Diane Ravitch

“Diane Ravitch is the rarest of scholars—one who reports her findings and conclusions, even when they go against conventional wisdom and even when they counter her earlier, publicly espoused positions.” Howard Gardner

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education is Diane Ravitch‘s new tome. It is clear, now that I have read it, why reviewers are saying”…this is a very important book”.

‘The Death and Life…” is a well-written, very readable and well-researched. The multiple perspectives Ravitch brings to the debate about school reform makes the book particularly valuable. Diane Ravitch is an academic and education historian with long experience but is best-known for her advocacy of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies as his Assistant Secretary of Education. Her book explores educational reform that she originally supported but now feels was terribly misguided.

Ravitch knows schools need to be improved.

A wave of reforms, in the US, over the last century has not been satisfactory and she says, “the policies we are following today are unlikely to improve our schools…(and are) likely to make the schools less effective”. Ravitch’s book looks at the most recent waves of reforms that she supported but now knows were errors of judgement. Particularly important is her analysis of how data in New York City was misinterpreted in District 2.

This model was adopted by other states and educational precincts based on the flawed belief that the new approach was working miracles (always a good reason for skepticism). You can still read about the ‘success’ of the approach taken by Anthony Alvarado, here and also an interview discussing that ‘progress’. His approach caused much bitterness. In San Diego (chapter 4) 1998-2005, where the Alvarado model was adopted even more forcefully, with a  ’90% turnover rate of principalships’ (p.61) and dismissal of ‘fifteen administrators’ during Alan Bersin’s tenure. There appears to have been no discernible improvement, in fact, there’s evidence to suggest a decline in educational oucomes. With such ‘angry and disaffected…troops’, Ravitch is not surprised. “Trust not cercion is a neccessary precondition for school reform” being her sage point. (p. 66)

Ravitch, in her chapter, ‘The Trouble with Accountability”, says that, ‘tests are necessary and helpful” but when “we define what matters in education only by what is measured, we are in serious trouble”. (p.166)

Ravitch believes that the ‘fundamentals of are to be found in the classroom, the home, the community and the culture, but reformers in our time look for shortcuts and quick answers”. (p.225)

Australian educators, systems leaders and politicians who do not read Ravitch’s book are being irresponsible, considering the implications of some of the current Federal government’s education policy for our children and communities. I implore all interested in education to read this important research and analysis.

Here is an interview (and another) with Ravitch and a very good review by ED Hirsch. Here’s a complete list of reviews.

Please consider reading this important analysis of educational reform and the impact on children and communities.

UPDATE: Diane Ravitch is on twitter.

MySchool: Part II

The MySchool site lists each Australian school in a group of 60 ‘similar’ institutions using the ‘Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage’ (ICSEA). As explained at the site:

The performance of schools on NAPLAN tests is greatly affected by a range of student intake and school location characteristics. When comparing schools, it is important to compare like with like. The My School website allows and encourages comparisons with schools that are statistically similar in terms of a range of factors known to affect test performance.

This has led to Ms Gillard often using the phrase, ‘comparing apples with apples’ in an attempt to validate the data. The line is very much to say, it may not be fair to compare a wealthy school with a one from an impoverished area of the country but just look at the similar schools comparison and you can see how your place is doing. It is a fair and just comparison!

Here is further explanation of how ICSEA is supposed to work.

However, this has been widely criticised with some quite embarrassing media stories about the problems with the statistically reliable measure of similar schools. When you look at the website and see the ‘value’ of a community:

it feels wrong, and terrible. Most schools score between 900-1100 with 1000 being the average. It feels like communities are being ranked and assigned ‘a value’. The justification, of course, is so the school can be compared fairly with another. I doubt this is possible, or desirable, for a range of reasons. Trevor Cobbold, an economist for the Australian Productivity Commission for more than 30 years and convener of the Save Our Schools public education advocacy group, has been trenchant in his opposition to the New York model and wrote a thoughtful article early last year covering a range of these issues.

Like many Australians, I have looked closely at all the schools personally known to me, dating back to my own kindergarten days, including the ones surrounding them. After a while, I started to notice some oddities with the lists of similar schools.

Here’s one, as an example: choose a selective school in NSW. Look at the similar schools and check who they are compared; see if there are other selective schools in the group. The first example I found was ‘similar’ to a regional high school and one on the outskirts of Sydney. Both were comprehensive, co-educational, non-selective schools. It seemed difficult to imagine they were in any way similar. Of course, the selective high school was way above the other similar schools in the group. Adding the selective high school’s data must have made it challenging for other schools in the group to ‘compete’ with an ‘elite’, creamed off by testing in Year 6. Or, have I got this wrong?

What have you observed when looking at similar schools? Please be sensitive and sensible when posting.

What should we, as a nation, be most ashamed about with our education system? Inequality? Party political politics that has led to, what Professor Barry McGaw has said, that poor Australian children are less likely to do well at school than disadvantaged children overseas. I find it difficult to imagine that any Australian can live with that stark comment, priding ourselves, as we do, on having an egalitarian society.

There are many, simple and complex, reasons that this has developed and the MySchool website is going to result in many unintended outcomes. The best possible outcome from the publication of the NAPLAN data at the MySchool website would be government levelling the playfield. Considering how funding works at a federal level and the electoral pressures of continuing to fund wealthy private schools at the rate of the previous Liberal/National government, one hopes that the hidden agenda is to address this funding issue.

The Deputy Prime Minister’s agenda, expressed here in a mid-2008 lecture, is now in a crucial phase and leaves us with many questions. She said, in the lecture:

How can we hope to address the needs of individual students and whole communities if we are not using the best possible information as the basis for our decisions?

We need all of this information, not for the production of crude league tables but to inform a real program to address disadvantage. And we need all of this information, and more, in the public domain to inform parents and teachers in their efforts.

It is only with this information that we can truly assess the work being done by schools, their strengths and their weaknesses. And it is only by having this information we can look at comparable schools, compare results, understand different patterns of disadvantage, identify the best teaching practices and share them.

Ms Gillard will have to be skilful to avoid, what she said of John Howard’s government education policies:

…division (is) the Howard Government’s legacy to the nation in education

Read MySchool: Part 1

MySchool: Part I

I support transparency, governments sharing information with citizens and believe schools must improve by using data, along with a range of other innovations.

I applaud the Federal Government’s Digital and Building Education Revolution policies, while recognising far greater vision is needed, as they go nowhere near far enough in regards to innovation or funding.

I believe that Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard have a passionate understanding that education must improve in Australian schools and are energetically leading, asking schools to re-invigorate and enhance learning opportunities for our communities.

However, the deeply flawed, controversial policy of releasing school data, that was never designed for this purpose, at the MySchool website has the potential to create exactly the opposite conditions needed in schools to develop an educated citizenry, healthy communities, love of life-long learning, quality teaching, a strong economy and development of 21st century curriculum.

 

 

What will happen?

 

What will be the intended and unintended consequences of the Deputy Prime Minister’s reform? I am certain she intends it as a game-changing innovation to improve the quality of schooling and wants to break through the clay layer. Ironically, the data from the US and UK does not support Ms Gillard’s position - which seems to be that the ‘sunlight’ of publicly available data is ‘the best disinfectant’. 

This vexed issue must be discussed intelligently, not with 5 second news bites by politicians, unions and parents filmed at the front gate, picking up their kids. One hopes that the ensuing conflict, brewing between the Federal Government and a range of parents, professional associations and educational unions, will see some intelligent ways forward. Most likely, the NAPLAN tests will be banned across the country and despite Ms Gillard’s suggestion she can organise for them to be invigilated, teachers and parents will lose data that has been used successfully to diagnose student needs. This will be a lose-lose scenario.

The countries that have the most impressive educational data, for example Finland, have a completely different approach and explanation of why they have such quality learning outcomes.

What’s wrong with league tables?

The headlines and stories in Australian newspapers this week confirm what our former director-general in NSW, principals, teachers’ associations, parents, The Greens, citizens of New York  experiencing that city’s misguided reforms and education unions warned would happen – league tables. Slowly at first and then with frightening momentum, schools reduce curriculum experiences for children as teachers scramble to ‘teach to the test’.  Kevin Donnelly, originally an advocate of league tables, recants that position for what one assumes are intellectually honest reasons, rather than partisan politics, considering he was once a Liberal Party staffer.

This article is worth thinking about too, as it muses on the possibility of leagues tables in other areas of our community life? A good idea or not?

I recommend you read Lawrence Lessig’s lengthy, The Perils of Transparency. The article does not discuss transparency in education at all, as this one does but explores, from the perspective of a proponent of the transparency movement, his concerns at what is being unleashed. If you do not have the time or inclination to read the entire article, here’s a few important quotes:

Reformers rarely feel responsible for the bad that their fantastic new reform effects. Their focus is always on the good. The bad is someone else’s problem. It may well be asking too much to imagine more than this. But as we see the consequences of changes that many of us view as good, we might wonder whether more good might have been done…

The problem, however, is that not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it…people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response.

This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand…is almost always less than the amount of time required.

We see the attention-span problem everywhere, in public and private life. Think of politics, increasingly the art of exploiting attention-span problems–tagging your opponent with barbs that no one has time to understand, let alone analyze.

Considering the above comment, one hopes you have time to read the entire article by Lessig.

Some more reading on the issues of league table, standardised testing and accountabilty regimes can be found here.

I look forward to your comments and analysis. What is particularly of interest are thoughts on what may happen to 21st century skills and the stalled movement towards genuine personalised learning?

 

Read MySchool: Part II

Trends

Older internet users are catching up with Generation Y in the US it appears. Wonder what the Australian trends are in this area?

Also, the latest data on German online habits reveals that 26 million German Internet users viewed more than 3 billion videos online in May 2008. That really is a staggering number of videos but American usage dwarfs this for the same month. Look at the 1 billion increase in videos watched from April to May in the USA.