Merryl Tisch Shows How Test Supporters Get It Wrong

New York Chancellor of the Board of Regents Meryl Tisch stopped by All In with Chris Hayes to avoid answering some pointed questions about high stakes testing and the opt out movement in New York. She had the additional disadvantage of sitting beside Diane Ravitch, who did answer questions and made Tisch look even slipperier by comparison, but I think Tisch's appearance is a quick, capsuled look at what promoters of high stakes testing get wrong.

After opening with some background (Atlanta convictions, rising parent opposition, left-and-right wing hatred for Big Standardized Tests), Hayes notes that New York's opt out numbers are huger than ever and turns to Tisch.

Hayes: When you see the reports of opting out, including the high strong numbers from some areas, do you think "People are crazy" or "We are doing something wrong"?

Tisch does not think people are crazy (phew!) and believes that people "should act in what they perceive to be the best interests of their children." That's an important construction because like many BS Test fans, Tisch is also a charter school fan, which puts her in the awkward position of believing that parents should opt out of public school, but not public school testing. Choice is only okay sometimes.

So why the push back? "Perhaps we have not been clear enough in describing the intent of the test." So, opt out is a PR problem, because if people disagree with us, it could only be because they don't understand how right we are. So what is the intent of the test?

"The intent of the test is to give a snapshot of performance and allow parents to know where their children are at any given point in their educational career as compared to their peers."

And there's your first problem, because that doesn't even make sense. "Snapshot" and "at any given point in time" do not go together. I can't see how my child is doing at any point in time because I only have a snapshot from one particular point in time.

Tisch moves on immediately to asserting that income inequality is directly tied to the achievement gap (which is actually the BS Test score gap) for our poor students, and she starts waving the Wait Let Me Speak hand at Hayes because he is completely ready to call her on that piece of baloney, so she squeezes in that poor students can't make more money unless they have access to high quality education. Hayes calls her on her correlation-causation fallacy, but I'd like to call her on her fallacious equating of high quality education and high stakes snapshot testing. What does taking the BS Test have to do with access to high quality education?

The reformster answer (which Tisch doesn't get to) is that BS Test results allow us to target the students who are struggling. The problem here is that 1) we already know where they are and 2) after years of targeting them with BS Testing, we have yet to actually get them additional resources to help them do better.

Ravitch gets her turn and uses it to point out that tests are not vaccinations and these tests are not useful because the results provide no useful information. "There is no diagnostic value to the test," somehow prompts Tisch to smirk, like she has caught the help trying to act like they know how caviar really tastes. Hayes notes that Tisch clearly has something she wants to share with the rest of the class, and she unveils Test Purpose #2.

The tests are a diagnostic tool for curriculum and instruction development on the state level, and a way of making sure the taxpayers get their money's worth.

In other words, a completely different purpose for the tests than the one she offered about two minutes earlier. It's now a snapshot of how our children, schools, and systems are doing-- for the taxpayers. So that business about info for the parents was, what-- just spitballing? Because if this is the actual purpose of the test then 1) what's wrong with the NAEP and 2) why is it necessary to test every child every year?

Hayes points out that Tisch gave a non-response to the observation that the tests are not diagnostically useful for students, parents or children, and she insists that she be allowed to insert a non-response to that point. When parents opt out it messes things up. Also, she was in a doctor's office where a parent wanted to compare their child to a growth chart. Like the vaccination analogy, this is bogus for many reasons. I'll just pick one: When I weigh my child, I get a full picture of how much my child weighs, but when my child takes a BS Test and I get just the score, I get only the tiniest sliver of a slice of how well my student is doing in school.

As for the diagnostic value of the tests, Tisch asserts (with her asserty hand waving before her) that school districts report "all the time" that they make decisions about curriculum around the test results. Which certainly proves that schools will teach to the test as best they can, particularly when threatened with punitive responses to the results. This does not prove that either test results or the following curriculum adjustments serve the educational interests of the students. She also says words about how the ability to glean specific info from these tests is really important, which is not remotely the same as proving that it can actually be done.

Hayes asks Ravitch if there's a right way to do test-driven accountability or if it's just the wrong tree at which to be woofing. "Wrong tree," says Ravitch. You can't do the wrong thing the right way. The model is wrong. We are the most overtested nation in the world.

What would Tisch like to say to parents?

Tisch would like parents to understand that this is all the union's fault, and that if teacher evals hadn't been linked to the tests, they would all be testing away happily. Children have just been trapped in a labor dispute between the governor and teacher.

In about six minutes, Tisch manages to showcase a full range of pro-test arguments, all specious.
If the goal is to give parents information about their student, why does the test return so little data? And what difference does it make if other students opt out?

If the goal is to give teachers and schools actionable data to inform instruction, why return so little data, so late?

If the goal is to give taxpayers and policymakers feedback about how the system is doing, testing every child every year is by far the least cost-effective method.

If the goal is to identify and diagnose troubled schools for intervention, why don't bad scores trigger a release of additional resources for the identified school?

And why do pro-testers never, ever provide solid data about how well the tests actually measure any of the things they supposedly measure?

Tisch can blame the opt out movement on the union and politics all she wants; the reality on the ground is that more and more parents have had enough. The BS Test boosters are going to need better talking points.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Randi, LIly, and Diane at NPE

It was the marquee event of the NPE convention. Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Randi Weingarten sitting down with Diane Ravitch in front of a stuffed-full ballroom. I did not take notes, and the video is not up to rewatch yet, but I want to put my impressions down before they fade too much.

An organizer made one more fruitless attempt to get a room filled with teachers to behave, because when it comes to behaving like good students, teachers are the worst. But as he did so, he informed us that 1,000 people were already online to watch-- so we had to start on time.

Xian Barrett did the introductions, which had to be just a bit nervewracking, but he set a nice tone-- not too formal, but still respecting the weight of the occasion. Nicely done.

My expectations were not high. Both Garcia and Weingarten have carefully staked out and fully fleshed out positions, and while they are the faces of their unions, they are also tied to a big bundle of leadership teams and union bureaucracy. I did not imagine for a minute that either was suddenly going to throw up her hands and say, "Yeah, you know what? I've been wrong about that. I'm going to go ahead and reverse my union's position on the spot."

But it was my first time to see either in person, and I was interested to see how that played out.

Both came in full professional labor leader snappy dress and were whisked to one side moments before the start to don official NPE t-shirts. Garcia by far beats all comes in a hair contest-- it is just a magnificent mane, as iconic as an Elvis DA flip.

The discussion got off to a somewhat plastic start-- Ravitch asked a question and each leader in her turn launched into full-on campaign mode, which led to Ravitch's imposition of a three minute time limit on answers. Ravitch was herself as moderator-- one minute she's a scrappy political veteran and the next she's your grandmother learning how to use a smartphone app.

My not-high expectations were met. Garcia displayed a great grasp of how privatization, crushing unions, dismantling democracy, and test-and-punish all fit together into a larger picture that is bad for teachers, students, and public education. But she either can't or won't see how Common Core is part and parcel of that same drive to break up public education, and her enthusiasm for the Core (there's a great app for the Core! whee!) is both disappointing and intellectually puzzling. Hating testing and loving the Core is like going to the pound and saying, "I want to take home a puppy, but only the end that smiles and licks you on the face. I don't want to take home the end that poops."

Both were support-ish of the opt out movement (Parents should be able to do it; teachers should be able to talk about it). But neither was very strong in denouncing the enshrinement of testing in the ESEA rewrites. You can read a full version of what were essentially Garcia's remarks which boil down to "Less testing, less punishment for test results, and no using tests for purposes for which they weren't created." She is not so much envisioning a world without the Big Standardized Test as a world where the Big Assessment is so swell that everyone welcomes it cheerfully (in part because her imaginary assessment will cover what she considers the good parts of Common Core). She might as well envision a future in which students will ride to school on the backs of brightly colored dinosaurs. The assessment she imagines cannot and will not exist on a national scale.

I did hear Weingarten say one interesting thing (well, two, if you count the part where she said that she had no particular desire to marry her partner). What I believe I heard her say was that testing "has killed" or "has destroyed" the promise of Common Core. I'll be checking the tape-- if I'm correct, then Weingarten just declared Common Core dead, which is not as good as repudiation, but I'll still take it. Her hardest question actually came afterwards, when Mercedes Schneider asked her about that damn robocall to help Cuomo (let's not pretend it wasn't that).

The big moment came with the agreement by both that their unions would no longer take money from Gates. I don't imagine for a moment that they did so on the spot (or that they have the authority, really, to make that decision), but it was still a nice moment.

It was interesting to see their personal styles on display. I have to love Garcia for being quick-witted and snarky; plus, she speaks in a manner that seems completely authentic, like a regular human being. Weingarten is more of an old-school labor leader who suddenly erupts into a hollering bluster that I expect is a measure technique for whipping a crow up into a frenzy, but on Sunday seemed a bit affected and at times over-the-top. But I was born in New England, so maybe that's me.

I know lots of folks who watched from home and in the ballroom were disappointed. I wasn't, but as I said, I wasn't expecting much. Large national unions cannot turn on a dime, and labor leaders live with political realities (we may not like it, but I have heard multiple times from multiple directions that mandatory testing is untouchable in ESEA in part because advocates for civil rights and students with disabilities support testing fervently).

Their support of Common Core is misguided and wrong. Their opposition to test-driven reform-- but not the actual tests-- is befuddling. They have some great things to say about building and defending union power-- but having the power would mean a great deal more if they'd use it for something useful. I haven't liked their position on Common Core and testing

But here's the thing to like about Sunday at NPE.

They were there.

The two leaders of the largest teacher unions in the country agreed to come explain themselves and answer questions in front of a houseful of people who were vocal advocates for public education. Think back less than two years to Dennis Van Roekel dismissing NEA member opposition to Common Core with a flip, "Well, what do you propose to do instead?" That's not where NEA is now.

Even if you're just paying lip service-- you can't do it if you don't know what the answer is supposed to be. Two years ago our union leaders didn't even know that. Before giving her answer about testing, Weingarten acknowledged that some people were going to boo (they didn't, and there wasn't much booing, but there was plenty of hissing at some of the worst)-- she knows that her positions are not popular with advocates for public education.

Two years ago the Network for Public Education barely existed, and the support for public education that it represents was fragmented and invisible to the folks doing political calculus. Not that long ago national union leaders could have easily dismissed NPE and the viewpoint it represents. Today, they cannot.

On so many fronts, the folks who stand up for public education are becoming harder to ignore (looking at you, NY opt outs). Reformsters are spending money to try to rebut and respond to public education advocates. In fact, Peter Cunningham of Education Post, the heavily financed pro-reformster rapid-response PR organization was also at the convention this weekend.

You know the drill. First they ignore you. But eventually, they can't. The movement to defend and support public education has become strong enough that the union presidents came to us to talk about it. Yes, they brought much of their same old baggage. But they came.

As several speakers noted this weekend, this is a long haul. We are not going to turn any of the large organizations involved quickly or abruptly. But we can help them evolve. And the best place to start is with our natural allies, and THAT can't start until they show up to talk to us. Who knows-- maybe next time they'll come to listen to us, too. Baby steps.

Six Recommendations for Responsibility

Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue should be on your bookmark list. In addition to Cody's own valuable voice, the blog provides a great assortment of voices from the education world.

Last month he included a piece with a rather twisty pedigree. Last year NEA entered into a project with VIVA Idea Exchange (I'm supposed to put a little TM with that, which gives you your first hint about these folks). VIVA is linked to New Voice Strategies, a PR opinion-pushing firm that Dennis Van Roekel (blessedly-former NEA president) used and which hired Paul Toner once Massachusetts teachers had booted him out of his union president job. Reportedly, 900 teacher comments were solicited, then boiled down to the final product.

A result of that project was presented at Living in Dialogue, prompting considerable discussion both at LID and at Diane Ravitch's blog. There's considerable debate about how hard VIVA pushed for certain inclusions in the final product and how "pure" the process remained. I thought I'd just go ahead and see if I thought the results were any good. Here are the six recommendations regarding accountability:

1) Shift away from blame, toward shared responsibility.

This requires moving away from models that hold any ONE stakeholder as solely responsible for a student’s learning, and moving to a model acknowledging that teachers, families, students, and policymakers share responsibility for how well students learn.

Interesting list of stakeholders, as it includes politicians but misses taxpayers, voters, and members of the community. I'm not just nitpicking-- I consider that a glaring omission. But beyond that, I would certainly support any model that didn't involve intoning that teachers are the single biggest factor in student learning, so let's spank them real hard. I would welcome moving away from the ridiculous reasoning that if 50% of a state's students are not proficient, the only possible explanation is that 50% of the state's teachers are bad teachers.

So, basic idea is good. Specific iteration needs work. 

2) Educate the whole child

Good lord, yes. Reformsters have insisted that the parts of the child that they believe they can measure are the only parts that matter. Educating the whole child has not always been one of public education's Best Things, but we have never moved further away as a matter of deliberate policy than we have right now. If teachers are going to do their whole job, accountability freaks will have to accept that not all parts of a teacher's job performance can be measured easily, or even a all.

3) Top down funding without top down control.

This is unicorn farming. The federal government simply doesn't play this game; all federal money comes with strings attached. And the writers have sandwiched a whole lot of stuff in this particular bullet point that smells of horn polish.

Educators in every state need to develop education standards, benchmarks, and assessments in all content area due to an increasingly mobile and transient student population – without dictating a specific curriculum.

First, no. No, they don't. I know reasonable people believe in the inevitable necessity of national standards of one sort or another. I do not. And while I would be extraordinarily hard to budge on this point, I have never seen a single solitary piece of evidence that national standards have any educational value at all. None. Not a bit. So don't keep saying that to me like it's self-evident, because it's not, nor has anyone provided any evidence yet.

Second, you cannot fix your (imaginary) transient student problem with anything except a national curriculum.

They also have a wish list of three unlikely items and one good one. The three unlikely ones include a constitutional amendment requiring states "to direct necessary funds toward public education." Who's going to decide what "necessary" means? Their wish list also calls for a combination of lawmaking and lawsuiting to establish education as a civil right and supplement limited state money with limitless federal money. So, the feds won't exert top down control, except when they do.

The fourth item is full testing transparency-- what the tests cost in money and time and scoring and everything else. That would be peachy.

4) Teacher autonomy and professionalism

Recognize educators as professionals who care about the growth of students, the climate of schools, and the state of education in today’s world, and allow them the autonomy afforded to such professionals.  Given the impact of teachers on student achievement, it is imperative that teachers be treated as trained professionals who know their students, their students needs, and how best to deliver instruction in the most appropriate way.  Allowing teachers to determine best practices will result in removing scripted, one-size-fits-all lessons that often emerge from upper-level decision-making, ignoring the human element. Classroom teachers know how to assess, monitor, and adjust, and if allowed to use their professional judgment with their own students, schools will witness student growth.

Well, yes. That sounds about right, other than "given the impact of teachers on student impact" is just reinforcing the accountability myth that bad test scores can be best explained by bad teachers.

The second paragraph, unfortunately, is way too mealy-mouthed. Teachers should be valued. Their voices and opinions should be considered. Teachers should be free to offer comments and criticism without fear of retaliation (you know--we could offer them some sort of job protection that we could call "tenure").

Sorry to unload on this particular article, but I am tired of teachers and reformsters putting forth as their best ideal a world where teachers are "considered" and "listened to." I'd love those things. But as long as we're staking out unicorn farms, I'd like a world where the state licensing board for teachers and teacher education programs is composed entirely of working teachers. I'd like a world where no major decision about a school building can be made without the approval vote of the teaching staff. I would like a world where nobody is allowed to hold a major education oversight position, like charter school operator or state ed  commissioner or secretary of education, without at least ten years of teaching experience in a public school. That's my unicorn farm, and it includes a hell of a lot more than teachers just being listened to politely by all the non-teachers who have the actual power over the world of education.

And don't tell me they were just being realistic when they were writing this. They drop-kicked realism easily enough one item ago when the feds were going to hand out free money with no strings and the states were going to approve a Constitutional amendment. If the writers' biggest dream was to be listened to, they need to dream bigger.

5) Emerge from evaluation to support


Now here are some big dreams. Scrap every stitch of the current system, they say, and replace it with teachers providing an end-of-year report. No evaluations linked to merit pay, licensure, punitive crap, nothing, nada.

I can hear the public (some of whom I've been hanging out with over vacation)-- "So bad teachers will just write their own job performance review?" And I have to agree with them.

Look, if we want everyone to extend trust and respect to teachers based on our professionalism and ability, then we need to extend that same courtesy to our principals. Their proposed self-evaluation certainly has a place in a larger picture, but it wont stand by itself. More than simple honesty, it requires a self-awareness that even some really great teachers lack. I cannot imagine a functioning evaluation system that does not include principal obeservation.

I agree that the goal of such a system needs to be support, not punishment. That's good for the profession, good for the teacher, and good for the school system.

However, test scores have no place in teacher evaluation. You can send the principal to my classroom every day; I won't mind a bit and you'll probably learn a lot about how I do my job. But looking at my students' test scores won't tell you a damn thing about how well I teach.

6) One size does not fit all.

Students arrive with their own unique strengths, aptitudes, interests, and life experiences.  Education begins with recognizing who our students are as persons and facilitating the development of their gifts. 

Yeah, that's about right. And this, too:

Education must extend beyond a narrow academic focus to include a broad range of human developmental goals and values.   In order to educate the whole child, we need to support student growth through individualized guidance programs, electives that nurture aptitudes and extra-curricular activities that develop social skills.  This can only happen in a safe and democratic environment. Schools and school districts must communicate to students that they are accepted, valued, and needed just as they are, regardless of their academic achievements.

It's a good finish for this proposed list that-- well, it came from somewhere, somehow. It's kind of sort of about responsibility and accountability, though beyond the teachers-grade-themselves idea, it's not exactly loaded with actionable material. It's an interesting exercise in I-don't-know-what, because I can't imagine any reformster being convinced by it, and I'm not sure (beyond a few choice pull quotes) what PR usefulness VIVA will glean. Apparently there's another group working on turning it into another sort of document, so we can look forward to that.

More on Rochester Charter Wunderkind (Or: How Hard Is It To Do Your Job, Anyway?)

It has only been a day since the story of Ted Morris, Jr., Rochester's 22-year-old charter school phenom and new holder of a NY State charter school authorization, began to unravel.

I did some quick research and wrote about it. Mercedes Schneider turned her research mojo loose. Leonie Haimson turned up some inconsistencies in his CV. And Diane Ravitch covered the story as well, drawing out a note from his alleged former principal shooting more holes in his story.

The Democrat & Chronicle has... well, "updated" would be an understatement and "finally did the legwork they should have done the first time" might be too mean. At any rate, a whole new version of the story appears here.

Turns out that young "Dr." Morris might have overstated his resume a bit.

Elaine Comarella, the [Hickock] center's CEO, said his title was actually administrative assistant, and that the responsibilities he listed in the resume were "a little overshot."

His high school administrators remember him as someone who was a great talker and very sociable, but not real big on attending classes. Morris allows as he just wasn't challenged enough. And at this point it's not really clear where he did or did not get his college degrees. It does seem that none of his diplomas involved interacting directly with humans.

My favorite new detail may be that he found his board of trustees mostly through LinkedIn, Craigslist and a website for nonprofits.

You can find even more here at Mercedes Schneider's update from today. The information just keeps rolling in. 

Justin Murphy, the reporter covering the story, clearly did some real legwork and talked to many of the parties involved (though some have yet to return his calls), and it's great that he did. But here's what I want to underline.

Twenty four hours.

It took a handful of bloggers and one reporter twenty-four hours to find the holes from which the fishlike smell emanates from this story. I don't know how much time Mercedes, Leonie and Diane spent following up on this, but I used the twenty-five minutes left over after I finished my cafeteria sub on Monday. A computer, some search terms, google, and twenty-five minutes.

The New York Board of Regents has had considerably more than that. The guy has been sending in letters of intent for this charter since January of 2010! Did nobody at the Board of Regents do even a cursory background check? If I take care of filling out the paperwork carefully for him, can my dog get authorization to run a charter school in New York?!!

I mean, I want to do a small tsk tsk to reporter Murphy, but I know that sometimes a nice press release lands on your desk and a quick seemingly harmless feel-good story writes itself without you having to exert much effort, and that's kind of irresistible. Also, it's becoming clear that Morris got a PhD in shmoozing from somewhere. But Murphy at least went back, did his job, and made things right.

Will the New York Board of Regents do the same?

[Update-- because this story just never stops-- My hat is off to Murphy-- I was hard on him above but he has been on this story like a boos all day--

Breaking: Ted Morris, he of suspicious resume, resigns from board of trustees of Greater Works Charter School. #ROC
— Justin Murphy (@CitizenMurphy) November 26, 2014

Morris submitted his resignation shortly after this story was published: http://t.co/nUwNTgo6rD #ROC
— Justin Murphy (@CitizenMurphy) November 26, 2014

School trustee Peter Kozik, a Keuka College prof, takes over. "It was too much of a distraction." School will still open.
— Justin Murphy (@CitizenMurphy) November 26, 2014

What will that mean in terms of his total involvement with "his" school? Stay tuned, campers!

Still unrolling-- Dr. Kozik apparently has a specialty in adapting CCSS for students with disabilities. Here's his presentation-- from EngageNY.

And here's his LinkedIn recommendation for Dr. Ted

Ted has done an outstanding job as the Executive Director of the Greater Works Charter School where I serve on the Founding Board of Directors. He listens exceptionally well, is extremely detail oriented, and has balanced many complex tasks in developing an application for the charter school successfully. He is bright, gracious, and works well beyond what's required to ensure the success of the group. He is a talented team builder as well as a "team player." I recommend him unequivocally for any position for which he is qualified.

So the whole thing should be in great hands now. Holy smokes-- is this any way to run a school??

The Mystery of Excellence

Diane Ravitch's recent columns about Ms. McLaughlin, one of the undeservingly employed terrible teachers of the Vergara trial, underlines one of the central problems of the whole teacher evaluation portion of the reformster dream.

Ms. McLaughlin won awards for teaching excellence not once, but twice in her career. And yet one of the plaintiffs found her to be grossly ineffective. Now, it's possible that there are factors at play here-- the plaintiff was reportedly recruited for the lawsuit by her only "effective" teacher, a teacher who was RIFed and whose job was then taken by Ms. McLaughlin. So, wheels within wheels.

But could it be possible that a teacher so many students found wonderful was a total dog for another teacher? Of course. Because as much as we think we get excellence in this country, excellence is still a mystery.

I don't imagine I'm God's gift to teaching, but I do okay. My feedback from students, both blind and personal, has been good over the years. But there have been years of my career when I was definitely less good, and there have been students who have been sure that I sucked hugely.

I had a colleague years ago whose students were sure they never did a damn thing in her class, that she was confused and disorganized and didn't know what she was doing. Yet those students came to me next, and invariably time after time I would ask a question about X, and they would answer it, and I would ask, "How did you know that?" and they would realize that Ms. McClueless had actually taught them a great deal.

And it's not just teaching. Every successful writer has devoted fans and an assortment of rabid haters. Every boss of a successful company has supporters and employees who would like to see him roasted slowly over a gas grill. And of course there has never been a political leader who was universally hailed as excellent.

How can someone be both excellent and terrible simultaneously? Mostly it comes down to different measures. If we measure strictly on writing skill, Stephenie Meyer is not awesome, but if we measure based on ability to generate revenue, Stephenie Meyer is a genius.

When measuring excellence, we use a wide variety of metrics. Some are irrelevant; my grandmother used to stop listening to any singer who was divorced, because a divorced person couldn't possibly sing well. Some not only accept bias, but embrace it-- if you are not on The Right Side, then everything you have to say must be horribly wrong. And some are just a matter of personal values. I may just want to hire somebody who gets the job done even if he's not very pleasant, while you may be as concerned about getting along with the person as getting the job done.

The problem with identifying teacher excellence has always been that we have a million ideas about what a teacher is supposed to do. Should Pat's kindergarten teacher make sure that Pat is happy and getting along well with others and maintaining a joyful attitude about life no matter how little Pat learns, or should Pat's teacher be making sure that Pat can master sight words even if it makes Pat miserable to do it? And if we're splitting the difference, where do we split it? And that's before we get to all the other expectations-- should my students learn traditional grammar (and how much) or should we spend more time on writing and what part of the canon (if any) should we read? Should my classroom be a free and open place where everything is filled with the spirit of free and open inquiry, or should it be like a tight, well-disciplined machine? And what's the proper balance of being teacher-directed and student directed?

We could play that game all day. You get the idea. We have a gazillion ideas of what an excellent teacher looks like.

Plenty of attempts have been made to use science-ish techniques to break down the traits of teacher excellence. People still disagree. Or rather, people still default to their own idea of what teacher excellence looks like.

The reformsters thought they had a solution. We'll just define an excellent teacher as one whose students get good scores on the Big Test. And now we're going to use Vergara-style lawsuits and new teacher-eval laws to cement that definition. You can have whatever definition of teacher excellence you like. The courts and the legislatures have the last word.

We could talk about why that definition of teacher excellence is small and narrow and not particularly good. But that's been covered. Let's talk about how it's reformsters shooting themselves in the feet again.

Remember how the whole Big Test thing worked:

Reformsters: We will give students a test to show exactly what they learned in the course of the year.
Parents:Well, that sounds like a good idea.
[Students actually take the test]
Parents: Damnl! I didn't realize that was how that was going to work. You want to do it some more?! Oh, hell no.

Reformsters can install new systems of determining teacher excellence, covered with a smoke screen about how this will "protect great teachers" and "guarantee a great teacher in every classroom." But when the random "ineffectives" start appearing and the public is seeing beloved Ms. Awesomesauce being canned because some system that nobody can really explain claims that she's no good, there will be noise. Particularly in smaller districts (we don't all teach in New York City, Chicago and LA) where teachers are well-known in their communities.

Reformsters keep making the same mistake. It's not enough to have a great sales pitch and convincing story about how well your super-duper plan is going to work. At some point, you have to deliver. From the promise of the Awesome Big Test (which was never going to work) to the promise of charter schools (which, operated for something other than profit, could have), reformsters have made promises they failed to keep.

The promise of evaluation-based staffing will be more of the same. When people see how badly it actually work, reformsters will feel the same kind of pushback that has them scurrying for cover on testing (umm... moratorium! yea, that's it!). The truly unfortunate part is that some large number of teaching careers will be derailed and uncountable could-have-been teachers chased away from the profession by the time that pushback happens. Reformsters are shooting themselves in the feet, but a lot of other people are going to get caught in the crossfire.

Serious People

Why is it that I'm so hard on some people I disagree with here and so gentle with others? Because I have a hard time taking people seriously when they aren't serious people.

Certain positions in the current debates indicate clearly how serious a person is. I don't support the idea of national education standards; I think it's a bad idea, doomed to failure, that will not yield any of the benefits its supporters believe in. But I recognize that serious, well-intentioned, intelligent people can support the idea. Pitch national standards to me and I will disagree with you, but I won't automatically think less of you.

On the other hand, no serious person could ever say, "Only Common Core has made it possible for me to teach critical thinking in my classroom." Say that, and you have announced that you are a silly person, and I will treat you like a silly person who insists on saying silly things.

Serious people are not necessarily serious (I think of myself as a serious person), but you can usually spot them by their language:

1) Serious people recognize that words have both meaning and consequences. They don't just say whatever bullshit they feel like making up just because. They do not view communication as a game to win. They consider how words and actions really affect the things they claim to be serious about.

2) Serious people seek congruity between reality, their values, and their goals. Serious people don't focus on one at the cost of the other two. They do not ignore reality and sacrifice their values in order to achieve goals. They do not allow their values to blind them to reality. They do not look at reality and give up everything else. They don't ignore reality because it might be inconvenient.

3) Serious people do not lie. Most particularly, they do not lie about their goals and objectives. They are not bullshit artists. It's the silly people who will pee on your leg, tell you it's raining, and expect you to believe them because they used words and a faux serious expression.

One of the most striking things about the battle for public education is what a large percentage of the people fighting in the resistance are serious people, and what a large percentage of the people battling for the CCSS-anchored, high stakes test-driven, corporate backed status quo are NOT serious people.

Arne Duncan is not a serious person. Earlier in his career he made noises that sounded good, but which were unrelated to the actual policies he pursued. More often lately he sounds like that kid who hasn't done the homework but is hoping he can bullshit his way past you. There are no signs that he has ever made a serious attempt to see what is happening on the ground when it comes to the current test-driven status quo.

She Who Must Not Be Named is not a serious person. She does not appear to grasp the connection between rhetoric and reality, that somehow if you declare, "I must take action to show my deep and abiding love for you," and then punch your partner is the face, that's perfectly okay. Especially if you then announce, "He was totally pulling a gun on me." Even if there's no gun to be found.

David Coleman and his ilk are not serious people. Coleman has no more interest in what actually happens in classrooms than he has in the traffic patterns in ant colonies. When you are so deeply wise, you don't need to understand lesser realities-- you just make them bend to your will.

The Hedgemasters backing the charter movement are not serious people. Charters are investment opportunities and educational rhetoric is just ad copy. They are no more serious about finding real educational solutions than General Mills is serious about researching what the most healthy breakfast would really include.

The Data Overlords are not serious people. Or rather, they're not serious about education. They are serious about data collection, but it really makes no difference to them whether the education delivered is good or not, just as long as it's all tagged and bagged.

The Systems and Government pushers are not serious people. They are sure that if they can get total control of the whole system, it will work the way they imagine it will, and they do not want to be distracted by any evidence to the contrary. The pursuit of excellence should never be derailed by facts, or by the puny lesser humans who get in the way.

The corporate profiteers are not serious people. When Pearson believes their main problem is bad PR, they show such a disconnect from life on this planet that they cannot be taken as serious people.

People who are serious about education recognize that education is hard, teaching is hard, learning is hard, and that it takes a lifetime of looking and listening and paying attention to get a handle on how all the moving pieces of a public education are working. They seek to live out their respect and devotion to education, and they seek to live out their respect for the students that we serve. They align their words and actions and values. They are not worried about making education a lesser priority than profits and power.

If you are serious about education, your focus is on education. Not on finding facts to match your pre-conceived notions. Not on figuring out ways to "message" people so that they will believe you (and not, say, their eyes). Not on how you can use education to further your own ends (and it's someone else's problem if education gets busted up while being used as a tool). And certainly not on arranging for the biggest payout.

I have not yet mentioned the biggest tell of all-- serious people are still, always looking for answers. Do serious people sometimes fall for the reformy rubbish? Yes, they do. But I can tell they're serious because they are still trying to figure out how all this can fit together (and ultimately, like the entirely-serious Diane Ravitch, figuring out that it doesn't). Beware people who believe they have all the answers (personally, I have about 2% of the answers).

The supporters of the high-stakes test-driven corporate-backed status quo are, for the most part, silly people. Dangerous, powerful silly people, but still, while I have to take the danger they pose to public education seriously, I find it impossible to take them seriously at all.