Why I’m running for the school board

Yesterday I filed to become a candidate for the school board vacancy created by the resignation of Tuyet Baruah. The filing included over a hundred petition signatures, and although it wasn’t required, I made sure that I included at least four signatures from each of the twenty elementary school attendance zones in the district.

The vacancy that I am running to fill occurred only a week ago; it’s going to take me a couple of weeks to get a campaign fully in gear. In the meantime, for those of you who don’t already know me:

My name is Chris Liebig, and I have lived in Iowa City for nineteen years. This year, my wife Carolyn and I will have one child at Hoover Elementary, one at Southeast Junior High, and one at City High. I have been writing regularly here about local and national education policy for almost six years. In my day job, I teach legal analysis, writing, and research to first-year law students at the University of Iowa. (The opinions I express here are, of course, my own.) In addition to my law degree, I have an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Why I’m running:

• Our district needs to be more responsive to what the community wants. Too often district policies—for example, the new school day schedule, or the dismayingly short elementary school lunch periods, or the continual talk of school closures—seem to descend from on high, without any regard to community input.

• I want to keep all of our schools open. Closing schools when enrollment is expanding makes no sense and is needlessly divisive and expensive.

• We should pay special attention to the needs of disadvantaged students and their families. In my view, those families are the best judges of what those needs are. We should seek out their advice and bring it to bear on district policy.

• We need the voters to pass a bond to complete the renovations and new facilities in the district’s long-term plan. Passing a bond requires not cheerleading or groupthink but transparency, candor, inclusiveness, and critical thinking. Asking the voters to approve a bond that pits some neighborhoods against others, for example, would put the entire plan at risk.

• The district should make it a priority to protect kids as much as possible from harmful policies that are imposed on us by the federal and state governments. For example, if new state standards are developmentally inappropriate for the youngest kids, we should do everything within our power to blunt their negative effects and to lobby for change.

• Teachers and school staff have invaluable knowledge about what is happening in our schools and what might need to change. They should not feel inhibited for any reason from speaking publicly about the district’s policies and practices. I’d like to develop an employee free speech policy to ensure that school staff will feel free—and encouraged—to contribute publicly to the discussions about our schools.

• We need sound, capable management from our administrators, but on policy issues the board should lead, not follow, the administration. The board is the only democratically accountable element in what would otherwise be an insulated and self-reinforcing system. It needs to speak up for the community and push back against proposals that don’t have the support of the public.

Having blogged here for so long, I’m a pretty open book. If you browse through old posts, you’ll get a sense of where I’m coming from. But I’m not interested in running for the board so I can impose all my idiosyncratic preferences on the district regardless of whether anyone wants them. Our best hope is a school system that reflects the ambitions and values of this community. I believe in the great potential of community-based, democratically accountable public schools.
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School board adopts amended proposal for new school day and year

At the school board meeting tonight, many members of the public spoke about the administration’s proposal to change the school day and year. None of them were in favor of it. Most speakers—including at least one pediatrician and several high school students—focused on the harms of making teenagers start school at 7:45.

After hearing the community comment, several board members seemed reluctant to move forward with the change, especially given how little opportunity the community had had to learn about it. But the board was concerned about the collective bargaining implications of not going forward with the proposal, since the proposal was the basis of a tentative agreement with the teachers’ union about work hours. If the board did not go ahead with the change, it might then set negotiations back and have other bargaining consequences. The board went into a private session to discuss the bargaining implications with district administrators.

When they returned, the board members quickly approved a modified version of the administration’s proposal. The proposal was exactly the same, except that everything had been shifted fifteen minutes later. So elementary school will go from 8:45 - 3:45, while junior high and high school will go from 8:00 to 3:10. The school year will be 175 days long instead of 180; the summer break will be thirteen weeks long. As I understand it, time lost to weather cancellations will not be made up (unless it brings the total hours below 1080, which is unlikely).

Given the way events unfolded, I’m sticking with my initial hypothesis. My guess is that if the board had insisted on maintaining the current school day and the 180-day year, the union would likely have insisted on additional pay to compensate them for the longer year. That, in turn, might have forced the board to go through another round of budget cuts like those we experienced last year. Let’s hope that tonight’s discussion about cutting back the school year will be in lieu of a discussion about more program cuts.

I don’t blame the teachers’ union for negotiating the best deal it can get for its members, and I don’t blame the school board for facing reality if the options were limited. I appreciate that they were able to take some of the edge off the early start time. I do blame the Governor and the state legislature for preferring tax cuts and teacher leadership programs to general school funding.

The losers tonight? Teenagers, who will now start school at 8:00 instead of 8:05 or 8:10, though at least that’s not as bad as it might have been. Elementary schoolers, who will now have to add another half hour to the six hours they’re already cooped up in class, all in the name of “more time on task.” Working parents, who will have to line up three more weeks of child care over the summers (which probably means over $1000 per child per year). Members of the public, who learned about the proposal only a few days ago and never got the full story of what is driving the change. And, if my hypothesis is right, teachers, who might have preferred to work a longer year for commensurate pay, rather than three fewer weeks for presumably less pay.

Winners? I suppose the people and corporations who got the biggest tax cuts from the Branstad administration.
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What’s the real reason for the proposed change in the school day?

The more you look at the district’s proposal to change the school day, the less credible the rationale is. District administrators said that the change is “aimed at increasing instructional time for elementary students,” because “more time on task is great for our students.” But while it increases the total hours in school for younger kids, it also decreases the total hours for the older kids. That’s because the junior high and high school day will be the same length as it is now, but the school year will be at least five days shorter. In the end, it’s likely to be a wash, or even a net loss of instructional time overall. (I’ll put the math in a comment, below). This is not a proposal designed to increase instructional time.

My best hypothesis: there isn’t enough money to give the teachers decent raises next year, so the teachers sought a shorter school year instead, and this was the only way to pull it off. If that’s true, then the only alternatives to the calendar proposal are (1) to give the teachers little or no raise next year for the same work schedule as this year, or (2) to give them a raise and then go through another round of program cuts like those we experienced last year.

Those are all unappealing options, and the blame needs to fall primarily on the state for putting the district in this position. Governor Branstad and the Republican legislators have made it clear that they would rather cut taxes than fund schools. Democrats aren’t blameless, either, since they supported last year’s bill creating the “teacher leadership program,” which ate up the money that would have been available for school aid this year. (Many of them also helped pass Branstad’s tax cuts.)

For what it’s worth, the teacher leadership money means that many teachers will be getting additional pay next year. Basically, the state decided that (1) our most experienced teachers should spend less time in the classroom and more time teaching other teachers, (2) we should fund that teacher-leader program with the money we otherwise would have gotten as supplemental aid, and (3) as a result, we should have that much less money to pay the remaining teachers, to keep class sizes down, or to fund curricular programs. Thanks, legislators!

The superintendent’s proposal essentially shifts the costs onto parents and kids, by making the young kids sit through a longer school day, making the teenagers start school at 7:45 in the morning, and making parents pay for more child care coverage over the summer, which will now be thirteen weeks long.

What a mess. If my hypothesis is right, the state is pitting parents against teachers, and the stinginess at the state level is falling ultimately on the kids and their families.

At the very least, the district should be up-front and transparent about what’s really driving the issue. Maybe my hypothesis is wrong and something else explains this proposal, but it’s impossible to believe that it’s about “more time on task,” as the district has portrayed it—since it’s not likely to add any instructional hours overall.
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It’s almost as if they’re unprincipled

Peter Greene has a good post about the inherent tension between wanting federal aid for schools but not wanting federal control of school policy.

But I really don’t understand the attitude of our federal lawmakers toward school policy. They intentionally designed No Child Left Behind so it wouldn’t directly regulate school policy; it just puts conditions on whether the states can get federal money. But the feds aren’t just “giving” that money to the states; first they’re collecting it from the people of those states through taxation. In other words, federal school policy occurs through putting conditions of the federal redistribution of wealth.

So our federal lawmakers seem to agree that school policy is a state issue that they shouldn’t regulate directly. And many of them would certainly oppose any suggestion that we should redistribute wealth. But apparently they’re fine with redistributing wealth when it enables them to control state issues? WTF?

If “redistribution” weren’t such a dirty word, maybe we could recognize that we’re already doing a lot of it, and that it would be a good thing even if it were unaccompanied by federal intrusions into state policy-making.
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Those are big numbers

We have no idea how much money it will take to implement the Smarter Balanced standardized tests. That’s one of the main objections to going ahead with them. We can estimate how much it will cost to buy the actual tests—and that’s an enormous increase over what we’re currently spending—but we don’t have any estimates of what the necessary tech upgrades and support will cost. Any estimate I try to make here would have to be very rough, because the state has simply not done its homework about the cost.

But I’ll try anyway.

Start with the proposition that every one-percent increase in state school aid in Iowa means about $64 per student. (Derived from the numbers here.) Right now, the Governor is proposing an $80 per student increase for next year.

Then let’s look at what another state has done to prepare for using Smarter Balanced. California is a much bigger state than Iowa, but we can at least try to compare on a per-student basis. California approved $1.6 billion to “help” districts implement the Common Core, including the Smarter Balanced tests. California has about 6.2 million K-12 students. So that’s about $258 per student.

Now school districts in California are taking legal action to obtain an additional $1 billion that the Smarter Balanced tests are costing them. That’s another $161 per student. We’re up to $419 per student (though some portion of that is for other Common-Core-driven costs). And, as the California School Board Association advised the districts, “Remember that while the state has provided some one-time funding for SBA implementation, the expenses of SBA implementation will be ongoing.”

Is it a perfect comparison? No, because I’m a spare-time blogger Googling figures on the internet, as opposed to, say, a building full of state employees who are paid to figure things like this out.

But those are big numbers. More reason to think that if these tests are adopted, we can say goodbye to any hope of decent supplemental aid.
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Superintendent, school board members want more cuts to school programs

What other conclusion can you reach from their utter silence on the proposal to spend uncounted millions on the Smarter Balanced standardized tests?

They know that the tests will cause cuts. If they didn’t know it already, their experience with the teacher leadership program would make it obvious. When the legislature debated the teacher leadership program last year, our superintendent and board members didn’t object. Then—surprise!—the teacher leadership program cost so much that there wasn’t enough left for supplemental aid. And now the district wants us all to lobby for more aid. Where were they when it mattered?

Now the same thing is happening again. The state wants an enormous increase in the amount spent on standardized testing. This will obviously divert money from supplemental aid; a 4% funding increase will be a pipe dream. You can have the tests or you can have decent supplemental aid; you can’t have both. How can our district ask us to lobby for more aid while not objecting at all to that huge expense, especially when a much cheaper alternative is available?

There’s only one way to interpret it: They want the cuts.

UPDATE 2/8/15: The Press-Citizen has an article this morning about the tests; the ICCSD curriculum director told the reporter that district leaders have “concern” about the tests. See the comments below. Still no indication that that concern is enough to make those leaders oppose adopting the tests, or that they are expressing any of those concerns to the legislators who will decide the issue. Still, it’s something. More please?
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Parties can (and should) endorse in local elections

Prompted by a meeting he attended of the Black Voices Project and Sound Off, John Deeth has a post discussing the ways in which the Democratic Party can and cannot support candidates in local elections.

Local elections in Iowa are “non-partisan,” which just means that party endorsements do not appear on the ballot. Parties can still endorse candidates, of course, just like any group can. Deeth points out that the Democratic Party’s own rules make endorsements in local elections very hard to obtain, and he notes that changing the rules can be a years-long affair. (Deeth doesn’t discuss Republican Party rules, but I’ll assume they’re roughly the same.)

I left a comment saying that I wish parties would endorse—and change their rules to make it easier to do—because it’s a piece of information that at least some voters would be interested to know.

I also think that there’s a relatively easy work-around. Deeth is right that the Democratic party rules are cumbersome and hard to change. So do this: Create a new group called, say, the Johnson County Democratic Association. Provide in the group’s constitution or by-laws that every member of the Johnson County Democratic Central Committee gets one vote in this new group. Then provide much simplified procedures for endorsements in local elections. Set a biennial meeting to consider endorsements in local elections, set a reasonable quorum requirement, and then allow endorsements by majority vote at that meeting.

That’s all it would take. Of course, you couldn’t force the party to take part, and you’d need a critical mass for the system to work. But if local party committee members participated, voters would quickly come to understand that these are the equivalent of Democratic Party endorsements. And if party committee members decide they don’t want to take a stand in local elections, then at least they couldn’t blame party rules for their choice.

I don’t mean this as a cheeky thought experiment. I really believe that party endorsements can happen this easily if the parties are willing. I’d happily volunteer to draft something if anyone’s interested.
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Assess this

This is from New Jersey, but does anyone doubt that it would look the same in Iowa?

But our legislators do love to legislate. Because they know best!
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School budget cuts will be (mostly) your legislators’ fault

It looks increasingly like we’re in for more school budget cuts. The Governor has proposed a paltry 1.25% increase in supplemental aid (formerly known as “allowable growth”) for next year. According to our superintendent, that’s well below what it will take to avoid another round of cuts like last year’s. If last year was any indication, the district will probably consider eliminating fifth grade orchestra and band and cutting foreign languages from junior high entirely, and that would only be the beginning.

The blame for this will fall mainly on the Governor and the state legislature. Not only are they failing to provide the needed funding, but they are funding education “reform” ideas like the “teacher leadership” program with money that otherwise could have been made available for supplemental aid. As Karen W. points out, supplemental aid for next year would have been almost 4% (and for the following year, 6%) if that “teacher leadership” money had been used for supplemental aid.

The Johnson County legislators who are complaining about the paltry supplemental aid increase all voted for the teacher leadership program. Did they not realize that it would come at the expense of other educational needs, like music, foreign languages, and smaller class sizes?

With higher supplemental aid, our school board could always have chosen to fund a teacher leadership program by cutting music and foreign languages, if they really thought it was worth it. Instead, our state legislators made that decision for us, without any consideration of the cuts it would cause.

Can’t you just feel your schools getting better?

And if the state Department of Education has its way, the legislature will divert even more funds next year to pay for the expensive new standardized tests that the public is clamoring for. What will be left to cut?

So I have some sympathy for our school board members, who will have to decide where to make the cuts. But I do hope they look closely at how the district is spending its money, and not just at the usual targets. One thing they could do is to take a close look at how much the district is spending on standardized tests, above and beyond those that are required by the state. Here is a chart showing all the standardized tests that our district uses (click to enlarge):

That’s a lot of testing—and so, I assume, a lot of money. Some of it may be required because of strings attached to various revenue sources. Maybe some of it is even so beneficial that it’s worth cutting music, languages, and staff for. Is anyone asking?
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Local control, we hardly knew ye

At last we have a simple test for whether a legislator or state official has even a shred of belief (beyond empty lip service) in the idea of local control in education:

Do you believe that the state, rather than local school districts, should decide what day the school year must begin?

If there are any arguments for why that should be a state decision, rather than a local one, I have yet to see them anywhere.

Nearly every school district in Iowa has requested an exemption from the state-mandated start date, but the state knows better. After all, there are tourism and State Fair profits at stake. (There’s a petition here, if you’re interested.)

At the local level, of course, people can reasonably disagree about when the school year should start. Personally, I like the current calendar for our district. School starts awfully early, but so does the university calendar, which affects many parents in the district. Many university workers are nine-month employees, whose on-campus duties wrap up in May. Extending school until late June will simply shorten the summer for those families, since the parents have to be back on campus in mid-August regardless. Either that or the parents will pull their kids out of school in early June because the family’s summer plans take them elsewhere.

But surely there are people in the district who would prefer the later start (and even some who would prefer—ugh—year-round school). Fine, hash it out democratically and let the school board, not the state, decide.
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Why not elect the superintendent of schools?

This week, prompted by our city’s charter revision process, the Press-Citizen published two opinion pieces advocating that we shift to a strong-mayor form of city government. Both pieces emphasize that we should vest real decision-making power in elected officials, rather than career bureaucrats. One writer writes: “Policy should be actively made by people who answer directly to voters, not passively rubber-stamped after it’s been staff-crafted the way Iowa City has done it for decades.” Says the other: “Our present city manager form of government puts too much power into the position of the unelected city manager and the staff. The council is usually passive due to its low salary and its relatively small time commitment compared to the staff.”

Hmm, that sounds familiar. How is it that no one ever applies that same logic to the administration of our public schools?

There are good arguments both for and against strong-mayor local government. As a result, different cities make different choices; strong-mayor government is one fairly common choice. Yet I’ve never heard of any school district anywhere in which the superintendent is elected. I assume there are statutes in every state that would forbid it. Why is the idea so unthinkable—and so different from strong-mayor city government—that it should not happen anywhere?

Maybe it reflects the (in my view, misguided) idea that education is a science and so must be insulated from the workings of democracy. Or maybe it reflects the idea that K-12 education is now so tightly micromanaged by state and federal bureaucracies that it needs to be run by professional bureaucrats rather than elected officials. Neither explanation reflects well on the state of public education.

How is it that aspects of democracy that are unremarkable in other contexts seem so alien to the world of K-12 education? What is it about education and democracy that doesn’t mix?
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What the board members said about redistricting when they were candidates

I wrote yesterday that there’s no reason to think that the community supports using major elementary school boundary changes to meet the district’s diversity goals. One reason for that is that most of the current board members did not campaign on that kind of approach when they were running for the board.

Right before the 2011 board election, there was a candidate forum focused entirely on issues related to redistricting. Here’s what the candidates who were elected had to say (transcript after the jump):

I included Karla Cook in that clip, even though she’s no longer on the board, because she was elected, which tells us something about what the voters wanted, and because she was part of the 4-3 board majority who enacted the Diversity Policy, which directed the superintendent to meet numerical goals for the percentage of kids eligible for free- and reduced-price lunch at each school. Marla Swesey and Sally Hoelscher also voted for the Diversity Policy, while Patti Fields and Jeff McGinness voted against it. (Once it passed, McGinness said that he would work to move forward with it.)

The Diversity Policy did require the superintendent to meet the diversity goals by certain dates, and put very few restrictions on how to meet them. It did not, however, require that the goals be met through extensive redistricting. In fact, it contained language suggesting a preference against “non-voluntary movement of students,” and its supporters on the board emphasized the possibility of using incentives such as magnet schools to entice students to change schools voluntarily.

The superintendent’s proposal, however, uses “non-voluntary movement” as the primary (and almost exclusive) means of meeting the diversity goals. Under the proposed maps, for example, almost 80% of the kids at Coralville Central would change schools; so would 63% of the kids at Kirkwood and 54% of the kids at Lincoln. Those changes would be attributable almost entirely to pursuing the diversity goals, since there is no new school opening in that cluster. Although the changes do not involve much busing, many of them would send kids (especially kids from low-income areas) to schools significantly farther from their homes. It’s awfully hard to square that kind of extensive, diversity-driven redistricting with the board members’ positions as candidates.

My point isn’t that board members can never change their views, though fidelity to campaign stances does have value in a democracy. My point is that there is no reason to think the community supports the superintendent’s approach, and that, if anything, the election of these board members is evidence of the opposite. We can only speculate about what would have happened to candidates who campaigned on boundary changes like these, because nobody did.

School board should reject top-down approach to redistricting

I posted last week about some of my doubts about the superintendent’s recommended elementary school boundary changes. But there’s another, more basic objection to the proposed maps: there’s no reason to believe that they have the support of the community.

If watching national education policy for the last ten years should teach a person anything, it’s skepticism toward top-down “reforms.” From the creators of No Child Left Behind to Arne Duncan to Bill Gates to proponents of the Common Core, today’s education “reformers” have one thing in common: they’re so sure they’re right that they don’t care whether the affected communities agree. As they impose their policies on local school districts, regardless of whether the people in those districts want them, they often use the most high-minded rhetoric. When the people who want to privatize education and close schools in impoverished neighborhoods—inevitably citing studies about “student achievement”—tell you that their cause is “the civil rights issue of our time,” it’s a good moment to be skeptical.

The proposal to enact major boundary changes to meet the district’s diversity goals, largely by sending kids from low-income families to schools farther from their homes, has some unfortunate parallels to other top-down policies. I believe its supporters have the best of intentions (unlike some of the obviously profit-driven participants in the national ed reform debate). But there’s no indication that supporters of this approach have persuaded the community of its wisdom, or even that they’ve persuaded the low-income families who are its supposed beneficiaries and who will bear the brunt of the disruption. The board shouldn’t impose a change of this magnitude if the community doesn’t support it.

I’d feel differently if the current board members had run for office advocating major diversity-driven boundary changes, but they didn’t. (On that, more in my next post.) Nor has the community “engagement” process demonstrated support for that approach. At the community workshops, the district pointedly instructed the public to take the diversity policy’s numerical goals as a given, asking the participants only for input on how to use redistricting to meet the goals, not on whether to do that. It’s almost as if the district learned its lesson from the facilities workshops: if you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question.

I sometimes hear, in response, that “you can’t please everyone,” but that’s just fighting a straw man. Of course you can’t please everyone; no one is suggesting that every change has to be unanimous. Any redistricting is going to make some people unhappy. But that can’t justify imposing a change that doesn’t have the support of most of the broader community. It’s a big leap from “You can’t please everyone” to “So therefore we should adopt my ideas regardless of what the community wants.”

It is understandably tempting for people, even for those who consider themselves progressive, to impose their policies on the community when they have the chance, even without public support. But in the long run, that just legitimizes the kind of top-down government-by-elites that is hostile to progressive values (and to many strands of conservative values as well). If you’re against top-down governance only when you disagree with the policies, you’re not against top-down governance.

Everybody’s got a great idea. The best thing you can do for people, though, isn’t to impose your great idea on them. It’s to empower them democratically. Then try to win them over to your idea. I’m sure that in any community-driven system, many of my ideas would be voted down, but I’d trade all of my policy preferences for a school system that reflected the community’s values. I’d much rather put my kids’ education in the hands of the greater Iowa City community than in the hands of any set of people who think they know better.

Related posts here and here.
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Magnet schools I’d like to see

Our school district is thinking about turning one of our elementary schools into a magnet school. I think it would be great if the district could make a magnet school work, though I do have some questions about the idea. In any event, the news got me thinking about what sort of magnet school “themes” I’d find most appealing. Here are my ideas:

• School’s Not Boring Magnet School
• Humane Lunch Period Magnet School
• Students Have Autonomy Magnet School
• Intrinsic Motivation Magnet School
• Local Control Magnet School
• Free Time Is Important Magnet School
• Think For Yourself Magnet School
• Standardized Tests Are Overrated Magnet School
• No Homework Magnet School
• Democracy and Individual Rights Magnet School
• Question Authority Magnet School

I won’t hold my breath. Most of them are probably illegal.
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School budget cuts are only the beginning

This is an extended version of my guest opinion in the Press-Citizen today.

Families in the Iowa City area were disappointed to learn of the school district’s planned cuts to band, orchestra, foreign language and other programming because of a $3.6 million budget shortfall. Many have contacted state officials to urge them to increase funding for K-12 education. But the state is on the verge of making matters worse, not better—and causing more cuts—if it moves forward with its plan to adopt an expensive new regime of standardized tests.

When Iowa adopted its version of the Common Core standards, it also became part of a consortium of states that have pledged to adopt new Core-aligned standardized tests, called the Smarter Balanced Assessments. The legislature has not yet approved the Smarter Balanced tests, but it has required that Core-aligned tests be implemented by 2016 and has tripled the number of grades in which the tests would have to be given. These changes were adopted with bipartisan support.

The tests currently in use, the Iowa Assessments, cost about $3.50 per student to administer and are required in three grades. By conservative estimate, the new tests will cost at least $22.50 per student and will be required in nine grades. That means that the state is about to make districts spend at least nineteen times more than they are currently required to spend on standardized testing. (Because our district already tests in nine grades, it would have to spend over six times as much as it currently spends.)

And that’s just the cost of the tests themselves. Because the new tests are designed to be administered by computer, they would also require a substantial investment in new technology. They would also almost certainly require an ongoing increase in tech support staff.

The legislature also decided to require a science assessment in nine grades. The Smarter Balanced Assessments do not include a science component, so districts would have to pay for additional standardized tests to meet that requirement. Those tests could cost another $10 per student.

Where will all the money come from? If the state spends that much more on standardized testing—at the same time that the Governor is pushing tax relief—the funding can only come at the expense of other educational needs. To pay for all this gold-plated testing, the schools will have to make even more cuts like the ones we’re seeing now. Will French go the way of German? Will band and orchestra be cut from elementary school entirely? Will class sizes increase? Will teachers be laid off? What else will we have to sacrifice for the sake of all this testing?

So yes, people should contact their legislators and the Governor. But it’s not enough to ask for more education funding. We should demand that the state let us fund the kind of education we value, instead of imposing its own idea of test-driven education on our schools.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard protest after protest about the cuts to music, foreign language, and other programs. If the state chose not to implement expensive new standardized tests, would there be even a single complaint? How did our schools end up so far from what our community values?

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Here’s some additional information that I couldn’t fit into the guest opinion:

There are several reasons to think that the Smarter Balanced Assessments will cost more than the $22.50 per student estimated by the consortium. First, that figure includes only the year-end “summative assessments,” not the optional additional tests the consortium offers, which could add another $5 per student. Second, the cost figures are only estimates; some of the administration and scoring services will have to be purchased from private vendors, who may well charge more than the consortium estimates. Third, paper-and-pencil versions of the test, which could be necessary if the technology is not ready, will cost an additional $10-12 per student.

One reason the Iowa Assessments are relatively inexpensive is that they are produced by the University of Iowa, which provides them to Iowa school districts at cost. Other states pay as much as $15 per student to use Iowa-created tests, but that’s still a significant savings over the cost of the Smarter Balanced tests.

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The legislature may well appropriate funds to pay for new standardized tests, though it’s unlikely to cover all the associated expenses. But even if it does, that’s money that it could have used for other (more compelling) educational needs. If the state won’t give us the allowable growth that we need to pay for things like music and language classes, it will be because it has already spent the money on standardized tests.

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There has been an interesting back-and-forth between the state Department of Education and the legislature on the Smarter Balanced tests. Under both Governors Culver and Branstad, the Department made a commitment to the Smarter Balanced consortium to adopt the tests. Meanwhile, though, the legislature decided that schools would have to continue using the Iowa Assessments until it decides otherwise. That put the Department in an awkward spot. The Department continued to push for the Smarter Balanced tests, but the legislature decided only that it would settle on some set of Core-aligned tests by 2016-17, and it created a task force to make a recommendation. The task force has not yet issued its report—but its members were all chosen by the Department.

The legislature did decide to triple the number of grades in which tests would be required, starting in 2016-17. The bill to create the assessment task force and to require testing in nine grades received bipartisan support, including the support of every legislator from Johnson County, including Senators Joe Bolkcom, Bob Dvorsky, and Sandra Greiner, and Representatives Dave Jacoby, Bobby Kaufmann, Vicki Lensing, Mary Mascher, and Sally Stutsman.

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The federal government, including the Obama Administration, also bears responsibility for this increase in testing. Iowa’s push for increased standardized testing was part of its attempt to receive federal Race to the Top funding, which incentivized exactly that approach. Alas, even though we adopted the Common Core standards and joined the Smarter Balanced consortium, we didn’t get the money.

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Education in Iowa recently had a terrific post on just how little we know about Iowa’s readiness to shift to computer-based testing, including a discussion of testing debacles in other states that “ought to be keeping Iowa proponents of Smarter Balanced Assessments up at night.” An excerpt:

[The Department of Education] can’t ask the Iowa Legislature to appropriate funds for tech readiness if they don’t know what is needed, leaving schools to fund needed tech readiness upgrades out of existing school budgets that are already stretched thin. This might be much less of a concern for schools ahead of the curve tech wise, but ought to be a concern nonetheless. Diverting local funds from the classroom or needed facility maintenance or upgrades will hardly make the Common Core and the accompanying standardized assessments more popular.

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Of course, there are also non-fiscal objections to the role standardized tests now play in our schools. Here are FairTest’s concerns about the Smarter Balanced Assessments.

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Where does the money go? It’s hard to say exactly, because each state will do its own contracting with vendors for Smarter Balanced test administration and scoring.  But you can bet that Pearson stands a good chance of getting those contracts in Iowa.

Needless to say, standardized testing, together with all its associated “educational services,” is a major industry. Pearson’s North American Education division, for example, reported £536 million in operating profit in 2012—the equivalent of about $900 million.

Does anyone think that the Smarter Balanced Assessments—or for that matter, the Common Core standards—would have been adopted on such a wide scale if there weren’t millions of dollars to be made by for-profit testing companies like Pearson?

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The same bill that increased the required testing also established a “teacher leadership” program that will take experienced teachers out of the classroom to spend more time mentoring junior teachers; it will begin in 2015. We have yet to see how this program will affect local budgeting decisions: will more programs become expendable, or will class sizes grow, when the most experienced teachers start mentoring other teachers instead of teaching kids? (The legislature did appropriate funds, but again, that could only make less money available for other needs.)

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Notice that our district is already using the Iowa Assessments in three times more grades than it’s required to (not to mention all the other standardized tests it gives). Apparently that category of expense didn’t come up when the administration was making budget cuts.

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The single best place to go for information about the status of standardized testing in Iowa, and of the Smarter Balanced Assessments in particular, is the Education in Iowa blog. Its posts on Smarter Balanced Assessments are here.

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Source note: The current requirement that the Iowa Assessments be given in fourth, eighth, and eleventh grade is in Iowa Code section 256.7(21)(b) and (b)(1). The requirement that testing be given in third through eleventh grades as of 2016 appears in section 256.7(21)(b)(2), which also requires the science assessment.
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More bogus labels from No Child Left Behind

The newspaper dutifully reported this week that two local elementary schools—both with a high percentage of low-income students—have been designated “persistently low-achieving schools” under No Child Left Behind, because of the standardized test scores of the students. This designation allows the schools to receive federal grant money if they take certain types of corrective action—all of them based on the assumption that there is something wrong with how the schools have been educating the kids.

The district has stated, wisely, that it will forgo the grant money, explaining that the schools are already making changes. I can’t say whether those changes are good or necessary, but I wish the district would address the federal government’s faulty logic more directly. The district, and its school board, should be shouting: This designation, and the test scores that it is based on, tell you nothing about the quality of the education at those schools. Schools and teachers aren’t to blame for the poverty in their attendance areas. That doesn’t mean the schools shouldn’t do their best with whatever kids they have—but No Child Left Behind’s labels are dishonest and its “improvement” schemes are fraudulent.
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The not so Iowan core of the Iowa Core

Although our governor is trying to downplay the uniform, national aspect of the Common Core and assert that the Iowa Core is a home-grown approach, it turns out that in 2011 he wrote to the Smarter Balanced Assessments Consortium—the designers of the standardized tests geared to the Common Core—asking to be promoted from an “advisory state” to a “governing state” and saying:

We have also adopted the Common Core standards which are now known as our Iowa Core standards. Our new Governor, State Board Chairperson, and State Director of Education believe this is the right time for Iowa to be involved in building a system of formative, interim, and summative assessments, organized around the Common Core standards.

At that point, the previous governor and his education officials had already signed a memorandum of understanding agreeing to adopt the Smarter Balanced Consortium’s summative assessment by the 2014-15 school year. None of that sounds very home-grown to me.

Now the governor is facing a legislature that wouldn’t be rushed into approving the Smarter Balanced tests and a task force, created by the legislature, that could recommend different choices about assessments instead. I don’t know why our governors have been so sure that the legislature would willingly sit on the sidelines while Iowa jumped on the Common Core bandwagon.

Karen W. recently pointed out that the Iowa Core’s “21st Century Skills” standards on “civic literacy” pay scant attention to constitutional rights. The standards do (somewhat opaquely) touch on federalism, though, declaring that students must “understand the differences among the complex levels of local, state and national government and their inherent, expressed, and implied powers,” “understand the design and features of the Constitution prevent the abuse of power by aggregating power at the national, state, and local levels and using a system of checks and balances,” and “understand issues concerning the relationship between state and local governments and the national government.” I can’t say that these are the people I would put in charge of making sure my kids learn those topics. But maybe my age is showing: constitutional rights and federalism are so Twentieth Century.

Well, I’m out of hours. If I had more stamina, I’d want to look more closely at people’s objections to the standards themselves. Even if you like the idea of nationwide uniform standards, you might not like these. Some have argued, for example, that the standards for grades K-2 are developmentally inappropriate; others have argued that the high school math standards are hopelessly inadequate to prepare kids for college. Here’s a good article expressing other objections (largely from a liberal point of view) to the Common Core. But I’ll leave the further Googling to you.

Thus endeth the micro-blogathon. Not sure I’ll be signing up for another one of these any time soon.
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Defer to your betters

One reason many liberals (and others) are skeptical of the Common Core is that they have concluded that the federal government has been captured by the wealthy—especially on the issue of education—and that the imposition of the Common Core on local school districts is effectively the rich deciding that they know what’s best for everyone else.

One way that cities and towns differ from states and the nation is that a good number of them are populated largely by relatively poor people and by minorities. Supporters of the Common Core are determined to take policy-making power away from local governments. Maybe that’s a coincidence, but the effect is the same regardless.

Call me crazy, but I tend to be skeptical about proposals to disempower people for their own good.
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Is uniformity worth it? Is it even real?

Yikes, it’s seven o’clock and there are whole categories of objection to the Common Core that I haven’t even touched on yet. But first, what about the argument that we need a uniform set of standards to make it easier for kids to adjust when they move from one school to another? This concern is especially important, the argument goes, for addressing the “achievement gap” between poor kids (whose families may be less likely to remain in one school district for long stretches) and kids who aren’t poor.

This argument is clearly the best one Common Core supporters have to offer, and really the only one that gives a substantive reason for sacrificing state and local preferences for the sake of signing on to a uniform federally-driven project. How powerful is the argument, though? And does it outweigh the cons of centralization?

First of all, it’s important to notice (despite the assertions of Core supporters) that this argument is completely inconsistent with local or even state control of education. The way to ensure that kids can move freely between school districts without a hitch is to have to have a national curriculum. If this is really the concern underlying the Common Core, why do its supporters hasten to assure us that they find the idea of a national curriculum abhorrent? (Answer: PR.)

But I don’t doubt that kids who move from one place to another are burdened and disadvantaged by the disruption to their schooling. This would have to be a particular problem in a subject like math, where the ability to master some concepts depends on prior mastery of other concepts. (Even then, a much less detailed list of coverage goals would achieve about as much.) As for some of the other subjects, well, I’m less convinced. Has any teacher ever complained that the new kid can’t handle this year’s social studies class because he didn’t learn to “understand the rights and responsibilities of each citizen and demonstrate the value of lifelong civic action” in the previous year? Has any sixth grader ever struggled because she missed the fifth grade class on how to “understand the changing nature of society”?

But again, either the standards are specific and meaningful, in which case they are tantamount to a top-down national curriculum, or they are broad generalities that are likely to be applied in ways that vary greatly from one district to another. Suppose you teach fourth grade in a Common Core state, and you determine that your lesson plan teaches the kids to “Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened and why, based on specific information in the text.” How confident are you that your fourth-graders are coming away with the same abilities and skills as those of your colleague in a different Common Core state?

Moreover, when a kid shows up at a new school (and maybe it’s his third or fourth new school) and is not at “grade level” in his classes, how often is that because his previous schools weren’t teaching the same skills? Isn’t it quite possible that the student was struggling in his previous school, too? How much will adopting the Core really address the causes of why disadvantaged kids struggle in school?

When I think of all the ways poor kids are disadvantaged in their lives, educationally and otherwise, I don’t come away thinking, “What those kids need is uniform standards.” What I actually think is: What those kids need is some money. While Iowa is spending time and money on developing and pushing the Core, which will require even more spending on standardized tests and on the fancy technology that the new tests require, it has fallen into the bottom half of states in per-pupil spending. Why not give those kids who move from school to school more actual services, more individualized attention, more small class sizes, to help them get to where they need to be? But no, apparently the way to help those kids is by imposing uniform standards and expensive standardized testing schemes on their school districts.

So sure, considered in isolation, it would be great if students could move seamlessly between one school and another, anywhere in America. But Common Core supporters are offering a chimerical vision of that ideal to get us to trade away our ability to have any meaningful say over what goes on in our kids’ schools and what kind of approach to education we want our schools to follow. The Common Core supporters want you to think that the Core is just an objectively correct, expert-driven approach that no one could possibly quibble about. Just like No Child Left Behind was. Who could possibly choose anything other than top-down, standardized-test-driven education for their kids?
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Thought experiment

Imagine the students who attend Iowa schools after the adoption of the Common Core. Imagine them when they are ten or twelve years out of school. Take a look at the standards. How many of those students, at age thirty, will have all the skills described in the standards? How many will be fluent in all of the math concepts listed in the standards? How much different will those numbers be than they are for the thirty-year-olds who attended Iowa schools before the Core standards? What evidence is there to think that the difference will be significant?

Of course, there is no right or wrong answer to this thought experiment. Maybe the Common Core will transform society as we know it. Or maybe not. My own feeling is that people attribute near-magical powers to K-12 education, when experience shows that the choice of one curriculum over another doesn’t make nearly as much difference in actual adult knowledge and abilities as we’d like to think it does.

This isn’t an argument against the Core per se—just an argument that it’s not so obviously and urgently important that it has to be imposed on everyone everywhere.
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