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.

On Monday, the Northwest Arkansas Times ran an op-ed from a local tea-partyer, James Laubler, that went on at length about the Fayetteville School Board’s plan to use a combination of reallocation and refinancing  to pay for improvements to the current high school.

Laubler made a couple of reasonable points.  It is reasonable to wonder if the Board can make good on their promise of budget cuts (which have yet to be spelled out) and whether or not expected future revenues will hold true.  But it isn’t accurate to say that the board has decided to “circumvent the voters.”  The Board has a budget that they are free to work with, and they are free to allocate the approved budget as they see fit.  Unlike the situation with the proposed millage that was defeated, the overall size of the district’s budget is not being grown under the current plan.  If anything, the Board should be commended for coming up with a fiscally responsible way to improve the current high school.

Laubler even seems to take issue with the very idea that the federal government is subsidizing the rate at which the district will have to pay back any stimulus money it receives, but one can hardly blame the Board for making sure that Fayetteville takes advantage of what’s being offered.  If Laubler has an issue with the provisions of the stimulus money, then he should take that up with federal lawmakers.  From our local perspective, it would be ridiculous to not take advantage of the opportunity.

The real problem with Lauber’s rant, though, was that his arguments dissolved into outlandish melodrama.  He said the Board must be “socialists, communists, or bought politicians with no moral compass,” and he reminds us all that “this is not a socialist or communist nation.”  He says there is a movement in this country to take back “our country from these types,”  followed up with threatening language that he “wouldn’t want to be the one to ultimately challenge these patriots.”  He closes with more threatening innuendo, as he references the American Revolution and tells the Board not to “anger us the way the last king did.”

Ugh.

Ultimately, and with sweet irony, the tactics employed by those who rely on  this type of  grandstanding are the architects of their own undoing.  While there are some segments of our population who may be moved by such demagoguery, most Americans prefer common sense and reasonable discussion.   They respect the opinions of reasonable people, and reject those who aren’t.

If anything, Lauber’s letter assured sensible Fayettevillians that the Board’s plans are sensible.  There’s not many who want to be on the side of the local McCarthyite.

Apparently, political ineptitude runs throughout the “tea party” movement.  Recent events at their national convention were downright embarrassing.

In the previous post, I said that I would address whether Arkansas reading tests do a good job of covering material that is actually taught in the rest of the curriculum.

So I looked at the grades 3-8 Benchmark tests available here. I wasn’t impressed with what I found.

In a recent year, Arkansas students collectively faced the following reading passages:

• A passage on Olympic bobsledding

• A recipe for cookies
• A fictional story about children writing mean notes
• A story about kings, dragons, and princesses
• The history of a set of duckling statues in Boston
• Instructions on how to make a toy car
• A fictional story called “My Mom Hates to Cook”
• A passage titled “The Invention of the Trampoline”
• A passage about snowboarding
• A fictional story called “Priscilla and the Wimps”
• A biography of a female French painter from the 1800s
• A passage about buying a skateboard
• A story (possibly fictional, possibly not) about growing up in an old farmhouse
• The history of Jumbo the elephant in P.T. Barnum’s circus
• An inspirational story called “You Can Do Anything,” in which Boy Scouts plant trees
• A biographical passage about Alexander the Great
• A story about a female working at NASA
• A historical passage about George Washington

To be sure, these reading passages — considered collectively — do cover a few topics that touch on historical, scientific, or cultural knowledge (such as fertilizing trees or NASA or the history of colonial America). Even the story about kings and dragons implicitly requires that students be familiar with the concepts of “king,” “princess,” etc.

But it seems obvious that these reading tests could do a much better job of covering the actual knowledge that we expect children to learn in particular grades. Why do Arkansas tests have so much inane and poorly written fiction — not to mention passages about bobsledding, snowboarding, and skateboarding (none of which are important parts of the curriculum, I hope)?

One theory, of course, is that by testing how kids can read inane passages about random facts, the Arkansas tests won’t unfairly privilege the cultural knowledge of a few rich kids. But that’s not true: rich kids from Bentonville who vacation in Colorado are probably much more likely to know about snowboarding and bobsledding (for example) than is a rice farmer’s kid in the Delta.

To replace all of this fluff, the reading tests should include more passages about works of art or music, American government and history, and the sciences. And those passages should be directly tied to the official curricular Frameworks. This would be fair(er) to the poor Delta kid who might at least have had a chance to learn about the material in various other classes. On top of that, reading tests would effectively be testing the entire curriculum, not just a detached skill called “reading.”

P.S. I’m not considering here whether the Frameworks themselves are well written. On a quick glance, some of them are specific enough to be useful to a classroom teacher, but there are plenty of standards like the following, which could mean anything and which would be very difficult to test: “Analyze the impact of ideas, information, and technology on global interdependence” (that’s for 4th graders).

Lots of people criticize standardized tests for focusing too much on math and reading, claiming that tests end up forcing schools to narrow the curriculum to those two subjects.

Curriculum narrowing may occur from time to time, but it is far from necessary. Indeed, it’s counterproductive for a school just to focus on a separate subject called “reading” at the expense of other background knowledge in many other subjects. After all, most reading tests require a student to read various essays, and essays have to be about something.

Banal, I know, but this is the key point: students who have a lot of background knowledge about the essay’s subject, whatever that might be, will do better at “reading.” Past the point of decoding letters, reading is inseparably tied to background knowledge.

As cognitive scientist Dan Willingham says:

Remarkably, if you take kids who score poorly on a reading test and ask them to read on a topic they know something about (baseball, say, or dinosaurs) all of a sudden their comprehension is terrific—better than kids who score well on reading tests but who don’t know a lot about baseball or dinosaurs.

In other words, kids who score well on reading tests are not really kids with good “reading skills.” The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it.

Thus, as E.D. Hirsch wrote, state reading tests should be explicitly tied to material that students have been learning in their particular grade. The problem is that the tests usually are “random,” and “not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards.” Instead, “children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.”

Hirsch notes that if “reading passages on each test were culled from each grade’s specific curricular content in literature, science, history, geography and the arts, the tests would exhibit what researchers call ‘consequential validity’ — meaning that the tests would actually help improve education.”

For example, if kids in 4th grade have been learning about how the telegraph and the pony express affected westward expansion in the United States (that’s content standard H.6.4.16 in Arkansas), then a good reading test might have an essay on that very topic, or any of the many other topics studied in the 4th grade curriculum.

If that were the case, not only would reading tests be more fair — as they would cover material that everyone had been taught in school — they would actually reinforce all of the other subjects, rather than narrowing the curriculum. The best way to prepare for a good reading test would be simply to teach all the things that kids need to learn about history and science and the arts.

The question I’ll address in the next post is whether Arkansas Benchmark reading tests come anywhere near this ideal.

On the national front, the UCLA Civil Rights Project released a report today that claims to show that charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools. The report finds:

…that charter schools, particularly those in the western United States are havens for white re-segregation from public schools; requirements for providing essential equity data to the federal government go unmet across the nation; and magnet schools are overlooked, in spite of showing greater levels of integration and academic achievement than charters.

It looks like, based on a quick pass through the report, their main finding is based on demographic comparisons  between charter schools and traditional public schools at the state level. This method of comparison likely leads to inaccurate conclusions due to the fact that charter schools are overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon. The correct comparison is between charters and the demographics of their immediate geographic area. We have discussed this topic as it relates to Little Rock at length here.

The Economist’s take on this report is concise, to-the-point, and spot on.

In plain English, there are a lot of black kids in charter schools. This is because charter schools tend to get set up in neighbourhoods where the public schools are terrible, such as south-eastern Washington DC or the rougher parts of New Orleans. These neighbourhoods are disproportionately African-American. Charter schools are popular with poor black parents because their other choices are so awful. There are very few charter schools in rich white suburbs with nice public schools, because there is no call for them.

The important question about charter schools is: do they give kids a better education than they would otherwise have received? The answer is yes. Nothing else matters.

You can find information specific to Arkansas from the Civil Rights Project report here.

ADDITION: I had some additional thoughts that I wanted to add to this post, so , here goes.

First, to drive home the inappropriate nature of the report’s method of comparison, I would like to make an reductio ad absurdum argument. In any given state it is necessarily true that some traditional schools will have a higher percentage of black students than the state average and some will be lower . Take for example the West Memphis and the Little Rock here in Arkansas. Both have a very high percentage of black students compared to the state average, 80% and 68% respectively compared to the state average of 21%.  Would the authors of this report advocate regulating these districts, or perhaps, dictating where people live within the state so as to equalize the demographic makeup of all schools.  And, what happens when they realize that Arkansas is whiter than Mississippi and blacker than Oklahoma?

Second, I find it curious that opponents of choice see black kids choosing charter schools and blame the charters.  While it seems more likely to me that this represents a population of students being severely underserved by their traditional public schools who are making a choice to leave. Shouldn’t we be more concerned about those traditional districts that are failing to meet their student’s needs?

A little closer to home, Cynthia Howell of the Dem Gaz has an article today providing blow by blow coverage of the latest from the North Little Rock School District desegregation hearings. Some of the more interesting discussion focused on discipline.  Here are a couple of excerpts.

John Walker quizzed Bobby Acklin, assistant superintendent for desegregation,and Francical Jackson, director of student affairs, about why black students, particularly boys, are disciplined at greater rates than their white classmates and how students and parents are to know that the district will pay for field trips for students from poor families if those messages aren’t in writing.

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The district’s enrollment for the past several years has been 59 percent black. In 2006-07, 83 percent of 3,709 suspensions in the district were to black students. And 91 percent of the 1,079 out-of-school suspensions were given to black students.

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Jackson said she has not found racial bias in the discipline recommendations from schools but, in response to Walker, she said she has not prepared any written analyses on that matter.

She said that black students “misbehave more often than whites,” and that playful roughhousing among black students can be misinterpreted by district employees as fighting.

Walker noted that the district at times assigns students with behavior problems to privately operated day treatment programs at a cost of $232,000 per semester. He questioned whether Jackson had determined whether those students, most of whom are black, perform better upon their return to the North Little Rock schools.

“The culture in North Little Rock is to not put anything in writing and you don’t do anything to remediate students,” Walker told Jackson at one point.

“We may not have it in writing but we are making progress,” Jackson responded, noting that the district has increased the number of alternative education services for students who are not succeeding in the regular classrooms.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to education stakeholders last week touting the Presidents plans for the coming year.  I am encouraged to see continued support, at least lip service, for reform, but I am also a little disconcerted by the administration’s penchant for supporting programs based on political popularity/expediency rather than evidence and results.

In his letter, Secretary Duncan emphasizes two programs which have a rather shaky track record for results.  The first is increased student aid for higher ed.  While it is true that the cost of tuition has been rising quickly over the past decade, it is certainly not clear that more student aid will make college more affordable.  There is some evidence that universities soak up any increases in student aid through tuition increases, leaving the affordability of a college degree relatively unchanged. And, there is further evidence that student aid does not help low-income families to the extent that we would like. Navigating the complicated application process serves as a barrier to many of these needy students. Reforming the student loan process and simplifying the aid application could go a long way to mitigating the system’s deficiencies, but more money will mostly help college’s bottom lines.

It is also important to note that the returns to a college degree have also been rising at a rapid rate over the past decade. In other words the economy is placing greater and greater value on a college degree, and this has a direct positive  impact on lifetime earnings. The promise of greater lifetime earnings should not only induce more people to attend college, but should also increase their ability to pay for college by providing them with more income to repay student loans.

Evidence suggests that college readiness is a much larger problem than college affordability. In 2001 only about 32% of the nations high school students “leave high school qualified to attend four-year colleges.”  This report also found that nearly all those who were qualified to attend a four-year institution did. Given this evidence, shouldn’t we be focusing our money and attention on college readiness rather than affordability?

Mr. Duncan also touts the administration’s commitment to early learning (preschool) programs, the most notable of which is Head Start. But, there is a growing body of evidence showing that early childhood education programs produce marginal results that fade out alarmingly fast (here is a review of the latest study of Head Start).  I am not making the claim that early childhood education is not important, but I am questioning whether we are getting the best bang for our education buck.  Head Start gets an increase in funding in spite of poor results while programs with a demonstrated record of success like the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program get cut.

It’s time President Obama lived up to his claim of evidence based governance. Both the Race to the Top competition and the reauthorization of NCLB (now ESEA) will be great tests of the administration on this front.  We will be watching with our fingers crossed, but not holding our breath.

UPDATE: Rick Hess and Andy Rotherham have some interesting things to say about the President’s reauthorization strategy. Here is another article about ESEA from EdWeek.

Our friend Jay Greene has a great post over at his blog today.  It seems the NEA is making the claim that , as their headline puts it, “Teachers Take ‘Pay Cut’ as Inflation Outpaces Salaries.  Average teachers’ salaries declined over the past decade.” Interestingly their own data do not support this claim.

Jay takes a look at their report and finds that:

In Table C-14 “Percentage Change in Average Salaries of Public School Teachers 1998-99 to 2008-09 (Constant $)” we see that salaries increased by 3.4% nationwide over the last decade after adjusting for inflation.  The increase in average salary outpaced inflation in 36 states, which is very different from the claim that  ”Inflation over the past decade has outpaced teachers’ salaries in every single state across the country…”  Check for yourself, the table is on p. 20 of the report, which is p. 38 of the pdf.

I can’t find a single table or figure in the report that would justify the headline and claims in the press release.  But when the Ministry of Truth speaks who are you supposed to believe — them or your lying eyes?

Ministry of Truth indeed.

P.S. Check out this video from NEA president Dennis Van Roekal. On a technical note, it looks like they made this mistake by comparing the average salary growth in constant dollars (inflation adjusted dollars) to the inflation rate.

UPDATE:  So, it looks like the NEA has realized their error and have yanked the video I linked to and altered their report. Jay has a follow-up post here.  Here is the video I tried to link to just in case you missed it:

President Obama delivers his State of the Union address tonight, and new education initiatives are likely to be featured prominently in the speech. Today’s Washington Post has an article discussing some of the details that have leaked.

Administration officials are saying that the federal education budget may increase by as much as $4 billion or 6.2%. The bulk of the new funding would split between Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind. It is also expected that in addition to the funding increase, President Obama will announce that his administration will be trimming some of the excess fat at the Department of Ed. The Post reports that:

Obama is expected to propose the consolidation of federal education programs. The budget he submits next week will collapse 38 K-12 programs into 11 and eliminate six programs, senior White House aides said.

The next few years could be very exciting for education reformers. The Race to the Top competition has already spurred a number of promising reforms in many states. Choice has been expanded and new data and accountability systems have increased the focus on education outcomes. This new wave of spending could result in even greater gains. As the Post put it:

Obama has signaled that he wants tougher academic standards but more flexibility for schools to reach them. His administration has pushed for innovations such as public charter schools, teacher performance pay and stronger data systems to track student growth from pre-kindergarten all the way to college.

However, my optimism is tempered by the realization that there are large interests arrayed against any real and lasting reform effort.  The teachers unions, in particular, spend a lot of time, effort, and money impeding any real change, and they have proven to be quite skilled at this task.

I hope the administration has the resolve to stick to its reform agenda. New money should be targeted to specific reforms rather than simply spread around existing programs. States and districts should be held accountable for specific education outcomes, but be given the freedom to implement local strategies to meet these goals.

I look forward to tonight’s speech, but will be watching closely over the coming months.  Hopefully this will mark the beginning of real change, and not simply be another well delivered speech full of empty ideas and wishful thinking.

Here at Mid-Riffs we are no fans of education consultants and their edubabble. Especially hucksters who are willing to use their academic credentials to hustle taxpayers for money. These people charge exorbitant sums for their services while doing very little to improve actual classroom learning. So we were a bit concerned to learn that the Little Rock School District recently employed education hacks bandits consultants Picus and Odden (of Arkansas educational adequacy case fame) to compile a strategic plan for the district. A recently released draft of their report has been met with the approval of the community group the district formed to review the report and something bordering on revulsion from the Dem Gaz editorial staff. You can read the Op-Ed here if you have a subscription. Here are a few exerpts:

Somebody needs to translate this document into plain English, the way George Orwell once translated the political idioms and idiocies of his time in a brief but incisive essay that has become a classic, “Politics and the English Language.” Now the same service should be performed for education in ours. And in much the same way-first by repeating its pretentious newspeak, then saying what it all really means.

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Eye-rolling would be a more natural reaction to this highflown piffle. Do not be misled by the terms “minority” and “majority” for black and white students even if black students may now be in the majority in the school district. These euphemisms are used in place of black and white, which are considered dirty words in educanto and so must be censored. In a pinch, to avoid complete confusion, multisyllabic terms like African American and Caucasian may be used instead.

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Never refer to how well or how poorly students perform on tests but the “student performance situation.” Much as one would refer to war as the “human conflict situation.” Speak of “achievement gap” rather than how we have failed to educate our children, especially our black children. That way, somebody might have to take responsibility.

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The achievement gap between Caucasian and African American students in mathematics at the advanced levels has grown from about 20 to about 40 percentile points.

Translation: After all the millions of dollars We the taxpaying People have spent, after all the decades of wasteful litigation that have benefited only the lawyers involved, and after all the gibberish our “educators” have talked, our public schools are getting worse, not better.

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But to speak like this is to violate all the rules of educanto, a language designed not to transmit meaning but obscure it. Feel free to go through this report and pick out your own unfavorite part to translate into English, or attempt to. You’re fully entitled to do so. This study in educanto cost you, the innocent taxpayer, $200,760.

Don’t get me wrong, creating a strategic plan can be a useful exercise; however, the kind of cut-and-paste consultant speak  that Picus and Odden peddle is not worth the paper it’s printed on. To date Arkansans have given the dynamic duo (don’t ask me which one is Robin) $1 million plus for the privilege of listening to their drivel. Their latest iteration of gasbaggery cost taxpayers about $200k.

For a detailed critique of Picus and Odden’s work you can read Stanford economist Eric Hanushek’s particularly scathing piece which appeared in Education Next in the Winter ’07 issue. You can find a copy at his website here. Here are a few highlights:

So similar are the studies that at times it seems the copy function of the Microsoft word processor deserves to be listed among the authors.

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Picus and Odden … provide “scientific evidence” to support the claim that a specific set of policies can shift average student performance upward by three to six standard deviations, an extraordinary gain … If one then assumes a cumulative impact from giving students not just a single application but continuing treatment through grade 12, the gains reach astronomical proportions, somewhere in the range of 23 to 57 standard deviations … This, of course, is the stuff of science fiction novels, not research-based school policies.

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Why do different states and organizations pay ever-increasing amounts to see this research review when Google would bring up the most recent version immediately and without expense? The answer is simple. Clients want a bottom-line statement … Few people care about the “studies” on which consultants base their reports, or even their validity, because nobody really expects schools to implement these specific programs … Clients simply want a requisite amount of scientific aura around the number that will become the rallying flag for political and legal actions.

So why do people continue to pay for this ridiculous junk?  Because they lack either the ability or the temerity to lead.

It’s time our education leaders stopped passing the buck and started doing the job we pay them to do. And, if they must go to an oracle to know they need to do a much better job educating the district’s students, then I strongly suggest it’s time the people of Little Rock begin looking for new education leaders.