Curmudgucation: 40 Years of Failure by the “Ed Reformers” – Now What?

Peter Greene has some suggestions:

https://open.substack.com/pub/curmudgucation/p/the-end-of-ed-reform-and-a-clue-for?r=3u611&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

I had been also thinking (but did not write down) that the tide would turn, and that teachers and schools themselves would no longer be seen as the whole cause of poverty or brilliance.

Instead, I feared that racists would once again become free to loudly and publicly blame black and brown people for their own poverty, just like they did from the end of Reconstruction 147 years ago, right up through the anti-Civil Rights backlash of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1983 the essay (disguised as an objective report) called “Nation At Risk” (NAR) jump-started an Education Reform drive that was truly bi-partisan, and had scores of billionaires both liberal (eg Gates) and conservative (eg Waltons) willing to fund it and push politicians to back it. Presidents Clinton, Bush2, and Obama and their secretaries of education all embraced it.

If you hadn’t noticed, this reform movement failed completely.

By its own terms (that is, test scores).

Despite having ‘edu-reformers’ in charge of every single large public school system in the nation.

But it took a while for those failures to become obvious.

At first, only a handful of writers such as Gerald Bracey pointed out the errors in that study and in the reformers’ steamroller. When the report first came out, I was teaching math to 7th graders in a very poor region of DC, and felt embarrassed that so many of my students there (100% Black) did so poorly in school, despite my efforts and those of my colleagues.

Some teachers from East Asia warned me not to believe the hype surrounding NAR. They said the model of education that exists in China, Japan, Korea and so on was NOT one that should be emulated by the US.

But I did believe the myth.

Later, I read some columns by Bracey and others and began to have doubts.

Then the amazing fraud Michelle Rhee was given control of DC’s entire public school system in 2007, less than two years before I retired.

I had never heard of the woman before, but upon her being named Chancellor of DCPS, I heard that she claimed to have performed educational miracles in a low-income, all-Black public school as a 3rd and 4th grade charter school teacher in Baltimore. She wrote in her resume: “Over a two-year period” in the mid-1990s she “moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”

When I read that sentence in her resume, I seem to recall my jaw literally dropping open.

If you have ever been around kids and looked at their test scores, you would realize that this feat would be the equivalent of landing a triple axel in ice skating, while also sinking a three-pointer in the NBA, and running a marathon in under two hours.

Simultaneously.

If this really had happened, it would have been front-page news in every single publication that dealt with education.

(Sounds like George Santos took lessons on fake resume claims from Michelle Rhee!)

Of course, there were no such articles. So I scratched my head and wondered.

After I retired, someone pointed me to where the fairly detailed Baltimore test scores could be found. I looked at them, and found that she had mythologized a small bump in test scores into the greatest educational achievement ever accomplished, anywhere. And nobody had called her on this lie.

I suspect that the bump can be attributed in large part to the fact that over one third of the students at her grade level, at that school, in that year, had scores that were so low that they weren’t counted!!! I wrote a few posts on my blog about it, and even did a call-in on an NPR interview with her, asking why she lied so much, in particular about those scores. She just giggled, as if to imply that I was just being an idiot for trying to call her on such a small technicality, when she was still working miracles.

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From the Daily Howler: “In the 1994-1995 school year, the seven schools run by EAI were under enormous pressure. During and after the previous year, major disputes had broken out about the low test scores of the EAI schools; by the fall of 1994, everyone knew that the pressure was on, that the plug might be pulled on the program. (As a simple Nexis search will show, all these matters were being discussed in the Baltimore Sun.) Do we possess three brain cells among us? If any school in the EAI group had an educational miracle occurring, this glorious fact would have been shouted to the skies by EAI’s corporate leadership. Trust us: The teachers involved would have gained acclaim in the national media—the kind of “acclaim” Rhee used to say she had attained, before she realized she had to stop saying it. It’s absurd to think there was some large group of third-graders “scoring at the 90th percentile or higher,” but their test scores somehow never came to the attention of the UMBC researchers.”

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Apparently nobody else with any knowledge of basic, elementary statistics and probability had previously bothered to compare those actual scores with her extraordinary claims. So I wrote what I found, with a fair amount of fury at the fact that such an amazing, world-class fraud and liar could be in charge of education in my home city, Washington, DC, the very seat of national government and so on. I got my 15 minutes of fame, but while Rhee did retire in disgrace, she has unfortunately never been indicted for fraud, even though she clearly suborned all sorts of cheating and erasing of bubble marks on students’ tests, and gave prizes and awards to one of the most prolific cheaters, a principal in my own neighborhood. (see here for some details.)

As I have recently feared, but did not put into writing, the really scary part now is that right-wingers and racists are using the failure of this billionaire-led disruption of public schools to get rid of the very idea of public education as a public good. They applaud the self-segregation.

Along with Curmudgucation, I find the prospect very scary.

Humans had ZPG for 5,000 years!!!

I’m listening to “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States”, a new book exploring recent findings on the 97% of our past as human beings before writing, tax collectors, cities, and modern states.

One surprising finding: from ten thousand BC to five thousand BC, the total population of us human beings (homo sapiens sapiens) world wide went from about 4 million souls to 5 million — according to one estimate by Macevedy & Jones. (There are other estimates: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html )

That was rather slow growth, the author noted. But *how* slow, this retired math teacher wondered?

So I got out a pencil and my notebook and wrote an equation. I used G for the annual growth factor, and wanted to see how close to 1.0000000 it was.

(Note: If G is exactly 1, then the population never changes; if G is less than 1, the population shrinks with exponential decay. If G=2.0, then the population doubles every year, which obviously can’t happen in any human population anywhere nor at any time. Though it certainly can for some of our commensal pests like mice…)

So, Macevedy & Jones’ initial population estimate of 4,000,000 (assuming smooth exponential growth over five millennia — a useful mathematical fiction) gets multiplied by G, whatever that might be, five thousand times (ie by G raised to the 5,000th power) to produce 5,000,000 people.

Or, 4000000*G^5000 = 5000000

Dividing both sides by four million I get

G^5000 = 1.25

The only way I know to solve that is to take the logarithm of both sides. Doing that with base ten and using the special laws of logs, I get

5000*log (G) = log (1.25)

Then I divide both sides by 5000 and I get

Log(G) = log(1.25) /5000

Then I exponentiate both sides using the original log base (ten), and I get

G =10^( log(1.25) / 5000)

At this point I use a calculator on my phone, typing in exactly the stuff on the RH side of the equals sign. And I get

10^(log10(1.25)/5000) = 1.00004463

Which is very, very close to unity. How close? Let us subtract one from that. We get

0.0000463 or 4.463e-05 in scientific notation. Or roughly 45 parts in a million. Mind you, there were a grand total of four million of our ancestors on the planet then, so we can multiply that 45 by four, and we get 180.

But what does that mean?

It means that on average, out of the ENTIRE HUMAN POPULATION ON THE PLANET AT THAT TIME, there was a net increase of people of only 180 souls per year.

That’s all.

On the whole planet!!!!

They had nearly achieved zero population growth!

But during the next five thousand years our population really exploded, to some hundreds of millions of people. Doinfg the same calculation, I found that the annual growth rate was about 1.00074, or 0.074%, or 74 additional net humans per year per hundred thousand, or about 74 thousand net new humans per year total, world-wide, once they got up to about a hundred million people.

That’s just up to the year 0 BC/AD.

Let us remember always that this planet right here is the only one we humans can possibly live on or get to in any numbers. We are as a species have done incalculable damage. Here in North America, think of the thoughtless and greedy extermination (or near-extermination) of the passenger pigeon; the American chestnut, elm, hemlock and ash; the buffalo; almost all of old-growth forests; most anadromous Atlantic fish; and Chesapeake bay oysters — all of which used to be plentiful beyond belief.

Some species are now recovering, such as deer, beavers, skunks, rabbits, foxes and coyotes.. Why is that? If you look at photos of Virginia countryside from 90 to 150 years ago, you see very, very few trees. Lumber companies and plantation owners and small farmers had cut them all down to plant grain and cash crops. Plowed land erodes quickly from both wind and rain. Those formerly fertile fields became uneconomical to farm, and so field after field (including ones I played or worked or hunted on as a kid and young man) have been allowed to regrow brush and then trees or housing developments, shopping centers, and pavement. So East of the Mississippi, there has been a dramatic increase in percentage of tree canopy over the last century.

However, some countries are repeating America’s mistakes and are cutting down primeval firsts as fast as they can…

As a 7th grader, could you have solved these? And how about now?

Do you realize how DIFFICULT the problems are on today’s 7th-grade PARCC-style standardized tests?

Take a look at this handful of questions, and feel free to look at others. If you compare these to the typical 7th-grade standardized test items from 30 or 40 years ago, you will have to conclude that these items asked these days are **much** more difficult than the ones from the past.

I strongly doubt that the folks who wrote these items, and those who are putting these items on the tests that nearly every 7th grader in the USA has to take, could have solved these when they were 7th graders?

And how many of my readers can solve these now, as adults?

Here are just a few:

Part Two: Cheating in DCPS

DC Education Reform Ten Years After, 

Part 2: Test Cheats

Richard P Phelps

Ten years ago, I worked as the Director of Assessments for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). For temporal context, I arrived after the first of the infamous test cheating scandals and left just before the incident that spawned a second. Indeed, I filled a new position created to both manage test security and design an expanded testing program. I departed shortly after Vincent Gray, who opposed an expanded testing program, defeated Adrian Fenty in the September 2010 DC mayoral primary. My tenure coincided with Michelle Rhee’s last nine months as Chancellor. 

The recurring test cheating scandals of the Rhee-Henderson years may seem extraordinary but, in fairness, DCPS was more likely than the average US school district to be caught because it received a much higher degree of scrutiny. Given how tests are typically administered in this country, the incidence of cheating is likely far greater than news accounts suggest, for several reasons: 

·      in most cases, those who administer tests—schoolteachers and administrators—have an interest in their results;

·      test security protocols are numerous and complicated yet, nonetheless, the responsibility of non-expert ordinary school personnel, guaranteeing their inconsistent application across schools and over time; 

·      after-the-fact statistical analyses are not legal proof—the odds of a certain amount of wrong-to-right erasures in a single classroom on a paper-and-pencil test being coincidental may be a thousand to one, but one-in-a-thousand is still legally plausible; and

·      after-the-fact investigations based on interviews are time-consuming, scattershot, and uneven. 

Still, there were measures that the Rhee-Henderson administrations could have adopted to substantially reduce the incidence of cheating, but they chose none that might have been effective. Rather, they dug in their heels, insisted that only a few schools had issues, which they thoroughly resolved, and repeatedly denied any systematic problem.  

Cheating scandals

From 2007 to 2009 rumors percolated of an extraordinary level of wrong-to-right erasures on the test answer sheets at many DCPS schools. “Erasure analysis” is one among several “red flag” indicators that testing contractors calculate to monitor cheating. The testing companies take no responsibility for investigating suspected test cheating, however; that is the customer’s, the local or state education agency. 

In her autobiographical account of her time as DCPS Chancellor, Michelle Johnson (nee Rhee), wrote (p. 197)

“For the first time in the history of DCPS, we brought in an outside expert to examine and audit our system. Caveon Test Security – the leading expert in the field at the time – assessed our tests, results, and security measures. Their investigators interviewed teachers, principals, and administrators.

“Caveon found no evidence of systematic cheating. None.”

Caveon, however, had not looked for “systematic” cheating. All they did was interview a few people at several schools where the statistical anomalies were more extraordinary than at others. As none of those individuals would admit to knowingly cheating, Caveon branded all their excuses as “plausible” explanations. That’s it; that is all that Caveon did. But, Caveon’s statement that they found no evidence of “widespread” cheating—despite not having looked for it—would be frequently invoked by DCPS leaders over the next several years.[1]

Incidentally, prior to the revelation of its infamous decades-long, systematic test cheating, the Atlanta Public Schools had similarly retained Caveon Test Security and was, likewise, granted a clean bill of health. Only later did the Georgia state attorney general swoop in and reveal the truth. 

In its defense, Caveon would note that several cheating prevention measures it had recommended to DCPS were never adopted.[2] None of the cheating prevention measures that I recommended were adopted, either.

The single most effective means for reducing in-classroom cheating would have been to rotate teachers on test days so that no teacher administered a test to his or her own students. It would not have been that difficult to randomly assign teachers to different classrooms on test days.

The single most effective means for reducing school administratorcheating would have been to rotate test administrators on test days so that none managed the test materials for their own schools. The visiting test administrators would have been responsible for keeping test materials away from the school until test day, distributing sealed test booklets to the rotated teachers on test day, and for collecting re-sealed test booklets at the end of testing and immediately removing them from the school. 

Instead of implementing these, or a number of other feasible and effective test security measures, DCPS leaders increased the number of test proctors, assigning each of a few dozen or so central office staff a school to monitor. Those proctors could not reasonably manage the volume of oversight required. A single DC test administration could encompass a hundred schools and a thousand classrooms.

Investigations

So, what effort, if any, did DCPS make to counter test cheating? They hired me, but then rejected all my suggestions for increasing security. Also, they established a telephone tip line. Anyone who suspected cheating could report it, even anonymously, and, allegedly, their tip would be investigated. 

Some forms of cheating are best investigated through interviews. Probably the most frequent forms of cheating at DCPS—teachers helping students during test administrations and school administrators looking at test forms prior to administration—leave no statistical residue. Eyewitness testimony is the only type of legal evidence available in such cases, but it is not just inconsistent, it may be socially destructive. 

I remember two investigations best: one occurred in a relatively well-to-do neighborhood with well-educated parents active in school affairs; the other in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Superficially, the cases were similar—an individual teacher was accused of helping his or her own students with answers during test administrations. Making a case against either elementary school teacher required sworn testimony from eyewitnesses, that is, students—eight-to-ten-year olds. 

My investigations, then, consisted of calling children into the principal’s office one-by-one to be questioned about their teacher’s behavior. We couldn’t hide the reason we were asking the questions. And, even though each student agreed not to tell others what had occurred in their visit to the principal’s office, we knew we had only one shot at an uncorrupted jury pool. 

Though the accusations against the two teachers were similar and the cases against them equally strong, the outcomes could not have been more different. In the high-poverty neighborhood, the students seemed suspicious and said little; none would implicate the teacher, whom they all seemed to like. 

In the more prosperous neighborhood, students were more outgoing, freely divulging what they had witnessed. The students had discussed the alleged coaching with their parents who, in turn, urged them to tell investigators what they knew. During his turn in the principal’s office, the accused teacher denied any wrongdoing. I wrote up each interview, then requested that each student read and sign. 

Thankfully, that accused teacher made a deal and left the school system a few weeks later. Had he not, we would have required the presence in court of the eight-to-ten-year olds to testify under oath against their former teacher, who taught multi-grade classes. Had that prosecution not succeeded, the eyewitness students could have been routinely assigned to his classroom the following school year.

My conclusion? Only in certain schools is the successful prosecution of a cheating teacher through eyewitness testimony even possible. But, even where possible, it consumes inordinate amounts of time and, otherwise, comes at a high price, turning young innocents against authority figures they naturally trusted. 

Cheating blueprints

Arguably the most widespread and persistent testing malfeasance in DCPS received little attention from the press. Moreover, it was directly propagated by District leaders, who published test blueprints on the web. Put simply, test “blueprints” are lists of the curricular standards (e.g., “student shall correctly add two-digit numbers”) and the number of test items included in an upcoming test related to each standard. DC had been advance publishing its blueprints for years.

I argued that the way DC did it was unethical. The head of the Division of Data & Accountability, Erin McGoldrick, however, defended the practice, claimed it was common, and cited its existence in the state of California as precedent. The next time she and I met for a conference call with one of DCPS’s test providers, Discover Education, I asked their sales agent how many of their hundreds of other customers advance-published blueprints. His answer: none.

In the state of California, the location of McGoldrick’s only prior professional experience, blueprints were, indeed, published in advance of test administrations. But their tests were longer than DC’s and all standards were tested. Publication of California’s blueprints served more to remind the populace what the standards were in advance of each test administration. Occasionally, a standard considered to be of unusual importance might be assigned a greater number of test items than the average, and the California blueprints signaled that emphasis. 

In Washington, DC, the tests used in judging teacher performance were shorter, covering only some of each year’s standards. So, DC’s blueprints showed everyone well in advance of the test dates exactly which standards would be tested and which would not. For each teacher, this posed an ethical dilemma: should they “narrow the curriculum” by teaching only that content they knew would be tested? Or, should they do the right thing and teach all the standards, as they were legally and ethically bound to, even though it meant spending less time on the to-be-tested content? It’s quite a conundrum when one risks punishment for behaving ethically.

Monthly meetings convened to discuss issues with the districtwide testing program, the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS)—administered to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. All public schools, both DCPS and charters, administered those tests. At one of these regular meetings, two representatives from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) announced plans to repair the broken blueprint process.[3]

The State Office employees argued thoughtfully and reasonably that it was professionally unethical to advance publish DC test blueprints. Moreover, they had surveyed other US jurisdictions in an effort to find others that followed DC’s practice and found none. I was the highest-ranking DCPS employee at the meeting and I expressed my support, congratulating them for doing the right thing. I assumed that their decision was final.

I mentioned the decision to McGoldrick, who expressed surprise and speculation that it might have not been made at the highest level in the organizational hierarchy. Wasting no time, she met with other DCPS senior managers and the proposed change was forthwith shelved. In that, and other ways, the DCPS tail wagged the OSSE dog. 

* * *

It may be too easy to finger ethical deficits for the recalcitrant attitude toward test security of the Rhee-Henderson era ed reformers. The columnist Peter Greene insists that knowledge deficits among self-appointed education reformers also matter: 

“… the reformistan bubble … has been built from Day One without any actual educators inside it. Instead, the bubble is populated by rich people, people who want rich people’s money, people who think they have great ideas about education, and even people who sincerely want to make education better. The bubble does not include people who can turn to an Arne Duncan or a Betsy DeVos or a Bill Gates and say, ‘Based on my years of experience in a classroom, I’d have to say that idea is ridiculous bullshit.’”

“There are a tiny handful of people within the bubble who will occasionally act as bullshit detectors, but they are not enough. The ed reform movement has gathered power and money and set up a parallel education system even as it has managed to capture leadership roles within public education, but the ed reform movement still lacks what it has always lacked–actual teachers and experienced educators who know what the hell they’re talking about.”

In my twenties, I worked for several years in the research department of a state education agency. My primary political lesson from that experience, consistently reinforced subsequently, is that most education bureaucrats tell the public that the system they manage works just fine, no matter what the reality. They can get away with this because they control most of the evidence and can suppress it or spin it to their advantage.

In this proclivity, the DCPS central office leaders of the Rhee-Henderson era proved themselves to be no different than the traditional public-school educators they so casually demonized. 

US school systems are structured to be opaque and, it seems, both educators and testing contractors like it that way. For their part, and contrary to their rhetoric, Rhee, Henderson, and McGoldrick passed on many opportunities to make their system more transparent and accountable.

Education policy will not improve until control of the evidence is ceded to genuinely independent third parties, hired neither by the public education establishment nor by the education reform club.

The author gratefully acknowledges the fact-checking assistance of Erich Martel and Mary Levy.

Access this testimonial in .pdf format

Citation:  Phelps, R. P. (2020, September). Looking Back on DC Education Reform 10 Years After, Part 2: Test Cheats. Nonpartisan Education Review / Testimonials. https://nonpartisaneducation.org/Review/Testimonials/v16n3.htm

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[1] A perusal of Caveon’s website clarifies that their mission is to help their clients–state and local education departments–not get caught. Sometimes this means not cheating in the first place; other times it might mean something else. One might argue that, ironically, Caveon could be helping its clients to cheat in more sophisticated ways and cover their tracks better.

[2] Among them: test booklets should be sealed until the students open them and resealed by the students immediately after; and students should be assigned seats on test day and a seating chart submitted to test coordinators (necessary for verifying cluster patterns in student responses that would suggest answer copying).

[3] Yes, for those new to the area, the District of Columbia has an Office of the “State” Superintendent of Education (OSSE). Its domain of relationships includes not just the regular public schools (i.e., DCPS), but also other public schools (i.e., charters) and private schools. Practically, it primarily serves as a conduit for funneling money from a menagerie of federal education-related grant and aid programs

What did Education Reform in DC Actually Mean?

Short answer: nothing that would actually help students or teachers. But it’s made for well-padded resumes for a handful of insiders.

This is an important review, by the then-director of assessment. His criticisms echo the points that I have been making along with Mary Levy, Erich Martel, Adell Cothorne, and many others.

Nonpartisan Education Review / Testimonials

Access this testimonial in .pdf format

Looking Back on DC Education Reform 10 Years After, 

Part 1: The Grand Tour

Richard P Phelps

Ten years ago, I worked as the Director of Assessments for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). My tenure coincided with Michelle Rhee’s last nine months as Chancellor. I departed shortly after Vincent Gray defeated Adrian Fenty in the September 2010 DC mayoral primary. 

My primary task was to design an expansion of that testing program that served the IMPACT teacher evaluation system to include all core subjects and all grade levels. Despite its fame (or infamy), the test score aspect of the IMPACT program affected only 13% of teachers, those teaching either reading or math in grades four through eight. Only those subjects and grade levels included the requisite pre- and post-tests required for teacher “value added” measurements (VAM). Not included were most subjects (e.g., science, social studies, art, music, physical education), grades kindergarten to two, and high school.

Chancellor Rhee wanted many more teachers included. So, I designed a system that would cover more than half the DCPS teacher force, from kindergarten through high school. You haven’t heard about it because it never happened. The newly elected Vincent Gray had promised during his mayoral campaign to reduce the amount of testing; the proposed expansion would have increased it fourfold.

VAM affected teachers’ jobs. A low value-added score could lead to termination; a high score, to promotion and a cash bonus. VAM as it was then structured was obviously, glaringly flawed,[1] as anyone with a strong background in educational testing could have seen. Unfortunately, among the many new central office hires from the elite of ed reform circles, none had such a background.

Before posting a request for proposals from commercial test developers for the testing expansion plan, I was instructed to survey two groups of stakeholders—central office managers and school-level teachers and administrators.

Not surprisingly, some of the central office managers consulted requested additions or changes to the proposed testing program where they thought it would benefit their domain of responsibility. The net effect on school-level personnel would have been to add to their administrative burden. Nonetheless, all requests from central office managers would be honored. 

The Grand Tour

At about the same time, over several weeks of the late Spring and early Summer of 2010, along with a bright summer intern, I visited a dozen DCPS schools. The alleged purpose was to collect feedback on the design of the expanded testing program. I enjoyed these meetings. They were informative, animated, and very well attended. School staff appreciated the apparent opportunity to contribute to policy decisions and tried to make the most of it.

Each school greeted us with a full complement of faculty and staff on their days off, numbering a several dozen educators at some venues. They believed what we had told them: that we were in the process of redesigning the DCPS assessment program and were genuinely interested in their suggestions for how best to do it. 

At no venue did we encounter stand-pat knee-jerk rejection of education reform efforts. Some educators were avowed advocates for the Rhee administration’s reform policies, but most were basically dedicated educators determined to do what was best for their community within the current context. 

The Grand Tour was insightful, too. I learned for the first time of certain aspects of DCPS’s assessment system that were essential to consider in its proper design, aspects of which the higher-ups in the DCPS Central Office either were not aware or did not consider relevant. 

The group of visited schools represented DCPS as a whole in appropriate proportions geographically, ethnically, and by education level (i.e., primary, middle, and high). Within those parameters, however, only schools with “friendly” administrations were chosen. That is, we only visited schools with principals and staff openly supportive of the Rhee-Henderson agenda. 

But even they desired changes to the testing program, whether or not it was expanded. Their suggestions covered both the annual districtwide DC-CAS (or “comprehensive” assessment system), on which the teacher evaluation system was based, and the DC-BAS (or “benchmarking” assessment system), a series of four annual “no-stakes” interim tests unique to DCPS, ostensibly offered to help prepare students and teachers for the consequential-for-some-school-staff DC-CAS.[2]

At each staff meeting I asked for a show of hands on several issues of interest that I thought were actionable. Some suggestions for program changes received close to unanimous support. Allow me to describe several.

1. Move DC-CAS test administration later in the school year. Many citizens may have logically assumed that the IMPACT teacher evaluation numbers were calculated from a standard pre-post test schedule, testing a teacher’s students at the beginning of their academic year together and then again at the end. In 2010, however, the DC-CAS was administered in March, three months before school year end. Moreover, that single administration of the test served as both pre- and post-test, posttest for the current school year and pretest for the following school year. Thus, before a teacher even met their new students in late August or early September, almost half of the year for which teachers were judged had already transpired—the three months in the Spring spent with the previous year’s teacher and almost three months of summer vacation. 

School staff recommended pushing DC-CAS administration to later in the school year. Furthermore, they advocated a genuine pre-post-test administration schedule—pre-test the students in late August–early September and post-test them in late-May–early June—to cover a teacher’s actual span of time with the students.

This suggestion was rejected because the test development firm with the DC-CAS contract required three months to score some portions of the test in time for the IMPACT teacher ratings scheduled for early July delivery, before the start of the new school year. Some small number of teachers would be terminated based on their IMPACT scores, so management demanded those scores be available before preparations for the new school year began.[3] The tail wagged the dog.

2. Add some stakes to the DC-CAS in the upper grades. Because DC-CAS test scores portended consequences for teachers but none for students, some students expended little effort on the test. Indeed, extensive research on “no-stakes” (for students) tests reveal that motivation and effort vary by a range of factors including gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, the weather, and age. Generally, the older the student, the lower the test-taking effort. This disadvantaged some teachers in the IMPACT ratings for circumstances beyond their control: unlucky student demographics. 

Central office management rejected this suggestion to add even modest stakes to the upper grades’ DC-CAS; no reason given. 

3. Move one of the DC-BAS tests to year end. If management rejected the suggestion to move DC-CAS test administration to the end of the school year, school staff suggested scheduling one of the no-stakes DC-BAS benchmarking tests for late May–early June. As it was, the schedule squeezed all four benchmarking test administrations between early September and mid-February. Moving just one of them to the end of the year would give the following year’s teachers a more recent reading (by more than three months) of their new students’ academic levels and needs.

Central Office management rejected this suggestion probably because the real purpose of the DC-BAS was not to help teachers understand their students’ academic levels and needs, as the following will explain.

4. Change DC-BAS tests so they cover recently taught content. Many DC citizens probably assumed that, like most tests, the DC-BAS interim tests covered recently taught content, such as that covered since the previous test administration. Not so in 2010. The first annual DC-BAS was administered in early September, just after the year’s courses commenced. Moreover, it covered the same content domain—that for the entirety of the school year—as each of the next three DC-BAS tests. 

School staff proposed changing the full-year “comprehensive” content coverage of each DC-BAS test to partial-year “cumulative” coverage, so students would only be tested on what they had been taught prior to each test administration.

This suggestion, too, was rejected. Testing the same full-year comprehensive content domain produced a predictable, flattering score rise. With each DC-BAS test administration, students recognized more of the content, because they had just been exposed to more of it, so average scores predictably rose. With test scores always rising, it looked like student achievement improved steadily each year. Achieving this contrived score increase required testing students on some material to which they had not yet been exposed, both a violation of professional testing standards and a poor method for instilling student confidence. (Of course, it was also less expensive to administer essentially the same test four times a year than to develop four genuinely different tests.)

5. Synchronize the sequencing of curricular content across the District. DCPS management rhetoric circa 2010 attributed classroom-level benefits to the testing program. Teachers would know more about their students’ levels and needs and could also learn from each other. Yet, the only student test results teachers received at the beginning of each school year was half-a-year old, and most of the information they received over the course of four DC-BAS test administrations was based on not-yet-taught content.

As for cross-district teacher cooperation, unfortunately there was no cross-District coordination of common curricular sequences. Each teacher paced their subject matter however they wished and varied topical emphases according to their own personal preference.

It took DCPS’s Chief Academic Officer, Carey Wright, and her chief of staff, Dan Gordon, less than a minute to reject the suggestion to standardize topical sequencing across schools so that teachers could consult with one another in real time. Tallying up the votes: several hundred school-level District educators favored the proposal, two of Rhee’s trusted lieutenants opposed it. It lost.

6. Offer and require a keyboarding course in the early grades. DCPS was planning to convert all its testing from paper-and-pencil mode to computer delivery within a few years. Yet, keyboarding courses were rare in the early grades. Obviously, without systemwide keyboarding training in computer use some students would be at a disadvantage in computer testing.

Suggestion rejected.

In all, I had polled over 500 DCPS school staff. Not only were all of their suggestions reasonable, some were essential in order to comply with professional assessment standards and ethics. 

Nonetheless, back at DCPS’ Central Office, each suggestion was rejected without, to my observation, any serious consideration. The rejecters included Chancellor Rhee, the head of the office of Data and Accountability—the self-titled “Data Lady,” Erin McGoldrick—and the head of the curriculum and instruction division, Carey Wright, and her chief deputy, Dan Gordon. 

Four central office staff outvoted several-hundred school staff (and my recommendations as assessment director). In each case, the changes recommended would have meant some additional work on their parts, but in return for substantial improvements in the testing program. Their rhetoric was all about helping teachers and students; but the facts were that the testing program wasn’t structured to help them.

What was the purpose of my several weeks of school visits and staff polling? To solicit “buy in” from school level staff, not feedback.

Ultimately, the new testing program proposal would incorporate all the new features requested by senior Central Office staff, no matter how burdensome, and not a single feature requested by several hundred supportive school-level staff, no matter how helpful. Like many others, I had hoped that the education reform intention of the Rhee-Henderson years was genuine. DCPS could certainly have benefitted from some genuine reform. 

Alas, much of the activity labelled “reform” was just for show, and for padding resumes. Numerous central office managers would later work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Numerous others would work for entities supported by the Gates or aligned foundations, or in jurisdictions such as Louisiana, where ed reformers held political power. Most would be well paid. 

Their genuine accomplishments, or lack thereof, while at DCPS seemed to matter little. What mattered was the appearance of accomplishment and, above all, loyalty to the group. That loyalty required going along to get along: complicity in maintaining the façade of success while withholding any public criticism of or disagreement with other in-group members.

Unfortunately, in the United States what is commonly showcased as education reform is neither a civic enterprise nor a popular movement. Neither parents, the public, nor school-level educators have any direct influence. Rather, at the national level, US education reform is an elite, private club—a small group of tightly-connected politicos and academics—a mutual admiration society dedicated to the career advancement, political influence, and financial benefit of its members, supported by a gaggle of wealthy foundations (e.g., Gates, Walton, Broad, Wallace, Hewlett, Smith-Richardson). 

For over a decade, The Ed Reform Club exploited DC for its own benefit. Local elite formed the DC Public Education Fund (DCPEF) to sponsor education projects, such as IMPACT, which they deemed worthy. In the negotiations between the Washington Teachers’ Union and DCPS concluded in 2010, DCPEF arranged a 3 year grant of $64.5M from the Arnold, Broad, Robertson and Walton Foundations to fund a 5-year retroactive teacher pay raise in return for contract language allowing teacher excessing tied to IMPACT, which Rhee promised would lead to annual student test score increases by 2012. Projected goals were not met; foundation support continued nonetheless.

Michelle Johnson (nee Rhee) now chairs the board of a charter school chain in California and occasionally collects $30,000+ in speaker fees but, otherwise, seems to have deliberately withdrawn from the limelight. Despite contributing her own additional scandalsafter she assumed the DCPS Chancellorship, Kaya Henderson ascended to great fame and glory with a “distinguished professorship” at Georgetown; honorary degrees from Georgetown and Catholic Universities; gigs with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Broad Leadership Academy, and Teach for All; and board memberships with The Aspen Institute, The College Board, Robin Hood NYC, and Teach For America. Carey Wright is now state superintendent in Mississippi. Dan Gordon runs a 30-person consulting firm, Education Counsel that strategically partners with major players in US education policy. The manager of the IMPACT teacher evaluation program, Jason Kamras, now works as Superintendent of the Richmond, VA public schools. 

Arguably the person most directly responsible for the recurring assessment system fiascos of the Rhee-Henderson years, then Chief of Data and Accountability Erin McGoldrick, now specializes in “data innovation” as partner and chief operating officer at an education management consulting firm. Her firm, Kitamba, strategically partners with its own panoply of major players in US education policy. Its list of recent clients includes the DC Public Charter School Board and DCPS.

If the ambitious DC central office folk who gaudily declared themselves leading education reformers were not really, who were the genuine education reformers during the Rhee-Henderson decade of massive upheaval and per-student expenditures three times those in the state of Utah? They were the school principals and staff whose practical suggestions were ignored by central office glitterati. They were whistleblowers like history teacher Erich Martel who had documented DCPS’ student records’ manipulation and phony graduation rates years before the Washington Post’s celebrated investigation of Ballou High School, and was demoted and then “excessed” by Henderson. Or, school principal Adell Cothorne, who spilled the beans on test answer sheet “erasure parties” at Noyes Education Campus and lost her job under Rhee. 

Real reformers with “skin in the game” can’t play it safe.

The author appreciates the helpful comments of Mary Levy and Erich Martel in researching this article. 

Access this testimonial in .pdf format

More on the “false positive” COVID-19 testing problem

I used my cell phone last night to go into the problem of faulty testing for COVID-19, based on a NYT article. As a result, I couldn’t make any nice tables. Let me remedy that and also look at a few more assumptions.

This table summarizes the testing results on a theoretical group of a million Americans tested, assuming that 5% of the population actually has coronavirus antibodies, and that the tests being given have a false negative rate of 10% and a false positive rate of 3%. Reminder: a ‘false negative’ result means that you are told that you don’t have any coronavirus antibodies but you actually do have them, and a ‘false positive’ result means that you are told that you DO have those antibodies, but you really do NOT. I have tried to highlight the numbers of people who get incorrect results in the color red.

Table A

Group	Total	Error rate	Test says they are Positive	Test says they are Negative
Actually Positive	50,000	10%	45,000	5,000
Actually Negative	950,000	3%	28,500	921,500
Totals	1,000,000		73,500	926,500
Percent we assume are actually positive	5%	Accuracy Rating	61.2%	99.5%

As you can see, using those assumptions, if you get a lab test result that says you are positive, that will only be correct in about 61% of the time. Which means that you need to take another test, or perhaps two more tests, to see whether they agree.

The next table assumes again a true 5% positive result for the population and a false negative rate of 10%, but a false positive rate of 14%.

Table B

Assume 5% really exposed, 14% false positive rate, 10% false negative
Group	Total	Error rate	Test says they are Positive	Test says they are Negative
Actually Positive	50,000	10%	45,000	5,000
Actually Negative	950,000	14%	133,000	817,000
Totals	1,000,000		178,000	822,000
Percent we assume are actually positive	5%	Accuracy Rating	25.3%	99.4%

Note that in this scenario, if you get a test result that says you are positive, that is only going to be correct one-quarter of the time (25.3%)! That is useless!

Now, let’s assume a lower percentage of the population actually has the COVID-19 antibodies, say, two percent. Here are the results if we assume a 3% false positive rate:

Table C

Assume 2% really exposed, 3% false positive rate, 10% false negative
Group	Total	Error rate	Test says they are Positive	Test says they are Negative
Actually Positive	20,000	10%	18,000	2,000
Actually Negative	980,000	3%	29,400	950,600
Totals	1,000,000		47,400	952,600
Percent we assume are actually positive	2%	Accuracy Rating	38.0%	99.8%

Notice that in this scenario, if you get a ‘positive’ result, it is likely to be correct only a little better than one-third of the time (38.0%).

And now let’s assume 2% actual exposure, 14% false positive, 10% false negative:

Table D

Assume 2% really exposed, 14% false positive rate, 10% false negative
Group	Total	Error rate	Test says they are Positive	Test says they are Negative
Actually Positive	20,000	10%	45,000	2,000
Actually Negative	980,000	14%	137,200	842,800
Totals	1,000,000		182,200	844,800
Percent we assume are actually positive	2%	Accuracy Rating	24.7%	99.8%

Once again, the chances of a ‘positive’ test result being accurate is only about one in four (24.7%), which means that this level of accuracy is not going to be useful to the public at large.

Final set of assumptions: 3% actual positive rate, and excellent tests with only 3% false positive and false negative rates:

Table E

Assume 3% really exposed, 3% false positive rate, 3% false negative
Group	Total	Error rate	Test says they are Positive	Test says they are Negative
Actually Positive	30,000	3%	45,000	900
Actually Negative	970,000	3%	29,100	940,900
Totals	1,000,000		74,100	941,800
Percent we assume are actually positive	3%	Accuracy Rating	60.7%	99.9%

Once again, if you test positive in this scenario, that result is only going to be correct about 3/5 of the time (60.7%).

All is not lost, however. Suppose we re-test all the people who tested positive in this last group (that’s a bit over seventy-four thousand people, in Table E). Here are the results:

Table F

Assume 60.7% really exposed, 3% false positive rate, 3% false negative
Group	Total	Error rate	Test says they are Positive	Test says they are Negative
Actually Positive	45,000	3%	43,650	1,350
Actually Negative	29,100	3%	873	28,227
Totals	74,100		44,523	29,577
Percent we assume are actually positive	60.7%	Accuracy Rating	98.0%	95.4%

Notice that 98% accuracy rating for positive results! Much better!

What about our earlier scenario, in table B, with a 5% overall exposure rating, 14% false positives, and 10% false negatives — what if we re-test all the folks who tested positive? Here are the results:

Table G

Assume 25.3% really exposed, 14% false positive rate, 10% false negative
Group	Total	Error rate	Test says they are Positive	Test says they are Negative
Actually Positive	45,000	14%	38,700	6,300
Actually Negative	133,000	10%	13,300	119,700
Totals	178,000		52,000	126,000
Percent we assume are really positive	25.3%	Accuracy Rating	74.4%	95.0%

This is still not very good: the re-test is going to be accurate only about three-quarters of the time (74.4%) that it says you really have been exposed, and would only clear you 95% of the time. So we would need to run yet another test on those who again tested positive in Table G. If we do it, the results are here:

Table H

Assume 74.4% really exposed, 14% false positive rate, 10% false negative
Group	Total	Error rate	Test says they are Positive	Test says they are Negative
Actually Positive	38,700	14%	33,282	5,418
Actually Negative	13,300	10%	1,330	11,970
Totals	52,000		34,612	17,388
Percent we assume are really positive	74.4%	Accuracy Rating	96.2%	68.8%

This result is much better, but note that this requires THREE TESTS on each of these supposedly positive people to see if they are in fact positive. It also means that if they get a ‘negative’ result, that’s likely to be correct only about 2/3 of the time (68.8%).

So, no wonder that a lot of the testing results we are seeing are difficult to interpret! This is why science requires repeated measurements to separate the truth from fiction! And it also explains some of the snafus committed by our current federal leadership in insisting on not using tests offered from abroad.

 

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

EDIT at 10:30 pm on 4/25/2020: I found a few minor mistakes and corrected them, and tried to format things more clearly.

PISA shows great US education progress under Common Core, charter proliferation, reforms. (JUST KIDDING!)

If there is anything that the recent PISA results show, it’s that the promises by David Coleman, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Betsy Devos, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, and others of tremendous achievement increases and closing socioeconomic gaps with their ‘reforms’ were completely unfilled. I am copying and pasting here how American students have done on the PISA, a test given in many, many countries, since 2006. There have been tiny changes over the past dozen years in the scores of American students in reading, math, and science, but virtually none have been statistically significant, according to the statisticians who compiled and published the data.

Then again, nearly any classroom teacher you talked to over the past decade or two of educational ‘reforms’ in American classrooms could have told you why and how it was bound to fail.

Look for yourself:

 

Source: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_USA.pdf

 

EDIT: I meant David Coleman the educational reform huckster, not Gary Coleman the actor!

 

More Educational Miracles (Not!)

I have prepared charts and graphs for 8th grade NAEP average scale scores for black, hispanic, and white students in various jurisdictions: the entire nation; all large cities; Washington DC; Florida, Michigan; and Mississippi.

You will see that there was a general upwards trend in math from about 1992 to roughly 2007 or 2009, but the scores have mostly leveled off during the last decade. I included Michigan, since that is the state where current Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has had the mo$t per$sonal influence, but that influence doesn’t look to be positive.

While it’s good that DC’s black students no longer score the lowest in the nation (that would be Michigan – see the first graph), there is another feature of my fair city: very high-performing white students (generally with affluent, well-educated parents) in its unfortunately rather segregated public schools, as you can see in the last graph. 

Not So Fast, Betsy DeVos!

I attended the official roll-out of the results of the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) a couple of days ago at the National Press Club here in DC on 14th Street NW, and listened to the current education secretary, Betsy Devos, slam public schools and their administrators as having accomplished nothing while spending tons of money. She and other speakers held up DC, Mississippi, and Florida as examples to follow. Devos basically advocated abandoning public schools altogether, in favor of giving each parent a “backpack full of cash” to do whatever they want with.

Some other education activists I know here in DC shared their thoughts with me, and I decided to look at the results for DC’s white, black, and Hispanic students over time as reported on the NAEP’s official site. (You can find them here, but be prepared to do quite a bit of work to get them and make sense out of them!)

I found that it is true that DC’s recent increases in scores on the NAEP for all students, and for black and Hispanic students, are higher than in other jurisdictions.

However, I also found that those increases were happening at a HIGHER rate BEFORE DC’s mayor was given total control of DC’s public schools; BEFORE the appointment of Michelle Rhee; and BEFORE the massive DC expansion of charter schools.

Here are two graphs (which I think show a lot more than a table does) which give ‘average scale scores’ for black students in math at grades 4 and 8 in DC, in all large US cities, and in the nation as a whole. I have drawn a vertical red line at the year 2008, separating the era before mayoral control of schools (when we had an elected school board) and the era afterwards (starting with appointed chancellor Michelle Rhee and including a massive expansion of the charter school sector). These results include both regular DC Public School students and the charter school sector, but not the private schools.

I asked Excel to produce linear correlations of the average scale scores for black students in DC starting in 1996 through 2007, and also for 2009 through 2019. It wasn’t obvious to my naked eye, but the improvement rates, or slopes of those lines, were TWICE AS HIGH before mayoral control. At the 4th grade level, the improvement rate was 2.69 points per year BEFORE mayoral control, but only 1.34 points per year afterwards.

Yes, that is a two-to-one ratio AGAINST mayoral control & massive charter expansion.

At the 8th grade level, same time span, the slope was 1.53 points per year before mayoral control, but 0.77 points per year afterwards.

Again, just about exactly a two-to-one ratio AGAINST the status quo that we have today.

Charter schools do NOT get better NAEP test results than regular public schools

It is not easy to find comparisons between charter schools and regular public schools, partly because the charter schools are not required to be nearly as transparent or accountable as regular public schools. (Not in their finances, nor in requests for public records, nor for student or teacher disciplinary data, and much more.) At the state or district level, it has in the past been hard or impossible to find comparative data on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress).

We all have heard the propaganda that charter and voucher schools are so much better than regular public schools, because they supposedly get superior test scores and aren’t under the thumb of  those imaginary ‘teacher union thugs’.

However, NCES has released results where they actually do this comparison. Guess what: there is next to no difference between the scores of all US charter schools on the NAEP in both reading and math at either the 4th grade or 8th grade level! In fact, at the 12th grade, regular public schools seem to outscore the charter schools by a significant margin.

Take a look at the two graphs below, which I copied and pasted from the NCES website. The only change I made was to paint orange for the bar representing the charter schools. Note that there is no data available for private schools as a whole.

If you aren’t good at reading graphs, the one above says that on a 500-point scale, in 2017 (which was the last year for which we have results), at the 4th grade, regular public school students scored an average of 239 points in math, three points higher than charter school students (probably not a significant difference). At the 8th grade level, the two groups scored identically: 282 points. At the 12th grade, in 2015, regular public school students outscored charter school students by a score of 150 to 133 on a 300-point scale (I suspect that difference IS statistically significant). We have no results from private schools, but Catholic schools do have higher scores than the public or charter schools.

The next graph is for reading. At the 4th grade, charter school students in 2017 outscored regular public school students by a totally-insignificant 1 point (222 to 221 on a 500 point scale) and the same thing happened at the 8th grade level (266 to 265 on a 500 point scale). However, at the 12th grade, the regular public school students outscore their charter school counterparts by a score of 285 to 269, which I bet is significant.