Sec. Cardona's Bold Bowl Of Oatmeal (And That's Okay)

This is a critique of a pronouncement from Education Secretary Cardona, with a special twist ending. We're going to Raise The Bar: Lead The World.

That's the title, a thing stripped of any poetry or sense, of some new initiative thingy that the United States Department of Education is embarking on. Secretary Cardona rolled it out in a "major address." And if you're wondering what, exactly, they're talking about--well, let's drill down into the language of the announcement and see what we can find.

The press release is appropriately vague, speaking of "global engagement" and making "a call to strengthen our will to transform education for the better, building on approaches that we know work in education" and a "collective will to challenge complacency." The department tweet is even more obtuse, exhorting that "we must step up, seize this opportunity & maximize the potential of our students, our schools, and our country." It all seems vaguely familiar.

This new--well, I guess we call it a "direction" which I suppose is less definitive than an "initiative" but more focused than a "general inclination"-- thing comes with three "focus areas." 

• Achieving Academic Excellence
• Accelerating learning for every student
• Deliver a comprehensive and rigorous education for every student 
• Boldly Improve Learning Conditions
• Eliminate the educator shortage for every school
• Invest in every student’s mental health and well-being
• Creating Pathways for Global Engagements
• Ensure every student has a pathway to college and career
• Provide every student a pathway to multilingualism

A, B, C--get it? The actual goals are about as generic as one can get, with nary a specific actionable item in sight. I'm not even sure what "global engagements" are. Do we want our citizens to outdo workers in other countries? Bring the jobs back here (as if that is in worker control)? 

We can tease out some more specific notions from the actual text of his speech.

The speech, like the press release, really really wants you to know that the American Rescue Plan includes a "historic" $130 billion thrown in the general direction of schools. 

What we do need is a collective will to fight complacency and status quo in education with the same passion we used to fight COVID. We need the same spirit of unity and bipartisanship we had in the first two months of the pandemic, when we looked past red and blue, and tapped into our humanity, courage, and American spirit.

That's a bold choice of comparison, because education is still dealing with people whose passion is to fight against the fight against covid, a passion that they have indeed transferred to education itself. "No masks" and "No vaccinations" shifted pretty quickly to "No naughty books" and "No telling kids to be nice." He says at one point that culture wars aren't the answer, but maybe he doesn't get where they're coming from. Nor does getting nostalgic about a period that was a two-month blip in the larger narrative seems unlikely to yield help.

But I really take exception to the "complacency" line. I know a lot of teachers, and while they might be described as tired, beleaguered, passionate, overworked, committed, professional, and doing their damned best, I can't say I know many that are "complacent."

But from there we move on to the ABC's of this new thingy.

Academics? We get this baloney:

As much as it is about recovery, it’s also about setting higher standards for academic success in reading and mathematics. It’s unacceptable that in the most recent PISA test, an assessment which is done internationally, our students scored 36th place out of 79 countries in math.

Bringing up our rank on the PISA is an automatic disqualifier from the Take Me Seriously derby. We have always ranked low on the PISA, and nobody has ever correlated that performance with anything. We always get beaten by Estonia. So what? If you want to convert education to a Prepare for the PISA model, it could be done--all you'd have to do is give up any pretense of actual educating.

What specific academic advances does he have in mind? "Science of literacy" and "strong decoding," and I'm not going to get into the reading wars because (spoiler alert) winning the reading wars and teaching students to read are two different things. Financial literacy. High standards aka stop grade inflation. STEM. Pre-K. And this bold stance:

It means that we pursue good pedagogy in a well-rounded education that includes and embraces the Arts—and reject a school experience that is narrowed to only what is tested.

It tells you something about the last twenty-some years of government edumeddling and general bullshittery that it's even a thing that a statement by the secretary of education saying that "good pedagogy" is a thing we should pursue. 

We need to recognize once and for all that standardized tests work best when they serve as a flashlight on what works and what needs our attention – not as hammers to drive the outcomes we want in education from the top down, often pointing fingers to those with greater needs and less resources.

This is a true thing. Federal education people should say it, and they have, many times. It's a fine thing to say, but if it is not immediately followed by "And so we will call on Congress to end federal mandates for standardized testing as a measure of school effectiveness, teacher quality, and student achievement," it doesn't mean a damned thing. Especially when it's coming from the guy who defended the BS Test at a time when it was clearly a waste of valuable time and resources.

Then we're on to better learning conditions. Cardona calls for better mental health supports, with more counselors, somehow. More professional development on trauma informed practice (because one more PD session will totally take care of that). 

Let’s not have pandemic amnesia and forget how schools closed because they did not have enough teachers.

Yeah, too late on that pandemic amnesia thing. Teachers are important and we should pay them more, he says, with various rhetorical flourishes. The administration is ready to throw a bunch of money at teacher development and retention. Higher salaries. Career ladders like Master Teacher and Teacher Leader. Cancel college debts. Actually listening to teachers and respecting their opinions. These are all nice ideas that we have heard before (though admittedly not in the previous administration, so thanks for setting that bar low, Secretary DeVos).

Pre-K through college connection. Career and technical education. Watch for the rollout of a "new pathways initiative" which will "include very specific plans on how our high schools should be evolved to meet the career and college pathways of today and tomorrow." Micro-credentials. Career pathways create options. 

This cradle to career stuff will help our graduates "compete on a global stage," and whenever I hear that magical phrase I want to know if A) better educated widgets will somehow cause corporate bosses to bring back jobs to the US and B) what sort of education prepares students to compete by agreeing to live on subsistence wages. Cardona seems to love the cradle to career model; I've complained about his support before. 

Also, multilingual stuff is good.

Then it's the big finish, including something Cardona cribbed from the Betsy DeVos playbook. In a list of parallel structures exhorting folks to join in:

If you believe that it’s worth taking a few lumps as we challenge the protectors of the status quo in education: join me on this journey.

What status quo, and which protectors? Seriously. Because one status quo I can think of is the continued use of the Big Standardized Test, and that piece of status quo is protected by the federal government. So go ahead and get started on that one, will you? 

The speech and the thingy that it introduces seem like the usual lukewarm bowl of unflavored oatmeal, and in a way, I guess that's okay. Here's a bit from early in the speech:

We have seen shiny silver bullets from the federal level promising to “fix” education. We’ve seen big initiatives with clever names that promise everything, only to fade away after the sense of urgency is over.

That’s not what this Administration is about.

This Administration is about substance, not sensationalism in education. It’s about real solutions to complex issues, informed by real experience – with an unrelenting focus on the instructional core.

Okay, I'm not sure that it's clear what the heck this administration is about when it comes to education, but the idea here is sound.

Any Secretary of Education who stands up to say, "Hey, here's a Great New Thing that will fix education in this country" is full of it. Doesn't matter if the Great New Thing is National Standards or a Big Standardized Test or a federal grant competition/bribery system or even Freedom Scholarship Vouchers--anyone who thinks they have a silver bullet for education is full of enough fertilizer to turn the moon brown. 

The speech that I would most trust from a Secretary of Education would be one that admits that there's nothing special or exciting that the feds can do, other than make it possible for states to support teachers in doing the work. 

That's the big secret of education. Doing the work. Getting good people to do the work, and then removing as many obstacles and providing as many supports as possible. We've lost our way educationally in this country by a sustained bipartisan effort to do the inverse--providing obstacles and removing supports. The federal government has treated teachers with distrust and tried to micromanage them, and bot directly and indirectly empowered the very people who want to put obstacles in the path of public education. 

It's not drudgery. It's not a grind. But the work is slow, steady, unglamorous work, and every attempt to turn it into drama of operatic proportions just gets in the way. The work is about relationships, and though teacher-student is a relationship different from others, it still thrives not on the Grand Gestures but on the daily maintenance. 

It's not just that I'm not looking for fireworks from the bully pulpit in DC-- I distrust them. And while I find nothing in this bland compendium of committeefied bureaucrat-speak to get excited about, I can't imagine what a secretary of education could say that would excite me. 

But do you know how I know for absolute certain that Raise the Bar is a nothingburger?

Here's the twist ending. Although the tweet that brought it to my attention went up March 31, the press release and speech about Raise the Bar happened back in January. And since then...?

It made it obliquely into Cardona's Not Gonna Take It Anymore interview with Politico ;ast week:

“I was hired to improve education in the country. I’m not a politician. I’m an educator. I’m a dad, and I want to talk about raising the bar in education,” Cardona said in an interview with POLITICO last week. “But I won’t sit idly when some try to attack our schools or privatize education.”

In that interview he went to actually say some stuff, like calling out bogus culture war baloney. In an op-ed run in Florida, he actually pointed out that parent's right rhetoric was just a fig leaf for a push to defund public schools (a point on which I'd say he's exactly correct). 

“Our students are as [emotionally] dysregulated as they ever have been in the last twenty years. The surgeon general reminded us that we’re in a youth mental health crisis, where one in three high school girls has considered suicide in the last three years,” Cardona told POLITICO. “I’m tired of folks looking to get political points by attacking vulnerable students, vulnerable communities and attacking our schools.”

He added: “If we’re not standing up for our students, who will? I feel it’s time.”

In other words, let's get all this crap out of the way of doing the work. I would take one education secretary like this over a hundred of the kind that pump out oatmeal like Raise the Bar. It remains to be seen if he can sustain it, or if we're just going back to oatmeal.