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Teacher Beat talks about the recent report Data not really being as useful as people think for teachers.
In a brief released this morning by the Alliance for Excellent Education, the group says teachers are suffering from what some educators call the DRIP syndrome–data rich but information poor.
The brief says “while student data is becoming more abundant, not enough teachers have access to training, support, and the structures needed to use data effectively.”
The Alliance’s conference this morning on the topic was filled with something unusual at a Washington education conference: actual teachers and administrators!
Those from the ranks of the classroom were not only in the audience, but on the panel to help their fellow educators figure out how, where and when to use all these reams of information to do the much-vaunted “data-driven decision making” most superintendents will tell you is already going on in their schools.
One large barrier to schools using data effectively is the lack of training teachers and administrators have in creating and using good assessments, said Leslie W. Grant, a visiting assistant professor at The College of William & Mary in Virginia.
Grant recalled her own teacher preparation program, in which she said her professor told the class they would have to design an assessment for their lesson plan, but never taught them how.
There’s a lot of this in the education and sometimes it seems to run much deeper than that: sometimes assessments are not judged on actual validity to subject matter, just generalisability and repeatability.
Sometimes it is questionable whether a domain is really as telling. Sometimes states are compared on test scores in which entirely different segments of their population were encouraged or forced to take a test (SAT score comparisons are notorious for this).
Tons of data, but perhaps not a lot of real information or knowledge comes from it. When you hear a factoid about the education system, be skeptical of even valid numbers until you know the context for those numbers and what comparison actually is doing is known. Also don’t assume every bit of data collected is meaningful information towards a task.
At Ed Week, there is an article about the recent debate about lack of transparency in the setting up of common standards:
Those two panels have produced draft standards for college and career readiness in mathematics and English language arts. More-detailed guidelines for grades K-12 are expected to come later. Yet those groups’ deliberations have so far been deemed “confidential” and closed to the public by the NGA and CCSSO, which say there will be several opportunities for public input in the weeks and months ahead.
Complaints about lack of transparency are common during the crafting of standards, curricula, and education policy reports at all levels. The criticism of the new standards effort—a process in which 46 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, have agreed to participate—comes after a draft of the document was leaked on the Web last week; that working version alternately drew praise and censure from those who read it.
NGA and CCSSO officials say the views of the public and outside experts will be taken seriously—and that such dialogue is, in fact, already occurring. The organizations have created a pair of “feedback” panels of experts, who along with state officials and outside organizations are poring over the draft. In addition, NGA and CCSSO officials say they are actively reaching out to state leaders and others for additional input.
What’s the reason for the semi-secrecy:
The end goal is to create a “structured process,” he said, in which views of the standards are informed by research. NGA and CCSSO officials expect that those drafting the standards will receive valuable insights from the feedback groups, state officials, and the public, which the working groups would take seriously.
“We want the feedback to be used,” Mr. Linn said, adding that the reviewers “represent a range of views on English language arts and math.”
Yet the panels doing this research are not independent academic groups, but
The working groups of standards writers are made up mostly of representatives of Achieve, a Washington policy organization; and the Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT and the New York City-based College Board, two organizations probably best known for developing college-admissions tests.
Think-tanks and test makers with ONE teacher. No sociology or education researchers from Universities unattached to political or business interests seem to be involved.
“Research” here is hard to validate, particularly because the justifications for “research” are closed. This, by the way, is not how scientific investigations of such matters would go much less democratic ones.
So education tends to decrease religious belief, but which majors do so. According a study published in Inside Higher Ed that was done at University of Michigan, that all majors but business and education have negative effects on religiousity, but the exact breakdown even surprised me:
- the odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or who view religion as more important in their lives. The researchers speculate that there may be a “nagging theory” in which fellow churchgoers encourage the students to attend college.
- Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity — measured by either religious attendance and how important students consider the importance of religion in their lives. The impact appears to be strongest in the social sciences.
- Students in education and business show an increase in religiosity over their time at college.
- Majoring in the biological or physical sciences does not affect religious attendance of students, but majoring in the physical sciences does negatively relate to the way students view the importance of religion in their lives.
- Religious attendance is positively associated with staying in majors in the social sciences, biological sciences and business majors. For most vocational majors, the researchers found a negative relationship between religious attendance and staying in the same major. The researchers compare this finding to their data about how students who attend services are more likely to enroll in college in the first place: “In both cases, religious attendance encourages a shift toward a higher status path.”
This surprised even me because secondary teachers in the humanities are known for being both more religious and more conservative than their science counterparts. It seems like studying culture as much as studying the hard sciences erodes belief in various cultural things. This makes sense.
My hopes that the funding threats and reforms in public schools would slow down the culture wars over things like textbooks, because of the size of their state school systems–a few states, notably California, Texas, and New York–get to basically have text policy set. So with the expansion of creationism into the Texas, we see an expansion of this culture war into Social Studies now. The Wall Street Journal explains
The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.
Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.
I have always found the conservative critique of liberal indoctrination in schools to be vapid on one key point: conservatives are PERFECTLY willing to do everything they accuse liberals of doing when they have the power to do so. If you think this is just about politics, you would be sadly mistaken. Another quote from the Wall Street Journal gets to this point:
“We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.
and
The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.
The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good — and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart.
“America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children,” said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. “The foundational principles of our country are very biblical…. That needs to come out in the textbooks.”
But the emphasis on Christianity as a driving force is disputed by some historians, who focus on the economic motivation of many colonists and the fractured views of religion among the Founding Fathers. “There appears to me too much politics in some of this,” said Lybeth Hodges, a professor of history at Texas Woman’s University and another of the curriculum reviewers.
Now, Christianity was a driving force in American culture, but I don’t know that is was a primary animator for the “founding fathers.” Furthermore, the “founding fathers” were not a monolithic group, opinions on religion varied and many kept their opinions quiet (Franklin , Jefferson and Madison seemed to talk out of both ends of their months about it).
This, however, should be a warning to those of us in the humanities and social science education fields: Science is NOT the only thing that can be attacked in the culture wars.
IF you’ll pardon me this moment of policy wonkery, but I don’t want readers thinking that just because I don’t like the way the NGA only included ACT and College Board insiders in a largely secret meeting on what looks to be national standards. I think that the NEA largely endorsing national standards is a great move. We need something to make education more unified in this country. I would go so far as to say we need natural standards for science as well.
What I think is necessary, however, is an open dialogue that includes FAR more than just people who make standardized tests. I still think people who do scientific work in the field who DON’T work for testing companies need to be included as do teachers representatives and other “stakeholders.”
The Bridging Difference Blog has a post about Obama’s speech and attempt at policy reform:
I want to go back and discuss President Obama’s big speech on education. At the time I heard it, I was surprised by some of his statistics about how terrible things are, but I didn’t have time (or inclination) to do the fact-checking on my own. I was too busy working on my book, trying to finish a chapter on a different topic.
Just the other day, a friend sent me an item that was posted on FactCheck.org, which is published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. A group of diligent researchers at FactCheck.org did exactly what needed to be done. They went through every single statement in the speech about the condition of American education and posted the results on March 18. I highly recommend it.
FactCheck notes the irony: President Bush left office boasting of the great improvement in U.S. education performance as a result of No Child Left Behind. Then comes President Obama, painting a dismal portrait of a nation whose education system is locked in steep educational decline.
Let’s look at what factcheck had to say:
Whether the education system in the U.S. has improved greatly or needs great improvement may depend on whether a president is nearing the end or just beginning his time in office.
In his final State of the Union address, President George W. Bush claimed student test scores had gone up after enactment of his education legislation. As we said at the time, he was mostly correct. Bush said for example that in 2007, fourth- and eighth-graders “achieved the highest math scores on record.” We noted that the “record” of scores dates back only to 1990, and also that Bush failed to note a decline in reading scores for eighth-graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But, in general, test scores have risen since enactment of the No Child Left Behind law.
Touting those cheery stats, however, wasn’t exactly on President Barack Obama’s agenda last week when he spoke about education to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. Just as Bush left out any mention of less-than-rosy assessments of the nation’s education system, Obama didn’t say too much about how smart our kids are. And some of his gloomy claims were just plain wrong, or misleading.
And what Obama said about the drop-out rates in the America are the EXACT opposite of truth:
But the claim that “our high school dropout rate has tripled in the past thirty years”? That’s not even in the ballpark. According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, the “status dropout rate” – defined as the percentage of people between ages 16 and 24 who are not in school and do not have high school diplomas or GEDs – was 9.3 percent in 2006. In 1976, 30 years before that, it was 14.1. That’s actually a 34 percent decrease in the high school dropout rate.
Of course, dropout rates are notoriously hard to measure and compare. For instance, while NCES shows a status dropout rate of 9.3 in 2006, the high school completion rate for that year was only 74.8 percent. Why the discrepancy? Instead of counting people of a certain age with a diploma or equivalency certificate, this figure compares the number of high school freshman in a certain year to the number receiving a high school diploma four years later. Those who take more than four years to finish aren’t counted, nor are students who get GEDs instead of diplomas. But using this calculation still doesn’t back up Obama’s claim. The dropout rate – that is, the discrepancy between incoming freshmen and graduates – would have been 25.2 percent in the 2006-2007 school year. The rate in 1976-1977 was 25.6 percent.
Even pessimistic accounts don’t show a tripled dropout rate. According to a report by the Educational Testing Service, titled “One Third of a Nation” after the number of students they say are high school dropouts, high school completion rates peaked at 77.1 percent in 1969 and dropped to 69.9 percent in 2000. (NCES shows higher numbers in both years.) That would put dropout rates at 22.9 and 30.1 percent respectively – a 30 percent increase over 31 years. As many sixth-graders could tell you, tripling would mean a 200 percent increase.
Just like there was unblinking credulity in some of the improvement under NCLB, the narrative of decline in this country seems more culturally embedded than entirely factual.
I could speculate on the “golden age” mentality at play here and how it hints that even American progressivism is by and large reactionary in its outlook. I, however, don’t know that…
I do know this, I don’t trust anybody, even bodies I voted for, to give me straight facts that contradict their political agenda.
I don’t say this because I completely disagree with President Obama’s agenda or even with a good deal of the criticisms he made of public schooling… I don’t know that he was being deliberately dishonest. All I am that this is an exercise in realizing that confirmation bias is something that politicians of ALL stripes depend on you not questioning.
Partially in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, here is my brief interview with Kylie Sturgress.
Skepoet: How did you get involved with formal skepticism and skeptical thinking?
Kylie Sturgess: I’m not entirely sure what you mean with ‘formal skepticism’, since there are few opportunities for people to get involved with high-profile groups like Skeptic.com or the JREF unless you are actually employees! I have, however, been a volunteer at every conference for skepticism that I’ve attended overseas and I work in conjunction with several members of the NSW Skeptics on the podcast The Skeptic Zone. I’ve never been supportive of poorly researched ‘all talk, no walk’ groups and so doing what I do now suits me fine.
I would probably attribute my initial interest in skepticism to subscriptions to a consumer affairs magazine called ‘Choice’ and a popular TV program on Australia’s ABC, called ‘The Investigators’, which looked at scams and frauds. I was also very keen on comedy as a teenager – whilst friends were into the likes of Milli Vanilli (yes, the irony that they were not singing isn’t lost on me!), I was collecting works by artists such as the Doug Anthony Allstars, TISM and various stand-up comics hailing from the Melbourne comedy boom of the late 80s – early 90s.
If you listen to the lyrics and comments from works by DAAS and TISM, Corky and the Juice Pigs and Andrew Denton (Money or the Gun), you’ll recognise a significant bias toward questioning societal norms, encouraging philosophical reflection, criticising religion and the status quo. I can see a similar influence in modern times by the works of Tim Minchin and George Hrab – and I’m certain that there’s plenty of young people out there who watch pop culture shows where the occasional off-the-cuff comment by a Stephen Fry or Sarah Silverman make them stop and question their world.
Skepoet: How did you get involved with education?
Kylie Sturgess: I was always interested in teaching, simply because I had seen many examples when I was a student myself of teaching initiatives and projects, seen various attitudes and strategies – and wanted to know what really worked and why. I don’t think people last long in the profession if they have an attitude of ’saving or rescuing’ kids. When I was very young, I worked as an artist and did sculpture classes with other children, so I guess the early exposure to teaching others helped with building my confidence in that way.
Skepoet: How do you think the various education systems you have been exposed have done to teach critical thinking effectively?
Kylie Sturgess: The only education system I have had formal experience with working in has been the Western Australian system, which has undergone significant changes over the past ten years or so. We have seen the implementation and collapse of Outcomes Based Education – one benefit of this has been the creation and implementation of a new Philosophy and Ethics course which has continued beyond the OBE system and has been extremely successful as a popular course. I have been involved in teacher training and writing for the course, which has a compulsory element of skepticism and critical thinking and logic throughout the units. This has stemmed from my involvement with the West Australian Association for Philosophy in Schools group, known as APIS – we run Philosophy cafes and teacher training using the Philosophy for Children methodology statewide.
I have recently become involved with a group called the Critical Thinking Education Group, which is designed to cater for networking and promoting like-minded teachers worldwide.
I don’t make a habit of commenting on my job in any direct way on my blog and I am not going to start, but I will mention this: going to a heavily politicized school board meeting tells me that there is NOT a lot of reason on any side going into a lot of decisions in education. Reform is a mindfield and most reforms explode before any real efficacy can be judged. I saw a lot of repetile brain and then a lot of rationalizations.
Thomas B. Fordham Institute has an interesting critique of NCLB… I push this particular critique because Fordham is generally in the same school of thought as the architects of NCLB.
Let us be skeptical of Fordham, who really is a fairly right-leaning think-tank. Fordham is also EXTREMELY skeptical of class size research even though it really is one of the few reforms that has a LOT of research backing it.
While Charter schools are the part of the belief creed of the Fordham foundation, there is little research supporting them.
All in all though–both the Standards-Based model and the Progressive School model REALLY have a problems with oversimplifying the research on various sides.
While I really I am strongly skeptical of Fordham–I do think they do legitimate research in areas of concern (but they are afflicted with strong confirmation bias as all political think-tanks are).
Dear Readers:
Sometimes being a teacher is very draining, particularly in a time of fairly massive forced resignations and lay-offs. This is my day job, however, and so I try to be both stoic and optimistic about it as well as skeptical of a lot of the claims made for and about education.
SO in that spirit, I am offering you some blog clippings and saying some interviews for clear date. This is a good one on the re-branding of ideas from Bridging Differences:
In brief, I maintained that the movement for “21st Century skills” sounds similar—if not identical—to earlier movements over the past century. Its calls to teach critical thinking skills, creativity, problem-solving, and cooperative group skills are not at all “21st Century.” Certainly for the past generation, these goals have been virtual mantras in our schools of education. If there is anything that teachers have been taught over the years, it is the importance of pursuing these goals, which are certainly laudable in themselves.
Earlier manifestations of the movement to teach outcomes directly was referred to as “life adjustment education,” or “outcome-based education,” or most recently in the 1990s, “SCANS skills.” In every manifestation, the movement says that we should teach students how to think and teach them real-life skills but downplay academic subjects because students can always look up “bits of information.”
E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham were brilliant as they argued that skills and knowledge are inseparable. People do not think in the abstract; they need knowledge—ideas, facts, concepts—to think about. Dan Willingham showed in his presentation that the mind does not compartmentalize into skills and knowledge. Problems cannot be solved without having the relevant knowledge to think with. Students can learn creativity, flexibility, problem-solving, and critical thinking as they learn about science, history, mathematics, and so on. To prioritize skills over knowledge, the panel argued, made no sense.
Ken Kay responded by saying that the “21st Century skills” movement gave equal weight to skills and knowledge and that he was sure there was common ground. He spoke of the many education organizations and technology companies that had endorsed the movement.
I must say, and I mean no disrespect for Mr. Kay, that I was struck by this thought (maybe I was just exercising my critical thinking skills). I have often written about education controversies, and in every case, one group of educators argues with another group of educators. In this instance, a panel of educators (me, Hirsch, Willingham) was debating a public relations executive. This seemed odd to me, and made me wonder about the movement itself.
Is it an effort on the part of the technology companies to sell more high-tech hardware and software to schools? Is it an effort to throw a wrench into the effort to develop meaningful and reasonable academic standards by replacing them with vague and pleasing-sounding goals?
And for something completely different:
An article on how there are actual brain differences between believers and non-believers according to a recent study:
Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made.
So confirmation bias is hardwired? Or is this a cause of neuro-plasticity? Or is this a valid piece of research? Only more time and experiments will tell.
