"Conditions of Education in the Commonwealth: Putting Students at the Center of Reform"

The event posting is here. Hashtag is #COE2017

December Board of Ed: PISA results

backup here
McKenna: why did we pay to do this?
Chester: in Massachusetts, we get a number of indicator that we're doing pretty well
where we were, NAEP assessment, a couple of international assessments
"in my mind, we should expect nothing less from Massachusetts than what the most aspirational systems expect"
cost about $600,000
US has participated since 2000
MA has participated twice as a state
1700 students in 49 schools; principals, teachers fill out questionnaires
"League Table" "comes out of the scoring world, tells you who's on top and who's on the bottom"
only Singapore scores better in science, top the world in reading, "less well" in math
"our science performance ticked up slightly, though it wasn't statistically significant"
"only 14% of the variance in MA science performance in attributable to increase in scores"
go read the charts if you're wondering about that; as you'd expect, it's more complicated; for one, kis socio-economic level is self-reported
Running through some charts here, which I'll add later.
Girls (36%) more likely than boys (30%) to expect pursuing a science related career
Sagan: "just on the edge of changing their minds" commenting that girls often slip in this as they get older (PISA is taken by 15 year olds) "or maybe it's encouraging"
fewer plan to pursue science than country
Policy implications: commitment to universal achievement, "gateway exams" were students need to pass to go on
"capacity at point of delivery"
class size versus student teacher ratio
"as much as 40, 45 students in a class, but teachers spending less of their day teaching those students"
"not about class size"
"very provocative results"
"resources where they yield most"
"higher performing systems have a capable central authority"
speaks of Fryer "hoping he will look at our data sets" to see what else can be done
Massachusetts fell in middle of frequency of testing
"stakes [in other places] are often quite high for students"
"I just feel so strongly for us in Massachusetts...particularly when there is an anti-globalization sentiment...we'd be doing a disservice if we didn't connect with the most aspirational systems around the globe"
Doherty: how schools chosen?
Chester: representative sample
Peyser: also is TIMMs: can you talk about that and this?
Chester: assessment of math and science, 4th and 8th grade
have participated as a state before
"much more of a traditional assessment of 'what you know'"
Stewart: what the style of pedagogy is in the high class size places?
how they're engaging this
"can get locked into a mindset without thinking about what that might mean"
Chester cites Sweden which has declined
"allows each school to grade itself and it has declined overtime"
"and I thought that was an interesting little tidbit"

The Board of Education meets Tuesday, December 20

They've posted the agenda here.
After the usual comments from the Commissioner, the Chair, the Secretary, and the public, they'll be hearing an update from Holyoke; note this report on the high school redesign from MassLive this morning. It's also worth noting that, while dual language has expanded under the receiver, the initial impetus for that came prior to the state takeover.
They'll be receiving a report on the PISA results for Massachusetts. As in prior years, Massachusetts paid to have the state evaluated separately on this international exam. Also, as in prior years, Massachusetts came in close to the top in the world. I posted some links last week regarding things to consider about PISA.
DESE will be giving an update on the state's plans under ESSA, after the series of public input sessions they held across the state. While final regulations were issued this month, note that the Republican members of the policy committee for the Congressional Review Act is looking at them closely; particularly with the new administration and an entirely Republican-controlled Congress, it isn't at all clear what is going to happen with this.
There is an initial discussion scheduled around educator licensure.
The discussion this month on MCAS will involve six recommendations from the Commissioner on high school testing. Those are:

1. Provide clear and accurate signals to students about whether they are on track for the expectations of colleges, employers, and civic engagement.
2. Keep the high school competency determination for English language arts and mathematics at grade 10 for the near future
3. Add history and social science to the competency determination.
4. Eliminate the high school chemistry and technology/engineering tests (as most choose bio or physics).
5. Add an introductory physics re-testing opportunity in February (in addition to the retest of bio already offered).
6. Convene a stakeholder workgroup to identify and recommend options for a grade 11/grade 12 assessment program to gauge students' readiness for success after high school.

(all of the above outside of parenthesis are quotes) 

This backup includes one of the more hopeful things I've ever read in a DESE backup: 

We're also cognizant of the many other scheduled activities in high school, and we've heard loudly and clearly from our stakeholders that we need to minimize additional time lost to standardized testing. 

So, in looking at options for grade 11 and grade 12, I recommend that we take this opportunity, and take the time, to think creatively and not assume the answer is another one size fits all standardized test.

There will be a presentation on the Legislative update on the calculation of economically disadvantaged students. Watch this one closely: not only does it matter for the calculation of the foundation budget, but there has been some work going on behind the scenes to improve the matching of students that has to take place to create those numbers (you might remember that students have to be "found" in another database to create this count; MassBudget had an excellent series of recommendations on this last month). There also remains work for the Legislature to do (yes, including updating the foundation budget!).

There is a report on the probation of the Martin Luther King Charter School of Excellence (backup is a Word doc which you can find off the agenda).

Finally, there is "continuing discussion" on the Mattahunt in Boston.

So about those Massachusetts PISA scores

Can we all say this together? "We are proud of the work of our students and teachers but there is still work to be done!"
(really: check the quotes)
It's interesting to see what PISA itself emphasizes in the release of the results:

Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Hong Kong (China) and Macao (China) achieve high levels of performance and equity in education outcomes.  

 Poorer students are 3 times more likely to be low performers than wealthier students, and immigrant students are more than twice as likely as non-immigrants to be low achievers. 

Nearly 20% of students in OECD countries, on average, do not attain the baseline level of proficiency in reading. This proportion has remained stable since 2009.

These would be useful conversations to have. They aren't the ones being had, however.
It's worth (as always) reading Yong Zhao about the relative worth of such results:

PISA is not a political poll, but it does attempt to predict the future. “PISA assesses the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education have acquired key knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies,” according to its brochure. These students are 15 years old. In other words, PISA claims that its results predict the future success of individual students and, by association, their nations.

I riffed a bit about PISA on Twitter this morning: we'll inevitably have comparisons between Massachusetts and our only real competition, Singapore, which is a Malaysian city-state which spends 20% of its budget on education. Call me a cynic, but I suspect we'll hear less about that and more about how they teach math.

UPDATE: and I'd be interested in any explanation that someone can offer on this (from DESE's press release):

"Of particular note is the fact that only 14 percent of the variation in our students' science scores is attributable to family economic background. Eighty-six percent is determined by instruction and district practices," Commissioner Chester said.

And we know that how?

Friday linkages

An ICYMI list for the weekend: 

• John Monfredo, Jack Foley and I (among others) were at a presentation this morning by the Building on What Works Coalition, a joint project of Mass Inc, Mass Business Alliance for Education, Mass 20/20 and some others. They're calling for a three year $75M competitive grant program open to districts with 50% high need students or above for early childhood ed, extended day, and innovative programs. I don't want to speak for others, but my sense that they were met with some polite skepticism here in Worcester. I know that Mr. Foley spoke for my concerns as well when he spoke of the importance of a focus on the Foundation Budget Review Commission and the core funding of education in the state.
• Important detail from the Brookings report on the gender gap in reading (as flagged by Libby Nelson at Vox) that the much-praised Finnish PISA test results, which lead the world, rely entirely on girls for their superior performance. As per usual with Brookings, I have my doubts about some of their other points. Nonetheless, good catch.
• If like me you have a soft spot for a literary spoof, you'll enjoy Scot Lehigh's take on Boston 2024 via Poe.
• Novelist Richard Russo is helping to raise funds for his hometown library, which he credits for much. 
• Looking ahead to the presidential election, here's Hillary Rodham Clinton's relationship with various education perspectives. 
• Education Next has a "Defense of Snow Days," with some research showing that days off don't hurt student performance (yes, on standardized tests) but student absence due to snow on days there is school DOES. 
• And Jarrett J. Krosoczka shares a bit of excitement on reading

Bet you didn't see this in the PISA coverage yesterday

Massachusetts, were it an independent country, would score third in the world on PISA.

Remarkably, the Commissioner did not mention this in an coverage that I have seen on this. 

"picture of educational stagnation"

Oh, Arne...
If you're anywhere in the education universe today, there's a good chance you may hear some mention of the PISA results. These are the Program of International Assessment results from last year's test, released last night. PISA was taken by 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science in 65 countries, including the US; three US states received their own results: Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Florida.
If you look at the above summary (that's Valerie Strauss, reprinting the basic rundown from PISA) you can sum up the local angle this way:

the US is doing about the same as it has been, and Massachusetts is continuing to rock the curve.
Enter the spin machines.

I'd say that Motoko Rich, from the New York Times, probably summed it up the best:

In the midst of increasingly polarized discussions about public education, the scores set off a familiar round of hand-wringing, blaming and credit-taking.

If you follow education at all, you can probably take it from there, which gives us the quote in the title from our U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. I think it's fair here to point out that he became Secretary of Education in 2009, which is when the test was last taken, so if we're looking for top-down accountability, we can start there. We've got hand-wringing from business groups about global competition (at least this time I'm not seeing any read "Shanghai" as "all of China," so at least we've gotten that far).  We've got teachers groups pointing out that we've still done basically nothing on child poverty. And we'll have some complaints about the lack of standardized testing to measure what really matters.
I'm not giving links to all of the above; you can find it all in that NY Times article.
 
The Massachusetts results, of course, leave our educational leaders in a bit of a bind. They've been busily assuring us that everything's not been great, and so we must abandon the Mass state standards and the MCAS for the Common Core and the PARCC. You'd think that might put them in a tough spot going forward.
But bless our Commissioner; he never lets me down.
Here he is in the Globe this morning:

“We have a lot to be proud of in Massachusetts,” said Mitchell Chester, state commissioner for elementary and secondary education. “We have another marker showing our students perform better than most others in the world. But we still have room for improvement, particularly in math and science.”

...cue the comparison with Shanghai.
I'll leave it to others more knowledgeable about I than Shanghai to fill you in. Yong Zhao points out that the East Asian countries that have had rising PISA scores in recent years aren't satisfied with their educational systems' focus on testing. And Tom Loveless gives us this on Shanghai:

Shanghai’s population of 23-24 million people makes it about 1.7 percent of China’s estimated 1.35 billion people.  Shanghai is a Province-level municipality and has historically attracted the nation’s elites.  About 84 percent of Shanghai high school graduates go to college, compared to 24 percent nationally. Shanghai’s per capita GDP is more than twice that of China as a whole.  And Shanghai’s parents invest heavily in their children’s education outside of school.  According to deputy principal and director of the International Division at Peking University High School, Jiang Xuegin:

 Shanghai parents will annually spend on average of 6,000 yuan on English and math tutors and 9,600 yuan on weekend activities, such as tennis and piano. During the high school years, annual tutoring costs shoot up to 30,000 yuan and the cost of activities doubles to 19,200 yuan.

The typical Chinese worker cannot afford such vast sums.  Consider this: at the high school level, the total expenses for tutoring and weekend activities in Shanghai exceed what the average Chinese worker makes in a year (about 42,000 yuan or $6,861).

Anyone want to place a bet on Commissioner Chester advocating that we increase our educational spending in Massachusetts accordingly?
In addition, I have a real issue with this gamesmanship. The U.S. has not "dropped;" it's doing about the same. We've dropped in the rankings because other countries are improving their educational systems.
Isn't that good?
Do we really want to live in a world where we're doing better than everyone else because they're failing to education their children? More and more countries are spending more on education, educating more of their children,  educating their children for more of their lives.
This is a good thing!
I really, sincerely, do not care if we beat Shanghai. Or Finland or Poland or South Korea.
I do care that all children in rural China and Somalia and Afghanistan get a good education, regardless of how much education their parents have, where they live, if they're girls, or if they're wealthy.
 
That's the sort of world I want to live in, even if it means we fall in the PISA rankings.

PISA scores come out tomorrow

...and Jersey Jazzman is celebrating.

Zhao suggests giving up forks

I'm beginning to think we're going to need to subtitle this blog with the fallacy"Post hoc ergo propter hoc*."

If you read Friedman on Sunday, please read Zhao today:

To be globally competitive, we should all begin to use chopsticks because chopsticks produce better education outcomes as measured by the international gold standard of education the OECD’s PISA, which tests 15 year olds in math, reading, and sciences, and TIMSS, which assess 9-10 and 13-14 year olds math and science abilities. The top five performers in the 2009 PISA math (Shanghai, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan) all use chopsticks, so do the top five in TIMSS math in 2007 (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong), in 2003, and 1999. And PISA and TIMSS scores are what drive nations’ economic growth and back their global competitiveness.

Such is the logic of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and OCED’s PISA group, exemplified by Friedman’s March 11^th, 2012 column Pass the Book, Hold the Oil. Citing a correlational analysis between PISA math scores and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of GDP, Friedman attempts to prove a point that does not need to be proven: education matters.

*"this therefore that" also known as "correlation does not (necessarily) equal causation."