Most Amazing Cover Ever

In a wild departure from my semi-serious thoughts, everyone should check out the cover and the following two pages from this report:

http://www.nsba.org/HPC/NewsIssues/Issues/School-Boards-Circa-2010-Governance-in-the-Accountability-Era.aspx

Now, that is a report from the National School Board Association. A national report. From a national organization.

And so I throw this out:

1) Can anyone possibly think of where they got this from? So far, the best answer has been your high school algebra text book cover.

2) What do you imagine the conversation went like when they sat down to make the cover?

3) Does anyone else have an awesome cover on some report to rival this?

As prizes, I will give more shout-outs since apparently whoever the hell is reading this is a sucker for them, as my readership shot up by like 90 people in the last rambling post.

NY Times, you wily paper you.

This one goes out to Ben Cooper and Rob Morgan, who independently and without any prompting, mentioned my blog to me. Also, when I hit 500 views, I think I can sell out and get endorsements. Alright.

So, let's grade the president! To grade him, we have a usual cast of characters: Diane Ravitch, Michelle Rhee, a teacher, the guy who always advocates for school choice (seriously, I think he only has one move... everyone knows he is going right... zing!), this guy ("the intellectual father of the economic integration movement," i.e., the movement that sounds great but will never happen), and Bruce Fuller, a professor from UC Berkeley, who I will get to below.

I am going to focus on Ravitch and Fuller.

First, Ravitch: seriously, what's your deal? For those of you who don't know, Diane Ravitch was assistant secretary of ed and had some role at NAEP, and in 2005 wrote, "We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act ... All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents' generation." Then she changed her mind, said it was a bad idea, wrote a book, and now she yells at Duncan and Obama and Gates. This is what I don't get: why do people give her such heed when she was pumped about NCLB, changed her mind, and now opposes it? This rhetorical act is absurd to me, but everyone buys it: "I was wrong, I get it now, so now I am always right." And everyone thinks she is right now. I don't get it. She was incredibly wrong about something, so she can't be wrong again? What? How does that make any sense? Just because she admits fault does not make her faultless in the future.

Hey, I was wrong once in 2005. I will never be wrong again. With that being established...

Now we move on to these fun quotes:

Ravitch: These "reforms" are not likely to improve U.S. education. Charter schools on average do not perform better than regular public schools.

Fuller: Three national studies have now shown that the average charter student fails to outperform the average peer attending a public school.

Okay, let's actually look at this in two ways.

First, "charter schools" versus "public schools" is a ridiculous comparison: there are bad charters, medium charters and good charters; there are bad public schools, medium public schools and good public schools. There is no one or the other. In thinking about a comparison, though, I can't think of one-- anyone think of a public good offered with public dollars that operates outside of public regulations that has a corollary with the first two but inside public regulations? Perhaps something like economic development (convention center?), but that is a one-off case. Regardless, though, the comparison does not work on a comprehensive level. However, that will not stop people from doing it!

Which brings us to Fuller's "three national studies" and Ravitch's "on average" charters aren't better. Well, let's look at the studies: thank you Wikipedia. You know what, Fuller, we can switch your sentence: "The average charter student fails to outperform the average peer attending a public school" could become, "The average peer attending a public school fails to outperform a charter student," or, to eliminate syntactic bias, we could just say, "On average, charters perform similarly to public schools." We could do the same thing with Ravitch.

Oh but you didn't, Richard. So, I guess I will just have to go to the most authoritative of those sources, the CREDO study. And what did they find? Well, they found that first thing you mention:

"While the report recognized a robust national demand for more charter schools from parents and local communities, it found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference."

But they also found this:

"The report found several key positive findings regarding the academic performance of students attending charter schools. For students that are low income, charter schools had a larger and more positive effect than for similar students in traditional public schools. English Language Learner students also reported significantly better gains in charter schools, while special education students showed similar results to their traditional public school peers.

The report also found that students do better in charter schools over time. While first year charter school students on average experienced a decline in learning, students in their second and third years in charter schools saw a significant reversal, experiencing positive achievement gains.

The report found that achievement results varied by states that reported individual data."

It's more complex than you say, but you don't care about that, do you, Ravitch and Fuller? You have to have known this, right? Those quotes are from the press release; I didn't even have to open the whole thing. So why do you write things like that? Come on, you are Diane Ravitch and Bruce Fuller-- if I can't trust you, who can I trust?

Nobody reads.

Somehow I got redirected to a random education blog this morning, which highlighted the PISA (an international test designed to give some idea of comparative performance). The blog highlights reading scores by free and reduced lunch levels and shows how the USA actually does quite well when wealthier schools are considered. However, in trying to track down the data, I clicked on one link, and then another, and then another.

As I clicked, the blogs became slightly more politicized and critical. The one that spurned this post writes:

"There is, however, someone who recognizes that the data is being misinterpreted. NEAToday published remarks from National Association of Secondary School Principals Executive Director, Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, that have taken "a closer look at how the U.S. reading scores on PISA compared with the rest of the world’s, overlaying it with the statistics on how many of the tested students are in the government’s free and reduced lunch program for students below the poverty line." Tirozzi pointed out, “Once again, we’re reminded that students in poverty require intensive supports to break past a condition that formal schooling alone cannot overcome.” Tirozzi demonstrates the correlation between socio-economic status and reading by presenting the PISA scores in terms of individual American schools and poverty. While the overall PISA rankings ignore such differences in the tested schools, when groupings based on the rate of free and reduced lunch are created, a direct relationship is established."

So I thought, huh, I should download the full data set and do it myself to see if I could. But I couldn't-- I couldn't find the free and reduced lunch variable in the PISA dataset.

But you know what I could find-- the exact table and statistics on reading levels and poverty in the appendix to the report (table r4, page 16). It's right there-- it wasn't Tirozzi who performed this amazing analysis. The NCES just did it themselves-- but nobody reads the full report. Ever. And then education bloggers all over go crazy-- "Look at what they left out! Thank God we are so much smarter than that government! We are so smart and critical."