matter for blog.

The dumb technocratic class (Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, Steve Perry, Arne Duncan) and the assholes who fund them (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ExxonMobil, US Department of Education) continue to pump out the mantra that effective teachers are the single most important variable in student performance, retention and graduation. This despite a half-century’s worth of research showing that family income was the far more important piece of data.

But even if Kopp, Rhee and Perry’s snake oil somehow turned out to be true, the fact is, the high-stakes testing movement and No Child Left Behind (and now Race to the Top) has turned effective teachers into lab leaders teaching to state-wide tests. Our current K-12 regime makes it so that ineffective teachers can be seen as effective because they’re only concerned with higher test scores, not actual learning. And some of them, not even concerned with that.

About this time thirty years ago, I had a group of wholly ineffective teachers in my tenth grade Humanities classes at Mount Vernon High School (see my posts “Half-Baked Z and Christian Zeal” from September ’10 and “This…Is…Jeopardy” from March ’11). Mr. Lewis was but one example of an unimaginative instructor. He was our Level 1 Chemistry teacher. We started his class in a very tense situation. There were fifty-one students in our class to start the year because the school administrators had failed to hire a new Level 0 (the highest level for the highest of the high-performing students) teacher for Chemistry. Our future valedictorian and other Level 0 folks spent a month protesting to the head of the Science Department, Estelle Abel, about the overcrowding and the mixing of the two levels. It took nearly two months before the situation was resolved. By that time, November ’84, none of us wanted Lewis for a teacher.

His was a class that could be fun and entertaining, but not usually educational. Sometimes our chemistry education came with errors and miscalculations. Perhaps his mistakes piled up because it was seventh period and near the end of the school day. Or maybe we were tired and inattentive.

Marlboro cigarette butts, September 19, 2007. (bachmont via Wikipedia/Flickr.com). In public domain.

The truth was that Lewis was a teacher with a serious chemical addiction. His was a chain-smoking world. When he opened up the door to the storage room where the test tubes and Pyrex jars were, stale cigarette smoke entered the room. His teeth were a pasty yellow, and they had a film that seemed to build up on them and in his mouth by the time we had him at the end of the day. On more than one occasion, Lewis would get phlegm caught in his mouth while in the middle of one of his lectures. Then he’d pause as he gulped the phlegm, and then he kept going. It was absolutely disgusting.

One day I met with Mr. Lewis after class to discuss my struggles with the material. He was at the front lab table sitting on a stool. In front of him on the table were fifteen Marlboro cigarettes, all lit and neatly lined up in a row. During our ten minutes together, he smoked one cigarette after another, sucking them down so fast that he had to pause to clear his throat from time to time. By the time I left, he’d gone through twelve out of fifteen, and I smelled like I’d been at one of my father Jimme’s bars. I was more than sure that Lewis’ nicotine dependency was a factor in his inability to teach Chemistry to us well (Cigarettes And Coffee, by Otis Redding).

My grades for the year going into the last weeks of the school year had ranged between an unimpressive 70 and an 87. But with the New York State Regents Exam in Chemistry coming up, Lewis was nonchalant in his attempts to prepare us for the Regents. Lewis went as far as to say, “There’s nothing to worry about” on the subject of organic chemistry. “There will be hardly any organic chemistry on the exam, anyway,” he said. After eight months of listening to his blathering, I thought “That’s it!” The next time I got money from Jimme, I bought the Barron’s Chemistry Regents exam prep book. It was just before Memorial Day, and I had a month before the exam.

Barron’s Regents Exams & Answers Chemistry (2011), December 3, 2012 (http://barnesandnoble.com).

On my Chemistry Regents I scored a 95, the third or fourth highest grade in the school (the highest grades were a 99 and 97 that year). My score raised my final grade in Lewis’ class six points, from a 79 to an 85. My score left me feeling jaded and disillusioned. “Wow,” I thought. “My teachers really don’t know much more than I do!” I knew that a lot of my Level 1 Chemistry classmates didn’t fare so well on the exams, because they believed Lewis when he said that there wouldn’t be much organic chemistry on the exam. By my own count during the exam, between thirty-five and forty of the 100 questions were organic chemistry ones.

It took having Meltzer for AP US History in eleventh grade for me to trust teachers again. I didn’t need anyone to teach tests to me. I needed a teacher who could help me open up a door into myself and into a world I hadn’t explored before. And millions of students — especially of color and from impoverished backgrounds — need teachers free to do that, without the threat of high-stakes tests hanging over them like a boulder.

Education, A Numbers Game Love Story

22 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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Accountability, Craps, Crunching Numbers, ETS, High-Stakes Testing, K-12 Education, K-16 Education, NCLB, P-20 Education, Politicians, Politics of Education, Psychometricians, Psychometrics, Qualitative Research, Quantitative Analysis, SAT, Statistics, Student Success, Teaching Effectiveness, The Education Trust, US Department of Education

Craps dice, like the state of education reform via numbers crunching these days, August 6, 2006. (Source/Roland Scheicher via Wikipedia). In public domain.

This could just as easily be titled, “Why your multivariate regression analysis isn’t better than my chi-square test,” because that is the state of mainstream education research these days. I find it stifling, like being wrapped in Saran Wrap covered by a condom lined in sheep’s intestines.

Numbers have their place, but the field’s obsession with crunching numbers for trends that defy quantification has increased as a result of federal mandates like NCLB and philanthropy’s accountability movement over the past fifteen years. What’s the long-term impact of the thousands of studies and the deployment of thousands of psychometricians and research analysts in P-20 education reform (that’s early childhood education, K-12, undergraduate and graduate education combined)? Not much, because our politicians and philanthropists are staking themselves to trends almost regardless of numbers.

It all started for me about this time twenty years ago. I did an independent study with Bruce Anthony Jones,

Linear regression graph with over 200 data points, February 22, 2009. (Source/Michael Hardy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

then an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh School of Education’s ed policy and administration department. In that one semester, I quickly learned that folks in the education field defined research in only two ways: quantitative and qualitative. And by qualitative, they meant soft research, like Carvel’s soft-serve ice cream. What I didn’t know was that many in the field were working to make the qualitative — surveys, focus groups, oral interviews/transcripts — quantifiable.

Today, everything that can be tracked in American education usually has a number attached to it. It’s hardly grades and standardized test scores anymore. Homework hours, time to task on lesson plans to work on a single problem that may be part of a high-stakes state exam, teacher effectiveness, suspensions and disciplinary reports disaggregated by race and gender. It drives me nuts, and I’ve used SAS and SPSS before, during my grad school days. I can only imagine how a teacher who just wants their students to learn and do well must feel about this numbers game.

But if education has become a number game, it most resembles the game of craps. Take the issue of teacher

Michelle Rhee, former DCPS Chancellor, one of many who've taken advantage of education as craps game, Washington, DC, February 19, 2008. (Source/US Department of Labor). In public domain.

effectiveness, often tied to state-mandates around test scores and students meeting or exceeding a percentile at a given school on these tests. Let’s say if a school as a whole actually exceeds the proficiency percentile. They may well receive more money, and teachers may well get a bonus (depending on the state and school district and union contracts, which by the way, may also be part of a statistical formula). None of this actually proves that these students are better prepared for, say, thinking independently or critically, because critical reasoning isn’t tested by most of the high-stakes state tests.

Nor can they show the writing skills necessary for student success later on in their education, as most of these tests don’t test writing comprehension skills either. Most importantly, where does teacher effectiveness come in as a factor? Do we have to account for time to task in comparison to each exam item, like a psychometrician at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) would? Do we factor out home studying/ homework time, parents’ education, income and race, or whether they eat a hearty breakfast the morning of the exam? Or do we continue to simply say, if Teacher X gets Class A to raise its state test score by 25 percent, they get a raise and a pat on the head? Really?

What’s more, whether teacher effectiveness, student success, or free and reduced lunch programs, politicians, parents and pundits hardly look at any numbers beyond any report’s executive summary. We all insist that our school and community colleges and universities get better at graduating students ready for the real world of work. Fine. Then we insist on lower taxes, blaming teachers, destroying unions, complaining about the state of things but not doing anything to make education work for all of our students. Not fine.

It doesn’t take a two-year study from The Education Trust to realize that there’s no one-to-one correlation

Taco Bell's Gordita Supreme, September 22, 2011. (Source/TacoBell.com).

between an effective teacher and higher student test scores. Or a report from the Institute of Education Sciences at the US Department of Education to know that a lunch of murder burgers and suicide fries with ketchup as a vegetable is about as nutritious as a Taco Bell gordita. School districts and many a college have gone without even adequate resources for years. But instead of providing them, we make them kneel in begging for them, and yet expect them to perform Lazarus-type miracles in the process.

We waste time with numbers and spend little time on causes and solutions that make sense in education. I think about that weak +0.4 correlation number that ETS has put out for years regarding the SAT. It’s the likelihood of someone who does well on the exam beginning their freshman year in college with a 3.0 GPA. I scored an 1120 on the SAT in October ’86, not exactly the greatest score. But I did manage a 3.02 average my first year (and a 2.63 my first semester, by the way), and still came within a few days of dropping out because I was homeless at the beginning of my sophomore year.

I dare say the numbers crunchers at ETS didn’t factor that in their multivariate analysis. Or my homesickness or obsession with a former high school crush. Mark Twain is right about statistics — they can “a good walk spoiled (or lies, I think).”