Core Ready Schools, Aspen and Achieve

So you want to know how your district is doing on the implementation of the Common Core? Well, the folks at Achieve and the Aspen Institute have a tool for you. It's Core Ready Schools, 
a handy tool for evaluating your school's progress in implementation that only misses one huge, gigantic, Uranus-sized indicator. But let me work up to it.

There is a whole 90-minute rollout presentation on video right here and I know I usually watch these things for you, but I couldn't quite get through all of it. But let me tell you about what I did get through, and if you actually want to watch the whole thing, drop me a note in the comments and let me know how it was. Because who knows-- it might not have been quite as mind-numbing as I began to fear it was.

The video opens with a nice lady from Aspen who covers a bunch of specs and screenshots about the-- well, she keeps calling it an app, but it appears to be a website. Also big thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and their Program Officier, which I infer is a person from the foundation who comes and works with you on your program so that you don't have to do that nasty application process, and for some reason I'm thinking of the Roman system of local governors, but maybe we should leave this for another day. What's this thing actually for? Well, it's not an accountability tool (I know because she said so). Let's bring up Mike Cohen from Achieve to talk.

Mike from Achieve talks about Achieve's Core cred and says "I feel like the Home Depot of the Common Core" Nobody laughed and he took that to mean that nobody got that joke at all."It's a tough crowd this morning"

Anyway, Achieve was concerned about a lack of data and tools to monitor implementation. They needed a way to get data on how implementation was going on state level. First tries they gave up as too hard. But then somehow we all realized that Aspen had already kind of done the work, with their handy transition guide for school leaders and so the Core Ready Schools app-site-tool covers similar ground.

Core Ready Schools ia aimed at things you would want to monitor, and that chiefs at CCSSO would commit to using. Something lightweight, but with depth. Balance of common across states but flexible enough for individual states. Here are the seven factors Mike says (the site calls them "levers") the tool is designed to consider.

1) Is leadership focusing on CCSS as part of school improvement
2) Is instruction being aligned with it
3) Is ongoing professional development supporting CCSS
4) Do you have an aligned assessment system?
5) Do you have aligned instruction resources and curriculum in school
6) Do you have mechanisms for engaging families and communities (because you're going to have to get them to buy into this, so by "engage" we seem to mean "talk to" and not "listen to.")
7) And are there sufficient resources and staffing (technology)

The tool is supposed to allow for different states' emphasis and ways to collect data. Mike tells a story about how one school chief was just going to ask superintendents how things were going and not dig any deeper. "Don't you think there will be inflation" "Yes, but then they'll have a harder time explaining results on assessments." So, give a principal enough rope? With this not-an-accountability tool?

Mike also says, "They desperately need it to know what's going on-- there's no debate about that." I would be happy to debate him. Also, though this started as Common Core thing, but they've been flexing it to handle states other CACR standards. Because we'd hate to get left behind when the Core is dumped.

Do you know what we haven't talked about?

I said there was a glaring omission. So far it appears that when we're assessing the success of our Common Core implication, we are not going to ask if the students in the schools seem to be getting a better education. That seems to be primarily because we assume that if Common Core is well-implemented, it will automatically lead to better test scores (what? is there some other way to measure how well children are being educated?) But no-- at no point in this entire process do we actually look at the affect of Core implementation on student learning.

Who is this for again?

This tool fits the whole reformster style because it assumes that superintendents simply can't know what is going on in their own districts, presumably because of some combination of stupidity and lying subordinates. Also, of course, information is far more informationny when it's in number form.

The big selling point here is that this tool will be useful inside of districts, helping leaders tell how well the implementation is going on inside the district. This skips over the question of whether we should implement CCSS in the first place, plus it skips over another question-- when school leaders are implementing a program because it has been mandated and they had no say in it, how much time to they spend worrying about implementing it well? Or, on the deeper philosophical level, how much commitment to doing a bad thing well is a good amount of commitment to doing a bad thing well. Or, if you prefer classic filmic references, exactly whom should we be rooting for in Bridge on the River Kwai?

Never mind that for a moment, because I'd like to offer for your consideration the user agreement from the Core Ready Schools website:

By clicking the button below, you agree to have your anonymized survey results recorded by Anabliss Design + Brand Strategy and shared with the Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute reserves the right to utilize the data in research, analysis, and reporting on the implementation of the CCSS and other education-related trends; however, the Aspen Institute agrees that any data disclosed will be anonymized data that is not tied to specific users and is not released in any manner that could identify an individual, school, or school district.

So, NOT just collecting data for your district. You're also collecting data for Aspen and their friends. You are volunteering for a walk-on roll for the next production of "How the Implementation of Common Core Is Going in Our Schools." Yes, it's one more great chance to do free grunt work for our Data Overlords.

More fun with websites

One cool things about Core Ready Schools? Anybody can log in and create an account. You could, for instance, sign in and start the account for your school or district; I did that, and I'm sure my superintendent will be calling to thank me if she ever hears about it. I suppose you could log in and start an account for any school-- even fake ones-- although if a lot of people did that, it might make Aspen's aggregated numbers less accurate, and that would be a shame, I imagine.

You're allowed to take the survey ten times over five years. I found the questions simple and the interface easy to navigate. There are just a handful of self-assessment questions for each "lever," and most of them are unexceptional. The program occasionally reveals its blind spots. One of the questions about instruction asks about how well teachers understand and use the Core, and it does not allow for the possibility that teachers are familiar with the Core but don't use it because they don't want to. Everything in the survey assumes that we all want to welcome the Core into our home and make it happy here and that its success will naturally flow into educational awesomeness and joy for all. There is no "You're not my real mom" option.

The whole effect is very Borgian, and it reveals an extremely specific view of exactly how a school should be assimilated into the Core universe. This is no surprise. Since the Core is a one-size-fits-all prescription for students, why would it not come with a one-size-fits-all school districts to implement it? Yes, Aspen is promising customizable versions of this tool (for a price), but this is customizable in the same manner as a fast food burger-- you can change the balance of the elements a bit, but you'll be choosing how to tweak the ingredients that the restaurant has chosen for you. So, not very customizable at all (kind of like that "personalized" education we keep hearing about).

So if your school district decides to sign on to this handy tool, God bless you and have fun. Thank you for making a contribution to the giant holding cells of our Data Overlords.And remember-- student learning is irrelevant to the process.

David Coleman Is Superman!

Politico dipped into the David Coleman at Aspen Ideas festival file and pulled out a quote in which Coleman admits that “I think then we make a great mistake by caricaturing the opponents of the standards as crazies or people who don't tell the truth." They call this "a big takeaway." They also catch Coleman admitting that it's no sign of great paranoia to be concerned about how individual student data is handled.

So has Politico discovered Coleman 2.0 (great taste, less filling), or has Politico simply made use of the magic of careful quote-clipping? I listened to the whole thirty minute clip so that you wouldn't have to, and you owe me.

The second portion of the Aspen Ideas talk has been previously covered in this space; it deals with super new marketing things happening with the College Board. What we're looking at today is the first fifteen minutes or so. And I have important news to report--

David Coleman is the Superman everyone has been waiting for.

The press opportunity is hosted by Jane Stoddard Williams, who telegraphs her position by characterizing the College Board's decision to hire Coleman as "brilliant."She also refers to him as maybe the main architect of the Common Core, and Coleman politely fails to correct her even to the extent of pointing out that there were a whole batch of math guys working while he handled the ELA side.

Williams also makes oblique reference to finally being able to get him to explain what's going on with Common Core " to the extent that he can" and that's definitely not a slam on his knowledge-- there's more a tone of talking to someone who's working on a super-classified modern-day Manhattan Project.

Coleman explains his current employment simply. College Board helped develop the Common Core and it was because of his involvement with the Core that they hired him.

So please expect that public leadership role to continue, and that means visibly aligning instruments like the SAT and AP so that we are clearly showing kids and teachers that there's a path to college that extends from Kindergarten through twelfth grade.

 Tougher than malaria

Williams tosses out the Gates quote about battling disease being easier than fixing schools. Coleman says that's unsurprising, and then he shares some "terrible facts." Which are mostly that in forty years of reforminess, we've not moved some test needles much at all. We've hit a wall.

Coleman imagines that Gates is bothered that he hasn't moved the needle enough, and Coleman thinks it's very brave and decent to admit that. And for those of you hoping to see Coleman 2.0, I'll point out that neither Coleman nor Williams addresses the question of why, in a democracy, a really rich private citizen should be taking on personal responsibility for a function of federal, state and local government without the benefit of, say, voters asking him to do so.

But trying to take on that wall-- that's what keeps Coleman up nights.

The burdens of poweriness

Williams wants to know how Coleman came to take all this on. She lists his achievements and colleges and that he's a Rhodes Scholar, to which he interjects "yes, I am" and she asks did he just wake up thinking "we need to get all the states to use the same standards." (So, in this narrative, the phone does not ring with someone calling him to ask him to come help with this standards thing that the states are already doing.)

Coleman, instead of answering that, meditates on power.

As people grow in supposed importance and power in the world, he says, they get self-destructive in how they use their time. "People think if they're important they don't have time to write their own speeches or spend extended time alone." Says Coleman, "Any good I have done has come out" of balancing time to allow him to be alone, thinking.

He went into business designing tests, but that wasn't satisfactory because the standards underpinning the tests were crappy. So he spent time alone, thinking. "One idea that I've been cultivating" was the idea of students doing fewer things, but really well.

Anyway, that's how he works. "It's almost embarrassing to admit how much time I need to spend alone... as part of trying to o anything good." And now I am imagining what Coleman's Fortress of Solitude looks like.

So Coleman is not just busy being a Great Man-- he is actually better at it than lots of other great men.

And that co-operation and collaboration thing? That's for ordinary mortals. Coleman just hatches great ideas out of his own head.

Setting the record straight

That's what Williams tries desperately to get Coleman to do. She steers from his process into the semi-question "So that's where the idea of the standards came from?"

Coleman tosses in "listening" as a technique (though he never says to whom) and then, again, tells us first the standard of greatness that he is going to surpass. There's something annoying about "the sanctity of the entrepreneur" he says. "The world was dark and then I came and there was light," is what those sanctimonious types say. But what Coleman understands that they do not is that entrepreneurship is about telling the truth. This is to introduce himself obliquely as David Coleman, Super-Truth-Teller.

Committees, he observes, suck. At the end, you put everybody's stuff in, and you get a big mess. The standards movement was failing because it was death by committee resulting in a huge vague swamp of standards. We are left to close the circle on that implication, that you need a Superman to leap tall committees in a single bound.

Williams tries again, noting that she knows he's reluctant to discuss this because it's fraught and he's humble. She tries citing the Layton WaPo article, asking him directly to set the records straight. And I'll walk you through the larger version of the answer in a second, but the short answer is "No."

Coleman wants us to know several things. The standards movement started a long time ago. We should decide things based on evidence and not Gates' or Coleman's personalities. And it's in the context of this answer that he provides the quotes about Common Core opponents not being all crazies. He sees many of these folks as principled and smart, and he appreciates the anxiety of parents who feel they've lost control of their children's educations. And he acknowledges that it's a wide range of people who are upset.

Coleman says he's resisting on setting the record straight because  he could take a stance of "Now I will tell the facts" and no one will care. He knows that "a person in my position is supposed to say look this was a group endeavor." But there are principled smart people who will still be worried. So he's not going to set the record straight.

Because....? I don't know. If a policeman pulls you over, do you say "I'm not going to explain. You'll just write me a ticket anyway." If your child says he can't sleep because of the monster under the bed, do you say, "I'm not going to bother telling you there's no monster because you'll still be anxious." Of course, if you have certain sorts of scruples, when your child asks, "Is Santa real?" you may avoid saying yes because you don't want to say something you believe is false.

Is it that Superman just doesn't owe us an explanation, or is Coleman unwilling to provide anything that could checked against facts or any of the forty-seven hundred versions of the Common Core origin story floating about? I don't know. I do know that Coleman was handed, on a platter, with golden platters on top, an opportunity to explain exactly where the Core came from, and he refused to give it (though, clearly, he knows exactly what the record really says).

Did you notice?

In a twenty-some minute chunk of audio interview about the Common Core, David Coleman did not mention another single human being, with the exception of Bill Gates. He did not once say some version of "Well, getting this huge project done would have been very challenging without the help of [insert names here] " He also did not once say, "For this part of the Core, I really leaned a lot on the work of researchers and writers such as [insert names here]." So much for clearly citing your sources and backing up your conclusions with data and evidence.

If you had just climbed out from under a rock, and this interview were your only exposure to the Core, you would have to assume that the Common Core Don't-call-them-state Standards were singlehandedly written by David Coleman, sprung from his own brain.

Why tug on Superman's cape?

It is not my intention to simply get my ad hominem on up in here. It's a distraction, and we could all do well to remember that good things are sometimes done by bad people and bad things are sometimes by good people. So David Coleman could be a Very Bad Man, and that would not rule out the possibility that the Core are a Swell Thing.

But if you don't take the medicine that you prescribe for others, others are justified in questioning the medicine. And this interview really highlights the degree to which Little Davey Coleman and his Common Core project would get a failing grade in a Common Core classroom.

Likewise, if you keep changing your story, you make it hard to believe whatever the new story is.

And. And this is a huge and. As a private citizen, you don't get to usurp the functions of government just because you went off to your Fortress of Solitude and had a big think. I don't care how rich or powerful you are, you don't get to just walk over to the Pentagon and say, "I'm going to go ahead an re-organize the armed forces." You don't get to walk into your local city hall and declare, "I just decided to change how the various city departments function."

These sorts of interviews are worth paying attention NOT as a way to say, "Oooooo! That David Coleman is so terrible," but because they provide one more window through which to see that the process that brought is the Core is just as flawed and amateur and unsupported and unsubstantiated and anti-democratic as we thought it was.

So yeah, Coleman changed his story a bit-- we opponents are not crazy, just scared. But don't imagine that a shift on that point signals any kind of exposure to kryptonite. Superman has not yet left the building.

David Coleman To Fix Inequality in America

David Coleman is here (well, not here here-- he's actually in Aspen) to explain how the College Board is going to recapture market share by synergistically monetizing its products break down the walls of inequality in education.

David Coleman (Common Core writer and current president of the College Board) is deeply concerned with fairness. Huffington Post has a report from the Aspen Institute (because "let's solve America's social problems" is so often associated with "let's go to Aspen") on Coleman's "conversation" with Jane Stoddard Williams of Bloomberg EDU, and the excerpts presented give us a picture of how Coleman plans to boost the College Board's bottom line bring educational equality to the US.

He is sure to tout his free test prep deal with Kahn Academy, by which the College Board will get a foot firmly in every door of the market make test preparation available to every student in America. (Perhaps the new SAT will include references to pieces of 21st Century wisdom such as the new idea that when it comes to websites, if you're not paying for it, the product is you.)

But Coleman's not here primarily to tout the new means of amassing data on every college-bound student in America free SAT prep, though he says it's an example of how the College Board is "leaning into" challenges. There's also a hefty chunk of conversation where Coleman artfully inserts himself in an imaginary conversation between imaginary test critics and imaginary test proponents; it's a pretty clever way to position himself as a perfectly reasonable guy trying to find a middle way in the midst of this contentious and imaginary debate. But that's not why he's here. He's here to talk about AP.


When we worry, perhaps rightly, that assessment can discriminate, let's remember that there's another thing that we know ... that can discriminate more, which is adults.

Yup. That's the problem. Because Coleman says he has learned from "my work in K-12" that we've got to change our game. And that test anxiety is bad. And, using one of his new marketing slogans educational insights, American students don't need more tests, they need more opportunities.

And let's give Coleman credit-- he hasn't said anything that's particularly wrong. What the most capable of reformsters understand is this simple process:

       1) Say something true as a premise
       2) Do something awful that does not actually follow from #1 at all

Coleman's genius marketing idea solution to educational inequality is to take human bias out of the equation and replace it with hidden human bias and testing.

See, he's worried that African-Americans and women and Latinos are missing out on the chance to give College Board their money the opportunity to take AP courses. But it turns out that a great predictor of AP success is the PSAT!! So let's use the previously maligned and increasingly skipped-over PSAT as a marketing booster for AP a means of finding worthy students. AP, we are to understand, is a massive cash cow for the College Board a doorway to opportunity, and if we get more students into AP courses it will be a great payday for the College Board step forward for America.

So let's use the PSAT to generate sales leads AP course recommendations. Let's send letters to parents and lists to guidance departments and let's get students moved into those courses by the carload.

Look, the lack of minorities and women in certain fields is a legitimate problem, and it's a problem the education world should be addressing, and addressing aggressively. But the fact that Coleman can correctly diagnose the disease does not mean we should keep listening when he says, "So you should buy a bottle of Dr. Coleman's Miracle Cure, made of oil squeezed from the finest snakes in Arabia."

We knew this was coming. The Coleman College Board is a business that has leveraged some genius marketing strategies; who else has found the giant brass balls to get their product made part of state policy (well, other than Common Core-- one more reason Coleman's new job makes sense). And if AP were as great as it says, or at least benign, that would be swell. But even as the College Board struggles to regain market share, they are also working feverishly to mess with their products. The SAT has been redesigned to match the Core, and AP courses have begun a transition from loosely structured high-quality courses to CCSS-aligned tightly structured products in a box.

But Coleman's recasting of the College Board quest for new markets as a drive for social justice is the work of a master salesman. Coleman may not know jack about education, but he can sling bullshit like a pro probably change the world with his audacious plan to sell the solution to reviving College Board's revenue stream social and economic justice.