Sherman Dorn

Race to the Top: review, revise, redux

I am in California this weekend for the Social Science History Association annual meeting, where we get to talk about Maris Vinovskis's book on the last quarter century of school reform, and since one of my copanelists Saturday morning is Jennifer Jennings, I finally get to meet the sociologist-formerly-known-as-Eduwonkette in person, face to face. Because several family members live in Costa Mesa, I also get to enjoy Kean Coffee about 20 miles south of the conference hotel/cruise ship (when the heck did the SSHA officers decide to book the Queen Mary??!).

While the focus of the book panel will be ... well, Maris's book, I'm sure we'll be talking about Obama education policy at some point, including Race to the Top. I was rushing around last night not getting enough done, so I didn't have a chance to do more than casually skim the stuff that's now available on the revised final guidelines. A few initial thoughts:

Bottom line? No idea. I traveled west and had coffee (see above), so I don't have a bad case of jet lag, but I've been on planes for 7 hours today.
I very much like the competitive priority on STEM fields. That uses a standard device for focusing grant-writers' minds in USDOE competitions (the bonus points for meeting a competitive priority). (Disclosure: it looks like my state's department of education is following the push a bunch of us have been making about using Race to the Top funds for end of course exams, especially in science.)
From the list of changes made, it looks like there have been a lot of political calculations made on what changes had to be made to keep stakeholders in the game and what had to stay the same to satisfy policy goals.
Duncan is not anal retentive enough to make the points add up to a "nice round number." I have a suspicion this is deliberate, and if so I think I know the reason why.
People who focus on the total potential range of points for each section are missing an important feature of point distributions in scoring systems: it's the actual range and not the potential range that matters on rankings. If the potential range is 58 points from top to bottom on one component but the scoring leaves a real-life range of 10 points, it doesn't matter that the total number of points is 58. It could have been anything from 10 to 58. So what matters is how the reviewing panel looks at everything.

If we have time, I'll try to persuade Jennings to put on her Eduwonkette cape and save the state where I grew up. But I think California's problems are beyond what even a brilliant sociologist can solve. At least I get to see family members, which is worth the jet lag I'll be fighting in the next week.

Methodoxology

My graduate students are reading Jeff Henig right now, and it appears that few editorial boards or other advocates have taken his argument in Spin Cycle seriously, at least from reactions to the latest sets of charter-school reports issued by think tanks. Ritualistic incantations at the publication of the Brand New Latest Report Showing That Your Deepest Beliefs Are True should be tempered by the possibility that Sean Reardon might soon write a Think Tank Report focusing on the study's methods. Hoxby is a respected economist, and the key point of Reardon's report should be to remind us that one study does not a literature make. As Henig argued, individual studies are drops on the mill's paddles and are very rarely the whole stream. Or as Colorado's Kevin Welner said in response to Reardon's review of the 2009 Hoxby report, even the most enthusiastic reader of a study on one city might wish to "explore the causes rather than to jump to broad conclusions." I will hereby jump to the broad conclusion that this is wise advice.

Sometimes, negotiations are tough slogging because they're tough

Whether in reference to the Obama administration, the AFT, academic administrators at some universities, Iran, or some other entity, my personal news reading and listening in the last week has been full of finger-pointing about reneging on deals, backing away from apparent deals, undermining good trends, falsifying promising hints, or ruining fresh minty breath. It is frustrating to see people so quick to jump out with criticism, a self-fulfilling prophecy of finger-pointing in situations where further negotiation could be fruitful.

There's a corollary to the truism about not worrying about credit attributed to Ralph Winter, George Marshall, Ronald Reagan, and probably many others: sometimes you have to choose between getting things done and setting up blame in case of failure.

Incentives for high school curriculum change

Leslie Maxwell writes a short and solid blog entry (and maybe a story later this week) about the politics of college admissions at San Diego State University. Specifically, SDSU's move to eliminate a preferential admissions policy for high school students from San Diego has sparked a debate about perceived obligations to serve the local community. I am of multiple minds here about the consequences of excluding potential students who are unlikely to move to go to college outside their home county, but I don't know if the potential SDSU students outside the county are more or less advantaged on the whole, and what would happen with college completion.

On the other hand, I think see where the dynamics are heading... towards setting up one of the local districts (Sweetwater Union's school district) as a model because of its existing compact with SDSU. I recall Peter Sacks reporting on a certain high school teacher in Oceanside, and I'm curious how he'd see this. Calling Peter Sacks...

Avoid the interrupting, comma

One more bit of advice to students this afternoon: If you wish to write forceful sentences, do not be a writer, who places a comma between the subject, and verb of a sentence, nor between parts of a compound verb or noun with, only two items, nor in the middle of, a prepositional phrase. (Remove the underlined commas and reread.)

Doctoral students and Ph.D.s tend to be addicted to the dual comma interruptus, but other students appear to have a habit with the single, self-pleasuring comma.

Do not use dictionary definitions in papers, unless you're writing a paper about dictionaries

A word of advice to all students: in almost every subject, no matter what some teacher told you years ago, do not ever waste your time or words repeating a dictionary definition in an academic paper. Whatever Mr. Johnson's and Mr. Webster's successors wrote down is descriptive, not authoritative, and almost certainly it is useless for the argument you wish to make. There are obvious exceptions (philology, etymology, etc.), but I have never seen a paper where a dictionary definition serves any purpose other than to motivate my tooth-grinding.

Issues in electronic grade reports

This morning's article in USA Today on electronic grade reports is a reminder of a few important facts in evaluating technology use in schools:

Ease of use (in jargon, "usability") is critical to adoption. The systems that existed a few years ago were (and many still are) clunky and hard to use for both teachers and parents. New systems are becoming easier for parents to use, creating different accounts for students and parents (so students are aware of what parents can access but not interfere with that access), e-mailing notices of new grade uploads, and so forth. Larry Cuban's dicta about hybridization still hold true for anything living on a server.
The digital divide is especially important to pay attention to when private records are involved. Many poor parents and children use public libraries for internet access. With libraries' reducing hours, and with the public nature of computer-use rooms in libraries, parents without at-home internet access face significant barriers to accessing information that is online. That doesn't mean that districts should not build on-line systems, but there needs to be careful thought about how parents might access the information when they do not have private internet access, in the same way that there is a need to plan for parents with disabilities, parents who do not speak English, etc.
Districts should begin to figure out how to bring data together for parents. I'm not talking about a giant data warehouse--that becomes cumbersome (as well as security-fraught) if anyone can have access to databases--but a slim addition to the type of stuff that is showing up in the online grade report systems. I've proposed that for high school students there could be something akin to a look-at-everything-your-student-is-doing "dashboard" (if you'll forgive that term). Grades, extracurricular activities, jobs, etc. That will take some careful thought, but maybe an economic crunch is the right time to do it, when districts will think about the tradeoff in use v. design/maintenance costs.

My children's high schools are both using Edline this year, which is a dramatic improvement from attempts at online assignment and grade access a few years ago. There are still significant issues: some teachers find the interface hard, the school district took several weeks before realizing that maybe it might want to send the private authorization codes to parents in the mail rather than entrust them to students, and the school district still has not yet addressed the divorced-parents issue with regard to access (at least from the report of one co-custodial parent frustrated that the other parent has the authorization code and sole access but isn't using it). This is still significant improvement from my perspective.

Now, if only the school district will get new online systems for high school counselors to schedule classes, for special educators to work on IEPs, and teachers to sign up for professional development. At least in Hillsborough, those are legacies from when the district incompetently tried the low-bid strategy with vendors who didn't demonstrate capacity to fulfill the contracts, and so everyone is stuck with systems that still (expletive verb) (colorful adverbial expression).

Election results -- eh.

Andy Rotherham has a tempting interpretation of election results (and their effect on federal education politics), but I'm guessing he's just suffering from living in Virginia this morning. Normally, it's a very nice state, but I've seen some pretty-well-expected "darned my state is going down the tubes" messages from Va. acquaintances over the past 12 hours.

The more fundamental questions for any domestic initiative are whether health-insurance reform passes this year and what happens with employment in the next 4-5 months. My best guess is that health-insurance reform will pass and employment will start to nudge up but not by leaps and bounds. The result is that the potential for "oh my gosh I have to protect my seat" paranoia by majority Congresscritters will abate as a result of a health-insurance law but that pressure on the employment front will keep members of Congress nervous (regardless of party).

And, in any case, since the action in education politics is usually at the state level, that's where the import of yesterday's elections lies:

The death of two more TABOR referenda means that education funding is imperiled only by a horrid economy and state revenues. Yippee?
An unpopular Democratic governor in NJ is replaced by a Republican governor who may well enter office nearly as unpopular, facing a legislature that tends to protect wealthy communities at the expense of poor communities when it comes to education.
A popular Democratic governor in VA is replaced by a conservative Republican governor who promised to focus on education (among other service-oriented campaign promises), with a legislature dominated by Republicans.
In the sick state of New York, a billionaire buys a third term and a probable minor scandal about his elbows as well. In the meantime, an ineffectual governor will increasingly be overshadowed by state-level politics over education.
The sick state of California loses its often-running lieutenant governor to Congress.

Read Cliff Adelman's new report

Cliff Adelman's brand new report on international comparisons in higher-ed attainment (hat tip) is a must-read. I just wish I had enough time to read everything I should, including this item. (My reading lists: want to, need to, should have read three months ago.)

I therefore assign you, my dear reader, to read the report. This is your chance to get ahead of me.

Ready-made dissertation topic on local school politics

Anyone looking for a dissertation topic on school policy or politics can now rest easy: read the Palm Beach Post's description of a local reform effort that blew up in the face of a superintendent. You've got everything in there from the data-driven mantra to parental backlash to odd bedfellows with the teachers union and coalition politics. I have been watching the story unfold for a few months and suspecting that there's been a lot more beyond the headlines. I want to read the book on this, so get cracking, somebody!

Do Times reporters know the difference between percentages and raw numbers?

I suspect the following is an unfortunate placement by the reporter on a story about record high percentages of young adults in college (with an emphasis on percentages):

"What's behind this," Mr. [Richard] Fry added, "is that we have the biggest pool of young adults we've ever had who've finished high school."

I suspect that this is in reference to the growth of enrollment in two-year colleges, not total college-going. That distinction was not clear in the article.

Florida Student Group Fights for Zombie Rights

Tallahassee, Florida (Dissociated Press) -- At an early-morning press conference in the state capital, five zombies attending Florida state universities announced the formation of the new organization Florida Upbeat Zephyr Zombies (FUZZ) to fight for zombie rights.

"There are organizations that fight for the rights of students to be free from discrimination on all sorts of grounds," said FUZZ President B. Ray Andy-Indira Nougat. "Until now, though, no one has fought for the dead and undead. That all changes today."

The leaders of FUZZ explained at the press conference that after the suppression of student zombies Wednesday at the University of Florida, and the discovery earlier in the month of a plan to fight zombies at the same university, there was a pressing need to act immediately.

"The official stance of the state's flagship university is anti-zombie, and that's unacceptable," said the FUZZ vice president, Yasmin Urgun-Morales. "There is a stigma that all undead students face in schools. But we're supposed to be educating all Floridians who can benefit from college."

A staff member for Governor Crist said that he was unaware of any need for protection of zombies or other undead Floridians, though she admitted off the record, "Oh, what the hell. We have zombie mortgage companies, a zombie professional football team, and utilities that act like vampires. Why not a zombie student group?"

Later, the governor's office issued the following statement: "Governor Crist welcomes the productive contributions of all Floridians to the welfare of the state and looks forward to working with zombie students to advance the state's education system and economic development."

University of Florida officials had no comment for this story apart from a one-sentence statement: "The University tries to create an environment free of disruption, and the university will not tolerate actions by any student who threatens to eat classmates or any vital organs or significant parts of classmates."

In an unrelated story, researchers reported this morning that this reporter's brains are entirely unappetizing.

Channeling Jerry Bracey on "proficiency": it's political, not scientific

One of the late Jerry Bracey's hobbyhorses was the pretense that the NAEP achievement level labels were scientific, as he argued in 1999: "The standards have generally been the object of scorn and derision from the psychometric community." He was fond of quoting the 1999 report on NAEP proficiency levels, esp. from p. 162: " Standards-based reporting is intended to be useful in communicating student results, but the current process for setting NAEP achievement levels is fundamentally flawed." So when NCES issues a report comparing the implied theta-values of cut-scores for proficiency on state assessments to the theta-values of cut scores for proficiency on NAEP and both Ed Week and the Christian Science Monitor report on the paper with a straight face, we're obviously seeing one place where Bracey's voice is already missing.

I think Jerry perseverated on this issue, to the detriment of a sensible argument about political judgments. The larger point which is inescapable is that cut scores are set arbitrarily, and there is no way to avoid that fact. Those who support setting achievement levels hope and pray that they're arbitrary in the sense of arbitration and careful judgment, not by being capricious. But they are arbitrary, and even moreso the labels assigned them. What we know is that someone who scores at a "proficient" level on NAEP is scoring higher than someone in the "basic" band. That's all we know from those labels: ordinality. Moses did not come down from Mount Sinai with NAEP scores carved in tablets.

So what do we do with the inherently political nature of those labels? As I have argued in Accountability Frankenstein, the caution with which we use the judgments on cut scores should depend on the stakes of their use. If they're used to target resources, that's one thing (resources are going to be targeted in some manner), but the more that someone's job depends on them, the more wary we should be of how we set thresholds.

Today, however, NAEP labels and cut-scores are serving a purely performative act, to stigmatize states for their political response to NCLB. I hereby propose that we have the following new labels for NAEP achievement levels:

I think that's in the spirit of the day's report...

Correction: I assumed that NCES was using detailed data from the state assessments to estimate IRT parameters. Silly me. They were using distributional data for linkage. Oops... for me for forgetting the methods from the last such report. I'll let the measurement folks argue about the methods used here.

Why unions need competent administrators on the other side

Dean Dad neatly explains why Southwestern College's leaders aren't even competent Machiavellian administrators. While I've occasionally heard from people that the best union recruiting tool is a horrid manager, life is more complicated. Yes, there are threshold effects of managerial incompetence and cruelty on organizing campaigns, but for an already-recognized union with plenty of duties, competence from most of management is far better, for a number of reasons:

Most union members--including most vigorous union members--do not want to spend their entire lives in conflict with coworkers (which most managers are, in terms of daily contact). Unions as advocates, watchdogs, and the workplace equivalent of public defenders? That's a sustainable metaphor for what unions do. Us-Them metaphors can get people through a crisis, but not generally through an entire decade without some loss of integrity (see the great new book Staying with Conflict for more on the long game from a conflict-resolution expert's perspective).
It's better to win grievances by persuading managers on most cases than be taking every issue to an arbitrator. In a large enough workplace, there will inevitably be contract violations, if for no other reason than because most managers don't understand collective bargaining agreements and there are many pressures to take short-cuts on process. Informal resolution of the vast majority of such situations is in the interest of union members, and you're much more likely to get that if the people on the other side of the table are sane and competent.
Competent and sane administrators are less likely to do extraordinary damage to your members. That's not a foolproof, money-back guarantee, since everyone makes mistakes (see the last point), but I'd rather save my resources and time for a handful of problems than try to address dozens of serious problems every year.
Competent and sane administrators can be engaged and taught how to improve relationships with the people you represent. Everyone has an ego, but I'd like to work with people where a solid majority can put aside their egos and ideas to learn how to work better. And where I might learn a thing or two in return.
Part of a union's job is to promote the careers of its members, and that may take them into management. Do you want managers who understand the needs of the people you represent? If you put a target on the back of every current manager, you discourage your coworkers from becoming sympathetic managers.

At this point in my career and union work, I am convinced that patience, a good ear, and large doses of self-deprecating humor are important tools of power for union leaders. Using them requires suspending a belief in the Force (which is required to believe in the Dark Side). As in all things automotive and judgmental, your mileage may vary.

In no language either is there the phrase "as quiet as an airport"

Heard on the Philadelphia International Airport intercom. Or at least the small bits I could "understand"...

THIS IS A BOARDING ANNOUNCEMENT FOR
PASSENGER GRISENSD PLEASE GO TO TRUMP ATE
FERRITINOUS PAGING WE NEED YOU AT GATE
WYNNEWOOD NARBUHTH ARDMORE HAVERFORD BRYN MAWR ROSEMONT
CODE PHILLIES WAITING RAIN
DELAY HAS WITHDRAWN FROM DANCING WITH THE
STARS SEEN ELOPING IN NEXT MONTH'S
PEOPLE ARE ACCORDING TO POLLS NO LONGER BELIEVING THAT
OBAMA ATTACKS FOX
NEWS EVERY THIRTY MINUTES ON THE
HALF HOUR UNTIL DEPARTURE PLEASE TAKE YOUR BOARDING
PASS GO COLLECT
TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS ONLY IF YOU ORDER FROM SKYMALL
CATALOG THE ERRORS OF YOUR WAY
WHILE AWAY THE TIME UNTIL YOUR FLIGHT
BOARDS AT GATE
TWENTY-THREE WEEKS OF CONSTRUCTION TO IMPROVE OUR AIRPORT.
WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.