MAPping Revolt

Cartoon courtesy of maineiac.com.

The Seattle Schools superintendent has magnanimously chosen not to behead those upstart employees who boycotted the MAP® “universal screener” test earlier this year. Natch, his decision has nothing to do with the public uproar any disciplinary action would have provoked, or with the fact that the district was still able to implement the test in spite of it all. So there.

 

Amazing how many progressive educators have bought into the testing craze, given that “progressive education” used to denote student-centered policies that made schooling more humane, not less. Under the New Clinicism data is king, even data gathered at any price. As is so often the case in public education, the current reality was begotten by the worst of the political left and right both.

Speaking of children, one has to ask whether this current generation of students will allow their own kids to suffer the same testing regime under which they’re suffering now. And will our policymakers apologize for their own arrogance when their decisions are repudiated at the ballot box in the years to come? Perhaps educrats and politicos should take more interest in timelines and less interest in maps.

Blooming Corruption

In the “Data Is Fabulous!” department, efforts are afoot to place every American schoolchild’s academic records on the cloud. In fact, it’s not just afoot: it’s a done deal. A newborn nonprofit called inBloom, Inc. (love that stylized corporate Esperanto) has already been forklifting reams of data from nine states onto a digital stockpile, and more states are eager to follow. And it’s all perfectly legal. Seems education secretary Arne Duncan wisely arranged to have FERPA altered last year for this very purpose, so that meddlesome parents and advocacy groups can’t assert their privacy rights. Way to strike a blow for the privatizers, Mr. Secretary.

This is truly cause for celebration. As the age of McLearnings™ advances, children everywhere will soon be able to enjoy the very best that commercial education franchisers have to offer: pricey scams, constant text and e-mail solicitations, “curricula” written by software developers, personalized trinket-trash, and much, much more. It’s a good thing that opting out is not an option.

Field Testing: What Price Validity?

Among the scurrilous multitude of wrongs inspired by the most totally bitchin’ education law ever is the practice of field testing, in which students are made to undergo standardized tests that don’t even count. Students are impressed into service as guinea pigs with no due consideration in return, not so much as a thank-you or a Tootsie Roll. Both education officials and testing companies call this a necessary—even desirable—means of quality assurance. Others call it just plain child abuse.

 

Field tests are not-ready-for-primetime versions of the state juggernauts that already dominate the time and resources of public school systems nationally, not only because of the end-of-year administration of said tests but because of the regular “benchmarking” and dress-rehearsals schools have put in place throughout the year to prepare and remediate students. Often field tests occur in dumbfounding conjunction with the real ones, as when, a few years ago, I was forced to administer a full-day writing field test to my high-school junior English classes in February, the same students who would take the actual exit-level English Language Arts test in early March—another full-day testathon in itself. Now, in April of this year, certain lucky Texas 11^th-graders will sit for a mandatory STAAR English field test even though they are the last cohort to graduate under the old Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test regime, and even though they will have sat for their exit-level TAKS Language Arts exam only a month before.  

 

“Field testing is an important part of the item and test development process,” says the Texas Education Agency in one policy document. “[It] allows for the development of tests that are fair for all student groups, are of high quality, are legally defensible, and can withstand rigorous scrutiny when evaluated relative to professional standards.” As if the damage wrought by lost instructional time, crowded schedules, wasted resources, and additional stress is fair to students. As if field testing itself is professional or withstands rigorous scrutiny. The phrase “legally defensible” is telling as well, denoting as it does the state’s interests, not students’. While field testing may indeed provide a ready CYA for education ministries beleaguered by a litigious society, that is still a poor excuse for shifting the burden onto children.

 

Most lawsuits over standardized tests involve incompetence and chicanery by the private contractors who create and manage the tests. Both Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Pearson Education have paid out millions in recent years to plaintiffs damaged by botched test scores. The shift of education assessment from the public sector into the hands of a few powerful private vendors was probably inevitable under No Child Left Behind, and even with such high-dollar foul-ups, business obviously remains good. At the moment Pearson holds a $500 million contract with Texas to author and administer the STAAR. At that price, one might reasonably assume Pearson—a billion-dollar British conglomerate—has its own internal resources for determining test reliability and validity. But one would be wrong, despite the fact that Pearson can somehow afford six lobbyists to carry its interests to the halls of the Texas legislature. And there is still another problem with privatized testing: when a commercial entity with contracts in numerous states (New York: $32 million) is allowed access to students for the purpose of product-testing, why is it not exploitation?  

 

Legalities aside, there are other reasons why the Powers That Be should either put a stop to field testing or do a better job of explaining it. Strangely, the Powers That Be are rarely available to answer for their bad policies. When April comes, juniors statewide will look at their teachers, mouths agape, and say “But we just took our exit test! Why do we have to go through this again?” And hundreds of teachers, I included, will look at our students and shrug, perhaps mumble a vague apology. Once again, the system has sabotaged us. Once again, teachers are left holding the bag, made to answer for decisions made by hypocrites and charlatans who are nowhere to be found at the moment of truth. And what student wouldn’t hold such a system, and the people who run it, in utter contempt?

 

Field testing is a deplorable practice, and it should end at once.

The Name Game

How refreshing to see Texas actually tap the brakes on testing this past week. But even if HB 5 or something like it clears the legislature, the age of the New Clinicism, in which everything taught in schools must have direct and measurable impact on student achievement, will surely continue in Texas and everywhere else.  

 

Given that our own professional leadership now advocates linking teacher performance with student outcomes as much as the political reformers do, then perhaps it’s time for another type of education reform: truth in advertising. Because students no longer complete course curricula but rather achieve “mastery” as measured by standardized tests, then let the instruments of measurement be the curricula on student transcripts. In other words, let’s drop the whole pretense of course names like “Language Arts” and “History” and title each course for the specific test-prep boot-camp that it is: Texas high-schoolers would no longer take English I, English II, etc., but rather “STAAR English I Reading,” “STAAR English II Writing,” etc. (English IV would simply bite the dust since the state test doesn’t assess British literature.) Let the test become the course in name, as it already is in practice, and let student class schedules and transcripts reflect this, so that parents and colleges don’t draw the false conclusion that students have actually completed a traditional course of study. And let us not insult the great traditions behind the humanities and the sciences by claiming that test-mastery and education are the same thing.

 

The standards movement has so thoroughly conflated the benefits of learning with “outcomes” that there is probably no going back. But at least we can stop deceiving ourselves and our students with names and labels that try to have it both ways. As a matter of fact, about that word “diploma”….

Memo: No More "i" in Office

Over at AllThingsPLC, we have a forehead-slapping rationale why even school-office personnel should be trained in the ways of a Professional Learning Community: they perform their duties “in isolation,” the cardinal sin in PLC theology. Woe unto thee, O Dilbert.

 

But fret not. In today’s cutting-edge, research-based, gluten-free PLC, the phone-answering and copy-making continue, only now they occur “side by side.” When office staff “view themselves as a practicing PLC,” they enjoy the advantages of more meetings, more togetherness, and, apparently, more work. Because a true PLC happily exploits that devilish phrase in every public-school employee’s contract, “other duties as assigned,” office personnel can expect to have their duties “updated,” expanded, inflated, and distorted. Why?  So that principals can spend more time micromanaging teachers and enforcing ideology.
 

Question: in the PLC Shangri-La of “shared” this and “collective” that, do these newly burdened office managers “share” in their principals’ salaries?

Marzano Is God

In the hazy, crazy, late 1960s, a young bloke’s smokin’ blues guitar on a one-album stint with a soon-to-be-defunct British blues band inspired some other bloke (or blokes) to spray-paint CLAPTON IS GOD on a London Underground station wall. A hero-cult was born, as the same graffito soon proliferated throughout central London, a sort of rock’n’roll KILROY WAS HERE.

 

For decades afterwards the Clapton in question, Eric, both profited by and suffered from his early deification. A legend is hard to live up to, especially when you’re still alive. Rock historians will say that to subscribe to the Clapton cult is to ignore the ground broken by Clapton’s numerous contemporaries—Jeff Beck, Peter Green, Jimmy Page, and perhaps a dozen others. Some say, when examining Clapton’s musical greatness, that there is precious little “there” there at all. It turns out that this early Clapton fever was driven more-or-less by a technical gimmick, i.e. Clapton’s use of a particular kind of Les Paul with two PAF humbuckers. Clapton’s anointing as “God,” much like Springsteen’s “The Boss,” was the offspring of a few nameless enthusiasts and the slot-machine of celebrity.   

 

Strangely enough, this is the same process by which modern American education chooses its own icons. A case in point is Dr. Robert Marzano, author, meta-analyst, and all-around guru grande, whose products and services are among the most-sought in the lucrative professional-development industry. Some teachers swear by his work, and those who don’t have at least encountered it one way or another; “Marzano” the brand is as commonplace at educational workshops as trinket-trash.

 

Meta-analysis is Marzano’s humbucker, his fancy gadget whose precise function and nature are rarely understood or even questioned—especially by teachers. Simply put, it is the research of others’ research, ground and processed through any number of statistical veeblefetzers and sprayed out on a gigantic canvas. In a certain sense, meta-analysis is really mega-analysis: it’s BIG, damn BIG, IMAX BIG, its very appeal being its supposed ability to make sense out of staggering stacks of minutiae. That probably explains why so many administrators adore San Marzano tomatoes: needing some way to manage teachers across all departments and disciplines, they seize on What Works in Schools or The Art and Science of Teaching and go scurrying through school classrooms and corridors, looking for “evidence” that teachers are not just following Marzano’s recipes for learning but following them CORRECTLY.

 

But meta-analysis is not without its critics, nor (thankfully) is Marzano. It’s just that challenging the Marzano brand or the techniques behind it risks provoking the “Marzano Is God” cult. Because whole school systems as well as individual administrators have developed policies based on the work of Bob Marzano (May we call you “Bob,” Doctor? I think we will, thank you!), the mere act of questioning his meta-orthodoxy now carries the additional risk of insubordination. That’s an awful lot of power and authority for one man, one brand, or one vendor of educational products. Marzano and his namesake company constitute all three.

 

Take Marzano’s research on Promethean boards, published in 2009 and loudly heralded by the manufacturer itself. Seems that Promethean’s ActivClassroom is one sweet little humbucker when it comes to student achievement, causing “relatively large percentile gains” in learning under “quasi-experimental” conditions. Is it reasonable to assume that some school systems went all ascramble to get their purchase orders in to Promethean because of this announcement? Hells yes. Were those school systems aware of the numerous design flaws implicit in the Marzano study? Probably not. Were they aware that Promethean itself sponsored (read: paid for) said study? Don’t even go there.

 

More recently, furor has erupted in Florida over Marzano’s sexy, state-of-the-art teacher-evaluation system. This in turn has caused some commentators to start probing the Marzano cult more closely. That’s a good thing, but the backlash against the Marzano brand is a little late. Even if one accepts its research methods as valid, there is the added problem of the conditions under which Marzanism arose. Educational leaders are big on paying tribute to pseudo-scientific formalities like “data” and “research,” but in their hearts they are still ideologues, susceptible to whatever floats their precious boats, the same kinds of closet fanatics who vandalized that Islington Station wall in 1967. And let us not forget either the hippie pretenders who sold out in the 1980s, traded their suede for business suits and went mercenary. These, too, are the kinds of personalities—administrative types who harbor their own ambitions of joining the consulting racket post-career—responsible for fostering the current educational reality.

 

Everyone knows that teachers don’t choose their profession for the sake of riches. But there are a few ways to get rich in education, and every one of them reeks of corruption. These paths include the testing industry, the textbook business, and the consulting racket. Of these, consulting is the most vulnerable to hero-worship. Over the years Eric Clapton at least had the good sense to disassociate himself from the whole hero-cult thing, probably recognizing the danger to his reputation was greater than whatever glory came from being “God.” Still, it’s hard to say how much of Clapton’s legacy is legit and how much is hype. Similarly, it’s hard to say how much of Marzano—the man, the brand, the business, the tomato, the whatever—is legitimate when the consultant business in general operates just beyond the kind of public scrutiny under which teachers labor. Did he profit a little too much? Did he wield just a little too much power? The world may never know.

 

That’s rock’n’roll.

Would You Like a Side of Learnings with That?

Know a sophist by his linguistic perversions. The word “learnings” is gaining near ubiquity in education circles of late, part of the ever-growing mutant lexicon of congealed crap known as edspeak. What an underwhelming surprise to learn that it originated in the corporate arena, from among the same oily ladder-climbers who gave us “synergy” and “let’s do lunch.” What a refreshing delight to learn it has inspired at least one parody website. By god, if subversives like these keep insisting on thinking for themselves, we might just reclaim our language if not our education system.