Arne Duncan (Obama) and Margaret Spellings (G. W. Bush), noneducators and former education secretaries, recently appeared on PBS News Hour, Study shows parents overestimate their student’s academic progress to dash any hope parents might have that their children are doing well in school. Who’s behind such gloomy reporting?
Here’s how PBS begins, and here’s the survey:
A survey conducted in March of 2023 for the group Learning Heroes found 90 percent of parents think their kids are doing fine, but standardized test scores show otherwise. Among eighth graders, for example, just 29 percent were proficient in reading either at or above their grade level. In math, just 26 percent were considered proficient. This sheds light on what’s being called the parent perception gap.
Learning Heroes? They’re a group called a campaign, seemingly to create divisiveness, sowing distrust in teachers and public schools, to tell parents about so-called gaps in student learning. They call parents learning heroes. They appear to be critical of grades and a teacher’s evaluation of the student, and they focus on standardized test scores.
Gaps have been the focus for 22 years since No Child Left Behind, and Duncan and Spellings had their chance to reduce the learning and opportunity gaps they speak about. They never discuss or seem to reflect on their accountability for public school problems, especially their emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing.
Learning gaps are the difference or disparities between what students learn and grade-level expectations. Adults create expectations with standardized tests. Few raise questions about whether such expectations could be developmentally inappropriate, and even when they do, they’re ignored.
Opportunity gaps are life factors children struggle with surrounding ethnicity, race, gender, disability, and income. Many children facing opportunity gaps attend poor schools without resources or quality curricula.
Learning Heroes receives support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Charles and Lynn Shusterman Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
None of the above champion public schools. Most promote school privatization and, for years, have praised charter schools, which continue to do poorly in many places.
Looking closer at the learning heroes team, many come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The PBS report also references Go Beyond the Grades, connected to the Chamber of Commerce, which has never been optimistic about public education either. Remember their state-by-state report called Leaders and Laggards?
What’s ironic is that these same individuals helped put high-stakes standardized testing and Common Core State Standards in place years ago, along with other bad reforms, and they still complain that public schools are failing. They’re criticizing their own failed ideology in the name of school privatization!
Duncan is currently managing partner with the Emerson Collective in Chicago, a group sponsored by Laurene Powell Jobs, who’s also behind the online program Amplify and appears to have distain for public education and teachers. Amplify is sweeping school districts across the country (see Texas and NYC).
Educator Thomas Ultican recently described the Texas takeover by Amplify in Education Profiteering Accelerates in Texas.
The Emerson Collective claims to be committed to philanthropy and venture investing as some of its goals.
Spellings, who once promised that NCLB was 99% pure like Ivory Soap and all children would read well by 2014, also brought us Reading First which focused on phonics. She’s currently CEO of Texas 2036, a nonpartisan Think Tank that, among other issues, talks about school readiness and the workforce.
Could it be that America’s students are, as parents believe, doing well? I’d place money on students and teachers even with all the difficulties they’ve faced after the pandemic.
One must raise questions about any reporting connected to those who seek to end public education and the teaching profession.
Beneath such gloomy reporting, parents and teachers know their students and recognize their educational growth, and teacher, parent, and student connection is what matters most.
I just want to run screaming from the room.
I hear you, Christine. We’re not alone too.
Maybe it’s not either/or (either public education is a horrid failure or it’s a glowing success), but rather both/and. So much about evaluating something as large, complex, and amorphous as education depends upon the criteria chosen to measure and the tools used to get useful data about those criteria.
In the world of Arne Duncan, Margaret Spellings, and other entrepreneurial bureaucrats, the only thing worth measuring is what can (theoretically) be captured by standardized tests. So for them, the testing instruments ARE the criteria they value and the exact outcomes they will measure. But one of many things they ignore or forget is that by definition standardized tests produce normal distributions of whatever scores you’re collecting. The ETS doesn’t count raw scores (the actual number of questions a student gets right) because of expected variations in different test questions, the overall difficulty of a given test – an inevitable outcome if the questions differ from administration to administration – and variations in populations of students from year to year. So what matters is the scaled score – the raw score translated into the familiar 200 – 800 scale or some similar arrangement. And so 54 questions answered correctly on the Spring 2022 SAT may result in a different scaled score than a 54 on the Winter 2023 test. The difference won’t be vast, but it often arises. And part of the adjustment comes from the ETS and College Board’s goal of getting a bell curve. So if one year, students do better than expected on, say, the Quantitative (Math) portion of the test, the scale of next year’s tests will be adjusted accordingly (and it’s also possible that the empirical difficulty of questions will be bumped up a smidgeon). This adjustment allows the test-makers to claim fairness over a (usually) five-year period.
That’s good, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t address the question of whether these adjustments of the scale when converted to percentile rankings give us an accurate reading on how students are doing on these tests overall for any cohort one cares to examine. If the scale is adjusted, kids might actually be trending up or down and that’s hidden from the public (and school staff) because over time, such trends are adjusted for.
And all that statistical information begs the question of whether what tests measure is what teachers, parents, administrators, students, and other stakeholders in fact value. Obviously, the people described in this article value those scores, as do politicians, owners of private schools, charter schools, test preparation, and tutoring services, etc., value those scores. But to borrow from George W. Bush, the question remains, “Is our children learning?” And more importantly and grammatically proper, “What are our children learning?” Are the things being focused upon in our schools the things we most want schools to teach our children? And the answer in part has to be, “Yes if what we most want to be taught is what can be learned from prepping for the mandatory standardized test. And that is quite debatable.
Preach.
Well said.
Thanks, Michael. Good to hear from you, and I always learn from your comments. This is informative.
Thanks to Elisa, speduktr, and Nancy for the kind words.
All that work I did in the world of test prep taught me some useful things.
To which I reply that the high expectations that the corporate set pretend to aspire are in fact low if all you measure is reading and pretend there is an automatic equivalency to learning.
This is exactly the type of non-fiction reading senior high school students must read. They are intelligent and could see the bias in the reporting by PBS. And yet somehow our public high schools send qualified students to the military, workforce and universities alike.
I don’t know. Do high school teachers do these kinds of exercises in class anymore? Great question. Thanks, Arthur.
Yes, I do have my students connect readings such as this with while examining the veracity of the material. For example, the recent letter asking for a halt to competitive AI development for six months to reset things. It turns out Musk et al have created an AI corporation here in Nevada to rival ChatGPT.
This post should be sent to the powers that be that sponsored the PBS news hour program. Why are the opinions of working professionals continually ignored for the opinions of talking heads who have no interest in the survival of public education? Don’t public education advocates deserve equal time?
Thanks. I guess not. Duncan and Spellings pop up on all the stations from time to time. Neither do anything for public schools.
IIRC, newshour got significant funding from the Gates Foundation
Yes. Thanks for the reminder. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
PBS and NPR are profoundly dependent, and one might say captured, by corporate dollars.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/science-of-reading-literacy-parents.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Yes. Another report to look at. Thanks.
Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings are educational fraudsters, concealing their connection to corporate entities who profit handsomely from classroom destabilization caused by their anti-public education rhetoric.
Concealment is an essential strategy utilized by liars and con artists.
Thanks, Clyde. To think they were chosen to lead education in this country. I still find that amazingly sad.
Covid is over and blow it up Trump is gone (along with DeVos), so it’s back to usual for the deformer scam artists of the Bush/Obama education eras. They are nothing but grifters sucking on the teat of public education tax dollars. Stealing from children (by denying them a decent public education) to line one’s pockets is about the most despicable of all crimes.
When it comes to public education, they’re sadly shaking hands. Thanks, Lisa.
PBS:
“Among eighth graders, for example, just 29 percent were proficient in reading either at or above their grade level. In math, just 26 percent were considered proficient.”
NAEP Website:
“Students performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level on NAEP assessments demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter. It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).”
Astoundingly incompetent reporting.
Makes my head want to explode!
Mostly invalid standardized, no-stakes (for students) tests developed using vague, subjective, and developmentally inappropriate standards in just TWO SUBJECTS at only six grade levels are being used to broad brush three million teachers and 100,000 public schools as failures. Unfortunately, this ruse is working. As someone once said regarding misleading sound bites, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”.
And the narrow handful of standards that are actually tested include, with very few exceptions, NO CONTENT KNOWLEDGE – none zero, nada zilch.
Thank you, Rick. Thanks for getting to the heart of the reporting. You might appreciate this if you haven’t seen it already.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/23/03/harvard-edcast-weather-literacy-crisis-do-what-works
Harvard Professor Catherine Snow:
“And you have to ensure that students have wide vocabulary and a wide background knowledge basis in order to help them decode and comprehend what they’re reading.”
She listed this is as one of the many key pieces that need to be in place when providing a comprehensive literacy program.
I think it is the weakest link in the entire chain regarding classroom instruction – yet it is something that all primary and elementary teachers can reinforce. Speaking, listening, reading, and writing are completely limited by the degree to which students have a developed an enriched vocabulary and extensive background knowledge in a wide array of topics. It is fundamental reason that the so-called “learning gap” between the advantaged and the disadvantaged is almost impossible to close. It’s really not a “learning gap” between the children of affluence and children of poverty – it is a very long list of “gaps” Here are just a few:
pre-natal care gap
parental education gap
food security gap
enriched vocabulary gap
lake house gap
vacation gap
museum visit gap
home library gap
two parent family gap
family wealth gap
bedtime story gap
dinner table conversation gap
music lesson gap
expectation gap
support/motivation/encouragement gap
home aquarium gap
personal transportation gap
extended family support gap
birthday party gap
holiday traditions gap
trips to the beach/lake gap
commercial airline flight gap
This is great. Thanks, Rick. One I appreciate includes the gap between a nice school building and a rundown school building. A teacher who hasn’t worked in the latter might find it difficult to understand how hard it is with the disruptions and poor environment. Like how do children do well on tests without cool rooms in warm weather?
Thanks for this Nancy–more lazy reporting by relying on the same old (never learning or accepting their own part in perpetuating a fraud on the American public) talking heads
Thanks, Sheila. That’s about it.
My thanks to Diane Ravitch.
https://dianeravitch.net/2023/04/17/nana-y-bailey-why-does-pbs-listen-to-arne-duncan-and-margaret-spellings/
You a parent? Here’s the game.
Don’t listen to what wealthy progressives say, watch what they do.
My county – which is overwhelmingly progressive – is filled with public schools that uses Units of Study and Fountas & Pinnell.
It’s also filled with expensive private schools that do not and reading tutors, like Kumon what “start with phonics,” or even offer OG based coaching.
Follow the money.
I don’t propose any program. Teachers who teach reading need instruction from good universities. Most teachers or school districts will likely choose a reading program however, and teachers should hope they’ll have some say into it.
There’s lots of money now going to online instruction like Amplify. And you’re promoting two money-making programs too.
I don’t know about Kumon, but OG, after YEARS, still has little research to back it up. I’ve followed OG having been a reading resource teacher for students with learning disabilities. It certainly isn’t appropriate for all children.
Here’s my solution to this debate: whole language.
Ireland has GREAT PISA scores.
Ireland uses “Jolly Phonics,” a synthetic phonics program so extreme that they don’t even teach kids the names of letters, just the sounds they make.
But it’s characterized as “whole language” by experts in the UK who are critics of phonics. A cynic would say they’re just trying to claim another team’s success as their own.
I say we simply call this bluff.
They say Jolly Phonics is whole language? So be it.
Anyone who has staked their reputation on “whole language” gets the fig leaf they need to be at peace with it, my kids get a shot at Irish levels of literacy.
Say what you like about the Irish, they’re good with words.
I will have to read about Jolly Phonics, but I’m not usually keen on synthetic phonics because some in that camp push picture books aside until children master sounds.
Which reading curricula are you most familiar with? Which did you use in your own teaching?
I used a variety of programs for middle and high students with reading disabilities including SRA Morphograph Spelling and SRA Reading and I used Scholastic Scope Magazines for fun along with novel reading and Learning Strategies from Lawrence Kansas. including how to write sentences. And my students did journal writing. My hs students used Plato for skills now and then.