The Myth of Broken Schools

I am sick of hearing about “our broken public school system.” Our public school system is definitely not “broken” but the reformers and privatizers and our politicians in both parties are working very hard to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. To see why I say that our public schools are not broken, read this excellent post by former State School Boards Association president, Noel Hammatt.

The forces of privatization and corporate reform, by convincing the media to parrot their characterization of public schools as “broken” serve their own interests in profiting from the discontent they are creating.

What is broken is the takeover of most mainstream media by large corporations that have tentacles in the privatization and testing services that are being forced upon our schools.  Consider the Blomberg and Rupert Murdock media systems. These media giants have a direct conflict of interest, and it serves their bottom line to continue to report public schools as broken and to systematically ignore the growing scandals of graft and corruption in the privatization movement.

What is broken is the legislative response that is serving major political contributors who are allowed to use our tax dollars dedicated to public education to bribe legislators to give them even more of our tax money to further grow their profit making scheme.

Privatization grows like a cancer. It uses our society’s resources earmarked for public education to pay legislators to add more cancer-like charter and private voucher schools. The growth, which is in reality destructive rather than healthy, accelerates even as it destroys the host. To better understand where we are headed, see this report on the Chilean system, which is now trying to reverse the damage of privatization of their schools.

To better understand the myth of failing schools consider this excellent analysis of comparative PISA scores by Carnoy and Rothstein . Their study shows that if we compare student populations by socio-economic factors we will find that our public schools are still producing some of the best-educated high school graduates in the world. Where our society, not our schools, fail is in proper support for our high poverty, at-risk students.

But to characterize all public schools as "broken" because we have a disproportionate number of high poverty students in some schools is misleading and it was intended to mislead. It is not our schools that are failing, but it is our system of government that now is failing to serve as a proper guardian of our tax dollars and what used to be a champion of the ordinary citizens and their children.

Rigging the Louisiana High Stakes Testing Game

I testified at BESE last Thursday about the manipulation of LEAP test scores last year to make it look as though our students were doing just fine with the new Common Core aligned tests.

Several of my readers have asked me to report on the mastery cut scores I got from the LDOE by suing John White last September. This post is timely now since the faux PARCC test is going to be administered in a few weeks. White has announced that he wants to set a goal of getting the majority of our students to the Mastery level in ELA and Math within a ten-year period. Actually that should not be very difficult, since the LDOE has ways of manipulating the test results to make them go up even if there is no real increase in learning by the students. Here is how it works:

Last Spring the LDOE issued a press release announcing that even though the new CCSS aligned test given in Spring of 2014 was more “rigorous” or difficult than the ones in previous years, the performance of our students as measured by the percent achieving the rating of “Basic” had remained steady.  In addition, the percentage of our students achieving the rating of “Mastery” had actually improved! Wow! So apparently White was beginning to make good on his effort to get our students up to the Mastery level. (Some of our reformers think that the secret to student achievement is to simply set goals and then order the educators to “make” the students learn at those levels. That’s all there is to it. This is education leadership.)

After reading that press release, I started wondering if the success was real or if it may be a result of lowering the cut scores for the ratings of Basic and Mastery. But when I first inquired, the LDOE informed me that the scale cut scores for Basic and Mastery had remained the same for the last ten years. I then realized that I was asking the wrong question! So next I asked for the LDOE to supply me with the “raw cut scores” for Basic last Spring compared to the raw cut scores of the two previous years. Well that information turned out to be harder to extract from all the layers of PR folks that get to decide on releasing the information. But finally, after two months of wrangling with the Dept. and threatening to sue them based on the public records law, I got the raw cut scores for Basic compared to the two previous years for ELA and Math. Here they are:

4^th grade ELA – 2012 = 53.9%, 2013 = 51.5%, 2014 = 44.6% (So the cut score for Basic in this area was lowered significantly as the Common Core aligned test was phased in)

4^th grade Math – 2012 = 52.8%, 2013 = 50%, 2014 = 47.2% (So the cut score for Basic in this area was lowered significantly also.

8^th grade ELA – 2012 = 58%, 2013 = 58%, 2014 = 58.7% (So the cut score in this area remained pretty constant)

8^th grade Math – 2012 = 55.3%, 2013 = 48.6%, 2014 = 40.1% (So the cut score here was lowered drastically over the last three years)

This information which was so difficult to obtain from the LDOE led me to believe that the press release about student performance at the basic level remaining steady as the state moved to the more difficult Common Core aligned tests was very misleading, if not an outright lie!

So next I asked the LDOE to give me the cut scores for the last three years for the rating of Mastery in ELA and Math.

Well, unfortunately that information turned out to be much harder to get released, even though I knew that it had been set since last May when the percentages for Mastery were tabulated by LDOE.

I ended up having to file a lawsuit to get the Mastery cut scores and did not actually get them until September 22 after a judgment from the 14^th district court of Judge Downing. (Along with my court costs and lawyer’s fees)

Here are the results for Mastery for the last three years:

4^th grade ELA – 2012 = 75.4%, 2013 = 71.5%, 2014 = 66.9% (So I concluded that the cut scores for mastery in this area had been significantly lowered)

4^th grade Math -2012 = 75.7%, 2013 = 72.8%, 2014 = 68.8%  (So I concluded that the cut scores for mastery had been steadily lowered also)

8^th grade ELA – 2012 = 73.9%, 2013 = 75.4%, 2014 = 75.4 (So I concluded that the cut scores in this area for mastery had remained essentially the same)

8^th grade Math – 2012 = 86.8%, 2013 = 84.7%, 2014 = 74.3% (So I concluded that the cut scores in this area had been significantly lowered)

Now I think I know why it was so difficult to extract the raw mastery cut scores from the LDOE. Instead of student performance at the Mastery level improving as the Common Core aligned tests got harder, the scores in three out of four areas went down significantly. There is simply no excuse for such blatant misleading propaganda from our Department of Education. It should be renamed the Department of Education Propaganda. (LDOEP)

The only reason I can see why the LDOE would lower the cut scores for mastery so much was so that our students would seem to be performing well with the new CCSS aligned test. There would then be no reason for parents or the legislature to be concerned with the new curriculum.

BESE members, Dr. Lottie Beebe and Carolyn Hill passed a motion at this last BESE meeting to get a report on the cut score changes as we get the results of the faux PARCC test this Spring.  John White tried to muddy the water again by telling them that such cut scores may not be available right away. But that is total bull since the only way to report the results on the tests is to use the cut scores to calculate those results!

I told them that if I have to sue White again to get the cut scores I would be happy to do so.

Note: There is one other way the LDOE can manipulate the results of the state testing every year.  As long as Louisiana is not really a part of the PARCC Consortium, our LDOE works with the testing company, Data Recognition Corporation to actually select the questions that go on the test form. The form is changed every year so that students and teachers cannot teach the exact test by getting a copy of it. Well it just so happens that our test creators have a choice from a pool of questions that are rated according to difficulty. They can make the test harder or easier just by changing the mix of “easy” verses “difficult” questions.

One more thing: The LDOE claims that the cut scores are reset each year using scientific formulas that ensure that each test form is equal in difficulty to all other test forms. (Of course that negates their argument that the students did as well even though the test got harder) But if was a true scientific calculation to reset the cut scores, why did they wait until all the results statewide were in before calculating the new cut scores? My public records request also got me the emails between LDOE and Data Recognition Corp. indicating that the cut scores were approved by the LDOE after all the student scores were in. That way the gurus at the LDOE and DRC could sit a their computers and run simulations to see how many kids would pass based on different cut scores.

Do you get the feeling as I do that this is all just a cruel game being played by the LDOE and the testing companies with our students and teachers being the victims of efforts to discredit our education system and to push for further privatization?

Grading Schools on the Curve

Superintendent John White’s system for grading schools is about to get really crazy.

With his latest proposed revision of school accountability guidelines to BESE, White attempts to reassure school principals by temporarily grading schools on a curve as more difficult tests are given to students. White explains that for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years, the relative number of A, B, C, D, and F schools will remain the same as 2013-14.  At the same time however, under Whites new rules all principals are expected to improve their school performance scores each year. But that’s impossible if the schools are being graded on a curve. The only way for one school to have its score go up is for another school score to go down. This system is inherently unfair.

Whites new proposals for school accountability are coming as requirements tacked on to the Act 240 subcommittee report.  Act 240 was a bill passed by Rep. Hoffmann for the purpose of improving the teacher evaluation system. But as I explain in the post below, the subcommittee report was manipulated by White to require that all school principals set a goal of raising their school performance scores every year.  In addition, the principal’s quantitative evaluation will be based only on the school performance score. But it is impossible for all schools (or even more than half) to improve their performance scores if the schools are being graded on a curve.

With these two opposing rules, White is guaranteeing, based on statistics that approximately 50% of our public schools will have a lower SPS for this school year and the next school year. The declining schools may be different each year, but when graded on the curve, approximately 50% must decline. So the quantitative portion of the evaluation of half of our principals will have to go down for those two years.

In addition one of the new rules proposed by White that was not considered by the Act 240 subcommittee, requires that the local superintendents be shamed by submitting a report to BESE on any school that has a decline in SPS for two years in a row. (White had a more embarrassing rule for 3 consecutive SPS declines, but it has disappeared from the recommendations to BESE)

How do these new rules affect teachers? What White is driving at is forcing principals to demand that student test scores go up in every classroom each year. White and his friends at LABI and CABL believe that they have finally found a formula that will either drive up student scores or get more teachers and principals fired. What the new rules will do is to force teachers to spend more and more time on test prep instead of real teaching.

The new rules for school accountability and for principal evaluation are in contradiction and impossible to administer fairly. Please ask BESE to send White back to the drawing board before adopting any rules that put principals and teachers in an impossible predicament. (Click here for BESE districtmaps and email addresses) Such rules will only further demoralize the education profession and will not benefit our students in any way.