E-Valuation – Page 11 – constructing a good life through the exploration of value and valuing

Military Academies… who says educational reform needs to be anything other than ideological?

While military academies have been part of Chicago schools since 1999, the surge in efforts to create more is palpable, and Arne Duncan is a big supporter (no surprise there). The latest development is the financial incentive to local often financially strapped school districts to open charter schools run by the Marine Corps. Little to no evidence suggests that these schools improve the quality of education or academic achievement for students. However, Congress has passed a bill that supports increases in Junior ROTC. In the absence of evidence that such military academies are better schools, one has to conclude that they serve other purposes–fueling the military ranks and using vulnerable students for the benefit of the corporate-military apparatus.

Evaluations of all charter schools, including military academies need to consider a broad context and consider their worth and value by taking into consideration more than the simplistic representations of their value and dig through a state supported rhetoric that is at best diversionary.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31108509/

When Smart People Evaluate

Michele Lamont in How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment opens the Pandora’s Box of peer review, the primary form of evaluation in higher education. Lamont’s curiosity, like Pandora’s, reveals secretive deliberations that all too often amount to judgments of quality based on the similarity of the work being judged to that of the judges. Lamont examines differences across disciplines, highlights the tension between the idea of having independently established criteria and standards and the inevitability of situational deliberation on what is good or bad, and ultimately calls for a more open, transparent approach to evaluation in higher education. In this later move, she searches for the hope that Pandora found at the bottom of the box.

Lamont describes the details of her book in a short essay in the Huffington Post.

Hope and Change in Educational Evaluation?

I have to confess I was disappointed when Shepard Fairey developed the posters for Obama’s campaign. Shepard Fairey, before the Obama campaign, a skateboarder and graffiti artist stood for a challenge to authority, war and capitalism. Perhaps best known for the Obey campaign (Andre the Giant has Posse) but also his images directly challenging capitalism. Fairey is a contradictory character–using others copyrighted images but threatening to sue those who use his images. And so maybe creating the icon images for Obama, who is little distanced from the corporate, capitalist interests Fairey’s work critiques, are just part of that contradiction. Fairey himself says he is too corporate for the street artists and too street for the establishment.

But hope and change in education are not what the Obama posse is delivering. In fact, it is intensification of what came before–even higher (and probably national) standards, ‘better’ (and probably national) tests, support for charter schools, and now teacher pay for test results are what is being offered. The initial enthusiasm of new resources for education from the stimulus package is fading in the face of draconian demands from Education Secretary Arne Duncan and it becomes clearer with each speech that Obama is misinformed about the facts and this misinformation is critical to perpetuating the sense of crisis in education. Obama claimed that school drop out rates have increased three-fold when drop out rates have dropped by a third; he claimed that 8th grade achievement has dropped, when in fact it has risen; and set up fake goals–like having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world, when the US is almost there already.

It would have given me hope for change had Obama called for an evaluation of NCLB, even in small ways such as an analysis of NAEP scores pre NCLB and now. It would have given me hope for change if Obama demonstrated some understanding of the inevitable corruptability of high stakes assessment, whether in the form of mc tests or performance tasks. It would have given me hope for change had Obama focused on ways to cultivate options within public schools and promoted magnet schools rather than charter schools.

I don’t recall who said, authority has no wisdom, but methinks we are seeing this is action.

Serving the Public Interest through Educational Evaluation

This is a pre-publication version of a chapter that analyzes the nature of educational evaluation in a global, neo-liberalist world. The chapter includes some advice to evaluators on how to take back evaluation to serve democratic values, that is, the inclusion of all stakeholders (especially those most often shut out) and open deliberation about what it means for education and schooling to be good or bad.

This chapter will appear in Ryan & Cousins’ edited International Handbook of Educational Evaluation to be published by Sage.

Book signing at AERA

Most Significant Change Discussion Group

For those who are doing or are interested in learning more about the MSC evaluation approach, think about signing up for the MSC Yahoo Group.

Evaluation’s contribution to the economic disaster

Investment ratings by the big three rating companies (Moody’s, Standard & Poors, Fitch’s) are supposed to be the independent evaluative data that provide potential investors with a sound judgement of where to best put their money. Turns out, though, that Moody’s gave high ratings to AIG just before they were bailed out by the US government, and to Lehmann Bros just before they declared bankruptcy. Also turns out that Moody’s (and the other raters) receive big bucks from the companies they are rating, giving at least the appearance of less than independent evaluation and more cynically giving the appearance that companies buy ratings. Moody’s, on the other hand, blames rogue employees diverting attention from these pecuniary relationships. While there may be some incompetent or unethical evaluators at Moody the suggestion this is a one-off diverts attention from the very fundamental connection that exists within our society between capital and goodness. In his article Blowback (American Journal of Evaluation, Vol. 29, No. 4, 416-426 (2008)), Ernie House illustrates similar entanglements in the drug industry, where the appearance of good science masks profit making.

When good becomes synonymous with profit (which is what happens in neo-liberalism) then evaluation CAN serve the profit making (or the ideology that prizes profit making) which becomes the indicator of good. Evaluation no longer gets left to evaluators ~ the drug industry funds its own clinical trials and the capitalists fund their own rating systems to support their end goals. This scenario creeps into educational and social programming evaluation and should set off alarm bells.

It may be a little comforting to see the value of Moody stock dropping.

Obama’s “new culture of accountability in America’s schools”

There is no reason to be surprised that Obama continues with his teacher pay for results mantra, and he now adds the expansion of charter schools. There is much babble about “data driven” decisions, but as always the devil is in the data. Apparently Obama hasn’t bothered to look very closely at the research on charter schools, which in general should not give any policy maker comfort in giving the nod to the expansion of these publicly funded ‘private’ schools. Overall, student test scores are lower in charter schools. And, where are the data that point clearly to a connection between forms of teacher compensation and improvements in student learning?

I’m not sure what the NEW culture of accountability is meant to be, but I am guessing that this new culture has all the potential to be scarier and more destructive than the old culture. The Clinton and Bush administrations have buried American education deep under neoliberal regulatory accountability. The NEW culture seems to be about more not different, with even more regulatory requirements driven by the “yes, you can” experiences Obama identifies as the sources of his own success (those fabulous early morning tutoring sessions with his mother).

There is nothing to give one optimism here, and whatever good Obama might do for the country is not going to manifest itself in improvements to education and schooling under these plans.

Here are links to a couple of Jerry Bracey pieces in the Huffington Post that point to the hypocrisy and sophistry in Obama’s education plan.

Bracey #1

Bracey #2

Race & IQ ~ All Brains Are the Same Color

The debate about what IQ scores mean and whether differences between groups are meaningful continues in spite of evidence that environment makes a huge difference. Richard Nisbett gives a nice short and lucid account of the matter in this article.

quotable quotes

For there is nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew every time he sees me, while all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

George Bernard Shaw