Read, Circulate, and Discuss

The recent $40 million failure of the ILEARN test has prompted the “Red for Ed” rally scheduled for November 19, 2019 at the State House when the General Assembly gathers for its annual organization day. Among other things, the movement is asking for schools and teachers to be “held harmless” from the consequences that the legislature has tied to such testing. That would include not penalizing schools for performance on this test, stopping the clock on the time given to “failing schools” to improve (since this testing year was essentially wasted), and not penalizing teachers based on data generated by this test. 

It is also a good time to revisit our overall approach to education policy in Indiana. What we have now isn’t really a “system” per se in that its component parts don’t work well together. Rather than our current ideologically driven approach based on what policymakers think ought to work, we should evaluate the systems and curricula that actually are working in places like Singapore, Canada, Finland, and Japan and adapt their approaches as best we can to Indiana. Ultimately, a good educational system will have to be built on the quality of its teachers. That means attracting the best and the brightest high school students to the teaching colleges. It means preparing those incoming teachers to teach the curriculum which, in turn, requires a stable approach to education. And, once trained, it means retaining those teachers.  

There has been some criticism of the Red for Ed rally and its goals by school privatization enthusiasts. But it has mostly been hand waving. Shane Phipps, writing at Inside Education does a pretty good job of addressing some of these criticisms. 

At root, there is a lack of appreciation as to what a world-class educational system provides and possibly a lack of ambition by policymakers. Can we afford one? We can’t afford not to have one. Opportunity is slipping away from Hoosiers because we’re allowing our foundation to erode. The high stakes testing and privatization approach that have been in place for the better part of a generation have put us in a downward spiral. Teachers have been scapegoats and their salaries have remained mostly stagnant as their burdens have grown.

When it comes to education, we are too often shrewd with our pennies but foolish with our dollars. This is an investment. As Caleb Mills, the father of Indiana’s common school system observed in the 19th century, a good education system adds to the social, literary, and intellectual capital of the citizens and adds materially to the real and substantial happiness of everyone. Mills said that we must “convince the ignorant man that knowledge would increase his happiness and satisfy the prejudiced man that he has only misapprehended the best means of securing his own welfare.” In 1848, a referendum was put to the people of the State, asking “are you in favor of free schools?” The result was narrowly in favor, but it was significant that the opposition came chiefly from the areas with the highest level of illiteracy. The people with better educations recognized the tremendous opportunity provided by public education. 

There is a charitable, moral argument for paying to educate your neighbors. But, even on the level of simple self-interest, we have an interest in the proper education of all who are socially and politically connected to us. Better schools lead to (as Mills pointed out) “more valuable real estate, productive capital, lightened public burdens, increased social enjoyments, and security of possession.” Investment in education pays further dividends in reduced expenses from crime and costs of punishment.  What’s more, for most areas, the school serves as the nucleus of the social fabric. It’s an important part of what turns a collection of individuals into a community. 

Mills again: “There is but one way to secure good schools, and that is to pay for them.” How much should we pay for them? As much as they are worth.  Taxes are absolutely part of the equation. This will require some courage from legislators as taxes inevitably cause initial dissatisfaction. Per Mills, “a legislature that would wait for a harmony of views before action would never affect anything great and noble.” As with any investment, benefits come later.  Politicians who crow about surplus funds and low taxes while we are unable to attract and retain teachers should receive the same reception as a homeowner who brags about a shiny new car and a healthy bank account while the foundations of his home are crumbling. The State has taken over the business of funding schools. Locals lack the power to move the needle very much. If we want good schools, we will have to persuade the legislators we have or get new ones. Because the State made the decision to swallow the elephant of public education, it now represents about half of the state budget. As such, there is a strong argument to be made that education should be a central focus of every legislator and that the General Assembly should be judged based on the resulting quality of Indiana schools. In 2021, as the Governor takes total control of the State’s education system (by virtue of the Superintendent of Public Instruction becoming an appointed position), a gubernatorial candidate’s education bona fides should be one of the electorate’s primary concerns.

Ultimately, we need to produce the best teachers at our institutes of higher learning and pay teachers commensurate to their training and value. We are entrusting them to instill in our children the capacity to be productive citizens. What’s that worth? To attract and retain teachers of the highest caliber, we need to recognize what society gains by attracting the best and the brightest to the profession. Mills describes the situation in the 1840s:  “What inducement had a youth of commanding talents, noble and generous aspirations, to spend years of time and hundreds of dollars [19th century money] to fit himself for an employment that would not command a higher compensation than was given for services requiring no intellectual training or moral culture?” The young men you would have wanted as teachers chose instead to become preachers and lawyers. History may not repeat, but it certainly seems to rhyme. 

The privatization fad isn’t working. Voucher and charter schools do not produce better results than traditional public schools and there is some evidence that they produce worse outcomes. A fractured approach to education cannot produce consistent results. If we’re looking to be responsible with our money, we can’t afford to have education dollars sucked up by self-dealing charter management companies with opaque accounting or vouchers sent to private institutions with books closed to the public. We can’t spend tens of millions of dollars on tests with arbitrary faulty metrics. The reason we’re having so much trouble with the tests and vouchers and charters is because the arguments for them were always pretexts. The tests weren’t designed to provide feedback to improve education — they are designed as cudgels for proclaiming that public schools are failing (and to redirect public money to testing companies.) Vouchers weren’t designed to give poor children attending public schools a way out — they were designed to subsidize religious education and give “good families” a way to keep their kids away from undesirables. If we were serious about our approach to charter schools, we’d consider the rigorous accountability process used in Massachusetts. But, we’re not, so we get charters authorized by tiny Daleville and overseen by apparently nobody. 

If the concern was truly that Indiana’s traditional public schools were not performing as well as they should, the rational approach would be to look to those school systems in our country and around the world that are producing the desired outcomes. That’s not what we did because those systems would not have provided a rationale for subsidizing private, religious education; reducing the influence of teacher’s unions; or redirecting public education money to friends and well-wishers of privatization enthusiasts. So, they had to come up with this cobbled together mess of half-measures and contradictions they could market to the public with rhetoric about “choice,” “accountability,” “empowerment,” and “the market.” When the results fail to materialize they either ignore the results or just say we have to do it harder. Privatization can’t fail, it can only be failed.

We have been some place like this before. Prior to creation of common schools, Indiana’s commitment to public education was more aspirational than real. The qualifications of teachers were left to local trustees. The quality of education was wildly uneven. There was a powerful disincentive for educated Hoosiers to become teachers. At a time other institutions were becoming well organized and efficient, the schools were struggling with unequal lengths of term, incapable teachers, dishonest trustees, diversity of textbooks, lax enforcement of school laws and school discipline, neighborhood quarrels over school sites, narrow views of education, and a lack of wise leadership. (Worley at p.6) This description reminded me powerfully of our recent charter school debacle at the Indiana Virtual School. 

We pulled ourselves off the educational floor once. So did Finland and Singapore and Ontario and any number of places that now surpass us in educational outcomes. We can do it again. But we have to look to examples that work and craft a system with pieces that fit together, one enhancing the other. A Hobbesian war of all-against-all, even if marketed under the banner of “choice,” will inevitably result in a cacophony of cross-purposes. We need to rethink our policies.

—One of the People

 

Steve Hinnefeld at School Matters has a good post on school referendums in Indiana. There are several of them on the ballot across the state today. Oversimplifying a bit, but generally, when the State took over funding school operating costs, they gave districts the opportunity to request that voters approve an increased property tax to supplement that funding. Interestingly, the wealthiest districts and the poorest districts are most likely to initiate the referendum process with schools in the middle quite a bit less likely to ask the taxpayers for more money. The richest districts tend to get less “complexity” money from the State. (This is money that supplements the base amount and is calculated based on a district’s number of kids getting free/reduced lunch, SNAP benefits, and the like.) So, the rich districts are getting less money and have locals who are willing & able to pay extra. The poorest districts are up against the wall, having greater needs and also initiate the referendum process.

For those schools in the middle, it’s tough to say whether they haven’t needed the money or school leadership simply felt that the voters wouldn’t go for the tax increase. Anyway, I recommend the School Matters post – it has links to some other resources if you want to dig in.

Michael Hicks, writing for the Muncie Star Press has a thoughtful opinion piece on the education strategy Indiana has been pursuing that is well worth a read. (Although, I have to take a second to grouse about the Star Press site – the content loads slowly and the page jumps all around as the ads load in a scatter shot fashion. These Gannett sites are all but unreadable on my laptop.) Generally speaking, Hicks complaint is that our educational policies have not been sending our children on to education after high school:

Since the third quarter of 2007, when the economy was booming, Indiana’s workforce down-skilled profoundly. We’ve seen 31 percent growth in workers with less than a high school diploma, nearly no change among those with high school diploma and under 5.0 percent growth among those who have been to college or have an Associate’s degree. The simple fact is from third quarter 2007 to third quarter 2018, a whopping 55 percent of new workers had less than a high school diploma.

He attributes this to a shift in education policy that he calls “the Mississippi Strategy” which might please a certain segment of political donors (he does not say, but I’m thinking the likes of Hilbert and DeVos) but does our state and our children a disservice. Under the Mississippi Strategy, the educational system focuses on supplying the economy with workers rather than supplying the state with citizens. Such an approach, he argues, is misguided, empirically unsupportable, and authoritarian.

Obviously this opinion piece caters to some of my deeply held biases. I named this blog “A Citizen’s Guide to Indiana” for a reason. (Although I recently read someone quip that when a person of color hears a white person use the word “citizen” it never means anything good.) I don’t use the term “citizen” to necessarily mean that we need to educate our kids to be deeply involved in politics — though they should have an understanding of the functions of our institutions and an awareness of what’s happening. Rather, we should aspire to teach our children what it means to be human and how to function happily and meaningfully in a society. I know this gets dangerously close to sounding like a bunch of liberal arts gobbledy-gook, but it’s important. Teaching our kids nothing more than how to be good workers for a job that exists right now is like building a one-legged stool with that one leg being too short. We need to teach our kids how to adapt to the economy as it changes or, even better, how to change the economy themselves. And, we need to teach kids how to make positive contributions to themselves, to their families, and to their communities when they aren’t working.

This isn’t all on the schools, of course, but as Mr. Hicks points out, if our education policy focuses narrowly on short-sighted employment goals, we will regress. Never forget, Indiana was once a powerhouse. Over a period of 50 years or so, we supplied six vice-presidential candidates (4 successful) and one President. We became an industrial force as cities like Muncie, Marion, Kokomo, and Anderson grew – creating over 100 factories and thousands of jobs in the late 19th century. It is no coincidence that, during this political and economic boom, our Golden Age of literature flowered with authors like Lew Wallace, James Whitcomb Riley, and Booth Tarkington. There were other factors, but I don’t think it’s an accident that Indiana became a juggernaut a generation after Caleb Mills finally persuaded the General Assembly to make a state wide education system a reality rather than merely an aspiration.

Maybe I’ll try to expound upon this later, but I think there is a fundamental difference between policymakers with respect to whether they see people as liabilities or assets. When we see people as liabilities, then the goal of government is to spend as few resources on them as possible, getting them from cradle to grave with as little fuss as possible. When we see people as assets, then the goal of government is to maximize their potential as efficiently as possible, knowing that the return on that investment will exceed the expenditure as the children become productive, well-rounded citizens contributing to the community. The Mississippi Strategy takes the former approach.

I was reading a book on school grading metrics, as one does on a Sunday. The book is “On Your Mark: Challenging the Conventions of Grading and Reporting” by Thomas Guskey. Warning to the reader: I read the book pretty quickly and this is some stream of consciousness on my part. So any mistakes are likely on my end and not on the author’s.

One issue is that the use of a single grade is often an amalgamation of potentially confounding variables that, ultimately, makes it difficult to tell what a grade represents. One example he gives is two “C” students. One is diligent, grinds away, participates in class, turns everything in on time but ultimately what the student produces is unremarkable. The other is not terribly diligent, turns work in late, has attendance problems, but what he does produce is excellent, demonstrating good understanding of the material and penetrating insights.  These are very different students but the grade is the same. Some systems — I think Canada was referenced — deal with this by giving separate marks for product, process, and progress. In the example I gave, the first student would have a good process grade but a mediocre or poor product grade. The second student would be the reverse. Progress would tell you more about the impact the class had had on the student’s knowledge.

Another issue is a sort of illusory precision we give our grades that can have some pernicious effects. Categorizing student achievement in five broad categories has its challenges, but is doable. Something along the lines of excellent (A), decent (B), acceptable (C), poor (D), and unacceptable (F). The difference between 83% and 86% is going to be arbitrary, dependent on a bunch of variables and teacher idiosyncracies. There is really no foundation showing that these metrics are telling us what we want to know. The author points out that by making the scale 100 points and setting the “D”/”F” line at 60%, you’ve now created 60 points of failure on the scale with only 40 points of passing work. You’re using up a lot of real estate on the failing end of the scale that’s not really helping anyone. Combine that with the confounding process variable I mentioned above, and you potentially end up with something like a late assignment being given a 0 — more than half a grading scale away from a passing grade; you know nothing from this about the student’s substantive knowledge of the subject matter; and the student is in an academic hole that is a great deal deeper than it would be without this illusion of precision.

And maybe the biggest issue is that we have grades working at cross-purposes. What are we trying to do with these things? Is the purpose of our educational system to develop academic proficiency or to identify and select the best and the brightest? If you’re trying to develop academic proficiency, you will ideally develop a system that gets all of your students to the desired levels of proficiency. If that’s the case, you’ll end up with a bunch of kids at the highest end of the spectrum. On the other hand, if you’re looking to rank, filter, and sort the students, then you’ll implement a grading system that exaggerates the distinctions to make things easier for university admissions officers and whatnot. (Part of that “whatnot” includes a cultural sense that there can’t be meaningful success without the failure of others. This, in turn, I think comes from a sort of Manichean idea that there is no good without evil. But, I certainly digress.)

This final bit is more me than the author, but poking at our grading system and questioning why we do what we do, you can see some of the accretions from bygone years. There are echoes of the 19th century when education was more of an aristocratic thing, used to justify and entrench privilege. There are echoes of the industrial revolution where we tried to standardize and mechanize everything. There are echoes of the Progressive Era, seeking some kind of objective perfectability of people and the related drift into eugenics.

Our reaction to change is probably going to reflect some of that entrenched privilege as well. When a high socioeconomic status area embraces the idea of designing a system where almost everyone is able to attain the academic objectives, it seems plausible and everyone getting As and Bs doesn’t seem as objectionable. When this happens in a low socioeconomic school system, you’ll get more of the protests about grade inflation and participation trophies. The aristocracy is to be nurtured, enhanced, and preserved. The masses are to be goaded and culled for their own good.

Like I said, this was all a bit stream-of-consciousness for me. So, I don’t have any strongly held opinions here. I just thought there were some interesting ideas to chew on.