Sherman Dorn

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.

Ted Sizer's push

It had instant credibility to the vast majority of readers who all probably shifted uncomfortably while reading certain passages, recognizing themselves. And the terms that came out of that project...

Classroom treaties.Tell me if you don't remember an entire class wheedling a teacher or two to change an assignment, to lower expectations a smidgen, and also reduce the teacher's workload.

The anonymity of the high school student. Tell me if you don't remember the bright classmate hiding in the back of the class, never called on, never pushed to think hard, never affected personally by a teacher.

The shopping-mall high school. That was the title of one of the other books that came out of the same project, and while it had a bit more of an edge, it had the same subtext: we can expect more.

Exhibitions. Most people call them portfolios, but he wanted them to be exhibitions in a more public sense, to get adolescents to be proud of their work, even if they were works in progress themselves (as are we all).

I know that I'm going to read laudatory eulogies of Ted Sizer in the next month, and I hope they don't forget his strategic choices in the 1980s, as he put together the project that became Horace's Compromise, The Shopping Mall High School, and The Last Little Citadel. I suspect that while his own books will be emphasized, along with his Essential Schools project, there was a subtle and clever point about his focus on the plurality experience in suburban high schools after World War 2: "I'm talking about you. Not Other People who don't have your advantages. You. Your children. How we're not expecting what we can from teenagers in your life."

His underlying ethic was one of pushing teenagers in healthy directions. It's close to Deborah Meier's point about a small high school: adults are supposed to be "in your face" in the right ways, so adolescents don't disappear into the woodwork. It's a structure to encourage pushing without having to be pushy. "I love you and expect more from you." "No, you can't get away with that." "I know you can do more." It's not without choices, by any means, but the choices have consequences and need to be deliberate, not the first thought off the top of a teenager's head. "That's interesting. How else could you do that?" "How did that affect the people in your lives? What else did you think about doing?" It's about pushing teenagers into thoughtful independence. "Here's the end goal. How would you get there? What would be your first step?"

I'm at the History of Education Society meeting this week, and there are so many here who knew or worked with Ted Sizer, including Bob Hampel (who wrote The Last Little Citadel). Many of the historians of ed who knew Sizer closely have retired, and many of us (including me) are young enough and unlucky enough that we never met him. But we know both his scholarly contributions (the first serious historical work on the high school) and his contribution to serious reform discussions over the past quarter-century.

In lieu of sending flowers, don't let an adolescent get away with sloppy thinking this week. Push.

Duncan's talk at Teachers College: first impressions

Some quick impressions of the text of Arne Duncan's speech at Teachers College today:

Historical quibble: Duncan said he was speaking at a place where "giants like John Dewey played such a formative role." No, he didn't, or at least not at Teachers College. When Dewey moved from Chicago to Columbia, he moved from education to philosophy, which is south of 120th Street. At Teachers College at the time, Edward Thorndike was far more influential. And after Dewey left Chicago, Charles Judd ruled the roost there. Correction to the quibble: In comments, Aaron Pallas points out that Duncan's speech was sponsored by Teachers College but held in a lecture hall south of 120th St. (i.e., on the Columbia side of the Academic Gorge of the Upper West Side). I stand corrected. Or I blog corrected.

Right: Duncan is correct that teacher education in the U.S. is currently inadequate. Duncan is correct that colleges of education do not teach everything that teachers need, and the reports he hears (about the inadequacy of preparation for classroom management and use of student performance information to improve instruction) is consistent with plenty of other information.

Wrong: Duncan wrongly implies that teacher education can easily fill the holes that teachers see from the classroom. Many years ago, I remember seeing the surveys for one absolutely solid program that taught about behavior management and using student performance data in a rigorous manner, and the primary complaints of alumni/ae was ... that the program didn't prepare them adequately in classroom management. On some things there is no substitute for experience, I suspect.

Right: Duncan argues that teacher education programs (and states) have not looked sufficiently to what happens with their graduates and the students of their graduates. He points in contrast to Louisiana's longitudinal analysis of teacher preparation programs, and he is right to do so. In contrast with all sorts of self-aggrandizing projects, George Noell has built a team whose reporting is relatively careful with methods and conclusions.

Wrong: Duncan baldly claims that he knows what good teacher education looks like. Dear Secretary Duncan: don't you remember the other part of the speech where you said that we don't look sufficiently at outcomes? Either we need to look at data carefully to figure out what works and what doesn't, or we know everything right now. I suspect that we know plenty of stuff that does not work, but that doesn't say much about the inevitable tradeoffs--whether it's more important to put resources into giving teachers detailed assessment classes or putting principal and specialist candidates through those classes, whether it's more important to make teacher-ed students spend their entire last year in schools (as happens with one of the programs Duncan praises), or make them spend more time learning content. By highlighting and praising a few current fads in teacher education, Duncan is falling into the same pattern he criticizes schools of education for.

Right: Duncan did not try to point fingers in politically-convenient directions. He did not try to claim that all teacher-ed programs are alike in content or structure. In contrast to Arthur Levine's semi-ahistorical report, Duncan did not claim that a major problem somehow lies with those of us on the margins of teacher education (as if all colleges of education are run by philosophers and historians). He correctly pointed to the institutional environment within which teacher-education programs operate:

It is far too simple to blame colleges of education for the slow pace of reform. In fact, universities, states, and the federal government have all impeded reform in a variety of ways.

Minor quibble here: One could legitimately claim that colleges of education have been on the forefront of reform plenty of times in the past century, sometimes but not always on the side of improving education. See my note above about Dewey, Thorndike, and Judd. And Diane Ravitch is correct about Teachers College in one very important way: William Bagley was on the right side in the early 20th century, against the conventional-wisdom of the day about reform.

But the reasons why elite schools of education headed in the wrong direction at the time fits with Duncan's institutional context: for universities, the easiest money in the early 20th century was in collecting school administrators and administrator wannabes into graduate programs, at the beginning of a trend that no one who reads Duncan's speech text should be surprised about: for decades, education and chemistry regularly vied for the highest number of doctorates granted in the country.

I teach at a college of education, one of the larger ones in the country. At first blush, Duncan's criticism strikes me on the whole as reasonable, and far more reasonable than the more venomous attacks I've seen before. I would love to trade the double standards and incredible micromanagement of programs we currently experience in our state (and I could tell tales of some of the idiocies we experienced in our last joint state-NCATE review--and this comes from one of the faculty members who had relatively little time sucked away for this) for a requirement to pay attention to what happens to our graduates and their students after they leave us.

A gadfly remembered: Jerry Bracey

An e-mail from Kevin Welner yesterday announced Jerry Bracey's death Monday night. I only met him a handful of times in the past 20 years of his persistent, indefatigable efforts to poke holes in every public report or news story he saw as an effort to demonize public schooling. His Huffington Post column from September 25 is representative of both the topics that he addressed year in and year out and the disdain he felt towards those who he thought libeled and slandered public-school students and educators.

According to one online biography, he was an early-childhood psychologist at the Educational Testing Service and Indiana University before becoming a testing director for the state of Virginia in the late 1970s and then taking a similar position in a small school Colorado district in the mid-80s. At about the same time he moved to Colorado, he began writing columns on education research for Kappan magazine, and in 1991 he wrote a long article excoriating critics of public schools, primarily the authors of the 1983 A Nation at Risk report and anyone who repeated the claims in that report.

He has spent the last 18 years writing detailed critiques of whatever target happened to catch his eye. I first met him when he visited the University of Delaware in 1992-93 as he was beginning his second career as a mythbuster. My impression at the time was that he was smart, detail-oriented, and tilting at a windmill. I think my judgment at the time has been borne out by his writings since then. For more than a decade, the Kappan magazine published his annual "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education," which usually praised a handful of individuals and dished out acidic criticism to those Bracey thought were fools or worse. For a few years, Kappan published his "Rotten Apple" awards with Bracey's annual report and then thought better of it once the first lawsuit threat appeared (when Bracey handed Willard Daggett the "No, you're not a ham, ham can be cured" Rotten Apple Award in 2000). Thereafter, every year at about the same time as his rotten-appleless report appeared in Kappan, Bracey would e-mail his annual Rotten Apple nominations to the world (or at least a long list of recipients), eventually publishing them and the annual report manuscripts online. Bracey was the Pauline Kael of education research.

Bracey was a true gadfly, a semi-retired professional who did his best to discomfit those who he thought were abusing their positions. He held no White House post, no political appointments in the U.S. Department of Education, no leadership spot in a well-funded think tank.

It is often the case that gadflies are ill-appreciated during their lifetimes, and often they pick the wrong windmills, or they tilt at windmills when they could be digging out the foundation instead. But Bracey was always there to respond to what he thought was poor reporting and sloppy thinking. There is probably no national reporter on the education beat in the past 20 years who didn't hear at one point or another from Jerry Bracey about Simpson's paradox or why NAEP's achievement levels were more political than scientific. Debra Viadero's blog entry today is very much in the vein I've read from reporters on occasion over the years: "He was, to put it bluntly, a thorn in our side. Once in a while, though, he had a point and I was awed by his tireless persistence and his willingness to heap criticism on government leaders from both sides of the political aisle, from Margaret Spellings to Arne Duncan."

The curious case of Larry Summers

Okay, maybe I can't let well enough alone on economics. About a decade from now, someone will have both the material and distance to write a fabulous biography of Larry Summers. On one level, he is a brilliant economist. At another level, he has been a total MF, and at Harvard the financial games and the Schleifer scandal are worse than his noncollegial style and tendency to say tremendously stupid things in public. I think he clearly has matched Bill Clinton on the "fast thinker with a deep mental problem" scale. The extent of all this is unknown at the moment. We have some interesting pieces by Ryan Lizza on his role on the White House economic team, Vanity Fair on the collapse of Harvard's endowment, and evolving coverage of what was clearly a bone-headed move in interest swaps* that the Boston Globe reported Friday but bloggers had uncovered in the summer (as Margaret Soltan explains). I know that Mark Ames tried to put things together last fall on Summers, but events move faster than journalists and sometimes you need a real historian and real time to put things in perspective.

When that time comes, you'll need someone with financial acumen and knowledge of higher education, as well as politics. That will be an interesting challenge, but I look forward to reading the Summers biography when it eventually comes out. If you're 13 years old and looking for a great dissertation topic, here's the one to keep in mind!

* In response to a colleague's concern many months ago about swaps, I looked at the interest-swap agreements of my own university. Mind-numbingly dull and mundane, they were the ordinary kind where the university bonded out debt at variable-rate interest and then turned around and agreed with a bank to pay the bank a fixed rate in return for the bank covering the variable-rate interest on the bond. It's a hedge against inflation, and because interest rates can't go below zero, the ordinary interest-rate swap looks like it has a limited liability. What Summers did at Harvard was different: Apparently Harvard agreed to interest-rate swaps on debts that Harvard would not incur for years and years.

** The swap-swashbuckling was compounded by the other bone-headed move of investing operating funds in less-liquid, more-risky investments.