From Romeo and Juliet:

But, let them measure us by what they will,
We’ll measure them a measure, and be gone.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

The melee damage-buy seems mutual where Rahm blew a test-result law by the union.

There is so much wrong with this article by Eric Hanushek that I fear that anything less than a line-for-line rebuttal will be woefully inadequate as a response. Out of consideration for my readers, I will refrain from providing one, and will rather try to focus on the most important points. Hanushek, of course, is the Stanford economist whose lurch into the field of education has driven much of the recent misguided effort towards “Reform” in today’s educational system. His article does a good job of summarizing his most crucial arguments, so it’s worth some time examining.

The title of the piece is “Valuing Teachers” and a brilliantly disingenuous title it is. Rather than using the word as we might use it (placing a high value on teachers), he is using it as an economist might (assessing the value of teachers). He is measuring how much teachers are worth. According to Hanushek, better teachers result in higher incomes for their students later in life. To make his case, he uses a series of unscientific leaps of logic that will yield easily to a few moments of rationality.

He notes that “a student with achievement (as measured by test performance in high school) that is one standard deviation above average can later in life expect to take in 10 to 15 percent higher earnings per year.” I have no reason to doubt his numbers.

But Hanushek is making the classic blunder of confusing correlation with causation. Do higher test scores in school directly cause higher incomes? Or is it possible that they may have common contributing factors? What about factors that the student brings in, such as intelligence, stamina, and motivation? Is it possible that parental income can be a factor in both standardized testing scores and future income? Hanushek’s famous value-added study attempted to isolate these factors, but he seems content to ignore them when citing this achievement/income connection.

And, as Diana Senechal points out, “there is no evidence (as far as I know) that students in the highest percentiles in high school are those who made the greatest gains on their standardized tests over the years. In fact, I suspect that most of them did pretty well on those tests all along.”

Using future income as a measure of teacher quality is even more outrageous than using test scores. How much does a Stanford professor make compared to a Wall Street hedge fund manager? Is that a function of the quality of education they received? In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I make significantly less than LeBron James. Did he have better teachers?

Hanushek’s solution is to “contemplate asking 5 to 10 percent of teachers to find a job at which they are more effective so they can be replaced by teachers of average productivity.” (Note to my boss: if it should ever become necessary to fire me, I would request that you instead contemplate asking me to find a job at which I am more effective.)

Hanushek’s solution – fire the bad teachers – is very simple, but it requires several assumptions that I don’t think we should be so quick to grant.

Assumptions

1. Standardized tests accurately measure student achievement.
2. The teachers whose students don’t make progress on the tests are the bad teachers.
3. There is a line of average teachers at the door waiting to be hired.
4. No factors other than teacher quality are significant.

Peruse this list, and note that Hanushek’s plan falls apart if even one of these assumptions is false. In fact, they all are.

Assumption: Standardized tests accurately measure student achievement.

False. The tests that students are given are deeply flawed indeed. Many of the questions do not test what they purport to test, and test-taking itself has become it’s own skill set that schools ignore at their own peril. If we’re careful, we can use some the results to identify areas in need of improvement. But the tests on the whole are way too idiosyncratic to use the overall scores as a basis for high-stakes decision making.

Assumption: The teachers whose students don’t make progress on the tests are the bad teachers.

False. In an August 2010 paper for the Economic Policy Institute, a team of highly distinguished education researchers laid out the case against the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. Bottom line: It doesn’t work. Test scores are simply an ineffective statistical measure for identifying bad teachers. If you don’t find twenty pages of research from a panel of experts compelling, then you can read about this well-respected hard-working teacher who got slammed by a statistical formula.

Assumption: There is a line of average teachers at the door waiting to be hired.

False. In fact, teacher recruitment and retention is becoming a serious problem. A McKinsey study, Closing the Talent Gap, describes the decline in the teaching profession’s ability to compete in the labor market.

However, I suspect there is a bit of condescension towards the profession of teaching when we assume we can just go out and hire average teachers. The implication is that the average person would make an average teacher, rather than acknowledging that teaching requires a particular set of qualities (e.g., diligence, patience, intelligence, and a calling to want to do it) for someone to even be an average teacher. To glibly say that we can just fire the bad teachers and hire average ones is unintentionally insulting.

Assumption: No factors other than teacher quality are significant.

False. Hanushek anticipates this rebuttal, and is kind enough to provide examples of other factors that are not significant:

The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly.

Costly? I thought we were discussing what is most effective. Aren’t we having a national education crisis? Hanushek has moved past his role as researcher and now is making policy judgements. Danny Westneat argues effectively against the idea that class size is irrelevant, so I don’t have to. Teachers already know the importance of class size, and I suspect that the Reformers do as well. Similarly, other initiatives we take to improve education, costly or no, are based on research and accumulation of best practices. Even if we let Hanushek fire all of the bad teachers, we would still want to implement successful education initiatives. Sorry.

Neither side is happy with our current educational system. But Reformers seem to offer nothing but slapdash solutions that keep expenses low but ignore the facts on the ground. It seems, then, we have a choice to make. Do we want to have a public education system in this country? Many do not, and would rather see the free market take over education. Charter schools seem to be a first step in that direction, and I think the Reformers who tout them have become, wittingly or unwittingly, somewhat of a stalking horse for the movement against public education. Diane Ravitch, in her eloquent response to Waiting for Superman, discusses why charter schools aren’t the panacea they’re often held up as. She also discusses the impact of poverty on student achievement, and the dangers of ignoring it in the national discussion. Paying teachers more? Keeping class size down? Addressing the needs of high-poverty schools? It all seems so… costly.

That’s what it’s going to take, though. If we want a high-quality public education system, we’re going to have to pay for it. These may be troubled economic times, but really it’s just a question of priorities. If we’re going to have public education at all, we need to increase, not decrease, funding for it. We need to increase it by a lot. Reformer “solutions” only distract from the real issue. They want us to look at charter schools, but if we look closely enough, we’ll see that the most successful charter schools are able to spend much more per student than the public schools who are expected to emulate them.

And so, we must choose between abolishing public education and funding it adequately. Abolishing it is not really a choice at all, and would lead to an even worse crisis than we have now. But, if we can adjust our priorities and give our students the schools they deserve, then, as Dan Quayle said, “We are going to have the best educated American people in the world.” (Should we be blaming his teachers?)

I recently saw a particularly poignant piece of graffito etched on a friend’s Facebook wall:

A public union employee, a tea party activist and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, “Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.”

And while this might easily refer to any number of anti-labor sentiments, it seems most appropriate as a reaction to the current – inexplicable – War on Teachers that has been raging in the media lately.

If you haven’t seen last Thursday’s Daily Show, you really need to go watch it. In a brilliant piece at the top of the show, Jon Stewart demonstrates the hypocrisy of the right-wing talking heads when talking about teachers. Later, he interviews education truth-teller Diane Ravitch, who lays out the rest of the argument.

If you want to understand the conversations surrounding education reform, then – as Tom Tomorrow says in this week’s strip – that’s all you need to know.

I was talking to my graduate students about the literacy standards last night, and predictably got pulled off on a tangent about accountability. I found myself making a point that I’ve alluded to before, but it’s worth making explicit now.

Robert Benchley famously said “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” I will put myself in the former category when I say that, generally, there are two kinds of people who talk about standards and accountability.

The first believes that anything worth doing is worth doing well. In order to make sure we’re doing the best job we can, it’s important to measure our results, so we can identify areas for potential improvement and apply strategies for intervention where they will do the most good.

The second believes that taxpayer-funded education is one of the evils of socialism and must be eradicated. In order to make the necessary changes, evidence must be gathered that the public education system is a failure, so that arguments to turn education over to the free market will be more persuasive.

And my point was that, when you hear someone talking about standards and accountability, it’s important to know which of these two groups that person is in.

From Henry VIII:

The gentleman is learn’d, and a most rare speaker;
To nature none more bound; his training such,
That he may furnish and instruct great teachers,
And never seek for aid out of himself. Yet see,
When these so noble benefits shall prove
Not well disposed, the mind growing once corrupt,
They turn to vicious forms, ten times more ugly
Than ever they were fair.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

The director of An Inconvenient Truth lent aid to ruthless enemies of government-funded education.

Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman should seek to learn the inherently right way: reform relentless poverty.

Instead, it prefers to foment barbed attacks on unions as anathemas. Why? Why?

Remember, the real superheroes teach in our schools.

More on Waiting for Superman here.

Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary about the need for reform in the American school system is one of the most important films of the year and everyone should go see it. Although I have a number of significant problems with the movie (which – rest assured – will be inventoried below), I think there are a lot of dark truths that Guggenheim brings to light, and even if we don’t all agree on what the solutions are, we can agree on what’s at stake in getting it right.

Waiting for “Superman” follows the journey of five students, and their individual quests to improve their educational opportunities. I’d say the movie gets about 75% of it right: the system is failing these students, and millions like them. But while it might make a good movie narrative to divide the issue into good guys (charter schools) and bad guys (teachers unions), the real issues surrounding education in this country are much more complicated than Guggenheim suggests.

I came out of the movie disappointed about many of the factual inaccuracies and glaring omissions that Guggenheim uses to make his case, but I found that these were well addressed by this piece in the Washington Post. Even better is this excellent article in The Nation, which digs much deeper into the issues surrounding the debate. I strongly recommend these two articles, as they cover a lot of ground that I consequently won’t need to cover.

I do believe that Guggenheim is sincere in his desire to reform education, and that’s important to say, because many participants in this discussion are not. Their goal is to end taxpayer-funded education entirely, and they tend to support measures that move the nation closer to this ultimate goal. The problem with this is that the free market will do an excellent job of educating some of our students, while a great number of children in this country will be starkly left behind. So I’m on my guard when I hear arguments about how charter schools have solved all of the problems faced by public education. But despite some of the darker connections behind Waiting for “Superman”, I do believe that the filmmaker is earnest and I can counter his points secure in the belief that we share the common goal of educating all of our students.

Not only does Guggenheim omit important details, but he often doesn’t even draw the correct conclusions from the evidence actually presented in the movie. What was most striking to me was how powerfully the film showed how the lack of economic opportunities for parents in these inner-city communities directly impacts the education of their children. That alone was worth the price of the surprisingly expensive ticket. But then, we’re told that “many experts” (who?) now believe that failing schools are responsible for failing communities, not the other way around.

Each of the five children depicted has a parent or guardian who is hell-bent on making sure the child has the best education possible. They enter their children into a lottery for the local high-performing charter schools. Presumably, all of the children in the lottery have similarly committed parents. That makes for a pretty good head start for the charter school. Public schools tend to have a more varied range of parent commitment. Also, did you notice how few students are accepted each year? What does that do for class size? And I have to mention, even though it’s well covered in the articles linked above, the large amounts of private funding that the high-performing charter schools depicted in the movie enjoy.

So yes, the charter schools in the film are doing very well, and that’s great news for the students who attend them. But if, as it is admitted in the movie, only one in five charter schools are showing results, that’s a dismal record indeed. And despite the emotionally manipulative scenes where each student’s “fate” was decided by random lottery, I felt myself more concerned for the students who were never in the lottery.

So perhaps the real lesson we can learn from the successful charter schools is that, if the school has a clear and progressive vision, then increased funding can actually make a difference in student achievement. And if we take a closer look at what Geoffrey Canada is really doing for the students in the Harlem Children’s Zone, we might realize that student achievement isn’t only impacted within the school building. He may have even created a microcosm of the society we would have if we could make the connection between our nation’s social fabric and the way our children are educated.

But “firing all the bad teachers” is a much more digestible solution.

And yes, there are bad teachers, and I agree that it should be easier to get rid of them. But in truth, this represents a very small part of the problem, and blaming teachers unions for the decline in educational quality is seriously misguided. Teachers unions have been and should be a partner in education reform, but they also have the task of protecting the rights of their members. Teachers have the same rights to collective bargaining as any other labor force in the country. To frame the issue as children vs. adults is a dangerous distraction, especially when our goal should be to attract the very best people to the profession, and retain them once they’re in. The movie makes the point that great schools start with great teachers. I agree! So let’s make teaching the most desirable profession in America. You can read more about teacher recruitment and retention issues in this Washington Post article. Because once we’ve fired all the bad teachers, who will we get to replace them?

By the way, nobody is actually waiting for Superman to come and save our children. It’s a classic rhetorical trick to frame the sides of the debate as the people who agree with the solutions provided and the people who would rather do nothing. But smart and passionate people are already implementing solutions within public education that resonate with the solutions presented by Guggenheim. Here in New York City, we’ve increased educational accountability enormously, and with the cooperation of the teachers union. Nationally, we’re moving towards Common Core Standards for student achievement. We’re not there yet, not by a longshot, but nobody in the system is complacent about that.

Still, despite all the movie gets wrong, it should be praised for shining a spotlight on issues that have been festering in the darkness. This movie has the potential to spark a national conversation about the problems in American education, and how we can best address them. If it does that, despite the film’s flaws, its ultimate effect will be a net positive. If it does that, it will be my very favorite of all of the Superman films.

UPDATE: An anagram review.

I am proud to announce that I have recently published a chapter in this book on teaching literature through technology. You can ignore the description; it seems to have been inadvertently switched with that of this book. Neither page describes my chapter, but you can read the abstract on the publisher’s page, or I could just tell you what it’s about.

Unlike this blog, the book chapter is actually about teaching Shakespeare! No riddles. No anagrams. No politics. (Well, maybe a little bit of politics.)

Here is the basic idea. I begin by citing experts who are skeptical of the ability of elementary school students to do Shakespeare. Specifically, I discuss the Dramatic Age Stages chart created by Richard Courtney.

Courtney describes “The Role Stage” as lasting from ages twelve to eighteen, at which point students are capable of a number of new skills that I would consider essential for understanding Shakespeare in a meaningful way. These skills include the ability to think abstractly, to understand causality, to interpret symbols, to articulate moral decisions, and to understand how a character relates to the rest of the play. So based on this chart, I would have to conclude that a student younger than twelve would not be ready to appreciate Shakespeare in these ways.

But Courtney bases his chart on the framework of developmental phases of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. These phases describe what a lone child can demonstrate under testing conditions. A more accurate and nuanced way of looking at development is provided in the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who described a “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD), which is a range between what a child can demonstrate in isolation, and what the same child can do under more social conditions.

So I wondered if fifth-grade students (aged 10) would have some of the skills associated with “The Role Stage” somewhere in their ZPD. If so, a collaborative class project should provide enough scaffolding to develop those skills and allow ten-year-old students to understand and appreciate Shakespeare on that level.

So I developed and implemented a unit to teach Macbeth to a fifth-grade class in the South Bronx, using process-based dramatic activities, a stage production of the play performed for their school, and a web-based study guide to apply what they had learned. The idea was to use collaborative projects to get the kids to work together to make collective sense of the play. I then examined their written work for evidence that they had displayed the skills associated with “The Role Stage” in Courtney’s chart, and I was able to find a great deal of it.

I also create a three-dimensional rubric to assess the students’ work over the course of the unit. I say a three-dimensional rubric because I use the same eight categories in all three rubrics, but they develop over time to reflect the increased sophistication that I expect the students to demonstrate. I then compare the students’ performance-based rubric scores to their reading test scores to demonstrate that standardized testing paints only a very limited picture of what a student can achieve. (I did say that it had a little bit of politics.)

Anyway, that’s what my chapter was about. I just saved you $180! And I’m hoping to return to a regular blogging schedule soon, so more content is hopefully on the way.

with apologies to Elizabeth Bishop

This is a school in Brooklyn.

This is a student out in the yard
Who needs his Student Metrocard
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

These are the books that are much too hard
For the struggling student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is a principal with budget cut short
Who is forced to scale back and is needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the curious student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is the yearly progress report
For the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the sleeping student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is the panel that serves as a Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the hard-working student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is the Mayor who’s closing the schools
And like it or not we must follow his rules
For he chooses eight of thirteen on the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the faceless student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is a city in fiscal dismay
That inflated its scores for Election Day
To support the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the hungry student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is a state that pulls funds away
From its largest city in fiscal dismay
That elects the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the creative student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is the Congress with heavy mandate
That sends rules but not money to the crowded state
That diverts precious funds away
From its largest city in fiscal dismay
That elects the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the failing student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This is a country that lives only to borrow
And spend money on yesterday, not on tomorrow,
With the help of the Congress with heavy mandate
That sends rules but not money to the crowded state
That diverts precious funds away
From its largest city in fiscal dismay
That elects the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the brilliant student who needs a card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

These are the teachers who catch the blame,
Year after year it is always the same,
In a country so broke it must constantly borrow
And spend money on yesterday, not on tomorrow,
With the help of the Congress with heavy mandate
That sends rules but not money to the crowded state
That diverts precious funds away
From its largest city in fiscal dismay
That elects the Mayor who picks the Board
That looks at the tests to see how we scored
To issue a yearly progress report
To the desperate principal needing support
To replace the books that are much too hard
For the innocent student who’s losing his card
To get to his school in Brooklyn.

This morning, I read an editorial from the New York Times editorial staff in my pajamas. How they got in my pajamas, I don’t know:

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was supposed to create clear, reliable data that told parents how local schools stacked up against schools elsewhere in the nation. It has not worked that way, thanks in part to timidity at the Department of Education, which initially allowed states to phony up even the most basic data on graduation rates. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings took a welcome step in the right direction by issuing new rules for how those rates are calculated.

By the 2012-13 school year, states will have to use the generally accepted way of computing their dropout rate. That means tracking students from the day they enter high school until the day they receive regular diplomas, counting as nongraduates those who leave without the diploma. This method was endorsed three years ago by the National Governors Association, which realized that accurate graduation rates were a vital indicator of how well the schools were doing.

Had the federal government led the way on this issue instead of waiting to see how the wind was blowing the country would already have built a sound data collection system.

Were they waiting to see how the wind was blowing? Or were they simply waiting until they were almost out of office?

Let’s be clear. The Bush administration did not simply “allow” states to falsify their dropout rates; they led the charge. George W. Bush ran in 2000 on the “Houston Miracle” in education, where Superintendent Rod Paige was able to raise test scores and lower dropout rates. Paige became the first Secretary of Education in the Bush White House.

Unfortunately, the “Houston Miracle” turned out to be a scam, which was eventually debunked by, among others, Bill Moyers and 60 Minutes:

All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year, for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country.

“That’s how you get to zero dropouts. By assigning codes that say, ‘Well, this student, you know, went to another school. He did this or that.’ And basically, all 463 students disappeared. And the school reported zero dropouts for the year,” says Kimball. “They were not counted as dropouts, so the school had an outstanding record.”

Sharpstown High wasn’t the only “outstanding” school. The Houston school district reported a citywide dropout rate of 1.5 percent. But educators and experts 60 Minutes checked with put Houston’s true dropout rate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.

“But the teachers didn’t believe it. They knew it was cooking the books. They told me that. Parents told me that,” says Kimball. “The superintendent of schools would make the public believe it was one school. But it is in the system, it is in all of Houston.”

The political ramifications of this should be obvious. The school system is pressured by the politicians to fake the numbers, and the very same politicians get to run on an excellent record of educational reform.

So what happens when the fraud is finally elimated and the statistics start to reflect reality? We’re going to see a massive rise in high school dropout rates. This will not reflect actual high school students dropping out in larger numbers, but rather a change in the way such things are measured. And it’s all set to happen by 2012, when the next president, likely a Democrat, is running for re-election. And the story will be about that president’s dismal record on education, with a chilling statistic about rises in high-school dropout rates during that president’s term.

I agree that the formula needs to be fixed, and the Times is correct that the administration waited too long to do it. But I don’t think the Times editorial goes far enough in outlining the true consequences of the timing, appearing even to praise Spellings for taking this “welcome step in the right direction” which will cost her and her boss a total of nothing, and will likely help the Republican candidate in 2012.

The Center on Education Policy released a disturbing new study this week, measuring the effects of No Child Left Behind:

The report finds that approximately 62% of school districts increased the amount of time spent in elementary schools on English language arts and or math, while 44% of districts cut time on science, social studies, art and music, physical education, lunch or recess.

Now, I’m pretty much appalled by all of the cutbacks, but I’ll leave the bulk of it to ScienceTeacher.com, SocialStudiesTeacher.com, and LunchTeacher.com. I’m ShakespeareTeacher.com, so I want to talk about arts education.

(And let’s make no mistake – the extra time being spent on ELA isn’t being spent on literature. It’s being spent on test prep, and more test prep.)

Arts education is absolutely essential for students preparing for the world that we’re currently living in. With the image continuing to gain dominance over the written word, people who can demonstrate artistic ability are highly marketable in today’s economy. From graphic designers to documentary filmmakers, those who can master today’s tools of communication are able to command a wider audience and expand their range of communication. In the connected world, this is real currency.

And even if all of that weren’t true, the arts teach us how to identify problems and solve them with creativity and discipline. Those skills help us in any endeavor.

I came across a website for an artist named Jen Stark, who creates sculptures from construction paper that won’t help anyone pass a reading test any time soon. But they bring beauty into the world, which is worth at least a link from my blog. Take a look at her work, and tell me she didn’t have to develop some pretty sophisticated math skills along the way.

Or take French artist Huber Duprat, who recruited caddis fly larvae, who typically create protective shells out of silk and their surrounding materials, and placed them in an environment of gold flakes and precious gems. The result is a combination of art and science that boggles the mind. Click the picture below to see the video.

Or take a look at the Universcale by Nikon, an application of the mathematics of scale to allow human comprehension of the natural universe, and tell me your appreciation of it isn’t primarily aesthetic.

I wonder what Leonardo DaVinci would have thought about eliminating arts education to teach math. What would Shakespeare have thought about eliminating arts education to teach literacy? What would Descartes say about eliminating science to teach math? What would Hemmingway think of eliminating social studies to teach literacy?

Reading and math are important skills. But even if an educational system were somehow able to acheive 100 percent literacy and numeracy, and nothing else, it would still be a failure.