Unfortunately, the early reviews aren’t encouraging. They report that the book is a mish-mash, starting with adoring interviews of school-reform advocates, but ending with doubts and uncertainty about those same reforms.

According to these reviews, Brill started with a strong bias (anti-union, pro-reform) but gradually learned that the issues facing public education are much more complex, and that nobody really seems to know how to improve public education.

I’ve decided not to pay $15 for this book.

Some early reviews:

• New York Times (Sara Mosle)
• The Nation (Dana Goldstein)
• Washington Post (Jay Mathews)
• Wall Street Journal (Joel Klein)
• “Fact-Checking pages 1-100 of Class Warfare“ (Gary Rubinstein)
• Education Week also published an article about the book’s revelations about the “Race to the Top” process

Related book reviews by Mark Welch:

• 2010: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Diane Ravitch)
• 2002: And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City Students (Miles Corwin)

It’s no surprise that some administrators and teachers have turned to cheating on the high-stakes tests required by the federal “No Child Left Behind” law.

Follow this link Google News to see recent news articles about the detection of “unusual erasure patterns” on some schools’ tests. (Feel free to modify the search by adding the name of your state.)

There’s a whole art to identifying classrooms and schools where there are an unusually high number of “erasures from wrong to right.” The systems used to identify this form of cheating rely on statistical models (mostly aggregate, not focusing on individual students’ performance compared to past years).

This is not the only type of cheating, but it is the cheapest to detect. There are several types of “erasure cheating,” including a teacher pointing to a student’s wrong answer so that the student changes it, or a teacher or administrator making changes to tests after the students are dismissed. Other forms of cheating are much more expensive to detect and harder to prove.

Detecting “an unusual pattern of erasures” is not proof of cheating, and could represent a particular test-taking strategy (urging students to quickly read and respond to all questions, then use the remaining time to check their answers). If a district, school, or teacher recommends this strategy to students, then those tests should be expected to have a higher ratio of “erasures from incorrect to correct.”

Turn it around: if a district, school, or teacher recommends a different test-taking strategy (“carefully read and give a considered response to each question, even if it means that some questions may be left unanswered when time runs out”), then “erasure cheating” on those tests might be undetectable (with a much lower starting point AND the increased chance of unanswered questions, it’s unlikely that an objective reviewer would discover a statistically significant ratio of “erasures from incorrect to correct).

Why would students use a strategy intended for timed tests for a test without a time limit? Because students are likely to use the same strategies for all tests — and when students choose test-taking strategies, they know they’ll face huge consequences for their scores on college admissions tests (but no consequences for their performance on NCLB tests).

Cheating is a predictable result, if the test results will impact schools and teachers personally.  It’s not an ethical or proper response — but the “No Child Left Behind” law was never ethical or legitimate, as an educational policy.

__________

Added July 6: Another standardized-testing scandal makes the news: Atlanta’s improved test scores were based on “rampant, systematic cheating on test scores … ending two years of increasing skepticism over remarkable improvements touted by school leaders. The administration  … punished whistle-blowers, hid or manipulated information and altered documents, the investigation found. … the cheating occurred at 44 schools and involved at least 178 teachers and principals, almost half of whom have confessed … A culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation existed in the district, which led to a conspiracy of silence…” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/education/06atlanta.html

It seems like a reasonable assignment, extending from the common practice of asking students to respond to a book’s cover or “jacket blurb” before starting to read the book.

I’m flattered, of course, not just because the teacher required students to read my review before reading the book, but also because some students praised my writing:

• http://ariberri.blogspot.com/2010/01/assignment-2.html
  http://luharris0611.blogspot.com/2010/01/and-still-we-rise-assignment-2.html
• http://amaliat21.blogspot.com/2010/01/and-still-we-rise-assignment-2.html

When I mentioned this discovery to my wife, her first question was, “Was this a good review, or a mean one?” Yes, indeed — I’ve written some mean reviews, including some of the book reviews on my web site.  But this was probably the most positive, glowing review I’ve ever written (indeed, I credit this particular book for inspiring me to explore teaching as a career).

Something else just occurred to me: I spend much more time writing a negative review than a positive one, in part because I always spend much more time re-evaluating and fact-checking.  But although I’m proud of some of my “negative” reviews, I’m more proud when I can praise and recommend a book.

(I’ve written only about a dozen book reviews, none for professional publication, but I’ve written at least 200 reviews of computer software and technology products for magazines and newspapers.)

Today, I read a Facebook post which both criticized and linked to a news article.  Then, after someone “Liked” that post, the person who’d posted it wrote: “A little confused–do you ‘like’ the [article] or my comment???”

Facebook has quickly transformed the meaning of two words: “Like” and “Friend.”  There is only one way to “connect” to someone on Facebook.  To connect with a person, you must “Friend” them; to connect with a Facebook “page,” you must “Like” it. You’ll only see posts in your Facebook “newsfeed” for folks you’ve “Liked” or “Friended.”

But of course, not all of my 400 Facebook “Friends” are really my friends, in any traditional sense. A few are family or friends; many are acquaintances; and many are people I’ve never met or interacted with outside of Facebook, but who share my interests.  (Sometimes I even “friend” a frenemy, to keep an eye on what they’re saying and doing on Facebook.)

Nor do I like all of the Facebook “pages” which I’ve flagged with the “Like” button. Instead, I mostly would just “like” to see what’s being posted on those pages.

Recently, Facebook has begun shifting the terminology for some activities from “Like” to “Share,” which is more accurate.

Complicating matters further, Facebook offers only two ways to signal your reaction to a particular post in your newsfeed: you can “Like” the post (and/or one or more of the comments to the post), or you can post a comment yourself.

But when I click the “Like” button for a post or comment, it doesn’t mean that I actually like (or agree with) what’s being said in a post or comment (or in a linked article).  Instead, I just appreciate that specific factual information (or an opinion) has been shared, even if I don’t agree with the message. Often, I “like” posts and links that reflect ideas that I find offensive and upsetting, because I believe it’s very important to listen to a wide range of views, and to know what others believe.

Some online communities offer different ways to signal a reaction to a post: some provide a “thank you” button, while others allow readers to click on either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon.

Using terms like “friend” and “like” creates confusion for many Facebook users, and leads to misunderstandings about what we mean when we use Facebook.  It’s quite possible that we’ll just accept these new, more ambiguous meanings for these words, which means that Facebook has helped transform the English language; it’s also possible that we (and/or Facebook, or its competitors or successors) will simply adopt or invent different words to use.

Related articles on other blogs:

1. “Language Matters: Name Your Feature Carefully” (Actiance blog)
2. “Entrenchment: ‘Befriend’ vs. ‘friend’” (Meaningful Games blog)

In the past two days, several folks have replied rudely to some of my Facebook posts about school reform, apparently assuming that anyone who criticizes any school reform or school funding proposal is only interested in protecting teachers’ financial interests and isn’t considering students’ needs.

But as I sulked about this unfair assumption, I realized that over the past few weeks, I’ve also adopted a mantra of many opponents of certain school reforms: that the goal of many (or most) “school reformers” is to privatize education, by first branding all public schools as “failing.” I soon recognized some other assumptions I’ve made about other people’s intentions.

Our assumptions about each others’ intent are both wrong and unhelpful.

We all want the same thing: for all students to learn, thrive, and excel in their efforts in school and beyond.  We simply disagree about the best strategies to optimize achievement.

But so long as we assume that our “opponents” have an evil or selfish intent, we can’t communicate effectively, and we’re not likely to achieve our common goals.

I’m going to try to change the way I consider and write about our disagreements on school reform.  For example, I’ve just considered how my use of the term “perverse incentives,” to describe the effects of certain school reforms, might be perceived as a personal attack by some supporters of those reforms — and perhaps I did take glee in using that term (which is accurate but probably not helpful).

Today, I realized that nearly all the “disputed” ideas involve accusations of perverse incentives.

Here are a number of specific topics or issues; for each, I’ll start with “shared beliefs,” and then address the proposed improvements for that topic or issue.

(1) Teacher Evaluation, Teacher Quality: We all believe that in our schools, there are some excellent teachers, some good teachers, some mediocre teachers, and some bad teachers.  We all agree that all teachers (including the excellent ones) could learn and improve their teaching skills, and we all agree that there are some current teachers who should stop teaching.

The “real controversy” isn’t whether teachers should be evaluated; it’s about how teachers should be evaluated, and what consequences should follow the evaluations.

(2) Standardized Tests: For every complex problem, of course, there is at least one obvious, simple, cheap solution that is absolutely wrong.  Here, the obvious, simple, cheap solution is to evaluate teachers based primarily on their students’ performance (or improvement) on standardized tests.

This strategy (the core of the NCLB and RTTT laws) creates “perverse incentives” for schools and teachers to change their curriculum in ways that we all agree are wrong:

• In thousands of elementary schools, teachers and students now spend nearly all their time on “reading and math” (more specifically, those aspects of math and reading which are “testable and frequently tested” on standardized tests, to the exclusion of more complex aspects of math and reading).  Forget about history, science, art, or music — for elementary schools and teachers, consequences only attach to math and reading test results. (Secondary teachers of history and science will need to rework their curriculum to deal with large numbers of students with limited experience in those subjects.)
• Perhaps more insidious, many schools pressure teachers to focus on “buffer students,” who are “just below” a proficiency level, to the exclusion of other students who need help, but aren’t likely to jump to the next proficiency level on the next test.
• In some schools (but not others), many students are “held back” to prevent them from being included in test results for the next grade level.
• Some schools allocate resources to find ways to exclude, transfer, or expel students with low test scores (but not students with high test scores).
• Some states “dumbed down” their content standards and their standardized tests, to make it easier for students to achieve “proficient” scores.
• Administrators may deliberately place specific students in schools or classrooms to improve or worsen that school’s or teacher’s test scores (thus, the system can easily be “rigged” against certain teachers, in favor of preferred [compliant] staff).
• Student performance is generally higher in elective or leveled classes where students “self-select,” creating a perverse incentive for secondary teachers to avoid working with low-performing students, when possible. Some teachers might also seek out elective classes for which there are currently no standardized tests.
• The “high stakes” have led some teachers and administrators to cheat, including correcting answers on student answer sheets before they’re submitted for grading.

It’s also important to recognize that these standardized tests were originally designed to evaluate student performance, not teacher quality.  And student performance is affected by many factors other than teacher quality or effectiveness. Perhaps more troubling, students face no consequences for their performance on these standardized tests, which are “high-stakes” only for teachers and schools.

(3) Relationships Among Teachers: We all believe that every teacher can benefit from the exchange of ideas with other teachers. (That doesn’t mean that we agree on the value or importance of specific types of exchanges, such as peer observations, collaboration meetings, or curriculum uniformity.)

But performance-based “merit pay” creates competition between teachers within a district or school.  This creates a perverse incentive against collaboration and cooperation among teachers.  Teachers who share ideas will be at a disadvantage, as other teachers use those shared ideas alongside their own “proprietary” ideas. In some cases, some unethical teachers might deliberately sabotage other teachers’ efforts — and be rewarded.

Competitive “merit pay” does create another incentive, which some might like: good teachers in low-performing schools would be more likely to receive merit pay increases than good teachers in better-performing schools (if you believe that the overall quality of teachers is higher at the “better” school, making the competition harder there).

(4) Evaluating Teachers Fairly is Complex (and Expensive): We all agree that teacher evaluation is important but very complex.  Many of us also believe that “we know good teaching when we see it.”

Education professionals agree that teacher evaluation should include significant classroom observation time, and that teachers would also benefit from observing other teachers.  Unfortunately, subjective evaluation can be unfairly “colored” by many factors, including teaching styles or the relationship between the teacher and evaluator, so a fair system would include multiple evaluators.  And since every teacher has some “off days,” evaluation should cover multiple class sessions over several weeks or months.

But time is money, and there is constant demand for administrators’ and teachers’ time for a variety of “urgent tasks.” It’s just not plausible to expect schools to fairly allocate staff time for meaningful evaluations. (Ask some teachers: during each year you’ve taught, how many hours were you actually observed by someone evaluating your work?)

Likewise, we all agree that teacher quality can be improved by effective collaboration and professional development — but fairly allocating time for these is implausible in many schools.

(5) Fairness of Evaluations: Teachers and school administrators are human.  Each of us has biases and preferences about who we’d like to work with, and who we’d prefer not to work with. We have good days and bad days; we have distractions. These skew our perceptions, and they may even skew our intentions.

Ask a few teachers, and you’ll soon hear lots of stories about unfair subjective evaluations of teachers.  Now imagine attaching additional consequences to evaluations, and not just for new teachers but for all teachers in a school. Think about the impact of evaluations if “tenure” were eliminated, and teachers could be terminated “at will.” Now add the burden on staff to evaluate every teacher, not just new teachers. Now add the loss of collective-bargaining rights to negotiate a fair evaluation process or dispute process.

(6) Financial Perverse Incentives:  Huge budget cuts are also shifting more weight to some decisions, separate from other “reform efforts.”  For example, in most schools, class size limits vary for some subjects, with certain “elective” classes (art, music, drama, PE) allowing more students per teacher, and some other classes must be smaller.

Many states and schools are raising class sizes and teacher-pupil ratios, in order to reduce costs, but this makes teachers’ jobs even more difficult.

(7) Public Education, School Choice, Private Schools, and Vouchers: Many of the most vocal “school reform advocates” believe that much of public education should be “privatized.” They want to replace public schools (and teacher unions) with private schools (with no unions), for a variety of reasons: to save money, to support religious schools, to shift political power, and more.

Nearly all charter schools (and all private schools) benefit from a “self-selection” advantage (passive students and parents never apply), accompanied by more liberal expulsion policies.  (We should be alarmed that even with this advantage, plus longer hours, students in charter schools don’t outperform their public counterparts.)

The “No Child Left Behind” law, enacted a decade ago, promised huge funding to help schools (which never materialized, loading new costs onto already-strained school budgets), but in fact its primary goal was to “prove” that public education was failing.

The NCLB law asserted a bizarre, impossible goal: that schools should improve their test scores each year until 2014, when 100% of students were expected to score “proficient.” That’s a great aspiration, but not a reasonable goal (the simplest examples: non-English-speaking students who move to the US, special-needs students, and non-cooperative/resistant students).  Each year, more draconian penalties apply to schools that don’t meet this impossible goal — creating uncertainty and chaos which amplified the “perverse incentives.”

Now What?

If you read this far expecting a solution, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

We all agree that there’s room for improvement in education. We all agree that teachers would benefit from improved evaluation and feedback. We certainly don’t agree on the weight (if any) that standardized testing should be given in teacher evaluations.

Most of us probably agree that more resources should be allocated for classroom observations, meaningful collaboration, and high-quality professional development.

I doubt that many education professionals expect any of these things to happen soon.

On January 1, 2011, I “launched” LessonIndex.com — which I believe is already the most useful and relevant directory of Literature Lesson Plans for K-12 teachers.

After gathering data from many sources and launching this version of the site as a “proof of concept,” I’m turning back to refine the ontology, database structure, and import scripts so I can expand the site to include resources for all K-12 content areas.

Some relevant links for my new site:

• Short Index page (with links to directory pages for about 200 literary works);
• Big Index page (with links to directory pages for each of 2,034 literary works);
• blog.LessonIndex.com, which provides update information, suggestions for publishers and merchants, and a list of the “Most Frequently-Taught Works” (works with the most resource links).

Unfortunately, I’ve “stalled” with this project, mostly because of the incredible “loss of incentive” caused by the probable enactment of an “Advertising Nexus tax law” in California. If enacted, the law will force Amazon and other out-of-state retailers to terminate their advertising in California, wiping out much of my advertising revenue overnight.

I’m still doing some organizing and planning work, and I’m making some major updates to the database that “drives” the site, but I’m only allocating a small part of my time and effort to the project.

Despite my ambivalence about the financial outlook for LessonIndex.com, traffic and revenue have continued to grow nicely:

This is a news story that attracts me from all my perspectives (Wisconsin native, journalist, lawyer, teacher, and of course critic).

All night, I’ve been checking in on this Wisconsin “bellweather” election — an amazing cliffhanger. (Late Wednesday, with all precincts reporting, the AP now reports the liberal candidate now leads by 204 votes, or 0.014%.)

In Wisconsin, many citizens feel betrayed and violated by the actions of the Republican governor and legislature, barring collective bargaining by public-employee unions which didn’t support the governor’s election (while retaining it for other public-employee unions).  Many others, of course, believe the Republican rhetoric blaming public-employee unions for the state’s budget deficit (which appeared only after the new Republican legislative majority enacted huge tax cuts for the wealthy).

Let’s be clear: it’s very unlikely that this election (for Supreme Court Justice) will change the outcome of this particular battle.  (The current law will likely be stricken down as invalid because its enactment was in violation of the state’s Open Meeting law, but the legislature will re-enact the law anyway, and I doubt the Wisconsin Supreme Court will strike down the law on other grounds before new elections lead to its reversal.)

But just weeks after the political adventures surrounding the collective-bargaining provisions, this was the first opportunity voters had to weigh in — and despite the overwhelming 2:1 lead that the conservative incumbent had (just a few weeks ago), exactly half of Wisconsin’s voters voted for each candidate.

Where are the lessons here? Well, let’s start with the obvious: every vote really does count.  This election will probably end with the winner leading by just a few hundred votes out of 1.5 million — probably less than one-fiftieth of one percent difference between the vote counts for the two candidates.

Another lesson: money was immensely influential, probably pivotal. In the final days of the election, “independent groups” spent at least $3.5 million (probably more than $5 million). While a substantial amount was spent by union supporters, most was spent by business groups supporting the conservative incumbent.

Wisconsin Republican legislators facing recall campaign should be worried — even in districts which voted 60% or 70% in favor of the incumbent Supreme Court justice in this election.

I’ve rearranged the sequence of Slekar’s points.

• Don’t wait for superman. You already have super teachers. Support them!
• Accountability is code for blame.
• NCLB is a system designed to “prove” that public schools are failures.
• Participation in a system designed to “prove” that public schools are failing is unethical and I would hope offensive to anybody’s religious values.
• My son is not a data point to be used by politicians and talking heads to “prove” that public schools are failing.
• The boycott of NCLB is in support of public schools.
• NCLB narrows the curriculum. This is bad because a rich curriculum supports learning.
• The tests have sucked the life out of teaching and learning,
• The system doesn’t measure what it says it does.
• Tests weren’t designed to evaluate teachers.
• Where are the experts?
• A College dropout like Bill Gates and a second rate basketball player like Arne Duncan in charge of education policy, really?
• The new reformers need to spend an extended amount of time in schools.
• High stakes testing seems to only be able to predict socioeconomic level.
• Control for poverty and our scores beat international scores.
• Read Valerie Strauss, Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, and Alfie Kohn.
• Research, evidence, research, evidence.
• Finland.
• Punitive systems do not work.
• NCLB is a failure. Achievement gap remains.
• We love our public schools. They are the bedrock of democracy in this country.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-d-slekar/how-to-boycott-nclb-in-90_b_843972.html

Marsia Mason, please note: if I find your car in a parking lot . . . I might leave a nasty note under your windshield wiper.

“As we were walking into the high school, we passed several expensive sedans with signs that read ‘Respect and Fairness.’ I had left my baseball bat at home, which is a good thing because instead of feeling sympathy for the teachers, I actually wanted to club their Beemers; leave them my own special sign.”  — Marsia Mason, “Bored of Education,” patch.com

There’s so much wrong with this, I don’t know where to start.

First, do we even know if the “expensive sedans” in the school parking lot on “back to school night” even belonged to teachers, and not parents?

If they belonged to teachers, were they paid for with the teachers’ salaries (or more likely, paid by another family member’s salary)? Or might some teachers choose “expensive sedans” as more suitable for a second job as a real-estate agent?

My disbelief of this parent’s story arises from an experience I had 20 years ago, when I was a new attorney:

I was asked to speak to a class at Monte Vista High School in Danville, which serves a very affluent community, with an average household income higher than 99% of school districts in California.

I’d never been to the school before, and when I drove into the parking lot, I was astonished to see lots of expensive sedans (BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, etc.). I was driving my brand-new Toyota Corolla, which was clearly the cheapest car in the lot.

I drove around the parking lot several times, but couldn’t find a parking space, so I parked at the curb in front of the office and ran in to ask where I should park.

“Oh, you can’t park in the student parking lot,” said the school secretary. “You need to park in the teacher’s lot. It’s up that dirt path.”

I drove up the dirt road, and soon realized that my new Toyota Corolla was the finest car (by far) in the unpaved teacher’s parking lot.  I saw lots of old, beat-up cars, which the teachers drove many miles from the distant communities where they could afford to live on a teacher’s salary.

As I’ve mentioned in other blog posts here, I’ve had several careers in my lifetime: journalist, attorney, internet marketing consultant, and (very briefly) teacher.  As a teacher, I collected the lowest pay of any career, and worked the hardest, under the worst conditions.  I refused to tolerate the conditions, and quit.

If teachers’ salaries were doubled, they’d still be underpaid for the work we demand from them.