-- a Gerald Bracey Report on the Condition of Education
EDDRA
Articles
THE EDUCATION
ROTTEN APPLES
AWARDS OF 2002
INTRO
THE "CRAWFORD BEST DANG
TROJAN HORSE SINCE ANCIENT TIMES " AWARD:
This
is truly a weapon of mass destruction, a bunker-buster of mammoth proportions.
Some of the lunacy is inherent in the legislation.
Other gobs of goofiness fall from the work of the National Institute
for Doctrinal Uniformity, previously known as the U. S. Department of
Education. In its first pass at labeling schools as failures,
the Department uncovered startling facts: Michigan has the greatest
number of failing schools (1500) and Arkansas is home to the smallest
(zero) (has anyone observed convoys of prairie schooners heading South
on I69 out of Lansing?). Obviously,
Bill Clinton was a better education governor of the Razorback State
than anyone, Clinton included, previously realized.
The
National Council of State Legislatures projects that 70% of all public
schools will be labeled failing (or, "needs improvement" under
the obfuscation code derived from another George, George Orwell). According to Department regulations, all children
in failing schools must be offered the option of transferring to a better
one. Crowding is not acceptable
as an excuse (except, and I am not kidding here, where it might violate
fire codes or other safety regulations).
Schools with large numbers of students wanting in must have larger
classes, buy mobile trailers or build more classrooms (how's that for
an unfunded mandate?). We thus
face the possible prospect in a few years of having 100% of our children
attending schools currently occupied by only 30% of our children (no
one has yet dealt with what those transferring students will do to the
test scores of the "successful," receiving schools).
I say, old chums, is there a bit of irrationality in all of this?
Chris
Whittle is no doubt standing by ready to accept in Edison Schools kids
arriving with the vouchers that Bush will without doubt resurrect.
The
NCLB trap has already received additional attention and deconstruction in
"The Twelfth Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" (Phi Delta Kappan, October, 2002, posted
at www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA/EDDRA26.pdf)
and in "No Child Left Behind: Just Say No." Although many have been offered the latter, only the Minnesota
School Boards Association has had to courage to publish it. It's been posted, and will be soon, if not
already, archived at EDDRA.
THE "SWIFTEST REPUDIATION
OF 'SCIENTIFICALLY BASED RESEARCH'" AWARD:
THE "SWIFTEST MISINTERPRETATION
OF 'NON-SCIENTIFICALLY BASED RESEARCH' AWARD
I
have no idea what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I do know
this: Lyon completely misinterpreted Hart and Risley's study. Hart and Risley observed interactions between
mothers and children and recorded some of the verbalizations. They found that three-year-olds of "professional"
mothers (they didn't use the word "affluent") in fact used
more words than mothers of three-year-olds on welfare used while
talking to their children.
For
neither mothers nor children, does this constitute anything like "working
vocabulary," which is a pretty fuzzy concept in any case. If you did take it as working vocabulary you
would be stuck with the ludicrous conclusion that professional mothers
have a working vocabulary of only two thousand words.
That's how many they used in the interactions Hart and Risley
taped.
Beyond
that, Lyon's grand, wrong generalization reading is based on a grand
total of 38 people living in Kansas: Hart and Risley taped 13 professional
parents and their children and six welfare parents and their children. Whew.
Betty
Hart and Todd Risley published their study in 1995 as, Meaningful Differences, Paul H. Brookes Publishing. It's a good book and worthy of anyone's perusal.
Stanford
linguist, Geoffrey Nunberg also raked Lyon over the coals for his statement in
one of his frequent commentaries on NPR's "Fresh Air." Nunberg's essay, " A Loss for
Words," can be found at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/vocabulary.html
THE "MOST INCENDIARY POST
9/11 EDUCATIONAL LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL
TO: Reid
Lyon, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
At
a November 18, 2002 symposium, sponsored by the Coalition for Evidence-Based
Policy (an off-shoot of the Council for Excellence in Government), "Rigorous
Evidence: The Key to Progress in Education?", Lyon commented that
"If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would
be to blow up colleges of education." He said of those issuing forth from such colleges, "they do
not know what they do not know" and attacked colleges of education
as some of the "most resistant and recalcitrant" institutions
around.
He
allowed as how his comments were probably not politically correct, but
no one objected or questioned him about them even though a number of
other presenters and, no doubt, audience members as well, held college
of education appointments.
TO: Susan Neuman, Assistant Secretary for Elementary
and Secondary Education
In
a speech in Stockton, Neuman declared that the No Child Left Behind
law would "stifle and hopefully eliminate" creative teaching
in the classroom. "Our
children are not laboratory rats," she said.
Well, of course, but what is NCLB other than a massive untried
experiment?
In
Chicago a few days later, Neuman said she was misquoted. Stockton
Record reporter, Victor Balta insists she was not. In any case, Neuman then proceeded to say essentially
the same thing:
I was misquoted. I
said very specifically that we should end experimental teaching. I said that our children are better than experiments,
that we needed to focus on scientifically based evidence in our reading
instruction. We have over 100,000
studies [that number again!] which give evidence of how we should teach
reading. We need to emphasize
phonics, vocabulary and comprehension so that all of our children can
achieve.
Chicago
CBS radio reporter, John Cody then asked her, "Can you specify
some of the experiments that you found wanting?" Neuman's reply:
I can only speak for myself, from my own experience.
I remember many teachers. They
would go to a conference and they would see a great, very charismatic
teacher. And then they'd go home and say, "I'm going to try this."
Your
own experience? But Susan, I thought all policy should flow from "scientifically
based evidence."
The
quotes come from tapes of the briefing.
THE "TAKING CRONY
CAPITALISM TO THE CRADLE" AWARD
Superstar
Salomon Smith Barney telecom analyst Grubman earned $20 million a year
managing stocks worth more than $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion). After years of treating AT&T like a loser,
Grubman suddenly upgraded his recommendation for the stock from "hold"
to "buy." Why, people
wanted to know. Grubman changed
his rating shortly after his boss, Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill donated
$1 million in company funds to help Grubman get his twins into an exclusive
Manhattan nursery school.
In
a curious coincidence, shortly after Grubman decided AT&T was an
OK stock to buy, AT&T chose Grubman's outfit to handle the IPO of
the company's wireless division. The
IPO was worth $10.6 billion; Grubman and Weill's firm walked away with
a mere $45 million. And shortly after the IPO, Grubman once again
downgraded AT&T. Grubman
currently faces a lifetime ban from Wall Street.
I
have not been able to determine if Jack Grubman is related to Lizzie
Grubman. Lizzie, recall, was the
"PR Princess" (clients include Britney Spears) who slammed her
father's (Allen, not Jack) $70,000 Mercedes SUV into reverse and mower down 16
people outside a night club in East Hampton.
She called broken-boned victims "white trash" and sped off
into the night. In court, she claims
the vehicle accidentally slipped into the wrong gear. She couda got 8 years, but apparently beat the DWI charge and got
away with 60 days.
TO: National Computer Systems (NCS)
When
Marty Swaden learned that his daughter had flunked the Minnesota Basic
Skills Test, he set out to help her.
He decided that his best course of action was to look at the
test to see what kinds of questions had caused her problems.
The State of Minnesota refused to let him see the test. He persisted. The state resisted. He persisted.
It resisted. He threatened litigation. He's a lawyer. He finally got to sit down in a room with a state official to peruse
the test and his daughter's answer sheet.
He
found not one but a bunch of items that NCS had mis-scored, enough to
put his daughter over the top. And
not only his daughter, but also another 8000 Minnesota high school students. The students filed a class action suit.
NCS
claimed the error was a one-time affair, found and fired a scapegoat,
and argued that things were now fine.
The depositions from NCS officials showed otherwise. At first the judge bought NCS' one-time-error story and refused
to permit the class to sue for punitive damages.
Lawyers
for the plaintiffs then argued that "NCS has a corporate culture
of hiding and ignoring testing errors and problems.
Stunning deposition, newspaper articles and e-mail show an appalling
corporate culture than not only tolerated errors, but refused to fix
errors unless caught by someone else."
The
judge found merit in these arguments.
He declared that "the error [in Minnesota] was preceded
by years of quality control problems at NCS. NCS had committed scoring
errors on standardized tests dating as far back as 1997 in as many as
eight different states. In 1999,
the State of Michigan threatened to cancel NCS' contract because of
NCS' 'failure to deliver services as promised, specifically, the absence
of communication, oversight and quality control.'"
Numerous
NCS officers had pleaded for more staff and for more training for existing
staff--some responsible for quality control and processing of test answer
keys and answer sheets had never worked with tests before--but to no
avail. CEO Russ Gulotti schemed to keep costs low,
thereby making rendering high and thereby making NCS an attractive takeover
target. In 1999 he told his
staff
NCS is in a good position to leverage the very large
investments we have made over the past few years. It's time to get paid back for these investments. Be very firm on expenses; say no to hiring;
stop the unnecessary travel; and show me significant improvement [in
profits for fiscal 2000].
Gullotti's
strategy worked and the Pearson Empire swallowed NCS. Gullotti is rumored to have taken $50 million from the deal to his
retirement estate in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
Students
didn't fare quite so well. Once
the judge permitted the plaintiffs to sue for punitive damages, NCS
settled. Some seniors denied diplomas received as much as $16,000. Most awards to underclassmen ranged from a few hundred to $1000.
Full
Disclosure: I was hired as a witness for the plaintiffs, but didn't testify
since the case did not go to trial. I
was privy to the confidential depositions, but all quotes above come from
public documents.
THE "CONDUCT SCHOLARSHIP
AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO" AWARD
TO: Herbert J. Walberg
Walberg
has received several "apples," none of them golden. In a chapter of a book edited by Terry Moe,
Walberg struck back:
"Despite
the huge amount of evidence, three writers have dismissed the validity
of the unrelenting findings [that American schools are no good]. Gerald Bracey often takes this view in his
monthly column for Phi Delta Kappan,
a widely circulated education journal.
David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle wrote The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America's Public
Schools…Neither Bracey's work nor Berliner and Biddle's book has
gone through scholarly peer reviewing as would be required in journal
publication in education, psychology and the social sciences." Thereafter, Walberg refers to us collectively
as BBB. Some scholarship.
In
fact, I do not take "this view" in my monthly column. For the 19 years that column has existed, it
has almost invariably summarized research of other people, not my own
analyses and the column often reports problems in public schools. And, that column and the annual Bracey Reports
receive substantially more peer review than do manuscripts submitted
to peer reviewed journal. The
editors know that people like Walberg (or Checker Finn or Diane Ravitch)
lie in wait hoping to find an error that will permit them to discredit
and dismiss the reports and so the editors scrutinize every word, check
every fact. (For the record, I review manuscripts for Educational
Assessment, the American Educational
Research Journal and Educational
Researcher. The last publication
honored me in 2002 as an exceptional reviewer). And, contrary to Walberg's assertions, two of my articles on international
comparisons have appeared in the peer-reviewed house organ of the American
Educational Research Association, Educational
Researcher.
In
a footnote, Walberg says, "Bracey doesn't hesitate to employ ad
hominem argumentation. He, for
example, has been allowed to give "Rotten Apple Awards" to
presidents from both political parties [inanity is non-partisan, Herb],
reporters from nationally circulated newspapers, and prominent scholars
for criticizing education. Because Bracey is given first, last and regular
word in the journal [Phi Delta
Kappan], few people correct his faulty arguments."
Wrong
again, Herb. This is the second
time Herb has shown that he simply doesn't understand "ad hominem"
arguments. The Rotten Apples
simply point at dumb, wrongheaded or erroneous things that people have
done or said in the 12 months since the previous Apples.
That is not ad hominem argumentation.
That is calling attention to stupidity.
An
ad hominem attack attempts to discredit a person or an argument using
material that is logically irrelevant
to the assertion. Thus, if I said, "Walberg's research is
not to be trusted because his wife is a thespian," I would be making
an ad hominem argument. Walberg's
wife's skills as an actress are logically irrelevant to the quality
of his research.
As
for first, last and regular word, Kappan
editors accord this to all authors.
If any author's Kappan
article generates a letter to the editor, the editors advise the
letter writer that the letter might be published, space permitting,
and if so the author of the original article will be given a chance
to respond.
Terry
Moe gets a few seeds from this Rotten Apple, too. When I advised him that I thought Walberg's piece was unworthy
and damaging to Moe's reputation, Moe replied that my quarrel was with Walberg. He acted generally as if he, the editor, had
not even read Walberg's essay.
THE "SOUND OF ONE MIND
CLOSING" AWARD
TO: The American Council of Trustees and Alumni
The
American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) describes itself as dedicated
"to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards,
safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus and ensure that the next
generation receives a philosophically-balanced, open-minded, high-quality
education at an affordable price."
In
2002, ACTA published Educating
Teachers: The Best Minds Speak Out.
Reading the list of contributors to the 10 chapters in this
booklet some people might actually wonder how ACTA arrogated to itself
the power to designate these folk as the "best minds."
But
speak out they do. And as a
consequence one wonders about ACTA's dedication to the free exchange
of ideas. Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute,
a Right Wing propaganda machine masquerading as a think tank, has this
to say in the booklet's opening essay, "Why Johnny's Teacher Can't
Teach:" "The Source
of (the student's) newfound wisdom, Donaldo Macedo's Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know, is an
execrable book by any measure. But
given its target audience--impressionable education students--it comes
close to being a crime. Widely
assigned at Hunter, and in use in approximately 150 education schools
nationally, it is an illiterate, barbarically ignorant Marxist-inspired
screed against America."
Later
chapters deride constructivism, progressivism, etc. ACTA officers include Lynne Cheney, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Georgie
Anne Geyer, Irving Kristol, and Martin Peretz.
THE "RISING TIDE OF WARMED
OVER RHETORIC" AWARD
TO: The Council for Basic Education
When the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) released the results from its Program of International
Student Assessment (PISA), in December 2001, American 15-year-olds finished
very close to the international average in all three topics, reading,
math and science, among the 32 nations participating.
To
the Council for Basic Education, this outcome signaled "A Rising
Tide of Mediocrity," in the deathless prose of "A Nation At
Risk in 1983." CBE said
the PISA results meant that no progress had been made in the twenty
years since "Risk" and should act as a wake-up call.
Why, it did not explain, but the unstated rationale was that
we need higher test scores to be economically competitive with other
nations.
In
2002, the Geneva-based World Economic Forum released The Global Competitiveness Report, 2001-2002. Among the 75 nations ranked, the United States was #2. It was #1 on the constellation of variables
the WEF refers to as contributing to innovation. Innovation, of course, is antithetical to standardized tests. Tests converge on a single right answer.
The
author of the CBE statement on PISA apparently didn't bother the read
"A Nation At Risk." "Risk"
claimed that in international comparisons, "American students were
never first or second and, in comparison with other industrialized nations,
were last seven times." I
don't know what those seven studies were (given the studies since then,
they were no doubt hopelessly unsound), but if we take "Risk"
at its word, finishing in the middle with 32 of the world's richest
countries is quite an improvement (oh, OK, 28 wealthy OECD nations plus
Brazil, Latvia, Liechtenstein, and the Russian Federation).
THE "ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED
WITH…" AWARD
TO: The Education Trust
When I have questioned people about the Education
Trust, I usually get a reply like, "Their heart is in the right
place," or "They're well intentioned." So be it. But still.
When
Greg Toppo of the Associated Press (now with USA Today) did a story on NCLB, he quoted Education Trust's Amy Wilkins
as gushing "This will give schools much better and much more detailed
data about what's working and what's not, with much more precision than
they've had in the past." One
imagines Karl Rove saying to Amy, "Look deep into my eyes. You are getting sleepy…sleeeeepy…." FairTest's Bob Schaeffer was closer to the
mark when he said to Toppo that it would strain the testing companies
and wreak havoc in the schools. (see, "No Child Left Behind: Just
Say No)."
Later
in the year, The Education Trust blithely announced that it had destroyed
the myth that poor children cannot learn.
I know of no one at any point on the political or ideological
spectra who ever espoused this, although I suspect some on the Right
of harboring Trent-Lott-like sentiments about it.
The Ed Trust claimed that for all states they had found a goodly
number of "high-flying schools," schools with high proportions
of minority kids or high proportions of kids in poverty or both, yet
with high test scores.
Well,
there are problems with this designation of "high-flying
school." Herewith a list of such
problems
1.
Lenient
criteria. To receive the honorific
"high-flying" a school had to place only ONE grade, in ONE
subject (reading OR math), in ONE year above the criterion. This criterion for the one grade, one subject, or one year was to
have finished in the upper third of test scores for the state (no national data were used).
2.
Even
so, only a few schools qualify. In
California, in reading, 134 schools qualified and of those 83 qualified
with only one grade. There are
8,761 schools in California.
3.
Not
all children in high-flying schools live in poverty and some analyses
indicated that poor kids in high-flying schools were not
scoring well on tests and that the schools test scores were elevated
by kids who weren't living
in poverty.
4.
Errors. Some schools listed as high poverty or high
minority are not.
5.
Questionable
classifications. Some schools
are magnet schools for highly specific qualities including gifted and
talented. Little wonder that
they qualify.
6.
No
longevity. When subjected to
a criterion of having two consecutive years of high flying test scores,
many schools disappear from the list.
7.
Overwhelming
concentration of elementary schools.
Virtually all schools are elementary schools--e.g., schools in
which it is easier to manipulate test scores with drill-and-kill exercises.
8.
Anomalies. In one Virginia district, for instance, a high
school qualified, but none of the feeder elementary and middles schools
did. This seems odd.
The
Education Trust established an interactive database at their web site
(www.edtrust.org). This allows anyone to manipulate various criteria
and see how many schools qualify and to identify them. I played with the data for California for which
Ed Trust had done a special report.
I
varied only the poverty level. I
first looked to find high-flying schools among those that had to 1 percent
or more poverty students (you cannot set poverty to zero), then 5% or
more, then 10% or more, etc. I
did not vary minority enrollment in the schools.
I looked at all schools whether they had zero or 100% minority
enrollments. I checked only for third grade reading. I also
checked on what happened when I set the achievement criterion for two
years in a row. To get the designation
of high-flying in my analysis, a school's test scores had to be in the
upper quarter of California schools. Here are the results:
Total
# of California Schools: 8,761
Poverty
Level | #of High-Flying | # Two Years
Greater
Than Schools
In a Row
1% 1,206 1,141
5% 980 930
10% 723 684
25% 273 243
50% 40 21
75% 5 2
90% 2 0
By
the time we get to schools that have 50% or more of their kids in poverty,
only about 0.46% of the schools in California qualify. And…this poverty level is defined by eligibility for free and reduced
price meals that are available to people with incomes up to 135% of
the official poverty definition.
[NOTE: These numbers were captured on December 28.
They are slightly lower than those reported in October's12th
Bracey Report. I have no idea why]
Things
look even worse when we consider that California is a low-scoring state. In the NAEP 2000 8th grade mathematics assessment,
only Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and New Mexico scored lower.
In the NAEP 1998 8th grade reading assessment, California finished
ahead of only Florida, Hawaii and Mississippi.
In TIMSS 8th grade math, of 41 nations, only Colombia,
Iran, Kuwait and South Africa scored significantly lower than California.
This is important because the Ed Trust's analyses are within a given
state, not across states. Many California schools that the Ed Trust categorized as high-flying,
would lose that designation if transplanted to a "high-flying state"
like Iowa, or Maine, or, in fact, many other states (In TIMSS math,
only 6 of 41 nations scored higher than Iowa, only one of 41 was higher
in science).
The
Ed Trust study actually shows the horrific, powerful impact of poverty
on achievement. The Right has
often said, "Poverty is no excuse."
They're correct. Poverty
is not an excuse. It is a condition. Like gravity. Like gravity, it affects everything.
And
as for those good intentions…In addition to cozying up to the Bush administration
with kind words about NCLB, the Ed Trust has climbed into bed with Achieve,
Inc., (IBM CEO Lou Gerstner's baby), the National Alliance of Business
and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation on something called the American
Diploma Project (www.achieve.org.nsf/DiplomaProject?openform).
(Thomas
B. Fordham was a Dayton, Ohio magnate who happened to have Checker Finn's
daddy as his lawyer. Papa Finn
cajoled Fordham into setting up the foundation with the Fordham estate,
then put his son in charge. I have heard that the Fordham family sued,
but can't confirm it)
THE "POLYANNA MEETS DR.
PANGLOSS AND THEY GO OFF TO HAVE LUNCH WITH GEORGE ORWELL" AWARD
TO: The Education Trust
Initially,
this looked like just an addendum to EdTrust's other prize, but the
more I delved into it, the more I came to appreciate that a separate
trophy was obligatory.
The
Ed Trust gets this award for its December, 2002 posting, "ESEA:
Myths vs. Realities." I
encourage readers to check it out (www.edtrust.org,
it's only six pages of text). Most
of these myths are straw men invented by Ed Trust. At least, I never heard most of them before from anyone else.
And
those that ring true, not as mythical are dismissed with rhetorical
flourishes: "Myth: The teacher quality goals established by ESEA
are impossible or unrealistic."
They are. But not according to ET: "Reality:..Far
from being unreasonable to expect a qualified teacher in every classroom,
who could argue for anything else?"
I suppose the guy who has (has not) stopped beating his wife.
Consider
this fantasy, maybe my favorite:
"Myth:
The new ESEA expects more from schools, but doesn't provide any additional
resources to help meet these expectations.
Reality: The new ESEA provides more than $1.5 billion in additional
funding for Title I in 2002, and targets that money more effectively
than ever before on districts with high concentrations of poor children." As a sum, $1.5 billion still looks large to
some people (though surely not to Everett Dirksen's ghost). But as the Quad City Times (Iowa) put it on December 23, "All the money
for Iowa wouldn't even cover the cost of Davenport Central's renovation,
let alone build a new school."
No
mention of the fact that analyses indicate that ESEA is really a huge
underfunded mandate. An analysis
in Vermont shows that the Green Mountain State will receive $56 million,
but spend $151 million to implement the law.
Or
again. "Myth: We don't need tougher accountability requirements
in the new ESEA because public education is doing just fine." How many people have you heard saying "just
fine" lately? Right. Not one.
In
dispelling this "myth" Ed Trust says, "the United States
is the only country in the latest International Adult Literacy Study
where literacy is higher among older adults than the younger adult population." Anyone hear a lyric in their heads? I do: "Oh, why can't they be like we were,
perfect in every way? Oh, what's
the matter with kids today? "Bye
Bye Birdie," 1960.
First
off, about Ed Trust's statement: there were only eight countries in
the original study and four more were added later.
It's not like TIMSS that had over 40 nations taking part in one
or more of its assessments.
The
specific results table that Ed Trust refers to shows the proportion
of people age 16-25 and 46-55 who scored "3" or better (maximum
score, 5) on the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). All save Canada and the U. S. were European nations in the original,
while New Zealand was one of the added nations.
IALS
administered tests in 1994. Now,
think about this for a minute. What
were most Europeans 46-55 doing during their formative years? Dying.
They
would have been born between 1939 and 1948, at the beginning of the
World War II. Even the youngest
would have lived a youth in a Europe still devastated.
Go to school? Yeah, right.
Compared
to Europe, the U. S. emerged relatively unscathed and almost immediately
made a commitment to universal secondary education.
The pattern that Ed Trust cites as a indicating a failure might
actually show a triumph: older Americans score better than younger ones
because they had more education than their European peers and kept on
growing.
The
IALS results point to a methodological caution: Beware of secondary
sources. Ed Trust did not cite the IALS
report itself, but the 1998 version of OECD's Education at a Glance. In
the actual IALS report there is a note next to the 16-25 results for the U.S.:
"The
proficiency of United States' postsecondary students has been underestimated
due to a sampling anomaly" (Literacy,
Economy and Society, p. 79). It
provides no indication of how large the underestimation might be.
THE "READY,
AIM, DELETE" AWARD, or "THE ELDERLY MAN AND THE SEA"
AWARD
TO: The
New York State Department of Education
The New York State Board of Regents
New York State Commissioner of Education, Rick Mills
Educational Testing Service
And probably all other test publishers
"You
can imagine how honored I was to learn that my work was going to be
mangled for the sake of standardized testing."
Thus wrote author Anna Quindlen in Newsweek. Actually, Quindlen was disappointed that
New York had not put her in
the company of Isaac Beshevis Singer, Annie Dillard and Anton Chekhov,
all of whom suffered at the hands of test construction censors building
the New York Department of Education Regents' tests.
Quindlen was relegated to losing a few words to ETS expurgators
for some Georgia tests.
The
distortions come from the various test producers' "sensitivity
guidelines." Words the
censors conclude might upset testtakers get axed.
In New York, these words included "skinny," "fat,"
"wine," and "gringo."
The
Department's word play came to light when Brooklyn mother and literature
lover, Jeanne Heifetz, noticed a maimed passage on one of her son's
tests. On further investigation, Heifetz discovered
that "almost no piece of writing emerges from this process unscathed."
Quindlen's comment: "Nor could any except the most homogenized
piece of pap about Cape Cod tide pools."
Quindlen's
purple prose included the following:
"The
Sumerians first used the written word to make laundry lists, to keep
track of cows and slaves and household goods."
"And
soon publishers had the means, and the will to publish anything--cookbooks,
newspapers, novels, poetry, pornography, picture books for children."
ETS
censors snipped "slaves" from the first sentence, redlined
"pornography" in the second.
ETS helpfully explained to Quindlen that "The words 'slave'
and 'pornography' deal with controversial issues that could cause an
emotional reaction in some students that could distract them from the
tests and affect their performance."
Quindlen
pointed out that the week the test was taken contained suicide bombers
in Israel, the gunpoint abduction of a teenager in Utah, and the arrest
of a rock star for appearing in videos having sex with an underage girl.
"And they're going to be distracted by the words 'slaves' and 'pornography?'"
Quindlen,
and all other commentators overlooked the obvious: given the sanctions
attached to the tests, the kids already
had emotional reactions that affected their performance.
Some
of the authors whose works were bowdlerized pointed out that getting
the right answer on the test depended
on the extirpated material. Now
that probably caused some emotional reactions
in kids taking the test.
Quindlen
called attention to the worst of the New York sensitivity guidelines. It directed word surgeons to ask, "Does
the material assume values not shared by all test takers?" Said Quindlen, "There is no book worth
reading, no poem worth writing, no essay worth analyzing that assumes
the same values for all. That
sentence is the death of intellectual engagement."
Mills
sent assistant commissioner Roseann DeFabio out to defend the practice. DeFabio graced us with an instant classic:
"Even the most wonderful writers don't write literature for children
to take on a test." Exactly.
Having
forced DeFabio to defend the practice, Mills then ended it. Or so he said. Time will tell.
THE "WORST PERFORMANCE
ON A WRITING TEST" AWARD
TO: The Ohio State Legislature
Four
times over the last decade, the Ohio legislature has written new school
funding laws. Four times over
the last decade, the Ohio Supreme Court has declared the new formula
unconstitutional. It did so again in 2002.
THE "THEY SAY THAT MEMORY
IS THE SECOND THING TO GO" AWARD
TO: Scientific American Magazine
It
was only two years ago, in the "Tenth Bracey Report" (Phi Delta Kappan, October 2000), that
Scientific American garnered a Golden Apple
for publishing "The False Crisis in Science Education." That article contended that "U.S. residents
have consistently demonstrated a firmer grasp of basic science facts
than have denizens of many countries that dramatically outperformed
the U. S. on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study"
(TIMSS)(see the Twelfth Bracey Report concerning ignorance of science
in China). It debunked the allegation that any backwardness
in science hurt us economically.
Now,
however, in an article by someone named Rodger Doyle (not further identified
except by an email address. He
didn't respond to my challenge to his article, but you can try if you
like: rdoyle2@adelphia.net.), SciAm headlines, "Can't
Read, Can't Count." Sub
headline: Up to One Third of American High School Seniors Aren't Ready
for the Real World." Gee,
when I was a senior, people kept telling me that none of us were ready.
Doyle
relies on dreary achievement levels from NAEP to make his case. As I have noted over and over, these levels
have been rejected by everyone who has ever studied them: the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards
and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA and the University of Colorado,
the General Accounting Office, and the National Research Council, as
well as individual psychometricians.
They do not accord with any
other evidence. For instance,
only a tiny fraction of fourth graders reach either the "proficient"
or "advanced" level on the NAEP science assessment, but American
fourth graders were third in the world among the 26 nations taking part
in the fourth grade assessment of TIMSS.
Doyle's
atrocity returns to the old, disproved notion of test scores and the
economy: "Lack of basic
skills portends higher unemployment or lower pay, probably retards overall
productivity growth of the U. S. economy…" Doyle should be sentenced to a week in solitary with only the World
Economic Forum's publication, The
Global Competitiveness Report, 2001-2002 mentioned in connection
with the award to the Council for Basic Education.
THE "STAND THE ARGUMENT
ON ITS HEAD" AWARD
TO: George F. Will
No
one is better than Will at using rhetoric in the service of ideology. In his June 28, 2002 Washington Post column in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision
on Cleveland's voucher program, he actually managed to accuse the middle
class of attempting to keep poor kids down:
Dare one hope that yesterday's ruling, although 5-4,
will nevertheless be decisive, and that the anti-choice forces will
relent in their campaign to continue blighting the lives of poor children?...The
opposition to school choice for the poor is the starkest immorality
in contemporary politics. It
is the defense of the strong (teacher unions) and the comfortable (the
middle class, content with its public schools and fretful that school
choice might diminish their schools' resources and admit poor children
to their schools) against the weak and suffering--inner-city children.
I guess Will was hoping people would not see
the logical flaw in his opus: the equation of anti-voucher with anti-choice.
But among those whom Will sneers at with utmost disdain, liberals,
are those who perceive that the two can be separated.
As the title of a Mary Anne Raywid piece in Phi
Delta Kappan some years ago had it, "Choice, Yes; Vouchers,
No."
THE "LET ME COUNT THE
WAYS" AWARD
TO: Chris Whittle and Edison
Schools, Inc.
If
I actually had to buy a statuette to give winners of these awards, Whittle
and Edison would break me. I
couldn't afford that many. I
hardly know where to begin.
To
Chief Education Officer John Chubb for his whining on the op-ed pages
of Philadelphia's papers?
To
Edison spokesperson, Adam Tucker, whose press conferences make Bush
press secretary, Ari Fleisher, look like the man Diogenes sought?
To
Whittle, for proposing to save money by letting the students replace
paid employees and do a lot of the administrative and computer chores
in his Philadelphia schools? Close,
but he's already received raspberries for this one.
Since his schools in Philly (and elsewhere) are overwhelmingly
elementary schools, community groups attacked the proposal as showing
Whittle was willing to violate child labor laws and was, therefore,
morally unfit to run schools.
To
Edison for the hubris of taking a probably illegal, no-bid $2.7 million
contract from the state of Pennsylvania to "study" Philadelphia
public schools, despite having no track record for such evaluations? Or for the chutzpah of spending all the money
in two months and claiming to have done it? (hubris is different from
chutzpah; for hubris the gods eventually strike you down).
To
Edison for its creative counting of schools?
Edison says it manages 26 schools in Philadelphia. Everyone else counts 20. If a school building at a lone address contains
grades K-12, educators call it one school. Edison counts it as three
(Edison's similar creativity in counting income landed it in a heap
of trouble with the SEC).
To
Whittle, who bought an East Hampton estate in 1989 for $7.5 and tried
to allay some personal financial difficulties in 2002 by putting it
on the market for $45 million? (Tommy Hilfiger bought it for a mere
$31 million. One of them shouda consulted Lizzie Grubman first, no doubt).
To
Whittle and Edison officers who fought off de-listing from the NASDAQ
with a frenetic buy-back of Edison stock?
Edison had lots of problems, not the least of which was that
after its debacle in Philadelphia, the stock drifted as low as 12 cents. It had been as high as $39. (It worked.
The stock rose from 14 cents a share to $1.65 it has since drifted
back to ___).
And
so forth. After much deliberation,
I award Edison a Rotten Apple for
1.
Its
novel, oh-so-generous-to-itself analysis of test scores. Edison's inventive numbers crunch permit it
to say that 84% of its schools show positive trends and
2.
Its
full-page ad in the October 28, 2002 New
York Times, "Edison: The First Decade" (p. A21 in the
edition printed in DC; page A9 in another edition I saw elsewhere).
Edison's
ad repeated its oft told tale: "If you take a closer look at all
of Edison's schools, 84% of Edison schools have increased student performance"
First of all, is this the kind of lousy grammar and syntax they teach
in Edison schools? Second, this
is not true. Edison's 84% figure comes from its "study"
of schools managed prior to 2001.
Even
so, to reach this happy conclusion, Edison engaged in the kind of creative
arithmetic that got it in hot water with the SEC. It calculated the average change in test scores for each subject
and each grade in a school. It
then averaged all of those changes.
If the resultant value were greater than zero, even just one
percentile rank, Edison rated the trend as "positive"--improving.
Obviously
if you have four grades that show a one percentile rank decline in reading
and one grade that shows a five percentile increase, you end up with
a "positive" change. Edison
says 84% of its schools are positive.
Jacques
Steinberg and Diana Henriques, reporters for the New York Times, looked at Edison's figures with jaundiced eyes.
They applied Edison's methods Cleveland's public schools.
They found 87.4% of the Cleveland's schools were positive. Cleveland's chief of testing demurred at this characterization,
saying that some schools that looked good when analyzed a la Edison
were sources of great worry to the district.
No one is holding Cleveland's schools up as models, but if Cleveland's
school outperform Edison schools…
As
for that ad, a weekday full-page ad in the Times
these days runs $135,627. Whittle
is fond of them. Back in the
days of Whittle Communications, he ran one saying that his "Special
Reports" reached 100,000,000 readers.
This led Whittle employees to ask one another if these were real
numbers or Whittle numbers.
No
doubt any parent reading the praise Edison heaps on itself--it claims
its test improvement "is 2.7 times better than the average major
public school system in America"-- would rush out and sign their
kids up. After gushing over its accomplishments, Edison
asks, "How is Edison doing financially?"
Herewith,
its answer:
Since inception, the company has raised over $500 million
in capital. We've used that
money to create a great school design; to open 150 schools [Edison arithmetic
again] with our partners; to build the best professional-development
programs for our educators; and to implement industry-leading accountability
and data systems. It is because
of those investments that our schools are succeeding.
And it is because of that success that we are about to become
profitable.
We'll
see. In 1998, Whittle told the
Education Industry Report he might end
up in the black ink that year and surely would in 1999. He didn't and hasn't. The ad doesn't say that in fiscal 2002, Edison
lost $49.3 million or 92 cents a share, up from $11.5 million and 22
cents a share in fiscal 2001.
THE "WATCH WHAT WE SAY,
NOT WHAT WE DO" AWARD
TO: Edison CEO Chris Whittle and Edison President,
Benno Schmidt
From
the outset, Edison schools promised to bring its high-tech, high-performance
magic to fruition for no more than what public schools cost. "We believe we can do this spending the
same amount per student as the average school district now spends,"
wrote Schmidt. It hasn't happened.
Bill
Webster, Dallas Associate Superintendent of Schools told me one reason
Dallas dropped Edison was that Edison schools cost $2000 per kid per
year more than regular schools (another reason: they didn't do any better). When districts terminate Edison contracts,
cost is invariably a reason.
In
2002, Edison gave up all pretense of costing no more than publics. To run its 20 Philadelphia schools, Edison
demanded $1500 per student more than the average per pupil. Despite the machinations of Pennsylvania Secretary
of Education, Charles Zogby, it got only $800 (Zogby, dumped when Democrat
Ed Rendell won the state gubernatorial election now works as a senior
vice president for K12, Bill Bennett's Internet curriculum company. Don't you love how the Republicans keep out-of-work
buddies off the welfare rolls)?
------
I'll
end it here, not because I've run out of worthies, but because, it's
almost the end of the year. I
managed to lose yet another of Pete Dupont's dreary op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, else he'd be a winner. Ditto Kurt Landgraf, CEO of ETS whose smiling
visage accompanied some unconscionable sucking up to the Bush administration
in ads that ran in Education Week
and various dailies, and Sharon Robinson, ETS Veep and former assistant
secretary at the U. S. Department of Education, who calls the No Child
Left Behind law the "Test Publisher's Full Employment Act."
Happy
New Year.
Jerry
© 2003 Gerald Bracey
Posted January 8, 2003
