Michael Phelps Owes Everything To Coach (Not Mom, Not Genetics, Just Coaches!)

This is a comment by reader "Pondoora" from eduwonkette about this post. The post posits that policy should not be made based on the achievements of statistical outliers. I agree, and the comment below shows the stupidity of the blame-the-teacher corps, led by Michelle Rhee:

It's very clear to me that Michael Phelps' coaches were practicing their craft to perfection and that they were 100% responsible for his achievements.

The fact that his mother had the insight to firmly guide Phelps to the sport of swimming, made tremendous sacrifices herself and didn't ruin him emotionally, had little effect on his outcome. Phelps' success had nothing to do with his intense competitive drive and sense of discipline, nor his unique set of physical gifts. His sustained, daily access to high-end swimming facilities didn't play a part in developing his speed, either.

It's obvious that the other swim coaches in the world are just clinging to the status quo and don't truly believe that any of their trainees can succeed. Most of them are lazy and ineffective, and all they want is to collect pay and benefits from rec centers and swim clubs.

Our nation's swim coaches are also responsible for the swim gap (a study in 5/08 showed that 58% of African American children can't swim, for whites it's 31%). The intolerable truth is that most pools where young people swim are simply "failure factories."

We are way overdue for reforming them.

eduwonkette Revealed!!

Yes, it's true. She has revealed herself. She is Jennifer Jennings.

eduwonkette is written by Jennifer Jennings, a final year doctoral student in Sociology at Columbia University. I study many of the topics regularly covered on this blog: the effects of accountability systems on race, gender, and socioeconomic inequality, teacher and school effects on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, the effect of non-cognitive skills on academic achievement and attainment, school choice, and gender gaps in educational outcomes.

Gotta love her!

Educational Testing: A Brief Glossary

Another bit of test-explaining from eduwonkette. You want to understand terms? I got your explanations right....in that eduwonkette link above.

Some NCLB Wonkishness: More Bad News

eduwonkette does a great job in the eduwonk dept. Here is a bit of bad news about the high achieving kids:

June 17, 2008

High Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind

Fordham's new study on how high achievers have fared under No Child Left Behind is out. (See NYT coverage here.) Here's the main story:

* While the nation's lowest-achieving youngsters made rapid gains [on NAEP] from 2000 to 2007, the performance of top students was languid. Children at the 10th percentile of achievement (the bottom 10 percent of students) have shown solid progress in fourth grade reading and math and in eighth grade math since 2000, but those at the 90th percentile have made minimal gains.

* This pattern - big gains for low achievers and lesser ones for high achievers - is associated with the introduction of accountability systems in general, not just NCLB. An analysis of state data from the 1990s shows that states that adopted testing and accountability regimes before NCLB saw similar patterns before NCLB: stronger progress for low achievers than for high achievers.

All of this, of course, should have been expected in a system focused on proficiency rather than growth. And contrary to popular belief, NCLB's growth model pilot doesn't allow true value-added models, but is instead based on a "projection model." Michael Weiss has a great commentary in Ed Week this week on this issue:

In practice, projection models are extremely similar to NCLB’s original status measure. In schools where students enter with high initial achievement levels, the learning gains required to get students on track to become proficient are quite small, while in schools where students enter with low initial achievement levels, the required learning gains to get students on track to become proficient may be unrealistically large. Consequently, under the federal growth-model program, schools are still held to different standards­—some must produce large gains while others need only to produce small gains. Both status and projection models require all students to reach a fixed proficiency target regardless of their initial achievement levels. It is because No Child Left Behind’s status model and the growth-model pilot program’s projection models are so similar that very few new schools are making AYP because of “growth” alone.

If Tom Toch's post over at The Quick and the Ed is any indication, it looks like many factors are coming together to shift the winds on NCLB - both from proficiency to value-added models, and from ignoring the role of out-of-school factors to acknowledging that it is unfair to hold schools solely accountable for them. Said Toch:

What we need to do is find ways to give schools credit for successfully improving the educational performance of the kids they have, by using so-called value-added measures of student performance, and by capturing more than just how well schools teach basic reading and math skills....Yes, we need to hold schools and teachers accountable for their performance....But no, we shouldn’t pretend that poverty has no impact on students. No accountability system can work unless it is credible, and NCLB, as currently crafted, is not.

The Truth Is Slowly Emerging

Eduwonkette has a little post you should read (check out the links, too). Folks are beginning to publicly acknowledge what I, as well as many others, have been saying for years...the achievement gap is not the fault of schools! Here is the post:

Big Props for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education"

The potential effectiveness of NCLB has been seriously undermined, however, by its acceptance of the popular assumptions that bad schools are the major reason for low achievement, and that an academic program revolving around standards, testing, teacher training, and accountability can, in and of itself, offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on achievement.
-The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education Task Force Report

This morning, more than 60 heavy hitters kicked off a campaign calling for a "broader, bolder approach to education policy." (You may have already seen the print ads in the Washington Post and NY Times.) Co-chaired by Sunny Ladd, a Duke University economist, Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at NYU, and Tom Payzant, the former Boston schools superintendent and U.S. assistant secretary of education, the task force calls for a more expansive view of education policy that views schools as one component of a comprehensive youth development strategy. Here are their four recommendations:

1. Continued school improvement efforts. To close achievement gaps, we need smaller classes in early grades for disadvantaged children; to attract high-quality teachers in hard-to-staff schools; improve teacher and school leadership training; make college preparatory curriculum accessible to all; and pay special attention to recent immigrants.

2. Developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school and kindergarten care and education. These programs must not only help low-income children students academically, but provide support in developing appropriate social, economic and behavioral skills.

3. Routine pediatric, dental, hearing and vision care for all infants, toddlers and schoolchildren. In particular, full-service school clinics can fill the health gaps created by the absence of primary care physicians in low-income areas, and poor parents’ inability to miss work for children’s routine health services.

4. Improving the quality of students’ out-of-school time. Low-income students learn rapidly in school, but often lose ground after school and during summers. Policymakers should increase investments in areas such as longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs with demonstrated track records.

eduwonk suggests that the acknowledgment that schools can't do it alone is just another tired opinion, "The explicit rejection that perhaps schools are even a substantial part of the educational problem is unsettling." Recall that many of these signers have spent years studying school effects - the effect of going to one school versus another, all else equal - on test scores. This is a conclusion derived from years of confronting that distribution of school effects over and over again.

Particularly notable in this regard is the leadership of Sunny Ladd, who spent the last 10 years investigating the effects of accountability on North Carolina schools. She's an economist - hardly someone against the use of incentives - but she's seen the meager effects of accountability alone on the reduction of achievement gaps. And many early supporters of NCLB-style arrangements are represented here as well - Susan Neuman, Bob Schwartz (the President of Achieve from 1997-02), and Milt Goldberg (of the A Nation at Risk commission).

No one is saying that schools aren't important. No one is saying that we should abandon efforts to improve schools. And no one is saying that we should "let schools off the hook." What they are saying is that the effects of schools are not large enough to wipe out the gaps that are created by students' out-of-school environments.

You can - and I hope you will - become a co-signer on the statement here.

What Can Other Professions Teach Us about Evaluation and Accountability in Education?

Check this out, from eduwonkette...

Now updated with article and links

What Can Other Professions Teach Us about Evaluation and Accountability in Education?

In a very productive exchange, Dean Millot and Corey Bower have been contemplating the professional status of education. Dean's most recent post, "Why Legally Recognized Professionalism is Necessary to Reasonable Teacher Accountability," is one of the best think pieces I've read in some time. Read the whole thing, but here's the central theme of the post:

Lawyers and doctors are not punished for undesired outcomes; they are accountable for doing what professionals should do given their client’s circumstances....As a legally recognized profession, teacher conduct would be judged by teachers, according to standards of educational care devised by teachers, applied to the client circumstances in question.

Dean's post links well with AEFA conference talks by Randi Weingarten and Richard Rothstein last weekend. Weingarten also drew on the medical metaphor to argue that "teachers are physicians of the mind." In her view, there is a difference between the most skilled physician and a miracle worker. Just as the best hospitals can't solve public health crises on their own, Weingarten argued that, "schools cannot beat back all personal, social, and economic challenges that kids have." In an op-ed last week, she also endorsed a professional standard similar to that proposed by Dean:

[Teachers] should be assessed on how they use test scores and other data to adjust their teaching to help students improve....The approach is akin to judging doctors on how they use the results of blood tests, X-rays, and the like to prescribe a course of treatment.

In his talk, Rothstein drew on the experience of more fields than I can name (business, medicine, public works, etc). Despite many leaders' calls for education to mimic the private sector, Rothstein's review concluded that "private sector performance incentives rely primarily on subjective evaluations, not easily corrupted quantitative measurements." The central theme of the talk was that systems of measurement distort the processes they are intended to measure. The paper on which the talk is based - "Holding Accountability to Account: How Scholarship and Experience in Other Fields Inform Exploration of Performance Incentives in Education" - is a comparative/historical tour de force, and a must read if you're interested in the evaluation question.

Blog posts without positions generally fall on their face, but I still have more questions than answers about Dean's proposal. Here are the two questions I'm pondering:

* How do the processes of diagnosis, inference, and treatment in education differ from those in medicine and law, and what are the implications of these differences for "professional accountability?"

* How does the state of our knowledge about educational diagnosis and treatment differ from that in other professions?