The Fruit Loops Dashboard
I have a hefty appetite for visual expressions of school data. So it was with a hungry eye that I saw the EdSource visual representation of the new CDE Dashboard results. I clicked … but quickly lost my appetite. Five colors. Six columns. But no numbers. The invitation to compare schools seems tempting, until you try. What does it mean [...]
The logical flaws with identifying students “at-risk”
Every time I hear the term “at-risk,” I wince. It’s usually an attempt by educators to evade saying that students whose parents aren’t well-off or college-educated, or who speak Spanish at home, are likely to score lower on tests or drop out. But recently I did more than wince when I read this article in the NY Times (10/11/24), “Nevada Evaluates [...]
Are CAASPP results sound enough when deciding whether a charter school lives another five years?
Today, California’s Dept. of Education fields a test (CAASPP) that educators are told is good for almost everything. Like the Veg-O-Matic, a kitchen appliance sold on television in the 1960s, its promoters claim it is good for finding out to what degree classrooms, schools and districts full of students in grades 3-8 have reached grade level mastery of reading, writing [...]
California’s Charter Authorizers Are Taking Measurement Seriously: CCAP Conference Observations
I returned recently from the annual conference of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals, a hardy band of brave education leaders who have shouldered a great deal of responsibility even while being handed too few resources to do their jobs. In effect, they are expected to create both guardrails and guidance to keep 1,300 charter schools on the road to improvement. [...]
Standards for Evidence Missing in Action: Charters and Authorizers Left in the Lurch
Educators have standards for nearly everything. Why not data? Why not evidence? With so many people feeding so much data about so many education factors into so many computers, no wonder we are seeing evidence of vastly different quality across the K-12 landscape. Certainly, not all evidence is of equal quality. Just as in cooking or construction or woodworking, both [...]
The Charade of Planning: SPSAs, LCAPs and Soviet Five-Year Plans
Could we get “real” on the topic of planning? Planning in too many districts is a rote exercise to give higher-ups the paperwork that is required by state and federal law. It is too often a cut-and-paste compliance festival designed to exhaust the readers of those plans with over a hundred pages of numbers and words that too often sound [...]
The CDE’s Dashboard Leads to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party
I returned a few weeks ago from the California Charter School Association conference, where I was among 3,000 educators brave enough to lead 1,200 charter schools in the not-so-golden state. I admire their courage in facing the Alice-in-Wonderland rules of the California Department of Education’s (CDE). Those rules, plus the deeply flawed Dashboard, make it more likely that charter authorizers [...]
As school board trustees make sense of test results, supes have an opportunity to build a common view
California’s CAASPP test results were released statewide on October 18. All over the state, many of the 4,500-plus school board trustees are sitting down with their trusted sources at their side, trying to make sense of it all. Some will rely on reporters' interpretations. Others will ask their superintendent for guidance. Fewer still will request a board study session. Isn't [...]
Why the popularity of “Street Data” worries me
I am troubled by signs of growing opposition to testing. One indicator is the popularity of the book by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, Street Data (Corwin, 2021). The book has been ranked on Amazon as either the #1 or #2 seller in the category of education administration for months. In Amazon’s larger category of education books, at the end [...]
One reason we misunderstand progress of emerging bilingual students
Educators almost everywhere rely on classifying and sorting their students. If a child is seven years old, she’s a second-grader. If a child’s parents earn less than 1.8 times the federal poverty standard, that student gets reduced price meals. If a student’s parents speak Spanish or Tagalog at home, and the student scores below a threshold score on the English [...]
The “do-or-die” renewal moment for charter schools requires better evidence
I’m back from the desert of Palm Springs, where I had the pleasure in mid-June to address the annual conference of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals (CCAP), and listen to the authorizers discuss their work. Many see themselves as school improvement leaders, who are really in the continuous improvement business. Like doctors, they aim to help their schools to prosper. [...]
Data about California schools’ vital signs have been vanishing. Why?
Today we know less about California schools than we knew ten years ago. The list of data missing in action includes data about courses taught, class sizes, teachers and administrators, student-counselor ratios, librarians and the college-going rate of high school graduates. As a result, Californians are no longer able to answer questions like these: What is the ratio of students-per-counselor [...]
The reading debate is an opportunity for education to become a modern profession
The errors of the medical profession became visible only when evidence of harm from cigarettes was accepted and interpreted correctly. In John Hattie’s book, Visible Learning, he asks whether teaching “… can shift from an immature to a mature profession …” He comes to this stunning question after looking at the practice of medicine in the 1890s, and [...]
When K-12 leaders make mistakes, who takes note?
[This first appeared in Andy Rotherham's blog, "EduWonk" on February 15, 2023.] I’ll confess, mistakes, errors and miscalculations fascinate me. I find they hold rich opportunities to learn. The errors made by district and site leaders, their origins and the learning lessons they offer became the heart of a book I wrote during the pandemic, together with my friend Jill [...]
See where students struggle (or succeed) with reading
You are looking at a map of the reading gap. These red and blue counties estimate elementary students’ reading skills. Why is weaker reading so prevalent in some states, and stronger reading in others? Why does weaker reading (red) dominate in California, Arizona and New Mexico? Why is Indiana solidly blue (stronger reading)? Why is Texas a mix of red [...]
How sound is your evidence of reading? The case for multiple measures.
You think your 1st or 2nd or 3rd graders are learning to read. But how do you know that's true? More to the point, how confident are you that the test evidence you're using is sound, and how certain are you that your interpretation of that evidence is correct? Well, if you are relying on one test alone, you are [...]
When reporters misrepresent NAEP test results, misunderstandings spread far and wide
The New York Times assigned reporter Sarah Mervosh to make sense of the 2022 results of the Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Her headline (which may have been written by the copy desk) twisted results into a New York sized pretzel: “The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Reading and Math.” What the pandemic [...]
The hazards of labeling, or what the 2×4 can teach us about our words
How quickly our words get away from us. We sometimes sow the seeds of misunderstandings when we use words that don’t really mean what we think they mean. In a field as jargon-filled as education, perhaps we should slow down and choose our words more carefully. Consider the term “2x4.” This is a familiar phrase to carpenters. It describes the [...]
Now published … “Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs”
What did I do with my pandemic time? I called my friend, veteran school board trustee Jill Wynns, and asked her if she'd like to join me and write a book about the 101 ways that schools' vital signs are mismeasured and misunderstood. The two of us have spent a total of over 50 years in the school world. So [...]
Half of lagging readers suffer from dyslexia, and the other half from dysteachia
Lagging readers are visible in every school and district. But how many of your second- or third-grade students are lagging one year or more? If your answer is about 20 to 30 out of every 100 third-graders are behind grade level by a year or more, I would not be surprised. But would you be surprised to discover that half [...]
