David Berliner and Pasi Sahlberg

I'm in Calgary at the Calgary Teachers' Convention and I am listening to David Berliner and Pasi Sahlberg talk about The Roots of Success for All Children: It's in the context of their lives, not just in their classroom experiences.

David Berliner

• Despite what you might hear, teachers do not affect standardized test scores very much
• Teachers do affect student's lives but not their scores
• Standardized test are influenced by socio-economic circumstances and less by classroom instruction.
• Want to improve scores? Improve children's lives outside of school.
• As the context of children's lives changes, so do their standardized test scores.
• Children who live in chaos tend to be chaotic. Remove the chaos --  
• Societies affect on children's performance is intense.
• The Problem is Poverty.
• There are many school variables that teachers can't control: class size, administrators, collective empathy of the faculty, teacher turn over, students coming and going.
• We can not trust standardized tests to tell us what we want to know about our schools.
• Want to find the school with the highest test scores? Buy an expensive house.
• When governments cut education, they make inequality and inequity worse, and the poorest people pay the most.
• There is a huge difference in the number of books in the richest homes and the poorest homes.
• Affluent parents tend to speak more with their children than the poorest parents who are struggling to make ends meet.
• The best education systems care as much about what happens outside of the classroom as what happens inside.
• Standardized tests are insensitive to teacher instruction.
• Alberta needs to pay closer attention to the research on school improvement
• Here are all of my posts on David Berliner

Pasi Sahlberg

• In 2000, many school systems thought that they had found the secret elixir to fix all schools: Accountability through standardized tests. PISA's influence was born.
• Since 2000, the focus of school improvement has been focused intensely on teachers.
• The United States is a good example of how not to improve education.
• Finland's reaction to school improvement and PISA is unique and paradoxical.
• Finland did not react or allow PISA to affect their system until 2008. 8 years after they were lauded as the best in the world. Finland was reluctant to share their story.
• Two Global Paths of Inquiry: What makes education systems perform well? What prevents system-wide improvement?
• Traditional Policy Logic: Should we focus on quality or equity? We know that we don't have to choose.
• Canada does very well with high quality and equity, but we are going in the wrong direction.
• While Canada and Alberta has traditionally compared well with their equity and equality, they are going in the wrong direction.
• Finland has had an inclusive education system for two decades.

Five things to learn from Finland:

1. Resourcing Policy: Schools with more needs, need more resources.
2. Early Childhood Care: This isn't really about education -- it's about childcare. 
3. Health and Wellbeing: Universal healthcare inside and outside of school. In the US, the number 1 reason why students miss school is because of problems with their teeth.
4. Special Education: A system that is proactive and preventative with students with special needs. Prevention is always cheaper than repair. 
5. Balanced Curriculum: Children need to learn about the arts and physical education as much as numeracy and literacy.

The future of principals in Canada

This was written by David Berliner who is Regents' Professor Emeritus at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College of Arizona State University. His interests are in the study of teaching and general educational policy. He is the author, with Bruce J. Biddle, of The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools. This post was originally published as the Forward for a national research study The Future of the Principalship in Canada.

by David Berliner

I am old enough to have learned that those predicting the future for American education are frequently wrong. As I grew up the Russians were going to beat us in everything; as I matured the Japanese were going to do the same; later I learned we were not competitive in industry. But then Apple and Microsoft came along. The futility of prediction beyond, say, the next three years became clear. But, on the other hand, strategic action calls for examination of current and future trends.

There is value in trying to understand the contemporary life of principals and to extrapolate the implications for the professional and personal life of the holders of that position, now and in the future. In order to understand the work of school leaders—as it is now and as it will be in the future— the voices of those undertaking that role must be heard by stakeholders and policymakers. With this in mind, the ensuing report focuses on principals’ perspectives from across Canada and offers remarkable insight into what needs to be done to improve this job at the personal level and to redesign the job to support efficacy.

The social contexts in which Canadian principals, as well as their colleagues globally, operate are always different and always fluctuating. Particularly in education, general findings stop being general because contexts vary significantly. For instance, schools in a First Nations community, suburban Calgary or inner city Toronto have different needs and demand different types of work from principals. Safety may be a primary concern and a powerful stressor for one principal; for another principal, stress on the job is rooted in the behavior of local parents; for other principals, scores on externally- mandated tests are what stress the principal and demand more time. Further, all educational work must take context into consideration because certain educational ideas, practices or leaders may not be right for a particular setting. Instability of context—and the need to adapt to an unstable context— is perhaps the only thing that can be generalized.

All leaders of industry and government need to monitor and understand shifts in context as they try to control their organizations’ and their nations’ future. Stasis is rare in educational systems and, thus, the question of “what needs to be done now” requires frequent re-examination. As highlighted in this report, this is part of the complexity inherent in school leadership: the principal has a critical role to play as the “change spotter” and leader of accommodations to change in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. This is work that is both very hard and very important, and upon which communities and nations depend.

The effects of shifting contexts and trends require understanding by those who choose to become principals and, even more so, by those who judge their performance.

This study on the Canadian principalship highlights the burden that too many directives from above place on school leaders. This corresponds to data from the USA, where, for example, school leaders in the state of Massachusetts, in the years 2009-2013, received 5,382 multiple-page documents—around three documents a day—from the state and the federal government. These documents required action by local school districts and frequently demanded the time and attention of school principals. That reality makes Kafka’s worst descriptions of bureaucracy seem benign!

As long as the bureaucracies in which principals work inundate them with memos and mandates, neither American nor Canadian school leaders will be able to meet the needs of their students, parents and communities. Principals in both countries have to contend with almost endless needs to which attention must be paid; among the most galling of these are the ‘top-down’ mandates, which often imply that principals and teachers are either incompetent or derelict in their duties, or that they are super men and women who can do whatever is asked of them, regardless of their other responsibilities.

From the perspective of an outsider and researcher who has worked across the globe, the Canadian provincial and national systems seem to be shifting toward an organizational culture where there is diminished trust and much greater external accountability. The way around this issue was put well in this report: “At the risk of sounding simplistic, more trust and less accountability is required to make schools more engaging for our students and staff.” In fact, Finland has a system much like this, and it works.

What this report makes clear is that the principalship is a paradox. While it is a nearly impossible job, it is done remarkably well by most practitioners—even though they are usually understaffed and under- resourced—given the demands that are made on them.

If wisely acted upon, the findings in this document can be used to support and sustain a better principalship across Canada. If that is done, the profession will likely attract and keep the kind of leaders who can effectively shape the schools and communities serving this increasingly diverse and complex nation. But we need to remember that the challenges faced by our principals cannot all be addressed without also attending to the social context and the issues that exist within it.

Place equity at forefront in education debate

This was written by my friend and colleague J-C Couture who is an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teachers' Association. While I wish he did blog and tweet, he does not. I'll let you know if I ever convince him otherwise. This post was originally found here.

by J-C Couture

In recent weeks, there has been much hyperventilating concerning government efforts to fundamentally redesign Alberta's K-12 curriculum based on the five year-old promises of Inspiring Education.

A small but vocal segment of this province has been gathering the tinder for what could become a season of wildfires. Calls for "back to the basics" and a return to more testing are being countered by those who question Alberta's overloaded curriculum while calling for more local flexibility for schools. Adding potential fuel for a firestorm is the exit of Alison Redford as premier, leaving Education Minister Jeff Johnson with an orphaned mandate and an image in some people's eyes as advancing an ambiguous agenda of "21stcentury learning" hatched by an inner circle of advisers.

Whether it is the competitive energy expended over international rankings, the current hand-wringing over memorizing multiplication tables or bemoaning the decline of phonics instruction - Albertans' deeply rooted anxieties over what counts as learning (remember the existential threat from the Japanese in the 1980s?) perpetuate our collective inability to address the systemic barriers to student learning.

According to Joel Westheimer, one of Canada's pre-eminent educational researchers, these interminable curriculum debates obscure larger social problems that stand in the way of a great education. Rather than polarizing debates over content versus competencies or traditional versus progressive education, the greatest impact on student learning is support for students in the early years of development and provision for optimal conditions of learning throughout schooling. Renowned scholar David Berliner and his team take Westheimer's point further. In their recent book, 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools, Berliner concludes the impact of the quality of teaching on student learning contributes 10 per cent of the variation in outcomes. Student background, community characteristics and other variables shape 60 per cent. Further, his team found that no credible researcher disputes the claim that teacher and school programming combined determines more than 30 per cent of student learning outcomes.

This is all not to say teaching, curriculum and what goes on in schools do not make a difference. But Albertans cannot lose sight of the fact with family and community characteristics determining more than 50 per cent of the chances for students to succeed in school, equity ought to be our strategic priority. Unfortunately, the current curriculum flare-ups distract us from the reality that among peer countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Alberta along with the rest of Canada ranks 17th out of 20 in terms of income

inequality, with one in seven children living in poverty in the province.

In a two-year national study involving more than 600 principals from across Canada that we undertook with the Canadian Association of Principals, school leaders report that rather than being able to focus on instructional leadership and supporting their teachers, they are increasingly struggling to mitigate the negative impacts of growing income inequality, the brittleness of families and increasing psychosocial problems of children and youth.

B.C., Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and other far less economically advantaged provinces than Alberta have made huge strides in their education systems by focusing on the systemic barriers to learning. Quebec's comprehensive daycare system is yet one more example of how addressing the readiness to learn can lead to huge gains in learning. While we are materially some of the richest people of the planet, Alberta remains at the bottom of the 25 economically advanced jurisdictions with respect to children's readiness to learn by age six.

Alberta teachers are mindful that literacy and numeracy will always be part of the eternal golden braid of learning. In a recent visit as part of the three-year-old educational partnership, Krista Kiuru, Finland's minister of education and science, remarked that as with her country, Alberta remains among the select few "education superpowers." With our Finnish colleagues and other international partners, Alberta teachers understand that the goal of creating a great school for all students will not be achieved through a preoccupation with finetuning government-mandated curriculum documents, obsessively testing students on the so-called basics or aggressively chasing competitive rankings.

Our schools are constantly renewing and recreating themselves. The 19,000 new students expected to enter next year and the 144 babies born every day in this province deserve more than the current curriculum brush fires - they deserve our sustained commitment to equity. This will ensure a great school for all students and our province's vibrant future.

Three Decades of Lies

This was written by David Berliner who is Regents' Professor Emeritus at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College of Arizona State University. His interests are in the study of teaching and general educational policy. He is the author, with Bruce J. Biddle, of The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools. This post was originally found here.

by David Berliner

We have endured 30 years of lies, half-truths, and myths. Bruce Biddle and I debunked many of these untruths in our book, The Manufactured Crisis, in 1995. But more falsehoods continue to surface all the time. The most recent nonsense was "U. S. Education Reform and National Security," a report presented to us last year by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice. A Nation at Risk had us losing the political and economic races to the Soviet Union and Japan. Did we? No. Our economy took off, the Soviet political system collapsed, and Japan's economy has retreated for two decades. So much for the predictions of A Nation at Risk.

The newest version of this genre by Klein/Rice has us losing the military and economic races to China and others. But this odd couple seems to forget that militarily we spend more than Turkey, China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India, Italy, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, and Canada combined. If we are in any danger now, or in the foreseeable future, we must have the most incompetent military in the world.

As for economic subjugation? Not likely. The Chinese are still stealing our patents. They still manufacture things for us. More important, they still have around 300 million of their population in remarkably deep poverty and millions more in near-poverty. They need to bring a population about the same size as the United States out of poverty. They must provide enough food, drinkable water, clean energy, breathable air, and employment for an urban population that is expected to reach nearly 1 billion people in coming decades.

Will China be competing with us, or will they be so deeply involved in trying to satisfy these pressing internal needs that we are of only secondary concern to them? None of us is smart enough to know, but Klein/Rice, like the authors of A Nation at Risk, like to create devils. Be afraid! Be very afraid! Then, as part of the exorcism, these writers promote destroying the evil public schools, which then brings to us a new age of national success though vouchers, charters, tax credits, and online schooling. What a crock.

These critics never blame our economic woes on, say, Jack Welch, America's most admired CEO. Welch is quoted as saying he wishes he could put every factory GE had on a barge and tow it to wherever in the world labor was cheapest. Could such leadership affect our economic problems? None of these school critics ever blame GE for the neglected neighborhoods and family poverty that hampers success in many of our schools. Yet it has been reported that GE, led by patriots like Welch, earned profits of more than $14.2 billion in 2010, and paid no federal taxes that year. In addition, GE received $3.2 billion in tax benefits that year. (GE disputes such reporting.) Is it possible that the health of our economy and military are related to factors like these? Nah, blame the schools. In A Nation at Risk and the Klein/Rice report, it is not Welch and his ilk that endanger the United States, it is our teachers and their unions; it is lazy parents and incompetent administrators.

Condoleezza Rice must be quite trustworthy as an educational critic since I once read a column of hers titled "Why We Know Iraq is Lying." Joel Klein is a trustworthy critic since he gained experience failing to help the New York City schools improve, and was linked in the press to what some people regard as educational fraud. He now works at a for profit educational company.

And Bill Bennett, who promoted A Nation at Risk and was first author on "A Nation Still at Risk," is also not to be taken seriously. He made a lot of money from speeches that promoted morality and attacked the public schools. But at the same time he was losing money gambling, and went into the "for profit" ed business. So Bennett and Klein gain much by badmouthing public schools and promoting privatization plans.

Frankly, it looks to me like our nation is more at risk from critics like these than it is from the hard-working teachers and administrators trying to help poor kids and their families get ahead in a nation that is increasingly stacking the deck against the poor. It really is not an achievement gap between the United States and other nations that is our problem. We actually do quite well for a large and a diverse nation. It's really the opportunity gap, not the achievement gap that could destroy us. If only the wealthy have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed for a post-industrial economy we are, indeed, a nation at risk.

Valuing the score or the child?

Take a minute to watch this 1 minute clip.

Please Read: Valerie Strauss

This is another post in a series that I wish to call Please Read. My purpose here is to randomly and inconsistently provide a handful of links on a certain topic that should be read.

I honestly don't know what I would do without Valerie Strauss's blog The Answer Sheet. I know no other journalist in the popular press that shows such a heightened understanding for how children learn. I am over-the-top impressed with both her posts and the brilliant guest posts she publishes in the name of real learning, good teaching, authentic assessment and progressive education. Thank you, Valerie Strauss!

In this past week, she has featured a number of must read posts:

Advice to Education Dept. on newest Race to the Top by Monty Neil

Kozol: "I'm sick of begging" Congress to do the right thing by Valerie Strauss

Why giving standardized tests to young children is 'really dumb' by David Berliner

How to do the right thing in a system that is wrong? by Marion Brady

Easing test pressure

I just read Jay Mathews' post Easing Test Pressure won't Save Kids which addresses the Atlanta cheating scandal.

The premise of the post is that despite all the evidence showing the cancerous consequences of high stakes standardized testing, Jay Mathews wants to stay the course.

I guess he hasn't seen enough blood, sweat and tears from the victims of testing. After reading plenty of other blogs and columns point towards the inappropriate and unreasonable pressure brought on by high stakes testing as a source of the cheating, Mathews isn't convinced:

I have trouble squaring with reality their conclusion that the fault was too much test pressure and that our schools will work better once we dial that down.

If he isn't prepared to dial down the test pressure, then I have to assume that Mathews wants to either keep the pressure the same or perhaps even increase it - either way, such a stance is completely ignorant to a social science law called Campbell's Law.

In their book Collateral Damage, David Berliner and Sharon Nichols summarize a stack of high stakes testing cheating scandals. Their premise is built around Campbell's law which states:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.

Like Wile E. Coyote's relationship with gravity, pundits like Jay Mathews find Campbell's Law to be quite inconvenient - so they simply ignore it. But if you've watched any of the cartoons, you know how this ends. Whether laws are of the physical world or the social science variety, they don't like to be ignored. Humming and hawing over their existence like Matthews does simply won't take us anywhere productive.

Here's Mathews:

We are trying, as a country, to raise achievement so that when students graduate from high school they will have the reading, writing, math and time-management skills that will allow them to do well in the workplace or college. How do we do that without motivating them and their teachers to do the work necessary to achieve those goals?

Unfortunately, student achievement has become code for nothing more than high scores on bad tests. It's also important to note that when Mathews wrote that last sentence above, he wasn't really asking a question. You see, he may have wrote this:

How do we do that without motivating them and their teachers to do the work necessary to achieve those goals?

But what he meant was this:

How do we do that without motivating them and their teachers to do the work necessary to achieve those goals!

Putting an exclamation mark at the end, rather than a question mark, is the equivalent to putting your fingers in your ears and saying, "La la la la la la". It's not an honest attempt to ask a question to which you don't know the answer -- it's an act of willful blindness.

Mathews and other pundits like him not only get school reform wrong, but they also get motivation and learning wrong, and to grasp just how wrong they are when it comes to supporting high stakes standardized testing, Richard Ryan and Netta Weinstein's Undermining Quality Teaching and Learning is a must read. They conclude:

High stakes testing represents a motivational strategy that, because it is controlling and extrinsic in character, often raises targeted test scores in the short term while producing a plethora of unintended negative long- term consequences. Nichols and Berliner (2007) discuss these issues in terms of Campbell’s law: the idea that attaching serious consequences to any indicator increases the probability that its meaning and utility will be corrupted. While that names the problem, it does not explain how and why such corruption occurs. Teaching to the test, narrowing of curricula, crowding out of enriching student activities, test preparation resulting in poor generalization of gains, and the other corruptions we described, are motivated phenomena – they occur because of the controlling nature of high stakes testing policies. These effects of high stakes testing can all be predicted from Self-Determination Theory, and indeed have been for over two decades.

You don't make change by manipulating people who have less power than you, and yet that is precisely what Bush's No Child Left Behind 1.0 and Obama's No Child Left Behind 2.0 are designed to do.

I find it more than a little disturbing that Mathews' title implies that he has the kids' best interest at heart by refusing to ease the pressure of testing. Is he, and others like him, not aware of the harmful and destructive affects high stakes testing has on children? Alfie Kohn writes:

The significance of the scores becomes even more dubious once we focus on the experience of students. For example, test anxiety has grown into a subfield of educational psychology, and its prevalence means that the tests producing this reaction are not giving us a good picture of what many students really know and can do. The more a test is made to "count"—in terms of being the basis for promoting or retaining students, for funding or closing down schools—the more that anxiety is likely to rise and the less valid the scores become.

Accountability, if nothing else, should be about transparency. That is, at the very least, citizens should know what they need to know about their schools, and yet the more pressure applied to high stakes testing, the more distorted and corrupted the scores become. 

While easing test pressure may not be sufficient it most certainly is necessary if we wish to save our kids and our schools.

Teaching without wanting to

An educated person has the ability and inclination to use judgement and imagination in solving the problems that confront them at work and at home, and to participate in the maintenance of democracy.

-David Berliner

David Berliner presented this quote in a keynote speech here. He goes on to mention that the quote above was influenced by Deborah Meier - who was likely influenced by John Dewey.

Berliner notes that it's not just the acquisition of skills but the inclination to use them that's important. Berliner states:

It does us no good to get kids to learn to read and have them not want to.

You learn to read by reading, but we are turning kids off, and we are seeing the demise of reading as a hobby. 

Berliner's reasoning works as well for teachers as it does for children.

When education reform sees teachers as nothing more than a tool to be used by bureaucrats to implement policy, we engage in an activity Alfie Kohn calls Operation Discourage Bright People from Wanting to Teach. 

It does us no good to get teachers to teach and have them not want to.

David Berliner, Wile E. Coyote and Campbell's Law

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

-Winston Churchill

The clip above is an excerpt from David Berliner's keynote here.

Where there's smoke there's fire; and where there's high stakes standardized testing there's cheating.

We can bemoan this inconvenience all we want. We can play the blame game until we are blue in the face, but it won't change a damn thing.

The Emperor, in Hans Christian Andersen's Story of the Emperor's New Clothes, was naked whether he liked it or not; and high stakes standardized testing corrupts absolutely whether policy makers and education pundits like it or not.

Like the Emperor's chamberlains who walked along holding up the train that was not there at all, high stakes standardized testing has its own entourage who blindly hold up it's fraudulent vail.

Andrew Rotherham from Time.com has vail in hand:

Critics of today's push for greater accountability are quick to argue that cheating is the inevitable by-product of any high-stakes system. That's ridiculous. While fraud is a fact of life, there are numerous professions with far-reaching consequences for performance in which cheating is not rampant. Besides, that argument insults teachers by implying that they can't achieve challenging goals without cheating.

What's insulting and inaccurate is that Rotherham makes the assumption that chasing high scores on bad tests is a worthy use of our finite resources; and even if there was a consensus towards doing so, it is asinine to believe that we can simply mandate a social science law such as Campbell's Law out of existence.

Education deformers can no more skirt the real world ramifications of Campbell's Law than Wile E. Coyote could avoid the punishing effects of gravity.

If we are too move forward, we all better understand Campbell's Law at least as much as we understand gravity.

Campbell's Law states:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.

Here are all the posts I have written on Campbell's Law:

Campbell's Law and Standardized Tests

Regression to the mean

High Stakes Testing's Kryptonite

John Merrow: Value added or value lost

Campbell's Law and Standardized Testing

I am so thankful for The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss. She is one of the few journalists that I know of who actually publish something about education that is worth reading.

Today a post written by Justin Snider features a handful of great reasons why we need to be more than a little skeptical of standardized test scores.

The case against standardized testing is a good one, but for many the idea that high test scores are at best unhelpful and at worst harmful to a good education system is quite counter-intuitive.

Today I wish to draw your attention, as Justin Snider has, to a well-known (but not well-known enough) social science law called Campbell's Law. Here is an excerpt from a book by David Berliner and Sharon Nichols:

Campbell's law stipulates that "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Campbell warned us of the inevitable problems associated with undue weight and emphasis on a single indicator for monitoring complex social phenomena. In effect, he warned us about the high-stakes testing program that is part and parcel of No Child Left Behind.

I've come to identify Campbell's Law as high stake testing's Kryptonite. But remember that Campbell's Law is not just true for manipulative, top-down, reward and punish education policies. It is a law that rears its unavoidable head whenever you try to legislate professional behavior. In medicine, Campbell's Law plays a role in explaining why linking doctors pay to performance can leave the sickest patients without proper care, and in education, how lower performing students are being left behind by the very law that vowed not to do so.

For more on the devastating effects Campbell's Law has on education, I invite you to read David Berliner and Sharon Nichol's brilliant book Collateral Damage: How High Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools.

Merit Pay: a 123 year old bad idea

Below is an excerpt about the history of merit pay from David Berliner and Sharon Nichols' book Collateral Damage:

Another warning about the dangerous  side effects of high-stakes testing surfaced, when a plan to pay teachers on the basis of their students' scores was offered, making student student test scores very high stakes for teachers. A schoolmaster noted that under these conditions, "a teacher knows that his whole professional status depends on the results he produces and he is really turned into a machine for producing these results; that is, I think unaccompanied by any substantial gain to the whole cause of education." This concern about testing students to judge a teacher's worth first surfaced in the year 1887, but is as fresh as recent headlines about pay-for-performance in Denver, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Florida; Minnesota and Iowa.

The idea of merit pay is not a new, ground-breaking idea that will save education. Sadly, it is yet another bad idea that has been recylced over and over again. 123 years ago, it was clearly established that the cons of merit pay clearly out-weighted the pros - and so it was rightfully abandoned.

And yet, here we are. ugh

High Stake Testing's Kryptonite

The effects of high-stakes testing should not come as a surprise to us. That some very good teachers feel the pressure to cheat for their students in a kind of Robin Hood act to save their children and their school from undue harm should make sense. With the proper pressure, even very good people can be forced into doing 'bad' things.


A well-known (but not well-known enough) social-science law called Campbell's Law helps to explain why high-stakes testing will NEVER work the way it was intended. David Berliner and Sharon Nichols explain Campbell's Law in their book Collateral Damage: How High Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools.

Campbell's law stipulates that "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Campbell warned us of the inevitable problems associated with undue eight and emphasis on a single indicator for monitoring complex social phenomena. In effect, he warned us about the high-stakes testing program that is part and parcel of No Child Left Behind.

Campbell's Law should disturb anyone who uses data to make decisions. If the stakeholders responsible for caring through with the day to day doing that the data measures feel like their work is attached to a high stakes indicator, they will work to corrupt the validity and reliability of the measurement.

Berliner and Nichols summarize:

Apparently, you can have (a) higher stakes and less certainty about the validity of assessment or (b) lower stakes and greater certainty about validity. But you are not likely to have both high stakes and high validity. Uncertainty about the meaning of test scores increases as the stakes attached to them become more severe.

The high stakes reward-punishment nature of today's testing regime has contributed to its own demise. Everytime someone places more emphasis on testing, the more likely the results gathered will be comprimised - making the data less valid and any decisions based on that data less reliable.

This is a complicated idea with huge implications for policy makers. We can't afford to ignore this law anymore.

No matter how valid or reliable we think certain data is, if high-stakes reward-punishment consequences are to follow the data, then that data becomes more and more invalid and unreliable.

Bastardized Accountability

This is an excerpt from Collateral Damage: How Hight Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools by Sharon Nichols and David Berliner

A dedicated eigth-grade math teacher we know told us that in one year he went from being a celebrated, successful teacher, to being required to attend "remedial" teaching workshops. We asked, "What happened?" In the first year, he said, he taught students who were relatively motivated and interested in the subject. Although these students struggled throughtout the year to grasp the mathematics he was teaching, their motivation and his teaching efforts resulted in significant learning, as reflected in his students' "acceptable" test score performance. The teacher was asked to lead workshops to share his techniques with less successful colleagues. The very next year, however, he saw an influx of students with speacial learning needs or for whom English was a second language. Still, he went to work doing everything he knew how to do - employing the same tactics that made him a "success" the previous year. He made more home visits than he ever had before and stayed after school to tutor as many students as possible - all without extra support. In the end, all that mattered were the test scores. The principal, seeing practice test scores that were consistently low throughout the fall and early spring terms, actually asked the teacher to attend the same workshops he once taught so he could "improve" his teaching.

"How can we recognize good teaching and work to improve it," the teacher asked us, "in an atmosphere of such confusion?"

When I hear politicans who are not directly involved in the education of our children speak about accountabiliy, I think of stories like this.

More times than not, this is the kind of crap that is a result of today's top-down, high-stake, reward and punish brand of accountability.

Education and Sports Analogies

Education can rarely be made analogous of other institutions or industries, because I believe education to be neither an institution or an industry. Education is life, or life is education. Take your pick. And yet I find myself hearing about and reading about how some creative (and some not so creative) people have come to reduce education to a sports analogy.

For example, I occassionally referee basketball on evenings and weekends. Tonight one of the players found himself in a bad defensive position, and rather than allow his opponent to score an easy two points, he decided to take the foul. I found none of this particularly thought provoking. If you watch sports (or play them) then you know that many sports such as hockey and football have similar instances. So we lined up for two foul shots. The foul shooter promptly missed his first shot, and one of the defending player's teammates turned to him and said 'good foul'.

Stop.

Think about that for a second.

Why did he say that? And why did he wait to say it then?

For those unfamiliar with basketball, let me explain: by taking the foul, and not allowing the player to score two points, the fouled player gets two free throws - each one counting for one point each. If the shooter misses one or both shots, they will have scored less than the original two points - had they been left unfouled.

Honestly, I am not okay with any analogy that comes from a sport that's rules openly encourages players to sabotage others to personally gain. Seriously, can you think of one instance in a child's learning where you would propose that it would be morally comprehensible to teach a student to sabotage another student's learning so they may gain personally? I would hope that we would encourage students to see their peers as caring allies in a collaborative endeavour, rather than competators who are forced to play a zero-sum game where there must be a loser fo every winner.

This is also a fantastic example of how Behaviourism can poison our interactions with others. The issue isn't whether it is right to foul another player - rather it is about the risk of punishment versus the risk if reward. How many of the important rules in life can you think of where you would feel comfortable with your child doing this kind of risk analysis? I would hope we aspire to a more reliable moral compass than that.


I'll admit that some sports analogies are good. For example, David Berliner does a fine job here, but for the most part sports analogies for education are typically baseless, too subjective, overly simplistic and misleading.

more to come,

Joe Bower