Indy Democrat has a post about the recent teacher evaluation reports showing that 87% of Indiana teachers were in the top two categories. The post indicates that the low fail rate has caused skepticism by Rep. Behning and State Board of Education board member Gordon Hendry.

Per Hendry:

“I find it hard to believe that a system of evaluation where only a handful of people are said to need improvement is accurate or effective,” at-large board member Gordon Hendry said. “Clearly, the system failed.”

Per Behning:

“We didn’t think it was possible for a D or F school to say all teachers are effective or highly effective,” State House Education Committee Chairman Bob Behning said. “We thought [the school ratings] would keep schools somewhat a little more honest.”

There are a number of possibilities. Maybe the teachers aren’t, by and large, the problem in schools where kids are failing. Maybe chaotic home lives and a social setting that doesn’t value education, combined with a tattered social safety net contribute more to struggling schools than the merits or lack of merit of particular teachers. No offense to the fine teachers and administrators in the West Lafayette school system, but I’m of the opinion that you could likely put some fairly bad teachers in our system, and the students in our area would, by and large, emerge well educated. Teachers are just one variable in a very large system, and the metrics we use to evaluate teachers and schools have never been very well thought out in terms of controlling for all of the variables that are well outside the control of the school system.

But, we have a rush to measure things; often in hopes of confirming preexisting biases and sometimes in the more venal hope of transferring gobs of public money from a constituency that donates and votes for the other guy to friends and well-wishers of one’s own political campaigns.

I tend to agree that a metric which lumps almost the entire population being measured into one or two categories probably isn’t calibrated in a way that provides much utility. But, first we need to clearly articulate what the hell we’re trying to measure. Then we need to test the tests to see if they actually measure that thing.

Mikel Livingston, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has an article entitled, “1,000 attend documentary premiere two years in the making” about the premiere of Rise Above the Mark; a documentary about the effect of the privatization/voucher/charter movement on public schools. I am happy to say that I was among the 1,000.

It is an effort spearheaded by the West Lafayette Schools Education Foundation — an organization associated with West Lafayette School Corporation but funded separately. WLCS superintendent, Rocky Killion has been instrumental in its development. The documentary, I think, has two primary goals: start a discussion that is focused on finding the best way to develop the children who will be our citizens in the future; and to give a voice to the public schools and public school teachers who feel that they have been largely voiceless in the debates that have gone on in recent years. The pro-voucher side is well-funded, well organized, and seems to have the ear of most of the decision makers.

Relentless standardized testing is panned by this film. We spend a lot of money paying testing companies to waste a good bit of our kids’ educational time in order to provide information that the teachers and principals already knew. (The implication (not mentioned in the film) is that those advocating standardized testing don’t particularly trust public school teachers and administrators.) It also distorts the educational process; tending to produce students who lack creativity and the ability to self-direct their studies. Our democracy depends on creative, self-directed citizens far more than it relies on citizens with superior Scantron bubble filling skills.

Another primary point is that we have had 20+ years to experiment with public funding of alternative schools and, turns out, they don’t produce results that are notably better than traditional public schools. Often enough, they perform worse.

The sharpest attacks were on some of the Indiana-specific processes we have seen; particularly those having to do with former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett. The stony-hearted inflexibility, and rules-are-rules attitude, shown by the Indiana State Board of Education toward Munster High School was contrasted with the contortions and after-the-fact metric changing used to ensure that political darling, Christel House charter received an “A” instead of the “C” that the initial metrics gave it. Munster High School was apparently given a “C” for its performance. Due to the metrics in place, the difference between the school receiving an “A” instead of a “C” was one special education student who required a little extra time to graduate. Had that particular student graduated on time, the grade would have been dramatically different. Munster did not get nearly the consideration that Christel House did. The Munster principal (I believe that was his position) cynically wondered whether he could have saved Munster’s grade if he had contributed $100,000 to Bennett’s campaign the way Christel House’s founder did.

The documentary also goes abroad, looking at what countries with successful educational outcomes do that works. Finland’s model, in particular, appears to be one to emulate. Students can choose; but all of the schools are public, all are well funded, and there is not a great deal of disparity in funding. On the other hand, nowhere is a privatization model notably successful.

One thing only alluded to briefly is that money is a driving force behind the privatization movement. Having a conversation about finding the best way to educate our kids is only useful if all the people honestly agree that the best way to educate should guide our decisions. If both sides are motivated by a desire for excellent education; common ground can likely be reached. You look at the evidence about what educational models are most successful, you look at the resources, and you allocate the resources accordingly. However, if one side is (probably secretly) motivated primarily by a desire to redirect resources to friends and well-wishers; successful educational models probably aren’t going to be all that persuasive. I’m not saying that any of the people involved in this debate are nihlistic opportunists looking to mine the educational system for power and profit. I’m just saying that if such people designed an educational system, it would probably look a lot like the system we’ve been developing over the last twenty years.

It’s time to look around the world at what more school systems do to produce a highly educated, capable citizenry and discuss how to imitate those methods. Rolling the dice on our kids’ lives guided by non-evidence based ideological convictions is reckless.

Richard Longworth, the Midwesterner, has a good post looking at the Midwestern states as laboratories for various economic theories. He recognizes any number of caveats to interpreting the results, but notes that Minnesota is having a better time of things economically with its approach when compared to places like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. A significant difference between Minnesota and these other Midwestern states is that Minnesotans have been more inclined to spend on education and public infrastructure.

As we noted above, the divergence between incomes in Wisconsin and Minnesota began some 50 years ago. More to the point, most Midwestern states – Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana especially – have economies based on heavy industry. Industry’s decline in the last half century, culminating in the recession, has hit these states harder than it did Minnesota, which has less of a heavy industry legacy to overcome.

What can be said is that Walker hasn’t made things any better. Daniels made things demonstrably worse. With Drayton, so far so good.

Economists like Jacobs, Johnston and Glazer are on stronger ground when they argue that governors such as Drayton are preparing their states to compete in the global economy by spending in crucial areas such as education and infrastructure. Walker and Daniels, by focusing more on budget-cutting than investment, leave their states with no weapons to fight these global economic wars.

This post attracted Aaron Renn, the Urbanophile, to the comments. He mentions:

Race is the elephant in the room. It’s easy to look good on these metrics in a bifurcated economy when you’ve got lots of privileged white people, especially when more educated and concentrated in an urban area like Minnesota. Give those states similar racial makeups and population distributions, and see how they fare.

Dr. Longworth responded that racial composition and income are pretty much all over the map in terms of correlation. For example, Maryland is first in per capita income and fourth as a percentage of black population. (He goes through a number of other states.)

Meanwhile, I had posted a link to the Midwesterner on my Facebook wall which drew the attention of a professor friend of mine who has professional and personal experience with Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. His sense is that Minnesota has been more successful than the others in developing a knowledge based economy; noting “a much stronger appreciation of education and knowledge in Minnesota than . . . in Indiana.”

I can’t speak to Minnesota, but there is a distinct streak of anti-intellectualism in Indiana. Our people purport to prefer “common sense” to “elitism”; the problem being that common sense is not reliably sensible. Certainly, when I was a kid in eastern Indiana, a bunch of fancy book learning didn’t inspire the admiration of one’s peers.

In any event, the original post is well worth a read.

Tom LoBianco appears determined to save journalism all by himself. Hot on the heels of his investigative story about former Gov. Daniels and his efforts to stifle teaching of Howard Zinn, Tom (I can call him Tom because I met him one time!) has a story that I think is a lot more substantively important.

He reports that e-mails from former Superintendent of Schools, Tony Bennett, reveals that the State gamed the school rating system to accommodate a favored narrative and a favored political contributor.

Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan’s school [known as Christel House] received an “A,” despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a “C.”

“They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,” Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence’s chief lobbyist.

Bennett’s response suggests that favored schools run by influential donor’s cannot fail; they can only be failed. Apparently the fact that the existing metrics gave DeHaan’s school a low grade was evidence of problems with the metrics, not the school.

Responding to news that Christel House would be getting a “C” under the existing metrics:

“This will be a HUGE problem for us,” Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12, 2012 email to Neal.

Neal fired back a few minutes later, “Oh, crap. We cannot release until this is resolved.”

A weeklong behind-the-scenes scramble ensued among Bennett, assistant superintendent Dale Chu, Gubera, Neal and other top staff at the Indiana Department of Education. They examined ways to lift Christel House from a “C” to an “A,” including adjusting the presentation of color charts to make a high “B” look like an “A” and changing the grade just for Christel House.

Stories like Tom LoBianco has been unearthing show how and why journalism can be saved. Digging for and examining evidence about what happened; and afflicting the powerful when they have it coming is what journalists do best and the value they add to the system. Bloggers will not often replicate this sort of thing. I think newspapers would be well-served to focus on this aspect of their business. Opinion pieces and classified ads can be imitated and replaced. Journalists can’t.

Karen Francisco, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article entitled Back in session: Indiana’s education brain trust. You know which way she’s going to run with this when she says:

Lawmakers are education experts, of course – they all went to school and know precisely how schools should be run.

This is maybe a corollary of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality which states, that the volume of discussion on a subject goes up as the technical difficulty goes down. The technical difficulty of good education policy is likely fairly high. But, everyone has an opinion on the classes they sat through as a kid.

Ms. Francisco highlights SB 184 which would continue to erode limits for voucher demands on public money. It provides that “a sibling of a student who is receiving a choice scholarship is eligible to receive a choice scholarship without first attending two semesters in a public school or receiving a scholarship from a scholarship granting organization.”

The ostensible reason for these vouchers is to create choices for people stuck in public schools. But, this continues the trend of providing a subsidy to those who weren’t stuck in public schools but, rather, simply want a subsidy for a choice they could already afford (and were already affording.)

The column also highlights SB 193 which would exempt Indiana from the Common Core State Standards, SB 189 which would exempt high performing districts from certain requirements – measures designed to undermine urban schools are apparently having some unintended spill over into wealthier, suburban schools.