Obama vs Romney on Education, Wrong Question

Despite a lot of special interest Romney bashing on the issues of education at least Romney want s to return local control.  I'll vote for that any day over the convoluted Obama policies.

FireDogLake expose the hypocrisy.

For my money, I'm more interested in Ron Paul's position on education.

Of course, these gents including George Carlin may be the best observers of where we are with education (not for the faint of heart or overly sensitive);

Career Advice for the Future

This is the time of year that commencement addresses flood the internet and so many are good that there simply isn't enough time to see or read them all.

This one by Sheryl Sandberg is outstanding in its entirety but most excellent where speaking to career advice for anyone in or out of work.

"As the world becomes more connected and less hierarchical, traditional career paths are shifting as well. In 2001, after working in the government, I moved out to Silicon Valley to try finding a job. My timing wasn’t really that good. The bubble had crashed, small companies were closing, big companies were laying people off. One woman CEO looked at me and said, we wouldn’t even think about hiring someone like you.

After awhile I had a few offers and I had to make a decision, so what did I do? I am MBA trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and my criteria in the rows, and compared the companies and the missions and the roles. One of the jobs on that sheet was to become Google’s first business unit general manager, which sounds good now, but at the time no one thought consumer internet companies could ever make money. I was not sure there was actually a job there at all. Google had no business units, so what was there to generally manage. And the job was several levels lower than jobs I was being offered at other companies.

So I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO, and I showed him the spread sheet and I said, this job meets none of my criteria. He put his hand on my spreadsheet and he looked at me and said, Don’t be an idiot. Excellent career advice. And then he said, Get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.

About six and one-half years later, when I was leaving Google, I took that advice to heart. I was offered CEO jobs at a bunch of companies, but I went to Facebook as COO. At the time people said, why are you going to work for a 23-year-old? The traditional metaphor for careers is a ladder, but I no longer think that metaphor holds. It doesn’t make sense in a less hierarchical world. When I was first at Facebook, a woman named Lori Goler, a 1997 graduate of HBS, was working in marketing at eBay and I knew her kind of socially. And she called me and said, ‘I want to talk with you about coming to work with you at Facebook. So I thought about calling you, she said, and telling you all the things I’m good at and all the things I like to do. But I figured that everyone is doing that. So instead I want to know what’s your biggest problem and how can I solve it.’

My jaw hit the floor. I’d hired thousands of people up to that point in my career, but no one had ever said anything like that. I had never said anything like that. Job searches are always about the job searcher, but not in Lori’s case. I said, you’re hired. My biggest problem is recruiting and you can solve it. So Lori changed fields into something she never thought she’d do, went down a level to start in a new field and has since been promoted and runs all of the people operations at Facebook and has done an extraordinary job.

CAREERS ARE NOT A LADDER–THEY’RE A JUNGLE GYM

Lori has a great metaphor for careers. She says they’re not a ladder; they’re a jungle gym. As you start your post-HBS career, look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact, look for mission. Move sideways, move down, move on, move off. Build your skills, not your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they’re going to give you. Do real work. Take a sales quota, a line role, an ops job, don’t plan too much, and don’t expect a direct climb. If I had mapped out my career when I was sitting where you are, I would have missed my career.

You are entering a different business world than I entered. Mine was just starting to get connected. Yours is hyper-connected. Mine was competitive. Yours is way more competitive. Mine moved quickly, yours moves even more quickly. As traditional structures are breaking down, leadership has to evolve as well. From hierarchy to shared responsibility, from command and control to listening and guiding. You’ve been trained by this great institution not just to be part of these trends but to lead. As you lead in this new world, you will not be able to rely on who you are or the degree you hold.

You’ll have to rely on what you know. Your strength will not come from your place on some org chart, your strength will come from building trust and earning respect. You’re going to need talent, skill, and imagination and vision, but more than anything else, you’re going to need the ability to communicate authentically, to speak so that you inspire the people around you and to listen so that you continue to learn each and every day on the job. "

Good stuff!

A Bell Curve Gone Wrong

A report from National Public Radio informs us that a new study disrupts our understanding and practice involved with the application of Bell curves in many of our endeavors. The report published in Personnel Psychology by Ernest O'Boyle Jr. and Herman Aguinis draws a number of interesting conclusions that educators should consider in evaluating the performance of students.  All bolded statements are mine to emphasize the conclusion.  The first summary of implications were;

Regarding performance measurement and management, the current zeitgeist is that the median worker should be at the mean level of performance and thus should be placed in the middle of the performance appraisal instrument. If most of those rated are in the lowest category, then the rater, measurement instrument, or both are seen as biased (i.e., affected by severity bias; Cascio & Aguinis, 2011chapter 5). Performance appraisal instruments that place most employees in the lowest category are seen as psychometrically unsound. These basic tenets have spawned decades of research related to performance appraisal that might “improve” the measurement of performance because such measurement would result in normally distributed scores given that a deviation from a normal distribution is supposedly indicative of rater bias (cf. Landy & Farr, 1980; Smither & London, 2009a). Our results suggest that the distribution of individual performance is such that most performers are in the lowest category. Based on Study 1, we discovered that nearly two thirds (65.8%) of researchers fall below the mean number of publications. Based on the Emmy-nominated entertainers in Study 2, 83.3% fall below the mean in terms of number of nominations. Based on Study 3, for U.S. representatives, 67.9% fall below the mean in terms of times elected. Based on Study 4, for NBA players, 71.1% are below the mean in terms of points scored. Based on Study 5, for MLB players, 66.3% of performers are below the mean in terms of career errors. Moving from a Gaussian to a Paretian perspective, future research regarding performance measurement would benefit from the development of measurement instruments that, contrary to past efforts, allow for the identification of those top performers who account for the majority of results. Moreover, such improved measurement instruments should not focus on distinguishing between slight performance differences of non-elite workers. Instead, more effort should be placed on creating performance measurement instruments that are able to identify the small cohort of top performers.

 The second;

Productivity difference between the 99.86th percentile and median worker should be 6.0 according to the normal distribution; instead the difference is more than quadruple that (i.e., 25.0). With a normality assumption, productivity among these elite workers is estimated at $33,981 ($11,327 × 3) above the median, but the productivity of these workers is actually $141,588 above the median. We chose Study 1 because of its large overall sample size, but these same patterns of productivity are found across all five studies. In light of our results, the value-added created by new preemployment tests and the dollar value of training programs should be reinterpreted from a Paretian point of view that acknowledges that the differences between workers at the tails and workers at the median are considerably wider than previously thought. These are large and meaningful differences suggesting important implications of shifting from a normal to a Paretian distribution. In the future, utility analysis should be conducted using a Paretian point of view that acknowledges that differences between workers at the tails and workers at the median are considerably wider than previously thought.

Speaking of implications for OB domains, they say,

 With less output from the center of the distribution, more output is found in the tails. Ten percent of productivity comes from the top percentile and 26% of output derives from the top 5% of workers. Consequently, a shift from a normal to a Paretian distribution points to the need to revise leadership theories to address the exchanges and influence of the extreme performers because our results demonstrate that a small set of followers produces the majority of the output. Leadership theories that avoid how best to manage elite workers will likely fail to influence the total productivity of the followers in a meaningful way. Thus, greater attention should be paid to the tremendous impact of the few vital individuals. Despite their small numbers, slight percentage increases in the output of top performers far outweigh moderate increases of the many. New theory is needed to address the identification and motivation of elite performers.

Their interest extends to work teams and that interaction;

 If performance follows a Paretian distribution, then these existing theories are insufficient because they fail to address how the presence of an elite worker influences group productivity. We may expect the group productivity to increase in the presence of an elite worker, but is the increase in group output negated by the loss of individual output of the elite worker being slowed by non-elites? It may also be that elites only develop in interactive, dynamic environments, and the isolation of elite workers or grouping multiple elites together could hamper their abnormal productivity. Once again, the finding of a Paretian distribution of performance requires new theory and research to address the elite nested within the group. Specifically, human performance research should adopt a new view regarding what human performance looks like at the tails. Researchers should address the social networks of superstars within groups in terms of identifying how the superstar emerges, communicates with others, interacts with other groups, and what role non-elites play in the facilitating of overall performance. 

and to the darker implications of superstar based performance;

At a more fundamental level, our understanding of job performance itself needs revisiting. Typically, job performance is conceptualized as consisting of three dimensions: in-role or task behavior, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and CWB (Rotundo & Sackett, 2002). CWB (i.e., harmful behaviors targeted at the organization or its members) has always been assumed to have a strong, negative relation with the other two components, but it is unclear if this relationship remains strong, or even negative, among elite performers. For example, the superstars of Study 4 often appeared as supervillains in Study 5. Do the most productive workers also engage in the most destructive behavior? If so, future research should examine if this is due to managers’ fear of reprimanding a superstar, the superstar's sense of entitlement, non-elites covering for the superstar's misbehavior out of hero worship, or some interaction of all three.

Their final conclusion is most interesting, mining the Bell Curve scrapheap of research topics has gotten us nowhere;

...a Paretian distribution of performance may help explain why despite more than a century of research on the antecedents of job performance and the countless theoretical models proposed, explained variance estimates (R²) rarely exceed .50 (Cascio & Aguinis, 2008b). It is possible that research conducted over the past century has not made important improvements in the ability to predict individual performance because prediction techniques rely on means and variances assumed to derive from normal distributions, leading to gross errors in the prediction of performance. As a result, even models including theoretically sound predictors and administered to a large sample will most often fail to account for even half of the variability in workers’ performance. Viewing individual performance from a Paretian perspective and testing theories with techniques that do not require the normality assumptions will allow us to improve our understanding of factors that account for and predict individual performance. Thus, research addressing the prediction of performance should be conducted with techniques that do not require the normality assumption. 

They go on to suggest methodologies that might correct the false assumptions we've taken as gospel.  Furthermore, their analysis disrupts every fiber of our system of rewards and artificially induced  ethical sensibilities;

Our results put the usual conceptions and definitions of fairness and bias, which are based on the norm of normality, into question and lead to some thorny and complicated questions from an ethical standpoint. How can organizations balance their dual goals of improving firm performance and also employee performance and well-being (Aguinis, 2011)? Is it ethical for organizations to allocate most of their resources to an elite group of top performers in order to maximize firm performance? Should separate policies be created for top performers given that they add greater value to the organization than the rest? Our results suggest that practitioners must revisit how to balance the dual goals of improving firm performance and employee performance and well-being as well as determine the proper allocation of resources for both elites and nonelites.

Beyond concepts of ethics and fairness, a Paretian distribution of performance has many practical implications for how business is done. As we described earlier, a Pareto curve demonstrates scale invariance, and thus whether looking at the entire population or just the top percentile, the same distribution shape emerges. For selection, this means that there are real and important differences between the best candidate and the second best candidate. Superstars make or break an organization, and the ability to identify these elite performers will become even more of a necessity as the nature of work changes in the 21st century (Cascio & Aguinis, 2008b). Our results suggest that practitioners should focus on identification and differentiation at the tails of the distribution so as to best identify elites.

Organizations must also rethink employment arrangements with superstars, as they will likely be very different from traditional norms in terms of starting compensation, perquisites, and idiosyncratic employment arrangements. Superstars perform at such a high level that makes them attractive to outside firms, and thus even in a recession these individuals have a high degree of job mobility. In an age of hypercompetitiveness, organizations that cannot retain their top performers will struggle to survive. At present, we know very little about the motivations, traits, and behaviors of elite performers. Our work indicates that superstars exist but does not address the motivations, behaviors, and individual differences of the superstar.

To put these results into context, substitute the concept of 'employee' with 'student'.   Studies such as these represent yet another nail in the coffin of the idea that there is such a thing as a failing school.  what is failing is our sensibility to admit that not everyone can or will perform to normative testing regiments nor will they respond to the empty mantras of higher expectations.

Add to the discussion that, given our existing dysfunctional fetish with high-stakes, high-stress testing in public schools, failing schools are more likely to not fail by motivating their superstar learners rather than the majority of disaffected students.  To compound matters the skimming of the brightest and best of urban public school to private schools virtually ensures and exacerbates the perpetual failing of the very schools we are (presumably) trying to **cough** save.

And for all of the suburban Lake Wobegone schools whose students are ALL exceptional, a rethinking of what exceptional means may be forth-coming sooner than later.  When grades reflect little more than a metric indicating completion of assigned grunt-work, homogenization of perfunctory core curriculum tedio-content, and social standing rather than true learning performance, we distort the educational mission, potentially stunt the learning potential of our brightest and best, and put this nation at risk of becoming institutionally mediocre and irrelevant.

This is called No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and it is a national disgrace.

My first Ted-ED Tutorial

Last night I experimented with TED-Ed's latest tool to create tutorials from YouTube content.

Here's the link.

Chomsky's Latest Thoughts on Education

Noam Chomsky has written an article for Truthout in which he describes the current situation eloquently.

"Mass public education is one of the great achievements of American society. It has had many dimensions. One purpose was to prepare independent farmers for life as wage laborers who would tolerate what they regarded as virtual slavery.

The coercive element did not pass without notice. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that political leaders call for popular education because they fear that "This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats." But educated the right way: Limit their perspectives and understanding, discourage free and independent thought, and train them for obedience.

The "vile maxim" and its implementation have regularly called forth resistance, which in turn evokes the same fears among the elite. Forty years ago there was deep concern that the population was breaking free of apathy and obedience."

Censoring The Right to Know

Update:  This movie was made available to students and parents to share after bloggers such as myself pointed out...

As usual, the blowback of the unintended consequences of blanket censorship is doing more harm to those it was supposed to protect than good.

In an opinion piece from GoodCulture, we are introduced to a tough film about Bullying called Bully that teens must break the law to see.

"The new documentary Bully takes on the issue of harassment in American high schools, depicting real scenes of school bus torture, schoolyard violence, administrative indifference, and the tragic fallout in explicit detail. Now, the Motion Picture Association of America has made sure that most American high school students won't be able to see the film: It's slapped the doc with an R rating."

The Youtube trailer:

New EO Smith Digital Learning Initiative Committee Blog

This year the EO Smith Board of Education has created a Digital Learning Initiative Committee of which I am the chair.

We've held one meeting and we're announcing a new blog that will complement the committee's interests.

You can access the blog here: http://eosdigitallearning.blogspot.com/

Our documents are made public from Google docs.  We will promote digital learning across the community.

Ah, Global Competition

Global competition is often sited as the stimulus for the mind numbing arguments that we NEED standardized education or the sky will fall.

Here's a sample of what that globalized competition looks like:

and here's the backstory:

"And I say to her, you seem kind of young. How old are you? And she says, I'm 13. And I say, 13? That's young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you're-- and she says oh no. And her friends all agree, they don't really check ages. The outside companies do have inspections, but workers told me Foxconn always knows when there's going to be an inspection. So what they do then, they don't even check ages then. They just pull everyone from the affected line, and then they put the oldest workers they have on that line.
You'd think someone would notice this, you know? I'm telling you that I do not speak Mandarin. I do not speak Cantonese. I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture, and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture. I don't know [BLEEP] all about Chinese culture. But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12."

Mic Check: Occupy the DOE

Here's a web site that announces a national action to opt out of high-stakes, high-stress testing.

 We are requesting to everyone that this remain a PEACEFUL occupation with NON-VIOLENT actions.

Be sure to click the link and read the guidelines carefully.  Given how the Obama administration has perversely botched education policy in this country, the very idea that people are still smart enough to protest is heart-warming.

FAIL: CT Superintendents Play Intellectual Hookey

The Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents (CAPSS) recently issued a comprehensive set of recommendations in a document called NextED - Transforming Connecticut's Education System.

In examining the documentation, the Superintendent's get the right answer but cheat when it comes to the details.  They haven't done their homework.

What they get right is that children need to learn at their own pace based on their personal intellectual, physical, psychological, and other maturities.  After forty years of empirical educational evidence that this makes perfect sense, the superintendents agree.  Rather than call them "slow" we'll defer to calling it "bureaucratic impairment syndrome". But identifying this self-inflicted, brain-deadening malady cannot excuse the poor scholarship.

You see, these folks are not really advocating anything along the lines of true personal learning, they are sugar-coating the toxic No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT) anti-child pograms of the Bush/Obama administration.

In computer programming, we talk about code smell.  That is that the syntax and logic of a computer program is obviously lacking veracity just based on a superficial reading of the code.  NextEd suffers from this precise problem.  You can't get to a better education system based on their assumptions and recommendations.  Their recommendations are an expensive and poorly thought-out prescription for guaranteed continued public education dysfunction.

Where do they  go wrong?

First, they pander to the idea that CT public education "has been successful at providing access to a quality education for 150 years".  If that were true there would be no "education gap" between suburbs and cities and this set of recommendations would not be necessary. 

Second, their agenda reads like NCLB and RTTT, two disgraced, failing, and criminal programs that have been ram-rodded down the throats of State legislatures to marginalize local control of school districts.

The ideas are as stale as the vernacular.  The superintendents want to "raise the bar", "educate all students with high standards", "using direct measures", "strengthen the State Dept of Education", and so on.  This Orwellian slight of tongue is anathema to improving public education.

To get serious about educational reform this country needs to eliminate both the Federal and State Departments of Education.  Preferably they should be tried for child abuse first and embezzlement of taxpayer funds for disingenuous appropriation of said funds.

Secondly, all of the recently passed education legislation that was passed based on NCLB and RTTT need to be repealed entirely.  These laws prevent public schools from performing any kind of useful educational improvement.   As long as education is based on high stress, high stakes testing regiments - nothing of their recommendations, good or bad, is likely to have the desired effect.

And maybe this is the point of such studies - exhaust the funds, write some flowery platitudes, and wait for the predictable fail.

University Math -> the University As a Rogue IRS

A few days ago, Stephanie Reitz reported in the Courant that UConn had funded a study of "recommendations from McKinsey & Co., which it paid $3.9 million last year to suggest ways to cut costs and boost income as the school's state subsidies drop."

Wow.  Four million dollars to find ways to cut costs or increase revenues.  That's a pretty amazing  amount of money to throw at such dare we say *obvious* recommendations.

• Offer more year round classes!
• Charge more for parking and busing
• Eliminate sparsely enrolled majors
• Consolidating technology
• Centralized purchasing
• Increasing ticket prices for popular sports
• Reviewing sports budgets
• Offering more online courses
• More aggressive fund-raising
• Staff attrition savings
• Premium dorm room price increases

Really?  This is what we get for four million dollars?

Here are my open source suggestions.  If you think they're worth more than four million dollars then donate a dollar to the first charity you encounter after reading this.

Everyone with a brain knows that the true cost of education is in administration.

• Eliminate 10% of the administration, topmost first.  Consolidate accordingly. 

Everyone familiar with the free ride program - that is that if a person works at UConn, their children attend tuition free - is a profoundly expensive and discriminatory -cough- "perk".

• Eliminate the free tuition ride perks, they're discriminatory, expensive and unnecessary

It is not centralized purchasing that needs to be implemented, it is competitive purchasing that needs to be introduced.

• Open the purchasing up to competitive bidding for quality products - quality need not be compromised, crony-ism needs to be eliminated

Privatize the University maintenance functions.

•  The keystone kop buffoonery that has become local legend must end.  maintenance workers who drive 15 minutes back and forth to take 15 minute breaks,  the Rube Goldberg repair of dormitory leaks, and other sordid tales is empirical evidence enough to rethink these positions and processes.

Repeat and rinse these recommendations every two years until the budget is balanced. Make education affordable by being serious about offering an accessible, affordable State University program.

The University system has no right to impose its own new taxes in the form of fees, new charges, or other subversive fiscal tactics.  If the State can no longer afford the expense the Universities are incurring  then those bodies need to tighten their budgets not act like an independent agency that is royally entitled to more State tax money no matter how they get it.

CT's private sector citizens have been taking massive cuts in pay and benefits while the public sector employees and institutions yawn as they plan their retirement homes in low tax havens leaving their scorched earth fiscal carnage to those who have already been kicked too often.  It's time for everyone to share the economic realities facing the State and the nation.

Where did this kid go to school?

To Hell with NCLB and Race to the Top, America needs to clone this kid's education.

Some Truth That will Fall on Deaf Ears

Hat tip: ZeroHedge

WikiLeaks on Chinese Education

A new wikileak exposes a cable from the US delegation in Chengdu, China, where a counsel met with a local representative of the World Bank's International Finance Corporation, for a candid one on one. What's most interesting is how poor the Chinese education system is. And what's of most interest in terms of the American system of education that is in such dire straits is that for over a decade American educators have been taking junkets to China to -cough- "study" the Chinese education system. All on the taxpayer dime of course. Nice "work" if you can get it. From ZeroHedge, here's the excerpt of interest;

"Terrible" Education System Is Main Impediment 11. (SBU) However, Lai identified China's "terrible" educational system as presenting a serious impediment toward achieving a shift to a more knowledge-based economy. The current system promotes copying and pasting over creative and independent thought. Lai said that the system rewards students for thinking "within a framework" in order to get the grade. He described the normal process undertaken by students when writing as essentially collecting sentences from various sources without any original thinking. He compared the writing ability of a typical Chinese Phd as paling in comparison to his "unskilled" staff during his decade of work with the IFC in Africa.

Video Primer for New School Board Members

Ham-fisted Education ( We have Ways of Making Them Learn!)

Once the Berlin Wall fell there were few challenges left for our military leaders. And about that same time the politicians began a "War on Drugs". This opened the floodgates of opportunity for the militarists to retire and establish a front for the *war* in our schools. School Principals, Superintendents, and administrators soon required a military background as well as a few education courses to "straighten schools out".

Over a quarter century later, teacher pedagogy has been reduced to animal trainer memorization exercises

And along the way, a lot of bad educational theory and practice followed. Here we'll examine the mytheme made popular by the conservative and centrist forces of the time and that is that if a child is having problems learning then what's needed is MORE work, ever HARDER Work, LONGER days, SHORTER vacations, MORE tests, HIGHER standards, TOUGHER discipline - MORE, HARDER, LOUDER!

And we should acknowledge that anyone who takes exception to this American gospel will be marginalized, ignored, and -gasp- labeled as a soft liberal wimp whose ideas aren't worth considering. And the Teachers Unions not only go along with the myth but they structurally reinforce the MORE, HARDER, LOUDER paradigm because it is an easy, no-brainer. If it fails, they point the finger at the parents who aren't tough enough, hard enough, draconian enough to *MAKE* the child love learning.

Nazi Germany were amateurs compared to the kind of standardized education we can ensure these days. Our children goose-step through more nonsense that any child in history and recent studies continue to show that its all wrong. In fact a case is being made that public education is hazardous to the health and well-being of children.

The Chicago Public Schools are providing some interesting studies. The New York Times reports that efforts to lengthen the school day there are having unintended consequences;

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and new leaders of Chicago Public Schools have been pushing for a longer school day and school year to help raise student performance. But last week’s state test results show that charter schools — which typically have more instructional time — actually have a lower percentage of students exceeding state standards.

So does the empirical evidence suggest a closer examination of the concept? Um... NO;

In 2014, the state test will switch to a new, more rigorous exam that aligns with the Common Core, a set of curriculum standards adopted by states across the country to better prepare students for college.

Ms. Donoso — who is replacing Charles Payne, the interim chief education officer — is responsible for developing the district’s curriculum strategy and working with school leaders to carry it out. Her main focus in the coming years will be the Common Core, which is intended to develop analytical skills beyond those currently tested on the ISAT.

Ms. Radner said the district “needs to step it up” or scores could crash when the new test is given in 2014, calling the change “the biggest shift I’ve ever seen.”

”We can’t be complacent,” she said “This is a whole different generation of standards and assessment.”

This is always the answer MORE rigor, if its failing we aren't trying hard enough - there's a whole new generation of kids who we can experiment on - the perverse dysfunction of hope.

Wait, there's more. EDWeek reports that Chicago tried herding students into college prep courses and that too is having unintended consequences;

Research has shown that students who take high-level course sequences learn more in high school and are more likely to attend and to perform better in college than students who do not take these classes. Yet despite the popularity of default-curriculum policies, we actually know surprisingly little about whether changing course requirements will necessarily lead to improved outcomes for students. This is because previous studies cited by many in the policy and reform communities do not fully correct for selection bias: that is, the fact that students who choose to take high-level classes are often the most motivated and high-achieving in their schools, and that the schools offering advanced courses are those with the capacity to teach them, and often are college-oriented in other ways.
"Default-curriculum reforms are not likely to work effectively without other significant and complementary policy efforts."

To inform state and district curriculum policies, and to address some of the limitations of the previous research, the Consortium on Chicago School Research and the University of Michigan have spent the last three years examining an effort by the Chicago public schools to implement a version of the default college-preparatory curriculum. The 1997 policy change ended remedial classes and mandated college-prep coursework for all students in four subject areas: English, mathematics, science, and social studies. Our study compares outcomes for cohorts of students in Chicago before and after policy implementation in English, mathematics, and science. What we found is sobering, to say the least.

First, the good news: The 1997 policy did increase student enrollment in college-preparatory classes in all three subject areas, and significantly reduced previous inequities in coursetaking by prior achievement, race and ethnicity, and special education status. The policy had no effects, however, on any of the major outcomes that default-curriculum reforms generally seek to affect: Test scores did not rise, nor were students more likely to take advanced mathematics classes beyond Algebra 2, or to complete advanced science classes.

Moreover, the policy produced a number of adverse unintended consequences: Grades declined, failures increased, and absenteeism rose among average and higher-skilled students. There also were no improvements in college outcomes, and those students who attended college were no more likely to stay there than students were before the policy change. High-achieving students were actually slightly less likely to attend college after the 1997 curriculum reforms were implemented.

The Chicago experience should serve as a cautionary tale for those who advocate for similar default-curriculum policies in their communities. Let us be clear: Curriculum requirements have important equity benefits, and can play a role in efforts to improve students’ high school experiences and their preparation for college. But default-curriculum reforms are not likely to work effectively without other significant and complementary policy efforts.
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This raises an important point: As long as students are minimally engaged in their courses and attend school irregularly, policymakers should not expect substantial improvements in learning. Getting the content and structure of courses right is just the first step. Real improvements in learning will require states and districts to develop strategies that get students excited about learning, attending class regularly, and working hard in their courses.

Although our findings may be disappointing to default-curriculum advocates, we are not suggesting that such policies are misguided. Prior to 1997, the differentiated curriculum was clearly not serving Chicago students well; even when they took remedial coursework, large numbers of students failed those courses and eventually dropped out.

We argue instead that curriculum policies need to be accompanied by greater attention to instruction and stronger efforts to improve the academic behaviors—particularly attendance and studying—associated with better school performance. Without improved instruction and engagement, the promise of these well-meaning reforms is likely to go unrealized.

Paul Krugman reinforces the argument further;

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

But education is not only dysfunctional as a service to students, it is apparently equally dysfunctional for teachers at the University level. The Huffington Post reports;

Despite more than a decade of research showing the money has little impact on student achievement, state lawmakers and other officials have been reluctant to tackle this popular way for teachers to earn more money.

That could soon change, as local school districts around the country grapple with shrinking budgets.

Just this week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the economy has given the nation an opportunity to make dramatic improvements in the productivity of its education system and to do more of what works and less of what doesn't.

Duncan told the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday that master's degree bonuses are an example of spending money on something that doesn't work.

On Friday, billionaire Bill Gates took aim at school budgets and the master's degree bonus.

"My own state of Washington has an average salary bump of nearly $11,000 for a master's degree – and more than half of our teachers get it. That's more than $300 million every year that doesn't help kids," he said.

"And that's one state," said Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at a speech Friday in Louisville to the Council of Chief State School Officers. Gates also took aim at pensions and seniority.

"Of course, restructuring pay systems is like kicking a beehive," he acknowledged.

The article concludes with the following understatement;

"There's a relationship between education schools and teachers that is not particularly healthy," he [Erick Hanushek, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University] said.

One would think that University Education Departments would study the ways that children learn and don't learn and what they need so that the teachers they train can advocate and promote those things. Instead we find that they're paper mills that enrich teacher's paychecks but little more.

Maybe we need to *GET TOUGH*, demand *HIGHER EXPECTATIONS*, and *TOUGHER STANDARDS*.


Wait...

Universal Small Class Size is an Expensive Lie

A number of years ago I studied the class size issue by examining national and international studies on the subject. The most interesting are locked behind the walls of academia and require JStor access. It was not and is not hard to understand why - the studies, one by one and cumulatively refute the veracity of the argument that small class size is a primary factor in the success or failure of children learning in the classroom.

These studies rarely see the light of day in the American discussion. I have added a tab on the home page that includes the best of them.

My analysis of these studies was and remains that class size *can be* meaningful in two cases. The first is in early elementary grades. Here very small classes can make a difference if the teachers involved are capable of making the most of small class size education. Not all teachers teach small classes well.

The second case are in classes at any level where the critical mass of students have exceptional needs either personally or due to the complexity of the subject matter. Certain art classes fall into this category. Remedial classes fall into this category.

I found no study that could claim that universally small classes yielded consistently superior students or learning experiences. Every study found that the anecdotal opinions of teachers were that they and the students were far better off in small classes yet no such thing could be discerned in comparing a small class to a larger class. The union propaganda never mentions this even though the STAR study and others make this point clearly. Disingenuously the union message is that class sizes are very important without saying that this assertion is based on teacher preference and not cost or learning effectiveness.

A new tsunami of evidence is washing ashore thanks in large part as a reaction to the propaganda wars between Diane Ravitch and her consumer groups and the political forces trying to reform eternally troubled schools.

Let's take a look;

Brookings recently released this report that concludes:

Because the pool of credible studies is small and the individual studies differ in the setting, method, grades, and magnitude of class size variation that is studied, conclusions have to be tentative. But it appears that very large class-size reductions, on the order of magnitude of 7-10 fewer students per class, can have significant long-term effects on student achievement and other meaningful outcomes. These effects seem to be largest when introduced in the earliest grades, and for students from less advantaged family backgrounds.

When school finances are limited, the cost-benefit test any educational policy must pass is not “Does this policy have any positive effect?” but rather “Is this policy the most productive use of these educational dollars?” Assuming even the largest class-size effects, such as the STAR results, class-size mandates must still be considered in the context of alternative uses of tax dollars for education. There is no research from the U.S. that directly compares CSR to specific alternative investments, but one careful analysis of several educational interventions found CSR to be the least cost effective of those studied.

Almost immediately the Brookings study was attacked by an organization called NAEP. Diane Whitmore Schazenbach asserts that the Brookings study...

conclusion is based on a misleading review of the CSR research literature. The report puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States. It argues that class-size reduction is less cost-effective than other reform policies, but it bases this contention on an incomplete accounting of the benefits of smaller classes and an uncritical, unexamined list of alternative policies. The report’s estimates of the potential cost savings are flawed as, in reality, schools cannot structurally reduce class size by only one student. Well-documented and long-term non-academic gains from CSR are not addressed. Likewise, the recommendation for releasing the ―least effective‖ teachers assumes a valid way of making such determinations is available.

Her criticism is hailed by Ravitch, Haimson, and others as if it is proof-positive that smmall class sizes are a panacea to the educational chaos. In fact, the criticism is both shrill and silly. Chingos of Brookings calls her out in a rebuttal;

The California and Florida evaluations certainly have significant limitations, but in my view they provide preliminary evidence that large-scale policies are unlikely to produce benefits as large as those found in Tennessee. But applying Schanzenbach’s standard for studies leaves us with no studies of these kinds of large-scale policies. It seems awfully hard to make a case for large-scale CSR policies if we know essentially nothing about their effectiveness.

Even more important than the effectiveness of a policy is its cost effectiveness. As Russ Whitehurst and I argue in our paper, the right question to ask about any policy is not whether it has any effect at all, but whether it is the most effective use of limited resources. Unfortunately, there is little rigorous evidence on the relative cost-effectiveness of various education policies. There is a clear need for such evidence, but in the meantime it seems unwise for policymakers to mandate widespread adoption of a costly policy with uncertain benefits.

CSR may well be cost-effective in some circumstances, especially if it is implemented in a targeted way. For example, a district may find it sensible to provide small classes for its most disadvantaged students or its newest teachers. But CSR mandates take exactly the opposite approach in that they apply across-the-board and take away schools’ autonomy to decide whether reducing class size is the best use of limited resources.

But Chingos gives the STAR study a pass as I do on its conclusions. Not all critics are so kind. It is not a foregone conclusion that classroom size reduction (CSR) truly makes a difference even when its cost is not part of the calculation.

Andreas Schleicher as profiled in the Atlantic reinforces Chingas' arguments.

He concluded that the best school systems became great after undergoing a series of crucial changes. They made their teacher-training schools much more rigorous and selective; they put developing high-quality principals and teachers above efforts like reducing class size or equipping sports teams; and once they had these well-trained professionals in place, they found ways to hold the teachers accountable for results while allowing creativity in their methods. Notably, in every case, these school systems devoted equal or more resources to the schools with the poorest kids.

And the Educational Writers Association just published some interesting studies about teacher effectiveness.

Are teachers the most important factor affecting student achievement?

This has become the default first sentence of many speeches and reports on teacher quality. Recently, it’s become common to clarify that teachers are the most important “school-based” factor in learning—a critical qualification, given that factors external to schools exert more influence overall on student achievement than any factors inside the school.

A famous 1966 study by James Coleman found that background characteristics such as race, parental achievement levels, and family income swamped most other factors studied as determinants of student test scores. Decades of research have confirmed this study’s general findings, with a 1999 paper estimating that 60 percent of variation in student achievement was attributable to such background characteristics. [1]

Researchers have been unable to link a significant share of the variation in student achievement—as much as 25 percent—to any particular input. Of the remaining share, attributable to what happens within school, researchers have linked most of that variation to teachers.

It is difficult to cite an exact figure on what percent of the variation in achievement observed is attributable to differences in teacher effectiveness. Three economists in 1998 estimated that at least 7.5 percent of the variation in student achievement resulted directly from teacher quality and added that the actual number could be as high as 20 percent.[2]

Researchers have found that school-based factors, including teaching, are more influential in math than in reading. A 1999 paper puts all in-school factors, including school-, teacher-, and class-level factors, at approximately 21 percent of the variation in 10th grade mathematics achievement. It further estimated that 8.5 percent was directly due to teacher effectiveness.[3]

Some researchers warn that other important factors that potentially affect achievement— such as the effect of principals and other administrators, and the interaction of teachers with the curriculum—have not been as carefully studied as teacher quality.[4]

It can be said:

Research has shown that the variation in student achievement is predominantly a product of individual and family background characteristics. Of the school factors that have been isolated for study, teachers are probably the most important determinants of how students will perform on standardized tests.

The myth of small class size will not go away for lots of reasons. But as we watch our state and national prosperity continue to evaporate we would be doing ourselves a favor to opening our eyes to the facts.

Education's Circular Firing Squad - What's the Plan, Diane?

These days as union teaching jobs become ever more threatened on a daily basis, teachers unions and teachers are raising their voices, rattling their pencil cases, and running with scissors. What they aren't doing is demanding more efficiently run schools, right-sizing of staff, better curriculum, diversity of learning rather than centralised conformity, nor a host of other things that might actually transform public schools.

No, mostly they practice the mean politics of industrial revolution unionism. This consists of rabid attacks on the messengers and agents of inevitable and obvious change. It's a shill game that's predictable and disheartening.

On one hand are public school teachers - most of whom are truly hard-working, well-paid professionals who for far too long have allowed the union politics of "workplace rules", insatiable greed, and out-of-control legislated educational malfeasance to trump common sense.

Most recently, Jonathan Alter wrote an opinion piece that criticized Diane Ravitch's assertions about public education alternatives.

Alter's criticism's are spot on;

She uses selective data to punch holes in the work of good schools and turn reformers into cartoonish right-wingers. Her view is that we should throw up our hands and admit that nothing will change until we end poverty in our time.

That is defeatist, wrong on the facts and the mother of all cop-outs.

On twitter, Ravitch and her sympathizers respond by attacking the credibility and integrity of Alter as if he were a villan rather than yet another educated and informed stakeholder in the conversation about education.

Ravitch raises the disingenuous question of whether Alter has a conflict of interest;

Conflict of interest? http://www.salon.com/news/michael_bloomberg/?story=/politics/war_room/2011/06/03/bloomberg_alter_school_reform

Yet, Alter's criticism is not about Michael Bloomberg nor is it political in nature. On the other hand, as I've questioned before, where was Ravitch when the damage could have been averted? She offers endless platitudes that are as empty as hoping for world peace:

Families are children’s most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science.

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.

One has to wonder if she reads what she says. There's not a word about improving the public schools in any of that. It is as if she is saying, "it is what it is, keep paying teacher raises and benefits, look the other way when none of that makes a difference and keep buying into the status quo until some utopian event takes place to straighten it all out."

I am an ardent supporter of public schools.  But they must transform themselves into  effective and responsible institutions willing to fire ineffective teachers, right-size and adjust their curriculum to ever-changing circumstances,  and serve the kids first and foremost.

Charter schools and alternatives aren't responsible for the hubris of the public schools - educators who profited for decades as the schools became ever more ineffective own that shame.

The Public School Technology Scam

A recent entry on Slashdot caught my attention.

The Walking Randomly blog does a cost analysis of mathematical calculators that are often used in schools and finds them to be oddly technically deficient and profoundly expensive for what they do.

Furthermore the blog observes:

I (and many students) also have mobile phones with hardware that leave these calculators in the dust. Combined with software such as Spacetime or online services such as Wolfram Alpha, a mobile phone is infinitely more capable than these top of the line graphical calculators.

They also only ever seem to be used in schools and colleges. I spend a lot of time working with engineers, scientists and mathematicians and I hardly ever see a calculator such as the Casio Prizm or TI NSpire on their desks. They tend to have simple calculators for everyday use and will turn to a computer for anything more complicated such as plotting a graph or solving equations.

One argument I hear for using these calculators is ‘They are limited enough to use in exams.‘ Sounds sensible but then I get to thinking ‘Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?‘ Why not go the whole hog and ban ALL technology in exams? Alternatively, supply locked down computers for exams that limit the software used by students. Surely we need experts in useful technology, not crippled technology?

So, I don’t get it. Why do so many people advocate the use of these calculators? They seem pointless! Am I missing something?

There is a simple truth staring us in the face when we wonder why our students seem stunted - they are often forced to use arcane technology to solve complex problems. Not only is this asymmetrically lame as a learning experience, it never actually solves the problem in a practical real-life way.

It's about time to examine the pseudo-monopolies certain technologies have created for themselves in our school systems. The comments that follow this blog include...

I suspect there’s a large number of nervous people at Texas Instruments. Surely they know that their huge profit margins that they’ve enjoyed from selling the same TI-83 calculator for the same price for 15 years (while everything else got cheaper) won’t last forever. I think you’ve identified their best hope – that standardized tests allow students to use certain calculators but not a computer. Even so, TI is probably moving the right direction by selling nSpire software for PCs, although I doubt the testing companies will allow that given all the other capabilities found even in the cheapest netbooks.

If we look past standardized tests, then you’re right – let’s not only teach students how to use crippled technology. The day after WolframAlpha was live, I showed it to every one of my classes. And in every class I got the same question: “Aren’t you worried that we’ll use this to cheat on our homework?” My answer was the same: “No, my real worry is that if you don’t know how to use this you’ll be at a disadvantage when compared to a student who does.” - Raymond Johnson

"Couldn’t agree more. I have always asked why I am not being taught the tools that I will use as an engineer. I agree that theory is important, but not teaching me these other tools is not good."

In the interest of balance there are many defenders of the simple calculator, but the question of why superior tools aren't taught remains an enigma.

How High Stakes Testing has Divorced Reality

The educational community, such as it is today, is split about the use of high-stress, high-stakes testing. I've met a teacher or two in the past few years, who have helped develop and who have profited from preparing the testing regiments that are in use today. And behind them stand an army of companies whose very existence is owed to the process of standardized tests.

My conversation with them often goes something like this; if public schoolings primary objective is to assimilate children into the culture, to indoctrinate them with the principles of representative democracy, and to provide the children with the opportunity to learn what will be necessary for them to pursue their life's ambitions - why are we insisting on homogenized and, let's face it, arbitrary testing regiments that every child is forced to psychologically and academically pass?

And the answer is often that "we know best", "every child must absolutely without exception know this, that, and the other thing", and defensively, "*WE* have taken all of that into consideration".

But the fact remains that these arguments are both shallow and empty often driven by nostalgia, political agendas, and a hubritic ignorance that is ubiquitous in the teaching community (what we worry?).

The other way of thinking about testing is the way the best teachers have always used tests - as a metric of progress from where someone is to where *they* want to go and should go based on that inertia. For example, the cliche that, "schools need to keep raising expectations" is considered a political truth in this country.

And so schools try to oblige. Children who already have a love of reading are subjected to reading exercises that are mind-numbing. And over the years those who might be lifelong readers avoid the pain.

The expectations for an artist are different than the expectations for an athlete. a child who loves working with their hands have different expectations than those who like to research ancient history. And so all those natural expectations are sacrificed for artificial expectations. And with those artificial expectations come stress.

For the future young artist, they must put aside their love for subjects that they have no aptitude or love for. The same for the athlete, the musicians, dancers, cooks, plumbers, social workers and so on. In fact the standardized tests mostly serve the interests of politicians and bean counters, not the children.

And even in the political realm the pressure of standardized tests on poor, urban schools is nothing less than sadistic.

Which brings us to a couple of incidents this week that demonstrate how far wrong we've gone with the current testing practice.

First, a young girl- Isabella Oleschuk - an honors student runs away from home. The incident is described this way from this Courant article,

One question police did not answer is why Isabella ran away.

Brady, the superintendent for Regional School District No. 5, said he didn't have an answer, either.

"It's very perplexing," he said. "We saw her as a typical seventh-grader, a good student, with a circle of friends." Isabella is an honor roll student, he said.

The middle school's principal, Kathleen Fuller-Cutler, allowed students to respond to their classmate's disappearance in a positive way, Brady said. They decorated her locker, leaving messages of hope there and on her empty desks in her classes, he said.

The article claims the police could not figure out *why* Isabella ran away! In fact article after article are filled with descriptions of how fragile children are, how easily exploited they can be, HOW MUCH WE ALL CARE about children but few answer the obvious question, "Why did she run away?"

This article from the Connecticut Post tells us precisely why;

Beth and Roman Oleschuk are keeping their daughter home from school for now, said John Brady, superintendent of the Amity Regional School District.

"They want some time to regroup as a family. We'll provide tutoring if necessary, and then when Isabella is ready we look forward to welcoming her back to school in a way that is most comfortable for her.''

Brady discounted a statement by the girl's father that his daughter ran away because of pressure from taking the Connecticut Mastery Tests.

"That has us perplexed, because the tests ended on March 16, and this happened four days later," he said. "And we make it as normal as possible; the test is only an hour a day and there is no homework given during the testing period."

But a woman whose daughter is also a seventh-grader at Amity Middle School and is a friend of Isabella's said test pressure might have contributed to the girl's decision to flee.

"Those tests are hell for a typical kid, let alone these who are very bright but can't navigate the lunchroom," she said.

The woman, who asked that she and her daughter not be identified, said that the two girls and a few others like them have found each other in middle school and have formed a clique of their own. The woman said Isabella and her daughter are socially naïve and sometimes struggled with unstructured time during school like recess and time on the bus.

"They are super bright, but they don't handle things the way a typical kid would," she said.

An Amity district source said that Isabella does not receive special education services and has no identified social or behavioral problems. Assistant Chief Edward Koether said Orange police had not been called to the Oleschuk's Derby Avenue home for any reason until the girl was reported missing Sunday morning.

So how could the police not know? Why would all these concerned citizens dismiss the obvious?

You see if it was a bully then the police guns cocked, Miami Vice ready could take Brutus down. The community would be saved. Brutus could be shipped to Afghanistan to ply his stock-in-trade.

But the police aren't equipped to handle the bully they found - high-stress tests. They can't taze it, shoot it, rough it up.

So the only other explanation is that Isabella must have a special need - something MUST BE wrong with *her*. What other explanation could there be? Surely you've all seen the movie where the child is possessed.

And all those concerned citizens draw the line at testing. TESTING AM GOOD! So sayeth the LORDS OF TESTING. Yes, blah-blah-blah - children are fragile.... yada, yada, yada - but jamming standardized tests down their throats cures it all.

In America, the bully is testing and there ain't a damned thing anyone's going to do to bring it down.

The second incident involves a congresswoman from Alabama trying to legislate an easier-to-remember version of the mathematical PI.

Congresswoman Martha Roby (R-Ala.) is sponsoring HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, declaring the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3. The bill comes in response to data and rankings from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, rating the United States' 15 year-olds 25th in the world in mathematics.

OECD is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2011, and the Paris-based NGO released its international educational rankings, placing the US in a three-way tie for math, equaling Portugal and Ireland, just beneath No. 24 Luxembourg.

"That long-held empirical value of pi, I am not saying it should be necessarily viewed as wrong, but 3 is a lot better," said Roby, the 34-year old legislator representing Alabama's second congressional district, ushered into office in the historic 2010 Republican mid-term bonanza.

Pi has long been defined as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius, a mathematical constant represented by the Greek letter "π," with a value of approximately 3.14159. HR 205 does not change the root definition, per se. The bill simply, and legally, declares pi to be exactly 3.

Roby, raised in Montgomery, Ala., is on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.

"It's no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi," Roby said. "I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier."

Laughable as this sounds, it is telling. We no longer care about inquisitive minds, learning, offering children the opportunity to find their own bliss.

Children are pawns to the delusional races, test status rankings, and me-first pathologies that drive this monster.

Yes sir. Children are fragile. Now back to the competition.

Public Accountability Tool

To understand CT's bloated public spending, one needs a tool like this:

http://www.ctsunlight.org/PayrollBranching/tabid/72/Default.aspx.

Connecticut Sunlight org is a very interesting site, enjoy.

Guidance Goes Digital

EO Smith's own Douglas Melody has joined the ranks of bloggers. I couldn't be happier or more proud.

I'm actually a bit late to the grand opening of two blogs. One called Learning Matters and the other called Guidance Matters.

Who said you can't teach veteran educators new tricks?

Responding to Ravitch

Diane Ravitch has a guest blog on Edutopia that once again reinforced my perception of her educational opinions as opportunist pandering. Her thinking is neither original nor thought-provoking but it is annoying.

Here's some of what she asserts:

Myth #2: Achievement Will Soar With Younger, More Enthusiastic Teachers

A second, related narrative asserts that teachers who work in the poorest schools are lazy and burned out; achievement will soar if only we can fire more of the older teachers and replace them with young, enthusiastic ones, especially those from Teach for America, who have only five weeks of training. But this demand runs counter to what we know to be true in every other profession: experience is a plus. Indeed, while the evidence is mixed on some aspects of education policy, it is unmistakably clear on this point: experience is one of the best predictors of teacher quality.

I responded to the whole set of arguments this way;

Ravitch is as much responsible for the way things are as anyone. For over thirty years she's served in positions of authority often double-talking.

Her *truth* is disingenuous. The so-called achievement gap is pure fiction, a statistical artefact of an education industry run amok. It is the coinage of a social-engineered subliminal class-ism. By warehousing the poor in urban encampments, the rest of America doesn't have to deal or interact with them. The real-estate pyramid schemes that have wrecked our economy were the engine that kept this phenomenon rolling profitably.

Educators have known for forty years that children of poverty environments cannot be lifted from that original state of ignorance and desperation by schooling alone. We can talk about this. The fact that Ravitch insists that we can't speaks to the real myth.

Myth #1: Educators are the solution to America's education crisis

They are not. They and their unions have long ago sold out the welfare of children for the negotiated comforts of cozy and disingenuous work rules that eliminate any possibility that schools can be managed for the best interests of everyone involved.

Numerous studies indicate that the insane escalation of spending on education shows flat if not negligible classroom returns. *That* is the real achievement gap and everyone paying the bill knows it.

Politicians who pander to the idea that schools should become homogeneous in achievement ignore the fact that in order for schools to get better we need achievement gaps. If there are no superior schools continuously pushing the educational envelope how can we get better? Since when is being academically "equal" a good thing?

We should be advancing education gaps in every subject and pedagogy, dropping the ineffective and adopting the proven winners. WAIT! That's against union work rules.

Myth #2; The false dichotomy of young vs old teachers. Here Ravitch is simply acting as a special interest lobbyist for preserving a seniority system that is cancerous to educational reform.

She isn't trying to elevate the debate, she's trying to derail intelligent discussion. Ravitch and her followers will insist class size is an important factor in children's education because *magically* teachers will spend more time individualizing classroom learning.

Anecdotally, teachers ALL insist this happens. Study after study disputes this assertion. Studies indicate that *the opportunity for individual attention* increases. Yet only teachers who already practice the art actually practice the art - a rare breed. Furthermore, studies indicate that some teachers are better with small classes and some are awful. Likewise with large classroom sizes.

What does seniority have to do with this? What? Why can't schools be managed to take advantage of teachers strengths and weaknesses? Why?

WAIT! Union rules.

Yes, Diane let's be honest. By all means. But you have a lot of catching up to do .