mathematics | GFBrandenburg's Blog

Progress (or Not) for DC’s 8th Graders on the Math NAEP?

$8th grade naep math, DC, w + H + B$

Here we have the average scale scores on the math NAEP for 8th grade students in Washington, DC.* You will notice that we don’t have data for 8th grade white students in DC in math for the years 2003, 2007, and 2009, because there weren’t enough white students taking the test in those years for the statisticians at NCES to be confident in their data.

The vertical, dashed, red line near the middle of the graph represents the date when the old, elected, DC school board was replaced by Chancellors Rhee, Henderson, and Wilson, directly appointed by the various mayors. That year (2007) was also when Rhee and her underlings instituted brand-new teacher evaluation systems like IMPACT and VAM and new curricula and testing regimes known as Common Core, PARCC, and so on. Hundreds, if not thousands, of teachers were either fired or resigned or took early retirement. If these reforms had been as successful as Rhee promised in writing, then the lines representing scores for white, black, and hispanic students in DC would go slanting strongly up and to the right after that 2007 change.

I don’t see it.

Do you?

In fact, let’s look carefully at the slopes of the lines pre-Rheeform and post-Rheeform.

For black 8th grade students, scores went from 231 to 245 in the years 2000 to 2007, or 14 points in 7 years, which is a rise of 2.0 points per year. After mayoral control, the scores for black students went from 245 to 257, or 12 points in 10 years. That’s rise of 1.2 points per year.

Worse, not better.

For Hispanic students, scores went from 236 in the year 2000 to 251 in 2007, a rise of 15 points in 7 years, or a rise of about 2.1 points per year. After mayoral control, their scores went from 251 to 263 in 10 years, which is a rise of 1.2 points per year.

Again: Worse, not better.

With the white students, a lot of data is missing, but I’ll compare what we have. Their scores went from 300 in year 2000 to 317 in the year 2005, which is an increase of 3.4 points per year. After mayoral control, their scores went from 319 in 2011 to 323, in 2017 or a rise of four (4!) points in 6 years, which works out to about 0.6 points per year.

Once again, Worse, not better.

Voters, you have the power to stop this nonsense, if you get organized!

—————————————————-

* Note that I’m using the numbers for Washington DC as a whole – which includes the regular DC Public School system, all the charter schools, as well as private (aka ‘independent’) and parochial schools. At one point, NAEP divided the DC scores into those for DCPS only (on the one hand) and for everybody else. In addition, they began to make it possible to separate out charter schools. However, since the regular public schools and the charter schools together educate the vast majority of students in DC, and the DCPS-only score-keeping started well after 2007, I decided to use the scores for all of DC because there was a much longer baseline of data, going back about twenty years.

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

Here are my previous posts on this matter:

DC’s Black, Hispanic and White Students Progress on the NAEP Under Mayoral Control and Before – 8th Grade Reading

We are looking at the average scale scores for 8th grade black, Hispanic, and white students in DC on the NAEP reading tests over the past two decades. Ten years ago, Washington DC made the transition from a popularly-elected school board to direct mayoral control of the school system. Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson, our first and second Chancellors under the new system, promised some pretty amazing gains if they were given all that power and many millions of dollars from the Walton, Arnold, and Broad foundations, and I showed that almost none of their promises worked out.

In the graph above, the vertical, dashed, green line shows when mayoral control was imposed, shortly after the end of school in 2007, so it marks a convenient end-point for school board control and a baseline for measuring the effects of mayoral control.

For 8th grade black students in reading in DC, their average scale scores went from 233 in 1998 to 238 in 2007, under the elected school board, which is a (very small) rise of 5 points in 9 years, or about 0.6 points per year. Under mayoral control, their scores went from 238 to 240, which is an even tinier increase of 2 points in 10 years, or 0.2 points per year.

Worse, not better.

For the Hispanic students, scores only increased from 246 to 249 before we had chancellors, or 3 points in 9 years, or about 0.3 points per year. After mayoral control, their scores went DOWN from 249 to 242 in 10 years, or a decrease of 0.7 points per year.

Again, worse, not better: going in the wrong direction entirely.

For white DC 8th graders, it’s not possible to make the same types of comparisons, because there were not sufficient numbers of white eighth-grade students in DC taking the test during five of the last ten test administrations for the NCES statisticians to give reliable results. However, we do know that in 2005 (pre-mayoral control) white 8th graders in DC scored 301 points. And since the mayors and the chancellors took over direct control of education in DC, not once have white students scored that high.

Again, worse, not better.

Why do we keep doing the same things that keep making things worse?

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

My previous posts on this topic:

Published in:

on April 20, 2018 at 1:29 pm Comments (1)
Tags: Fenty, Henderson, math, NAEP, NCES, reading, Rhee, school, test, testing

Comparing DC’s 4th Grade White, Black, and Hispanic Students in the Math NAEP

$4th grade math naep, DC, w + B + H$

Here we have the average scale scores for DC’s white, black, and Hispanic fourth graders in math on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, prompted by the data rollout earlier this week of the 2017 results.

The vertical, blue, dashed line at the year 2007 shows where DC changed from having an elected school board with real power, to having a mayor who sets educational policy on his/her own, appointing a Chancellor (starting with the serial fabulist, Michelle Rhee).

If mayoral control of the schools, along with the firing or forcing out of hundreds or thousands of teachers, and all the other ‘reforms’ that have been instituted since 2007, were such a great success, then you would see the purple, orange, and green lines going sharply upwards to the right after the year 2007.

But you don’t.

In fact, let’s do a little math here, and look at rates of change pre- and post-mayoral control

For black 4th graders in math in DC, under the elected school board, the average scale scores went from 188 in the year 2000 to 209 in the year 2007. That is an increase of 21 points in 7 years, or about 3.0 points per year. After mayoral control, those scores went from 209 in year 2007 to 224 in year 2017. That is a rise of 15 points in 10 years, or a rate of change of 1.5 points per year.

That’s worse, not better.

For Hispanic students, during period under the school board, the scores went from 190 to 220 in 7 years, which is a growth of about 4.3 points per year. After mayoral control, their scores went from 220 to 230, which is an increase of 1.0 points per year.

Once again, that’s worse under mayoral control, not better.

For white students in DC, pre-Rhee, the scores went from 254 to 262 in 7 years, or a growth of roughly 1.1 points per year. After mayoral control (and under Rhee and her successors), their scores went from 262 to 273 in 10 years, which is exactly 1.1 points per year.

No change.

So, to sum things up: for black and Hispanic students, who are obviously the two main groups of economically-deprived students in DC, if we look at scores on the NAEP over the past 20 years, there has been LESS improvement under mayoral control (and under IMPACT, VAM, PARCC and everything else) than there was before.

Is anybody paying any attention to this?

Or will the beatings continue and intensify until morale somehow, miraculously, improves?

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

You can see my previous posts on this topic at these links:

Published in:

on April 20, 2018 at 12:53 pm Comments (2)
Tags: administration, Fenty, mayoral control, NAEP, Rhee, school, test, testing

One Area With A Bit of Improvement: 4th Grade Reading for Black Students on the NAEP

If you’ve been following this series, you’ve noticed that pretty much all of the trends for all subgroups in 8th grade math and reading have been flat — essentially no change after 20 years and billions of dollars of ill-spent money on ‘reforms’ that most teachers have found to be utterly worthless.

This graph, however, for 4th grade students in reading in DC and elsewhere, does show a little bit of improvement in DC only for the period 2013-now. However, there have also been drops. Mostly, there is not much change at all. But if you look very carefully you can see a small increase during that time period – just as there were small increases for DC’s hispanic students BEFORE mayoral control.

How good are your eyes?

$4th grade math naep black students dc + elsewhere 1998-2017$

EDIT: My bad: this was reading, not math. It’s fixed now, and I edited some of the text. GFB, 4/17/2018, 2:12 pm

Published in:

on April 17, 2018 at 6:32 am Comments (4)
Tags: black students, math, NAEP, testing

Was There Any Progress in 8th Grade Math on the NAEP in DC or Elsewhere?

The answer is, basically, no.

You can see for yourself. This time I am posting a graph and table for average math NAEP scale scores for 8th graders who were black, Hispanic, or white. Honestly, they show that billions of dollars spent in dubious schemes such as having students spend an enormous fraction of the school year doing test prep, firing teachers based on students’ test scores (either their own students or those whom they’ve never met) and turning over much of our public educational system over to billionaires and profiteers — it’s all been a failure. Based on their own yardstick — test scores.

Here are the graphs. Read them and either weep or get determined to do something better about this ‘reformster’ charade.

$8th grade math naep black students 1996-2017$

$8th grade math naep hispanic students 1996-2917$

$8th grade math Naep scores, white students, 1996-2017$

Published in:

on April 16, 2018 at 11:25 pm Comments (3)
Tags: black, hispanic, math, NAEP, reform, standardized testing, white students

Why is it that we keep on testing?

The only actual impact it’s had has been to distort education in a top-down manner, and that’s not exactly a good thing, as Peter Greene points out at Curmudgucation.

A few excerpts, concerning the reasons we were given for all this testing, and how that excuse turned out:

“Address Inequity

We would find where non-wealthy non-white student populations were being ill-served. Anyone who can’t figure that out without the BS Test is a dope. And as with the last point, the problem has been that the data hasn’t so much been used to find schools that need help as it has been used to find schools that are vulnerable and ready to be turned into somebody’s business opportunity. Instead of focusing our will to address educational inequity, test-based accountability has highlighted our lack of will (and wasted the good intentions of some folks).

Informing Instruction

Teachers were going to get their data spreadsheets and figure out, with laser-like precision, who they needed to change their instruction. But right off the bat it became clear that data about students in your class would only arrive long after the students had departed for their next classroom. Then the security issue reared its stupid head– I can see student scores, but I am forbidden to see the test itself. (For that matter, students who are so inclined are unable to see their specific results to ask “What exactly did I get wrong here?”) This means I can tell that Pat only got an okayish score, based on some questions that might have asked about something about reading that Pat apparently answered incorrectly. How can that inform my instruction? It can’t. It doesn’t. The BS Tests “inform instruction” mostly by encouraging teachers to spend more time on test prep. That’s not a good thing.

Letting Parents Know How Their Children Are Doing

Under this theory, parents have no idea how their children are doing in school until the BS Test results appear. Assuming for the moment that the parents are that disconnected, the information provided is minimal, scoring a few categories on a 1-3 or 1-4 scale. A BS Test provides very non-granular data, less nuanced than a report card– and based on just one test. There is nothing for parents to learn here.”

Published in:

on April 12, 2018 at 4:20 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: inequity, instruction, public education, public schools, standardized testing, standards, teaching, testing

Even Big Edu-‘Reformers’ Can See That Their Plan Has Failed

I’m cutting and pasting one of Peter Greene’s latest columns:

AEI: Voiding the Choice Warrantee

Posted: 20 Mar 2018 11:38 AM PDT

The American Enterprise Institute has a new report that calls into question one of the foundational fallacies of the entire reform movement. Think of it as the latest entry in the Reformster Apostasy movement.

Do Impacts on Test Scores Even Matter? Lessons from Long-Run Outcomes in School Choice Research asks some important questions. We know they are important questions because some of us have been asking and answering them for twenty years.

Here are the key points as AEI lists them:

For the past 20 years, almost every major education reform has rested on a common assumption: Standardized test scores are an accurate and appropriate measure of success and failure.

This study is a meta-analysis on the effect that school choice has on educational attainment and shows that, at least for school choice programs, there is a weak relationship between impacts on test scores and later attainment outcomes.

Policymakers need to be much more humble in what they believe that test scores tell them about the performance of schools of choice: Test scores should not automatically occupy a privileged place over parental demand and satisfaction as short-term measures of school choice success or failure.

Yup. That’s just about it. The entire reformster movement is based on the premise that Big Standardized Test results are a reliable proxy for educational achievement. They are not. They never have been, and some of us have been saying so all along. Read Daniel Koretz’s book The Testing Charade: Pretending To Make Schools Better for a detailed look at how this has all gone wrong, but the short answer is that when you use narrow unvalidated badly designed tests to measure things they were never meant to measure, you end up with junk.

AEI is not the first reform outfit to question the BS Tests’ value. Jay Greene was beating this drum a year and a half ago:

But what if changing test scores does not regularly correspond with changing life outcomes? What if schools can do things to change scores without actually changing lives? What evidence do we actually have to support the assumption that changing test scores is a reliable indicator of changing later life outcomes?

Greene concluded that tests had no real connection to student later-in-life outcomes and were therefor not a useful tool for policy direction. Again, he was saying what teachers and other education professionals had been saying since the invention of dirt, but to no avail.

In fact, if you are of a Certain Age, you may well remember the authentic assessment movement, which declared that the only way to measure any student knowledge and skill was by having the student demonstrate something as close to the actual skill in question. IOW, if you want to see if the student can write an essay, have her write an essay. Authentic assessment frowned on multiple choice testing, because it involves a task that is not anything like any real skill we’re trying to teach. But ed reform and the cult of testing swept the authentic assessment movement away.

Really, AEI’s third paragraph of findings is weak sauce. “Policymakers should be much more humble” about test scores? No, they should be apologetic and remorseful that they ever foisted this tool on education and demanded it be attached to stern consequences, because in doing so the wrought a great deal of damage on US education. “Test scores should not automatically occupy a privileged place…”? No, test scores should automatically occupy a highly unprivileged place. They should be treated as junk unless and until someone can convincingly argue otherwise.

But I am reading into this report a wholesale rejection of the BS Test as a measure of student, teacher, or school success, and that’s not really what AEI is here to do. This paper is focused on school choice programs, and it sets out to void the warrantee on school choice as a policy.

Choice fans, up to and including education secretary Betsy DeVos, have pitched choice in terms of its positive effects on educational achievement. As DeVos claimed, the presence of choice will not even create choice schools that outperform public schools, but the public schools themselves will have their performance elevated. The reality, of course, is that it simply doesn’t happen.The research continues to mount that vouchers, choice, charters– none of them significantly move the needle on school achievement. And “educational achievement” and “school achievement” all really only mean one thing– test scores.

Choice was going to guarantee higher test scores. They have had years and years to raise test scores. They have failed. If charters and choice were going to usher in an era of test score awesomeness, we’d be there by now. We aren’t.

So what’s a reformster to do?

Simple. Announce that test scores don’t really matter. That’s this report.

There are several ways to read this report, depending on your level of cynicism. Take your pick.

Hardly cynical at all. Reformsters have finally realized what education professionals have known all along– that the BS Tests are a lousy measure of educational achievement. They, like others before them, may be late to enlightenment, but at least they got there, so let’s welcome them and their newly-illuminated light epiphanic light bulbs.

Kind of Cynical. Reformsters are realizing that the BS Tests are hurting the efforts to market choice, and so they are trying to shed the test as a measure of choice success because it clearly isn’t working and they need reduce the damage to the choice brand being done.

Supremely Cynical. Reformsters always knew that the BS Test was a sham and a fraud, but it was useful for a while, just as Common Core was in its day. But just as Common Core was jettisoned as a strategic argument when it was no longer useful, the BS Test will now be tossed aside like a used-up Handi Wipe. The goal of free market corporate reformsters has always been to crack open the vast funding egg of public education and make it accessible to free marketeers with their education-flavored business models. Reformsters would have said that choice clears up your complexion and gives you a free pony if they thought it would sell the market based business model of schooling, and they’ll continue to say– or stop saying– anything as long as it helps break up public ed and makes the pieces available for corporate use.

Bottom line. Having failed to raise BS Test scores, some reformsters would now like to promote the entirely correct idea that BS Tests are terrible measures of school success, and so, hey, let’s judge choice programs some other way. I would add, hey, let’s judge ALL schools some other way, because BS Testing is the single most toxic legacy of modern ed reform.

Published in:

on March 20, 2018 at 2:43 pm Comments (2)
Tags: AEI, Peter Greene, standardized testing, testing

Ten Years of Educational Reform in DC – Results: Total MathCounts Collapse for the Public AND Charter Schools

Just having finished helping to judge the first three rounds of the DC State-Level MathCounts competition, I have some sad news. NOT A SINGLE TEAM FROM ANY DC PUBLIC OR CHARTER SCHOOL PARTICIPATED. Two kids from Hardy MS were the only ones from any DC public or charter school.

I was in the judging room where all the answer sheets were handed in, and I and some engineers and mathematicians had volunteered to come in and score the answers.*

In past years, for example, when I was a math teacher and MathCounts coach at Alice Deal JHS/MS, the public schools often dominated the competitions. It wasn’t just my own teams, though — many students from other public schools, and later on, from DC’s charter schools, participated. (Many years, my team beat all of the others. Sometimes we didn’t, but we were always quite competitive, and I have a lot of trophies.)

While a few public or charter schools did field full or partial teams on the previous “chapter” level of competition last month, this time, at the “state” level I am sad to report that there were none at all. (Including Deal. =-{ )

That’s what ten years of Education ‘Reform’ has brought to DC public and charter schools.

Such ~~excellence!~~ a bunch of rot.

In addition to the facts that

one-third of last year’s DCPS senior class had so many unexcused class absences that they shouldn’t have graduated at all;
officials simply lied about massive attendance and truancy problems;
officials are finally beginning to investigate massive enrollment frauds at desirable DC public schools
DCPS hid enormous amounts of cheating by ADULTS on the SAT-9 NCLB test after Rhee twisted each principal’s arm to produce higher scores or else.
the punishment of pretty much any student misbehavior in class has been forbidden;
large number of actual suspensions were in fact hidden;
there is a massive turnover of teachers and school administrators – a revolving door as enormous percentages of teachers break down and quit mid-year (in both public and charter schools);
there isfraudulent manipulation of waiting lists;
these frauds are probably also true at some or all of charter schools, but nobody is investigating them at all because they don’t have to share data and the ‘state’ agency hides what they do get;
DC still has the largest black-white standardized test-score gap in the nation;
DC is still attempting to implement a developmentally-inappropriate “common core” curriculum funded by Bill Gates and written by a handful of know-it-alls who had never taught;
Rhee and Henderson fired or forced out massive numbers of African-American teachers, often lying about the reasons;
they implemented a now-many-times-discredited“value-added method” of determining the supposed worth of teachers and administrators, and used that to terminate many of them;
they also closed dozens of public schools in poor, black neighborhoods.

Yes, fourth-grade NAEP national math and reading scores have continued to rise – but they were rising at just about that exact same rate from 2000 through 2007, that is to say, BEFORE mayoral control of schools and the appointment of that mistress of lies, fraud, and false accusations: Michelle Rhee.

So what I saw today at the DC ‘state’-wide competition is just one example of how to destroy public education.

When we will we go back to having an elected school board, and begin having a rational, integrated, high-quality public educational system in DC?

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

* Fortunately, we didn’t have to produce the answers ourselves! Those questions are really HARD! We adults, all mathematically quite proficient, had fun trying to solve a few of them when we had some down time — and marveled at the idea of sixth, seventh, or eighth graders solving them at all! (If you are curious, you can see previous year’s MathCounts questions here.)

Published in:

on March 10, 2018 at 1:18 pm Comments (5)
Tags: closing schools, DC, DCPS, firing, fraud, Kaya Henderson, math, mathcounts, Rhee, Value Added Measurement

Poverty vs Proficiency In DC Public and Charter Schools

You’ve all heard the slogan:

“A child’s course in life should be determined not by the zip code she’s born in.” Source

Reformers like Bush2, Barack Obama, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Arne Duncan, Adrian Fenty, Bill Gates, the Bradleys and the Waltons, all said they were going to bust the educational effects of poverty in DC and other places around the country. Their chosen methods were gutting the teachers’ unions, establishing lots of charter schools, firing or forcing into retirement thousands of teachers, establishing a revolving door of inexperienced teachers who almost all crash and burn out after a few years, and transforming schooling into all testing and test prep, all the time, especially on-line, so as to collect lots of data.

Have they been successful at solving the zip-code-and-destiny problem?

If we look at the only publicly-available data that we have for Washington, DC, namely PARCC scores and percentages of students who are designated as ‘At Risk’, the answer is:

NO.

Look at these two graphs, which I’ve prepared by matching the percentages of students scoring ‘Proficient’ or ‘Advanced’ in Washington, DC, at every single DC public school and charter school, versus OSSE’s official list of the percentages and numbers of students officially designated as being ‘At Risk’.

Unfortunately, the correlation is extremely strong, and negative. In other words, the fewer the kids who are officially ‘At Risk’ at any given school, the higher the percentage of kids scoring ‘Proficient’ or ‘Advanced’ on the PARCC – the Big Standardized test given in April of 2017. And obversely the greater the percentage of students at risk at any school, the lower the percentage of students ‘passing’ the PARCC.

The effect is particularly strong in the English and Reading part of the test.

(Note: I didn’t make up the ‘At Risk’ category. It’s relatively new, but combines statistics regarding homelessness, receiving food, living in poverty, divorces, family members being incarcerated, and so on.)

Here is the graph I made for the English Language Arts test. That R-squared correlation, 0.7016, is one of the strongest correlations you will find anywhere in the social sciences.

Now here is the graph for the Math section of the PARCC:

$2017 math PARCC proficiency vs at risk, public and charter$

This is certainly not an indication that education ‘reform’ in DC has been a success. After more than a decade.

Next time I’ll break this down into charters and public schools. I think you will find that many of the charter schools have populations near the middle of these charts, while the regular DC public schools have populations near the extremes.

Many thanks to Ruth Wattenberg, Mary Levy and Matthew Frumin for showing me where these data files were kept – here and here. Any errors are my own.

Published in:

on January 29, 2018 at 9:29 pm Comments (2)
Tags: At Risk, bill gates, billlionaires, bradley foundation, destiny, ELA, Joel Klein, math, Obama, PARCC, poverty, Walton, zip code

Vision of a Dystopian Education Future, Coming to Kids Near You

Not sure who wrote this, but if this is where education is going, it’s not a future I want anybody to grow up in. Not my kids, not my grand-kids, nobody.

Computerized education can really suck.

{Update: “Wrench in the Gears” is Alison McDowell; the section I referenced is the third of a series}

Automated Education: Building Sanctuary Part 5

Published in:

on January 24, 2018 at 1:08 pm Comments (2)
Tags: dystopia, education, wrenchinthegears

GFBrandenburg's Blog

Just a blog by a guy who's a retired math teacher

Follow This Blog via Email

Search GFBrandenburg’s Archives!

Categories

Blogroll

Recent Posts

Just a blog by a guy who's a retired math teacher

Share this:

Like this:

Why do we keep doing the same things that keep making things worse?

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

“A child’s course in life should be determined not by the zip code she’s born in.” Source

NO.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Follow This Blog via Email

Search GFBrandenburg’s Archives!

Categories

Blogroll

Recent Posts