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More Thoughtful

October 13, 2009

Debunking Standards Issue #3: Fear of Failure Rates

by Alexander Hoffman, at 12:05 am

This and next week I am raising objections to the idea that new standards — particularly new national standards — are worth the attention they get. It is ridiculous to think that they can be a meaningful lever of broad educational improvement. In fact, I do not think that they can have any significant impact at all.

Problem #3: Fear of Failure Rates

I am not a fan of most of what appears on The Quick and the Ed, but last month Chad Adelman made a great point about setting high standards. He explained that when they are taken seriously and the inevitable high failure rates occur, people find or create loopholes or backdoors.

Frankly, people do not have the stomach for high failure rates. It is easy to say that we want to raise standards; that is the good news. But it is hard to endorse high failure rates; that is public bad news.

In a 2001 episode of The West Wing, two characters discussed the impact of making the standard for poverty more rigorous and realistic. The good news was that they had a better sense of the problem and would be better able to address it.

Toby: Let’s get back to the bad news. Four million people
became poor on the President’s watch?

Sam: They didn’t become poor. They were poor already. And now we’re calling them poor.

Toby: What was wrong with the old formula?

Sam: I don’t know.

Toby: Find out.

Sam: It is possible that this is a statistical reality and not a political finding.

But public failure is always a political finding, too. And people subject to politics, be they elected, appointed or just in high visible positions, have great incentive to undermine bad news or prevent the news from coming out. So, the more rigorous the standards, the less seriously others will take them, knowing that they will likely be blamed for the bad news. The idealized senior staff of The West Wing could accept “the bad news” because it was really just a more accurate description of reality. But would our real flesh & blood leaders, with all of the pressures they face today, be as well able to accept “the bad news” — and potentially the blame for it? When new more rigorous standards lead to reports of fewer expert or even proficient students, those in positions of responsibility will be blamed. Will they allow that to happen?

Previous: Problem #2 — An Unrealistic Bar!
Next: Problem #4 — Classrooms!

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  • Gideon

    Actually, people DO have the stomach for high failure rates, as evidenced by the hundreds of poorly performing schools and the unconscionably high dropout rates. They just don’t want to know about it. And to contradict your argument that politics will not allow high standards, consider the outrage at how easy last year’s NY state exams seemed. Obviously there has been tremendous gaming of the system so that some states appear to have highly skilled students, when in fact the bar is set so low as to make their performance meaningless. But that’s the argument for one set of high standards. The other point, which seems relevant to every post so far, is that it’s not the standards that are problematic, but how they’re measured.

  • Gideon

    And since when should political fear of failure dictate our policies. If that were the case, we’d have no social security and Medicare (which has nearly wiped out elderly poverty), we’d never have entered World War II, we’d never have gone to the moon. It’s critically important that we know which students are struggling and devote the resources necessary to meeting their needs.

  • http://MoreThoughtful.blogspot.com Alexander Hoffman

    Gideon,

    I do not agree that people accept responsibility for high failure rates. When it falls on THEIR desk, when the buck stops with THEM, they undermine such measures. Accepting high failure rates elsewhere is different than accepting responsibility for them locally. Notice the ways that high school graduation rate have been rigged for years, from drop out being counted as transfers in TX to to “credit recovery” being used to artificially boost graduation rates in NYC. Notice the uneven even ways that graduation rates have been measure, in some places counting only the number of seniors attending school in may/june in the denominator.

    However, I do not suggest that we ought to allow fear dictate our policies. Rather, I mean to point out that fear already does, and we need to take that into account. Pressing for the adoption of policies that we already know will be undermined rather than allowed to make the positive difference we are looking for doesn’t do anyone any good.

    The question at hand is *not* what standards could do, in a perfect world with strong leaders ruled by integrity. Rather, the question at hand is what these sorts of standards actually mean or signify in our very real world, with the leaders we have, the schools we have and students we have.

  • Gideon

    I did not say people accept responsibility for high failure rates, I said they stomach failure, mostly through willful ignorance. In my opinion, the main benefit of NCLB has been the requirement to disaggregate student performance results to shine a light on how students of color or poor or ESL students are doing, making it harder for people to ignore the needs of these subgroups. And I readily acknowledged that there has been tremendous gaming of the system to avoid the appearance of failing to serve students well. Asking people to do anything different or difficult will always lead to some undermining, but failing to aim high enough because of it makes no sense.

    As for what standards signify in our very real world, I believe they represent our aspirations for what we as a society want our children to know and be able to do as a result of a public education system that we require most students to attend for 16 years. Have you looked at the proposed core standards. Here are a few for English language arts:

    1. Determine both what the text says explicitly and what can be inferred logically from the text.
    2. Support or challenge assertions about the text by citing evidence in the text explicitly and accurately.
    3. Discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.

    I find it hard to believe these are the problem you’re devoting so much time and space to opposing. The real debate is how we use them, how we benchmark individual grades, how we measure progress, the implications for policymakers, school leaders, teachers, parents and students. I think its advantageous to have a set of clear standards to focus these debates, to provide common language for discourse, and to build our policies and practices around.

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