California’s Suspension of the
Academic Performance Index
In a recent editorial, the San Diego Union Tribune, owned by union-hating real estate developer Doug Manchester, lamented the dropping of the Academic Performance Index (API) to help in the adoption of Common Core Standards. While admitting that the API isn’t “very sophisticated,” the Tribune claimed that it was still a useful score to grade schools. But Manchester’s real agenda was spelled out here: “California’s public schools are run primarily for the benefit of their employees.”
Doug Manchester and his cronies despise unions, especially the National Education Association, with 3.2 million members, and the American Federation of Teachers, with 1.5 million members. Considering there are only 14.5 million people unionized in the entire U.S., these two teachers’ unions represent 32% of all unionized workers. The destruction of the NEA and the AFT would be a huge feather in the cap of Manchester, Scott Walker, and all union haters nationally. More importantly, it would open the floodgates of privatization in grades K through 12.
High stakes standardized testing (HSST) is one of the primary weapons Manchester, the neo-liberal education “reformers” (Arne Duncan et al), and the swelling ranks of “edupreneurs” use to bring about the destruction of the unions — the prerequisite to privatization. Note that there is a big difference between HSST and testing in general. No good teacher is opposed to testing in general. My wife tests her students almost every day. But the idea that a single test should be the metric that determines educational progress — for a child, a teacher, or an entire school — is insulting. Even worse, it is a binary metric: only one bubble represents the correct answer to every problem.
I used to be a corporate mucky-muck. I ran a company that had around $100 million in sales, and more than 100 employees. We utilized quality improvement metrics extensively to measure every facet of our warehouse operations. Later on, I even taught operations management using total quality management (TCM) to MBA candidates at a local college. In retrospect, I realize that these statistical measures worked best with processes that had single outcomes. For example, we measured the quality of picking in our warehouse. A warehouse worker with a pick list either chooses the right product or the wrong one. You can determine average quality for individual workers as well as an entire process without too much difficulty. If this is being done in an unenlightened company, the workers having problems are punished. However, if a company is truly following the precepts of quality management, the data are used to improve the process overall.
When I was teaching these concepts, I assumed TCM could be applied to any process, including education. We even talked to some public schools in the area to see if they would be interested in learning to use TCM. When they weren’t, we assumed it was simply because they were stuck in their ways, resistant to change.
Even then, though, I always wondered why TCM in Japan was such a success on the factory floor and such a failure in the office, especially when evaluating management. This proved to be the case in the U.S. as well. The U.S. auto industry, for example, implemented TCM and today U.S. cars are nearly the equal to Japanese cars. As for management, whether in Japan or the U.S., TCM doesn’t seem to apply.
Why is this? I think it is because management is a very complex task. There is no single metric that defines a good manager. Indeed, good managers know how to motivate people, organize tasks, solve complex problems, deal with organizational politics, and a myriad of other functions. When management is judged by a simplistic set of metrics alone, it often backfires. In order to make the “goals,” they ignore a hundred vital, but unmeasured, tasks that create a smooth running and effective organization.
What does this have to do with teaching? A lot. HSST is based on the premise that a single metric can be used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools. This premise turns children into widgets.
If a society needed nothing more than data entry clerks, this approach might work. Every child would be a widget, in that, upon graduating high school, they would be able to enter information into a computer with an accuracy rate exceeding 98.5%.
This dystopian view of education is the essence of No Child Left Behind, perhaps the greatest disaster in our educational system since the days of Jim Crow-forced segregation.
Yes, our society needs data entry clerks, but it also needs scientists and engineers, poets and novelists, conformists and non-conformists. There is no single metric that can evaluate the creation of this quilt of life.
Isn’t it interesting that corporate leaders, who have brought us recessions that cost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars, along with politicians, who have a lower job approval rating than hemorrhoids, are the very ones who insist on this simplistic metric?
Is there any way to evaluate educational progress? Those who are teachers, or married to a teacher as I am, know that it’s being evaluated every single day. There are two teachers in my wife’s grade, along with special ed teachers who work in multiple grades, and a principal who is very involved with everything going on in the school. This team knows exactly who is doing well and who is not. More importantly, they know why a student is having problems — something that HSST will never tell them.
Okay, then how does someone who is not a direct part of a particular educational system evaluate achievement? I think this is where as a society we need to put our thinking caps on. But teaching is hardly the only profession where this is a problem. We have exactly the same problem evaluating doctors and lawyers. The difference is that doctors and lawyers are treated as professionals, while politicians and neo-liberal “reformers” treat teachers as public enemies.
I’m not sanguine about the near-term prospects of improvement on this front. While much of the thinking behind Common Core does indeed address holistic educational development, behind the scenes the “reformers” are working on applying HSST to Common Core. For example, since Common Core requires much more writing, they are developing automated ways of grading that writing. Most of us realize that computers are not capable of syntactically analyzing text. So what will the automated grading do? It will measure the use of key words. In text “a”, did the student use words “x,” “y,” or “z”? If so, they “grasped” the main concept. If not, that student obviously failed.
This type of evaluation will destroy any possibility of Common Core improving the quality of our public education. Worse, it will push less confident and lower seniority teachers to “teach to the test,” in this case to master key words instead of concepts. It is the perfect way to create a generation of perfectly average students, capable of description while incapable of analysis.
Doug Manchester and his ilk lament the dropping of API today, but tomorrow they will return with a brand new arsenal of tests and legislation designed to solve the “disaster of public education.” The whole arsenal will be aimed directly at teachers and their unions. We need to ask ourselves: do we want to graduate widgets or young adults who contribute to society in countless ways?
