Shedding light on cut scores.

Lots of talk among ed reporters this week about cut scores—lowering them to ensure that more students pass, raising them and seeing more students fail. It is a nearly impossible topic to report really well, given that states tend to make the process, and the tests, utterly opaque. Not to mention that “making the questions harder” is sort of vague. I liked this effort, back in 2007, by Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira to show at least a tiny little bit about what setting cut scores looks like. (That part is at the end of the article.) Please, do what you can to show how, specifically, your state changes the questions and/or scoring regimen. If state officials won’t reveal enough to be able to illuminate readers, write about that too.

And in case I don’t beat this drum enough: The New York situation serves as yet another reminder that usually what we are talking about is PASS RATES, and not SCORES that are going up. Pass rates can go up while student scores go down. 

To beat the summer blahs, read school board policy.

No, really! One of my favorite pieces to write on the ed beat was about an odd policy on the books of the Montgomery County Public Schools, encouraging teachers to mix up alphabetical order so as to not discriminate against the Z kids. The article took only an afternoon to report and write, and would have been even shorter and sweeter were it not for the Metro editor’s superfluous insistence that I include an expert comment and find out—on deadline, natch—whether every other D.C.-area had such a policy on the books. I got more feedback on that piece than anything else I wrote all month.

Maybe you too should look for some archaic or offbeat policies on the books of your school system, if you can’t figure out anything better to do before pitchers and catchers report.

Shameless plug, sibling division.

Simon & Schuster released its first “enhanced” e-book today, interspersed with archive footage and video interviews with the author. Is it Stephen King? Laura Bush? Ernest Hemingway? “The Secret”? No, silly: It is “Nixonland,” by my brother, Rick Perlstein. Read more in today’s New York Times, or REALLY read more (896 pages!), by buying the e-book.

Leadership capacity and RTTT.

Already there is talk in Tennessee about whether the state can find enough people experienced and savvy enough to fill the high-level jobs created by its successful Race to the Top bid. It stands to wonder, then, whether the talent pool can match the challenge once a dozen or so more states are in the mix for major reform. Oversight directors, accountability advisers—not sure what kind of people fill these jobs. Think tankers? CMO gurus? Superintendents? Do they need to have track records of large-scale success in education reform? Because, sadly, that rules out a lot of people. And how many of the ones who do are looking for new jobs, at state salaries?

So my elderly aunt was talking about Michelle Rhee the other day...

I didn’t realize how strongly news of Michelle Rhee’s firings resonated until several people who don’t even live around here asked this weekend what I thought of them. “Is this a big deal, or not?” they said. I explained how in theory getting fired for performance reasons isn’t shocking, but in teaching it is. (Less, though, than we make it out to be. While it is rare, I know a lot of principals who are successful at “encouraging people to leave,” or whatever they call it.) Given that the D.C. goings-on are getting national attention, I figured I would offer up a few things worth considering:

1. The number of teachers didn’t faze me. But I would like to see more reported on the actual implementation of IMPACT and efforts like it. When you hear officials talk about them, they may make sense. But teachers can give us a clue if the observations, evaluations and feedback are taking place as advertised. That’s important to know. I have heard D.C. officials concede bumps in implementation; just how bumpy would help people judge whether they think the firings were hasty or not.

2. Do the IMPACT scores (most of which, for practical reasons, are not yet based on test scores) correlate with student outcomes? I believe the district is working on figuring this out—in the cases where they can; officials have not yet figured out how to measure performance of teachers and students in certain situations, classes, grades. When they answer this question, I hope they release the data publicly.

3. This is a hard nut to crack, harder than interviewing teachers to find out if their five observations and half-hour consultations with master educators happened, and harder even than correlating past outcomes with evaluations. Perhaps only the geeks among you care to continue with me here: It is important to ask whether IMPACT scores are predictive—if this is truly a valid and reliable measure. If IMPACT works as designed, it tells us how well a teacher did. But does it tell us how well she or he will do? This is worth asking not just because in the early years teaching quality improves with experience, but because I am not sure the value-added research tells us whether we know anything about teachers can repeat their successes. Will the evaluation of IMPACT consider that, say, by randomly assign teachers so that we can compare the performance of students with high-scoring teachers versus low-scoring ones?

If so many eyes are on the program, they’ll need something solid to look at.

Judge Underhill clearly doesn't watch “Glee.”

For a long time I was in the cheerleading-is-not-a-sport camp. This attitude partly stemmed from my own experiences in the early 1980s as a middle school cheerleader and briefly, until I realized the group was more about cementing popularity than about dancing, a high school pom-pom girl. There was nothing strenuous or rigorous about what we were doing; we were playacting, mostly, at what we thought cheerleading was supposed to look like. I don’t recall advisors or coaches, I don’t recall warming up or wearing out, and we certainly never competed against anyone.

Since then, of course, cheering has morphed into something completely different. Whether you have witnessed the outcome from the actual sidelines or just on a screen, isn’t it obvious that what you are seeing is just as much a sport as, say, golf or gymnastics? Behind those plastered smiles and excrutiatingly tight ponytails are athletes working every bit of their bodies to adhere to specific judging criteria. I have been to cheerleading competitions. There is nothing “underdeveloped and disorganized” about them, contrary to what U.S. District Court judge Stefan Underhill wrote this week in a much-reported ruling related to Title IX.

I am not defending the way schools use Title IX to offer the bare minimum of athletics for girls while pumping thousands or millions (hey, it’s booster money!) into football and other prominent boys’ sports. Insofar as acceptance of cheerleading as a sport means schools will jump to get rid of rid of volleyball teams, that’s a shame. And I still think “cheering” for nobody is weird.

But reporters should spend some time with the volleyball team and with the cheerleading squad to see, and tell readers, if one is noticeably less developed, organized or sport-y than the other.




Today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students

Standards vs. reality, cont'd.

Had I read the actual Fordham report I mentioned yesterday, I would have seen, and highlighted for you, this passage in the foreword, by Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli: 

Yet everyone also knows that standards often end up like wallpaper. They sit there on a state website, available for download, but mostly they’re ignored. Educators instead obsess about what’s on the high-stakes test—and how much students actually have to know in order to pass—which becomes the real standard. After making the most superficial ad- justments, textbook publishers assert that their wares are “aligned” with the standards. Ed schools simply ignore them.

So it’s no great surprise that serious analysts, recently including the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst, have found no link between the quality of state standards and actual student performance.3 That’s because standards seldom get real traction on the ground. Adopting good standards is like having a goal for your cholesterol; it doesn’t mean you will actually eat a healthy diet. Or like purchasing a treadmill; owning that machine only makes a difference if you tie on your sneakers and run.

But when great standards are combined with smart implementation, policy makers can move mountains.