Coercion: The philosophy of the neocons

[Moses]

The Case for Being Mean

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar at AEI. His next book, Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave), is due out in 2004.
www.aei.org/publication19614

---

[Ohanian Comment: In positing two types of accountability, mean and nice, Frederick Hess poses a false dichotomy in order to advocate for mean. For example, he insists that under mean accountability, teachers no longer pass on students unequipped for the most fundamental requirements of further education, work, or good citizenship. A whole lot hangs on the definition of fundamental. In conceding that in order to get students to "master" a prescribed curriculum, electives and other courses must be sacrificed, Hess ignores just what this sacrifice means to any notion of students developing divergent interests and abilities. There is too much outrage here to summarize, but I think one fundamental principle people must face is that although mastery of, say, algebra and Elizabethan sonnets and other college prep material is not necessary to being a useful and productive citizen, a high school diploma is necessary. Hess and others of his ilk are hell-bent to deny that diploma to increasing numbers of students. He boasts that this is mean accountability. I say that it is an outline for the destruction of democracy. susanohanian.org/show_outrages.html?id=278] [/i]

---

Performance-based accountability promises to ensure that every student, regardless of background, masters crucial knowledge and skills. But to realize that promise, accountability needs to be coercive, that is, it must confront failure with real consequences for both educators and students.

The enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in January 2002 made performance-based education accountability a federal mandate. ....In such places as Nevada, Florida, and Massachusetts, where thousands of high school seniors are at risk of being denied diplomas in 2004, angry parents are protesting, civil rights groups have threatened boycotts over the high rates of failing minority students, and educators worry that their schools will be targeted by state education agencies as low-performing or inadequate.

The allure of performance-based accountability is its promise to ensure that all students, even the most disadvantaged, will master crucial knowledge and skills. An overwhelming percentage of adults, often 90 percent or higher, support accountability in the abstract, recognizing the appropriateness of holding public educators responsible for teaching essential material instead of permitting them to use public classrooms as personal forums. Aside from a few ideological critics, even most educators are sympathetic to the goals of performance-based accountability. The important split is not between ideological proponents and opponents of accountability, but between those who support tough-minded accountability, despite all its warts, and those who like the ideal of accountability but shrink from its reality.

Nice versus Mean Accountability

Simply put, there are two kinds of accountability: suggestive and coercive, or, more plainly, "nice" and "mean."

Advocates of nice accountability presume that the key to school improvement is to provide educators with more resources, expertise, training, support, and "capacity." They view accountability as a helpful tool that seeks to improve schooling by developing standards, applying informal social pressures, using tests as a diagnostic device, increasing coordination across schools and classrooms, and making more efficient use of school resources through standardization. The educational benefits produced by nice accountability depend on individual volition.

Mean accountability, on the other hand, uses coercive measures--incentives and sanctions--to ensure that educators teach and students master specific content. Students must demonstrate their mastery of essential knowledge and skills in the areas of math, writing, reading, and perhaps core disciplines at certain key points and before graduating from high school. Educators are expected to do what is necessary to ensure that they no longer pass on students unequipped for the most fundamental requirements of further education, work, or good citizenship.

In such a system, school performance no longer rests on fond wishes and good intentions. Instead, such levers as diplomas and job security are used to compel students and teachers to cooperate. Mean accountability seeks to harness the self-interest of students and educators to refocus schools and redefine the expectations of teachers and learners.

For educators, mean accountability offers many benefits that nice accountability does not. Unlike its nicer variant, mean accountability gives the school and district leadership personal incentives to seek out and cultivate excellence. It enables policymakers to roll back regulations designed to control quality by means of micromanaging procedures. It builds popular support for education by providing state officials and voters with hard evidence on school performance. And, in well-run schools and districts, mean accountability gives effective teachers new freedom to teach as they see fit and with the materials they deem appropriate, as long as their students master essential skills.

Advocates of mean accountability agree that nice accountability yields real benefits, but they point out that these benefits have been only modest and uneven. The 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that just 33 percent of U.S. fourth graders and 36 percent of twelfth graders scored at least at the "proficient" level in reading; 36 percent of fourth graders and 26 percent of seniors scored "below basic." The results are far worse in urban communities, where two-thirds of fourth graders are routinely reading at "below basic" level.

The split between those who insist on mean accountability and the gentler souls comes down to whether one agrees with nice-accountability proponents that educators are doing all they can, that student failure is caused largely by factors outside the control of teachers or administrators, and that incentives will not productively alter educators' behavior.

Proponents of coercive accountability reject such claims. Common sense tells us that people work more effectively when we hold them accountable for performance, reward them for excellence, and give them opportunities to devise new paths to success. In any line of work, most employees will resist changes that require them to take on more responsibility, disrupt their routines, or threaten their jobs or wages. To overcome such resistance, we need to make inaction more painful than the proposed action. In education, this means making a lack of improvement so unpleasant for local officials and educators that they are willing to reconsider work rules, require teachers to change routines, assign teachers to classes and schools in more effective ways, increase required homework, fire ineffective teachers, and otherwise take those painful steps that are regarded as "unrealistic" most of the time.

The idea is not to simply lay more weight on the shoulders of teachers or principals. The challenge is more fundamental. In any line of work, decision-makers want to avoid unpopular decisions. But sometimes school officials have to make painful choices: to drop a popular reading program that is not working; to cut elective choices if students have not mastered the basics; to fire a well-liked principal who is not achieving results. In each case, the easier course is to not act. The way we force people to make unpleasant choices is by pressing them to do so--even if it angers employees or constituents. Coercive accountability provides the best, most straightforward way to bring that pressure to bear in support of core academic subjects.

Rethinking Systems and Practices

For decades, U.S. schools have been constantly reforming without ever really changing. As long as we give veto power over change to those who will endure its costs, we will continue to shy away from reinventing schools as more efficient and effective organizations. We will not force painful improvement by convincing those who bear the costs of change that it really is for the best. We must leave them no choice in the matter.

(continued)

[Moses]

[Here is a false analogy-- Where is the competition that allows education consumers to choose other products?-- There are no consumers in his coercive equation, just objects of coercion.]

It is not just a question of making people work harder, but of forcing managers and leaders to rethink systems and practices. Take the Detroit automakers who fell upon hard times in the late 1970s. They were producing oversized and poorly designed cars, had gotten lazy about quality control, had permitted costs and union contracts to spiral out of hand, and had added layer upon layer of middle management. The emergence of fierce foreign competition and a dramatic loss of market share shocked these firms into action. Energetic new leadership rethought the product line, redesigned quality control, slashed middle management, renegotiated contracts, and cut costs. The aim of transformation was not to berate workers; it was to force those in charge to focus on high performance and make painful decisions to achieve it.

Today, district and school leaders spend their time pleading with their subordinates to cooperate because they can imagine no other ways to drive change [This is bullnuts-- the district and school leaders are the most rotten part of the system], but they are mistaken. We can drive change by requiring educators to meet clear performance goals and attaching consequences to success or failure.

Ambivalence about Being Tough

Although public officials and educators are sympathetic to the notion of accountability, they are often squeamish about the demands of coercive accountability. The benefits of accountability--a more rigorous and focused school system--are broad and widely dispersed and often hard to isolate, whereas the costs are borne by visible students and teachers, many of whom can inevitably point to various extenuating circumstances. A Texas principal, after affirming that she believed in rigorous standards for student learning, expressed the ambivalence felt by many:

Last year I had to tell a student that she didn't pass the "last chance" TAAS exam administered in May of her senior year. I do not even want to imagine the heartbreak that she and her family felt. I've only had to do this once, but it was one time too many, and I don't know that I have it in me to do it again.

Accountability requires education officials to make five politically sensitive sets of decisions. First, they must designate a prescribed body of content and objectives to be tested. Such a course necessarily marginalizes some other goals, objectives, content, and skills. Second, officials must impose assessments that accurately measure whether or not students have mastered the requisite skills and content. Third, they must specify what constitutes mastery. Fourth, they need to decide what to do with students who fail to demonstrate mastery. Finally, for accountability to significantly alter education programs and practices, the system must reward or sanction educators on the basis of student performance.

Each decision tends to produce passionate opposition among those who bear the costs. Opponents of coercive accountability seize upon the arbitrary nature of many of these decisions, demanding modifications that will increase test validity and reduce any inequities or pernicious effects produced by misuse of assessments.

Proponents of coercive accountability often have trouble holding the line against the appeals of aggrieved constituencies. ....

....In Arizona, for instance, when more than 80 percent of tenth graders failed the state math test in 1999 and 2000, the state board of education and the legislature scrambled to push back the graduation requirement from 2002 to 2006. In recent years, other states--including Alabama, Alaska, California, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and Wyoming--scaled back testing programs or postponed their effects.

If policymakers don't delay implementation, they often soften accountability in various other ways. Although each accommodation can be justified on educational grounds, each of these common compromises also serves to dull the mean edge of accountability:

Lowering the stakes of the tests for students, for educators, or for both. Weak or nonexistent sanctions offer little incentive for teachers, low-performing students, or anyone else to worry much about test results.
Making tests easier. This can be done by lowering content standards, adopting easier questions, or reducing the cut-off scores for satisfactory performance.

Offering lots of second chances. Giving students a number of retests or a teacher several years to boost his or her performance means that the law of averages will help a number of moderately low performers to clear the bar.

Permitting some students or educators to sidestep the required assessment. Some schools issue a "basic" diploma in lieu of a standard diploma, and some administrators exempt teachers who teach specialized classes from evaluation.

The Temptations of Compromise

From the inception of high-stakes testing, proponents have tended to laud the requisite tests and accompanying systems as clear, scientifically defensible, manageable, and concise. Critics typically attack the tests and systems as unreliable, simplistic, overly focused on trivia, or lacking the necessary curricular and pedagogical support. They argue that linking teacher incentives or student advancement to anything so crude will pose inevitable perils. In truth, both sides are correct.

The details of accountability--the content to be tested, the assessments to use, the definition of minimum competency, and how to address the performance of educators or students--are inherently arbitrary. The closer one gets to crafting and enforcing standards, the less defensible specific program elements can appear.

Determining what students need to know, when they need to know it, and how well they need to know it is an ambiguous and value-laden exercise. Neither developmental psychologists nor psychometricians can "prove" the necessity to teach specified content at a particular grade level. Such decisions are imperfect judgments about students' needs and capacities.

Proponents have difficulty standing firm on program details precisely because decisions regarding what students need to know, when they need to know it, and how well they need to know it are only reasonable approximations. No amount of tweaking will yield a perfect instrument.

Loath to concede that graduation testing is inevitably flawed, proponents try to placate critics with one "refinement" after another. They soften sanctions, adjust passing scores, offer exemptions, fiddle with school performance targets, delay implementation, and take other similar steps as they seek to discover just the right balance.

Unfortunately, the painless, happy medium is fundamentally at odds with the purpose of coercive accountability. This series of compromises may preserve the façade of accountability but will eventually strip accountability of its power.

The Importance of Being Mean

The challenge for proponents of coercive accountability is to acknowledge the localized pain and dislocation that they intend to visit upon some educators and students as the price of a system that will ensure that educators are serving all of our nation's students. The challenge for those enamored of nice accountability is to explain how they plan to ensure that schools prepare all students for their adult lives. Although their caveats about inequalities in home environments and natural student abilities have merit, surely it is not overly ambitious to demand that educators find a way to teach all students the essentials of reading, writing, math, and the rest of the key disciplines before sending them into the world.

Most accountability programs[and who is holding the automanufacturers accountable? The consumers-- not neocon think tanks] begin with at least a rhetorical commitment to the transformative ideal. Over time, critics weaken such systems, often while espousing their support for the principle of accountability. These critics trace their opposition to the specifics of existing arrangements, stating that they will support transformative accountability if only . . . it is stripped of its motivating power.

The choice is between an imperfect accountability system and none at all. In the absence of coercive accountability, we have seen how easy it is to graduate ill-equipped students and excuse inadequate school performance--especially among the most disadvantaged students.

In the end, standards are a useful and essential artifice. They and the accountability systems they support must be defended as such.

If accountability finally becomes part of the "grammar of schooling" for parents, voters, and educators, then its performance benchmarks for ensuring that students are learning, teachers are teaching, and schools are serving their public purpose will become accepted practice. [Note the importance, to our Masters, of “changing our vocabulary” in order to accept their coercive regimes] State and federal officials now face the question: will accountability fulfill this potential or become another hollow rite of spring?

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar at AEI. His next book, Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave), is due out in 2004.

[Moses]

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar at AEI. His next book, Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave), is due out in 2004.

Professional Experience
-Executive editor, Education Next, 2001-present
-Research associate, Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University, 1998-present
-Assistant professor of education and politics, University of Virginia, 1997-2002
-Teacher, public high school, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1990-1992
Education [Two whole years of "real world" experience. Does he even have any kids?]

Ph.D., government, Harvard University[date?]
M.A., government, Harvard University[date?]
M.Ed., teaching and curriculum, Harvard University[date?]
B.A., political science, Brandeis University [date?]

[Moses]

Some results of the neocon regime in Public Education:

Are Schools Cheating Poor Learners? Officials say federal rules compel them to focus on pupils more likely to raise test scores

Ohanian Comment: We have an addition to educationese: cusp students. They are the focus in schools' attempts to game the system, aiming extra help not at children who most need it but at children most likely to make the school look good in the federal numbers game. Saying the rules make us do it or our hands are tied sounds dangerously close to just following orders.



At the end of each day, when most pupils at Remington Elementary School in Santa Ana head home, about 100 children stay behind for more work on their reading, writing and math skills.

For Principal Edna Velado, deciding which of her nearly 600 pupils would attend the after-school program was difficult.

Last year, she filled those seats with her poorest-performing students — many of whom spoke little English or were years behind in learning.

This year, confronted with a federal law that requires her to dramatically increase the number of children passing standardized tests, Velado made a different call.

Students who had nearly made the mark on last year's tests, she reasoned, stood the best chance of clearing the hurdle this year. Those kids, she told her teachers, would receive the additional 90 minutes of instruction — even though they weren't the ones most needing help.

"Our job is to educate all students, and we do that," Velado said. "But in order to avoid the sanctions of this law, we need to [make choices] that will make the most impact for the school. There are numbers we have to reach."

In her decision and her frustration, Velado is hardly alone.

As teachers and principals throughout California and the country struggle to satisfy the increasing demands of the federal No Child Left Behind law, education experts and school officials say they are paying increasing attention to the middle-of-the-road students who have fallen just short of test requirements.

This new focus on so-called "cusp" or "bubble" students, many experts say, is an unintended consequence of a law that emphasizes test scores and defines success in narrow terms.

The 2-year-old federal law — a centerpiece of President Bush's domestic policy — aims to improve schools by requiring states to administer annual math and English exams to all students.

The law mandates that by the 2013-14 school year, all students must at least score at a "proficient" level.

States were left to set the incremental targets that schools would have to reach each year to meet the law's ultimate goal.

Under the federal law, schools get no credit for improving test scores — and can be designated as failing — unless they meet the strict annual improvement targets set by each state.

"There are a lot of perverse incentives built into this law," said Gary Orfield, a Harvard University education professor. "It has put tremendous pressure on people to find what shortcuts they can…. Because there is only one data point that determines how a school is doing, there is no incentive to work with the kids who are on the top or on the bottom."

Eugene Hickok, deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education, acknowledged that "as a fact of human nature, [teachers and principals] will focus on the margins where they have the chance to make the most impact."

But he disputed the claim by Orfield and others that the law leaves school leaders no choice but to work with cusp students over others.

Schools, Hickok said, must attend to all students equally in order to ensure that the worst-performing students are steadily improving and eventually are able to pass the tests.

"The law is forcing schools to get kids to proficiency. It does not tell them how to get there," he said.

Schools that receive federal funding for serving a large percentage of underprivileged students have the most at stake. If such a school falls short of the improvement targets two years in a row, a series of increasingly serious interventions and sanctions kick in that can culminate with principals and teachers being replaced or control of a school handed over to outside managers.

This year, the bar is rising sharply in California. About one quarter of each school's students must be proficient by year-end — an increase of nearly 11% from previous years.

A recent Los Angeles Times analysis showed that more than 1,200 schools — about 13% of the state's 9,000 public campuses — are unlikely to hit the target this year. And based on the last two years of scores, 3,500 schools would probably be deemed as failing in 2008, the analysis showed.

Teachers and principals say that in the face of the sanctions, they have no choice but to try to meet the federal standards. For many, that has meant poring over test data to identify the students approaching proficiency in hopes of raising their scores.

Like Velado at Remington in Santa Ana, Principal David Diaz of Independence Elementary in South Gate set aside funds this year — in his case about $80,000 in overtime — so teachers could work an hour after class each day with their cusp students.

Tony Delgado, principal at Van Nuys Middle School, said he is well aware of the importance of raising his cusp students so his school can make the grade. He said that in the weeks before the standardized tests, he, along with vice principals and counselors, plan to meet with them in small groups to review test-taking strategies.

"These key students — if they make the jump [to proficiency] — can really carry a school," Delgado said. "They're crucial to a school making its target."

It is impossible to determine how many schools are employing the strategy or to what extent they are, education experts said, although they expect it to become an increasingly common response to the law in coming years as schools scramble to meet its demands.

Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley professor and director of the Policy Analysis for California Education research center, said several teachers and school administrators mentioned the idea of targeting students on the cusp while being interviewed as part of a recent study by the center on how teachers are responding to the federal law.

Like other teachers and principals, Denise Dennis, a fifth-grade teacher at Remington, said she tries not to let the focus on cusp students come at the expense of other students. But with school resources and budgets limited, they said, something often has to give.

"We could give a huge amount of help to our lowest performing students, but they're not going to make a big [impact on the school's score]," Dennis said. "It's an impossible situation. Our hands are tied."

— Joel Rubin
Los Angeles Times
2004-11-28
www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-behind28nov28,1,5804128.story?coll=la-news-learning

[Moses]

Every Child Left Behind


Ohanian Comment: Read these statistics of not measuring up to NCLB and realize it is not paranoid to think that NCLB is out to destroy public education.

Imagine a world 10 years from now where every single K-12 student is performing proficiently on state tests.

It's a nice thought, but is it possible?

Unfortunately, no, say many Weld County school district administrators who are working toward that goal but ultimately failing to get there. That failure means the districts aren't meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which aims to have every student scoring proficiently on state tests by 2014.

Many Weld County school officials say 100 percent proficiency for every student is a goal that every district should strive for. But in reality, it's impossible to meet.

"We are getting better, but are we going to get to 100 percent? Not likely," said Linda Gleckler, deputy superintendent for Greeley-Evans School District 6. "We believe it's statistical impossibility to get there."

Most Weld districts have not met the requirements for two years, meaning they have to send a letter to every parent in the district child explaining which areas students did not perform proficiently. Those letters are expected to go to district parents at the end of November or beginning of December.

In Weld, eight of the 12 school districts failed to improve test scores enough to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind. The districts that met the requirements were the four smallest in the county.

Platte Valley Re-7, Briggsdale Re-10J, Prairie Re-11J and Pawnee Re-12 districts reached their goals.

This is the same trend happening in Colorado where no district with more than 5,400 students has met the requirements. The districts that are behind educate about 80 percent of the state's schoolchildren. Some of the districts such as Denver's Cherry Creek boast some of the highest test scores in the state. Even Windsor Re-4, which consistently tops Weld County in test scores, failed to meet the requirements.

"If we were the only district that hadn't met the requirements, then I would be discouraged," said Laura Richardson, the district's director of instruction. "But there are many who didn't. ... You can't miss one target. There is no room for error."

The problem many larger districts are facing in the state is the number of subgroups enrolled. Subgroups are groups of students identified by certain characteristics such as special education students, English language learners, poor children or Latinos. Many of these children have historically performed poorly on tests and have to make more progress than the rest of the students to meet the same standards. A district must have at least 30 students to make a subgroup.

The problem becomes even bigger when groups are continually changing.

In the Fort Lupton Re-8 school district, 38 percent of the students are English language learners. That group seems destined to fail under the law's requirements because each time a student does become proficient, he or she is moved out of the group, said Ranelle Lang executive director of learning services for the district.

"You can't show improvement. When they improve, they're not in the group anymore," she said. "It's like you're always looking at the milk and not the cream."

Gleckler said District 6 will continue to work toward the goal but doesn't think it will ever get there.

"I don't think we're ever going to be a grade level for every kid," Gleckler said. "We can get really really close. But every kid? No."

Windsor Tribune editor Julie Piotraschke contributed to this report.

— Maria Sanchez-Traynor
Greeley Tribune
2004-11-28
www.greeleytrib.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041128/NEWS/111280042&rs=2