The Arkansas Department of Education has launched a new data visualization website.  Here is the ADE blog post announcing the launch. You can find the new sites here and here. The site, built on a flash framework, provides several tools that allow users to both view individual district data in unique ways and compare districts on various metrics. You should check it out when you get a chance. Between this new tool and the ADE’s data center, people in Arkansas have a wealth of interesting education data at their fingertips.

The Arkansas legislature listened to a report from Paul Atkins, of the Bureau of Legislative Research, on Tuesday descriptively linking school expenditures to student achievement. You can view the report here. Mr. Atkins did a great job making it clear in his statements that legislators (and the public) should be careful drawing causal conclusions from this purely descriptive analysis, but one thing the report clearly demonstrates is that after Lakeview, we are providing our poorest districts with more resources. On the flip side, this report also demonstrates that money is not everything, or at least it can’t magically turn things around. Take a look at the following portion of the Dem Gaz article:

Regarding revenue per student from all sources (federal, state and local), the top quintile of districts received $10,753 per student.

Those same districts had the highest percentage of students – 75 percent – on free and reduced-priced lunches from the federal government. This is the indicator the state uses to show poverty.

They also had the lowest percentage of white students (58 percent) and the lowest percentage of students scoring at proficient or greater (also 58 percent) on the Arkansas Comprehensive Testing, Assessment and Accountability Program, known as ACTAAP.

Atkins also found that the quintile with the highest percentage of proficiency (81 percent) had the lowest percentage of poverty students (48 percent) and the highest percentage of white students (89 percent).

This group also posted the highest percentage of expenses on instruction, 60 percent. The lowest ACTAAP quintile spent the least on instruction, 56 percent.

Atkins said that could be because the districts with better academic scores might pay their teachers more than other districts.

It turns out that it may be how districts spend their money that really makes the difference. It is curious (or maybe not so curious) that the best performing districts spent the most on instruction. I am inclined to believe spending more in the classroom will make a difference in achievement, but this report and this data cannot answer that question exactly. It is likely true that high poverty districts need more support support staff because their children come to school with more problems. However, these poor districts also experience the greatest difficulty recruiting and retaining high quality teachers, and teacher pay is likely part of the problem. If the state is looking to, as Jimmy Jeffress said, get “any bang for our buck”, it is time  they took another look at strategies to recruit and retain high quality teachers in these poor districts.

Another interesting takeaway from the report is that by the state’s measure of growth the poorest districts, where we spend the most money, are not catching up. In fact it appears that while they are improving, the richer district’s scores are improving at a faster rate. Here is what the Dem Gaz quote:

Over the past two years, the percentage of students scoring at least at the proficient level in the quintile with the lowest ACTAAP scores went up by 9 percent from 2007 to 2009. The highest scoring quintile posted proficiency scores that were up by 12 percent.

If simply spending more money in the same old ways really did the trick, we should be seeing at least some evidence of this in the data. This report is a reminder that overcoming the difficult challenges associated with poverty require clever, innovative solutions, not just more of the same.

Here is a link (it was impossible to embed, sorry) to Commissioner Kimbrell’s latest video address. Not a whole lot of substance here, but he does discuss the Race to the Top competition and National Standards. For those of you interested in keeping abreast of Arkansas education news, the ADE Blog is a good site to check regularly. While blog posts are often not all that substantive, you will find many interesting department news items (e.g. Dr. Diana Julian is retiring) as well as Dr. Kimbrell’s weekly video addresses. At the very least the ADE blog gives us an idea what the commissioner and department staff are working on. Give it a look sometime.

Also, Stuart Buck, a regular Mid-Riffs contributer, is doing a series of posts over on Jay P. Greene’s Blog titled “Ravitch is Wrong.” Here is his intro for the series:

Diane Ravitch’s new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” has been burning up the charts. Ravitch has been ubiquitous, writing op-eds in support of her book, doing lectures and interviews all over the place, and being reviewed in all sorts of high-profile venues.

As an overall matter, the book says little, if anything, that is actually new on the subjects of testing and choice. What Ravitch is really selling with this book is the story of her personal and ideological conversion. Not so long ago, she was writing articles like “In Defense of Testing,” or “The Right Thing: Why Liberals Should Be Pro-Choice,” a lengthy article in The New Republic that remains one of the most passionate and eloquent defenses of school choice and vouchers in particular. Now she seems to be a diehard opponent of these things. But she’s not saying anything that other diehard opponents haven’t already said countless times.

The book does score a few points in critiquing the charter school movement (e.g., charter schools have an unfair advantage in competing with Catholic schools in the inner cities, and charter test results haven’t been as promising as might have been expected), or in critiquing testing and accountability (e.g., states have been watering down their standards, as shown by wide discrepancies between NAEP and state tests).

But these few good points are outweighed by the bad arguments and leaps of illogic that permeate much of the book. The book’s faults fall into five general categories, each of which will be the subject of a blog post this week (click the link to see the post pertaining to the specific critique):

1. Ignoring or selectively citing scholarly literature;
2. Misinterpreting the scholarly literature that she does cite;
3. Caricaturing her opponents in terms of strawman arguments, rather than taking the best arguments head-on;
4. Tendering logical fallacies; and
5. Engaging in a double standard, such as holding a disfavored position to a high burden of proof while blithely accepting more problematic evidence that supports one’s own position (or not looking for evidence at all).

This week the director of the research unit that creates Arkansas’ grade inflation report told lawmakers that it was a poor measure and should not be used to determine which hurdles high school students must clear before becoming eligible for an Arkansas Lottery Scholarship. Under a law that will go into effect next year, high-school students who attend schools identified as grade-inflaters must score a 19 or higher on the ACT to  be scholarship eligible.  Students from all other schools only need a 2.5 GPA to be deemed eligible for a scholarship.

State Senator Jimmy Jeffress (D-Crossett) suggested that the debate over the dual measures could be ended if a minimum score of 19 on the ACT was made the sole criteria.  Jeffress also questioned why the minimum was set at 19, which is a relatively low ACT score.

This is a good sign from Jeffress, and we said almost the same in an earlier post here. Requiring everyone to make at least a minimum score on the ACT gives everyone an even playing field to compete for a scholarhsip.  Still, while GPA should never be used as a sole indicator, it is probably worth keeping because it does capture some important college-ready characteristics, like the ability to work hard over a sustained period of time.  While ACT scores are likely correlated with hard work, they really only provide a snapshot of knowledge and skills.

Still, even in the best case scenario where both measures are required for all, raising both the GPA and ACT requirements should be considered.  Other state scholarship programs typically require GPAs in the range of 2.75 – 3.0, with ACT requirements in the mid-20s.

Welcome to Spring .. Some Interesting News is Hitting the Wire Today.  Read on ….

Progressive School District in Mississippi Planning “Straight-Free” Prom

• Ricky Martin and Toby Keith will headline the afterparty

Teacher Union Leader Comes Clean: “We don’t really care about children!”

• NEA general counsel Bob Chanin admits surprise — “Frankly, I can’t believe we had people going this long … I just had to tell!”

Texas Removes All References to Arkansas in State Textbooks

• State’s lead educator argues that “like evolution, the claim that there are fifty states is merely a theory.”

Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times - Caught Shopping at Wal-Mart

• Sources close to the Arkansas Times admit that Brantley is also an avid Glenn Beck listener.

Nation’s 4th Graders Continue to Trail Nation’s 5th Graders

• Experts fear this will continue into grade 6

The Department of Education announced the winners of the Race to the Top competition today.  Of the 16 finalists, Tennessee ($502 million) and Delaware ($107 million) will be the only applicants to receive money in the first round.  Surprisingly, front-runners Florida and Louisiana finished out of the money this round as did several large states including New York and Illinois.  We are still waiting on the score-sheets and reviewers comments to be released. Should be some interesting info there.  For those of you who want to read about the first round winners check out Ed-Week, The Wall St. Journal,and The New York Times. I also plan to keep an eye on Rick Hess’s blog.  He’s had some great RTTT analysis. Here is his take on today’s announcement:

Looking at Delaware and Tennessee leaves me thinking that all the talk about bold reform was window dressing. The states that explicitly set out to blow past conventions, and devil take the hindmost, fell by the wayside. Florida and Louisiana’s bold, action-backed plans–which reflected a belief that they could push forward if they did so only with the eager and willing–lost out to states that obtained laughable levels of buy-in from school districts, school boards, and local teachers’ unions.

*****

Placing this much weight on ‘stakeholder support’ is going to feed cynicism about the sincerity of Duncan’s calls for bold, transformative change. Hard to square this very conventional emphasis on consensus with all his tough talk. Of course, this does remind us of his famously cautious reform efforts in Chicago. Wonder if the White House is having second thoughts yet about having passed on Joel Klein?

UPDATE: The DOE has posted the score-sheets and reviewers comments. Here is the DOE press release, and here is a ranking of state scores.

If Diane Ravitch insists that there’s no evidence on a particular point, you can be almost certain that there is. Here’s her piece on mayoral control, from a recent issue of Phi Delta Kappan:

Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress . . . argued that local control and local school boards are the basic cause of poor student performance. . . . In an ideal world, he wrote, we would scrap local boards and replace them with mayoral control, especially in urban districts. This one act of removing all democratic governance, he claimed, would lead to better education. . . . There is not a shred of evidence in Miller’s article or in the research literature that schools improve when democratic governance ends.

Once again, Ravitch misrepresents the literature. For example, there’s Kenneth Wong’s study of mayoral control, which found that “mayoral control has a statistically significant, positive effect on student achievement.” Granted, Wong’s study may be imperfect and it may be difficult to properly measure something as nebulous and potentially endogenous as mayoral control. But trying to refute Wong would be more defensible than claiming definitively that studies like his don’t even exist.

P.S. If you’re going to discuss scholarly literature with which you’re not familiar, the wiser approach is to say, “I’ve never seen convincing evidence that such-and-such,” which leaves you two easy outs: if anyone points out a study, all you have to do is note that you hadn’t personally seen it, and/or that you don’t find it convincing.

P.P.S. The Wong article above appeared in a book to which Ravitch herself contributed an article. So Ravitch had to know that her “not a shred of evidence” comment was false.

Last week we heard from Theodore M. Hesburgh.  Hesburgh, a founding member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King), wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal chastising Democrats for failing to support the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

This week the acting president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, spoke at a Miami rally of 5,500 in support of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship for low income children.

I wonder if anyone is listening?

“It is no coincidence that the first African-American to live in the White House is a man with an Ivy League degree, and just last summer President Obama made a powerful point about our history. There’s a reason, our President said, the story of the civil rights movement was written in our schools.  There’s a reason, he said, that Thurgood Marshall took up the cause of Linda Brown.  There’s a reason, he said, why the Little Rock Nine defied a governor and a mob. It’s because, President Obama told us, there is no stronger weapon against inequality and no better path to opportunity than an education that can unlock a child’s God-given potential.

I say to you today that the Tax Credit Scholarship program is one of the keys we use to unlock that potential. It is one way we can reach some of those children who go to bed hungry at night. It is one way we show that an empty pocketbook doesn’t have to mean an empty bookshelf – that all our learning tools need to be on the table for all our children.

I am here today as a messenger of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and I am here to proudly proclaim that the organization created by Dr. King believes that a scholarship for low-income children is one way to break the cycle and close the gap. I am here, standing before this inspiring sea of hopeful faces, to announce that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference endorses Tax Credit Scholarships and endorses the bill this year that will expand them. This is our future. God bless you all.”

(HT: Matt Ladner)

Diane Ravitch said the following at a recent event:

“Every test publisher says, to my knowledge, and everyone who’s involved in the psychological testing business says, the tests should be used only for the purpose for which they’re intended. If a test is intended to measure a 5th grader’s ability to read, it’s not developed and designed to measure whether the teacher is effective. There are all kinds of reasons why students’ scores are higher or lower which may have nothing to do with the effectiveness of the teacher but rather with a million other things.”

What if we want to know whether the 5th grade teacher was effective at teaching the 5th graders to read? What exactly would be covered on the test other than items measuring the 5th graders’ ability to read? I understand the point that there are lots of reasons the 5th graders might not do very well (low SES, bad family circumstances, homelessness, illiteracy at the start of the grade, etc.), but none of those factors have anything to do with how the test itself would be written, would they?

Elvis Says "Don't Be Cruel"!!

Who dances with whom at prom?  Are we kidding?  How about worrying about who graduates and what they’ve learned ……

A few weeks ago, most people in the US, or in the world, had never heard of Itawamba Agricultural High School (IAHS) in Fulton,  Mississippi.  Fulton is less than 30 minutes from Tupelo, made famous of course by one Elvis Aaron Presley.  We’ll get back to that in a moment.

Itawamba Agricultural High School serves 689 students. The school is relatively advantaged — fewer than 40% of the students qualify for subsidized lunches (as compared to 58% statewide) — and very white (nearly 9 of 10 students are white).   The students are doing OK on state tests — In three of the four subjects, IAHS is higher than the Mississippi state average. In U.S. History, 79% of IAHS students scored proficient/advanced (state total 63%), 75% in Biology I (state total 63%), and 67% in English II (state total 49%).   The students do less well in Algebra I where 63% of the state’s students scored proficient or advanced, while at IAHS only 59% did so.  In terms of graduation rates, the school is near the national average at about 75%.

Overall, this reasonably advantaged school does fine.  And, perhaps since this school does not get recognized for exemplary performance, their fine leaders have sought recognition for other accomplishments, such as making gay high school students feel even more uncomfortable.

By now,  we have most likely heard about the Itawamba Agricultural High School in Mississippi for cancelling prom rather than allow a Lesbian student named Constance McMillen bring her girlfriend to the dance.  Of course, this is a cruel decision that may well lead to bullying and harassment by her peers who were deprived of their prom.

You might ask, upon what school policy did they base such an odd decision?  Don’t worry, the school did have a policy that required that senior prom dates be of the opposite sex.  Thanks goodness that our school leaders are attending to the important details! Otherwise, they might have time to think about how to ensure the graduation of those 25% of the school’s students who don’t make it …

Elvis, a well-known promoter of equality and fairness (despite unfounded rumors) would not have approved!