"We took our licks, we got outvoted," [Republican Texas Board of Education member David Bradley] said of the last time the [Texas] standards were debated and approved in 1999. ... "Now it's 10-5 in the other direction. ... We're an elected body, this is a political process. Outside that, go find yourself a benevolent dictator."

The induction model certainly makes some sense. But isn't it another name for constructivism?

Knowledge is not directly transferred into a learner, but rather knowledge is acquired indirectly through an inductive process. Specifically, knowlege is typically acquired through an "inductive reasoning" process.

That is, the learner observes stimuli (examples and non-examples); (2) performs a series of logical operations on what it observes; and (3) arrives at (induces, figures out, discovers, “gets”) a general idea revealed by the examples and nonexamples.

Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print. ... Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page-by-page.

Follow print (words and text) from left to right and top to bottom.

Students should certainly do this when learning to read. My question is this: Before Minnesota developed this standard, was anyone there not teaching kids to read English from left to right and top to bottom? Apparently. The people who sat on that committee and collectively decided to write this out as a standard for the children of Minnesota—did they feel literate and scholarly and innovative when the final vote was tallied? I hope this standard makes a significant contribution toward correcting the problem with the way people used to teach reading in Minnesota.

These standards are harmful because they are, for the most part, meaningless verbal detritus on the one hand, but textbook publishers live and die off them, on the other. Even with respect to clearly incomprehensible standards, publishers have to come up with something to stick in a textbook that helps create the illusion that the textbook is aligned with some set of standards. I am empathetic with the publishers … to a point. The standards are a major incentive for the publishers to produce crap. Over the years, I’ve worked with several major publishers, and none of them has aspired to produce crap. They do it, though, because the market demands that they do it.

And standards and state tests, taken together, are very harmful. First, because the standards are so bad, it is nearly impossible to assess them. In short, the standards and the state tests don’t align, except in the most meaningless and specious ways. But here is the biggest problem of them all, and the reason the tests and standards are so damaging. IF the standards were really “good” according to some criteria that would make sense to the average educated person on the street, and if they were precise enough to be aligned with assessment tools that were actually technically sound, widespread failure would continue, unabated. Figure 1 shows Doug Carnine’s illustration of the problem.

The black box in the middle is the magic by which teachers start out with goals for students and end up with students performing brilliantly on tests that are valid and reliable. The black box is the instruction, and the states and just about everyone else are so clueless about instruction that they give it very little attention. With the best standards and the best assessments, the system is doomed to failure if, at the center of it all, we don’t have the best instruction. As it stands now, the standards are, for the most part, ridiculous, and few if any of the state assessments have been certified as valid and reliable.

1. The top inductor representing teacher (or resource) effects.  Following the electronics metaphor, a teacher (or resource, such as a book) with more windings is more capable of transferring data to the student than a teacher with less windings.  The inductor windings represent teacher effectiveness.
2. The bottom inductor which represents student effects.  A student with more windings will be more capable of inducing a transfer of data from the teacher/resource than a student with less windings.  The student windings represent cognitive ability and other student factors.
3. The distance between the two inductors represents the presentation of the data from the teacher/resource to the learner/student.  I've termed the distance the "inductive gap."  The teacher presentation represents what actually takes place in the classroom that effects learning.  It is the curriculum, the classroom management, and pedagogy.  A poor presentation makes learning more difficult by increasing the distance between the teacher and student inductors.  A good presentation reduces the distance, making learning more likely.

[We] have learned from extensive applications that nothing may be assumed to be taught to at-risk children unless it appears on at least three consecutive lessons...When we apply this formula to the first draft of the material, we presume that when the program is field-tested, our estimates will be confirmed. However, we remain perfectly aware that in some cases the practice estimates are wrong. They may vary in either direction—providing too much practice, or providing too little. More frequently the error is in the direction of too little practice.

An important issue that we must address in creating a sequence of activities is how large the inferential gaps are between one exercise type and the next type in the sequence…

… If we were to unintentionally design a program with enormous gaps for teaching reading, we might first teach letter names, teach the short sounds for the vowels, and then require learners to sound out regularly spelled words like run and hat. Obviously, the gap between the exercise types is large because students haven’t been taught the sounds for the consonants, or how to blend the sounds together to identify words.

Although some bright students may be able to formulate workable inferences about how to derive the sounds from the names of some consonants, most students will fail the instruction because of the large gap between what they know and what they are expected to do. Discovery learning assumes that students are able to fill large inferential gaps between what they know and what they are expected to learn. Proponents of structured instruction believe that only small sequence-related inferences are appropriate.

Note that there will always be inferential gaps between exercise types. The only issue is how large they are. This is an empirical issue. If we believe that students should be successful, we would design instruction so the inferential gaps are small enough for students to succeed. If students do not succeed, their failure suggests that the inferential gaps are too large, which means that the sequence should be redesigned to make the gaps smaller. Direct observation of how students respond to a sequence is necessary because that is often the only way these gaps are identified. Typically students are progressing through a sequence well and then encounter an exercise type that is too difficult for them. If the exercise seems clear and apparently provides adequate practice, the problem is not with this exercise type, but with the sequence of activities. In other words, student performance implies that there is a gap in the sequence that is too large for the students.

As suggested above, the size of reasonable gaps is not the same for all students. The children we have worked with have ranged from those who could not take even the smallest imaginable steps without considerable practice, to children who drew correct inferences that were far in advance of what they had been taught.

At the extreme low end was a pair of twins who had spent the first four years of their lives with virtually no human contact and who could identify some real objects, like a shoe, a ball, and a cup, but could not identify any two-dimensional representations. Even when the teacher prompted the relationship by holding a red ball next to a picture of a red ball, the children could not identify the object in the picture. After many trials, they could identify pictures of balls, shoes, and cups without the corresponding three-dimensional object next to it; however, these children had to practice identifying more than 10 illustrated objects before they could generalize and identify an illustrated object that had not been taught.

At the other extreme are the highly talented students who make a mockery out of the three-lesson rule. They learn names of new things in only a couple of trials and are able to take great leaps from what they know to remotely related inferences they are scheduled to learn much later.

If the designer assumes that every minor variation in what is to be taught requires explicit instruction, the instructional sequence may be many times more laborious than it needs to be for the average learner who goes through the program. On the other hand, if the designer makes elitist assumptions that characterize analyses of Dewey and Bruner, the inferential leaps required by the program are so large that they may be made by fewer than one fourth of the students. For example, a math program that presents a single example of each problem type assumes that students will formulate an algorithm for solving the problem presented that will generalize to the full set of related problems that are not taught. In fact, possibly only one fourth of the average students will solve the problems or benefit from the experience of struggling with them. The percentage of low performers making this leap is virtually zero percent.

The only way to determine whether the program is highly effective with the intended student population is to provide an empirical test of the sequence. This test will not only identify the missing inferences but will reveal both their character and size. In other words, they provide the designer with precise information about how to address the missing inference.

The children we have worked with have ranged from those who could not take even the smallest imaginable steps without considerable practice, to children who drew correct inferences that were far in advance of what they had been taught.

That was an amazing and surprising find re. Milwaukee charters. I thought that at the very least they'd get the advantage of being in a more diverse (integrated) setting with more middle-class kids and that being chosen (even by lottery) would produce a kind of halo effect. Why it didn't is what should baffle the media. But it doesn't.

Or perhaps, your implicit assumption that diverse (integrated) settings with more middle class kids confers an educational advantage which leads to improved student performance is invalid.


The assumption rests on shaky empirical support in the first place. So, one would think that this additional piece of potentially-negative evidence might lead an un-biased thinker to question her underlying assumptions. Why it doesn't baffles me.

PS: This might be one of the best examples of irony I've ever seen in an education blog.

PPS: It's also a good example of why we never make any progress in education. Policy thinkers become so wedded to their pet assumptions and will bend over backwards to discount contrary evidence. Classic Confirmation Bias.

The No Child law, passed in 2001 by bipartisan majorities, focused the nation’s attention on closing achievement gaps between minorities and whites, but it included many provisions that created what Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Friday called “perverse incentives.”


In an effort to meet the law’s requirements for passing grades, many states began dumbing down standards, and teachers began focusing on test preparation rather than on engaging class work.

“We’ve got to get accountability right this time,” Mr. Duncan told reporters Friday. “For the mass of schools, we want to get rid of prescriptive interventions. We’ll leave it up to them to figure out how to make progress.”

Every student should graduate from high school ready for college and a career. Every student should have meaningful opportunities to choose from upon graduation from high school. ... Four of every 10 new college students, including half of those at 2-year institutions, take remedial courses, and many employers comment on the inadequate preparation of high school graduates. And while states have developed assessments aligned with their standards, in many cases these assessments do not adequately measure student growth or the knowledge and skills that students need, nor do they provide timely, useful information to teachers. We must follow the lead of the nation's governors and challenge students with state-developed, college- and career-ready standards, and more accurately measure what they are learning with better assessments. We must reward the success of schools that are making significant progress, ask for dramatic change in the lowest-performing schools, and address persistent gaps in student academic achievement and graduation rates.

I got struck by lightning. Some people get magical powers when they're struck by lightning, like reading minds or seeing the future.

I got the power to twitch on the ground and crap my pants.

I still haven't decided if I'll use it for good or evil.

A couple fighting about which gang their 4-year-old toddler should join caused a public disturbance that resulted in the father's arrest, Commerce City police said Thursday.

DARREN A. NICHOLS
The Detroit News

Detroit --The City Council voted 6-3 this afternoon against asking voters in November if they want to authorize mayoral control of the Detroit Public Schools.

Dozens in the audience erupted in applause and shouts of "it's all over."

The council rejected a proposal fine-tuned this afternoon from Council President Pro Tem Gary Brown that would have asked voters Nov. 2 if they support the elected board or want the mayor to supervise schools. The plan called for the mayor to appoint the superintendent and the current board to be replaced with an advisory board of two parents, two teachers and three other stakeholders. The City Council would also play a role in school finances.

Brown supported the measure along with Council President Charles Pugh and Saunteel Jenkins. Members Kenneth Cockrel Jr., Andre Spivey, Kwame Kenyatta, JoAnn Watson, Brenda Jones and James Tate opposed it.

They killed the plan despite heavy lobbying by Mayor Dave Bing, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to let residents weigh in before DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb's term ends in March.
 . . . .
During a highly charged debate that spread out over three weeks, activists likened the proposal to slavery and claimed it subverts democracy because it could have abolished the 11-member board. Even if voters had approved the advisory referendum, the Legislature still would have had to approve changes to the district's governance.

And many activists worried that Lansing would not adhere to the wishes of the city's residents.

"This is our school system, not yours," said Mildred Madison from the League of Women Voters, who also pushed a successful advisory referendum last November calling for City Council members to be elected from wards rather than the city as a whole.

"This is a state issue and it never should have come to you. We have an elected school board. Let them do (their) job."

Activist Malik Shabazz warned council members would invite "war" if they approved the measure.

"I ask you to do the right thing," Shabazz said. "Why don't you all do the job you are elected to do? The council and mayor can do something about homelessness, (and) the loss of residency, which is destroying the tax infrastructure of this city. If you pass this, it means outright war. We're going to recall y'all and march on your houses." . . . .

Comments on Obama's talk to the Urban League, July 29, 2010

"I remember going to a school back in my organizing days and seeing children -- young children, maybe five or six -- eyes were brimming with hope, had such big dreams for the future.  You'd ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up?  They'd want to be a doctor; they'd want to be a lawyer.  And then I remember the principal telling me that soon, all that would change.  The hope would start fading from their eyes as they started to realize that maybe their dreams wouldn't come to pass -- not because they weren't smart enough, not because they weren't talented enough, but because through a turn of fate they happened to be born in the wrong neighborhood.  They became victim of low expectations, a community that was not supporting educational excellence."

That last sentence is the sort of slipperiness that needs careful attention. It may be true as far as it goes, but that is not far. Check out inadequate housing (including lead paint) and homelessness; lousy jobs, lousy-paying jobs, and joblessness; structural continuing racism; inadequate health care; largely non-responsive government; corporations whose lust for profits leads to mass social destruction. Every one of these may well be more important that teacher low expectations -- never mind when put together.

First this avoids the real issue raised by civil rights groups, the lack of necessary resources and the misuse of competitive grants. Next is an all-too-typical maneuver -- defending whatever you are doing by saying what is happening now is not working. In some ways quite obviously the current is not working well, though the diagnosis Obama offers is wrong and self-serving to his administration (first quote above). The obligation when things are not going well is to do things that have a plausible chance of working better and that won't make things worse. Much of RTTT fails on both counts.

No, not 'some kind,' but high stakes test-based accountability of a sort that does NOT apply to the school to which he sends his daughters (so much for 'as a parent.')

"So, for anyone who wants to use Race to the Top to blame or punish teachers -- you're missing the point.  Our goal isn't to fire or admonish teachers; our goal is accountability." 

So blame states for doing what Duncan clearly signaled he wanted them to do? And does Obama think people forget both he and Duncan applauded firing more than half the teachers in Central Falls, RI? Or the refusal by Duncan to allow even one strongly evaluated, widely liked principal in VT to keep her job by offering even one waiver (as Mike Winerip recounted in the Times)? One size does fit all to these folks -- and it is about firing. Also, with the discussion of removing teachers, including test-score gain models (we should stop referring to this as "growth" as if it were a person), evidence continues to roll in, most recently from the federal government itself, that such models are not ready for prime time (see Valerie Strauss Answer Sheet and the links from it, especially to Baker's comments.

"And part of making sure our young people meet these high standards is designing tests that accurately measure whether they are learning.  Now, here, too, there's been some controversy.  When we talk about testing, parents worry that it means more teaching to the test.  Some worry that tests are culturally biased. Teachers worry that they'll be evaluated solely on the basis of a single standardized test.  Everybody thinks that's unfair.  It is unfair.

As rhetoric, some of this sounds good. In fact, RTTT uses existing tests that embody the flaws Obama points to. Even if the new tests to be produced by multi-state consortia are better, as they might be, that won't be till at least 2014-15. And based on my review of their proposals, they will only be marginally better. They won't really do what Obama says he wants them to be able to do. They may well both "stifle" and "dictate." It will take a lot more than a limited number of possibly somewhat better tests to overcome the destructive consequences of imposed high-stakes testing, and this speech makes clear that they want high-stakes standardized testing to continue.

Why did the number of students at level 1 [the lowest scorers] plummet?  Becase the state lowered the bar and made it easier for students to reach level 2.  On the sixth-grade reading test in 2006,students needed to earn 41 percent of the points to attain level 2; by 2009 students in that grade needed only 17.9 percent.  In seventh-grade math, students needed to earn 36.2 percent of the points on the test to advance to level 2 in 2006, but by 2009, they needed to earn only 22 percent.  The standards to advance from level 1 to level 2 dropped so low that many students could get enough correct answers to pass to level 2 by randomly guessing (p. 79).

Applying new, tougher standards, state education officials said Wednesday that more than half of public school students in New York City failed their English exams this year, and 54 percent of them passed in math.

The results were in stark contrast to successes that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had heralded in recent years. When he ran for re-election in 2009, he boasted of state test scores that showed two-thirds of city students were passing English and 82 percent were passing math.

But state education officials said that performance was misleading because those scores were inflated by tests that had become easier to pass. The scores released on Wednesday were the first attempt to establish what the officials considered a more trustworthy measure of students’ abilities.

Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said she had encouraged teachers and parents to greet the news “not with disappointment and not with anger.”

“Now that we are facing the hard truth that not all of the gains were as advertised, we have to take a look at what we can do differently,” she said. “These results will finally provide real, unimpeachable evidence to be used for accountability.” . . . .

. . . .There’s no polite way to say this: The procedures described in the DCPS IMPACT Guidebook for producing a value-added score are idiotic. These procedures warrant this harsh characterization because they make a preposterous assumption based on a misunderstanding of the properties of the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (DC CAS).  . . . .

MEET WITH YOUR U.S. REPRESENTATIVE AND SENATORS IN AUGUST 

Today, a group of seven education and civil rights groups released a six-point plan for equitable and sustainable national education reform in this country. And, big surprise, the report is basically a 17-page repudiation of the Obama administration's education reform platform.

Groups including the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Urban League, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the Schott Foundation for Public Education called for an end to many of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's signature initiatives, and a commitment instead to policies that incentivize positive results and lay the groundwork for long-term change in the neediest school districts. On every major Duncan policy initiative--aggressive promotion of charter schools, turnaround models for failing schools, national education standards, punitive teacher accountability measures--the coalition had harsh criticisms. . . .

. . . .On charter schools, the civil rights groups write that not only is charter school performance uneven at best, but many charter schools only serve a small selection of the neediest students. The civil rights groups criticized the blind acceptance of charter school-as-panacea, because charter schools often don't accept as many students with disabilities, students who rely on free school lunches, and English language learners--many of the groups of students who could jeopardize their test scores.

"While some charter schools can and do work for some students," the report says, "they are not a universal solution for systemic change for all students, especially those with the highest needs." Regarding "turnaround" models, the reform approach that demands mass firings of teaching staff when schools are deemed "failing," the report said that where they've been tried, they've rarely produced positive results.

The civil rights groups perhaps reserved their harshest criticisms for Race to the Top, the $4.35 billion competitive grants program that hands out money to states that commit to the Obama education reform agenda. They write:

The Race to the Top Fund and similar strategies for awarding federal education funding will ultimately leave states competing with states, parents competing with parents, and students competing with other students. Moreover, even states that do not choose to compete for federal incentive funds should have an obligation to provide a standard of education consistent with protecting their children's civil rights. The civil right to a high-quality education is connected to individuals, not the states, and federal policy should be framed accordingly. Good federal policy should mitigate political inequities that serve as barriers to delivering the ultimate change that is so plainly desired and needed. By emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader.

The Duncan-led Obama education reform crusade is built on several programs: the competitive grants program called Race to the Top, which rewards states with cash if they can prove they're committed to the Obama reform platform. Many states have successfully rammed through overhauls of their states' education laws to lift state caps on charter schools; tie teacher salaries (and job security) to their students' test scores; and adopt national education standards.

Duncan's reform often looks like a slash-and-burn assault on educators. Case in point: one of the education reform movement's darlings, Washington, D.C.'s chancellor of schools Michelle Rhee, announced on Friday the termination of 241 teachers, and threats for another 700 teachers who could be fired within the year if their students' test scores don't improve. The stated aim is teacher accountability, by any means necessary. But in actuality, it just blames teachers for the plainly under-resourced and overly bureaucratic systems they work in.

The new report coincides with the National Urban League's 100th anniversary and annual conference, where both Duncan and President Obama are scheduled to speak this week.