You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Accountability’ category.
I recently posted an article about New Jersey’s graduation rates though it is based upon dubious calculations which misrepresent education in New Jersey. To be clear, the article was extremely concerned about the use of alternative tests without guaranteeing sufficient skills. I am concerned not just about the number of students going to college but about New Jersey’s high school graduates fitting into their future occupations in a job market that is increasingly more difficult to navigate.
In my article, I was too focused on college going rates and not sufficiently on the latter question. The percentage of change in enrollment is not a strong indicator of competency and may simply reflect student choice or the effects of immigration. If enrollment is indicative of anything, it is probably the health of the economy. In fact, in 2008 the Bloustein School at Rutgers suggested that enrollment rates, relatively stable since 1965, may decline as students in a poor economy choose jobs over higher education. Based upon my research, I am concerned that only half of our students go on to college in USA and, of that half, half of them drop out. Out of that remaining 50 percent, 30-50 percent of them may need remedial education.
Despite the large amounts of money spent as a result of the Abbot decisions, dropout rates in urban high schools are abysmally high. We need a strong core curriculum, national common standards, and effective faculty development. As New Jersey’s Education Commissioner Davy and the Department of Education are currently working to develop a new core curriculum for our K-12 students, these questions demand even more of our attention. The determinants of curriculum success are still vague and they need to be discussed as much as possible. If we have learned anything from the recession of 2008 it is that a trained workforce is almost as important as an educated citizenry: http://www.nj.com/opinion/times/letters/index.ssf?/base/news-2/1246075513209250.xml&coll=5
Released today, a Thomas Fordham Institute report, “The Accountability Illusion” selects, in the Institute’s own words, “36 real schools from around the nation (half elementary, half middle)— schools that vary by size, achievement, diversity, and so on—and determin[es] which of them would or would not make AYP [average yearly progress] when evaluated under each state’s accountability rules. In other words, if a particular school that made AYP in Washington were relocated to North Dakota, or Ohio, or Texas, would that same school also make AYP there?” The smart little report found that, “Although schools are being told that they need to improve student achievement in order to make AYP under the law, the truth is that many would fare better if they were just allowed to move across state lines.” The AP in, “Study: No Child Standards Vary Widely from State to State” quotes new EdSec Arne Duncan who said, “the notion that we have 50 different goal posts doesn’t make sense, […] A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it’s from.” AP goes on to mention that the way to make one “goal post” for all 50 states is open: “in the newly enacted economic stimulus bill, there is a $5 billion incentive fund for Duncan to reward states for, among other things, boosting the quality of standards and state tests.” “Quality” and “uniformity” in 50 states is tough. How will they do it? Well, AP adds, states are starting non-profits devoted to the task of developing these common measures of achievement. Ok, that’s fine. But no one is talking about what that should be. The only common attribute of the way this accountability system works is the absurd approach. Let’s set common standards for a really good education and just assume that we’ve already cracked the $5 billion question: what is an education?
Some of history’s greatest thinkers have spent their lives scratching their heads about that one. Those like Plato, Aristotle, John Dewey, and Robert Maynard Hutchins were most adamant about the ultimate propose of education or education as a means to some final societal or governmental end. In all of this talk about standards, parents seem to be the only ones scratching their heads.
It doesn’t seem like many people are taking the time to ponder the purpose of education but instead, and Dewey warned about this, they proceed with progress as a headless concept, toward some newer progressive education without considering the true end of progress. Math is good, let’s have more of that. Science is good, let’s give it more money. For quite a while, the object of education has been to increase our TIMSS or raise SAT scores nationally. No one has considered the actual effects of rigorously tuning millions of children to a collection of multiple choice questions.
In the spirit of thinkers like Dewey who supposed a lack of stimulus was the education best suited dictatorship, I would like here to wonder: is there some bizarre societal effect or organization produced by training kids to think only through the negative prism of elimination? There have been studies that suggest that multiple choice exams in high frequencies inhibit critical thinking by conditioning testers to confine their thoughts to a finite number of answers. The underlying idea is that there is one answer an one answer only. There are no rewards for coining unknown answers because, for one thing, how would you quantify a suitable reward on a standardized test for an answer that not unknown to the test makers? Children who coin things experience immediate negative stimulus, shame from their higher achieving peers and teachers and, in their adult lives, lowered earnings and social status.
The important question, the one that those important education thinkers of the past might ask is: what does standardized testing in high frequencies do to the character of our government? Well, Mr. Hutchins, for example, once suggested that, should people lose the capacity to think for themselves, they would become poor deciders. Invoking the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, a tradition much older than Jefferson himself, Mr. Hutchins declared that if we are incapable, or too incompetent to rule ourselves we ought then to end the relatively young project of our universal suffrage and appoint a king. He famously said that Democracy, in this way, tends toward dictatorship.
Mr. Dewey once argued that a democratic and progressive society is one with fewer boundaries in which the greatest diversity of experience exists. He noted that democracy moves toward progress as part of its intrinsic nature and in a society of heavy class division, for instance, the rich will experience no pain and their culture, said Dewey, will be sterile, turning back in upon itself and generating nothing new as they become detached. They soon know nothing of physical reality. The poor, by contrast, will experience nothing but negative pleasure and pain in such a society. The experience of this latter group will be entirely a function of pain, a kind of experience which usually admits only sensory pleasures. Both kinds of experience, for Mr. Dewey, are incomplete and represent a kind of learning disability. Experience, for progress to happen, must be diverse and dialectical.
What then will our society look like when the effects of widespread standardized testing catch up in full force? As I have noted, standardized testing tends to restrict the creative imagination and to produce the illusion that either there are a finite number of answers or there is only one answer to every question: a, b, c; T or F. Further, citizens of, let’s call it bubble land, tend to believe that knowledge is a game of chance. If one does not know the answer at first, it can be obtained “analytically,” that is, by process of elimination. It is a dark day for thinking and for philosophy when analytic thinking becomes lopsided and synonymous with “process of elimination.” Most interesting about the citizens of bubble land is the fact that “analytic thinking” only occurs when some proctor has first bound some problem in 4 or 5 choices for them. Unfortunately for the bubble people, real problems, those of both mediocre existence and of higher order spheres, are not often shaped that way. Problems are rarely ever composed of perfect squares and circles. Instead, problems are most often pear shaped—as goes the expression.
Bubble people cannot formulate questions themselves; they can only answer questions that have been posited beforehand. Indeed, this makes Kant’s conjectures about knowledge look even grimmer for future human understanding. When Kant talked about the irritating limits of human reason, “reason” encompassed all things knowable in the universe and excluded only those things unknowable or outside our perception or fundamental set of premises. This situation is depressing enough when we consider the likely existence of things in the universe for which humans are not perceptually equipped to know. However, in a society wherein knowledge has been reduced to a small multiple of choices, the inventory of all things knowable will, unfortunately, all fit into the proctor’s handbook.
We can avoid the genesis of a race of bubble people. The standard of standardized testing was premised on the idea of equity, an equal education for all. We test this way because there are so many children, rather, there are so many parents, and each of them wants to know that each child is being taught equally—or that theirs is learning better than the others. Parents check pools of standardized testing scores on the same screen where they count their blog hits. The bubbling method is only really a matter of expedience for parents and educators.
We do not teach great books because, as Dewey told us, great books are filled with stuffy old ideas and the study of dusty old ideas only perpetuates the same stuffy old ideas. It’s is one of those vicious cycles. It’s Kantian, really. There is no room for growth or for new tradition, quoth the education god: we need diversity of experience. And anyway, said Dewey, children are too immature to learn about Aristotle’s categorical notion of friendship or, to decode the nuances of Swift’s sociological description of the Big Enders. I think he might be right.
The progress approach didn’t work and for quite a number of years children ran amok as their experience degraded inevitably into hedonism and mischief. The progressive education was traded for a moderate approach. If we skip ahead to the present we find that the curriculum has changed, though the children are still running amok. Rather than the great books, we now teach the shadows of great books based on bullet points extracted by experts who have actually learned the material—usually in private schools. Experts reduce the knowledge into pill form and children are asked to find it in a labyrinth of dubious turns. Indeed, it looks as if it was not Mr. Dewey or Mr. Hutchins, but Mr. Skinner who finally won the education battle.
Many people, including parents and policy makers, seem to believe that is that there is such thing as a best education, an education of perennial truths. This is not the case. What we have is an education system without a tenable education mission. Our educational goals have been notoriously lofty and inarticulate. We believe that education should prepare children for the 21st century; prepare children for the labor force; prepare children to compete in the global community. Then we find the subjects that do these things and throw money at them. Some of us see this and think that throwing money will not teach children. Tsk, these people say, that’s not how children are educated. They are not wrong to say so. Then, moronically, these people declare that individual spending like vouchers rather than pooled spending, throwing the money, is what educates children. Taken alone, that’s a very simple and negligent strategy. What is wrong with our current ideas of education is that education is not always a vertical category. It is, however, always a horizontal category. That is, education is political, but never perennial.
Education cannot be used to compete with other nations in an attempt to measure whose children are more capable of knowing and transmitting eternal truths. If that were possible, then we would be at the final stages of what has been called globalization. We are not, that is to say, we do not yet share one political reality with the rest of the world. We do not yet share a consensus view of which truths are eternal and which are contingent. Education always has an agenda. When educators do not choose an agenda, the agenda is chaos. Chaos is, in a sense, a patchwork of things.
In New Jersey, the Fordham Institute study found the following:
• New Jersey schools were apparently more rigorous as “15 of 18 elementary schools in [the] sample failed to make AYP in 2008 under New Jersey’s accountability system.”
• Elementary schools in 15 states that satisfied AYP requirements beat elementary schools in New Jersey that also met AYP requirements: “New Jersey ties with 4 other states that each have 3 elementary schools making AYP.”
• “The performance of individual subgroups” of New Jersey’s students with disabilities cause scores to lower in schools that might otherwise meet AYP requirements. Most interesting, “as is the case in other states, schools with fewer subgroups attain AYP more easily in New Jersey than schools with more subgroups, even when their average student performance is lower. In other words, schools with greater diversity and size face greater challenges in making AYP.”
• “Every single elementary school with limited English proficient and SWD subgroups failed to make AYP, in part because these students did not meet the state’s targets in reading.”
• “New Jersey falls near the middle of the state distribution in terms of the number of schools that make AYP. One particularly interesting thing about New Jersey is that a large group of Hispanic/Latino, African American, and low-income students met their targets in math. […]However, New Jersey’s definitions of proficiency generally ranked below average compared with the standards set by the other states, especially in grades 3-5 math. This likely accounts for the higher pass rate for traditionally disadvantaged groups.”
Most interesting was that “schools with greater diversity and size face greater challenges in making AYP” and also the last point about pass rates in New Jersey. Some people in New Jersey have suspected that our tendency to pass kids through the system by lowering our standards is responsible for our high graduation rates and, consequently, creates very soft graduation numbers. This may look good on the annual Quality Counts report, but it essentially leaves kids with less than an even substandard education. Lowering our standards is just another way of ejecting low scoring children from the system.
The worst thing about having no educational agenda is that ejected low scorers are being ejected merely because they cannot figure out the game and for no other reason. If they are not ejected and they matriculate through the system for several years, it is for the same reason. It’s actually pretty perverse. They are not being ejected because they have failed the test of citizenship—though for many children in our education system, citizenship is what, essentially, is at stake. When they are ejected, they are really being catapulted into a substandard citizenship to live as substandard citizens. Though education has forgotten the purpose of education, but the streets of our country have not.
The report admits that New Jersey is not the only guilty party when it comes to the way some groups of children are processed:
Even if actual participation guidelines for English language learners and students with disabilities are more generous under the current state assessment system, doesn’t the massive failure of these students to meet New Jersey’s targets indicate that a new approach is needed for holding schools accountable for the performance of these students? Yes, schools should redouble their efforts to boost achievement for ELL students and students with disabilities, as for other students, but when almost no school is able to meet the goal, perhaps that indicates that the goal is unrealistic. These will be critical considerations for Congress as it takes up NCLB re-authorization in the future.
Here’s On Voting’s opinion: Teaching math and science are good. Let’s teach them and leave it at that. We’ll audit or test our teachers to make sure they are teaching math and science—add civics and English, though, at equal or greater weights. Teaching is where we should be most rigorous.
I echo the words of Mr. Hutchins of the 1930s when he said that America still lacks a teaching profession. If becoming a teacher were more like becoming a doctor a lawyer or president of the United States, we might then be more inclined to trust what goes on in America’s classrooms. After all, we don’t rate or close hospitals based simply on how many patients are murdered each year by mistreatment—though sadly, as the medical profession becomes more revenue driven and more easily gamed, some people are considering such measures.
If ever we take seriously the original ends of our education system, public opinion would be the best place to begin our search for an ideal curriculum—and the curriculum is where all of our standards should begin, rather than end. If the public, you say, is far too ignorant to decide what its children ought to be learning, consider that to be a very telling fact about the present rulers of this country. Public hearings and a frequent public referendum for curriculum in each state would not only ensure that children are learning what they ought to but it would garner the direct involvement of parents in ensuring the educational outcomes. Also, parents are less likely to say that they dislike how their children are being taught. It’s just an idea. If you don’t like it, then let us reconsider the monarchy.
Perhaps there’s another option. As the end has always been western education, we might consider resuming our system of traditional education as Mr. Hutchins nearly did. Mr. Hutchins called this perennialism because the great books of western civilization–as he saw it–were perennially important and chock full of eternal truths. I disagree about their eternality, though not about the idea that they successfully transmit truths about western culture. If your end is western tradition—AND IT HAS NOT EVER NOT BEEN—then the great books would be a great curriculum. Kind of a tautology isn’t it. Perhaps it is time to realize the political, rather than the perennial, import of great books.
Today, as the Senate Education Committee met over Senate bill no. 1609 (Lesniak, Whelan) The New Jersey Business and Industry Association petitioned that although it didn’t disagree with the project set out in the bill which seeks to reform New Jersey’s Higher Education Act, or to the installation of a new secretary of higher education, it wanted to ensure that “flexibility” was available to New Jersey’s state universities. I believe the sentiment was that “business believes in flexibility.” This was followed by, I think it was: “business also believes in affordability.” Ok, well, there comes a time when we have to stop thinking about what this business chump “believes.” Have you seen what he’s done to Rutgers, no, even better, to the country? So what if business believes in flexibility, the pope believes a lot of fine things but people still give that guy a hard time.
Proposed legislation, among other things, does the following:
• Installs a Secretary of Higher Education at the head of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education.
• Forms the membership and stations of the new New Jersey Commission on Higher Education.
• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities create an audit committee of financially experienced voting members of the board, an internal audit staff, and an external auditor.
• Compels the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education to prepare a “comprehensive master plan” for state higher education.
• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities create a nominations and governance committee to revise policy and oversee the internal governance of the board itself.
• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities develop fund raising strategies.
• Places tighter restrictions on campus expansion and new construction.
• Requires that outside grants and funds received be for the purpose of higher education.
• Redirects all incoming revenue through the Office of Management and Budget and to the discretion of OMB’s director.
Given the recent and varied controversy at our research schools these reforms are good things. Especially striking are the audits, and other reports required from the commission which could add a much needed layer of transparency and community involvement to New Jersey higher education. Also, the redirection of funds through OMB is a great idea. These are good steps toward creating oversight so state universities can do what they are supposed to—teach New Jersey kids. Though the bureaucracy and process described in the bill is enormous, perhaps the rigorous oversight will gain more revenue for higher education in the long run, capturing it from the various projects which have had nothing but tentative connections to higher education, and from the scandals that have not only injured our public higher education funds but the general morale of students, alumni, and taxpayers.
Regarding “flexibility,” we have to ask ourselves whether our state universities have actually earned their autonomy since passage of The State College Autonomy Laws (SCAL) of 1986. Have these institutions budgeted with student affordability in mind? When they accepted money from outside sources, did they do so for reasons that would ultimately increase the likelihood that kids would graduate on time and pay less out of their own pockets? In 2008, the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities claimed that tuitions increased because states cut back their funding and because their capital projects must be financed independently. This latter, independent financing, means that the debt falls back on students. I remember that representatives of a certain college were going on about how hotel room-like accommodations were absolutely necessary if they were to enhance their enrollments. They complained that not only was there less funding but that more regulation/oversight would cramp their style and that they would not be able to find the most competitive bidder for this project. They blamed other state schools for dirtying the bath water and bringing this regulation down on them. They blamed the state for insufficiently funding their “campus modernization” processes and forcing them to raise tuition. Under the SCAL of 1994, the college or university is allowed to invest college funds, to put their income to work. Also, our state colleges under the SCAL, fix tuition. There is simply too much incentive to raise tuition in order to use state money to offset the costs of capital projects.
As SCAL increased the powers of colleges and universities to self govern, the Education Restructuring Act (ERA) of 1994 in turn removed the then unnecessary State Department of Higher Education. There since has been no balance between taxpayer money and the receiving institutions. A new Secretary of higher education would be a great thing, or, at least, not a bad thing. Flexibility and business is out of place in a state funded school. Also, what’s the use of funding an institution that admits the majority of its student population from out of state? These kinds of state institutions exist among those included in the bill. Leave that out-of-state diversity to someone else, to Seton Hall, state schools. There’s plenty of diversity here in New Jersey, and disparity, too.
Do state colleges and universities think that this new layer of bureaucracy is paralyzing and unfair? You bet they do. But to many in the public, accountability is what is needed here. For many,New Jersey’s colleges and universities have blown their chances at autonomy. If some of our state colleges or universities think that they are being punished for wrongs that they haven’t committed, then perhaps these people shouldn’t have been so complicit when others in the system were abusing their autonomy. Being innovative with finance, “flexible,” can certainly help during a recession, but great business ideas are just bad bets when they go wrong. New Jersey cannot let its state higher education schools gamble with public money.
Here’s Michael Riccards talking about his experience working for the previous higher education agency in New Jersey listen>
The New York Times reports today on the closing of P.S. 090 George Meany in the Bronx, a closure that NYC DOE justifies with the school’s low performance in its last grading cycle. PS 090 scored an F in New York City’s school report card accountability system. The NYC DOE has received plenty of flack for its use of letter grades to reduce overall school performance to a familiar character on a report card and there is good reason for this. The use of grades as a metric for overall school performance is reduced from a relatively nebulous performance assessment. Really, the grades function in two ways: as a means of consumer-friendly valuation that is essential to the marketplace of New York City’s school choice program; likewise, as a political means of exerting the force of business style accountability on the marketplace of New York City schools. The latter use of letter grading really defeats all the value of the former.
Presumably, schools receive their letter grades based on a series of dubiously weighted performance indicators such as school attendance, suspensions, English as a Second Language and other standardized assessment test scores. The choice to close a school, The Times describes, “based on a mishmash of factors like performance on standardized tests, situations of violence, student demand for the school and whether the school seems capable of turning around.” Importantly, in the 2007-08 cycle, P.S. 090 was 56 percent Hispanic or Latino, 37 percent black, and about 6 percent Asian. More importantly, P.S. 090 serves only 1197 children from K-4, a large though small in scope and very young group. Many of the children in this school experience a home life that is not culturally and often not linguistically conducive to high English proficiency and European American cultural knowledge—both of which are essential standardized testing. Yet, slating a school for termination based on a rigorous assessment of 4 graders from exclusively from minority homes seems a bit perverse, but maybe there is something in it. P.S. 090 represents a concentration of risk, a necessary product of the choice-grading system wherein students inevitably sediment because of some cultural, physical, or environmental handicap, or because their parents are unable to understand the education marketplace. Perhaps the correct action to take is not closure but identification and positive intervention from the state. Undoubtedly, the little kids of P.S. 090 represent a concentration of special needs. Moving them around to other schools is no guarantee that they will be successful but more a guarantee that they will become lost in the system as their risk becomes crowded out by the performance of children with significantly more cultural capital. Looking at P.S. 090’s vitals, I see the obvious impossibility for high scoring and an obvious opportunity to install a pre-kindergarten-like program and to collect linear student data. There must be some way to teach these kids. Why don’t we look for it rather than shifting them around.
The political facet of letter grading is incompatible with the more innovative aims of New York City’s education market place. Schools should not be closed down unless they no longer serve the community—unless all the students in the community it serves have moved on to other schools. P.S. 090 does not have below average enrollment numbers—there are still consumers here. What is needed here is consumer protection, not recall. Why are enrollment and attendance high at P.S. 090 while its other scores are so low? Let us keep New York’s education marketplace free. No one is cooking the books here. There’s no reason to let honest schools fail.
What do we earn from teaching our kids to monetize their education? Well, for the moment, all we have learned is that distributing checks to kids in D.C. lowers tardiness and class skipping. Rather: kids will show up at a designated time if you pay them to.
Some kids whose parents are able to convince them that there are rewards on the other side of education learn to monetize their brains on their own. This is called getting on the career track. For some, perhaps, without a nearby example of the formula for success, study=money, understanding the value of an education is probably more difficult.
As most education innovations these days this latest, the attendance monetization project called Capital Gains, was developed by economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. a Harvard researcher at the American Inequality Lab. I buy this approach more than that weird destabilizing education movement that people were all excited about a few months ago. With all of their Apple analogies it seemed to me that those people were just trying to sell computers and software. For teachers and administrators it promised to relieve them of having to learn to teach all those underprivileged kids who had to be taught how to learn. It’s a pretty cruel proposal, at its core.
So far the money gets them into the class. For some, it compels them to try–or gives them an excuse to. Sometimes, an excuse is all that children need. Often, the culture of anti-intellectualism pervades homes where parents, once poor students themselves, bitterly attack instances of intellectualism. This incentive program at least takes steps toward undoing some of these paralyzing social roles by sterilizing scholasticism with materialism—something we can all get behind.
What about those children who are now learning that they needed more than an excuse to do well in school? Hopefully the incentivizing experiment will not grind away at their emerging confidence about their power to think. Indeed, once they begin to try they will learn something else about the difficulty involved with learning. As Aristotle said: learning ain’t no walk in the park, it’s painful and that’s why many of us—including parents and teachers—naturally avoid it. Solutions like replacing teachers with computers or incentivizing grades may soothe some of the pain of being at school for kids, or some of the pain of running a school for teachers, but the real pain of learning always looms. Teachers and parents should not let the promises of painless education get the better of them.
Education monetization side effects?:
1. Merit will slowly become exclusively a two-way function of money.
2. Children are now free to do Marxist readings on their report cards.
3. Over protective parents can actually barter with teachers at parent-teacher conferences.
Is it possible to sell learning as an end in itself? Was it ever?
D.C. is airing out its teaching ranks by tying teacher performance to pay raises. The plan requires teachers to drop their tenure protections in order to increase their pay. Edweek explains:
Teachers choosing the plan’s “red” tier would receive generous boosts according to a traditional salary schedule based on teachers’ experience and credentials. Under the “green” tier, base pay would be supplemented by up to $20,000 annually in performance bonuses based on improved student achievement. But teachers would have to give up tenure protections for a year—and risk dismissal—to participate.
What an interesting and severe strategy.
Washington Teachers Union President George Parker complains that “You cannot fire your way into an outstanding school system; you have to build great teachers.” Here is a philosophical thought: teachers are built not born. I am not sure what is most troubling about this formula: that teachers are built of money alone or that teachers should undergo most of their development while generations of children suffer through their growing pains. How many kids in title 1 fund areas are forced to endure unqualified or inexperienced teachers for no reward whatsoever? Now, assuming that all teachers are mortal and Socrates was a teacher, etc. I would say that teachers were once pupils; shouldn’t they also be included as former pupils in discussions about alternate graduation programs?
When pupils fall short of “graduate” we try our hardest to hold from them the title until they are able to qualify. So what if some of the teachers do not satisfy “teacher”? I say hold them back. When those teachers were pupils, there must have been some sort of achievement – or aptitude – test to tell the widget-quality-control-people that the widget is done or perhaps that it requires 10 minutes or 2 years more baking before it can be considered a full-fledged teacher. If the proto-teacher fails to meet the grade, they are sent back to the factory.
Is it fair? I think yes.
Let’s leave thediscourse of the business model and call this get-tough move La Bocca della Verità education reform, “the mouth of truth” education reform or “the pay tier of truth.” Essentially a large stone disk from indefinite Roman origins, it is thought that putting your hand in the mouth of truth obligates you to tell the truth as lying will cause the stone mouth to bite off your hand. La Bocca della Verità earned the power of truth detection from the medieval European inheritors of Rome and the actual mouth of truth, the stone disk, is thought most likely to be nothing more than a glorified manhole cover. La Bocca della Verità gleaned its celebrity and parody appeal after it appear
ed in the famous American movie Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn and has appeared in reference to this latter in various other films including The World a recent film by celebrated Chinese director Jia Jiang Ke.
Here’s how I see it. If you put your hand in the mouth, then tell the truth or lose the hand; if you can’t afford the truth, keep your hands in your pockets. It’s common sense. I think that you can fire your way into an outstanding school system – I think there’s also plenty of proof to support the notion that we can’t just hire our way into one. Teachers who can’t cut the mustard are free to lay conspicuously low, down there with their pay, until they’ve brought their teaching up to par.
This is supposed to produce capable teachers and ultimately root out the uncapable ones. After that happens, we should also make testing optional for students and reward them when they choose to bet their grades and futures against their mastery of the curriculum. After all, you can’t flunk your way to an outstanding school system either; great students are taught.
New Jersey Education Commissioner Lucille Davy educated the New Jersey Assembly Education Committee on the application and distribution of the $3.9 billion appropriation of Assembly bill No. 2873. The commissioner presented the three tier prioritization device that should ensure that the new $3.9 billion in school construction money will be applied effectively and accounted for. The Commissioner’s proposal is a fairly straight forward approach to dividing the much contested appropriation among several districts. Also discussed were graduation rates, the SRA exam and instances of school officials using unaccredited degrees to procure more pay.
A2873 drew heated criticism during the passage of the FY09 budget and received its most trenchant jabs from Republican Senator Leonard Lance who characteristically pointed out that because the appropriation was a debt measure it exceeded the authority of the Senate and Assembly who, he suggested, should consult the tax payers of New Jersey through public referendum. His argument was most compelling, though ultimately unheeded. Under the aegis of the prior Supreme Court ruling which mandates school spending in order to assure equal educational opportunities to all New Jersey students, the $3.9 billion appropriation for the continuation of school construction efforts throughout the state passed both houses, 21-18-1; 42-36-0-2a.
Senator Lance is currently working on an addition to the upcoming November referendum that would require New Jersey voters to be consulted before the legislature passes laws that permit appropriations to back state issued bonds. Last week, Sen. Lance told the Courier News, “I am convinced the people of New Jersey will approve new borrowing as appropriate, including new borrowing for school construction, as long as there is accountability, as long as the money is borrowed for appropriate purposes’ (Ballot question asks…Sept 22, 2008)
The most common criticism was an attack launched from the apparent failure of the previous school construction program which produced practically no results and provoked a formal inquiry into allegations of waste, mismanagement and fraud. In May, New Jerseyans began to monitor school construction sites through camera feeds online. At the budget proceedings in June, advocates of the new school construction proposal were unable to provide an account for the last $8.6 billion in school construction funds or for how $3.9 billion more will be used differently.
The first criterion of the three tier program requires that acceptable construction applications be 100 percent funding eligible. Next, applicants should meet one of the three priority tiers, in order: “critical operational and program mandates” or basic needs construction special population needs etc.; “renewal of existing buildings, overcrowding, and improving quality of existing instructional spaces”; “renovation and/ or new construction”. The Commissioner and Susan Kutner from the office of School Facilities assured the Assembly committee that there won’t be any room for exorbitant construction, “Temples To The Gods,” or waste and that the allotment for each school is actually capped at $143 per square foot—which makes it more like a fund matching program than a full blown school construction. The Assembly was told that there is little room for districts to extort more grant money from the state by building hidden costs into their proposals and that each proposal will be assessed holistically which means that all proposals will be assessed with building characteristic rather than quantity in mind, that eight classrooms cannot be cashed out as three parking lots or one swimming pool: “the process has really been designed to do that, because the primary criteria to for a grant is you have to be 100 percent eligible for state support which means that you have to come within square foot per student efficiency […] the whole project has to be 100 percent eligible which means you can’t offset the Taj Mahal type things with the grant money” (Assembly Committee Sept 22, 2008). The commissioner told the committee that any projects that exceed the cap and also satisfy the conditions of eligibility will need to sell the balance to tax payers in their community. Times are tight, after all.
Concerns were most frequently for accountability, though Assemblyman Harvey Smith, from Jersey City asked whether schools should insist on using labor in-state. That’s a great idea considering the fiscal pain New Jersey will be suffering as a result of America’s dim economic future. The question, however, could not be sufficiently answered. The Commissioner told the Assemblyman that this question is for the School Development Authority. Yet, the question is still a very important one. Earlier this month, Winnie Hu of The New York Times reported on this economic dimension citing two Rutgers researchers, Michael L. Lahr and Aaron R. Fichtner who found (Economic Impacts…July 2008) that “the school construction would create an average of 9,357 full-time jobs annually over the five-year period, more than two-thirds of them in construction and manufacturing, and generate a total of $3.3 billion in profits for businesses and salaries for workers” (Despite tight Times…Sept 9, 2008) Should there be some sort of preference for New Jersey labor built into some part of this program?
The discussion about school officials was a bit silly and its true purpose was over looked for much of the meeting. The Assembly had to be assured that the problem was not analogous to malpractice since the interview process for new school officials, superintendents, their assistants and administrators is rigorous. The problem, rather, has to do with bookkeeping and saving and evidence that some officials may be earning increases in pay that have been built into their contracts by earning degrees from unaccredited institutions. Some enthusiastic members of the Assembly demanded punitive damages, though the problem is nothing really to get so worked up about. It’s ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than average contracted pay for a New Jersey superintendent of schools. It might, however, be possible to press charges for something more like larceny rather malpractice or the endangerment of students.
The discussion about the SRA and graduation rates ran an hour or so and was heated, philosophically interesting, and better addressed apart from the issues of school construction formulas and the persistent wasting of New Jersey taxpayer’s money on the salaries of mail order Ph.D. administrators.
If you haven’t checked Edweek in the past couple of days, the online school K12 Virtual School is drawing negative publicity over its outsourcing of essays to India. Apparently an Arizona blogger named David Safier revealed this on a blog site called Blog For Arizona and directed readers to investigate their local school for the same business practices. The core issues reviewed by Edweek are the possible lapse in grading quality and the issue of the privacy of those students whose information has been sent overseas.
Having categorized his post as an “Irony Alert”, blogger Safier seems to think the charge of phoniness and lack of transparency is enough and that K12 Virtual Schools are taking their virtual students for a ride. K12 spokesperson Jeffrey Kwitowski maintains that the outsourcing was not to cut costs but rather to give virtual teachers more time with their students. Kwitowski maintains that the outsourcing, to qualified and degreed teachers of English abroad, actually costs the company more.
I say, and I’m sure many people agree, that there are easier and less perverse ways to spend more money that don’t involve sending thousands of English papers overseas. Indeed, I would have charged them twice the price if they had just come to me—what American wouldn’t!? That, however, would have been a stupid thing for a profit seeking business to have done. Yes, it is usually the case that people outsource things these days because it is in fact cheaper. Why? Well, I’d say that it is because in some other countries there is a dearth of well paying jobs and an abundance of skilled labor. Also, it’s capitalism.
Once we privatize the stuffing out of Education, rather, once McCain begins to hack away at our public school systems, prepare to see education businesses do business. Education is becoming, has become, a hollow ritual of certification. If you think an online degree will get you the job you want, go on and get it. Hire a company to certify you but don’t be surprised about common shifty American business practices like outsourcing—and really, I wonder if anyone really is.
Last month, Edweek did a story about online education, in fact about K12, called “Teachers Go to School on Online Instruction” which almost cast the movement online as the next best thing and added an almost absurd amount of complexity to the concept. Perhaps they were too charitable. And perhaps I was the only reader chuckling when they inventoried the new woes of retired and home-bound teachers who had now to learn the complexities of email, digitalized grading and viewing student statistics on a computer screen while somehow juggling the many complexities of their lives outside of work. The tasks, it seemed, were not so daunting.
So, as Kwitowski mentioned that the purpose of outsourcing tests was to free up a teacher’s time for students we ought to be asking how much free time these people need. It actually seems that, since these teachers don’t teach but rather “must forgo lectures and become more like coaches, while students, who are generally at home, have considerable latitude in directing their own learning” (“Teachers Go to School on Online Instruction”, Aug 14) what K12 pays their teachers for is nothing more than coaching and encouragement. First they banished the sage from the stage to guide thereafter from the side—K12 has now launched the guide into space, and then to India. But do not fear because the guide is back from India, Edweek reports, and K12 is done with outsourcing. It was apparently just an experiment.
By the way, if I were a noble businessman as the K12 people may be I would have either fired the American virtual faculty and left the cheerleading to telemarketer types who earn minimum wage, or cut down faculty heavily leaving only a few with the burden of professional encouragement.Is this how capitalism works? Yes, yes it is. Why are we still so shocked about this?
See David Safier’s follow up on the K12 outsourcing here
Last November, the New York City Department of Education’s new letter grading system for New York City schools was hot—as hot as things get in the world of education writing. A new means of oversight, the system of letter grades had been in the oven for about a year while it absorbed its first wave of criticism from school officials throughout the state.
I hear the gilded beast, Stuyvesant High School, received a B grade when the initial scores were released—oh the horror. I suppose similar cases had well-to-do principals from all over New York City flying to the Department of Ed, their unfairly scored tests in-hand, demanding a recount or at least extra credit. That must have been so annoying. If I were Joel Klein, DOE Schools Chancellor, I’d have them write reports about grade inflation. Anyway, that’s not what happened. What happened was grade inflation and Stuyvesant went from a B to an A.
So New York City schools have letter grades from here on out. I’m for it. Without letter grades, I’d argue, there is no way to determine the value of education in such a free market system. In New York City, going to High School is little like buying a car; it’s a commitment and an investment in your future. You want to get the most value and the most mileage out of your investment and you don’t want something that’s going to break down all the time, you don’t want to be walking to work. As value prior to letter grades was carried by word-of-mouth, value became a function of rumor and image alone. People would say that getting into a good high school will get you that banking job down the line or guaranteed entrance into a good college.
For instance, as Hunter College High School is known for sending the most students to Ivy League colleges, incoming students may believe to some degree that they are guaranteed an Ivy League education on their way out. I’m not sure if Bronx Science kids think they’ll all get their Nobel Prizes at the end of their senior year, but the idea that Bronx Science turns out more 
Nobel Laureates than any other high school definitely figures into the value students ascribe to it. Furthermore, in a free market where prices are fixed by word-of-mouth and reputation alone, schools like Stuyvesant, “known” to be “the best and most exclusive in the nation,” necessarily hold all the resources. The effect is that every other school’s value is only ever expressed as fractions of Stuyvesant’s. Stuyvesant has become a pure measure of value. The DOE’s new system, among other things wrests this value from the mouths of Stuyvesant alumni and nails it to a letter between A and F.
There have been murmurs that the letter grades are too ambitious and reductive: how can a school be reduced to a letter? I think the only people who begin this line of questioning are principals at B-ranked schools like Randy Asher from Brooklyn Tech who tells the New York Times that the letters are “ridiculous.” Personally, I don’t think the letters are any more reductive or ridiculous than, “sends more kids to Ivy League schools,” or “the best.” What does all that mean?
Let me put it this way, if you are a New York City middle school or high school student you know which high schools are the best high schools, you know the name of Stuyvesant. This is because, if you are a New York middle school or high school student, you are a consumer. Similarly, as a New York City student you know how education looks immediately below the Stuyvesant mark, you know the names of most middle tier high schools, and you also know—perhaps you dread—the names of zoned schools like John Jay, Prospect Heights, or Boys and Girls. In short, New York City students are expected to be savvy consumers; it’s a seller’s market after all.
The price of Stuyvesant and that of a few other exclusive high schools cashes out as a few years of intensive study and personal tutors. This in preparation for the SHSAT, a rigorous examination invented specifically for this group of high schools and mandated as admission criteria by Article 12 of the New York education law. For many, and I mean just about everyone, a couple of years of focused study and tutoring for one test is way too expensive, and by expense I mean to say wealth, money, coinage, you get it.
Letter grades produce a better market for consumers, and consequently the New York City school system should have more students applying to alternate and less exclusive grade-A high schools. Students in other A-grade high schools may soon begin to ask of Stuyvesant, “what’s all the big talk about?” And B schools may start to work on their product, perhaps giving A schools a run for their money down the road.
The consumer reports that substantiate the DOE’s letter grades provide some success criteria for failing schools. In this vein, student consumers will now have the chance to properly vet the constant tide of new schools in the ever changing New York City School market.
The letter grades are a good move for NYCDOE, and, as other states adopt similar school choice school systems, it might be a good idea to think about the value of education. New Jersey already has a similar reporting system which can be found on the NJDOE website. However, as New Jersey is so district oriented it would be difficult to come up with an accurate rating system with so many statistically different schools. New Jersey, in such a situation, may have to become more “school ruled” like New York. This will certainly be necessary if New Jersey adopts a choice system.
A free market school system would force some serious changes in the way we do things in New Jersey. Such a system would definitely be too limited in an environment that has little or no urban transit and therefore it might help push the development of our urban spaces by posing transit problems for us to solve. Also, school rule would clean out lots of useless money-sucking administration at the district level and thus relieve some of the property tax burden.
Popular Sovereignty 