CAP: The Promise of Testing

CAP is back with another one of its "reports." This one took four whole authors to produce, and it's entitled "Praise Joyous ESSA and Let a Thousand Tests Bloom." Ha! Kidding. The actual report is "Implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act: Toward a Coherent, Aligned Assessment System."

The report is sixty-some pages of highly-polished CAP-flavored reformster baloney, and I've read it so you don't have to, but be warned-- this journey will be neither short nor sweet. But we have to take it in one shot, so you can see the entirety of it, because there are large swaths of their argument that you probably agree with.

Who is CAP, again?

The Center for American Progress is billed as a left-leaning thinky tank, but it has also served as a holding tank for Clintonian beltway denizens. It was formed by John Podesta and run by him between his gigs as Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, and has provided food and shelter to many Clinton staffers who didn't want to have to leave DC while waiting for their next shot at the Big Show.

CAP loves the whole privatizing charterfying profiteering common core cheering reformster agenda. In fact, CAP's deep and abiding love for the Common Core has burned brighter than a thousand stars and longer than even Jeb! Bush's willingness to keep saying that name. CAP has stymied me, taxing my ability to invent new versions of the headline "CAP says something stupid in support of Common Core" (see here, here, here, and here).

If the last fifteen years have seen the building of a revolving door, education-industrial complex on par with the military and food industries, then CAP is right in the center of that culture. They have never met an ed reform idea they didn't like or promote, and they are not afraid to manufacture slick, baloney-stuffed "reports" to push the corporate agenda.

So that's who produced this big chunk of goofiness.

Introduction

Like many other advocacy groups, CAP sees a golden opportunity in ESSA, and that golden opportunity is all about the testing.

States and districts must work together to seize this opportunity to design coherent, aligned assessment systems that are based on rigorous standards. These systems need to include the smart and strategic use of formative and interim tests that provide real-time feedback to inform instruction, as well as high-quality summative tests that measure critical thinking skills and student mastery of standards.

So how can states build on the research base and knowledge regarding high-quality assessments in order to design systems that do not just meet the requirements of federal law but actually drive student learning to a higher level—especially for students from marginalized communities?

And later, CAP says that this report "outlines a vision and provides specific recommendations to help federal, state and local leaders realize the promise of tests." The promise of tests? Not students, not education, not learning, not empowering communities to help their children grow into their best selves. Nope. The promise of tests. So, as is too often the case, we've skipped right the question of "should we" and will proceed directly to "how," setting out once again to do a better job of more precisely hitting the absolutely wrong target. Yay.

History Lesson from Alternate Universe

CAP will now set the stage by hanging a backdrop of Things That Are Not True.

High-quality assessments play a critical role in student learning and school improvement. No, not really. Well, maybe, in the sense that "critical" is a pretty vague word.

High-quality tests can also show how well states, districts, and schools are doing in meeting the educational needs of all students. No. At least, not any allegedly high quality tests that currently exist.

CAP is willing to acknowledge that testing is "driving the agenda" and that's Not Good. They even acknowledge that despite their "research" showing that tests only take up 2% of school time, lots of folks have noticed that standardized testing has become the focus of too many schools.

CAP wants you to know that the ESSA has many cool, shiny features. It requires states to use broader measures and afford flexibility. CAP thinks ESSA might lead to less teacher evaluation emphasis on testing, maybe. There is money available for tweaking testing, including $$ for "innovation."

There's more history, like a history of tests. CAP equates the Socratic method with testing. They also cite the establishment of the Chinese testing that helped kick off centuries of conformity and non-innovation (read Yong Zhao's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon). We work our way through the present, skipping the parts where tests were useful for eugenics and Keeping the Lessers in Their Place.

Then we insert the usual Story of Accountability, beginning in 1983 Nation at Risk, which I always think is a bold choice since Nation at Risk predicted that the country would have collapsed by now, so maybe it's not such a great authority.

Then we move on to the "promise of the Common Core State Standards," and as usual, CAP is shameless in its willingness to recycle old baloney like "the Common Core Standards are comparable to the academic standards in the highest performing nations in the world" (this leads us, by a circuitous route, back to some Fordham Core promotional work) and in reference to the Core testing, "like the Common Core, these tests are more rigorous and of higher quality than what many previous states had before." It's a big word salad with baloney on top. CAP also lauds the imaginary "shifts in learning" which are supported by a footnote to the Common Core website, so you know it must be true.

The state of testing

CAP explains the three types of test (formative, interim and summative) and notes that federally mandated tests are summative, and are "used to give students, parents and educators a detailed picture of student progress toward meeting state standards over the past school year" and I wonder, do they giggle when they write this, or have they smacked themselves the brain with the PR sledgehammer so many times that they just don't feel it any more? The current Big Standardized Tests of course don't provide a detailed picture of anything at all.

CAP also wants us to know about high-quality tests, which "measure critical thinking and problem-solving skills" and why don't we also say that they measure the number of unicorns grazing in the fields of rainbow cauliflower growing behind the school, because they do both equally well. But CAP wants us to know that "good assessments are also field tested and evaluated by experts," so suddenly many of the BS Tests aren't looking too good.

CAP acknowledges the anti-test movement, but goes on to say that despite the backlash, national polling data shows that people really love the tests. Why, polls by Education Next and Education Post both found signs of the testing love! This is as surprising as a poll commissioned by the National Mustard Manufacturers that discovers a wide-spread love for mustard-- Post and Next are both unabashedly advocate, push for, and profit from the testing, reform and privatization industry. CAP also takes us on a tour of the many states that have tried to tweak the testing biz one way or another, and I would take you through those, but we still have pages and pages to go, my friends.

Methodology

CAP takes this moment to share their methodology, which appears to be that they held some focus groups, talked to some people, and checked in with some parents, some rich and some poor, according to CAP. How these people were either located or selected is a mystery--they could have been random strangers from the street or CAP family members. They also made sure to talk to some other thinky tank pro-reform profiteering groups like Achieve, the Education Trust, and the College Board. They describe their sample as a "wide variety of stakeholders and experts," and we will just have to take their word for it.

What did they find out? 

So what are some of things discovered in this vaguely defined researchy sort of activity?

Parents want better tests.

Here we see a return of the classic "just misunderstood" story line; the value of tests needs to be "made more evident" to parents. The report quotes one parent as "not against standardized testing, because there is a need to understand on a national level whether our children are being educated and where different districts need to have extra resources and the like." Which is a great quote, and might be a useful purpose for testing, except that it doesn't work that way under current reformster programs. Instead of, "Hey, this school is clearly underfunded and undersupported," we hear cries of, "Hey, this school has low scores. We must rescue students from it with charters and maybe close it, too."

And while parents in the focus group seem to see global and large-scale uses for testing, they aren't getting much use out of them for their own children.

Teachers do not get the time and support they need

This section is shockingly frank, reporting teachers who got PD about the PARCC when it wasn't completed, and teachers who report essentially being told to get those test scores up, never mind the regular instruction. Shocking, huh? I wonder what created that sort of atmosphere. We will all just numbly skip over the issue of whether these reformsters ever listen to a single word that teachers say, because remember-- when you want to creatively disrupt and make over an entire field, it's important to disregard any noise fomr the trained, experienced practitioners in that field.

Communications to stakeholders is weak 

Yes, it's the PR. Common Core and BS Tests are just misunderstood. If only people could be re-educated about the tests. Maybe at a nice camp somewhere. (Bonus sidebar lauds the PARCC for their clear and colorful report card, which uses nice graphics to tell parents far less useful information than could be gleaned from a five-minute phone call to your child's teacher.)

Fun sidenote: several parents reported that they got the most useful information about testing from the John Oliver show segment on tests. That was probably not the kind of info that CAP wanted to have spread.

The Test lacks value for individual students

And that, boys and girls, is how a bureaucrat translates "The students sense that the BS Tests are a bunch of time-wasting bullshit with no connection to their actual lives." In fact, some parents and teachers said they had the impression that BS Test scores aren't even used to influence instruction. It's true. Instruction is also not very influenced by reading the warts of a grey toad under a full moon.

End-of-year summatives are not aligned to instruction

Well, no, they aren't. And as long as your plan is built around a large-scale, one-size-fits-all BS test, they never will be.

Too much test prep is occuring

Well, duh. The BS Tests have high stakes. And while CAP wants to pretend that new BS Tests are just so high quality and awesome that test prep is a waste of everyone's time score-wise, most everybody's experience is the opposite. The most authentic assessment matches the instruction and the actual task being learned. Since reformsters have fixed it so that teachers cannot change the assessment, the only way to make the BS Tests a more authentic assessment is to change what we teach. As long as schools are locked into a statewide high stakes BS Test beyond their control, there will be test prep, and lots of it.

CAP found that test prep was more prevalent among the poorer students. Again, duh. Lower socio-economic status correlates pretty directly to standardized test results. Lower SES students are the ones who need the most extra help to get up to speed on the twisty mindset needed to play the "What does the test writer want me to say here" game.

Weak logistics and testing windows and nutsy bolty things

If the test must be given on a computer and there are only thirty computers in the building, there's a problem. I'm inclined to think the problem is that you are requiring the students to take the test on a computer. Also, CAP has concerns about timing of test results and test taking allowing for accurate measures and useful feedback. I'm prepared to reassure CAP that no matter when or how my students take the BS Test, it will not provide an accurate measure or useful feedback, so y'all can just relax.

So what does CAP think we should do about all this?

So here's what CAP thinks the state, district and school authorities can do "to improve the quality of assessments, address concerns about overtesting, and make assessments more valuable for students, parents, and teachers." And if you've been reading carefully, you can guess where this is going.

Here's what states should do

Develop rules for "robust" testing. Okay, CAP says "principles," but they mean rules. Write some state-level rules about what ever test should look like. Yessirree, what I need in my classroom is some suit from the state capital to tell me how to create an assessment.

Conduct alignment pogroms. Okay, maybe that's not the word they used. But they suggest that states check all up and down the school systems and make sure that every single teacher is fully aligned to the standards (including curriculum and homework). Because thanks to the Ed-Secretary-neutering powers of ESSA, reformsters can now shoot for total instructional control of every school district without raising the Federal Overreach Alarm. Oh, and the alignment should run K-16, so don't think you're getting off so easy, Dr. College Professor.

Since districts may not have the time and resources to make sure that every single solitary assessment is aligned and high quality, states should be ready to lend a hand. Give them some money. Create all the tests and assignments for them, or, you know, just hire some willing corporation to so it.

Demand a quick turnaround on test results. Because that creates more "buy-in" at the local level. Also "a quick turnaround also creates more value, and educators and families can use the assessment results more readily in their decision-making." Oh, yeah-- everyone is just waiting on pins and needles so they can make decisions about Young Chris's future. But about that...

Increase the value of tests for parents, teachers and students. How could we do that? By making better tests! Ha! Just kidding. By offering rewards, like college credits for good performance. Or awards and prizes for high scores. Like stickers and ribbons? Yes, that will make the BS Tests so much more valuable.

Jump on the innovative assessment development grant-band wagon. And here comes the punchline:

If states move forward with performance-based or competency-based assessments, they should consider carefully whether their districts and educators have the capacity and time to create high-quality, valid, reliable, and comparable performance assessments. Instead of looking to dramatically change the content of assessments, states should consider how they can dramatically change the delivery of assessments. States should explore moving away from a single end-of-year test and toward the use of shorter, more frequent interim assessments that measure student learning throughout the year and can be combined into a single summative determination. 

Yes, all-testing, all the time. It solves all of our problems-- with one perfectly aligned system that constantly logs and records and data-crunches every canned assignment and delivers the assessments seamlessly through the computer, we can plug students in and monitor every educational step of every educational day.

Finally, states should step up their communication game with better, prettier and more explainier printouts from the uber-aligned 360 degree teaching machine system, so that parents will understand just how much their elder sibling loves them.

What should local districts do? 

Bend over and kiss their autonomy goodbye? Ha! Just kidding. CAP would never say that out loud.

Get rid of redundant tests, preferably not the ones that are created by favored vendors.

"Build local capacity to support teachers' understanding of assessment design and administration." God, sometimes I think these guys are morons, and sometimes I think they are evil geniuses. Doesn't "support" sound so much nicer than "re-educate" or "properly indoctrinate." Because I have my own pretty well-developed understanding of assessment design and administration, but if they knew it, I don't think CAP would support it.

"Create coherent systems of high-quality formative and interim assessments that are aligned with state standards." Buy your entire assessment system from a single vendor. One size will fit all.

"Better communicate with parents about tests. To build trust, districts should be more transparent around assessments. This includes posting testing calendars online, releasing sample items, and doing more to communicate about the assessments." You know what's an excellent way to build trust? Behave in a trustworthy manner. Just saying. Also, this is not transparency. Transparency would include things like, say, releasing all the test items so students and parents could see exactly where Young Pat was marked right or wrong.

Tackle logistics. Remember how hard it is for schools to test many students on few computers? Districts should tackle that. It's not clear if that should be, like, a clean ankle grab tackle or districts can go ahead an clothesline that logistic. But CAP does have concrete examples, like "Plan well in advance" with the goal of "minimizing disruption." Thanks, CAP. I bet no district leaders ever thought of planning in advance. I can't believe you gave dynamite advice like that away for free.

What should schools do?

Make testing less torturous. Let students go pee.

Hold an explain-the-test social night. Have principals announce open-office hours so that any parent can stop by at any time to chat about the tests, because I'm sure the principal's day is pretty wide open and flexible.

Tell teachers things so that when parents ask questions, the teachers know the answers.

Oh, and stop unnecessary test prep. Just keep the necessary test prep, which is as much as you need to keep your numbers up. But thanks for the tip-- lots of teachers were in their classroom saying, "This test prep is a total waste of time, but I'm going to do it anyway just for shits and giggles, because I certainly didn't have it in my mind to teach my students useful things."

I am pretty sure that the further from broad policy strokes and the closer to actual classroom issues they get, the dumber CAP becomes.

How about the feds?

Use Title I as a means of threatening states that don't do all the jobs we gave them above. Help all the states that want to build the next generation all-day all-testing regimes. Spread best practices about assessment, because man, if there's anything we have learned over the past fifteen years, it's that when you want good solid answers about how to teach and assess your students, the federal government is the place to turn.

And the final recommendation?

If you are still reading, God bless you, but we needed to travel this twisty road in one go to see where it led.

It is the reformsters oldest and most favorite trick-- X is a clear and present problem, therefore you must accept Y as a solution, and I am going to sell X so well that you will forget to notice that I never explain how Y is any sort of solution.

Overtesting is a problem. Bad testing is a problem. Testing that yields up no useful results is a problem. Bad testing as an annual exercise in time-wasting futility is a problem. Testing driving instruction is a problem. CAP has given more ground on these issues than ever, but it appears to be a ju-jitsu move in hopes of converting all that anti-testing energy into support for Performance Based Education.

Don't like testing? Well, the solution is more testing. All the time. In a one-size-fits-all canned package of an education program. And here's the final huge irony. This is CAP wrapping up with a description of the long-term goal

system leaders should develop a robust, coherent, and aligned system of standards and assessments that measures student progress toward meeting challenging state standards. This exam system should be deeply grounded in the standards as assessed by an end-of-year summative test. Formative and interim assessments administered throughout the year will routinely—at natural transition points in the instructional program, such as the end of a unit—assess student understanding and progress and provide the results to teachers, parents, and students in close to real time. This system will enable everyone involved in a student’s education to make adjustments where needed in order to support learning so that no student slips through the cracks.

You know who does this sort of thing well already? Good, trained, professional classroom teachers. We assess daily, wrap those results back into our plans for the next day, and adjust our instruction to the needs and issues of individual students. We don't give pointless tests that are redundant or disconnected. We wrap larger and more formal assessments in with the informal assessments and we do it while maintaining instruction and looking after our students as if they were actual live human beings. And we do it all in  timely manner. Of course, we don't do the things that CAP considers most critical.

For this assessment system to be as useful as possible, alignment is key. All assessments—formative, interim, and summative—must align with academic standards. 

At the end of the day, CAP loves testing very much. But the thing they love even more is broadly adopted, all-knowing, all-controlling standards. One size fits all, selected by some Wiser Higher Authority who somehow knows what all human beings must know, and unhindered by those damn classroom teachers and their professional judgment, and all of it giving up a wondrous river of data, a nectar far more valuable than the vulnerable little humans from whom it was squeezed. Jam the standards in and drag the data out. That's CAP's coherent, aligned future.

TeachStrong Gathers More Anti-Teacher Moss

Just a few weeks ago, TeachStrong burst upon the scene, declaring itself ready to lift up the teaching profession with its nine steps of teacher swellness.

TS represented an odd assortment of groups, apparently led by the Center for American Progress and including such strange bedfellows as NEA and TFA, AFT and EducationPost. What could these groups answer together? How should we train teachers? Do we love public schools? In fact the whole thing had a random, cobbled-together look right up to the point that any observer asked, "Which of you groups would like to back Hillary Clinton for President" at which point a new spirit of unanimity entered the room.

Well, it's only getting weirder. CAP announced that ten more groups have signed on, including DFER and Education Reform Now (two arms of the same nominally-Dem reformy octopus), the Albert Shanker Institute,  and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

DFER is the most surprising entry, as DFER and their head honcho Whitney Tilson have not been subtle in their belief that teachers generally suck more than ever before and that evil, stinky teachers unions are a huge obstacle to making schools great. (You can find both ideas in this slide show and peppered throughout Tilson's blog).

Remember that scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Cap is in an elevator, and as it stops at each floor, it fills up with more and more people who are there to kick his ass? I wonder if the wise union leaders who signed us up for TeachStrong are starting to feel like that yet.

I do not know what TeachStrong's actual agenda is, other than pushing a blandly vague education-flavored agenda that it hopes to inject into the election (by way of any particular candidate, do you think?) But whatever it's about, it becomes increasingly obvious that NEA and AFT have no reason and no excuse to be involved. If they can team up with CAP and DFER while prematurely endorsing Clinton, it would seem that there is absolutely nobody that the unions would call out for destructive anti-public ed, anti-teacher, anti-teacher union policies-- as long as those people call themselves Democrats.

NY: Eval Overhaul In Scary Hands

The expert names for the New York teacher evaluation high speed overhaul panel are in, and it is, at best, a mixed bag.

* Thomas Kane, an economist from Harvard. Kane thinks that evaluation should be directly linked to the Common Core via high stakes testing; he likes to compare this to using a bathroom scale when dieting. He thinks too few NY teachers were evaluated as sucky last year, and he imagines that maybe video-based observation would be swell. And he was an expert witness for the Vergara trial (can you guess on which side?) He headed up the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching study, and he thinks Cuomo is pretty much on the right track.

* Catherine Brown, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, a thinky tank invariably billed as "left-leaning" despite their general on-boardedness with assaults on the teaching profession. CAP has issued any number of sloppy and ill-supported attempts to push Common Core and VAM.

* Sandi Jacobs, vice-president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group that has taken the position that US teachers are low-quality hacks. These are the guys who help US News and World rate college teacher programs (including programs that don't actually exist) and who cobbled together a report on the rigor of college teacher prep programs by sitting in their offices and looking through a stack of commencement programs.

* Leslie Guggenheim of TNTP (The New Teacher Project), a group that really wants to see more personnel decisions, including pay, based on test results. They'd kind of like to get rid of tenure, too. Their big claim to fame is a paper called "The Widget Effect," that argues that teachers are not interchangeable widgets, but are in fact interchangeable widgets of varying degrees of quality.

I will go out on a limb and predict right now, today, that these four will declare that Cuomo's evaluation plan is okee dokee. But in the interests of not-entirely-kangaroo courtage (and perhaps additional entertainment value), the group also includes:

* Jesse Rothstein is a professor at Berkeley who has spent some time shooting holes in the research of both Kane and Raj Chetty. Starting with the same data, he found far less to love about VAM.

* Stephen Caldas is a professor at Manhattanville College who tagged the NY evaluation system with the delightful term "psychometrically indefensible."

* Aaron Pallas of Teachers College. He's been busily pointing out the problems with VAMmy systems for a few years now.

Those of you who have scored proficient in counting will notice that the majority of the committee seats are occupied by fans of reformy nonsense. But wait-- there's more.

Cuomo's insanely accelerated timeline (why get things right when you can get them done quickly) means that the usual 45-day post-draft comment period on proposed regulations is being waived because, well, if you had it, people might comment. Hey, it's not like anything else about supposed ed reform has suffered from being rammed through too quickly.

So NYSUT (which you may or may not love-- honestly, you New Yorkers and your intra-union alliances and battles) is on point when they say that everybody had better start making comments and making them now. President Karen MaGee says that folks need to speak up.

"NYSUT is well aware of the unrealistic deadlines contained in the governor's convoluted and unworkable plan, and the pressure that puts on the Regents and SED to try and mitigate the worst of it. Still, those deadlines do not absolve them of their responsibility to listen carefully to parents and practitioners and make any necessary adjustments to the draft regulations they wind up writing," Magee said. "One month is plenty of time for SED and the Regents to hold public hearings and still meet their deadlines."

So if you're a New York teacher or parent, it's time (right now-- the committee meets May 7) to get word to a Regent or the State Education Department. Tell them you want hearings on the draft. Tell them what you want in the evaluation system. Tell them why the stuff the committee is about to okay is a bunch of hooey (I'd suggest a more professional word than "hooey")


You can find a guide to individual Board of Regents members right here, complete with email links. You can find some NYSED phone numbers here and a whole department index starting with the A's right here. The clock is ticking. Time to make some noise. You might want to let the non-junk-science portion of the group know you support them-- they may be feeling a bit lonely soon. Heck-- you can even send word to Andrew Cuomo himself. It looks like this whole mess isn't going to be pretty-- but it doesn't have to be ugly and quiet both.

Am I Ready for Hillary?

So now it has officially begun, again. Hillary Rodham Clinton is running for President. Let the questions begin. But the questions I'm interested in are not the stupid ones (Was she behind a nazi commie plot to blow up Benghazi?) or the horse racey ones (Will Hillary become inauthentic in a more authentic way?) Clinton, for a variety of reasons, receives a lot of stupid animosity for a lot of stupid reasons, and there are chapters of her career that could stand to see a little sunlight. I am not interested in any of that.

My question is, will she be good for public education?

I think we can all agree at this point that it's no longer possible to assume that anybody running under the Democrat standard is a supporter of public schools. Andrew Cuomo and the Obama administration have painfully proven that sad current reality. So it would be useful to know what kind of Democrat Clinton II proposes to be.

There's not much of a record to search through. Clinton's track record hasn't brought her into education issues very often. But there is one huge honking squealing flashing siren wrapped in a fluorescent red flag atop a high-powered blinking crimson light.

It's the Center for American Progress.

CAP bills itself as a progressive thinky tank, but it could also be called a holding tank for Clintonian administration members-in-waiting. Among the folks already attached to the HRC are John Podesta, who rose through a career of political aiding to become Chief of Staff for the second Clinton term. After that he formed CAP and  has run it since. Podesta protege Jennifer Palmieri has also bounced between government jobs and CAP. They are both major players in the HRC campaign.

CAP has hosted many folks related to the campaign, including Clinton herself.  In fact, if you start looking through Clinton's various appearances intended to help stave off controversy, they often turn out to be at CAP. When close Clinton advisor Huma Abedin came under fire, CAP CEO Neera Tanden was one of her staunch defenders.

CAP does an excellent job of hoovering up contributions from wealthy money-wielding folks, and it's a measure of CAP's closeness to Clinton that this money shoveling is seen in some quarters as a means of getting access to what may be the next DC administration.

All in all, it does not seem like a huge leap to think that CAP's positions on education could hew closely to the Clinton II positions. And that takes us back to the sirens and flags and blinkers.

I've looked at some CAP stuff over the past year. Here's some of what we've turned up.

CAP offered a "paper" (because that's what thinky tanks do) providing a roadmap to implementing Common Core. The paper pushes high stakes testing, test-based accountability, computer-based testing, aligned curriculum, VAM, and the fantasy that the new tests will be test-prep free.

When Senator Alexander floated his first ESEA rewrite, CAP was there to call it a failure, primarily because it didn't love high stakes testing enough. Minorities and students with disabilities need the opportunity to take many tests, because that's how they'll achieve more. Also, parents need the feedback in order to know what the kids are doing, and also to make selections from the various school choices available. Any bad idea you've ever hated in the Obama/Duncan administration, CAP has been praising right along.

CAP is not above floating new talking points with a whacky disregard for reality, including a bizarre article that tried to argue that CCSS really helps the female girls, even though the data it cited doesn't support the claims they made. CAP also occasionally turns to TNTP for research back-up, which is like hiring Daffy Duck to work on your dignity and etiquette practice for the Royal Ball.

And CAP was sloppy enough to illustrate an article about how teachers now stick around for more years by slapping up a picture of a TFA teacher who quit after two years to get a corporate job. Fun fact: after being called on it by bloggers near and far, they've left the picture on the article.

In short, there is no reason yet to think that Clinton would change a single, solitary piece of Obama/Duncan education policy. Heck, maybe she could just keep Arne around for another four years. He already knows where the office is, already has furniture he likes.

If Hillary wants my support (and while I may be representative of nobody but myself, maybe there are a few other teachers who are kind of tired of the current administration ed policies-- just two or three of us), then she had better explain exactly what she's going to do differently. I could also say we'd like to know who we're going to get for USED secretary, but hey, we thought we knew last time that we were getting Linda Darling-Hammond and look how that turned out.

But I can tell you this. I have never been a single-issue voter, but my profession has never been so attacked, besieged and crushed under policymakers' boots. So I will not, not under any circumstances, vote for any candidate who gives me the slightest inkling that she (or he) is planning to give me four more years like the last fifteen. I don't care if you're promising me a pony and your opponent is threatening to send locusts to my home town-- if you aren't going to change the destructive, educationally abusive, mandatory malpractice policies of the previous two administrations, I will not vote for you, period, full stop.

That is what I'm ready for.

CAP Scolds Lamar Alexander

CAP has rushed to the defense of the reformy status quo and takes a moment to try to school Lamar Alexander with the pearl-clutching headline, "5 Reasons Why Sen. Alexander's Draft Education Bill Fails Parents." Let's take a look at their five compelling slices of baloney.

1) Lowers academic standards.

Today, all states have academic standards that are aligned to career and college readiness.

Man, if you're going to lie, be big and bold. Their is not a shred of evidence anywhere that the Common Core (which oddly enough CAP does not mention by name once in this article-- oh, where has the love gone) or any of the versions of it actually align to college and career readiness. In fact, I'd be delighted for CAP to show us all where any such "college and career readiness" exists to be aligned to.

Nor is there a shred of evidence that Common Core standards are high standards. None.

2) Prevents parents from making informed decisions about where to send their children to school.

Yes, an ESEA rewrite could undercut the marketing programs for privatizers and takeover artists, and will create a major revenue gap for the corporations that are hoovering up billions of tax dollars on the backs of federal testing requirements. Of course, the premise here once again is that parents are dopes, completely unable to judge how well a school is doing without helpful government documents to straighten them out.

Then again, given the number of parents who find themselves being shafted, snowed, and just generally abandoned by various charter operators, perhaps some sort of consumer protection is in order. Given the number of charter schools that can't manage to keep a simple sales promise like "we'll stay open till your child finishes," maybe ESEA does need some beefing up in this department.

But the assertion that parents have no idea how their child is doing without a federally-mandated standardized test-- that's both patronizing and stupid.

3. Allows low-performing schools to languish.

The other recurring theme? States are terrible and stupid and can't be trusted. I've always found this argument in favor of federal centralism odd-- didn't most of the people working in DC get their political starts in states? Were they shiftless, untrustworthy, and dopey when they worked on the state level, but when they breathed in the air of DC they were suddenly imbued with wisdom?

But the argument here is that "states could design and implement almost any system they want with no federal checks or guardrails." And that would be bad because....? Yes, I know that states have not always exercised superior judgment in the past, but neither have the feds, and when the feds screw it up, they screw it up for a whole country-- not just one state. If you are really concerned about this, set a low bar that you won't let a state sink below. If they sink below it, then the feds can step in. Otherwise, the feds can leave them alone.

Here's the thing-- the feds have been taking steps to not allow low-performing schools to languish for over a decade, and how has that worked? Name me ten schools that used to suck and are now doing great because of federal intervention. Name me five. You can name me lots of schools and districts where federal intervention allowed some charter chains and educorporations to make a bundle, but that's it, and it's certainly not enough.

4. Eliminates federal funding for before- and after-school programs.

Well, it eliminates one funding stream for them. This is small potatoes, easily fixed by legislators if it's an actual issue across the nation.

5. Fails to provide parents with protection from substantial school budget cuts.

The concern here is about a stream of Title I funding, which is an intriguing concern coming from reformsters who have happily held Title I funds hostage in order to arm-twist states into accepting federal control of state-level education.

Without this provision, states would have free rein to cut their education budgets. As a result, children would face larger class sizes and under-resourced schools.

Because states don't have the ability to cut education budgets now? Because I'm in Pennsylvania and over the past few years we sliced off a few billion budget bucks without any trouble at all. I'm not seeing how this provision mysteriously ties state budgetary hands.

But if such cuts become a problem, you know what might help balance it out? Not having to spend billions of dollars on federally mandated tests or billions of dollars on federally mandated new curricular materials or billions of dollars on computers and infrastructure just to take federally mandated tests. If you are really deeply concerned about states having enough money, there are all sort of revenue-leeching bloodsuckers attached to the public education teats-- lend a hand and scrape them off.

Bottom line?

CAP's tale is a story of nefarious states and hapless parents, tragic situation that can only be fixed by federal mandates and bureaucrats (and their dear, close friends at Pearson et al who make a convenient bundle from the one-stop-shopping opportunity that is federally-controlled public education).

Lamar Alexander may well manage to fail parents before he's over, but it sure won't be because he failed to listen to the compassionate humanitarians at CAP. Of all the criticisms of the new draft version of ESEA out there, these are five of the lamest and least valid.

Dear Randi: About That ESEA Petition--

You've been kind enough to drop me an email about your position on testing in the might-be-new ESEA, so I wanted to share my reaction with you.

What the hell are you thinking?

You've enumerated four actions you would like Congress to take with the could-be-revamped ESEA (in partnership with CAP which already blew my mind just a little). While they are clearer than the joint-CAP statement, they don't make me feel any better.

End the use of annual tests for high-stakes consequences. Let’s instead use annual assessments to give parents and teachers the information they need to help students grow.

Oh, hell. While we're at it, let's use annual assessments to make pigs fly out of our butts, because that's just about as likely as the test being a useful source of information that I need to help my students grow. Exactly how would this work. Exactly what would I learn from a standardized test given late in the year, results to be released over the summer, that would help me grow those students?

Use the data we collect to provide the federal government with information to direct resources to the schools and districts that need extra support. 

Yes, because that has worked so well so far. The federal government is great about allocating resources on the local level without lots of red tape and strings attached. 

You know what would work better? Actual local control. Actual democracy on the local level. Actual empowerment of the people who have the largest stake in the community's schools. 

Ensure a robust accountability system that judges schools looking at multiple measures—including allowing real evidence of student learning. 

Do you remember when you were on twitter, pushing "VAM is a sham" as a pithy slogan? What the heck happened? How can the head of a national teachers' union take any approach about the widely discredited and debunked test-based evaluation of students other than, "Hell no!" 

And finally, the federal government should not be the human resources department for local schools, and should not be in the business of regulating teacher evaluation from Washington D.C. Teacher evaluation is the district’s job.

Oh, come on. In what universe does the federal government give local school districts resources, oversee their accountability system, but still leave them free to do the job. Answer: they don't. This is local control just like adoption of Common Core was freely adopted by states. This is the feds saying, "You can paint your school any color you want, and we'll buy the paint, just as long as you meet the federal standards that say all schools must be black. But otherwise you're totally freely under local control."

Randi, I have been a fan in the past, but I find this policy package an absolute headscratcher, and no matter how I squint, I cannot see the interests of public education (or the teachers who work there) reflected anywhere in the shiny surface of this highly polished turd. 

So, no. I'm not going to sign your petition, and I'd encourage others to refrain as well. This is just wrong. Wrong and discouraging and a little anger-inducing, and I'm not going to the dark side with you, not even if they have great cookies.

Sincerely,

Peter Greene

AFT, WTF?

The Center for American Progress is "a left-leaning think tank long associated with the Obama Administration," according to Stephen Sawchuk at EdWeek. That's fair.

But I might describe CAP a bit differently. I might call them an intellectually dishonest bunch of shills for the reformster movement. I might the call them one more group that ardently churns out anti-public education material under a thin shell of legitimacy, a group that is devoted to hiding the privatizer agenda under a bad costume of progressive causes. And if you want to read some of the other things I've called them, you can look here, here, here, and here.

What I would not call them is "a fit ally for any teacher union, large or small."

And yet, somehow, Wednesday saw the release of a joint statement between CAP and the AFT.

Sawchuk called it "a sort of compromise." Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post called it "a hybrid position." At Living in Dialogue, Mary Porter calls it "terms of final surrender." My own theory is that the high level of stress and pressure created by the anticipated rewrite of ESEA has created cracks in the time-space continuum leading our universe's AFT to be switched with the AFT from some other universe where the AFT neither speaks to nor represents the interests of the teachers who belong to it.

What does this statement of shared principles contain?

Well, first, it assures us that it is not concerned with all of AFT/CAP's ideas for ESEA reauthorization-- just the ones dealing with accountability, the use of tests, and the "need to elevate the teaching profession." So, what do these two groups now apparently agree on?

First, they believe that federal policy should be used "to address funding inequities, to improve teaching and learning, and to support and elevate the teaching profession." Well, that's certainly broad and fuzzy. However, for the life of me, I cannot imagine how the federal government can improve teaching. Seriously-- exactly what specific action could Congress take to improve the profession, other than to get the hell out of the way? And as always, I'm wondering why we get this crap-- does Congress ever decide that they must improve doctoring or lawyering or welding or opera singing?

Next, well--

We propose that in order to inform instruction, to provide parents and communities information about whether students are working at grade level or are struggling, and to allow teachers to diagnose and help their students, the federal requirement for annual statewide testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school should be maintained.


Wow! I mean, just, wow! Not only has AFT decided to reverse itself on opposing testing, but they're ready to go on record agreeing that big standardized tests can do magical things like diagnose student issues. On what planet will PARCC or SBA "inform instruction" ever?

AFT/AP also loves them some accountability based on multiple measures. Well, that seems like a-- wait!! WHAT??!!

While these systems should include assessment results...


So AFT now supports VAM? Randi "VAM is a sham" Weingarten says, "Sure, we'd like a little
sham in our accountability"?!!


AFT now agrees that the fundamental principles of corporate reform-- evaluation through standardized testing results. The quality, validity, use of these tests-- we're not even going to push back on this a little? Well, at least AFT is going to stand up for public education, right?

All accountability systems should be designed to help all students succeed and to identify and target interventions to schools with large achievement gaps or large numbers of low-performing, disadvantaged groups.

So-- the system preferred in many states of targeting schools for turnaround or takeover or both, the whole reformster foundational principle of "Label schools failing and then target them to be the leading edge of market penetration by privatizers"-- AFT is signing off on that, too?

Next: States should fund schools properly. Well, thank goodness AFT still believes that, anyway.

AFT/CAP believes that ESEA should be used to make it harder to get into the teaching profession, because that will make student outcomes better and give us a national economic edge. Because, if anybody should be controlling what it takes to get into teaching, it should be the federal government. Certainly not teachers.

Oh, but they have more details. AFT/CAP wants a $4 Billion investment in Title II, Part A "focused on creating incentives for states and districts to invest in systemic reforms aimed at elevating the teaching profession and supporting educators." That money should be used to bribe the states into doing some of the following Swell Things taken from both the union and reformsters playbook (eg pay teachers more, and make licensure harder).

I confess to being absolutely gobsmackedly stumped about what AFT is thinking. As far as the actual content of the document, Diane Ravitch hits it pretty well:

The mandate for annual testing in grades 3-8 should not remain in federal law. Even though the signatories to this agreement say the scores should not be used for accountability, habits die hard. They will be, even though doing so is inaccurate and invalid. There really is no point to testing every child every year unless you want to know whether they have mastered the art of test-taking. Grade span testing (elementary, junior high school, and high school) should be quite enough. No high-performing nation tests every child every year from 3-8. Unless you happen to be a shareholder in Pearson or McGraw-Hill, it is a massive waste of children’s time and taxpayer’s money.

And I also like Mary Porter's take on the compromise

The PEOPLE don’t want a “compromise” at all. They want to be rid of high-stress mass testing, and rid of the forces that use testing to put a corporate heel on their third grader’s neck, period. They don’t want annual testing for any reason at all. They don’t want their child held accountable to Pearson or McGraw Hill or to Bill Gates or Jeb Bush or Barack Obama every year, or every third year, or AT ALL.

This document is truly puzzling. Why would AFT feel the need to negotiate a compromise position about hypothetical legislation with people who won't be helping to write it? What possible use is there to AFT in compromising away so many fundamental principles for no purpose whatsoever? It's not like they can say, "Well, at least we got X or Y out of this." They got nothing. Nothing. They simply provided the public spectacle of reversing themselves and selling out their members.

We know that the Big Standardized Test accomplishes nothing for actual education. We know it serves no useful purpose in the classroom. We know that it generates numbers that are a favorite tool of reformsters to use in the offensive against public education. We know it robs time from our students and gives them nothing in return but stress and grief. We know that it will create results that will be used against those of us who work in public education.

Why would AFT sign off on this document? Why would they team up with CAP? Should I watch for an AFT/DFER joint conference, or an AFT lovefest at the next national charter school operators convention?

I'm not a member of AFT. I wish I were. Because if I were a member of AFT, I could now quit.

CAP and Teacher Retention

The Center for American Progress got another quick lesson in How the Internet Works. In their haste to prove that beginning teachers are sticking around for years and years (well, six years, anyway) they slapped up a lovely picture of a TFA temp who finished her two year stint and headed off to her real career in a corporate office. They helpfully included her name (Gabrielle Wooden) so that her actual job history could be found by anybody with an internet hookup and access to google. Joe Bower (in Canada) worked out this tricky research problem as well, and in the last fifteen hours a very long list have people have emailed and messaged me to join this particular swimming party in the warm waters of Lake Schadenfreude.

Did somebody in the photo department just not bother to tag carefully? Did the editor who attached the photo not pause to think things through? Was their googler broken? Did they not know the difference? Did they just not care? Can we expect more great headers from CAP such as the following:

Strong Conservative Contenders Expected in Republican Primary Race

Selecting Best Cuts for a Successful Barbecue

Honoring the Great Champions of American Public Education

All right. That concludes the Taking Cheap Shots portion of this post. 

If we look past CAP's unfortunate photo choice for the article, does it contain anything useful?

Essentially, CAP wants to challenge the conventional wisdom that half of all new teachers are leaving within the first five years, and I agree that it's a stat that bears examination. The Grand Mac Daddy of this sort of research is Richard Ingersoll, and his work on the subject of the changing face of the teacher force is rigorous and nuanced-- far more nuanced than the various soundbite-sized data tidbits that are generally pulled from it.

CAP raises a couple of legit concerns beyond the not-shocking news that media do not always report scientific research accurately.

One is that the existing work on teacher retention is old, that we are talking about data from seven or eight years ago. Most importantly, we are not far enough down the road to see the effects of Common Core on the teacher force. Not to do obvious math here, but there's no way to know what percentage of teachers are staying past five years when looking at teachers who entered the profession after 2009.

Another is that this data can be highly local. My theory is that it's even worse in the most teacher-hostile states. In North Carolina, a state that has gone out of its way to make teaching non-viable as a lifetime career, it would appear (via CAP) that a good local administration can make the difference between losing 10% or 20% of the teaching staff. When there's a terrible storm blowing, what you do next depends a lot on whether you're in a tumble-down shack or a solid brick structure. This is a problem with plenty of educational research and almost all education policy-- every school is different in distinct and important ways (kind of like human children-- go figure).

CAP also notes that, hey, we don't want to retain 100% of beginning teachers because some of them probably should be seeking employment in other fields, anyway. Fair enough.

Not that CAP didn't also say some stupid things in the article.

Given what is known about how much teachers improve their classroom practices during their first few years, the fact that more beginning teachers stay could actually mean that many more students today have access to more effective teachers. 

Yes, since second year teachers are the very best, a system that puts mostly first and second year teachers in front of students would be the very best one. Perhaps Gabrielle Wooden left the classroom after two years because she knew she had peaked. But CAP's use of TNTP "research" does not speak well of their research-using skills. Perhaps it's time to look at how they came up with the figures they use to dispute Ingersoll's work.

The Center for American Progress calculated this much-higher statistic of new-teacher retention using several national surveys from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

Oh. They used some federal reports and just sort of crunched those puppies up themselves. 

I think we're done here. CAP has raised some important and legitimate questions-- our knowledge about teacher retention is always lagging by several years, and in today's climate, those years can make a huge difference. I'm not sure that there's a great deal of practical use in national knowledge other than to generate talking points for those of us who debate policy; it seems like that local districts are perfectly capable of knowing what they need to know in order to tweak their own hiring and mentoring processes.

But the article is a reminder to not just toss things around without reflection. It's easy to grab a 50% departure statistic or a picture of a pretty young woman teaching because they seem to fit whatever point we're trying to make, but a little reflection and thought and additional research never hurt anybody, and might save you an embarrassing mistake.

CAP: Core Is for Ladies [Updated]

The Common Core is great for the ladies.

At least that's what we can learn from a new CAP (Center for American Progress) article that combines two now-classic Core-boosting rhetorical techniques-- wacky leaps of logic, and taking credit for what was already happening.

The piece opens with a paragraph with a shout out to Title IX, then sadly shakes its head and notes that there are still gender-based inequities in education and employment persist, particularly for girls of color and from low-income background. Plus, girls often lack access to high-quality, rigorous STEMmy courses, which would prepare them for college and high-paying careers. Not that the author offers any evidence, or even an assertion, that they lack access to a higher degree than boys.

Next up: charts and data. The data is exclusively high stakes tests based, so here's what we know. More eight grade boys get proficient-ranked test scores on science tests than eight grade girls. The boys barely edge out girls on the math test results on the eight grade test. And as always, black and brown girls score lower on the test than their white counterparts. So that's a picture of how eight graders score on those two tests. What we can actually deduce from that about the entire educational system is a whole other debate. I just want to be clear on what we're actually talking about. 

Fewer females than males take the AP computer science test. Few females take STEM related AP tests. Also, female students and students of color take more college remedial courses (the article lumps women and minorities together a lot). And we get a section (well, two paragraphs) of data with a chart about the pay gap between men and women. This, the article tells us, exists even when controlling for college major, hours worked, and occupation.

So wait-- how is the Common Core fixing all this? Let's go back to the introduction:

The Common Core State Standards represent an important step toward closing achievement gaps and opening the door to higher-paying STEM fields for millions of girls. By establishing uniform and more-rigorous academic standards, the Common Core helps ensure that all students—both girls and boys, regardless of their income levels and backgrounds—are taught to the same high expectations. 

This is followed by the data establishing, sort of, that the gender gap exists. Then we arrive at this conclusion.

More engaging and challenging standards build a strong academic foundation for all students. Girls—and in particular, girls of color—have a lot to gain from more-rigorous learning standards that better prepare them for college and career success. By raising the expectations for student learning, the Common Core State Standards allow girls the opportunity to seize STEM learning opportunities while in grade school; to pursue a diverse set of college majors; and to obtain jobs that command higher salaries. The Common Core State Standards can expand on the progress girls have made since Title IX and can have a long-lasting impact on women in society.

Many of you will recognize a composition technique known as "recycling your introduction in new words as your conclusion."

That's it. That's the whole argument. CCSS will raise everybody's standards, so women (and, I guess, students of color) will just automatically be raised up to the level of white guys. Of course, that effect would theoretically work with literally any educational standards at all-- so why didn't the states (particularly those with super high standards rated by Fordham Institution as better than CCSS) already wipe out their own gender gaps? And how can rigorous education wipe out the pay gap when the pay gap, as CAP just said, is controlled for occupation? Will lady engineers suddenly be paid more because they have a Common Core seal of approval stamped upon them?

This has to be one of the laziest arguments I have ever seen for pretty much anything. I guess it's good that they didn't print a special CCSS edition in pink for girls, but the implication that girls have been doing poorly because, well, it's just that nobody asked them to do better-- it's somehow insulting to everybody. If CAP is going to try to score social justice points, they're going to have to do much better than this.

[Update 10/30] The evening that this post went up, several of us were contacted by CAP chieftain Neera Tanden who asked if anyone wanted to take issue with the data.

The answer was, of course, that the data about gender gaps were fine, but there was no data at all to indicate that CCSS could close the gap. Tanden cited gains in the College and Career Readiness Ratings for girls in Kentucky, one of the first states to adopt the Core. I asked how those gains for girls compared to gains for boys, and she referred me to this site, where Kentucky parks all their reports on student achievement.

This actually raised more questions than it answered, because the high school data clearly shows that girls outpace boys by large margins in most tested areas (boys win on the social studies test) and that the gender gap on the College and Career Ready ratings also runs in favor of the girls. I asked about this, but have yet to hear a response (it's twitter-- I don't read much into the silence). My conclusion, however, is that the CAP article profiled above makes even less sense than it did before.]

Seasoned Teachers Not Getting Filthy Rich

In other news, scientists anticipate the sun rising in the East tomorrow morning.

Okay, this might actually be news to some folks. To listen to the merit-based pay crowd, you would think that we are currently throwing bales of teachers based on years of experience. But an issue brief  released last week by the Center for American Progress suggests that in many states that's simply not true.

"Mid- and Late-Career Teachers Struggle with Paltry Incomes," authored by Ulrich Boser and Chelsea Straus, opens with the tale of Richie Brown, a former teacher of the year candidate and "the type of teacher every principal should want." Brown left at the end of six years because he couldn't support his family, having gone several years without a raise at all.

Brown, of course, was teaching in North Carolina (motto: "We hate teachers and hope they will go away"), but Boser and Straus show that North Carolina is not so much an outlier as a trendsetter. Here are their findings.

Mid- and Late- career teacher base salaries are painfully low in many states.
Here's where the paper throws in the striking stats that truck drivers, sheet metal workers, and flight attendants make more than 10 or 15 year teaching veterans in some states.

In some states, ten year teachers who are breadwinners often qualify for various aid programs.

Large numbers of teachers work second jobs. The paper keeps using the term "base salary" to distinguish the teachers' teaching income from their total annual income, which may include their work at other glamorous jobs.

The paper provides two charts that help provide context. Here's one that shows salary growth by state between the first year and the tenth.

 And since people do so love to compare us based on international data from the OECD, here's a chance to do that

 

Though I will gladly note with pride that we beat Estonia on this one.

The authors note that this is probably part and parcel of the general downturn for the entire middle class. 

But what we can also note here is that we are not exactly pouring money into the salary raise pool. Which raises a couple of questions.

For one-- what exactly does the merit pay crowd propose to do. If the intention is to base raises on performance, will it really help if the merit-based raises are just as paltry and inadequate as the raises given for longevity? CAP uses its conclusions to make a case for more merit- and assignment-based bonuses, but this remains a pipe dream. Merit and bonus pay will not work. Beyond the issues of evaluating teacher worthiness of such bonuses, there is a more fundamental problem. Businesses pay bonuses out of the extra money they made by having a good year. School districts do not make extra money, and no school board in the country is going to go to its taxpayers and say, "Our teachers did so very well this year that we need an extra couple mill to give them the merit bonuses they deserve." CAP's data are interesting; their proposed solution is bogus.

The other big question is the same old one. Exactly how do you attract people to a profession that does not promise the ability to provide an actual life, like a grown-up family-supporting adult? 

That question itself is premature, because it assumes that reformsters want to do that. The lack of career-level salary scales may well be yet another indicator that for some folks, the goal is not to attract people to teaching, but to turn teaching into a temporary job that people do for a year or two before moving on, providing schools with a cheap pensionless labor force. If that's the goal, it would appear many states are right on track.

CAP Releases New CCSS Baloney Sandwich

For a couple of days I have had CAP's new "report" open on my desktop, trying to slowly drag myself through it. From its odd cover image (uniformed school children, grasping gigantic pencils; one tries to nonchalantly look at the other's paper, while the cheatee looks back with an expression of "Oh, no, you didn't") to its final pages of "endnotes" cataloging references to everything short of wikipedia, this "report" is a fine embodiment of the Thinky Tank As PR Firm school of advocacy.

"Roadmap for a Successful Transition to the Common Core in States and Districts" caught my eye thanks to a CAP tweet touting it as a document that"shows" how CCSS, impemented well, totally works. I think CAP has confused "shows" with "says." The "report" is actually a set of recommendations. Let's look, shall we?

Introduction

At this point, these reformster puff pieces of CCSS praise pretty much write themselves. Roadmap of knowledge and skills needed for 21st century. End of rote memorization and bubble tests; it'll be all sunshine and critical thinking form now on. Evidence based. BUT despite the awesome, CCSS are in jeopardy Righties think feds overreach, but "no federal input" into standards (at least CAP doesn't try to claim they are teacher-written). And there have been some implementation bobbles that we need to work out. Teachers are "apprehensive" about test-based eval (nice word choice-- I hear many front-line soldiers are apprehensive about being shot and killed).

But good news-- we can save the Core. Just follow this handy list of recommendations and everything will be all hunky AND dory! The recommendations are summarized in the intro, but let's skip the foreplay and jump right into bed!

1. States and Districts should administer better, fairer and fewer.

So I see the heading and think, "Hey, something I can agree with," but CAP blows it in the very first sentence:

"Testing is critical to ensuring students receive a high-quality education..." Yes, just like a yardstick is necessary to growing tall and a scale is necessary to getting in shape.

It doesn't get any better. CAP's complaint is that the current tests aren't Common Core-y enough. They should be harder and more confusing. And states should all get in the national testing pool, because what good is a test if it doesn't let you compare your kid to a kid a thousand miles away. And we'll also invoke the children of military families because we need to remake the entire education system to accommodate that minute percentage of students, and yet there is no other subgroup we're worried about like, say, students with special needs or English Language Learners or primary grade students whose first encounter with a computer is to take a standardized tests. All of those students should suck it up and get some grit, but military students who move into new states should have a nation's education system designed around them. Also, if CCSS is not a curriculum, how does it help traveling students?

And with better tests, there should be no drilling or test prep. Because although the tests will show if a student is getting a complete education, it will not test anything related to actual knowledge? As long as there are standardized tests, there will be standardized test prep. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

2. States and Districts should phase in high stakes for teachers and students

I'm pretty sure the authors managed to write this section without including a single True Thing. Take this:

A meaningful system of teacher evaluation that assesses teacher performance across multiple measures, including multiple observations of classroom instruction, student feedback, and measures of achievement gains based on assessments over multiple years, can fairly and reliably identify effective teaching.

And so on. We'll use these VAMMY systems, even though they've been repeatedly debunked and proven inaccurate, invalid, and unreliable, and we will identify the best teachers and then we will, somehow, move them around so that students who previously had ineffective teachers will be given great ones. I've already explained how this is a massive crock.But let me do the short form.

In a 2011 study of 10 school districts across 7 states, the National Center for Education Evaluation found an “overall trend that indicates that low-income students have unequal access, on average, to the district’s highest-performing teachers,” and the distribution of effective teachers is uneven within
and across districts.

No. The study found that low-income students tend to get low scores on tests (not a new finding). The study then assumed that no other reason in the whole entire world could account for that except low-performing teachers, so that must be what kind of teachers the poor kids have.

CAP recognizes that teachers may have concerns about being evaluated by this cockamamie system, and while those concerns are valid, CAP recommends that schools do it anyway-- just not so fast that you spook the natives.

3. States should have statewide accountability systems that single out individual schools

Not how they put it, but my way has fewer words. Use tests to identify problem schools, redirect money and resources accordingly. Show no results because you didn't address the actual problems. Declare schools useless failures, announce that only closing them and bringing in charter operators will fix the schools. Fortunately, charter operators will not be hard to attract since area is receiving additional resources.

Okay, I actually skipped ahead. They only admit to the first couple of steps. I filled in the rest based on what we've already seen in great urban reformist areas.

4. States and schools must ensure that teachers are engaged in the development of—and have access to—comprehensive curricula and instructional materials aligned with the Common Core standards.

Least weaselly thing they've said so far. Giving teachers a fighting chance to adapt to new materials seems like a no-brainer, but a few years ago reformsters were so sure we could build the airplane while we were flying it that this objection was rolled over repeatedly. Nowadays fashionable reformistas are more into building the plane on the ground, so they're "discovering" this idea that teachers have been yelling at them for a while.

CAP points out that schools and states can do this design work on their own, but, hey, there are plenty of consultants out there just itching to cash in on the new standards help schools achieve excellence.

5. States and districts must invest in teacher preparation and ongoing professional development for educators. 

Speaking of consultants, there are many that would love to take your money for help you out with teacher training. And don't forget, states-- all college and university teacher training programs should be assimilated as well. It's easier to train them properly if you catch them young.

6. States, districts, and schools should provide additional time for teachers to collaborate and plan together. 

This is not stupid. Oddly enough, it's at this point that CAP chooses to bring up the example of what they do in high-performing school systems of other countries. You would think they would have already brought up examples of high-performing nations that organize their schools around a national system of standards-- oh! except there aren't any!

CAP points out that Finland, for example, has its teachers up in front of students several hundred hours per year fewer than we US teachers spend. And then CAP recommends that the solution here is to lengthen the school day. Damn, CAP. This was like shooting fish in a barrel and you still ended up spearing the family cat.

7. States and districts should engage educators, parents, and other stakeholders in the implementation effort

Parents, teachers, community members, businesses, institutions of higher education, and student advocates must be engaged regularly for the Common Core to be implemented successfully.

The fact that we're even talking about this as a recommendation is a sign of how far off track we've been. This is like including "put on pants before you leave the house" in a list of fashion recommendations. Put another way-- if this is news to you, shame on you.

But it does represent a change of direction for reformsters, who started this Journey to the New Status Quo thinking they could just snap their fingers and everyone would fall into line. Live and learn, I guess. Wouldn't it be wacky, though, if someone like David Coleman stepped up and said something like, "Yeah, I was kind of a dick about all of this, and I'd like to apologize for not considering your thoughts and feelings. I'd like to apologize, and I'd like to start over, and I'd like to begin our fresh start by listening to you, teachers, parents community members, etc."

But I digress. What CAP actually advocates is that districts should " partner with supportive nonprofits and other organizations across the state." So, not actual people. Just get hooked up with the right groups.

Schools should prepare parents and families for the revelation that their children suck (probably not looking to Arne for a model here). As for teachers--"States and districts must similarly engage teachers. Not only will it increase teacher readiness to teach to the Common Core, but it also recognizes that teachers are trusted ambassadors with parents and other stakeholders." CAP's point, driven home through the paragraph, is that teacher support is a great marketing tool. They even cite a 50CAN (another fine CCSS advocacy group) study indicating that teachers are most trusted when it comes to evaluating educational changes. No kidding! Who knew?

8. States should help districts get enough computers to take tests.

These tests are supposed to be taken online, because, computers. But those test-taking terminals computers aren't going to buy themselves. There's a boatload of money to be handed over, and it will have to some form somewhere.

9. States and districts should use available resources andguidance to improve the Common Core implementation process

That turns out to mean that states and districts should pick up some of these handy papers from various other CCSS-promotion groups. So, like a last "buy our t-shirts in the lobby" announcement.

Conclusion

Insert rewrite of introduction.

Bonus Round

Each recommendation comes with some tales from particular districts. Tales from Hartford's teacher eval system, North Carolina's Move Teachers Around program, Colorado's Involve Teachers in Writing Programs program. Some are just filler-- after the first (fewer tests) section, the anecdotes were of school districts that are definitely looking into probably doing something about that. I didn't find any of them compelling; perhaps you'll feel differently.

Notes!

CAP wants you to see how researchy this paper is. However, almost none of the notes reference actual scholarly studies of any of the standards in action. There are plenty of newspaper articles, many commentaries from other reformsters on the topic of "What I Think You Should Do."In short, there is "proof" in this paper on the same order of the "proof" I include in this blog when I link to myself and to other bloggers.


Finishing Up

Since falling down the reformy rabbit hole, I've become kind of fascinated with this kind of faux scholarly paper product. CAP hasn't done anything more rigorous than what I do here at the blog-- state my opinion in a semi-organized manner, arguing for it based on my own ideas about what's right, what should be right, and how I think the world works. The less-than-serious tone and language I use is my way of acknowledging that this blog is just me, shooting off steam, generally based on nothing except my own powers of observation, logic and language. It would be foolish to use anything I've ever posted as "proof" of anything.


But this type of faux paper dresses it all up in the appearance of scholarship (look! endnotes!!) and slick layout, attached to an organization with a fancy name and slick production values. All of these fake thinky tank PR groups are doing their best to convey some sort of Great Authority when in fact they are just like the rest of us-- bullshitting some words about what they happen to believe is right and true, using some sort of political PR theater to add weight.

It makes me wonder how much undeserved power I could gather if I were an organization instead of a guy, and somebody had given me a huge grant to fancy things up around here. I don't begrudge CAP the right to get on line and express their own sets of beliefs about education, but the only difference between CAP and a Mercedes Schneider or a Jersey Jazzman or a Paul Thomas is that CAP comes wrapped in the finest veneer that money can buy (well, and the number of actual facts used, but let's let that slide for the moment). [Added value addendum: And it's a good pile of money too. From Schneider's research, we learn that CAPS got a nice piece of the Gate$ Foundation pie-- $6.4 million since 2008, with $550,000 specifically for CCSS.]

In other words, stripped of its glossy pdf file, using links instead of endnotes, and attached to its three authors instead of a big PR group, this would just be one more unremarkable blog post, and would probably sink into the same couple-hundred views ephemeracy as most blog posts. Beyond its repackaged same-old-baloney content, this "report" is one more example of how the reformsters depend on money to keep their point of view alive in the marketplace of ideas.

CAP Serves Some CCSS Baloney

The Center for American Progress came down hard for the Common Core last week, providing yet another field test for the 100% baloney sandwich that is the Core's urban poor talking point menu.

In "The Common Core Is An Opportunity for Educational Equity,", CAP asserts, "The Common Core State Standards hold promise for low-income students, students of color, English language learners, and students with disabilities, who traditionally perform significantly worse than their peers." And you know that this is a serious position paper because it has footnotes and stuff. What it doesn't have is sense.

Quality Control

The standards will act as a "quality-control check," and let's just stop right there, because do you know, CAPsters, how a quality control check works? Because this seems to be a point on which many CCSS supporters are really fuzzy.

Quality control does not mean that every piece that rolls down the assembly line is now suddenly up to standard. What quality control means is that we check every piece on the line, and when we find pieces that don't meet the standard we throw them away. Quality control does not mean every toaster will be perfect-- it means that every toaster that makes it out of the factory will be perfect.

Using Common Core standards as quality control can only mean one thing-- we will find the students who don't meet the standards and we will throw them away. This is really, really wrong and completely counter to the point of American public education and I can't believe I even have to type that out, but apparently I do.

Out of the Stone Age

Students will explore concepts deeply, work together to solve complex problems, and engage in project-based learning—instead of focusing on worksheets and rote memorization. 

Yes, because no teacher in the history of teacherdom ever knew how to teach concepts or cooperative learning or anything except worksheets before CCSS.


Highlighting Educational Gaps

In this section, CAP notes that low-income students and students of color are less likely to have access to higher-level courses, are more likely to have inexperienced or out-of-area teachers, and along with ELL and students with disabilities are less likely to graduate on time. They have footnotes, and I have no reason to doubt that these are all true facts.

Students of Color and Low Income Students Have Lower College Outcomes

Fewer of these students attend college and a high percentage of them need remedial courses. Again, I believe that by and large this is all true.

And Now That We've Wound Up, The Pitch!

So having established the need, I expect we're now going to make a case for how the implementation of CCSS will help address these issues and-- wait! What? Ummm... no, this is the whole conclusion, verbatim:

The Common Core will improve education quality for all students—particularly traditionally underserved students. Raising standards and preparing all students for college and careers will help reduce the disparities identified for low-income students, students of color, ELLs, and students with disabilities.

But-but-but--HOW!! Fairy dust! Magic beans! I mean, hell, I can type "Eating a baloney sandwich every day will make me grow tall, handsome and wise," but that doesn't make it so! Are you not even going to TRY to explain how Common Core will help? Not even try a teensy weensy bit??

Because-- and I don't think you need me to tell you this, but I want you to know that I know-- those are serious issues that you've laid out. Inequality of opportunity, of education, of employment, or health care-- this is a bit of a national shame. The fact that schools intended for the urban poor are underserved, underresourced, underfunded, understaffed-- I mean, all those things you listed as gapos and problems are things that we really ought to be trying to fix.

But here we are in the hospital ER looking at a patient who has been hit by a truck, who is broken and bleeding, and you want to offer him a magical baloney sandwich??!! Come on, CAP. You can do better than this.