ICYMI – Michelle Croft and I talked AI and assessment on LinkedIn Live. Another installment of “Ask A Psychometrician.” And I talked Charm City education with departing schools CEO Sonja Santelises. Today at 2p ET/11a PT Indiana state chief Katie Jenner, former SD state chief, CCSSO president, and Metametrics VP Melody Schopp, Virginia parent activist … Continue reading "Lexile For All?"
ICYMI – Michelle Croft and I talked AI and assessment on LinkedIn Live. Another installment of “Ask A Psychometrician.”
And I talked Charm City education with departing schools CEO Sonja Santelises.
Today at 2p ET/11a PT Indiana state chief Katie Jenner, former SD state chief, CCSSO president, and Metametrics VP Melody Schopp, Virginia parent activist Todd Truitt, and I will discuss the new paper on Lexiles/Quantiles that I discuss below. You can watch later or join live to ask questions.
Bottom Up Accountability
Some context:
1 – We saw again last week that we have a student achievement problem. Not just gaps — but overall issues as well. Achievement was declining post-ESSA, post-no phones, whatever your preferred monocause, but it went off a cliff in 2020.
2 – We have a holy war about public v. public charter v. private v. homeschool when in fact you can find great and lousy examples in each of those sectors. I mean, don’t tell the advocates and ruin all the fun, but the variable to pay attention to is school quality, not school type. Especially if you are a parent looking for a specific school for your kid.
3 – We are experiencing an unbundling of the public school system — that is about to be accelerated by the new federal education tax credit. Enrollment is declining, people are seeking more choices and are less ideological about it than your average education policy professional. Last week Treasury officials said* there were not going to be poison pills in the tax credit regulations, so expect more blue states to come in.** I’m hearing even some union affiliates are reluctant to fight this hard at this point given how it’s constructed. You’ll also see some energy toward creating public-school-facing options.
Last week Bellwether released a new paper looking at Lexiles and Quantiles*** and confusion about student “proficiency.” The main thrust of the paper is the difference in what it means to be proficient from one state to the next. This issue is often discussed in the context of how hard it is for policymakers to tell what proficient means in different states. I don’t think that’s the case. If you work in the field, it’s pretty straightforward to figure out how rigorous a state’s standards are, make some inferences about performance, and not get too excited about exceedingly high proficiency rates or too morose about performance against demanding standards.
But this still leaves two problems.
First, communicating what any of this means is a challenge. People hear “pass,” “proficient,” or “basic” and come away with different perceptions. That matters to parents, and it matters to education politics more generally, given that states and schools don’t always level with parents about what’s going on. The honesty gap is harder to solve if the measures are not granular.
Second, it’s all messy for parents. Despite some important work in the NCLB and Common Core eras, it’s still often hard for parents to figure out what a score or performance level means. What their child is on-track or off-track for. Learning Heroes is documenting this problem well. We don’t do a great job of saying what performance actually means in the real world. Not just “on grade level” but what a student can or can’t do.
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Lexiles and Quantiles solve a few of these problems. They’re common across schools and states, so they’re applicable in all settings. And they are anchored in real-world applications — what kind of math you can do, what kinds of things you can read. It’s one thing to tell a parent their kid is below basic in reading or not at grade level; it’s another to say they can’t read a safety warning in the workplace or might get scammed in a financial document they can’t make sense of.
That’s important, and in my experience, the fight to raise standards is at least a little easier when you’re talking about real things, not abstract labels like “proficient.” You still get institutional and political resistance but some people look at actual examples and say, ‘yeah, you need to be able to know how to do that.’ This is one reason the San Diego state math episode got traction – it was concrete examples.
So addressing the proficiency confusion is a real issue. Clear signals are a basic matter of transparency and equity.
But I am interested in another possibility the paper discusses. With the new tax credit about to come online next year and greater pluralism in education delivery all around us, anything anchored to real-life applications is an important signal to parents about what’s happening in their kid’s school, be it public, charter, homeschool, online school, or microschool.
That’s why, if I were a governor right now, I’d opt in to the new tax credit program, it’s money for kids and education, but at the same time I’d also make Lexiles and Quantiles available, on a voluntary basis, for every parent in my state so that all parents, regardless of where their kids attend school, have access to some measure of performance and some signal on quality should they want it.
One of the common mistakes we make around education assessment is trying to use one measure for everything. This is because of costs, efficiency concerns, and ideology. It can create a Swiss Army knife problem, where you get something that’s mediocre at many things, not outstanding at any one. So I’m not suggesting this is the only tool any state needs or should supplant existing measures. Far from it. And there are limitations to Lexiles (and Quantiles), in particular their skill focus, and the paper discusses some of that.
Still, even with the limitations in mind, giving every parent, in every setting, at least something of a reference point would be a powerful lever for real attention to education quality across all kinds of schools. It might even start a conversation that is less about school type and more about school quality — bear in mind measurement and transparency are fiercely resisted in parts of every school sector. Putting some information and leverage in the hands of parents, rather than trying to regulate schools that don’t want to be regulated, might be the best near-term solution. It might also impact education politics in some healthy ways.
A lot of people believe public regulation should follow public dollars. I agree to a large extent. But that fight is not being won. Voluntary information offers a different path around student learning.
Sure, ‘Lexile for All’ might not roll off a Bernie Bro’s tongue or pack an AOC event, but in this moment it might be what we need in education.
*The first few bullets here are important, especially around program design.
**We talked earlier this spring about who was walking into a trap on this — the first movers or the first opponents? I thought it was odd that people were staking out such firm ground before the regs were out (the program could be public-school-facing, and given that this is the Trump Administration, who knows what might happen), but it’s increasingly looking like the answer is going to be first opponents.
***Disclosure: MetaMetrics supported this work.
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