Quotation Of The Day: Worst Congress Ever Edition

Conor Firedersdorf lays out the case that it's not the current 112th Congress but the 107th Congress from the early years of the Bush Administration:

In October 2001, with just one senator dissenting, that Congress passed the PATRIOT Act, the most alarming infringement on civil liberties in a generation and a precursor to all War on Terrorism abuses to come. In a bipartisan bill that January, legislators approved No Child Left Behind, a well-intentioned but flawed education-reform bill that forced an ineffective test-taking regime on the states and has not lived up to its name. Another bipartisan bill, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation, didn't remedy the problems it was meant to address before or after parts of it were found by the Supreme Court to violate the Constitution.

But no failure was as consequential as the 2002 authorization for military force against Iraq. What a historic debacle. That same Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, so their legacy of awfulness may well continue in perpetuity. It's all worth remembering next time someone tells you that the present Congress is the worst ever because they won't get anything done. For a couple years after President Bush took over, Congress agreed enough to push through all sorts of major policies with bipartisan support. They just turned out to be follies.

Sometimes bipartisan agreement is far more catastrophic than gridlock.

A Useful Metaphor For Educational Reform Efforts

From this National Geographic article:

In a "eureka" moment worthy of Dr. Frankenstein, scientists have discovered that two 3,000-year-old Scottish "bog bodies" are actually made from the remains of six people.

According to new isotopic dating and DNA experiments, the mummies—a male and a female—were assembled from various body parts, although the purpose of the gruesome composites is likely lost to history. [ Emphasis in original]

The most recent efforts began with NCLB which was based on a Texas Miracle that never happened. Reformers then urged everyone to emulate Michelle Rhee whose alleged results did not stand up to scrutiny. Every state created new "tough" standards and schools started testing just to test.  Meanwhile, teachers began creating curriculum maps to perfectly demonstrate that each lesson met some standard.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan attempted to institute Race to the Top which is billed as being both the same as but also different from NCLB.  Meanwhile, one can now get NCLB with waivers.  New Common Core standards arrived, so no one uses the old maps but the curriculum remains the same.

NCLB, Rhee, RTTT, waivers, and Common Core have created "a gruesome composite" "assembled from various body parts" with a purpose that has been "lost."

Quotation Of The Day: The Last Decade In Teaching Editon

From Yong Zhao:

NCLB has led to a narrowing of curriculum, demoralization of teachers, explosion of cheating scandals, reduction of teaching to test-preparation, weakening of public education, and deprivation of the disadvantaged children of a meaningful education experience. The national standards movement in the U.S. has coincided with a significant decline in creativity over the last few decades. Of course, another side (or intended) effect is the increased wealth of publishing companies, tutoring services, and for-profit education ventures.

The Common Core, however dressed, shares the fundamental spirit with NCLB: standardization of curriculum enforced with high-stakes testing. In fact, the Common Core comes with more force on a larger scale. The side effects will be even more significant.

NCLB: An Anniversary I'd Rather Forget

Sol Stern sums up 10 years of NCLB with a great article at The Daily Beast.  He makes three or four key points.  First, NCLB is hopelessly optimistic and has rendered testing rather useless because it now becomes the test has become a goal rather than a measuring instrument.

Though well intentioned, NCLB’s perverse incentives left the door wide open to the corruption of educational standards. The law stipulated that all American students must become “proficient” in reading and math by 2014 --- a hopelessly utopian goal – and then set sanctions for those states that didn’t make “adequate yearly progress” in meeting that goal. But the law also allowed each state to determine its own proficiency standard. Since men are not angels, it was inevitable that state and local education authorities would dumb down the tests to make themselves look good to the feds and to the voters.

The framers of NCLB might have avoided this outcome if they had familiarized themselves with the work of the great American social scientist Donald Campbell. According to Campbell, “when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.” That’s exactly what seems to have happened.

Second, NCLB pushed schools to lower standards and demand less from top students.

One other perverse incentive in NCLB: Because the law emphasized mere “proficiency” and rewarded schools for getting their students to achieve that fairly low standard, teachers and administrators were pressed to boost the test scores of their lowest-performing students but were given no such incentive to improve instruction for the brightest students – the nation’s future engineers and scientists.

Finally, things may not be getting better any time soon.

“We have to stop lying to children,” Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, announced last year at a meeting of the National Governors Association. “We have to look them in the eye and tell them the truth at every stage of their educational trajectory.” A nice sentiment, but Mr. Duncan concocted the biggest lie of all when he replaced NCLB’s 2014 proficiency goal with the pledge that all American children will be prepared for college-level work by the year 2020.

Quotation Of The Day: NCLB Edition

Yesterday's Sioux Falls Argus Leader contained an editorial about NCLB and South Daktoa's efforts to obtain a waiver.  I'm less sanguine about SDDOE's efforts than the Argus Leader's editorial writers.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that the state will preserve or exacerbate NCLB's flaws.

That being said, this analysis is spot on.

For today’s high school freshmen, who started kindergarten the year NCLB became law, it provided a decade of underachieving standards and misplaced efforts. NCLB left behind a well-rounded education, and national test data show that students made greater strides in reading and math before the law was enacted.

I Wonder If Arne Duncan Is A Light At The End Of the NCLB Tunnel Or An Oncoming Train

I'm intrigued, confused, hopeful, and worried about this New York Times report.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

Mr. Duncan told reporters that he was acting because Congress had failed to rewrite the Bush-era law, which he called a “slow-motion train wreck.” He is waiving the law’s proficiency requirements for states that have adopted their own testing and accountability programs and are making other strides toward better schools, he said.

I am happy that Duncan is taking steps to end to impossible 100 percent requirement.  The process, however, does give me pause.

In Friday’s conference call, Mr. Duncan and Ms. Barnes [Melody Barnes, director of President Obama’s White House Domestic Policy Council] said the Department of Education would issue guidelines next month inviting states to apply for the waivers. For a waiver to be approved, they said, states would need to show that they were adopting higher standards under which high school students were “college- and career-ready” at graduation, were working to improve teacher effectiveness and evaluation systems based on student test scores and other measures, were overhauling the lowest-performing schools, and were adopting locally designed school accountability systems to replace No Child’s pass-fail system.

Those requirements match the criteria the administration used last year in picking winning states in its two-stage Race to the Top grant competition. Ms. Barnes said states would not be competing against one another with their waiver applications. But the similarity irked critics.

I have three main fears.  First, Duncan's record spotty record doesn't give me hope that he will accept sensible plans.  In short, we'll get more bureaucrats telling teachers what to do and Race To The Top through other means.

Second, Duncan seems to favor those who defer to him.  South Dakota's Melody Schopp took a stand earlier this summer to unilaterally change South Dakota's standards.  I realize I may be acting on stereotypes about Chicago politicians, but I can't believe that Duncan is going to make things easy on Schopp and South Dakota nor do I trust Senators Thune and Johnson or Representative Noem to apply effective and proper political pressure.

Third,  this action feeds the conservative narrative that Duncan and Obama are trying to centralize everything and further politicize the process.  The Times report indicates that the politicization is happening.

When Mr. Duncan sketched an outline of the administration’s waiver plan in June, Representative John Kline, the Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the House education committee, demanded that Mr. Duncan show by what legal authority he would override the federal law. Mr. Duncan responded by citing provisions of the No Child law itself that give the education secretary broad waiver powers.

On Friday, Mr. Kline said in a statement, “I remain concerned that temporary measures instituted by the department, such as conditional waivers, could undermine” efforts by Congress to rewrite the law.

Mr. Kline’s committee has completed three overhaul bills focusing on elimination of federal programs, financial flexibility for states, and charter schools. But the committee has not yet produced bills rewriting the law’s crucial school accountability and teacher effectiveness provisions.

Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is chairman the Senate education committee, said he understood why Mr. Duncan was pursuing the waiver plan, since “it is undeniable that this Congress faces real challenges reaching bipartisan, bicameral agreement on anything.”

I applaud efforts to remedy the harm done by NCLB. RTTT, however, is not an improvement.  Given Washingon's recent performance. I'm worried that Duncan and the politicians who oppose his efforts will simply make matters worse.

My Fellow Teachers Do Something Stupid

The National Education Association voted to endorse Barack Obama for the 2012 election.  They also voted to direct

. . . . the NEA President to communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately to President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that NEA is appalled with Secretary Duncan's practice of:. . . .

Blogger Teacher Ken tries to put the decision in historical perspective.

Let's provide some historical context for elections since 1988.

1988  Dukakis got 86%

1992 Clinton got 88%

1996 Clinton got 91%

2000 Gore got 86.5%

2004 Kerry got 86.5%

2008 Obama got 79.8%

2011, Obama got 72%.

Unlike Clinton, in his endorsement for reelection Obama dropped 7.8%, while Clinton went up 3%.

And Obama's percentage in 2008 was already the lowest in the past 5 elections.

This is far from "overwhelming" support by historical standards.

Those numbers according to Teacher Ken mean the vote was something other than overwhelming by historical standards.  Overwhelming or not, the endorsement is a stupid decision.

First, Obama's education record is dismal.  The Washington Post describes an individual teacher's frustrations that echo mine.  Teachers supported Obama to "stand strong for public schools and break from a federal education policy of 'testing, testing, testing.'"  However the results have been something different.

Three years later, all the standardized tests are still there. In some places, they are beginning to be used to fire teachers. Lately. . .  the solutions to all of public education’s troubles seem to boil down to a refrain: “Blame it on the teacher[s] who works [their] tail[s] off for 14 hours a day."

Further, education historian Diane Ravitch who tweets with the handle @DianeRavitch has tweeted the following:  "Obama education policy is worse than NCLB because of increased pressure for high-stakes testing, judging by teachers by scores." and "Suppose we might refer to the Bush-Obama education policy since NCLB and RTTT [Race to the Top] are so well aligned, bipartisan."

In short, President Obama has done nothing that teachers supported him to do and he may well have made matters worse.

Second, the vote to endorse and the vote to issue disapproval seems to indicate that Duncan is a wild card who is acting without Obama's approval.  The President appointed Secretary Duncan.  The President has shown a willingness to overrule his generals.  The New York Times reported,

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said Thursday that President Obama’s new schedule for drawing down forces there was “more aggressive” than he had recommended and increased the risk that the military would not meet all its goals.

Teachers are now supposed to believe that the President can overrule a general but not a secretary of education. It's much more logical, Duncan is putting Obama's policies in place.

Third, NEA may have felt pressured to make the endorsement now so they hold the Representative Assembly every July.  The Chicago Tribune reports

Because the NEA's representative assembly, its primary policymaking arm, meets once a year, union leaders said they faced a dilemma of either being early or late in determining their political support. The group typically makes an endorsement in July preceding the presidential election.

The endorsement is the most important political tool that NEA has.  They have squandered it.

Given that Obama's policies are no better than President Bush's policies, all this early endorsement accomplishes is re-enforce the idea that teachers are lap dogs of the Democratic party.

A Rather Sweet Melody Was Heard

The Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports,

In a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Schopp said Wednesday that the state intends to use 2010 benchmarks in calculating whether public school students and schools made "adequate yearly progress" in this spring.

It means, for example, that only 63 percent of high school juniors at a school will have to have scored proficient in math last spring, instead of 72 percent. Just 69 percent of students in grades 3-8 must have scored proficient in reading, not 76 percent.

Schopp's logic is impeccable.  The article claims she wants to send "a message that she's tired of waiting for Congress to update No Child Left Behind."  Further,

"Without making these changes, we believe our accountability system, as it currently stands, would inappropriately label schools as failing. This situation would eventually trigger a number of NCLB-related sanctions that our department simply does not have the capacity to address," Schopp wrote to Duncan.

Of course, Schopp's move is not without risk.

By going ahead with the plan, Schopp acknowledged the state "could potentially be out of compliance" with No Child Left Behind, meaning the government could withhold funding.

Losing funding frightens me, but this may be worth the risk, especially if other states go along.  The Argus Leader goes on,

Like South Dakota, Idaho is not waiting to see what that plan will be. Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna last week was the first education chief to announce his state's plans to defy No Child Left Behind.

I'm going to quibble with the august publication a bit.  Montana informed Duncan in May that that state would not be raising its requirements.  If I'm not a good enough source for the Argus Leader, NPR agrees.

Our story implied that Idaho was the first state to refuse to comply with No Child Left Behind. Actually, Montana sent a letter to the Education Department in April, announcing that state would not be raising its NCLB requirements. That letter preceded Idaho's announcement.

The larger point is that Duncan is not going to punish 15 or 20 states.  If others join South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, the funding levels will remain the same.  One would hope that fewer strings will be attached.

What Will Kristi Do?

The Sioux Falls Argus Leader opines

It's a good sign that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has indicated that he will work with schools through this limbo created by the stalling of the NCLB reauthorization. He predicted that without changes, more than 80 percent of U.S. schools would be labeled failing next year. No matter what the good intentions of the NCLB law, that sort of failure rate is certainly an unintended consequence.

Congress needs to move quickly to at least put the yearly proficiency ratings standard aside while the next round of education legislation is worked out. Rep. Kristi Noem, who sits on the House Education Committee, is in position to take a lead role in moving this discussion forward. She should do that. [emphasis mine]

Last week KELO reported,

Associated School Boards has discussed the concerns with Representative Kristi Noem, who's on the education committee. She agrees something more needs to be done.

"Just loosening some requirements doesn't really get us more progress down the road that's better for our kids,” Noem said. “We really need to head back to the reauthorization process and fix things that are wrong with the law.". . . .

Noem says she'd like to see new NCLB provisions give more local control to districts, to improve and enhance where they see fit.

South Dakota's most widely circulated paper and the state's school board association believe the state needs some immediate relief from NCLB.  Meanwhile, the New York Times reports,

In a sharp rebuke to the Obama administration, the Republican chairman of the House education committee on Thursday challenged plans by the education secretary to override provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Law, and he said he would use a House rewrite of it this year to rein in the secretary’s influence on America’s schools.

Responding to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s promise to grant states waivers to the education law’s most onerous provisions if Congress failed to rewrite it, the committee chairman, Representative John Kline of Minnesota, sent Mr. Duncan a letter on Thursday demanding that he explain by July 1 the legal authority that he believed he had to issue the waivers.

Mr. Kline went further in a conference call with reporters, criticizing the administration’s use of the $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition to get states to adopt its reform agenda.

“He’s not the nation’s superintendent,” Mr. Kline said of Mr. Duncan, who assumed powers greater than any of his predecessors when, in 2009, Congress voted $100 billion in economic stimulus money for the nation’s school systems and allowed the secretary to decide how much of it should be spent.  

It seems that House Republicans want to rein in Duncan before they fix NCLB.  Noem seems to be being pulled in opposite directions.

The fact is both goals need to be met.  Duncan needs to be reined in and Congress needs to repair some of NCLB's stupid requirements.  Whatever his faults, Duncan correctly asserts "unless the law is rewritten quickly, 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools could be declared failing this fall, demoralizing educators and paralyzing administrators with red tape."

NCLB will be a key test for Representative Noem who has shown little talent for anything except raising money.  Can she use her position on the committee to rein in Duncan and fix NCLB before September?

I'm not sanguine about the prospects, but I'll let oddsmakers set the line in the comments.

Minor Musing about Politics and Liberty

A couple of days ago, The Madville Times posted about the apparent failure to get enough signatures to refer two bills made necessary by federal health care reform.  In the comments, Steve Sibson, Cory, and I were amiably discussing Hegel without a philosophical license. when Sibson ended the conversation by, "The end-game is the same…statism. The frog’s water is now boiling."

Given the topic, Sibson seems to be saying that health care reform will end the Republic.  Big government certainly carries inherent risks, but I've always been confused why health care reform was the issue that animated tea party supporters.

Why wasn't it the Patriot Act? Why did it take 10 years to see reports like this one?

Congress bumped up against the deadline mainly because of the stubborn resistance from a single senator, Republican freshman Rand Paul of Kentucky, who saw the terrorist-hunting powers as an abuse of privacy rights.

Paul held up the final vote for several days while he demanded a chance to change the bill to diminish the government's ability to monitor individual actions.

The measure would add four years to the legal life of roving wiretaps — those authorized for a person rather than a communications line or device — of court-ordered searches of business records and of surveillance of non-American "lone wolf" suspects without confirmed ties to terrorist groups.

The roving wiretaps and access to business records are small parts of the USA Patriot Act enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But unlike most of the act, which is permanent law, those provisions must be renewed periodically because of concerns that they could be used to violate privacy rights. The same applies to the "lone wolf" provision, which was part of a 2004 intelligence law.

Paul argued that in the rush to meet the terrorist threat in 2001 Congress enacted a Patriot Act that tramples on individual liberties. He had some backing from liberal Democrats such as Durbin and Udall, as well as civil liberties groups who have long contended the law gives the government authority to spy on innocent citizens.

"The Patriot Act has been used improperly again and again by law enforcement to invade Americans' privacy and violate their constitutional rights," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington legislative office.

 Why wasn't it NCLB?  Why did it take nearly a decade to read this?

“I think what you’re seeing is the Republican Party going back to its conservative roots and, yes, going back to its core principles and I think that’s a good thing,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in an interview here, adding: “I would argue that we did lose our way for a while.”

Jindal, who was an official in Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services and served two terms in Congress during the Bush era, cites No Child Left Behind as an example of wayward Republicanism.

“How does it make sense for Republicans to be imposing this one-size-fits-all approach from the federal level onto the states and the local school board when we’ve always believed that government that governs closest to the people governs best?” he asked.

Why aren't conservatives angered about situations like this one?

Risen claims the intimidation began under the Bush administration but has continued into the Obama era. "I believe that the efforts to target me has continued under the Obama Administration, which has been aggressively investigating whistleblowers and reporters in a way that will have a chilling effect on freedom of the press in the United States," Risen wrote.

When it comes to basic liberties, I have to agree with E.D. Kain who writes,

Rand Paul is quickly becoming one of the most important voices on civil liberties in the Senate, alongside a small cadre of others like Democratic Senator, Ron Wyden, of Oregon. I think it’s important to get away from the left/right Republican/Democrat politics and work to elect as many civil libertarians as we possibly can.

Update:

Several people have pointed out that Rand Paul’s free-speech record is pretty bad. Perhaps the civil libertarian label doesn’t apply. Still, on some level I’ll take what I can get. Paul has voiced sensible opposition to the Patriot Act, the TSA, and the war in Libya. He’s far from perfect, but he’s better than many nonetheless. So far, at least, he hasn’t plotted the assassination of a U.S. citizen.

I'll take every ally I can get in the war to preserve freedoms, but I get really confused by the items that become priorities that motivate anger.  All of the above situations seem to be more of a threat than health care reform which seems to be an insurance company protection act that might hit my pocket book but won't take away basic liberty.

A Quick NCLB Musing

At the Madville Times, Cory posts about Melody Schopp's comments that NCLB is unworkable.  I'm thankful that Schopp admits that the 100 percent goal is bogus.

Earlier this month, Montana's Superintendent of Education Denise Juneau went a step further.  She sent a letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

announcing her decision not to raise the target test scores that Montana schools must meet this year to avoid being labeled as failing under the federal law. "I'm not asking permission," Juneau said in an interview. She said it's "unfair" to make schools work on both the old priorities of the No Child Left Behind law and the new priorities set by the Obama administration.

Schopp takes an important step by publicly announcing that NCLB goals are unworkable.  Her next step should be to send Duncan the same sort of letter that Juneau has.

Tests Test But They Don't Predict

When I read "[a]t my South Bronx elementary school, we had a Teachers College consultant who encouraged us to 'teach tests as a genre of literature,'” I almost lost breakfast and lunch and broke the computer.  After all the Hulk is an acceptable role model.  I'd sooner treat Fox News as real news than entertain the idea that tests can be literature.

Although he doesn't take on NCLB or Race to the Top mandated testing, Jonah Lehrer provides some perspective on testing.  Citing the work of Paul Sackett, psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Lehrer points out that there are two types of performance.  "Maximum" performance occurs when people know they're being tested whereas "typical" performance occurs when people don't know they are being watched.

Lehrer asserts

We live in a society obsessed with maximum performance. Think of exams like the SAT and the GRE. Though these tests take only a few hours, they're supposed to give schools and companies a snapshot of an individual's abiding talents.

Or consider the NFL Scouting Combine, in which players entering the draft perform short physical and mental tasks, such as the 40-yard dash. The Combine is meant to measure physical ability; that's why teams take the results so seriously.

 Although high priced colleges and graduate schools and $9 billion industries like the NFL may like tests because these tests "don't take very long,". . . "can quantify many people," . . . .and "make assessment seem relatively straightforward," Lehrer writes,

Though the SAT does a decent job of predicting the grades of college freshmen—the test accounts for about 12% of the individual variation in grade point average—it is much less effective at predicting levels of achievement after graduation. Professional academic tests suffer from the same flaw. A study by the University of Michigan Law School, for instance, found that LSAT scores bore virtually no relationship to career success as measured by levels of income, life satisfaction or public service.

Even the NFL Combine is a big waste of time. According to a recent study by economists at the University of Louisville, there's no "consistent statistical relationship" between the results of players at the Combine and subsequent NFL performance.

 Citing Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Lehrer claims that "grit" and "self-control" "consistently predict levels of achievement." He concludes,

The problem, of course, is that students don't reveal their levels of grit while taking a brief test. Grit can only be assessed by tracking typical performance for an extended period. Do people persevere, even in the face of difficulty? How do they act when no one else is watching? Such traits often matter more than raw talent. We hear about them in letters of recommendation, but hard numbers take priority.

The larger lesson is that we've built our society around tests of performance that fail to predict what really matters: what happens once the test is over.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has asserted, however,  that the Race to the Top tests "will be an absolute game-changer in public education"  Further, and one must cue the original Six Million Dollar Man intro, these tests will "better, smarter assessments -- the kind of tests our teachers want and our students need.” 

Because we have the technology, cue the original Six Million Dollar Man intro again, 

Much of the testing will take place via computer, allowing teachers to get results more quickly. One coalition would use computer adaptive technology so that students at certain skill levels would skip to appropriate questions to more efficiently pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses.

Of course what has happened is that teachers are going to spend time teaching to a test; the kids will get bored; learning won't take place. Yet, under Race to the Top, "thousands of colleges have agreed use them as one indicator that students are ready for entry-level courses." The NFL makes $9 billion dollars a year.  It tests for easily measurable things like speed and strength.   All one needs to access these qualities is a stop watch and a a lot of weights.  Yet the NFL can't find a test to determine an athlete's opportunity for success.

Every bureaucrat who has forced NCLB's or Race to the Top's tests down schools' throats should be forced to read Lehrer's article every day for the next three years.  There won't be a test.  Instead, we'll see if the habit develops the "grit" necessary to understand that tests cannot predict success.

Of Teaching And Testing

Today is the first day with students.  It’s a ritual; there’s a little dog and pony show, a few laughs, a few reminders, and the hope for a fresh start.  

Yesterday, the 2010 ACT data were released. It’s a ritual; there’s a big dog and pony show, several sorrowful condemnations of the nation’s secondary education system, and demands for wholesale change.  

According to the Wall Street Journal article “Scores Stagnate At High Schools,”  “fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses.”  Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, asserts that these scores indicate "High schools are the downfall of American school reform. . . ."  

First, without access to the actual data, one has to assume that ACT released the scores of only students who graduated in 2010 not students who took the test in 2010.  Large numbers of juniors take the test every spring.  Juniors have completed only 75% of their high school education; they probably shouldn’t be college ready.  Second, many seniors take the tests offered in September or October.  Once again, they have over half of their senior year to develop the requisite skills.  

ACT may have some formula to take these factors into account. Outside of Delphi, prophecy is a tricky business. I’d like to know how a testing company can determine whether a given student will or will not learn enough to prepare them for college when meteorologists have trouble accurately predicting tomorrow’s weather.  

Let’s assume that ACT has correctly ascertained that graduates are not prepared for the future, and let’s take at face value that this fact “suggests that the core courses they are taking are not sufficient to prepare them for what they will face in college or the work force."  What should the education establishment do?  I want to do my job.  I don’t want to send students out to fail.  

I’ll offer a few modest proposals.  I would guess that they will be ignored.  

First, colleges and universities should end their practice of accepting students in October or November.  No student should be accepted until April 15.  Students who have been accepted don’t need to work with the same rigor as those who are still trying to impress admission committees.  

Second, colleges and universities need to reject more applicants.  If more students saw that poor high school performance meant not being able to attend college, more students would work.  Listening to lectures is preferable to asking “Do you want fries with that?” 

Third, scrap NCLB.  Under NCLB, high schools are applying a version of the Pareto principle; 80% of the effort and resources are going to the 20% who must be brought up the proficient so that America can say 100% of its students are proficient in reading and math.  The rest of the students are given the other 20% of a school’s resources.  Moving away from NCLB will allow schools to allocate more resources to prepare students for college.  

Fourth, lengthen or alter the school year.  The WSJ article quotes Joseph Harris, director of the National High School Center at the American Institutes for Research, who says, "We have a conflict where we are trying to increase the rigor and push kids to learn more, yet we try to do all of this in the same 180 days, 40-50 minute classes we've always had.  High schools are still very traditional institutions."  

There’s no doubt in my mind that teachers and schools can and should do more.  The problem is that most solutions forced upon secondary education have worsened the situation.  This round of hand-wringing is unlikely to change that trend.

Of Dogs And Students

I own copies of First Break All The Rules:  What The World's Great Managers Do Differently, Now Discover Your Strengths, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Teach with Your Strengths:  How Great Teachers Inspire Their Students, and Strengths Finder 2.0.  Each of these books assert that people have different aptitudes and they should find ways to maximize their strengths instead of always working overcome weaknesses.  To use a sports analogy, these books assert Ichiro Suzuki shouldn't try to hit 40 home runs in a season and Jim Thome shouldn't try to steal 40 bases.  Ichiro is a great singles hitter and base stealer and Thome is a great power hitter.  Both men will be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame because they stick to their strengths.

Marion Brady, guest blogging at the Washington Post's Answer Sheet, puts a canine spin on using strengths.  Brady observes that "among the people for whom herding sheep is serious business, there is general agreement that Border Collies are better at doing what needs to be done than any other dog. They have ‘the knack.’"  Lest he be accused of being a "breedist" or whatever the PC term would be for unjustly favoring one breed over the other, Brady points out "[i]f you’re lost in a snowstorm in the Alps, you don’t need a Border Collie. You need a big, strong dog with a really good nose, lots of fur, wide feet that don’t sink too deeply into snow, and an unerring sense of direction for returning with help. You need a Saint Bernard."  He also points out that the Fox Terrier is great at protecting chicken coops. 

Brady concludes, "It isn’t that many different breeds can’t be taught to herd, lead high-altitude rescue efforts, or kill foxes. They can. It’s just that teaching all dogs to do things which one particular breed can do better than any other doesn’t make much sense."

Brady continues the analogy to condemn NCLB.

. . . . If that fact makes you optimistic about the future of education in America, think again about dogs.

There are all kinds of things they can do besides herd, rescue, and engage foxes. They can sniff luggage for bombs. Chase felons. Stand guard duty. Retrieve downed game birds. Guide the blind. Detect certain diseases. Locate earthquake survivors. Entertain audiences. Play nice with little kids. Go for help if Little Nell falls down a well.

So, with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top as models, let’s set performance standards for these and all other canine capabilities and train all dogs to meet them. All 400 breeds. All skills. Leave No Dog Behind!

Two-hundred-pound Mastiffs may have a little trouble with the chase-the-fox-down-the-hole standard, and Chihuahuas will probably have difficulty with the tackle-the-felon-and-pin-him-to-the-ground standard. But, hey, no excuses! Standards are standards! Leave No Dog Behind

Brady is preaching to a choir of at least one when he illustrates that people's strengths differ, and that NCLB is idiocy.  He does, however, ignore the fact that schools failed to teach students to emphasize their strengths and focused instead on fixing weaknesses long before NCLB.  The number of remedial classes has always exceeded the number of advanced classes.  Students with no aptitude for algebra were forced to take Algebra II or another advanced math class to get a diploma.  Students who can't see symbolic stars when hit with the symbolic hammer were forced to take four literature classes in order to graduate.

Let me offer a caveat here.  Public education should provide students with the basics necessary to function in the contemporary world.  Our increasingly fragmented society might be better served if more people shared knowledge of the same literature.  Some required classes are necessary.

Even with that caveat, the students who excel at finding out what's wrong with a car engine probably should be encouraged to develop that skill.  Students with a great personality but an below average intellect should be taught how use those people skills to their advantage.  Both types of students probably should be allowed to skip an fourth literature class or a third science class.  Instead, they should be taught how to prevent an employer from taking advantage of them.  They should be taught how to make themselves so valuable as a mechanic or waitress or salesperson that no one will even think about firing them even if they are in a low level job.

Brady will probably be excoriated for comparing students for dogs.  Some PC folk will probably be upset because I'm saying that some students have a better intellect than others.  It's not in vogue to make such assertions.  Apparently, people are all interchangeable parts that can learn everything and be proficient in everything.  If that's true, Ichiro should swing for the fences tonight,  and Chihuahuas should be used as seeing eye dogs.

A Common Sense NCLB Post

Rod Dreher at his new site makes great points about unintended but pernicious effects of NCLB.

Ignorance Is Strength and Torture Is Not Torture

I missed this story while fulfilling other commitments, but it has caused me a bit of consternation.  Apparently I have been making a grievous error as an English teacher; I have spent my entire career telling students to read Orwell's 1984 as a warning; I should have been telling them to read it as a road map.  

The New York Times will no longer use the term "torture" to describe torture such as waterboarding.  The NYT "acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper's usage calls."  Because "defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture” the venerable, allegedly liberal newspaper declined to tak[e] sides in a political dispute."

Big boy blogger Andrew Sullivan  covered the story here and here far better than I can.  Like Sullivan, I am amazed.

What we have here is an admission that the NYT did change its own established position to accommodate the Cheneyite right. So their journalism is dictated by whatever any government says. In any dispute, their view is not: what is true? But: how can we preserve our access to the political right and not lose pro-torture readers? If you want a locus classicus for why the legacy media has collapsed, look no further. (emphasis in original)

Sullivan covers the major implications of the NYT's acquiescence to the government, but I do want to add an aside about what this event says about education.  In short, we've failed.  Anyone who has sat through a high school English class should be able to see that the phrase "harsh interrogation techniques" is an effort to obfuscate.  Anyone who has sat through a high school government class should know that American citizens need to stand up to government power and that Americans have been able to accomplish much good when they have opposed government overstretch.  In short, anyone with a high school diploma should be able to see that the so-called Patriot Act is a far greater threat to liberty than the health care law.

One of the results of NCLB is that most of the recent graduates won't know what "obfuscate" means.  They have had their reading list trimmed to include only works that will help them be proclaimed as proficient on their NCLB mandated tests, so they probably won't know that Orwell believed that using language to limit expression was a terrible idea.  Many probably won't understand the attempted humor if I allege that Orwell thought limiting vocabulary is worse than terrible; he would think it is "double un-good."

The longer I live with NCLB and Obama's continuance of the most pernicious elements of the law, the more I'm seeing that its major effect, whether intended or not,  is limiting students' thought and their ability to express ideas.  I don't want to channel Glen Beck and his paranoid reading of American history, but as time passes I'm beginning to have a nagging suspicion that limiting citizens' thought and expression is NCLB's intended goal.  If that's the case, then everyone needs to read and understand Orwell to read between the lines of not only government newspeak but also NewYorkTimesSpeak. 

Education: An American Tragedy

The New York Review of Books posts this E.D Hirsch review of Diane Ravitch's  The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.  As a teacher, I began to channel Cassius from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar when I read the following paragraphs.

Yet I do not agree with Ravitch that we should chiefly rely on experienced educators. We certainly should consult them and win them over, but we have been relying on them, and they have failed us—not least in their response to the No Child Left Behind law. Ravitch strongly criticizes NCLB for its narrow emphasis on reading and math and its reduction of schooling to preparation for tests. Her analysis is factually accurate. But to understand why the law failed we need to imagine what might have happened had our experienced educators responded differently to it.
The law would have had a much more beneficial effect if educators had reacted with more insight to its provisions. NCLB was quite right to place a dominant emphasis on the development of language ability and reading skill. Verbal skill is known to be a chief constituent of adult success and effectiveness. But verbal ability is not, as the schools wrongly assumed, simply a how-to skill. It is largely a knowledge-based skill. NCLB did not, after all, mandate that the schools must practice reading strategies at the expense of a strong curriculum in literature, history, science, and the arts—the very kind of schooling that, according to the findings of cognitive science, would raise reading abilities by systematically building background knowledge. The decision to teach strategies instead was made by experienced educators who had been indoctrinated by education schools into an anticurricular point of view, emphasizing “how to” read, and giving quite inadequate attention to what should be learned to build up needed knowledge (Hirsch, How to Save the Schools, 13/5/2010). [Bold Mine]

Some of the blame goes to those who love what Emerson in "Self-Reliance"calls the "foolish consistency [that] is the hobgoblin of little minds.  This consistency is "adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines"  I'm pretty sure that and school principals, district superintendents, and secretaries of education at all levels also have a love affair, metaphorically, of course, with that same foolish consistency.

As comforting as passing the blame is, however, it strikes me that Cassius in Shakespeare Julius Caesar has it right, "The fault . . .is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, . . ."  I just hope we get a chance to fix the mess we created.

SHAZAM: Some Comic Geek Stuff

Bloggers or assorted lifehack experts frequently publish lists of things they wants school to teach.  The lists frequently include bromides like Polonius's "to thine own self be true."  Quite frankly, I wish we could teach some comic books because comic books sum up most of the "how to succeed" points that many of the lifehack blogs enunciate.

For example, this post on Hilife2B tells readers to "become really good at one thing."  Nearly every superhero has one skill:  The Thing and She-Hulk are strong; Green Arrow has mastered using a bow; The Flash is fast;The Human Torch controls his flames, and The Invisible Woman controls her force field.  Each strives to master the particular strength.

The other things comics teach is SHAZAM.  For any youngsters that might stumble upon this blog, Shazam is the acronym that Billy Batson utters to turn into Captain Marvel.  SHAZAM stands for the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury.  If you don't believe me, ask Wikipedia.

Outside of the fact that SHAZAM is fun to type and say, the work provides two important reminders.  First, the qualities it supposedly stands for are important to succeed in nearly every endeavor.  Second, it's a reminder that one needs people to look up to and learn from.  This post about creating a personal High Jedi Council elaborates on the point (I apologize for mixing geek genres to try to prove a point; I promise not to make any Star Trek reverences in this post.  Also, please note that I blanch at the idea of including Oprah on any list of mentors, but its his high council, not mine.)

The most important thing that comics teach is that one has to accept contradiction.  Mastering a skill and learning to rely on oneself seems to contradict the idea that one frequently needs help.   Many of the superheroes are technical geniuses, but many others rely on ancient weapons like swords, bows, or whips.  More importantly, the heroes who master the old weapons frequently defeat villains who have technologically superior tools.

In the NCLB era, no one's going to let me teach a high school comic book class.  It's tough to create a standardized test with bubbles that spell SHAZAM,

Of Sticks, Hammers, and Carrots

The Answer Sheet blog points to a couple of items of concern.

First, it reprints an open letter from Jim Horn to President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan about reauthorizing NCLB. The key quotation,

Despite all the politicizing of the teaching profession, at heart teachers remain child advocates and cultivators of the next generation of citizens. Teachers want children to succeed and flourish, but it is not because they have been paid to do so. A student’s growth and well-being remain the teacher’s most ardent concerns, despite the fact that she is undervalued, demonized, ridiculed, mistrusted, and paid less than most other professions that require the same level of education and training.

If a child’s test scores are to be used to make decisions regarding a teacher’s most basic needs for adequate sustenance for her family and for a dollop of dignity from her principal, then you risk damaging the teacher-student relationship that goes as far back as Socrates.

Second, a report on Florida's efforts to "hammer" teachers.  The term "hammer" comes from one of the bill's authors.  The legislation would tie teacher pay directly to student test scores.  Districts could not take into account years of service or education.  The key quotation,

This approach could easily spread beyond the borders of Florida. It’s everybody’s business.

The Florida approach can easily find a home in South Dakota.  The State currently offers few legal protections for teachers or any other workers.  That fact won't stand in the way of people's perceptions that teachers are overpaid, lazy people who teach for the thrill of June, July, and August.

Teachers need to make it possible for their students to learn.  They should know their material and how to communicate that knowledge.  Although Socrates famously argued that he know nothing, he obviously know enough to ask great questions. Test scores won't show whether teachers help students learn, know their material, or promote asking great questions;  test scores illustrate whether students can take tests.  That's it.

Further, high school students need to take responsibility for their education.  As a wise man once told me, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink; you can send kids to school but you can't make them think."  Tying test scores to continued employment or pay automatically allows students avoid thinking and learning.  They get to put the responsibility on someone else.  In fact, they can fail every test and every class, and it will be the teachers' fault.

The efforts to link teacher pay or job security to student results indicate a lack of reading skills.  Proponents will probably admit to using a carrot and stick approach because the best teachers will get the "carrot" of higher salary while the poor teachers will get the "stick" or in this case the "hammer"of lower pay or unemployment.

A careful reading of the story, however, reveals that the boy never got results while using the stick to punish the donkey.  The more he "hammered" the donkey with the stick, the less work the donkey accomplished.  It was only after the stick became an extension of the boy's arm and was used to dangle the carrot in front of the donkey that the donkey began to pull the cart.

The people who love NCLB or who support the Floridan bill seem to assume that testing will produce students who are better prepared to work or attend college because teachers who have been doing absolutely nothing for the past fifty years will suddenly start teaching and thousands of new applicants will eagerly seek the benefits that come to teachers whose students pass NCLB mandated tests.  They are wrong on both counts.  A high school career that allows students to blame someone else for their failure to learn will produce graduates who need extra workplace training or remedial college classes.  The proposed changes to NCLB and the Florida approach will make the teaching profession more desirable for only those people who enjoy being "hammered."  In that case, future teachers will have to be drunks or masochists or both.

A Random Question about Accountability

 Michael Steele, head of the RNC, apparently isn't responsible for the staffer who took people to a lesbian/bondage themed club.  High school teachers, however, are responsible for how their students perform on NCLB tests. 

Most stats say that kids are away from school 91% of the time.  I have contact with my students about 55 minutes a day.  I'm willing to bet that Steele has more contact with his staffers than I have with my students.  Isn't there a double standard here?