What's New

What's New at Asora In January 2012

Advancing the Goal of Ending Education as We Know It


For First Time Visitors:
Welcome to Asora Education Enterprises, which is presently engaged in:


1.) Publishing regional guidebooks to public schools and the supplementary resources locally available that are needed to bring the children attending these schools up to grade level. The need for the latter is implicit in the low performance levels of nearly all public schools (and most private schools) that we have studied.


2.) An achievement test consulting service, in which we analyze state administered tests to remove the exaggerations found therein. Our guidebooks are based on those studies.


3.) The Stellar Schools Franchising Project, which plans to organize K-12 franchising networks of brick & mortar schools that are based on a blended format of self-paced online instruction combined with real books (including e-books) and real tutors.


4.) The online courseware brokerage.


5.) A speakers' bureau focused on these topical areas.


If you're a new visitor to our website we suggest that you might review the "headlines" below before venturing into the other areas.


What Was New In Preceding Updates:
If you have not seen our previous quarterly What's New updates, then you might want to peruse our What Was New page to see them by using the link at the bottom of this page.

What’s New in January 2012

By David Anderson

We were not late with the December 2011 update!

Rather we decided to shift our quarterly updates forward to be dispatched in the months: January, April, July & October. We did this in recognition that December is a month of distraction with Christmas and other holidays focusing your and our attention away from these more secular matters.

A Ceiling of Mediocrity

Our theme this quarter, A Ceiling of Mediocrity, is descriptive of the performance of children in public (and sometimes private) K-12 education. Our interest here is data driven. We find that even in the best public schools that a majority of children are below grade level. Thus we refer to these "best" schools as being at the "ceiling of mediocrity." So far, beyond one or two exceptions, there are no excellent public schools and to find a good one is exceedingly difficult or impossible depending on where one resides.


As we have been gathering assessment proficiency data for a guidebook to public schools of the East Coast United States, we have been struck by the seeming inability of our schools to produce proficiencies much over 60% - even when nearly all of the students are not disadvantaged.


A more meaningful statistic, in our opinion, is not the proficiency level of the entire tested population. Rather a more relevant parameter is the performance of a group with specified demographic characteristics that enables making comparisons with other groups having those same demographics. In making the NAEP estimates discussed here, we have looked at the subset of tested groups limited to those groups having 80% or more non-disadvantaged children. We call this group the Top Tranche.


Nearly All Schools Are Sick
When we segregate our proficiency estimates by these demographic tranches, the usual disparity of student performance, from state to state, narrows significantly:


At the 4th and 8th grades, the differences among states diminish. The spread of their proficiencies narrows by half or more. We see this effect at the 12th grade as well, but are not as confident given the additional assumptions and approximations used at that level to generate our estimates.


When we see this narrower range of public school performance it suggests that the operations of public schools, from state to state, do not vary much. Given that the proficiencies seen for the Top Tranch rarely exceed 60%, it suggests that nearly all schools are drab, monolithic and dysfunctional. Moreover it implies that there are few if no role model schools for others to emulate. These problems extend beyond public schools into most private schools as well.


We believe that a combination of two practices, that are endemic to public and private education, provide the essential basis and explanation for these problems:

1. Group instruction

2. And its accomplice, social promotion.

The good news is that technology now makes both of these practices obsolete and relatively inefficient. Online instruction, mediated by tutoring, combined with a rigorous assessment regime can replace these traditions. They can lead us into a new era in education in which proficiency will be the norm (rather than the exception it is now). Asora's Stellar Schools are designed around these concepts.


Is It Possible That Washington D.C. Tops the 4th Grade Heap?
One of the results of these NAEP estimations- covering all public schools in 14 East Coast states- is that Washington D.C., with an estimated NAEP proficiency of 65%, for the Top Tranche, is significantly ahead of number two, Massachusetts (at 61%). and number three, Connecticut (at 58%).


When demographics are ignored, one gets the usual result: Massachusetts leads with 47% proficient, and D.C. comes in last at 17%.


Although our focus is on the Top Tranche, for comparison we note that in the Bottom Tranche (where 80% or more of the children are disadvantaged) the estimated numbers of proficient children range from 9% to 27% over these same 10 states.


The nearby table shows the best performers in the Top Tranche NAEP estimations for the three grade levels of interest.

New Jersey Leads in the 8th Grade Comparisons

As the chart shows, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island take the top three positions- win, place and show- with 56%, 55% and 54% estimated proficient within the Top Tranche, respectively.


Massachusetts Wins the High School Competition Among Those in the Top Tranche

Whether or not demographics are taken into account, Massachusetts high school students have NAEP estimated proficiencies significantly above its nearest rivals. Within the Top Tranche, we estimate Massachusetts average proficiencies of 50%, 6 points above runners-up New Jersey and Connecticut.


We believe that Massachusetts is unique among the Northeastern States in that it uses its achievement testing (the MCAS examinations) as a graduation requirement. Based on this we hypothesize that it acts as an incentive for students to learn more or, in some cases, to drop out of the tested group. Either way, the average MCAS performance of the tested group should increase, which indirectly increases our NAEP estimates for them.


When Even The Best Are Bad

The implications of the foregoing suggest that even the very best public schools, which are found in the Top Tranche, are highly dysfunctional when approximately half of their children are below grade level.


Private schools are not immune to these problems, though they are impacted less than their public counterparts.


We know how to fix these schools, but the political will is not there to accomplish such an overhaul. It is left to parents to arrange additional instructional resources to fill the gaps. Asora's guidebooks are designed to help parents detect their children's shortcomings and lead them to resources that can provide the needed remediation. We are currently producing a book covering schools in East Coast states. Here's a peek at the book's cover page:




Enhancing the Global Report Card
Last summer we learned about the Global Report Card (GRC), which provides percentile ranks for school districts within the United States in three different frameworks: statewide, national and international.The GRC results are provided by an online service of the George W. Bush Institute for Public Policy. You can view them at

http://www.globalreportcard.org/map.html.

Jay Greene, a professor at the Univeristy of Arkansas and a Fellow at the Bush Institute, is the pioneer who developed this school performance measure in which local school districts are compared in mathematics skills at the three different levels just mentioned.


Unlike our work, in which we estimate proficiencies at the school and district level, the GRC uses percentile rankings as its figure of merit. Currently it does not report at the school level, but the data to do that is available.


At Asora we have generalized the methods Greene developed to provide more accurate estimates of the percentile rankings. More details are described in our report, Mapping District Level K-12 Scale Scores Onto National & International Assessment Distributions. The report is in the file QuantileMeasurements.docx , which can be downloaded from our Reform Reports page.


Encouraged by GRC's international example, we have also developed an analogous method for estimating NAEP proficiencies of selected foreign countries to which we can compare districts and states in the United States. For example, New Hampshire, which has an 8th grade NAEP math proficiency of 43.3% falls between Estonia (42.2%) and Germany (43.9%). We don't interpret this as to say New Hampshire is as good as these European countries. Rather these European countries and New Hampshire are doing a poor job of educating their students when over half of their students are not meeting standards.



Our Guidebooks Can Help Tutoring Firms Attract Private Pay Customers
Our first guidebook, It Takes More Than A Village to educate your child when the schools aren't up to the task, covered the public schools in Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C. The phrase "More Than" refers to supplementary services, which include many tutoring companies and other vendors in the "afterschool" space. You can learn more about this guidebook by clicking here. The guidebooks play two roles: First, parents and others can use them to find a better public school. More importantly, the guidebooks contain directories to those offering supplementary and alternative services.


Thus our guidebooks provide a means by which vendors can publicise their services and thereby "drive" customers to their businesses.


We Seek Help To Complete Our Guidebooks
In the past year our efforts on the guidebooks have expanded. We recently completed the data analysis for an additional 10 states (Delaware through Maine) with the intention to publish a guidebook for the East Coast states. We are reviewing that decision and are considering instead a "growing" guidebook that will eventually cover all 50 states plus the District of Columbia.


We seek various kinds of assistance in the completion of this project. Interested parties could consider, among other possibilities:

1. Investing in the production of the books.

2. Collaborating with Asora in their production.

3. Contracting with Asora to make these kinds of estimates for states and regions of interest.


The numbers we generate paint a "picture of need." When parents and stakeholders finally "see this light" they will often seek out the services of the vendors listed within.


There Is Much More On Our Website


For further information, consider reviewing our home page where there are links to more detailed descriptions of the services and activities of Asora Education. Alternatively you might consider visiting "What Was New" to learn more about our recent and not so recent history.