This is a joke, right?

Chronicle of Higher Education:

Academics who champion causes may be gambling with their careers. But for some dedicated activists, the choice is clear.

Mr. Hansford, an assistant professor of law at Saint Louis University, [...] When he joined the law faculty at the university, in 2011, it never occurred to him to cast his causes aside: "I was an activist before I was a scholar, you could say."

In the months since the unrest in Ferguson, Mr. Hansford has become a well-known face in the Black Lives Matter movement. He has served as a legal observer during protests, was once arrested and jailed overnight, and was a key organizer of #FergusonToGeneva, a delegation that frames police violence in the United States as a human-rights issue worthy of global attention. [...]

"There’s a tradition of black scholar-activists who fought for justice," says Mr. Hansford, who studies human rights, legal ethics, legal history, and critical race theory. "This particular activism is almost like a calling for me." But he knows it could hinder his academic career.

With issues of social justice dominating the national conversation, some academics identify as scholar-activists, a term typically used by those deeply involved in progressive causes. They take to the streets as part of protest movements, work alongside community organizers, and push for policy changes, applying their research to underserved communities. Yet balancing activism and scholarship can be risky, especially while on the tenure track.

"I was an activist before I was a scholar, you could say."

Yes, I'm sure it's soooooo hard to get tenure after making a name for yourself in the Black Lives Matter movement. The school is probably breaking open the champagne and getting ready to give him a big fat tenure package. This is exactly the kind of professor schools are looking for.

Or, how about this one:

Rajani Bhatia saw a Ph.D. as a way to enhance her work in the reproductive-rights movement, including a job at an advocacy group. But once in a women’s-studies program [...], she found that staying on top of her courses, teaching undergraduates, and pursuing a research agenda stripped her of spare time.

"I realized the very first year that I was going have to give up certain aspects of my life," says Ms. Bhatia, who is now an assistant professor of women’s studies at the University at Albany. "For me, it was my activism."

With her tenure clock ticking, Ms. Bhatia still keeps her activist work at a minimum. She maintains connections to groups she used to collaborate with and tries to attend some academic conferences that draw scholar-activists, but that’s about all she can manage, she says. "My clear priority is getting tenure."

In other words, when she gets tenure, she can finally ditch those pesky little things like doing work, teaching classes, publishing, etc. and get back to her activism! And people wonder why the cost of college is skyrocketing. Pre-professors do all the work, knowing once they get tenure, they can go off and do the things they really want to do and leave all the work to the next round of indentured servants, that is to say, graduate students.

----

Now, how about the activist who dedicates their time to working for conservative causes? How would a Tea Partier, the gun rights advocate, the anti-abortion campaigner, the campaign worker for Jeb, be able to juggle their graduate school commitments or their pre-tenure professorship with their activism? The question, of course, is moot, since they would never have received the offer for a place at the school in the first place.

I recently came across some posts by my brother in the comments section over on NRO. The subject was the Common Core. He and I seem to agree about one thing: there is nothing, or little, actually in the math standards that are objectionable. The point-by-point details in the Common Core, of what students should learn each year, aren't that bad. Many people—even the CC’s strongest critics—admit that the CC math standards are better than what most of the states had before. I follow the arguments surrounding the Common Core's math standards fairly intensively and rarely have I seen actual nit-picking of individual standards. (Apart from the fact that they are often written in bureaucratic gobbledygook.)

The criticism I have seen hits many different notes:

1. The pacing is slow. James Milgram, one of the CC's major critics, has said that the CC puts US kids one year behind our peer countries' math curricula by 5th grade, and two years behind by the end of 7th grade. In other words, what we teach in 7th, other countries cover in 5th. And it gets worse every year.

   [ James Milgram ] For example, by the end of fifth grade the material being covered in arithmetic and algebra in the Core Standards is more than a year behind the early grade expectations in most high achieving countries. By the end of seventh grade Core Standards are roughly two years behind.

   In addition, a lead writer of the Core, Jason Zimba, has said in a public forum and on camera that the math standards are "not only not for STEM, they are also not for selective colleges." In other words, students who follow the CC pacing in math will not be prepared to get into a selective college and will not be prepared to study a STEM field if they do get in. Zimba can be seen saying this in the short movie "Building the Machine" starting at about 20:40 in.
   
   Keep in mind what this means: no student who follows the Common Core’s pacing will be prepared to major in math, science or engineering in college.
   
   When Jason ZImba was later questioned about his public statements that the CC math standards would not prepare kids for selective colleges or for STEM studies, he tried to say that he never said anything of the sort. Only when he was faced with the actual video of him saying exactly that, was he forced to address the issue. He continues to obfuscate and pretend that he didn’t really say what he clearly said.
   
   Did he misspeak? Most people who look over the standards would say that he did not; the CC math standards are minimalist and aimed at making sure that everyone has a basic level of competence. They are not aimed at the high end of the spectrum or at future math and science majors. In addition, the Common Core documentation states that it prepares kids for the level of study provided at community colleges, and not for studies at more rigorous schools.
   
   
2. This brings up a semi-related point. I recently was talking to a parent in the Santa Monica school system. She has a daughter in 6th grade who is advanced in math. She is ready to take algebra next year. However, Santa Monica's adoption of the CC has included a jettisoning of all accelerated tracks of math study. Her daughter will not be allowed to take algebra in school until 9th grade. I remember when California passed the law adopting the CC, it did so in a rigid manner. The law said that what the CC says students should be taught in 7th is what all students should taught in 7th--even if they are ready for advanced work. This eliminated the possibility of accelerated math. There was some talk about fixing this, and I know not all districts and schools have taken Santa Monica's position, but many have. Keep in mind, that in taking algebra in 9th grade, you cannot be on track to take calculus in high school--in a rigid system like this, high school calculus is not an option.
   
   Can this interpretation of the CC standards be laid at the feet of the CC? In part, yes. The Common Core does not talk at all about advanced students or allowing an advanced track with calculus as an end-point in high school. That has given schools, districts, and states an excuse to eliminate or reduce math tracking.
    
3. On the other end of the spectrum, Common Core makes no allowances for students who are not developmentally ready for the work required in the given grade-level standard. A student with special needs must be taught the grade-level standard math even if they are years behind in understanding, or even in the ability to understand the material. This is an "all students must be average" approach, which does not take into account the needs of learning disabled kids. Instead of giving those kids a curriculum which will advance them from where they are to where they can reasonably be at the end of the year, these students will be in way over their head with no chance of actually understanding the material and with little to help them catch up.
   
   For example: Students who have not mastered counting to 100 might be required by the standard to do multiplication and division. How can they possibly progress when the curriculum is so far out of their reach?
   
    
4. What is now happening, as the Common Core standardized tests are being taken in places like New York, is a massive upwelling of complaints about them. 

   Elementary school teacher Ralph Ratto the day after administering CC math exams: 
   I was angry that my students were victims in the abusive game to drive a political agenda.
   
   I lost it today. I lost a little bit of my self-esteem. I lost my faith in my party. I lost my faith in my ability to protect my students. I lost my faith in our future.
   
   I watched my students valiantly attempt math questions that most adults could not answer. These questions were wordy, and purposely confusing in a warped way to prove some point about our public education system.
   
   Historically, my students excel on standardized tests, often finishing near the top of our district and state. Today I witnessed –, no I was part of!!  – a situation in which students were forced to endure what amounted to what I would call an abusive situation.

   I can’t tell, without seeing the unpublished questions, whether he is complaining about how poorly-written these tests are, or whether they are testing math which is beyond the students’ learning. Is it simply the way they are asked to show their knowledge? Or are they being asked about things they haven’t been taught?
   
   
   Many of the complaints seem to be of the former variety: these tests are awful. That is a temporary problem, as the tests get better over time and as stupid questions and wording are removed. As I understand it, the NY exams were actually testing the tests, not the students. They were a dry run to see how well the tests worked. By the word leaking out about them, they seem to have failed in spectacular fashion.
   
   
   But, if it is a case of the students not having learned the material yet, then that might just mean that there will be an adjustment period. The new math standards are higher in many states than what was in place before, and it will take several years for the students to catch up to the standard. It should be that first graders starting out with these standards should do just fine. It’s only the older students who are being thrown in the deep end.
   
   
   The weird thing about this, is that many of the complaints against the Core are of the “it’s too slow” variety, but here, it might be too fast. Is this just because there needs to be a period of adjustment, or is the standard really too high for the average student?
   
   
5. In the only direct complaint against the actual standards I have seen, supposedly, the high school geometry standards came out of nowhere and embrace an odd view of geometry. I don't know if this is true or not, but I do know that the classic geometry of proofs and theorems and corollaries has been dying for a long time. Geometry was my favorite math class, and I loved the proofs-based course. If it has been dying for a while, it is hard to attribute that to CC.
    
6. In fact, that's true with many of the complaints against CC: what critics are complaining about isn't really the CC, but the education establishment's strange ideas of how math should be taught, and what they are and have been teaching for decades. Many of the crazy examples of homework coming home supposedly “Common Core Aligned” are not any different than what was seen prior to the adoption of the Common Core. 
   
    
7. This includes the word-heavy explanations required in K-12 math today, and the belief that if you can’t explain something in words, then you don’t really understand it. Showing your work used to be enough to show understanding: if you could show the steps you took, you already showed your understanding. Now, even simple tasks have to be explained in complete sentences.
   
   I’ve seen examples, including with our kids, of students baffled by how you explain why 5 x 6 = 30, or how you got that 3+3 = 6. My nephew, when asked to explain a simple problem this year, said: “They take something simple and make it so hard!”
   
   One of the problems with this verbal-based math is that when kids are learning basic arithmetic they have not necessarily yet developed the linguistic abilities to explain things. You can fully understand that 5 x 6 = 30, you might even picture a 5 x 6 grid of objects, you might understand that this means adding 5 to itself 6 times, and might also understand that it means adding 6 to itself 5 times; and still not be able to put that in words.
   
   As for explanations of the obvious, my favorite answer I’ve seen so far is: “my brain told me so.” At some point the language of mathematics becomes a real language and is sufficient to show understanding.  Today’s math teachers don’t seem to agree.
   
   This is especially hard on English-language learners, on kids whose brains take better to math than language, and on kids with learning/reading/writing disabilities.
   
   It used to be that non-English speaking immigrants, in particular, could get ahead through math and science. Because language skills were less important than in other studies, they could become engineers, mathematicians, programmers, etc. Today, when everything has to be verbally explained in words instead of equations, students like this have less hope of advancement.
   
   But, again, this is not necessarily to be laid at the door of the Common Core. These trends in mathematics education are long-standing and entrenched. What the Common Core adds to the problem is simply this: it locks the entire country down to this style of math education (and the accompanying documentation of the Common Core does do this, even if the individual standards do not) regardless of whether it is wise.
   
    
8. As for crappy worksheets coming home with the Common Core label, I would say that math textbooks and especially workbooks are notoriously bad. My nephew came home with a worksheet last week which had only six problems on the whole page and with a “match each problem to its answer” format—in other words, the answers were all on the page, and you just had to link up the problem with the appropriate answer. But, for one problem the actual answer was missing. This was for finding the volume of a triangular prism, and whoever wrote the worksheet forgot that when calculating the area of the triangular face you need to divide by 2:  b * h / 2 . Obviously, no one had bothered to check the worksheet for accuracy—including his teacher.
   
   Math books tend to be written by freelance writers who are working on a rushed pay-by-the-problem basis. Editors prize speed over accuracy and don’t care if the books follow a coherent, systematic progression.
   
   With the adoption of the Common Core, publishers sped to slap the label of “Common Core Aligned” on everything possible in their library, and commissioned rush-jobs of new material. Editing costs money and provides little, or no, return on publishers’ investment, so little editing took place. I don’t really see the Common Core texts and worksheets as being anything worse than what came before. It is simply that these things are now under greater scrutiny, and parents are wondering what the heck is going on.
   
    
9. "Internationally Benchmarked" and "research based" claims about the Common Core are complete fabrications. The few attempts to compare the CC standards to our international peers fall into two camps: a) comparisons done by CC partisans which show some  correlations and b) comparisons done by independent or anti-CC partisans showing no or negative correlations. Either way, the studies are few and far between and have been done *after* the standards were written.
   
   Though the CC writing process is somewhat shrouded in secrecy, it does not appear that the committees that drew up the standards did so with an eye to our international competition. In fact, there is little research done about anything in the CC or about the CC in general. A recent study, by the Brookings Institution,  showed that those students in states with a math curriculum most unlike CC did better than those states with a CC-like curriculum. The correlations were small, but the point here is that there is nothing out there which shows that CC is a superior (or even adequate) curriculum—or, conversely, that it is a bad curriculum. There is simply little out there to look at. 
   
    
10. Similarly, the claim that his was “state led” is bogus. This came out of the Gates Foundation and from a consortium of education think tanks that Gates had funded. Actual state involvement came after the fact when they were asked “hey, do you like this?” They were allowed no actual input during the writing process. So, yes, the promoters are lying about it, but that doesn’t mean the standards themselves are therefore bad.  For a rundown of how the Common Core came to be written the movie “Building the Machine” goes through it.
    
     
11. Prior to the adoption of the Common Core by 45 states, each state was on their own. At least two states, Massachusetts and California, are widely acknowledged to have had a better and more rigorous math standards before their adoption of the Common Core. Several states had to dumb down their standards to adopt the Core.
    
    In fact, in this case, the rigidity of standards was also a routine complaint. California, in particular, required algebra in 8^th grade; this despite the fact that many students were simply not ready for it. Setting the bar that high meant that many students failed and hit the wall.
    
    If anything, the argument should be made that it is not the grade level, which is largely decided by a student’s age, that is important, but what they are realistically capable of understanding given their prior learning. Common Core, like many standards before it, often does not take this into account.
    
    The problem, as I see it here, is that the methods used by many teachers, and those they are led to believe in at ed school, simply do not work: Group math projects. Homework with only a handful of problems. No drilling of math facts. “Spiraling” curriculum, which believes in going over something lightly again and again every few months in the hopes that something will eventually sink in—instead of carefully, methodically, and systematically making sure the kids learn it the first time. The constant attempts to make every aspect of math class “fun” instead of addressing those aspects which simply take focus, work, and dedication.
    
    This has nothing to do with the Common Core, and points to a deeper issue at the heart of education. Common Core, unfortunately, does nothing to negate, and often supports, these teaching methods.
    
     
12. What was the rush? The Race to the Top program required states to adopt the Common Core standards by a certain date (if they were applying for RttT grant money, which most did). The final standards were only published a month or two beforehand. There was very little time for debate and for deep assessments to be made before it got passed. Once again, however, that doesn’t address whether the standards themselves are good or bad, just that the states which adopted them had very little time to review them. The RttT initiative dangled the carrot of grant money, and states signed on without really analyzing the standards.
    
     
13. Just like anything else, the Common Core will obey the law of unintended consequences. If you ask any of the people involved in its creation, or in the government who pushed for, or who voted to adopt the Common Core, you are likely to hear some variation of the hope that this will help poor and disadvantaged kids get ahead; and moreover, that the Common Core should reduce inequality. In part, that might be true, but with a ceiling on these students’ aspirations.
    
    Because in many states the Common Core is an improvement on what existed before, those students in those states who stick to the new program should come out the other side in a better position than their predecessors.
    
    However, as I said above, the Common Core is not a selective-college or STEM-ready standard. Poor and disadvantaged students, or students with poorly educated parents, will be completely reliant on the schools to give them their math curriculum. On the other hand, students in the middle-class or better, and students with well-educated parents will get more.
    
    The family in Santa Monica that I mentioned earlier will not simply have their daughter twiddle her thumbs for the next two years until her peers catch up with her and she can finally be allowed to take algebra. The family will hire the tutors necessary to make sure that their child continues to stay on the track she is on now.
    
    There are six Kumon centers within five miles of where I’m sitting. There are two Mathnasiums in that same area. There is one Sylvan. There is one C2 center. There are many other smaller tutoring centers as well. In addition there are many people who tutor independently, including myself. We are in a middle class to upper-middle class neighborhood, and just to our east is Koreatown. All around us are parents who are not going to let their kids fall behind and who have the resources to make certain that they do not.
    
    Poor kids have no such opportunity. Those students who are stuck in schools that are eliminating math tracking in the name of the Common Core, and who will only offer a single not-STEM or selective-college-ready curriculum, will bifurcate between those getting outside help and those who can only afford to be taught at school. To some extent, this has always been true. But with more systems eliminating tracking, more students will be denied advanced study.
    
     
14. The effects on public colleges and universities should also be taken into account. As part of the push for the adoption of the Common Core, the Race to the Top initiative included a stipulation—signed onto by 45 states—that any student who completed the Common Core math curriculum in high school could not be placed in remedial math in public colleges and universities. They must be placed in non-remedial, credit-bearing classes. With current colleges often requiring 40-50% of their freshmen to take remedial math, this will require a great deal of shifting on the part of schools. This can take several paths:
    
    a) They can just put students in the intro college classes and let them crash and burn. This one is highly unlikely to happen, especially when the kids crashing and burning are likely to be disproportionately poor minorities who went to crappy high schools.
    
    b) They can dumb down the intro courses so that the students can pass. This is the most-likely scenario, and will result in the level of college math work diminishing for many.
    
    c) They can remove the requirement to take math in order to graduate, depending on the major chosen.
    
    This is actually not necessarily a bad thing. While I would say that the ability to do college algebra should be universal among college students, I would also wonder why someone majoring in social work needs to pass algebra? Or why someone majoring in early-childhood education (say preschool – third) would need to?
    
    There are many college majors and post-college careers that simply do not require math at all. Many adults will never do another algebra-style problem for the rest of their lives. Apart from showing a level of mental discipline, why is college algebra required for these studies?
    
    I know one former community college student who could not pass algebra to save her life. In the end she dropped out of school and never got her AB. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. She went on to start a small business and is doing well—either way, she will never be called upon to do any algebra problem at any time for the rest of her life.
    
    When college algebra puts up an impenetrable barrier to students who want to study something which has nothing to do with math, and in which they can do well, why is math a requirement at all? I would think it is quite likely that the math requirement will be removed from many majors and as a general requirement for graduation. It might be replaced with something like a statistics course, which would be much more useful to more students than college algebra.
    
     
15. Some of the weakest critiques of the Common Core are about the process of its implementation and the knee-jerk reaction to nationalizing school standards.
    
    a) To some extent this is justified. As Jay P. Greene, in particular, has tried to point out, there are at least two separate federal laws which explicitly prevent the federal government from creating or trying to implement a national curriculum. Race to the Top and the Common Core violate those laws.
    

    The intent of Congress is clear: The federal government cannot mandate, direct, supervise, or control curriculum or programs of instruction.  Indeed, the legislative history of the DEOA [Department of Education Organization Act] underscores this, as does its statement of intent “to protect the rights of State and local governments . . . in the areas of educational policy” and to “not increase the authority of the Federal Government over education or diminish the responsibility for education which is reserved to the States and local school systems.” Yet…the Department is evading these prohibitions and using proxies to cement national standards and assessments that will inevitably direct the content of K-­12 curriculum, programs of instruction, and instructional materials across the nation.

    So, whether or not the CC is a good idea, it seems to be explicitly illegal according to several laws governing the Department of Education. It is reasonable to add this to the list of extra-legal legislation coming out of the current White House, and it is reasonable to object to the CC on this basis alone.
    
    b) As I’ve said above, several states had better math standards pre-CC and had to jettison them to adopt the new standards; and  previously, each state wrote their own standards (or in some cases didn’t write standards at all).
    
    This plays to the old idea that states are “little incubators” of innovation. If one state has a better program, other states are free to use it as a model and alter their own in response. Hopefully the better states serve as exemplars until another state comes along and surpasses them. With a national set of standards, experimentation and change comes to an end. We will never know where that dynamic experimentation would have led.
    
     
16. The weakest arguments of all, which I’ve seen too often, and which I think are things both my brother and I object to the most, are the “if it comes from Obama, it must be bad” mentality. A lot of the criticism starts with that idea, and searches for evidence to fit it. The standards themselves aren’t terrible, and aren’t even too bad. In some areas, they are quite good. Even if Obama’s name’s attached.
    
     
17. At the end of the day, the people instituting the new standards, and the new curricula that go with them, are the same people who have been failing our kids for decades. The same mentality dominates in schools and ed schools. (Often against anything rigorous, and in favor of all things that are “fun,” and thus will make the children happy to learn. Not all that children need to learn can be constantly “fun”—you still have to learn how to spell, and you still have to learn your math facts.)
    
    I often liken the implementation of the Common Core to the whole country throwing all its educational balls up in the air at the same time. Considering how bad the system has been, you would think that whatever gets reassembled would be an improvement; but, the same people who were in charge before are the ones now catching the balls, and they will do their utmost to try to put them right back where they were.

Interesting article:

The whole point of paying thousands of dollars for a Louis Vuitton bag is that other people can't. If they could, the bags would instantly lose almost all value in the eyes of those who buy them. Hence, the more such things cost, the more desirable they become.

In economic terms, higher education is a positional good: It is valuable to have a college degree because other people don't have one. It is also to a significant extent a Veblen good: Sending one's children to college, and most especially a prestigious (meaning expensive) college, is a way of signaling social status via the conspicuous consumption of a luxury good.

All of this helps explain why college tuition has increased three times faster than the cost of living over the past three decades. University administrators have discovered that, to a remarkable degree, the more they charge for what they're offering, the more people will want to buy it.

Our kid's school has a "Smart Lab", which is a place where kids, generally in 6th-8th grade, can play with technology.

Here is a transcript-by-memory of a conversation I had with the instructor:

Me: Do any of the kids do any actual programming?

Instructor: Oh, yeah. Have you heard of Scratch?

Me: Yes. That's basically like MindStorms; you tell it to move the figure three steps this way, two steps that way. I mean actual coding.

Ins: Sure! Some kids even make webpages.

Me (trying very hard not to laugh in his face): No, I mean actual programming, like goto subroutine, if this then that.

Ins: Oh, no, not really.

Me: (Beating my head against the wall)...

What's amazing is that the technology teacher didn't even know what I meant when I said either "programming" or "coding".

Meanwhile, I asked the other kid's 8th grade computer programming teacher whether they taught any other languages than Java, and if students were taught to document their code. Answers: Other languages are offered later, in high school (the AP test is only Java, so that's the emphasis), and documenting is not stressed in the level 1 class, but in the second class they do.

Via Meadia

Colleges are facing a problem they haven’t faced in nearly a decade: declining enrollment. New Census Bureau data reports that college enrollment dropped by about a half-million last year for the first time since 2006. Some of this may simply be a result of students who went to school in the late 2000s to avoid the recession finally graduating.

But college administrators are clearly worried that this may be the sign of a long-term trend. A recent survey of industry leaders found that over one-third are now concerned that they won’t be able to keep enrollments steady with tuition prices where they are now...

Mead didn't run the numbers, I did. The entire decline in enrollment can be attributed--almost perfectly--by the change in the number of men and women attending college.

Male enrollment 2011 = 9,123,000
Male enrollment 2012 = 8,602,000
Change = -521,000 / -5.7%

Female enrollment 2011 = 11,256,000
Female enrollment 2012 = 11,327,000
Change = +71,000 / +0.6%

Since overall college enrollment declined by 449,000; all but 1,000 of it can be attributed to the decline in men's enrollment.

(links for data from this page: http://www.census.gov/newsroom... )

A decline of over 5% of male enrollment should set off alarm bells, and would if the genders were reversed. The stories of schools treating men like predators abound, with men treated as guilty and needing to prove their innocence instead of the other way around. Perhaps men are getting the message that college is enemy territory and not for them.

Colleges should wake up and not turn away this cohort with their discriminatory anti-male policies.

Dan Mitchell at his "International Liberty" blog showed a graph charting education spending with achievement of 17-year-olds since 1970. The original graph was from a blog post by Andrew Coulson at Cato's "Cato@Liberty" blog. Here's the graph:

The steep blue line represents all education spending. The flat little lines at the bottom shows the percentage change in achievement. For all the spending, we got bupkis...except for the steep dotted line. That's the percentage increase in the number of education employees.

The bottom line numbers are:

Spending on Ed: +140%
Math scores: 0%
Reading scores: 0%
Science scores: -3%
Ed Employees: +75%

Our schools are the same or worse, but they employ more people than ever. Increasing proof that the national education system isn't about education, it's a jobs machine.

(Cross Posted from Square Dots.)

When the Best is Mediocre - Education Next

American education has problems, almost everyone is willing to concede, but many think those problems are mostly concentrated in our large urban school districts. In the elite suburbs, where wealthy and politically influential people tend to live, the schools are assumed to be world-class.

Unfortunately, what everyone knows is wrong. Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compared with those of our international peers. Our best school districts may look excellent alongside large urban districts, the comparison state accountability systems encourage, but that measure provides false comfort.

My childhood district, which is considered to be a good one, with a high percentage of college-goers, came in at: 61st percentile in math and 74th in reading when compared to students in other developed countries. Los Angeles Unified comes off badly with: 20 & 25. Milwaukee comes off even worse: 16 & 26.

But the point of the article is to look at those nice suburban districts that so many people rely on. It points out that they aren't keeping pace with the educational attainment of students in comparable countries. In other words, the districts that we think are good, aren't.

(cross posted on Square Dots)

I really don't understand the concept of "Teaching to the Test (TTTT)." I often hear the term used in reference to No Child Left Behind. The claim is that No Child Left Behind has increased TTTT, and this is very very bad. Surely it doesn't mean teaching the material that is going to be on the test... that seems to me to be the whole point of curricula and testing. As far as I can tell, TTTT means teaching people how to answer questions on a test without really understanding the material being tested.

For a hilariously biased overview, check out the Wikipedia article on topic. Articles like this give Wikipedia a bad name, but they do provide a good laugh now and then.

It seems to me TTTT is mostly a straw man. Tests today, especially standardized tests used in public schools, are designed to test understanding. To what sort of questions could TTTT possibly apply? I can think of a few. For example, if you know how to add and multiply single-digit numbers together, then you could possibly learn and use the method for multiplying larger numbers together without really understanding what is going on. For math beyond these simple algorithms though, it gets harder for me to think of TTTT-approachable problems. Here is a practice math test put out by the Tennessee government. I don't see much TTTT-approachable material in there.

I can't think of any TTTT-approachable reading exam questions. You read a paragraph and answer questions about what you have read. How can you approach that other than by learning to read?

BBC News - Harewood Junior School bans leather footballs from playground

Kids want to play with a soccer ball? Don't they know how dangerous they are? Are they crazy!! Ban the blasted balls before some death-defying kid gets hurt!

It used to be that the UK would laugh at the US's stupid rules and regulations and our litigious society. Now who's laughing?

I have two new posts on Square Dots.

Premier Preschool Produced Functionally Illiterate Adults

and

Spending time with Aleks

The union of graduate teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin seems to be collapsing. Essentially, it won't be able to raise enough cash without automatic deductions from paychecks. It's notable in particular because it is the grand-daddy of all such student unions.

There was a strong unionization effort at the University of Minnesota when I was a graduate student there. I was not a supporter. Indeed, I thought the deal that Minnesota gave me was great, and I felt more grateful than exploited. In return for about 10 hours per week of work as at teaching assistant, I got all my tuition paid for, plus plenty of money to live on. I had a nice apartment, a car, food money, and beer money. In addition, I had pretty good health care coverage. What more could a graduate student ask?

The fact is that the science and math departments have money to support their graduate students. This is because of the research money that flows in and the huge introductory undergraduate classes that bring in tuition money. The humanities are much more cash-strapped, and the pay and benefits to graduate students in those departments was not as good. Much of the debate during the unionization effort was between the two groups of students, with humanities graduate students and union leaders advocating for "equality" in these wages across departments. The vote split down these lines, with science and math strongly voting "no" and humanities "yes"... the union movement failed.

Really, if you want to get a PhD in French poetry, best of luck to you. But don't expect me to chip in to fund your folly.

A massive cheating scandal is rocking the Atlanta school district. A widespread and systematic effort to cheat on standardized tests has been uncovered. It included teachers, principals, staff, and superintendents. In some cases, they literally erased the kids' answers and replaced them with the correct ones.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

You can see the gains in this chart I posted several months ago, where Georgia raised its scores on the national test NEAP dramatically:

Click to embiggen.


It should also be noted that Georgian schools s*^%! If you line up all the states according to their various NEAP scores, Georgia would come in between 33 and 40 just about every time. They do a little better with English Language learners, where they rank around 20, even breaking into the second quintile with a rank of 17 for 4th grade math proficiency.

They s(%& even with the cheating scandal. Atlanta makes up just better than 4% of the population of Georgia. If the scores from the APS system are bogus, that means Georgia did even worse than everyone thought.

I love the first lady interviewed in this Reason video from Los Angeles. The venue was a teachers' demonstration for more taxes to pay teachers more. As background, a Los Angeles Times project grabbed data on kids going in and coming out of teachers' classrooms. They calculated how much improvement kids made for each teacher. Uniquely, they named names. You could actually do a search for your kid's teacher.

The interview I love came about 30 seconds in.

Reason: How did you do on the Los Angeles Times value added rankings?

3rd Grade Teacher Murphy (with a smile): I sucked!

Reason: Really?

Murphy: Yeah!

Here's her ranking on the LA Times. She's below average in both math and reading for value added. And the charts for her ranking:

NPR is doing a series on financial literacy among young Americans. They started with two pieces on college loan debt today. In the introduction to one piece was this comment about college graduates:

For many of them, life's first big decision will be how to pay off college loans.

Ahem, their first big decision should have been whether to take the loans out in the first place!

In the last few weeks, the post below and ones like it have been circulating around Facebook and the internet (see eg: here, in the comments here: , and here ):

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Their ranking on ACT/SAT scores:

South Carolina - 50th
North Carolina - 49th
Georgia - 48th
Texas - 47th
Virginia - 44th

Wisconsin is currently ranked 2nd. Welcome to the race to the bottom.

The statistics have become so widespread that they've been used by the Economist and Paul Krugman at the NYTimes has pulled similar data.

Rebuttals have pointed out that the SAT is a really bad way to judge educational achievement, since in Wisconsin in particular only a small portion of students—those heading for selective colleges—ever take it:

As it turns out, these ratings are bogus. For each state it adds the ranking for SAT scores to the ranking for ACT scores (and it's not even clear what year the data comes from), but it doesn't take into consideration the percentage of the population who take either test. The College Boards specifically warn against doing state-to-state comparisons for the SAT, because in some states all students are required to take the text, while in others only the best students do. Only 4% of Wisconsin students took the SAT in 2010, and since they tend to be the cream of the crop it's not surprising that Wisconsin does well (but third in the nation, not first). On the other hand, 69% of Wisconsin seniors took the ACT in 2010, and Wisconsin comes in 17th in terms of composite ACT scores.

A more thorough debunking of these statistics may be found here; among the revelations is the fact that the data is from 1999. The owner of this site is actually an advocate of "student organizing"; it is to his credit that he has the intellectual honesty to challenge claims that purport to back up his side of the argument.

So, since I like data, playing with data, and living in data, I decided to look at a much better measure of educational achievement—the “Nation’s Report Card.”

For a long time now, the US Department of Education has compiled NEAP scores. These are the results of exams given nationwide to a massive number of students. They show trends, and apples to apples comparisons can be made easily. The exams are given in Mathematics, Reading, Science, Technology and Engineering, Arts, Civics, Economics, Foreign Language, Geography, US History, World History, and Writing. The exams are given to both 4th and 8th graders. A pilot program has started to test 12th graders as well, but none of the states mentioned above are participants.

Iowahawk, the usually comedic web poster, took a break yesterday from satire to mine some of this data--he compared Texas and Wisconsin, with Texas coming out mostly on top.

As it turns out, I was already compiling data from this same source. I decided to focus on the two main parts of the NEAP results: Math and Reading. The reports for 2009 are available here: Math and Reading.

I looked at three categories of student for each grade level: 1) All students, 2) Students eligible for subsidized lunches—which is a short-hand way of looking at children in poverty, and 3) English Language Learners. I also looked at two levels of educational achievement: 1) students meeting basic requirements and 2) students testing as proficient. I took the 50 states and sorted them from best to worst and gave them their numerical rank (I gave states with ties the same rank.) The charts below show the numerical rank of each state with respect to the other 49. (Some students, such as people with reading disabilities, are granted special accommodations for the exam, I used those scores for the data below.)

It is clear that Wisconsin does quite well, especially in math, but the results are really not much to crow about. Wisconsin’s reading scores are actually surprisingly low. The best ranking for Wisconsin in math in any of the categories came in at a rank of 8—that was for 8th grade English language learners testing at the basic level. In reading Wisconsin achieved a rank of two for educating ELL students in 8th grade to basic levels. It should be noted, though, that ELL students do very badly overall.

Here is what I found:

4th Grade Math



For all students, and for these six states—remember Virginia, the Carolinas, Texas, and Georgia are used for the comparison because they do not allow their teachers to collectively bargain—Virginia, North Carolina and Texas are all better at getting kids a basic understanding of 4th grade math than Wisconsin. Wisconsin is the best of the bunch at getting kids to a proficient level, but 13 other states in the union actually do better than the cheese state, putting the dairyland in the second quintile. The percentage of Wisconsin students ranking at basic and proficient levels are: 85% and 45% respectively.

For students in poverty, Wisconsin gets a ranking near the middle of the 50 states: 22 for students reaching basic levels, and a better 19 for students reaching proficient. In Wisconsin 73% of students in poverty can do math at a basic level and 24% are proficient.

For English language learners, Wisconsin is well above the median for the 50 states with rankings of 14 and 13, however, among the six states presented here, Wisconsin actually does poorly, only Georgia does worse. In Wisconsin 66% of ELL students in 4th grade are at the basic level and 15% are proficient. The ELL scores, though, do have a caveat: not all states report these results. On this exam nine states did not report: Alabama, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Whether those states would change the rankings can not be known from this data.

8th Grade Math



For 8th graders, Wisconsin does well overall, getting more kids to the basic and proficient levels than the other five states, and makes the top ten for overall basic skills. The percentage of students scoring at basic and proficient are a respectable 79% and 39%. Texas shows itself to be very good at educating children in poverty, getting a basic rank of 3 (they are tied for third place with South Dakota and Massachusetts, and North Dakota and Montana do better,) and a proficient rank of 9. (Wisconsin’s scores are 60% of student in poverty achieve the basic level, 20% proficient.) South Carolina is again the best at educating English language learners, tying with Virginia for the number 2 spot at the basic level and getting the second rank for proficient as well. Wisconsin does well (45% at basic, 9% at proficient), but lags behind Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—Georgia did not report these scores, neither did: Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming (16 states did not report ELL scores.)

4th Grade Reading



Wisconsin does surprisingly poorly on this exam. For a state that is said to have a good educational system, scoring below or at the median for reading among all students is not the educational beacon it’s been made out to be. Only 67% of Wisconsin 4th graders read at a basic level, only 33% are proficient. For students in poverty, the numbers are even worse. For the first time in the data I’ve looked at, Wisconsin falls into the bottom quintile of states, wracking up a pathetic rank of being the 42nd best (worst!) state in which to be a student in poverty. Of these six states Wisconsin is the worst at educating students in poverty (with SC tying at the proficient level.) In Wisconsin, less than half—only 46% of 4th graders in poverty read at a basic level, and only 15% are proficient. My own state of California is in the dead-last position, with only 38% of students reaching the basic level, and only 10% reaching proficiency. Again, South Carolina seems to understand how to teach English language learners, or their cohort of ELL students is different from the ones in other states. They have the honor of being at the top of the league in ELL. Wisconsin is better than Georgia among these six states, but is the second last in both basic and proficient ELL students. (Eleven states did not report their ELL scores.) Among ELL 4th graders in Wisconsin only 31% are at basic and 8% are proficient.

8th Grade Reading



By comparison to the other five states in this dataset, Wisconsin does well at educating students in 8th grade reading. However, with the exception of ELL students, Wisconsin still isn’t doing very well. Wisconsin has a 50-state rank of 19 and 15 for educating all students to the basic and proficient levels respectively. In Wisconsin 78% of 8th grade students reach the basic level of reading, and 34% are proficient readers. Again Wisconsin is below the national median at educating students in poverty to the basic level of competence (61% of students in poverty achieve basic scores), but does slightly better than the median at getting kids to proficiency (18%). The ELL exam is again hampered by the fact that not all states report these results; in this case nearly half (23) failed to report. Among Wisconsin’s ELL students in 8th grade, only 49% can read at a basic level and only 7% are proficient.

Conclusions: Don’t send your kids to school in Georgia! Georgia did poorly across the board, though in a couple categories Wisconsin actually did worse. Wisconsin comes in at being a better-than-average state for education, but not if you are a student in poverty. Of the 24 categories presented here, Wisconsin was the best of the six states in nine of them, Virginia: eight, South Carolina: seven (all ELL), Texas: four, North Carolina: one, and Georgia: none.

Does Wisconsin’s collective bargaining state shine above the ones without it? Not according to this data. Unlike the skewed SAT results, this shows these states doing some things well and some things poorly. None are shown off in a really good light, and Wisconsin’s reading achievement is surprisingly bad when compared to its reputation as a great state for education.

Update (4/8/11): Jay P. Greene posted a chart of gains and losses on these same tests. I highlighted the five non-collective bargaining states in red, and Wisconsin in green. These only show gains in the scores over time, not the actual scores: