Poverty, Shmoverty! Part II

As I said before, Amanda Ripley misstated Diane Ravitch's claims about international comparisons of poverty; she doesn't seem to understand a low-poverty district still has poor kids, so it and others like it can be compared to a low-poverty country, which also has poor kids.

But Ripley also has a problem with how the US traditionally defines children in poverty:

The free/reduced-price lunch figure measures the number of kids from families making 185% of federal poverty line, right? So that means a family of 4 needs to make less than about $40,000 to qualify. Under this measure, roughly 40% of American kids qualify as “poor.”

OK. Then the other measure is the measure usually used in international comparisons of poverty. That is the percentage of kids from families earning less than 50% of the median income in that country. (In the US, this comes out to about 22%. NOT 40%.) 

[...]

Conversely, PISA’s own measure of socio-economic background, the one you can find detailed in Table II.3.1 in PISA Volume II, offers a more valid comparison. And yet Ravitch does not cite it—because it does not show what she wants it to show.

I have been to Finland, Korea and Poland working on this book, and I have the luxury of spending hours reading PISA results. Most writers do not. They just repeat what Ravitch and others say. And so the magical thinking continues.

Well, since you spent "hours reading PISA results," maybe you remember this (p. 57 - WARNING! SUPER-DUPER WONKINESS FOLLOWS!):

As Figure II.3.2 shows, the gradient line for many countries is roughly linear. Although the OECD average in the index of curvilinearity is -1 and statistically significant, it can be considered as practically linear. In some countries, however, the gradients are steep at low levels of economic, social and cultural status, and tend to level off at higher status levels, signalling that there is progressively less associated advantage in student performance at higher levels of socio-economic background. This phenomenon is moderate in the Slovak Republic, Norway, Japan, Iceland and Hungary, and is also visible in Finland, Ireland, Poland, Italy, Denmark and Sweden and in the partner economy Hong Kong-China. However, in another group of countries, most notably in the United States and the Netherlands but also in Chile and Canada and the partner countries and economies Panama, Kyrgyzstan, Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Colombia, Indonesia and Tunisia, the gradients are relatively gentle at low levels of socio-economic background, becoming steeper at higher levels (Table II.3.2). In these countries, the greater the socio-economic advantage, the greater the marginal increase observed in student performance, and among students from socio-economically less advantaged backgrounds, there are small differences in performance. [emphasis mine]

In other words: in the USA - more than any other country in the OECD - way more wealth means way larger increases in learning.

Now, I've read Diane Ravitch. I've heard her speak on several occasions. She even answers my tweets now and then. And I am here to tell you, this is exactly what she is talking about. Socio-economic status matters; in the US, it matters a lot. Are you seriously going to try to tell me that it's the poor quality of more-affluent American schools that's responsible?

Because Ripley says "rich kids" in the US do poorly compared to "rich kids" in other countries:

The most respected international tests of teenagers around the world (PISA) has consistently shown that our most-affluent kids do not perform as well as the most-affluent kids in the highest-performing countries around the world (even though our rich kids are richer than their rich kids). PISA measures students’ economic, social and cultural status to get a sense of their socio-economic background. In reading, American kids’ best subject, our most affluent students still rank behind the most affluent kids in six other countries. (Even though we spend far more money per student than all of those countries.)

Rich Kids Ranking (PISA Reading 2009)

1. New Zealand

2. Korea

3. Belgium

4. Finland

5. Canada

6.  Australia

OK, back to that beloved PISA report; Ripley took the above from p.165. You know how the report defines "rich kids"? Top 10%? Top %5? 1%?

Nope: top 25%. You think maybe there's a little variation in that group?

Remember: that same report says that in the US, your test scores go higher faster the wealthier you are. So it's quite conceivable our top 10% most-affluent kids - or 5%, or 1% - are killing it on these tests. Do we know? Of course not. But that doesn't stop Ripley from believing - or not.

Look, I could do this all night, but here's the takeaway: there is an indisputable correlation between poverty and student achievement. You can try to bad-mouth our schools all day long, but that's the fact. We have huge income inequity in this country, and it's affecting our kids. It's ridiculous to expect the schools to mitigate all of this.

One last thing message for Ripley: argument by authority is really, really boring. I don't care if you've been to the North Pole; Ravitch has a valid point in her comparison, and your floundering around trying to play "gotcha" is not going to be validated by your passport.

ADDING: I'm sure this is all the fault of bad schools in affluent districts as well.

Poverty, Shmoverty!

I came across this post by Amanda Ripley in my reformy-type blog travels; she is taking on Diane Ravitch's claim that the USA's relatively poor showing in international test comparisons can be blamed, in large part, on poverty:

Ravitch’s claim can be traced back to a small table on page 15 of a government report that broke down the PISA results based on the percentage of kids who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When you do that, you see that kids at U.S. schools where less than 10% of the students qualify for free/reduced-price lunch score on average very high—indeed higher than the average for, say, Finland.

But then she makes the magical leap. She says that since Finland has less than 10% poverty, and those schools do, too, then…ta da! Our low-poverty schools are best in the world—when you compare rich kids to rich kids.

Here’s the problem: she is using 2 different definitions of “poverty.”

The free/reduced-price lunch figure measures the number of kids from families making 185% of federal poverty line, right? So that means a family of 4 needs to make less than about $40,000 to qualify. Under this measure, roughly 40% of American kids qualify as “poor.”

OK. Then the other measure is the measure usually used in international comparisons of poverty. That is the percentage of kids from families earning less than 50% of the median income in that country. (In the US, this comes out to about 22%. NOT 40%.)

In other words, Ravitch is comparing the test scores of kids from families that earn more than $40,000 in the U.S. to the scores of all kids in Finland (where the median household income is about $40,000).

I don’t have tenure, but even I know you can’t mix and match data like this. Unless you are really, really desperate to find a certain answer, that is. [emphasis mine]

Except that Ravitch isn't doing this. She's comparing US schools with fewer than 10% of kids in poverty to other countries. Guess what? These schools still have poor kids; presumably, they took the tests too. Not all of the kids in these schools have families that make over $40k. So what's the problem with the comparison?

Now, if we're going to have a discussion about definitions of poverty around the world, fine, let's do that. We can talk about our vast income inequity and lack of universal health care. We can talk about how much narrower the distribution wealth is in other countries than the US. We can talk about all of the  societal infrastructure other countries have that we don't. We could even talk about how bogus it is to compare spending per pupil averages in different countries when the costs of teacher benefits are included in the US average but not in countries with universal health care.

But let's stop this nonsense about how poverty doesn't really matter much. It's always embarrassing when folks try to make the case.

Happy 20,000 Blue Jersey!

Blue Jersey just posted its 20,000th diary, a remarkable accomplishment. Let me be the first to say congratulations!

I've been writing at BJ for a while now, but haven't really played up my connection, which is a mistake on my part. Being a part of the community at BJ has really helped me sharpen my writing and strengthen my political chops. BJ has a great stable of featured writers, and the regular diarists and commenters are a smart, savvy set.

Blue Jersey would be nothing were it not for Rosi Efthim, a true force of nature. Her tireless work has made the site the premiere destination for progressive opinion in the Garden State. You'd probably be surprised at the amount of work that goes into BJ, and most of it is hers; we all owe her a bundle.

I try to do a few pieces a week for BJ that are separate from my usual screeds here at JJ. And BJ remains the home of "Ed Reform 101," a concise reference for fighting back against the (ebbing?) tide of corporate education reform. Although most of it is under my name, it was a true team project between me, Rosi, and Kendal James, another great writer at BJ.

So Happy 20,000, Blue Jersey; you don't look a day over 10,000!

Happy 20,000 Blue Jersey!

Teachers Iz Stoopider!

The last I spoke of Laura Waters, she was playing a particularly ugly game of innuendo. I guess that's the sort of stuff B4K likes, because she recently left a guest post on their blog:

In a related article today, Matthew Di Carlo in The Shanker Blog notes that the “cognitive ability” among female students who choose teaching as a career has declined over time:

An important 2004 longitudinal analysis of the trend in teachers’ cognitive ability (as measured by math/reading tests) suggests that the proportion of female students who both chose teaching and scored in the top ten percent on these tests was around 15-17 percent in the late 1950s, compared with roughly 7-8 percent in the early 1990s (also see here). There were similar, though less pronounced, patterns among female students scoring in the top 70-90 percent. This suggests, in other words, that the highest-achieving (at least as measured by these aptitude tests) young women are more likely to choose other professions than they used to be.

Di Carlo also notes that part of the decline of teacher cognitive ability, at least among females, is due to the expanding opportunities for women in the work force. (The choices aren’t just social workers, teachers, or nurses anymore.) Ohanian, however, attributes much of the decline to the lack of competition for higher salaries, since compensation for teachers is frozen into salary guides that disregard effectiveness in the classroom. He points out the much-publicized case of Megan Sampson, “a public school teacher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, [who] was laid off because of lack of seniority, even though she received Wisconsin’s outstanding first-year teacher award.”

Di Carlo is no anti-unionist. His blog is funded by AFT and he describes his mission (on the blog's homepage) as advocating for “teacher unions as advocates for quality;" understandably, he posits no link between the decline in teacher quality and the lack of differentiation between great teachers and lousy ones. But he and Ohanian (who hails not only from UCLA but also from the Conservative American Enterprise Institute) dovetail in their agreement on national problems in attracting smart and ambitious candidates to the teaching profession.

Go that? Matt DiCarlo is intellectually dishonest, because he admits the teacher corps has become less bright, but won't make the case that unionization is at fault.

Except DiCarlo says this in the very same post - IMMEDIATELY after the above quote:

(The results also suggest that the likelihood of choosing teaching may have actually increased slightly among top-scoring men, though samples were too small to get very precise estimates.) 

It is, however, very important to note that, while there was this change in the likelihood of teaching at the top of the “cognitive ability” distribution, there was only a negligible decline in the scores of the average new female teacher over this same time period. This suggests that the decrease in the likelihood of teaching among the highest-scoring female students may have been offset by a decrease in the likelihood of choosing teaching among the lowest-scoring students. Other analyses have reached similar conclusions.* [emphasis mine]

So Waters says DiCarlo says teachers iz getting moor stoopider. Problem is, he never said that. But he did say this:

Nevertheless, overall, the evidence supporting the conventional wisdom that there has been a substantial decline in the “quality” of the average teacher over time is much less clear than is sometimes assumed. This of course does not change anything as far as the desirability of improving current and future teachers, but it does suggest we might be more careful about making blanket statements regarding the trend in “quality” among a huge workforce like teachers, and about offering simplistic explanations for incredibly complicated trends in educational outcomes.

Yeah, we might be careful - but Laura Waters won't.

If I have the time and the stomach, I may deal with the rest of the post later. But understand that this is really nothing more than the latest round of teacher bashing, wrapped up in psuedo-academic language.

Hypocrisy One

Chris Christie, 12/14/11:

Gov. Chris Christie deflected a question today on whether he used his power this week to extract revenge on State Sen. Richard Codey — but not before taking another jab at the former governor.

“What I’ve learned about legislators over time, and particularly about Sen. Codey, is that they seem to be much more worried about the perks of the job than they are about actually getting the job done,” Christie said today at news conference in Pennsauken. [emphasis mine]

Oh, that's just awful. Good for you to point that out, Governor.

Oh, by the way, have you been to any of your kids' games at their private schools lately, followed by a nakedly political meeting?

All on the taxpayers' dime, of course. Christie's not worried about the perks of his job, because he brazenly takes them whenever he wants.

Does NJ DOE Commish Cerf REALLY Want A Hearing?

There's a pissing contest going on right now between Governor Christie and NJ Senator Ron Rice. Christie wants a confirmation hearing for his ACTING Education Commissioner, Chris Cerf, but Rice is holding up the process. So Christie is holding up judicial nominations in Rice's county in retaliation; it's already affecting trials. And now former Governor and current Senator Dick Codey is being dragged into the battle.

What I fail to understand is why Christie is so hellbent on getting a hearing for Cerf. The ugly truth is that the ACTING Commissioner is likely to be asked some very pointed and embarrassing questions at a confirmation hearing. For example:

• Why was your tenure as President of Edison Learning such an unmitigated educational and financial disaster?
• How did you wind up using money exclusively from the Florida teachers pension to fund a white knight for Edison? How was Jeb Bush involved in the deal?
• What was your personal take from the deal? Will you release your personal tax returns to confirm your account?
• How is it possible you were not aware of the New York score inflation controversy while you worked at the NYC Department of Education?
• You graduated from the Broad Superintendent's Academy in 2004; what further contacts have you had with the Academy and Eli Broad? What do you think about the questionable track records of other Broadies like Jean-Claude Brizzard of Rochester and Maria Goodloe-Johnson of Seattle? 
• If you believe standardized test scores should be used in teacher evaluations, why didn't you inform all of the teachers you were using them in a program in New York City in 2008?
• Why did you hold an interest in Edison Learning - a clear conflict of interest - several months after you were appointed to your position at NYC DOE? Why did you wait until the day before you were about to be outed by a parents' group to divest yourself?
• Why is the report into your Edison stock scandal and a subsequent quid pro quo donation so heavily redacted? Do you agree with the report that you violated the law? 
• Were you personally in charge of the NYC DOE "truth squad" that taped and kept research files on critics like Diane Ravitch? Did you feed the information from those files to the press? Are you keeping such files on your current critics now? Will you release any information you've gather freely or will an OPRA request need to be filed?
• Will you apologize to Dr. Bruce Baker of Rutgers for your mischaracterization of his views?
• What qualifications do Derrell Bradford, Shelley Skinner, Kim Chorba, and Josh Pruzansky have to judge charter school applications? Why did the NJ DOE want to keep their names secret? Did your deputy, Carlie Bolger, say she would "go to the mat" to protect their identities?
• Why did you give a consulting contract to fellow Broadie William Cox instead of drawing up an RFP from established people in the field? Did you vet Cox's ties to McGraw-Hill, a major standardized testing company?
• Why did you ask the Star-Ledger not to publish a story about your ties to Global Education Advisors (a company you founded), which received a $500,000 contract to push charter schools in Newark, funded by the Broad Foundation? (I guess this one kind of answers itself...)
• What is your brother Randy's connection to Global Education Advisors? Is he the CFO? Why would he say he had no knowledge of the company if he was listed as an officer on its website?
• This year, you publicly defended Rupert Murdoch, who is the boss of your former NYC boss, Joel Klein. Do any of Murdoch's businesses have current or pending contracts with the State of New Jersey?
• Do you believe it is appropriate for Larrie Reynolds, Mt. Olive superintendent, to also be president of Sangari Active Science, your former company? Do you think it's appropriate for him to solicit business for a private for-profit alternative education provider? Do you have any current financial ties in Sangari? When did you divest yourself from that company?
• Why has it taken so long to get data about charter school performance released?
• Why did you appoint an expert for SFRA review who makes up graphs that have no connection to actual data?
• Did you think it was appropriate for Deputy Commissioner Smarick to serve on the board of 50 CAN, a "reformy" advocacy organization, while employed at NJ DOE?

I'm sure I've left quite a few things out. And I haven't even addressed Cerf's highly questionable ideas about education. Or his ridiculous "pilot" on teacher evaluations. But this will do for a start.

Looking at this list, I'm tempted to ask Senator Rice to drop his hold. Let's get all this out in the open, once and for all. I think the people of New Jersey would like to get to know their ACTING Education Commissioner a little bit better, don't you?

"If I Were a Clueless Old White Guy..."

I'd write a tone-deaf, dumb-ass column like this:

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently.   I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city.  Even the worst have their best.  And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities.  Getting good grades is the key to having more options.  With good grades you can choose different, better paths.  If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.

So when you poor black kids show up to school hungry and from a home without books and parents with little economic opportunity and a neighborhood with no public or private infrastructure and little public safety and 400 years of racism breathing down your little five-year-old necks, just suck it up, OK? Because we all know every five-year-old is cognitively capable of clearly seeing how his current actions affect his future, right?

And I would use the technology available to me as a student.  I know a few school teachers and they tell me that many inner city parents usually have or can afford cheap computers and internet service nowadays.  That because (and sadly) it’s oftentimes a necessary thing to keep their kids safe at home then on the streets.

Of course, "scholars" at wingnut-welfare think tanks will tell you that you aren't really poor anyway if you do buy this stuff.

We then get a laundry list of all the great, free* software out there on the interwebs that poor, black kids can use to overcome all of life's little obstacles. Of course, while they're doing that, the wealthier kids in the 'burbs will be going to modern schools with small classes and playing sports and going to scouts and taking music lessons and going to the orthodontist and getting paid tutoring and having dinner with their families because Mom and/or Dad don't have to work the night shift at Wendy's.

But Oprah's a billionaire, so obviously anyone can overcome all of this inequity - just keep dreamin' that dream!

Is this easy?  No it’s not.  It’s hard.  It takes a special kind of kid to succeed.  And to succeed even with these tools is much harder for a black kid from West Philadelphia than a white kid from the suburbs.  But it’s not impossible.  The tools are there.  The technology is there.  And the opportunities there.

See, if you just learn to consume enough of the right stuff, you'll live the American Dream too! Because that's what it's all about: consuming your way to success. Our country might not have been founded on the idea, and instead on quaint notions like brotherhood and equality and the rule of law. But don't worry; we've got plenty of folks around these days working to change that.

Once you've consumed enough, you can then escape poverty to become one of the digerati who live in total denial about how damn near impossible we've made it for kids living in chronic poverty to succeed. And you too can salve your guilty conscience by making a fetish of technology, as if it were a substitute for common human decency.

President Obama was right in his speech last week.  The division between rich and poor is a national problem.  But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality.   It’s ignorance.

Got that right, chief.

* If it's supported by ads or a gateway to premium packages, it ain't free.

Voucher Mendacity

The school voucher proponents are just so brazen in the way they twist the facts:

When critics worried that OSA would divert funds from local public schools, it is a revenue-neutral bill that was revised to pass on the savings as well as the costs to local school districts.

Although school districts bear the costs of their students’ scholarships, they also avoid the costs of educating those students. Since the average school district spends $18,000 on each student, districts will save at least $8,000 for each scholarship recipient in elementary or high school, respectively.

The money saved by OSA will allow school districts to invest even more money on the remaining students. [emphasis mine]

Here's the fiscal estimate prepared by the Office of Legislative Services for the OSA bill. It couldn't be more clear: this bill will take away money from school districts. It's completely disingenuous to call vouchers "revenue-neutral."

Further, the districts most likely will NOT save money from OSA. Why?

1. The private schools will take the children who do not have special needs; in other words, the children who cost the most to educate. Every "cheap" student a private school takes raises the average per pupil cost of the district.
2. As OSA says, the district may be on the hook for transportation costs.
3. The district will lose any economies of scale, because it costs just as much to educate 18 kids in a class as it does to educate 20.

Oh, and by the way: all this talk about "saving" kids would be great if it were actually true. But vouchers do not increase student achievement, and private schools do no better than public schools in educating kids.

If you want to send your kid to private school, great. If the wealthy want to subsidize scholarships to private schools, great. Do it on your own dime.

2 Legit To Quit

I'm going to bring this up one more time:

Apparently, you still can't mention me at B4K:

OK, that's their right. But if I'm not "legitimate," why waste space and time on an entire essay debating me point-by-point? I mean, either you're going to engage me or you're not; it seems a little fickle to pick and choose when you want to take my arguments on. 

Perhaps B4K could let their readers know if the only problem they have with my "legitimacy" is that I write under a pseudonym. If that's the case, would they allow folks to post my work on their Facebook page if I wrote under my given name?

Just curious.

Don't Believe Everything You Read

One of the hallmarks of our modern discourse is that there are those who hold a particular position so dear (usually on the right, but not always) that they not only block out masses of contradictory evidence; they jump on the first bit of "research" that comes along that comports with their world view, no matter how shoddy it may be.

Case in point: B4K is jumping for joy that a study "proves" money doesn't matter in our schools:

A NEW STUDY: MORE RESOURCES DO NOT MEAN BETTER SCHOOLS

Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools

12/12/11

Amid the debate on education reform in New Jersey, we often hear assertions that more resources are better: more teachers for smaller class sizes, more overall spending on schools, continued pay increases for teachers for advanced degrees, and so on.  Support for such policies is claimed to be “research-based” and thus apparently beyond question.  However, new, credible research sheds some doubt on these longstanding assertions.  As New Jersey embarks on devising new education reform legislation, our citizens and politicians should take notice. 

A recent working paper by two Harvard professors, Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer, is appropriately titled, “Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City” (National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2011) (here). While not yet an official NBER publication, their exhaustive study collected “unparalleled data” on the inner workings of 35 New York City charter schools employing a wide range of educational strategies to determine what separated effective schools from the others.   Their findings are eye-opening.

The authors conclude that traditional measures long held out to be determinative of “good” schools class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with advanced degrees – are not correlated with school effectiveness.   In fact, the data suggest that increasing such resource-based inputs may actually lower school effectiveness.

I knew it! I knew that money couldn't possibly make a difference in our schools! I mean, 30 years of conservative propaganda primed me to believe it, so it must be true!

Oh, wait...

But I’ll be honest here. I find this Dobbie/Fryer piece infuriating on many levels, some of which are simply entirely inexcusable (and, as noted below, this is the 3rd in a row, so my patience is running thin).  The basic structure of their study, as far as I can tell from the disturbingly sparse documentation in their working paper,  is that they conducted a survey of NYC charter schools to gather information on practices (the no excuses stuff) and on expenditures and class size. Then, they evaluated the correlations between individual factors (and an aggregate index of them) among traditional and no excuses measures, and alternative forms of their charter effect estimates.

Let’s be really clear here – simply testing the correlation between spending and an outcome measure – comparing higher and lower spending schools and their outcomes to see if the higher spending schools have higher effectiveness measures – WOULD TELL US LITTLE OR NOTHING, EVEN IF THE DATA WERE ACCURATE, PRECISE AND WELL DOCUMENTED. Which, by the way, they are not.

Oh, dear - you mean an incomplete and poorly documented working paper about 35 charter schools in NYC may not be applicable to the general student population? And that maybe we shouldn't make radical changes to education based on this research?  Who ever would have guessed...

I've made the parallel between global warming research and ed reforminess before, and I think it really is apt. Common sense alone would suggest that you can't pour billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere without something bad happening. The research overwhelmingly confirms this. But every now and then,  someone with good credentials says something to the contrary, and BAM! Fox News is off and running. Meanwhile, the planet burns up.

In the same way: I don't know how anyone could look you in the face and tell you the amount of money you spend on schools really doesn't matter, and could in fact make things worse. We just had a case in Colorado where the judge effectively told an "expert" making this claim that he was flying in the face of both the overwhelming evidence against him and simple reason.

But the folks who have their hearts set on reforminess will believe what they want to believe. And they will always be able to find "evidence" to back up their views; that's what think tanks are for, apparently.

But not all "evidence" is the same. Caveat lector.