“Before last school year, I had worked crazy hours and given up much of my life for work, but only because I loved my job and really believed in what I was doing.  Last year, my mindset was completely different.  I started doing everything I was doing because I was scared of what would happen if I didn’t do those things.  I was no longer motivated by a passion for teaching and learning, nor was I trying to develop myself into the great teacher I had once dreamed of becoming; I was motivated by a fear of being stigmatized a loser, and I was trying to do whatever it would take not to be considered one.

His solution? Exclude them all and look what wonders appear! The poor little fourth-graders in DCPS made great strides  – nay, unprecedented, unequalled strides — under the great Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson, after all, and despite the nay-sayers.

My response?

Meh.

Despite all his statistical legerdemain – which I have not attempted to replicate, at least not  yet — I still don’t see any miracle occurring in years 2009 and 2011, not even using his own graph and data. What I see is a continuation of past trends. No miracle.

For your edification, I attach both his graph and the original graph. Ladner has clearly learned his lesson from the great “How To Lie With Statistics” — he has stretched the vertical axis to make it appear that the gains were big. He uses about twice as much room going from 180 to 215 as NAEP does in going from 170 to 220.

Look for yourself. And wonder why he didn’t also do this for 4th grade math, 8th grade math, and 8th grade reading.

The top one is from Matthew Ladner at Jay P. Greene’s blog; I added the vertical and horizontal lines.

The bottom one is from the NAEP TUDA site.

According to the data produced by Ladner, there was a rise of 27 points in 13 years from 1998 to 2011, a shade more than 2 points per year, or 4 points every 2 years. Some years a bit more (like from 1998 to 2002, when they rose by 12 points in 4 years), some times a bit less. What happened in 2009 and 2011 fits a pure-and-simple straight-line test for all the data quite well.

And, by the way, the folks at NAEP, who are way better statisticians than you, me, or Ladner, I bet, don’t think much of his argument. Although the official NAEP TUDA 4th grade scores for 2011 and 2009 are different from each other by 2 points, they don’t believe that they are significantly different, statistically speaking.

Even though I had pre-registered for the conference.

Even if I were to solemnly promise to sit there like a good boy and not bother anybody by giving them a 2-page commentary I had written, I could not remain.

Nor even if I promised to raise my hand politely before either being ignored or called on, at their pleasure…

I guess they seriously consider me a dangerous crank. But you know something? There seem to be a lot of teachers in the classrooms or retired, old or young, as well as parents and students, who make pretty much the same points that I do. Often they make their points much more eloquently and clearly than me on their blogs, in replies to other folks’ comments, on Facebook, and elsewhere. My major (very small, but not without significance) contribution to the debate on NCLB and the future of education has been mostly to supply some data showing that the Educational DEform movement does not seem to be based on real data.

I am still working on the wording of the letter to DQC, and am trying to figure out what to ask for.* I sent out a couple of drafts, got considerable help from those folks who edited the drafts, and now need to somehow combine all the contributions and make my letter to DQC first of all a lot shorter than it is.

Was this official DQC policy that was spelled out that Guy Brandenburg is so special that he can’t come to any of our conferences? Or more broadly, anybody who disagrees with Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee cannot attend? Or that anybody will be barred who raises the idea that there are serious problems with a lot of the data that is being collected, and that a lot of these mathematical models are built upon an utterly shaky and weak deck of cards, and give wrong results? (I refer to the sudden surge, across the nation, in “Value-added methods”.)

Or was it just someone local who really hates me? Gosh, I didn’t think I was so infamous. Should I be flattered?

Meanwhile, I began looking closer at the DQC site, which I had only glanced at earlier.

A lot of what I saw, or didn’t see, shocked me.

I had no idea that this group has been around for several years and has been busy attempting essentially to federalize/nationalize all data about schools and everything else, in all 50 states and all the counties and school boards and city councils and individual schools and teachers and classrooms. I think it’s kinda scary when anybody at all has that much information about you, AND THAT SO MUCH OF IT IS WRONG!

It’s clear now that there is a lot of fraudulent test data in a lot of schools and school districts across the country, in many cities and states. Some states have gone after the cheating problem with serious investigations that netted scores, or is it hundreds, of confessions, and long lists of chargees. A lot of folks who understand a little bit about human nature said, “I told you so. When people are put under pressure to keep their jobs by meeting impossible goals, then they cheat. People cheat to achieve large bonuses, as many bankers, politicans, and businessmen bear witness.” (Some do a little time in jail, but generally they get away with their riches with merely some bad headlines in the press for a week or so.) They also point out, “When you dangle rewards in front of people, you get lousy results. People do their best work because they really want to, deep down, not for a paycheck.” (Confirmed in many studies of learning and human response, and once again by Dr. Roland Fryer of Harvard, as I’ve mentioned earlier. Search this blog, top right of this page.)

And this fraud has sometimes devastating effects for honest teachers, and doesn’t help the kids at all. For example, suppose that teacher T has an average-achieving class as scored onthe NCLB test. The kids are promoted to the next grade, where they have teacher U. Teacher U, with or without the knowledge of anybody else, cheats, somehow or other, and raises the kids’ scores significantly above where they would have without the cheating. [there are many ways of doing it, I realized by doing some brainstorming with some other folks a while ago. Don't think I'm going to list them, at least not here. Never tried any of them!!!!!]

So, Teacher U earns a big fat bonus check, her name on certificates and programs, perhaps other benefits as well, like a promotion to master educator so she can get out of the classroom… Who knows?

Next year, those kids go to teacher V. Teacher V receives kids, and V eventually notices an enormous discrepancy between the kids’ achievements on tests made by the school district’s own publisher, given in the second week of school, way before teacher V had learned all of their mothers’ last names by heart or had had much time to have much of an impact on the kids at all. I mean, how could all of those kids go from “Advanced” or “Proficient” to “Basic” and “Below Basic” in the time from June 20 to about August 25? That sort of thing happens only in the magical world of high-stakes, corruptible testing as we have now.

Kids in V’s class who should have had an extra class in math or reading or whatever because they are so far behind, don’t receive those services, because they are supposedly well above average. Sometimes those extra classes really help, too.

So there is teacher V with a class of kids with contradictory data: last year’s data which showed wonderful scores, and all of this year’s data, starting with the very first official, district-wide standardized, multiple-choice, machine-scored commercially-produced and -marketed test; a test supposed to “inform” the instructor what he/she should instruct. Teacher V doesn’t cheat; instead he/she works his/her but off trying to use all that data to determine what to teach, how and when. But V still does not perform miracles. (We know that miracles are, at best, and by definition, rather rare.) In other words, V’s students score much lower on the NCLB test than they had done the previous year’s test would supposedly predict by the incomprehensibly complex mathematical data algorithm that the school district is using. There are many such models; they are not all the same.)

Teacher V is notified in late July that he/she is terminated because of those bad test scores.

Remember teacher U, who cheated? He or she might be the teacher leader for that grade level next year. And might show the others just how it’s done…

But there seems to be no awareness of this by our ‘friends’ at DQC.

We all know people who have lied to us. And we’ve all told lies before. All of us do it from time to time. We only disagree about exactly how much, and when we tell those lies, and whether they are justifiable or not. Why doesn’t DQC seem to emphasize the riskiness in all of this?

Curious, and knowing that there was no time to search through the enormous DQC website by mouse, I used their “search” engine to look for a few terms, to see if they even consider the concepts of fraud and cheating.

Here are the number of hits I got on their website:

Fraud – 0 hits. Zero.

Cheat – 1 hit; the reference pointed to a page on theft of social security numbers.

dishonest – 0 hits.

data – 750 hits on their website (that was just to make sure the search engine was working!)

erasure – 0.

erase – 0.

form – 400 (yup, it’s still working. They are very much into forms and other paperwork…)

erasing – 0 {I didn’t know if it would consider erasure, erase, and erasing differently. I still don’t, but none of them turned up anything}.

jeopardy – 0.

risk – 9 .

This last one is quite instructive. When I got those 9 hits from the word “risk”, one of the hits was the following, and I swear that I am not making this up:

“Guide to Protecting the Confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).”

Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. Had you come across the acronym PII before? Wow. They’ve really been at this for a while, haven’t they? An entirely new set of acronyms…

The entire bureaucratic mind-set is stunning. Reminds me of nothing more than the US military and federal government bureaucracies, and I don’t know about you, but they scare me. I want as little as possible to do with them; and with that, my sympathies definitely lie with the people who rose up and fought a revolutionary war in this country for about 7 years and defeated the greatest naval and military power in the world at that time.  They didn’t want something like Big Brother watching over them. Not just the right-wingers want some privacy! I mean, I think everybody has a right to their own private life, and unless you’re the type of weirdo that likes everybody to know everything about you, there’s a lot that I, and just about all of you as well, want to keep private.

After all, for one thing, medical conditions can sometimes cause really enormous financial problems (like going bankrupt) if the wrong people find out about them — namely insurance companies. (Irony of ironies!)

Now some of the stuff on the DQC website seems very reasonable and logical, and I find no objection to at all. Individually.

But it seems to me that they really think that putting all of the quantifiable data on every person into a single database will immediately produce policy conclusions that must be promptly put into effect.

Not so fast.

What if the data you are using is utterly fraudulent in the fist place?

Wouldn’t that then be like the phony data described in various books and stories by Gulag prisoners and others in the USSR or in Kafka stories – perverse incentives to do useless things to survive by cheating. (I don’t think Kafka ever quite figured out how some people can prosper and live quite beautiful lives of luxury by cheating others.)

Are those formulas really valid? After all, you aren’t using all of that data in those conclusions you just drew. You cherry-picked the numbers you wanted to get the result you wanted using a formula of your own choosing, producing the result in a clearly visible way, or a way that appeals to certain decision-makers.

What if we use different data, different formulas, and throw out stuff that we think is invalid? Well, we’d probably get different results. And what about all of those internal TFA survey documents that apparently show no positive results, or else they would have been trumpeted in the national media?

Instead, you could use this as a data base for social “scientists” to examine and try a number of different models, and see whether stuff works. But unlike with drug or medical companies, we need to publicize the results of experiments with NEGATIVE results as well. (BTW: it’s not only companies like Glaxo or Pfizer that do this sort of selective data blackout.  I remember looking at the NIH alternative medicine website a few years ago to see what the results were for the various experiments that NIH had paid good money to fund – you know, on acupuncture and other stuff like that. I did this search many years after the studies had started. But NONE of them had any published results.

Does that mean that they were all incompetent and couldn’t finish their studies?

In that case, they should pay us (i.e., the public in the form of NIH) back with interest or penalties or something.

Or does it mean that the results weren’t published because they did not show what the authors WANTED them to show?

I suspect the latter.

It also really began to bother me that so many person-years of highly skilled, highly-paid labor had been poured into this project, linking up pretty much all of the data on every single person in every state, county, city, and every single teacher and school and every student, just about completely out of the limelight. For lots and lots of money, in other words, some of it privately raised, but I’ll bet there is a lot of taxpayer money in there as well in one way or another.

Keep in mind that a relative handful of testing-and-data companies will earn enormous revenues from processing all of this enormous database of data .

While none of us citizens have had a say on this at all.

And while so much of the data is flat out WRONG.

Which seems to be utterly ignored.

Be for real: In the entire Data Quality Campaign, is there no written acknowledgment that there is cheating and erasures on high-stakes tests? No procedures to discount and correct for that? No calls for additional forensic studies of cheating patterns?

Answer: No. The word “forensic” returned no hits at all on their website.

That’s pretty disturbing.

Or did I miss something?

==========

* no, not for money! I think that the views of teachers, parents and students in the trenches, so to speak, should be heard, and the problems with fraud and misrepresentation in test data are very serious and must be discussed. Roland Fryer’s conclusions also need to be aired. {and I speak as someone who has disagreed with him, in print, in the past.}

Note that Rhee has still not disclosed any financial reports from SF. She seems pretty desperate to get folks to “join” — but at SF, you have to take a bit of care to NOT get sucked into putting your name on something that sounds reasonable, like apple pies for the teacher or something. If you just look at her website, you might not notice that she is taking the money from Bain and Gates and the Koch brothers and going around lobbying for the most vile laws that will, if they continue, utterly destroy public education in this country and will make more kids suffer from a cram-it-down-their-throat regime.

You probably think I’m making this up.

Nope.

See for yourself.

* [not Capital, but just plain Bain. See if you can figure it out; there are some important technical differences between Bain this and Bain that, bviously, but while in law it makes a huge difference, to me, not so much. In fact, I began thinking, "When you've seen one billionaire, you've seen them all." However, I thought some folks might be offended, so I won't write it any more just now.]

Another addendum: read this article about Bain et al by somebody who appears to be far to my political right. You can also look at this op-ed that ran in the Washington Post.

CHARTER SCHOOLS PROFIT OFF PUBLIC FUNDS

Those are just a few six-word essay entered in a contest that is a ploy by serial liar Michelle Rhee to get phantom members to join her Astroturf organization, Students First. A lot of people have had a very good time making fun of her phony group and all of the twisted, incorrect distortions of the actual truth that she has been observed to make.

One such distortion is the ad that I just saw when I looked at her page.

It says something to the effect that good teachers are being laid off because of evil union seniority rules.

That’s such a lie.

The force that is causing teachers (good, bad, young, old, black, white, whatever) across the nation to lose their jobs does not originate from unions or seniority rules. It is because huge amounts, perhaps trillions of dollars, is being sucked out of the pockets and savings of ordinary American people of all walks of life, and is going to enrich an already obscenely-rich ruling class who is wealthier than any ruling class has ever been in the entire history of the world.

The way I see it, they are cutting taxes on the rich and shifting the burden for all of the many necessary functions of government (including education, health, and public works of all types) onto the backs of the non-rich. They then use the ensuing grumblings from the masses as justifications not to pay more for those services themselves, oh, no. They somehow justify laying off workers, reducing pensions, cutting funding for public hospitals, public schools, you name it. Instead, they find ways to drain more of the public’s money into their fattened onshore or offshore bank accounts and into their private jets, yachts, lakes, islands, ranches, luxury vacation spots, expensive clothing, jewelry, and so and so on. While public services crumble — such as our bridges, our sewers, our water lines, our electric plants (of whatever type), our roads, and most egregiously, the schools that educate the vast majority of our students.

I think that we have, in fact, as a society have plenty of money that we can spend wisely and well and improve the living standards and levels of well being and happiness not only for America, but in countries around the world. For example, I just learned that Apple makes over $400 in profit from each iPhone, outsourcing most of the work in other countries while the US manufacturing base is allowed to crumble or is simply picked up and put on a ship and sent to Asia. I’ve seen it happen. Now if this was all something that we had decided to do together, that would be one thing. But when was the last time you were given the chance to vote on whether we were going to let our infrastructure, in all of its ways, go to hell while the rich and the super rich became the ultra-over-the-top-wealthy-beyond-all-imagination?

As you know, the job held by you, your family members or friends or neighbors could be outsourced at any time; you could end up with bad debts from medical bills, student loans, or housing mortgages and going bankrupt. It happens to a lot of decent, hard-working folks, including my wife’s cousins. Whereas if a large bank speculates like crazy on weird mathematical models and dubious legal and financial opinions, and ends up losing billions or trilllions of dollars, then they get bailed out and live like kings of old could only dream of. And by “them”, I specifically mean the boards of directors and all the few hundred or few thousand folks who take home astronomical salaries in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, plus free this and free that, plus stock options and a whole bunch of other ways to pad their income that the public is purposely almost completely unable to detect or track down.

Matt Taibbi’s book on this stuff is pretty good.

Let me point out that it was unions and radicals and church-going people, black and white, who formed a large core of people who fought against slavery and its continuation in-all-but-name called Jim Crow, which lasted until about 50 years ago. Let me also point out that this was a time when union membership was pretty high among american blue-collar workers, and wages generally got better during that period; also, black students began making the largest strides to catch up with the education of white kids than has ever happened in documented American educational history.

Getting back to the offensiveness of that ad: The reason teachers are getting laid off has nothing to do with seniority rules. It’s because of budget cuts and because school systems in nearly every major city and high-poverty county, urban or rural, are being demolished by the corporate elite — led by a handful of the enormously wealthy hedge fund managers I was just mentioning. Notice that the idea of fighting back against the budget cuts is never even considered in Michelle Rhee’s ad. Instead, she attempts to pit one group of teachers against another group of teachers, or to divide and conquer. Wow.

So, if there is a force for social progress in this country, it’s probably got a a lot to do with the membership of various trade unions.

A good place to look for humor and data about Michelle Rhee is RheeFirst!

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

In case you thinking I’m making the whole thing up, here is the text of the actual form letter:
Sent:
Subject: Your submission was received

Hi *****,

Thank you for entering the StudentsFirst six-word essay contest!

Your submission has been received. Please watch your email closely; we will notify you by email if you are selected as one of our 30 semi-finalists.

In the meantime, tell your friends and family what it means to be a great teacher, and inspire them to write their own six-word essay. Share your essay on Facebook and Twitter now.

Share your six-word essay on Facebook.

Share your six-word essay on Twitter.

If you’re new to StudentsFirst we want to welcome you and invite you to learn more about our grassroots movement to transform public education. In our first year one million members have come together to help pass more than 50 policies in seven states to improve the education of 8.7 million children.

Learn more about StudentsFirst and how you can get involved at http://studentsfirst.org.

Thanks again for entering and best of luck!

The StudentsFirst Team

P.S. You can read the official contest rules here.
–

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

• Just look at Ron Paul -

  He’s a racist endorsed by WHITE POWER KKK groups because he wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act (Think hard Libertarians – Can you figure out how this is racist?)

  For the record, he also wants to privatize public education, abolish SS, kill Medicare, re-establish DADT, eliminate public housing, abolish federal student loans, kill Planned Parenthood, end the Departments of Energy and Education and the EPA, abolish the minimum wage, end affirmative action (RACIST!) disagrees with equal pay for women, wants to end FEMA, believes in mixing religion w/government & would allow fundamentalist Christians to control the government, the very people who would end the personal liberties he claims to fight for.

  Ron Paul is a dangerous individual who’d destroy every good thing liberals have fought hard to gain over the last 100 years.

  ^ THAT’S NOT MY ‘OPINION’ – IT’S FACTUAL REALITY.

  Are you going to open your doors & let the millions of elderly affected by the end of SS live with you? Or the medicare recipients unable to get healthcare? Will you make your home hospices for them?

  Or the millions of homeless because Paul eliminated public housing? Do you have any gay friends you want to tell they have to go back into the closet again on voting day?

  How are you going to tell your kids they needs to hang up their dreams of ever going to college ‘cuz crazy uncle kook ended federal loans? They’re going to have to take a minimum wage job instead & god forbid there is sexual harassment happening there ‘cuz crazy uncle kook would tell your daughter to suck it up or quit!

  Oh wait! Did I say minimum wage??? I mean LESS THAN THAT ‘cuz crazy uncle kook is getting rid of that too! The top 1% Job creators will pay you pennies & you’ll like it! Maybe he’ll institute NEWT’S TOILET SCRUBBING 101 to his agenda & she’ll be lucky enough to get a taste of hard labor in grade school!

  Are you going to tell your kids they can’t go to the park or beach anymore because it’s polluted beyond repair since crazy uncle kook dissolved the EPA & gave private corps concerned with profit only FREE REIGN over our environment? And god forbid there is a natural disaster from those increased hurricanes Global warming is causing (which the GOP denies across the board) because uncle kook is getting rid of FEMA aid too! Are you gonna open your doors to all the poor people struck by these casualties too?

  Finally, one of my favorites, god forbid your daughter is ever the victim of rape or incest – or an unwanted pregnancy of any kind, are you going to tell her that she doesn’t have the basic rights over her own uterus any more? Even if her personal health is at risk if she carries the baby because crazy uncle kook signed the ‘PLEDGE’ (along with the rest of the GOP) that would deny her right to an abortion?

  ^ THIS IS NOT MY “OPINION”…

  These are the things that would happen to americans across the country if crazy conspiracy theorist, racist Ron were made President

  “Defender of the constitution” – but NOT the poor, sick, needy, minorities or women. That’s some selling point! In a nutshell, the GOP Republican TeaBagger ideology is –

  “I GOT MINE – FU@K EVERYBODY ELSE”

  That’s NOT the way civilized society behaves, Sorry.
  Our liberal founding fathers disagree with this “PATRIOT” POSER

  Friday at 9:20pm · Unlike ·  2
• 

  Elisa Vote Dem Velez

  FOR YOUR EDIFICATION –

  “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

or click here:

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/01/trouble-with-alexander-russo.html

Alex Russo naming me #4 blog post of all time? Can’t be real.

The problem is that they then plan to have a panel of “external experts” to review all of this information, sanitize it, and present their results to the public as fact. Obviously the results of the ‘investigation’ will depend on who’s on that panel of experts.

Here are the pertinent paragraphs:

“First, the Department is issuing this request for information (RFI) to collect information about the integrity of academic testing. We pose a series of questions to which we invite interested members of the public to respond. Second, the Department will host a symposium where external experts can engage in further discussion and probe these issues in greater depth.Show citation box

“Third, the Department will publish a document that contains a summary of the recommendations that were developed as a result of the RFI and the symposium, as well as other resources identified by external experts participating in the symposium.”

If you would like to participate, here is the link to the Federal Register.

Let me remind you that CTB McGraw-Hill has a number of forensic data-crunching packages (so to speak) that could be purchased by school districts that already are purchasing their tests. I don’t know exactly what detection methods they have, and they wouldn’t discuss details with me, but if you are interested in finding out one possible method, then read the first chapter of Freakonomics by Dubner and Levitt.

And let me remind you that DCPS (for one) has been steadfast in refusing to purchase such forensic packages.

It’s called stonewalling.

In Georgia, a serious investigation by the state bureau of investigation got to the bottom of it, and got lots of confessions. A serious investigation by the FBI here in DC and other cities would be a good start.

This Federal Register RFI, unfortunately, sounds to me like another attempt at a whitewash. It is not serious, I predict.

Looks quite interesting.

Yes, I know teachers have less and less job security or freedom of speech or freedom to do what they professionally think is the best for their students.  And charter schools don’t have to listen to their students, parents, or teachers at all, in any way shape or form.

But if we just keep quiet and keep takinjg it, it’ll get worse and worse.

Take a look at this blog, called Fight Back Fridays, I think, or

http://fightbackfridays.blogspot.com/

I guess the first occasion is tomorrow.