What Opponents of Measure 97 Accomplished

Public services in general and schools in particular were looking down the barrel of a gun because of PERS costs.  Measure 97 was a way to shield them.  It would have given time for the legislature to find a legally enforceable reform package, at the expense of someone other than our children.

But Measure 97 failed.  That didn't solve PERS either, the vote against M97 changed nothing about pension obligations or the politics around it.  We're no more likely to reform PERS than we were before the election, or if M97 had passed.

All opponents of Measure 97 did was put our kids are on the firing line. 

Nice going, dicks.

Equity without Measurement is Impossible

This is a popular image demonstrating the difference between equality and equity (with equity implicitly the more desirable outcome).  Think about something though.  What does equity mean without measurement?  It's easy in the picture because we can see it, height is easily gauged by visual inspection.  But what happens if we don't know anything about height, either of the kids or the fence they all want to see over?  

To get a sense of the problem, imagine if we could only see the kids from above:

Without height, all we see are the tops of three heads and the fence in front of them.  How do we know who needs more resources and who needs less?  How do we know who can see over the fence?  Without the ability to measure height we can't answer any of those questions.  We could make some kind of guess and move resources based on that, but we wouldn't know if we were improving equity or diminishing it.  In the absence of measurement equity is impossible, even if we got lucky and lined up everything perfectly no one would know it.

I bring this up because measurement in at least one area, education, is a highly contentious issue.  Opposition to testing is a mainstream movement in Portland, even promoted by School Board members.  Not infrequently, those people also claim to be concerned with equity.

Any test can be improved, and any process informed by tests can be improved.  But categorically rejecting testing, which seems to me the heart of the anti-testing movement, simply isn't compatible with a commitment to equity.  Without testing policy is necessarily blind, and equity nothing more than a good but meaningless intention.

An Open Letter to Portland Public School Board on Boundary Review

Portland Public School Board Members,

I'm writing to urge you to complete the District Wide Boundary Review Process as soon as possible.  At [my neighborhood school] overcrowding is materially degrading educational quality and school leadership is not adequate to deal with the problem on its own.  Boundary Review offers immediate relief for enrollment disparities.  But it isn't enough.

Within PPS there are currently high reputation or "good" schools that are overcrowded, and low reputation or "bad" schools that suffer from under-enrollment.  Merely increasing the catchment area of "bad" schools and shrinking the catchment of "good" schools won't work in the long term.  The reputations still exist and families will react by finding a way to enroll in the "good" school such as by moving or maintaining an address in the new catchment area, or they'll switch to a charter school or out of PPS entirely.  I don't think you'll ever convince parents with means to go to a "bad" school.  Enrollment balancing in the long term requires addressing the reputations that make schools "good" or "bad" in the first place.

Reputation in my view is primarily a function of parents.  Reputation doesn't matter to kids, they don't care about financial hierarchy or relative privilege.  Nor are they in a position to make decisions based on reputation, they go where their parents send them.  It is parents who create and react to school reputation.  Breaking down the process that creates "good" schools and "bad" schools requires changing the way parents interact with schools. 

From my experience the two institutions that most involve parents are the PTA and Foundations.  Generally speaking, the former is a mechanism by which parents can improve their schools through donations of time and skills, the latter is a way to improve schools through donations of money.  Both resources materially impact the student experience, providing some factual basis for differences in reputation.  Disparity is reinforced psychologically; participants in parent groups commit to "their" school, they make sacrifices for "their" school.  People are proud of their sacrifices and attribute to them value and distinction, which contributes to a negative view of schools lacking that distinction.  And disparity is reinforced socially, because parents who are passionate enough about schools to make sacrifices on their behalf want to be with other parents similarly engaged.  Those dynamics create a positive feedback loop, particularly when applied to a backdrop of economic segregation in which some neighborhoods have much greater resources to donate to schools than others.  The end result is schools with disparate reputations, often wildly out of sync with the underlying reality.

I think the solution to this problem is to loosen the connection between parent organizations and specific schools.  Instead of silos defined by school, PTAs and Foundations should be organized over a wider area with a mission to promote the welfare of all schools within that area equally.  Dividing the district into four or five areas, each would be broad enough to incorporate an economically diverse population and to retain that diversity over the long term. 

Resources would be spread more evenly, rather than being concentrated in the neighborhoods where those with money or the ability to have a stay at home parent happen to live.  It would allow those who are passionate about schools to find community and support regardless of where they live.  And it would retain a degree of autonomy and local connection.  Parents wouldn't be donating to an anonymous, monolithic "PPS" but to the local area schools that that their children or friends of their children attended.  If boundary rebalancing were broken down by area, they would also be the schools parents' children might attend in the future as a result of enrollment balancing.  I think this would create a culture of investment in schools, directed not just where people with resources live but where investment is needed. 

With regards to boundary changes, it would make the switch to a different school far less intimidating.  The new school would be familiar and less likely to carry stigma.  At the same time there would be less social loss, parents would maintain connections with those at the old school through the broader parent organizations and have the same access to their resources.  Families subject to boundary change would be grounded and supported by community, instead of feeling like they're being voted off the island like they are now.

It could be argued that this approach is geared too much towards the subset of parents that are active in PTA and Foundations.  But I'd argue it is exactly that group that is most influential in determining school reputation.  They are the ones who care enough about educational quality to act on it.  They're the ones least likely to accept going to a "bad" school and who will not only pursue alternatives, but promote them to all their friends reinforcing disparities in reputation.  People seek community one way or another.

So in summary, please complete the boundary changes as quickly as possible.  But don't stop there, because it won't be enough.  Look at the dynamics that make rebalancing such a traumatic process and find ways to ameliorate them.  I think doing that will create a stronger, more equitable school system positioned to thrive rather than merely survive.  For the 21st century, Portland needs no less.

Passages I like

From Cringely:

My kids go to the best public school in Sonoma County. I know that because I chose my house based on that research. But when Cole finishes his math problems in a quarter the time it takes anyone else in the class, his teacher has him insert a wait state by putting his head down on his desk.  Conversely, when some other kid never quite gets the problem set finished, ever, well he/she never gets a rest and never masters the material, either.

The current system is unfair to both kids.

The only solution I can see is one teacher per student. And the only way something close to that is going to happen is through technology.  And it’s coming.

 A followup passage that I don't like but agree with:

My conclusion, then, is that schools serve a limited social and cultural function but our kids mainly learn despite them. My own experience is that I learned a lot about learning from half a dozen teachers in my life, so those relationships are both rare and essential. But are they reliable enough to even justify modern schools?  I don’t know. What I do know is that if I want to improve the educational environment for my children in the next year or two, I’ll probably have to come up with my own solutions.

Hardware vs. Software

The NY Times ran a story this week questioning the value of technology in the classroom.  They cite in particular a showcase district in Arizona that has been pouring money into tech without creating any observable benefit in test scores. 

To me that story highlights a key point:  The “software”, that is the teaching practices and processes that rely on tech are critical to effective utilization.  As one teacher puts it in their signature file,

“It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”

The conclusion to draw from that isn’t that tech doesn’t matter, it’s that you need to do more then just buy stuff.  You need to think about how to use it, and adapt as you gather experience. 

Flashback:  The Social Life of Information makes the same point about business processes.

Online Education

I was impressed with this article in Harvard Magazine covering online education.  It ties together a number of threads:  Disruptive innovation, the unsustainable increases in tuition, the potential impact of dynamic programming tailor learning to the individual.  Best line:

When America’s traditional universities arose, knowledge was scarce, which meant that research and teaching had to be coupled tightly. That is no longer the case.

Even sharper is this analysis of the structural problems with traditional universities:

Examining the traditional universities through the lens of innovation, we see that a muddled business model is causing the industry’s ruinous cost increases...  A typical state university today, for example, is the equivalent of a three-way merger of the consulting firm McKinsey—focused on diagnosing and solving unstructured problems; the manufacturing operations of Whirlpool—which uses established processes to add value to things that are incomplete or broken; and Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company—in which participants exchange things to derive value: fundamentally different and incompatible business models all housed within the same organization.

Good stuff!

Teacher Ranking: A Pessimistic Note

From the NY Times.  You can always find examples of misclassification when you apply a discrimination function:  A mispriced insurance risk, an unfair speeding ticket, a student penalized because of poor handwriting.  What is important is to have clear channels of redress.  If a teacher thinks their ranking is unfair, they should by all means make the case to change it. 

Note how that doesn’t happen when the rankings aren’t part of the evaluation.  If the rankings don’t matter then teachers have no reason to correct them and they don’t mean anything.  In other words, it isn’t a ranking at all if there are no consequences.

More goodness in teacher evaluations:Students

Courtesy of the Gates foundation.  Novel concept- students who spend an ungodly number of hours with teachers over the course of a year maybe come out knowing something about how effective or ineffective the teacher is.

Kudos to Hillsboro

This is the second time I’ve seen the Hillsboro School District aggressively seek to engage the public in navigating the coming budget cuts.  Good things can happen when you try, even in dark times.  PPS is still asleep at the switch.  Will they cut gym?  Cut a week or two off the school year?  Not talking about it now guarantees a rushed decision when the time comes, and inevitable push back from parents who don’t know any better.

Maybe their plan is to make writing letters to congress into an annual tradition- like writing letters to Santa Claus.

More efforts on teacher rating

The Gates Foundation gets into the act in a big way.  I especially liked the comments on using retired principals or teachers to review video of teacher performance.  Why not expand that to parents as well?

One of the craziest mismatches in education is the number of people who want to help their kids vs. the number of people who can improve what goes on in school.  Video allows time-shifting and space-shifting, vastly expanding the pool of people a principal could draw on.

School Performance Data: an untapped resource

Patrick Emerson writes about school reform.  These lines stood out to me:

What is needed is a little humility and a desire to learn what works on the part of policy makers.  PPS, for example, is sitting on a mountain of incredibly valuable data, but as far as I am aware no real study of this data is being done.

Data indeed!  Every homework assignment, quiz, or test creates comparative data by student and class.  The volume of that data compared with standardized tests is overwhelming.  What happens to it?  Aside from being added to some semester average that ultimately results in a letter grade, what use is made of it?

Success stories like Bridger or Pauling show good things can happen when you actually use that data by making coursework contingent on performance, constantly evaluating and adjusting as you go.  Those schools make coursework dynamic, teaching students what they need to learn versus what the teacher thought the class needed to learn when they set lesson plans at the beginning of the year.  That is what information technology does best- making something specific and relevant instead of general and irrelevant.

Race to where?

Not that I want to encourage Oregon in blowing off federal grant money, but there is an interesting story on where the Race to the Top funds actually went. Food for thought: If urban bias was pervasive, how did North Carolina and Georgia win?

Action in the face of trouble

It's good to see a community taking control of it's destiny and confronting the long term funding issue. A lot more inspiring then anything the Portland Public School District has done.

POW: Cringely

Robert Cringely put out an excellent column on 3/21/08, the podcast is here.  The theme:  Society at large is only just beginning to adapt to the emergence of personal computing, and that changes to come will be greater then the ones we've already seen.  He picks on schools in particular as an institution destined to be radically altered in character and purpose.

The current educational system is designed to help children internalize knowledge, that is to learn.  Technology in this setting is a two edged sword- on the one hand it permits vast and cheap access to knowledge (Wikipedia).  It also permits vast and cheap plagiarism and cheating (Yahoo Answers).

Cringely poses the question:  Should schools be fighting such conduct?  Is knowing how to find an answer an adequate substitute for knowing the answer itself?  In an information economy the answer must be yes, and if so what then should educational institutions look like?

For a less pessimistic view of the future of education, see Brown and Duguid.