When Did Parents and Students Lose Freedom of Choice?

United Teachers Los Angeles demands that schools remain closed unless police are defunded, charter schools eliminated, government health care imposed and a statewide wealth tax implemented. Faced with such heavy-handed political demands, many parents have been taking a hard look at independent non-government schools. This prompts a meditation on educational choice, based on the example of college athlete-students.

No law forbids students from marketing their name and image, but when athlete-students get to college they are suddenly forbidden to market themselves. The NCAA takes over that function, sharing the considerable monetary rewards with television networks and the various universities. The athlete students, shorn of the ability to market themselves, are paid in kind, through tuition. Their freedom to market themselves has been taken away.

No law specifically bars parents from selecting a school, but when their child is ready, the parents find themselves restricted to the school the government wants their children to attend. If parents choose an independent school, their tax dollars still fund the government K-12 system, generally speaking a collective farm of mediocrity and failure. The process is bound to differ in various states, but somewhere along the line, freedom of choice was taken away. This should signal a new approach.

Advocates of educational choice are not making a demand for something new or creating some new right. Rather, the political and educational systems have severely restricted the basic right to choose the parents and students already had. The onus to change is on the system, and this is not a difficult matter.

As in higher education, public educational dollars should fund the student, not the system. Parents and students, not politicians and bureaucrats, should decide where students attend school. Politicians should strive to restore the basic right to choice a failed system has taken away.

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Is Our Defense of Florida’s New K-12 Standards Biased? Fordham Institute Should Look in the Mirror

Last week, Amber Northern, a senior vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, penned a rebuttal to the Independent Institute’s evaluation of Florida’s new Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.) standards. As the author of the foreword to that evaluation, I decided to respond to some general statements of Northern’s rebuttal here. I will not address, in any depth, her criticism of the English language arts (ELA) and mathematics reviews themselves—that is left to the authors of those, if they so choose.

Northern describes two of Independent’s evaluation authors as “Common Core opponent” (myself, foreword) and “Common Core critic” (James Milgram, mathematics). This is true, as far as it goes, and is intended to imply that we cannot be objective judges because of that—hence our evaluation and judgment are automatically suspect. Yet, strangely, when Northern describes David Steiner and Ashley Berner, Independent’s ELA reviewers, she “forgets” to mention their PRO Common Core past, which should serve to make their evaluation and judgment doubly authoritative, since they now highly praise Florida’s standards over the Common Core.

Even more strange—one may even call it hypocritical—is the fact that all the reviewers from the Fordham Institute evaluation who found Florida’s standards to be “poor” are long-time supporters and promoters of Common Core. Moreover, the very sponsor of their evaluation, the Fordham Institute, has received over seven million dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2010 to promote Common Core standards. Yet Northern now dares to imply that our evaluation is likely biased.

Speaking of Fordham Institute’s bias, Northern goes on to write:

Fordham has been publishing reviews of state standards for almost twenty-five years. … Our expert reviewers have always developed upfront the comprehensive criteria by which they then assess the content, rigor, clarity, and specificity of state standards. They do that before they lay eyes on the first set of standards, in part to hold themselves accountable to a rigorous external benchmark. That means they don’t grade on a curve relative to the quality of standards in other states.

There are a couple of problems with her statement.

First, although this may have been (somewhat) true between 1998 and 2010, before Common Core existed, Northern conveniently “forgets” to mention that in 2018 Fordham replaced its evaluation criteria to tailor them to Common Core and, at the same time, replaced all of its previous team of reviewers with a new team made up of only Common Core fans. In other words, Fordham’s “objective” and “rigorous” criteria serve to evaluate everything against Common Core, which is held as a reference. This, in fact, was also observed by our evaluators. Naturally, anyone who departs from Common Core—even intentionally, as Florida did—is automatically penalized by Fordham.

Second, if one considers it for a moment, even the notion that one can determine up-front evaluation criteria for sight-unseen standards is ridiculous on its face. How can one determine what should go into each grade? By fiat? By the Bible? Once one reads proposed standards, one can opine about their clarity, coherence, depth, or rigor, but attempting to decide “how clear,” or “how coherent,” or “what content belongs where” the standards are supposed to be before reading them is a fool’s errand. It assumes that there is a single God-given way to write “good” standards. It also shows basic misunderstanding of how educational standards are written and evaluated.

Finally, Northern’s comments on the actual evaluations of ELA and math are nit-picky, and she seems unable to see the forest for the trees. She also seems to misunderstand Independent’s ELA review when it comes to its rejection of disciplinary literacy, as well as math problem-solving. But I’ll leave it to others to respond to all of that.

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Renewed Sanity on Campus? Yes to Free Speech, No to Football?

This is truly an annus horribilis, with our nation suffering not only from a massive pandemic but also with the very foundation of our society under internal attack on multiple fronts. This has hurt higher education in many ways. But a couple of unrelated events this past week gave me a little hope that sanity has not completely disappeared from American, including collegiate, life.

The Harper’s Magazine Letter

A healthy number of prominent academics were on the list of nearly 150 signatories to a letter to Harper’s bemoaning growing intolerance of free expression and divergent ideas. Among other things, they said, “The free exchange of ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted....More troubling...institutional leaders...are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms....professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study....”

This refreshing challenge to the worst manifestations of the Cancel Culture was signed by famous writers (notably J.K Rowling, Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem), but also by a host of well known academic scholars: Noam Chomsky (M.I.T.), Nicholas Christakis (Yale), Francis Fukuyama (Stanford), Atul Gawande (Harvard), Jonathan Haidt (NYU), Anthony Kronman (Yale), Deidre McCloskey (Illinois-Chicago), Steven Pinker (Harvard), Salman Rushdie (NYU), and Ronald Sullivan (Harvard) to name just ten.

Well intended and morally justifiable protests sometimes build a momentum of intolerance and terror, as the French Revolution taught us (for the relatively few among us who still read and respect tales of our past). The Jacobins started out as democratic, anti-monarchical reformists who became, quite literally terrorists, and some of the Harper’s group may be concerned about that experience.

The Cancel Culture Comes to Football

Sometimes health and safety issues trump other interests. To borrow from the Bard, “To Open, or Not to Open: That is the Question.” Most schools are planning on reopening in some fashion, and in recognition of the fact that interaction between faculty and students, and students with each other, is at the heart of the collegiate experience, schools are appropriately struggling with trade-offs between safety and good health on the one hand, and fully achieving their mission on the other.

But collegiate sports are another matter. The U.S. is the only major nation where colleges have athletic teams that are an important part of campus culture. If football is not played commercially, the college experience goes on. Football is an important American entertainment—I eagerly attend or watch games and scour weekly rankings. But it is not a necessity, rather what John Stuart Mill once called a “superfluity” of life.

The denizens of the Ivy League have done crazy things recently (see earlier posts), but they did this one right, canceling fall sports. Kids playing football are not social distancing, nor are those watching the events. As bad, perhaps, as gathering in crowded bars. For schools like Harvard to ban live instruction (as they have) this fall, but allow contact sports to continue with an audience, would make a mockery of efforts to contain Covid-19.

Then something happened that temporarily turned the anno horribilis almost into an annus mirabilis: the Big Ten cancelled about 25 percent of its fall football games, the non-conference events where Big Ten teams devour less proficient teams from lesser leagues to pad their win-loss record and provide the wannabe powerhouses some cash for the humiliation. Probably they are trying to stave off total cancellation like the Ivy League, but it is at least a tacit recognition that campus life can go on without football.

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Australia: NAPLAN, attendance and aspiration best indicators of High school final results

Researchers have developed a system that predicts students' final High School marks with more than 90 per cent accuracy using information such as their year 9 NAPLAN results, their HSC subject choice and their year 11 attendance.

The University of Newcastle academics say their findings raise questions about whether the final two years of school that are now devoted to HSC courses and exams with predictable results could be better spent on deeper learning and more focused career preparation.

But critics argue using NAPLAN to determine students' future would just shift Higher School Certificate stress from year 12 to year 9, and say the HSC is not just about ranking and testing students, but also giving them a strong education regardless of their social background.

A team led by Professor John Fischetti, pro vice-chancellor of the university's faculty of education, developed a system that analyses information about students, such as NAPLAN results, family background, aspiration and attendance, to estimate how they would fare in their HSC.

After feeding in the results from 10,000 students across 10 years in 14 subjects, Professor Fischetti found it could predict students' exact HSC mark in each subject with 93 per cent accuracy.

The researchers began with 41 different variables, but narrowed them down to the most influential 17, which included the amount of time students had spent in Australia, their school's demographic index, and whether the students chose HSC subjects that challenged them.

"We anticipated that [the most influential factor] would be their marks all the way through, their teacher marks, assigned marks," Professor Fischetti said. "But it actually turned out that the year 9 NAPLAN, your year 11 attendance, and your year 11 course selection were most influential. We factored in some demographic information, but those three became critical."

Professor Fischetti said the analysis showed the importance of students mastering literacy and numeracy, which is tested by NAPLAN. English language skills were also important, as was aspiration, shown by a willingness to choose subjects that challenged them.

"It puts the pressure on, that primary education really does cover on [literacy and numeracy]," he said. "If students leave primary school weak in them, they struggle to catch up. It doesn't mean it's impossible, but we found it's that 7 per cent [whose result cannot be predicted]."

Professor Fischetti argued the approach to the final two years of high school could be changed, to give students greater depth in their learning or focus on their passions, rather than study for an exam in which their results were predictable.

His comments come as a new, federally commissioned report on post-school pathways has recommended students curate a learning profile, focusing on non-scholastic skills as well as academic results, as a way of reducing focus on the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, which is based on HSC results.

"[The HSC] is not wasted time, but we haven't taken advantage of it in the ways we could," he said. "Our exit outcome is a score on an exam, not the habits of learning."

However, Tom Alegounarias, a former chair of the NSW Education Standards Authority and president of its predecessor the Board of Studies, said educators had always been able to predict the likely outcomes of students.

"Some students achieve results that are not predicted, and that's an important part of a meritocratic process," he said. "Particularly for disadvantaged students, we should not be defining their prospects even in part as a function of their socio-economic background."

Greg Ashman, author of The Truth About Teaching, said year 9 NAPLAN assessments were not high-stakes tests at present. "As soon as they are used to determine university entrance, you'll have all the pressures of year 12, only three years earlier," he said. "It also seems unfair on students who may improve over those three years and it creates a licence for those who are so inclined to learn little in that time."

Professor Fischetti said students spent 10 years gathering the knowledge and skills they would need to do well in year 9 NAPLAN, so it would not involve the same pressure as a two-year, high-stakes HSC program.

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