Testing

The Sad Truth Behind Mr. D's Take on Assessment

After my recent rant on the sad state of technology in schools, Gerry Varty -- a regular Radical reader and good friend working as an assistant superintendent for the Wolf Creek Public Schools in Canada -- dropped me an email looking to cheer me up.

He pointed me to this hilarious clip from a new Canadian #educentered sitcom.  In it, Mr. D figures out a new way to speed-grade essays written by his students and then ropes a buddy into helping him work through the stack over beers at the bar:

 

 

Here's what worries me, y'all:  I've BEEN Mr. D more than once during the course of my career.  The truth is that grading essays can be a grind -- and even when I use rubrics to give targeted feedback or when I focus on ONE criteria -- student voice, proper mechanics, organization, content -- to save time while grading a written task, I end up overwhelmed. 

This is nothing more than a function of simple math:  I serve 120 students every day.  Giving good feedback on an individual essay takes about 5-7 minutes.  That's 12 hours of grading per task.  After attending meetings, filling out paperwork and answering my email, I have about 30 minutes free each day to plan and to give students feedback.  

The result: I skim my way through papers on a good day and I completely stop asking challenging questions that require anything more than multiple choice responses on a bad one. 

To be honest, that confession leaves me just short of completely ashamed. 

Out of all of the tasks that I'm charged with, NOTHING is more important than giving my students tasks that challenge their thinking and force them to demonstrate sophisticated understandings of the content and skills that we all care about.

More importantly, NOTHING is more important than giving my students timely, targeted feedback on their levels of mastery.  Without detailed feedback highlighting strengths and weaknesses, students don't grow as learners. 

But NOTHING about the current structure of schools makes timely, targeted feedback on tasks that require complex responses from kids doable.  Our class periods are too short, our student loads are too large, and our time away from students is increasingly filled by requirements that draw us away from important individual tasks like planning and grading.

#frustrating

#frightening

#anotheredufail

__________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Is REAL Formative Assessment Even Possible? 

Assessment's Either/Or Conundrum

Assessing Learning the Danish Way

Your Data Dream. My Data Nightmare


Shame in Georgia: More Evidence that High-Stakes Testing Invites Widespread Corruption

Georgia may still be reeling from the eye-popping cheating scandal uncovered this year in Atlanta, but things are getting worse.

The governor’s Special Investigations division has just released a bombshell report detailing systemic corruption in the administration of the state exans, I’ve reprinted most of the overview below. Check out the whole crazy thing here and here.

How can anyone say with a straight face that these are just bad apples and this high-stakes testing regime is the right thing for kids?

(The italics and bold print below are mine. Hat tip to Bob Schaeffer at FairTest for the links.) 

The disgraceful situation we found in the Dougherty County School System (DCSS) is a tragedy, sadly illustrated by a comment made by a teacher who said that her fifth grade students could not read, yet did well on the Criterion Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). This incredible statement from a teacher in a school where the principal flatly refused to cooperate with our investigation is indicative of what we found in many of the schools we visited.

To our amazement, this top-level administrator would not even answer questions about how she mishandled her duties as the person who is most responsible, at that school, for overseeing all testing activity. 

Another school principal, whose salary was over $90,000 per year, allowed her family to falsely claim that they were eligible for a federally-funded free lunch each school day, even though official guidelines required the annual income to be no more than $24,089.  

Yet another principal, with regard to our interviews, told a teacher:  “Don’t you tell them anything, you hear?”   

Notwithstanding these examples of misconduct, there are skilled, dedicated and well-meaning educators in this school system.  But their work is often overshadowed by an acceptance of wrongdoing and a pattern of incompetence that 1is a blight on the community that will feel its effects for generations to come.   This is the Dougherty County School System.        

Hundreds of school children were harmed by extensive cheating in the Dougherty County School System. In 11 schools, 18 educators admitted to cheating.  We found cheating on the 2009 CRCT in all of the schools we examined.  A total of 49 educators were involved in some form of misconduct or failure to perform their duty with regard to this test.     

While we did not find that Superintendent Sally Whatley or her senior staff knew that crimes or other misconduct were occurring, they should have known and were ultimately responsible for accurately testing and assessing students in this system.  In that duty, they failed.  

The 2009 erasure analysis, and other evidence, suggests that there were far more educators involved in cheating, but a fair analysis of the facts did not allow us to sufficiently establish the identity of every participant.  

The statistics, and the individual student data, leave little room for any other reasonable explanation, save for cheating.  For example, the percentage of flagged classrooms for DCSS is ten times higher than the state average.   

Sitting Next to Arne Duncan: What I Said About the Future of the Teaching Profession

Last week I had the privilege to sit on a panel of National Board Certified Teachers at the White House with Arne Duncan. It was heartening to really get the sense that the Department of Education does get the pulse of teachers' attitudes and is actively making efforts to hear teachers' voices. Full video of the event is here. (I come in close to the 33-minute mark.)

 

On the stage, my palms were sweaty and my throat was dry. I've transcribed my answer to the first questions sent my way. What do you think? What would you have said to the Secretary of Education?

 

(Official White House photo. I led with my signature claw dance move. Sec. Duncan looked on inscrutably.)

 

Question: What is your vision for the future of the teaching profession?

My answer:

It’s often said that we need to base decisions on the facts on the ground. That’s true and on the ground in education teachers know what’s going on. NEA research published last year showed that among teachers, the number one most cited hindrance to good teaching is “heavy workload.” The default mode for teachers is swamped. Teachers are by nature doers and go-getters, so they’re going to go the extra mile, so people get isolated into their little pockets where they either burn out or just create pockets of excellence but aren’t really in a position to spread the wealth.

 

The second hindrance is “hostile or unsupportive school leaders” so teachers that could be great are misused. Imagine if in the very beginning of Tom Brady’s career he was forced to play a different position or benched the first time he threw an interception. At the first school I worked at in the Bronx, nobody was a NBCT. I’d never even heard of it. The atmosphere was one of fear and intimidation. So a lot of people with talent weren’t able to realize it.

 

So how do we activate the talent? There are over 3 million teachers in this country and they’re overwhelmingly smart people, talented people— but swamped. If I wasn’t here right now I’d be teacher three consecutive 100-minute blocks. It’s brutal— for me and my wife.

 

What if teachers could have more career ladders and hybrid positions or job-sharing opportunities to keep them in the classroom but also to provide time and space for them to use their talents in their school communities? I have a degree in Film & Television from New York University and I have experience teaching filmmaking to young people. If I could cut my teaching load in half, I’d love to travel to schools all over DC and help them set up AV programs. We can systemically spread the wealth.

 

Teaching is great. It’s great work and I love being with the kids, but it can really burn you out. When I did my student teaching at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, one of the last huge five-thousand-student comprehensive high schools in New York, teachers carried 5 classes per day with 34 students per class. They saw 170 students per day. It was prohibitive not just to go through the National Board process where you really have to scrutinize student work, where you have to examine how to promote listening and speaking and fairness and equity and diversity with a fine tooth comb, but also even to assign essays. It’s staggering if it takes you 15 minutes to really read and provide quality feedback on a piece of student work. The math is mind-boggling.

 

There’s so talent that’s lying dormant in our teaching force. It’s dying on the vine. But the whole profession is under attack because there’s this big suspicion out there hovering over all teachers now: Are you a bad teacher? Are you one of the bad ones? Let’s plug in our algorithm and find out.

It’s scary. Teachers really need to advocate for their vision of the future of the profession. This is a fight and NBCTs need to be on the frontlines.

What Would Happen if YOU Took the End of Grade Exams?

Good question, isn't it?  And a question that I've asked myself about a million times as I've proctored my state's sixth grade reading and math tests considering how FEW of the questions on the math test -- my personal weakness -- I'm ever able to figure out.

More importantly, it's a question that I've wanted to see state policymakers -- who seem hell-bent on tying test scores to systems of teacher and student evaluation -- answer publicly. 

I mean, seriously:  If you are so flippin' confident that tests are a reliable tool for failing students and canning teachers, shouldn't you be willing to take those same tests and have YOUR results made public to the world?

Well, that's EXACTLY what Rick Roach -- a successful businessman and current school board member in Orange County, Florida -- did this year, and his results may surprise you:  He earned a 62% on the 10th grade reading exam and literally had to guess at every question on the math test, eventually getting 10 out of 60 questions right. 

What Rick learned from the experience ought to be tattooed onto the foreheads of every single elected official in the nation.  He writes:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning.

Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict?

Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

Thank you, Rick -- for going out on a limb and for speaking the truth about end of grade exams.  Not only do they carry incredibly high stakes, they test skills that no one really cares about. 

Now if only your peers in the #edpolicy world had half of your guts. 

#unlikely

#cowards

Need MORE Proof that Incentive Programs are Dangerous?

If you've read the Radical for any length of time, you'll know that I pretty much despise the carrot-and-stick approach to managing teachers and students that seems to be all the rage in education right now (see here, here and here).

What's completely wild is that many of the top organizational thinkers who are working largely in fields beyond education -- including Authorspeak Keynote presenter Daniel Pink -- agree that incentive programs almost NEVER work.


Download Slide_ThePerfectCarrot

 

Chip and Dan Heath -- authors of a TON of great reads including The Myth of the Garage, a completely free Corwin eBook -- are no less critical of our fascination with incentive programs than Pink.

In Myth of the Garage, they compare incentive programs to the popular urban legend of a Darwin Award winner who strapped a rocket engine to his Chevy Impala looking for the ultimate joy ride only to end up "as a human flapjack" on the side of a lonely Arizona mountain.

The Heaths write:

Incentives are like that jet engine.  There's no question the engine will take you somewhere, fast, but it's not always clear where.  Or who you're going to mow down on the way.

Yet incentives are still the first resort of most managers.  We all think we're smart enough to create the perfect carrot.

(Kindle locations 357-363)

So what makes incentive programs so dangerous -- particularly in fields like education?

According to Chip and Dan Heath, incentive programs inevitably cause well-intentioned people to fall victim to a focusing illusion.  Instead of taking multiple measures into account when judging performance, we overemphasize the single variable that we are attempting to measure.

In other words, when all you are worried about measuring is how fast your car can fly down a dry desert lakebed, you tend to forget about the mountain that you're sprinting towards at 300 miles per hour. 

The Heaths write:

"To be fair, there are some contexts where one variable dominates.  If you're employing a field sales rep who is selling a simple, self-contained product, then it probably makes sense to tie incentives to the sale.

If you're traveling a long, straight road, the jet engine will get you there faster.

But chances are you don't live in a one-variable world.  In your complicated, squishy, matrixed world, if you're dreaming up an incentive plan, you're almost certainly in the grips of a focusing illusion."

(Kindle locations 386-391)

Now, I don't know about you, but I can't think of a MORE "complicated, squishy, matrixed world" than education. 

The honest truth is that we -- teachers, principals, parents, policymakers, community leaders, students -- DO care about multiple variables when looking at the outcomes of education.

Sure we want students to become better readers and writers.  Sure, mathematical competency is an essential outcome for every student. 

But in an era when incentives -- and pretty darn serious consequences -- for both teachers and students have been tied to just two testable variables, I've GOT to believe that we're in the grips of one seriously wicked focusing illusion too. 

My only hope is that we'll come to our senses and switch off the rocket before we run out of road.

_______________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Bulldozing the Forests

The Monster You've Created

Statistically Snookered

The Unintended Consequence of Incentive Programs in Schools

 

 

 

Original Image Credit: Minty Python’s Frying Circuits 5/52 by Neal

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on December 23, 2011

 

 

 

Four-Hour Reading Tests for Third Graders: Our Brave New World

Where’s Hunter S. Thompson when you need him? Our national discourse has gone gonzo, hijacked by maniacs. 

I’ve done my best to tune out the cynical cluelessness permeating the Republican primary race, but these guys are actively working to ruin the country. It’s hard to single out only a few howlers, but just this month we’ve seen:

Mitt Romney: brazen distortion and lies about President Obama’s positions

Herman Cain: knew from the beginning this was only about self-promotion

Rick Perry: wants to radically reform government but can’t remember how. (Oops.)

New Gingrich: Child labor laws are in the way of really making our economy work.

The disingenuousness takes your breath away.

I feel an indirect link between these out-of-touch corporatist ideologues and a New York Daily News story by Ben Chapman this week on the insane new expansion in New York State testing. Check out this lunacy:

State Education officials are expanding mandatory reading exams that students across the state take each spring, according to documents posted on a state website Monday.

Third graders would spend 245 minutes on a reading test given over two consecutive days in April 2012 — up from 150 minutes over two days last year. Other grades will see similar gains.

Teachers and parents slammed the state’s new, super-sized testing schedule.

“It’s insane to make third graders sit still and take a test for that long,” said Lisa North, a reading teacher at Public School 8 in Brooklyn who administers the tests. 

I truly don’t know what’s next in this brave new world: four-hour reading tests in second grade? Why not in first grade too? Why not a three hour reading test in kindergarten? Capture the data early! Where is this all leading? How much of our soul are we selling in the name of data?

No one wins here— except for-profit corporations selling tests and test prep. (And privatizers who cheer the demise of public education.)

I recently received an email from Peggy Robertson, an administrator for the grass roots group United Opt Out National. They’ve got something strong to say about this.

Principals Acknowledge Testing Has Gone Way Too Far

Principals don’t revolt against the system. It just doesn’t happen. Until now.

High-stakes testing has become downright Orwellian and finally principals are speaking up. In his stunning article in Sunday’s New York Times, Michael Winerip (perhaps the top edu-journalist out there right now) gives voice to the over 650 New York State principals who have been pushed past the breaking point. And the rebellion is growing.

Read Winerip's whole piece, but here are two tasty tidbits:

“It’s education by humiliation,” Mr. Kaplan [20-year principal of Great Neck North High School on Long Island] said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

The trainers at these sessions, which are paid for by state and federal grants, have explained that they’re figuring out the new evaluation system as they go. To make the point, they’ve been showing a YouTube video with a fictional crew of mechanics who are having the time of their lives building an airplane in midair.

“It was supposed to be funny, but the room went silent,” Ms. Burris said. “These are people’s livelihoods we’re talking about.”

*****

Katie Zahedi, principal of Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook in Dutchess County. said the training session she attended was “two days of total nonsense.”

“I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations,” she said. “It takes your breath away it’s so awful.”

She said one good thing about the new evaluation system was that it had united teachers, principals and administrators in their contempt for the state education department.

Isn’t public education supposed to be about strengthening future generations of citizens with skills they need? Why does it feel like the education train— conducted by consultants and ideologues— is plowing in the wrong direction?

 

Dinner Conversation With Tea Partiers: How to Fix Urban Education

I recently had dinner with a couple who were incredibly smart, friendly, funny… and conservative. They are active members of Tea Party organizations. My politics range from pretty liberal to very liberal, and I gravitate to the like-minded, so our candid conversation hit me as a shock to the system.

Since I’m a teacher and we all have opinions about education, the inevitable, guaranteed, stone-cold-lock cocktail party question was posed to me:

So Dan, what do you think of Michelle Rhee?

I find it really hard to give a short answer to this question. I’m critical of many of Rhee’s policies and I believe her legacy (hushed-up cheating scandals, stagnant test scores, disenfranchised parents, alienated veteran teachers, a viciously anti-union ideology) is problematic.

This tends not to go over well with the ballroom set who have been conditioned to revere her brand by Waiting for Superman and cover stories in Time and Newsweek. So I start with the positive: the status quo was no good and Rhee brought much-needed attention into DC Public Schools. She got people talking about school reform.

As I was falling all over myself in an attempt to be even-handed, diplomatic, and still true to my beliefs, the couple politely and directly asserted their vision for inner-city education.

It involves (and I’m paraphrasing as best I can):

• Allowing individuals to donate to private charities that will choose how to allocate funds in schools;

• Narrowing the vision of the school day to teach basic skills reading and math (and occasionally the arts) while providing two good meals per day;

• Eliminating all government assistance programs because they enable laziness and bad parenting;

• Encouraging all parents to get jobs.

Each suggestion contained a grain of reasonableness surrounded by skewed assumptions and a vision shaped by ideology rather than understanding. We were at the same dinner table but evidently living in two different universes. When one side believes that all public funds are at best suspect, and at worst actively ruining society, it’s hard to imagine truly strengthening a public school system.

What Do the GOP Presidential Candidates Think about Education?

I understand that jobs and the economy are the frontline issues of the moment. But our next president needs to have his head in the game when it comes to educating our next generation. There are about 50 million students currently enrolled in American public schools. Barack Obama's education platform and record are well documented. What do his leading challengers think about education?

Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have nothing to say about education. The topic doesn’t appear on Romney’s or Perry’s campaign website. Zero. 

An independent website that tracks political positions lays out Romney’s prior stances here. One representative nugget: He supported closing the U.S. Department of Education… and then said Bush was right about No Child Left Behind, which vastly expanded the reach of the Department. As a bonus, at CPAC in 2010 he used the phrase “fat-cat CEOs of the teachers' unions” to describe who was in charge of education in America. Gov. Romney's positions seem entirely political and substance free.

Rick Perry seems like a nightmare for anyone who cares about education. This year, he sought $4 billion in cuts to Texas schools. Advocates desperately pointed out feasible ways to avoid the draconian cuts, but Perry pursued them anyway. He is a leader in the new right wing ideology of all government spending being innately bad. The future isn't bright in the state he has governed for 12 years; Texas leads the nation in minimum wage jobs and residents over 25 without a high school diploma.

Herman Cain actually does offer a few paragraphs of his thoughts on education. It’s not inspiring, and it leads with a lie:

“Unfortunately, education has become weighed down with administration that has shifted the focus from educating students to maintaining an excessive level of bureaucracy through expanded unionization and regulation.”

I think Cain is more interested in selling books and cashing in than in performing public service, but let’s talk anyway about his education ideas. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unionization rate among workers in education, training, and library occupations is only 37.1 percent. Membership in the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union, declined by 100,000 members (3.5 percent) in the past year. 

So… expanded unionization and undefined “regulation” is ruining education? This is mindless boilerplate.

I’m disgusted by the field of Republican candidates. Their total lack of interest or seriousness about education is one of many red flags that a defeat of President Obama in 2012 would be disastrous.

Here is the entirety of Cain’s blurb on education:

Unbundling Education

Education is the key to unlocking a prosperous future. At the heart of education should always be the students. Unfortunately, education has become weighed down with administration that has shifted the focus from educating students to maintaining an excessive level of bureaucracy through expanded unionization and regulation. It’s time to unbundle education from the federal government down to the local level.

Of course, most teachers are in the field of education to foster intellectual development for eager minds. Through a system of accountability, we should reward those teachers whose students excel and better evaluate those whose students perform poorly. Performance incentives work in business, and they will work in education, too.

A critical component of improving education in our country is to decentralize the federal government’s control over it. Children are best served when the teachers, parents and principals are making the day-to-day decisions, coupled with the leadership of local municipalities, school boards and states. What might work for a third grader in Oklahoma might not work for a third grader in Hawaii.

Another way we can put kids first is to offer school choice as a real option for educational competition. This means expanding school vouchers and charter schools. Such measures have proven time and time again to best serve the students, many of whom do not have the economic means of attending better schools. In a post-Katrina New Orleans, these programs were immensely popular with both the parents and the students, giving opportunities to children who might otherwise have been stuck in poor-performing, if not failing, schools.

Unbundling education means putting kids first. It means rewarding those teachers who enrich the lives of their students, and it means holding those accountable who do not. It means putting students before union interests, and it means keeping their development paramount. Unbundling education means localizing education- making those on the ground responsible for the teaching and learning that happens in our local communities. Unbundling education means offering parents choices for their children to create a truly competitive educational system.

 

 

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