The Nation’s most valuable book of the year!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2013

Ravitch’s Reign of Error: Yesterday, we saluted The Nation for naming Marc Steiner’s radio program the most valuable program of the year.

Right above Steiner in the list of awards, John Nichols selected the year’s most valuable book of the year. It’s a book we’ve been reading, musing about:
MOST VALUABLE BOOK: Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error

Yes, she really did serve as an assistant education secretary for George H.W. Bush, and yes, she once supported George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind.” But Ravitch refuses to cling to failed strategies, as she explains in her groundbreaking new book, subtitled The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Driven by experience and data, she demolishes the argument that rigid requirements and punishments will make schools better. Indeed, she argues, these schemes too frequently serve the interests of misguided foundations, ideologically driven billionaires and Wall Street speculators more interested in privatizing public education—with some of them profiting in the process—than in helping children, parents and communities. Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis says, “Diane is a fierce warrior against the so-called reformers whose ideology exacerbates the problems of poverty and inequity.”
Was Reign of Error the year’s most valuable book? Has it been a valuable book at all?

We’re not sure how to answer those questions. In the past few weeks, we’ve taken to reading Ravitch’s blog. We plan to start discussing aspects of her book next week.

Quite often, we find the book a bit maddening. On the one hand, it lays out a very important list of topics, some of which are treated in informative ways.

On the other hand, Ravitch tends to overstate and misstate to a degree we find striking in a public intellectual. And as we explained not long ago, she doesn’t seem to have any ideas about what should go on inside actual classrooms, aside from a set of generic recommendations anyone could make.

That doesn’t mean her generic recommendations are wrong. (Smaller class size, a “rich curriculum.”) It does define the possible limits to Ravitch’s experience and understanding about what happens in classrooms.

Ravitch’s book has a lot to recommend it, a point we plan to discuss. In what ways does she tend to drive us nuts? For today, two examples:

In this blog post from yesterday, Ravitch discusses Randi Weingarten’s recent flip-flop concerning so-called “value-added models / measures / assessments.”

As it is being applied by state legislatures, VAM is a way to see how much a given teacher’s students have gained or learned from their year with that teacher. Example:

If the kids all start the year scoring on the 30th percentile; and they all finish the year scoring on the 40th percentile; then those kids have gained ten percentile points from their year with that teacher. They're still scoring below the national average, but the teacher has helped them advance.

In theory, this sounds like a reasonable way to assess a teacher. In practice, there are various problems. But this is the way Ravitch starts her post:
RAVITCH (1/6/14): Randi Weingarten has come out in opposition to value-added modeling (VAM), the statistical measure that judges teacher quality based on the test scores of their students. This is great news! As I have often written here, VAM is Junk Science. It also is the centerpiece of Race to the Top, which makes the absurd assumption that good teachers produce higher test scores...
Would it really be an “absurd assumption” to think that good teachers produce higher test scores? Not really, no; it wouldn’t be. Nor is that a reasonable account of expert objections to the current practices.

In our view, no one can make objections to “reform” practices sound quite as absurd as Ravitch. It seems to us that this makes her work less valuable than it would otherwise be.

Everyone has his or her flaws, of course. In our view, Ravitch tends to overstate. Over the holidays, we were struck by the peculiar assessments we heard from educational experts and leaders like Weingarten and Linda Darling-Hammond. This included another overstatement we ran across from Ravitch.

On the December 26 Morning Edition, Darling-Hammond sang the praises of mighty Finland, then seemed to paint a rosy portrait of our own low-income schools. (“Our low-income schools and districts...perform extraordinarily well, given the circumstances they have to meet.”)

To us, that assessment seemed a bit rosy. We then encountered what Ravitch had said on the same show in September:
INSKEEP (9/27/13): You seem to think that the major problem with American education is not actually American education, but poverty. Some kids are poor.

RAVITCH: Well, let me tell you what I think everyone needs to know. American public education is a huge success. Test scores have never been higher than they are today for white children, black children, Hispanic children and Asian children. High school graduation rates have never been higher than they are today—for all of those groups. Our schools are not failing; they’re very successful.

Where there are low test scores, where there are higher dropout rates than the national average, is where there is concentrated poverty. Now, we cannot—obviously—wipe poverty out overnight. But there are many things we can do to make school a stronger equalizer than it is today. One of those would be to have reduced class sizes in the schools that serve the children of poverty. Another would be to have universal pre-kindergarten. We should have a strong arts program in every one of these schools because children have to have a reason to come to school other than just to be tested.
It’s true! As we’ve been noting for years, “test scores have never been higher than they are today for white children, black children, Hispanic children and Asian children.”

We think the public should be told about that. We’ve been urging liberals to do so for years. With the exception of Kevin Drum, liberal writers and pundits refuse to do so. There’s no sign that our “leaders” actually care about matters like this.

On the other hand, why would anyone want to say that “American public education is a huge success,” that “our schools are very successful?” If you look at where those scores remain for our black and Hispanic kids (as populations; on average), that strikes us as a very strange type of statement.

Do our low-income schools “perform extraordinarily well, given the circumstances they have to meet?” On balance, we’d have to say no, they don’t, though that isn’t the “fault” of their teachers.

Ravitch’s rosy overstatement topped even that. Her statement struck us as very strange. It seems to us that persistent overstatement tends to dilute the valuable role her new book might otherwise play.

That book includes a lot of stuff the public deserves to be told. It also includes a persistent string of overstatements, misstatements.

Next week, we’ll try to start sorting them out. On liberal cable, at liberal sites, no one will notice or care.

In fairness, Lawrence O’Donnell cares how children do in school. As long as they live in Malawi.

23 comments:

  1. As a hypothesis, the idea that "good teachers produce higher test scores" may not be absurd, but it is extremely weak. What constitutes "good" in a classroom of only low-income students? If it's only those who produce test scores closer to average, it is circular. Is it only those teachers who are better than average (by whatever measurement mechanism one chooses)? In the top 75%?

    As an "assumption" in the real context of the complexity of measuring quality in a school system, however -- an assumption is something likely to cause action to be taken -- it is, indeed, absurd. It's really absurd to question that.

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  2. By "good teachers" the reformers mean those who can produce a small rise in test scores one year in a row.

    Being a "good teacher" is something essential to one's personality that cannot be manipulated by outside forces. It is rather like being one of the elect of God, since the reformers are explicit in their belief that good teaching does not depend on teacher preparation or on resources allotted to schools, only on rewards and punishment meted out to teachers who produce or don't produce good test scores at the end of the year.

    I am not making this up.

    Of course, good teaching will produce higher achievement. But the reformers feel that funding for research or dissemination of best practices is a waste, since good teachers are born not made. (Although they respond to incentives, according to their theory). Evidence that their theories are mistaken is simply swept out of the way.

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  3. Damn straight. Fuck those kids in Malawi.

    "And what the data shows is test scores for American students today, based on federal tests, have never been higher. They`ve never been higher for white students, black students, Hispanic students or Asian students. Graduation rates are at their highest point in history. The drop at rate is at its lowest point in history. I even looked at the international test scores and found that we`re actually doing quite as well."

    http://www.today.com/id/53209013/ns/msnbc-all_in_with_chris_hayes/#.UsyJQNJDvKg

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    1. Ravitch goes on in the interview with Hayes to repeat some of the things Somerby has criticized her for here. She talks about Rhee's performance in Washington DC, about the difference between high stakes and teacher-based student assessments, and she talks about impact of poverty. The difficulty with overstating her points is that it leaves her vulnerable to comebacks from those she is opposing. She does talk as if early childhood education were a panacea that would eliminate both the effects of poverty and the racial gap. That oversells a solution that should be done but won't solve all of the problems in inner city schools.

      Her point that the results of testing are received too late to do anything about them conflates individual feedback with system-wide feedback. These high stakes tests are not to measure individual children so that their needs can be addressed. They are to assess schools and districts so that broader changes can be made. By conflating the two, she adds to confusion and undermines whatever confidence someone might have in her as an effective advocate.

      It is easy to care about kids in Malawi because it is not our reesponsibility to do anything to improve their lives. Focusing on the needs of kids here demands that we make some sacrifice to help them and that is threatening, especially if we arent' sure what to do.

      Hayes asks explicitly what should be done for inner city schools. I agree with Somerby that her response is inadequate. If the response of the profession is similarly inadequate, then we should be doing more research on how to meet the needs of such kids. If the reformers were advocating that, their focus on testing might be justified. I do not believe that is among their suggestions.

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    2. O'Donnell does more than "care" but it's amazing that caring about kids that are "not our responsibility" is somehow a flaw worthy of TDH's snide disdain. Yeah, it's easy to raise millions of dollars for kids in desperate need. Sure.

      Apparently what's hard is continually blogging about certain reports on education from certain sources and using one's analysis as proof that liberals don't care about black kids.

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    3. What's hard is doing something about our own problems that involves something more than mailing a check to a 3rd world poster child.

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    4. What's not hard is engaging in the usual uninformed snark in, this case, to defend TDH's obnoxious jab at O'Donnell. Yeah all those desks and school supplies and scholarships for girls are just mailed checks to "3rd world poster children".

      I guess writing endless and repetitive blog posts on the same subject involving, usually, pedantic attacks on the same targets is now considered "doing something hard about our problems" as opposed to seething up a foundation that is actually doing something tangible and hard and getting results.

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    5. The Internet isn't real life. You have no idea what anyone here does offline for kids. I teach. Maybe Somerby still does too. Or maybe he does other things. We know he blogs. We don't know what else.

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    6. Yes the KIND fund is real life too. In any event, so what? The point is you're lamely carping about somebody else for doing something kids in the most trite manner possible.

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    7. I am not. It is a simple matter of fact that pundit like O'Donnell do not mention inner city kids in the USA but do talk about the needs of kids in third world countries. It is OK for Somerby to deplore that fact. He did not make this into an either/or situation -- you did that. There is no law against helping kids in BOTH the USA and other countries. When someone focuses on kids around the world but neglects kids right here, it is fair to ask why and to make it clear that is happening. YOU and the other trolls are the ones suggesting that Somerby doesn't want to help third world kids or has mocked the needs of such kids. YOU are a troll because you don't care about any kids at all -- you just want to attack this blog. Why?

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    8. Stop whining and using the "troll" fallback because your argument is weak. Now you know that "pundits like O'Donnell do not mention inner city kids in the USA"? Never, ever? Sure about that? Who are the pundits like O'Donnell? You know this how? Because TDH told you so. It's part of one of his silly long running shticks aka "liberals don't care about black kids"

      You nor I don't know what else O'Donnell is doing and guess what, it doesn't matter though the notion that he is "neglecting kids right here" is absurd.

      Somerby did in fact mock what O'Donnell is doing unless you can somehow translate this into another "language": "In fairness, Lawrence O’Donnell cares how children do in school. As long as they live in Malawi."

      The bottom line is what kind of asshole mocks something that has no negative effect whatsoever on their lives but is having a positive effect on the lives of others just to score a throwaway cheap shot? Hiding behind being a teacher, current or former, doesn't change that it's still a crappy tactic.

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    9. "In fairness, Lawrence O’Donnell cares how children do in school. As long as they live in Malawi."

      Doesn't sound like mockery to me. Sounds like a claim. A claim there's no evidence Larry cares about US education.

      Is there any?

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  4. CTA published a letter awhile back in which a teacher described going from being a top teacher at a school with high test scores to being a mediocre teaching at a school with lower test scores, without any real change in her own teaching ability. It may be that her teaching skills were not as attuned to the needs of the lower achieving students in her new school, but she didn't think her teaching ability had changed substantially when her school assignment changed. Unless VAT scores can be shown to correspond to meaningful differences in teaching ability, they aren't fair or useful as assessments of teacher performance.

    Few school districts use VAT scores as the sole measure when evaluating teachers.

    There are many people who equate good teaching with charisma and believe that personality is the sole determiner of teaching effectiveness. It is the most ego-sparing explanation for what happens when someone untrained tries to teach and cannot do it well. I agree that a lot of the reform enthusiasts do believe that this is just a matter of selecting the people with the right personalities and intelligence and getting rid of the burnouts -- that none of the other stuff matters (training/mentoring, resources, preparation). I like the movie "Chalk" because it is a more realistic exploration of problems with the TFA approach.

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  5. "Would it really be an 'absurd assumption' to think that good teachers produce higher test scores? Not really, no; it wouldn’t be."

    As a NYC public school parent and a sociologist, I have grown weary of such simplistic statements that imply that standardized test scores are valid measures of student achievement and teacher performance. There's no "in the abstract" when it comes to standardized tests and the complex phenomena they supposedly measure. In NY, we have poorly written tests and politically generated cut scores determining whether kids are promoted to the next grade, whether teachers keep their jobs and whether schools are closed. How much research is needed, how many kids need to be unnecessarily held back, how many teachers need to be unfairly fired and how many communities need to be devastated by yet another school closure based on such dubious measures before folks "get it"? You think Diane Ravitch is overstating things? I have two children whose educations have been ruined by a decade of federal, state and city experimentation with education policy, including a fetish for standardized test scores in only two subjects!!! If I weren't living it, I wouldn't believe it.

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    1. I, for one, would very much like to hear from "a NYC public school parent and a sociologist" as to what would be a valid system for measuring student achievement and teacher performance. Also, when you say you "have two children whose educations have been ruined by a decade of federal, state, an city experimentation with education policy" what does that mean exactly, would you describe your own children as not having mastered the basics of a secondary education, or at least the basics for the highest grade level each of the two completed?

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  6. 7:02 pm said "Her point that the results of testing are received too late to do anything about them conflates individual feedback with system-wide feedback. These high stakes tests are not to measure individual children so that their needs can be addressed. They are to assess schools and districts so that broader changes can be made. By conflating the two, she adds to confusion and undermines whatever confidence someone might have in her as an effective advocate."

    "Broad changes" means firing teachers and closing public schools and replacing them with unregulated private charters. These are the only changes that the reformers advocate. The evidence is in. They are not working now, have not worked in the past and are disruptive and harmful to children, families, teachers, our economy, and our democracy.

    Ravitch is not "conflating" anything. On the contrary it is the 7:02 who engaging in devious, Jesuitical rhetoric in order to misrepresent what is going on and what Ravitch is saying. She is completely right. Tests ought to be used to improve teaching on an individual basis, not to fire large groups of teachers arbitrarily in the hope that "creative distruction witll miraculously cause charismatic teachers (even if untrained) to l appear out of nowhere to replace those who have been let go, while breaking the power of the unions to assure teachers humane working conditions.

    As far as closing schools and replacing them with charters, it is by now abundantly clear after over 10 years of experimentation that children in charters perform worse or at the same level as those in public schools, while charter school administrators and landlords rake in HUGE sums at taxpayer expense. Ravitch is only telling it like it is.

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  7. According to Max Weber: The leaders of the modern world, "would have to secure their authority by possessing "charisma" -- a term he introduced into modern political analysis and whose overuse a century later he would have deplored. Charisma, literally, is an authority bestowed by God. -- Alan Ryan "On Politics: Book Two" (2012), page 835. - E

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  8. The statement "Good teachers produce higher test scores" is ambiguous. It doesn't tell us 'Higher than what"

    I think the meaning is supposed to be "higher than some hypothetical bad teacher would produce in the same circumstances." With this definition, I think the statement is true -- almost a tautology.

    However, there's no way to measure the performance of some hypothetical teacher. In practice our basis of comparison will be "absolute test scores vs. some norm, or change in test scores vs. some norm. These two measures are imperfect, for reasons given by other commenters.

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  9. OMB (Roger that, Roger! Over to you BOB)

    Well BOBfans, perhaps not too many of you (or should I say not too high a percentage of you) followed the link from Roger in the comment above. It takes you to an appearance by Diane Ravitch on the nation's cable telly. Before we launch into further discussion we remind you of a comment by BOB in this very post.

    "That book (Ravitch's 'Book of the Year') includes a lot of stuff the public deserves to be told. It also includes a persistent string of overstatements, misstatements.

    Next week, we’ll try to start sorting them out. On liberal cable at liberal sites, no one will notice or care."

    The One True BOB

    BOB noticed Ravitch's book for the first time on September 5. http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2013/09/dont-know-much-about-public-schools_5.html

    In that post he said something similar to the quote above. In fact he said it over and over again. Here's a taste:

    "Can we talk? On The One True Liberal Channel, they simply don’t care about public schools or about the children within them! You can tell that the channel doesn’t care, because these subjects never get discussed in its endless prime-time hours.

    The One True Channel doesn’t care about schools!"

    "But the children on The One True Channel would rather jump off the Eiffel Tower than stoop to the level of discussing our ratty public school students..."

    "We’ll make a fairly safe bet. On the whole, people who watch The One True Channel don’t know much about public schools. They don’t know about NAEP scores, or about the strong gains found therein. They don’t know about all the major countries our students outscore on international tests."

    Unfortunately on October 4, 2013 Ravitch was the guest of Chris Hayes on The One True Channel to discuss her book. That appearance contains the quote from Roger's comment. The very quote
    repeateded here twice by BOB who tells us we will never hear such things from liberal except good old Uncle Drum.

    BOB did aknowledge that appearance over two months later, on December 20, 2013. That was a post in which BOB took us on a stroll down Memory Lane to his gretest hits as a journalist from 1982. He seems to have already forgotten it by now, because it does not fit his Script. He must not have wanted his fans to be upset by the sight of Hayes's brain matter and shattered skull at the base of the Eiffel Tower.

    As someone sang for BOB's generation:

    La ta ta ta ta ta taa-a-a-a (History)

    KZ (Tah-tah for now)


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    1. Shorter: Ravitch was on MSNBC that time and Bob knows that!!

      Well, thank you KZ!

      Learning this, I for one am now outraged(!) that any blogger would have the gall to suggest MSNBC doesn't care about schools!

      Thanks for trying as you do to to show us blinkered BOB (that's the way to type it, right?) fans the truth.

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    2. Spoken like a true BOBfan, Anon. 12:33 PM. Response like yours was a fairly safe bet.

      We tip our beret to you as we fall. Pardon my overstatement.

      KZ

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  10. David in California, it's not about identifying "good" teachers, much less improving teacher performance. It's about raising the GDP. The way the "reform" movement's leading theoretician proposes to identify "good" teachers is to recommend that least effective 5-8 percent of teachers be fired and replaced by average teachers for three consecutive years. He estimates that this would increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 75 to 110 trillion dollars in present value.
    In other words, "rank and yank", the policy that worked so well for Enron.

    However, critics point out that in the real world, teacher performance, as measured by end of year student test scores, varies so much from year to year depending on the makeup of the student body and other factors, that they conclude that student test scores are statistically worthless as measures of teacher quality. Where some correlation can be shown, they point out, it only occurred in the third grade and not the higher grades. Furthermore, all of these recommendations come from one study dating from the early 1990s (of third grade math students). Despite all this, rank-and-yank based on high-stakes test scores has been implemented in many states with a predictable lack of positive results for the GDP.

    But never mind all that, look over here, at a few vague statements by Diane Ravitch. Surely, Ravitch's occasional lapses are much more important than her eloquent exposure of the mindless destruction of and outsourcing to private, for profit business of the nation's public school system.

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  11. "That book includes a lot of stuff the public deserves to be told. It also includes a persistent string of overstatements, misstatements.
    Next week, we’ll try to start sorting them out. On liberal cable, at liberal sites, no one will notice or care."

    The reason Ravitch is read and quoted so often is contained within your post, Mr. Somerby.
    She's one of the few people talking about public schools. A lot of people talk about ed reform, and a lot of people talk about charter schools and vouchers, but very few people talk about public schools.
    I don't know how it happened. It's the strangest thing. The schools that 90% of kids attend get absolutely no discussion in media, other than this tired mantra on how they're all "failing".
    Does Ravitch have faults? Absolutely! But you can hardly blame people for reading one of the few people who talks about public schools.

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