Quote of the Day
Leaders don't make excuses for inaction. They are first movers and early adopters. They make things happen.
W. Bennis, G. M. Spreitzer, and T. G. Cummings
The Atlanta Education Testing Scandal: Some Comments
Make no mistake: this scandal is going to be used by mediocre educators, self-serving teacher unions and clueless progressives as weapons to challenge the education reform movement, such as Michelle Rhee's Students First. We have already seen disingenuous ad hominem attempts by bloggers to debunk Rhee's record and/or evidence in support of reforms; she points out in a recent response that one particular blogger used apples and oranges methodology for his analysis. If outstanding reformers like Michelle Rhee were ineffective, these opponents would ignore them. As per my favorite Albert Einstein quote: "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds."
Don't get me wrong: the guardians of the status quo try to co-opt the mantle of education reform, not unlike how the intellectually dishonest Democrats in the Congress and White House (in particular, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi in their Alice-in-Wonderland rhetorical nonsense) use the term "shared sacrifice" as code words for class war tax hikes; when half of workers pay not a single penny towards federal government overhead--in fact, a large percentage of those receive net federal disbursements--there is no "shared sacrifice". You see, the status quo involving things like crony peer evaluation reviews has been so effective, we've seen no momentum in international comparisons for decades, despite throwing away good money after bad in lowering student/teacher ratios and other progressive "solutions". (Certainly bumping up teacher union enrollments had nothing to do with that particular reform, did it? Forget what's going on outside the US, like foreigners with better results but fewer teachers.)
There is a scandal going on in Atlanta and/or other Georgia schools, involving at least a dozen to two dozen schools where there have been highly suspect jumps and drops in standardized test scores, including highly improbable ratios of incorrect-to-correct changes. Now, even without checking the Internet (and I haven't yet), I GUARANTEE that thousands or millions of teachers who have fought the increased reliance on standardized scores (since the days of No Child Left Behind) are going to remind us that they have been warning us that all we would get from increased reliance of objective versus subjective measures of teacher performance is illusory "teaching to the test" results. You are going to see "I-told-you-so" op-eds everywhere, predictions that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, etc. Defenders of the unacceptable status quo have been waiting for years for just this opportunity to attack legitimate reformers.
What you had here was a failure not in the concept of testing but in terms of internal controls. When I've done questionnaire design, I specifically designed it to guard against, say, a respondent simply filling in a predictable pattern, which would contribute to an artificially high reliability score. The point is, you control for reliability and validity of measurements from the design stage. For a school with a vested interest in student performance outcomes to have access to tests, administration of the exam, or control of completed exams violates every concept of internal controls. There are technical solutions to any of these issues: for example, it's feasible to give different standardized tests on the fly for each student, encrypted exams or results which can be decrypted only by authorized personnel, not to mention traditional internal controls used for decades, even for the simple garbage-in, garbage-out poorly designed college teaching evaluations I had to deal with at 4 universities: I had to be absent from the classroom while proctors administered and collected the evaluations.
Eyebrow Threading and Arizona's Regulatory Attack on Practitioners
This is a textbook example of how crony capitalism works to create barriers of entry into markets, artificially creating a shortage of practitioners, driving up the cost of services at the expense of the consumer. A few weeks back I discussed an older barber whom had apparently forgotten to renew his license in a timely fashion and essentially they wanted him to requalify as a barber from scratch; the end result was that he retired. Let us never forget the Golden Rule of Bureaucracies: "Rules are rules".
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
ELO, "Strange Magic"
