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. 

Living in an online world, but not creating for it.

College students in America today are probably the biggest Internet consumers on the planet, yet according to Michael Koretzky, a Florida Atlantic University journalism advisor writing in the Huffington Post, they are lousy at producing online journalism. Have you noticed this? Koretzky says they are all about the print product, which should comfort some folks.

California and D.C.: Yay, they’re the best!

California, D.C. and Indiana have language arts standards that are stronger than the Common Core, according to a new Fordham Foundation report. They also shine in math. And yet their students perform worse on NAEP than about anyone else. Again, I can’t help thinking about the disconnect between those standards sitting in files in state departments of education ad actual teaching and learning going on in classrooms. High standards? They’re like chocolate chip ice cream and baby animal photos: How can you not love them? But this sure does make one wonder if anyone has correlated strong standards with student performance. I would try to find out myself but ... OOOH, NEWBORN MONKEYS!!!

For those interested in bullying ...

If my log of reporter requests means anything, a lot of you are. Slate reporter Emily Bazelon began to dive into the world of school bullying some time ago, and her lengthy investigation of the Phoebe Prince case in South Hadley, Mass., that was published this week is a worthwhile read. Some of the commenters are excoriating Bazelon for, as they see it, excusing the bullying; I don’t think that is what she has done. Rather, she has provided much-needed fleshing-out to the quick narrative we got after Phoebe’s suicide—and has offered some context that helps evaluate the relationship between the punishment and the crime.

Embanet University, Class of '12.

I liked this piece on outsourcing distance education, by Marc Perry at the Chronicle of Higher Education. (I always learn something when I read Marc’s pieces; I think he is really good and has a totally fascinating beat.) It seems to me that anybody who covers a college should find out whether it outsources its online classes, to whom, and what—if any—conflicts or unintended consequences those relationships create. Would employers care, down the road, if a Northeastern University diploma reflected an education built more by a company like Embanet than by Northeastern itself? Would the parents shelling out $45,000 a year care, even if the employers don’t? Would the students care? I don’t know—maybe nobody cares but the professors whose roles are being supplanted.

I come back to this question again and again: Must for-profit efficiencies and delivery of an excellent education be mutually exclusive? My gut has its own answer, but my brain needs to know far more about the who, what, when, where and why.

We’ve got standards. Now what?

If a state adopts the Common Core standards but is not taking any steps to change its assessments, is it really changing its standards? If you are a reporter in a state that has already adopted, find out what, if anything, is in the works for curriculum and testing. Obviously textbooks and classroom practice and graduation exams cannot be changed on a dime, but someone in your state department of education should at least be thinking about how to make those standards actually mean something. That’s the person you should get on the phone.

Some thoughts on (college) student life.

More than anything else about higher ed, I am interested in the relationship between students and their studies. What could be more important? Unfortunately, this does not get written about much, but it happens occasionally. Like this piece by Keith O’Brien in the Boston Globe last week, on a finding that students study 10 hours fewer per week than they did a half-century ago. Of course my kids-today string got majorly plucked. Those lazy do-nothings! That stupid Internet!

But read further—too far! the 20th graf!—and you learn that nearly all the decline came in the first two decades of the research. Study times fell from 24.4 hours in 1961 to 16.8 hours in 1981. Since then, they have only declined another 2.8 hours. I don’t doubt there is a disturbing lack of academic engagement for many students, but a discussion about this particular piece of research should really ask what happened academically in the ’60s and ’70s, rather than more recently.

The piece that really captured my attention last week was by Trip Gabriel of the New York Times, on the elaborate efforts the University of Central Florida and other schools go through to detect cheating. I do believe that cheating is prevalent, even among many of the “good kids” I have followed closely. Often students don’t think they are cheating. In a master’s program at an Ivy League school, I had to explain to my classmates that you couldn’t just pass chunks of books off as your own writing. In my mind, I tried to be generous: being from foreign countries, maybe they didn’t know better? Except that of course Americans have the same problem. Recently a college student asked me to read a paper, and I found that several of her sentences were taken verbatim (not quoted) from magazine articles she cited. She didn’t realize this was wrong.

I cheated twice in my life: on an American history test in 11th grade (substitute teacher, cheat sheet in my pocket) and on a multivariable calculus exam in college (closed-book take-home test). I remember little about all the bad grades throughout my schooling. But I will never, ever stop feeling gross about the cheating. The students UCF’s high-tech methods are detecting obviously know they are cheating, unlike the student whose paper I read. Do they feel gross, too?

The “not the worst thing ever” award goes to ...

... portable classrooms!

If there were a ratio of how much parents cared about a specific educational issue to how much it actually mattered in their children’s daily lives, you know what would score highest? Classroom trailers. The article in which parents complain that their children are in portables, or board members call for increased capital funds because of all the portables, is a staple on the education beat. Next time you are writing it, do us all a favor and spend some time in a school with trailers. Visit those classes, as well as classes in the regular building. Are children learning differently? Are they unsafe? I am so lazy I occasionally skip lunch rather than walk downstairs to the kitchen, and I hate to go out in the cold, so I get that having to pass outside between class and, say, P.E. can be annoying. But is it truly the tragedy so many make it out to be? I wish stories on the subject read less like laments and more like straightforward assessments of reality.

What the class size research REALLY says.

As school system budgets tighten, more journalists find themselves writing about—and misinterpreting the research on—class size. Nearly every education writer knows about Project STAR, the only large-scale, random-assignment experiment that has been conducted on class size. Over four years in the late 1980s in Tennessee, researchers assigned children in 79 schools to classrooms ranging from 13 to 25 students. They found significant academic advantages in reading and math for students in small kindergarten and first-grade classes, and the effects diminished in second and third grades. We do not know much about is what kind of difference class size makes outside the parameters of that experiment, at least not with the certainty that comes with the methodological rigor of an experiment like STAR.


To nail down “what the research says” about class size, I contacted three authorities on the topic: Eric Hanushek at Stanford, Thomas Dee at Swarthmore and Beth Graue at University of Wisconsin-Madison. This issue, like nearly any in education, divides people somewhat; I think it’s fair to say that Graue and Dee think reducing class size has more merit than Hanushek does. But they all agree that it is not accurate to extrapolate and say, as some do, that because of STAR we know that class size “only matters” in kindergarten and first grade. Some quasi-experimental studies show benefits of smaller classes; some do not. But there isn’t high-quality evidence to confirm one way or another. There has not been another study the likes of STAR, and in this climate—small class size is out of favor among national reformers, and it is very expensive—I am not sure we will see one, though some researchers would like to make that happen.


In my gut, I cannot help but think the number of kids in a room matters in a variety of ways (what sort of assignments teachers choose to give, how connected students feel to their teachers) when we are talking about big differences in size. To take an extreme example: Just because nobody has studied what would happen if we increased the size of an eighth-grade math class from 28 to 58 doesn’t mean the outcome would be pretty. Of course, on average across a big district, class sizes usually increase only a couple of students at a time. But in individual schools and classrooms, big disparities in class size can happen. We do not have much research on this kind of thing; Dee recommends a study from the early 1990s by Joshua Angrist in Israel, where a maximum class size of 40 made for interesting comparisons. (Forty kids in a grade? One class of 40. Forty-one kids? A class of 20 and another of 21.) For those interested in looking at larger classes than evaluated in STAR, Graue recommends the work of Peter Blatchford in the U.K., who compared classes in the mid-20s to those above 30 students. 


Hanushek points out that an issue of key importance is how teachers are hired (in the case of class-size reduction) or fired (in case of increases). He suggests that changes in teacher quality borne of such decisions matter as much as—probably more than—the number of children in the room. If a district reduces class size without a pool of good teachers to draw from, why would you expect improvement? If a school increases class size and has to get rid of teachers with no regard to their effectiveness, the big classes might matter less than losing good educators.


This is all to say, be careful about how you represent the research—only STAR represents the so-called gold standard of research, and even that has its limitations. I suppose “We don’t know if it matters” is not a great line to stick in your story when the school board is debating whether to enlarge classes. If this is an issue in your area, do some shoe-leather reporting comparing classrooms and give qualitative examples. Did a teacher whose classes got bigger stop assigning essays when she felt like she had too many to grade? To what degree do teachers attribute differences in classroom climate to the number of students versus the other myriad factors? I could go on; there is a lot to look at. While doing so,  remember that there is a difference between a teacher who says he would leave if his class were significantly larger and one who actually does so. 

A new blog from EWA ... and the “value” of education.

EWA has started a blog called Ed Beat. You’ll hear from my smart colleagues about what education journalists might keep their eye on and what questions they might ask, and I will chip in once in a while too. Please read, and contribute.

Two of the first posts are about reports on the financial value of an education. I am always a little skeptical about future-jobs-lost and income-that-might-have-been-made estimations. These calculations assume that everyone who gets a degree or diploma will be employed to their fullest potential, yes? And that jobs will be created just because everyone has the education for them. I am certain many factors beyond that depend what jobs will exist and what people might earn. I’m curious if anyone has looked at earlier predictions of this ilk and matched them up against what really came to pass. I imagine the prognosticators of a decade ago overestimated what diplomas and degrees would mean for job creation and income in 2010, right?

Misleading press release of the month.

I received an e-mailed press release today that was titled “Students Aren’t Interested in Growing Field” and led with the following: “Despite the projected need for healthcare practitioners at all levels in a challenging job market, nearly half of high school-age students (45 percent of 13 to 18 year-olds) are not considering pursuing a career in healthcare and science fields.” Doesn’t that mean that at least half of all teenagers are considering health and science careers? And isn’t half enough? 


This brings me to another question. If you are a journalist, do you ever pay attention to unsolicited press releases? Does the answer change if it comes from an organization you already have worked with?

i3 online.

Michele McNeil at Education Week does a nice job of summing up the i3 grant applications today. I was psyched to see $17 million requested for something called “Free to Be,” thinking we might see a nationwide renaissance of the early ’70s hippy-dippy Marlo Thomas album that had such an influence on me and my friends ... but that wasn’t it. What it is I cannot quite figure out from the description at the (very useful!) i3 grants page at ed.gov, but I have a feeling it does not stand a chance against TFA or KIPP. Browse around and see what you find.

Shhh! We adopted the Common Core!

David Griffith at ASCD has an interesting blog post about how states aren’t publicizing their adoption of the Common Core standards. The organization mapped the states that have put out statements about their adoption and linked to documentation; Catherine Gewertz’s Education Week blog, Curriculum Matters, counts more.

If you didn’t loathe credit card companies enough...

Bad enough that credit card companies target college students, and the schools facilitate that. But did you know that many universities have contracts with credit card companies that pay out more to the schools if cardholders go into debt? Just ... ew. Check out this story by Daniel Burnett of the Red & Black, a student newspaper at the University of Georgia. Nice job.

If you are a college journalist who wants to learn how to investigate your school, check out the webpage for the Campus Coverage Project, a joint project of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Student Press Law Center and EWA. Our second annual conference will be held in January; stay tuned for details.