U.S. Senate See Full Big Line

(D) J. Hickenlooper*

(R) Somebody

80%

20%

Governor See Full Big Line
(D) Phil Weiser

(D) Joe Neguse

(D) Jena Griswold

60%

60%

40%↓

Att. General See Full Big Line

(D) M. Dougherty

(D) Alexis King

(D) Brian Mason

40%

40%

30%

Sec. of State See Full Big Line
(D) A. Gonzalez

(D) George Stern

(R) Sheri Davis

50%↑

40%

30%

State Treasurer See Full Big Line

(D) Brianna Titone

(R) Kevin Grantham

(D) Jerry DiTullio

60%

30%

20%

CO-01 (Denver) See Full Big Line

(D) Diana DeGette*

(R) Somebody

90%

2%

CO-02 (Boulder-ish) See Full Big Line

(D) Joe Neguse*

(R) Somebody

90%

2%

CO-03 (West & Southern CO) See Full Big Line

(R) Jeff Hurd*

(D) Somebody

80%

40%

CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado) See Full Big Line

(R) Lauren Boebert*

(D) Somebody

90%

10%

CO-05 (Colorado Springs) See Full Big Line

(R) Jeff Crank*

(D) Somebody

80%

20%

CO-06 (Aurora) See Full Big Line

(D) Jason Crow*

(R) Somebody

90%

10%

CO-07 (Jefferson County) See Full Big Line

(D) B. Pettersen*

(R) Somebody

90%

10%

CO-08 (Northern Colo.) See Full Big Line

(R) Gabe Evans*

(D) Yadira Caraveo

(D) Joe Salazar

50%

40%

40%

State Senate Majority See Full Big Line

DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

80%

20%

State House Majority See Full Big Line

DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

95%

5%

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
May 06, 2010 05:42 PM UTC

Oppose Senate Bill 191 - Teacher Performance Pay

  • 112 Comments
  • by: Angela Engel

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Performance Pay in the Colorado Legislature

Senate Bill 191 will make its way to the House Education Committee to be debated this Thursday May 6, 2009. The deciding vote will be cast by Representative Karen Middleton of Aurora. This legislation has very serious implications for all of us.

The arguments:

Educator and principal evaluations are a good idea.

I agree with the majority of Americans who feel that teachers and principals should be evaluated annually. Although I am an ardent supporter of the preservation of freedom of thought and the highest standards of professional teacher excellence, I would be willing to concede tenure. So long as we recognize that all evaluation is subjective, even quantifiable measurement tools are developed and graded by human subjects. In any profession, the best appraisals come from experts in that particular field. Public defenders should not be assessed by their clients or jurors. Although they are recipients of a lawyer’s services, they are not experts in the law.

As an educator, I have always surveyed my students and parents. When I taught for Douglas County Public Schools the questionnaires from students and parents were helpful. While we recognized the limitations of those valuations, those surveys helped inform the professional goals I developed and accomplished each year. However, my most valuable assessments came from my principal, vice principal and building resource teacher – experts in my field. Their careful valuations came from direct formal and informal assessment and were guided by education and experience.

Why quantify?

Let’s face it. There is an over reliance on technology and an obsession to assign quantitative values to everything.  We have forfeited wisdom for the safety of the numeric. Governor Ritter earlier this year said, “Only what can be measured, can be improved.” That’s a stupid comment. I know that as a parent my relationship to my daughter’s is the most important element in effective parenting. When I returned from a recent business trip my little Sophie (10 years old) asked me if I would cuddle with her. I always make time for cuddling and so we climbed into her bed where I listened attentively as she caught me up on her weekend. This kind of experience cannot be measured. Even so, I’m still improving my listening skills – eliminating distractions, making eye contact, focusing my attention, asking interesting questions, and demonstrating understanding. Education is not the only professional field being reduced to the numeric. Nurses are spending so much time quantifying and accounting that they have little time to actually treat their patients. I wonder what number Governor Ritter would assign the nurse that holds her patients hand.

Proponents of SB 191 say that the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) won’t be used. When I asked one of the sponsors of the bill what tools would be used in calculating a teacher’s value and compensation, he replied, “A standardized test.”  He wasn’t in the legislature in the late 90’s for the debate over grading schools according to CSAP. Back then they said CSAP was a better tool but in the 10 years of high-stakes testing, CSAP was never independently evaluated for validity or reliability. Yet the legislature appropriated millions of dollars over the last decade on developing and administering that test and tracking the subsequent student data. CSAP data told us the same things we’ve known all along. Children of low-income families perform lower on standardized tests and their growth rate is slower than their middle class white counterparts.

We measured it. We did not improve it. In fact, the schools throughout Colorado that are being closed predominantly have the highest populations of low-income and minority children in their respective districts. I asked a legislator if it would be appropriate to assess his leadership ability through the means of a standardized test. Being a statistician, he answered, “yes.” Only that wouldn’t be the model driving SB191. The same paradigm behind SB191 applied to legislators would mean that their pay would be determined by how well their constituents scored on the standardized test. This concerns me greatly. I live in Centennial, Colorado.  While our test scores are guaranteed to be high as indicated by income – we are one of the wealthiest House Districts in the state – our elected representative is Spencer Swalm. Enough said.

How much will it cost?

The current investment in No Child Left Behind is 26 billion each year. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan is proposing $350 million to revise tests. The projected cost to redevelop CSAP is $80 million. Wasted opportunity will cost even more. This past decade of high-stakes and grading schools according to a single measurement tool has failed. Here in Colorado and throughout the nation drop-out rates have increased and the achievement gap has remained unchanged. Money spent on CSAP and the growing bureaucracy needed to manage all the data and reporting has meant less money for higher education. College tuition since the passage of No Child Left Behind has undergone the highest rate increase ever reported in our nation’s history. College is becoming a distant dream to too many families now left in the “Race to the Bottom.” I recently served on a panel with Stephen Krashen. When asked about the alternative to high-stakes testing reforms he said, “food and books.” See the appendix below.

What else does the research say?

SB 191 would require an expansion of testing, at a time when children are already over-tested. There is no research evidence that supports the idea that tying the success of teacher to a standardized test score improves teacher quality. In fact, the evidence shows that high-stakes testing reforms have not correlated to improved student achievement.

Nichols, Glass, and Berliner (2006) found in general no relationship between testing “pressure” in 25 states and achievement on the NAEP math and reading tests. Research by UC Berkeley scholars Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Saltelices shows that high school grades in college preparatory courses are a better predictor of achievement in college and four-year college graduation rates than are standardized tests (the SAT).  Geiser and Saltelices found that adding SAT scores to grades did not provide much more information than grades alone, which suggests that we may not need standardized tests at all. Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson  (2009) reached similar conclusions.

Education is Accountability.

When 49 Governor’s first met in 1989 at the National Education Summit to bring state standards to public education what they didn’t realize was that we already had academic standards. They weren’t uniform but neither are our kids and neither are our communities. When they met again in 1996 at the 2nd Annual Education Summit along with 44 executives they developed the plan to drive education through commercial tests and government mandates.        Assessment is a fundamental component to teaching and learning. The difference is that classroom assessments are applied in real world contexts, without artificial time constraints. Reading, writing, and mathematical problem solving previously were evaluated on an ongoing basis by professional educators, not Kelly Girls or other temp agencies that contract to score state tests.  I’d like to think those Governor’s and business men were simply uniformed and misguided. But that’s not really true. You see, the job of business is to find market opportunities and exploit them. Our schools represent an enormous investment in our tax dollars. It is the role of text book and testing publishers to capitalize, expand their business lines, and grow their profits. And it is the role of parents and teachers to protect our children from those interests. Our job is to fortify our schools of learning and assert our role to elect and direct our local school boards. When our forefathers determined that if “we the people” through the process of representative democracy are to direct our own future, then “we the people” must be educated and empowered. When it comes to government or business defining “what”, “how” and “when” our children must learn, or “how teachers are evaluated” we as citizens must cry foul. Humanity is not a perfect science and it never will be. We are living in a climate of distrust. On the subject of education policy, we have the opportunity to restore our faith in educators, parents, and students or we will lose not only our classrooms but democracy too.

“It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”   — United States Supreme Court in American Communications Association v. Douds

Tweet
Share

Comments

112 thoughts on “Oppose Senate Bill 191 – Teacher Performance Pay”

  1. You start off with:

    I agree with the majority of Americans who feel that teachers and principals should be evaluated annually.

    But unless I missed it, I didn’t see anything in your post above about how you think we should evaluate teachers and principals.

    I agree with a lot of your points, but I also see a system that is failing. How do you think we should improve it?

      1. It’s usually totally bogus.

        What is grade level? I’ve seen it defined as the mean of all scores. If only 1/3 are below average, then 2/3 are above average. Unless you live in Lake Wobegone, you can’t all be above average.

        So, please define “grade level.”

              1. to be able to back up arguments I make. And if you pick a fight, you don’t win by running away from it. You were asked a simple question to demonstrate a basic understanding of the thing you’re complaining about, and you can’t do it.

                    4. A couple of years ago, the Boulder Camera ran a story on the front page that 40% of students were reading below grade level (for some particular grade). In the very last paragraph, they stated that grade level was defined as the state-wide mean for that grade.

                      If the same is true in Ralphie’s case, then the kids are doing great – well above average. If it means something else, then that’s a different matter. For example, if there’s a defined standard for where kids should be at that age, then the meaning is harder to interpret. How is that derived?

                      But he never said any of that. Instead he apparently got pissed off that I questioned the unattributed stats he was citing.

                      Now, I’ve looked at CSAP scores (my kids’ scores are mailed home every year) and it would have been helpful if Ralphie had actually said that he was looking at CSAP scores.  The only ranges I recall are advanced and proficient. As I recall, there are 2 levels below proficient. If he’s saying that 1/3 of the kids are below proficient, then that could be a problem. But I still don’t know how these standards are derived and I still don’t know anything about the context, like how are the kids doing in relation to similar populations? What is the trend? To me, numbers in the absence of context are just numbers. YMMV.

                    5. half of all people are below average?! That’s just shocking!!!    😉

                      I agree with you that the relevant basis of comparison for American educational performance is to the educational performance of other nations (and particularly other nations at a similar level of economic development). We do lousy in such comparisons, and we need to change that. “Grade level” has to be clearly defined to be relevant; how it is defined determines how students are doing relative to it.

                    6. I agree with you that the relevant basis of comparison for American educational performance is to the educational performance of other nations (and particularly other nations at a similar level of economic development).

                      You are both wrong.

                      ALL OTHER INDUSTRIAL NATIONS ABILITY GROUP THEIR STUDENTS AND TRIAGE WHO GOES WHERE ABOUT THE AGE OF 11 OR 12.

                      We do NOT do this in the United States and so any comparison of the results of US kids to any other industrialized nation is invalid, because the population selected are not comparable.

                      More than fifty years ago, the National HIgh School

                      Forensic League chose this as their debate topic….comparing US schools to British schools.  I cannot believe that Americans are not knowledgeable about other countries’ school systems.  It is a failure of our school system that Americans are so ignorant.

                      The real problem is that we are a nation of consumers.  We are programed to respond to persuasive techniques and not to think, but to buy.  

                    7. But surely we need some standards to measure ourselves against, and a key component in developing such standards is to look at other educational systems, and how well they perform. There are challenges in doin so, other variables effecting the comparison that are difficult to isolate, but if we don’t look around when asking ourselves “how are we doing?” then how can we ever come up with a meaningful, non-insular answer to that question? Without looking around, we can only measure ourselves against arbitrary expections, selected at random according to the predispositions of those doing the selecting.

                    8. But, SH, if we compare ourselves to other national systems, we will always fall short.  Just because you want a standard doesn’t mean it exists.

                      Now, if you want to argue that we should ability group kids according to IQ and focus on our best and brightest and give them a superior education, then make that argument.

                      You current analysis would find you losing in high school debate tournaments..even against B teams…with whom I am very familiar.

                    9. can control for differences. It is not a simple dichotomy of either compare to other national systems, or ignore other national systems in our self-evaluation. Rather, any system by which we measure our own performance should take a variety of factors, a variety of sources of information, and use them as the basis for deriving a domestically relevant set of standards by which to measure our own educational performance.

                      If we completely disregard overall performance in other nations (including the performance of those tracked into trade schools rather than universities, for instance), then whatever standard we measure our own current national academic performance against will be a “protectionist” standard, a standard based only on the performance of the system we are trying to measure.

                      You read too much into my suggestion that we take performance of other systems as one basis by which we measure our own, when you insist that that necessarily means copying or praising everything that those other systems have done. You also read too much into it when you insist that by comparing our own academic performance to that of other countries we can (let alone must) ignore segments of their populations while doing so (i.e., those segments that you are saying are left out of the measurement).

                      Comparisons of entire systems are not based on comparisons of selected isolated aspects of those respective systems, or, if they are, they are irrelevant comparisons and not at all what I’m talking about.

                      On the other hand, if we cling to the assertion that we can’t reference other nation’s educational systems at all when creating standards against which to measure our own, then we are saying that we are an island unto ourselves, that the educational performance of other countries is irrelevant to us, and how we view our own success or failure in the enterprise of educating our youth should be made in a vacuum. That makes no sense at all.

                      Identifying challenges to using the various aspects of how other nations’ educational systems have succeeded and failed, along various dimensions (including fairness, inclusiveness, etc.), is not a persuasive argument that such comparisons can’t and shouldn’t be made.

                    10. There is too much jargon in your response.  It is not clear what you are saying.  To study other educational systems and look at how they function and their outcomes is a legitimate study.  To look at our educational system and compare it to others is also legitimate.  To measure US student achievement and take another system as a standard is not okay.  Why?  Because the groups being compared are not homogeneous in ability and nothing of value can be learned.

                      For example, it would not be fair to take a US population which scored in the top 10% of the LSAT and use them as a standard against which to guage the achievement of a group of British students who did not pass the national 11+ exam and subsequently graduated from a  trade school.

                      If you could be specific about which elements of which educational system you want to compare, I might be able to follow your argument.

                    11. that the first two things that you say “are okay” lead to a variation of the third, which you say isn’t. If, in our quest to improve our own educational system, we study other systems, and make comparisons of our own to those systems, then we are implicitly incorporating that knowledge into our determinations of what we need to do to improve. That is “a standard” (as well as a strategy for meeting it; it is the identification of specific room for improvement, and how to facilitate that improvement).

                      I never said, it would be utterly unlike me to have said, that we should take another educational system as the standard against which we measure our own educational system. As for doing an actual comparative analysis here and now, forget it. I just finished law school finals, and am not going to work that hard just to prove a point.

                      When you say “the groups involved are not homogenous in ability,” you are either making assumptions different from mine, or we are somehow still not talking about the same thing. Any comparison would be between the entire student-aged populations of the countries being compared, not between some subset designated by any system to which we are making the comparison. And comparing two entire student-aged populations of two countries does not involve any disparity in ability other than that produced by the different systems themselves.  

                    12. Just because other nations track their students, doesn’t mean we have to compare our entire student population to just one of their tracks. That’s not the right comparison: The right comparison is between comparable population segments, such as all children between some range of ages, or, conversely, between entire adult populations, with success of national educational systems being measured in reference to future relevant academic abilities. Those are design issues, made all the time in all sorts of research contexts.

                      The fact that systems are different doesn’t mean they can’t be compared, and that standards can’t be derived from the comparison. If tracking means that some students do exceptionally well due to being given concentrated access to resources, and others do exceptionally poorly due to being denied access to resources, then we can decide how to incorporate those factors into the comparison. We can not only compare the average performance, but also the distribution of performance (how clustered or dispersed it is), and even rank the value of not foreclosing future academic opportunity. Values are reflected in choosing how to weight various factors when making a comparison, but we can choose what values we want to emphasize. That’s what standards are all about.

                      This is already done in existing international rankings of public education systems, with various values weighted and compared in the process of deriving the relative rankings. One can certainly argue over how those factors are weighted, but that’s a political issue to be resolved, not an insurmountable obstacle to be surrendered to.

                    13. Comparisons of entire systems are not based on comparisons of selected isolated aspects of those respective systems, or, if they are, they are irrelevant comparisons and not at all what I’m talking about.

                      But when you write this

                      I agree with you that the relevant basis of comparison for American educational performance is to the educational performance of other nations (and particularly other nations at a similar level of economic development). We do lousy in such comparisons, and we need to change that.

                      that is exactly what you do–make comparisons of entire systems that are based on isolated (and non-equivalent) aspects of those systems.

                      You also write:

                      Identifying challenges to using the various aspects of how other nations’ educational systems have succeeded and failed, along various dimensions (including fairness, inclusiveness, etc.), is not a persuasive argument that such comparisons can’t and shouldn’t be made.

                      I agree. But most critics of American education haven’t done that analysis. For analysis that does do such comparison, read Gerald Bracey’s “Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the U.S.” or almost anything by Bracey.

                      You also write:

                      As for doing an actual comparative analysis here and now, forget it. I just finished law school finals, and am not going to work that hard just to prove a point.

                      Time to write a thousand words to make your point, but not time to prove it? Dwyer is on target here.

                    14. 1) It’s not true that using international comparison as a basis for a domestic standard is inherently or inevitably the same as comparing one faction of other countries to our entire population. One possible analytical error does not discredit the utility of a particular suggested comparative analysis.

                      2) Existing international rankings already take into account differences in how much of the population is served in what ways. Whether they do so to your (or my) satisfaction is another issue.

                      3) The time involved is not the time to do the writing, but rather the time to do the analysis requested of different isolated elements of different systems. Despite having declined the invitation, my following post sketched out what such an analysis might look like.

                      4) What most critics of American education have and haven’t done wasn’t under discussion. What information is required in devising an educational standard was.

                      5) Being challenged to “defend” my simple statement that our standards should not be arbitrary, but should take into account international comparisons, doesn’t obligate me to defend it to your satisfaction. How much time I spend here making and defending my points is really up to my own discretion, until you want to pay me for my time, don’t you think? All things considered, it’s a little absurd to complain that I don’t argue my points thoroughly enough.

                    15. 1. “Its not true that…is inherently or inevitably the same…” I agree, but my point here was that most of these

                      “international comparison” researchers treat it as true. I never said we should not be looking for such research, just that the current studies do not achieve that–but many still use them to criticize American education. (It is the inaccurate criticism that is the problem.)

                      2. It is not a matter of my “satisfaction,” but reality. Existing rankings do not achieve that accurately. Again, I refer you to Gerald Bracey, as one source, for analysis of those international rankings.

                      3. OK, got it.

                      4. I thought I made my view clear on this: What “most critics of American education have and haven’t done” is part of this discussion because many use flawed “international comparisons” and other studies. To determine “(w)hat information is required in devising an educational standard,” making assumptions from flawed research will not get you there. It is that initial bias that has led many researchers astray.

                      5. OK, got it here too. Indeed, a comparative analysis to which you referred would be extensive, and I was wrong to jump on you for that.

                      Your history on this site is to write detailed, well thought out comments. I appreciate that. I usually agree with you. And on this issue, I think we have the same goals: good research that will improve American education. We can’t do that if we are chasing myths.

                    16. I’ve never systematically or closely examined current international rankings methodologies, so I’m not making any assertions about them. I do recall that one I once glanced at (long ago) used several dimensions by which it ranked educational systems, mostly, it seemed to me, tracking what you and I would probably consider the right dimensions to include. So I don’t know if current studies do or don’t accomplish something akin to what I suggested, but the impression I had was that the good ones (and the ones that professional researchers refer to) do. To the extent that poorly done, superficial and skewed international comparisons are employed as evidence in arguments, yeah, that would certainly be a problem. No argument there. Nor will I argue that that is not the norm, because I have little to no knowledge about the state of international educational comparative methodologies.

                      I was never talking about current studies (other than some casual passing references to them). My original point was that, if we feel some need to create standards against which to measure our performance, then it needs to be in some ways internationally informed, because otherwise we are measuring ourselves against either ourselves, or some arbitrary product of ideological imagination. That’s the only point I’ve been defending.

                      Thanks for the tone of your reply, and for your kind words. Sometimes, “in the heat of battle,” I react too aggressively to challenges. My apologies.

                    17. I cannot believe that Americans are not knowledgeable about other countries’ school systems.  It is a failure of our school system that Americans are so ignorant.

                      Uh, dwyer, not making the same assumptions you make isn’t necessarily “ignorance,” or a “failure of our school system,” certainly not on the part of those not making the assumptions you’re making. I’m very well aware of European school systems, both for having spent years of my adult life in Europe, and for having both studied and taught a variety of academic subjects that both directly and indirectly explore various countries’ social institutional landscapes. My disagreement with you isn’t based on ignorance, and I don’t think too many people would ever suggest that ignorance is generally one of my many flaws.

                    18. The achievement rates  of US students in math, for example, are routinely compared to math scores of students in other countries.  The popular analysis never describes which students in which countries who have received which particular math instruction are being compared.  The popular assumption is that all the students in all the countries being compared received the same math instruction.  They don’t.

                      That is the popular assumption to which I referred in my  comment you quoted:

                      cannot believe that Americans are not knowledgeable about other countries’ school systems.  It is a failure of our school system that Americans are so ignorant.

                      I am just trying to get you to state clearly what it is you want to do:  You could say:

                      The US should develop a standard which states that students in the US, who have had advanced placement physics, should score on a standardized test, in the same range as students in Britian/Europe/Asia who have had the same core content as advanced physics.

                      I don’t have any problem with that kind of standard.  But you haven’t said that.   I am not sure what it is you have advocated.  Be clear, SH, be clear.

                    19. We should use measures of educational performance for entire populations within a given age-range as the basis of comparison. That’s what I’ve said from beginning to end; it’s a simple, concise, straight-forward response to a question you keep repeating and I keep answering.

                      In other words (since the phrase “whole populations” isn’t clear enough), if we want to make international comparisons of academic achievement for eight year olds, then we compare the academic achievement of all eight year olds in various countries, whether they’ve been tracked into gymnasium or hoch schule, or don’t have access to public education at all, or are home schooled, or whatever. All eight year olds.

                      You’re right that I haven’t said that we should compare particular, and probably incompatable, sub-populations, such as the comparison you suggest above (all AP physics students to students in the UK who have had similar subject material), because it is the opposite of what I’ve been suggesting. I think that would be a highly problematic and dubiously useful comparison for a variety of reasons. But comparisons of whole populations are valid comparisons, with weights given to various values (such as distributions as well as averages).

                      Actually, I’m not “advocating” anything. This began as a result of my responding to another poster questing the usefulness of the concept of “grade level” without specifying how “grade level,” as a standard of achievement, is determined. I observed (rather than advocated) that any such standard would have to include international data, because otherwise it does not utilize as a basis of measurement anything external to the system it is measuring. For instance, if you asked me how long my arm is, the answer “it is one Steve-Harvey-arm-length long” is not very informative, because my measure did not utilize as a basis of comparison anything external to the thing being measured.

                      As I’ve said from beginning to end, I am suggesting that in order to measure American academic achievement at various grade levels, against some standard other than either current average American academic achievement at various grade levels or an arbitrary assumption about what should be the standard at various grade levels, you have to use data of non-American academic achievement at various grade levels, just as you have to use something other than the length of my arm against which to measure the length of my arm.

                      And, when you raised the issue of tracking, I responded, “of course, you would not compare an entire American age group to some selected sub-population of that age group in another country. You would compare the entire age group to the entire age group, regardless of whether that is the data that the other country puts forward as their equivalent of ‘average third grade performance.'”

                      I don’t know what’s unclear about that. I’ve never referred to or defended any “popular analysis,” and am not responsible for any popular analysis. From beginning to end, all I’ve said is that, if we are going to create standards against which to measure such things as grade level achievement, then we have to, among other things, use unedited, whole-population international data to help determine what a reasonable standard would be.

                      Again, since you insist I’ve been unclear: compare whole populations to whole populations, or whole age-groups to whole age-groups. Nothing unclear about it.

                    20. that a standard has to be based on a single data point, or on some crude average of raw data. In reality, data can be processed in many different ways to derive the kind of information you need for your purposes. What I’m suggesting is that by taking the universe of available international educational data points, without conveniently omitting any information that skews the inferences that would be drawn from that universe of data, one can derive standards that suit the values and purposes toward which they wish to apply those standards.

                      Let’s say that Country 1 tracks its students according to performance at age 12, and that 30% of any given age group thereafter is in gymnasium and 70% in Hoch Schule, and that average performance for those 30% in subjects A, B, and C are X, Y, and Z. Half of the Hoch Schule students take subject A as well, and their average performance is W. In Country 2, students who can’t afford school don’t have access to it, but among those who can afford it (and thus do have access), the average performance in subjects A, B, and C is T, U, and V. And so on, for all data available for all countries.

                      Those children for whom there is no data would either have to be counted as “zero” academic performance in all subjects, or be assigned some well-reasoned and defensible set of values for academic performance based on available evidence. These are design problems that require a lot of specific information and a great deal of precise analysis to resolve.

                      Now, with all of that information, using well-reasoned and defensible assumptions about how to extract generalized information from it, you decide what would be a reasonable expectation for educational performance for all eight year olds in a system of universal public education without tracking. Then perhaps you decide what would be reasonable expectations for distributions of scores.

                      You might incorporate the assumption that not tracking diminishes ability to focus resources on an elite few, and so expecting the same performance from the same percentage is unreasonable, or you might incorporate the assumption that if such a performance from such a percentage can be achieved in any system it should be achievable in ours as well. Or you could decide on some compromise position, that splits the difference in some way or another. That’s a debate that would be part of the work of designing the standard.

                      Now, it may be that such arguments would fail in a B-league debate tournament (though I’m not sure how much credibility a reasonable person would assign to an individual in a disagreement making such a gratuitous assessment of the quality of the arguments of the person they are opposing), but it nevertheless is an accurate representation of how international data could be used to create educational standards relevant to our needs and values. I’ll just have to suffer the indignity of losing the B-level debate, as judged by my opponent.

                    21. I totally disagree with your assertion that any international  meaningful standard could be developed by comparing total age group to total age group.

                      The statistical gymnastics are too convoluted to make the final results meaningful.

                      It makes more sense to try and find comparable populations BEFORE doing any evaluations.  It is just more simple and the resulting data would be helpful.

                      As for the reference to the B debate team, I, of course, was a proud member of a B debate team  The first thing one must do in debate is define your terms, which you finally have done.

                      I could  drag out my old quantitative analysis textbook and I believe that I could disprove your assertions about deriving standards which would serve some purpose.  However, I don’t want to do that.  I might not be able to disprove some of your assumptions in the equations you are designing.  

                      But, the original contention was whether the current comparisons, as popularly published,  between American students and those students of other industrial countries was a fair comparison.  I argued that it was not.

                      You argue that, given some statistical gyrations, such a comparison could be made.  That wasn’t my assertion.

                      There is no evidence that the statistical gyrations you mentions were actually ever done.  The comparison is not fair.  

                    22. dwyer: “You argue that, given some statistical gyrations, such a comparison could be made. That wasn’t my assertion. There is no evidence that the statistical gyrations you mentions were actually ever done. The comparison is not fair.”

                      My Response: Since the conversation began when you objected to my response to someone else made before you had entered the conversation, about what would be required to create a meaningful grade level standard, and no assertion of yours was ever the subject as far as I was concerned, there’s no reason why my comments would or should refer to any assertion of yours, and there’s no question of fairness when all I am doing is clarifying my own original statement that you had objected to.

                      dwyer: “the original contention was whether the current comparisons, as popularly published,  between American students and those students of other industrial countries was a fair comparison.  I argued that it was not.”

                      My Response: Wrong. Go back to the top of the thread. Our exchange began when I stated that grade level standards require some international basis. I made no reference to current comparisons, ever, except to inform you when you first brought it up that I had made no reference to current comparisons, ever. When you object to what someone else says, you cannot claim that they are in error for not having incorporated the same assumptions as you into the statement you are objecting to. The error, in that case, belongs to the person adding in assumptions to the statement they are objecting to that were never made, implicitly or explicitly, by the person who made the statement.

                      dwyer: “It makes more sense to try and find comparable populations BEFORE doing any evaluations.  It is just more simple and the resulting data would be helpful.”

                      My Response: If it makes more sense to try to find comparable populations before doing any evaluations, then you are agreeing that comparable populations must be found. Since you can’t compare a thing to itself (American populations), you must be agreeing that some international referent is necessary.

                      But, in fact, selecting “comparable populations” means constraining the comparisons by more rather than less initial assumptions, which reduces the value of such comparisons. It brings one back to the arbitrary standard-setting that the comparisons are employed to avoid, by deciding prior to the comparison some standard to impose upon the comparison.

                      dwyer: “The statistical gymnastics are too convoluted to make the final results meaningful.”

                      My Response: There is nothing terribly elaborate or unusual about the kind of analysis I am suggesting. It is done all the time, in a wide variety of contexts. Almost all statistical social science analysis employs techniques as or more complex than the ones I’ve outlined in my above posts. That’s what you do with data.

                    23. Looking back at my first post, I made one (perfectly accurate) statement about how we do in existing international comparisons. But the (allegedly debatable) assertion that I had made to which you objected, that some international basis of comparison is necessary to determine the range of possibilities in setting standards, if those standards are to avoid being either too insular or too arbitrary, made no reference to current comparisons or current methods of comparison, and was not an assertion about or defense of current comparisons.

                    24. We disagree on the value of international comparisons. I said the ones to which you “alluded” were not fair and not valid.

                      That is it.  That is my point.

                      As for the rest. Steve, you can’t set up standards for the third grade by examining all the third graders in the First World to develop criteria for setting up a standard for US students to follow because

                      The term “third grade” is a cultural construct in the United States.  It doesn’t necessary have meaning in other countries…or even a counterpart.

                      As for the statistics, here is one of your quotes.

                      Let’s say that Country 1 tracks its students according to performance at age 12, and that 30% of any given age group thereafter is in gymnasium and 70% in Hoch Schule, and that average performance for those 30% in subjects A, B, and C are X, Y, and Z. Half of the Hoch Schule students take subject A as well, and their average performance is W. In Country 2, students who can’t afford school don’t have access to it, but among those who can afford it (and thus do have access), the average performance in subjects A, B, and C is T, U, and V. And so on, for all data available for all countries.

                      Those children for whom there is no data would either have to be counted as “zero” academic performance in all subjects, or be assigned some well-reasoned and defensible set of values for academic performance based on available evidence. These are design problems that require a lot of specific information and a great deal of precise analysis to resolve.

                      Instead of all of this hypothetical suppostions, just eliminate those populations which don’t fit a certain criteria.  Because in order to do an equation, you are going to have to quantify those values, not just suppose a percentage of them.  In order to even set up your various equations for your various analysis, you would have to have specific data defining each group. So you might be able to find comparable subgroups in the US and in Europe and do a comparison. (As I suggested earlier: See the advanced physics example)

                      But, what you are asserting is that you can compare a non-tracking US educational system with an artificially created European system by cherry picking groups to come up with what you think would be a non-tracking European system….even though all European systems (+ the United Kingdom) track.  I think that you would have “design flaws” the way that BP has “design flaws” in its spill technology.

                      I got my degree in Political Science before it was seduced by social science statistics.  My graduate work was in anthropology…field work.  Long ago and far away….most of what I was taught has been modified or thrown out as new research emerged.   But I do know how to evaluate the internal validity of a study.

                    25. “eight years old” isn’t a cultural construct, so, as I already said, we compare our eight year olds (who happen to be in third grade here) to eight year olds elsewhere.

                      You make lots of false assumptions about my position. One, I never said that these standards would be a good idea. I simply commented that if such standards are going to be pursued, then they must have an international referent in order to be meaningful.

                      Second, I have never been a fan of the overuse of statistical analysis in social science either, and one of my roles in a multimillion dollar research project of which I was a core member was as the team ethnographer, which means being in the field telling the story of what is going on. Nevertheless, statistics is what it is, and triangulating from a large amount of data is one of the things that it does well.

                      You said “what you are asserting is that you can compare a non-tracking US educational system with an artificially created European system by cherry picking groups to come up with what you think would be a non-tracking European system….” Unfortunately, that’s not at all what I’m suggesting. But I’m not going to repeat the same things over and over again. If you’re interested in what I’m actually suggesting, reread my posts above.

                    26. The problem with comparing by age is that different countries teach different concepts/ideas/techniques/information at different ages. For example, many other developed countries teach algebra at an earlier age that we do in the US. Some of the international tests, therefore, come after Europeans have been taught the subject and before US students have even been exposed to the material. Critics then conclude that American teachers are lousy, American schools are lousy, etc. I keep bringing up Gerald Bracey–but one of the points Bracey makes is that when American students who have taken algebra are compared to others who have taken algebra, the Americans do well–much better than in the typical international comparisons based on age or grade.

                      One can argue that we should teach the same thing at the same time across the developed world–but besides being a questionable and likely controversial proposition, that is a totally different argument from how well American teachers and schools teach what they teach. Critics constantly unfairly equate these two things. Good international studies can contribute to the discussion of both what we teach and when on the one hand, and how effectively we do those things on the other. But they are separate issues and should not be confused.

                      Reading and writing are obviously different in sequencing and prerequisites from math, but even in those areas, there are differences between countries that mean an age to age comparison is not an apples to apples comparison to assess how effectively teachers are teaching and schools are schooling. Again, one can argue what we should be teaching at what age, but that is different from effectiveness in what we are doing. Your “eight year old to eight year old” comparison would not eliminate the variables.

                    27. you don’t compare particular-to-particular but rather extract a standard from the totality of information. Some cultures teach this before that, and others that before this; some have this many in school, and others that many, and others a different quantity. Some offer education for free, some only to those who can afford to pay. As I said before, if you want to derive a standard from that information, you don’t look at each in isolation, but rather at the triangulation of all combined, applying your own cultural values and goals to the process.

                      Ideally, you don’t bother with such standards at all, but just teach kids as much as they are able to learn. But that ideal is difficult to attain for various reasons. And if our standards are insular rather than informed by a world of information, than they will not reflect the pool of people against whom we are competing in the global economy.

                    28. so just getting back to this–a few days late. I agree with what you say here, but I am puzzled. You say, “don’t compare particular-to-particular,” but it seemed to me that your eight-year-olds to eight-year-olds comparison was doing exactly that, and was not taking into account all those other factors–and that is what I was disagreeing with. Anyway, thanks for the discussion on this topic.

                    29. was just an example of comparing any compatable age range (could be from birth to 80, if you like, controlling for differences in longevity and life expectancy). In any comparison, you have to control for extraneous variables, many of which are a function of age (it would make no sense, in any model I can imagine off hand, to compare 25 year olds to three year olds, for instance).

                      Likewise, thanks for the conversation. See you next time!

                    30. You said: “Instead of all of this hypothetical suppostions, just eliminate those populations which don’t fit a certain criteria.”

                      That’s what cherry picking means, not using all data in order to make comparisons, which is the opposite of cherry picking.

    2. We could fund k-12 at an appriate level or at least at par with the national average which we are now 1,500 behind per student!

      For another we can make sure students are coming into the classroom not hungry, making sure our children aren’t suffering from hunger seems like a much better use of our tax dollars then once again blaming teachers.  A student that isn’t well fed is much less likely to get anything out of class at all.

      Once we’re there then maybe we can look at how our teachers are performing.

      1. Paying more money to the same teachers who are getting shitty results.  I’m all for more money, but it has to come with strings attached.  The objective is improved performance.

        I’m also in favor of well-fed kids.  But that’s simply deflecting the argument in a different direction–blaming the kids and their families.

        The kids are who they are.  They’re a design constraint.  The system isn’t working for them.

            1. someone paid for your education, why is it ok not to be willing to pay the same for those who need it now?  Why should teachers be able to do more with less?

            2. That’s why I’m anonymous. It’s just my own opinion.

              I think just saying “shit” and “shitty” over and over again is extremely helpful. Thanks for your valued input, Mr. Customer/Investor. Sorry your education was so terrible that you can’t put together any more serious criticism of the teachers you hate so much, but obviously that’s Not Your Fault in any way.

                    1. In DPS, unfortunately, “fraction” is a word that gets used too much.

                      Approx. 30 percent of minority students will graduate from DPS.  Disgrace.

                    2. What do you want to do about it? Give me an example of another state that has had this problem and fixed it. I want to see actual solutions proposed, something you have a good reason to believe will work, instead of this misguided trashing of the teachers who are trying to fix it.

                      We could close all the schools and fire all the teachers, but I think that might lower the graduation rates. So give me something practical instead of just bitching.

                      You keep citing this statistic as though you care a lot about it, yet when it comes to the difficult task of solving it, you (like a lot of people here) retreat into the most facile of feel-good teacher-trashing sloganeering.

                    4. Now give me some proof that they work.

                      And since I know exactly what you’re going to post, let me pre-empt you. I don’t want to see ONE private school that’s doing well, because there are plenty of public schools that are doing well. I want to hear about a voucher program that’s raised minority graduation rates to something respectable.  

                    5. vouchers for everyone, let school competition force administrators, students, and teachers to do better!

                    6. that will substitute for evidence that this crazy approach will work?

                      No?

                      Really, no?

                    7. But reading Caroline Hoxby’s seminal paper, “Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?” (2000) actually does.

                      In this paper she finds strong statistical support for the hypothesis that increased school choice increases educational performance. Thus a system of vouchers would increase school choice and thereby performance. Additionally this would be particularly beneficial to students from low-income areas that would now be able to transfer to high-performing schools. Obviously this would force some public schools to shut down, but then the government could just sell the schools at rock-bottom prices to another high performing school and then the teachers that were employed there will be paid a higher wage (since the U.S. government is ultimately footing the bill) at a private institution.

                      I’m getting ahead of myself at the end there, but here’s the link to her article (jstor subscription required):

                      http://www.jstor.org/pss/2677848

                      If you don’t have jstor access let me know and I can email you a copy.

                    8. So she created some arbitrary-looking measure of school choice based on parents’ ability to choose where to live in order to go to a good school? And found a slight correlation? I don’t know a whole lot about statistics, but the one thing I do know is that if you have enough variables and are willing to play with all the coefficients, it’s very easy to get spurious correlations.

                      If the study had any value in this debate (and skimming through it, I’m not sure it does; it really looks contrived), it says literally nothing about vouchers or even private schools. It seems to be about choosing from among different public schools.

                      Laughing Boy’s evidence is slightly better for vouchers, but I’m not sure even he is proposing eliminating all public schools and privatizing the whole thing.

                      I’m sorry, your extremely radical plan needs better evidence than a completely unrelated scatter plot before any reasonable person would agree to consider it.

                    9. Politically the end game, if we have another 5 – 10 years of no progress, will be the dismantling of the public school system to be replaced by vouchers. I’m not talking is that the best approach, I’m talking simple politics.

                      What’s going to happen is that the next time the Republicans are in strong control (yes it will happen), if K-12 is still a basket case, then they’ll push strong for vouchers. And the voters will support it. Why? Because these other approaches either didn’t work or weren’t tried.

                      People are not going to continue to accept no improvement.

                    10. and they haven’t shown significant improvement.

                      The idea that I don’t want any improvements or changes in the current system is absurd. I want it to work better. But if we’re talking about changing the whole state’s educational system, I think proponents should be able to demonstrate success in other smaller-scale situations first.

                      And of course crazy Republican ideas will get passed. That’ll be true regardless of what happens in the educational system. A lot of the voters hate teachers and will support anything that teachers think is a bad idea. But I think honest people should be looking for successful ideas, and not just in theory but in practice.

                      What I don’t want to hear is “let’s try this, maybe it’ll make things better, maybe it’ll make things worse, but at least it’s something different.” That’s what we’ve BEEN doing. Educational reform is not a new idea. Many things have been tried for decades. What we have now is the result of reforms from the past, yet there’s very little concern about the accountability of reform projects. I’m too young to have seen “new math,” but I saw calculus reform in the 90s. It wasn’t successful, and most calculus teachers have gone back to the old ways. I want to see some evidence that a new proposal is going to work before supporting it. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, and I don’t think it’s fair to view that as obstructionist. A lot of kids are in a bad situation now, and the idea that it’s OK to possibly make their situation worse just to be seen as doing something seems callous to me.

                      Politically teachers are not powerful enough or popular enough to really stop any proposal. But I’d be really surprised if we’re not still lamenting the same problems and having the same debates in 20 years. There’ll always be some crazy new scheme people will want to try blindly. But the Monte Carlo approach just seems to get us back to the same or worse situations.

                    11. I bet you could line up nearly every econometrician at the University of Chicago and they would tell you the methodology is crap (they are generally not a fan of instrumental variable regression analysis) but for every professional economist that you could find who held that view I could find you another (probably most of the economists from M.I.T. and Harvard) who would say that this is a worthy study of the highest caliber.

                      But critiquing the statistical methods of this paper gets into some nitty gritty on the idea of 2SLS regression, which is fascinating to get into, but probably not relevant for the moment.

                      More relevant is that you are right, in that I was extrapolating from the conclusions of this paper which was about choice between public schools leading to better outcomes. However I feel certainly justified in making the leap to include private schools in choice because Hoxby’s conclusion on the effect of choice is that increased choice of public schools leads to a decrease in private school participation, so if that choice pool was broadened to include private schools it would either lead to a decrease in private school enrollment — in which case, what’s your concern? — or it would shift students away from low-performing public schools to high-performing private schools which would seem to increase student performance.

                      So while I would invite and expect disagreement about my conclusions (I agree it is very radical), I would need a more thorough critique of Hoxby before I would dismiss her conclusions so quickly. This is a very famous paper with important conclusion, and it irks me that you would  you would simply wave it off as  “completely unrelated” without understanding the detail and rigor of the econometrics behind it.

                    12. No. It’s about public schools. Ergo, completely unrelated. You can use it to support the conclusion that school choice as measured by ability of parents to move into a good school district helps schools perform better, but it’s still just a damned dot product on some linear combinations of numbers. It doesn’t say anything about the effects of policy.

                      And it doesn’t seem terribly difficult to understand, so I don’t know why you conclude I can’t understand it. It’s just a correlation. It seems like a pretty simple thing. The paper seems famous more because it finally found a result that a lot of people were hoping to find, than because it’s much better than any other study.

                    13. and while I appreciate your shout out below, I don’t understand how you can claim it’s “completely unrelated.” The article is not about vouchers, but it is about school choice and vouchers are a means of enabling additional choice. You say that this just measures the ability to move into good school districts, but the point of a universal voucher system is it would allow everyone to move into a good school district/school. So thanks for helping me prove my point I guess.

                      And yes I absolutely enjoy being able to have a reasoned conversation about this as well, so thank you for participating.

                      As to the final point, the entire methodology of regression analysis is that it allows us to measure beyond correlation to test causation. Particularly when running an instrumental variable regression like Hoxby does here, one is able to control for omitted variable bias, simultaneity, and measurement error via the statistical methods that such an analysis employs. I mean, I can post up the math if you want but that would be a pain, so I hope I don’t have to do so. As gaf noted below there are economists who disagree with this technique (as I said before, most economists at the University of Chicago don’t believe the exogeneity requirement can ever really be met), but I would personally defend, and could get just as many economists to defend this sort of causal analysis.

                      So while the effect may seem small and just like dots on a page, the relevancy and importance of this paper comes from the strength of the methodology used as a way to determine causation rather than mere correlation. And yes, I am sure that you are correct in saying that a great deal of its notoriety is due to its controversial conclusions and implications, but if important works just pointed out obvious and accepted truths, they wouldn’t really be important now would they?

                    14. so if you’re doing an analysis of the effects of vouchers, you should get a lot closer than Hoxby’s study does to actually studying vouchers.

                      It’s like finding a study saying good teachers correlate well with student performance on CSAP, then saying “Paying teachers more will result in more competition for those jobs, which will result in better teachers, so the study has shown that paying teachers more raises CSAP scores.” Well no, it hasn’t. Part of it is what the study said, and part of it is your beliefs about what’s true.

                      The idea of vouchers has been around for a long time, as have pilot programs. We should be able to see results from those. That’s what I want to see. Until then, you’re mixing up rigorous science with wishful thinking.

                    15. but I don’t think that what I’m proposing here fits in with your analogy for two reasons. First because what I’m proposing is a universal voucher system, thereby eliminating to include variables for income, ethnicity, location, etc. because everyone everywhere is getting the same new benefit.

                      Second, the reason that your example is an example of poor reasoning is unproven link between paying teachers more and better teacher performance, but the corollary for my theory would be the unproven link between vouchers and increasing school choice. That is a very good catch to point that out, and I don’t have any proof on hand for that assertion, but it seems pretty logical to me. I mean, what could vouchers do besides increase school choice? Where before most families could only choose between open enrollment and their local school, with vouchers they would have that plus choice of private schools as well. Thus choice increases, which is the fundamental point of the Hoxby article. I suppose you could also be making a similar argument that I am not proving the link between increased school choice and competition, however I don’t think I need to make that link explicitly simply because the end game point of Hoxby is relation between choice and performance. Additionally, I think I do make that link by formulating my idea of increased choice under a system whereby top-performing schools are awarded cash bonuses for doing well (maybe I made that point in a different thread, if so, apologies.). So either way, I think that I have answers for your concerns.

                      Would my argument be better if I had a very credible paper tailored to my exact policy idea? Sure, but that’s not really feasible, or at least I haven’t found it in the literature yet, so for now I’ll rely on what I have and extrapolate (dangerous as that may be) from that.

                    16. Thanks to Raphael and Laughing Boy for providing some studies and evidence for their proposals, even though I’ve been picking them apart. I really do appreciate it. It allows us to have a much more intelligent conversation than the “Teachers are greedy lazy morons who hate kids/No they’re not fuck you” that so many (hi again Ralphie!) want to have on this blog.

                    17. Nor did I say they hate kids.

                      If you’re going to “quote” me, please do it without making shit up.  Your “quote” was pure fabrication.

                      My father retired as an elementary school principal.  My sister retired as a special-ed teacher.  I do not dislike teachers by any stretch of the imagination.

                      I simply want to pay teachers for performance, not longevity.  Period.

                    18. who claimed some time ago that school was completely useless to you and you never learned anything from a teacher? If that was someone else, I apologize, and I’ve been way too harsh with you today.  

                    21. My mom led the charge against killing those fucking prairie dogs that were tearing up most of BVSD’s open space.  She’s as liberal as they come.

                    23. In the limited time I have, I can’t find the criticisms of Hoxby’s 2000 paper, but the critiques were similar to those of her recent study in New York City. Title of one such critique: “Headline-Grabbing Charter School Study Doesn’t Hold Up To Scrutiny.”

                      Link to article here (link to full critique in article):

                      http://epicpolicy.org/newslett…

                      Key sentence from the above article: “But Reardon points out that the [Caroline Hoxby, Sonali Murarka, and Jenny Kang] report’s key findings are grounded in an unsound analysis — an inappropriate set of statistical models — and that the report’s authors never provide crucial information that would allow readers to more thoroughly evaluate ‘its methods, results, or generalizability.'”

                      As I said, the criticisms of Hoxby’s 2000 work were similar. It indeed was “seminal” to true believers, but her flawed projections, extrapolations and assumptions, and the lack of transparency in her data, result in unsupportable conclusions.  

                    24. Ongoing evaluation of Milwaukee Choice Program finds students achieving on same level as peers

                      April 7, 2010

                      Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program scored at similar levels as their peers not participating in the school choice program, according to a study released Wednesday.

                      …

                      The reports released Wednesday represent the midway point of a five-year study of the oldest and largest public voucher program in the United States, which provides funding for more than 20,000 students to attend private schools in Milwaukee.

                      …

                      The evaluation project represents the most comprehensive evaluation of school choice in a single place ever attempted….

                      …

                      “We still have two more years of data to collect for this longitudinal study,” Wolf says, “but at this point the voucher students are showing average rates of achievement gain similar to their public school peers.”

                      Link: http://www.news.wisc.edu/17934

                      I am a strong supporter of choice within public schools. But vouchers to private schools have not been shown to improve performance. You will have to look elsewhere for solutions.

                    25. Here.

                      This trajectory follows that of urban Catholic school students in other reports. A comprehensive study sponsored by New York University in 2001 comparing the city’s Catholic and public schools showed students performing very similarly in the lower grades. By the 8th grade, public school students lagged considerably on state tests. Evidence of this trend continuing through the 12th grade is expressed every year in much higher graduation and college acceptance rates at Catholic high schools.

                      Researchers from James Coleman in the 1980s to Derek Neal, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, in the 1990s, to a study released in May 2008 by Loyola Marymount University’s School of Education document very high graduation rates for minority students in urban Catholic high schools. Neal found that black and Hispanic students actually matriculated at higher rates (91 percent) than urban whites (85 percent). The Loyola study tracked 205 disadvantaged students who received private vouchers to attend Catholic high schools in Los Angeles and 98 percent graduated.

                      I think you almost need to look at schools that would be considered voucher schools and compare them to public schools the kids are currently stuck in.

                      I’d put Arrupe up against any DPS school, and to me, Arrupe is the epitome of what a voucher school would look like.

                    26. (and yes, I mostly skimmed it since it’s a busy day for me), the author pretty explicitly states that vouchers are not especially effective in general, at least not compared to the claims of their advocates. Even the article you wrote (written by an Obama critic and conservative) doesn’t claim that the two paragraphs you selectively quote are typical. The typical result seems to be students do about the same no matter what.

                      And again, great for Arrupe but I’m not interested in how the best charter school would do. I’m interested in how the worst ones will do, since that’s where you’re going to see high dropout rates and other such problems for kids on vouchers.

                      The NYU study doesn’t seem to be about vouchers at all. And yeah, Catholic schools are pretty good in some ways. My parents liked them until I was in 3rd grade, when the tuition became too expensive. Parents with more resources tend to have children who do better, for various reasons. This is irrelevant to the voucher debate, I think.

                      The Loyola one sounds fishy; only 205 students? That’s a weird sample. But if that’s the only evidence that vouchers work (and even your pro-voucher article doesn’t seem to cite any other evidence that vouchers work), then I’d want to see the study. Don’t have time to look for it right now.

                    27. is that Arrupe is a Cristo Rey school (where its students are required to work in law firms or hospitals one day a week, those law firms/hospitals then partially subsidize the students’ tuition).  It’s a fabulous model, but also draws highly motivated students and parents.  There are lots of Cristo Rey schools around the nation, and I wonder if that Loyola study simply looked at one of the Cristo Rey schools out there.

                    28. an interesting quote from your article written by a voucher supporter. A good share of the article, however, contains much different information, such as:

                      At first glance, it seemed disheartening for advocates to see that after 17 years, voucher students performed at about the same levels as demographically-matched Milwaukee Public School (MPS) students (an apples-to-apples comparison). All students averaged around the 33rd percentile, typical for low-income students in urban centers across the country.

                      The voucher-supporting author then tried to make a case by using such words as:

                      is likely…

                      there are two other intriguing possibilities…

                      This might explain why…

                      might be accounted for by…

                      It’s possible the voucher program would show a significant test score advantage over MPS if…

                      (emphasis mine)

                      In other words, like Caroline Hoxby (see my comment above), McCloksey engages in speculation, extrapolation and assumptions. Perhaps informed speculation, but still speculation, not research, and not research that stands up to scrutiny.

                      Another quote from the article you choose to persuade me:

                      Certainly the early optimism about vouchers’ capacity to turn around declining educational attainment was misplaced: Test scores haven’t rocketed, and are unlikely to. As Charles Murray notes in Real Education, there isn’t any evidence showing that academic ability can be raised much on a large scale. Academic ability, which he defines as the combination of logical-mathematical, linguistic and spatial abilities, is influenced greatly by parents and home environment and is set around the time a child begins the first grade.

                      The studies do show potential for improving graduation rates, and a future report from the Milwaukee study will focus on that. The challenge for that report–and the flaw of many previous reports–is in separating out the graduation rate effect due to vouchers from that due to choice. My experience tells me that choice is important. But choice can be offered among public schools, and the effect may be similar to choice with vouchers. I do not have data to support that. But I will acknowledge that up front. Researchers like McCloskey and Hoxby also don’t have the data, or don’t use it properly, but still make claims beyond what their research will support.

                    29. Usually, sxp 151, I agree with everything you say.  However, the DC voucher program was very good, and it was eliminated by the Obama administration.

                      I would have preferred a voucher system trial where all kids got a chance to use them, instead of these blasted lottery systems.  However, the DC system was working for those few kids who were lucky enough to get in to a private/parochial school.  There is one caution.  Because the DC schools have been so bad for so long, and there is a very wealthy class in DC, the parochial/private schools are excellent.  That may make the difference.

                    30. I hear some people arguing the D.C. voucher system was working well and others saying it didn’t have significant effects.

                      Just saying “This is good” is not the same thing as evidence. We’ve HAD programs in place in D.C. and a couple states. We should be able to see measurable results. Instead we get anecdotes at best. Why?

                      How have scores on tests changed? How have graduation rates changed? How have college admission rates changed? These numbers should be really easy to measure.

                      People keep proposing this big expensive radical solutions to problems and won’t provide even the tiniest bit of evidence in favor of them. The idea seems to be, “Look there’s a problem with the patient, let’s prescribe arsenic because at least we wouldn’t be doing nothing.”

                    31. That is extraordinary.  No one really talks about the burden this places on the system.  Have you ever tried to learn a new language…not just “where is the bathroom” and “take me to your leader,” but the kind of fluency one needs for advanced English lit….or freshman high school composition.  It is extraordinary that DPS has any kind of graduation rate among English learners.

                      Now, I am a constant critic of DPS.  One reason is that they do not describe accurately what the challenges are; they are addicted to “reform plans” which are expensive and futile, and the whole system is too damm political.

                      However, the problems faced by DPS are huge.  There are over 80 languages spoken as a first language by English language learners.  The demographics of the system are a reflection of the political climates of the last 100 years, and include:

                      1) African American students come from families whose parents/grandparents received a subpar education because of segregation and prejudice…HERE in Denver.

                      2) Hispanic American kids, born in the US and whose parents have been in the US for generations, and those parents/grandparents were denied an education or discriminated against and whose first language was Spanish and whose English instruction was inadequate.

                      Because of the long history of discrimination in DPS,  a civil rights suit back in the 70s was successful and the system was placed under court order to ensure that these groups got a fair deal. The court order was lifted in 1995, but there was supposed to be court supervision of the Bilingual/English learner programs.  I think that just died out.   Did these groups achieve at a better rate when DPS was under court order?  I don’t know.  Does anyone?  That would be critically important information.

                      Now, DPS has also been absorbing whole new immigrant populations, who get lumped into the “minority status” and/or “free lunch category” but whose background and problems are totally different, How are they doing?  I don’t know.  Do you?

                      DPS has the legal obligation to educate all undocumented immigrant children. It is also prohibited legally from asking about the immigration status of the children and/or their parents. So how do you even get good stats or evaluations???

                      NCLB demands that all kids be lumped together for the purposes of testing for achievement.

                      Now, the state is posed to toss into this horrific mix an untested system which will cause even more turmoil and turnover in a badly battered school system, where as far as I can tell, the supporters of Bennet are not even talking to the supporters of Romanoff……that bears well for an “objective” evaluation system…

      2. First, how is SB 191 “blaming” teachers?  It does nothing of the sort.

        Second, since we can’t magically add $1,500 per year per student, what other suggestions do you have?

        Third, why should we believe adding money (if it were possible) would result in any improvement?

        1. It comes from the budget, which comes from taxes. What a silly thing to say.

          This bill will also cost money. That’s not magical either.

          1. Answering the questions posed.  

            That’s a disappointing response from you–I think we all generally expect more thoughtful and responsive comments from you.

            So: where does the money come from in the budget?  

        2. into this, I’d be glad to.  The fact of the matter is we still don’t fund education at the rate we did in 1988!  And you can thank Gallagher and TABOR for that!  And no adding money isn’t magical, you get what you pay for, simple as that, all those out there who went to school pre-1988 had their education paid for by the good taxpayers of the state, but now those same people seem willing to tell students no to shove off and get better teachers…

          In reality teachers are now expected to do more with less.  It shouldn’t be a shocker that they can’t.  And really how could our teachers suck that bad when they generally are better educated than teachers were in the past when our schools were performing quite well.

          And since you ask, SB191 is blaming teachers because it assumes that the problems in our education system are being caused by bad teachers, if there was no such assumption then there would be no “problem” to fix and therefor no bill.  By tying teacher’s jobs to their student’s performance, they are saying flat out that the student’s performance (or lack thereof) is entirely the result of having a good or bad teacher, thus blaming teachers for students who perform badly.

            2. What do the dollar amounts on the vertical axis represent? Does this graph account for the increase in students in the system? Per pupil funding is the best measure.

            3. Court decisions in the sixties and seventies mandated equal education opportunity….more money was spent on minority kids.

              MOST IMPORTANTLY, DD, DEVELOPMENTALLY DISABLED KIDS, WERE ADMITTED IN THE SCHOOLS STARTING ABOUT 1974.  Some of these kids were so disabled as to require attendants to be in the classroom with them.  As a group they were much more expensive to educate because of their special needs.  Prior to 1974, they were not in public schools and so the cost of educating them is a new cost which your graph does not reflect.

              You have to stop listening to Rosen..remember he flunked out of college first time around and got drafted.

    3. As a former Colorado principal who now works in “get your hands dirty systemic school improvement” I’d like to respond from a base of research knowledge and a certain degree of personal success in improving schools.

      Everyone wants a simple recipe for improving schools and districts but I don’t believe there is one. We have depended on structural and policy changes for the last 25 years and we need to admit they do not work. Systemic change is much more complicated than that – it requires changes in organizational culture and new types of knowledge. The previous writer is correct in that there is no basis in the research for tying evaluation to student achievement.

      If you want to know what to do, David, find a successful exemplar (often an outlier within the system). You will see smart leaders who think outside the box and attend to the quality of instruction and the  culture, relationships, and responsibilities within their organizations. They do it within the framework of existing laws, policies, and educational structures. They can take an existing staff of teachers (all of them – the whole bell curve from great to pretty bad) and believe that “a rising tide lifts all ships”. They motivate their staff to take responsibility for “the good of the whole” and together they learn how to be better teachers with better results, by systematically looking at their data and adjusting their practice and then looking at the data again and readjusting their practice – over, and over, and over. They know their students and they design interventions based on what they need as individuals. For an example, check out Beach Court Elementary in DPS. If they can do it, others can also.

      Without the money to develop sophisticated assessments, SB 191 is another “feel good remedy”. It’s great in principle – but not as a remedy for failing schools. Let’s get real. If you think the problems in our system are due to a few bad teachers, you haven’t been in schools. Motivated, well intentioned teachers mostly do what they’ve always done, but because their students are different they don’t get the same results they used to. Ask high school kids about their schools. Over and over, when asked for a one word description of their schools, they say “boring”.

      Teachers need great leadership that will provide support for them in learning more effective and engaging instructional strategies. It’s no secret what those are. Most administrators don’t understand how to monitor the quality of instruction in their buildings and don’t know what to do when they find it lacking.

      The existing system finds it extremely difficult to confront its own issues and effectively change its practices. It’s easier to change a policy or school structure (witness SB 191; DPS’ gazillion school structures) than to insist that monitoring and accountability actually happen. I believe we know how to do this, we just lack the will.

      1. That’s kind of a natural thing for a kid to say. It’s not video games. It’s not TV. It’s not sports. It’s learning things that they’ll be expected to know.

        You can try to make math interesting by spicing it up in various ways. You can use real-world examples. You can talk about history. You can try to make it relevant in their lives. But really and truly, a lot of times you just need to write down equations and solve them. You need to practice lots of examples. And it won’t always be fun, and you can’t expect students to find it fun. It’s work.

        You can help students enjoy the work more by rewarding them for achievement and praising those who do well, rather than justifying their negative conceptions about school.

        A lot of people think their jobs are boring too. Even cool jobs have boring aspects. Professional sports has a ton of mundane training that the athletes have to do; making video games involves mundane bug-fixing. They’re things that need to be done, and we somehow accept this in other aspects of our lives.

        Yet we think kids shouldn’t have to work in school. We think everything the kids need can be fed to them like you’re watering a plant. We think learning should be like watching a movie.

        I agree with most of what you say, but this idea that teenagers won’t find school boring if you do it right is misguided, I think. There are only a few students who wouldn’t say school is boring under any circumstances, and in American society those who think school is fun are usually ostracized by their peers for it.

    4. your argument is based on poor logic.

      Teachers can see that this is a bad bill.

      Yet you attack them for not having anything better to offer, but you fail to recognize that the administrators are supposed to be the ones coming up with the ideas, not the teachers.

      Secondly, can anyone here explain why any democrat would ever support an Education policy that directly, immediately, will reward a Bush family member with millions of dollars in contracts for standardized testing?

      And that Bush member is Neil Bush, already a convicted felon who robbed Americans of billions in the Savings and Loans scandals of the 1980s?

      http://www.businessweek.com/ma…

      No Bush Left Behind

      The President’s brother Neil is making hay from school reform

      That single point alone, should make you question the proponents of such a bill.

      I would submit that the Colorado legislature provide a provision on any reform that all spending be audited by an independent commission to see who is making money from these reforms.

      1. Wade,what are you talking about? Neil Bush admitted he contracted herpes from prostitutes in Southeast Asia, but he’s not a felon. Get your facts straight.

    1. That’s huge–no other way to spin it. Not even the CEA spokeswoman could and it looks like she tried.

      But Brenda Smith, president of AFT Colorado, said her union’s support is not meant as disrespect to the CEA.

      “It’s definitely not a thumb in the eye to the CEA,” she said. “The intent behind this was we truly need to change the way we evaluate teachers for the good of kids.”

      The AFT’s endorsement came because of three new amendments: Seniority must remain an advantage when “effective” teachers face layoffs in budget-driven reductions; two teachers must provide input to the principal on hiring decisions involving teachers transferring between schools; and an appeals process must be established when a tenured teacher is returned to probationary status.

    2. That union has almost all its 2,500 members in Douglas county, one of the wealthiest in the country!  They have nothing to worry about with this bill, their students most likely will walk in well fed, leave well fed, have supportive families with the time to help them in their work.  They will likely have better funding with money coming in from property taxes and better programs for advanced students.  Bottom line is they are more likely to have students who will excell,having students at the top side of the achievement gap means they have nothing to worry about with this horrible bill.

  5. and the most thoughtless aspects have been toned down a bit, so there is room for decent stuff to come out of this.

    But I am REALLY FUCKING SICK of assholes blaming teachers for every problem in the schools. Teachers work hard. Teachers care about students. Teachers do the best they can with paltry resources in this state. Show them some goddamned respect for once, and you’ll see the union being more willing to engage you. Keep treating them like shit, and you’ll find they think all your proposals are designed to hurt them.

    P.S. Happy teacher appreciation week!

    1. Am sick of teacher-bashing, too. All sticks and no carrots is a terrible approach to getting the outcomes we all want. If policymakers tried some positive reinforcement every once in a while I think they’d see a helluva lot more cooperation. That goes for administrators, teachers and students, too.

  6. Scores in our school district have been static for several years.  Admin and teachers are trying different things but we have found a plateau … and no one is happy about it.  Do we fire all of the teachers because of a plateau / no growth in every school?  Do we fire admin?  Do we work together: parents, community, teachers, admin, students, to find some solutions?  The latter is what we have been doing and its hard work that is difficult to track and difficult to know what has worked and what hasn’t.  And the first problem is CSAP:  it’s a lousy program that doesn’t give results for months – it doesn’t work as an assessment but as it was intended, a benchmark.  Two weeks of school in testing and several other weeks for preparation.  That doesn’t sound like good management of the issue to me?  Can any of us claim that is the way to run a business?  Setting aside weeks every year to assess the organization?

    Someone explain to me, in language a third grader can understand, why the Leg is fucking around with this stuff and hasn’t addressed the present shortcomings in the system.

  7. Ritter was right when he said that.  The tricky part is to measure what you want to improve.  Then, of course you have to actually make efforts to fix problems, and measure again to see if it worked.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

    This doesn’t mean that improvement automatically follows measurement, and to argue “We measured it. We did not improve it.” demonstrates a failure in logic, not to mention the failure of any unmentioned efforts to actually do better.

  8. The research shows food and books are a better predictor of student achievement than teacher salary. This is hard to read but it is also on my website: angelaengel.com under the May newsletter. In terms of evaluating teachers. My performance objectives as a non-probationary teacher were determined by formal and informal principal evaluations – including video taping. We also used parent and student surveys. It’s a lengthy and expensive process but I do feel that teachers benefit from regular feedback. When it comes to education, everyone assumes that there is some magical formula. When I taught in a wealthy suburban school district my students test scores were high. Five years later when I transferred to an inner-city school, my test scores were low. The variable is not the teacher as it always assumed. The variable is opportunity and children with more advantages also have an advantage on standardized tests. I’m not sure are leaders really wants to improve schools for low-income and minority children, otherwise they wouldn’t be spending all our time and resources on meaningless mandates. Clearly books and food are a great deal cheaper and more effective than calculating streams of data.

    We’ve got “Mr. Fuck you” and we’re worried about third graders not scoring proficient on CSAP. Those are multiple choice questions graded by a temp agency. If you want to know if a kid can read, sit down and listen to him read and then ask some worthwhile questions.

    English Language Arts, grade 11 (Achterman, 2008 table 60)

    predictor beta

    community 0.51

    school 0.14

    library 0.46

    r2 = .57 (adjusted)

    Community factor = parent education, free/reduced lunch, ethnicity, percent English learners

    School factor = average teacher salary

    Library factor = hours, collection size, budget, staff hours, total services, total technology

    Achterman, D. 2008. PhD dissertation, http://digital.library.unt.edu…

    Krashen, Lee, McQuillan: PIRLS analysis

    Multiple Regression Analysis: reading ability of ten year olds in 40 countries

    predictor beta p

    SES .42 0.003

    SSR .19 0.09

    Library .34 .005

    Instruction -.19 0.07

    r2 = .63

    Socio-economic status (SES) a strong predictor of reading ability

    SSR = percent participating in sustained silent reading programs.  Nearly significant.

    LIBRARY = percent of schools with school libraries with more than 500 books. Strong predictor.

    Amount of formal instruction – beta is NEGATIVE!

    These predictors give us 63% of the information needed to predict reading scores.

    1. Is that me? After all my contributions here, is that all I’ll be remembered for?

      Oh well, at least it’s better than nothing.

      Although if that’s my new nickname, the proper spelling is “Mr. Fuck you n/t”

      P.S. Thanks again for posting actual data in addition to anecdotal evidence! Be nice if we had more posters like you.

Leave a Comment

Recent Comments


Posts about

Donald Trump
SEE MORE

Posts about

Rep. Lauren Boebert
SEE MORE

Posts about

Rep. Gabe Evans
SEE MORE

Posts about

Colorado House
SEE MORE

Posts about

Colorado Senate
SEE MORE

132 readers online now

Newsletter

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop with regular updates!