On the heels of the much-publicized change of heart by Diane Ravitch and the accompanying joyful outbursts by anti-testing and anti-accountability people everywhere, we can provide a bit of a reality check from right here in Arkansas.  Hot off the presses of the popular teacher magazine Phi Delta Kappan is an article by a few University of Arkansas colleagues and me. The article is available here.

We visited several schools last year to talk with teachers about standardized testing and the “teaching to the test” concept. The surprising results can be seen on page 51:

In the end, teachers said many good things about various aspects of the testing process and, overall, gave a very positive impression of the effects of the annual assessments on classroom teaching. After we sifted through all of the comments from all of the teachers at all of the school sites, five positive themes emerged. The consensus of teachers with whom we spoke was that the tests provide useful data, that the testing regime helps create a road map for the year’s instruction, that the standards and tests don’t sap creativity or hinder collaboration, and, perhaps most surprising, that the accountability imposed by the testing regime is useful.

Here’s just one example of the pro-testing sentiments we uncovered:

Many teachers noted that before testing, it was easy to teach idiosyncratically — perhaps spending “six weeks on the dinosaur unit and just totally ignor[ing]” other topics. With increased focus on testing, however, teachers have focused on matching their instruction to a coherent set of standards. Thus, one math teacher said that while she had initially “hated” the Arkansas benchmark tests, she has since changed her mind: “I’m OK with it now, to be honest; I see where knowing the standards and knowing what’s going to be tested can help me plan the whole year and make sure I’ve covered everything.”

Education scholar Diane Ravitch has been making headlines (including a mention on Max Brantley’s blog) with a new book in which she reverses what had been long-held beliefs in favor of competition and choice in education. Now she says that schools should be like families:

“There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition,” Ravitch says. “Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what’s [been successful] for them. They’re not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block.”

But without competition — in the sense of there being a wide variety of different schools (charter schools, private schools, etc.) — there’s less room for experimentation and diversity, and hence less possibility that different schools will find out what works.

Moreover, one of the strongest rationales for educational competition is that “what works” isn’t the same for different children — some children need more of a focus on the academic basics, some are more interested in the arts, some are more interested in a science and math-based curriculum, some want more structure while some thrive with less direct guidance, some do well in a large school that has lots of different clubs and activities while others get lost in the crowd.  No one school can be everything to every child.

The NPR story linked above also has an excerpt from Ravitch’s book, in which she describes how she came to oppose the No Child Left Behind Act:

My support for NCLB remained strong until November 30, 2006. I can pinpoint the date exactly because that was the day I realized that NCLB was a failure. I went to a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. — a well-respected conservative think tank — to hear a dozen or so scholars present their analyses of NCLB’s remedies. . . .

Choice was not working, they all agreed. The scholars presented persuasive evidence that only a tiny percentage of eligible students were asking to transfer to better schools. . . .

As I listened to the day’s discussion, it became clear that NCLB’s remedies were not working. Students were offered the choice to go to another school, and they weren’t accepting the offer.

So the whole point here is that very few students took the opportunity to choose a different public school farther from their home. “Choice” was not working, because there wasn’t enough of it.

But Ravitch immediately flips the rationale for opposing choice:

I began to question ideas that I once embraced, such as choice and accountability, that were central to NCLB. As time went by, my doubts multiplied. I came to realize that the sanctions embedded in NCLB were, in fact, not only ineffective but certain to contribute to the privatization of large chunks of public education.

As excerpted by NPR, Ravitch’s book doesn’t seem to make sense. She criticizes NCLB’s choice provisions both for having no effect (because so few students avail themselves of choice) and for privatizing “large chunks of public education.”

The Department of Education announced the finalists for the first round of the Race to the Top competition this morning, and Arkansas is not among those listed.  Here is the Department of Ed announcement and the Ed Week blog post.

Sixteen of the initial 41 applicants were named as finalists. That so few of the applications made it to the final stage is telling. The Obama administration may really be serious about education reform. The Department of Ed will be posting score sheets and reviewers comments here. The winners for round one will be announced in April.

Here in Arkansas we are holding out hope for round two.  Applications for round two are due in June.

UPDATE: So maybe the administration isn’t so serious about education reform.

Others around the web are expressing displeasure with the list of finalists. There is this from Flypaper

The list includes Kentucky, a state with no charter law and New York, which brashly rejected reform legislation–including a critical cap lift provision–in advance of the deadline. It includes Colorado, which backed off of important reforms related to teachers, and Ohio, whose proposal was weak in a number of areas.

And this from Eduwonk

First reaction*: With the obvious caveat that not all these states get money in the first round, still sort of an “uh oh.”   Some states with good apps here but OH and NY is not a great sign…and IL and CO were arguably bubble states at best and not sure what SC means given how out of step they are with parts of the administration’s agenda.   Hard to argue the political fix is in if SC is here though…And surprised that IN didn’t pop more, they had an interesting approach to this.

And this from Jay Greene

The Race to the Top finalist states were announced today.  15 states are in the hunt for some portion of $2.3 billion, which is less than one-half of a percent of annual K-12 education spending.  It is rounding error.

The contest may shape state and local education policy debates where something might actually happen, but no one should be fooled into thinking that this money is going to have any significant, direct effect.

And this from Ed Week’s Politics K-12 Blog

We’ll have more analysis on the winners—and losers—later, but our first take on the list of finalists is that many of them are Southern, right-to-work states. New York is a surprise because many argue its student-teacher data law is weak, and its attempt to loosen restrictions on charters failed. Kentucky made the list, but has no charter law. Also, Colorado is the only Western state to make the cut.

Mid-Riffs contributor Stuart Buck has a book coming out in May.  The book titled “Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation” investigates the origins of the pejorative ”acting white” slur. You can pre-order the book here at Amazon, and you can find Stuart’s author pages here and here .

Monday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution had a good op-ed about the book. Stuart’s thesis is summed up in the following excerpt from that piece.

“The analogy I would draw is treatment for cancer,” said Buck, speaking by phone from Arkansas. “Segregation is like a cancer that we had to get rid of, but the treatment that saved our lives had unintended side effects.”

While black students often attended segregated schools that lacked the resources of white facilities, Buck says the schools served as the connective tissue in a community that historically valued education.

“In segregated schools, black children had consistently seen other blacks succeeding in the academic world,’’ he says. “The authority figures and role models — teachers and principals — were all black. And the best students in the schools were black as well.”

While black parents welcomed integration, they had hoped for a merger of black and white schools. Instead, they witnessed the destruction of black schools and the erasure of the culture, community and closeness that the schools had created. Their children marched off to white schools where they experienced hostility and were tracked into lower-level classes. In his research, Buck found many examples of new facilities that had housed black schools being abandoned because white parents weren’t willing to send their kids to black schools.

“They did not want to send white schoolchildren into black schools, to be taught by black teachers and disciplined by black principals,” he says.

*******

Once reassigned to desegregated schools, black students “were sitting in a classroom with mostly other black students in what they believed to be the ‘dumb’ class, watching as the white students headed to the ‘smart’ class down the hall,” writes Buck.

Dispirited, black students began to associate achievement with white students and ostracize peers who joined the white kids in the “smart” classes.

Stuart also did a radio interview on Monday. You can listen here. The book should be a good read. I encourage you all to check it out.

On the matter of grade-inflating high schools and the Arkansas lottery scholarships, the state legislature is poised to take a step in the wrong direction.  At issue are eligibility requirements that, under current law, require students who attend identified grade-inflating high schools to jump through additional hoops in order to receive scholarships.

Currently, in order to qualify for a scholarship, high school students must complete the Smart Core curriculum and either obtain a 2.5 GPA in high school or score a 19 or better on the ACT.  Students from grade-inflating schools, however, must have both a 2.5 GPA and get an ACT score of 19 or score at a proficient level or better on the state’s End-of-Course exams to qualify for a scholarship.

Concerned members of  the state leg, such as State Sen. Joyce Elliot, are on the right track by insisting that the requirements amount to “blatantly unequal treatment” and that in effect the policy amounts to punishing students for the actions of adults.

The leg’s planned move is to delay the additional requirements by a year.  Under that scheme, any high school student with a 2.5 GPA will qualify for a scholarship.

Lame.

Removing the additional requirements isn’t the answer. I agree that punishing students for what is ultimately a failing of the adults running their schools is a mistake.  But removing additional measures of achievement and ability is not the answer.  If anything, they should make the tougher requirements proposed for students of  grade-inflating schools apply to everyone.

Using GPA as a sole indicator of eligibility is problematic.  Making it possible for every student in Arkansas to get a scholarship with a 2.5 GPA is only going to lead to more grade inflation in Arkansas’ high schools.  Teachers will be put in the uncomfortable position of having their grading decisions mean a great deal more than they already do, and the pressure to inflate grades will be even higher.  Just look at the situation in Georgia, where scholarships are based on GPA.  Grade inflation there is rampant, and USA Today reports that 40% of college freshman lose their scholarships after the first year.

Another problem with basing scholarships on GPA is that it gives students an incentive to take less challenging courses.  This is especially problematic when one considers that future scholarship renewals will be based upon college GPA.  Again, Georgia provides an example.  A study by Thomas Dee and Linda Jackson found that:

“students whose major course of study is in engineering,  computing, or the natural sciences are 21 to 51% more likely to lose their HOPE Scholarships than students in other disciplines. These results suggest that the eligibility standards used in Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship program may have some important and unintended consequences. In particular, such standards appear horizontally inequitable in that they financially punish those HOPE Scholars whose chosen course of study provides fewer opportunities to earn high grades. This differential may also be noteworthy since it could constitute a strong incentive that influences the course and major selection of subsequent college students. Such a change in the incentives facing college students could be particularly relevant to policy given the recent evidence on the growing importance of science and math skills for the distribution of wages.”

In other words, students will have an immediate financial incentive, in both high school and college, to take easier classes.  In Arkansas, students with a C- average while in college will lose their money, while students with a C+ won’t.  Bad news , unless maybe you think the world needs more communications and marketing majors.

The bottom line is that, at a minimum, all students who receive Arkansas lottery scholarships should have at least a 2.5 GPA, AND be able  to score at least proficient on End-of-Course exams, AND score a measly 19 on the ACT.  Such a policy might actually curb grade inflation while diminishing the incentivisation of mediocrity.

UPDATE: The bill that passed the House and Senate yesterday removes the extra requirements for grade-inflating schools. Only Reps. Burris and Hobbs voted against removing the restrictions. To my knowledge, no one in the legislature suggested making the requirements universal.

A new study by respected economists finds large academic benefits from a KIPP school, especially for minority children:

Who Benefits from KIPP?

by Joshua D. Angrist, Susan M. Dynarski, Thomas J. Kane, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher R. Walters

Charter schools affiliated with the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education. These schools feature a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms and a focus on traditional reading and math skills. We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP charter school that is mostly Hispanic and has a high concentration of limited English proficiency (LEP) and special-need students, groups that charter critics have argued are typically under-served. The results show overall gains of 0.35 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn. LEP students, special education students, and those with low baseline scores benefit more from time spent at KIPP than do other students, with reading gains coming almost entirely from the LEP group.

.35 standard deviations in math improvement per year is HUGE. That’s enough to eliminate the achievement gap in just 2 or 3 years of schooling.

As someone who canceled cable television about 4 years ago and who has the above bumper sticker on his car, I loved Obama’s advice to parents:

President Barack Obama, who is spending billions of dollars to overhaul the U.S. public education system, says there’s one sure thing parents can do to help their kids learn, regardless of financial means: Forbid them from watching television on school nights.

Of his own daughters, Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8, Obama told Essence magazine: “The girls don’t watch TV during the week. Period.”

So are we going to see an overall drop in Nielsen ratings? Probably not, but aspirational advice like this is still useful.

In Arkansas, and in many other states with large rural populations, policymakers struggle to develop appropriate strategies to deliver high quality courses with high quality teachers to students in sparsely populated rural schools and districts.  And of course, the state mandates that each of these districts deliver the full array of curricular options to students each year.

Recently, our policymakers have chosen consolidation as the preferred strategy to ensure high quality for all students.  In doing that, we have reduced the number of school districts in the state by about 60 to about 250 and we have eliminated most districts with total enrollments of under 350.    Nevertheless, Arkansas still is populated with many tiny schools in many small districts throughout the rural areas of the state.  How can these schools afford to hire a high quality high school math teacher, for example , for upper-level math classes with only a handful of students enrolled?

The short answer is: they can’t.  And this brings us to a recent seminar at the UA Fayetteville earlier this month in which a Harvard Prof stopped by to tout the achievements of a virtual cyber- school in Florida and argue that the improvements in technology will help improve school coursework — whether we like it or not!

As reported in the local paper, the Harvard Prof argued for a mix of virtual coursework with traditional coursework.  And in Florida, this works as schools can purchase individual courses for their students from the Florida Virtual Academy.  In this case, the traditional schools do not have an interest in battling the virtual school as a competitor.  If the students want to take one class from the Florida Virtual School,  so be it; the brick and mortar school in the neighborhood still delivers the bulk of the curriculum and, importantly, receives the bulk of the per-pupil funding.

Unfortunately, in Arkansas, we can’t adopt such a model.  We do have an Arkansas Virtual Academy (serving K-8) and an Arkansas Virtual High School, but these are not as flexible as the Florida model.  The K-8 school is an all-or-nothing proposition — that is, students must be enrolled in all classes in this school or not at all.  And the virtual high school is a pilot program aimed at providing options for struggling students in need of an alternative learning environment.

State Policymakers — let’s step up and make technology our friend.  Let’s loosen the rules and allow school districts or students to take some coursework from the virtual schools while remaining enrolled in the local smaller schools.  If nothing else, this seems like an ideal model for upper-level math and science courses.  Teachers skilled in these disciplines are in such high demand that it is impossible to think that we will find them for all of our 250 or so districts.  Let’s instead, find several excellent teachers in these areas, and have them build and teach online versions of these courses from our virtual school site so that districts throughout the state can all have access to such skilled teaching.

And I think that math is the way to try this out.  Universities and community colleges are already employing technology to teach college algebra and college calculus to thousands of students across the country.  Why?  Perhaps because interactive technology lends itself perfectly to courses focused on learning mathematical formulae and problem solving and the need for constant practice.  Some might worry that students need teachers to interact with while learning challenging math.  However, it may be true (and I have observed some college-level cyber-classes that support this) that interactive computer-based programs may be better able to interact with students in a 1-to-1 way than are teachers in traditional classrooms with 20-or-so students.  With each student performing at his or her own pace, it is not clear how teachers can efficiently work; however, interactive math programs can easily pay attention to each student’s pace, move her own to the next skill after she has mastered the earlier skill or provide additional explanation or practice when it is needed.

Sure, cyber-classes are not as tailored for a seminar discussing Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, or a Separate Peace, but they may be just what the Professor ordered for isolated schools in rural Arkansas who cannot find qualified math or science teachers.   We are at the point in Arkansas where two small school districts named Weiner and Delight have recently proposed a district merger, despite the fact that they are more than 200 miles apart! The Arkansas State Board of Education said no to this peculiar proposal.  Perhaps our policymakers — with the help of technology — can offer a better way for these small districts to stay in business and offer quality curricula to our state’s rural students.

As a lifelong Arkansan it is almost a foregone conclusion that I am not all that fond of the state to our southwest.  And I just discovered another reason to dislike Texas.  Wingnuts on the Texas Board of Education are working to single-handedly rewrite history. Don McLeroy, the same board member who attempted to remove science from the science books, and his band of imperialist “Christians” want the Texas social studies guidelines rewritten to portray America “as a nation intended to be emphatically Christian.” The New York Times had a great article on Sunday detailing the battle.

Why, exactly, should the rest of us care? Well because Texas’..

… $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country. Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State.

McLeroy contends that “textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict.” He may have a point there, but he goes too far when he attempts to force his particular brand of religion on other people’s children.

While it is true that a Judeo-Christian world view certainly influenced the founders’ thinking and that at the time of the nation’s founding, religion was more a part of civic life than it is today, it is also true that the authors of the constitution took great pains to protect individual liberty and choice. They did not set in place a system to ensure people remained Christian. They created a system of government which they thought would ensure that people remain free.

Religion is not at odds with liberty; McLeroy’s authoritarian nature is.

I made a trip down to Little Rock with Jay Greene today, and for lunch we met up with Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times and Warwick Sabin of the Oxford American. As you would expect, this meeting of the minds lead to some pretty spirited discussion of education and politics in Arkansas. I found the conversation quite enjoyable, and it appears both Jay and Max did as well.

The four of us found much common ground over some excellent burgers at the Copper Grill. We seemed to agree that there are some glaring inequities in education opportunity, and that schools need more flexibility to recruit and retain the best and brightest teachers (rockstar teachers as Jay puts it). We also agreed that high standards are a must and that rewarding students for their achievement shows promise.

I hope that this initial conversation leads to some more lively discussions in the future. Next time you guys are up in Fayetteville, drinks are on me.