School Board Contemplates Dress Code ... For Teachers

The Peoria (AZ) Unified School District board is working on a dress code for teachers. It would specify appropriate footwear and even address issues such as the square inches of skin visible on the torso. Existing policy in the district regarding teachers' attire specifies only that it be professional.

This amusing incident is emblematic of the general trend to de-professionalize teaching. Anything that can lower the level of respect accorded to public school teachers can lead eventually to lower pay, less autonomy, and more political regulation of the profession. De-skill, de-professionalize, and depreciate.

That such policies have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the ultimate objectives of schooling is clear from a simple thought experiment: Imagine attempting to impose a dress code on teachers of Grade 13, i.e., university professors teaching the Freshman year of college. That such a course of action is inconceivable reveals the fact that a dress code for K-12 teachers is nothing more than an arbitrary act of disciplining a weak profession on its way to becoming a skilled trade, and one compensated as such.

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University

Another Stunning Gubernatorial Appointment

Gov. Jan Brewer has appointed Craig Barrett, one-time president of Intel Corporation—a dominant Arizona presence—to the chairmanship of the recently formed Arizona Ready Education Council. The Arizona Ready Education Council is charged with spearheading reform in K-12 education in the state. Barrett also serves as president of Basis School Inc., a non-profit charter-school chain. In commenting on the condition of public K-12 education in Arizona, Barrett remarked: "We ought to be ashamed of ourselves."

This appointment ought not surprise anyone who understands the business of public education in Arizona. It is increasingly conceived of and operated as a business; and who better to advise on how a business runs than a business person.

That's old news. What's new—to me at least—is the fact that Craig Barrett was appointed to the Board of K12 Inc. on September 29, 2010. K12 Inc. is the biggest provider of full-time online schooling to nearly 300,000 children in the U.S. Those who read this blog will already be acquainted with the company. It is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has revenues of more than half a billion dollars annually, and was created with the help and participation of William Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, who resigned from the K12 Inc. Board shortly after his gambling problem became public...and before the authored the ephemeral best-seller The Book of Virtues.

David Safier of Tucson, Arizona, is an indefatigable blogger on the story of K12 Inc. I highly recommend that persons interested in the fate of American public education should spend some time on his blog.

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University

Among the Many Things Wrong With International Achievement Comparisons

2012

Gene V Glass

The Brown Center for Education Policy of the Brookings Institution released a report just a couple days ago with the jaw-breaking title “HOW WELL ARE AMERICAN STUDENTS LEARNING? With sections on predicting the effect of the Common Core State Standards, achievement gaps on the two NAEP tests, and misinterpreting international test scores.” (See for yourself: http://tinyurl.com/7vtwlfl.) The report is penned by Tom Loveless, a researcher from whom one might have expected nothing but analysis aimed at proving the abject failure of American public education. In this instance, he has disappointed any followers seeking such a message, and has in fact produced a fairly balanced analysis of the many pitfalls in basing policy on numbers.

My attention was drawn to the section on “misinterpreting international test scores,” since I have long felt that these international assessments are a mess of uninterpretable numbers providing a full-employment program for psychometricians, statisticians, and journalists. Loveless took a close look at PISA (Program for International Assessment). He concluded that policy makers, educators, journalists, and the public in general often arrive at “dubious conclusions of causality” based on the results of such assessments. Of course. Just recall the grand exodus to Japan in the 1980s when our nation was discovered to be “at risk” and the Japanese economy was booming, just before the Japanese economy tanked. And what did emissaries discover as the secret to education excellence? Jukus (privately operated “cram” businesses), high suicide rates among young people who were subjected to immense high stakes pressure, and an economy about ready to go into the dumpster. Now all eyes are on Finland. The whole scene is reminiscent of the IRA (International Reading Assessment on the 1970s) that showed that the top nation in the world on reading was …are you ready?...Italy. Italy?? That one sent people to Rome for a few months until it was discovered that the attempt at random sampling in the assessment was never so badly compromised as it was in Italy.

Loveless also pointed out that the numbers (averages of a nationwide sample of students) on which rankings of nations are based are frequently so close that there is no “statistical significance” to the differences. True, but let’s ignore this problem so as not to be diverted into an alley of dry mathematical mumbo jumbo.

But wait a minute. There is something far more wrong with these international assessments and comparisons than anyone seems interested in talking about. Think! A reading test that compares students in dozens of countries. The obvious question is “In what language is the test written?” And the obvious answer is “In the language of that nation.” But who is drawing the obvious conclusion? How in heaven’s name can you construct a reading test in dozens of different languages (English, Hungarian, Norwegian, and yes, Finnish) and be confident that the test is equally difficult in all of these languages? Well, the answer is that you can’t. It should be perfectly obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than five minutes that it is impossible. And all the ministrations and obfuscations of the companies and consultants who make or supplement their living off of such stuff do not change that fact.

Let’s take a look at some of these results. I have excerpted some data from the 2003 PISA Reading test for 15 year-olds. They are merely illustrative and it’s of no consequence that it is a small subset of the complete results.

2003 PISA Reading 15 year-olds
Finland	543
Canada	528
Liechtenstein	525
Sweden	514
Hong Kong	510
Norway	500
Japan	498
Poland	497
France	496
USA	495
Germany	491
Austria	491
Hungary	482
Spain	481
Italy	476

So there is the USA a point or two or three below France and Poland and Japan and whoever, and a point or two above Germany and Austria. This is the kind of statistical insignificance that Loveless was talking about. However, even to take seriously the kinds of differences like 19 points between the US and Sweden ignores the question before us: How do you write a reading test in English and then translate it into Swedish (or vice versa) and end up confident that one is not intrinsically more difficult than the other? I insist that the answer to that question is that you can’t. And to claim that one has done so merely sweeps under the rug a host of concerns that include grammatical structure, syntax, familiarity of vocabulary, not to mention culture of the students taking the test.

Now the keepers of the PISA tests have produce a lengthy—almost 40-page–Appendix to a report that in which they claim to have solved the problem of producing equivalent translations by the assiduous application of the finest psychometric theories. ( I don’t believe it. Forget about DIF analysis, i.e., Differential Item Functioning which only tosses out a few items that show really large differences in difficulty between two forms and ignores consistent though small differences.) What the PISA technical manual omits are any examples of reading test items in two or three different languages so that we might scrutinize the results of all this fine theory. (Ironically, one keeper of the items declined to release a few examples to me even though that person was my own doctoral student some 30 years ago.)

So let’s look at an example of our own. Tom Sawyer setting up Huck Finn to whitewash the fence.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

And now, a translation into German (since I majored in German as an undergrad some 50+ years ago):

Tom ist auf dem Bürgersteig mit einem Eimer von Tünche und einer langbehandelten Bürste erscheinen. Er hat den Zaun vermessen, und alle Freude hat ihn verlassen und eine tiefe Melancholie aud sein Geist geberuhigt wird. Dreißig Höfe von Ausschusszaun neun Füße hoch. Leben, zu dem ihn Hohlraum gescheinen hat, und Existenz aber eine Last.

Now we could observe multiple difficult choices that would have to be made in translating the English to the German that would surely affect the ability of a student to comprehend a sentence, phrase or the entire passage. Just a few: “whitewash” being Tünche in German is a relative obscure word? Is it equally obscure in American English or Canadian English (who are prone to speak of Scotch tape as “cello”); Melancholie might just as well be translated as Traurigkeit, depending on the local preferences for Latinate vs Germanic roots, such preferences still being strong in certain locales; etc. And what should we do with the 30-yard long fence? Translate it as a fence that is 27.432 meters long?

Bottom line: I believe that the differences in difficulty produced by the vagaries of translating a reading test across several languages are at least as large as many of the differences among average PISA Reading test scores, the latter differences being the stuff of media accounts as well as learned papers on school reform.

To bolster my belief, along comes an actual piece of education research addressed to precisely the translation question in international reading comparisons. A recent article in the Scandanavian Journal of Educational Research by Inga Arffman carries the title “Equivalence of translations in international reading literacy studies,” (Vol. 54, No. 1, 37-59). The paper summarizes a study that examined the problems encountered in translating texts in international reading assessments. And in spite of the fact that Arffman is a faculty member of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland—which has every motive possible to believe that PISA Reading assessments are the most valid tests in the history of psychometrics—the conclusion of the research is that “..it will probably never be possible to attain full equivalence of difficulty in international reading literacy studies….” Amen.

Colorado Legislature Struggles With How to Handle the Cyber-charters

Colorado House Bill 12-1124 was approved by a vote of 13-0 on February 13th. If it becomes law it will require the Colorado Department of Education to hire a "Colorado-based consultant" to do a study of online K-12 education in the state. Cyber-charters in Colorado enroll thousands of students whose state allotment travels primarily out of state to the coffes of K12 Inc and Connections.

The study would have to be completed by January 31, 2013 and must address, among other things:

• Eligibility for and access to digital learning
• Quality of digital learning curriculum and instruction
• Funding models for digital learning that create incentives for performance
• Existing state laws and regulations governing digital learning
• Existing accountability measures as they relate to online students

The bill was sponsored by a Republican legislator from a small town who serves as Chair of the House Education Committee. Some view the proposed legislation as a means of balking tougher legislation that would closely regulate the cyber-charters. That legislation may still be in the works, and is expected from Sen. Brandon Shaffer (D-Longmont) who began studying the online K-12 movement some months ago.

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University

It's Just How Arizona Does Business

Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ)—of finger-wagging-in-the-face-of-the-President fame—filled a vacancy on the AZ Board of Regents in a not unexpected way recently. The Board of Regents oversees the three state universities (U of A, ASU and Northern AZ Univ) and though not directly responsible for K-12 education, they often make decisions that redound to the operations of the K-12 system as well as the state’s huge community college system.

Brewer appointed one Jay Heiler to the vacancy. As a student at Arizona State University in the mid-1980s, Heiler led a conservative take-over of the campus newspaper, the State Press. Under the editorship of Heiler and his friends, the State Press refused to print announcements of meetings of the student gay and lesbian society. Not only were liberal professors and gays the target of a young Heiler’s pen, but immigrants came in for some rough treatment in the pages of the State Press as well: “The immigrants come here to start a new life, then try to cling to their own language and customs. This tendency leads to all sorts of societal problems, ranging from interracial unrest to unexplained disappearances of dogs. The former difficulty crops up wherever aliens are to be found; the latter arose in California when the Vietnamese arrived.”

Heiler went on to fame and fortune after graduation to become Chief-of-Staff to Governor Fife Symington, who was convicted of a half dozen felonies and bounced from office before the end of his term. Heiler’s career path after Symington led to the Board of the Goldwater Institute and lobbying for casino interests. The Arizona Legislature quickly approved Brewer’s appointment of Heiler to the Board of Regents.

But here is the possible tie-in to K-12 education in Arizona. Heiler is President of the Board of Directors on the Great Hearts Academies, a system of 14 charter schools—some being former Catholic private schools. His role at Great Hearts is described as “Political and public affairs consultant.” He is also Chairman of the Arizona Charter Schools Association. The Great Heart Academies cater to religious leaning families seeking a quasi-private environment. Veritas Academy is highly ranked in the Global Report Card issued by the George W. Bush Institute. In the Academies mission statement, one reads: "...we believe that true education (as the formation of the soul) is a matter of development over time and within a stable community." The Arizona Board of Regents deals with policy that directly affects K-12 education, including admissions policy. Now Heiler is strategically positioned to look out for some of his principal financial interest.

This is simply the standard way of doing things in Arizona. Conflicts of interest are accepted as an ordinary way of doing business; and in Arizona, seemingly everything is about business. As Henry Giroux recently wrote, “Buried beneath Arizona's new mode of education, pedagogy and politics is a return to a frightening antidemocratic ideology and a set of reactionary policies.”

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University

Cyber-Schooling Comes to Iowa

The following post appeared as an op-ed piece in the Des Moines Register on Februray 12th:

The cyberschool movement is spreading across the country like a brush fire in a Santa Ana wind storm. Enrollments of kids whose entire school experience is on a laptop on the kitchen table have topped 250,000, and they are headed toward a half million in the next few years. Of the more than two dozen states that permit profit making companies like K12 Inc and Connections Learning—recently acquired by the U.K. publishing giant Pearson—to set up shop and collect hundreds of millions of dollars for running “schools,” there is little appetite to stop the spread or even to keep it in reasonable control. Abuses like those in Arizona—where essays were being graded in India—or in Colorado—where missing students were counted as enrolled so that state funds could be collected—seem to be ignored by legislators, some of whom may have been the recipients of the generous amounts of money spent by these giant corporations on lobbying.

And what about the kids? No one seems to have their interests at heart, at least, not as much as they look out for the interests of the stock holders of the companies. Students who abysmally fail an exam might be told to “go through the course again.” Students emailing a question to their “teacher”—often an uncertified “teacher’s assistant” responsible for perhaps hundreds of students—may get an answer a day or two later by return email. And how many students survive the boredom and isolation of school on a laptop? One suspects not many, but just try and find out what the true drop-out statistics are; you’ll never find out from the distant company.

No one denies that a little bit of math or grammar can be learned on a computer; real schools have been supplementing the efforts of flesh-and-blood teachers with networked computers for years. Yet hardly anyone truly thinks that 12 years of cyberschool can equal the benefits of a quality education in a brick-and-mortar school. Slick TV ads and corporate hucksters would have us believe that the cyberschool can teach even better than the best traditional elementary and secondary schools the Nation has to offer. Yeah, right. The day that Phillips Exeter Academy replaces its teachers with laptops is the day I might start to believe them.

Addenda, February 13, 2012:

• Iowa, without a charter school presence, is being exploited by the cyber-vendors via the open enrollment law. With the exception of five districts, any child may enroll in any district in the state without question by March 1st of each year. A couple of superintendents in tiny towns have been bought off by K12 Inc. and Connections with promises of keeping 3% administration fees. The company sales forces are now scouring the state signing up cyber-students from among the ranks of homeschoolers and the disaffected.

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University

Education in Two Places

I'm on a flight from Phoenix to Denver, capitals of the two places referred to in the name of this blog. The contrast is amazing; surface slowly or suffer the bends.

The start-up of a legislative session is always revealing. Bills are drafted at the extreme of political positions, more to signal ideological purity to constituents than to stand any hope of passage. Even if a bill survives the political process to become law, it is likely to be considerably altered through a gauntlet of compromises. And so what legislators toss into the hopper at this stage is very revealing of the sentiment of an electorate.

So what are Arizona legislators up to and what is going on in Colorado?

The Arizona legislature is considering bills that a) would increase funding for a "virtual school" student to 100% of the normal per pupil expenditure, b) would fire teachers who use FCC-prohibited language in the classroom, and c) would bust teachers union a la Scott Walker's controversial Wisconsin edict.

Meanwhile, Colorado legislators are debating a) free tuition for children of undocumented parents, b) an "opt-out" provision from the CSAP, the state achievement assessment, and c) an appeal procedure for teachers who have been unfairly treated by the teacher evaluation system.

How things could be so different in two places so similar in geography, economy, and demographics, is a subject for a later day.

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University

Almost Beyond Belief: Arizona Wants to Fire Teachers Who Say Bad Things

It's the nutty season as Arizona legislators fashion bills that pander to the small mindedness of their constituents. Bill 15-108 provides for firing any teacher who speaks or does anything that would be banned by the FCC from appearing on the broadcast networks. Herewith the details of the lunacy.

• 15-108. Public classrooms; compliance with federal standards for media broadcasts concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity; violations; definition

• A. If a person who provides classroom instruction in a public school engages in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the federal communications commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio:
  1. For the first occurrence, the school shall suspend the person, at a minimum, for one week of employment, and the person shall not receive any compensation for the duration of the suspension. This paragraph does not prohibit a school after the first occurrence from suspending the person for a longer duration or terminating the employment of that person.

  2. For the second occurrence, the school shall suspend the person, at a minimum, for two weeks of employment, and the person shall not receive any compensation for the duration of the suspension. This paragraph does not prohibit a school after the second occurrence from suspending the person for a longer duration or terminating the employment of that person.

  3. For the third occurrence, the school shall terminate the employment of the person. This paragraph does not prohibit a school after the first or second occurrence from terminating the employment of that person.
• B. For the purposes of this section, "public school" means a public preschool program, a public elementary school, a public junior high school, a public middle school, a public high school, a public vocational education program, a public community college or a public university in this state.

At the very least, such nonsense reveals the low opinion in which Arizona politicians hold education professionals. What's next? Legislatively mandated dress codes for teachers?

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University

Colorado "Exempted" from NCLB

It was announced today by the Obama Administration that Colorado is among ten states exempted from the most onerous requirements of No Child Left Behind. Specifically, rather than being required to have 100% of students "at grade level" by 2014—a patently absurd standard when dreamed up a decade ago—Colorado and nine other states will be allowed to devise a new test achievement standard. For example, a state-designed test could be used to measure growth. Measurement experts will put together precisely what it takes to make certain that the state reaches its goal. Of course, the exemption comes at some cost. Now the exempted states must show that they are evaluating teachers and principals by a system that includes, in some proportion, student test data. Arguably, this is an even worse requirement than having to have all students at grade level by 2014.

Nothing in this exemption addresses the major problem with these crude accountability systems. Obama himself twice stated publicly—once when announcing the availability of exemptions and again later in his 2012 State of the Union address—that NCLB had produced teaching to the test and abandonment of teaching such subjects as history and science. He was right. But the substitution of "growth on a state-designed test" will do nothing to correct the problems of teaching to the test and narrowing of the curriculum.

Nearly all states will eventually be exempted from NCLB worst requirement, and nothing good will change in the schools.

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University

Why Should Anyone Care About Arizona?

Henry Giroux has just posted a brilliant article—quite long and definitely worth the read—entitled "Book Burning in Arizona." It is not merely an account of the recent shut down by the State Superintendent of Instruction of an ethnic studies course in the Tucson Unified School District, but a sweeping denunciation of anti-democratic authoritarianism in history and at large today.

If Giroux's analysis does not convince you that Arizona is front and center in the assault on public institutions in the United States, then I will attempt to convince you of that in a future posting.

In the meantime, watch to Giroux point the finger at AZ:

Crafted at a time when Arizona is at the forefront of a number of states in enacting a right-wing offensive that produces anti-immigrant and anti-Latino opinions, sentiments, and policies, the law was designed not only to provide political caché for Arizona conservatives seeking political office, but also to impose regulations "which [would] dismantle the state's popular Mexican-American/Raza Studies programs."

Buried beneath Arizona's new mode of education, pedagogy and politics is a return to a frightening antidemocratic ideology and a set of reactionary policies.

Arizona is but one example of how, at the current moment, what goes into American culture, what is aired in the media, and what is taught in both public and higher education is being intensely policed by right-wing fundamentalists in all sectors of society.

... what we see happening in Arizona poses a threat both to critical education and to the very nature of democracy itself.

Among the many noteworthy passages in Giroux's article is the following, that refers to Tom Horne, former State Superintendent of Education and now Attorney General of the State:

Not only has Horne invoked racist attacks against Mexican-Americans for over a decade, but he also has a long history of criminal behavior, including being banned for life from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a Tea Party favorite, he has been able to indulge his anti-immigrant racism with impunity, particularly since assuming public office in a state whose tough immigration laws have elevated it to one of the most high-profile states targeting and waging a racist attack on immigrants and all Latinos.

I had heard such things rumored about Tom Horne as far back as when he was running for State Superintendent, but this is the first time I have ever seen them mentioned in a credible place.

Gene V Glass
University of Colorado Boulder
Arizona State University