Tag Archives: Education Secretary Arne Duncan

Education, education reform, Testing

The New York Times in an Era of Kool-Aid Journalism

2 Comments

With Advertisements for the Common Core, the Editorial Board at The New York Times has offered its special brand of Kool-Aid journalism to the careless claim that 2013 NAEP data somehow prove education reform is a success:

The country is engaged in a fierce debate about two educational reforms that bear directly on the future of its schoolchildren: first, teacher evaluation systems that are taking hold just about everywhere, and, second, the Common Core learning standards that have been adopted by all but a few states and are supposed to move the schools toward a more challenging, writing-intensive curriculum.

Both reforms — or at least the principles behind them — got a welcome boost from reading and math scores released recently by the federal government. …

Two examples are the District of Columbia and Tennessee, among the first to install more ambitious standards and teacher evaluations. Tennessee jumped from 46th in the country in fourth-grade math two years ago to 37th, and from 41st in the nation to 34th in eighth-grade reading. The District of Columbia, though still performing below the national average, has also shown progress. The scores of its students improved significantly in both math and English.

Moreover, according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the eight states that managed to get the Common Core standards in place in time for the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress exams this year showed improvement from 2009 scores in either reading or math.

Kool-Aid journalism occurs when journalists relinquish their work as researchers and reporters to political appointees—in this case the Editorial Board of the NYT decides to turn Secretary Duncan’s baseless claims into statements of fact that support an editorial position. The Board concludes:

But the progress seen elsewhere — like Tennessee and the District of Columbia — shows that improvement is possible if the states strengthen their resolve and apply solutions that have been shown to work.

However, if the Editorial Board at the NYT had made even a basic effort at confirming Duncan’s claims, the Board could have discovered that NAEP data are complicated and cannot prove in any way that recent reforms are a success.

As I have detailed, and despite my not having any training as a journalist or as an investigative reporter, the Editorial Board could have benefitted from the following clarifications about NAEP that I found easily—all of which discredit Duncan’s claims and the Board’s position:

When I point out that raw changes in state proficiency rates or NAEP scores are not valid evidence that a policy or set of policies is “working,” I often get the following response: “Oh Matt, we can’t have a randomized trial or peer-reviewed article for everything. We have to make decisions and conclusions based on imperfect information sometimes.”

This statement is obviously true. In this case, however, it’s also a straw man. There’s a huge middle ground between the highest-quality research and the kind of speculation that often drives our education debate. I’m not saying we always need experiments or highly complex analyses to guide policy decisions (though, in general, these are always preferred and sometimes required). The point, rather, is that we shouldn’t draw conclusions based on evidence that doesn’t support those conclusions.

This shows that the places with the greatest gains were D.C., Tennessee, and Indiana, three places that have embraced the corporate reform strategy of testing, closing down schools, and opening charters.  If this was the only data we had access to, it would seem to prove that “the ends justify the means” when it comes to education reform….

There are many other things to analyze, and I’m looking forward to reading how others analyze the data.  For example, it is curious that Louisiana had ‘gains’ that were smaller than the national average despite that state having, certainly, the most aggressive reforms occurring.  For ‘reformers’ who are so obsessed with test scores and test score gains, this is certainly something that shouldn’t be ignored.  Also, Washington and Hawaii were pretty high up on the ‘growth’ numbers even though Washington does not have charter schools and Hawaii has been very slow to adopt Race To The Top reforms so their ‘gains’ can’t be attributed to those.

I’m still pretty confident that in the long run education reform based primarily on putting pressure on teachers and shutting down schools for failing to live up to the PR of charter schools will not be good for kids or for the country, in general.  I hope politicians won’t accept the first ‘gains’ chart without putting it into context with the rest of the data.

  • Latest NAEP Results, by G.F. Brandenburg exposes that DC gains pre-date the reforms championed by Duncan and the NYT:

First of all, the increases in some of the scores in DC (my home town) are a continuation of a trend that has been going on since about 2000. As a result of those increases, DC’s fourth grade math students, while still dead last in the nation, have nearly caught up with MISSISSIPPI, the lowest-scoring state in the US.

You will have to strain your imagination to see any huge differences between the trends pre-Rhee and post-Rhee. (She was installed after testing was over in 2007.)…

So, the Educational DEforms instituted by Rhee, Henderson, and their corporate masters have not produced the promised miracles.

Yesterday gave us the release of the 2013 NAEP results, which of course brings with it a bunch of ridiculous attempts to cast those results as supporting the reform-du-jour. Most specifically yesterday, the big media buzz was around the gains from 2011 to 2013 which were argued to show that Tennessee and Washington DC are huge outliers – modern miracles – and that because these two settings have placed significant emphasis on teacher evaluation policy – that current trends in teacher evaluation policy are working – that tougher evaluations are the answer to improving student outcomes – not money… not class size… none of that other stuff.

I won’t even get into all of the different things that might be picked up in a supposed swing of test scores at the state level over a 2 year period. Whether 2 year swings are substantive and important or not can certainly be debated (not really), but whether policy implementation can yield a shift in state average test scores in a two  year period is perhaps even more suspect….

Is Tennessee’s 2-year growth an anomaly? we’ll have to wait at least another two years to figure that out. Was it caused by teacher evaluation policies? That’s really unlikely, given that those states that are equally and even further above their expectations have approached teacher evaluation in very mixed ways and other states that had taken the reformy lead on teacher policies – Louisiana and Colorado – fall well below expectations.

As it stands, the position taken by the NYT Editorial Board lacks even the barest qualities of credibility, but it does expose the utter failure of Kool-Aid journalism.

education reform

UPDATED [Part II]: From Spellings to Duncan [Add King and DeVos]: Incompetence and Deceit

10 Comments

UPDATE II: No need for comment except to prompt you to this:

Shanker Blog: We Can’t Graph Our Way Out of the Research on Education Spending

NOTE: With the appointment of John King to replace Duncan, consider this Tweet from Bruce Baker:

—

While Secretary of Education (2005-2009), Margaret Spellings announced that a jump of 7 points in NAEP reading scores from 1999-2005 was proof No Child Left Behind was working. The problem, however, was in the details:

During President George W. Bush’s tenure, NCLB was a corner stone of his agenda, and when then-Secretary Spellings announced that test scores were proving NCLB a success, Gerald Bracey and Stephen Krashen exposed one of two possible problems with the data. Spellings either did not understand basic statistics or was misleading for political gain. Krashen detailed the deception or ineptitude by showing that the gain Spellings noted did occur from 1999 to 2005, a change of seven points. But he also revealed that the scores rose as follows: 1999 = 212; 2000 = 213; 2002 = 219; 2003 = 218 ; 2005 = 219. The jump Spellings used to promote NCLB and Reading First occurred from 2000 to 2002, before the implementation of Reading First. Krashen notes even more problems with claiming success for NCLB and Reading First, including:

“Bracey (2006) also notes that it is very unlikely that many Reading First children were included in the NAEP assessments in 2004 (and even 2005). NAEP is given to nine year olds, but RF is directed at grade three and lower. Many RF programs did not begin until late in 2003; in fact, Bracey notes that the application package for RF was not available until April, 2002.”

With the 2013 release of NAEP data, then, shouldn’t we be skeptical of Duncan’s rush to claim victory for education reform under Obama?:

This year, Tennessee and the District of Columbia, which have both launched high-profile efforts to strengthen education by improving teacher evaluations and by other measures, showed across-the-board growth on the test compared to 2011, likely stoking more debate. Only the Defense Department schools also saw gains in both grade levels and subjects.

In Hawaii, which has also seen a concentrated effort to improve teaching quality, scores also increased with the exception of fourth grade reading. In Iowa and Washington state, scores increased except in 8th-grade math.

Specifically pointing to Tennessee, Hawaii and D.C., Education Secretary Arne Duncan said on a conference call with reporters that many of the changes seen in these states were “very, very difficult and courageous” and appear to have had an impact.

Duncan’s claims, in fact, have prompted The Wall Street Journal to announce “School Reform Delivers”:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan hailed this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (i.e., the nation’s report card) results on Thursday as “encouraging.” That’s true only if you look at Washington, D.C., Tennessee and states that have led on teacher accountability and other reforms….

However, a handful of states did post significant gains, and the District of Columbia and Tennessee stand out. Until very recently, Washington, D.C. was an example of public school failure. Then in 2009 former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee implemented more rigorous teacher evaluations that place a heavy emphasis on student learning. The district also tied pay to performance evaluations and eliminated tenure so that ineffective teachers could be fired.

Between 2010 and 2012, about 4% of D.C. teachers—and nearly all of those rated “ineffective”—were dismissed. About 30% of teachers rated “minimally effective” left on their own, likely because they didn’t receive a pay bump and were warned that they could be removed within a year if they failed to shape up.

Clearing out the deadwood appears to have lifted scores.

As I warned on the release date of NAEP, we should anticipate this careless and unsupported eagerness to use NAEP data as evidence of corporate reform success.

Jim Horn has highlighted that NAEP shows a powerful picture of the growing problem with re-segregation and the entrenched reality of racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps—messages ignored by Duncan. At the very least, then, Duncan is cherry-picking.

Gary Rubinstein has also dismantled the DC NAEP “miracle,” and G.F. Brandenburg provides a clear chart showing that DC gains are a continuation of a trend pre-Rhee, and thus before the policies praised by Duncan. As Rubinstein concludes:

I’m still pretty confident that in the long run education reform based primarily on putting pressure on teachers and shutting down schools for failing to live up to the PR of charter schools will not be good for kids or for the country, in general.  I hope politicians won’t accept the first ‘gains’ chart without putting it into context with the rest of the data.

With the USDOE at Duncan’s disposal, it seems careless and inexcusable to make unproven claims that policy has caused test score changes when no one has had time to analyze the data in order to make such claims.

As Bruce Baker explains, after showing making causational claims between reform policy and NAEP gains is tenuous at best:

Is Tennessee’s 2-year growth an anomaly? We’ll have to wait at least another two years to figure that out [emphasis added]. Was it caused by teacher evaluation policies? That’s really unlikely, given that those states that are equally and even further above their expectations have approached teacher evaluation in very mixed ways and other states that had taken the reformy lead on teacher policies – Louisiana and Colorado – fall well below expectations.

Like Spellings, Duncan proves that he is either unqualified to be Secretary of Education due to a lack of understanding of statistics or that he is willing to place partisan politics above what is best for children and public education. Either way, this is yet another example of failure from the top in the world of education reform and politics—as well as the likelihood that the mainstream media will continue to play along.