Posts filed under 'News'
The editorial on the national standards in today’s New York Times is uninformed as to beggar belief. “National School Standards, At Last” argues that:
The countries that have left the United States behind in math and science education have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards — often the same curriculum — from one end of the nation to the other.
The problem with the proposed national standards is not that they would be uniform, though there are good reasons to fear what they would mean for states like Massachusetts, which have used federalism to push ever higher. The principal problem is that the proposed standards are not high at all.
The Times goes on to call the new standards “rigorous”. The Times says that the standards are “based on intensive research” and that they “reflect what students must know to succeed at college and to find good jobs in the 21st century. They are internationally benchmarked…”
All of these statements are half-truths at best. So is the claim that the proposed standards are “vertically aligned, building in complexity each year.”
Worst of all, the editorial is stale in its view of what has happened in this country since the 1983 “Nation at Risk” report. I understand that the Times writes for the country, but big parts of this country have advanced really great standards that would be weakened with the thin gruel that the NGA and CCSSO are pushing.
In essence the Times is arguing that it is better to have academic standards than not to have any. That’s a view that might have been valid back in 1983, but while the Times editorial board slept, many states have spent billions, expended political capital, and engaged citizens in years of debate in order to implement high standards.
States have led the way, and the federal government would be in error, and states would have to be stupid, to let these new proposed common core standards replace all of the states’ effort. Especially in places like Massachusetts, where our standards are higher, and where we have demonstrated what works.
The Globe editorial board on February 3, entitled “Obama’s education plan errs in abandoning ‘proficiency’ goal,” demonstrated far greater knowledge of education reform – which is only normal given this state’s experience and the Globe’s strong hand in supporting hard reforms like high standards, accountability and charter schools. The piece was on the Obama administration’s “retreat”
from a deadline to bring every child in 98,000 public schools to academic proficiency by 2014. What was seen as an attainable goal in the Bush years is now a “utopian goal,’’ according to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
The editorial closes strong:
The Obama administration wants to replace universal proficiency with a mandate for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.’’ What that means isn’t entirely clear yet. But it would be a setback for standards-based education in America if the new requirement relies heavily on so-called “21st century skills’’ – global awareness, media literacy, and critical thinking – that are now the rage in education circles.
…
Massachusetts manages to promote proficiency without punishing students who can’t reach that grade on the challenging MCAS test. Schools are required to create specific “education proficiency plans’’ for such students that include intensive classes in areas of academic weakness. If students show good progress in these classes, they remain on track to graduate, even without achieving MCAS proficiency.
In Massachusetts, where students rank at or near the top of national assessments, educators regularly produce students who are “college or career ready.’’ The Obama administration could learn a thing or two by taking proficiency standards as seriously in Washington as they are taken here.
Let’s hope the new editor of the Globe’s editorial pages Peter Canellos continues to stand strong for what is best for Massachusetts and does not simply buy the view of the Mother Ship in New York.
March 14th, 2010
The MetroWest Daily today also published a different op-ed piece by Ze’ev Wurman and Sandy Stotsky on the national standards. The piece makes the point that the standards effort started out as a voluntary for states. But
President Obama just announced that signing on to once voluntary standards would be a condition for receipt of federal funding, even though the standards aren’t even complete and recent drafts are woefully deficient.
In short, the “Common Core College Readiness” standards wouldn’t get you into college. Our review of a recent draft finds that they fail to meet the requirements of almost all the nation’s state colleges and universities.
The standards are not benchmarked against those in high-achieving countries. As a result, requirements at higher grade levels lag one-to-two years behind academic standards in those countries.
The math drafts cover too few topics to adequately prepare students for college. The standards place topics in the wrong grades and dumb down critical stepping stones to college success.
High school math teachers will look in vain for course standards in Algebra II, pre-calculus, or trigonometry. The drafters deem algebra, which the prestigious National Math Advisory Panel identified as the key to higher math study, as an outdated organizing principle.
The English language arts (ELA) standards aren’t much better. They often show little increase in difficulty from grade to grade and contain few substantive requirements.
Neither the so-called top-level college- and career-readiness ELA standards nor the tests to be based on them would require students to demonstrate familiarity with the major authors and works of American and British literary history. That familiarity is what allows them to be educated readers of the nation’s seminal political documents.
The top-level standards aren’t really academic standards at all, just content-free generic skills.
Some states, like Connecticut and West Virginia, have implemented standards similar to these drafts, with predictable results. Rather than improving student achievement and narrowing achievement gaps, they’ve had exactly the opposite effect. In recent years, Connecticut reversed course and adopted standards modeled on Massachusetts’ content-rich curriculum frameworks.
States like Massachusetts have the most to lose. …
A thoughtful, deliberative process was used to develop strong state standards. The process by which draft national standards have been developed leaves the distinct impression that the U.S. Department of Education, National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers knew they had something to hide when they formed the Common Core State Standards Initiative. For months, no membership lists were available for the standards development committees, even though their work was proceeding.
Rather than giving this important topic the deliberation it deserves, the process is being rushed. Standards are to be developed and implemented in less than a year, and this important work is being undertaken by people who lack the necessary qualifications for writing K-12 math and ELA standards. Recently we learned that only three weeks will be allowed for public feedback before the standards would be finalized.
With Minnesota, Virginia, California and Texas all shaking their heads at this national standards effort, you’ve got to wonder if it is imaginable for state officials to join. After all, these states all have weaker standards than our own. Will we be willing to throw away the nation’s highest standards?
March 14th, 2010
Today’s Worcester Telegram & Gazette editorial underscores that adoption of the national standards needs to remain voluntary. The core of the argument is that the federal government should not have “legal power” over the standards.
Washington is pressing to command a greater role in dictating what American children should learn, and how they should be taught. The result could be a useful adjunct to local and state instruction, or a costly blunder into a thicket of bureaucracy that does real harm to taxpayers and students.
A common set of education standards that draws upon the collective wisdom of educators could present underachieving states and school districts with successful models to emulate, such as those in Massachusetts. But such standards must remain voluntary and advisory. Forcing a national standard onto states would be counterproductive.
The release last week of draft standards by the Common Core State Standards Initiative may seem little more than a conversation starter from a coalition expressing concern about academic achievement coast to coast. It may prove to be something more insidious: the opening salvo in an effort to draw education more firmly under federal control, with an expanding bureaucracy that seizes powers and responsibilities long reserved to states and communities.
In short, what has begun as standards linked to a competition for “Race to the Top” federal education dollars could end with Washington calling the shots, telling states what they must teach their students about history, mathematics, English, art and literature.
…
We see nothing wrong with Uncle Sam whispering some advice in the hallway. But he should be kept outside the classroom itself. State education officials, and the public, should view national standards with a wary eye, and read the fine print.
I may not agree with every last statement in the T&G editorial, but the more I am seeing of the CCSSI effort — with the threat of pulling Title I funds, the lack of transparency, the money players behind the scenes, and the poor quality of the standards — the more I find the T&G’s overall view convincing. It would be so much easier to either set a floor (minimum standards rather than a requirement that the states adopt 85% of the federal standards) or even better provide financial incentives for states to improve on agreed measures (perhaps NAEP and some international benchmarks such as TIMMS or whatever the experts tell us is an appropriate measure).
March 14th, 2010
In the past days, the announcements by Minnesota and Virginia that they are most likely not going to adopt the common core standards drove giant holes right through the wall of consensus that the CCSSO and NGA have tried to maintain.
Ze’ev Wurman, a high-tech executive in Silicon Valley active in developing California’s standards and assessments in the mid-1990s, and Sandy Stotsky, one of the nation’s top experts on academic standards, authored our research, Race to the Middle?, chronicling the numerous weaknesses in previous drafts of the common core standards drafts, as well as the soft conceptual underpinning for the whole effort.
In today’s Boston Globe, they come out swinging on the public comment drafts. This is a must read, as it encapsulates many of the major points. Look for more on this from Pioneer.
March 13th, 2010
Seems our report and the release of the common core standards draft have set off a lot of interest in Massachusetts’ view, and especially in Pioneer’s take on the national standards effort. See Jay Greene’s blog for a long string of comments. Here is a bit of a longish overview of some of the issues we see in this from the Massachusetts and the national perspective. First, the Mass perspective:
1. Standards are the lifeblood of student achievement in public schools; and that includes even those site-based managed schools that are based on parental choice. You all know the stories of charters and voucher programs that don’t deliver the kind of transformational improvement we all want. In MA, our charters for the most part are of a higher quality than elsewhere and far outperform their district counterparts. In part that is because of the great upfront business planning/vetting and accountability/closure processes (yes, regulation), but it is even more because MA has set really high academic standards, assessments, and teacher testing. Charters are effective at attaining goals but you have to set high academic goals for them to be good schools with high-achieving students. Arizona, with its numerous but too often lower quality charter schools, take note.
2. The March common core academic standards drafts, notwithstanding improvements that we see on the math side and also on the ELA side, still fall way short of what Massachusetts or Minnesota have. We have systematically gone through the previous drafts and we have also gone through the latest drafts. We are not there, and not even close. There are lots of problems with specific ELA and Math standards, but there are also two larger points: (1) the wonderful lists included in the appendices are not binding, and (2) the end goal or frame for this whole exercise is the College and Career Readiness standards, which are skills-based gobbledy-gook. And the skills focus will govern the application of the ELA and math standards, and even more so the assessments.
Three broader points:
1. Checker Finn (see his comment on Jay Greene’s blog) is right to lament good-on-paper-only states, but the creation of new federal standards will not help move that any faster. In fact, the development of all new federal standards will likely slow or in fact reverse the process and gains in some states. Perhaps on that score some federal incentives to ensure implementation of state standards would be a more effective approach. After all, the changes entailed by standards are enormous, and they include local implementation by districts of the standards, assessments, and in most cases even teacher testing (which ought to be aligned with the new standards). Were the provisions of NCLB so quickly and so rigorously implemented? 
(Hate to say it, Checker, but federal officials have just as much grease in their hair as state officials.)
2. Why aren’t we moving forward based on an approach where the federal government sets a “floor” (basically minimum requirements, not “word for word” or 85% adoption of national standards as CCSSIers/ Duncan laid down) with, going forward, guarantees of flexibility for states to develop even higher standards? (See the comments of the NY Times’ Sam Dillon in this regard in a New American magazine article.) Or why not provide financial incentives for states to improve on NAEP scores and leave it to them to get it done? Massachusetts is not alone in finding that a much more comfortable fit, rather than letting decisions on standards move to Washington, where we know so much, ahem, good work goes on.
3. There are many reasons to think this is going to die of its own weight, but I’ll stick to two reasons:
a. There are so many jurisdictional trip wires on the path to moving forward that it is bound to blow up. The CCSSO, the NGA and USED have crossed into the jurisdiction of (1) Congress on the use of Title I funds in a coercive fashion; (2) many state legislatures which will want to review the intersection with key provisions of their respective statutory reforms of education; and (3) some boards of education, which will want to preserve their roles in education policy.
b. A number of states that have focused on standards (VA, CA, MN, and TX) have begun peeling off.
We certainly hope that we can list Massachusetts among the states who insist on higher standards than what the NGA/CCSSO have offered us.
March 12th, 2010
Bob Stuart of the News Virginian reports that now
Virginia won’t jump onboard a push for national K-12 standards if it means dumping the state’s standardized test, the governor and other state officials said.
…
Some of the proposed English and math benchmarks already are partially embedded in Virginia’s standardized test, known as the Standards of Learning, or SOL, educators said.
While Gov. Robert F. McDonnell supports the idea of international benchmarks, he said he does not want to substitute the core English and math standards for the SOL’s.
“The commonwealth’s policies have demonstrated a significant commitment to accountability, benchmarks and positive education reform,’’ McDonnell said in a statement. “While we support the development of internationally benchmarked targets, we do not have a desire to substitute the common core standards for our Standards of Learning.”…
“We are 15 years into a successful standards-based reform,’’ Pyle said. “There is no discussion on the Board of Education about abandoning the Standards of Learning.”
The dominoes are starting to fall. See Pioneer’s recent report, Race to the Middle, on the recent draft of the proposed national standards. And look for an additional piece. Soon.
March 12th, 2010
MIT’s Professor Peter Diamond, a well-regarded authority on employee benefits, spent some quality time last year on the Commonwealth’s Special Commission on Pension Reform. I went to every meeting and attempted to chronicle that effort.
One of the lowlights of those meetings was PERAC Executive Director Joseph Connarton’s crude mocking of the Professor at one point. It was all part of the odd dynamic in that room — the central conflict was between Connarton (who is appointed by a board that has several gubernatorial appointees) and Commission Chair Alicia Munnell and Professor Diamond (both appointed by the Governor).
Well, it seems that Diamond is going to be ok. Obama is going to appoint him to the Federal Reserve.
March 12th, 2010
As Sam Dillon of the New York Times noted our opposition to the national standards effort because it would weaken the Massachusetts standards.
And now the opposition builds. Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota punched a hole in the life raft that the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are drifting along on, together with all their fellow travelers, by refusing to join the national standards effort because it would entail weakening the state’s math standards:
“The math portion of the draft K-12 education standards unveiled today would water down Minnesota’s rigorous standards that require students to take algebra by eighth grade. In a hypercompetitive world, Minnesota should not adopt less rigorous standards than we currently have in place.”
Yup. Minnesota is important because it is, like Massachusetts, one of the nation’s leading educational systems. More states to come, and let’s hope Secretary Reville and Commissioner Chester stay true to their word and refuse to adopt anything less rigorous than our great standards.
March 12th, 2010
There is a reasonable accommodation that has to be made as regards the libraries in Boston. Here are a few facts that no one debates:
More and more information, and more and more books, are being viewed online;
There are specific areas and groups who have less access to online resources;
The libraries are currently understaffed, and that will be more so if no changes are made;
The library hours will need to be cut down if no changes are made.
The mayor deserves praise for raising this issue and noting that we have to change with the times. Does that mean shuttering all the libraries. Heck no. We need libraries as physical spaces where children and moms, people who are employed and looking for information, people who are unemployed who are looking to better themselves, and anybody who wants to walk through the stacks can go.
But we also need more resources dedicated to staff, to hours at branches, and to online options in order to keep up with a number of “customers”. The outcry about closing some library branches strikes me as way out of line. Why don’t we take a look at other cities and see how many branch libraries they have per capita. We may want to have more. But we should know what we are doing and deciding. For example, a quick look at Manhattan, a little bitty slice of land with almost 1.7 million people, has 44 branches.
Boston, with three times fewer people, has 26? Again, let’s talk rationally about these things.
We need to figure out what library users need and ensure that we serve all needs, but I think we can do that without all the halberds raised.
March 10th, 2010
Got your attention? The State has put a wealth of disclosure from health insurers and providers up on the web. I lack the time and, frankly, the chops to really get at all the good stuff but I did find a few interesting pieces of disclosure.
In Partners’s disclosure, they note the rates they charge insurers could have been 18% lower in 2008, if government funded programs had covered their costs. (Yes, I am naively assuming that the insurers would pass that savings along to consumers.)
Put another way, Partners had negative operating margins of -33% on Medicare and -44% on Medicaid in 2009.
Also, floating around in the ether around the federal health care reform debate is a proposal to cut Medicare reimbursement by 21% (ah-ha, savings!). That’s not going to happen and if it did, it won’t help things.
So, the hospitals eat these losses and lose money, right? No, privately insured customers end up subsidizing the difference. Puts the “Medicare for All” argument in a different light doesn’t it?
So, am I advocating for a massive expansion of Medicaid and Medicare spending? No, I’m not. What I’m saying is that both these very expensive programs are also getting a hidden subsidy from private payers. Expanding either of them will increase that subsidy.
March 9th, 2010
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