Why should all students be treated exactly the same?

The Standards movement is getting really crazy. Why, exactly, must all students learn exactly the same things and master the same material on the same tests? Kenneth Bernstein explores this question brilliantly in a piece at Daily Kos:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/2/6/834419/-students-should-graduate-with-a-rsum,-not-a-transcript

or http://tinyurl.com/stdsRnuts  for short.

I recently wrote the follwing, before reading Bernstein’s piece. But his article is, frankly, much better than mine.

“One of the weird things about the ‘Standards’ movement, and even of NCLB, is the very idea that ALL students need to be held to a single standard of some sort. That’s a crazy idea, frankly.

“Every single person is different, and each one has his or her own ideas about how to pursue happiness and so on.

“Not everybody wants to be a doctor or a computer programmer, or should become one, although it’s good that there are those who want to do this very much. Not everybody wants to be a plumber or a day-care worker, with the same proviso. Not everybody wants to be a sanitation worker or a taxi-driver, but where would we be without them? Even more lost and deeper in doo-doo than we are with this Standards drive.

“ All of those professions or jobs are extremely useful fields of work, and we all should be glad that there are people who want to do them. Some of those fields have wage levels that ought to be increased by a lot, and the members thereof should be given training that is a bit more useful and appropriate for what they are doing. And more prestige, to boot.

“But why on earth should people who would like to perform those tasks ALL be required to learn exactly the same things, and master them at exactly the same, in secondary school? What good will it serve to require every single person, in all of those fields, to learn pre-calculus, or creative writing, say? Is it so that the ones who end up taking the less-remunerative and lower-prestige tasks can be made to feel that they are, really and truly, failures who deserve crappy lives?

“Even in France, which has (in my opinion) an overly strict and centralized centrally-administered educational system, admits that there are different strokes for different folks.Some students go to what are essentially vocational schools, where they are supposedly trained for existing jobs. And those who go to the academic schools get to choose which track they are going to specialize in – social sciences, medicine/pharmacy, mathematics, foreign languages, exact sciences, and so on. The specialties may or may not actually correspond to future vocations, but they at least make some effort to try to match what people learn, and what they are tested on, with their future plans.

“As Susan Ohanian put it in her book, One size fits few.”

Censorship at WaPo

How long will honest, mild-mannered reporter WaPo Bill Turque keep his job? His managing editors don’t want to hear the truth about Chancellor Rhee, and definitely don’t want the public to hear it either.

Washington Post management (big shots Fred Hiatt and Liz Spayd, in particular) forced Bill Turque to re-write his Wednesday blog because he accurately pointed out the extent to which the newspaper’s editorial board is in thrall to Michelle Rhee, chancellor of DC public schools, and siphons news about her through themselves when possible. They raked him over the coals (figuratively), according to the WaPo ombudsman, even though the blog had already been approved by two other editors.

Here is what the ombudsman wrote:

“Spayd immediately called Turque on the carpet. Soon, the blog post disappeared. In its place, readers saw this: ‘We are unable to locate the page you requested.’ And when the blog item reappeared several hours later, it had been noticeably altered.
‘She was pretty hot,’ Turque said of Spayd. ‘She said it was completely inappropriate’ and that ‘I had no place as a beat reporter taking on the editorial board.’

“Spayd gave a similar version of what she said to Turque in her 5th floor office. ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate for a reporter in our newsroom to be challenging the views, or challenging the integrity, of our editorial board,’ she told me. ‘And I also don’t think that he should be ascribing motives of Michelle Rhee as to who she picked to speak with.’ “

Bill Turque writes both news articles and a blog for the Washington Post, mostly dealing with education in DC. For a period of time, his Wednesday 1-27-09 blog was taken off-line; the original was pasted by somebody else onto my blog. When Turque’s blog was put back up, the very passages that I had quoted in an earlier post were the ones that were made much less sharp, accurate, and pointed. Or, much better, from the point of view of the corporate types on the Washington Post editorial board.

(1) Here is the first passage. I am reprinting the original version in maroon , and am underlining the parts that are different from the edited version.  (Jo-Ann Armao is a former reporter who is now on the WaPo editorial board.)

“Jo-Ann, on the other hand, sits on an editorial board whose support for the chancellor has been steadfast, protective and, at times, adoring.”

Here is the sanitized version, which I am reprinting in a dark blue, and in which I am underlining notable additions.

“Jo-Ann, on the other hand, sits on an editorial board whose support for the chancellor has been steadfast.”

(2) Another example:

“Where this gets complicated is that board’s stance, and the chancellor’s obvious rapport with Jo-Ann, also means that DCPS has a guaranteed soft landing spot for uncomfortable or inconvenient disclosures–kind of a print version of the Larry King Show. This happened last September during the flap over the out-of-boundary admission of Mayor Fenty’s twin sons to Lafayette Elementary in Chevy Chase.”

Here it is in the edited, sanitized version:

“Where this gets complicated is that board’s stance, and the chancellor’s rapport with Jo-Ann, means that DCPS may prefer to talk to her than me. This could be what happened last September during the flap over the out-of-boundary admission of Mayor Fenty’s twin sons to Lafayette Elementary in Chevy Chase.”

(3) Another example:

Original version:

“Are Fenty and Rhee gaming the system by using the editorial page this way? Of course. Is this a healthy thing for readers of The Post? Probably not. Is it going to keep me from doing my job effectively?  Nope.”

Sanitized version:

“Is this kind of thing going to keep me from doing my job well? Nope.”

So – how long does one keep one’s job if one writes, accurately,in the Washington Post, that the Empress (sorry, chancellor) has no clothes?

=============================================================================

Full disclosure:  when someone posted Bill Turque’s blog on my blog, as a comment, I was confused for a while. I thought that Turque himself had put it as a comment. Not true. Not only does he not hate his job that much, but my blog would probably be the last place for him to commit journalistic suicide.

More slander, lies, and spin from Michelle Rhee

After strongly implying that the reason that she fired 266 teachers was that they were sexual perverts, sadists towards children, and never came to work, Rhee has once again put a “spin” on her comments.  As you have probably read elsewhere, Rhee told a “Fast Company” reporter, “I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn’t we take those things into consideration?”

In a letter to the City Council Rhee has backtracked somewhat, saying that there was exactly ONE teacher out of the 266 who had been charged with sexual misconduct; but that teacher’s case has not been brought to a conclusion one way or the other. She also said that there were a total of SIX teachers who had at one time or another served suspensions for corporal punishment. Out of two hundred and sixty-six. And TWO who were accused of having had absences without leave. Let’s see: 1 + 6 + 2 = 9, I think. (Did I get that right?) And 9 out of 266 is a little more than 3 percent.

(Keep in mind that teachers can be, and often ARE, accused of corporal punishment or sexual misconduct without any basis in fact. I have seen it happen at my school. Also keep in mind that apparently neither the sexual misconduct case, nor the abuse of leave cases, had been brought to a conclusion. I don’t know any of the facts in any of the cases, and I don’t presume anything, one way or another.)

It is really shameful of Rhee to tar all of the staff that she illegitimately fired with such a nasty brush. But it’s so typical of her; like Ronald Reagan, she is utterly convinced of the rightfulness of her cause, and she seldom lets facts get in the way of her just-so stories.

By one account, in the same letter, Rhee apparently peddled the big lie that she can never fire anybody for misconduct like the cases she alleges, because of the big bad old union contract. That is a flat-out lie. What having the union does is much like the promise behind the Bill of Rights and the theory behind American jurisprudence: accusations need to be substantiated, one is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and anybody charged needs to be accorded due process in one way or another. Can a teacher or other school staff member get fired for actual, proven sexual misconduct with a student, or for a gross instance of proven corporal punishment? Absolutely! In fact, I can’t think of an easier way for a teacher to lose his/her job.

What Rhee is really complaining about is that she doesn’t think that teachers or other school staff know anything, are pretty much all evil malingerers, and don’t deserve any rights whatsoever. Unless they have clearly hitched their wagon to hers. (I bet you get the allusion!)

There used to be a word for people who believe that workers inherently have no rights to collective bargaining, nor to due process when accused of anything. This sort of person also believes that the true Leaders are better than anybody else, and deserve to be followed no matter what.  Their present-day counterparts pull out all the stops to stop any attempt at union organizing in any US factory; believe that anybody accused of ‘terrorism’ should be tortured and held indefinitely without any charges, a trial, or the right to confront their accusers. Their educational counterparts – in my opinion – would like to boil down the educational process to little more than getting a certain number of answers right on multiple-choice tests in only two subjects, and believe that teachers are not to be trusted to come up with interesting or inspiring lesson plans.

Back in the 20th century, such people were quite proud to call themselves Fascists. Although they call label themselves differently today, I don’t see a whole lot of difference. And I don’t think we need to stand for it.

Disinformation about Teach for America

Amanda Ripley’s recent article in The Atlantic ( http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching ) wildly exaggerates the supposed positive benefits of having a  Teach for America (TFA) teacher in the classroom. After reading the article, you might come away believing that TFA teachers regularly work miracles in their classroom, just like Michelle Rhee pretends she did, while their do-nothing veteran colleagues just sit and read the newspaper in class. (Although, funny thing: the super-achieving teacher described in the article was NOT a TFA-er!)

However, if you read the published data that Ripley refers to, they show that both TFA teachers and other teachers in high-poverty schools are having a hard time getting any positive results at all.

In English/reading, the results are as follows (the blue, thick line represents the scores of the TFA teachers’ students). I cut-and-pasted the following two graphs directly from the study; they are on page xiv.

If you ask me, there is essentially no difference between the 13th, 14th, and 15th percentiles. These are all very low scores! The reason that the TFA students had slightly higher initial and final scores is almost undoubtedly because of random variation.

In math, the results are as follows, and again, the thick, blue line shows the scores of the TFA teachers’ students. This the area in which TFA teachers supposedly did so well:

Ripley, and the Mathematica authors, claim that the differences in the math scores are statistically significant. Keep in mind, however, that significance in reality and in statistics are two different things. To me, if you are at the 14th, 15th, or 17th percentiles, you are in very bad shape. Neither the TFA teachers, nor their veteran or novice counterparts, were in fact able to work miracles. My own opinion is that any differences here are due to random variation.

You can read the whole statistical study here if you like:

http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/teach.pdf

The study looked at a fairly small number of classes (100) taught by TFA teachers and their non-TFA colleagues, spread out over the following cities or regions: Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles/Compton, the Mississippi delta, and New Orleans. They looked at a total of 17 schools, and about 1,765 students. I have no way of knowing – and neither does just about anybody else – whether these students are in fact representative of all schools serving disadvantaged students. My suspicion is that a different selection of classes might have yielded quite different results. Here is the description of the sample, which I cut-and-pasted from page 9:

I would like to finish by quoting a few passages from a teacher who is blogging from some (unnamed) high school here in Washington, DC: ( http://filthyteaching.blogspot.com/ )

“…TFAers, and for that matter, first-year teachers in general, have ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS working in these kinds of systems. [meaning, systems like DC, Baltimore, Chicago, etc.] And if we were to really get serious about boosting student achievement, I’d say five years should probably be the minimum number of years experience required to apply in these districts (with some exceptions).

“The children of DCPS, New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore, LA, Memphis, and any other severely challenged district across the US that one might think of, do not have the luxury of being guinea pigs for a legion of completely incompetent, albeit well-intentioned, college graduates. Anyone who’s taught for more than a few years can tell you that the vast majority of teachers (I’d say all, but I suppose there’s a small possibility that there are one or two out there who are miracles) have virtually no idea what they’re doing in the classroom in their first year (I know that was certainly the case for me).

“Your first few years are spent learning that almost everything you thought teaching was supposed to be was completely wrong. You’re overwhelmed by classroom management and discipline struggles. You have no idea how to plan a unit or an effective lesson. You don’t recognize the importance of constant quality assessment, and you sure as hell don’t have a clue as to how to go about creating one. You don’t yet know how exactly to build relationships with kids (even though you thought you did), nor do you quite realize how critically important they are to the children who are almost completely deprived of positive relationships. You don’t realize that in addition to teaching your subject matter, you desperately need to teach your kids how to read, but you don’t have a clue how to. You can’t see through the bullshit that the administration throws at you or the petty bickering that some of your colleagues may do around you. And on the day that you think your lesson actually went okay, you don’t realize that not a single one of your students will be able to demonstrate that they learned what you thought they did the next day.
…
“These are things that teachers learn over years of experience. You don’t get them in a summer training, or even in your first year of teaching. They come slowly. … I don’t blame the TFAers themselves. I was like them not very long ago. I did my first year teaching in a socio-economically disadvantaged school in Knoxville, TN, and then wanted desperately to try my hand in DC or NYC. I wanted to go out and save the world. I thought I could do it. I found out how ridiculously wrong I was. Luckily I couldn’t find a job in DC or NYC, and I’m so glad that I began teaching in a school that, while not perfect in supporting new teachers, at least offered me an environment in which I could make mistakes and learn from them.

“I would not recommend ANYONE try their hand at their first year teaching in a district like DC or New Orleans. It will make you believe that education is something that it’s not, that to be a teacher is to be a martyr, that getting through a school year is like running a marathon EVERY DAMN DAY, and that you deserve no rights or respect from your administration or district. It’s a run through a gauntlet, and it’s no wonder so many new teachers leave the profession when this is how we treat them.”

Guess whom the WashPost picked as Pundit For The Year?

You won’t believe this. The Washington Post editorial board is SOOOO in love with Michelle Rhee and her policies, that they picked her ex-husband, Kevin Huffman, as its pundit. As far as I can tell, Huffman has no philosophical disagreements with Rhee.

Oh, and I am sure the voting was completely above-board and objective.

Arne Duncan’s cloudy legacy from Chicago Public Schools

An article published two days ago (12-29-09) in the Washington Post acknowledges that Arne Duncan’s legacy as head of the Chicago Public Schools is not nearly as wonderful as we have been led to believe.

Here is the link to the article: http://tinyurl. com/dunchibust   or

http://www.washingt onpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/ article/2009/ 12/28/AR20091228 02368.html

A telling quote from the article: “… Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education.” Another quote in the article, this from Chester Finn, with whom I seldom agree: “’Chicago is not the story of an educational miracle.’”

Duncan was in charge in Chicago from 2001 to 2009, or 8 years. During that time, Chicago public schools’ 4^th-grade math NAEP scores slowly rose from 214 to 222 (out of 500), or 8 points. In Washington, they went from 205 to 220, a rise of 15 points. The average large city math score went from 224 to 231, a 7-point gain.

During that time, Chicago’s 8^th-grade math NAEP scores went from 254 to 264, a rise of 10points, DC’s 8^th-graders went from 243 to 251, a gain of 8 points, and the average for large US cities went from 262 to 271, an increase of 9 points.  I doubt that those rises are significantly different from each other – even to a statistician. So Chicago public school students don’t seem to have improved as much as Duncan’s hype might suggest.

In fact, there is quite a pattern of hypocrisy, and/or mendacity going on with education in the US, and President Obama’s education secretary unfortunately seems to fit right in. Here are a few examples:

• Do you remember Rod Paige, the education secretary under Bush 2? Supposedly he worked such miracles in Houston Public Schools that his example became the model for No Child Left Behind. Under his leadership, supposedly 100% of the graduates of some very-low-income and nearly-all-minority-population high schools went to college, and dropout rates fell to nearly zero. But it was all smoke and mirrors. To quote Wikipedia:  “Many touted the ‘Houston Miracle’ accomplished under Paige where student test scores rose under his leadership. A 60 Minutes report exposed many dropout rates touted in the ‘Houston Miracle’ as false; deliberate fraud occurred at Sharpstown High School, for instance. Not only were dropout rates falsified, but Houston area teachers admitted to raising test scores (for which they received cash bonuses) by cheating.” You can find lots more details if you read an in-depth New York Times article written by Diana Schemo and published on  August 28, 2003: “For Houston Schools, College Claims Exceed Reality.”
• Bill Gates was a well-to-do grandson of a national bank president. He attended an exclusive private school where the parents purchased for him, and for a few others, computer time on one of the tiny number of mainframe computers that existed in the US at the time. The school even let him program Tic-Tac-Toe on the computer instead of going to math class.  After finishing private school, he went to Harvard University, programmed some more, and then dropped out to found and run Microsoft. He constantly says that US public schools are no good at all.  But what does he really know about public schools? As far as I can tell, his foundation gives its money to charter schools, and has a policy of not funding regular public schools unless they make teacher pay based on student scores and get rid of teacher certification.
• The public story behind DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee is that she worked incredible miracles when she taught for 3 years in a non-union, privatized, formerly-public Baltimore school, and that the news of this success was all over TV, in the Wall Street Journal, and many other places. The fact is that repeated computer searches of the Wall Street Journal do not show her name appearing at all during the 1990’s. Also, the only articles I found, in a Connecticut newspaper, make it seem like she was just barely hanging on as a teacher. What is also true is that test scores at her school actually seemed to go DOWN during her time there, and the private company that ran her school there was thrown out by the Baltimore city administration for not only not improving anything, but also for costing more. So, while her actual accomplishments as a teacher are rather slim, her REAL claim to fame is that she wrote a position paper while she was at the New Teacher Project that supposedly ‘proved’ that the main problem with inner-city public education is the very existence of teacher unions. Since then, she got the attention of rich foundations that want to privatize public schools. She has been pretty consistent in lambasting DCPS teachers (except when she found it expedient to backtrack), and her main method of administering  DCPS has been mass firing of teachers, staff and administrators without any due process, appeal, or even a real explanation. (Except for nearly-uncheckable innuendo.) She also takes credit for progress that started years before she came to Washington. Unfortunately, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama and McCain both extolled her. See the blog called ThatsRightNate for a satirical take on her wondrousness. The only good thing I note is that a lot of people are beginning to see through her act. Even Duncan and Obama haven’t mentioned her for quite a while. On the other hand, it appears that they almost never visit regular public schools – it’s almost always charter schools or private schools.
• Consider also Jason Kamras, who won the National Teacher of the Year for 2005 award (for reasons I cannot discern), and who is now Michelle Rhee’s chief accomplice. I’ve examined, in as much detail as I could gather, what effect he had at Sousa. What I found was that the longer he was teaching there, the lower the DC-CAS scores got at the school. When he left, they began to rise. See my blog from Dec. **** Hmm…
• Arne Duncan attended the exclusive University of Chicago Lab Schools for grades K-12 and then went to Harvard and played pro basketball in Australia. After that, he set up a charter school funded by an investment firm (Ariel Investments).  This apparently qualified him to become first an executive in, and then the head of, Chicago Public Schools in 2001 – so he was in sole control there for 8 years. As far as I can tell, his only experience with teaching was being a tutor for minority students. I have read that Duncan’s primary means for “success” in Chicago has been to close down a school, scatter all the staff, and IN FACT TO REPLACE MOST OF THE STUDENTS, TOO, start over and then claim success. See http://thatsrightnate.com/ for some hilarious details. (“Nate” also has a serious blog, too.)

Is all of the test prep mania causing the “achievement gap” to widen?

If you recall, one of the two possible reasons that I proposed for the widening of the “achievement gap” here in DC is that instructional practices might have changed in such a way that the students who are ahead, get further ahead, and that those who are behind, get further behind.

If this is true, then as a veteran (and now-retired) DC math teacher, then I think that one of the major changes I have seen over the past few years has been the very large increases in the amount of instructional time that is devoted to test preparation. Maybe this is one of the causes?

After No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed in January 2002, I noticed more pressure to do test preparation activities, rather than just teaching normally.  (There is not enough room in this blog to talk about all of the things that are wrong with NCLB!)  After Dr. Clifford Janey was installed during the summer of 2004, DCPS contracted with one of the major textbook publishers to make test prep more systematic in grades 3-10. The result was that four times a year, for at least two days each time, all across DC public schools, all of those students lost most of  their morning classes and spent several hours trying to answer questions that were supposed to be like the test that really mattered for NCLB – the DC-CAS, which replaced the SAT-9. Unfortunately, it used to take months to get the results. Only then would we be able to analyze them with our students and to discuss good and not-so-good strategies for solving the problems. (Of course, by that time, the students had completely forgotten what the questions were!)

Some time later – it might have been after Michelle Rhee took over, but perhaps not –  DCPS contracted for the testing company to send to the teachers, on-line, in a reasonable period of time,  statistical analyses of our students’ performances on those practice tests. At my school, you could only be a “good teacher” if you had a “word wall” of vocabulary terms, and a “data wall” with full-color printouts of student test data.

However, I generally found the data to be pretty useless. For one thing, there were always content errors, typos, or ambiguities on the test items themselves. Or, the test item would actually NOT be testing the skill/objective/standard that it was alleged to be testing. Also, the difficulty levels of the questions would vary widely from test to test during the school year. On one test, the questions on, say, statistics and probability might be very hard. A couple of months later, on the next city-wide practice test, they might be very easy (and cover different topics). So the students would do poorly on that “strand” the first time, and much better the second time, which would probably make “data-driven” administrators quite happy. But did the test really reveal anything about student learning and progress? NO. The questions just got easier. Or the situation could be reversed.

Almost all of this effort was, in my opinion, just time wasted from actual teaching and learning.

I found that the final, end-of-the-year tests (which come in April, not June) were not a whole lot better than the practice tests, but they went on for much, much longer. The testing manufacturers try their best NOT to allow teachers to look at the tests at all. However, one day, during the official testing, one of my homeroom students was absent, so I carefully looked at the math test. Using a printed list of the official DCPS math standards/skills/objectives that we were supposed to teach in 7th grade, I made check marks by the standards that were, in fact, tested by the items on the test. (No, I didn’t secretly record any of the answers, or copy or memorize any of the questions, or anything underhanded like that.)

What I found was startling.

About half – maybe more – of the math standards were not tested at all, even ones that DCPS and the testing company promised would, in fact, be tested.

Of the ones that were in fact tested, in numerous cases they were hit with four or five questions that essentially measured the same skill. In almost every single case, I found that the skills/objectives/standards that were “hit” multiple times were ones that involved solving arithmetic problems by computation. Almost anything that involved more conceptual ideas in math was not touched.

[If you think that arithmetic and computation is all there is to 7th grade math, you will be surprised to find out that there is a whole lot more. Or at least in theory, and in our math books. But not on the DC-CAS.]

To me, it seemed like the important stuff was not tested on these tests.

During Rhee’s first two years (‘07 to ‘09), pressure to do test preparation became even more intense than under Janey. She made vague claims to the press that her massive firings of principals had the effect of raising test scores. I have done statistical analyses to show that, as usual,  she was lying about her “success”. (I disseminated a lot of this on a local list-serve, but I think I need to put this in this blog, as well. It will come soon.)

Rhee and her assistant Jason Kamras have now institutionalized making student scores on these fundamentally-flawed tests a part of teacher evaluations. So, teachers are probably going to do whatever they can to raise those scores. In many cases, this effort will take the place of teaching. Inevitably, when something like this is made into a high-stakes matter that means the difference between keeping your job and losing it, some people will cheat.

Never mind that Rhee’s and Kamras’ own claims of massive success in raising test scores among their own students have been shown to be, at very best, highly exaggerated, if not downright lies.

So, what does this all have to do with widening the test gap on the NAEP?

I am not sure. But it is possible that all of this test prep busy-work has different effects on different sorts of students:

• Students who are generally high achievers might actually pay attention to the somewhat-useless little test-prep tips and tricks, and do a bit better on similar tests, because they enjoy it.
• Students who are generally low-achievers might get even more bored with school than usual, since there is generally no hands-on activity associated with test prep. (This is something I found in my classes.) They also are aware of the fact that how well or poorly they do on the test has almost no effect on their lives, one way or another. Particularly, the NAEP. So, they might say, “to heck with this” and go to sleep during the actual test. Or else stay home.

I really don’t know if this hypothesis – that all of this testing mania is actively widening the gap – is true, and I don’t know how to go about searching for data to test it.

But I do know that the high-stakes multiple-choice tests that are being used in DC for NCLB, and now, to determine whether a teacher keeps his/her job, are fundamentally flawed, and don’t measure what we need to know. Also, the misuse of these tests is warping education in DC, and elsewhere, more and more.

Possible Causes for DC’s Widening Achievement Gap

In my opinion, there are two possible causes. I would like to pose and discuss both of them.

(1) The group of students being tested, scored, and counted in DCPS on the NAEP has changed in nature.

or

(2) There have been major changes in curriculum and/or instructional practices in DCPS.

Let’s consider #1.

We know that this is definitely part of the story,  case, since the NAEP TUDA report (which you can find at http://nationsreportcard.gov/math_2009/math_2009_tudareport/ ) states that for 2009, TUDA no longer counted DC’s charter schools when giving detailed breakdowns of population groups, percentile ranks, and so on for DCPS. (I’ve tried to make this clearer by putting a note to this effect on every graph and table. )  They also point out in their technical notes that if they had also excluded the charter schools in 2007, then the average 8th grade math NAEP score for DCPS in 2007 would have been lower: 244, not 248. However, they do not provide us with enough information for us  to figure out what else would have changed. We are left with a good bit of speculation.

In spring 2009, according to my calculations, there were more 8th graders in regular DC public schools than in the DC charter schools ( 2531 to 1940). However,  higher percentages of students in the 8th grade charter schools scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the DC-CAS  in reading (56% as compared to 40%). So the actual numbers of students making AYP in the public and charter schools in reading in the 8th grade, according to my calculations, were 1,019 in the public and 1,093 in the charter schools – very close. We can infer from the NAEP technical note that in 2007, the 8th grade charter school students had again performed a bit better in math than the regular DCPS students. However, I don’t know off-hand the enrollment figures at that time for the two groups, and I also don’t know if NAEP does some sort of weighted average or not with different students or groups of students. So I really can’t extrapolate to say exactly what the average for regular DCPS students would have been in math for the 8th grade in 2007.

In the 4th grade, the situation is quite different. For one thing, NAEP does not inform us what the true 2007 4th grade regular-DCPS average math score would have been. However, I calculate that there were 3,303 students in the 4th grade  regular DC public schools in April 2009, of which about 48%, or 1,573  students, made AYP in reading on the DC-CAS (not the NAEP). In the charter schools, there were 1,254 students, of whom 492, or about 39%, made AYP in reading. So , unlike in the 8th grade, the 4th grade regular DCPS students did better than the 4th grade charter school students in reading. I think we can safely conclude that in 2007, the regular 4th grade DCPS students probably also did better in math.  If this conclusion is correct, then the regular DC public school students‘ average score in math for 4th grade in 2007 would have been somewhat higher than the 214 that is recorded for year 2007 on page 48 of the NAEP TUDA report.

Unfortunately, I have not done similar detailed breakdown calculations for every single grade level and subgroup at every single public or charter school for the math scores for 2009’s DC-CAS.  I only did them for reading. (And that, alone, took a huge amount of work.) I have done neither math nor reading for 2008, nor 2007, nor any other prior year’s DC-CAS scores.

As you probably know large percentages of students in DC are now attending charter schools, rather than regular public schools. I imagine that every time that DCPS administration does something stupid, then more parents probably decide to move their children to a charter school, hoping that they will do better there. (Despite the statistical evidence to the contrary.) And since there has been so much movement (and with record numbers under Rhee’s administration), the population of DCPS has been generally shrinking.

But why, and how, would this, all by itself, possibly make the achievement gap get larger? Let me try to explain by making up an example that has to do with space rocks.

Suppose a museum has a very large collection of meteorites (rocks from space). These rocks are quite expensive, and they are weighed (and priced) by the gram. One of the curators decides to put into a case a sub-collection, consisting of exactly one 1-gram space rock, one 2-gram space rock, one 3-gram rock, one 4-gram rock, and so on, all the way up to a single  100-gram meteorite. There are 100 rocks in the collection, as you can see below. The average weight of all of these rocks is the sum of all the weights, divided by the number of weights, or 5,050 grams divided by 100 rocks, or 50.5 grams per rock.

I have also shown where the 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentile rocks are, which I will explain later.

Now, if you take out the ten smallest meteorites, the average will increase. Why? Because the total weight of all of the meteorites is now only 4995 grams, and the number of rocks is 90, and when you divide those you get an average of 55.5 grams per rock.  So, dropping the lowest ten rocks increases the average by 5 grams, and the locations of the 10th and 90th percentile rocks have moved as well, as you can see below.

What if the curator had taken out the 10 heaviest meteorites? The sum of all the rocks’ weights would now be 4,095 grams, and when we divide that by 90, we get an average of 45.5 grams per rock. So the average weight has dropped by 5 grams, as you see below, and the locations of the 10th and 90th percentiles have moved, also.

If we take out the 10 middle-sized rocks, that is, the ones from 46 through 55, then you would think that the average weight shouldn’t change. And you would be correct.  The sum of all the rocks’ weights is now 4,545 grams, and when you divide that by 90, you get 50.5 grams again.

But something definitely HAS changed – the middle has disappeared.

You might remember those graphs I made about percentile ranks in DCPS, the nation, and in other large cities. If not, you can look at some prior posts in this blog. Let’s agree that a thing is at the 90th percentile if it is greater than 90 percent of the other things in the group. If we are talking about heights of people, being at the 90th percentile probably doesn’t mean they are 90 inches tall! In fact, men who are about 6 feet, 2 inches are taller than 90% of all other men, so they are at about the 90th percentile.

However, in our example with the 100 original space rocks, the rock that weighs 91 grams has exactly 90 rocks that are lighter than it is, so I will say it’s at the 90th percentile. The rock that weighs 11 grams only has 10 rocks lighter than it is, so let’s agree that it’s at the 1oth percentile. The rock weighing 76 grams is at the 75th percentile, and the rock with a mass of 26 grams is at the 25th percentile.

Now let’s now take out the middle 40 rocks, much like charter schools have taken nearly 40% of the students in DCPS. So the remaining 60 rocks have masses of  1 gram through 30 grams, and then 71 grams through 100 grams. To find the rock that is at the 10th percentile, take 10% of 60. That’s 6. So for a rock to be at the 10th percentile, it only has to outweigh six rocks; those are the ones with masses of 1 g through 6 g. So the rock at the 10th percentile now weighs 7 grams. A rock at the 90th percentile has to have a mass greater than 90% of 60 rocks, which is 54 rocks. I get that  the rock weighing 95 grams is now the one at the 90th percentile. Similarly, I get that the rock weighing 16 grams is now the one at the 25th percentile, and that the rock at the 75th percentile is now the rock with a mass of 86 grams, as you see below.

In the original meteorite collection, as you can see in the first diagram I made, the gap in masses (or weights) between the 10th and 90th percentile was 91 grams minus 11 grams, or 80 grams. The gap between the 25th and 75th percentile is 76 minus 26, or 50 grams.

When we take out the middle 40% of the rocks, the average weight won’t change. But the gaps between the 10th and 90th percentiles HAVE changed: it’s 95 minus 7, or 88 grams, which is 8 grams larger than it used to be. And the gap between the 25th and 75th percentile is now 86  g minus 16 g, or 70 grams, which is 20 grams wider than it used to be.

However, if we just took out the lightest 40% of the rocks, the average mass of the remaining rocks would go up, but the intervals between the 10^th and 90^th percentiles, or etween the 25^th and 75^th percentiles, would get smaller.

My conclusion from all of this is that the charter schools are probably *not* really taking the very highest-performing students from DCPS. Nor are they taking the very worst-performing students from DCPS. I think they are taking the ones that are in the middle of the road, so to speak.

Next time: changes in instructional practices…

Even more on the widening achievement gap!

Some folks have told me they don’t think the evidence so far of a widening of the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is statistically significant or even real.  I will let the readers make up their own mind, but the evidence so far definitely belies the boasting, everything-is-wonderful, I-fixed-DCPS propaganda of Michelle Rhee.

Here are two tables and graphs that show how the gap is widening when you compare students in DC public schools, all big cities, and the entire nation who are at the 25th percentile with those at the 75th percentile, in the 4th grade, and in the 8th grade.

(That is, we compare the scaled NAEP math scores of students who only score better than 1/4 of their peers, with the same scores students who score better than 3/4 of their peers. Students at the 25th percentile are also said to be at the first quartile, and are not very high achievers. Likewise, students at the 75th percentile are also said to be at the third quartile; they are relatively high achievers.)

First, the fourth graders:

As before, the green line is for DC public schools. The gap is not huge here, but we do see that the gap in DC public schools seems to be getting a bit larger over the past few years.

Now, the gap for 8th graders:

Here, the recent increase in the size of the gap for DCPS between the top quartile and bottom quartile is larger than in the 4th grade, and to my unsophisticated mind, appears more significant, especially since the ones for the rest of the country look pretty stable. And it’s sad that DCPS no longer beats the average for other large cities.

In the 8th grade, in Washington, DC public schools, there are simply not enough white students for NAEP to present any statistics at all, so I don’t have anything to show you, either.

However, we do have data on income levels, as shown by whether the child’s family is deemed to be eligible for the National School Lunch Program or not. If they are eligible, that generally means a lower family income level (especially per person) than if they are NOT eligible.  First, the data for both 4th and 8th grade students across the nation, in large cities, and in DC public schools, taken directly from the NAEP TUDA report. Remember again that in 2009, charter schools are NOT included.

and, now, a table and graph showing the actual gaps in match achievement at the 4th grade level between students eligible for the national school lunch program, and those who are not:

and, for the 8th graders:

Really remarkable, isn’t it? By race, by percentile ranking, and by income level, during the last 2 years, on every single measure, the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” has dramatically increased. But this same trend is NOT found in the nation as a whole, nor in large cities as a whole. That is, it has happened only in DC public schools, ever since Michelle Rhee (and Adrian Fenty) took over.

How and exactly has this happened????

More on the widening achievement gap

Here are a few more graphs and charts that show how striking Michelle Rhee’s new achievement gap really is.

First, an overall table showing how black, white, and hispanic fourth-graders averaged on the NAEP in math in the nation as a whole, in all large cities, and in DCPS. Note that DCPS white students do very, very well in comparison to just about all other groups, and that DCPS black students do very poorly in comparison to all of the other groups listed here. DCPS latino students are, in fact, catching up to other hispanic students in other cities and across the nation.

Now let’s look at the differences between black and white students in all three regions, over this period of time. This time, it’s both a table and a graph:

Notice that until Michelle Rhee came to DC, we were actually starting to make some progress in closing the gap between the achievement of black and white students. But, since her arrival, the gap has widened again to what it used to be.

Now let’s look at the gaps between whites and hispanics on the same test, same locations, same time period:

Again, in DC we were starting to make significant progress in closing the gap – until Michelle Rhee was plucked from a richly-deserved obscurity to become the un-accountable Chancellor of DC Public Schools.