The unintended consequences will be epic

A still from 1980s-era video video purporting to teach police how to spot signs of Satanism.

 A parent group in Nevada's Washoe County (think Reno) wants to outfit teachers with body cameras in order to ensure no one teaches Critical Race Theory.  Let's get to the fun stuff:

• This could do wonders for student nutrition. Parents will finally see that their kid consumes a steady supply of chips, Red Bull, and Skittles when they're out of Mom's sight. Those carefully packed veggies? Trash can. 
• Parents will learn that there's a reason their daughter chooses to wear an unseasonable sweatshirt every day in late spring. Related, they will also learn that halter tops have never gone out of a style for teens. 
• The public will learn that teachers are every bit students' equals when it comes to procrastination. 

Of course, there's the obvious points -- e.g. This would lead to gross violations of student privacy; It's so impractical that it would near-impossible to implement; CRT is a niche theory usually covered late in law school or maybe some public policy grad programs; No one is teaching 12-year-olds about different philosophies on how to deal with structural racism, etc. 

But we all (should) know this isn't about Critical Race Theory as an academic theory. C'mon -- maybe a few thousand people in this country of 330 million could succinctly explain CRT and none of them teach kids. 

This is about CRT as another boogeyman for the culture wars. It'll come to represent anything and everything deemed dangerous by grifters, ideologues, cynics and the credulous idiots who finance them. See: Common Core, Colin Kaepernick kneeling, etc.

This practice itself is older than the country. You can draw a line from Salem Witch Trials to the Satanic Panic to QAnon and you'll see the same cast of opportunists and morons.

Are Reno's schoolteachers going to be wearing body cameras? Uh, no. I don't think this parent group is any more representative of public sentiment than your typical post on Nextdoor. But it's a useful reminder that moral panics will always be with us.

Tests and dumb tests

"I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."
-- Barack Obama, 2002

Borrowing Obama's formulation, I don't think most teachers oppose testing. I think many oppose dumb testing. 

Some teachers in Seattle are rebelling against testing -- sort of. They're boycotting giving a second test to their students. (The students in question already take an state-mandated end of course exam in some classes. As best I can tell, this isn't controversial.) Jesse Hagopian, a teacher at Garfield High School (and a Teach for America alumnus**) pinpoints the chief issue:

Students don’t take the MAP seriously because they know their scores don’t factor into their grades or graduation status. They approach it less seriously each time they take it, so their scores decline. Our district uses MAP scores in teacher evaluations, even though the MAP company recommends against using it to evaluate teacher effectiveness and it’s not mandated in our union contract.

That is dumb testing.

The more I read, this story seems less about whether testing is worthwhile and more of a tale of how an inane bureaucracy requires teachers to give a useless test. 

A letter from teachers at a Seattle elementary schools demonstrates why the test in questions is useless:

 ...the current version of the MAP test is aligned with the old state standards and it is clearly an unsuitable vehicle for evaluating students currently being taught the new required Common Core Standards. So not only are the results of little instructional value, but this discrepancy between what is taught and what is measured will yield falsely low scores making the MAP test invalid for the purpose of measuring student growth/teacher effectiveness.

(Emphasis mine.)

The test that's the focus of the boycott is the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress). It's a national test, though I don't know if the testmakers adjust the questions to suit the standards of different states. 

As it happens, I can somewhat empathize with the Seattle teachers. My ninth graders have a similar testing regimen -- a state-mandated end of course test (EOC) and the MAP. The reason I'm OK with the kids also taking the MAP is because the data from it helps me do a better job.

The MAP is something we chose to do as a school. We use it to track student progress throughout the year and make sure my students are on track to reach their desired ACT score. The MAP is taken three times a year on a computer and takes about an hour for most students to take a subject-specific test. Unlike the state-mandated tests, it offers a sophisticated breakdown of student growth and skill level.

It's very useful in terms of knowing where a student is, how quickly they're making progress, and tweaking instruction to meet students. As we switch to Common Core standards -- which are more rigorous -- the data from the MAP will be even more relevant. 

It is, of course, worthless if teachers don't use the data. 

The information I get from it actually saves quite a bit of class and planning time because I don't need to design my own diagnostic test, nor do I have to crunch the raw data. It's helped me teach because we're more accurately diagnosing skill deficits. It's one thing to know a student isn't reading on grade level. It's much more useful to know that, say, a student struggles with differentiating between certain vowel sounds. With that sort of precision, we're able to conduct targeted reading interventions. When students take the MAP again, we track progress. 

In other words, this isn't testing for testing's sake. We use this stuff to help our kids become better readers. It's a simple goal, but not an easy one. Helping kids make strides is complicated. That's why so many kids fall behind in the first place.

The idea of education is also simple, but not easy: everything a school does should help students learn. All tests, whether it's a ten-question vocabulary quiz or a state-mandated exam, are supposed to serve that goal. If the data from a test isn't meaningful, then what's the point in having students take it? 

As with so many things in education, poor execution sabotages a policy's intent. This seems like district leadership kept on adding testing systems without thinking through how it would play out in classrooms. The Seattle debate isn't about testing; it's about dumb testing.

****

** Read Hagopian's entire article. There's a persistent idea that TFA alumni don't have many different opinions about what ed reform should be. There's another one that many TFA alumni don't stay in the classroom. Both are false. 

Assigned reading

Your assigned reading:

Andy Rotherham on "Why Chicago Matters"

 In practice the city gave a lot of ground on key issues to get kids back in school. Sure, in 2014 thirty percent of teachers evaluations will be based on how much students learn. But that’s state law in Illinois! It’s illegal for the contract to do less. Evaluation results will not be especially consequential anyway. Mediocre teachers can keep their jobs year after year and the great teachers in Chicago will not be protected during layoffs, which will still be determined largely based on seniority rather than effectiveness. It’s unclear meanwhile how the city is going to afford the 17 percent raise it committed to – especially at the same time Chicago’s teacher pension fund is nearing insolvency.  The city won on some issues, too, by protecting principal autonomy and maintaining a sensible policy on guaranteed jobs when there are layoffs because of the downsizing everyone can see coming. But, overall it’s hard to see the agreement as anything but a substantial victory for Lewis and one that will resonate far beyond Chicago.

Robert Pondiscio on "Hobson's Choice" 

  It would be ironic to be in the business of education and have little faith in parents’ ability to make an informed choice—or to correct course if that choice proved untenable.  My personal bottom line, speaking only for myself, is that choice is an intrinsic good.  I like exercising school choice for my child and I want you to have the same options.  And let’s face it, education is fundamentally coercive: you have to educate your child.  Some latitude in how you go about it is to be encouraged. 

Dana Goldstein on David Colman as "The Schoolmaster"

But what has proved most controversial is Coleman’s unilateral vision for American students, of college as the goal and a college-prep curriculum as the means. In public education, a new reform is always coming down the pike. Longtime educators develop a healthy cynicism about which grand policy ideas will trickle down to classrooms and which will sputter during implementation or simply go out of fashion. But David Coleman’s ideas are not just another wonkish trend. They have been adopted by almost every state, and over the next few years, they will substantively change what goes on in many American classrooms. Soon, as Coleman steps into his new position as the head of the College Board, they may also affect who applies to college and how applicants are evaluated. David Coleman’s ideas, for better or worse, are transforming American education as we know it. 

One reason Common Core is a good thing

A former student once told me that he'd lived in five states since kindergarten. While that's a high number, he wasn't the only student I've ever known who had done that.

I'll grant that while students who've lived in three or more states are unusual, students going back and forth between states isn't. At least, it's not so unusual that it wouldn't affect academic outcomes for a decent number of students.

It's hard to get data on this specific issue because data tracking students making intra-district moves in a school gets lumped into data tracking students moving state-to-state. Regardless, the general facts on student mobility are sobering. From a 1994 U.S. General Accounting Office study -- and it's a safe assumption that the mobility rate has only increased since then: (Hat tip Hoover Institution)

• About 17 percent of all third graders—more than a half million—have changed schools frequently.
• More than 24 percent of third graders have attended two schools since the first grade.
• Of third graders from low-income families (incomes below $10,000), 30 percent have changed schools frequently, compared with approximately 10 percent from families with incomes of $25,000–$49,000 and 8 percent of children in families with incomes of $50,000 or more
• About 25 percent of third graders in inner-city schools have changed schools frequently, compared with about 15 percent of third graders in rural or suburban schools.

And it damages achievement:

• Overall, third graders who have changed schools frequently are two and a half times as likely to repeat a grade as third graders who have never changed schools (20 versus 8 percent).
• For all income groups, children who have changed schools frequently are more likely to repeat a grade than children who have never changed schools.
• Children who changed schools four or more times by the eighth grade were at least four times more likely to drop out than those who remained in the same school; this is true even after taking into account the socioeconomic status of a child’s family.

Moving from school to school within a district is something that could be addressed by policy. Students moving from state to state is another challenge altogether. It seems to me that the best solution is to make the academic transition as smooth as possible. Hence the need for grade-level expectations to be as consistent as possible from district-to-district and state-to-state. 

Of course, not all agree. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley sees, in the words of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, "a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy."

From USA Today:

"Just as we should not relinquish control of education to the Federal government," [Haley] wrote in a letter to a state lawmaker, "neither should we cede it to the consensus of other states."

With an education system ranked dead last in achievement, God forbid that South Carolina learn anything from other states. 

And, of course, if Arne Duncan is in favor of something, then Diane Ravitch opposes it. From the same USA Today article:

Last month, New York University education historian Diane Ravitch, a vocal Duncan critic, blasted the standards, writing in The New York Review of Books that they've never been field-tested. "No one knows whether these standards are good or bad, whether they will improve academic achievement or widen the achievement gap," she said.

A question for Ravitch: How will decreasing the differences between academic expectations state-to-state widen the achievement gap? 

I could see a problem if Common Core standards were less rigorous than the typical set of state standards, but they don't seem to be. I'm spending the year moving from Tennessee English I standards to Common Core. The latter are tougher -- which is a good thing. I'm also familiar with English I standards in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and Texas** -- Common Core seems to be a step up for all of them. 

That aside, I suspect that some of the real winners will be these students who have high mobility rates, particularly those who change districts.

After all, does anyone envision a future where families less frequently move from city to city?

**During the past few years, I've spent more time than I'd care to admit perusing different states' standardized tests. It's yet another one of my nerdy hobbies.