Testing Teacher Effectiveness

Grant Wiggins, the "Understanding By Design" guy, agrees with Cuomo that the current local system of teacher ratings in NY is a "sham", but writes (from New Jersey) in An Open Letter to Governor Cuomo: Re-think the Regs of APPR | Granted, and...

Here is a simple analogy to make the point. You were a ballplayer and are a Yankees fan. But suppose only once per year, we “tested” the Yankees on their skills, on tests developed by experts. Now, imagine, the players do not know how they did, either during or after the test. Now imagine, the NYSED gives them a value-added score – with test security, so they cannot double-check or question the test results (or test validity). Worse, imagine in addition that the impartial evaluators and internal supervisors (coaches) went to one game where the Yankees were terrible – like the game last week in which they made 4 errors, left runners stranded, and pitched poorly. By the logic of your plan, we would be obligated to find Manager Girardi “ineffective.” But that’s both bad measurement and not common sense. Two weeks later it looks different, doesn’t it? Indeed, the charm of baseball is that a long season of 162 “tests” enables the truth of quality to out. If this is true for highly-skilled and trained professional athletes, what about novice young students?

In short, I fear you are making matters worse, not better, by this new round of reductionist rules. And by insisting that they be put into operation next year, with no time to really think them through, test them, and refine them ensures that this effort will backfire.

Campbell's Law, Standardized Testing, Accountability, Atlanta

I've mentioned Campbell's law on this blog before. As Wikipedia says, Campbell's law

is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell:

"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

The social science principle of Campbell's law is sometimes used to point out the negative consequences of high-stakes testing in U.S. classrooms. This may take the form of teaching to the test or outright cheating.

This week SlashDot reports Prosecutors Get an 'A' On Convictions of Atlanta Ed-Reform-Gone-Bad Test Cheats - Slashdot

in early 2010, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported on how Hall and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were bringing a "fair and transparent evaluation and support mechanism" to the Atlanta Public Schools. "We are excited to continue our [$23.6 million] partnership with APS and Dr. Hall," said Gates Foundation director of education Vicki L. Phillips. Five years earlier, in a 2005 Gates Foundation press release, Hall said, "We look forward to partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to take our reform efforts to the next level."

And now they're in jail -- well, Hall was facing 45 years in prison, but died before the end of the trial. Eleven are in jail. And it's hard to argue that this isn't a foreseeable consequence of excessive reliance on measurables -- i.e., on standardized testing. As the Atlantic puts it, Eleven Atlanta Educators Have Been Convicted for Cheating Conspiracy, Revealing the Dangers of Standardized Testing — The Atlantic

The scandal shows the dangers of hyper-testing and bureaucracy in a school district serving a particularly disadvantaged population of students. Unfortunately, although what happened in Atlanta is especially egregious, these educators' actions are not unusual...

People do respond to incentives.

That doesn't mean that testing is bad...testing is good, every teacher uses it. High-stakes testing creates strong incentives which will distort results and hurt some kids. The kind of low-stakes testing built into Khan Academy or Ted-Ed lessons is pretty safe because no individual score is worth gaming. But the Big Test Day idea, where scores mean money, strikes me as fundamentally flawed.

Motivation, Feedback, Content

For an infovore like me, the Internet does indeed seem like a gigantic, interactive version of the libraries that took (or do I mean provided?) so much of my childhood -- and between them, they've served as basis for self-education that keeps on going. But does that provide an alternative to classroom learning for normal people? I dunno. Arnold Kling suggests in Online Self-Education: The Bigger, Closer Library | askblog that we

think of learning as requiring motivation, feedback, and content. The library has the content, but you have to be motivated to use it and you need feedback to know whether you are using it well. Perhaps right now the classroom provides better motivation and feedback.

However, I expect within a few years to see feedback systems on phones and tablets that are at least competitive with the feedback process that occurs in a classroom. At that point, the only contribution that classroom time can make is to help with motivation–teachers motivating students and students motivating one another.

That's quite a claim, but it's not at all impossible. Feedback systems on phones and tables will not, of course, be similar to the feedback system provided by a teacher any more than a sewing machine's motions are similar to those of a traditional seamstress. However, the app that reacts to your input will have learned from experience with tens of millions of students, some of whom had more or less exactly the problem you're having. Dissimilar != worse.

State Policy Impact on HCS Budget

(updated below 2015-03-31, and again 2015-04-03)
A link with clips to a document on the Hamilton Central website, at Factors Affecting the Hamilton Central School 2015-16 Budget (PDF)

New York Schools face an exceptionally difficult task when preparing budgets this year. The Governor has linked funding to an aggressive legislative agenda, and has pushed back the dates for sharing state budget runs with districts. This document provides a brief summary of how these proposals could impact HCS.

The Gap Elimination Adjustment(GEA) is an adjustment to state aid to schools first implemented in 2009-10 to help close large state budget deficits. ... The amount taken from this year’s budget was $474,572. We cannot predict the GEA amount for next year’s budget....With a 5 billion dollar state budget surplus there is no longer a budget gap, and there is no justification for continuing the GEA.

The final tax cap calculation for HCS that had to be submitted to the state by March 1 was -0.49%. In order to be tax cap compliant this year, we would have to reduce the 2014-15 levy amount by $32,232. Of course our expenses continue to rise, so even keeping the budget the same as the current school year would result in cuts to our current offerings....

The Governor and the Board of Regents advocate changing APPR so that 50% of a teacher’s performance score will come from student performance on standardized tests. [Part of the remaining score must be based on] observations... by an independent observer... This is an unfunded mandate, and would put more strain on our budget....

Contact Information:

• Governor Andrew M. Cuomo http://www.governor.ny.gov/contact
• Assemblyman Bill Magee contact via online form: ​ http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/William-Magee/contact
• Senator Dave Valesky​: valesky@nysenate.gov​
• Members of the Board of Regents: http://www.regents.nysed.gov/members/
• HCS Board of Education: boe@hamiltoncentral.org

Update:Deal Is Reached on New York State Budget; Ethics Measures Are Included - NYTimes.com

The governor had dangled a $1.1 billion increase in education aid in exchange for the Legislature agreeing to pass a series of reforms, including tying teacher evaluations more closely to students’ state test scores, making it more difficult for teachers to receive tenure and allowing the state to take over low-performing schools.

Teachers’ unions energetically opposed the governor’s proposals. ...

In the end, the budget will include an even larger increase in education aid – about $1.6 billion, according to Assembly Democrats. Cuomo administration officials said the budget would establish parameters for teacher evaluations that would result in a more rigorous evaluation system; the changes would be left to the State Education Department to work out.

The budget agreement would lengthen the time before teachers are eligible for tenure to four years, from the current three; Mr. Cuomo had proposed a five-year wait.

Update 2:Estimated State Aid for 2015-2016 is shown at 2014-15 AND 2015-16 AIDS PAYABLE ... HAMILTON which they summarize as

$ CHG 15-16 MINUS 14-15                                      140,890
% CHG TOTAL AID                                                 3.26
 
$ CHG W/O BLDG, REORG BLDG AID                               260,655
% CHG W/O BLDG, REORG BLDG AID                                  7.43

Most items are increased a bit, but the biggest single change is the $-291,889 reduction ("GAP RESTORATION") in the GEA. There's some discussion at Only 1 school district in Central New York will get state aid cut in NY state budget | syracuse.com

On Being a Student (Temporarily)

I'm not sure how much effort this blog deserves, at this point; I was letting it die without ever really deciding to do so, but it's possible that saving brief notes or at least clips on educational practice and progress will be useful in future, and I do scan blog posts anyway. So.... Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns - The Washington Post

I have made a terrible mistake.

I waited 14 years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things – the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!

This is the first year I am working in a school but not teaching my own classes; I am the High School Learning Coach, a new position for the school this year. My job is to work with teachers and administrators to improve student learning outcomes.

As part of getting my feet wet, my principal suggested I “be” a student for two days: I was to shadow and complete all the work of a 10th grade student on one day and to do the same for a 12th grade student on another day....

It's an interesting story, and perhaps all teachers should do that... one or two days per year? There's a postscript to it on Wiggins' blog, at A PS to the guest post on shadowing HS students (and the author revealed) | Granted, and...

I was the first teacher in my school – in 1978 – to tape myself. I thought: well, coaches watch game film; why don’t I? Yikes! I was horrified. I had thought of myself as a good teacher and I was praised for being one. But the tape told a different story. My manner was a bit off-putting; I was a tad sarcastic; I was using phrases like “Well, it’s obvious that…” and “So, anyone can see that…” and I was not as skilled as I thought I had been in checking peripheral vision. I had missed 5-6 kids making a timid attempt to enter the discussion. Without my noticing and imploring them in, they fell back to more passive distanced listening...

It occurs to me that every class minute is a minute of "public" behavior by the teacher; perhaps webcams, available for view by parents, should always be on. (Or perhaps every teacher would immediately quit.)

Fractions

Every now and then, when we consider where education should go, it behooves us to pause and reflect on where we're coming from. The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: Why the Third Pounder hamburger failed

One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, ... the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. ... instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
--Elizabeth Green, NYT Magazine, on losing money by overestimating the American public's intelligence

Her source for the story is mentioned by Kevin Drum in The Great Third-Pound Burger Ripoff. I'm skeptical of the moral drawn by Green -- in fact I've tried to teach computer science to bright Colgate students who had major difficulty with fractions or even with "You know how many feet and inches tall you are; you know how many inches there are in a foot; what is your total height in inches?" I ended up attributing this to "Math Anxiety" as described by the books of Sheila Tobias, and I don't think that's what Green is talking about counteracting... Still it's a good story, and it might very well be true.

Board of Education Meeting, Tuesday 2014-03-18

It's really nice to have the BoE meetings put up on YouTube; unfortunately there was no microphone in front of Diana Bowers (Superintendent until July) so that answers to some questions are not audible to me, except in bits and pieces. Also, some BoE members leaned back too far from the microphones, sometimes. Anyway, I'll set it here with notes below so that you can find segments for particular speakers or subjects. Umm, I skipped the FFA presentation somewhere early, I see...sorry, it's not what I was focused on. (But the state FFA convention will be here, with local schools including HCS as hosts; it seems to rotate among all the participating schools.)

Bottom Line, as I understand it: We can't save money by refinancing any of our debt; we can save some by not keeping our "resource officer" (policeman), we will probably save some with an "interim Superintendent" being paid less than Diana has been paid and we may save quite a bit if that interim Superintendent is part-time or shared with another district. We may save a trivial amount of money on the GEA if the House amendment to the NY budget goes through, or a small but non-trivial amount if the Senate goes through; the Senate version does end the GEA in 2016--2017, and they have different rules about going past the tax cap (which is 2.21% this year.) We have a long-term problem of sustainability in that our instructional budget has been rising more slowly than inflation for years, while the Special Education program has risen rapidly; it's not clear that anything can be done about that, but in a world of limited resources it is unfortunately fair to say that we (and other NY districts) have increasingly been doing special education instead of general education; resources have been redirected, and the tax cap says they can't be increased at the same pace. Perhaps it has to be that way. Meanwhile, we can certainly save money by cutting art, which doesn't seem to be covered in the testing which evaluates how well HCS is doing, so obviously it's not important. (end sarcasm)

6:50--13:55 Barbara Houze, retiring art teacher; she's unhappy at being replaced by a total of 0.7 part-time people who, by "magic math", will be able to cover the actual classes, but the art program will have no planner, advisor, or advocate; only the actual classes will be covered.
14:00-16:00 John Knecht spoke up as artist and educator, to say that art should be treated like chemistry or history or math or any other academic subject. (I doubt this; I think of art as a category of subjects, not as a subject; it's of very little importance if we're just training workers with specific skills, but immense importance if we want the creative class, the "black-collar" entrepreneurs/innovators/designers/scientists of the 21st century. Or if we want artists, I suppose.)
16:20--18:15 Denise Leone as a "visiting artist at HCS" said that we evaluate cultures based on their art, and she wanted to understand why art is among the first items to be cut ... to understand the process. Molly Johnson replied that it's not, (a) it's not decided if the art will be cut and anyway (b) we've been cutting a lot for a long time and (c) the process is open, working through open meetings and openly available documents like those at boarddocs for this meeting.
20:00--21 Audrey Miller spoke as a parent of a child who hates school except art/music; this is not about saving the art program, it's about saving the children.
21--22 An HCS art student whose name I can't hear (upd: Sydney Craven) said that a lot of kids need an arts background for what they hope to do with their lives, especially of course if that involves application to an art school. It was well-spoken.
22--24 Lynn Schwarzer talked about the amazing changes wrought by the art teacher who ought to be given a full-time position, after decades of relative inadequacy at HCS. She also talked about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education broadening into STEAM education (I just can't think what that "A" could stand for, but I'd be happy to buy an Evil Mad Scientist STEAM T-shirt for each BoE member; I did long ago link to STEAM Learning Network site: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, to STEAM: A Framework for Teaching Across the Disciplines, and just as an example to Maker Faire and Science Education: American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests. - Slate Magazine.)

Art/music/theatre good, tests bad. (All right, all right -- tests are good for some things, just not for all we now use them for. Art/music/theatre good.)
24-- Carolyn Hsu wanted to know about the specific rules and limits for donations...I could hear Diana's response when I was sitting there, but I can't hear enough of it on the video.
28:15--Stephanie McClintick, as a local artist, wanted further clarification....
31:10--Molly (BoE) Somewhat into the next phase, thanks for and acceptance of the Sports Boosters donation.
31:30--40:00 Embarking on search for the next Superintendent; nothing solid yet, but looks like it has to be an interim.
40:--46 Molly, Diana, Bud -- policy on testing and opt-outs chosen by students or parents.
46--Aaron on opt-out consequences; if fewer than 95% of students participate for two consecutive years, there might be financial consequences but it's not clear in the regulations; there will be a reclassification of the school as not being "in good standing" which might hurt college applications, but (Diana) there may be a lot of downstate schools in this situation and college admissions people will understand.
47 Kevin Ellis continues same topic, but I can't hear him.
52--1:00:30 Matt Crumb on 2.21% tax cap calculation, on failure to save money by refinancing debt, and on House and Senate bills to amend the Governor's proposed budget. Get Your Protests In Before April 1st!
1:00:30 Bill Dowsland on Senior class trip to Hershey Park.
1:01 Susan Marafino pointing out that the "resource officer" is costing us $20K/year, which may be money well spent but it might be money better spent e.g. on keeping the art program going, and that a part-time rather than full-time Superintendent might save even more. (Molly replies that there is some savings implicit in having an interim Superintendent anyway, who will get a lower salary than Diana has received.)
1:05:40 Ellen Larson on testing and teacher evaluation, which ought to be separate.
1:07:50 Ryan Solomon contrasts South African actual violence with American over-protectiveness and would rather spend the resource officer's cost on art; applause suggests that this is a popular view.
1:08:50 Ferdinand von Muench talks about the art and strings programs which seem to be at risk; we just need to follow the library's example with a 3.6% tax increase. He wants to encourage people to go to the next public Finance Planning meeting, but it hasn't been rescheduled yet. He makes two major points: our Administration costs are high, with 6 people to do the admin that other similar-size schools do with 4. (Note that the most expensive of these is of course the superintendent; as he knows but does not say, "School superintendents get paid more than governors in a dozen states: New Jersey, New York,...". So a part-time or shared superintendent might be a really good buy for a financially stretched district. And Special Education of which he is very much in favor, but there is a question of sustainability. (See "bottom line" above, or better yet listen to what he's saying. The recent growth in special education is substantially larger than our deficit; the GEA is larger than our deficit; life is difficult.)


Well, I guess I ran out of steam (not STEAM) as I approached the end, but I'll post this and hope it's somewhat useful to somebody. Error-correction would be appreciated.

Update: Radio Free Hamilton reports here. Sadly, the first comment is "Are these all the same people that voted against the merger. Do they truly not get it and see what they caused". This appears to reflect a failure to realize that some of us turned against the merger when we realized that according to the merger study, it wasn't actually a money-saver -- the economy of scale (reduced staff) and diseconomy of scale (more transport) were quite close to balance. It's certainly probable that most or all of those speaking voted accordingly--I dunno. Obviously, most of Hamilton did. (It was a money-shifter, and that gets complicated. Never mind.) So it goes.

Appealing to International Students

I posted on the possibility that appealing to international students could have financial, academic, and cultural benefits for the school (and quite possibly for schools nearby, as one case where we might share benefits as well as costs). I'd like to say a little more about that.

One interesting question: why would students from China want to come to American schools? School quality is compared between different nations by the "PISA" tests, whose 2012 results came out earlier this month; as you can see at Wikipedia's Programme for International Student Assessment, China (specifically Shanghai) is on top, and we're not. As the Washington Post put it at Key PISA test results for U.S. students

Average scores in mathematics literacy ranged from 613 in Shanghai-China to 368 in Peru. The U.S. average score was 481, which was lower than the OECD average of 494. The U.S. average was lower than 29 education systems, higher than 26 education systems, and not measurably different than 9 education systems.

If we're way down on the test-takers list and they're at the top, why would any students want to come here from there? Community members who went to Yong Zhao's lecture here in August, which I mentioned (with a variety of related material) at HamiltonCentralOptions: Rethinking School Motivations, will not be surprised. Indeed, I'd talked about him (and about psychology prof Peter Gray talking about him) in May at HamiltonCentralOptions: The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately

You might think the Chinese educational leaders would be happy that their kids are scoring so high on these international competitions. But they’re not. ... At the same time that we are continuing to try to be more like them, they are trying—though without much success so far—to be more like us, or like we were before we began trying so hard to be like them. They see that their system is quashing creativity and initiative, with the result that it produces decent bureaucrats and number crunchers, but very few inventors and entrepreneurs.

So take that as context for the Huffington Post's 2011 article on this topic at Public Schools Recruit Tuition-Paying International Students To Boost Revenue

Lei Huang, 16, from Shanghai, is attending Camden Hills high school this year. The school aims to have 10 foreign students next year, from China and Vietnam.

Schools in China, he said, demand long days in the classroom and long nights doing homework, with an emphasis on memorization and testing. In Camden, he appreciates the emphasis on creativity and tapping into students' interests.

Outside of school, he likes being able to drink water out of the tap, the abundance of trees and time to participate on the high school ski team. But he misses buying live fish at seafood markets in China, authentic Chinese food and public transportation so that he's not dependent on others with cars to get around.

So it shouldn't be surprising that this year, Yong Zhao responded to the PISA score release by saying Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Reading the PISA Tea Leaves

While the East Asian systems may enjoy being at the top of international tests, they are not happy at all with the outcomes of their education. They have recognized the damages of their education for a long time and have taken actions to reform their systems. ... It is no exaggeration to say that that the majority of the parents in China would send their children to an American school instead of keeping them in the “best performing” Chinese system, if they had the choice.

I'm not denying the importance of test scores -- other things being equal. Test scores give good data about how well students do on tests, and that tells you a lot about the quality of a significant part of education. However, test-directed education means giving up some even more significant parts of education...and one of the most attractive aspects of attracting Chinese students (and students from other countries that consistently outscore America by virtue of test-directed education) is that it might help us remember that test-directed education is not necessarily good education. The theatre program is also relevant; so are other things. Yes, we should worry about the PISA results with the worst-case interpretation being something like CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: U.S. Education: "Unthinking, Unilateral Educational Disarmament". Yes, we should also look at demographic factors as in Super-Economy: The amazing truth about PISA scores: USA beats Western Europe, ties with Asia. And yes, we should also consider other points of view like TheMoneyIllusion » Why Swedish schools are better than Finnish schools

South Korean students are the least happy students in the world. Finland’s students are near the bottom, and are the least happy of any Western European country. In contrast, South Korea usually scores at the top of “education rankings” based on test scores, and Finland is often in second place.

It’s interesting to compare Finland with its neighbor Sweden. Based on test scores Sweden has the worst schools in Western Europe, even worse than America’s K-12. Horrible schools. But their students are above average in happiness, far above Finland. What explains that difference?

One reason might be that Sweden has a 100% voucherized school system, so schools have to cater to parents. Now I don’t mean to suggest that schools in Sweden are perfect—Swedes have told me the legacy of the old socialist system hangs on to some extent, and most students still go to state schools. Still, the vouchers are gradually forcing the schools to conform more to customer preferences.

Some might argue that high test scores are needed to produce the sort of highly-skilled workers needed for the modern economy. That’s false, and Sweden proves it. Its workers are more productive than Finnish workers because test scores tell us little about productivity...

(Recent news suggests that some of the private companies providing Sweden's education weren't well-run, financially. That's a factor too.)

And is there a conclusion here? Not really -- except that (1) everything is more complicated, the more you look at it, and (2) there are good reasons why some, perhaps even most, Chinese parents might prefer our school system to theirs, and (3) learning about international students might tell us something about ourselves. Is that surprising?

I was also going to list random attractions, like the walkability of the village and the presence of the hospital, but I think I'll skip that for now.

On Centralization

Larry Cuban's teacher blog, which often discusses historical trends in teaching, notes the context of the Common Core at Competing Traditions of Teaching: An Old Story Written Anew | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Since the early 1990s, however, states have embraced standards-based reforms, accountability measures, and mandated testing peaking with No Child Left Behind in 2001. How, then, in the past two accountability-driven decades have most teachers organized instruction, grouped students, and taught lessons?

For those who listen to teachers, the answer is self-evident. Classroom stories and teacher surveys have reported again and again that more lesson time is spent preparing students for high-stakes tests. And what is taught has narrowed to what appears on tests.

Such stories and surveys describe classroom instruction, particularly in largely poor and minority schools, as more teacher-centered, focused on meeting prescribed state standards and raising test scores. Teachers have felt pressured to drop student-centered activities such as small group work, discussions, learning centers, and writing portfolios because such activities take away precious classroom time from standards-based curriculum and test preparation.

I think this is in line with Yong Zhao's discussion; centralization (and the high-stakes testing which holds it together) tends to conflict with letting students develop as self-directed learners/citizens.

Or then again, maybe not.

The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately

More on Yong Zhao's case against US educational "reform" trends (I've mentioned him here and here) at Be Glad for Our Failure to Catch up With China in Education | Psychology Today

Our schools are better than China’s because ours don’t work as well as theirs.

For more than 20 years we’ve had national educational goals aimed at emulating the Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) educational system. We’ve been working toward more centralization of control, more standardization of curricula and methods, and more student time in the classroom and at homework, all in an effort to produce higher scores on standardized tests. ...

You might think the Chinese educational leaders would be happy that their kids are scoring so high on these international competitions. But they’re not. ... At the same time that we are continuing to try to be more like them, they are trying—though without much success so far—to be more like us, or like we were before we began trying so hard to be like them. They see that their system is quashing creativity and initiative, with the result that it produces decent bureaucrats and number crunchers, but very few inventors and entrepreneurs.

The columnist is psychologist Peter Gray; his alternative reform direction is interesting, to put it mildly. I should write about that.

Education Funding: the Null Hypothesis

It's hard to believe that more money doesn't produce better results. It's hard to believe the graphs that accompany Evaluating the Null Hypothesis in Education | askblog

there is no clear correlation between funding and school average performance; for a given level of funding, there is significant variation in performance the calculated correlation coefficient between the two variables was less than 0.1. In our view, this suggests that the level of funding, per se, is almost irrelevant as a predictor of performance.

Not absolutely irrelevant; only almost.
Or then again, maybe not.

America's "Best" High Schools (Newsweek/Daily Beast)

Radio Free Hamilton notes that HCS is #874 among the country's high schools "that have proven to be most effective at turning out college-ready grads." HCS Rates Among Best Public High Schools in U.S.

Only a handful of schools in the area were included on the list:

• Clinton 635th
• Cazenovia 903rd
• Skaneateles 941st
• Cooperstown 1,386th
• Vernon-Verona-Sherrill 1,896th

I would also note that New Hartford Senior High was #250, Jamesville DeWitt was #561, and Fayetteville-Manlius was #606. Morrisville was not on the list.

Tests, Grades, Gender

So little boys test well, but get worse grades. And people keep doing research on why. Here's this week's entry: New UGA research helps explain why girls do better in school | UGA Today

Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys-even when they perform worse on standardized tests?
New research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University published in the current issue of Journal of Human Resources suggests that it's because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts.
... The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.
The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or "how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalized or internalized problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills." ...
This difference can have long-reaching effects, Cornwell said.

I would think it might indeed. This causes me to think two kinds of thoughts: one is that maybe more girls than boys are comfortable in a top-down directive factory-model school; different school formats will work for different kids. And the other kind of thought is more specific...it would be very interesting to see if this is still true with "flipped" classrooms.

Instant Feedback

The New York Times reports onNew Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com

EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers.

The software will be freely available to any institution that wants to use it, and apparently the grading results (after initial training) are within the range of variation expected of human graders. I'd expect that for years to come, the "artificial intelligence" code will fall short in the sense that a student who understands it (and would be getting excellent grades anyway) could use that understanding to get excellent grades for essays that any human would say are lousy. In practice, that may not matter: the essays will be online, which means that students trying to "cheat" in this way will have to face the fact that some of those essays will be seen by human readers; perhaps a random selection, perhaps at a later time, and some courses will be designed so that students read and react to two essays for each essay which they write, to provide supplementary feedback. I would think that the main value of the system will be the instant feedback that it provides; a student can submit, consider the response, submit, consider the response, submit... And learn.

Or then again, maybe not.

Adult Incentives and School Reform

This morning I saw Eugene Robinson: The racket with standardized test scores - The Washington Post

It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform — requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores — is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.
I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta public schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday...

and the problem seems to be that administrators, teachers, and students are all rewarded for doing well on measurements -- measurements which can be faked, so those who are disposed to fake them will do well. Business Insider reports on Atlanta Cheating Indictment Beverly Hall

Former 'Superintendent Of The Year' Could Go To Prison For 45 Years
Thirty-five Atlanta educators were indicted last week for allegedly participating in a cheating conspiracy involving one of America's most storied school superintendents.

and similarly Daily Kos discusses, saying

Robinson writes

Our schools desperately need to be fixed. But creating a situation in which teachers are more likely than students to cheat cannot be the right path.

....the vast majority of teachers do NOT cheat. The statement has the effect of smearing the profession. It is more than unfortunate that Robinson offered those words. For all the cheating scandals he can identify, even where teachers were involved, in some cases they were directed by their superiors to do things that are illegal and unethical....

I don't see that as a correction to Robinson, but as an explanation of part of the mechanism by which some teachers were led to cheat. Sure. Creating a situation in which [administrators and] teachers are [more] likely [than students] to cheat, whether because they are directly ordered to do so or simply because their evaluations depend on it, cannot be the right path. For some reason I am reminded of Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, found as a Gutenberg text here.

Or then again....

update: I see a better write-up at Cheating in schools: There are no good guys here | The Economist, but not a basically different point of view.

Other School Analogies: Day Jail?

School isn't just about learning; it's also about signaling that you've learned, of course. Beyond that, it's about making society work, in such a way that parents can do what they need to do all day. Arnold Kling, in The Dark View of Schooling, notes

Bryan Caplan thinks that schooling is not about education. He thinks instead it is about signaling.
Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.

society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. ... That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

I do believe that technological improvements can make signaling a lot easier, in K-12 as much as in How testing could transform higher education:

having a well-calibrated measurement would put a lot more focus on learning the material and much less on how you learned it. No one will care too much which book you read, which online class you took, or what exercises you did. Those are all just ways to learn. Second, this would truly democratize education—the self taught Bangladeshi is on equal footing with the legacy Harvard admittee.

If you want to know if a kid has grasped 10th grade math, start him on the Khan Academy 11th grade sequence and see how quickly he reaches "mastery". Of course you probably need humans to rate English composition, if not reading comprehension, but you can go a long ways without adult humans involved -- let ten kids write short essays to summarize some information, each of them answers ten sets of multiple-choice questions, and they get comprehension scores based on how well they answered, but composition scores based on how well their readers answered. (Is this a bad idea? Probably; I just thought of it. There are lots of possibilities.) The testing tools for this probably won't come very quickly, and they won't come at the same pace in all subject/skill areas, but they're coming. I'm less confident that we'll get a substitute for the "day jail for kids." Many parents will want to know that their kids are somewhere being supervised -- the sort of "off in the woods, probably building a dam" that went over well enough in the late 50s (when I went along with my elder siblings) is probably gone forever.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

Federal yes-and-no

The American Enterprise Institute has interesting opinions and lengthy arguments on What Uncle Sam can (and cannot) do to improve K–12 schooling: Lessons for the next four years

We believe that federal policymakers are uniquely well-suited to put particular education issues on the national agenda, tackle discriminatory practices that violate constitutional protections, push states to adopt cut-and-dried policies like annual assessment or data disaggregation, and promote transparency by collecting data and requiring states to report on student achievement. At the same time, Washington is ill-suited to change what happens in schools or classrooms and to compel state and local officials to conscientiously do things they are not inclined to do. Attempts to mandate school improvement models, teacher evaluation frameworks, professional development, or other interventions that depend on the skill and commitment with which they are implemented are likely to disappoint for the same reasons that have hampered even the best-laid federal plans for “fixing” schools.

I'm not convinced by much of it -- in fact it's not at all the infrastructure focus I'd choose for Federal policy, but it's worth reading.

Study Strategies

Which study strategies make the grade?

Students everywhere, put down those highlighters and pick up some flashcards! Some of the most popular study strategies -- such as highlighting and even rereading -- don't show much promise for improving student learning, according to a new report published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

If I understand correctly, basically they support flashcards and practice tests (spread over time). Looking at the successes and failures, it seems that the more effective techniques (in their study) are those which directly mimic performance (on a test) rather than those like highlighting and summarizing which try to make sense of the material. My suspicion is that we're not comparing apples and oranges but rather axes and hammers -- different tools which should be used at different times for different tasks by different students; so I'd advocate computerized highlighters (as in the Kindle) and computerized flashcards (all kinds of software available) linked to self-tracking software (based on Google spreadsheet forms, or the equivalent.) Your mileage may vary, so you should keep track of it.

Saving Money

The "Conversable Economist" keeps looking for research supporting low-cost school reform proposals. Lately he's seen Classroom Evaluation of K-12 Teachers

"During the TES [Teacher Evaluation System] evaluation year, teachers are typically observed in the classroom and scored four times: three times by an assigned peer evaluator—high-performing, experienced teachers who are external to the school—and once by the principal or another school administrator. ... dozens of specific skills and practices covering classroom management, instruction, content knowledge, and planning, among other topics.... the evaluators are often pretty tough in grading and commenting on lots of specific skills and practices, but then they still tend to give a high overall grade.... almost everyone was ending up with fairly high overall scores, so the practical effects of this evaluation in terms of pay and jobs was pretty minimal.
Nevertheless, student performance not only went up during the year that the evaluation happened, but student performance stayed higher for teachers who had been evaluated in previous years. "... Imagine two students taught by the same teacher in different years who both begin the year at the fiftieth percentile of math achievement. The student taught after the teacher went through comprehensive TES evaluation would score about 4.5 percentile points higher at the end of the year than the student taught before the teacher went through the evaluation. ..."

It's a substantial change, presumably higher for some teachers (and students) and lower for others. It would be interesting to see how much the effect depended on the administrator evaluation vs. the external evaluator evaluation; what could be done by variations in the rubric, or self-evaluation, or even student evaluation using different rubrics. But mostly I'd be interested in how this would work with classes structured in non-traditional ways, especially flipped classrooms.

Taylor (the Conv. Econ.) links to his earlier low-cost reform research post at Low-Cost Education Reforms: Later Starts, K-8, and Focusing Teachers

three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K–12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments.... We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform.

Again, my main concerns would be how this interacts with modified classroom structure -- and with consolidation, which tends to separate the age groups from one another, and by increasing mileage among low-density populations tends to increase the cost of separating transportation.
Or then again, maybe not.

Flipping flops for some?

At the undergraduate level, the Khan-Academy style flipped classroom (extremely loosely defined as "watch videos alone, then come to class to do problems") gets skeptical comments and comments on the comments at I’ll flip something § Unqualified Offerings

I have several colleagues who are doing the flipped classroom this year and it’s bombing. Basically, they say it’s working great for motivated students who love going at their own pace with online “modules” and are happy to do problems in class. But, anything will work for motivated students.
For most of the lot, they say, it’s a failure because they come to these problem sessions (what used to be lectures) and they haven’t read the material and now you have to sort-of teach them in digest form on the fly if their time is not to be completely wasted. So yes, I am unimpressed with the flipped classroom.

This kind of thing obviously wants watching; I would like to know what sort of videos are in use here. It sounds like this might be simply institutionalized one-hour talking-head lectures made available to students on the web. If so, I would expect such failures...but if the results apply to actual Khan-Academy style small segments in Khan's own "don't see me, see what I'm seeing" style, with questions to answer before passing to the next segment, then there's at least a potential Big Problem. And of course this is possible. And if there's a Big Problem, it may or may not have a solution (are your online answers part of your grade? Do you need to check in to a scheduled lab to do your online work? etc. Khan's own belief, at the lower level where he's working, seems to be that scheduled labs, total maybe 20% of the day, are about right. But that's not the way some schools are trying it. Hmm.)
I dunno.