More from FairTest on Resistance to the Corporate Educational Deformation movement

This is from Bob Schaeffer:

The ever-growing movement of parents, students, teachers and researchers resisting high-stakes testing is finally being heard by some politicians: the week after Gov. Rick Perry signed legislation rolling back testing in Texas, New York City mayoral candidates agree that there are too many ‘standardized exams, and even U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has agreed to postpone some of the Obama Administration’s most damaging high-stakes testing mandates.

Of course, there’s much more to be done . . . and won.  Keep escalating the pressure!

More Virginia Families Boycott Standards of Learning Tests

http://www.newsleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013306140025&gcheck=1

New Jersey Parents Promote Test Overhaul Through Petition and Opt Outs

http://kids.baristanet.com/2013/06/montclair-parents-wanting-education-reform-through-petitions-and-opt-outs/

NYC Mayoral Candidates Want to Limit Standardized Exams

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/democratic-mayoral-candidates-limit-standardized-tests-article-1.1372585?localLinksEnabled=false

Chicago Parents Students Say Charter Schools Used Selective Expulsions to Boost Test Score Averages

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130611/chicago/parents-students-charge-charter-schools-with-targeted-expulsions

Tide Turns Against Test-Driven “Reforms” in Indiana

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130609/EDIT10/306099980/1021/EDIT

Errors Bedevil Testing Companies

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130616/BIZ/306169966/1031/BIZ

Perry Extends Texas Testing Rollback

http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/17/19008055-texas-rolls-back-student-testing-for-a-second-time

Texas Governor Vetoes Bill Cutting Interim Tests and Requiring Validity Study After Signing Limits on End-of-Course Exams

http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2013/06/commentary-did-rick-perry-veto-fathers-day/

Number of Texas Tests Still Too High

http://www.kutnews.org/post/hb-5-passes-number-high-stakes-tests-still-high

Great Teachers Are Another Casualty of Excessive Testing

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-weiss/another-casualty-of-exces_b_3443554.html

Encourage Your Colleagues, Family and Friends to Sign the National Resolution on High-Stakes Testing

http://timeoutfromtesting.org/nationalresolution/

Duncan Will Support One-Year Delay for States to Evaluate Teachers by Student Test Scores

http://seattletimes.com/html/politics/2021215479_apusnochildleftbehind.html

What Do Standardized Tests Really Tell Us?

http://www.cea-ace.ca/education-canada/article/telling-time-broken-clock

Test Score Deception Boosts Ed “Reform” — Lessons From Massachusetts

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/13/how-test-scores-can-be-deceiving/

Ed “Reform” Leaders’ Assumptions Falling Apart

http://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/Assumptions-of-education-reformers-falling-apart-4599145.php

Interview with Author of “No Child Held Back”

http://educationviews.org/an-interview-with-yovel-badash-standardized-testing-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-and-the-rest-of-the-story/

Teachers Letters to Bill Gates About the Failure of Corporate-Driven School Policies

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/14/teachers-letters-to-bill-gates/

Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
ph- (239) 395-6773   fax- (239) 395-6779
cell- (239) 699-0468
web- 
http://www.fairtest.org

A quick look at some of the Common Core math standards, grades 7 & 8

I was prepared to be appalled by the Common Core math standards, but I’m not.

The CC math standards — at first glance, anyway — actually look quite a lot better than the old middle-school math standards we used to have in DC, which had interminable lists of many minute details kids were supposed to know — and which lists repeated themselves over and over again in grades 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Mile wide, centimeter deep it was.

So far, I don’t see any sign of that ridiculous nonsense in the new CC standards.

However, I can just see teachers requiring their students to copy and recite turgid prose like this, which is a direct quote from page 56 of the PDF. It means something to me, but to how many other adults?

“Understand that patterns of association can also be seen in bivariate categorical data by displaying frequencies and relative frequencies in a two-way table. Construct and interpret a two-way table summarizing data on two categorical variables collected from the same subjects. Use relative frequencies calculated for rows or columns to describe possible association between the two variables.

For example, collect  data from students in your class on whether or not they have a curfew on  school nights and whether or not they have assigned chores at home. Is  there evidence that those who have a curfew also tend to have chores?

A Hedge Fund Speculator Tells Politicians How to Fix Education

{tongue_in_cheek ON}

Ever hear of a tremendous classroom teacher, with great student teams and classroom activities to his credit, and who has lots of contributions in the field of excellent teaching techniques and strategies, named Whitney Tilson?

Who is so celebrated as a teacher that Tilson has won every teaching award and now gives seminars to teachers on how to have great, active, participatory activities in their classroom, at level X through Z in multiple subjects?

No?

You never heard of the excellent teacher Whitney Tilson, who is Nationally Board Certified in two different subjects, also the Connecticut, California and New York State Teacher of the Year three years running, and coach of the national champion state teams in It’s Academic, MathCounts, soccer and basketball?

No?

{/tongue_in_cheek OFF}

That’s because he’s never taught school, ever.

There is another Whitney Tilson. He’s a hedge fund billionaire or multi-millionaire, and he thinks he knows all about education and can tell politicians how to DEform the public education sector. He claims to have helped Wendy Kopp found Teach For Awhile, and “Democrats” for Education Deform.

With no actual grounding in any classroom, mind you. He has never taught. He has made a ton of money gambling with other people’s money in hedge funds and such.

But he “knows” that most of us teachers, particularly those who are members of unions, are a bunch of lazy, incompetent slobs that skip work and need to be fired. The cheating that goes on surrounding the NCLB testing? it’s only these incompetent teachers doing it, not administrators having erasure parties after the kids go home, according to him.

And he also knows exactly how to “fix” education.

He claims to know that DC public schools are way better off after having Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson in charge for 6 years now.

(If you want to see how much progress there has been on the NAEP in Washington DC since the advent of mayoral control and the educational DEformers, just use the search box on my blog, in the upper right-hand corner of this screen, and enter the words “NAEP gap”. You will see lots of data showing that there has been, in fact, NO miracle of the kind that their Excellencies, Whitney Tilson, Wendy Kopp, and Michelle Rhee promised.)

Tilson is a snake, and his creations, DFER and TFA, are dangerous.

Mathematical Hubris, or Simply an Author Who Doesn’t Understand Statistics?

My brother, who works in urban planning, called and told me I should read the article “X And The City” in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

I did, and was quite disappointed. Here are my thoughts:

———————-

Hi, <brother>,

Thanks for pointing out to me the article on urban math in the current, May 2013 Smithsonian.

.

I was fully expecting to be quite enlightened and entertained, as I am by most Smithsonian articles, but I have to report that I was quite disappointed by it, and thought that the author was being naive. A lot of the conclusions seemed to me to be contrived or invalid.

.

I felt strongly enough to write this letter to compose my thoughts carefully.

.

The author does write, correctly, that “Cities are particular: You would never mistake a favela in Rio for downtown LA” and that many large cities will be surrounded by what they call ‘slums’ and others call shantytowns — developments put up informally and outside of any bureaucratic or official network of laws or public services of any sort at all, and which often exhibit a lot of negative behaviors and outcomes for their residents as a result.

Some of those bad effects are lack of public schools, no safe drinking water, no urban sanitation system, no safe and corruption-free police system, no public health facilities of any sort, no safe and reliable and dependable transportation system, no reliable electrical or postal delivery system, no zoning or building safety regulations that mean anything, and no real defense of the private property or land-ownership rights for those who have only small amounts of them. (Defense of private property only goes to the very rich and powerful. Matthew, you know.)

.

As the article correctly notes, we have very little dependable data on most of those shanty-town dwellers: neither how many people nor how much they earn or spend in the underground economy. A recent article I read indicates that cash payments are quite common in the US as well; so much of what is written about GDP per capita, anywhere in the world, is guesswork at best.

.

You know the saying about computer systems: Garbage IN, Garbage OUT.

.

Maybe I missed something, but I don’t see anything in this article that would allow any individual or group to use any of this data to do anything that would concretely help anyone in any significant manner.

.

One specific quibble concerns building heights. “…the equation H=134+0.5G where H is the height of the tallest building in meters and G is the Gross Regional Product in billions of dollars”… but previously, the author says the relationship isn’t strong. Well, how strong is it? It’s not clear at all. This page shows very different metrics, and rather different conclusions.  When I look up the so-called ‘Zipf Law’ I find that a number of people think it’s a trivial and unimportant correlation that one will find in almost any distribution of random-sized objects.

.

I did amuse myself by making this log-log graph with standings of population sizes of cities in the US.

This reminds me very much of graphs I used to see at the Naval Research Lab’s gamma-ray astronomy section, where they would have the logs of the energy of various gamma=rays that hit the Compton gamma-ray telescope on the left hand side, and the count of how many such photons on the bottom axis. Only the graph of the line of best fit went up to the right, not down to the right.

.

And those gamma rays were just about random, coming from anywhere in the universe. Weaker ones were much more common than strong ones.

A couple of minutes of work on a table from Wikipedia giving the masses of the largest solar system bodies and I get this graph:

Also apparently works for usage of words in ordinary language. Some are used very very often (like “the”, “is”, “of” and so on) and others hardly ever (“disestablishment”, “cornucopia”, “prolix”). You get a power law distribution. Not so special with cities, then.

.

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I like the part where one of the people interviewed said “it’s just a coincidence” about correlation angle of sunrise and street numbers….

.

Only 50-60 years ago, New York City had the world’s tallest buildings, and had the record for a long time. Until a few city promoters/corporate idiots in Dubai and Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong decided they would blow a few billions of dollars in building essentially useless tallest-in-the-world status symbols.

.

That being said, the data on heartbeats of and life expectancies of mammals do apparently fit a nice logarithmic line. That’s real data that anyone can measure — but now that I think about it, animal life expectancies very much depend on conditions, and critters living in zoos or labs are quite different from those in the wild… so I wonder how good even this data is… And are those resting heartbeats, or what?

.

In another case discussed in the article on making a decision whether to drive or take the subway to a Yankees or Mets game in NYC, or just to go home and watch it on TV if the traffic is bad enough as measured by Twitter or GPS on cell phones — I am skeptical, though I know that our smartphones have traffic-reading capabilities that do a fair, but not perfect job of showing you why you are stuck in traffic.  Seems to me that the decision on whether to go to a major-league sporting event is only partly based on traffic, and a lot on other value judgements that are not even considered.

.

Anybody who lets the folks in charge of technology decide for you how to spend an afternoon and evening needs to think again.

John Merrow on the Rhee-Henderson-Caveon Whitewash

John Merrow has a hard-hitting article on the multiple lies uttered by Michelle Rhee and her best friend, Kaya Henderson, and the whitewash they hired Caveon to perform. Here is a quote:

……………….

At the April 18th hearing Chairman Catania alluded to what he called Caveon’s ‘positive’ role in helping expose the Atlanta cheating.  That is an overstatement, to put it mildly. Prior to its work for DCPS, Caveon had been hired by the (so-called) “Blue Ribbon Committee” established to look into allegations of cheating in Atlanta.  Caveon looked–and reported finding nothing wrong in what turned out to be the epicenter of cheating by adults on standardized tests. [8] Dr. Fremer told me that while he ‘knew’ there was widespread cheating going on, that was not mentioned in his final report. “We did not try to find out who was cheating,” he said.  “Our purpose was to rank order the schools beginning with those with the most obvious problems (of unbelievably dramatic score increases), in order to make the task of investigating more manageable.”   In other words, Caveon produced a list!

Dr. Fremer admitted that he knew some Atlanta teachers were lying to him, but he said his hands were tied because he didn’t have subpoena power.

Georgia’s investigators are contemptuous of Caveon’s efforts, labelling it a ‘so-called investigation.’  Richard Hyde, one of the three leaders of the investigation, told me that “either by coincidence or design, it was certain to fail.”  Mr. Hyde denied that Caveon needed subpoena power because its investigators were representing a governmental agency, and under Georgia law it is a felony to lie to someone representing the government.  What’s more, Mr. Hyde said, Caveon had a fundamental conflict of interest–it was investigating its employer, at least indirectly, because the “Blue Ribbon Commission” (which Mr. Hyde dismisses as “The Whitewash Commission”) included a deputy superintendent of schools.

Robert Wilson, another leader of the Georgia investigation, is even blunter. Of course Caveon didn’t find cheating because “Caveon couldn’t find its own ass with either hand,” he scoffed.  Why anyone would hire Caveon was, he said, beyond him–unless they didn’t want to find out anything.

……………

3. Just how weak was Mr. Willoughby’s effort?  As we reported on Frontline in January, the Inspector General’s investigation is remarkable for what it did not investigate. He chose not to investigate 2008, the year with the most erasures. He chose not to investigate Aiton, the school Dr. Sanford had singled out for special attention because of its high wrong to right erasures. He did not examine the test answer sheets or perform an electronic analysis. And he did not investigate J.O Wilson – a school with excessive WTR erasures in 100% of its classrooms – simply because Chancellor Henderson had assured him that it was a good school.

Although more than half of DC’s schools had been implicated, he focused only on Noyes Education Campus, the school that USA Today had made the centerpiece of its investigation. Over the course of the next 17 months, his team interviewed just 60 administrators, teachers, parents and teachers, all from Noyes Education Campus. (Atlanta investigators interviewed over 2,000 people and reviewed 800,000 documents). Rather than seek outside experts (as Atlanta investigators had), he relied heavily on information from Caveon, which had been, of course, in the employ of DCPS. He did not ask to perform erasure analysis but relied on interviews–sometimes conducted over the phone.

Without the power to put people under oath, he told City Council member McDuffie in February that he just asked them if they had cheated. If they said they hadn’t, that was the end of it, because, he explained, he “wasn’t conducting a fishing expedition.” Test monitors sent by the central office to patrol Noyes for the 2010 test told Mr. Willoughby that they had been barred from entering classrooms. School officials denied that charge–and Mr. Willoughby believed them, not the monitors.

Citations for last article, on history of educational insanity

See LAST CALL on the insane ‘perfect storm’ of misguided movements to ban alcoholic beverages, which was victorious in 1919 and quietly repealed in 1932.

See WAR AGAINST THE WEAK on the eugenics movement, and its connection to wealthy racist ‘philanthropists’; there are any number of examples where the foolish, racist rantings of Henry Ford would get translated into German and reprinted in the Nazi party propaganda rags, nearly verbatim, justifying Hitler’s vile thoughts and speeches.

Read Lerone Bennett and Ashley Montagu and Steven Jay Gould on the insanity that wedded early, racist, mathematicalistic testing advocates to those same benighted policies.

I’m not making this stuff up.

But it reminds me more than a little of the connections between ALEC, the Koch and Walton families, and how they have bought off, or already own, almost all of the media in the US, from the right-wing mouth-frothers at Faux News all the way to PBS and WaPo, and of course StudentsFirst and the rest of that bunch of astro-turf organizations fighting against pensions, labor rights, and who have in fact been making things worse in all of the cities where there agenda has come to power.

“Erase to the Top”

Remember that TIME magazine cover with Michelle Rhee holding a broom in front of an empty classroom, suggesting she was going to sweep out all of us riff-raff teachers?

Someone has modified the cover. It now has Rhee holding a very large Number Two pencil, with a large pink eraser at her feet; the title is “Erase to the Top”.  The text reads:

“Michelle A. Rhee, America’s most famous school reformer, was fully aware of the extent of the problems when she glossed over what appeared to be widespread cheating during her first year as Schools Chancellor in Washington, DC.”

 

(improved image is courtesy of the artist)

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More on Advanced Placement Tests, 1955-2011

Last post, we looked at the total number of students taking Advanced Placement exams since 1955.

What about pass rates? Are more kids taking them but flunking them?

In a few places, that may be true, especially schools that are trying to do well on Jay Mathews’ fairly short-sighted ‘Challenge Index’. But look for yourself at the graph below, which shows how many students get scores of 3, 4, or 5 (passing)  on their exams and how many get scores of 1 or 2 (not passing). This graph only goes back to 1991, because that’s all that I could find on The College Board website.

 

I present the pass rates next as a percentage, rather than the absolute numbers.  In general, pass rates are declining a bit, but not tremendously. It would be better if the pass rates were bit higher, but consider this:

If a test is really rigorous, as these tests are, NOT EVERYBODY IS GOING TO SUCCEED.

Remember: neither you nor I would probably be able to pass the AP Chemistry test unless we happened to be an AP Chemistry teacher.

Nor could we succeed at being on ANY national Olympic Decathlon team, to pick a sport at random!

 

Once again, my point is this: despite all the problems that they really do have, and despite all the pressures and attacks on American public schools they are, in fact, doing some things much better than ever before, despite everything.

And it’s taken a lot of hard work by professionally trained and experienced teachers and administrators, with support from families and local school boards, to accomplish this.

Neither Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, nor Arne Duncan attended public schools. At best, they don’t know what they are talking about. At worst, they are trying to destroy American public education completely.

American Public Schools Are NOT Failing — For Example, Look At Advanced Placement Tests

Big shots like Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee assure us constantly that American public schools are failing and that only their leadership will save us.

Funny thing: every time they get their hands on a public school system, they screw it up worse than ever.

Another funny thing: while I certainly know that US public schools have lots of problems, in many ways they do a fantastic job.

One of those little ways is in offering Advanced Placement (or AP) courses and exams to more and more students.

Exhibit A, here, is a graph of the total number of students taking AP courses since the program began in 1955, up to 2011 (the last year for which The College Board has printed data), and the total number of exams given. (FYI, the ratio of exams to students is about 1.7, which means a lot of kids are taking two or more AP exams). This is not a graph showing things getting worse and worse. On the contrary, it’s a graph of things getting remarkably better, almost exponentially better.

)I’m not making this up. (I give the source at the bottom of the graph.

 

Let’s put that into perspective. Back when I was a supposedly hot-shot ace scholarship student at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1966, I took (and got a 3 on) the AP calculus exam along with a few thousand of other kids at a relative handful of magnet schools like Stuyvesant in NYC. Last year, nearly two MILLION students across the US took nearly 3.5 MILLION Advanced Placement exams in thirty-some different subjects, many of them getting much better scores than I did.

These AP kids are not all going to private or parochial or charter schools. Parochial school enrollments are dropping rapidly, and the charter schools that I know of here in Washington DC have absolutely miserable AP testing rates. The vast majority of the kids taking those AP tests attend public high schools, mostly in suburban districts.

But do they pass those tests? YES, mostly. A passing score is considered to be a 3, 4, or 5; it used to be that just about any college would grant a semester’s worth of credit for any passing score, but these days, many of our most selective colleges have tightened the requirements greatly, so that they only award credits for a ‘perfect’ score of 5, or don’t allow credit at all.

In the old days, you could get into almost any Ivy League or Seven Sisters college simply by being wealthy or being the son of an Ivy League alumnus. Nowadays, you have to have a GPA over 4.0, plus tons of volunteer work, plus be a varsity athlete, plus have numerous successful AP exams, plus tons of great recommendations. And all that might not work anyway; they turn away more and more applicants every year.

Some folks say that AP exams are superficial and don’t show evidence of thought. How wrong they are. I dare any of my readers to try any AP exam in any subject, and prepare to be humbled. (Of course, if you are currently a teacher of an AP course, you would have a tremendous advantage in that area; so, for this to be a fair challenge, try an AP exam in some other topic altogether. Here is the URL to find sample AP exams that you can download and try, for free.

Here is the ‘Smoking Memo’

Without any comment from me, here is the entire ‘Smoking Memo’.