New York Times

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War on Middle Class Mobility

If Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney become President, there would not be much hope for mobility in the middle class. Santorum disregards colleges as “indoctrination mills,” suggesting that college is not the key to success that the Obama administration considers it to be. Romney encouraged one student to find a low budget college, “And don’t expect government to forgive the debt you take on.”

This is very hard to hear from one candidate who has a Master’s degree and a J.D. and another candidate who attended an Ivy League school without the burden of student loans. There’s a hard subtext that says, “I’ve got mine, but you can’t assume you’ll get yours.” Or, as Paul Krugman concluded in his commentary on the two Republican candidates, “they believe that what you don’t know can’t hurt them” (New York Times, March 9).

The half-truths involved in these campaigns for the Republican nomination obscure  the brutal message of stunted class mobility from decreased access to higher education.  It is true that a university education is not the solution to an inadequate high school education.  Many students will climax their education in high school, if they have the staying power and the family income to sustain them.  High school graduation should prepare them for something, not merely college.

And it’s true that there are excellent moderate-priced universities for students to choose, although with persistent declines in state funding, “the tuition at public four-year colleges has risen 70% over the past decade,” according to Krugman. Graduates of such public institutions may not move directly into a six-figure income like Governor Romney, and many of them will have paid for their entire education with student loans that Romney will not forgive.

Even with such considerations, a college education remains the surest path to mobility within the middle and lower middle classes. Census data show that a college education will likely double the earned income compared to what a high school graduate will earn (2006).  The funds that allow so many college undergraduates to continue their education come from Pell Grants and other forms of federal student aid.  It is not the philanthropic funding from the private sector that keeps students from dropping out of college, it is the aid that pays their tuition while they work half-time or even full-time to pay their room and board.

How much of this do the sons of privilege understand?  How concerned are they for the first-generation college students whose every semester is a pitched battle between earning and learning?  How much do they care for the students who study their way out of poverty?

Perhaps this campaign does amount to class warfare, but the battle is not over who gets taxed. The battle front is the opportunity to learn and the possibility of social and economic advancement.  If they don’t understand the plight of students on the margins of higher education, then the Republican candidates are sadly misinformed. If they do understand the full implications of their policies toward higher education, then they are engaging in class warfare by despising or denying  these opportunities.

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Conviction and Passion

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. (W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

When have these words from Yeats had more relevance than today?  With the retirement of Olympia Snow, the parade of moderates leaving the U.S. Senate has become a stampede.  The voices of moderation are sounding fainter and fainter.

Barry Goldwater said famously, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.” And Barry Goldwater has begun to look very amiable in this political climate.  Goldwater could always work across the aisle to draft legislation he believed in. He was a surprisingly tolerant Senator, when there was work to be done.

Today’s Congress operates as a “take-it-or-leave-it showdown,” said the New York Times today (March 1), paraphrasing Senator Snowe.  The “showdown” has become a  grinding halt.  The work of legislating has become the work of posturing, taking an inflexible political stance to demonstrate the will to get one’s own way. In some quarters this is characterized as standing on principle.  In others it is the collapse of good will.

For some reason the voting public is not impressed with “standing on principle,” as the approval rating of Congress has plummeted to the single digits.  There are principles and there are demands, even as in the international arena there is terrorism and there are sanctions.  Terrorism is taking extreme actions on the basis of beliefs, while sanctions are mounting and unified pressure to oppose repugnant policies.  Which of these best characterize the standoff we currently see in Congress?

It is certainly hyperbole to call the Congressional stalemate “terrorism,” but it falls far short of “sanctions,” because the pressure is coming from a minority of representatives and their resistance to productive legislation is losing its support. The “principled” right certainly found its limits with the passage of the payroll tax relief and unemployment extension in the last month.  Didn’t they actually cave in to the suffering of their middle class constituents? Didn’t they abandon their principles in the face of dire need? So no need to label these legislators as “terrorists,” because they were willing to compromise to save their collective necks, if not for the good of their constituents.

With eight months to go before the general election, the candidates at all levels should be choosing between “passionate intensity” and “conviction.”  And the voters should be discerning who has conviction and who has only passion. There is plenty of rhetorical passion in the media stream, but there is less conviction. Convictions have to go deeper than partisanship. They have to be grounded in serving “the greatest good for the greatest number” (John Stuart Mill).  There should be no unequivocal promises or tax covenants that would compromise this conviction. There should be no one-issue candidates. There should be candidates who will stand up to the bullies, the ones who press their case to bitter stalemate.

If the moderates are leaving, then God bless them for their service. Now we should replace them with men and women of good will, a working majority that will take seriously its responsibility to govern and not to willfully obstruct.

 

 

 

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Out lying

“Teacher Quality Widely Diffused” trumpets the headlines in the New York Times today (February 25, 2011). The headline and the article strongly suggest that the disadvantages of poverty and literacy-poor home environments are not critical influences on student performance on standardized tests. Rather that “teachers who were most and least successful in improving their students’ test scores could be found all around–in the poorest corners of the Bronx, like Tremont and Soundview, and in middle class neighborhoods of Queens, like Bayside and Forest Hills” (1).

The same article qualifies the results of the “value-added” assessment of students and their teachers by reporting “the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence level around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English. . .”  This technicality may be conveniently ignored by the Times, but it is more than an inconvenience to teachers who are now publicly evaluated by their students’ test scores.

The media, the Bloomberg administration and the Obama administration are so hungry to get the goods on bad teachers, that they are willing to sanctify any statistics that appear to support their case.  “Value-added” statistics are a clear improvement on evaluating teachers on the raw data of their students’ test scores, but with a confidence level that spans 53 percentiles in English, there is still much to question about publishing such data.

Suppose the verdict of a jury had a 53% variance with the truth?  Suppose the testing of a drug to cure HIV had a 53% confidence level of success? Suppose the computer models of an air assault on the nuclear resources of Iran had a 53% chance of disabling their nuclear program?  Would anyone take these risks? Are these test scores any less damaging of the reputation and the professional survival of a school or a teacher?

The cases that seem to fall outside the range of probability in the field of statistics are often referred to as “outliers.”  Outliers are often subjects of further experimentation, because they may speak to the validity of the data that falls within the confidence levels of the data.  Thorough scientists do not ignore outliers, because they may reveal flaws in their original hypotheses. They investigate outliers more rigorously to learn what they can from the deviations.

That is not what is happening with the “value-added” data offered up by the New York Public Schools. The data is being privileged with a public showing and sanctified by a headline like “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused.”  In criminal prosecution this would be called a “rush to judgment.”

In the media, we should call this “out lying.” The data is out, even though some of it may be lying.  It is all well and good for schools to use the data for discussion and give it further scrutiny to see what it really says. It is another thing to pretend that the data is evidence that poverty is not a mitigating influence on teaching.  This is what I get from “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused.”

Let’s not use blunt instruments to execute teachers. Let’s investigate the outliers, not lie about them.

 

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Cooperation, not Coup D’etat

It is a mystery to me how school reform in the 21st Century has become something that is done to teachers, rather than something that is achieved by administration, teachers, students and parents together.  To be honest,  some teachers’ unions have been exposed as  intractable and not negotiating in the best interests of children. And admittedly it is very hard to dismiss bad teachers, because of the protections granted by tenure. But the “reform” of the school should not be characterized as the overthrow of these institutions.  They were once instruments of reform themselves.

The language of former New York Chancellor Joel Klein in Joe Nocera’s column in the New York Times today (April 26, 2011) is quite revealing. Asked about the impact of the child’s home environment on his or her education, Klein asserted, “We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty. To let us off the hook prematurely seems to me to play into the hands of the other side.” Spoken like a true lawyer.

If teachers unions remain intractable in this century, then Klein may have a case to make against them. But his adversarial approach, and the fire-breathing politician’s approach, to the reform of schools will never change the institution. They can change the rules, but not the quality of education.  They can raise the test scores, but not the critical thinking skills of the students.  They can hire younger, more compliant teachers, but the novices will not assimilate the standards of 21st century literacy, unless they remain in their positions more than three years.  The nature of reform runs deeper than these superficial adjustments to education.

Reform will come with the cooperation of all the stakeholders, the students, the parents, the teachers and the administrators, or it will not come at all.  Ramon Gonzalez, principal of M.S. 223, a middle school in the Bronx, understands this and has labored to bring his entire community together to the task.  Gonzalez was featured in a New York Times Magazine article by Jonathan Mahler and similarly on a broadcast of Sixty Minutes.  Joe Nocera portrays him as an independent reformer, somewhat dismissive of the top-down “experimentation” emanating from the central offices of the NYPS.  Gonzalez offered “goodie bags to lure parents to parent association meetings, yet barely a dozen show up.” But that is the strategy of reform: get everybody on board.

But Gonzalez and holistic reformers like Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone are success stories of reform. Writing about Canada in this week’s  Time Magazine (May 2, 2011),  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declares,

When Canada, 59, started HCZ Project 14 years ago, it was a one block pilot program. Today it covers 100 city blocks and serves 8,000 kids, providing not just a good education but also early-childhood programs, after-school services and guidance to help parents play a key role in their kids’ learning. Canada is driven by a deep belief that all children can succeed, regardless of race, wealth and zip code.

But this was not done with union-busting and lawsuits. Reform was a full-participation program. And it takes time or it doesn’t take. It is not a coup d’etat ala Michelle Rhee. Her reforms are being dismantled as fast as she installed them. And the same for any hit-and-run school superintendent who promises radical change, then leaves town before the test scores peak and fade. If a superintendent promises results in less than four years, watch him or her exit before the fifth year. Everyone knows that reform is a time-released medicine, but everyone wants it “fast, FAST, FAST.”

Bring back the reform that was a full-participation venture, the reform that included all the stakeholders and ripened like vintage grapes.  Bring back the reform that changed students, not their test scores.  Bring back the reform, where the adversaries lay down their non-negotiable demands and wondered together “What if?”  Bring teachers back into the process, instead of alleging they are the problem.

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Metaphors, Money, and Speech

Perhaps the dialogue across the pages of the New York Times on Tuesday, April 12 was accidental, but it was fascinating, just the same. On one side David Brooks reminded us of the importance of metaphor as our lens for seeing reality. On the other side the lead  editorial warned us that the Supreme Court may change the metaphor of money enabling speech in political campaigns to money being the equivalent of speech and therefore deserving the same protection as speech. Both articles suggest we ought to watch what we say and be wary of what we hear.

Commenting on the research of linguists, such as James Geary ( I Is an Other) and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Brooks reminded us to be alert to the metaphors we use:

It’s to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data–to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world form the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.

In the context of the upcoming budget debate these words could not be more timely. Just as poignantly, they address the debate about the financing of political campaigns and whether the right to uninhibited spending is protected by the First Amendment. The legal question must be complex ( or why would the Supreme Court be so sharply divided?), but the ethical question seems pretty stark to me.

“Money talks.” This seems to be the Supreme Court’s metaphorical view of campaign funding. I have never heard this expression used without some rueful implication that money has more influence than words.  No one says, “Money  should talk” or “We should pay attention to money more than speech.”   It is regrettable that “money talks,” and that valuable social programs are being slashed because of deficits, not because of their value to society. Perhaps it is reasonable to pay attention to funding, but it is not preferable.

So when a legislative or judicial body has the opportunity to curb the realities of funding, to curtail the power of money, it should ethically seize that responsibility.  The law should not maintain, but improve the status quo.  The law should not empower the powerful, but protect the weak.  The ethical responsibility of lawmakers and law mediators is clear.

Consider the regulation of speech. What if we allowed those with access to the press and publication to use language to slander and malign a person’s reputation? Those with the sharpest pens and most demented imaginations could wreak havoc on people they disliked. Instead the law curbs language which unfairly scars our reputations.  This is a fair restriction on speech. No matter how abundant your store of adjectives, you can not freely unleash them on your enemies in publications.

You can come pretty close to libel in a political campaign,  but if you have good lawyers and media consultants you can avoid overstepping the law.  With a substantial campaign fund you can disseminate half-truths to a wide audience. Hence, ” Money talks.” This is not an inescapable reality, but a sad commentary.

Turning money into a form of speech is a travesty of the First Amendment. A strict constructionist should be appalled by the ruling of the Supreme Court, which allows us to use money freely to consolidate power within the ample limits of free speech.

Given the power of language, however, we might be most concerned with the metaphors we use and interpret. If the Supreme Court can conflate money with speech, what other exaggerations might be unloosed on the voting public? How much will these metaphors determine what programs get cut in the coming months or which President is elected in the coming years? That is not a subject for the law, but for, you, gentle, but critical readers. Let the reader and consumer of media beware!

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Critical of Critical Thinking

The most troubling question about the study “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” is that Bob Herbert, New York Times columnist, like most of his colleagues, does not for a minute question whether the “critical thinking” of college students has been adequately measured by whatever assessment was administered.

It is indeed troubling that “Thirty-six per cent of the students said they studied alone less than five hours a week.” And perhaps alarming that the same students are pulling an average 3.16 GPA.  There are some disclaimers that might be made about “studying alone,” because colleges encourage study groups and collaborative effort is considered a crucial skill of the marketplace.  Did they ask how many hours were spent studying in groups?

But more troubling is the undisputed claim that “after the first two years of college, 45 per cent of the students made no significant improvement in skills related to critical thinking, complex reasoning, and communication” and that two years later the percentage had only improved to 36 per cent.

Does anyone know how these critical skills were assessed? Has anyone taken such a test, in which “critical thinking, complex reasoning and communication” were validly measured? I have not investigated the testing instrument used in this study, but I would think someone would, before proclaiming that college students are dumber than they used to be.

Suppose the assessment of critical reasoning was the time and accuracy it took to fill in a crossword puzzle with the content knowledge expected of college students? Suppose it was a version of the Miller Analogies test, with content expected of a liberal education (be sure to cover art history and music) ? Suppose it was a thirty-minute essay question asking for the causes of terrorism in the Western world? Ask yourself, college graduates, do you want your critical reasoning skills assessed on any one of these tests?

The irony is the utter neglect of critical evaluation of a study that purports to measure the critical reasoning of college students.  How can we claim to know such things without knowing the nature of the assessment? The news media are the most uncritical arbiters of news about education in the literate world. They accept every test at face value. Heaven forbid we might test journalists this way.

I admit I am disturbed by the findings of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, because, regardless of the validity of their thinking assessments, where there is smoke, there is fire.  I try to learn what I can from studies that probe the learning habits of college students.

But I think it either hypocritical or delusional that the news media in general and Bob Herbert, in particular, would report on studies of student competence and knowledge, without asking if the tests were valid.  This is a classic case of uncritical thinking.

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Politics and Education: A Failed Marriage

Politics and education just don’t mix. The disconnect between so-called budget-reforming governors ( particularly in Wisconsin, Indiana and New Jersey) and the national sentiment about teachers shows that politicians do not get education.  They view it as a budget item, rather than a national priority.

Public opinion polls consistently support teachers, especially local teachers, and the current N.Y. Times poll  supports their right to bargain collectively by 2 to 1.  Although Governors Walker, Daniels and Christie have tapped into the budget-cutting spirit of their constituents, they are taking on the wrong adversary, when they seek to de-professionalize education.  They are bringing a machete into microsurgery.

Pay attention to the destructive impact of government on education in the current fiscal climate. New Jersey’s teachers have been publicly excoriated by a governor who presumably wants to recruit better teachers to his schools. Providence’s mayor has laid off an entire teaching force, clearly a publicity stunt, and thoroughly demoralized an entire school system. The governors of Indiana and Wisconsin have attacked the collective bargaining rights of their teachers, because they were  not willing to make wealthy tax-payers help offset the deficit.  And our Congressional representatives have blithely wiped out funding for critical literacy programs, in particular the National Writing Project, because we can not afford $30 million to fund the most successful professional development program in the United States.

In Linda Darling-Hammond’s study of three countries with superior performance on the Program in International Student Assessments exams, she found several shared national policies on education. In a comparative study of Finland, South Korea and Singapore, she found that all three countries actively recruited and paid for the education of superb teachers for their schools, and that they separated the national administration of schools from the political process.

The study is summarized in Chapter Six of Darling-Hammond’s book The Flat World and Education, which highlights major differences in the recruiting, educating and mentoring of teachers between three nations and the United States. Regarding “National Teaching Policies” she says they

recruit able teachers and completely subsidize their extensive teaching programs, paying them a stipend as they learn to teach well. Salaries are equitable across schools and competitive with other careers, generally comparable to those of engineers and other key professionals (193).

Teacher education is modeled on the education that the professional ministry wants throughout the primary and secondary systems, and it continues into the early years of teaching where expert teachers are paid to mentor the first- and second-year teachers in the most difficult years of professional orientation.

But the national administration of education in all three countries is also de-coupled from the political institutions. This strategy affects the entire program of teacher education.

these systems are managed by professional ministries of education,which are substantially buffered from political winds. Frequent evaluations of schools and the system as a whole have guided reforms (193).

The reforms to schools and professional development of teachers in these three countries are a remarkable contrast to the reform incentives currently engineered by federal and state governments in this country. See Darling-Hammond’s remarkable book for the details (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010).

When will our lunacy stop? When we can perform a decisive poli-tectomy on our education system.  Politicians have mucked up our national program with alternate diet and binge budgets, with short-term reform programs, with pandering to the testing establishment, with demonizing the “enemies of reform,” and by declaring we will have to do better with less.  How would that fly in Finland, South Korea, and Singapore?

Teachers know they can do better, more than any politician could imagine. They just need the opportunity. They need better leadership. The marriage of politics and education has failed miserably.  Set them free to do what they do best.

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How Long to Make a Teacher?

The “Op-Chart” in the Sunday Times takes a fascinating look at the incubation of “street cops,” “Presidents,” and “Lawyers,” and many other roles and processes. It takes three years to make a good street cop, four years to make a President, five years to make a lawyer and six years to make a friend. I could not help but wonder: How long to make a teacher?

In every case the relationship between formal education and experience is the crucial variable. You can learn everything you should know about the principles of law in three years or the essentials of education in two years of schooling, but applying that knowledge to real cases and real students is the most critical phase of the incubation period.  In fact “Teach for America” made its reputation on shortening the formal instruction of a teacher and intensifying the field experience, essentially making it “on-the-job” training.

You can make a case for a teacher’s learning curve beginning with a year of formal preparation, followed by two years of hard knocks in the classroom, as the TFA model would advocate.  Research has shown that the students of these teachers are performing nearly at the same level as traditionally-prepared teachers at the end of two years in the classroom.  As I noted in “School Reform: the Popular Narrative”

In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year (Darling-Hammond 47).

So, by the standards of Teach for America it takes two years to make a teacher and three years to disillusion one.  Arguably the reward system of TFA does not promote longevity in teaching, but I would argue that something else is going on in that third year, based on my own experience in the classroom and the experience of teachers who attend our Summer Invitational Institute for teachers of writing.

As the current Common Core State Standards reveal, there are two kinds of learning in English Language Arts and in the other academic subjects: formal content and “capacities of the literate individual.”  The “capacities” are given cursory attention in the ELA section of the Common Core State Standards. Among them are “independence,” “adapting their communication in relation to audience, task, purpose, and discipline,” “comprehending and critiquing,” “citing specific evidence,” “using technology and digital media capably,” and understanding “other perspectives and cultures” (7)

For most teachers the centrality of these “capacities” or “habits of mind,” as they are often called, becomes evident after three years of teaching to a formal curriculum, i.e. the standards in place in their state or district.  They discover, by trial and error, that students fail to consolidate what they learn in the formal curriculum because they are not acquiring the necessary “habits of mind” along the way. They discover that habits of mind are not casually absorbed in the process of mastering the content of the curriculum, but must be taught explicitly as part of the curriculum.

This is where the Common Core State Standards misses the mark. It treats the processes of learning as incidental to the content of learning and gives the processes, i.e. the habits, short shrift. Every teacher who makes it beyond the second year of teaching eventually becomes aware of the centrality of these “habits,” and it either inspires them to reinvent their teaching or drives them out of the profession.

There are many reasons for teachers leaving the profession, but I would argue this is a significant cause: the discovery that teaching is not only the delivery of content, but the assimilation of hard-won habits.  And I would argue that this is a developmental process. You have to watch students learn and forget before you see the underpinnings of that learning, the habits, the meta-cognitive skills, the conscious disciplines.

Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” skills in the preparation of teachers, there is only so much about habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is a late-developing awareness for most teachers. To be frank, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the essential truth of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize their impact on my students until then.

So how long to make a teacher? Four years at best, and for the slow learners like me, eight, nine or ten years.  To think that teachers are made by the straightforward delivery of the formal curriculum is to maintain a short-sighted view of education. It is the unfortunate view of the current Common Core State Standards and the microwaved preparation of teachers modeled by Teach for America.

I think the Chinese proverb paraphrased in today’s Times says it best: It takes ten years to sharpen a sword (New York Times, p. 9).

Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Flat World and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.

Common Core State Standards Initiative: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects, 2010.

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How would a journalist “race to the top”?

In “Continue the Race” (August 29, 2010) the editors of the New York Times continue to celebrate the misguided goals of the “Race to the Top,” which include evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. This kind of assessment of teachers is wrong on so many levels: psychometry, pedagogy, social equity, and ethics.  Why do reputable journalists continue to hold teachers to standards they would never allow for themselves?

A cardinal principal of the science of mental testing, psychometry, is that a test should never be used to evaluate what it was not designed to evaluate. Therefore, a test designed to evaluate math or reading should not be used to evaluate the teacher of math or reading.  It would require an inference that could not be supported by the data.  Otherwise we might hire journalists based on their S.A.T. scores or fire copy editors for their low scores on the Millers Analogy Test. Even reliable tests can be abused and make faulty judgments.

Standardized tests are not true indicators of academic progress, especially for students who think critically or methodically.  All teachers know students who do not test well, because of the emotional pressure or because they read questions too critically or because they need time to process their thoughts.  Standardized tests privilege the quick response and the suppression of ambiguity, so that thinking is always convergent and the first answer is better than the second one.  What we consider higher order thinking, the core of our curriculum, is not assessed by standardized tests.

Perhaps journalists are accustomed to this on-demand world or even prefer it, since theirs is a world of deadlines.  Journalism is the one kind of writing with relentless and unforgiving cycles and only certain kinds of writers can adapt to them.  Yet writing in other circumstances allows the luxury of multiple drafts and time to receive feedback from other writers and editors. The same can be said of problem-solving in math, science and the social sciences.  Standardized testing does not foster these process-oriented, critical thinking skills, yet it is becoming the primary indicator of educational success.

The test performances of students in urban schools are a target of “Race to the Top.”  The conditions in urban school environments can subvert effective teaching to the extent that good teachers will run away from them.  Good teachers know they are constrained by the effectiveness of their schools.  Numerous factors are beyond their control, such as class size, flagrant absenteeism, aliterate family environments, and undiagnosed or over-diagnosed special needs.  These conditions contribute enormously to the achievement gap. Until such conditions can be reliably addressed, urban teachers and teachers of disadvantaged children should not be evaluated by their students’ performance. Otherwise good teachers will avoid the urban schools, knowing they will be penalized for teaching there.

And if  a young journalist began her career writing for a pulpy tabloid, how would that reflect on her style?  How much opportunity would a writer have to shine under the pressure to tell the most lurid story of the day?  How does the writer’s prose reflect her ability, if the text must be written at the fifth grade level? Professionals might call this “paying their dues,” but what would a similar early career performance do to a teacher, evaluated by her students’ performance?  Would anyone take into account the above-mentioned variables that undermine her good teaching?

Ultimately fairness in evaluation is a matter of ethics. You should not evaluate a job performance with the blunt instruments of standardized tests any more than you should evaluate a journalist by the word count she produces each month.  The professional standards implied by such thoughtless evaluation are unconscionable. How can we expect teachers to teach compassionately when they are assessed by tests they don’t take, with so many factors beyond their control?  They will become as disillusioned as a stringer might over time, because he never received a special assignment or appreciation for anything except meeting the deadline.

Since I am a teacher, I do not truly understand the conditions that might coarsen a young journalist, but I try to understand.  I wish for the same consideration for teachers from the editors of the New York Times.

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Figures Lie

The New York Times never fails to explore the nuances of the economy and politics, but it is surprisingly naive about testing. It rarely analyzes the results of achievement testing in the schools the way it scrutinizes the economic data that routinely lead the front page.

One of today’s editorials, entitled “Honest Testing,” begins “Congress did the right thing with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, when it required states to document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid. Parents and policy makers need to know how well their schools are doing.” (July 24, 2010). The editorial deplores the continuing decline in the rigor of the New York state math and English tests, compared with the NAEP  (National Assessment of Educational Progress) tests over the same time period.  It concludes that the only reason for eighth grade math scores to rise 20 percentage points in one year is that the test has become more predictable and easy to prepare for.  The Times may be right in this case, but there are dozens of reasons for the rising and falling of test scores, and the media seldom examines any but the most obvious ones.

One reason everyone respects the NAEP is its very cautious approach to reporting test scores, especially scores that compare states and cities.  While the reporting of local test scores may be greeted only with jubilation or dismay at the annual district trends in reading and math, the NAEP always qualifies results by reporting demographic and cognitive characteristics of the test takers. For example, it reported in the 2007 Nation’s Report Card on Writing, that the writing scores of eighth graders differed by 29 points based on the schooling level of parents (from “not finishing high school” to “graduated from college”). This tells us more about the scores than how one state fared against another. The gaps between these two groups is 30% higher than any other achievement gap studied, whether gender or race.

On the other hand, state scores take on greater significance when qualified by demography of the state.  One factor seldom examined in the media is “exclusion rates,” by which states exempt from testing  certain students with disabilities and second-language challenges that might invalidate their test performance.  Both No Child Left Behind and the NAEP have policies about excluding students from tests, but the states hold the ultimate power to exclude certain students from testing. Obviously the exclusion of large numbers of students from groups with language deficiencies will  have a positive effect on the average writing score within a given state.

With great delicacy NAEP cautions,

While the effect of exclusion is not precisely known, the validity of comparisons of performance results could be affected if exclusion rates are comparatively high or vary widely over time.  In the 2007 writing assessment, overall exclusion rates (for both students with disabilities and English language learners) were three per cent  at both grades 8 and 12, state exclusion rates at grade 8 varied from 1 to 7 percent, and the 10 urban school districts excluded from 2 to 11 per cent.” (“The Nation’s Report Card, Writing,   p. 7)

Suppose we compared the writing performance of eighth graders on the NAEP in 2002 and 2007? One state, let’s call it “Massachusetts,” showed an increase in scores from 163 to 167, while another state we’ll call “New York” showed an increase from 151 to 154. Both states exceeded the national average improvement, which was +2 points. In the media New York would be considered an also-ran, while Massachusetts would be honored for improving on writing scores already among the nation’s best.

But what if it was known that Massachusetts increased its percentage of students excluded for learning disabilities in 2007 from 4 percent to 6 percent, while New York decreased its percentage of LD students from 4 to 2 percent? What if the resulting increase gave Massachusetts an impressive average score of 139 among LD students, while New York, with its 120 average LD score,  was closer to the national average of LD students of 118. Wouldn’t a reasonable inference be that the increase in the overall writing score of Massachusetts students might be largely the result of excluding a larger percentage of students from taking the test in 2007?

It would be cynical to say that the 6% of students with disabilities in Massachusetts were unfairly excluded from taking the writing test.  Very likely they were legitimately excluded. But it would be just as unfair to claim the rise in the state writing score was attributable to the improvement of the teaching and learning of writing in the state’s middle schools.

For NAEP testing Massachusetts was among the highest three states in excluding for learning disabilities for middle school writing.  Massachusetts, Kentucky and Texas all excluded 6%. The national average for excluding students with learning disabilities on this writing test was 3%. If we were examining the eighth grade writing scores of Kentucky over  the nine-year period (1998 – 2007), we might want to consider that the state increased its exclusion rate from 2 to 4 to 6 percent over those nine years. While the exclusion rate was relatively stable in Texas over the same period, its writing scores declined with each administration, from six points higher than the national average to three points below it.

This is not the kind of test score analysis that fascinates the readers of the daily newspaper, but it is no more complicated than explaining what the changing unemployment rate might mean for real employment trends during a recession and no less significant for understanding raw data.  It is really a question of accurate reporting, not just writing for an audience of non-professionals.

It would be gratifying to read about educational test score trends in the national and local media with an intelligent analysis of reasons for the trends, rather than seeing it reported at face value like the pulse and blood pressure of a sick patient.