Stop With The NCLB Nostalgia

Some reformsters just can't stop longing for the days of No Child Left Behind, particularly the test-based accountability component. Reformy Rahm Emanuel thinks there's political gold to be mined by harping on the issue. Mike Petrilli's substack includes spirited defense of NCLB, echoing Arne Duncan's misty-eyed insistance that we quit when we should have doubled down. 

The narrative is that after NCLB started and brought test-based accountability that made schools just get better and better for about a decade, and then things just started to stall about the same time that Congress replaced NCLB with the less stringent ESSA. That was 2015. 

Petrilli and others have been reacting to a New York Times piece from Ross Wiener, and while it gets some things wrong, he's right on the mark with this:

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now.

The narrative of NCLB doing swell things until America lost its nerve and bailed does not reflect any reality I lived through. I was classroom teacher of English in those years. Let me tell you the story of NCLB and test-based accountability that I remember. 

When NCLB testing first hit, we received it initially as one more fiddly piece of government paperwork. But early on, there were some troubling signs. 

One was how it trickled down through the bureaucratic infrastructure. NCLB came to us as a state policy; back in those days we didn't expect that kind of micromanagement to come from the feds and it took us a while to catch on to the real source of these policies. We were also used to state trainings that tried to convince us to buy in, the hope that we would nod and smile and adopt the policy like we'd thought of it ourselves. But in the days of NCLB, that changed; no more friendly convincing, but instead a steely-eyed "You can get with the program or get rolled over."

But the program was nuts. While NCLB was "launched" in 2002, very little trickled down to the classroom for five-ish years. My region didn't get our first training in Value-Added measures (PVAAS in PA) until the fall of 2009, and it was absolutely alarming. I wrote about that training at the time in my regular newspaper gig (I wasn't a sophisticated blogger yet) and said, in part, this:

This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.

This came just as local district administrators were waking up to the coming NCLB disaster. The required annual improvement on test scores increased slowly at first, but the last few years of NCLB included incredible demands for test score improvement, culminating in 2014 in which 100% of all students in every school were supposed to be "proficient." Every classroom teacher in the country knew this was not possible, but any time one wanted to bring this up to The People In Charge, they simply spat back, "Well, which children do you want to leave behind?" 

Legislators and bureaucrats may have operated on the belief that of course Congress would change the law before 2014 arrived, but they failed to do so, and actual schools had to operate with the knowledge that by 2011 or thereabouts there would be only two types of schools-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. 

That unmeetable deadline had multiple effects. For one, there's something very demoralizing about feeling that legislators have set you up to fail. And of course that unmeetable deadline provided the leverage for Obama/Duncan to push states into Race to the Top (or RttT Lite) and the Common Core, with its accompanying message of "Teachers are doing a terrible job, so let us tell you how to do the work." Boy, we were hoping that Obama was going to make things better; that did not happen.

But why did test scores go up for a while, and then... not?

The early approach to the tests was hopeful administration directives. "We'll revisit our curriculum to make sure it's aligned, and then if you just do good teaching, the tests will take care of themselves." That was combined with practice testing and the kind of test prep that is aimed at teaching students how to take that kind of standardized test.

Then came targeting. Schools sorted students into three groups, usually with the aid of the practice test. Group A: These students will do well enough on their own. Group B: These students are unlikely to do well enough ever. Group C: These students are close enough to the line that with some extra work we might be able to drag them over. Group C got extra test prep. They were taken out of study hall and, in some cases, even taken out of music or art or science or history so they could spend extra time getting ready for the tests. 

This was the infamous period in which schools used a simple metric-- Is it on the test?-- for deciding what mattered and what didn't. And for a while it worked, though it came at a cost to other aspects of education. Schools even altered districts structures in an attempt to get the notoriously-low-scoring 8th graders under the same roof as some other better-scoring grade,

But all of these fixes could only do so much. By 2015, an entire generation of students had learned how to take these tests-- there was nothing to be gained in scores there. Nor is there any good fix for one major obstacle-- making students actually care about how they do on a test that is boring and has zero stakes for the students themselves. And of course, painfully for those of us teaching English, a shift from teaching whole works to drilling dumb short excerpts with multiple-choice questions to better mimic the tests.

Schools were in the grip of Campbell's Law, and teachers were shoved into a Dilbert-esque world where we had to take a bunch of time away from doing the work in order to create reports on how we were doing the work. 

So here's my narrative. In 2002, the was an attempt to reorganize the entire education system around standardized reading and math tests. It took about a decade for the reorganization to be fully implemented and for the schools to rebuilt themselves around the new normal. That adjustment period looked like an increase in test scores (which way too many people continued to treat as if they were a perfect proxy for educational achievement), but once the system was rebuilt around testing and students and teachers adjusted to the new status quo, and once they were settled into the new normal, test scores settled into a new equilibrium with the usual dips and bumps that every classroom teacher is used to seeing year to year (because students vary from year to year and test scores do not represent some ebb and flow of a singular body). 

By the way-- the pandemic undoubtedly resulted in teachers and students achieving less than in an ordinary year, but the testing dip also represents schools spending less time to test-taking prep because instructional time was shortened and schools chose to use that precious resource for education rather than testing. 

There are so many reasons not to go back to the days of NCLB, not the least of which is that it made the cynical assumption that education could only be improved by using threats and punishment. My question for every reformster arguing that we need to bring back testing and consequences-- at your workplace, do you only try to do your job well when you are sufficiently threatened by your bosses?

Some reformsters are going to argue that NCLB totally got real test score gains for Group Z. My response is a request to go do a follow-up study on those folks and find out if having a raised test score resulted in improved life outcomes. Because if the only desired goal of raising test scores is to have raised test score, I do not-- and I can't stress this enough-- give a shit.

NCLB and the attendant text-centered accountability movement gave a gut-kick the morale of the teaching profession as we were forced to understand that most of the people who we thought were supposed to have our backs actually viewed us a problem. Test-centered accountability has proven toxic to schools and education. And secondary effects are appearing, because a whole generation has been raised thinking that The Test is the main point of school, resulting in fewer people choosing the profession while those that do choose it come into it with some narrow, meager ideas of what the job is about.

I don't have a lot of trust of the Science of Reading movement, but I do appreciate the reform voices that are saying, "Look, teachers want to do well, so let's help them get the tools to succeed" as opposed to "Let's threaten teachers some more so they'll take out the secret magic lesson plans they've been hiding and start doing better." I know which message was more consistent with NCLB (right down to the implication that it was teachers who were leaving children behind). 

I have no doubt that the whole history looks different when you have a mile-high view informed mostly by spreadsheets. But on the ground, in classrooms, NCLB was a mess and test-centered accountability was destructive and not particularly helpful. Nostalgia for those days is misplaced. Test-based accountability was worse than inadequate, and after two decades, we should know better. 

Duncan Remains Relentlessly Wrong

This afternoon, Arne Duncan is at the Learning Forward conference to fall on his sword deliver some comments that include his spirited endorsement of the Every Student Succeeds Act. A portion of his remarks have been released, and they reveal Duncan in fine form as he cheerily supports the bill devoted to repudiating his work, sort of.

The excerpt picks up where Duncan answers the question, "What does this new law mean for your classrooms, schools, and districts?"

He starts by saying there's a lot to be figured out, and that's about the last thing he gets right.

The new law will mean that "you can continue challenging your kids to live up to new, higher standards that you have been working so hard to implement." Which is true. Under ESSA, states are still free to embrace the Common Core, either in original form or under one of its many aliases.

"You will still measure students’ progress every year, typically with new and much better tests that offer actionable information about students’ learning."Oh, Arne. We've been hearing the promise of new tests that aren't the same old standardized bubble test crap for over a decade. They haven't come. They aren't coming. They are never going to come. No large scale standardized test will ever measure critical thinking any more than you can measure hurt with a bathroom scale. He repeats the idea that the feds are really pushing for fewer redundant tests. He is full of it.

"The action from Congress will increase investments in preschool, so that it’s more likely that the kids you teach are better prepared for school." This despite the research showing repeatedly that all early gains in learning have vanished within a few years. Okay, pre-school could be a swell thing, but not if folks insist on testing and academics.

"This bill says what we all know to be true: you can’t have a great school without great teachers and principals." Sounds pretty, but he goes on to laud the new support for alternative certification routes aka five weeks of TFA summer camp. And this is kind of cute-- he still talks as if the master plan to move the best teachers to the neediest schools, as if that isn't a thing that has been in the law and yet never, ever happened for years and years now.

"Whereas No Child Left Behind prescribed a top-down, one-size fits all approach to struggling schools, this law offers the flexibility to find the best local solutions—while also ensuring that students are making progress." Now it's just getting surreal, given that the Obama-Duncan education plan was to supplant the top-down reform of NCLB with even MORE top down reform. The President's own reflection on testing noted that the problem was that the administration hadn't top-down managed enough!

"When those key decisions are made, states will rely on multiple measures of success—because as I have always said, no school and no educator should ever be judged by one test score alone." And now we have slid into another dimension entirely. It's not this world, but it is a familiar world-- the world where Duncan is completely clueless about how the Big Standardized Tests ever ended up being the entire focus of schools. Is it worth pointing out to him, yet again, in the December of his time in the job, that tests became the focus of American schools because his policies made it so? Probably not.

Then the speech jumps to the section entitled "How the new ESEA is totally what I wanted and not at all a big raspberry for me and my work."

And here's your proof that ESSA is not exactly a huge leap forward-- he's not entirely wrong. He has a laundry list of things he wanted made into law-- college and career ready standards, punishment for schools with low-achieving students, more pre-school, bunches of data collected and tossed around as if they mean something. He got all of those.

He also has a list of things that-- what! Really? These were among your policy goals? Catalyzing new ideas and innovations from local educators? Cutbacks on excessive testing? I would challenge Duncan to point at anything he's done in seven years that would have advanced any of these goals.

But this will be Duncan's ESSA position-- he got what he wanted, so he doesn't care about the politics and power distribution of it.

I’m not saying this is the bill I’d have written myself. No compromise ever is. But fundamentally, the idea of America as a country that expects more of our kids, and holds ourselves responsible for their progress – that vision is alive and well. And it’s a vision proven by the hard work of educators like you.

So Duncan leaves as he came-- making word-noises that actually sound pretty good, but are attached to policies and a reality that does not reflect them at all. Duncan never held himself responsible for the progress of students, choosing instead to blame bad, lazy teachers and low-information parents (so long, white suburban moms) and a Congress that wouldn't behave as he wanted it to. He never held himself responsible by bothering to see if there was a lick of real research and support for any of his favored policies, from "high standards" to VAM-sauce teacher evaluations to the fundamental question of how schools could be held responsible for erasing the effects of poverty and special needs while states could not be held responsible for getting those schools the resources and support they needed. Duncan leaves as he arrived-- eyes fixed on some alternate reality while in the real world, he hacks public education to bits and sells off the pieces.


And he's perfectly okay with ESSA. That is not a good sign.

Has CCSS Affected Instruction

Brookings, an outfit that is usually a reliable provider of pro-reform clue-free baloney, offers an interesting question from non-resident senior fellow Tom Loveless: Has Common Core influenced instruction?

It's a worthy question. We've talked a lot about how CCSS has affected policy and evaluation and assessment, but has it actually affected what teachers do in the classroom?

The proponents of the Core never developed a way to answer that question because their assertion has always been that we would see the effects on instruction in the flowering of a million awesome test scores. But the 2015 NAEP scores turned out to be a big bowl of proofless pudding, and so now we're left to ask whether the Common Core tree fell in the classroom forest without making a sound, or if it never fell at all.

William J. Bushaw blamed "curricular uncertainty," while Arne Duncan went with the theory of an "implementation dip." Loveless's brief piece includes this masterpiece of understatement:

In the rush to argue whether CCSS has positively or negatively affected American education, these speculations are vague as to how the standards boosted or depressed learning. 

In other words, Core fans are unable to get any more specific than their original thoughts that Common Core Standards would somehow magically infuse classrooms, leading to super-duper test scores. Of course, they also assumed that teachers were blithering incompetently in their classrooms and that adhering to awesome standards would mean a change. Loveless notes a 2011 survey in which 77% of teachers said they thought the new math standards were the same as their old math standards. So there's one vote for, "No, the standards changed nothing."

Then Loveless drops this wry observation:

For teachers, the novelty of CCSS should be dissipating. 

Yes, the "novelty" is surely fading away. I could jump to the conclusion that Loveless is one more deeply clueless Brookings guy, but he follows that up with these lines:

Common Core’s advocates placed great faith in professional development to implement the standards.  Well, there’s been a lot of it.  Over the past few years, millions of teacher-hours have been devoted to CCSS training.  Whether all that activity had a lasting impact is questionable.  

Loveless cites some research that tells us what we mostly know-- after a new change is shoved on us in professional development, there's a "pop" of implementation, and then it mostly fades away.

Loveless doesn't try to explain this, but I'll go ahead and give it a shot. Every teacher is a researcher and every classroom is a laboratory. And every instructional technique, whether it's in my textbook or pushed on me by edict or sold to me in PD or is the product of my own personal research and development efforts-- every one of those techniques is subject to the same rigorous testing and data-driven evaluation.

Does it work in my classroom?

I can find you numerous elementary teachers who took their newly purchased Common Core math textbooks, tried the recycled New Math instructional methods and pacing in the texts (because most of us will try anything once or twice) and then said, "Well, my students are confused and can't do the work. So I will now add a few days to the suggested pace of the book, and I will teach them how to do this The Old Way so that they can actually get a handle on it." The "fading novelty" looks a lot like "adapting or rejecting new ideas based on the real data of the classroom." And since Common Core's novelty is the product of well-connected amateurs and their personal ideas about how school should work, the novelty has indeed faded swiftly.

To the extent that we are allowed to (and that is the huge huge huge problem facing teachers in some districts-- they are no longer allowed to exercise their professional judgment), we do what meets the needs of our students. We do what works. We don't stick with something that doesn't work just because some textbook sales rep in a PD session or some faceless bureaucratic ed amateur in an office said we should stick with it.

Loveless suggests there are two plausible hypotheses. 1) As educators get better at using CCSS techniques, results will improve. 2) CCSS has already shown all the positive effects it ever will. I'm going to say that both are correct, as long as we understand that "get better at using CCSS" means " steadily edit, revise, change and throw out pieces of the Core based on our own research and knowledge of best practices."

Loveless does highlight one measurable effect of the Common Core-- the increased emphasis on non-fiction and the concurrent de-emphasis on fiction. He has data to back this up. And he also knows what the shift really means:

Unfortunately, as Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky have pointed out, there is scant evidence that such a shift improves children’s reading.

He also notes that more non-fiction doesn't necessarily mean higher quality texts, noting that two CCSS supporting groups provide completely different ideas about curriculum.

Loveless notes that analysts tend to focus on formal channels of implementation and ignore the informal ones. It's a good catch. A top-down directive from a state department of education can carry much less power than teachers sharing the video clip of CCSS architect David Coleman explaining that "nobody gives a shit what you think or feel." And politics are involved in the Core (and always have been, since the Core was imposed by political means).

Finally, he notes that implementing top-down curriculum and instruction reforms always runs afoul of what transmitters think, and boy, do I agree with him on this one. Every top-down reform is like a game of telephone, and each person who passes the program along reads into it what they personally think should happen.

As the feds tell state departments of ed and the department tells its functionaries and they tell their training division and they tell superintendents and superintendents tell principals and principals hire professional development ronin-- at each handoff of the baton, someone is free to see what they believe the program "must" require.

Loveless uses the example of non-fiction reading, postulating that an administrator who had always wanted to dump fiction for non-fiction would be given protective cover by CCSS. But that rests on a pretty explicit reading of what CCSS says about itself. This sort of top-down implementation also gives rise to policies that involve reading between the lines, such as an administrator who wants English teachers to teach less grammar and uses Common Core as justification. And of course the standards have been completely rewritten by test manufacturers, who interpret some standards and leave others out entirely.

In fact, some folks make a curriculum argument based on what the standards don't say at all. The rich content crowd insists that implementing Common Core must involve rich, complex texts from the canon of Important Stuff, and their argument basically is that because Common Core doesn't really require rich content because otherwise, it would just be a stupid set of bad standards emphasizing "skills" while leaving a giant pedagogical hole in its heart where the richness of literature should be. They must mean for us to fill in the gaps with rich text, they argue. Because surely the standards couldn't be that stupid and empty. (Spoiler alert: yes, they are).

In fact, in an otherwise pretty thorough brief, Loveless misses another possibility-- the Common Core Standards are limited in their ability to influence instruction because they aren't very good. Can I influence the work of cabinet-makers by putting bananas in their tool boxes? Can I influence how surgery is performed by telling surgeons to wear fuzzy slippers into the operating room? The implementation problem remains unchanged-- it's impossible to have a good implementation of a bad program.

Duncan's Magical One Size Fits All Test Unicorn

One of the central tenets of Arne Duncan's edu-amateur structure of beliefs is that Low Expectations Are Bad. This has led him to the corollary that special education, adaptations, modified curriculum, and specially altered assessments are all bad things, that special ed is a morass of perfectly capable students who have been shunted into learning support programs because of race or misbehavior or any number of reasons. Once in special ed, these students go into academic free fall because they are surrounded by teachers who expect them to do poorly.

Like much that comes out of Duncan, this is not 100% baloney. If we're honest, we all know stories of students who ended up labeled special needs for every reason from being a behavior problem to having insistent parents-- but not actually needing a Learning Support label.

But Duncan's continues suggesting that the entire system of structures, rules, and pedagogy that has sprung up a some sort of complex dodge, a bizarre lie perpetuated as a way to keep students, selected almost at random, held back and stomped down. This is just... weird. One would think that in all his years in Chicago, he would have met at least one student who struggled with the difficulties of a disability that truly rendered her unable to achieve at the same level and pace of her fellow students.

We've seen Arne argue that all students with disabilities just need teachers who expect them to do well. We've watched him struggle through a grilling about USED's (non-existent) policy for helping students with dyslexia.

Well, here comes the latest USED pronouncement on the subject: Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged; Assistance to States for the Education of Children with Disabilities, a rule that is supposed to take effect in about a month.

The rule is laced with the now-usual Department of Education balderdash. Let's open with this:

High standards and high expectations for all students and an accountability system that provides teachers, parents, students, and the public with information about students' academic progress are essential to ensure that students graduate from high school prepared for college and careers in the 21st century.

Torn between two questions here: 1) Why exactly are these things essential and 2) Is it going to be a problem that none of these things currently actually exist?

The document offers the history that way back in 2007, the feds were willing to allow modifications of standards and tests because 1) they believed "there was a small group of students whose disabilities precluded them from achieving grade-level proficiency" and who would take longer to get there and because 2) the regular state assessment was too hard.

But now it's 2015, and the feds believe that 1) newer research shows that "students with disabilities who struggle in reading and mathematics can successfully learn grade-level content and make significant academic progress when appropriate instruction, services, and supports are provided." This appears to be based mainly on meta-research, everybody's favorite sort of research. The feds also believe that 2) the new generation of tests are super-magical and can measure students of any level against all the standards.

Therefor, states should not modify tests or standards. Students with special needs should take the same tests and be accountable for the same standards-- but they should be totally successful at dealing with these things, because magic.

Any Discussion?

If none of this sounds new, it's because this rule was put up for discussion in August of 2013, with an opportunity for comments (the comment period was closed in October of that year-- about six weeks later). 156 folks shared their two cents, and the department takes some time to respond to some of those.

Some folks said, "You go, federal authorities." Using principle of "universal design of learning" and fixing accessibility issues "have eliminated the need for alternate assessments based on modified academic achievement standards." In other words, one size really does fit absolutely all! The magical testing unicorn can carry any student, whether she's 400 pounds or ten pounds or can't grip reins or is deathly afraid of unicorns.

One state-level person pointed out that their alternate assessments represented five years of time and money and actually were working quite well at helping students with disabilities have access a good education and helped teachers figure out how best to deliver quality educatin' to the students. The federal response is a mass of bureaucratic gobbledeegook that translates roughly to, "We hear what you're saying, but the new tests will be totally awesome and work great. Because, reasons."

Some parents made the point that without modifications, some students with special needs will not graduate-- can't we keep that? The feds respond with a pretty straightforward, "No, they can't do that any more." But they do note, as either a consolation or a further slap in the face, that states are required to provide a "free appropriate public education" even as the new rule will forbid it. Oh, those wacky federal rules. Put another way, IDEA and IEP's will still be required for the local school district, but under this new rule, the feds will require states to ignore both. There's a long discussion of the regs involved, but here's your bottom line:

However, under these final regulations, an IEP team may no longer select an alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards to assess students with disabilities under title I of the ESEA.

Some commenters argued that students with disabilities should not have lower standards because otherwise the students just fall behind-- because putting something on a test guarantees that students will master it no matter what?? But other commenters that setting students up for failure is sucky, and that "high standards" vary depending on the student ability. The department repeats its assertion that all students should be held to exactly the same standards because the only reason that students with disabilities fall behind their same-age cohort is that teachers give them easier stuff to do. Full speed ahead. Calculus for everybody.

But but but, argue some other parents and teachers-- giving students assessments that we know will be a "struggle" is just setting them up for failure. The federal response is. "We've rounded up some research that we think proves that students will do as well as you insist they do. So get in there and insist." Also, the new assessments are magical.

There's some discussion of timelines (originally the department thought this rule would come into play last year). There's some discussion of technical assistance and monitoring, which all boil down to more paperwork for state-level functionaries and the local officials they collect their data from. There's assurance that this will not affect students with "the most significant" cognitive disabilities. What actually gets your student into that particular club is not laid out, even a little.

Sigh. You get the picture. This goes on for lines and lines and lines of text, with the department occasionally dropping in pieces of crazy-making bizarro-world policy baloney such as

 The Department shares the goal that students with disabilities experience success. Removing the authority for modified academic achievement standards and an alternate assessment based on those standards furthers this goal because students with disabilities who are assessed based on grade-level academic achievement standards will receive instruction aligned with such an assessment.

So, students should succeed, and we will insure that they succeed by giving them one-size-fits-all assessments that ignore their developmental issues because we will tell you teachers to just make it happen, with unicorn horns dipped in fairy dust.

We eventually arrive as the department's assessment of the regulatory impact. Short form: they have no clue. Long form: some things, like taking high school kids who have had modified assessments their whole careers and now tossing them into the regular assessment may be hard, so we'll offer some grant money. For something? I don't know. Grants for wigs and toupees for special ed teachers who are tearing their hair out? Turns out that the impact statement doesn't cover things like "Large number of students with cognitive and developmental disabilities will now flunk and fail to graduate, become discouraged, and start looking for any kind of alternate education source."

Deep Impact

The new rule hits and hits soon, and it is going to be ugly. It is why the special ed teachers in your building are extra touchy; be extra kind to them. Meanwhile, Arne can keep riding his magical one-size-fits-all testing unicorn around the rainbow farm, secure in the knowledge that he has helped erase all cognitive and developmental difficulties in the country by simply insisting that they go away. Who knew it was so easy!

Duncan Gets a Pass

Catalyst Chicago has been reporting on Chicago education for twenty-five year, operating as "an independent news organization that serves as a watchdog and resource for school improvement in Chicago." While they do offer plenty of space to features like guest writers plugging the awesomeness of reform, their news coverage is pretty balanced-- they do not appear to have any requirement that their reporters never cover bad news about charters.

But last week Catalyst ran the fluffiest piece of fluffery ever in Maureen Kelleher's paean to Arne Duncan. Surely this is not going to be the narrative that anyone pushes about Duncan as he approaches his post-federal earning years.

First, Kelleher flashes back to Duncan's elevation to the head job of Chicago schools (he was successor to Paul Vallas). Duncan's big success-- adopting a tracking method for freshmen. On the other hand...

Duncan also championed expanding school choice and lent new urgency to the work of transforming struggling high schools -- initiatives that drew heat from the political left. These efforts had more mixed results.

No kidding.

Next we move on to Duncan's career as Secretary of Education in, perhaps, some parallel universe.

Duncan has encouraged states to innovate around accountability systems, offering waivers from No Child Left Behind’s rules.

This is true in much the same way it's true that a mugger encourages you to put your hands up and offers to take all of your cash. To talk about the waiver program as if it was a mild suggestion, even a favor, to state systems, is to miss the whole point. States, over a financial barrel, and looking at the unachievable goals of NCLB (100% above average by 2014), had a choice about accepting Duncan's offer in the same way that apartment dwellers have a choice about whether or not to pay the rent.

Finally, we look into Duncan's future.

As noted by the Washington Post, Duncan's family is moving back to Chicago while Duncan says he's sticking out the rest of the Obama Presidency. While some have expressed skepticism, I can believe it. Summer is the time to move kids without messing up their world, and this summer is likely to be less messy than next. Why not. Of course, as widely noted, his kids will attend an elite non-Common Core unreformed private school. That would have been a good thing to mention.

But Kelleher turns to Peter Cunningham for quotes. Cunningham is a long-time Arne associate who now heads up the $12 million dollar website-that-will-not-be-named, but which now looks almost hard-hitting compared to Kelleher's piece. Cunningham says Duncan is no quitter, with grit and drive and stuff.

Duncan's sister confirms he's not looking for work right now. Probably true-- Duncan can line up consulting work in the ed industry with an hour's worth of phone calls, so why rush anything.

Considering what other education secretaries have done after their terms, Cunningham doesn’t see Duncan returning to district leadership, either. Consulting, elected office and work with think tanks and foundations are more likely. While in CPS, Duncan’s team built relationships with private foundations and federal grant administrators that more than tripled the district’s take of competitive grant funds.

I'm not sure which thinky tank would have him, but I get a smile out of imagining him going off to work for Mike Petrilli at Fordham. The implication of that last sentence seems clear to me-- Duncan will be able to hook people up with some serious money.

So, not so much as a sentence to consider the reality, the controversy, or the legacy of Duncan's work in office. Between this and the Post profile, it's beginning to look like we're going to be subjected to a year or more of valedictory essays filled with attaboys but no consideration of the damage to public education done by Duncan.

Look, I have no desire to see the guy drawn and quartered and publicly pilloried, but he has presided over an unprecedented re-engineering of the entire purpose of US public education-- one of our oldest and most honored institutions-- and in the process has come close to destroying one of the legs on which democracy stands. Backlash against his work has created entire new movements that didn't exist a decade ago, and Congress has spent part of their time writing a new law arguing about just how much power should be stripped from his office simply in reaction to how he has used that power.

I don't need to see Duncan personally attacked, but any retrospective or faux retrospective has to look at where we are in education policy, what choices have been made, what the effects have been on us as a nation, if for no other reason than we need to have a serious talk about where to head next. A business as usual, nothing to see here, so how do you like living in DC puff piece is irresponsible.

Duncan's one gift is that he has such an aww-shucks lovable lunkhead air about him that people don't so much notice that he has been laying waste with a battleax. As he nears his exit from office, we cannot afford to pay attention only to the aw shucks and ignore the damage done with the battleax.

My Question for Hillary

I'll keep it brief.

Candidate Clinton has indicated in talks with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia that she will absolutely listen to teachers. That's a great promise, but let me pare that down to a more direct question.

Last year, after years of failed administration education policies, the NEA general membership called for the resignation of Arne Duncan.  So here's my question:

If you had been President, would you have required the resignation of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education?

Okay, I realize that's a little in-your-face and involves some hypotheticals (such as, would you have ever appointed the guy in the first place), so let me ask a question, because I really want to understand how your administration would represent a break from the destructive policies of the past two administrations:

If you had been President for the past eight years, and knowing what you know now, how would your education policies have been different from the policies that we've actually had?

Please, please please please PLEASE, be specific. Talk about the ESEA rewrite or Common Core or financial incentives for states. But tell us something. If you had been our President for the past eight years, how would US education have been different. Because-- and again, I'm not sure if you get this-- education policy for the last sixteen years has not been good for public education in this country.

I await your response.

Arne Talks Pre-K; I Have Questions

Monday Education Secretary Arne Duncan was hanging out in a bilingual pre-school in Maryland and Lydsey Layton of the Washington Post was covering it because, reasons?

Duncan is unhappy with the speed of adoption of Pre-K. He has a whole shelf of the stuff, and people just aren't buying. He "unveiled" a new report (was he carrying it around prior to that all draped in a veil? what color was the veil? sorry, but sometimes I get to looking at words thinking, "What the heck." anyway, I guess that's why he was there and being covered-- so he could use children as a presser backdrop) from the National Institute for Early Education Research, a group attached to Rutgers that is not so much a research institute as an advocacy that uses research to support their position. Does anybody do research without deciding what they want the answer to be ahead of time?

Anyway, the report said only 29% of four year olds and 4% of three year olds are in pre-school.

Somehow, this is a surprise to Duncan. It has been many, many years since my children were three years old, but that's not long enough to make me imagine that I would have considered pre-school a worthwhile choice back then. Of course, as always, I am troubled by the nagging gut feeling that Arne really thinks that Those Poor Folks are the ones who need to get their children out of the home and into a pre-school ASAP.

Layton reminds us that the feds have been trying hard to get pre-K promoted to headline status in the ESEA rewrite. Duncan asked for full-out grants and got competitive grants instead (which, given the administrations previous deep wet-kissing-with-tongue love for competitive grants is some kind of poetic justice). But anyway...

And whether that bill eventually will be passed by the full Senate and the House and become law is unclear. And it is likely to make a small dent in a “tremendous, unmet need,” Duncan said.

See, here's one of my questions-- what unmet need? What exactly is the need that school for three year olds must meet? Because I'm deathly afraid that the "unmet" need is the need for three-year-olds to open their books and start studying calculus so they can take a Pearson-manufactured standardized test to measure their sentence-writing skills. In which case, there is no unmet need.

Duncan notes that it would take 75 years at this rate to kid all the children into pre-school. Arne's explanation for why things are moving slowly is, well, not a good one. “We need more resources. We need Congress to invest, to partner with states to expand access," he says. Yes, and the Edsel wasn't sold in enough car lots. And New Coke didn't have enough marketing support.

When people aren't buying what you're selling (or in this case, trying to essentially give away), doesn't that mean you need to look at your product and the market and ask yourself if you're not trying to sell something that nobody wants?

I'll admit to mixed feelings about pre-school. I am sure that there are many ways that it could be handled that would really enrich life for children and their families, but at this point, I feel in my bones that the USED would like to do pre-school in the wrongest ways possible, for all the wrong reasons, and do it badly.

But in the meantime, what Arne is complaining about is simply all those delightful and beloved market forces doing their thing.

The piece was not a total waste, however. Layton totally got a picture of Arne roaring like a lion. I'm pretty sure that was worth the trip to Maryland all by itself.

Duncan's Regrets

Arne Duncan put in an appearance at the Education Writers' Association conference and allowed himself to be interviewed by Motoko Rich of the New York Times. Alyson Klein of EdWeek was there (because she's a real education writer and not some lousy blogger), and she reported some of the highlights of that interview. I'm going to look at some highlights of the highlights because, as usual, Duncan has some moments that make one question who, exactly, is this man who has been put in charge of a nation's education system.

Duncan regrets waiting so long to implement waivers. In hindsight, he thinks they wasted time waiting for Congress to get to rewriting the ESEA, and you know, I can almost sympathize with him on this-- until I remember that Congress is composed of people democratically elected to handle the writing of laws in this country, and Arne Duncan is neither 1) elected or 2) charged with writing the laws of this country.

But it is interesting that, contrary to the usual lines about ed reform being rolled out too fast, Duncan thinks it wasn't rolled out fast enough.

He underlines this when asked if maybe the simultaneous rollout of new testing and systems linking teacher evaluation to that same new testing-- well, maybe that was all a bit much. Klein quotes Arne:

It's been a lot of change, it's been a lot of change fast, it's absolutely been rocky and bumpy in some places. ... But for me the question is, how do you get better, faster?

I think I know the answer to that last question and, in brief, the answer is "Not like this." And maybe I'd also suggest that faster is not always better. But then I'd probably illustrate it with some sophomoric example, so I'll just not make that point.

A question brings up that whole testing and opt-out and people hating the testing thing. Duncan tries to once again suggest that he totally gets it and totally called for folks to back off on excess and unnecessary testing, by which he means state and local testing, which is another way of asserting that the Big Standardized Tests are the most important tests being given in schools, which I'd say is exactly backwards, and the BS Tests are the least necessary and useful and if we are going to throw a test over the side of the lifeboat for being fat and useless and repeatedly eating the supply of biscuits when it doesn't think anyone is looking, well, that test that had better start swimming is the Big Fat Standardized PARCC/SBA/WTF test.

He also makes his equity point, that folks in the civil rights and disability community want their kids tested, and I've heard this from enough places that I believe it, but I still believe those folks are being hoodwinked, because 1) we don't need a test to tell us that poor urban schools need help and 2) in ten years of this testing regimen, we haven't lifted a dollar to actually help the schools that have been identified as being in trouble.

Asked why he likes the Congress ESEA rewrite and not the House one, Arne says that seeing Congressional bipartisanship gives him goosebumps, and the Title I portability idea sucks. On this particular point, I think he's actually correct. Portability is one more way to take money away from poor schools (and help charter operators get rich). That is not good for anybody (except charter operators).

Asked about his plan to rate colleges, Duncan said, "Necessary colleges expensive argle bargle blerg."

Someone asked Arne when he would take funding away from a college that failed to satisfy Title IX. Duncan replied, "We'll take away federal funding when we need to." Klein called this non-specific, but I would call it awesomely non-responsive. It's rare when Arne just goes ahead and says, "Screw you. I'll do it the way I wanna" and I find those moments bracing in their honesty.

Asked about the digital divide, Arne fell back on a more standard Duncanswer, which is a wordy version of "That is a true thing that you have said, and I certainly heard you say it." It mimics reflexive listening and agreement, even if he has no idea what to answer. In fact, the Duncanswer format is exactly like the proper response to a writing prompt on a Big Standardized Test-- even if you don't understand the question, you can still recycle enough words from it to create a topic sentence and maybe even the first few paragraphs. You can see it in his dyslexia grilling, too. The Duncanswer. Remember, you heard it here first.

Asked about his biggest regret, Duncan models the non-apology apology. He doesn't regret anything he did including the white suburban moms crack (gosh, he's just a straight-shooter who speaks from his heart), but he does regret that Congress sucks and can't get its job done.

He also regrets that all of America sucks in its inability to think that education is really important, proof once again that Arne needs to get out and speak to regular non-government non-screened carbon-based life forms. It's a question that begs a follow-up-- who exactly is it that does not consider education a national priority? Your boss the CIC? Congress? All the parents? All the teachers? All the Americans pre-occupied with keeping their families fed and sheltered? Boy, I would really like to hear the rest of the explanation behind that idea, if he didn't try to dodge it completely. Which would be the Duncancover. You're welcome.

Arne Bumbles Dyslexia Grilling

Oh, it just hurts.

Here's a link to a clip from 2016 Budget grilling of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. In it, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) asks a simple question: What specific programs do we have in place for helping students with dyslexia?

And it just goes south from there.

The answer, pretty clearly, is "none." But Duncan is bound determined not to go there, so he tries, "Well, students with dyslexia have special needs, and we have a special needs fund, so they fall under that--"

Cassidy bores in, citing studies and facts and figures to elaborate on his point which is that students with dyslexia make up 80% of the students with special needs and as much as 20% of the general student population, so wouldn't it make sense to have programs directed at that particular issue?

Let the flailing begin. I would put together my usual summary-deconstruction of a Duncan word salad, but this is the mouth noise equivalent of a large-mouthed bass thrown up on the creek bank and trying to flop his way back to some water.

Cassidy tries again. Does Duncan have any sense of the quality of dyslexia programs out there? The answer, again, is "no," but Arne can't form that word, so instead he starts making up some sentences that boil down to, "I suppose there are some good ones and some bad ones and some in between ones" which is not exactly an insight that required the United States Secretary of Education to deliver it.

Here's Arne's problem-- he absolutely has an idea about what the approach to dyslexia should be. He's been very clear about it in the past. Let's go back to his conference call about new USED special needs policies

We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel. 

Or the explanation from Kevin Huffman in that same call. These words didn't come out of Duncan's mouth, but he didn't say, "Well, that's not quite what we mean" either.

Huffman challenged the prevailing view that most special education students lag behind because of their disabilities. He said most lag behind because they're not expected to succeed if they're given more demanding schoolwork and because they're seldom tested.

So, Senator Cassidy, that's the USED plan-- we will expect those students with dyslexia to do better, and then if they don't we'll get rid of their teachers and replace them with teachers who are better at expecting things. That's it. That's the plan.

But Duncan was smart enough not to say that out loud to a man who 1) has clearly done his homework about dyslexia 2) cares about dyslexia and 3) is a US senator.

Cassiday found a few more ways to make his point, comparing the USED stance on for-profit colleges (we're going to be all over that) to their stance on dyslexia (someone will either do something about it or not). He even offered some concrete solutions, noting that research indicated you need the entire teaching staff to have some understanding of dyslexia to address it, and maybe we could direct some money toward programs that would provide that broad level of training.

Cassidy starts a great question--In your dream of dreams, what would be done for the screening and intervention of students with dyslexia?-- but then it turns into a bit of a rant-- we're worried about the 1% of gifted students who will probably succeed no matter what, but what about the 20% that won't succeed unless we do something-- and he loses the thread, so that by the time Arne gets to talk, he can dodge the real question.

Well, I think our office that looks at this is doing really good work there [which office would that be, exactly?] Again, it's a fair critique. Do we have enough resources put behind children whether they have special needs or whether they're extraordinarily gifted that we're not investing enough in either population, and for us to invest more we clearly need your help and support.

I skipped all the "ums" and grimaces. Arne is just trying so hard to find his way back to his standard talking points and you can just hear all the tension go out of his voice when he finally makes it back to "we clearly need your help and support."


It's a pretty excruciating six minutes-- Sen. Cassidy is closing his eyes and massaging his own forehead by the time it's done-- and just one more example of where Duncan is in way over his head. Show it to all your friends who care about dyslexia.

Arne's New History of CCSS on MSNBC

Arne Duncan sat down with Chris Hayes on MSNBC to explain why folks are just so all-fired fire-up about Common Core. Let's see what the current story is.

Hayes starts by saying that CCSS has trouble because it has been conflated with high stakes testing which was linked to all sorts of stuff because of NCLB. This skips past the Obama/Duncan administration's role in bolting high stakes testing to everything from school evaluation to teacher evaluation, but okay. We're only seven seconds in.

Hayes leads with a fun question-- what, if anything, has been achieved in the years since NCLB was signed by Bush?

Duncan: Fixing achievement gaps is the big achievement, but NCLB "has been broken for a while" (which raises the question-- was it ever not broken) and Congress also sucks. So the administration "partnered with states" to provide waivers which allowed them to part ways with the most onerous parts of the law. Which begs a huge question-- outside of the absurd 100% above average test scores requirement, was there any part of NCLB that wasn't given a huge shot of steroids under waivers? Sadly, Hayes is not going to ask that question.

Hayes: My reading of the data (and one of the problems is that there's so much data you can read anything) is that the testing gap (and I love him just a little for calling it a testing gap and not an achievement gap) hasn't really narrowed at all, "certainly not the narrowing that we were promised back in 2001."

Duncan: We have a long way to go. (Which is true in the same way that I have a long way to go to get to Chicago because I'm still sitting in my office at home.) Anyway, we've seen gains over the past twenty-thirty years, but it's not fast enough. So this law has to be about equity. So put politics aside (says the guy who's got no political juice left in his thermos). This law also has to be about early childhood education, because that will level the playing field. Also, we have to bring more dollars to disadvantaged communities. The children who need the most get the least, says the man whose administration likes to frame all aid and grant proposals as competitions. But he thinks maybe Congress can fix inequity.

Hayes: I want to talk about Common Core for a second. (And he smiles a little smile, like "let's do this silly thing, I'm going to ask a question, you're going to sling baloney, it'll be fun"). Are you surprised by how controversial Common Core (which he characterizes as "kind of an obscure issue in certain ways") has become?

Duncan: "It's actually very simple. The goal's to have high standards." So, kids, the whole national consistency issue, the whole being able to compare kids in Idaho and Maine, the whole keeping everyone on the same page so mobile students will never get lost-- that's no longer the point.

Duncan goes on to display how much he doesn't understand about how this works. He talks about how, under NCLB, too many states dummied down standards. He says this was "to make politicians look good." I'd be more inclined to say "to avoid punitive consequences for their schools." If Arne had reached my conclusion (and really, given that he was in charge of a large school district at the time, it's kind of amazing that he didn't reach my conclusion) then perhaps he wouldn't have figured that the solution was to make the consequences of high stakes testing even more punitive than before.

Insert story here of how schools lied to students about how ready they were for college. So brave governors decided to stop lying to children. "Let's have true college and career ready standards for every single child." As always I wonder why reaching that conclusion leads to a next step where one says, "Let's hire a couple of guys who have no real education experience, either pedagogical or developmental, and have them whip something up."

Hayes: When you say it like that, it sounds swell. But instead this is very polarizing. Arne looks dumbfounded like "I know, right, dude? What is up with these crazy people?" and Hayes continues to point out that Jeb Bush is going to have to spend a bunch of time in Iowa confronting people (unless his huge ad buy actually helps and....nahh).

Duncan: It's only polarizing to politicians. If you talk to parents, to real parents--

And Hayes cuts him off to say "I disagree. I strongly disagree" which is an appropriate response to Arne's deep-fried fluffernuttery. It's ironic. Duncan is all "let's keep politics out of this" and yet the whole "this is polticians raising a stink and real parents just love it" is, of course, pure political spin.

Duncan soldiers on. If you ask parents if they want their children to really be college and career ready, do you want them to be able to write well, think critically, have a real chance at life, parents think that's just swell.

Hayes: That's right. But if you go in and say Common Core-- and he cuts to specific examples all across the country of kids coming home with dumb crap or taking a terrible test and the source of their kid's anxiety is Common Core. Common Core has become the name for all testing related stress.

And I'm going to interrupt to say, yes, that's right, because at this point "Common Core" is a deeply meaningless term. Duncan's point is also deeply dumb, because it assumes the sale. Sure parents want all those things-- but there is not an iota of evidence that Common Core is linked to any of them.

Look. If I say right now that I'm hungry and ready for supper, and you bring me out a plate of steaming hot liver covered in peppermint ice cream and pickles, when I say "Get this out of here," you would be an idiot to be puzzled and ask, "But I thought you wanted supper." Common Core is steaming hot liver covered in peppermint ice cream and pickles, with sauerkraut on the side.

Anyway.

Duncan: People are just confused and misinformed. The higher standards are different degrees of higherness in different places. We need to communicate with parents and students-- which is just a great insight to have five years into this mess. I suppose it's an improvement that he didn't just call white suburban moms big babies. Again.

Now he's going to trot out Tennessee as an example-- he looks really excited, like he just thought of the correct answer for a tough test-- which is brave given the mess that Tennessee has become, including the slinking away of reformster Kevin Huffman last fall. But the state was brave enough to tell their students that they all sucked, and now they are rapidly improving by some measure that we're not going to discuss.

Hayes: Softball round. Here's the Ted Cruz quote about repealing every word of Common Core and get the feds out of curriculum. Ted is of course wrong twice-- Common Core isn't in any federal law and it's already illegal for the feds to mess with curriculum. Let's see if Arne can handle this high lob.

And he gets it. And he looks so happy. Duncan always looks so pleased and surprised when he really nails something.

In the next over-talking portion, Arne says that we never claimed that the standards were universal. Which is...wellllll. It's true the administration has been pretty careful about not saying things that could be construed as, say, illegal federal directing of state education. But if you look at, say, Duncan's 2010 speech about the Big Vision, there's an awful lot of talk about how this will bring the whole nation up to equal excellence and scary stuff like this:

The North Star guiding the alignment of our cradle-to-career education agenda is President Obama’s goal that America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
That goal can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers.

This would probably be the time to note that the original draft of Race to the Top allegedly mentions CCSS by name. [Can't find a link-- if you've got it, leave it in the comments.]

Duncan plows on. States should do their own thing, but their universities should be saying that freshmen don't need remedial classes, which-- you do remember that CCSS only covers math and language, right, Arne?

Hayes: There is a question of who makes those standards. The fear is "that some nefarious actor somewhere..." and he doesn't really need to finish the sentence because "nefarious actor" sufficiently conveys that some critics be crazy.

Duncan: Nobody nefarious here. This has been led on the local level by governors from both parties (in some cases, "led" so much that they signed up for the standards before they were completed). This has also been led by educators, fantastic teachers-- and I'll give him a pass on what exactly "led" means in this context because I just know he's not silly enough to trot out the old canard about teachers helping to create the Core.

Hayes: Finally, a higher ed question. The for-profit Corinthian chain comes up, and that is not Arne's happy face. Corinthian, disaster, and federal government all make it into the same sentence, but Hayes fumbles this one, saying that the chain was essentially cut off from federal loans, and no, not so much. The feds were remarkably reluctant to kick Corinthian off the federal teat. Either way, there are now students with lots of debt and not so much education. Nine attorney generals are calling for the USED to forgive the loans. Are you going to do that?

Duncan: We're looking at this very closely. Duncan takes credit for the gainful employment measure and Hayes interrupts to call it one of the best things this department has ever done. Anyway, Duncan is watching the hell out of this, and even talked to some of the students.

Hayes: That's a non-answer (I love Hayes a little bit more).

Duncan tries to rally by adding a very (We are looking at this very very closely) and how it's about bad actors (cousins to the nefarious actors) who were allowed to just do whatever, which is swell, but does not address why the USED, which is already making obscene amounts of profit from student loans, can't just tear these loans up. But, boy, he's not going to tolerate any more of this bad acting, even though the department has been tolerating the heck out of it for over a year. There's no excuse at all for this weaselly response unless he's just afraid to say out loud that the department is deeply committed to looking out for the interests of the investors in Corinthian, which might be reflected by the association of Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell, whose qualifications for his job were his long history in the for-profit school industry. Duncan finishes with some noise about how he's not afraid of political pushback on the thing that he might do some day after he's done looking very very closely at the situation.

And we're done.

Kudos to Chris Hayes for pressing Duncan a tad harder than anybody else at MSNBC is ever inclined to, thereby adding to our gallery of ever-changing Common Core narratives. But this was still largely a baloney-delivering conduit for Arne, who should be limited to only so many stretchers per tv appearance, and he was once again over his limit.

Duncan Strikes Conciliatory Tone

The 50th anniversary of the passing of ESEA was an occasion for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to speak about the bill. It was also the first big set of wordage that Duncan has issued since the Senate version of the ESEA rewrite was unveiled. 

That bill contains a whole lot of "The federal government and the secretary of education shall keep their grubby hands off the operation of education in this country." It repudiated and revoked much of what the Obama/Duncan administration shoehorned into sort-of-law with Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver system.

Folks have been waiting to hear what Duncan might say in response to the bi-partisan Senatorial smackdown. But in this particular speech, he mostly said, "Please, sir, may I have some more."

Duncan opened the speech by co-opting a four-year-old as a live example of Things He Values. He rattled off a list of what he considers the successes so far, denounced NCLB as a "broken" law, and rang his notes about how every child deserves a whole raft of opportunities. Vintage Duncan.

Then he talked about the new bill and what it must have.

No portability. We shouldn't shift resources from poor schools to rich ones (no, he did not explain how he manages the cognitive dissonance involved in believing both this AND that charter schools are great and we need more of them).

Parents etc need the lush verdant jungle of information that springs forth from Big Standardized Tests, because without test scores, parents would be ignorant of their own children's development.

He rhetorically linked education to civil rights. He said that the new ESEA should support pre-K schooling. And we should get more students to graduate (and he illustrated this with a story about a Diplomas Now school, including a student who was also in the house to be a visual aid-- I know this use of humans as props is a pan-party political pastime, but it rubs me the wrong way twelve days to Tuesday).

He called for more education Research and Development (but used Tennessee as an example).

In short, he did not directly address any of the federal involvement that Alexander and Murray's committee explicitly rejected. He did not address the end of federally-mandated test-linked teacher evaluation, and he did not address the rejection of federal involvement in turning around "failing" schools, nor the department's seriously reduced role in approving state plans. He did not even whimper at the powers that the Senate proposes to strip from his department.

He did name check both Senators.

Senator Alexander and Senator Murray share a lifelong commitment to improving education. Senator Murray spent years as a preschool teacher and early learning advocate for the people of her home state of Washington. This work is in her blood, it is why she entered politics. Long before Senator Alexander was Secretary of Education, Governor and a university President—he fought to end a policy of racial discrimination at Vanderbilt when he was the editor of his college newspaper. My father is also from Tennessee and also attended Vanderbilt and he always had tremendous respect for Senator Alexander.

Both senators' commitment to this nation's children is real. 

In short, if folks were hoping that Duncan would come out swinging or that we would eventually be treated to a sassy catfight, folks may commence with the disappointment. There is not so much as a veiled oblique criticism of the Senate draft in this speech. The closest to a cautionary word was the sentence "We cannot cut our way to greater opportunities for our children."

And the short summary version of what he wants to see in the bill is now broad and vague:

A new law must build a foundation for 21st century schools by investing in innovation, supporting our fantastic teachers and principals, and encouraging every student's progress so that our nation's greatest asset, our vast academic and social potential, can be fully realized. 

There is not even so much as a "college and career" in the whole thing. Duncan here abandons many of the ideas that were previous must-haves. Instead this is a lot of the warm mushy platitudinous word pie that he has served up in the past while dealing lousy policy at the same time. So I'm not sure what there is to learn here, other than there's no storm brewing. At least not yet.

Perhaps Duncan is just lame-ducking it. Perhaps he wanted to stay positive for the big birthday party. Perhaps he's caught a sense that it doesn't matter if he suggests that the new bill should involve ponies and eclairs for all. But whatever his thinking was, there was not the slightest hint of confrontation with the Senate in this bill, and his advice to the House committee was to imitate the Senate's warm atmosphere of bipartisan swellness, advice that I'm sure the House will resolutely ignore. We may have to do without fireworks entirely until the bill takes its bow in front of the full Senate next week.

Senate Proposal Cuts Duncan Off At Knees

The bipartisan proposal from the Senate Education Committee is settled and ready to see the light of day. There's some good news for public education and some bad news for the Obama administration.

Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) expressed a big ole bi-partisan hug of support for this baby, un-euphoniously entitled The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 (just once I would like to send a poet to DC). Let's look under the hood (you can find a handy summary of the bill here).

The (Partial) Defanging of Testing

Tests are still mandated entirely too often (every grade 3-8 and once in high school), but the bill leaves it to the states to decide what to do with the "data" that tests generate. States must use them in their accountability system, somehow, but it's up to the state to decide how. States will also be given flexibility "to pilot innovative assessment systems." The dream of a single national test, which was already for all intents and purposes dead-- that dream now has a fork in it.

States must keep parents informed and disaggregate data so that subgroups are not lost, so critics who are afraid that nobody would know that poor urban schools are in trouble without test results can now relax. But states must design their own system for intervening in failing schools, and as long as those systems fall within federal parameters, the states can do as they please. In fact, the feds are forbidden to interfere in the whole process. "The federal government is prohibited from determining or approving state standards."

Suck It, Arne

That "Hands off, feds" attitude runs throughout the bill. State plans are acceptable unless proven naught by the USED, and the feds only have 90 days to do so. The Secretary must approve a state plan within the 90 days unless the department "can present substantial evidence that clearly demonstrates that such State plan does not meet the bill's requirements." To whom will such evidence be presented? A peer review board composed of "experts and practitioners with school-level and classroom experience."

Yes, unlike the waiver system that requires state bureaucrats to bow and scrape for Duncan's official okey-dokey, now the secretary must go before actual educators and prove to their satisfaction that a state plan is not acceptable. And if they say it's not, the state still gets to appeal and resubmit. This strikes me a huge shift of the balance of power.

Also, "the bill affirms that states decide what academic standards they will adopt, without interference from Washington." The feds can't mandate a set of standards, and they can't "incentivize" one, either. "States will be free to decide what academic standards they will maintain in their states."

And! The bill does away with any federal requirement for states to develop and implement a teacher evaluation system. It even axes the definition of a highly qualified teacher.

State May Not Slack

The Title IV section appears to say, in brief, that this federal hands-offiness is not license for states to do a half-assed job providing education to their citizens.

Charter Chain Christmas

While the ECAA does include some language encouraging strong charter laws and strong charter transparency and strong charter community connection, the cheers in charter headquarters have to be for the strong and unequivocal endorsement of charters as part of the education landscape. It puts three charter grant programs into law.

Two endorse the launching of charters, with particular attention to "replicating" the successes of "high-quality" charter schools, which of course means that charter chains are hearing the merry ka-ching-a-ling-a-ling of Christmas morning.

The third grant program is also awesome if you are a charter profiteer-- the feds would like a grant program to help pay for the buildings that charters squat in. No word on whether Senators Alexander and Murray considered a bill to cut up charter operators food for them or hire federal agents to wipe the charter CEO's chin when he's drooling with glee.

Oh, Also, Bite Me, Arne

Down among the less-exciting Titles we find support for rural schools (basically releasing them from spending requirements that don't make sense in rural schools). Under Title IX we have additional assurance that states use federal money to help shore up state and local spending.

Also under Title IX, this:

This bill prohibits the Secretary from mandating additional requirements for states or school districts seeking waivers from federal law. The bill also limits the Secretary’s authority to disapprove a waiver request.

And For the Children

An extra point-- federal money may be used for early childhood education. So any and all of the above can be applied to Early Childhood education. So not the requirement for Pre-K that some folks were hoping for, but full permission to turn the federal money hose on the little ones.

So, What Do We Think?

All in all, this is a more pointed rebuke of the Obama administration's ed farfegnugen than I might have expected, but while it still keeps those stupid, worthless Big Standardized Tests enshrined, it frees states to make their own peace with them (and that testing requirement might reduce the possibility that the test manufacturers would loose their lobbying dogs to oppose the bill-- they can rest happy now because their payday is intact). Now, that will mean different things in different states-- I'm pretty sure Andrew Cuomo will be a giant ass to education whether the feds are pushing him to or not.

And while Common Core is all but dead, this certainly frees everyone up to slap it around some more. This bill wouldn't end the ongoing education debate, but it would break it up into fifty little arguments and if that doesn't do anything more than divide up the reformsters money and forces, that's a good thing.

Of course, we still have the onslaught of amendments and the bill from the House and the President's desk to get past. And the enshrinement of the rapacious charter school industry is not good news. So this is by no means perfect.

But most of all, a new ESEA completely chops the back-door lawmaking of USED waivers off at the knees. If Congress can actually pull this off, it will be a gamechanger. There's much to hate about the new game, but there are some pieces of hope as well. Let's just see what happens next.

Duncan Looks for Spare Children

Arne Duncan teams up with Marc C. Morial and Janet Murguia in a blog post on The Hill, trying once again to get some attention for his vision of the new ESEA.

His choice of new catch phrase is extraordinarily unfortunate. He rolls it out in the headline and uses it again in the post:

America has no kids to spare.

Let's think about that for a second.

When you don't have any more of something to spare, that means you're already using all that you've got. "I don't have time to spare" means "I need every second I've got for some piece of business." Our spare tire is the one that we keep to use for tire-related business if one of the regulars gives up. Buddy, if I can't spare a dime, it's because I need to spend my dimes on something for myself.

So if we have no children to spare, that must mean that we (whoever "we" are) cannot give up any children because we intend to use them for something. It evokes a century ago when families might say, "We can't spare this child for school because we need him to work in the field" or the urban poor saying "We can't spare this child for school because we need him to earn some money in the factory."

If we can't "spare" any children, it must be that "we" have some other pressing use for them. What, I wonder, does Duncan imagine we need to use all these children for. What kind of coggitious widgetry is their destined use? We can't spare one child from our plans for a drone workforce? We can't spare one child from helping us create revenue streams for corporate interests? "I have no children to spare," is what the witch in the gingerbread house says, not somebody who is concerned about allowing children to grow and develop and stand up strong as the best persons they can be.

This particular construction reveals, once again, the notion that children are the toasters on the assembly line that is the reformsters' ideal education system.

Duncan et al get into some specifics from their ESEA wish list. 

For instance, they want to be sure that districts are getting resources, including various subgroups, and I think that's a great idea except that maybe, if that's our goal, we'd want a program other than Race to the Top or other signature "competitive" programs that say, "Hey, children in struggling subgroups-- we will get resources to you IF you are fortunate enough to be in a school system run by people who are good at filling out federal Give Me Money, Please paperwork. But if the heads of your state and local system do not meet our federal standards, we will teach them a lesson by giving fewer resources to you, struggling student."

Getting resources to students who need them and making many systems compete for limited resources are not compatible goals. Duncan needs to figure out which he stands for.

Duncan says parents should know that students who are found to be in non-goal-meeting schools, the feds will be on the way with resources and supports and interventions. Of course, by that last word, we mean "handing the school over to a charter operator," an intervention technique that doesn't seem to have saved many students at all, and has certainly stripped resources and support away from other students in those same communities.

Also, he wants preschool.

He also wants feedback about individual student achievement, support and autonomy for teachers, and money to go to high poverty schools, as well as support for "innovation" with a proven track record. These are great things; these are also things that the administration has not tried at all in the last seven years. Maybe this is the part of the article that Duncan did not write.

One more spare

Of course, there's another way to understand the word "spare." It can refer to a show of mercy, a relenting of damaging and destructive force, as in "I will spare your life."

If Arne is announcing his intention to spare no child the oppression of reformster education programs, then I will give him points, at least, for accuracy and honesty. If he is saying "America has no kids to spare the indignity, timesuck and waste of pointless standardized testing," then we have here one of those rare occasiona in which Duncan's words and his actions actually match up.

But I'm guessing that's not what he meant to say. In which case, we can just dismiss this as more pointless word salad from USED.

Arne's Dumb Expectations

Andrea Mitchell, always a reliable amplifier of administration PR, gave Arne Duncan yet another opportunity to try to peddle his wares recently.

Arne wanted to stand up for Common Core in the face of the GOP pre-pre-primary beat-em-up on the standards. As reported by Ben Kamisar at The Hill, Duncan is framing his pitch with one of his favorite spins-- it's all about the expectations.

“When you dumb down expectations to make politicians look good, that's one of the most insidious things that happens.”

Of course, another insidious thing that happens is when politicians raise expectations to make themselves look good, but don't actually deliver any of the support needed to meet those expectations.

It's also insidious when politicians raise expectations and back them up by holding other people responsible for meeting them. Imagine how different education would reform would play out if we just changed half of the following sentence. Instead of

Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold teachers and school districts responsible for their failure to properly teach those students

we could instead say

Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold politicians responsible for their failure to properly support those schools with needed resources.


Duncan's belief in the magic of expectations is well-documented. It just isn't well-founded in reality. High expectations are great-- when realistic. High expectations are great-- when they are applied to the people and government agencies that are supposed to provide the resources needed to meet those expectations.

But among the many things that Duncan fails to grasp is the result not of high expectation, but the placement of blame and punishment when those expectations are not met.

When a child fails to meet expectations that were set unreasonably high by politicians, who should be held responsible?

When a child struggles to meet expectations because her school and community are starved for the resources needed to help her achieve, who should be held responsible?

Duncan continues to fail to understand the system that he has perpetuated. Politicians did not lower expectations "to look good" under NCLB-- they did it to avoid losing badly-needed money for poor, struggling schools. Duncan continues to ask as if public education has twisted itself into a test-obsessed mis-directed pretzel on some sort of random whim, and not as a predictable and not-irrational response to the policy of test-and-punish pursued with gusto by this administration.

Congress and Your Homework

Congress must not abdicate its responsibility to help all children succeed.

That's Arne Duncan, responding to the proposed Lamar Alexander remix of No Child Left Behind. It's an interesting construction, an inspiring line.

The first picture that popped into my head was an old white guy in a suit, knocking on some family's front door. When a parent answers, he says, "Hello. I'm Senator Bumswoggle, and I'm here to help Chris study for the big algebra test tomorrow."

Okay, that's probably not what Duncan means. But it does raise the question-- what exactly can Congress do to help all children succeed? If we went into classrooms and asked the students, "What do you need from your Congressperson to help you succeed this week?" what would they say?

Would they say that they really, really need to take a bunch of standardized tests? "I think I'm getting better at reading," will say some bright-eyed eight-year-old, "but until I take a standardized test from Congress, I just don't know." Is that what would happen?

Would they say, "Please don't give any more resources to this school. Instead, give the money to some charter operator to set up a completely different school. Yes, I realize they might not let me go to that school, and I'll have to stay in this one scraping by with fewer resources, but I'll sleep better knowing that entrepreneurs have had the opportunity to unleash innovation while making good ROI."
It is sweet that Duncan and Congress want to help. The desire to help, particularly to help those who are most vulnerable, is a basic human impulse, and a credit to every person who feels it. But the desire to help does not automatically confer the ability to help.

Suppose one of my children is injured and rushed to an operating room. I would want to help. I would want to wave a magic wand and fix it, right now. But if I grab a scalpel and dash into the operating theater declaring, "I really want to help. What can I do?" they would have to throw me out, because as someone with zero surgery-related skills, the most useful thing I can do is get out of the way. Even if I am obscenely rich and incredibly powerful, I still don't have the skills.

So if Congress's message to children is going to be, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you" the question remains-- what can Congress actually do to help children succeed?

Not teach the children-- neither Congress nor the Department of Education contains barely any people with skills and expertise in actually teaching children. Congress doesn't know how to build schools or run a sceince fair or assess an essay. Nor would I want to watch a Congressman take a shift or two of lunch duty (okay, I might want to watch a little). With few exceptions, Congresspersons do not know how to do any of the things directly related to helping a child achieve success in school. So they won't help the children succeed that way.

In fact, Congress doesn't even know the individual children that it's talking about. This means that it has no idea what individual strengths and weaknesses the children have. It also means that neither Congress nor Secretary Duncan knows what each individual child means by "succeed." So the actual working with children is best left up to the people who are right there with them-- teachers and parents.That work includes defining and measuring success; Congress lacks the skills and expertise to do either of those tasks.

Congress does have the expertise to deal with the money and politics portion of the picture. Congress can do its part to make sure that every school has the resources that it needs, and Congress has a responsibility to do that honestly, without damaging fictions such as, "We can fund ten different excellent schools for the same money that's now spent on just one." Congress has a responsibility to do its homework, so that it's not making choices based on the lies in charter school PR materials.
Congress has the expertise and skills to make sure that states do not create funding formulas that treat some children like second-class citizens. Congress has the expertise and skills to require that states and school districts remain transparent.

Neither Congress nor the Department of Education has the expertise and skill to determine when a school is failing or what should be done with that failing school. They have been told that expertise in business, politics and money are sufficient to identify and cure failing schools; this is simply not true, any more than my expertise in teaching English means I belong in an operating room or a board room.

Congress's responsibility to help children succeed is not a bad measure. But if we're going to be honest and truthful about the matter, Congress's ability to help children succeed is nearly non-existent. Great responsibility can come with great power, but in this case, Congress's most important power is to step back and let the people with expertise, training and skills do their jobs.

Duncan's Legless Duck

I opened my eyes while you were kissing me once more than once
And you looked as sincere as a dog
Just as sincere as a dog does when it’s the food on your lips with which it's in love
                                                      --Fiona Apple "Parting Gift"

When you have to bribe or threaten people to be your friend, you can be sure that your friendship will be short-lived.

Over at EdWeek, Alyson Klein is asking one of the big questions of the moment-- how much political juice does the ED department have in NCLB waiver renewals? The related question is how much juice does the department have in the NCLB reauthorization itself?

The possible and imminent rewrite of ESEA/NCLB makes more obvious what some of us have been saying all long-- the tale of "voluntary" adoption of Common Core, high-stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluations, and the rest of the reformster package was a fiction. States complied with the federal mandates because the feds had everyone's violation of the NCLB ridiculously unattainable goals to threaten the states with, and because they could score some cash doing it.

Reauthorizing ESEA has always been the quick way to short-circuit reformster plans. NCLB has been the gun that the feds held to every state's head. Now Congress is threatening to take out the bullets. Without any bullets, and with the big piles of money running out, the administration is finding it's out of friends.

Arne Duncan can make impassioned speeches about the value of testing and then rerun the text in various publications. It doesn't really matter. Arne Duncan has had six years to prove that he has a vision of how to make US public education strong and vital. He has had six years to convince people that he knows what he's doing,that he knows where he wants to go and how to get there. He has failed. His only hope at this stage would have been a cadre of people saying, "Well, I wasn't sure, but I know I've seen the good his policies can do and the way they've really energized the school district, so I back this guy." There are no such people now. He may have some small input with the Senate committee (Sen. Patty Murray seemed to be parroting many of his talking points), but I don't hear anybody saying, "And of course we want to work closely with the Secretary as we consider this important legislation."

Duncan hasn't made friends in Congress. He hasn't made friends among teachers, which is in some ways his biggest failure; if you think back to the beginning of his time in office, you'll recall that he said many things that teachers thought were great, but then he followed those good statements with terrible policies. And he hasn't made friends among the states. He may have thought he was making friends, but all he was gaining was compliance for as long as held the gun in one hand and the purse strings in the other.

So now, as waiver renewal comes due, Duncan finds himself in the difficult position of negotiating the price of a condo in a development that may never be built and which he doesn't actually own. Someone else (someone who's not even listening to him) is designing the building, and he has to negotiate a deal with future tenants. The administration perhaps thought they were strengthening their hand by making new waiver deals good through 2018, but it's looking like a mistake-- why lock yourself into a long term deal you may not need to make in the first place.

And you'll notice that none of the states are piping up to say, "We would like you to rewrite ESEA so it looks exactly like the waiver requirements, because we think they are swell." Instead, Klein quotes Kentucky ed commissioner Terry Holiday saying that once waivers are dead and gone, "I think we'd all quickly abandon all the work on tying teacher evaluation to test scores."

The waivers exist to free states from the mandates of ESEA, but nobody knows what those mandates will look like after Congress gets through with them. Duncan's position? Make a deal for a waiver or else something might happen, somehow, maybe? 

Klein quotes Anne Hyslop at Bellwether:

"I don't see the department doing much more to really put the hammer down on states to get their evaluation systems in place," she said. "I don't think [renewal] means states are going to change what they're doing or get in trouble if they don't do what the department says. The secretary is saying pretty please do this, and states are saying thanks for your input, but we're going another direction."

Maybe if his programs had possessed some actual merit they would have developed support of their own, but here we are looking at VAMs and test-based accountability and increased charterization and turn-around schools and the feds telling every school in the country what success looks like and none of it-- none of it-- has produced anything resembling successful results. The only real success can be found in the same places as Duncan's remaining friends-- boardrooms and offices of edubiz corporations where the money has been pouring in.

Congress created NCLB in a flurry of bipartisan jolliness, but it was so closely tied to the Bush administration that it is still seen as a Bush law. Whatever comes out of the current move to rewrite, I don't think anyone is going to call it the Obama/Duncan ESEA.

Don't worry about Duncan. His connections have kept him sell-employed for most of his adult life, and I doubt that they'll fail him after he leaves USED. But for the moment he's just a guy trapped on a legless duck without enough food left on his lips to make the dog fake affection.