The Charter School Myth Take-down

School Finance 101 is good at explaining data, especially the lies used to misrepresent the data by those who would like to push their charter agenda. To wit:

The Offensively Defensive Ideology of Charter Schooling

There now exists a fair amount of evidence that Charter schools in many locations, especially high performing charter schools in New Jersey and New York tend to serve much smaller shares of low income, special education and limited English proficient students (see various links that follow). And in some cases, high performing charter schools, especially charter middle schools, experience dramatic attrition between 6th and 8th grade, often the same grades over which student achievement climbs, suggesting that a “pushing out” form of attrition is partly accounting for charter achievement levels.

As I’ve stated many times on this blog, the extent to which we are concerned about these issues is a matter of perspective. It is entirely possible that a school – charter, private or otherwise – can achieve not only high performance levels but also greater achievement growth by serving a selective student population, including selection of students on the front end and attrition of students along the way. After all, one of the largest “within school effects on student performance” is the composition of the peer group.

From a parent (or child) perspective, one is relatively unconcerned whether the positive school effect is function of selectivity of peer group and attrition, so long as there is a positive effect.

But, from a public policy perspective, the model is only useful if the majority of positive effects are not due to peer group selectivity and attrition, but rather to the efficacy and transferability of the educational models, programs and strategies. To put it very bluntly, charters (or magnet schools) cannot dramatically improve overall performance in low income communities by this approach, because there simply aren’t enough less poor, fluent English speaking, non-disabled children to go around. They are not a replacement for the current public system, because their successes are in many cases based on doing things they couldn’t if they actually tried to serve everyone.

Again, this is not to say that some high performing charters aren’t essentially effective magnet school programs that do provide improved opportunities for select few. But that’s what they are.
But rather than acknowledging these issues and recognizing charters and their successes for what they are (or aren’t), charter pundits have developed a series of very intriguing (albeit largely unfounded) defensive responses (read excuses) to the available data. These include the arguments that:

Read the rest, and the excellent point by point take-down (and links) here.

Yong Zhao On Data

A Pretense of Science and Objectivity: Data and Race to the Top

Education has a new god: data. It is believed to have the power to save American education and thus everything in education must be about data—collect more data about our children, evaluate teachers and administrators based on data, and reward and punish schools using data.

The US federal government has been dangling $4.35 billion to recruit worshipers through the Race to the Top (RTT) program, and possibly a lot more through the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Already 40 states have somehow made the conversion, although only two (Delaware and Tennessee) were deemed to have developed a system powerful enough to generate more converts in schools and thus rewarded with a total of $600 million. Other states will have a second chance and many are working to rewrite their pledges.

Both Delaware and Tennessee did an excellent job pledging to build an education system around data. The Delaware application for RTT lists three strengths that “few states can match:”

1. Delaware’s state-of-the-art system (emphasis original) captures longitudinal information about both students and teachers, and links them together. Today, the State can quickly analyze the performance of any teacher’s students over time, can track how graduates perform in college, and can link teachers to teacher preparation programs, providing rich opportunities to use data to drive performance at the system, school, and classroom levels.
2. Delaware’s rigorous statewide educator evaluation system is based on the most respected standards for teaching and leading. The system provides a multi-measure assessment of performance that incorporates student growth as one of five components…an educator can only be rated effective if they demonstrate satisfactory levels of student growth.
3. Delaware’s newly-defined regulatory framework for school turnaround gives the State the authority to intervene directly in failing schools and requires schools to demonstrate results b achieving AYP within two years. (p. A4-A5)

All three are about data. With the RTT money, Delaware promises to become even more faithful—moving from data-rich to data-driven (watch the panel interview on Youtube). The State will “administer up to three formative and summative assessments per year per student in core subjects” (p. B-10), provide “immediate information that a teacher will use” (p. B-10), “provide data coaches to aid in the use of assessment data,” make tenure and licensure decisions for new teachers based on student performance (D-8), and include in teacher and administrator annual evaluations (p. D-16). With all these plans, Delaware will be “poised to promote data-driven instruction across all schools” (p. B-23). (http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/delaware.pdf)

Tennessee embraces data as enthusiastically as Delaware. Its RTT application begins with a poetic piece that asks the reviewers to:

Imagine, for a moment, a new day that is coming for Tennessee’s children and families, teachers and principals, and the State’s economic future….It is a day when middle school students will have the benefit of formative assessments, with immediate results so their teachers can measure their progress and make adjustments in time for the annual test. And then principals will use that student achievement data as a significant part of more rigorous teacher evaluations, and work with their teachers to help them succeed (p. 10).

I could go on, but you could read the applications and/or watch their presentations/panel Q&A on youTube (quite fun, actually).

More at the link.

Data Driven To Madness

Data. The bane of teachers.

Your Data Dream. My Data Nightmare.

One of my greatest frustrations as a teacher is listening to those who work beyond the classroom dream up brilliant plans for reforming schools that are simply impossible to implement because they’re dependent on new resources that no one is willing to provide.

Take the constant drumbeat around “data informed decision-making” as a case in point.

Poke your nose into any conversation about teaching and learning and you’re bound to hear “how easy it would be to improve education” in our country if schools were just willing to “confront the brutal facts” about student achievement.

The best teachers and learning teams are “hungry for facts,” prognosticators will argue. They take an “action orientation” towards numbers, looking for “trends and patterns” that can inform their instruction.

And of course, someone is BOUND to throw out the ever-popular argument that our schools need to take a more “business-like approach to data.”

...

More at the link.

Data-Driven Accountability: Oxymoron?

John Thompson on data-driven accountability:

Data-DRIVEN accountability makes sense for enforcing the Voting Rights Act, fighting Medicaid fraud, or a war on other criminal conspiracies. It also makes sense when numbers have been proven to reflect physical reality or numbers are used to make sure that other numbers are accurate. Data-DRIVEN accountability is appropriate for deterring threats to society, but to improve teaching and learning we need data-INFORMED accountability and evidenced-based decision-making. We need accountability devised "with teachers" not done "to teachers."

Read it at the link [emphasis mine].