Spellings' ECS Speech: More Broken Analogies for NCLB

Tuesday morning in Austin, TX at the annual ECS meeting, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings revealed the states that had been approved for a differentiated accountability pilot. Her speech is notable for a variety of arguments and symbolism. Many are designed to further education as a civil right to keep the few remaining supporters of a botched law close. The text from her speech follows.

For this post I am going to harp on one failed analogy from Spelling's speech in this excerpt:

Which brings me to my next point, using data to support innovation for greater student gains.

Customization has already improved every other aspect of our lives. We have computers built to order...eyeglasses in an hour...and most web sites know what I want before I do. Yet while other fields rocket ahead, our education system is trapped in the industrial age. If Rip Van Winkle woke up today, classrooms would be the only thing he'd recognize. The term "24/7" has no relevance in education because we're still clinging to an outdated notion of 6 hours a day, 180 days a year.

Spellings thinks that the fields that produce Lens Crafters, Dell, and whatever web site she visits that "knows" what she wants before she does (I've never been to any site like that) "have rocketed ahead" of education. That's pretty incredible given how commoditized and old those technologies are. More so incredible, given that her analogies are purely consumeristic. The consumerism that she admires is in most ways antithetical to the hard work, concentration, deep learning, and subject mastery those original inventions/innovations required. Well then, you might say, her analogies are proper; she's talking about the hard work it takes to innovate. Right?

Wrong... she's not talking about the hard work it takes to innovate. She's talking about making education more customizable, and she makes this argument by suggesting kids should have access to education that more closely resembles a one-hour wait for glasses/a ten minute wait for a new Dell/ a 10 millisecond wait for a new pair of Nike Air Force Ones. And who is to say that education isn't already highly customized? Last time I checked school standards and curricula were jammed packed with choices. Many would argue that's part of the problem.

This speech is definitely not "99.9 percent pure or something."

Can Statistical Error Explain the World?

An email I sent to a colleague the other day, relevant to Andy's article in PDK, at least peripherally in using statistical error to explain away the differences in how certain folks operate in the world. Also, nice shout out to Kinder and Iyengar. Those guys bring me back to UVA Politics.

"OK, let me try this again. I'm trying to understand how confidence intervals (CI) can be explained in regards to AYP, particularly in light of something like growth models and ED's decision to not allow states to use CI when reporting growth under the Growth Model pilot.
The way I understand it.

When states don't use confidence intervals they increase the chance of making a Type II error. In the case of NCLB this gets operationalized as identifying subgroups as having met proficiency when they actually have not met proficiency. A Type I error in the context of NCLB would be the inverse: identifying a subgroup as proficient when they actually are not proficient. In statistics we are usually more concerned about making a Type II error because erring on the side of caution is good for a lot of things--like keeping people alive in medical trials.

But with regards to schools and calculating AYP, ED seems more concerned (based upon their general indifference to confidence intervals) about making a Type I error, or identifying a subgroup as having met proficiency when the subgroup in fact has not met proficiency.
Maybe it's not possible to talk about confidence intervals in this way--the unit of analysis being subgroups."

Swan Song for 2007 ESEA in the House?

So long as we have a President named Bush we can scapegoat the h-e- double hockey sticks out of him. He deserves it for hundreds of poor policy decisions alone, not to mention the very serious lack of bi-partisan effort (if you've got a National Journal account you can read this, if you don't, don't sweat it, in a nutshell Bush has one of the worst records of Bi-partisan accord of any president ever).

This is all introduction for short notice on a day-old press release from House Education and Labor Committee Chair George Miller. Miller, in what would appear to be the House's official swan song for reauthorization of ESEA in 2007, has publicly blamed the President. Is this entirely fair? Probably not. Am I suprising myself by writing that? Probably.

There are a lot of education groups, partisans, think tanks, membership organizations, and members of congress, not to mention TEACHERS who think that the reauthorization bill that landed late August from Miller and McKeon just isn't good enough--that it's too much in the vernacular of the publicly unpopular No Child version of the 1965 legislation, originally a funding vehicle designed to ameliorate conditions in schools for poor and minority students. The Senate gave up on it's 2007 reuathorization last week.

Point is Miller took it on the right, the left, up the gut, and on the chin this Fall. He's lucky, and maybe we're all a little lucky, for once, to have someone worth blaming to blame it all on. We must reauthorize the most important federal piece of legislation for schools, students, teachers, and for the future of this great country on the back of fair and flexible methods for schools and the resources and quality education for all students. We have our work cut out for sure.

Progressive Pay in a Time Where We Must Be Bold

Eduwonk posts that Charlie Barone has turned in a history/stakes piece on No Child Left Behind that we should check out (pdf). I admit I liked it. It was nothing new, but Barone's clear prose makes the history of our moment at once more provocative and delicate. Where I didn't like it is at the end when he likened the famously, (and improperly) lumped teachers unions to a hypertensive, ready-to-burst apologist for the status quo--apoplectic is his word. AFT is clear when it comes to local unions who want to implement alternate pay structures--it supports them and helps them.

Bush, NCLB Reauth: Sweeping Up Ed Thousands of Students at a Time

Bush, the Boston Globe reports, wants something decent to sticky to his legacy. EE says rots of ruck. The commander in chief wants reauthorization for NCLB this year. So much for the bets against reauth (pdf). Of course, this doesn't mean Bush'll get what he wants.

Bush challenged the Congress to not change the act too much--"don't change the core." Whatever that means. "Watering down No Child Left Behind would be doing thousands of students a disservice," he said. Apparently Bush is a little fuzzy on how much of an impact NCLB is having. NCLB only affects thousands!?!? I can picture him now. Bush up late at night with Laura. Scratching at his hair. "Laura, I just don't git it. Why all the fuss over a few thousand kids? I mean, seriously. The states and unions just need to let the thing alone. No Child is doing a lot of good for thousands of kids."

The U.S. enrolls 48.8 million public school students.

The rest of the article is a fluff piece about the school in New Albany that Bush visited (Silver Street Elementary School) and the Dems wanting more money for those thousands of kids whose education could be watered down if Congress acts wrongly.

"Laura how much money do these God damn Democrats want for a few thousand kids? Bleeding my government dry! Amateurs."