RYSK: Gutiérrez's Political Conocimiento for Teaching Mathematics: Why Teachers Need It and How to Develop It (2018)

Rochelle Gutiérrez keynoting the 2016 CCTM Conference

I haven't used the "RYSK" tag for a blog post in almost four years, but only because I've taken to summarizing research over on the MathEd.net Wiki. That wiki turns five years old this month while this blog turns eight! I think my best strategy is to summarize on the wiki and editorialize here on the blog, and the events of this week demanded that I break my blogging silence and deal with an issue of the moment.

Last Monday I was riding the bus home when Google stuck an article from an anti-liberal education site called Campus Reform into my news feed. It was about a math education professor and white privilege, so I checked it out (in incognito mode — I try not to give Google the wrong ideas about the sites I want more news from). The article was about Rochelle Gutiérrez and honestly, it didn't say all that much except to highlight connections Rochelle was making between math and white privilege. The comments below the article were...what you'd probably expect. I closed the story and didn't think much about it, other than, "I wonder if this story will go anywhere?"

Go somewhere, it did. On Wednesday Google showed me that Fox News had picked up the story. Predictably in this era of internet news, it wasn't original reporting on the content of Rochelle's work. It was just a rehash of the Campus Reform article and it was getting a lot of comments. Judging by what I was seeing, the Fox News patrons didn't seem to have read Rochelle's work either. I searched Twitter for use of Rochelle's handle and saw she was getting a lot of negative comments with some blatant harassment thrown in (I reported one person whose account was subsequently found in violation of Twitter's rules). Those people didn't appear to have read Rochelle's chapter, either. (A notable exception: Jason Miller's post and conversation on Google+, which took the rational approach of asking "Does anyone know more about this?" and got replies like, "Here's more info, but not enough to draw conclusions." Score +1 for Google+.)

If I've learned anything in 2017, it's that I need to be upset/outraged on my own schedule and on my own terms. That usually means doing more listening and learning and not jumping into a soon-forgotten online fray. So I ordered the book Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods, in which Rochelle's chapter appears, and waited a few days for it to arrive so I could actually read it before commenting.

I've now read and summarized the chapter on the MathEd.net Wiki. Did Rochelle link the privilege of mathematics to the privilege of being White? Did she say we perpetuate that privilege when we focus on Greek mathematical history and not that of other peoples? Did she say we should see mathematical knowledge is relational, and not objective? Yes, she did say all those things, and in that way the original Campus Reform article was mostly accurate. Where it wasn't accurate — and led many other sites and their audiences astray — was representing Rochelle's chapter as mostly about those things. Rochelle made most of those statements in a page or two, then spent the rest of her 27 pages laying out a framework of teacher knowledge meant to help prospective teachers deal with the political realities that affect their work.

What strikes me after reading the chapter is that Rochelle names many political influences on teaching and education that are also common targets of the right: Common Core, Pearson, big philanthropic foundations, bureaucratic inefficiency and misdirection, and control of schools that doesn't reflect local needs. There is plenty of common ground to be explored in the chapter if people choose to look for it and discuss it. The news sites could have done that, but they didn't. It wouldn't be sensational enough to generate traffic and ad revenue, and their typical narrative doesn't leave room for discussing the development of political knowledge meant to benefit traditionally underserved students.

Now that things have (probably) quieted down, we can look at Rochelle's chapter for the reasons she wrote it: to inform math teacher educators who want to help prospective teachers deal with the political pressures and distractions that can interfere with giving students the help they need. If you are a math teacher educator, this looks like a book you should have. I've put the table of contents on the wiki along with the summary of Rochelle's chapter.

NCTM New Orleans 2014:Levine's The Coming Transformation of American Education: Implications for Mathematics Education

Dr. Arthur Levine - President of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (amongst other things)

NCTM Research Conference - Monday, April 7, 7:00 pm

Arthur Levine.
Source: http://woodrow.org/about/president/

The 2014 NCTM kicked off this evening with a poster session (which I missed, sadly) and an address by Dr. Arthur Levine, President of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and former President of Teachers College, Columbia University. In this talk, Levine detailed what he saw as six current and future forces that have the capacity to transform education.

Force #1: Demographics

In this section of the talk, Levine focused on demographic shifts, such as an aging population, an increased number of people moving to the Sun Belt, changes in color and diversity, and increasing immigration. Here are some of Levine's thoughts and claims:

• We're going to see an extraordinary number of retirements, both in our university and K-12 systems, and they must be replaced.
• There's been a 12% increase in math majors in the past 10 years, but it's really hard to recruit them into math education because other professions are more lucrative.
• We're going to see a new majority of students in higher education: older than 25, part time, overwhelmingly female, and working. Higher education won't be their primary interest as they juggle responsibilities of work and family.
• Students of the future aren't going to want higher education with "softball leagues or psychological counseling," as they can get those elsewhere. What they want is convenience, service, reliable financial aid, quality instruction, professors who are current in their fields, and low cost. They won't want to pay for things they don't use and they won't care about elective courses. These students will be prime candidates for online instruction.
• People are moving to traditionally conservative states and we'll have a "Republican hegemony," at least for the near future. This will stress some education systems and deplete others.

Force #2: Economy

Here Levine talked about the shift from an "analog" economy to a "digital" economy and the jobs that either went abroad or no longer exist. Some claims:

• Entry-level job skills are higher-skilled, with a particular demand for STEM knowledge and skill.
• States are increasing their graduation standards to the highest levels in history and saying dropouts aren't acceptable, like they could in the past when dropouts could more easily find steady jobs.
• We're going to find that the fastest growing job fields are STEM fields.
• Levine says governors who he talks to only talk about economic development and STEM.
• Everyone will have to be fluent in two languages - words and numbers. We thought we needed to teach kids Chinese, but instead we realized we need to teach them how to code.
• The symbol of the industrial era is the assembly line. Our schools looked like that and, for a time, it worked. Students moved through by age, taking courses measured in Carnegie units devised in 1910. Now time is variable, process is variable, and we're switching from process to outcomes and a focus from teachers to students. States are imposing standards and outcomes, and this means more accountability and regulation.
• We're going to see a proliferation of equity lawsuits. Equity used to mean access to the same process. Now students need access to the same outcomes. We've started to see the rise of these lawsuits and they're going to go "through the skies" in the coming years.

Force #3: Relationships with Government

More thoughts from Levine:

• The emphasis in education is economic development, with STEM on the rise and humanities on the decline.
• Higher education has shifted from a growth industry to a mature industry. Truman convened a committee in 1947 to engineer for growth. Now it's different. We're not trying to bump from 70% completion rates to 90%. Instead, we're trying to tighten regulations and become more efficient, doing more with less money.
• If you look at the Obama education plan, you see choice, charters, and accountability. We used to have a name for people who supported those things: Republicans. Republicans and Democrats now only differ on two big education issues: Republicans trash unions in public, while Democrats do so in private, and they disagree on vouchers.
• Educational improvement has been on the agenda for 30 years. Baby boomers are such a large segment and when they agree on what they want - which isn't often - they get it. Boomers had kids in the 1980s and they demanded great schools. "If you were running for dog catcher or president, you needed an education plan." Now boomers are older and their issues are their parents, if they still have them, and they want health care, elder care, and social security. There are limited budgets and health care will compete with education for public dollars.

Force #4: Technology

Technology is a marker and driver of change, and Levine predicts that curricular materials will change drastically, making traditional textbooks a thing of the past. The same technologies that we use to construct virtual environments like possible sci-fi visions of the future will be used to make rich simulations of history. No longer will students be limited to reading about fifth-century Athens; instead, they can go there virtually, where they'll virtually interact with classmates from around the world. Levine continued with thoughts on "digital natives":

• "This year's freshmen were born in 1995. That's like last week."
• "I asked a student in a focus group, 'How are you adapting to new technology?' He said, 'It's not technology unless it happens after you're born.' It's just reality, digital natives at analog universities being taught by digital immigrants."
• "Sometimes what we call cheating students call collaboration and file sharing. These students float in miles of data one inch deep. If we're hunters, they're gatherers. If we do depth, they do breadth."

Force #5: Privatization

For Levine, this one is relatively simple. Education is very appealing to the private sector. They see it as a growth industry that's counter-cyclical: the market for education goes up when the economy goes down, and education is subsidized with dependable cash flows. Private says they educate more efficiently and with stronger leadership, so we can expect to see more and more money from the private sector in both post-secondary and K-12.

Force #6: Knowledge Producers

Publishers and other content producers are all after the same information, says Levine. He recalled a conversation he had with someone in the educational content/publishing industry:

Publisher: "We're not in the book business anymore. We're in the knowledge business. We have products in 15,000 schools and we offer professional development. No higher education institution can match that."
Levine: "Where are you getting your content from?"
Publisher: "We hired full-time content providers."
Levine: "I thought to myself, 'I don't know anyone who is a content provider,' so I had to ask what one was. What the publisher described is essentially what I would call 'professors.' So we're competing for the same people, except he can offer bonuses."

Implications

Levine summarizes with the claim that we'll see an increase in education providers, with a blurring about what's private and what's public. We'll also see a blurring of local and global. We've transitioned before, says Levine, when our country went from a predominantly agricultural economy to an industrial economy. The Latin and Greek classes the educated elite enjoyed weren't of much use in an industrial economy, so new universities were created that were more specialized and technical, like MIT, along with land-grant universities straddling the worlds of arts and sciences and community colleges that made higher education local. Our coming transformation will re-position faculty as assessors, prescriptors, diagnosticians, while learning will increasingly become outcome based.

More from Levine:

• We're going to see three kinds of higher ed institutions: brick, click, and brick-n-click.
• For students, we'll see more choice, "anytime" studies (study anyplace, anytime, any style/mode)
• "If students are going to school and every choice doesn't look like 15 weeks, 3 hours a week, there's got to be a way to calibrate it all, and I think we'll do it based on outcomes."
• "I think we'll see a change in high-stakes assessment. Imagine if our GPS gave us results every hour. What would it tell us? 'You're 80 miles out of the way. Recalculating.' That's not useful. Assessment will move from largely summative to formative, formative, formative until it's summative. I think we're also going to see data, data, evidence, evidence as we focus on outcomes and learning. We'll ask what George W. Bush once asked: 'Is our children learning?'"
• We're also going to see much more lifelong learning. "Now we have students taking all their courses just in case they'll need them." In the future, courses will be delivered just-in-time.
• I think we'll see talent prioritized over the institutions where talent works. Is it more important to have 100,000 students in a class, or be faculty at Stanford? Someone with 100,000 students doesn't need Stanford. They'll say, "I'm the product. I don't need their branding." These faculty won't have jobs - they'll have agents. Faculty will want MOOCs, consulting deals, book deals, TV deals, and they'll negotiate for them. This happened in Hollywood; for a time the movie studios dominated, but now we go for the actors and don't care about the studio. That will become increasingly true in higher education.

Lastly, Levine believes that mathematics and STEM is in a spotlight we haven't seen since the Sputnik era. So what do we do? This won't last forever:

"When it comes time to talk STEM and math, right now the media is much more likely not to come to us instead of Bill Gates. He's seen as being ahead of where we are. But these are the fields of the future, the ones our children will depend upon. I think universities are still the right ones for the job. Ninety percent of STEM educators are prepared there. Research shows that nobody's better than we are at this."

RYSK: Gutiérrez's The Sociopolitical Turn in Mathematics Education (2013)

This is the 18th in a series describing "Research You Should Know" (RYSK).

"Regardless of the focus of a research project, the fact that mathematics is a human practice means it is inherently political, rife with issues of domination and power, just like any other human practice." (Gutiérrez, p. 40)

This quote from Rochelle Gutiérrez is not significant because it represents a cutting-edge perspective in mathematics education research. Instead, the quote is significant because the "sociopolitical turn" has taken the field of mathematics education research to a place where the above -- directly addressed or not -- is accepted by most math ed researchers. Insisting that mathematics education is somehow politically and culturally neutral is now the marginalized view. We didn't reach this perspective overnight, and we will struggle with how this sociopolitical perspective affects mathematics education. But in return for that struggle, we give ourselves a perspective from which to better understand why some students and some reforms succeed while others do not.

I'd seen a pre-print version of this article posted on the NCTM website leading up to the publication of this year's Special Equity Issue. NCTM has posted the article as a "free preview," which is where Bryan Meyer (@doingmath) found it and asked if anybody would want to discuss it with him. A few weeks later, Bryan and I met via Google+ Hangout and talked about the article.

It's been a few weeks since Bryan and I talked, but my main recollections are (a) my explanation of the socio+political was a bit long, but okay, (b) Bryan's pretty dialed in to this, as evidenced by the quality of the questions he asked, and (c) my speculation of what all this means for day-to-day classrooms gets pretty shaky. On that last part, I stand by my statement that I don't think this means there's something wrong with the sociopolitical perspective. Instead, I think it means I'm still slowly coming to understand it and consider all of its implications. Bryan and I are interested in having more of these talks with more people, and recently on Twitter we threw out a few links for possible articles to read. I'd like to have these Hangouts with more people, so we'll be sure to plan ahead and even seek out a regular time (once a month?) to discuss some recent piece of mathematics education research or commentary.

Feel free to comment to this post, the Google+ event, or the YouTube video. (Here would be nice.)

References

Gutiérrez, R. (2013). The sociopolitical turn in mathematics education. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44(1), 37–68. Retrieved from http://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Journals_and_Books/JRME/articles/JRME_Special_Equity_Issue/jrme2010-08-5a.pdf

How the Race (to the Top) Was Won (Part 2 of 2)

Note to self: In the future, don't go on a multi-state road trip and become otherwise distracted for more than a month between Parts 1 and 2 of a two-part blog post. Sorry, readers!

In my previous post, I set out to answer the following questions about Phase 1 of Race to the Top (RTT):

1. Where in the RTT rubric could states score the most points?
2. For the portions of the RTT rubric identified in #1, which states scored highest?
3. For the states identified in #2, what did their application propose and what were the judges' comments?

The answer to #1 was Section D of the RTT application, "Great Teachers and Leaders." If you break down that section, you'll find that the highest subsection scores belonged to Delaware, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Kansas. This post will dig into the actual applications to see what proposed reforms warranted those high scores, along with some of the comments made by the judges during the scoring.

(D)(1) – Providing High-Quality Pathways for Aspiring Teachers and Principals (21 points)

The RTT scoring rubric specifies that this criterion must be judged for both teachers and principals. High points are awarded for alternative certification routes that operate independently of institutions of higher education (IHEs) and include at least four of the following five definitional criteria: (a) programs are operated by a variety of providers, (b) candidates are admitted selectively, (c) candidates have school-based experiences and ongoing support, (d) limited coursework, and (e) certifications are the same as traditional programs (Kentucky Department of Education, 2010, p. 7; U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 10).

Kentucky has a 20-year history of alternative certification programs, and in 2003 the Kentucky Legislature allocated funds for the creation and growth of such programs (Kentucky Department of Education, 2010, p. 118). Kentucky now has seven alternative programs, including specific programs for people with extensive work experience, college faculty, and veterans of the Armed Forces, as well as district-based, university-based, and institute-based options. Most of the programs are selective; the work experience route requires at least ten years of work in the area of certification and several others require Bachelor's degrees in the relevant content area (Kentucky Department of Education, 2010, p. 120). Ten percent of Kentucky's current teachers and 17 percent of new teachers in 2009-2010 completed an alternative program.

There were only two aspects of this portion of Kentucky's application that received criticism from the reviewers, and only two of the five reviewers deducted any points for this section. The first deficiency was in the area of alternative principal licensing. Kentucky only has one program for alternative principal certification, and it does not meet all five of the definitional criteria (U.S. Department of Education, 2010c, p. 32). Only one new principal was alternatively licensed in 2009-2010, and that individual went through a university-based alternative program (Kentucky Department of Education, 2010, p. 122). The other deficiency was in Kentucky's process for identifying and acting upon teacher and principal shortages. Shortages are identified by Kentucky's LEAs, but current efforts to place teachers are limited both in number and geographic reach (U.S. Department of Education, 2010c, p. 32).

My take: Kentucky got perfect scores from 3 of 5 judges, and the top score overall in this area, despite only having one alternative program for administrators that produced only one new administrator the previous year. This was the best proposal in the country.

(D)(2) – Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance (58 total points across four subsections)

This criterion, also applicable to both teachers and principals, is worth a maximum of 58 points. Rhode Island scored 94 percent of those points to lead all applicants. Unlike the previous criterion, this one is divided into four distinct subsections. Rhode Island had the top score or tied for top score in three of those subsections.

(D)(2)(i) - Measuring Student Growth (5 points)

Even though this subsection is only worth five points, Tennessee was the only state to be awarded a perfect score. To earn the points, states must "establish clear approaches to measuring student growth and measure it for each individual student" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 11).

Tennessee has been using the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) since 1992. Tennessee claimed to track every grade 3-12 student in every subject, and the state claims the TVAAS is the largest student database in history (Tennessee Department of Education, 2010, p. 82). Despite the "every subject" claim, a brief look at the publicly-viewable data on the TVAAS website (https://tvaas.sas.com/evaas/welcome.jsp) indicates only core subjects are tested, and not at every grade. Tennessee has used the TVAAS to determine Adequate Yearly Progress, to support progressive districts, identify strengths and weaknesses in grades or subjects, and inform instruction, but prior to the 2009-2010 school year only 14 percent of the state's teachers had access to the database (Tennessee Department of Education, 2010, p. 82). Now that Tennessee has opened up access to all teachers, they plan to train both current teachers and administrators, as well as pre-service teachers, in the use of the database. Not only will this value-added data be linked to teacher and principal compensation and evaluations, the state "will monitor and report access and usage of the system at the teacher, school, and district levels" (Tennessee Department of Education, 2010, p. 82). No explanation is given in Tennessee's application for this level of monitoring and reporting, but one might assume it is to apply pressure to ensure that the system is universally used.

None of the five reviewers of Tennessee's application made any mention of the criticisms that have been levied against the TVAAS, even though such research is easily found (Amrein-Beardsley, 2008; Kupermintz, 2003). The statistical model employed in the TVAAS, the Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), may currently be the best value-added model available, but experts have had difficulty resolving its flaws because neither the statistical algorithms nor full value-added data sets have been disclosed for peer review. As one researcher stated, "My own and others' attempts to access the EVAAS value-added data have consistently gone without response or been refused with the justification that the value-added data, if released to external researchers, might be misrepresented" (Amrein-Beardsley, 2008, p. 68).

My take: Tennessee got a perfect score despite not collecting data for all students, at all grade levels, for all subjects, and they use a system that researchers aren't allowed to inspect because the state doesn't think they'll understand it. This was the best proposal in the country.

(D)(2)(ii) – Developing Evaluation Systems (15 points)

This subsection encourages the development of an evaluation system that "differentiate[s] effectiveness using multiple rating categories that take into account data on student growth ... as a significant factor" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 11). The evaluation system should be "rigorous, transparent, and fair" and be "designed and developed with teacher and principal involvement" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 11).

Rhode Island was the top-scoring state in this subcategory, but unlike Tennessee, Rhode Island does not have a value-added assessment system currently in place. Instead, it is rushing to implement one by the 2011-2012 school year so it can be "fully operational" by 2013-2014 (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, p. 95). Rhode Island plans to use this system liberally in educator evaluations:

Every decision made in regard to the professional educators in Rhode Island, whether made by an LEA or the state, will be based on evidence of the respective teacher's or principal's impact on student growth and academic achievement in addition to other measures of content knowledge, instructional quality, and professional responsibility. These new RI Standards ensure that no child in Rhode Island will be taught by a teacher who has received an "ineffective" evaluation for two consecutive years. (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, p. 97)

Instead of mandating a single statewide evaluation system, Rhode Island will allow individual LEAs to develop their own, provided they comply with the rigorous standards specified by the state. If LEAs choose to develop their own systems (or fail to), they can/must adopt a state-provided evaluation system.

Reviewers of Rhode Island's application awarded them 96 percent of the possible points for this subsection. In response to Rhode Island's "no child will be taught by an ineffective teacher" clause, one reviewer commented, "This is bold, it shows the seriousness of effort and it is an incredibly important foundation for RTT plans to get traction" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010d, p. 5). Only one reviewer seriously questioned Rhode Island's aggressive timeline for implementing their evaluation system. Even though the state forecasts a "fully operational" value-added system by 2013-2014, value-added data will account for 40 percent of a teacher's evaluation starting in 2011-2012 before rising to 45 percent in 2012-2013 and 51 percent in 2013 (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, p. 98; U.S. Department of Education, 2010d, p. 44).

My take: Rhode Island outscored every other state by mandating that districts transparently and fairly evaluate teachers based on data that didn't exist yet and a growth model the state didn't yet have.

(D)(2)(iii) – Conducting Annual Evaluations (10 points)

Two states, Tennessee and Rhode Island, scored the maximum ten points on this subsection. To earn the maximum points, the RTT scoring rubric requires that states have policies requiring "annual evaluations of teachers and principals that include timely and constructive feedback" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 11) and that those evaluations include student growth data.

Tennessee gained favor in the scoring by having recently passed their "First to the Top Act," which establishes a 15-member Teacher Evaluation Advisory Committee tasked with developing a new evaluation system. All participating Tennessee LEAs will use the new evaluation system as described:

The evaluation system may be used to publicly report data that includes, but is not limited to, differentiation of teacher and principal performance (percentage in each rating category), the LEA's ability to increase the percentage of effective teachers and principals, and percentage of compensation based on instructional effectiveness. To ensure accountability on improving performance of teachers and principals, the state will encourage LEAs to set annual improvement goals, with a minimum of 15% improvement in terms of the number of educators moving up in each rating category. (Tennessee Department of Education, 2010, p. 86)

Much appears to be hinging on the application's use of "may be used" and "the state will encourage." One reviewer, despite awarding a perfect score, advised that "It would make sense to pilot some of these ideas in several districts and make any needed adjustments before adopting them statewide in July, 2011" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010e, p. 4). Meanwhile, another reviewer questioned, "With such heavy weighting on student achievement data, it is not clear what solutions the State has to evaluate teachers in non-tested subjects or grades" and "It is not clear if this new evaluation system will need to be collectively bargained, and if so, how the State intends to secure teacher buy-in" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010e, p. 12). None of the reviewers explicitly questioned the ability to expect a minimum, annual 15 percent improvement of the number of teachers moving up the evaluation rating categories. Only time will tell if this is a sustainable goal.

Compared to Tennessee, Rhode Island's annual evaluation proposal looks decidedly unremarkable and received few comments from reviewers. Rhode Island called for annual evaluations at a minimum, and the state is responsible for providing teachers and principals the academic growth data that constitutes the bulk of their evaluation. The evaluations must also be based on the “quality of instruction (or, for principals, quality of instructional leadership and management), demonstration of professional responsibilities, and content knowledge” (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, pp. 101-102). LEAs are expected to review evaluations to guide their professional development programs.

My take: Tennessee planned to evaluate everyone but only had a system designed to measure teachers in just a few subjects. How they would negotiate an expansion of their system wasn't clear. How they expected endless annual 15% improvements wasn't clear. Still, this and Rhode Island's rather bland proposal were the best in the country.

(D)(2)(iv) – Using Evaluations to Inform Key Decisions (28 points)

By far the largest subsection of criteria (D)(2), constituting nearly half its possible points, this subsection is targeted towards using evaluations to inform "key decisions." The RTT rubric specifies four such "key decisions:"

(a) Developing teachers and principals, including by providing relevant coaching, induction support, and/or professional development;
(b) Compensating, promoting, and retaining teachers and principals, including by providing opportunities for highly effective teachers and principals ... to obtain additional compensation and be given additional responsibilities;
(c) [Granting] tenure and/or full certification (where applicable) to teachers and principals using rigorous standards and streamlined, transparent, and fair procedures; and
(d) Removing ineffective tenured and untenured teachers and principals after they have had ample opportunities to improve, and ensuring that such decisions are made using rigorous standards and streamlined, transparent, and fair procedures. (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 11)

South Carolina and Rhode Island tied for the top score on this subsection, each earning 93 percent of the possible points. South Carolina currently uses two data systems: the system for Assisting, Developing, and Evaluating Professional Teaching (ADEPT) and the Program for Assisting, Developing, and Evaluating Principal Performance (PADEPP). (Acronym-loving South Carolina's RTT application is named INSPIRE, short for “Innovation, Next Generation Learners, Standards & Assessments, Personalized Instruction, Input and Choice, Redesigned Schools, Effective Teachers & Leaders, and Data Systems.”) South Carolina plans to tie these systems into their state-controlled certification system (which determines contract and due process rights) and statewide salary schedule (U.S. Department of Education, 2010f, p. 29). With the state handling certifications, tenure, and salaries, it will be much easier for South Carolina to implement the reforms specified in the RTT scoring rubric.

One reviewer only awarded 18 of 28 points and had particularly critical comments for this part of South Carolina's proposal:

The state proposes to provide induction support for beginning teachers and principals. There is no mention of coaching services after the induction period. The state application explains various statutory issues related to tenure and insists that tenure will be related to performance. The explanation is inadequate and does not lay out a clear plan. (U.S. Department of Education, 2010f, p. 4)

A different reviewer gave South Carolina the maximum 28 points for this subsection, saying only that "all beginning teachers and principals [will] receive induction support and mentoring" and "Salary incentives are part of South Carolina's plan, teacher effectiveness, retention, full certification, and removal, if necessary" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010f, p. 20). This kind of variability is a problem with the design of the RTT rubric and will be discussed in the conclusion of this post.

South Carolina might have the top-scoring proposal for using evaluations to inform decision-making, but their assessment and data systems have some glaring overall problems. The statewide data systems, ADEPT and PADEPP, do not use a value-added model. Some LEAs are piloting a value-added "approach," and the state plans on developing or selecting a statewide model in the near future. The data used in that eventual model will first be from their current statewide assessment and the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), but the state plans to abandon those assessments in favor of one aligned with the Common Core K-12 standards, whenever one becomes available (South Carolina Department of Education, 2010, p. 102).

Rhode Island equaled South Carolina's score, but did so while retaining a more traditional measure of local control. In most cases, the LEAs will be setting their policies to meet the proposed goals of Rhode Island's RTT application, and the State Department of Education will assume an enforcement role. For the compensation piece, Rhode Island proposes funding four pilot programs with RTT dollars. By 2015, LEAs will be able to choose one of the four compensation models or develop their own with the state providing guidance and support (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, p. 106).

As discussed previously, Rhode Island plans to use their evaluation system for promotion, retention, and certification of teachers. LEAs will have to prove to the state that they are using evaluation data in these decisions and report to the state those teachers who have earned promotions or leadership responsibilities, which will require at least an "effective" or "highly effective" rating on their annual evaluation (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, p. 107). LEAs will also have to certify that they have removed all non-tenured ineffective teachers and any teacher marked "ineffective" two years in a row (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, pp. 108-109). The state will continue to manage the certification system and current educators will be subject to the new rules as their current certificates renew.

My take: Despite the high point value of this subsection, the U.S. DoE seems unclear if they believe more strongly in local control or state control, in current tests or future tests, or in mentoring or induction support. These were the best proposals in the country.

(D)(3) – Ensuring equitable distribution of effective teachers and principals (25 points across two subsections)

Louisiana led all states by taking 90 percent of the maximum 25 points for this section, but did not have the high score in either of the two subsections. Instead of reviewing Louisiana's application, we will instead focus on the applications from Georgia and Kansas.

(D)(3)(i) – Ensuring equitable distribution in high-poverty or high-minority schools (15 points)

The RTT scoring rubric for this subsection requires policies that "ensure that students in high-poverty and/or high-minority schools ... have equitable access to highly effective teachers and principals ... and are not served by ineffective teachers and principals at higher rates than other students" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 11). Georgia earned 93 percent of the 15 available points in this subsection to lead all states. Georgia's strategy clearly delineates into solving problems of supply and demand. On the demand side, Georgia plans to award bonuses to effective teachers and principals in high-need schools "tied to the degree of reduction made in the student achievement gap every year" (Georgia Department of Education, 2010, p. 121). To entice effective teachers to move to high-need rural areas, the state is proposing $50,000 tax-free bonuses that vest over three years and require the teacher to maintain a high rating on the state's Teacher Effectiveness Measure (TEM). Districts wanting to participate in this program must compete for the funds and prove that the teachers eligible for bonuses have an established record of high achievement. Georgia is being bold with this plan, despite their decision not to "[offer] these kinds of bonuses to principals, having experimented with significant bonuses for principals in the past and having found that these incentives were not effective in getting principals to relocate" (Georgia Department of Education, 2010, p. 121). To improve the supply side of equitable teacher distribution, Georgia will work with LEAs to improve professional development and partner with organizations like Teach for America and The New Teacher Project that have experience recruiting teachers for hard-to-fill positions.

Only one reviewer offered the most glaring criticism of Georgia's plan: "There is also detail missing ... on the systems to ensure distribution over time" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010g, p. 40). The RTT money allocated for the bonuses is temporary, and programs like Teach for America and The New Teacher Project are not well-known for placing teachers who remain in high-need areas for more than a few years.

My take-away: Georgia actually had a straightforward approach here -- fill difficult assignments by offering significantly more money to teachers who have shown an ability to raise scores and close achievement gaps. Will it work? No one's sure, but this proposal should be worth following up on. After all, it was the best proposal in the country.

(D)(3)(ii) – Ensuring equitable distribution in hard-to-staff subjects and specialty areas (10 points)

Kansas, whose application ranked 29th overall, makes a surprise appearance at the top of the scoreboard. They introduce this section of their application with some startling statistics:

The Teaching in Kansas Commission found that:

• 42% of Kansas teachers leave the field after seven years,
• 36% of Kansas teachers can retire within the next 5 years,
• 25% fewer students entered the teaching profession over the past six years,
• An 86% decrease in Kansas teacher biology licenses will occur within 6 years,
• A 50% decrease in chemistry licenses will occur within 6 years, and
• A 67% decrease in physics licenses will occur within 6 years. (Kansas Department of Education, 2010, p. 81)

Kansas's plan mostly consists of expanding their UKanTeach program at the University of Kansas, both at KU and to other institutions of higher education around the state. Kansas claims that “UKanTeach is dramatically increasing the number of math and science teachers graduating from KU, resulting in over 100 new, highly qualified science and math teachers each year” (Kansas Department of Education, 2010, p. 81). They claim this “dramatic increase” without citing the number of graduates before the UKanTeach program and fail to address non-STEM hard-to-staff subjects such as special education and language instruction. Neither of these criticisms were mentioned by any of the five reviewers of Kansas's application. Additionally, despite having other plans for teacher preparation and retention in hard-to-serve areas, the reviewers almost universally fail to cite them in their comments (U.S. Department of Education, 2010h).

My take: Kansas's proposal sounds practical but lacks details. Can UKanTeach do anything for non-STEM teachers? Why did the judges find this to be the best proposal in the country without an answer to that question?

(D)(4) – Improving the effectiveness of teacher and principal preparation programs (14 points)

This criterion asks for a quality plan for linking student achievement and growth to the in-state teacher and principal preparation programs and expanding those programs identified as successful.

Tennessee, which earned 90 percent of the possible points, uses brief but strong language to sell this part of their application. They proudly boast "The cornerstones are competition and accountability," and "Our State Board of Education (SBE) has broken the monopoly on teacher preparation held by institutions of higher education" (Tennessee Department of Education, 2010, p. 110). Tennessee claims to publicly report their teacher preparation program quality data, but a search of their Department of Education website (http://tn.gov/education/) when the RTT results were announced revealed nothing. Tennessee planned in 2010 to gather stakeholders from across the state to examine how they link student achievement data to teacher preparation programs and develop a plan to "reward programs that are successful and support or decertify those that fail to produce effective teachers" (Tennessee Department of Education, 2010, p. 111). Most of the reviewers of Tennessee's application cited a lack of focus on principal preparation programs to match those for teachers (U.S. Department of Education, 2010e).

Rhode Island doesn't use Tennessee's tough language, but claims to "[act] aggressively to close programs that do not meet its rigorous current standards and has closed two programs, including a principal preparation program, in the last 5 years" (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, p. 125). Every educator preparation program in the state must be re-approved every five years and Rhode Island plans to include data from teacher and principal evaluations in the re-approval process. Specifically, Rhode Island wishes to track how many educators from each preparation program earn full Professional Certification and a disaggregation of preparation program graduates in high vs. low poverty and minority schools (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2010, p. 125).

My take: It's troubling to see Rhode Island acknowledge their closing of two teacher/principal preparation programs, and more troubling to see the judges view that as a positive achievement, without knowing in detail the specific failures of those institutions that led to the failure. How were the programs not meeting Rhode Island's "rigorous standards" and what efforts had been made to improve them? It would have been far more impressive for our country's best proposals to describe a successful rebuilding of those programs than their simple termination.

(D)(5) – Providing effective support to teachers and principals (20 points)

This criterion is based on two goals: provide ongoing, targeted professional development and supports while also monitoring and improving the quality of the professional development and supports. The supports could include “coaching, induction, and common planning and collaboration time to teachers and principals” (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 12).

Delaware earned 95% of the available points by requiring all participating LEAs to adopt a comprehensive professional development plan that contains all the supports specified in the rubric. Despite being the top-scoring plan, one reviewer commented:

The key weakness of this plan is the lack of specificity about how LEAs will know what is a good PD model and what is not – this section seems vague and not well thought through. Compared to other plans in the Delaware application, this area is not very creative nor clear. (U.S. Department of Education, 2010i, p. 15)

Delaware does specify plans for certifying effective professional development programs and requiring states to adopt such high-quality programs by the 2010-2011 school year, but the eleven pages of description in the Delaware application didn't translate into rich commentary from the reviewers, despite the high scores.

My take: It's as if the reviewers are confident in Delaware's plan despite not being able to accurately describe what the plan contains. Somehow, this was still better than the proposals from all other states.

Discussion

Taken all together, we see a policy preference for: (a) many alternative routes to certification, (b) an extensive value-added assessment system, (c) teacher and principal evaluations based on student performance and growth data, (d) annual evaluations of all teachers and principals, (e) teacher and principal compensation, promotion, and retention policies tied to evaluations, (f) incentives for teachers and principals to serve in high-need areas, (g) programs to increase the supply of teachers for hard-to-fill subjects, (h) quality, accountable teacher preparation programs, and (g) effective professional development.

This should be no surprise, because this is precisely what the RTT rubric asked for. How did this encourage a large pool of innovative and creative reforms? Is Kentucky's 20-year-old alternative licensure program creative? Is Tennessee's value-added assessment system, in use since 1992, innovative? It's very possible the RTT rubric has stifled creativity and innovation as much as it encouraged it. Even worse, states may have abandoned the innovative ideas they developed in Phase 1 and instead chose to copy the above high-scoring states in the hopes of winning funding.

A very troubling aspect of many proposed policies is the dependence of so many important decisions on a value-added student performance model that is not 100 percent transparent. Regardless of opinions concerning the use of value-added models, or beliefs that value-added models could achieve perfect accuracy and reliability, the use of a non-transparent model (such as the EVAAS) in so-called transparent evaluation systems is a significant flaw. Software is patentable and profitable, while the underlying mathematics is not, so the motivations for keeping at least some parts of these growth models secret is understandable, even if undesirable. Still, the RTT process could have been strengthened significantly if the scoring rubric had required 100 percent transparency for any and all statistical operations provided on educational data.

My final criticism of this process lie in the RTT rubric itself. Why have 500 total points? Why is "providing high-quality pathways for aspiring teachers and principals" worth 21 points and "ensuring equitable distribution of teachers" worth 25? Who decided that one category should be worth four points more than the other and why? If those four points had been allocated elsewhere, would the results have changed?

In a paper by Peterson and Rothstein (2010), the authors expose the arbitrary nature in which points were allocated in the RTT rubric and show how changes in the weights of categories could have changed the outcome of the entire RTT competition. For example, adding a mere 15 points to any of the four criteria (improving student outcomes, using data to improve instruction, using evaluations to inform key decisions, and ensuring equitable distribution), then decreasing the other criteria less than a half-point to keep the rubric's total score at 500, Georgia would have won the RTT competition (Peterson & Rothstein, 2010, p. 4). Similarly, the "demonstrating other significant reforms" criterion was only allocated one percent (5 points) of the total rubric. Given the innovation possible in this "other" category, including reforms called for in the DoE Blueprint and other federal education programs, it would have been reasonable to justify giving that category a larger weight. If that weight had been 25 percent of the application, then Pennsylvania would have been the winner (Peterson & Rothstein, 2010, p. 5).

This design of the RTT rubric and its point allocation not only affected the outcome of Phase 1, but likely affected the following phases even more strongly. The elements of the proposals examined in this paper were chosen regardless of the margin of victory. Not only are slim margins statistically insignificant in a 500-point rubric, but the scoring process itself leads to some arbitrary selections. Unfortunately, when trying to play catch-up with the winners, the simplest thing to do is copy, not create. In doing so, RTT reinforces a "don't just stand there, do something" atmosphere for reform, even if the choice and effectiveness of those "somethings" is uncertain and arbitrary.

References

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2008). Methodological Concerns About the Education Value-Added Assessment System. Educational Researcher, 37(2), 65-75. doi:10.3102/0013189X08316420

Georgia Department of Education. (2010, January 19). Race to the Top: Application for Initial Funding. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-
applications/georgia.pdf

Kansas Department of Education. (2010, January 14). Race to the Top: Application for Initial Funding. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-
applications/kansas.pdf

Kentucky Department of Education. (2010, January 14). Race to the Top: Application for Initial Funding. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/kentucky.pdf

Kupermintz, H. (2003). Teacher Effects and Teacher Effectiveness: A Validity Investigation of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 25(3), 287-298. doi:10.3102/01623737025003287

Peterson, W., & Rothstein, R. (2010). Let's do the Numbers: Department of Education's "Race to the Top" Program Offers Only a Muddled Path to the Finish Line (Briefing Paper No. 263). EPI Briefing Papers. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.epi.org/page/-/BriefingPaper263.pdf

Rhode Island Department of Education. (2010, January 14). Race to the Top: Application for Initial Funding. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-
applications/rhode-island.pdf

Tennessee Department of Education. (2010, January 18). Race to the Top: Application for Initial Funding. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/tennessee.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010b). Race to the Top Scoring Rubric Corrected. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/scoringrubric.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010c). Race to the Top: Technical Review Form - Kentucky. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/comments/kentucky.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010d). Race to the Top: Technical Review Form - Rhode Island. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-
applications/comments/rhode-island.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010e). Race to the Top: Technical Review Form - Tennessee. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/comments/tennessee.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010f). Race to the Top: Technical Review Form - South
Carolina. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/comments/south-carolina.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010g). Race to the Top: Technical Review Form - Georgia. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/comments/georgia.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010h). Race to the Top: Technical Review Form - Kansas. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/comments/kansas.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010i). Race to the Top: Technical Review Form - Deleware. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/comments/delaware.pdf

How the Race (to the Top) Was Won (Part 1 of 2)

Race to the Top (RTT), the foremost education policy instrument under the Obama administration, was introduced in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The first two winning states, Delaware and Tennessee, were announced in the spring of 2010. At that time I wrote a paper about RTT for a policy class but didn't blog about it. Since RTT has continued with more rounds of state competition and a new RTT program for school districts, I hope there's still some relevance in sharing some of what I learned about RTT and what states did to score well on their applications.

Using policy definitions developed by McDonnell and Elmore (1987), RTT is a near-perfect example of an inducement, where money is exchanged for action. Inducements are a simple model:

RTT adds a layer of policymaking to this simple process. In the model below, the state departments of education have all policy instruments at their disposal. The inducement exists between the federal and state policymaking bodies, and not necessarily between the state and the local education authority (LEA). (The new RTT for districts will obviously change this arrangement.) Regardless of the instrument(s) used by the states, the goal, as defined by the U.S. DoE, is for states to "[lead] the way with ambitious yet achievable plans for implementing coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010d). Additionally, the DoE clearly states that "Creativity and innovation are rewarded in this competition" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010c. p. 15).

In the ideal RTT scenario, the competition would look like this:

1. The U.S. DoE rewards the states with the most promising reforms.
2. Winning states would enact and enforce new education policies.
3. The effects of the new policies would be measured.
4. Policies that prove to be successful would be replicated by other states.

There are two significant problems with emphasizing creativity and innovation in RTT. First, creativity and innovation necessitates deviation from proven reforms. You can't be creative by saying, "We're going to do what we know works." Delaware and Tennessee's "innovative" reforms (a label worth questioning) may have helped them win Phase 1 of RTT, but it may some time before we know if the reforms perform as intended. Implicit in the RTT competition is an assumption that established, effective reforms are too few, too expensive, or too difficult to scale, so RTT challenges states to create new reforms that might be cheaper or more easily implemented. This creates a condition where RTT money gets awarded for the potential of a policy, and not its past, proven effectiveness.

The second problem with emphasizing creativity and innovation is that RTT was not structured as an brainstorming, anything goes kind of policymaking process. RTT comes with a detailed scoring rubric, and any state wishing to score well obviously wrote policies to satisfy the rubric. How does that encourage creativity or innovation? In addition, states or districts applying beyond the first round will likely replicate the highest-scoring applications from Phase 1. This means that policies developed as part of RTT Phase 2 and later are likely to be less diverse, less creative, and less innovative, but no more proven.

So how did states manage this balance of creativity versus scoring high on the rubric? Thankfully, the rubric, the applications, and the judges' scorecards are all publicly available, so we can see exactly what each state proposed in their application. The analysis in this post will answer the following questions:

1. Where in the RTT rubric could states score the most points?
2. For the portions of the RTT rubric identified in #1, which states scored highest?
3. For the states identified in #2, what did their application propose and what were the judges' comments?

Race to the Top Scoring

Here is a summary of RTT Phase 1 scoring:

Selection Criteria	Points Possible	Percent of Total	Average Score (Points)	Average Score (Percent)	Standard Deviation (Points)
A. State Success Factors	125	25	90	72	18.03
B. Standards and Assessments	70	14	61	88	9.63
C. Data Systems to Support Instruction	47	9	33	70	7.04
C. Data Systems to Support Instruction	47	9	33	70	7.04
D. Great Teachers and Leaders	138	28	91	66	21.5
E. Turning Around the Lowest-Achieving Schools	50	10	36	72	11.19
F. General	55	11	37	68	12.96
Competitive Preference Priority 2: Emphasis on STEM	15	3	11	73	6.73
TOTAL	500	100	359	72	67.22

(Source: U.S. Department of Education, 2010a, 2010b)

Looking at how the points on the rubric are allocated, it's clear that for any state to do well they'd need to score well on Section D, "Great Teachers and Leaders." It was worth 28 percent of the 500 total points, and we now can see that of all the sections, the fewest points (as a percent) were awarded in this section. That means there was a lot of potential upside here, and we can dig into the details of "Great Teachers and Leaders" to see which states scored best. In the table below you'll find all the subsections of Section D, along with the scores of the eight states (DE, TN, GA, SC, RI, KY, LA, and KS) who had the top score (in bold) in at least one of those subsections.

Selection Criteria	DE	TN	GA	SC	RI	KY	LA	KS
Overall RttT Phase 1 Rank	1	2	3	6	8	9	11	29
(D) "Great Teachers and Leaders" Score	86%	83%	81%	82%	88%	80%	89%	63%
(1) Providing high-quality pathways for aspiring teachers and principals	82%	71%	70%	74%	84%	94%	89%	32%
(2) Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance	87%	91%	86%	91%	94%	76%	90%	56%
(2)(i) Measuring student growth	88%	100%	48%	88%	80%	84%	96%	56%
(2)(ii) Developing evaluation systems	85%	91%	81%	89%	96%	83%	91%	68%
(2)(iii) Conducting annual evaluations	92%	100%	96%	90%	100%	58%	92%	68%
(2)(iv) Using evaluations to inform key decisions	86%	87%	91%	93%	93%	76%	89%	45%
(3) Ensuring equitable distribution of effective teachers and principals	85%	74%	87%	73%	79%	73%	90%	89%
(3)(i) Ensuring equitable distribution in high-poverty or high-minority schools	83%	68%	93%	68%	92%	72%	88%	85%
(3)(ii) Ensuring equitable distribution in hard-to-staff subjects and specialty areas	88%	82%	78%	80%	60%	74%	92%	94%
(4) Improving the effectiveness of teacher and principal preparation programs	81%	90%	73%	81%	90%	77%	86%	66%
(5) Providing effective suport to teachers and principals	95%	75%	75%	79%	84%	92%	84%	80%

(Source: U.S. Department of Education, 2010a)

Just by reading the titles of the subsections above, you can recognize some of the most contentious areas of education policy we've seen the past several years. So not only is this part of the RTT application about high points, it's high-stakes. If the greatest opportunity for improvement in education truly lies in this area, it will be critical to get these policies right. In Part 2 of this post, we'll look at each subsection and the application from the state with the highest score in that area. Some of the policies are sound, but some aren't, and sometimes the judges' comments indicate divergent interpretations of both the application and the rubric.

References

McDonnell, L. M., & Elmore, R. F. (1987). Getting the job done: Alternative policy instruments. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 9(2), 133-152. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1163726

U.S. Department of Education. (2010a). Detail chart of the Phase 1 scores for each State. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/phase1-scores-detail.xls

U.S. Department of Education. (2010b). Race to the Top Scoring Rubric Corrected. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/scoringrubric.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010c, May 27). Race to the Top Program: Guidance and Frequently Asked Questions. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/faq.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. (2010d, April 16). Race to the Top Fund. ED.gov. Retrieved June 6, 2012, from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html

The Research Works Act and the White House OSTP

Imagine Company X proposed a law that said if they added value to a public highway -- such as by organizing volunteers to pick up trash on the side of the road -- then that gave Company X ownership of the road and the rights to charge the public tolls to use them. Sounds crazy, right? Well, replace "Company X," "public highway," and "pick up trash" with "Reed Elsevier," "publicly-funded research," and "peer review," respectively, and you've basically got the Research Works Act, a bill currently in the U.S. House of Representatives. If passed, the Research Works Act would prohibit federal funding agencies (such as the National Institutes of Health) from requiring that the research they fund (with your tax dollars) be available to the public. Instead, publishers could restrict access to any research they add value to (such as coordinating volunteers for peer review) for profit. Where does that profit come from? Usually from the high subscription fees paid by research universities, money often obtained from public funds and tuition dollars. The effect is that taxpayers are paying twice for research that, in many cases, they still don't have access to.

Fortunately, people are paying attention. Michael Eisen's op-ed in the New York Times explains the Research Works Act and its potential harm to research and scholarship, and plenty more articles on the subject are easily found. Somewhat coincidentally, we are also at the end of a feedback period for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where they have made a formal Request for Information (RFI) about open access to scientific publications. Yes, the Research Works Act should be stopped and seen as little more than a request by for-profit publishers to continue having their work (along with their alarming profits) subsidized by tax dollars. But I don't think stopping one bill is enough. Instead, I hope to see all federal funding agencies adopt policies similar to those of the NIH. I expressed these hopes in an email today to the White House OSTP, the text of which I've copied below.

---

University of Colorado at Boulder
School of Education
249 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0249

January 12, 2012

To: Office of Science and Technology Policy
Executive Office of the President
725 17th Street Room 5228
Washington, DC 2050

From: Raymond C. Johnson, Doctoral Student in Mathematics Education
School of Education, University of Colorado at Boulder

Re: Response to the White House RFI on OA publications

I am a researcher, concerned citizen, and a supporter of open, public access to publicly-funded research. I speak for myself and not on behalf of my colleagues or my institution, although I believe I express ideas and opinions shared by many researchers and educators. In response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy request for information on “Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research,” I urge you to preserve policies that require public access (such as from the National Institutes of Health) and expand similar policies to other federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, a key source of funding for education research in mathematics, science, and technology. Currently it is with great jealousy I see the growth of open access publishing in areas such as health and medicine; as an education researcher I wish I had the ability to share the latest research with teachers and administrators, most of whom cannot afford the high fees charged by publishers of education research. Unfortunately, open access journals in education are relatively rare and undervalued. A change in policy, one that would require public access to federally-funded research, would quickly change the perceived valuation of open access publishing outlets and bring much-needed information to educators everywhere.

Prior to my becoming a researcher I was a high school mathematics teacher for six years in high poverty, rural Colorado school districts. I did not have the benefit of a nearby university or a district support staff with access to recent or prominent research. My main link to information was a powerful one: the internet. However, it seemed that my searches for research about teaching methods, curriculum, education policy implementation, etc., all eventually led me to paywalls put up by publishers to “protect” their work, requesting fees I could not afford to pay. Now, as a researcher, I realize that the authors of education research -- much of it funded with federal dollars -- are asked to give their copyrights to publishers in exchange for so-called “widest possible dissemination” of that research. Researchers neither receive nor expect any pay or rewards for giving away their work, other than some scholarly esteem and the hope their research somehow reaches and benefits students and educators. While that publishing model might have made sense twenty years ago, it does not any more. Any claim of “widest possible dissemination” that currently does not include searchable, full-text publication on the public internet is false, at best, and fraudulent, at worst.

In response to the eight questions in the RFI, I encourage you to consider the arguments and recommendations made by Harvard University in their response (http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/stp-rfi-response-january-2012). Their expertise in these matters far exceeds mine. However, I do wish to make the following amendments to their responses for questions (2) and (7):

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders involved with the publication and dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific research? Conversely, are there policies that should not be adopted with respect to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders?

Harvard’s response refers to a need to divide and share rights between researchers and publishers. My recommendation beyond their statement is that any discussion of copyright include Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), an organization dedicated to creating and defending content licenses that allow creators to reserve some, but not all, of their copyrights. Their expertise should be invaluable in any discussion about the sharing of intellectual property rights. The Harvard response includes a recommendation of a Creative Commons license at the end of their response to question 1. I also urge you to consider the expertise of SPARC (http://www.arl.org/sparc/), the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition.

(7) Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these public access policies?

In Harvard’s response, they say they “could support mandatory public access” for non-journal works, but consider these to be “secondary issues” and are “not prepared to list all the types of content to which a federal public-access policy ought to apply.” I worry that this position is short-sighted and leaves too much room to abuse public access policies. Often the events that lead to research becoming a book chapter instead of a journal article are entirely matters of circumstance, and not a basis of quality or public importance. In fact, the entire distinction between article and chapter relates to a paper-based publishing economy, one that is increasingly irrelevant in a digital age. After all, if we were still limited to publishing on paper it is unlikely that this kind of public access policy discussion would even exist. If the spirit of these policies is to give the public access to research they have funded through federal tax dollars, there is no need to worry about “types of content” other than to say the research will consist of bytes and files traveling the internet. Furthermore, if the policy only requires “journal articles” to be published openly, what is to keep publishers from re-branding themselves as something other than a journal? By relabeling their products as books, magazines, or something entirely new, unwanted loopholes around public access are sure to emerge.

Reflections of Multicultural Education

It’s the day after the last day of what has been a very busy semester. Being busy is good, and being awash in new information every day is something I relish. But there comes a time when we must pause and reflect, and too often this semester I have not given myself that time. Admittedly, just keeping up with the flood of new information proved to be too much, and the student-to-student whispers of “You can’t read everything, you know” proved too regularly to be true. But finally, now, I can take a few hours and think about the last core course of my doctoral program: Multicultural Education (MCED), taught by Linda Mizell.

Assessing the value of this class has been difficult, as there were plenty of moments during the semester when I felt I wasn’t making much scholarly progress. One reason for that feeling – and a reason I appreciate – is that prior coursework had left me better prepared for MCED than I expected. (Or so I thought.) Rarely were the issues we explored in MCED not ones I’d considered in prior courses like Culture and Ethnography, Ethics in Education, Policy Issues, Education Research and Policy, and Perspectives on Classrooms, Teaching, and Learning. It is a credit to my institution that attention to multiculturalism and equity permeates into most corners of the school, although I admit there are times where I still sense it as artificially layered on to a lesson or, even worse, uncomfortably absent. A second reason for that lack-of-progress feeling stemmed from not being able to keep up with all the reading and assignments for the semester. As I finished the last of my papers last night, I thought back to what remained unfinished and one reading in particular stood out: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists.

So after submitting my last final paper, I pulled Bonilla-Silva back off the shelf and picked up where I’d left off. I had read all but the last two chapters, but it was in those last two chapters where things appeared to get most interesting. In this, the third edition of Racism Without Racists, Bonilla-Silva added a new chapter at the end addressing the “Obama Phenomenon.” I started reading and almost immediately I was taken back to what I thought made this book so interesting, engaging, and challenging to begin with: Bonilla-Silva’s outspoken criticism of a system that perpetuates racism and inequality. In general, I do not disagree with Bonilla-Silva’s message. But the style with which the message was delivered came as a bit of an uncomfortable shock.

In his detailed analysis of interviews with both white and minority students, Bonilla-Silva exposed the racism found in peoples’ language. For example, in an interview with a white girl named Jill who claimed, “One of my best friends is black” (p. 58), Bonilla-Silva asks her to go into more detail. Jill then describes her friend as “bright” but with “terrible GMAT scores,” and then says, “What he lacks in intellect he makes up for in…he works so hard and he’s always trying to improve himself.” In his analysis, Bonilla-Silva addresses the contradiction about intelligence and points out that Jill never mentions this friend by name. This example by itself might seem lacking in evidence, but it is far from an isolated incident in the text. The dissection of racism in peoples’ speech happens on page after page. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes less so, and I remember feeling during my first reading that I’m glad Bonilla-Silva wasn’t interviewing me, because he seemed to make everybody sound racist!

Now, reflecting exactly on that thought, I see how that thinking exposes how I largely missed Bonilla-Silva’s greater point (even though it’s the title of the book): the kind of racism we’re dealing with now is less about the individual and more about a system. Bonilla-Silva wasn’t after Jill to make her sound like a racist – at least not the kind of racist most people imagine when they hear that label. Bonilla-Silva was instead exposing how Jill, along with most of the other interviewees in the book, demonstrates the systems and structures of racism and how they exist in what we all say, do, and believe. In other words, it’s not about Jill. For the same reason, I shouldn’t have worried about Bonilla-Silva interviewing me, as the interview would have only helped me understand how my actions, behaviors, and attitudes are being affected by the subtle yet significant culture of racism that still exists in our society. And until we are forced to recognize it, there is very little we can or will do about it.

It’s also this same system that allowed much of the country to endorse President Obama, and how that endorsement gives us a false sense of accomplishment that we’ve somehow reached a “post-racial” society. (We haven’t.) As an educator I wonder how we can have policies like NCLB which are so bold to declare a school a failure when achievement gaps persist, yet our greater society and government doesn’t always extend that same failure judgment to the enormous gaps in achievement, income, wealth, health, etc. that we see in our society. Sure, the #Occupy protesters have their message, but it’s unfortunate that so few were shouting until the perils of inequity reached beyond minorities.

The system that Bonilla-Silva describes should not have been an “uncomfortable shock” to me. From where I now stand, I can see how other readings described much of the same system, yet somehow by using more academic or less forceful language I was led to think I understood when I didn’t. Perhaps the best example of this is Beverly Daniel Tatum’s book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” I remember thinking as I read it, “I really like Beverly Daniel Tatum because she’s making me feel comfortable about a difficult topic.” Where I feared an interview with Bonilla-Silva, I would have welcomed the opportunity to speak with Beverly Daniel Tatum.

But somehow, disguised by my initial affection for the authors, I didn’t immediately see how in many ways Bonilla-Silva and Tatum were largely describing the same system of racism. I’m glad I read Tatum first and then Bonilla-Silva, because now as I reflect I can see how Tatum’s message didn’t really sink in for me; if it had, I wouldn’t have been so challenged by Bonilla-Silva. The lesson for me is not that I need to keep reading more critical work (although that would certainly help), but that it’s going to take more effort to make myself feel uncomfortable about issues of culture, race, class, power, etc., before somebody else gets the chance to do it for me.

For me, the simple title to this post has a double meaning. First is the more obvious, that I’m finally taking some time to think about a class I experienced over the past semester. Second, and more importantly, is the idea that multicultural education has a reflective property like a mirror bouncing light around a corner. As an educator who had a relatively monocultural upbringing in the rural Midwest, and who apparently can still be surprised by the injustices in the world around me, I need to use what I’ve learned about multicultural education to shine some light not only around corners, but back on myself. There’s so much more for me to see, most of which is hidden by its largeness, not its smallness. As an educator this is what we do: we help students explore and understand the world around them, and our reward for doing so comes both in our students’ growth and our own.

Review: Race to Nowhere

Tonight I had the pleasure of viewing a screening of the documentary Race to Nowhere at the Shepherd Valley Waldorf School. With other education films such as Waiting for Superman and The Lottery, Nowhere provides a very different, yet very important perspective on American education. Check out the trailer:


People need to see this movie -- especially people who see Waiting for Superman. (Are you hearing me, Oprah?) Where Superman wants you to point fingers at a school, a teacher, or a union, Nowhere doesn't try to assign blame. Nowhere wants you to understand our educational culture and our roles in it, and use that understanding to change the way we as a society view school. Instead of over-scheduling, over-working, and over-stressing our students, Nowhere advocates for children, letting kids be kids and fostering their creativity and happiness to make them (or let them be) accomplished learners. Nowhere paints a powerful picture of accountability-based, high-stakes reform, and we begin to see how easily we fall into the traps of our system even while we understand its failings. Where Superman demands anger as the impetus for social change, Nowhere is a plea for compassion. Anger generally trumps compassion when it comes to getting people's attention, so I have doubts that Nowhere will be getting the attention it deserves alongside Superman. But we don't always make our best decisions when we're angry.

I'll admit it: for most of my life I scoffed at the idea that student self-esteem was a prerequisite for student achievement. I always thought it should be the other way around. After a year or so of grad school, with sufficient guidance and time for reflection and self-enlightenment, I now realize that my opinions were far too grounded in my own experience as a relatively stress-free, high-achieving student. This movie isn't about the warm and fuzzy student self-esteem I may have discredited in the past; the students in this movie are being harmed both psychologically and physically in ways that are hard to watch, and students who don't want that stress are giving up altogether. Nowhere seeks a balance, a reciprocity between student welfare and achievement that we must desire as an educational outcome. High standardized test scores always look good, but not if they come with higher incidents of student sickness, headaches, sleepless nights, caffiene and stimulant abuse, eating disorders, and suicides. (The film contains a heartbreaking story of a 13-year-old girl who killed herself, essentially, because a bad test in 8th grade algebra was going to prevent her from getting straight As.) The most powerful voices in Nowhere are the students. They are bright, well-spoken, driven students who want to do well as much or more than any parent, teacher, administrator, or policymaker wants for them. They are the stars of this movie and they deserve not only our attention, but our action. Where should you start? Go see the movie and watch for the answers to that question at the end of the film.

A Week for Irony and Contradictions in Education

The recent past has been wrought with irony (or at least contradictions) in all corners of education. Let's look at a list:

Read Bruce Baker's "If money doesn't matter..."  Bruce examines the argument that "we keep throwing money at education and it hasn't made a difference," and points out that (a) schools with lots of money tend to do well, and (b) people who make that argument don't mind throwing money at charter schools.

Just days after Vanderbilt University released their study finding no improvement in test scores in Nashville's merit pay system, schools around the country (including Colorado) received millions of dollars from the federal government to implement merit pay systems.

NBC's "Education Nation" summit will gather "the foremost policymakers, elected officials, thought leaders, educators, members of the business community and engaged citizens" to discuss issues in U.S. education. Unfortunately, the list of invited panelists NBC is promoting doesn't include any teachers, students, principals, or professors. The only university-affiliated participant on the list is the President of the University of Phoenix, who happens to be a major sponsor of the event.

In a post called "Does Education Pay?" the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) criticize the College Board for "a confusion of correlation with causation." The day before, the CCAP asked, "Should We Abolish Colleges of Education?" and use this logic:

1. U.S. students "perform in a mediocre fashion" on international tests.
2. Kids need remediation and/or drop out of college because of their mediocre education.
3. Good teaching is better than mediocre teaching.
4. Most teachers studied at a college of education.
5. The teachers who didn't go to a college of education are as good or better than those who did, such as Teach for America teachers. (Sorry, CCAP, that's rarely true.)
6. Colleges of education support anti-knowledge and anti-intellectual biases and make their poor students look good by inflating grades.
7. Colleges of education don't want teachers to be rewarded for student learning because student self-esteem is more important than knowledge.
8. While there might be some good colleges of education, most of the people who really understand education are not in education schools.
9. Courses in education are less helpful for math teachers (for example) than advanced math courses. (This was not the finding by Floden and Meniketti (2005), who say it's not as simple as "more math is better.")
10. THEREFORE, we should close colleges of education, which are a "blight on true 'higher education' [that] should be discouraged at all institutions depending on taxpayer funds."

I admit, that post had no trouble working its way under my skin. If you can keep track of all the assumptions and correlation/causation confusions in their argument, you're doing better than me.

If I missed anything you want to add to this week's list, feel free to add them in the comments.

References
Floden, R. E., & Meniketti, M. (2005). Research on the effects of coursework in the arts and sciences and in the foundations of education. In M. Cochran-Smith & K.M. Zeichner (Eds.), Studying teacher education: The Report of AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education (pp. 261-308). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Colorado's Amendment 61: The Simple Facts

Several stories have hit the news recently about Amendment 61, which Coloradoans will vote on this November. Here's what you need to know:

• The property taxes that Colorado school districts rely upon for their funding usually start coming in during March.
• When Colorado school districts used to budget around a calendar year (Jan-Dec), they didn't have long to wait (~3 months) for property tax funds to arrive.
• When Colorado school districts switched to fiscal years (Jul-Jun), they had to wait much longer (~9 months) for property tax funds. Since districts don't have an extra 6 months of cash lying around, the state has provided interest-free loans to school districts to bridge the gap.
• A provision of Amendment 61, if passed, prohibits the state from making these loans to school districts, and many districts aren't sure what they will do (or, better put, not do) without that money.

I don't think I need to tell you how to vote, but this does sound like an Amendment worth studying carefully. Ed News Colorado has the best coverage I've seen yet, including links to sites for and against Amendment 61.