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As we mentioned in the District Deeds Sunday Reads last week, NAEP Day 2022 provided an opportunity for ALL San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Stakeholders to perform “Due Dilligence” and investigate the 2022 NAEP results for themselves.

District Deeds did virtually attend and gathered information directly from the October 24, 2022 NAEP Livestream event. Today we are providing relevant background material and assessments to help our readers assign accountability and responsibility for the dismal SDUSD results.  Our “Quote of the Week” will be taken directly from the NAEP 2022 Livestream.

Our featured article is from Chester Finn via the Fordham “Flypaper” series.  Mr. Finn makes three primary points about the NAEP 2022 results and our effort today is to tie NAEP Data and those points to the current condition of SDUSD Pre-K – 12 education and pretender “leadership”.

We have featured the complete Fordham “Flypaper” article today in Sunday Reads with our synopsis and analysis and a special NAEP 2022 Livestream “Quote of the Week” from Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.  We strongly urge our readers to click on the title and other links (in red) to read the full article for themselves.

Treating My NAEP Hangover

Chester E. Finn, Jr. –  10.27.2022

Monday was insane, with everyone and his grandmother (and her pet dog) attempting to make insightful, quotable comments on the avalanche of new data from the Nation’s Report Card. Some of it was indeed insightful, but much was simply self-promoting, as were many attempts to position oneself in advance as an expert to be taken seriously.

(This cake was taken by eight Michigan State professors who jointly announced on Friday that they’d be “available to comment” and previewed what they might say.)

Speaking as a fully-credentialed, deeply-respected, and widely-published world authority on NAEP myself, of course I have comments of my own on what the data show. But it’s more important to flag some big-picture items.

First, it’s probably unwise for state and local results to come out two weeks before a contentious election. Pre-pandemic, the Congressionally-mandated two-year cycle for fourth and eighth grade reading and math results hit in odd-numbered years. But because NCES felt it could not safely and reliably administer the NAEP tests in spring 2021, they delayed a year, pushing the assessment itself into spring 2022 and assessment results to October. While the three-year gap turned out to be well-timed for purposes of before-and-after Covid calculations, landing in even-numbered years has (obviously) led to a frantic effort to associate a state’s or city’s NAEP results with the policies and actions (or inactions) of incumbent governors and mayors.

On this cycle, the next big NAEP release containing state and local achievement data and trend lines will fall just before the 2024 election, when eleven states will have gubernatorial races, not to mention nationwide results that are bound to be argued over as evidence of what the Biden administration and/or Congress did or didn’t do.

We tend to forget how little direct influence governors and mayors—and presidents and members of Congress—have on what schools do and what kids learn (or not), although it’s not crazy to point to the influence they and their subordinates had in many places on school closures during Covid. Generally speaking, however, the country will not benefit from having its NAEP results—which are seriously meant to be objective, non-partisan, and apolitical—associated in any way with who is running for what. Or, for that matter, with who might be impeached for what. The National Assessment Governing Board should seek Congressional approval for another three-year cycle that puts NAEP back into an odd-year pattern.

Second, please notice the NAEP dog that didn’t bark on Monday: the twelfth grade. That’s because when lawmakers mandated NAEP to deliver state-level results in reading and math, they specified only grades four and eight. The fact is that (mandated or not) there is no subject for which NAEP delivers end-of-high-school data at the state (or local) level.

This is nuts. The end of high school is when state leaders should most want to know how their K–12 students are performing in core subjects. Maybe not reading, but surely math, science, history, and civics! That’s when kids are turning into adults, heading for college, emerging into the world of work. What do they know? What can they do? Who’s not making it? Must we forever settle for SAT and ACT scores, even as those tests fade and mindful that they were never intended for anything except gauging college readiness, often in a self-selected population?

Where’s the clamor for the Nation’s Report Card to tell us how our kids are doing at the conclusion of their compulsory education?

Third, can we please remind ourselves that NAEP results cannot explain why trends go up, down, or sideways? Summative assessments, whether taken by everyone or (in NAEP’s case) taken by a carefully selected sample of everyone, don’t deal with causation. At most, they can be correlated with other data and developments in the world around the kids who sat for them. We can reasonably infer that a key reason for the widespread declines that were reported on Monday is that so many schools were closed for so long because of the pandemic, yet NAEP data themselves cannot prove that that’s the cause. (It could be famine, hurricanes, divorces, curricular changes, absenteeism, measles.) To claim that NAEP results show the effects of such-and-such—e.g., teachers union leaders pressing to keep schools closed—is a form of “misNAEPery.” What we can safely say—and to me it’s pretty damning—is that union leaders wanted schools closed, school did close, and scores fell, all during the same period.

What’s more, because NAEP samples cohorts of students and yields no results for individuals, it doesn’t show whether Johnny, Michael, or Mary learned more or less between test administrations. It only shows that Missouri’s fourth graders, say, in 2022 were less proficient in reading and math than were that state’s fourth graders in 2019. For purposes of tracking actual gains and growth or stasis or losses in real kids, state assessments are more valuable because they yield year-to-year data on individual test-takers (and individual schools).

So where do we go from here? Everyone says we need to bestir ourselves to help kids “catch up” or risk a “lost generation.” Jeb Bush outlined a promising battle plan in the Wall Street Journal on Monday.

But are those who run our schools and school systems up to the challenge? Tuesday’s Washington Post featured two morning-after-NAEP revelations that point in opposite directions.

The “metro” section abounds with vows and plans by state and local leaders in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia to make “heavy investments to improve students’ performance.” Big numbers are tossed around for tutoring, summer programs, and such, with promises to deploy (in Maryland state superintendent Mohammed Choudhury’s words) solutions that “must be innovative, collaborative, and bold.”

Back on page one, however, the Post’s national team reveals that “despite having access to the dollars, school systems throughout the country reported spending less than 15 percent of the federal funding…the most recent installment of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, during the 2021–22 school year.” Half of the districts with students who were furthest behind spent less than 5 percent of available federal recovery dollars.

Put that in your pipe and try to avoid an explosion. Scores plummeted even as tens of billions meant to pay for recovery went unspent.

Achievement is challenging, and spending alone doesn’t change outcomes. What wasn’t happening in many places over the past two years was intensive tutoring, compulsory summer school, Saturday catch-up sessions, extending days, talking kids into repeating grades, and most of the rest of the Jeb Bush plan. Doing such things means changing an entrenched, calcified system that almost never does things that are “innovative, collaborative, and bold.”

Talking about change is easy. Getting the K–12 dinosaur to do anything different may be impossible.

DISTRICT DEEDS SYNOPSIS AND ANALYSIS:

There were numerous articles in the local press about the results of NAEP 2022.  Some (like the San Diego Union Tribune that posted the results at “ the night BEFORE the NAEP 2022 presentation) mirrored the following Michigan State example used by Mr. Finn:

Monday was insane, with everyone and his grandmother (and her pet dog) attempting to make insightful, quotable comments on the avalanche of new data from the Nation’s Report Card. Some of it was indeed insightful, but much was simply self-promoting, as were many attempts to position oneself in advance as an expert to be taken seriously.

This cake was taken by eight Michigan State professors who jointly announced on Friday that they’d be “available to comment” and previewed what they might say.

Mr. Finn’s first point was not really applicable to California and the SDUSD:

First, it’s probably unwise for state and local results to come out two weeks before a contentious election.

In San Diego, and California in general, the elections are NEVER “contentious”.  Elections are generally one party, super majority Democrat affairs with the local lapdog media tagging along and ridiculously endorsing SDUSD Board of Education candidate cronies of compromised SDUSD Trustee Barrera, corrupt former Supt. Cindy Marten and the SDEA Teachers Union as an “informed, independent voice”.

However Mr. Finn’s second point is completely relevant to the SDUSD educational disaster:

Second, please notice the NAEP dog that didn’t bark on Monday: the twelfth grade. That’s because when lawmakers mandated NAEP to deliver state-level results in reading and math, they specified only grades four and eight. The fact is that (mandated or not) there is no subject for which NAEP delivers end-of-high-school data at the state (or local) level.

and…

Where’s the clamor for the Nation’s Report Card to tell us how our kids are doing at the conclusion of their compulsory education?

As bad as Mr. Finn describes the 12th Grade “NAEP dog that didn’t bark”, it is 7 times worse in the SDUSD.

As we described two weeks ago on 10/16/22 in “Inaccurate, Invalid and Unreliable – SBAC Testing and Media Reporting “certainly not surprising””, the results are not valid for comparison:

The “SBAC Short Version” test given by the SDUSD in Spring, 2022 FAILS on both reliability measures and any comparison with the last completed SBAC from the 2018/2019 school year are COMPLETELY invalid since a completely different test was given.

In other words, by providing SDUSD Stakeholders with no NAEP results for “the twelfth grade” and invalid comparison of 11th grade SBAC results, the SDUSD and California Department of Education, has successfully avoided any accountability for failing to educate millions of Students during the Covid Pandemic and allows them to take full credit for improving the graduation rate of thousands of those same undereducated Students via the same lapdog media.

What a racket!!!

Mr. Finn makes a third point:

Third, can we please remind ourselves that NAEP results cannot explain why trends go up, down, or sideways?

We completely agree that there is absolutely no way that SDUSD Stakeholders can tell “why trends go up, down, or sideways” in the NAEP results and it has absolutely nothing to do with the NAEP.

Essentially there is absolutely no way that SDUSD Stakeholders can tell “why trends go up, down, or sideways” in ANY way for a couple reasons.

The first reason is part of what the San Diego Reader calls “San Diego Unified’s wall of stone“.

That item is FEAR.

The San Diego Reader refers to an article from CalMatters titled “Spending spree: Oversight scarce as billions in COVID aid poured into California schools“:

But despite its best efforts, CalMatters, the Sacramento-based website which revealed the district’s no-bid financial shenanigans in a detailed June 6 dispatch, couldn’t get principals in the case to come to the phone. According to CalMatters, government giveaways motivated the formation of businesses to milk money from federal agencies while deliberately sidestepping public transparency.

and..

Noted the story: “That a company with no history, no apparent physical location and murky ownership could get a massive no-bid testing contract with the second largest district in the state — all without any kind of public hearing — is emblematic of the large amounts of money flying out the door with limited oversight and little transparency.”

When you add “couldn’t get principals in the case to come to the phone” to “all without any kind of public hearing“, it reminds us of a quote we got from an administrator way back in 2014 in “Anatomy of a Failed Superintendent – Part 4 – Final Dismemberment“:

  • The current SDUSD Senior Administration culture of fear and intimidation will continue...as stated by an administrator: “We are all scared to death…I am keeping my head down and my mouth shut”  This will not only crush innovative collaboration and thought but also result in resignations at all levels in the SDUSD and a mass exodus from the SDUSD by the Parent, Student and Community Stakeholders.

Both our resignation “Brain Drain” and the “Mass Exodus” predictions came true.

But, based on the refusal by Principals to respond, a second much more distasteful reason has arisen out of that toxic work environment.

SDUSD Stepford Employees!

In one category of Stepford are employee hostages.  They are like abused Stepford spouses in the toxic SDUSD,  living in fear of losing their livlihood for speaking the truth.  That might be why, out of fear, some Principals were unwilling to voice their insights. Over the last 8 years, many rank and file SDUSD employees have also adopted the “head down, mouth shut” approach within this grossly dysfunctional school district as a partial form of Stepford for protection.

But some are full “Stepford Employees”, that actually aspire to that classification for greed, career aspriations and/or other purposes within the corrupt SDUSD organization.

But, based on recent quotes, the empty suit Senior Leadership “Brood” including Board of Education Trustees NOT named Barrera HAVE created a new category:

The SDUSD Stepford Executives who are “blandly conformist and submissive” to Trustee Richard Barrera!

Here is the proof.

Results from both the SBAC and NAEP showed the increased disparity between high performing White and Asian Students and already poorly performing Black, Latino, Lower Income and English Learners.  Here is a quote from the SDUSD Propaganda Press Release about that fact from pretender SDUSD Stepford Board of Education President Sharon Whitehurst Payne:

“All of us have been impacted by the pandemic. However, some students and families have been affected more than others. We cannot forget that many of our students are still grieving for the family members, caregivers, and loved ones they lost to COVID-19,” Dr. Whitehurst-Payne said. “Our work will focus on the whole child, and all members of our San Diego Unified community must rally to support our students and staff to ensure students feel a sense of belonging and can reach their full potential.” 

WHAT?!?

“focus on the whole child” when you can’t even handle the educational “part” of the child?!?

“ensure students feel a sense of belonging and can reach their full potential.” when you support graduating Students that can’t read or reach even a minimal “potential” while lying about both enrollment and the Graduation Rate?!?

NO OUTRAGE over the horrible educational damage to the Black, Latino, Lower Income and English Learners Students that make up the vast majority of her District E?!?

NO COMMITTMENT as to how that severe educational damage will be addressed?!?

A pure pretender SDUSD Stepford Trustee response to the families that she has betrayed and that elected her to office .

But it gets worse.

Here is a quote from empty suit pretender SDUSD Stepford Superintendent Lovey Dovey Lamont Jackson from the same Propaganda Release regarding the same scores:

“These results allow us to further understand the strengths and needs of our students. We need to ask questions to better understand how we can support our students, and create learning conditions that are grounded in equity so all students can succeed. San Diego Unified is committed to helping our students recover – with both academic and social-emotional support – so that all children have the ability to thrive at school,” Superintendent Dr. Lamont Jackson said.

WHAT?!?

“further understand” when you IGNORE performance discrepancies in the report between different groups of Students and do nothing to solve it?!?

“ask questions” when you have already IGNORED answers to the same questions for personal financial and career gain “During his more than 30 years with the district“?!?

“grounded in equity” when, as an Area Superintendent, you completely IGNORED for career purposes the gross inequities in the schools that you supposedly served?!?

“thrive at school” while you have completley IGNORED chronic absenteeism at SDUSD schools with most needs?!?

A PURE pretender SDUSD Stepford Superintendent response by one of the SDUSD Brood!

Based on all the proof we have shown, the only answer for the weak and useless responses from Stepford Trustee Payne and Stepford Superintendent Jackson is provided by a direct quote from your Workplace Spouse and Brood Master Trustee Richard “Tricky Dick” Barrera:

“certainly not surprising”

And as long as this horrible SDUSD “leadership” regime is in power, the ongoing  educational destruction of Black, Latino, Lower Income and English Learners Students will be…

“certainly not surprising”

Now for a special “Quote of the Week” taken directly from the NAEP 2020 Livestream by contender Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent (LAUSD) Alberto Carvalho. He was was appointed in February, 2022, right around the time the SDUSD was scamming SDUSD Stakeholders to accept the current inexperienced and incompetent pretender SDUSD Stepford Superintendent Lamont Jackson.  Apparently Mr. Carvalho knew better than apply to the SDUSD Brood.

We urge our readers to compare the leadership from Mr. Carvalho regarding NAEP results to the useless rubbish spewed by Stepford Trustee Payne and Stepford Superintendent Jackson regarding similar SBAC results.  The huge difference between the leadership and executive “empowerment” ability of Mr. Carvalho and his predecessor in two large school districts compared to the abject failures of Stepford Jackson/Payne and Trustee Brood Master Barrera in the SDUSD over the last 8 years is stunning.

“There’s no way of ignoring the crisis condition. And most disheartening is the fact that the kids that were in crisis prior to the pandemic are in a deeper crisis today, with some exceptions. And you’re absolutely right, it is interesting that the large cities did not fall as much as the nation. In some instances they held steady particularly in reading, that deserves to be studied.

And I think in terms of outliers in an otherwise universal performance, there is a bright star in the east and there was a bright star in the west. I was in Miami just eight months ago. Miami held steady across the board maintaining its high level of performance in TUDA. Los Angeles distinguishes itself not in terms of overall performance but growth. So in the four areas tested with exception of 4th grade math where it’s decline was half the decline of the large cities and one point below the decline of the nation, the other areas actually increased by two points in 4th grade reading, two points in 8th grade mathematics.

But the true story as you suggested is as far as 8th grade reading with a massive nine point increase. That’s a 12 point change compared to the large cities of the nation. Why?  Well I’ll give you some reasons and perhaps some of the reasons that may also explain the performance of large cities; urban America probably pivoted in the pandemic towards more effective levels of connectivity, engagement, and attendance. Because additional work had been done prior to the pandemic in terms of 1 to 1 empowerment.

So I look back to my days in Miami Dade and Los Angeles, we pivoted towards a more effective virtual setting because of investments made up front in terms of device empowerment, higher levels of connectivity rates, and higher levels of attendance.” – Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho

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