And if so, would that be a good or a bad thing?
I want to put together a number of pieces of information from the past week or so, some comments offered me by several people who are well acquainted with the policy making process with respect to education, one of whom very much served on the inside, and see if, like me, you come to the conclusion that the answer to my title question is Yes, we are headed for national tests and standards in our public schools, that is the only possible conclusion to draw from the statements of President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan. If you don't care, stop reading now. If you do, whether you favor or oppose such a move, you might find it worthwhile to continue reading.
Yesterday, in piece entitled A belated reaction to Obama's Education Speech - real problems, I explored some of the problematic areas of the speech before the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Obama gave on education. One passage of that speech on which I focused read as follows:
Today's system of 50 different sets of benchmarks for academic success means 4th grade readers in Mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than students in Wyoming -- and they're getting the same grade
That is also supported by the statements made by Secretary Duncan in his recent testimony before the House Budget Committee, as seen in this news story (and I apologize in advance for the particular cite, but it was the most convenient, and is accurate as to his words):
In his testimony, Duncan criticized allowing states to set individual standards for Adequate Yearly Progress, suggesting that "common high standards" may work better.
"Low expectations are the one sure way to guarantee failure, high expectations are absolutely a prerequisite for success," Duncan told the committee. "That’s why we must raise standards -- 50 states with 50 different standards is not good enough."
So far the rhetoric is only about standards, and there has been some language offered that suggests that states could determine individually how they were performing on common standards. But realistically that will not be allowed to stand. After all, we also heard the president talk about international comparisons, when he (incorrectly) stated
In 8th grade math, we've fallen to 9th place.
In the international comparison upon which the President relied, we were in 9th place, but that represented an increase - in the same test over time we have risen from the low 20s over the past several iterations, as was noted in this piece from the St. Petersburg Times. I would offer one caution about the study - the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) is not, as I have noted numerous times, an exact comparison, as some nations alter the questions used because of local conditions - for example, Hungary dropping questions on coastal biology because they lack a coastline - and a number of nations do not test students who are not native speakers of the national language. Still, noting how this administration still wants to rely upon what most (I believe inaccurately) perceive to be a common measurement seems to indicate a mind set that would like to be able to do the same among the states.
Now let me add in one additional piece. The administration is willing to fund the development of data systems allowing the tracking of student performance longitudinally. That is, states would have data bases wich would contain the historical record of performance of students within that state. This is not new - Tennessee has been doing this for a number of years as part of their Value Added Assessment System. Now let me note the following, and I apologize for the length of what I am going to post, although I will do so in sections. This is from a press release sent out after a conference in DC this past week, to which I was specifically invited but unable to attend, due to conflicts at school. It was put together by a group called The Data Quality Campaign (DQC), which describes itself as
s a national, collaborative effort to encourage and support state policymakers to improve the availability and use of high-quality education data to improve student achievement. The campaign will provide tools and resources that will help states implement and use longitudinal data systems, while providing a national forum for reducing duplication of effort and promoting greater coordination and consensus among the organizations focused on improving data quality, access and use.
When looking at funders one notes the first mentioned is the ubiquitous Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which seems to have fingers in just about every "reform" that rises to the point of media coverage. Their list of Managing Partners, organizations participating in this effort, notably does not include any professional organizations representing teachers, either in their unions or in their content areas (such as National Council of Teachers of English, or National Association for the Social Studies). Nor does it include the organizations of principals. Those who will be most likely to be "measured" and evaluated by such data have had to date no part in these discussions.
The headline on the release, all in bold in the email, reads
Secretary Duncan, NGA Chair Rendell, Congressman Miller
Urge States to Use Data Systems for Continuous Education Improvement
Data Quality Campaign Releases Action Guide for State and Federal Policy Makers;
Receives $4.8 Million from the Gates Foundation
Let me offer a few additional selections from the release. The 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of text read like this:
"Now that the Data Quality Campaign has put data quality on the map, we need to work together to leverage this work and push it to the next level by using data to drive reform," said Secretary Duncan Tuesday at a forum held in Washington, D.C. convened by the Data Quality Campaign. "The Department has made an early commitment to this by providing funding in the stimulus package for data systems so we can assess what's working and what's not. The path to real reform begins with the truth - and we must keep facing the truth and finding the answers until every classroom has a great teacher, and every child has an education that prepares him for college, for work, and for life."
The forum, "Leveraging the Power of Data to Improve Education," brought together hundreds of state and federal policymakers and education leaders to discuss the integral role of data to the national education improvement agenda, the challenges to growing and using these systems, the necessary leadership of state and federal policymakers, and how the newly available stimulus funds can be used to improve student achievement and close achievement gaps. The entire forum can be viewed via webcast at
http://ne.edgecastcdn.net/...
The DQC folks also released The Next Step: Using Longitudinal Data Systems To Improve Student Success, in which they outline 10 steps that are necessary for what they consider a model effort:
The ten action steps are:
- Link state K–12 data systems with early learning, postsecondary education, workforce, social services and other critical state agency data systems.
- Create stable, sustained support for robust state longitudinal data systems.
- Develop governance structures to guide data collection, sharing and use.
- Build state data repositories (e.g. data warehouses) that integrate student, staff, financial and facility data.
- Implement systems to provide all stakeholders timely access to the information they need while protecting student privacy.
- Create progress reports with individual student data that provide information educators, parents and students can use to improve student performance.
- Create reports that include longitudinal statistics on school systems and groups of students to guide school-, district- and state-level improvement efforts.
- Develop a purposeful research agenda and collaborate with universities, researchers and intermediary groups to explore the data for useful information.
- Implement policies and promote practices, including professional development and credentialing, to ensure that educators know how to access, analyze and use data appropriately.
- Promote strategies to raise awareness of available data and ensure that all key stakeholders, including state policymakers, know how to access, analyze and use the information.
There are ten states DQC already considers models, AR, CA, CT, FL, KS, KY, LA, MN, OR and the aforementioned TN.
Let me now return to the press release, and a statement by National Governors Association Chair Ed Rendell (D-PA):
"Longitudinal data is not just a K-12 issue; it requires gubernatorial commitment because all of our systems - from early childhood, to K-12 education, to colleges and universities, to workforce development, to employment databases - must work together to make data collection possible," Governor Rendell said. "And we need to do more to make the data useful, because even the best data collection system is worthless if it does not change what goes on in the classroom."
When I read that statement I paused, because implicit is the concept of a data base tracking performance of individuals throughout their life with respect to the various government entities, at least within a state - but easily transferable to linking up on a national basis if the data identifiers among the states were common.
Now note the Federal involvement and interest:
he recent federal economic stimulus package included $250 million for funding statewide education longitudinal data systems. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is developing the competitive grants process to distribute the funds to states which will be used to implement and use statewide longitudinal data systems which include education data for elementary and secondary students as well as postsecondary and workforce information. In addition, to tap into the State Fiscal Stabilization formula funds, a state must assure the USDOE that it is building its longitudinal data system across the P-20 education pipeline and linking it with workforce data.
Congressman George Miller, Chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor in the U.S. House of Representatives, also voiced strong support for the new federal investment.
"Congress has stepped up to make this investment a priority, and we will be watching implementation of the data systems very carefully," said Chairman Miller. "It is our hope that states and districts will take a serious and thoughtful approach about how they can use this data to help improve student learning."
And before I explain why I phrase the question of my title the way I do, let me offer one additional paragraph from the release:
"States have made great progress in building their longitudinal data systems, but now we need a cultural shift to build the political will and take the practical steps needed to ensure that this data is accessed, shared, and used for continuous education improvement," said Aimee Rogstad Guidera, Director of the Data Quality Campaign. "That’s what the Campaign will focus on now - helping states identify and put in place the necessary policies and practices so that key stakeholders actually use longitudinal data to help students succeed."
Let me start with the last quote. to help students succeed - succeed at what? Are we going to define success as performance on the measurements, however they are established? Given the idea that this data is supposed to span from Pre-K through graduate and professional school (that is was P-20 means) and be linked to "workforce development," what are the implications for educational effort not directly geared towards the economic interests implied in such statements? Who will have voices heard, meaningful seats at the table as such standards - which remember, both Duncan and Obama have made clear, should be national - are being developed? If the people shaping the discussion on longitudinal standards does not know include the voices of professional educators, nor of those groups who have traditionally been underserved educationally and economically, do we run the risk of an imposition of one model, yet another version of the kind of one size fits all mentality that has been behind so many of our recent, and failed, attempts at educational "reform," including NCLB? Where in this model is there any provision for civic education, for the development of the individual person as something in herself, even if the things that matter to her are not valued by some important economic and political actors?
Let me return to the question of my title. I think there is no doubt that this administration has bought into the idea of national standards. The creation of national standards is sure to be a major conflict, unless dissenting voices are systematically excluded. Given the track record of Duncan in Chicago (which by the way has NOT succeeded on meeting the Illinois standards, which makes it ironic that he thinks the solution is to further raise the bar on standards), where he and his predecessor Paul Vallas and their minions systematically suppressed the voices of those who disagreed with them, whose approach was to get commitment from the major elite players and ignore the concerns expressed by others.
Let me be fair - some of those elite players honestly believe they know what is best, that what they are doing is their version of noblesse oblige. One can legitimately make that argument for groups like the Gates Foundation and the Casey Foundation, and local efforts such as that in Chicago where Obama served on a board with Bill Ayers (who may have as good a track record as anyone in the nation on honestly addressing the issues of urban education, but who is now considered so toxic that when he is brought into a university to talk on that topic there are protests and attempts to cancel his appearance - this is happening at Millersville in PA, resulting in the event being closed to anyone outside the university's immediate family). But just because I believe I am correct should not legitimize my being able to impose my perspective and/or exclude the perspectives of those who may disagree with me.
I mentioned several people whose reaction to the press release was, shall we say, less than positive. Let me quote the well-connected former insider:
all of this data system development is intended to build a structure with test scores as their base. With the data system, the state will be able to attribute student scores to individual teachers and begin linking pay and bonuses to value-added.
. Tennessee was the first state to have a state-wide value added system. When the state legislature funded a huge increase in education funding, they not unreasonably demanded some way of ascertaining whether the funds were making a difference. Gov. Ned McWhirter, a Democrat, turned to a man named William Sanders, who had developed a statistical modeling method in a field other than education, in which he had at that point not spend much of his research time. Using a hierarchical linear model, Sanders developed the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System. He claimed he could measure the effect of an individual teacher for 3 years out. In the audits required by the State Auditors Office, two independent evaluations, one from Florida and one from Ontario, argued that the 3-year claim could not be sustained. At the time I closely examined the status of value-added assessment as part of my doctoral work, now almost a decade ago, Sanders had refused to allow outsiders to publicly look "under the hood" of his modeling, and most of the research that had been published had Sanders" name as one of the co-authors. That made more than a few in educational policy circles raise questions, which Sanders regularly attempted to beat back. I will not here explore the financial implications for Sanders of all this, but I think one can draw a number of conclusions.
In theory, value added assessments can provide more meaningful information that mere scores at the end of a course, or even the better pre- and post-test model to determine simple "gain" scores - how much has the student learned since entering a particular class. Sanders - and some others - claim they have the ability to control for external factors, such as poverty and other family characteristics, which otherwise can confound (technical term) the results obtained: one might otherwise be looking at data heavily impacted by factors other than what you are trying to measure, which is the impact of the instruction received. Of course, if all students are following the same course of studies, then what in theory you are measuring is the impact of the individual teacher - in theory, because after all the teacher lacks perfect control over the motivation of the students, which also plays a major role.
For a value-added system to be most meaningful, you need to be able to track individual students. That includes students who transfer from one school to another, within a district or across district lines. Tennessee had a standard regimen of tests statewide, which made it possible to accumulate the data for individual students who remained within the state. Further, at least in theory the tests from grade to grade were vertically aligned, providing an additional consistency in how the data was obtained.
Now consider all that. And also consider that we have students who move across state lines, in some communities in multi-state metropolitan areas, a significant number. Including them in the measurement of one state distorts the results when one is attempting to measure the effectiveness within the state of teachers and programs, and excluding them may reduce the available pool of information in a way that inevitably reduces the reliability of the conclusions we can draw.
But what if, even when a student moved across a state line, we had common data? And if we are going to move in the direction of national standards, is it not logical to assume that we would want common measurements to ascertain the comparative performance of states, school districts, schools, and - yes - individual teachers? Is that not the logical outcome of all the paths we now see heading towards the same point on the horizon?
My other reaction was from someone who looked at the groups involved in this effort, most especially Achieve and Education Trust, and got angry, having had multiple confrontations with them and their acolytes over the years. S/he sees the DQC endeavor almost as their wet dream coming to life, and fulminates over the damage it would do, given the track record of some of their previous efforts.
So there it is. Why I think what we are seeing may well be an organized effort to move us not only towards national standards, but ultimately national tests and then nationally integrated data systems.
You may think that is good. You may think that is bad. At a minimum, I think the discussion about the direction we are moving ought to be more open, more candid, and certainly more accessible to those whose lives will be impacted - professional educators and students.
I do not claim this diary is perfect, or even that it comes close to fully touching on all the related issues. I do believe I was justified in taking the time to write it and the electrons with which it is presented to help at least make people aware of some of what MAY be happening. Again, note that word - MAY. It is possible that all the pieces I and others see coming together will not, that some important player(s) will balk at continuing down this road. To many of us, perhaps too many, the path seems very clear, particularly given the players included and the voices deliberately excluded.
I will be interested in your responses, should you choose to offer any.
Peace.