EdReports: Almost All Publishers Fail Common Core Math

EdReports.org is a reformster non-profit set up to be the Consumer Reports of educational materials in the Age of Common Core. I wrote about them back in August of 2014, when they first hit the collective radar, and back then it looked easy to see where this was headed-- a well-connected group funded and backed by the Usual Suspects would presumably provide great "impartial" marketing cover for the major publishers.

Well, fast forward to now, and watch me eat my words. EdReports has stood up proud and tall and kicked the major edupublishers right where it hurts.

You can get the quick view in this handy chart.

EdReports looked at all the major publishers of math series. They checked for alignment with the Common Core and only one publisher met expectations across the board. Two partially met expectations, and McGraw-Hill was a winner in grades 4-5. All the rest failed their Common Core alignment test.

Holt McDougal. Fail.

Math in Focus. Fail.

Saxon. Fail.

And yes, Pearson's series only partially didn't fail.

The only series deemed to successfully align with Common Core was Eureka Math. From K-8, they are the only series that EdReports says will meet the requirements of Common Core.

EdReports also looked at Focus and Coherence, and again, many of the major players failed. Yes, including Pearson.

The executive director of EdReports is Eric Hirsch, and if you're guessing he's taking a few heated calls lately, you'd appear to be correct. Liana Heitin is covering this story in the latest print version of Education Week under the headline "Backlash Brews Over Critical Review of Math Materials," and that backlash appears to be from a whole bunch of grumpy parents who are upset that their pride and joy, their bouncing baby math books, are being stuck in the Remedial Group.

Methodology has been questioned and will be debated at length, but the rundown at the EdReports suggests at the very least that this is not a quick, ugly glance. At the very least, I'm figuring that if EdReports knew they were going to call out Pearson et al, they would make sure they'd done their homework.

This is kind of extraordinary because, again, this is not an anti-reform outfit. They were bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, as well as Hewlett and Hemsley money, and director Hirsch comes from the New Teacher Center and the Center for Teacher Quality. I think less of myself for experiencing a little wiggle of happiness when I see reformsters devouring each other; I'm going to start working on that tomorrow.

Diane Briars, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics thinks EdReports blew it. But Morgan Polikoff of USC and William Schmidt at Michigan State agree, according to Heitin, that "claims of common-core alignment are generally unfounded."

So if you're using Eureka Math, congratulations. If you own stock in Eureka Math, double congratulations. Everybody else-- it turns out you're not really doing the core after all. One more example of how the core standards are a botch as standards from top to bottom. And now they may stop working as even a passable marketing strategy.

Why Are We Still Listening To EdReports

 Feathers were ruffled recently with the news that both Fountas & Pinnell and Lucy Calkins both got "failing marks" for reading programs from EdReports. Some flappery broke out on Twitter, and there was wringing of hands around and about, but any time an EdReports rating comes out, I think we have to answer one important question.

Who cares?

EdReports was launched in early 2014. Politico actually covered the event, dubbing EdReports "Consumer Reports for the Common Core." Which is a good hint at where we're headed. EdReports was launched with a hefty $3 million in funding from the Gates Foundation and the Helmsley Trust. Education First, a thinky tank/consulting firm that had teamed up with the Fordham Institute to promote the core, "incubated" them (Education First's website even has a big thank you from EdReports' executive director). The executive director is Eric Hirsch, previously a big wig at the New Teacher Center (they sell teacher induction) and the Center for Teaching Quality (spoiler alert-- quality comes with the Core). Their board chair is still Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College and one of the ten board members of Microsoft.

EduReports uses a gated review system-- you have to get past Gateway 1 before they'll even look at your Gateway 2 stuff, and so on. To their credit, they use a lot of teachers as reviewers of materials, but less to their credit, they lean heavily on a rubric system, which is the kind of system that negates the expertise of whoever you're using to do the reviewing. But there are scores and numbers and specifics and it's all far more rigorous than some of the "research" we see pitched into the education arena..

However, there's a major problem. Everything keeps coming back to the phrase "alignment to the standards." Which standards? Well, EdReports is pretty coy about that these days, but their history makes it plenty clear that the standards they've always held dear are the Common Core. 

This was supposed to be one of the benefits of nationally adopted standards--the marketplace of textbooks could be organized around those standards and some nice group could rate texts on how well they were aligned so that shopping would be a breeze and the market would favor the Core-aligned materials. The idea behind EdReports was to help boost alignment to the Core, and not to provide more fodder for the reading wars. And asking "Is it aligned to a set of standards that have been widely disavowed by everyone" is not the same as asking "Is it any good?"

Yet here we are. A dozen outlets have run "Fountas and Pinnell publish bad reading books" while nobody has run a "Why are we still checking to see if textbooks are aligned to the Standards That Dare Not Speak Their Name?"

I'm not going to jump into the reading wars today. I'm in no mood to fling my body between the Science of Reading army and the fans of F&P at the moment. But I am going to suggest that that discussion needs to be held on its own merits and not an EdReports Common Core check. 

Bill Gates Is Still Pushing Common Core

Sigh.

You've undoubtedly heard the news over the past couple of days-- the Gates Foundation is going to throw $10 million at teachers to help promote "high-quality" curriculum.

There are several problems with this, and none of them are new.

First, despite the headlines, this money is not actually being thrown directly at teachers.

“We want to identify the content-specific professional development services, products, and models that are working really well for young people, and also study the attributes of those solutions that make them effective so we can share that learning with the field,” said Bob Hughes, the foundation’s director of K-12 education.

This guy, again, still. 

In other words, they are going to throw money at outfits that do professional development so that those PD providers can train teachers better. This is yet another variation of "It's the implementation" that translates roughly as "My grand idea would have worked if teachers understood better how to properly perform my great stuff."

This golden oldie never dies-- just this week I was embroiled in a Twitter thread in which someone explained that a particular practice would work if teachers just understood it properly. Back in 2016, the Gates Foundation was trying to explain what they had learned about their large-scale failures in education, but the only lesson they have ever come up with is "We've learned that the unreasoning resistance, educational ignorance, and poor training of education professionals makes it hard for our brilliant ideas to shine properly."

This, apparently, is more of that.

But wait-- there's more. Buried in that loaded term "high-quality" is an old friend. Because "high-quality" means "certified fresh" at EdReports.com.

EdReports was launched back in 2014 with funding from the Usual CCSS Suspects. It was launched as a sort of antidote to one of the many problems that emerged with adoption of the Common Core. Because there was no central authority on the Core, and, in fact, the guys who wrote it dispersed quickly to lucrative new gigs, there was nobody in place to stop textbook publishers from moving inventory by ordering a case of "Aligned to Common Core" stickers and slapping them on every dusty text sitting in their warehouses.

So EdReports' job was to check resources and determine whether or not they were actually Core-aligned.

They were tough. In the first year, almost every publisher flunked Common Core math. Now they have worked their way through many other areas-- well, math and ELA-- and you can see the results in handy charts. And prominently featured is whether or not that text is properly aligned. EdReports has dutifully scrubbed its site so that it now talks about "college- and career-ready standards" instead of the dreaded "Common Core," but the mission hasn't changed. EdReports will tell you how well a textbook is aligned to the Common Core Standards.

Which means Gates is still-- STILL-- spending money to get the Core into every classroom.

Mind you, this is chump change compared to the $1.7 billion that Gates is spending in his continued effort to singlehandedly force the redesign of American education. But the Gates Foundation keeps saying things like this:

A standards-aligned, high-quality curriculum is an essential feature of a coherent instructional system that can maximize its potential benefit. We hypothesize that such a system may consist of the following elements, as well as others:

Every adult human who ever set foot in a classroom has some "hypotheses" about what makes a good school. Only one of the richest men in the world has the power to try to force his hypotheses on everybody else. And to just keep trying and trying and trying, with a hammer sculpted out of a stack of money.

This continues to be the most recurring annoyance of much ed reform. Bill Gates has no more expertise regarding public education than my garage mechanic, who's a nice guy who was once in my class. But if my guy wants to put his ideas into action in a school, he has to run for school board and convince the taxpayers that he can be trusted with the job. He'd have to cooperate with other board members, and because he's a good guy without an overinflated ego, he would undoubtedly ask the opinions of professional educators. But because Gates and Broad and Walton et al have a giant pile of money, and no special misgivings about their judgment, they just go ahead and flex their money and start shoving their ideas down the system's throat.

Nor does Gates appear to be a quick study. Google "Bill Gates" and "doubles down" and watch the headlines stack up. And here we go again with more of the same. Next time a professional development session rolls around to help you "strengthen" your curriculum, you may want to ask who's paying the bills.

Marketing and Mystification for CCSS

Well, we knew this was coming.

Launching in winter of 2014, EdReports, a new non-partisan non-profit, will provide "Consumer Reports-style reviews will highlight those instructional materials that are aligned to the higher standards states have adopted so that teachers, principals and district and state officials charged with purchasing materials can make more informed choices."

Politico calls it a "Consumer Reports for the Common Core." The organization will bring in some teachers and other educationistas to rate materials from various publishers. They'll be starting with "Pearson’s enVision Math, McGraw-Hill’s Everyday Math, Houghton Mifflin’s Go Math and more than a dozen other widely used curricula."

If you are thinking, "Oh, good. Some independent experts will rate these materials and give us an impartial view of which materials are the best," then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. EdReports.org is brought to you by the usual suspects.

Per Politico, a cool three mill in funding is coming from the Gates Foundation and the Helmsley Trust. Education First, a thinky tank/consulting firm that has teamed up with the Fordham Institute to promote the Core, is "incubating" them. The executive director is Eric Hirsch, previously a big wig at the New Teacher Center (they sell teacher induction) and the Center for Teaching Quality (spoiler alert-- quality comes with the Core). The board chair of EdReports is Dr. Maria Klawe. Dr. Klawe's day job is mathematician and president of Harvey Mudd College, a sort of high-powered STEM school. You might also be interested in one of her side gigs-- one of ten members of the board of Microsoft Corporation.

So what's happening here? My guess is two things-- one obvious, and one not quite so.

First, it's just good marketing.

Common Core has always been in large part about branding and marketing. A nationalized education system where textbook companies don't have to market fifty different flavors of the same product, but can just hawk the same material coast-to-coast --- that kind large scale sales had to get Pearson et al salivating from day one.

But an unregulated CCSS marketplace meant that just anybody could slap a sticker on a book and start cashing in on the new wave. That's not good. For one thing, competition is a Good Thing if only the Right People are allowed to compete. Little fish have to be squeezed out. For another thing, what good are standards if you don't have standards for standardizing the standards. Folks like the Brookings guys have been saying all along that we have the need, the need to weed, as in weeding out the crap that is CCSS is cover sticker only.

An independent-looking verifier of  your product's excellence is super-duper marketing.

Second, the mystification factor.

Here's a quote from Thomas Newkirk, from "Speaking Back to the Common Core."


We are already seeing at work a process I call “mystification”—taking a practice that was once viewed as within the normal competence of a teacher and making it seem so technical and advanced that a new commercial product (or form of consultation) is necessary.

In other words, in the brave new Common Core world, teachers are not capable of choosing textbooks on their own. Their professional judgment is not sufficient to the task-- we need an entire non-profit organization of consultants and experts to truly discern if this math series or those language textbooks are okay to use.

In the old days, a committee of teachers could work as a committee, look through various texts, hear the pitch from salespeople, and make a choice based on what they thought would work best for their program in their schools. Now here comes EdReports to say, "Step aside, little ladies. We wouldn't want you to hurt your pretty little heads doing all this hard pedagogical thinky stuff. Let us just tell you what you want to pick."

Teachers used to be educational experts. Now, apparently, we're not.

Bonus factor: Common Core boosting

One of the things teachers would probably get wrong is considering textbooks and materials based on what would, in their professional opinions, provide the best education for their particular student population while fitting the strengths of their building and district. They might look at all sorts of technical things like the sequencing of concepts and the examples and exercises used to support instruction.

EdReports is here to remind you that what most matters when selecting a textbook is how well it lines up with the Common Core. All those myriad of questions that you ask your self when reflecting on your practices and instruction-- you should only be asking one question. Does this line up with the Core. Because nothing else matters except how well you and your students adapt yourselves to the one size that all must fit.

As I mentioned above, this delightful service doesn't launch for a few months yet (just in time for textbook shopping season). Be sure to alert your district administration so that you can avoid the mistake of letting teachers make up their own minds about materials.

High Quality Instructional Materials

When folks, particularly reformy folks, start talking about high quality instructional materials, I reflexively bristle. Part of it is that HQIM means, for some folks, materials that are aligned with the Common Core (either by name or under the various alias it has adopted). I also associate the term with curriculum-in-a-box, the kind of program that salespeople tout as teacher-proof, just as long as the school content delivery units present the program "with fidelity" aka "like mindless robots whose compliance is required and whose professional judgment is forbidden." 

But the truth is, I need to take a deep breath and return my hackles to their seated unraised position, because there is a conversation about quality materials worth having, albeit a more nuanced and complicated one than the one we're inclined to have (also, I'm pretty sure that "a more nuanced and complicated conversation than the one we're inclined to have" covers a huge number of education issues).

Because I know better.

The best instructional materials I ever had (not made by me) was a literature series by MacMillan-Scribner. A solid selection of literature, and a really great set of both questions for the selection and materials to create a unit test. The whole package was about 80% aligned with what I wanted to accomplish in the class. It saved me untold hours.

On the other hand, in 39 years, I never saw a grammar/usage/writing text that was worth the paper it was printed on. Most were simply dreadful, with explanations that were unclear and exercises that were too brief and often poorly focused. I depended on my own created materials for about 90% of my teaching in those areas. 

On the other other hand, there was my mentee who started her career depending heavily on Google as her teaching assistant, and not in a good way. We had too many conversation like this:

"I found a worksheet about this book/standard/lesson on line"

"Great. Why are you using this particular worksheet? How does it fit in your unit objectives?"

"It's about this book/standard/lesson."

There's still a problem with chirpy articles like this one (from EdReports, whose whole raison d'etre is certifying instructional materials as 100% common core fresh) that presume that if teachers just understood HQIM better, they'd realize that HQIM would make everything awesome. This is not true, either. 

And of course the entire conversation is muddied up by the term High Quality Instructional Material, which means whatever you think it means. So let me tell you what I think a piece of high quality instructional material looks like.

Accurate and Appropriate Content

I shouldn't need to bring this up, but every teacher has been there--you're working your way through new teaching materials and realize that the writers of the book got something wrong. Well, that's if you're lucky and vigilant; otherwise, the mistake will be brought to your attention by a student.

I know I may not be the person to fly the flag, what with my years of cranking out typo-riddled posts on this blog. But textbooks are expensive, and textbook companies are well-paid, so I don't want to open up a book and find a noun called a verb or Stephen Crane called a Romantic writer. I want materials created by somebody who knows the content and knows it well and not someone who is just plugging in stuff for a template (or--and I don't know how much this is an issue in other content areas, but in English it's a pain--is apparently working from an open copy of someone else's textbook and trying to copy it without actually violating copyright laws).

Nor do I want a textbook to include baloney like calling enslaved people immigrants or the USSR a Communist paradise or otherwise attempting to put a particular gloss on the content. 

And since time saving is one of the appeals of HQIM, the prospect of sifting through a haystack like Teachers Pay Teachers for some needle of high quality material seems like a problem. It may be my old-fartiness shining through, but TPT seems like an invitation to Just Grab Something without taking the time to find something good (and in that same time, could I not design something of my own).

Also--material that is grade/age appropriate. This is a hard one, given the wide range of end users. That's just one reason we need--

Flexibility

EdReports likes to say that the think teachers should implement materials with "integrity" rather than "fidelity." I agree at least half with this--no materials that demand to be implemented with fidelity are high quality, because what that actually means is that someone, somewhere, has decided that they know the best way to teach material to students that they haven't even met. The teacher is in the classroom; the book's authors are not. Note: anything with a script is not HQIM.

HQIM are adaptable, so that the teacher can use them to construct a lesson that's best for the class they're facing. EdReports actually cites some research to back this up, suggesting that  “'adaptation with guardrails' can actually help strengthen impacts on student outcomes beyond what is possible through program fidelity alone. In other words, learn the materials by sticking close to what the manufacturer suggests, then as you become familiar, adapt to suit. 

Implicit in all this is that HQIM provide more materials than you can actually use--because you're not going to use all of it. You're going to use the pieces that work best for you and your students, including making adjustment for achievement levels within the class.

Actual Support

Here's what teachers are used to getting: a PD session from some company rep who spent a couple of years in the classroom, then checked out for this sweeter gig. This person will suggest that you don't know what you're doing and will blow off any practical questions you want to ask.

Here's what teachers need, particularly with materials that are computer based: A person they can call who can actually answer questions and provide support other than reading from the same manual that the teacher already looked at on line. 

The Why

There is nothing more critical in a classroom than the why. The teacher has to know why they're covering the material, and it has to be a good reason and not "because someone told me to" or "it will be on the Big Standardized Test" or any of the other reasons that students hear, correctly, as "Blah blah blah no good reason." 

For HQIM, this becomes another aspect of flexibility. Instructional Materials cannot supply the why (pro tip: "Because it's in the book" is not a useful why) for the teacher, but they can be clear about what sorts of why the particular materials address. When a teacher goes to the materials bank, they need be able to search beyond "something about Hamlet." They should be dipping into the library looking for "exploring the themes of Hamlet" or "reviewing character relations in Hamlet" or "examining the plot sequence in Hamlet" and the teacher should be able to look for these specifics without having to read through every single piece of material to figure out what it's about.

A well-done teachers' guide can even help develop the why of a unit by suggesting possible ideas to explore.

A bad set of materials hides its why. The worst grammar/usage text I ever had offered terrible grammar exercises, and it was only after I was several chapters in before I realized that the exercises were all organized exceptions to or quirks in the grammar concepts, trying to test the students' grasp of the concepts with examples from the fringes--without ever giving students a chance to practice the basic core of the idea. 

Teacher enhancing, not teacher proof

No brand of instructional material can make a great teacher out of a lousy one, but administrative demands to follow a program with fidelity can make a mediocre teacher out of a good one (or a former teacher out of a good one). 

I know there are sales reps out there whose pitch, implicit or explicit, is "Buy our stuff and you will have a complete curriculum and a whole staff of teachers on the same page." And I have worked for a couple of administrators who totally bought that pitch. 

There are two problems. First of all, good teachers will be hamstrung, and lousy teachers will still be lousy (how to unlousify them is a whole other post). HQIM should save teachers time and trouble, not micro-managing them.

Second of all, imagine this--the company goes out of business and all of their materials suddenly vanish. If leaders in your district are suddenly saying, "Oh no! Now we have no curriculum!" then you never did, because teaching materials are not a curriculum. They should be used to implement your curriculum and enhance your teachers' work. It's like putting seatbelts in your school buses, strapping all your students in, and announcing that your focus is safety as you send a driverless bus careening down the road. 

Create your curriculum. Then select your books etc based on how well they fit your district's plan. Which means--yes--that some high quality instructional materials may conceivably be an excellent fit for one district and not so much for another. (Which takes us back to the old "Wait a minute--we can't have a whole bunch of different curricula higgledy piggledy all over the place," and that really is a post for another day).

The Gates Doubles Down

Yesterday it was time for Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Susan Desmond-Hellman to roll out an annual letter trumpeting the foundation's Good Works. The missive covers several of the foundation's areas of interest, and it devotes a whole section to education.

She opens with the observation that K-12 edcation has been "our greatest area of learning." So has Gates gotten any smarter or wiser about education? Have they learned from the contentious and problematic attempt to reconfigure US pubic education?

Short answer? Nope.

Desmond-Hellman is a biotechnologist, which rather fits with the Gates model of bad education as a disease that just needs aggressive treatment. She notes that "education is a bridge to opportunity in America" (which kind of ignores all the bigger, wider bridges like being born into wealth and privilege) and cites a speech by Allan Golston, a Gates Foundation mucky-muck who once wrote a sentence that I called "the wrongest sentence ever in the CCSS debate." So we're off to a bad start. And that leads us to this one sentence paragraph:

However, we’re facing the fact that it is a real struggle to make system-wide change. 

That's the fact we're facing-- that system change is hard. Not that, say, our basic assumptions about the system are flawed, or our theory of action hasn't held up to real world application, or we haven't paid enough attention to the real experts in the field, or the programs and policies that we have pushed might not actually be very good.


No. It's that damned change-resistant system.

This, as Joanne Barkan so ably chronicles, is the plutocrat's lament. My vision is so awesome, and I am so rich, and I am so used to having things go the way I direct them to, I cannot for the life of me figure out why my brilliant square peg will not go into this round hole. If people would just behave...

Desmond-Hellman continues with a fake statistic-- "only 40 percent of students met three of the four college-readiness standards across English, reading, math, and science." This is a problem both because of the basis for saying that in the first place (a study by test manufacturer ACT-- so it's kind of like a study by Ford Motor Company on whether or not Americans have enough cars) and the implication that you're not really ready for college unless you have the knowledge base of both a science major and an English major ("Sorry, Chris. We were going to give you a full music scholarship, but your biology scores were too low").

However, I’m optimistic that all students can thrive when they are held to high standards. And when educators have clear and consistent expectations of what students should be able to do at the end of each year, the bridge to opportunity opens. The Common Core State Standards help set those expectations.

So, apparently, nobody ever held students to high standards before (and apparently few people even thought of it). But we've discussed the magical power of expectations, and my advice to folks in the private sector remains the same-- if expectations of high standards are the key to making every student succeed, then I suggest Microsoft just start hiring people at random and then expecting them to meet high standards. What's that you say? Only some people can meet those standards, and so "hold to high standards" in industry means "sorting the wheat from the chaff, and only employing the wheat"? If that's so, then where do we send the students who are chaff in public education?

Also. "When educators have clear and consistent expectations of what students should be able to do at the end of the year," that almost certainly means that we have narrowed those expectations into a one-size-fits-all model that serves few students well.

Desmond-Hellman says that we have "begun to see signs of improvement," and goes on to cite Kentucky, which is a bold choice considering recent reports that after years of Common Core, Kentucky has widened the achievement gap. Granted, I think the "achievement gap" (aka "standardized test score gap") is a lousy measure, but it's the yardstick the reformsters asked to use, and it shows them failing. So, maybe Kentucky isn't actually a sign of improvement.

Desmond-Hellman includes a nifty graphic listing the "value of Common Core," except that it includes the same old baloney like "a deeper dive into subjects" and "focus on critical thinking," though at this stage of the game, there is still no evidence that Common Core actually promotes these things. The graphic also touts that "teachers have consistent and clear expectations" of what students should be able to do at the end of the grade level, and I suppose she doesn't mean "expect to get a good score on a Big Standardized Test," but this also skips over a big big huge ginormous question  because while it's lovely that expectations are clear and consistent, they also have to be developmentally appropriate and just plain correct. I can be clear and consistent in my expectation that a two-year-old run a six-minute mile, but that expectation is still a lousy one.

Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards. We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators – particularly teachers – but also parents and communities so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning.

No. No no no no no NO no nope nope nopity nope no. No.

It was not the implementation, stupid. The standards have not crashed and burned and morphed and changed into a shapeless mass of meaningless mulch because people did it wrong. The Core don't have an image problem because people don't understand them properly; they have an image problem for the same reason nobody likes your bad boyfriend-- they're bad.

Desmond-Hallman says that "this" has been a tough lesson to absorb, but what this? Because they don't seem to have learned any lesson at all, except the same old one, which is when your square peg won't fit into a big hole, you blame it on the hole and grab a bigger hammer. And so many failures. So many! Here's just a partial listing from Anthony Cody, who has watched Gates for a while, and is, in fact, an actual teacher that tried to get the Gates to hear him. Gates Common Core based reforms continue to be the Zune of education-- and yet somehow, it's not time to pull the plug?

You've already heard the doubling down quote from many reactions to the missive, but you should see the paragraph-sized non sequitor that is its context--

One of the best parts of my job is getting to hear from educators. And no one knows teaching like teachers. So, we’re doubling down on our efforts to make sure teachers have what they need to make the most of their unique capabilities.

Boy, those teachers really know all about teaching. That's why we are going to work even harder to force our top-down non-educator-created standards system down their collective throats.

She wraps up with a focus on materials, reminding us of awesome products like LearnZillion and EngageNY, plus the work of EdReports.org to review all this stuff. These are somehow going to drive a national demand for high quality materials, because presumably teachers were never before interested in high quality teaching materials.

Had enough of the hubris yet? Let's wind up for the big finish:

Our learning journey in U.S. education is far from over, but we are in it for the long haul. I’m optimistic that the lessons we learn from our partners – and, crucially, from educators – will help the American school system once again become the powerful engine of equity we all believe it should be.

What lessons??!! What lessons?? What lesson have you learned from educators, exactly, because so far it sounds like the lesson learned "from educators" is "we've watched these educators work with our awesome stuff and we've concluded that their system is too resistant to change, too slow to recognize that we know better than they do."

And "once again become the powerful engine of equity"??!! Once again?? When was that, exactly? I confess to wanting this to be true, that there was actually some golden age when public schools leveled the playing field between wealthy white kids and non-wealthy non-white kids. But while we've held that out as an ideal, it has been a long steady slog. Public schools reflect the culture they're part of, and that means every piece of classism, racism, sexism, and other ugly isms have been woven right into the fabric of our educational system.

We have to do better. We must do better. That, to me, is the best American goal-- not to recapture some dream of a golden time that never existed, but to unflinchingly see how we are coming up short and to strive, always, to get better.

The Gates likes the classic reformster formulation. There is a big problem, so you should embrace our solution, and if you ask me to explain how my proposed solution really helps anything, I will just keep telling you how awful the problem is. But the Gates remains convinced that their vision of a national education system re-organized around a top-down imposed set of one-size-fits-all standards-- that, somehow, despite all the objections, all the arguments, all the words from actual trained and experienced professional educators, all the lousy results, and all of that, let's not forget, the fact that nobody chose, elected, asked or otherwise enlisted Bill Gates to take on this project in the first place-- despite all of that, the Gates intends to keep plugging away, hitting the square peg with larger hammers, over and over, blaming everything in the world for the damage inflicted by their relentless failure except, of course, themselves.

PDK & Marketing for the Core

One of the features of Common Core has always been the ability to market materials on a national scale. A national set of standards should help edubizes get away from having to marker fifty different sets of materials, but it only partially solves the problem of millions of individual teachers who think they have the professional expertise to think and choose for themselves.

We've already covered the creation of EdReports, a site intended to be a Consumer Reports style recommender of education materials. But here comes a puff piece in the Phi Delta Kappan that read likes the advertising insert in a glossy magazine.

"Support the Common Core with the Right Instructional Materials" authors Rachel Leifer and Denis Udall both have nifty education pedigrees. Leifer did stint with TFA in DC ("where more than 80 percent of her students advanced at least 1.5 years in academic skills annually")and is now a program officer for the Helmsley Foundation. Udall graduated from Harvard's Graduate School of Education and went on to found a charter school; these days he works for the Hewlett Foundation. So, big fans and supporters of public education.

Leifer and Udall open with an anecdote about a school in New York that used EngageNY materials and -- whoosh!-- for the first time in years "test data show that nearly every student at Ripley is making substantial learning gains." Or at least test data show that students are generating better test data. But it wouldn't be another day in Reformsterland if we didn't blithely assume that test scores = learning. The conclusion Leifer and Udall reach in this introductory anecdote is that having the right materials makes all the difference!

So advertising point one-- you need good materials.

Point number two-- the good materials are essential, but they are scarce.

Well, damn. If only there were some expert organization that could direct me to the Right Stuff!

CCSS supporters "realized early that they would need to prod the marketplace to respond to the standards." So "working with educators," the Student Achievement Partners (the non-profit profiteering group founded by CCSS writers David Coleman, Susan Pimentel and Jason Zimba) decided they would whip something up.

Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool (IMET) is a product of SAP. It is

a set of rubrics designed to support educators and administrators tasked with developing, evaluating, or buying full-year or multi-year curricula. The rubrics distill the standards into non-negotiable criteria for alignment with tangible metrics.

Doesn't that sound grand and technical and like the kind of thing you'd need experts for-- real smart experts and not just classroom teachers? And so we consider the process of suggesting that classroom teachers are not knowledgeable enough to select classroom materials. I know that's not a new idea, but the CCSS marketing plan requires it.

Educators Evaluating Quality Instructional Products (EQuIP) is from our good friends at Achieve.

This rubric evaluates a lesson or unit on four dimensions: alignment to the depth of the standards, key shifts required by the standards, instructional supports, and assessments. Scores for each dimension classify materials as exemplar, exemplar if improved, revision needed, or not ready.

Achieve has trained a boatload of teachers to use this (because, again, the poor dears certainly couldn't have mastered it on their own) and has a cadre of fifty evaluators ready to give materials a look-see and the stamp of approval (or not).

It's about here, in a small-print paragraph, that Leifer and Udall note that both of these groups being advertised here get grant money from Helmsley and Hewlett.

The author's cite two benefits of using the rubrics. First, they will create "smart demand." In other words, these rubrics are a way for the rubric designers to coach the market, to encourage the market to want what the rubric designers think the market should want. Second, the rubrics will make everyone who uses them more familiar with the Core. Presumably not in the "Now that I understand what the Core is, I do not support it" manner documented in recent polls.

Two shining lights

Leifer and Udall go on to discuss two states that have had super-duper success with this sort of thing: Louisiana (where Leifer worked for a while) and New York.

For Louisiana, they talked to John White as well as touting the use of materials from some of the same folks who helped write EngageNY's lesson plan straightjackets. At any rate, they claim that LA reviewed textbooks so rigorously that only one each for math and ELA made the grade. White is proud of judging publishers transparently. The article does not in any way address that giant regulatory clusterfinagle that is currently LA education.

In New York, we just go ahead and declare EngageNY a success, based on anecdotes from a couple of administrators. This alleged success is due to three factors:

         1) Using the EQuIP rubric real hard
         2) Training many educators
         3) Facilitating adaptions instead of requiring scripts

Because EngageNY is just famous for its lack of scripting and its enormous freedom for teachers. Which, given what I've been hearing for the last year or more, will come as real news to some folks.

The Five Main Steps

So what does it take to come up with great materials? Five steps, it turns out.

1) Build on previous efforts and existing resources. By which they mean, use the techniques that have already worked for places like Louisiana and New York.

2) Make sure educators are involved and trained. The training is important because, remember, teachers are not sufficiently knowledgeable or professional to select their own classroom materials without first being properly indoctrinated trained.

3) Have non-negotiables. In the dating world, these are called dealbreakers. In this case, it means don't try to make your own revisions to the rubrics-- if the rubric says no go, then listen tot it. Remember, teachers and principals and curriculum directors-- you are not professionals and these sorts of decisions are beyond your ability to make unaided.

4) Provide detailed feedback. To textbook companies, that is. It's your job to help them make the sale.

5) Enable teachers to supplement and adapt material on their own. By which they apparently mean to allow teachers to go to "online libraries of vetted materials" (EQuIP and SAP both have them), not actually write or adapt materials themselves. Good lord, they're only classroom teachers-- how could they possibly do that?


It's a pretty little advertising insert and really, what better message to send out to the members of a society of professional educators that they can relax, because education is in the hands of people more capable than professional educators.

Curriculum As The Next Reformy Frontier

Just stay with me for a minute.

The right-tilted Hoover Institute has a publication out for the fortieth anniversary of A Nation At Risk, the Reagan-era hit job on public education, a collection of essays by various members of the reformster world. Some of these are not very enticing (Eric Hanushek on Fixing Schools Through Finance, or Cami Anderson on Lessons from Newark), but there's at least one that's worth a look. 

Robert Pondiscio's contribution is The Case For Curriculum (reprinted in slightly more readable form here), and it's a thoughtful look at his perennial point . And if it seems like I just wrote about this stuff, it's because I did, but it's a discussion worth continuing. 

Pondiscio opens with a sort of recap of ed reform so far, admitting that "the structural reform theory of change has underperformed" and that while they've logged some successes, "if the classic ed reform playbook of higher academic standards, high-stakes testing, and muscular accountability was going to bear fruit, drive watershed improvement in student outcomes, or appreciably narrow racial achievement gaps, we’d have clear evidence of it by now." 

Worse, as the education reform movement evolved from the do-gooder earnestness of its early days to a punitive technocratic regime, it overspent its moral capital and contributed to unmistakable reform fatigue. This led a significant number of public education stakeholders — parents, teachers, and taxpayers—to regard its policies and practices with skepticism, even cynicism, particularly as education spending continued to rise while student achievement stagnated and even declined.

The lingering effects of COVID-related disruptions have shifted much of the attention in US education away from long-running debates over testing and accountability to more urgent discussions about learning loss, student mental health issues, and declining school attendance. It seems unlikely that the bipartisan ed reform coalition whose agenda dominated America’s K–12 agenda in the first decades of the twenty-first century will be returning to prominence anytime soon, if ever. The appetite for reform has waned considerably. The movement is what advertising and marketing professionals call a tainted brand. Indeed, ed reform “is now considered to be a loaded term that is no longer spoken in polite company,” former Massachusetts secretary of education James Peyser recently observed, “without risking a heated argument or losing the friendship of former allies.”

Then he's on to the point he's made before. Given the number of human beings needed to fill teaching positions, the likelihood is that not all of them, maybe not even most of them, are going to be teaching superstars. And that, he argues, requires a different approach to ed reform.

If teacher capacity is unlikely to change, then what must change is the teacher’s job. If the education reform movement is to regain its momentum and moral authority, becoming not merely a disruptive force but an effective one, it must reinvent itself as a practice-based movement that is clear-eyed and candid about human capital and system capacity, committed not to transforming the teacher workforce but to making teaching doable by the existing workforce and those likely to enter the profession in the future.

Pondiscio knows this is a tall order, and he takes a few paragraphs to point out what teachers already know: Teach a few years, and you will live through several Hot New Ideas that will Fix Everything, and teach many years and you live through having old ideas covered with a fresh coat of paint and presented as the Hot New Idea. And as a bonus, these will be pitched to you, a working professional, by people who, as one teacher put it, "have never darkened the doors of our classroom."

Curriculum, he argues, is the lever to grab. He suggests that at least part of the long-puzzled mystery of why some teachers are more effective than other is curriculum. And he acknowledges the point that many teachers would make--

In theory, curating, customizing, or creating lessons from scratch allows teachers to tailor their instruction to meet the specific needs, interests, and abilities of their students. By designing their own curriculum, either in whole or in part, teachers can ostensibly adapt and differentiate class content, instructional methods, and assessments, resulting in a more personalized and engaging learning experience for students.

The next part of his argument is that this approach hasn't borne much evidential fruit, and he uses some research like the plate of baloney that is TNTP's Opportunity Myth to make the point that many teachers aren't self-building curriculum very well. We may disagree on the extent and quality of this issue, but it doesn't really matter, because it doesn't change the underlying idea. Regardless of the teacher, having good curriculum and instruction materials is better.

In my 39 years, there were times when we had a great textbook series with excellent materials, and times when we had terrible textbooks with lousy materials. The bad stuff threw more of the work onto me, which meant more of my time and effort was spent on building my own stuff. Likewise, later in my career, being faced with a particular teaching challenge would lead to "I have just the thing for this over in my filing cabinet" instead of "Okay, I can carve out a few hours tonight to find something for this." And I don't even want to talk about mentoring a new teacher who thought that googling a state standard and a topic was lesson planning.

So let's go ahead and stipulate that good, high-quality curriculum and instruction materials are better than bad ones, or none. 

Identifying high quality instructional materials is, of course, a huge huge huge challenge. EdReports, launched as "Consumer Reports for the Common Core," is often mentioned, but their process is still about whether or not the material is aligned with The Standards, which is meaningless because A) their no research base to tell us that the Standards are high quality and B) just because materials are aligned to the standards, that doesn't mean they're good teaching materials. One can absolutely teach the right materials badly and ineffectively. 

Pondiscio quotes Marcy Stein, an education professor, saying that of course, even if teachers had the training to do instructional design, "they would likely not have the time to prepare instructional materials, field test those materials to determine if they are effective, and modify the materials before using them to teach students." Well, first, I've seen a lot of instructional materials in my life that you will never, ever convince me were ever field tested anywhere. But even if they were, I have no reason to assume they were field tested on a batch of students like the one I face. Teachers do their field testing and implementation in the field; this is a piece of instructional design that isn't always discussed, the instructional redesign you do based on instant in-the-moment reaction to what is happening in your room. 

But again, it doesn't matter whether we agree about this or not, because better instructional materials are a good thing.

Pondiscio makes sure to dispel one concern that these conversations always raise-- he is not advocating for a scripted teacher-proof program in a box:

Readers might be tempted to see in between the lines of the preceding quotation an argument for the elimination of teacher autonomy or even a case for “McSchool,” a basic education deliverable by teachers of minimal competence and cognition who must be spoon-fed a scripted curriculum. Having anticipated this argument, let me put it to rest. An idea that is common to teacher training and professional development is that there should be a “why” behind everything a teacher does in the classroom, from classroom management to instructional decisions. The same principle applies here: the point is not for school districts to adopt a curriculum and for teachers to deliver it robotically. Well-prepared teachers should acquire through their training and professional development a sophisticated understanding of their subject matter and pedagogy and have it operationalized for them in the form of a curriculum or program.

Pondiscio calls for efforts to improve school performance to focus on instructional reform. He offers four key insights to keep in mind while making the attempt. First, rather than trying to turn the teacher pool into a land of superhumans, teaching must be "doable by women and men of ordinary talents and sentience." Second, it's easier and cheaper to change curricula than change teachers. Third

The soul of effective teaching is studying student work, giving effective feedback, and developing relationships with students. Teacher time spent on curating and customizing lessons, however valuable, takes time away from these more impactful uses of teacher time.

Fourth, because education is a public thing, policymakers can work for accountability, but "improvements at scale will not be wrested from rewards and punishments, nor from other 'structural' reforms."

Okay, what can I add?

First, let's acknowledge that this is a useful shift from the old classic reformster idea that education will be saved by rooting out all the Bad Teachers (located by checking Big Standardized Test scores) and replacing them (how and from where was always a weakness in this theory).

Second, I'll acknowledge once again that all policies focused on high quality instructional materials and a solid batch of content will always and forever involve spirited debate about what that should include. And that debate will never end, because the world keeps changing and because it's a subject that requires debate. And that's okay and doesn't have to a be problem as long as we accept that intelligent people of good intent will differ and debate will happen and a single correct answer will never be found--and that's okay. Not even just okay, but a feature of how people interact with knowledge and the world.

Finally, I think Pondiscio's essay has a huge gap, because while high quality instructional materials may be a policy issue, they are first and foremost a marketplace issue. Maybe even several marketplace issues, major and minor.

For instance, Pondiscio touches on the challenge of professional development related to curricular and instructional materials. It's not enough to get that Great New Stuff-- the staff has to learn how to use it. But who frequently does the PD? Someone from the publisher's sales staff. Someone who has not been in a classroom for ages (if at all) and left for a sales job because they didn't even like the teaching all that much. "This is how to use this material with your students," means nothing coming from someone who has never actually used the materials with students of their own. 

The best people to do PD are teachers who are good at using the materials, which creates its own problem because they're busy doing the work. 

But that's a relatively minor problem. A major problem, maybe even the major problem, is that the curriculum and instructional material is flooded with crap. Flooded. There's terrible ed tech, completely with various bells and whistles. There are companies that are designed around making a pitch to administrators, not to teachers. Pondiscio is heartened by the rise of Science of Reading, but here's NEPC finding that the market is already awash in materials that have simply had "science of reading" slapped on them as a marketing move (just as publishers did with "aligned with Common Core").

It's not simply a matter of elevating high-quality instructional materials; the marketplace is drowning in junk. The good stuff has a thirteenth clown problem (If there are twelve clowns in the ring throwing pies and seltzer around, you can jump down there and start reciting Shakespeare, but to the audience you'll just be the thirteenth clown). 

Any attempt to get more good stuff into teachers' hands has to include some sort of filtration system, and I'm not sure where that comes from. The government? God no-- I don't want legislators trying to make curricular decisions. Teachers don't have the time. Wading through it all is a full time job, not something for someone to squeeze in on the side. Which means that it costs money, which always goes over well. Maybe that's where policy makers can help. 

In the meantime, I welcome any version of ed reform that decides that rather than fixing or replacing teachers, thinks it might want to try to help them do the work. We'll see if that version catches on.

Pearson CEO Spreads It On Thick

EdWeek's Market Brief, a site that unabashedly focuses its gaze on the giant pile of money attached to the education biz, sat down with Pearson CEO John Fallon to unleash a heaping helping of corporate toolspeak.

Fallon responded to a series of questions from reporters that EdWeek has helpfully organized. So we'll borrow their organizational scheme here.

What is Pearson's biz?

Primarily, Pearson makes giant piles of money. Fallon claims $7 billion annual revenues and "50 percent come from courseware/content, in K-12, higher education, and across the professional space." Thirty percent comes from testing (ten percent of the high stakes variety). The last twenty percent comes from services provided to school and Pearson's own virtual school. So, bigtime education.

Fallon says that a Pearson motto is "content plus assessment, powered by technology, equalizes effective learning at scale." Similar to the sort of thing we all used to write on "why I want to teach" essays back in teacher school. Okay, not that similar, since the Pearson motto doesn't actually mention teaching as part of the plan-- just technology-powered content delivery and assessment. As we have noted before when studying Pearson's Master Plans.

Fallon also said the company’s approach is to “define what we do by the outcome, not by where it happens physically.”

In the Cyber School game

Reporters, apparently in a very diplomatic and polite manner, asked Fallon, "Pearson has bet heavily on cyber-schools through its Connections Academy, among other products. What do you say to customers who are have noticed that cyber-schools are a big poop sandwich?"

Fallon's answer is a Mona Lisa of corporate baloneyspeak.

It’s important to speak in specific rather than general terms…It’s not always the case, but it’s fair to say there’s a disproportionate number of students in virtual schooling who are there because physical schools have failed them in some form or another. So it’s going to be important that we track value-added, or progress-added.

We see technology as the means by which I can apply the benefits of teaching to far more people, and you can help free teachers up to spend more time with students, engaging students, learning from each other. Technology is not a panacea, it’s just a tool, and its primary value is in enhancing the power of teaching to reach more people.

We publish studies that show the value that these programs do add. I think on the whole, the results are pretty good….But we are not complacent or satisfied, and all the time we’re looking to improve the value that is added. If you look at Connections Academy, the schools are incredibly popular with parents…[We measure the extent to which parents recommended our online programs among each other] and it receives an incredibly high rating.

So, yeah, boy, measuring the effectiveness of the program is important, and we're totally working on that, and we're always working on getting better, so when you ask if we're actually accomplishing anything, we can-- say, have you seen these glowing customer reviews?

Common Core alignment

Fallon was asked about the charge that many publishers didn't so much align materials with Common Core as just slap some Common Core stickers on the same old materials. EdReports in particular fingered Pearson materials, among others, as a big ole fail. Fallon's counter-argument is, well, to say, "We’re very confident that our products are aligned to the common core." So there you go! Problem solved. A company assures you that their product totally works-- what else do you need?

Common Core implementation

Pearson has some ideas about a super-duper educational delivery product that would revolutionize everything and fit just great with Common Core. But Fallon believes that kind of total overhaul (or total commandeering) of the education system will take time.

In hindsight, one of the mistakes that were made around the implementation of the common core was to think you could switch from No Child Left Behind, that you could click your fingers and it would happen in one fell swoop. It will take the better part of a generation for the benefits to flow through, because it’s such a fundamental step change.

None of which means that Fallon has anything other than complete confidence. Yes, too-abrupt addition on test-based assessment made teachers cranky, and there wasn't a great understanding of how the data crunching and tracking would work, but Fallon notes that it all happened anyway, so, win! And yes, absolutely every aspect of schools will need to be changed, but that should be swell. He neglects to mention that the implementation is further hampered by the complete lack of proof, support, or data to suggest that any of these changes will be educationally beneficial.

This does leap Pearson into the Cautious Approach lead. Bill Gates said it would take a decade to find out if Common Core was actually working, but Fallon is willing to bet the education of an entire generation on this shot in the experimental dark.

Assessment! Assessment! Assessment!

While the heading focuses on the awesomeness of summative assessment, Fallon is quoted as being excited about the convergence of summative and formative assessment-- the ever-popular all-standardized-testing, all-the-time. This has been on the Pearson radar for a long time; you can start a fuller journey through the Pearson Master Plan for an Assessment Renaissance right here.

Wither High Stakes Testing?

Given the ongoing meltdown of the Big Standardized Test biz, do you ever see Pearson getting out?

Fallon is unmoved. We gave 15 million awesome tests successfully last year (presumably that "successfully" isn't considering whether or not the tests were crap). And we can't go back to bubble tests, because they don't prepare students for the real world. Seriously-- the pick-and-click computer BS Test is totally preparation for real life, if your real life is taking bad standardized tests. Is that a job somewhere?

Soooooo... About That LAUSD Debacle

Asked about the total and expensive debacle of trying to convert the Los Angeles to one-to-one tabletry, Fallon has nothing specific to say. In general, technology is hard and converting to new standards is hard and switching teachers over very quickly is hard, and boy, all these hard things take time.

But about the Pearson Pre-loaded Curriculum?

Lots of people have used it since then without any disastrous complaints at all.

Open Source?

"So," asks someone diplomatically, "are you afraid that the open source movement of Free Stuff will get in the way of your profitable market?"

"Well," says Fallon diplomatically, "there will always be a market for materials that aren't cheap crap you just google off the internet." And then he is correct yet again when he notes that the open source route is "not a free route." You still need software and hardware and to manage the whole big mess. So Pearson is not worried, and I can't say that I blame them.

Pearson's Confidence Game

Pearson's leadership belongs to that special elite group of reformsters. It may be that they are the champion poker-faced con artists, but I'm generally left with the impression that they are just that confident, that they can contemplate redesigning the entire educational system of several nations without ever wondering if maybe, just maybe, they're over-reaching in a way that would be alarming and dangerous in an actual elected government, let alone a multinational corporation that doesn't have to listen to anybody.

How much nerve does it take to say, "Redesign a cultural institution that serves as a foundation of our civilization and has roots going back centuries? Sure-- we can do that. And we will do it with products untested and unproven-- even products that have been shown to be defective-- and we'll gamble the education of an entire generation on it, and we'll do it by just taking over an entire sector just because we want to and certainly not because anyone asked us to."

If it weren't for that whole "gambling the education of an entire generation" part, the hubris would be breath-taking. As it is, the whole business just continues to be alarming.