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Bill Dunn Wrong

Yesterday, in his advocacy for HJR 493, legislation that would remove the Tennessee Constitution’s requirement that the General Assembly adequately fund schools, State Representative Bill Dunn suggested that increasing funding for schools across the state actually does not improve student outcomes. He cited the initial BEP investment, started in 1992 and said that from beginning to end, the program actually resulted in lower student achievement numbers.

This would be a great way to prove Dunn’s case that the General Assembly need not provide additional funds to schools in order to provide an adequate education.

It’s also not true.

Dunn cited ACT scores from the start of the BEP until 1998 and suggested they’d gone down slightly. What he failed to mention is that between 1995 and 1998, the number of students taking the ACT increased by 25%. That would seem to indicate that Rep. Kevin Dunlap was correct when he suggested that new BEP funds created new opportunities for students in rural districts. As the State of Tennessee noted in the 1998 State Report Card:

The ACT is one of three tests approved by the State Board of Education to fulfill the requirement in state law that all students take an exit exam to receive a full high school diploma. The total number of Tennessee graduates taking the ACT rose 25% during the first three years of this new requirement: from 32,628 in 1995 to 40,782 in 1998. Included among those tested were 14,284 who had not completed a college preparatory course of study. Even with these dramatic increases in the number and percentage of students tested, Tennessee’s students were able to narrow the gap between the state and national composite scores in 1998.

So, more students than ever were taking the ACT and by 1998, the state was turning around an initial decline in scores. That’s a different story than the one Bill Dunn told.

Another way to look at the data is to see what happened on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) during the early BEP years. While reading scores from 1992 are not readily available, math scores are. Here’s the comparison:

4th Grade Math

1992         211

2000        220

8th Grade Math

1992        259

2000       263

These results show statistically significant improvements in math scores over the same time period the General Assembly was significantly improving investment in public schools. That is, what Bill Dunn said yesterday was just plain wrong.

Finally, it’s worth examining the ACT score differences among districts during the early BEP years. An examination of data beginning in 1991 (the year before BEP) and ending in 2001 (so as to provide 10 years of comparable data) indicates that the top scoring districts in the state on the ACT were also among the top spending districts. In fact, over those years, while not technically statistically significant, it can be said with 92% confidence that the difference in ACT scores among the highest- and lowest-performing districts is explained by per pupil expenditures. That is, the higher the spending, the more likely the district is to be among the state’s top performers on the ACT.

Additionally, during this same ten year time period, the gap between the highest and lowest scores among districts is clearly explained by the gap in per pupil expenditures among those districts. You spend more, you get better results. The impetus for all this spending was the new BEP formula that sent more money to all school systems. Those districts already at the top were most able to take advantage and boost ACT scores while those at the bottom saw an increase in the number of students taking the ACT, resulting in the statewide slight ACT decline Dunn references.

Investing in schools matters. Our state’s constitution requires the General Assembly to provide a system of free public schools, including providing adequate funding for those schools. Bill Dunn doesn’t think spending levels matter. The data suggests otherwise.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

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Creative Problem Solving

What happens when, despite your best efforts, local school systems sue your state claiming a lack of adequate funding? You get nervous is what happens. Especially when three previous lawsuits claiming your state has underfunded schools have been successful.

When a body like the Tennessee General Assembly faces a dilemma such as whether or not to make funding schools a top priority, they can either make a significant new investment in schools OR wait and see if the courts order them to make a significant new investment in schools. Historically, our General Assembly has waited and then taken corrective action by way of new investment only after courts have found that school funding is not adequate and/or equitable.

Now, however, lawmakers are taking a different approach. They are advancing amendments to the state constitution that would essentially eliminate the requirement that the General Assembly provide for a “system of free public schools” in Tennessee.

That’s creative problem solving. The state’s governing legal document binds the General Assembly in a way they don’t much like. So, just change it. Thus, you are now free to continue inadequately funding the state’s schools.

Former state Senator Roy Herron decried this effort on behalf of Tennessee School Systems for Equity. Here’s his take from a letter he submitted to legislators:

I write on behalf of the Tennessee School Systems for Equity, which includes most of Tennessee’s school districts. As your former colleague, I know something of how incredibly busy you are and so I will come right to the point.

This week you will consider a constitutional amendment that would strip your schools and students of constitutional protection for adequate funding.

There are two different proposed constitutional amendments that would deny Tennessee’s children any state constitutional right to adequate public schools. We believe that if either of these provisions were in Tennessee’s Constitution instead of our decades-old Article XI, Section 12, then our children effectively would have no state constitutional protection to ensure even minimally adequate public schools.

Some may tell you that the amendments would leave your school systems and your students with some constitutional protections. But these amendments would deem whatever funding any future legislature provided — or didn’t provide — to be adequate and constitutional. No matter how little.

The amendments would leave in the Constitution language that would provide the illusion, but remove the reality, of constitutional protection for public schools. If the proposed language were in the Constitution, school children would be doomed to whatever fate any future legislature decreed. And schools in your district could receive millions less in state funding, leading either to woefully inadequate schools or soaring property taxes or both.

It’s hard to imagine anything that would adversely impact our students — or Tennessee’s future — more than stripping our children of their constitutional right to adequate public schools.

HJR 493. A distinguished House colleague of yours, however, also has a constitutional amendment, House Joint Resolution 493. It is before your House Education Administration & Planning Subcommittee this Tuesday, March 1st at 3:00 p.m.

The able sponsor says that he only wants to remove any constitutional requirement for schools to be funded “adequately.” But without constitutional protection, a future legislature could say, for example, that each child gets to go to a free public school for a month a year. And that would be legally and literally true.

This proposed amendment would strip our children of any state constitutional protection to an adequate education. That is the respected sponsor’s stated intent and would be the legislative effect.

Let me respectfully submit for your consideration the following beliefs and concerns:

1. To destroy our state’s constitutional protection for adequate funding:

1.1 Endangers children in every county;

1.2 Endangers Tennessee’s future;

1.3 Leaves future legislatures and governors free to undo every good thing you and this legislature have done to educate our children and would allow them to do wrong by our children.

1.4 Would let future legislatures and governors decide that our children and grandchildren could go to inadequate schools.

2. It is not conservative to:

2.1 Strip citizens of constitutional protections;

2.2 Blindly trust government and future governments to do right;

2.3 Ignore decades of constitutional precedent and history;

2.4 Vote to amend our Constitution without carefully hearing from leading experts or at least the Attorney General;

2.5 Ignore Congressman Davy Crockett’s maxim, “First be sure you’re right; then go ahead.”

On behalf of more than 80 school systems all across Tennessee, I respectfully request that you not strip our children of their constitutional right to adequate schools.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

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In Defense of Standardized Testing

A recent op-ed in the Boston Globe discusses how standardized testing is not the enemy. The two professors who wrote the piece made some really great points that I wanted to share with everyone, especially teachers. I am going to break down each section of the op-ed, but please read through the whole article.

The testing effect

The act of testing students will allow them to retain more information.

The testing effect is the idea that trying to remember something leads to greater learning than just re-reading information. In one famous experiment, participants tried to learn information from a textbook either by repeatedly re-reading, or repeatedly writing out everything they could remember after reading the information only once. The strategy of writing from memory led to 60 percent correct recall of the material one week later, compared to only 40 percent in the repeated reading condition.

But despite its effectiveness as a learning strategy, the testing effect had to be rebranded to the less scary/more fun-sounding “quizzing” and we have had to come up with more and more subtle ways to produce the effect without students realizing that they are being tested — somewhat akin to hiding broccoli in brownies.

 

Testing anxiety

Testing anxiety is talked about a lot when discussing standardized testing. Having more tests, which would be lower stakes, may make students less anxious about taking these tests. Additionally, the professors noted that informing the students that the anxiety they feel will be helpful on the test will ease the student’s concern.

Researchers have found one promising method in which students are told that the anxiety they feel before a test is actually helpful – not harmful – to their test performance.

Could teachers and parents be the problem with test anxiety? I hope someone will research this soon.

Finally – and this is something that ought to be examined empirically – the negative views of testing repeated by teachers and parents may be feeding into kids’ anxiety and test-aversion. Just like public speaking, tests are an aspect of education that kids tend not to like even though it’s good for them. Our job as parents is to realize that the benefits of testing outweigh the inconvenience of dealing with kids’ complaints.

Teaching to the test

This section talks about how many teachers feel they are preparing for a test that is made by outside forces that do not have any classroom experience.

 This may be based on the myth that “teachers in the trenches” are being told what to teach by some “experts” who’ve probably never set foot in a “real” classroom. What these defiant teachers fail to realize – or simply choose to ignore – is that these experts are groups of carefully selected individuals that always include well-seasoned “real classroom teachers”, who guide the decision-making on what material should be assessed by the tests.

Standardized tests are biased

I hear this one a lot from teachers. If you think a test that is carefully crafted by teachers and researchers is biased, your own teacher assessments are much more biased.

Standardized tests are not the great equalizer that will eliminate discrimination. But it is highly unlikely an individual teacher alone could create a more fair, unbiased test than many experts with access to a lot of resources, a huge amount of diverse data, and the ability to refine tests based on those data.

The lack of prompt feedback

The lack of prompt feedback is always on teacher’s minds. It usually takes a long time to get feedback from these assessments, and we need to find a better way to receive prompt feedback on these assessments. With the rise in computer assessments, I hope we will be able to get feedback very quickly in the coming years.

In the absence of direct measures of learning, we resort to measures of performance. And the great thing is: measuring this learning actually causes it to grow. So let’s reclaim the word testing, so that the first word that comes to mind when we see it is “effect”.

I am so glad that I stumbled across this op-ed. I hope you will read the rest of the op-ed.


 

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Ready for a Break

Following the Day One failure of TNReady testing, the state proposed switching to only paper and pencil tests.  Last week, the first sign of trouble on that front developed, as Dickson County reported a delay in receiving the printed materials.

While the Department of Education reports that most districts have received their materials, Chalkbeat reported yesterday that at least a dozen districts have had to reschedule testing due to printing delays. Those districts include:

  • Tennessee Achievement School District
  • Bartlett
  • Hamblen County
  • Maury County
  • Madison County
  • Murfreesboro City
  • Putnam County
  • Robertson County
  • Sevier County
  • Sullivan County
  • Tipton County
  • Wilson County

Despite these delays, the TNReady testing will continue, and in fact, many districts have already begun some paper and pencil testing.

Still, it seems that TNReady just can’t catch a break in its first year.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

 

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The Paper Chase

Following the failure of TNReady on Day One, Commissioner Candice McQueen announced a simple solution: Tests will now be administered on pencil and paper. Except, it turns out, it’s not so simple. What if the paper tests don’t arrive on time?

The Dickson Herald reports:

Dickson County Schools have delayed administering the paper version of the state’s new TN Ready standardized tests until March 7 after a delay in receiving the testing materials, the schools director said.

Schools Director Dr. Danny Weeks alerted parents to the issue in a SchoolReach phone message and he also discussed the matter with the county School Board on Thursday night.

Educators and parents had prepared for administering the paper tests on Monday. However, Weeks said the school system had not yet received confirmation the print testing materials had yet shipped Thursday.

The ongoing saga of the TNReady challenges reminds me of the time the legislature pulled Tennessee out of PARCC just as we were preparing to have our first year with the Common Core aligned tests. Instead of a year without a test, we administered another year of TCAP — a test not aligned with our state’s current standards, and thus not an accurate indicator of student mastery or teacher impact.

Governor Haslam and Commissioner McQueen have announced that teachers and students alike won’t be held accountable for test results this year, but what about just taking the year off and getting it right?

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

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Memphis NAACP Says No More ASD

The Memphis branch of the NAACP has called for an end to ASD expansion.

Specifically, the organization’s leaders noted:

The NAACP is also joining others in the community calling for a hold on the state’s Achievement School District. The ASD is tasked with turning around schools in the bottom five percent.

“We respectfully request that there be a statewide moratorium on the addition of schools to the ASD model until sufficient improvement can be demonstrated by the existing schools,” Taylor said.

“We have a proven model with iZone in Shelby County Schools,” said NAACP Education Committee Member Dr. Freda Williams.

ASD Superintendent Malika Anderson responded:

“We are disappointed by the NAACP Memphis Branch’s call to suspend the work of the Achievement School District and the mischaracterization of our turnaround efforts. Our students are showing real and significant gains, and it would be a shame to let politics put the progress of our schools on pause,” ASD Superintendent Malika Anderson said, in a statement.

I wonder if moving schools from the bottom 5% of all schools to the bottom 6% is the type of long-term progress Anderson is touting.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

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Edcamps and PD

Samantha Bates is the organizer of EdcampMidTenn
Every educator has been there: Mandatory school-wide professional development on a topic she doesn’t need at a time she doesn’t need it, like the last day of school before summer break. It’s times like these that I pity the PE teacher, forced to sit through an hour-long PowerPoint presentation on Differentiating Writing Assessments in the Content Area for English Language Learners.
The good news is that professional learning doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way that teachers can choose the professional development they need, experience it on their terms, share their personal knowledge, have conversations instead of suffering through lectures, and – my favorite part – get up and leave if it just isn’t working out. Oh, and it’s completely free.
I’m talking about edcamps.
An edcamp is an informal gathering of educators – teachers, administrators, specialists, consultants, superintendents, technology coordinators – who discuss the educational topics that are relevant to them. In fact, the entire beginning of an edcamp is just the educators deciding what they want to talk about that day.
Edcamp sessions are not about the presenter but about the learning needs of the attendees. I’ve presented edcamp sessions on student blogging and using Twitter, but I’ve never gone to an edcamp knowing that I was going to present. Instead attendees ask questions, and there’s generally someone in attendance with experience in that area – mine just happened to be student blogging and Twitter. There are edcamp sessions that begin with the statement, “I want to know more about ____,” and then the participants just have a conversation on that topic.
Then there’s the beauty of The Rule of Two Feet. This rule states that if you are in a session that isn’t meeting your needs, you get up onto your two feet, and you use them to walk somewhere else that will benefit you. This could be another session, or it could be to hang out beside the coffee and network with other educators. It could be to a general area to implement or practice something you learned in another session. You are not expected or encouraged to stay in a session that isn’t helping you.
Did I mention that edcamps are free? I can’t stress this enough. Actually, most edcamps have door prizes, so you’re likely to walk away with a free subscription to an educational product or even technology. At Edcamp Midtenn, the sponsors are Flocabulary, IPEVO, GoNoodle, Kahoot, Doug Robertson (a teacher and author), WriteAbout, HSTRY, TinyBop, and Edutopia. Next Saturday, over one thousand dollars in educational products will be given away to educators who are committed to their professional learning.

 

If you want to attend an edcamp, there are several in Tennessee in the coming months. Edcamp Midtenn will be in Tullahoma at West Middle School on March 5th; you can register at edcampmidtenn.eventbrite.com. Edcamp GigCity will be in Chattanooga at STEM School on May 14th, and there’s even an edcamp for leaders being planned for this summer in Nashville. You can receive updates about EdcampLeadTN by following @edcampleadtn on Twitter. If there’s not an edcamp near you, you can always organize one yourself. The Edcamp Foundation has a variety of resources on attending and organizing edcamps.

Professional learning is too important to leave in the hands of anyone but yourself. Take control of your professional learning needs by attending an edcamp.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

 

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Is Jeb! TNReady?

Ok, we all know Jeb! already suspended his campaign, but he’ll still be on the ballot in Tennessee.

But, Charles Corra is comparing the TNReady rollout to the Jeb! campaign over at his blog:

The current TNReady debacle is much like Jeb! Bush’s campaign for President:  It was looked at as an inevitable success, generated a LOT of money in support of it, ended up crashing and burning, and ultimately took way too long to pull the plug.

Corra concludes:

Our teachers, students, and families deserve better.  If students are going to be tested with a rigorous, common core-aligned exam, then at least get the mechanics of the exam figured out beforehand.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

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Rhetoric vs. Reality: ASD Edition

Over at Bluff City Ed, Ezra Howard is back with some pointed criticism of the way the TN Achievement School District (ASD) is doing business.

Specifically, Howard notes:

I find the rhetoric to be a deflection from real and valid criticism of the ASD and its approach to school turnaround. While collaboration is certainly a virtue in education, a hard look should be taken at the ASD’s approach. All this nice talk about collaboration avoids these courageous conversations. I think people will find that there are some serious flaws in the way in which the ASD and its operators are taking on the arduous task of school turnaround. I agree with Mr. Manning that working together is important, but if the ASD’s has fundamental flaws and does not address them then no amount of collaboration will help.

Howard notes that schools in Shelby County’s iZone significantly outperform ASD schools and that the ASD is now taking credit for iZone’s success. Rather than address it’s own disappointing numbers, the ASD suggests that it “caused” the iZone and therefore, changed education in Memphis.

Howard offers some interesting, data-based comparisons and proposes a way forward. But the bottom line is, the ASD needs to approach education with a dose of reality, not more hyperbolic rhetoric.

More on the ASD:

Quest for Answers

The ASD’s NAC for Problems

So, About the ASD

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

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Hope Street Group Seeks Next Round of TN Fellows

Hope Street Group is seeking its second class of Tennessee Teacher Fellows and applications are open through March 11th.

Hope Street Group seeks to engage Tennessee teachers in the education policymaking process. Fellows have opportunities to broaden their understanding of state reform efforts; learn media skills; and receive continuous support in writing blog posts, op-eds, and letters to the editor.

Hope Street is specifically seeking fellows from the following regions of the state:

Read articles from current HSG TN Fellows:

TNReady Made Students Tech Ready

Of Hope and TNReady

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport