It Ain't Just Claptrap: Can We Meaningfully Critique Our Schools?

On an education discussion list I follow, Jonathan Groves made that I will not reproduce here, in which he was critical of many aspects of US math and literacy education, based on what he sees in his own teaching at the college level. One reader of the list replied to Jonathan's post, "This is just a repetition of all the claptrap, generalizing, and stereotyping [this list] is supposed to combat."


I think the situation, particularly from the perspective of mathematics educators, is a bit more complex than would allow the dismissal of Jonathan's post as "claptrap."

The fact is that if you spend time in classrooms where things are not going well (for a host of reasons, not merely the short list that the deformers cite, if those apply at all), you can't help but be frustrated at how poorly we are presenting mathematics to a vast majority of students there. In that context, I speak of places like Detroit, but that list includes many other poverty-stricken places, large and small, in this country.

Next, looking at many classrooms in less economically depressed districts, one sees teachers who don't know the mathematics they're expected to teach (particularly, but not exclusively, at the K-5 level); those who 'know' the math, but don't know nearly enough about how to teach it well and effectively to any but a small number of so-called "mathy" kids - generally those who already like math, particularly when math is reduced to quick, accurate calculation; and then the lovely but all-too-rare cases of inspired teachers allowed to do their jobs without absurd shackles placed on them by national, state, or district tests and other idiocy that has little or nothing to do with mathematics or education.

We also know that this overall inadequacy doesn't result in an under-supply of mathematically competent folks. There's no shortage of mathematicians, economists, engineers, physicists, etc. That was made crystal-clear in THE MANUFACTURED CRISIS, but those numbers are ignored by the deformers, the anti-progressives in the Math Wars, by Obama and his "Sputnik moment," and many others.

So the question becomes much more an ethical one about whether to teach mathematics better to more kids for its own sake (the pleasure, power, and beauty of mathematics), for the sake of equity (everyone has a right to become mathematically competent and rise to whatever heights she desires and is capable of reaching), and for reasons of core democratic values (an innumerate citizenry is one easily deceived by politicians, demagogues, advertisers, and other scam artists). It is NOT a question of "saving" the economy with a new wave of math and science folks. So many jobs in the predictable future will NOT require all that much math or, for that matter, what's typically viewed as a college education, though competition and raising the bar may make folks have to have college degrees to get jobs that don't really require much of what colleges generally teach and students generally study there (in other words, even if employers choose to make a college degree a basic requirement for a service job, that doesn't mean the course of study will better prepare anyone to DO that job).

What this all boils down to, for me, is the issue of criticism from the right versus criticism from the left - to use a crappy metaphor - when it comes to public education. Not being of the educational deform mindset, my back goes up every time I read or hear an attack on our public schools that comes from Duncan, Klein, Rhee, the usual think tanks and foundations, the typical education reporter, ad nauseum. At the same time, I don't think our current public educational model is sound, I don't think it's been sound for a long time, and I think we can and must do better.

The problem becomes how to level correct, meaningful, constructive criticism at the system that leads to real change without throwing in with the deformers or inadvertently winding up supporting their causes (it's rather unlikely that they will help ours, no matter what their rhetoric about choice, accountability, raising the bar, and a host of other catch phrases and buzz words).

It becomes exhausting to have to keep repeating that I don't want to see our public schools dismantled or privatized, that I don't want to see teachers sacrificed on the altar of real or phony economic shortages (and misplaced priorities), that I "get" why we have teachers' unions, that teaching is a very difficult job, etc., etc., and that I STILL know that there are many crappy schools, crappy teachers, crappy administrators, crappy tests, crappy politicians with their fingers in the education mess making it worse, and a bunch of greedy asshats trying to suck away billions from kids into their own pockets, all the while singing psalms about global competition, accountability, 21st century skills, and so on.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

A MUST read: "PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid"

"PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid" by Mel Riddile http://tinyurl.com/povertyandPISA My comments: The sky isn't falling in US public schools, folks. Some readers likely already knew that, particularly those who are followers of the late Gerald Bracey's work, amongst other debunkers of educational disinformation. The results of the recent PISA exams highlight this fact, but you wouldn't know it from US Sec. of Education, Arne Duncan or any other doom-sayer, bloviator, pundit, or deformer. And with good reason. Because what the numbers say is disturbing, but not because our schools are failing us. The facts are that our schools are amongst the best in the world, but to see it you have to compare apples to apples. And what's being done with the PISA scores for the most part is what's been done with so much other data: the wrong things are compared and the apparent results make our public schools look like they're at best doing a mediocre job. What is being missed or hidden by the 'experts' who want to convince us to fire teachers, bust unions, turn public education over to Wall Street, promote charters, hand out vouchers to parents (particularly rich and upper-middle class ones), and generally dismantle our public schools in order to turn them over to drooling private market entrepreneurs and (many) charlatans? The fact that the US has an enormous disparity between rich and poor compared with other industrialized nations, and the impact of poverty on the average scores. But disambiguate scores so that we compare similar economic strata across nations and suddenly we're just where one might guess: Number One. But please, don't take my word for it. Read a detailed analysis. Then consider why Duncan, Rhee, Klein, and so many others are SO invested in convincing you that it's our ENTIRE nation's schools that are in crisis, at risk, failing, collapsing, corrupt, incompetent, bleeding money, and all the rest of it. Why they look at the public schools alone as having failed to solve the effects of severe poverty in rural and urban settings alike. Or in other words, why they don't want you to realize that poverty and greed at the top of our economic system, not teachers' unions, is what's keeping the folks at the bottom from lifting themselves by their non-existent bootstraps. http://tinyurl.com/povertyandPISA

Another Cartoon Worth Tens of Thousands of Words

Does Arne Duncan Have A Soul?

"Not even this much of one."

You'd think that after the recent infamnia the LA TIMES perpetrated against teachers, Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education with no background or credentials as an educator, would have had the good sense to either repudiate this clueless act or at least keep his mouth shut about it. Instead, he outdoes himself with the following:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week urged school districts across the country to disclose more data on student achievement and teacher effectiveness, saying too much information that would help teachers and parents is being kept out of public view.

The education secretary told an audience in Little Rock, Ark., that schools too often aren't disclosing data on student achievement that could not only help parents measure teachers' effectiveness, but also help teachers get better feedback.

Mr. Duncan said his remarks were prompted by a Los Angeles Times series analyzing teacher performance through value added scoring to show which elementary teachers were helping students make the most gains. The secretary said he was not advocating posting the results online, as the Times plans to do, but he urged transparency.

 From Education Week [American Education's Newspaper of Record], Wednesday, September 1, 2010, Volume 30, Issue 2, p. 4. See http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/09/01/02brief-3.h30.html?r=1277642202

So what, exactly, is the difference between posting the results of misleading or meaningless data on-line and Mr. Duncan's vision of "transparency"? As he apparently offered no specifics, it's impossible to know how he distinguishes what the LA TIMES did and plans to do from something else. But of course, the problem isn't transparency versus secrecy. It's between meaningful data and utter bullshit. And using student scores on questionable tests and a phony formula with no credibility to rank teachers in terms of "effectiveness" is simply the latter: complete, utter, political bullshit.

How many times are we going to be asked to swallow the patent lie (speaking of 'transparency') that any of these pols and pundits are interested in learning about what kids actually know and can do, or in seeing that TEACHERS (as well as parents, kids, and other stake holders in education) get useful data that will potentially lead to more effective instruction and great student learning and achievement? For in fact, were that the goal of the folks at the LA TIMES, at various right-wing foundations,at the US Dept. of Education, or anywhere else where self-righteous 'experts' wring their hands over the results of fraudulent excursions into experimental statistics and psychometrics, then they would be calling for a very different sort of assessment and holding their peace until such assessments were being give and data collected from them. Further, they would all demand that the data be collected in ways that gave teachers, students, and parents specific feedback on each and every relevant data point: kids and parents would know how the student did on each item, what his/her answer was, what are the likely weak points or areas of confusion in the subject based on the answers, and what is recommended for that student to improve; teachers would receive similar data, but for both individual students and classes as a whole, as well as expert recommendations on how to address the weak areas. Something might actually happen to make things better. But such is not the case, nor is it likely that it will be until at LEAST 2014 when the folks being paid to make better tests to fit the Common Core Standards roll out their first products.

It remains to be seen what those "better tests" will look like, given the much higher cost in time and money that creating, administering, and particularly grading non-multiple choice, non-short answer, non-true/false items of a performance-task nature entails. Creating ANY good test item is challenging, but creating test items that actually tell us what we need to know to improve teaching, learning, and parenting when it comes to academic subjects is a major challenge. If the deform crowd is seriously committed to these goals (as opposed to merely paying them lip-service and instead focusing upon destroying teachers' unions and public schools in order to promote profit-based, private takeovers of public education - quite frankly precisely their real goals, on my view - then they must publicly and privately commit to paying the price to create excellent assessment and seeing that only such instruments that pass reasonable professional and public scrutiny are used for "high-stakes" purposes.

I'd prefer, of course, to see the whole notion of high-stakes testing interrogated with as much care and brutality as the pundits and deformers have been using on kids and teachers. I've said on multiple occasions that as things stand, the only fair way to go if we're going to stick with the multiple-choice nonsense and weak 'student-generated' and 'free-response' questions that dominate the current crop of high-stakes tests is to demand that the pundits and pols who advocate and vote for these tests be made to take the things themselves and allow their scores to be circulated on the internet and published in newspapers. Until then, I doubt that many of them, even those with truly good intentions, will start to look closely at what's being tested, how it's being tested, and what practical uses the results of such tests can be put to. If they really pay attention, they might start to see how antithetical to the alleged purposes of improving education - i.e., teaching, learning, parenting - these instruments are in practice.

Meanwhile, Mr. Duncan will no doubt continue to alienate the vast majority of educators with his ham-handed, anti-teacher proclamations. It would be lovely to see him placed under the same sort of microscope and held to the same sorts of standards he advocates for teachers. It would be more lovely still if President Obama would get his head out of his behind regarding education. For all his own experiences, none of which had a bloody thing to do with the sorts of garbage he and Duncan have been pushing on our nation's public schools, Obama seems purblind about education. While I didn't grouse when the Obamas chose to send their kids to Sidwell-Friends School, I'm now starting to wonder if a dose of ordinary reality isn't just what the doctor ordered for our "socialist" president.

Clearly, he's not a stupid man. Can he really believe that the more we test kids, the more we scapegoat teachers, the more we put weapons into the hands of privatizers and right-wing education deformers, the more we bully and bribe states, the better things are going to be for kids? For the country as a whole? For the future of American democracy? Or has that never really been the point of public schools?

The LA TIMES Cracks Out of Turn When It Doesn't Know The Shot

David Mamet*

I'm not sure what I was doing or where I was the day the LOS ANGELES TIMES went from being a newspaper to being a national leader in evaluating teacher quality. Perhaps it was supposed to be kept secret, like what was discussed and said at the meeting Dick Cheney had with Big Oil executives a decade ago. If so, several  TIMES reporters have blown it with a recent article, WHO'S TEACHING LA'S KIDS?

In it, three reporters, Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith, present ratings of "teacher effectiveness." In particular, they single out one particular fifth grade teacher, John Smith, and claim he is the least effective teacher for his grade level in his school. Mr. Smith's photo is at the beginning of the article that purports to know, based on kids' scores on administrations of a single standardized test, which teachers are helping their students, teaching effectively, and making a positive difference, and, of course, which, like Mr. Smith, are allegedly failing to move their students ahead. 


I wrote the following to these reporters today and will be fascinated to see if any of them respond. I know that were I John Smith, I'd be speaking to my attorney and considering lawsuits against several parties, not the least of whom are Jason Felch, Jason Song, and Doug Smith. As I am not, the best I can do is try to point out how wrongheaded, how irresponsible, and how ultimately counterproductive is both their article and the methods they employ to smear the professional integrity of many fine teachers who for any number of reasons may not "measure up." The professional integrity I call into question, however, is that of these reporters, their editors, and others who profit from the publication of this sort of cheap-shot, ignorant journalism. 

If you start with the absurd assumption that multiple-guess
standardized test scores tell us anything (let alone EVERYTHING) we
need to know about teacher effectiveness or student learning of
subject matter or all the other things that teachers and schools are
about (not all of which are good, but that's another debate entirely),
then it follows that the LA TIMES is as qualified as anyone else with
no expertise whatsoever in psychometrics to determine which teachers are "most
effective" and which are "least effective." Further, with the same
starting assumption, there's nothing unconscionable about reporters
and editors  from that noble publication choosing to print a photo of
a so-called "ineffective" 5th grade teacher and include the following
in the article:

Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the

other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the

size of the class, the students or their parents.

It's their teachers.

With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on

state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third

of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to

a Times analysis. John Smith's pupils next door have started out

slightly ahead of Aguilar's but by the end of the year have been far

behind."

But if the assumption is false, then what the TIMES and its reporters have done is to pillory one 5th grade teacher on the wheel of meaningless test scores. They have, in fact, violated two  fundamental principles of psychometrics: never use a test designed to measure one thing (e.g., student achievement) to measure something it was not designed to measure (e.g., teacher effectiveness), and never use a single test score or measurement type to draw definitive conclusions (particularly not in the social sciences). Further, they have made the fundamental error of assuming that correlation (Teacher A's kids scores are higher than Teacher B's scores) equates with causation (Scores rose primarily BECAUSE of the superior teaching skills and methods of Teacher A).

In fact, the above-cited article is so fraught with error and leaps of logic (and bad faith) as to be utterly, irredeemably worthless, not unlike the test scores upon which its false (and probably libelous) conclusions are based. But then, the article's authors began with a patently incorrect assumption, and  they very likely had its conclusions well in mind to begin with.

So I am moved to ask: may we expect in the near future an article by the same reporters on which LA TIMES journalists are "most effective" and "least effective" based on how sales of the paper are impacted by their articles and reportage?

May we expect that the reporters will be taking, say, the tests given to high school kids in LAUSD (I assume all these journalists graduated from college) or perhaps the SAT or ACT (or, Darwin forbid! the GRE) and publishing the results in the paper? How about the politicians who pushed and voted for using these tests as fair measures of a host of things they were never designed to assess? (And I include in that list not only state and local officials, but every US senator, congressperson, US Department of Education secretary, and every US president from William Jefferson Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Hussein Obama who has supported these tests as the measure of all things.)

Let's shed more sunshine on the test-based competence of our reporters and politicians. Publish and publicize their scores. Threaten, meaningfully, to hoist these folks by their own petard and we'll see some critical examination of the assumption that the tests are valid and reliable, as well as adequate measures alone of effectiveness or lack thereof. My suggestion is no worse than what politicians and reporters are doing now with kids, administrators, schools, districts, and, of course, everyone's favorite scapegoat, public school teachers.

Until such time, shame on Messrs. Felch, Song, Smith; shame on the LA TIMES. Shame on anyone and everyone who buys into the ridiculous test-mad nonsense that has this country by the throat.

Michael Paul Goldenberg

p.s.: Lest someone suggest otherwise, my last official GRE scores, taken in October 1991, are Verbal 800; Mathematics 780; and Logical Reasoning 720. I feel safe in putting those scores up against those on any comparable test of the three reporters, any member of the LA TIMES staff, any current legislator in California or the United States Congress. I've spent over 30 years preparing students for various standardized tests and debunking many of the myths surrounding them. I'll happily meet anyone on the standardized test battle ground, No. 2 pencils aready at dawn or high noon.

*For those wondering what David Mamet's photo is doing at the beginning of this blog entry, it has to do with the title of my post. Mamet is very fond of the language of con artists. Apparently, our intrepid LA TIMES reporters are not unfamiliar with both the short and long cons. Or perhaps it's just their editors, the publisher, and others with vested interests in destroying US public education.

A Cartoon Is Worth 5,000 Words

My Favorite Week: Math Circle Summer Teacher Training Institute

Ellen and Bob Kaplan, Jordan Hall, University of Notre Dame, 7/7/10

I just got back from Notre Dame, and boy, is my brain tired! Well, actually not. Despite a lot of walking for this out-of-shape math educator and a lot of strenuous mathematical thinking, I'm exhilarated after my first Math Circle Summer Teacher Training Institute with the wonderful Bob and Ellen Kaplan. 

This was the third such institute held at the University of Notre Dame, a campus that seems as isolated from time as a medieval European monastery (though the food and accommodations are vastly better). I had wanted to go two years ago but couldn't get released from a relatively new teaching position to go. Last summer, I simply didn't have adequate funds to do it. But the third time was indeed the charm, and I can say without hesitation that this was the best-spent $800 I've invested in a very long time. 

The Institute ran from July 4th through July 9th, with five days of sessions in the morning and afternoon from the 5th until the 9th, plus evening informal sessions at the dorm in which Leo Goldmakher, a number theorist from University of Toronto, and Amanda Serenevy, a mathematician from South Bend who organized the Institute and runs local Math Circles groups at the non-profit Riverbend Community Math Center, led interested participants in the pursuit of various math problems (some held over from our daily sessions). 

I can't begin to express my pleasure at spending this much concentrated time with people who are really passionate about quality mathematics content, teaching, and learning. Some were K-12 teachers across the spectrum of grade bands. Some taught community college mathematics. Some were interested home-schooling parents. We had non-teachers who have a love for math and who have started or plan to start local math circles in their communities. There were high school students from the Riverbend Community Math Center. All of us participated in morning sessions led by Bob, Ellen, Amanda, and Leo on various mathematical topics, as well as regarding how to set up and run a Math Circle in keeping with how the Kaplans have been doing it. In the afternoons, we planned teaching sessions and then worked with students whose attendance Amanda arranged: some were in elementary school, while the eldest were in high school or getting ready to start college in the fall. I worked with three groups, doing a problem from Computer Science Unplugged on finding minimal spanning trees with a group of 2nd and 3rd graders on Tuesday, then trying a modified version and the original problem with 4th and 5th graders on Friday. The first group struggled a lot with both the language of the problem and with the complexity of the diagram. However, I finally came up with a very simple version on the spot that they were able to work with. I'd say that with proper modifications, they could have gotten the original problem, and indeed several students from this group came by later in the week to show me their correct solutions. The second group was somewhat "bi-modal" in that four students blew through both the modified and original problems: I left them to consider how many unique minimal spanning trees could be found for the given graph. One student was able, with help, to get through the modified problem. One student, who may have been cognitively impaired, seemed thoroughly out of his depth and likely would need to learn some requisite skills before tackling these problems, along with simplified examples and language.

On Thursday, I worked with a mixed-age group of students on several questions I'd been interested in going back to November 2009 surrounding something called "number bracelets." Specifically, after the students worked through some of the basic questions that arise when working the problem modulo 10, I posed the following to them: a) for a given base b, how many disjoint orbits will there be? and b) for a given base b, what will the lengths of those disjoint orbits be? 

This proved to be a deeply intrigued problem for all six students, regardless of age. One of the older students, who was perhaps 14 or 15, really sank his teeth into it. On Friday, he returned with a partially developed solution that could potentially answer part or all of each of my questions. He has promised to follow up with me as he continues to work on them. 

We also had the opportunity to observe Bob, Ellen, Leo, and Amanda work with these students on several lovely problems on Monday, and to observe some of our peers teaching when we ourselves were not so engaged. I had originally planned to teach only the Friday group, so I lost out on opportunities to do more observing of others' styles and interests, to my regret. But since we debriefed collectively for about 90 minutes every day after the one-hour classes, there was ample opportunity to hear feedback from those who did observe and comments from my fellow student-teachers. 

I cannot overly praise Bob and Ellen Kaplan's work in every aspect of this institute, as well as that of Leo and Amanda. And my "classmates" were all bright, dedicated, and highly-motivated to talk seriously about  and work on mathematics, mathematics teaching, their experiences with the students we worked with, and much else. The week was enormously rich in terms of math content, thinking about proof (we spent one morning with Ellen leading us through some of the early section of Lakatos' PROOFS AND REFUTATIONS, not directly, but through exploring the Euler Formula for polyhedra, Cauchy's well-known attempt at proving it, and problems with his method that are raised by Lakatos), pedagogy, and various notions about what it means to teach mathematics effectively. 

2010 has been one of my favorite years, and the week of July 4th has certainly been the most memorable thus far.