Month: October 2021

Today’s Friday Fish Porn is an extra special one. Years ago Paul Herdman and I were spending a lot of time in Colorado for a work project. Among my bad habits was slipping off to fish a nearby river whenever there was a break of any length because it held some large and hard fighting brown trout if you knew where to look.* Paul, who is savvy enough to recognize the obvious appeal of any addictive substance like that, decided to try it. One fall he stuck around after a meeting to join a few  friends of mine I fished with out there annually to hit a river full of trout gorging themselves on silly hatches of bugs.**

He caught a fish.

Now he’s a regular guest here. And slays them (metaphorically of course, he’s a catch and release type). In Colorado last week he got out for a few days near Vail. Beauties. Paul is one of the kindest and most committed people you’ll find in education. Deep understanding that one size does not fit all but quality must be a constant, and an appreciation of and background in experiential learning. The work he’s shepherded in Delaware would command more attention were it from a larger state.

If you’re new around here you might be like, ‘Friday fish what?’ In this archive you will find hundreds of pictures of education types with fish. Send me yours.

*Another high quality degenerate in the same way is Cami Anderson’s husband Jared Robinson who is always up for a dash to a river during break time and is a fine fly fisherman. If you’re in the market for a DEI consultant with an experiential bent who won’t give you the same template as everyone else, recommend.

**Prior to that he and his daughter slipped out with me one afternoon to a little mountain river where the fishing was super slow but the scenery lovely. At one point his daughter walked in my backcast and got one in her shoulder. The only meaningful thing we hooked into all afternoon. We all had an experiential lesson on popping out a hook, which is absolutely no fun for the popper or poppee when a kid is involved. But barbless hooks, this is the way.

Last week we heard from Sandy Kress and Marguerite Roza about their takes on what’s going on with NAEP results. Today, USC’s Morgan Polikoff.  More coming soon.

We Need More Evidence About Student Achievement, By Morgan Polikoff 

NAEP long-term trend scores dipped pretty substantially, and the alarm bells are going off. To be sure, the alarm bells should have been going off for quite a while—after big bumps in the early aughts (at least in mathematics), NAEP scores have been pretty much stagnant since around 2009 or so. And there have been troubling signs over at least the last decade that a) various long-standing achievement gaps have not been closing, and b) gaps between high- and low-performing students have been widening.

Worst of all, this evidence pre-dates the pandemic, which we have good reason to suspect will make things worse. It has clearly been felt disproportionately by those who were already underserved by our educational and social systems—students of color, those from low-income families, students with disabilities, and English learners.

The questions on everyone’s mind are what caused this dip, and what we can do about it. As someone who’s studied the standards movement for the last 15 years, I was asked to give my thoughts about the possible impact of the Common Core and related standards on these NAEP outcomes.

The short answer to the first question is I don’t think Common Core per se could have had much if anything to do with this LTT NAEP dip. The most obvious reason is that the timeline doesn’t make sense. Common Core started to be adopted by states in 2011 and new assessments rolled out by 2015. Whether the standards are even being implemented in classrooms today is anybody’s guess, but there is a good deal of evidence implementation is spotty, at best. In contrast, this LTT dip seems to have accelerated in the last two years. Could you squint and say, well, these are lagging results? Maybe, but that feels like a leap.

To be sure, the best evidence on the impact of Common Core and other college/career ready standards on student learning is far from overwhelming (and to be double sure, answering this question convincingly is incredibly fraught, if even possible). One short-term study found that Common Core produced small positive bumps in achievement, but a longer-term effort focused more broadly on CCR standards found negative impacts that were getting worse over time. Could these results align with the latter study? Possibly, but I’d want to reserve judgment until we got another round of state NAEP data to see whether it supports that conclusion.

What standards/curriculum related issues do I think could be at play here? One thing that’s worth paying attention to is the alignment of the NAEP LTT to current standards. The LTT assessment has a framework that is intentionally not updated to align with changes in curriculum over time. But what if content that used to be taught when kids were 7 or 8 is now taught when they are 9 or 10? There is some suggestive evidence that these kinds of timing issues may at least partially explain Main NAEP mathematics results, and one would imagine that these effects would be even larger for LTT NAEP.

Another plausible argument I’ve heard recently is about the widening gaps between high- and low-achievers. The argument goes that Common Core has often been interpreted as deemphasizing procedural knowledge in favor of more conceptual understanding (certainly I have heard this interpretation in my conversations with teachers), whether or not that’s a correct interpretation of the standards. But for students who might struggle in mathematics, not being exposed to this foundational procedural knowledge in early grades could have deleterious effects on their later mathematics achievement.

We need more evidence about student achievement, especially in light of the pandemic, and we need that evidence on a range of different kinds of assessments. We will probably never have a convincing answer to what caused this dip, but regardless of the reason we need to focus on proven solutions—high-quality curriculum aligned with the science of reading, careful professional support for teachers, strategies to improve teacher working conditions and support collaboration and data use, and direct student supports like one-on-one tutoring.

When it was released, it seemed like the NSBA letter calling for DOJ to investigate parents might have taken concerns about threats against school board members too far. The backfire potential and potential for it to create a target for opponents seemed real.

Now NSBA – facing pushback from its affiliates in a number of states and not all of them red – is walking it back.

As we’ve discussed, sometimes interest groups forget who signs the paycheck. That catches up with you, and seems to be at least part of what happened here.

Attorney General Merrick Garland testifies this week in the Senate but he should be able to sidestep this. The AG had already carved out a position that was at once somewhat vague and had some nuance about how heavy handed Justice was prepared to be here anyway. He testified before a House committee that,

“I do not believe that parents who testify, speak, argue with, complain about school boards and schools should be classified as domestic terrorists or any kind of criminals.”

The drip drip from Loudoun County, Virginia, in regard to a sexual assault incident(s) continues.  Today we learned,

ONLY ON WTOP: Loudoun County’s superintendent notified the school board the same day a female student was sexually assaulted at Stone Bridge High School, according to an email obtained by WTOP. https://t.co/Re4vkD7H60

— WTOP (@WTOP) October 22, 2021

This flatly contradicts earlier statements from the board and school officials. It’s sort of amazing there has not been more attention to this incident. There are credible, law enforcement confirmed, allegations that a student sexually assaulted or raped two different students in the school system. The second because the alleged offender was not removed following the first incident. That alone seems like an important story?

What we don’t know is everything that went into the district’s decision-making. What the second school knew. A whole host of issues. But at this point it’s pretty clear the district is not being forthcoming about what happened, which should get antenna up. It might be stonewalling, incompetence, or concern about legal exposure. It’s not OK. The parents of one of the alleged victims are suing.

So why does this matter? Because regardless of what’s going on there is a story here with some broader implications.

Scenario 1: These parents are so wound up about transgender issues and ‘CRT’ or whatever else that they and right wing media will stop at nothing – including cooking up stories about sexual assaults – to attack this school board and its leadership. So in this case, yes the district screwed up, but people are being opportunistic with the episode.

Scenario 2: Whether because of political sensitivities about some of the as of now unconfirmed details regarding the alleged perpetrator, general public relationist tendencies in the sector, or some other issue(s) the school district was not transparent about this issue or actively sought to squelch it.

It increasingly seems like scenario 2 is more likely. But either case seems like a big story? And either has pretty big implications as illustrative of the culture wars enveloping school boards.

Overall, around the country one faction says that parents are pretty worked up about nothing or are just bullying school boards, and another faction says school districts aren’t shooting straight about what’s actually happening in schools. Loudoun’s a high profile test case.

Bottom line: A 15-year-old was apparently raped, in a school, and a second student apparently assaulted by the same person, in a second school. Did the district cover that up, or are parents cynically using the episode to advance a political agenda? Or some of both? As we discussed on Monday, it’s going to take some scouts to ask some questions and sort this out rather than just repeat the narratives of either faction.

Local media continues to advance the story via TV news, radio, and print. But given the stakes, increasingly people are asking, where is The Washington Post? And the whole ostrich posture from the ed sector isn’t a good look. I hoped we had learned that lesson with Parkland.

Why are NAEP scores doing the opposite of what the Rolling Stones would want…going up up up. NAEP is going down or flat. People have different takes. Yesterday we heard from Sandy Kress about accountability, today school finance expert Marguerite Roza takes a look at the question of money.

NAEP scores are down. Funding is up. Wait, wut? By Marguerite Roza

Why are NAEP-reported student outcomes lower than in previous years? We’re likely to hear in the coming weeks that the culprit is a lack of funding.

But here’s the thing: The US increased funding for K-12 public education during the period in question. In 2013 we spent $11,791 per pupil and by 2019 we averaged $13,187 per pupil. And yes, those figures are both in 2019 dollars, which means the funding jump exceeds any rate of inflation.

And yet several key student outcomes went down. So, what gives?

The answer is messy: there’s a lot involved in making sure that money matters for students.

For years, dueling research battled over whether money mattered for student outcomes. On the one side were researchers like Eric Hanushek, who wrote in 2015: “Outcomes observed over the past half century – no matter how massaged – do not suggest that just throwing money at schools is likely to be a policy that solves the significant U.S. schooling problems seen in the levels and distribution of outcomes.”

Then, more recently, Kirabo Jackson and colleagues used newer analytical techniques and found spending more money translated into statistically significant benefits for students, including rising test scores and high school graduation rates. By 2018, Jackson declared: “By and large, the question of whether money matters is essentially settled.”

Now to be fair, we can’t cherry pick two data points (spending and NAEP outcomes) and use them to second-guess the conclusions of solid research studies. But at the same time, some of the explanation for the lower student outcomes on NAEP amid the higher student spending is right there in the concluding paragraphs of nearly every legitimate study: There are many factors involved in this complex relationship. Jackson and colleagues tell us that while “adequate funding may be a necessary condition… money alone may not be sufficient.”

Beyond the question of how much money, it also matters, for instance, how the money was spent. And of course it does. It’s a stretch to think that when new funding goes only to sports fields, for instance, or toward paying for retirement promises for former school employees, that such spending choices are likely to boost reading scores.

Studies suggest other variables matter too, like school leaders’ management skills or school-level student outcome targets. Or possibly factors like who made the spending choices. (Did local schools have a say in whether proposed investments would work for their kids?) Or even whether funds delivered to districts then made it to the schools with the most students needing added resources.

Even in those studies that have found a positive relationship between funding and outcomes, the relationship is limited and doesn’t explain as much of the variation as we’d like. That means: if the system doesn’t get better at translating dollars into outcomes, we’d need to spend hella more money to do right by kids.

There’s a caution in there for those tempted to make ‘more money’ the goal itself. Spending increases must be coupled with a corresponding commitment to ensuring the funds are allocated and used in productive ways. When money becomes the only rallying cry, students can get lost.

This all matters tremendously right now, especially as the country is investing an historic $190 billion in one-time federal pandemic relief. We must remain vigilant in calling on schools and systems to ensure students meaningfully benefit from the new funding. Leaders need to stay laser-focused on ensuring these investments translate to student outcomes—especially for students who most need help.

One thing we do know: There will be calls for continued increased investments when the federal money runs out, and those calls will undoubtedly be hampered by any evidence (including these NAEP scores) that erodes confidence that funding can bring real benefits for students. The strongest case proponents can make is to help make money matter more.

Last week’s NAEP results were received with less handwringing than you might have expected given that in the past relatively insignificant changes garnered a lot of attention. But the results matter – a lot. Especially if you consider it’s a precursor to the learning loss subsequently caused by the pandemic.

What’s going on? There are multiple theories and I’ve asked a few folks to discuss them here. Today Sandy Kress, education advisor to President George W. Bush and a former school board leader discusses accountability. Tomorrow school finance expert Marguerite Roza discusses money.  And we’ll also look at Common Core and the shifts in instruction associated with that reform. If you have another theory reach out and let me know.

Here’s Sandy’s take:

Accountability Works, Until It’s No Longer Accountability – By Sandy Kress

Although folks involved in K-12 policy disagree on many things, they will largely agree that the declines in achievement since 2012 are extremely disappointing and very worrisome. To learn of this lost ground after the economically strong decade of the 2010s and while we await even worse results coming out of the COVID period – this is all incredibly dispiriting.

Let’s look at samples of these discouraging outcomes.

In math, for 13-year-old blacks, the Long-Term Trend NAEP shows that while they made a nice gain of 13 scale score points (251-264) from 1999 to 2012, they lost a good part of it by 2020, back down to 256.

The bottom 10% of students fell from 240 to 228 from 2012 to 2020. The bottom 25% fell from 263 to 255.

In reading, 9-year-old blacks made impressive gains from 1999-2012 of 20 scale score points (186-206). Over the next 8 years, they were stagnant, falling back 1.

The bottom 10% of 4^th graders grew 12 points from 1998-2009 but fell back 7 from 2009-2020. The bottom 25% grew 8 in the earlier period but fell back 2 in the latter.

So much for every student succeeding. We made progress in achievement in some states just before No Child Left Behind was passed and considerable progress nationally afterwards. But then we lost ground badly.

So, why did we make progress in the 2000s and go stagnant-to-bad in the 2010s?

Let’s begin with the data scientists’ warning: we don’t know for sure. Until we do serious cause and effect research, we can’t prove our assertions.

But we’d be irresponsible to leave it there. Policymakers and citizens can’t look at these trends and walk away, frozen from acting, because we can’t know for sure the scientifically proven explanation.

What we must do is put forward our best hypotheses and act on what seems truest.

Let’s look at some of the most popular explanations.

Could it be Common Core standards? Without citing the research, I’ll summarize it: Common Core had no significant impact, one way or the other, on student achievement.

Some say the drops may be due to the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Unless students were so severely traumatized, and on a virtually unprecedented basis, there’s no proof student achievement should have continued to fall for a decade after the recession ended.

Money? Some argue money makes a great difference; some say not. In any event, education spending increased for most of the years achievement dropped.

Instead, I want to argue that once we reduced or eliminated consequences for failing to make progress for disadvantaged students, we should not be surprised that their achievement went south.

It began when Secretary Duncan let consequences for failing to make progress be diminished by states that agreed to buy into the Administration’s teacher effectiveness and Common Core initiatives.

The weakening of the commitment to accountability was formalized in the passage of the ironically misnamed Every Student Succeeds Act. Then, states, in effect, could stay soft, and studies showed that’s what many did.

The solid research on accountability (Carnoy and Loeb, 2002; Hanushek and Raymond, 2005; and others) shows that accountability moves the achievement needle positively. Plus, we’ve learned much more over the years. If we use this knowledge and hold ourselves accountable for improving student achievement, it improves.

Improve by how much? It all depends. If our commitment is widespread and we fix problems that arise, improvement might be greater, perhaps far greater, than in the past.

Here’s the burning question for us now: dare we allow 2009 to be the peak of student achievement in American history?

Julia Galef has a great book recently out called The Scout Mindset. The world needs scouts and soldiers but Galef argues the scout approach has unique value. I’d say that’s especially true in a sprawling sector like education. Oversimplifying a bit, scouts seek to see things as they are and have habits around seeking dissenting views, falsification, and so forth. Soldiers are more about narratives. We all have some of each. Recommend.

Last week journalist Katie Couric made news when she revealed, by way of her new book, that she had selectively edited an interview with then Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I haven’t read her book yet, so relying on public accounts. Apparently a few years ago when Couric asked Ginsburg for her take on Colin Kaepernick and his protest at NFL games the justice really leaned into the issue. It was reported at the time that Ginsburg had said she thought the protests were “dumb and disrespectful.” What was not reported is that she apparently also said the protest showed,

“contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.”

“Which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from,” the justice added, according to Couric. “[A]s they became older they realize that this was youthful folly. And that’s why education is important.”

What does this have to do with education? Perhaps more than it appears.

I don’t agree with Ginsburg here, protest and dissent are important and are exactly why the United States is not like the places many of our grandparents came from. Last week we talked about how our teaching and discussion of American history is undercut by a lack of appreciation for the role of dissent. Kaepernick and related anthem protests don’t really bother me because they’re just asking if we’re living up to our ideals. Mileage will vary.

In other words, I can appreciate some objections. Sure, there were too many people who didn’t like what Kaepernick was doing because they didn’t like seeing a Black person protest racial injustice, but that’s not the universe of objections about the format or the content of the protest. Ginsburg’s take would have been controversial, but also helped illuminate how not all objectors are of a piece. Only through airing and discussing can you arrive at a better understanding, a better politics, and some kind of progress.

Instead, for the most part one side said Kaepernick was un-American the other side said anyone who disagreed with him was a bigot. It’s that binary that led Couric to want to “protect” Ginsburg in the first place. But the effect was to deny us a perhaps richer conversation. Lashing ourselves to narratives is a bad way to have a real conversation.

Sound familiar?

Right now the same dynamic is playing out on the “CRT” debate in schools.* Rather than parsing the issue and listening there is a pretty intense pressure – on both sides – to just fall into line. Any quarter for “CRT” critics makes you a bigot in a lot of circles now. Pointing out that we do a pretty lousy job teaching about race in schools and that there are serious problems in schools that can be attributed to racism gets you labeled as unserious and woke in others. The ethos that anyone raising questions about what schools are doing in the name of “equity” is just an outrider for Christopher Rufo, or that if you raise concerns about racism and schools then you’re illiberal or “anti-white” (whatever the hell that means in 2021 America) flattens the dialogue – exactly what culture war partisans want.

But isn’t there a difference between someone who is trying to ban books in high school and some parent who doesn’t want their 7-year old getting half-baked workshops from a teacher who found some stuff on Pinterest or segregated activities and privilege walks? Or a difference between someone arguing that documented racial disparities in school demand attention and reform, and someone who wants schools to go full throated Kendi across the board? Of course there is.

People know this, which is why their private “I could never say this publicly” takes and their public posture is often so divergent. What’s happening now impedes progress, chills expression, obscures the messiness, and really is no way to have a conversation about such an important basket of issues. Or to separate the genuinely bigoted from other dissenters. As Kaepernick revealed in his strident opponents, only those who don’t have confidence in the power of their ideas are afraid to subject them to the give and take of debate and instead try to ram them through with tautologies, circular logic, or brute political force.

*Other recent examples of this narrative problem is the whole furor about schools having to teach “both sides” of the Holocaust in Texas. That Texas law is lousy policy in my view, on a few levels, one of which is that it leads to nonsense like this. But it pretty plainly does not require teachers to teach both sides of historical issues like the Holocaust. But that claim is what you call “too good to check,” casual slang for narrative confirming. This unfolding situation in Loudoun County, where it increasingly looks like administrators mishandled a rape at a school, perhaps for political reasons, is an apparently tragic example as well. [Update: Read this as well]. It has echoes of Parkland. We’re all better off when adhering to narratives is less important than just figuring out what’s happening.

Foo Fighters.

First, why is the @ACLU taking the side of compelled speech? Second, Loudon County…again?! https://t.co/o9zCyZ3HWc

— Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) October 16, 2021

It’s Loudoun people! And since it’s emerging as a toxic edge case you’re going to hear about it more.

More seriously, this is a take you are hearing a lot. But it seems like there are two actually complicated questions here for schools (and then also the overlay that a lot of people are surprised to see/concerned about the ACLU’s rapidly evolving position on speech questions more generally and their decision to join this case, what that signals, but that’s a separate issue).

First, teachers engage in compelled speech all the time. K-12 teachers don’t enjoy free speech rights the way we generally think of them or in the same way college professors do. For starters, K-12 teachers teach a state determined curriculum. So the issue here is not cut and dry in school if the state or a school division determines a policy about what to call students and pronouns and there is a rational basis for that policy. And as with some other recent episodes, your first obligation as a public employee is to legal policy not your own religion or political point of view.

Second, I’m not sure it’s cut and dry out of school either. It’s established since the late 1960s that teachers do enjoy First Amendment rights outside of school, including about school related issues, if they’re acting in a private capacity. A 2006 Supreme Court case eroded this right somewhat for public employees in relation to their job but you still can’t, say, fire a teacher for just stating a view on a school policy question. But it’s also established that there is a variety of conduct out of school that makes it impossible for a teacher to do their job effectively (the scope of this, a lot of which was sexist, has thankfully narrowed over the years).

Those issues seem like they will collide here? It hardly seems an unreasonable argument that a teacher who engages in out of school political activity that is clearly anti-transgender can’t effectively operate in a school context where there are transgender students.That’s not “safetyism” run amok from where I sit. Rather, it’s a line that is probably sometimes obvious and sometimes more grey – especially because in today’s context people disagree about what’s a political statement and what’s an attack on someone’s humanity. This all also seems complicated for the teachers unions.

While one faction in this debate seems to forget that transgender students are a fraction of a fraction of students another faction seems to forget that public schools have an obligation to be welcoming to all kids, and we’re talking about kids here. Legal questions aside, if, within reason, you really can’t call a young person what they want to be called, perhaps teaching isn’t the line of work for you anyway?

If you’re a First Amendment lawyer with some school law experience I’d like to hear from you and your thoughts on these questions.

72 hours ago everyone was pretty convinced they knew the deal in Loudoun County Schools. Maybe not?  It’s worth watching what’s happening there. Today the superintendent is apologizing for apparently seriously mishandling a sexual assault and a school board member is resigning. Loudoun County is the kind of place the Democrats need a strong showing in Virginia to hold the governor’s mansion.

The other day I noted that Eric Adams isn’t on board with the current push to reform gifted programs in New York and, “Hopefully the incoming mayor can craft a more robust plan to address multiple issues at once.”

Scant details, but apparently that’s his plan. Here are three unremarkable ways to do that. “Gifted” education doesn’t have to be as scarce a good as we make it.

Here’s an interesting one.

Outschool (live online classes for up to 18 learners) just announced a series D at a valuation of $3b. That’s a lot of Outschool. And it’s the third round of funding in the past year.

A friend observed this morning that with 7,000 teachers that’s a value of about $428k per teacher – organizations can join, too, but for argument’s sake 7k freelance teachers. Assume that there is some multiplier in there based on future value and perhaps it’s maybe $140k per teacher if it’s 3x, more or less depending on the assumption.

Is that a lot? Depends how you think about it. In some communities, ranging from Washington, D.C. to tony suburbs teachers make six figures annually. On the other hand Outschool offers value for teachers as well as students – flexible schedule, audience, payment processing, lower barriers to entry, and opportunity for creativity for instance. Outschool is pretty cool.

And despite the occasional headline, $140k is far more than the median teacher is seeing on any of the peer to peer teacher sites where teachers can sell their wares. So’s even a fraction of that.

But that’s not what Outschool teachers make. Outschool says the “average” teacher makes $50/hr. It’s a 70-30 split. Traditional teachers are not making $50/hour, but they do have guaranteed hours and employment for a set period of time. They also get benefits, sometimes really good packages.

An obvious question is, is this a good deal for teachers? For some teachers? Is this a better deal than unionized teachers are getting from their unions? Is a teacher gig economy desirable for some teachers? Should teachers see more upside with Outschool? You can argue those questions both ways – especially depending on what you value most. The New York Times op-eds write themselves, “I was a teacher unionist, then I discovered Outschool” or “I was an Outschool teacher, now I’m a building rep.”

For my part, I like Outschool* and think it fills an important and interesting place on the landscape – and is just one part of the a la carte or unbundled approach to schooling that is coming. Interestingly Outschool wants to work with employers. This was all coming before the pandemic, but that experience created more appetite. It’s not a substitute for trad school, but it’s a derivation that right now is offering real value.

Homeschooling has grown during the pandemic and an outstanding question is whether this will increase the demand for more a la carte services from schools by homeschoolers. Schools have traditionally resisted this although some states let homeschoolers take classes a la carte now. It might be a great time to build some bridges if broad support for publicly funded education and some sort of mass customization is the goal rather than pointless turf fights.

But what does it mean for teachers and how should Outschool teachers feel about this new deal and where it places them? I don’t know.** But it does signal change and probably more aggregated opportunities outside of traditional teaching roles in the future.

Satisfaction.

*No formal relationship, the co-founder and head of school spoke to a class I taught last year.

**Sorry Ned, two days in a row!