Valerie Jablow: Waste and Attrition in DC

Valerie Jablow is a parent on Capitol Hill (DC) and has a blog (EducationDC) where she delves into factual stuff – like the actual statistics concerning numbers of children in DC, in DCPS, and in the DC charter schools; as well as wasteful spending by the Mayor and DC City Council.

Here are some recent posts by her that she brought to my attention. I recommend reading them and taking some action. I also add what she wrote:

[Jablow] “posted a follow-up blog yesterday to Suzanne Wells’s great blog post about 4th to 5th grade attrition at Capitol Hill DCPS schools—and how that attrition is related to the recent PARCC scores. 

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[Jablow’s] blog post is available here:

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Suzanne’s blog post from September is here:

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Also related to Capitol Hill and education issues are two other recent blog posts:

http://educationdc.net/2015/12/01/parcc-and-the-elsewhere-schools/

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http://educationdc.net/2015/11/20/stuff-we-spend-our-city-money-on/

Even the Chancellor Calls the Results ‘Sobering’

The Washington City Paper has an article on the PARCC results with way more graphs and charts than I do, and they quote even Chancellor Kaya Henderson as saying the results were ‘sobering’.

Please remind me why she still has a job?

She and several other speakers said that the PARCC results were more ‘honest’ than the old DC-CAS results, probably because the new ‘passing’ scores are lower than the old ones. I guess that means that it’s more ‘honest’ to say that students are doing worse than we were previously led to believe, under the current regime of all-testing-all-the-time and turn-half-the-students-over-to-unregulated charters?

 

PARCC Results Released in DC

I just got back from watching the public release of the results of the PARCC test that students in Washington DC took about 7 months ago.

(Let that sink in: it took the testing company, and their consultants, and the city’s consultants, over HALF A YEAR to massage the data into a releasable form. So much for having these tests be able to be used to ‘inform instruction’ or help teachers figure out what kind of help their students need. It’s now the last day of November, and the students have been in school since August. What kind of help is that to teachers or parents? And tho I haven’t looked at the released school scores or samples of what the teachers will see, I’m not optimistic. If the past is any guide, the scores themselves will be essentially useless as well…)

(It won’t take so long next time, we were assured…)

I got to see Mayor Bowser, Councilman Grosso, Chancellor Kaya Henderson, [powerless] Superintendent Hanseul Kang, and Deputy Mayor for Education Jenny Niles, and charter honcho Scott Pearson perform and answer some mostly-lame questions from some members of the media.

What we saw were that advanced students in DC (largely white ones) do exceedingly well on this PARCC battery of tests, and that others (blacks; hispanics; SPEDs; students on free or reduced lunch; ELLs; or Students At Risk) do much worse. Which of course is  the very same result we’ve seen on the NAEP for a couple of decades.

In fact, of all the cities and states measured on the NAEP, Washington DC has the very widest gaps in test scores between the Upper Caucasia Haves and the Have-Nots everywhere else, and those gaps are if anything getting wider.

It was interesting to hear Henderson’s defenses of the results, which still showed very low percentages of most students “passing” the PARCC. She said, among other things, that

(1) since students at the lower grades generally scored higher than those at the upper grades, that show’s we are on the right path [seems to me it shows the exact opposite; the longer that students have been exposed to “Reform”, the worse they do… and

(2) It takes a long time, you can’t just expect to turn a switch and have everything be wonderful overnight, we need lots of wrap-around services and a longer school day and school year and support for teachers.

Regarding the latter excuse: isn’t that exactly what teachers were condemned for saying under Chancellor Rhee, whose understudy was none other than Kaya Henderson? Didn’t Rhee imply that the only reason that poor students did poorly in school was that their greedy, lazy teachers, empowered by their evil union, refused to teach them anything? And that anybody who said that it’s a lot harder to teach impoverished students of color with chaotic families (if any) than it is to teach middle-class children with educated parents – why those people were just making excuses for poverty?

 

Trends on the NAEP give a clue as to why Arne Duncan quit

Seeing the rather large drop on the NAEP scores for students across the nation – results released at midnight last night – gives me the idea that Arne Duncan (secretary of education for the past 7 years) quit rather than face the blame for his failed policies. After all, he (and the rest of the billionaire deformer class) have been promising that if you open tons of unregulated charter schools, use numerology to fire many of the remaining veteran teachers, and make education into little more than test prep for all students of color or those who come from poor families, then the test results will improve.

Well, they didn’t improve.

I will let you see for yourself how the percentages of students deemed ‘proficient’ in 4th grade and 8th grade on the NAEP at the national level generally dropped. I include DC (where I come from), and in five other states – two that are high-performing (NH and Massachusetts) and three that are low-performing (CA, AL and NM).

The one bright spot for District residents is that DC is no longer the last in the nation in every category! DC students now have slightly higher percentages proficient in certain categories than two other impoverished states – New Mexico and Alabama, as you can see in the graphs below. (The graph for the District of Columbia is the light blue one at the bottom,)

On the other hand, the increases in percentages of students ‘proficient’ in DC since 2008, the first year after mayoral control was imposed and the elected school board was neutralized, are nothing but a continuation of previous trends.

As usual, if you want to take a closer look, click on the graphs.

% Proficient in 4th Grade Math: DC, Nation, MA, CA, NH, NM, AL through 2015

Percentage ‘Proficient’ or Above on 4th grade NAEP reading through 2015, DC, Nation, AL, CA, MA, NH, NM

8th grade math NAEP

8th grade reading

The Harm Done by TFA – According to its own Alumni

Here is an article which points out the negative impact of Teach for America, as described by two of its own former members. It’s in a magazine called Jacobin. I recommend it highly.

Here are a few quotes:

In stark contrast to the harsh and constant criticism that TFA doles out to its corps members and staff members, much of what the organization has been doing in recent years — creating its own public relations machine — suggests a desire to be above criticism itself. During my tenure on staff, the organization created a national communications team whose job was to get positive press out about TFA and to swiftly address any negative press. My sense was, and still is, that TFA cares more about the public perception of what it is doing than about what it is actually doing to improve educational outcomes and opportunities for low-income students throughout the United States.

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For an organization that describes itself as “data-driven,” it is interesting that TFA does not collect data on how their corps members are impacted by their TFA commitments. While working in racially segregated and under-resourced schools, 35 percent of the corps members in this study began professional counseling; 27 percent began taking prescription medications to address depression, anxiety, and trauma; 38 percent experienced increased alcohol consumption and dependency; 42 percent experienced major weight changes; 46 percent experienced strained relationships; and 73 percent experienced physical fatigue, some to the point of requiring medical attention.

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After years of uncritical praise, TFA has started receiving less favorable media coverage and more public discontent from alumni. One corps member in your book, Jameson, writes about viewing her time in TFA as “almost a guilty secret.” Why has there been this sort of shift in how TFA is viewed by corps members and the broader public, and how has TFA as an organization handled this uptick in public criticism?

JB

TFA controlled the rhetoric about TFA for the first twenty-three of its twenty-five years. Critique has always been there but only in the last two years has that critique started to come together and find outlets. That was a fundamental aim of our book: providing an outlet for discussion where it was historically absent.

TFA has been forced to include defensive measures to combat negative press. And while any company would likely engage in a public relations campaign, TFA is determined to undermine any and all dissent ranging from nationally syndicated columns to obscure blogs.

The Matthew Effect in College Tuition Costs

The Matthew Effect is where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath. — Matthew 25:29, King James Version.

An interesting article in the NYT Magazine points out that In the United States, students at the top tier of universities and colleges collectively get enormous subsidies on the cost of their enormous tuition bills — even those who pay the entire bill themselves. From the article:

See Jersey Jazzman use the Gaussian Distribution to Show that Arne Duncan and Mike Petrilli are full of it

Excellent lesson from Jersey Jazzman showing that the old tests produce pretty much the same distribution of scores as the new tests.

He has superimposed the green scores from 2008 on top of the 2014 scores for New York state in 8th grade reading, and basically they have almost the same distribution. Furthermore, a scatter plot shows nearly the same thing, and that there is a nearly perfect correlation between the old scores and the new scores, by school.

Read his article, which is clear and concise. I don’t have time to go into this in depth.

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/09/common-core-testing-whos-real-liar.html?spref=fb

A 3 minute news segment on the NY lawsuit against Value-Added Modeling

Even-handed video from Al-Jazeera interviewing some of the people involved in the anti-Value-Added-Model lawsuit against Value-Added Model evalutations of teachers in New York state.

You may have heard of the lawsuit – it was filed by elementary teacher Sherri Lederman and her lawyer, who is also her husband.

Parents, students, and administrators had nothing but glowing praise for teacher Lederman. In fact, Sherri’s principal is quoted as saying,

“any computer program claiming Lederman ‘ineffective’ is fundamentally flawed.”

Lederman herself states,

“The model doesn’t work. It’s misrepresenting an entire profession.”

Statistician Aaron Pallas of Columbia University states,

“In Sherri’s case, she went from a 14 out of 20, which was fully in the effective range, to 1 out of 20 [the very next year], ineffective, and we look at that and say, ‘How can this be? Can a teacher’s performance really have changed that dramatically from one year to the next?’

“And if the numbers are really jumping around like that, can we really trust that they are telling us something important about a teacher’s career?”

Professor Pallas could perhaps have used one of my graphs as a visual aid, to help show just how much those scores do jump around from year to year, as you see here. This one shows how raw value-added scores for teachers in New York City in school year 2005-2006 correlated with those very same teachers, teaching the same grade level students in the very same schools the exact same subjects, one year later. Gary Rubinstein has similar graphs. You can look here, here, here, or here. if you want to see some more from me on this topic.

The plot that follows is a classic case of ‘nearly no correlation whatsoever’ that we now teach to kids in middle school.

In other words, yes, teachers’ scores do, indeed jump around like crazy from year to year. If you were above average on VAM one year – that is, to the right of the Y axis anywhere, it is quite likely that you will end under the X-axis (and hence below average) the next year. Or not.

I am glad somebody is finally taking this to court, because this sort of mathematics of intimidation has got to stop.

Where have all the teachers gone?

A lot of them have retired (like me) or quit in disgust. This writer collected comments from dozens of teachers around the nation who explained why they retired early or quit teaching altogether because they could not stand the direction that American education has taken.

Very worthwhile reading.

http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2015/08/where-have-all-teachers-gone.html

From Mark Naison – Parent Strike!

This is from Mark Naison, an author and professor at Fordham in NYC — gfb

Mark Naison July 23 at 4:51pm What Our Children and Grandchildren Deserve: No Compromise With Current Education Policies Every post I get from around the country suggests that the attack on teachers, students and public education shows no sign of letting up. Students are being tested more than ever; great teachers are being given low ratings and driven out of the profession; and whole cities are being turned into all charter districts without evidence that this will do anything to empower students, while at the same time funneling profits to consulting firms and real estate developers. While the worst of the attacks are hitting high poverty schools, no districts are immune from the scripting, the micromanagement and the obsession with test results. This nightmare is occurring in states with Republican governors and states with Democratic governors. Anyone who thinks that the new ECAA legislation being passed by Congress is going to bring relief is being extremely naive. Those who think than any Presidential candidate will make things better is living in Never Never Land. The momentum of current policies on the state and local level is powerful because it is driven by Billionaire dollars. The same people who are controlling the political process in DC are driving privatization and profiteering in public education at the local level. The only way to fight back against this is civil disobedience. Parent strikes, Student strikes. Teachers strikes. Test Refusal. And innovative tactics to bring the pressure on those who would destroy students lives and teachers careers. Disrupt meetings. Picket peoples houses. Make those who would make students and families pay the price pay a price themselves. This is why I am very excited about the formation of the group ParentStrike. And the refusal of United Opt Out to compromise at all with ANY federal legislation that uses standardized testing as the basis of school evaluation and uses federal funds to punish schools, school districts and entire states on the basis of test scores. Now is not the time to compromise. We are already losing badly. It is the time to disrupt. To confuse. To undermine, To resist Our children and grandchildren deserve better. Much better.