The Problems of Standardizing an Individualized Education

This past summer, the U.S. Department of Education announced an overhaul to the evaluation metrics used to judge the effectiveness of special education programs for students with disabilities who receive services through an Individualized Education Program (IEP). In announcing the new accountability framework, dubbed Results-Driven Accountability (RDA), Secretary Arne Duncan repeated the oft-heard rhetoric behind other accountability-based policy shifts under his tenure, saying, “We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to the general curriculum in the regular classroom, they excel. We must be honest about student performance, so that we can give all students the supports and services they need to succeed.” Of course, “being honest” entails evaluations based on standardized test results, including state assessments and the NAEP.

The problem with this, according to many experts in the field of special education, is that standardized tests like the NAEP are horribly inaccurate measures of learning outcomes for students with disabilities and often produce more negative consequences than they seek to resolve. IEPs are developed based on a student’s individual developmental and skill level by a team composed of the student, parents, teachers, and special education service providers. They are developed after taking into account multiple perspectives and assessments tailored to the individual student. The student then spends the next year progressing towards goals crafted to develop her individual academic needs. To then judge the effectiveness of the academic program working towards meeting those needs through a test that takes none of the students individual needs into account, and is instead standardized and administered by grade level, makes absolutely no sense.

Supporters of standardized testing adopt the language of disability rights advocates in arguing that exempting students with disabilities from the same tests their peers are taking for no other reason than the student’s disability status is discriminatory. Testing proponents point to studies claiming that excluding students with disabilities from standardized testing has the effect of increasing overrepresentation as school staff push low-performing students into special education to shield their school from the negative consequences of test-based accountability (for examples of this body of research, see here, here, here, and here). These arguments, however, miss the point entirely. Testing advocates misappropriate research that is an indictment of test-based accountability to serve their cause. The research cited above does not conclude that excluding students with disabilities is unjust, but rather that test-based accountability schemes create perverse incentives to further marginalize students who do not perform well on tests. There is no evidence this marginalization of low-performing students will end by forcing students with disabilities to take these tests and then judging their teachers based on the results. Further, recent attempts to compel students with profound disabilities to take standardized tests exemplify how “disrespectful” the process can be.  

The pushback against RDA should not been seen as an argument against measuring learning outcomes for students with disabilities. Instead, the argument here is for individualized assessments tailored to the goals in a student’s IEP, which is something that a standardized test is incapable of doing. If the concern is improving the education of students with disabilities, then the focus should be placed on addressing teacher shortages that help create illegal caseload sizes in many states, making sure schools––especially charter schools––are providing a continuum of services, and improving professional development so more students have access to evidence based supports, amongst other urgent areas of need. However, to proceed in this way would be to admit there are at least some areas where standardized tests are inappropriate and ineffective, and many of the barriers to student learning have nothing to do with being held to “high standards” and access to a rigorous curriculum tied to state or federal assessments, as Secretary Duncan claims. Such an admission and reversal of policy can serve as a demonstration that the current administration sees improving the education for all students as more important than an unwavering adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy.

by Ian Scott

Ian Scott is a PhD student in the program on Education Policy and Social Outcomes. His research interests center on the impact of incentivist and market-based education reforms on special education programs and access to mental health services in schools. His work attempts to answer broader questions about how social perceptions of difference are legislated, problems of distributional politics, and the political economy of education.

The Forum on the Future of Public Education strives to bring the best empirical evidence to policymakers and the public. The Forum draws on a network of premier scholars to create, interpret, and disseminate credible information on key questions facing P-20 education.

Three Initial but Insufficient Steps to Transform the Chilean “Neoliberal Experiment” in Education

The Chilean educational system is experiencing a notorious process of discussion, both inside the country and also by international watchers. Spurred on by the 2011, 2012 and 2013 student movement, educational reform introduced by the new Michelle Bachelet administration has been placed on the front burner of public consciousness and focus in the country. At the heart of this reform is the need to transform the current status of the country, from the “neoliberal experiment” which has the highest level of segregation among the OCDE countries, to a more equal and just society. In many debates the current administration has made explicit its goal of making education a social right, just as students movements have demanded.

The reform has three main goals: 1) ending profit making in primary and secondary public education; 2) the elimination of copayments of tuition fees to enter schools that receive public subsidies and tax-based funds, which will imply that private subsidize schools will change to public schools; and, 3) the enforcement of bans on primary and secondary schools’ selection of students.

This reform has been approved by the first House of Representatives and now will be discussed in the Senate. It seems as an alternative model to the legacy of Pinochet’s Dictatorship (1973 – 1990), nevertheless, a series of neoliberal educational policies imposed during this regime has not yet being proposed for transformation, among them: the vouchers system that privatized the educational system, the educational management system by municipalities, and the national standardized/accountability learning outcome test (Education Quality Measurement System - Sistema de Medición de Calidad de la Educación, SIMCE).

Different political activist organizations and students federations, such as Alto al SIMCE, Nodo XXI, and Fech have shown that guaranteeing education as a social right will eventually lead to transform these specific policies. At stake is the direction that the country will take in regards to education and the values that the Chilean society will promote and defend. From the other side, a parent organization of private schools that receive public funding, with few adherents but with a lot of public attention and political articulation, have argued that this reform might lead to schools closing, and in articulation with conservative politicians and political organization have raised questions about the constitutionality of this reform, specifically in regards to the freedom of education principle stipulated in the current Constitution - written in 1980 during Pinochet’s Dictatorship.


Chile is starting to take a direction that challenges the current status quo imposed in the 1980s, far from contradicting the freedom of parents to choose the education for their children, as some observers have argued and conservative groups believe, is creating the conditions by which freedom is no longer considered a private good. Under the principle of equal dignity of all human beings, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has established, we can see that the goals of current educational reform are the first three steps to improve and heal the current inequalities of the Chilean society. But to overcome the limits of Pinochet’s heritage, eventually we will have to discuss the best financial and management system of public education, a debate that should be connected with a discussion about the Constitution – specially in regards to what the right to education and freedom of education should mean.  

by Mauricio Pino Yancovic

Mauricio Pino Yancovic, is a Ph.D Student in the Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership Department - Global Studies in Education Division. MA in Ethnopsychology, was a professor of the Catholic University of Valparaíso in Chile, where he worked in teacher professional development programs and researched teachers transforming identity in the context of the new Chilean teacher evaluation and incentives system.

The Forum on the Future of Public Education strives to bring the best empirical evidence to policymakers and the public. The Forum draws on a network of premier scholars to create, interpret, and disseminate credible information on key questions facing P-20 education.

Teach For All: Constructing Global Education Reform Through a Global Network of Intermediary Organizations (IOs)

Note: This blog is adapted from an article currently under review by Priya G. La Londe, T. Jameson Brewer, and Christopher A. Lubienski. A further analysis of the below topic will be available in this forthcoming publication. Please contact Priya La Londe with any questions.

As local and global education authorities redefine “high quality” teaching and learning, Teach For America (TFA) has continued to garner recognition as an exemplar of “what works”. Since 2007, TFA has expanded into an international organization with extensive reach, Teach For All (TFAll).  TFAll was launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007 (Dillon, 2011) and now operating “social enterprises” in 34 countries, TFAll is the self-proclaimed “global network for expanding educational opportunity”. Building upon TFA’s sociopolitical ideologies that have proven attractive in the U.S., TFAll has established itself as a premiere, global “intermediary organization” (IO) in education reform and policymaking. The primacy of TFAll is noteworthy for two reasons. First, this reflects TFA’s shaping of global education into its model that is informed by its narrow perspective about what is best for “other people’s kids.” Secondly, TFAll represents a key global IO in education reform, a type of policy actor that operates in “localized policy communities” (Ball & Junemann, 2012), which often include a range of lobbyists, think tanks, foundations, researchers, and media actors. It is suggested that the fluid, elusive nature of these networks contributes to their dominance in educational policymaking (Scott & Jabbar, 2014). As such, we find it important to explore the linkages between TFA and TFAll in order to begin to conceptualize the dimensions and anatomy of a global network of IOs engaged in global education reform.

In fulfilling these aims we draw upon several complementary conceptual frames including the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Ball & Junnemann, 2012), Local Advocacy Networks (Jabbar, Goel, DeBray, Scott, & Lubienski, 2014), as well as literature that highlights the important role of foundations in policymaking (Reckhow, 2013; Scott, 2009; Scott & Jabbar, 2014). To examine national and global IONs, we use qualitative case study (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998; Stake, 1995) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA, Fairclough, 2003).  We draw heavily upon the TFA and TFAll websites, publicly available data from the World Bank, tax refunds, Annual Reports, and existing literature on TFA and IOs. We also draw upon existing network maps such as the below figure, Teach First, from Ball and Junemann (2012) work on policy networks (Figure 1).  

            We find that As an IO that acts as a hub for national-level affiliates, TFAll explicitly facilitates a neoliberal economic and political discourse. The TFALL “theory of change” proposes power through a public sphere (i.e. Teach For All) that opposes the state, mediates the society and state through reasoned opinion, and gains attention and power through supervision (Habermas, 2006).  Change happens through the press and private sector, through consensus politics and gold plating (Sennett, 2007); and through a strong narrative that is grounded in usefulness (Sennett, 2007). The enterprise provides a sense of accomplishment, happiness, betterment, and commitment to the value of transforming their society.  These foundational values at the base of TFA appear to be cloned or replicated in other contexts by TFAll, without the compelling evidentiary basis that reformers have claimed. TFAll’s notable global proliferation demonstrates how the values and dispositions of this brand of education reform can disseminate through formal or informal networks of like-minded advocates in vastly different contexts.

Such findings, at the very least, help move from theoretical work on policy mobilities (McCann & Ward, 2013; Peck & Theodore, 2012; Ball, 2007; Ball & Junemann, 2012) and toward the beginnings of understanding on how intermediaries, such as TFAll, interact with their counterparts in what we might call intermediary organization networks (or IONs) to advance particular education policy agendas. Additionally, this introductory analysis begins to unpack the micro- and macro-level ways the organization is a part of the greater context of global capitalism and “unmaking and remaking of schooling” (McCarthy, 2011).

Figure 1. Teach First

Source: Ball, S. J. & Junemann, C. (2012).  Networks, new governance, and education. Chicago, IL: The Policy Press.

by Priya La Londe

Priya La Londe is a joint Ph.D.-MBA student. Her Ph.D. focus is in education administration; and her MBA foci are entrepreneurship and general management. Priya's research interests include identity in P-12 leadership, globalization and curriculum, and parent engagement in school policy.

The Forum on the Future of Public Education strives to bring the best empirical evidence to policymakers and the public. The Forum draws on a network of premier scholars to create, interpret, and disseminate credible information on key questions facing P-20 education.

References

Ball, S. J. (2007). Education Plc: Understanding private sector participation in public sector education. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, N.Y.: Routledge.

Ball, S. J. & Junemann, C. (2012).  Networks, new governance, and education. Chicago, IL: The Policy Press.

Bogdan, R., & Biklen, S. (1998). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theory and methods (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. New York, NY: Routledge.

Habermas, J.  (2006). The public sphere: An encyclopedia article. In, M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works (pp. 102-108). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Jabbar, H., Goel, P., DeBray, E. H., Scott, J. T., & Lubienski, C. A. (forthcoming, 2014).  How policymakers define “evidence”: The politics of research use in New Orleans. Policy Futures in Education.

McCann, E., & Ward, K. (2013). A multi-disciplinary approach to policy transfer research: geographies, assemblages, mobilities and mutations. Policy Studies, 34(1), 2-18. doi: 10.1080/01442872.2012.748563

Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2012). Follow the policy: A distended case approach. Environment and Planning, 44(1), 21-30.

Reckhow, S. (2013). Follow the money: How foundation dollars change public school politics. Oxford, England ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sennett, R. (2007). The culture of new capitalism. New York, NY: Yale University Press.

Scott, J. (2009). The politics of venture philanthropy in charter school policy and advocacy. Educational Policy, 23(1), 106-136.

Scott, J. & Jabbar, H. (2014). The hub and the spokes: Foundations, intermediary organizations, incentivist reforms, and the politics of research evidence. Educational Policy, 28(3), 233-257. doi: 10.1177/0895904813515327