It's not that I don't appreciate the good parts or hate the bad parts. I'm not delighted to see social impact bonds tossed into the mix, nor am I pleased to see the doors opened here and there for performance based education. I take a bit of pleasure in seeing the ways in which the bill makes extra effort to spank the secretary of education (who has been weirdly trying to save face by repeatedly saying, "Oh yeah, this is what we wanted all along"), and I'm quite happy with the various piecesparts that defang the Big Standardized Test. It is a mixed bag, a shift of inches in mostly the right direction kind of. I think Jeff Bryant said it best with, "Go Ahead, Pass Every Student Succeeds Act, But Don't Celebrate It."
Because here's the problem. The ESSA won't actually solve a thing.
Yes, state leaders may very well say, "Thank God! Let's scrap the Common Core and replace them with real standards that we develop ourselves, and let's work up our own Big Standardized Test and let's design a way to evaluate teachers and public schools that uses authentic markers of excellence and not a bunch of BS Test baloney and let's even allow parents to opt out of testing and if the feds don't like it, they can try to sort it out in a courtroom. Screw 'em."
Or.
Or state leaders may say, "You know, all this stuff that we had to do under the Obama-Duncan-Bush-Page administrations is just fine with us, and it took a lot of time and money to get it all up and running, and some nice lobbyists tell us that it's all working great, so we're actually not going to change a single solitary thing."
Some state leaders might say, "We have a vision for truly excellent public schools in our state. Now that tests can be decoupled from the high stakes, we will embrace systems for evaluating our students, teachers and schools that support and reveal their many forms of excellence, building up a state system of education of which we are justly and deeply proud."
But state leaders might also say, "We actually share the vision of Arne Duncan and of Bill Gates and of our very most excellent good charter-operating friends over with the giant piles of money. We are pretty sure that our public schools suck with the suckage of a thousand black holes, and we look forward to breaking them down and dismantling them and handing the pieces over to our chartery friends."
The ESSA doesn't settle anything. It doesn't solve anything. Every argument and battle that supporters of public schools (and the teachers and students who work and learn in public schools) have been fighting will still be fought-- the difference is that now those arguments will be held in state capitols instead of Washington DC.
Depending on your state, that may be good news. Or it may be that the best we can say is that your state government isn't any worse, and they live closer to you.
There are definite advantages. State government officials are easier to find, to get to, to contact, to talk to. When a single state decides to implement terrible policy, they won't be implementing it for the entire country. And there are now plenty of groups that have become very accomplished and effective at making themselves heard in their home state (looking at you, New York opt outers).
Both those who love it and those who hate it, I think, missing the most important feature. ESSA replaces a great deal of the old "you must do" this language with "you may do this" language and even "you could get money for this but you have several choices here" language.
ESSA makes it possible to take many important steps forward. It also makes it possible for states to step backward. The steps that are taken will be decided state by state, and the same players who have worked hard to break down public education are still right there, still well-funded, still fully committed to the goals they have pursued for over a decade. It is absolutely critical that advocates for public education keep the pressure up on state governments. Congress has taken an unprecedented step in returning some power and control to the states; now we have to make sure that power is well used and that all students, schools and teachers receive the support and the tools needed to do the job we signed up to do.
The struggle is not over. It has just shifted venue. Get ready for the next rounds of debate-- all fifty of them. The one big change is the, unlike its predecessors, ESSA mandates relatively few things. But it opens the doors of opportunity wide to many many things, both good and bad. It's up to all of us to be vigilant about what walks through those doors.
Showing posts with label ESEA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ESEA. Show all posts
Friday, December 4, 2015
Thursday, December 3, 2015
NEA on ESSA
Thursday evening NEA Government Relations Director Mary Kusler and Director of Education Policy and Practice Donna Harris-Aikensspoke on a brief conference call about NEA and the New ESSA. This will be as disjointed as my notes, and there aren't many surprises here, though a few pieces of clarifying information (I may have missed a crossed T or dotted I thanks to my phone connection.)
Richard Allen Smith opened by observing that "we can see the finish line" for ending NCLB. Then he handed the conference off to Kusler.
Kusler used the word "historic" roughly six billion times, noting among other things that this was the first education conference committee meeting since about 2008, with a full conference committee meeting further still in the past.
Who was naughty
She also noted that it was bipartisan and bicameral about a thousand times (my notes are sloppy). She did note that the bill came out of committee with just one nay vote, and that nay-voter was Rand Paul.
The language NEA keeps using to praise the bill which Kusler echoed is that every child will have access to quality education regardless of their zip code. She thinks ESSA will do that. She's apparently kind of an optomist.
Kusler noted that NEA had "three buckets" that marked their goals:
1) reduce testing and divorce it from high stakes
2) maximize multiple measures, noting that everyone loved the disagregated data of NCLB, but we should also be noting if all subgroups are getting art class and guidance counselors, and not just test scores.
3) when educators have a voice, students do better. Looking out for the profession. That kind of thing.
What next?
Senate vote next week. It will pass overwhelmingly. Rumors are that the Pres could be signing this by the end of next week. We are on the cusp of changing the federal government's role and insuring quality education etc etc every child.
Dropping her rose colored glasses for more accurate ones, Kusler noted that the President signing this bill is not the end but merely the beginning. Implementation will be key. I will give my Senator a crisp twenty dollar bill if he can work in a provision that we don't have to hear the word "implementation" in the ed world for the next ten years.
The I Word
Harris-Aikensspoke will be the NEA implementation czar. She says there's a lot of opportunity built into this bill, pushing down responsibility so that state and local education folks have to decide what assessment should look like. She notes that there are pieces that guarantee educator (by which she means more than teachers) voice will be critical.
Note too that early education and community schools play an important role in there somewhere.
NEA will be developing a suite of materials for parents and teachers will be able to use, and teachers will help make them, and I resisted the urge to ask if they would be a crappy as the junk NEA banged out in support of Common Core.
Questions?
Actually, most folks resisted the urge to ask questions. I don't know. It's always hard to ask questions when you can't read or see the room, but fortunately, Leonie Haimson was there, and she asked:
What about special ed and ELL?
The answer was illuminating to me. The old rule is that only 1% of Students with disabilities could be proficient. The new rule is that only 1% of SWD can take an alternative assessment [Correction-- h/t to Leonie Haimson. 1% of all students, 10% of IEP students]. NEA does not love that, but they feel that language in ESSA clarifies that IDEA trumps ESEA and the the IEP team has the final word on what assessment a student should take.
Waivers can be granted on state and federal level. I suspect this will all end up in a court somewhere, but NEA seems to think IDEA has gotten the upper hand.
What about social impact bonds?
Leonie asked this too. The answer is A) NEA thinks these sucks and B) that old NEA favorite, you should have seen it before we got involved. Apparently SIB references were spread like crabgrass through the bill, and now are weeeded back to only two references in some specific locations. So, bad, but could have been worse?
And that was it. Quick and over in about 30 minutes, slightly illuminating. Particularly the Rand Paul part.
Richard Allen Smith opened by observing that "we can see the finish line" for ending NCLB. Then he handed the conference off to Kusler.
Kusler used the word "historic" roughly six billion times, noting among other things that this was the first education conference committee meeting since about 2008, with a full conference committee meeting further still in the past.
Who was naughty
She also noted that it was bipartisan and bicameral about a thousand times (my notes are sloppy). She did note that the bill came out of committee with just one nay vote, and that nay-voter was Rand Paul.
The language NEA keeps using to praise the bill which Kusler echoed is that every child will have access to quality education regardless of their zip code. She thinks ESSA will do that. She's apparently kind of an optomist.
Kusler noted that NEA had "three buckets" that marked their goals:
1) reduce testing and divorce it from high stakes
2) maximize multiple measures, noting that everyone loved the disagregated data of NCLB, but we should also be noting if all subgroups are getting art class and guidance counselors, and not just test scores.
3) when educators have a voice, students do better. Looking out for the profession. That kind of thing.
What next?
Senate vote next week. It will pass overwhelmingly. Rumors are that the Pres could be signing this by the end of next week. We are on the cusp of changing the federal government's role and insuring quality education etc etc every child.
Dropping her rose colored glasses for more accurate ones, Kusler noted that the President signing this bill is not the end but merely the beginning. Implementation will be key. I will give my Senator a crisp twenty dollar bill if he can work in a provision that we don't have to hear the word "implementation" in the ed world for the next ten years.
The I Word
Harris-Aikensspoke will be the NEA implementation czar. She says there's a lot of opportunity built into this bill, pushing down responsibility so that state and local education folks have to decide what assessment should look like. She notes that there are pieces that guarantee educator (by which she means more than teachers) voice will be critical.
Note too that early education and community schools play an important role in there somewhere.
NEA will be developing a suite of materials for parents and teachers will be able to use, and teachers will help make them, and I resisted the urge to ask if they would be a crappy as the junk NEA banged out in support of Common Core.
Questions?
Actually, most folks resisted the urge to ask questions. I don't know. It's always hard to ask questions when you can't read or see the room, but fortunately, Leonie Haimson was there, and she asked:
What about special ed and ELL?
The answer was illuminating to me. The old rule is that only 1% of Students with disabilities could be proficient. The new rule is that only 1%
Waivers can be granted on state and federal level. I suspect this will all end up in a court somewhere, but NEA seems to think IDEA has gotten the upper hand.
What about social impact bonds?
Leonie asked this too. The answer is A) NEA thinks these sucks and B) that old NEA favorite, you should have seen it before we got involved. Apparently SIB references were spread like crabgrass through the bill, and now are weeeded back to only two references in some specific locations. So, bad, but could have been worse?
And that was it. Quick and over in about 30 minutes, slightly illuminating. Particularly the Rand Paul part.
The New ESEA and Content
There's a huge amount of discussion about how the New ESEA will affect policy and the flow of money and the new ways that privateers can grub for that money and just how big a hash states will make out of education, anyway etc etc etc,
But over at the Fordham blog, Robert Pondiscio has put a bit of focus where focus ought to be-- the new bill's effect on content.
Pondiscio is a reform fan who has always been willing to see what we see in the classroom-- that an emphasis on high stakes reading tests is destructive to the teaching of reading. I've made the same argument. The current theories about reading embedded in both the Common Core and in Big Standardized Tests is that reading is a set of free-floating skills unrelated to content, prior knowledge, or the engagement of the reader. The BS Tests have focused on short excerpts specifically chosen to be boring and weirdly obscure so as to guarantee that students will have no prior knowledge and will not find the excerpts interesting. All this because some reformsters believe that reading is a set of skills that has nothing to do with content, which is kind of like trying to imagine waves that exist independent of any matter through which they move. As Pondiscio puts it:
Years of treating reading as a discrete subject or a skill—teaching it and testing it that way—have arguably set reading achievement in reverse. You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to “find the main idea,” “make inferences,” and “compare and contrast.” You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.
It has been, and continues to be, a dumb and counterproductive way to approach reading. For one thing, it means that the best way for me to increase student achievement would be to never teach anything but daily three-paragraph excerpts from anything at all. Throwing out my anthology of American literature and replacing it with daily newspaper clippings would be an excellent way to get test scores up-- and a complete abdication of my responsibilities as a professional English teacher.
And professional English teachers know that. But for the past many years, we have also known that our school and professional ratings rest on those scores. So we have made compromises, or we have been commanded by state and/or local authorities to commit educational malpractice in the name of "student achievement" (the ongoing euphemism for "test scores").
This, more than anything else, is why the federal decoupling of teacher evaluation and school ratings from the BS Tests is good news.
Under the new ESEA, states will still have to test students annually, including in reading. But they have a lot more control over the way the results from those tests are turned into grades for schools. This could offer an opportunity to restore some sanity to schooling.
Exactly. States have the chance now to put an end to questions like, "Well, that's a lovely unit, but how will it prepare students for The Test?" It gives us the chance to get back to teaching students that reading (and writing and speaking and listening) are ways to engage with and unlock the wonders of the world.
Whether states will take the opportunity remains to be seen. But if they screw this up, they can no longer blame it on the feds. And if we sit in our schools and let them screw this up without raising a fuss in our respective state capitals, shame on us. The federal defanging of tests gives us the opportunity to put reading (and writing and listening and speaking) back in its rightful place, taught properly and properly used to empower student discovery of a million amazing things. No matter how I feel about the rest of the ESSA, I feel good about this.
But over at the Fordham blog, Robert Pondiscio has put a bit of focus where focus ought to be-- the new bill's effect on content.
Pondiscio is a reform fan who has always been willing to see what we see in the classroom-- that an emphasis on high stakes reading tests is destructive to the teaching of reading. I've made the same argument. The current theories about reading embedded in both the Common Core and in Big Standardized Tests is that reading is a set of free-floating skills unrelated to content, prior knowledge, or the engagement of the reader. The BS Tests have focused on short excerpts specifically chosen to be boring and weirdly obscure so as to guarantee that students will have no prior knowledge and will not find the excerpts interesting. All this because some reformsters believe that reading is a set of skills that has nothing to do with content, which is kind of like trying to imagine waves that exist independent of any matter through which they move. As Pondiscio puts it:
Years of treating reading as a discrete subject or a skill—teaching it and testing it that way—have arguably set reading achievement in reverse. You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to “find the main idea,” “make inferences,” and “compare and contrast.” You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.
It has been, and continues to be, a dumb and counterproductive way to approach reading. For one thing, it means that the best way for me to increase student achievement would be to never teach anything but daily three-paragraph excerpts from anything at all. Throwing out my anthology of American literature and replacing it with daily newspaper clippings would be an excellent way to get test scores up-- and a complete abdication of my responsibilities as a professional English teacher.
And professional English teachers know that. But for the past many years, we have also known that our school and professional ratings rest on those scores. So we have made compromises, or we have been commanded by state and/or local authorities to commit educational malpractice in the name of "student achievement" (the ongoing euphemism for "test scores").
This, more than anything else, is why the federal decoupling of teacher evaluation and school ratings from the BS Tests is good news.
Under the new ESEA, states will still have to test students annually, including in reading. But they have a lot more control over the way the results from those tests are turned into grades for schools. This could offer an opportunity to restore some sanity to schooling.
Exactly. States have the chance now to put an end to questions like, "Well, that's a lovely unit, but how will it prepare students for The Test?" It gives us the chance to get back to teaching students that reading (and writing and speaking and listening) are ways to engage with and unlock the wonders of the world.
Whether states will take the opportunity remains to be seen. But if they screw this up, they can no longer blame it on the feds. And if we sit in our schools and let them screw this up without raising a fuss in our respective state capitals, shame on us. The federal defanging of tests gives us the opportunity to put reading (and writing and listening and speaking) back in its rightful place, taught properly and properly used to empower student discovery of a million amazing things. No matter how I feel about the rest of the ESSA, I feel good about this.
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
The New ESEA: Sturm or Drang?
The new version of ESEA is called the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is a fine sine of the sort of aspirational nonsense that legislators are capable of. Why not the Every Child Gets a Pony Act, or the Every Child Is Smart, Good-Looking and Above Average Act?
The most notable thing about the act is that it is 1,061 pages long. It is the Moby Dick Travels to Middle Earth of regulation. The second most-notable thing is that it has been spit out by committee on a fast track that allows pretty much nobody to actually look at the thing, including the people who are poised to vote on it. Make a note of this fast-track legislative prestidigitation the next time some some pundit ponders how politics got so tangled in education. Once again, politics have been hardwired into public education's dna.
I am not exactly a low-information voter on these issues, and I have not a chance to really check out those 1,061 pages. But some folks have been doing super work with it. The folks at EdWeek's K-12 have been doing super work (here, here, or here for starters) and Mercedes Schneider has apparently doing without sleep to work on this (here and here). Daniel Katz has put together a good compendium of what's out there as well.
There are things to hate. TFA, charter schools, and the folks who love social impact bonds have gotten good value from their lobbyists. The path has been leveled for Competency Based Education. And probably most hateable of all, the damned stupid Big Standardized Test is all its yearly waste-of-timeliness has been enshrined in law once again.
There are things to love. Most notably, in what may really be an historic moment, a federal agency has had power taken away. USED is told to go sit in the corner and shut up. Although there are also opportunities for it to weasel its way back into power again.
Which is part of the wonder and terror of a bill like this. Nobody knows what all is in it. And even when they figure out what's in it, nobody knows what that means. Bills like this are an exercise in committee style compromise, which is all about letting every person get in a piece of language that makes them (or their favorite lobbyists) happy-- and not at all about figuring out what the resulting language will actually mean to the people who have to live by it.
Some of this law is going to end up in court. And some of it will be... well, who knows. It's worth remembering that states have long been mandated, by law, to develop and execute a plan by which the most highly effective teachers would be moved to the most troubled schools. That law has never been enforced in any meaningful way at all. Over the years ahead, it will not just be what the law says, but what the authorities think the law says, what the courts think the law says, and what laws the People In Charge want to bother enforcing.
Bodies of regulation like this are rewritten on the ground all the time. What changes under the New ESEA is the USED's power to unilaterally write whatever laws tickle their fancy this week.
A huge number of people are deeply pissed about the bill. BATs are accused on their Facebook page of being sellouts, and conservative commentators are up in arms because the new law doesn't go far enough toward actually dissolving the Department of Education. Neither of these is the position of a grown-up who lives in a nominal democracy.
At times like this, I remind myself that this is a marathon. It is a journey of a million steps. To imagine that a legislative package can be crafted that will set public education On The Right Path or Fix All Our Problems is to engage in the same sort of magical thinking that lead reformsters to think that Common Core would "fix" schools.
The corporate interest in public education is never going away. There's a lot of money in education, and it will always draw those people as surely as cow poop draws flies. There will always be powerful amateurs who think they know the secrets of education. There will always be politicians who would like to please as many voters and well-financed election backers as they possibly can. There will always be bad ideas that become popular in education. The current struggles will always be going on.
The goal cannot be to find and fight that one big apocalyptic battle that will End It All, because that's just not happening. Those of us who are standing up for public education will win the current arguments because the reformsters are wrong, their ideas are failures, and eventually they will get bored with losing and move on-- but there will be other messes to take their place. If your thought was that we'd somehow get a great New ESEA and you'd be able to relax and stop worrying about the assault on public education-- well, I have a bridge that runs over some Florida swampland to sell you.
In the meantime, we need to speak up against what we see that is wrong and argue against what will make matters worse. I've been busy emailing my representatives and I hope you have been, too, telling them what parts of the new bill need to be improved or removed (as well as arguing for a period of actually looking at the damn thing before passing it). I'm not excited about the New ESEA, but I don't oppose its passage because on the matter of stripping power from the USED alone it is an improvement over the current arrangement. It has been handled badly, it has many terrible parts, and it sets the stage for more problems with privatizing public ed. But at the moment I see it as a small step in the right direction, and in the journey of a million steps, one step in the right direction is okay. We've still got a million more steps to go.
The most notable thing about the act is that it is 1,061 pages long. It is the Moby Dick Travels to Middle Earth of regulation. The second most-notable thing is that it has been spit out by committee on a fast track that allows pretty much nobody to actually look at the thing, including the people who are poised to vote on it. Make a note of this fast-track legislative prestidigitation the next time some some pundit ponders how politics got so tangled in education. Once again, politics have been hardwired into public education's dna.
I am not exactly a low-information voter on these issues, and I have not a chance to really check out those 1,061 pages. But some folks have been doing super work with it. The folks at EdWeek's K-12 have been doing super work (here, here, or here for starters) and Mercedes Schneider has apparently doing without sleep to work on this (here and here). Daniel Katz has put together a good compendium of what's out there as well.
There are things to hate. TFA, charter schools, and the folks who love social impact bonds have gotten good value from their lobbyists. The path has been leveled for Competency Based Education. And probably most hateable of all, the damned stupid Big Standardized Test is all its yearly waste-of-timeliness has been enshrined in law once again.
There are things to love. Most notably, in what may really be an historic moment, a federal agency has had power taken away. USED is told to go sit in the corner and shut up. Although there are also opportunities for it to weasel its way back into power again.
Which is part of the wonder and terror of a bill like this. Nobody knows what all is in it. And even when they figure out what's in it, nobody knows what that means. Bills like this are an exercise in committee style compromise, which is all about letting every person get in a piece of language that makes them (or their favorite lobbyists) happy-- and not at all about figuring out what the resulting language will actually mean to the people who have to live by it.
Some of this law is going to end up in court. And some of it will be... well, who knows. It's worth remembering that states have long been mandated, by law, to develop and execute a plan by which the most highly effective teachers would be moved to the most troubled schools. That law has never been enforced in any meaningful way at all. Over the years ahead, it will not just be what the law says, but what the authorities think the law says, what the courts think the law says, and what laws the People In Charge want to bother enforcing.
Bodies of regulation like this are rewritten on the ground all the time. What changes under the New ESEA is the USED's power to unilaterally write whatever laws tickle their fancy this week.
A huge number of people are deeply pissed about the bill. BATs are accused on their Facebook page of being sellouts, and conservative commentators are up in arms because the new law doesn't go far enough toward actually dissolving the Department of Education. Neither of these is the position of a grown-up who lives in a nominal democracy.
At times like this, I remind myself that this is a marathon. It is a journey of a million steps. To imagine that a legislative package can be crafted that will set public education On The Right Path or Fix All Our Problems is to engage in the same sort of magical thinking that lead reformsters to think that Common Core would "fix" schools.
The corporate interest in public education is never going away. There's a lot of money in education, and it will always draw those people as surely as cow poop draws flies. There will always be powerful amateurs who think they know the secrets of education. There will always be politicians who would like to please as many voters and well-financed election backers as they possibly can. There will always be bad ideas that become popular in education. The current struggles will always be going on.
The goal cannot be to find and fight that one big apocalyptic battle that will End It All, because that's just not happening. Those of us who are standing up for public education will win the current arguments because the reformsters are wrong, their ideas are failures, and eventually they will get bored with losing and move on-- but there will be other messes to take their place. If your thought was that we'd somehow get a great New ESEA and you'd be able to relax and stop worrying about the assault on public education-- well, I have a bridge that runs over some Florida swampland to sell you.
In the meantime, we need to speak up against what we see that is wrong and argue against what will make matters worse. I've been busy emailing my representatives and I hope you have been, too, telling them what parts of the new bill need to be improved or removed (as well as arguing for a period of actually looking at the damn thing before passing it). I'm not excited about the New ESEA, but I don't oppose its passage because on the matter of stripping power from the USED alone it is an improvement over the current arrangement. It has been handled badly, it has many terrible parts, and it sets the stage for more problems with privatizing public ed. But at the moment I see it as a small step in the right direction, and in the journey of a million steps, one step in the right direction is okay. We've still got a million more steps to go.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
My Question for Hillary
I'll keep it brief.
Candidate Clinton has indicated in talks with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia that she will absolutely listen to teachers. That's a great promise, but let me pare that down to a more direct question.
Last year, after years of failed administration education policies, the NEA general membership called for the resignation of Arne Duncan. So here's my question:
If you had been President, would you have required the resignation of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education?
Okay, I realize that's a little in-your-face and involves some hypotheticals (such as, would you have ever appointed the guy in the first place), so let me ask a question, because I really want to understand how your administration would represent a break from the destructive policies of the past two administrations:
If you had been President for the past eight years, and knowing what you know now, how would your education policies have been different from the policies that we've actually had?
Please, please please please PLEASE, be specific. Talk about the ESEA rewrite or Common Core or financial incentives for states. But tell us something. If you had been our President for the past eight years, how would US education have been different. Because-- and again, I'm not sure if you get this-- education policy for the last sixteen years has not been good for public education in this country.
I await your response.
Candidate Clinton has indicated in talks with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia that she will absolutely listen to teachers. That's a great promise, but let me pare that down to a more direct question.
Last year, after years of failed administration education policies, the NEA general membership called for the resignation of Arne Duncan. So here's my question:
If you had been President, would you have required the resignation of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education?
Okay, I realize that's a little in-your-face and involves some hypotheticals (such as, would you have ever appointed the guy in the first place), so let me ask a question, because I really want to understand how your administration would represent a break from the destructive policies of the past two administrations:
If you had been President for the past eight years, and knowing what you know now, how would your education policies have been different from the policies that we've actually had?
Please, please please please PLEASE, be specific. Talk about the ESEA rewrite or Common Core or financial incentives for states. But tell us something. If you had been our President for the past eight years, how would US education have been different. Because-- and again, I'm not sure if you get this-- education policy for the last sixteen years has not been good for public education in this country.
I await your response.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Duncan's Regrets
Arne Duncan put in an appearance at the Education Writers' Association conference and allowed himself to be interviewed by Motoko Rich of the New York Times. Alyson Klein of EdWeek was there (because she's a real education writer and not some lousy blogger), and she reported some of the highlights of that interview. I'm going to look at some highlights of the highlights because, as usual, Duncan has some moments that make one question who, exactly, is this man who has been put in charge of a nation's education system.
Duncan regrets waiting so long to implement waivers. In hindsight, he thinks they wasted time waiting for Congress to get to rewriting the ESEA, and you know, I can almost sympathize with him on this-- until I remember that Congress is composed of people democratically elected to handle the writing of laws in this country, and Arne Duncan is neither 1) elected or 2) charged with writing the laws of this country.
But it is interesting that, contrary to the usual lines about ed reform being rolled out too fast, Duncan thinks it wasn't rolled out fast enough.
He underlines this when asked if maybe the simultaneous rollout of new testing and systems linking teacher evaluation to that same new testing-- well, maybe that was all a bit much. Klein quotes Arne:
It's been a lot of change, it's been a lot of change fast, it's absolutely been rocky and bumpy in some places. ... But for me the question is, how do you get better, faster?
I think I know the answer to that last question and, in brief, the answer is "Not like this." And maybe I'd also suggest that faster is not always better. But then I'd probably illustrate it with some sophomoric example, so I'll just not make that point.
A question brings up that whole testing and opt-out and people hating the testing thing. Duncan tries to once again suggest that he totally gets it and totally called for folks to back off on excess and unnecessary testing, by which he means state and local testing, which is another way of asserting that the Big Standardized Tests are the most important tests being given in schools, which I'd say is exactly backwards, and the BS Tests are the least necessary and useful and if we are going to throw a test over the side of the lifeboat for being fat and useless and repeatedly eating the supply of biscuits when it doesn't think anyone is looking, well, that test that had better start swimming is the Big Fat Standardized PARCC/SBA/WTF test.
He also makes his equity point, that folks in the civil rights and disability community want their kids tested, and I've heard this from enough places that I believe it, but I still believe those folks are being hoodwinked, because 1) we don't need a test to tell us that poor urban schools need help and 2) in ten years of this testing regimen, we haven't lifted a dollar to actually help the schools that have been identified as being in trouble.
Asked why he likes the Congress ESEA rewrite and not the House one, Arne says that seeing Congressional bipartisanship gives him goosebumps, and the Title I portability idea sucks. On this particular point, I think he's actually correct. Portability is one more way to take money away from poor schools (and help charter operators get rich). That is not good for anybody (except charter operators).
Asked about his plan to rate colleges, Duncan said, "Necessary colleges expensive argle bargle blerg."
Someone asked Arne when he would take funding away from a college that failed to satisfy Title IX. Duncan replied, "We'll take away federal funding when we need to." Klein called this non-specific, but I would call it awesomely non-responsive. It's rare when Arne just goes ahead and says, "Screw you. I'll do it the way I wanna" and I find those moments bracing in their honesty.
Asked about the digital divide, Arne fell back on a more standard Duncanswer, which is a wordy version of "That is a true thing that you have said, and I certainly heard you say it." It mimics reflexive listening and agreement, even if he has no idea what to answer. In fact, the Duncanswer format is exactly like the proper response to a writing prompt on a Big Standardized Test-- even if you don't understand the question, you can still recycle enough words from it to create a topic sentence and maybe even the first few paragraphs. You can see it in his dyslexia grilling, too. The Duncanswer. Remember, you heard it here first.
Asked about his biggest regret, Duncan models the non-apology apology. He doesn't regret anything he did including the white suburban moms crack (gosh, he's just a straight-shooter who speaks from his heart), but he does regret that Congress sucks and can't get its job done.
He also regrets that all of America sucks in its inability to think that education is really important, proof once again that Arne needs to get out and speak to regular non-government non-screened carbon-based life forms. It's a question that begs a follow-up-- who exactly is it that does not consider education a national priority? Your boss the CIC? Congress? All the parents? All the teachers? All the Americans pre-occupied with keeping their families fed and sheltered? Boy, I would really like to hear the rest of the explanation behind that idea, if he didn't try to dodge it completely. Which would be the Duncancover. You're welcome.
Duncan regrets waiting so long to implement waivers. In hindsight, he thinks they wasted time waiting for Congress to get to rewriting the ESEA, and you know, I can almost sympathize with him on this-- until I remember that Congress is composed of people democratically elected to handle the writing of laws in this country, and Arne Duncan is neither 1) elected or 2) charged with writing the laws of this country.
But it is interesting that, contrary to the usual lines about ed reform being rolled out too fast, Duncan thinks it wasn't rolled out fast enough.
He underlines this when asked if maybe the simultaneous rollout of new testing and systems linking teacher evaluation to that same new testing-- well, maybe that was all a bit much. Klein quotes Arne:
It's been a lot of change, it's been a lot of change fast, it's absolutely been rocky and bumpy in some places. ... But for me the question is, how do you get better, faster?
I think I know the answer to that last question and, in brief, the answer is "Not like this." And maybe I'd also suggest that faster is not always better. But then I'd probably illustrate it with some sophomoric example, so I'll just not make that point.
A question brings up that whole testing and opt-out and people hating the testing thing. Duncan tries to once again suggest that he totally gets it and totally called for folks to back off on excess and unnecessary testing, by which he means state and local testing, which is another way of asserting that the Big Standardized Tests are the most important tests being given in schools, which I'd say is exactly backwards, and the BS Tests are the least necessary and useful and if we are going to throw a test over the side of the lifeboat for being fat and useless and repeatedly eating the supply of biscuits when it doesn't think anyone is looking, well, that test that had better start swimming is the Big Fat Standardized PARCC/SBA/WTF test.
He also makes his equity point, that folks in the civil rights and disability community want their kids tested, and I've heard this from enough places that I believe it, but I still believe those folks are being hoodwinked, because 1) we don't need a test to tell us that poor urban schools need help and 2) in ten years of this testing regimen, we haven't lifted a dollar to actually help the schools that have been identified as being in trouble.
Asked why he likes the Congress ESEA rewrite and not the House one, Arne says that seeing Congressional bipartisanship gives him goosebumps, and the Title I portability idea sucks. On this particular point, I think he's actually correct. Portability is one more way to take money away from poor schools (and help charter operators get rich). That is not good for anybody (except charter operators).
Asked about his plan to rate colleges, Duncan said, "Necessary colleges expensive argle bargle blerg."
Someone asked Arne when he would take funding away from a college that failed to satisfy Title IX. Duncan replied, "We'll take away federal funding when we need to." Klein called this non-specific, but I would call it awesomely non-responsive. It's rare when Arne just goes ahead and says, "Screw you. I'll do it the way I wanna" and I find those moments bracing in their honesty.
Asked about the digital divide, Arne fell back on a more standard Duncanswer, which is a wordy version of "That is a true thing that you have said, and I certainly heard you say it." It mimics reflexive listening and agreement, even if he has no idea what to answer. In fact, the Duncanswer format is exactly like the proper response to a writing prompt on a Big Standardized Test-- even if you don't understand the question, you can still recycle enough words from it to create a topic sentence and maybe even the first few paragraphs. You can see it in his dyslexia grilling, too. The Duncanswer. Remember, you heard it here first.
Asked about his biggest regret, Duncan models the non-apology apology. He doesn't regret anything he did including the white suburban moms crack (gosh, he's just a straight-shooter who speaks from his heart), but he does regret that Congress sucks and can't get its job done.
He also regrets that all of America sucks in its inability to think that education is really important, proof once again that Arne needs to get out and speak to regular non-government non-screened carbon-based life forms. It's a question that begs a follow-up-- who exactly is it that does not consider education a national priority? Your boss the CIC? Congress? All the parents? All the teachers? All the Americans pre-occupied with keeping their families fed and sheltered? Boy, I would really like to hear the rest of the explanation behind that idea, if he didn't try to dodge it completely. Which would be the Duncancover. You're welcome.
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
This Is How Congress Annoys the Rest of Us
.@SenAlexander: This is a tough subject to deal with. If it were easy, it woulda been done years ago. Thanks committee for improving bill
— Politics K-12 (@PoliticsK12) April 15, 2015
That tweet came over at 4:30, after a long day of Congressional wrangling over the new ESEA. It's a perfectly harmless sort of thing to say after a bunch of work, and it's a perfect example of how government types see things differently than those of us who work for a living.
Let's look at that for a second, and then think about other peoples' work.
I mean, teaching is pretty tough, and the work that goes with it is a challenge to deal with. But I don't remember any of my colleagues ever looking at a new batch of students and saying, "Damn, this looks like a tough bunch to deal with. Let's put it off for seven or eight years."
In fact, you know what has made my job extra tough? All the fallout from a law that set unattainable standards that not a single human being thought could actually be met but, because Congress couldn't do its job, stayed in place and created leverage for even more terrible education pseudo-law.
And it's not just teachers.
Surgeons don't walk into an operating room, look at an injury or illness and say, "Damn, this is going to be hard to deal with. Let's just set it aside for seven or eight years."
Pastors don't look at parishioners who are dealing with extremely tough issues and say, "Wow, this will be hard to deal with. I'll just put it off for seven or eight years."
In fact, pretty much nobody gets up in the morning and says, "My job is going to be really hard to do today. I think I'll just put it off for seven or eight years."
No, for most folks, the rule is , when you have a job to do, you do it, and you do it when it needs to be done. People do hard things every day in this country. Every. Day. Do not give yourselves a ribbon for this.
Look, Congressing is hard. Senatoring is extremely difficult. I couldn't do it (regular readers can confirm that my diplomatic skills are lacking). But you folks signed up for it. You paid good money to be elected. Senators Alexander and Murray should be proud that their committee came closer to accomplishing something that eight years worth of previous Congressy folks.
And I do appreciate-- hugely appreciate-- the attempt to turn ESEA into something less trainwrecky and destructive than NCLB. It's important work, valuable work, work that I'm glad the Senate is doing (even if I disagree with plenty of the substance, I believe they're by and large trying to help).
But the correct thing to say at 4:30 today was, "Thank you for doing the job that we've been failing to do for seven years. On behalf of the several Congresses, we'd like to apologize for failing so long to do this necessary work. We are pleased that we are moving forward, but we are also ashamed that it took us so long to get the job done, while the old bad law continued to wreak havoc on the entire American education system. We are pleased to announce progress, and ashamed that we failed for so long to do so while teachers and students showed up every day to make the best of a bad law that we failed to address. You have done your jobs; now we are going to finally try to do ours."
He might even have added, "Boy, we can be so oblivious to what goes on out in the rest of the country, sometimes!"
That's what Senator Alexander should have had to say at 4:30 today.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Duncan Strikes Conciliatory Tone
The 50th anniversary of the passing of ESEA was an occasion for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to speak about the bill. It was also the first big set of wordage that Duncan has issued since the Senate version of the ESEA rewrite was unveiled.
That bill contains a whole lot of "The federal government and the secretary of education shall keep their grubby hands off the operation of education in this country." It repudiated and revoked much of what the Obama/Duncan administration shoehorned into sort-of-law with Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver system.
Folks have been waiting to hear what Duncan might say in response to the bi-partisan Senatorial smackdown. But in this particular speech, he mostly said, "Please, sir, may I have some more."
Duncan opened the speech by co-opting a four-year-old as a live example of Things He Values. He rattled off a list of what he considers the successes so far, denounced NCLB as a "broken" law, and rang his notes about how every child deserves a whole raft of opportunities. Vintage Duncan.
Then he talked about the new bill and what it must have.
No portability. We shouldn't shift resources from poor schools to rich ones (no, he did not explain how he manages the cognitive dissonance involved in believing both this AND that charter schools are great and we need more of them).
Parents etc need the lush verdant jungle of information that springs forth from Big Standardized Tests, because without test scores, parents would be ignorant of their own children's development.
He rhetorically linked education to civil rights. He said that the new ESEA should support pre-K schooling. And we should get more students to graduate (and he illustrated this with a story about a Diplomas Now school, including a student who was also in the house to be a visual aid-- I know this use of humans as props is a pan-party political pastime, but it rubs me the wrong way twelve days to Tuesday).
He called for more education Research and Development (but used Tennessee as an example).
In short, he did not directly address any of the federal involvement that Alexander and Murray's committee explicitly rejected. He did not address the end of federally-mandated test-linked teacher evaluation, and he did not address the rejection of federal involvement in turning around "failing" schools, nor the department's seriously reduced role in approving state plans. He did not even whimper at the powers that the Senate proposes to strip from his department.
He did name check both Senators.
Senator Alexander and Senator Murray share a lifelong commitment to improving education. Senator Murray spent years as a preschool teacher and early learning advocate for the people of her home state of Washington. This work is in her blood, it is why she entered politics. Long before Senator Alexander was Secretary of Education, Governor and a university President—he fought to end a policy of racial discrimination at Vanderbilt when he was the editor of his college newspaper. My father is also from Tennessee and also attended Vanderbilt and he always had tremendous respect for Senator Alexander.
Both senators' commitment to this nation's children is real.
In short, if folks were hoping that Duncan would come out swinging or that we would eventually be treated to a sassy catfight, folks may commence with the disappointment. There is not so much as a veiled oblique criticism of the Senate draft in this speech. The closest to a cautionary word was the sentence "We cannot cut our way to greater opportunities for our children."
And the short summary version of what he wants to see in the bill is now broad and vague:
A new law must build a foundation for 21st century schools by investing in innovation, supporting our fantastic teachers and principals, and encouraging every student's progress so that our nation's greatest asset, our vast academic and social potential, can be fully realized.
There is not even so much as a "college and career" in the whole thing. Duncan here abandons many of the ideas that were previous must-haves. Instead this is a lot of the warm mushy platitudinous word pie that he has served up in the past while dealing lousy policy at the same time. So I'm not sure what there is to learn here, other than there's no storm brewing. At least not yet.
Perhaps Duncan is just lame-ducking it. Perhaps he wanted to stay positive for the big birthday party. Perhaps he's caught a sense that it doesn't matter if he suggests that the new bill should involve ponies and eclairs for all. But whatever his thinking was, there was not the slightest hint of confrontation with the Senate in this bill, and his advice to the House committee was to imitate the Senate's warm atmosphere of bipartisan swellness, advice that I'm sure the House will resolutely ignore. We may have to do without fireworks entirely until the bill takes its bow in front of the full Senate next week.
That bill contains a whole lot of "The federal government and the secretary of education shall keep their grubby hands off the operation of education in this country." It repudiated and revoked much of what the Obama/Duncan administration shoehorned into sort-of-law with Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver system.
Folks have been waiting to hear what Duncan might say in response to the bi-partisan Senatorial smackdown. But in this particular speech, he mostly said, "Please, sir, may I have some more."
Duncan opened the speech by co-opting a four-year-old as a live example of Things He Values. He rattled off a list of what he considers the successes so far, denounced NCLB as a "broken" law, and rang his notes about how every child deserves a whole raft of opportunities. Vintage Duncan.
Then he talked about the new bill and what it must have.
No portability. We shouldn't shift resources from poor schools to rich ones (no, he did not explain how he manages the cognitive dissonance involved in believing both this AND that charter schools are great and we need more of them).
Parents etc need the lush verdant jungle of information that springs forth from Big Standardized Tests, because without test scores, parents would be ignorant of their own children's development.
He rhetorically linked education to civil rights. He said that the new ESEA should support pre-K schooling. And we should get more students to graduate (and he illustrated this with a story about a Diplomas Now school, including a student who was also in the house to be a visual aid-- I know this use of humans as props is a pan-party political pastime, but it rubs me the wrong way twelve days to Tuesday).
He called for more education Research and Development (but used Tennessee as an example).
In short, he did not directly address any of the federal involvement that Alexander and Murray's committee explicitly rejected. He did not address the end of federally-mandated test-linked teacher evaluation, and he did not address the rejection of federal involvement in turning around "failing" schools, nor the department's seriously reduced role in approving state plans. He did not even whimper at the powers that the Senate proposes to strip from his department.
He did name check both Senators.
Senator Alexander and Senator Murray share a lifelong commitment to improving education. Senator Murray spent years as a preschool teacher and early learning advocate for the people of her home state of Washington. This work is in her blood, it is why she entered politics. Long before Senator Alexander was Secretary of Education, Governor and a university President—he fought to end a policy of racial discrimination at Vanderbilt when he was the editor of his college newspaper. My father is also from Tennessee and also attended Vanderbilt and he always had tremendous respect for Senator Alexander.
Both senators' commitment to this nation's children is real.
In short, if folks were hoping that Duncan would come out swinging or that we would eventually be treated to a sassy catfight, folks may commence with the disappointment. There is not so much as a veiled oblique criticism of the Senate draft in this speech. The closest to a cautionary word was the sentence "We cannot cut our way to greater opportunities for our children."
And the short summary version of what he wants to see in the bill is now broad and vague:
A new law must build a foundation for 21st century schools by investing in innovation, supporting our fantastic teachers and principals, and encouraging every student's progress so that our nation's greatest asset, our vast academic and social potential, can be fully realized.
There is not even so much as a "college and career" in the whole thing. Duncan here abandons many of the ideas that were previous must-haves. Instead this is a lot of the warm mushy platitudinous word pie that he has served up in the past while dealing lousy policy at the same time. So I'm not sure what there is to learn here, other than there's no storm brewing. At least not yet.
Perhaps Duncan is just lame-ducking it. Perhaps he wanted to stay positive for the big birthday party. Perhaps he's caught a sense that it doesn't matter if he suggests that the new bill should involve ponies and eclairs for all. But whatever his thinking was, there was not the slightest hint of confrontation with the Senate in this bill, and his advice to the House committee was to imitate the Senate's warm atmosphere of bipartisan swellness, advice that I'm sure the House will resolutely ignore. We may have to do without fireworks entirely until the bill takes its bow in front of the full Senate next week.
Monday, April 6, 2015
The School Funding Gap Is Worse
Over at the Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay has been crunching school funding numbers, and while her news is not really news for anyone who's been paying attention, it now comes with numbers and charts and color-coded maps.
Since 2000, the gap between rich and poor schools has been growing in at least thirty states. In 2001-2002, rich schools were getting 10.8% more state and local resources than poor schools. A decade later that gap was 15.6%, an increase of about 44%.
Barshay has made some handy interactive maps to break this down by states. The prize-winning Very Worst States for school funding gaps in 2011-2012 include Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, Virginia, New York, Vermont, and Rhode Island.
Barshay says that once you add federal dollars, the gaps almost disappear. I have some doubts about that (if it's true in PA, it's true in some way that's largely invisible to people on the ground), but she also indicates that this is a problem, and she quotes an anonymous USED source:
“Federal dollars were never intended to act as an equalizer for an unfair playing field set by state and local dollars,” said a U.S. Department of Education official, who said she was required to speak anonymously. “They are explicitly intended to supplement.”
As explained by education historian Diane Ravitch:
ESEA was originally conceived as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It had one overriding purpose: to send federal funding to schools that enrolled large numbers of children living in poverty.
But since ESEA became No Child Left Behind, it has become the crowbar used by the feds to force state mouths open so they will take their medicine, whatever medicine currently believe that states must take. This is not an unusual trajectory for federal money-- first it's given to address a problem, but sooner or later the feds want to know if they're getting bang for their buck, which invariably leads to federal kibbitzing about how said bang can be best achieved. Then once the feds have put themselves in charge of bang measurement and enforcement, lobbyists and corporations are drawn like moths to the flame, offering their expertise and assistance in developing bangological measures and programs and other Wise Methods to spend all those sweet, sweet bang-directed bucks. And that's about where we are now.
But I digress.
Barshay crunches numbers a few different ways, with maps to boot. One shows the 2001-2002 gaps. There's one that shows the change in spending gaps over the decade, and some states have actually gotten better-- there are such places. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Missouri, look terrible every time.
She acknowledges that computing cost-per-pupil is a fuzzy science at best and that some states have changed their accounting methods. But while the specifics of her compiled numbers may be arguable, the overall trend is not. She also points out that a low spending gap for schools can be achieved by just giving all schools lousy funding (she's looking at you, California). Nor does she think (it is an opinion piece) that there's any reason for poor schools to play catch-up with Rich Kid Academy and its heated tennis courts and cappucino service.
She finishes with an unexpected thought-- "It kind of makes you wish for a federal takeover of the educational financing system." Well, no, it doesn't (see above buck/bang discussion). But it does provide more context for the ongoing discussions of funding tied up in ESEA rewrite negotiations.
Since 2000, the gap between rich and poor schools has been growing in at least thirty states. In 2001-2002, rich schools were getting 10.8% more state and local resources than poor schools. A decade later that gap was 15.6%, an increase of about 44%.
Barshay has made some handy interactive maps to break this down by states. The prize-winning Very Worst States for school funding gaps in 2011-2012 include Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, Virginia, New York, Vermont, and Rhode Island.
Barshay says that once you add federal dollars, the gaps almost disappear. I have some doubts about that (if it's true in PA, it's true in some way that's largely invisible to people on the ground), but she also indicates that this is a problem, and she quotes an anonymous USED source:
“Federal dollars were never intended to act as an equalizer for an unfair playing field set by state and local dollars,” said a U.S. Department of Education official, who said she was required to speak anonymously. “They are explicitly intended to supplement.”
As explained by education historian Diane Ravitch:
ESEA was originally conceived as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It had one overriding purpose: to send federal funding to schools that enrolled large numbers of children living in poverty.
But since ESEA became No Child Left Behind, it has become the crowbar used by the feds to force state mouths open so they will take their medicine, whatever medicine currently believe that states must take. This is not an unusual trajectory for federal money-- first it's given to address a problem, but sooner or later the feds want to know if they're getting bang for their buck, which invariably leads to federal kibbitzing about how said bang can be best achieved. Then once the feds have put themselves in charge of bang measurement and enforcement, lobbyists and corporations are drawn like moths to the flame, offering their expertise and assistance in developing bangological measures and programs and other Wise Methods to spend all those sweet, sweet bang-directed bucks. And that's about where we are now.
But I digress.
Barshay crunches numbers a few different ways, with maps to boot. One shows the 2001-2002 gaps. There's one that shows the change in spending gaps over the decade, and some states have actually gotten better-- there are such places. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Missouri, look terrible every time.
She acknowledges that computing cost-per-pupil is a fuzzy science at best and that some states have changed their accounting methods. But while the specifics of her compiled numbers may be arguable, the overall trend is not. She also points out that a low spending gap for schools can be achieved by just giving all schools lousy funding (she's looking at you, California). Nor does she think (it is an opinion piece) that there's any reason for poor schools to play catch-up with Rich Kid Academy and its heated tennis courts and cappucino service.
She finishes with an unexpected thought-- "It kind of makes you wish for a federal takeover of the educational financing system." Well, no, it doesn't (see above buck/bang discussion). But it does provide more context for the ongoing discussions of funding tied up in ESEA rewrite negotiations.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Politics and ESEA
As we come down to the first of many wires on the next of many rewrites of ESEA, Politico provides a nail-biting tale of House Republicans looking to make sure they have the votes, while Andy Smarick has provided a handy chart of the range of political stances, ideas, and versions of a new ESEA.
The pieces are instructive. Smarick in particular shows how the various proposals, from Lamar Alexander's to NGA to FEE to-- hmmm, I don't see anything from Secretary Duncan on here. Almost as if he's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Anyway, it's an easy to size up look at the various political positions on the ESEA rewrite. As such it is somewhat informative and entirely depressing.
Likewise, the Politico piece which approaches the rewriting of ESEA as if it's a political office deserving the same horse-race style coverage of a battle for the job of Mayor of Chicago. Also depressing?
Why depressing? Because both pieces are a reminder that the one thing that is not being discussed with any degree of fervor or intensity or even at all is the educational basis for any of these choices. Many of the policy discussions (say, the desire for an eternal onslaught of standardized testing) could be informed by actual research and facts and stuff, but they won't be. ESEA could be rewritten in an atmosphere in which lawmakers and policy writers sit quietly and listen to what actual teachers and educators and researchers (real researchers, not thinky tank un-peer non-reviewed opinion pieces) have to say.
That's not going to happen, and I'm enough of a big boy to understand that that's not how the world works when it comes to any policy. I understand we've crafted a system where expertise and knowledge are often dwarfed by money and power, and that it's hard to have any kind of political system that tries to organize representative government will tilt in that direction. I'm a grown-up. I get it. I'm not going to sit and moan about how we should be living in some non-political utopia where lions and lambs lie down together and the birds and the bees sing kumbayyah. We live in the real world, and this is part of that.
But, by God, the next time some reformster wants to complain that the opponents of Common Core and standardized testing and charter schools keep politicizing things instead of discussing educational policies on their educational merits, I'm going to refer him back to these two pieces. It's time to watch, once again, how the sausage is made, and it's not made out of educational pieces-parts in an educational sausage factory. It's political sausage made at a political sausagefest.
This is a reminder to teachers who want to stay home and say, "Well, I don't want to get my hands dirty with political stuff" that they are opting out of making the decisions that they have to live with. And it's a reminder that "Why must you make this so political?" is another way to say, "I'd like you to go back to being uninvolved and ineffective, please."
The pieces are instructive. Smarick in particular shows how the various proposals, from Lamar Alexander's to NGA to FEE to-- hmmm, I don't see anything from Secretary Duncan on here. Almost as if he's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Anyway, it's an easy to size up look at the various political positions on the ESEA rewrite. As such it is somewhat informative and entirely depressing.
Likewise, the Politico piece which approaches the rewriting of ESEA as if it's a political office deserving the same horse-race style coverage of a battle for the job of Mayor of Chicago. Also depressing?
Why depressing? Because both pieces are a reminder that the one thing that is not being discussed with any degree of fervor or intensity or even at all is the educational basis for any of these choices. Many of the policy discussions (say, the desire for an eternal onslaught of standardized testing) could be informed by actual research and facts and stuff, but they won't be. ESEA could be rewritten in an atmosphere in which lawmakers and policy writers sit quietly and listen to what actual teachers and educators and researchers (real researchers, not thinky tank un-peer non-reviewed opinion pieces) have to say.
That's not going to happen, and I'm enough of a big boy to understand that that's not how the world works when it comes to any policy. I understand we've crafted a system where expertise and knowledge are often dwarfed by money and power, and that it's hard to have any kind of political system that tries to organize representative government will tilt in that direction. I'm a grown-up. I get it. I'm not going to sit and moan about how we should be living in some non-political utopia where lions and lambs lie down together and the birds and the bees sing kumbayyah. We live in the real world, and this is part of that.
But, by God, the next time some reformster wants to complain that the opponents of Common Core and standardized testing and charter schools keep politicizing things instead of discussing educational policies on their educational merits, I'm going to refer him back to these two pieces. It's time to watch, once again, how the sausage is made, and it's not made out of educational pieces-parts in an educational sausage factory. It's political sausage made at a political sausagefest.
This is a reminder to teachers who want to stay home and say, "Well, I don't want to get my hands dirty with political stuff" that they are opting out of making the decisions that they have to live with. And it's a reminder that "Why must you make this so political?" is another way to say, "I'd like you to go back to being uninvolved and ineffective, please."
Sunday, February 22, 2015
ESEA: Time To Speak Out (Again)
Word on the street is that as soon as this coming Friday (February 27), the House of Representatives could be voting on H.R. 5- The Student Success Act. That means it's time for defenders of US public education to speak up. In a few paragraphs, I am going to tell you just how easy it is to speak up this time, but first let me make my case for why you need to do it.
H.R. 5 is the House GOP proposal for rewriting ESEA, and while the Legislation Currently Known As NCLB desperately needs to be rewritten, this is the not the rewrite we've been looking for.
The proposal is almost 600 pages long; even so, many smart people have read through that monster (Mercedes Schneider got through 52 of the more important pages and you should look at what she found). But the four big fire engine red flags are:
1) A requirement for Big Standardized Testing in every year from grade 3 through grade 8, plus once in high school. This gives the BS Testing the force of law, enshrining what we know to be unproven, unnecessary, and unhelpful.
2) Title I funding would be portable, which is a less-alarming way to say that Title I would become a student voucher, inevitably making poor schools even poorer.
3) Cuts way back on Title II funding for class size reduction. Because if we're going to support BS Testing, for which there's no proof of benefits, why not even things out by unsupporting smaller classes, for which there is proof of benefits.
4) Expands support for charter schools and charter school companies. Because politicians hate throwing money at public schools, but throwing money at charters is awesome.
So. It's time, again, to write your Representative. I know you're a teacher and it's not really your thing to be politically active. I know you have a lot of other things to take care of. But you know who doesn't have anything else to worry about except politics and legislation? Lobbyists.
This is part of why we struggle uphill on this reformster stuff. We've got classes to teach and papers to grade and lessons to plan and lunch money to collect and school plays to direct and paying attention to politics, following politics, speaking out to our politicians-- those are all things we have to squeeze in around the edges. But meanwhile, there are people out there who literally have absolutely nothing to do all day except agitate for their causes.
If we are going to counterbalance an army of corporate shills and well-paid lobbyists who spend every single day explaining to legislators why America really needs to support test corporations and charter companies and everyone else trying to divert public education tax dollars into private corporate pockets-- if we're going to be a counterforce to those people, we have to speak. And speak. And speak.
Because, I have to tell you, this is not the last time we'll be called on to speak up. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and the reauthorization of ESEA is going to spawn a long windy parade of bad ideas auditioning for the role of Actual Law, and we're going to have to speak up every single time one rolls its parade float past our door. And we have to be tough and relentless because there will always be those paid lobbyists for the corporations getting up every morning with nothing to do except try to move legislation to their employers' benefit.
We can't count on someone else to do it. It wish we could count on our national teachers' unions, but they keep getting confused about what they support.
Fortunately, this time there's an easy approach.
The Network for Public Education, a group of public education supporters to which I proudly belong, has set up a quick an easy way to make your voice heard. Follow this link. Don't know for sure who your rep is? You'll type in your zip code and automatically get a form addressed to your representative's email. Not sure what to say or how to say it? The letter is already written; send it as is, edit it to suit, or erase it and write your own. And while you're at it, you can join NPE if you haven't already. Which you should.
Heaven only knows how long it will take to get an ESEA rewrite through both houses, or how long it will be before the next rewrite. But whatever comes out of this round will be the law we live with for years. It will be hard to get Congress to listen to us, and we may not succeed in all the ways we want to. But nobody is going to hear us if we don't speak. Raise your voice now.
H.R. 5 is the House GOP proposal for rewriting ESEA, and while the Legislation Currently Known As NCLB desperately needs to be rewritten, this is the not the rewrite we've been looking for.
The proposal is almost 600 pages long; even so, many smart people have read through that monster (Mercedes Schneider got through 52 of the more important pages and you should look at what she found). But the four big fire engine red flags are:
1) A requirement for Big Standardized Testing in every year from grade 3 through grade 8, plus once in high school. This gives the BS Testing the force of law, enshrining what we know to be unproven, unnecessary, and unhelpful.
2) Title I funding would be portable, which is a less-alarming way to say that Title I would become a student voucher, inevitably making poor schools even poorer.
3) Cuts way back on Title II funding for class size reduction. Because if we're going to support BS Testing, for which there's no proof of benefits, why not even things out by unsupporting smaller classes, for which there is proof of benefits.
4) Expands support for charter schools and charter school companies. Because politicians hate throwing money at public schools, but throwing money at charters is awesome.
So. It's time, again, to write your Representative. I know you're a teacher and it's not really your thing to be politically active. I know you have a lot of other things to take care of. But you know who doesn't have anything else to worry about except politics and legislation? Lobbyists.
This is part of why we struggle uphill on this reformster stuff. We've got classes to teach and papers to grade and lessons to plan and lunch money to collect and school plays to direct and paying attention to politics, following politics, speaking out to our politicians-- those are all things we have to squeeze in around the edges. But meanwhile, there are people out there who literally have absolutely nothing to do all day except agitate for their causes.
If we are going to counterbalance an army of corporate shills and well-paid lobbyists who spend every single day explaining to legislators why America really needs to support test corporations and charter companies and everyone else trying to divert public education tax dollars into private corporate pockets-- if we're going to be a counterforce to those people, we have to speak. And speak. And speak.
Because, I have to tell you, this is not the last time we'll be called on to speak up. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and the reauthorization of ESEA is going to spawn a long windy parade of bad ideas auditioning for the role of Actual Law, and we're going to have to speak up every single time one rolls its parade float past our door. And we have to be tough and relentless because there will always be those paid lobbyists for the corporations getting up every morning with nothing to do except try to move legislation to their employers' benefit.
We can't count on someone else to do it. It wish we could count on our national teachers' unions, but they keep getting confused about what they support.
Fortunately, this time there's an easy approach.
The Network for Public Education, a group of public education supporters to which I proudly belong, has set up a quick an easy way to make your voice heard. Follow this link. Don't know for sure who your rep is? You'll type in your zip code and automatically get a form addressed to your representative's email. Not sure what to say or how to say it? The letter is already written; send it as is, edit it to suit, or erase it and write your own. And while you're at it, you can join NPE if you haven't already. Which you should.
Heaven only knows how long it will take to get an ESEA rewrite through both houses, or how long it will be before the next rewrite. But whatever comes out of this round will be the law we live with for years. It will be hard to get Congress to listen to us, and we may not succeed in all the ways we want to. But nobody is going to hear us if we don't speak. Raise your voice now.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
The Very Best Policy Memo on Testing
Policy memos, like white papers, reports and means for grown-ups to say, "Hey, here's what I think should happen," are often a motley crew with little foundation and a lot of hot air. These kinds of reports are all-too-often just blog posts in a glossy tuxedo.
But the National Education Policy Center can be counted on to do actual research, use actual facts, and express their ideas in clear, cogent prose. And when it comes to the issue of ESEA renewal and testing, they do not disappoint.
"Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Time To Move Beyond Test-Focused Policies" is a mouthful of a title, but in a mere dozen pages (several are endnotes), Kevin G. Welner and William J. Mathis deliver a clear and thorough response to those who insist that annual standardized tests need to be the engine that drives the pubic education system. I am not going to do it justice here in this space, but let me give you the nickel tour of some of the best of the many great pull-quotes in the piece.
Their first paragraph presents a clear foundation:
Today’s 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they’ve known. The federal government entrusted their educations to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014. Thus, we would achieve “equality.” This approach has not worked.
They drop back for a history lesson, beginning with where we started:
NCLB was an ineffective solution to some very real problems.
But policy fails to provide supports for student success and ignores "the many opportunity gaps children face outside of school." Federal funding has been insufficient, has run out, has been kicked in the teeth by the Great Recession. "Adequate school funding remains a key, unaddressed issue."
NEPC then goes on to look at the testing debate itself, making this key point about what is not being included:
Nevertheless, the debate in Washington, D.C., largely ignores the fundamental criticism leveled by parents and others: testing should not be driving reform.
But the problem is not how to do testing correctly. In fact, today's standardized assessments are probably the best they've ever been. The problem is a system that favors a largely automated accounting of a narrow slice of students' capacity and then attaches huge consequences to that limited information.
The paper goes on the list some of the undesirable side effects of that "singular focus," including (and I'll paraphrase) sucking the fun out of school, turning teaching into clerical gruntwork, giving up on an actual well-rounded education, and tossing out non-academic skills related to becoming a decent human being.
Tests, they caution, can be useful when used properly and for their intended purposes.
The problem is not in the measurements; it is in the fetishizing of those measurements. It is the belief that measurements will magically drive improvements in teaching and learning.
NEPC next turns to the Equity Argument for Test-Based Reform. They note the real reasons, including historic neglect of some groups, for people to find this argument compelling.
...we do not see any reason to believe that a test-focused ESEA in 2015 would yield any greater focus on opportunities to learn than did a test-focused ESEA in 2002.
The writers note that the achievement gaps were well-known and documented via NAEP results before NCLB was ever hatched. Test-based attempts to close the achievement gap have never worked. And the NAEP provides all the measurement we'll ever need.
The secret? Poverty. The original ESEA language called for an additional 40% of a state's spending for each child living in poverty. This would be one of those parts of the law that nobody has ever come close to following. Meanwhile, poverty is making a mess, inevitably leading to larger opportunity gaps and achievement gaps. "Testing will document this, but it will do nothing to change it."
What about universal accountability?
NCLB and similar policies have done a disservice to the word "accountability." Our nation and our nation's education system need accountability, but it must be fair and it must be universal. Holding teachers accountable but excusing policymakers who fail to provide necessary supports is as harmful and illogical as holding students accountable but excusing poor teaching. Today's demoralized teaching force has been given too much responsibility for outcomes and too little control over these outcomes.
And then they wind to a close, which like the rest of the paper is thoroughly quoteworthy. Let's use this line:
The way forward is not to tinker further with failed test-based accountability mechanisms; it is to learn from the best of our knowledge.
The NEPC has an open letter to Congress with this report attached for any researchers and professors to sign; so far almost 1,500 names are attached. If you are a researcher or college prof, you should sign it. If you are a person who cares about public education, you should read the entire document. If there is an app that allows us to give something a standing ovation on the internet, this paper deserves it.
But the National Education Policy Center can be counted on to do actual research, use actual facts, and express their ideas in clear, cogent prose. And when it comes to the issue of ESEA renewal and testing, they do not disappoint.
"Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Time To Move Beyond Test-Focused Policies" is a mouthful of a title, but in a mere dozen pages (several are endnotes), Kevin G. Welner and William J. Mathis deliver a clear and thorough response to those who insist that annual standardized tests need to be the engine that drives the pubic education system. I am not going to do it justice here in this space, but let me give you the nickel tour of some of the best of the many great pull-quotes in the piece.
Their first paragraph presents a clear foundation:
Today’s 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they’ve known. The federal government entrusted their educations to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014. Thus, we would achieve “equality.” This approach has not worked.
They drop back for a history lesson, beginning with where we started:
NCLB was an ineffective solution to some very real problems.
But policy fails to provide supports for student success and ignores "the many opportunity gaps children face outside of school." Federal funding has been insufficient, has run out, has been kicked in the teeth by the Great Recession. "Adequate school funding remains a key, unaddressed issue."
NEPC then goes on to look at the testing debate itself, making this key point about what is not being included:
Nevertheless, the debate in Washington, D.C., largely ignores the fundamental criticism leveled by parents and others: testing should not be driving reform.
But the problem is not how to do testing correctly. In fact, today's standardized assessments are probably the best they've ever been. The problem is a system that favors a largely automated accounting of a narrow slice of students' capacity and then attaches huge consequences to that limited information.
The paper goes on the list some of the undesirable side effects of that "singular focus," including (and I'll paraphrase) sucking the fun out of school, turning teaching into clerical gruntwork, giving up on an actual well-rounded education, and tossing out non-academic skills related to becoming a decent human being.
Tests, they caution, can be useful when used properly and for their intended purposes.
The problem is not in the measurements; it is in the fetishizing of those measurements. It is the belief that measurements will magically drive improvements in teaching and learning.
NEPC next turns to the Equity Argument for Test-Based Reform. They note the real reasons, including historic neglect of some groups, for people to find this argument compelling.
...we do not see any reason to believe that a test-focused ESEA in 2015 would yield any greater focus on opportunities to learn than did a test-focused ESEA in 2002.
The writers note that the achievement gaps were well-known and documented via NAEP results before NCLB was ever hatched. Test-based attempts to close the achievement gap have never worked. And the NAEP provides all the measurement we'll ever need.
The secret? Poverty. The original ESEA language called for an additional 40% of a state's spending for each child living in poverty. This would be one of those parts of the law that nobody has ever come close to following. Meanwhile, poverty is making a mess, inevitably leading to larger opportunity gaps and achievement gaps. "Testing will document this, but it will do nothing to change it."
What about universal accountability?
NCLB and similar policies have done a disservice to the word "accountability." Our nation and our nation's education system need accountability, but it must be fair and it must be universal. Holding teachers accountable but excusing policymakers who fail to provide necessary supports is as harmful and illogical as holding students accountable but excusing poor teaching. Today's demoralized teaching force has been given too much responsibility for outcomes and too little control over these outcomes.
And then they wind to a close, which like the rest of the paper is thoroughly quoteworthy. Let's use this line:
The way forward is not to tinker further with failed test-based accountability mechanisms; it is to learn from the best of our knowledge.
The NEPC has an open letter to Congress with this report attached for any researchers and professors to sign; so far almost 1,500 names are attached. If you are a researcher or college prof, you should sign it. If you are a person who cares about public education, you should read the entire document. If there is an app that allows us to give something a standing ovation on the internet, this paper deserves it.
Monday, February 16, 2015
The Governors Want Their Schools Back
Last week the National Governor's Association (NGA) released their idea of what the new ESEA should look like. The document is only six pages long, but it has some remarkable features, and while the NGA may not ultimately carry a great deal of weight in this discussion, they certainly don't carry any less weight than Arne Duncan and the USED, and we've talked about their ideas. So fair is fair.
NGA, you may recall, is notable for being the copyright holders of the Common Core as well as being one of the groups that supposedly hired David Coleman, Jason Zimba, and some other gifted amateurs to punch up the nation's education system. So the first thing that we'll note is that the phrase "Common Core" does not appear anywhere in their proposal.
So what's the major upshot of this proposal from the folks who helped start the ball rolling on the federal take-over of fifty separate public education systems? The major upshot is this:
Give us back our schools.
Here are the more specific breakdowns of the proposal.
Governance and Educational Alignment
Governors and state legislatures believe that a student's success is determined by much more than time spent in elementary and high school. Students need a supportive, seamless progression from preschool through college to lifelong learning and successful employment.
So there's your fetus-to-fertilizer pipeline. The NGA loves it-- they just don't think it can be managed very well from DC. After all, he's called Big Brother, not Big Uncle or Big Second Cousin Once Removed on Your Mother's Side. Race to the Top was great for modernizing the approach to education, but "it is time to take the next step" by rewriting ESEA so that it "supports students in all phases of life." Yeah, that's not creepy and stalkery at all.
Does it seem like I'm over-reacting by thinking that this proposes to make the schools a cog in the worker supply chain? Well, here's a quote from their press release:
“The Elementary and Secondary Education Act will allow states to align our needs through early education to higher education with the needs of our innovative businesses, developing a stronger workforce development pipeline, expanding opportunity for all of our people and ensuring that students are prepared for success in all phases of life,” said New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, vice chair of the committee.”
Specifically, the NGA recommends that ESEA gives state-level leaders the authority to align, leverage, and finance their way to greater efficiency. Give states the tools to lump pre- and post- secondary education into the mix, as well as workforce development; break down silos, and allow flexibility for "public-private partnership." So, loosen up the rules so we can outsource to whatever vendor suits us.
Accountability and Testing
NGA would like to move away from "label and punish" and get with a more supportive framework-- for each student. For accountability to work, "federal prescriptions must be replaced with a federal, state and local partnership that makes certain every child counts."
So keep the public reporting of progress, and keep disaggregating results. But dump the "rigid structure" of Annual Measurable Objectives and Adequate Yearly Progress and let the states come up with their own systems that ensure ambitious targets, use multiple measures, account for college and career readiness, check districts' annual progress, gets public input from all constituencies, and allows states to cut a deal with individual districts.
Also, the state's assessment system should be one that "prohibits the US Secretary of Education from influencing or dictating the state's development of goals under ESEA." So, memo from NGA to Arne Duncan: Suck it.
The states should also get to create their own intervention process that does not necessarily hold Title I funds hostage, allows the state to partner with a failing district, but requires the state to flat out intervene after things stay too bad too long. The Title I non-hostage clause would be enough all by itself to get the federal monkey off the states' back.
Also, states should be able to pick or substitute their own alternatives to any federally-required assessments, and they should be able to do it without seeking the permission of the Secretary of Education. So, again-- Arne, suck it.
High Quality Education for All Students
Governors and state legislators want students to succeed and believe that all can (at high levels). We still think the transparency and disaggregatiness of NCLB are just fine, thanks.
So NGA advocates ensuring a high-quality education for all by continuing testing and reporting results, which is kind of backwards, like saying we'll make sure you get a good meal by cleaning the plates afterwards. NGA also advocates allowing some fancy footwork with aggregating, and getting rid of "cumbersome" government paperwork.
Also (I don't know why this is hiding here), they want you to know that "states" include US territories and outside regions. So, congratulations Kwajalein-- you get a piece of this, too.
NGA also recommends that students with disabilities not be left out of this, as well as English language learners. As with the rest of the high-quality delivery system, the states want flexibility to sort things out.
School Improvement
States have been researching ways to "lift up" failing schools like crazy and even trying ways to keep those that are circling the drain from failing. The feds should help us fund scaling up these various techniques (I presume that NGA meant to add "in case we ever find one that actually works, other than obvious things like getting money and resources to schools in trouble"). "The current limited federal menu of options for school improvement" keeps us from doing what we think we'd rather.
However, the feds should still send money. We may want to change other parts of this, but that sending money part? We would like to keep doing that. Then we will spend the money on turnaround specialists or state partnerships with the district or a menu of strategies. Also, we'd like to let successful districts export their ideas to unsuccessful ones (presumably NGA imagines strategies other than "build your school in a wealthy neighborhood" coming to light).
Districts might also use that funding to recruit some awesome high-quality school leaders and then gift them with flexible resources (aka folding money).
Schools would have three years to turn things around, unless they "partnered" with the state, in which case the time frame is open to negotiation. The state will figure out which data markers will determine success.
Empowering Teachers and School Leaders
Teachers and school leaders and the state should be co-developers of an evaluation system and professional development. Districts should be able to use federal money to build partnerships with postsecondary partners (because we all teach in districts right next to colleges).
The feds should scrap their definition of a highly qualified teacher and let the states go back to determining that for themselves. The evaluation system will likewise be a state thing that would give "meaningful weight" to "multiple-measures of teacher and principal performance" (I do not know what the hyphen is doing in there) as well as evidence of student learning and "contributing factors" to student growth. The state, working with educators at all levels, would decide what to do with evaluation results.
Also, "the Secretary may not dictate or require any methodology as part of a state's teacher and school leader evaluation system." So, a third time, NGA says suck it, Arne.
NGA says fine on retaining the requirement to distribute teachers equitably across the state (an requirement that nobody has ever even pretended to implement) but they would like the freedom to spend the money for that on, well, pretty much anything. "Efforts" to increase number of great teachers in a school-- heck, I can fob anything of as an "effort" to do anything.
State and Local Flexibility
States and schools must be given increased flexibility to meet the individual needs of students and prepare them to compete in a highly-skilled workforce.
Well, that certainly lowers the bar for what we want from an educated public, doesn't it. Just get 'em ready for a job. If their future employers are happy, that's all we need? The entire US public education system isn't here to serve students or parents or taxpayers-- it's here to serve businesses?
This part of the proposal is about flexibility in how states have to deal with the feds.
For instance, we spend a third of a page talking about federal approval of the state plan request. The Secretary must have a team to review these plans. The Secretary may not add academic requirements. The Secretary get the plan reviewed and back in sixty days or it is automatically approved. And the Secretary cannot disapprove a plan unless he can "provide substantive, research-based evidence that the plan will negatively affect children's education."
And in the event that we're still doing waivers, the Secretary is again given a list of restrictions, finishing with being forbidden to deny a waiver "for conditions outside the scope of the waiver request," nor may he add additional requirements not covered in ESEA. So in other words, under NGA's version of the law, the current waiver requirements that Arne has saddled everyone with would be illegal (or, if you like, more clearly illegal than they already are).
So, once more, and with gusto, Arne is cordially invited to suck it.
Two Thoughts
Two things occur to me reading this document (well, three, if you count how very much the governors want Arne to get bent).
One is that the governors don't seem to have a great deal of faith in the authority of the state. It seems that if they were really feeling their oats, they would just do some of the things on this list instead of asking if the feds might allow them a small cup of rights. "Please, sir, may I have some more," hardly seems like the stance for a full-scale American governor.
Second, the NGA seems surprised to be here, as if they can't imagine how education ever got in such a heavily-federalized mess. They've tried selling this "Who, us?" narrative before, but it was the governors who laid out what would be the framework of Race to the Top, and they did it back in 2008, before Duncan and Obama had made their unsuccessful attempt to get ESEA rewritten, before Race to the Top was devised as an end run around it. If the governor's don't like the current reformy scenery, well, we've arrived exactly where they wanted to take us. A piece of my heart will go out to any US Congress member who calls the governors on that.
The best final word on the NGA Christmas list comes from Anne Gassel at Missouri Education Watchdog, so I'll let her wrap this up by putting this newest reformy proposal in its proper context:
Outcome Based Education, School To Work, Goals 2000, NCLB are all signs that the federal government is incapable of drafting workable or effective laws regarding education. Reform at this level will not work. Such laws, by the very fact that they require central control (and accountability), are destined not to work for education and need to be eliminated. Unfortunately our Governors don’t recognize that they already have all the authority they need to do what they want and instead are asking for permission, thereby granting control to the feds. This is not leadership Governors. This is middle management at best.
NGA, you may recall, is notable for being the copyright holders of the Common Core as well as being one of the groups that supposedly hired David Coleman, Jason Zimba, and some other gifted amateurs to punch up the nation's education system. So the first thing that we'll note is that the phrase "Common Core" does not appear anywhere in their proposal.
So what's the major upshot of this proposal from the folks who helped start the ball rolling on the federal take-over of fifty separate public education systems? The major upshot is this:
Give us back our schools.
Here are the more specific breakdowns of the proposal.
Governance and Educational Alignment
Governors and state legislatures believe that a student's success is determined by much more than time spent in elementary and high school. Students need a supportive, seamless progression from preschool through college to lifelong learning and successful employment.
So there's your fetus-to-fertilizer pipeline. The NGA loves it-- they just don't think it can be managed very well from DC. After all, he's called Big Brother, not Big Uncle or Big Second Cousin Once Removed on Your Mother's Side. Race to the Top was great for modernizing the approach to education, but "it is time to take the next step" by rewriting ESEA so that it "supports students in all phases of life." Yeah, that's not creepy and stalkery at all.
Does it seem like I'm over-reacting by thinking that this proposes to make the schools a cog in the worker supply chain? Well, here's a quote from their press release:
“The Elementary and Secondary Education Act will allow states to align our needs through early education to higher education with the needs of our innovative businesses, developing a stronger workforce development pipeline, expanding opportunity for all of our people and ensuring that students are prepared for success in all phases of life,” said New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, vice chair of the committee.”
Specifically, the NGA recommends that ESEA gives state-level leaders the authority to align, leverage, and finance their way to greater efficiency. Give states the tools to lump pre- and post- secondary education into the mix, as well as workforce development; break down silos, and allow flexibility for "public-private partnership." So, loosen up the rules so we can outsource to whatever vendor suits us.
Accountability and Testing
NGA would like to move away from "label and punish" and get with a more supportive framework-- for each student. For accountability to work, "federal prescriptions must be replaced with a federal, state and local partnership that makes certain every child counts."
So keep the public reporting of progress, and keep disaggregating results. But dump the "rigid structure" of Annual Measurable Objectives and Adequate Yearly Progress and let the states come up with their own systems that ensure ambitious targets, use multiple measures, account for college and career readiness, check districts' annual progress, gets public input from all constituencies, and allows states to cut a deal with individual districts.
Also, the state's assessment system should be one that "prohibits the US Secretary of Education from influencing or dictating the state's development of goals under ESEA." So, memo from NGA to Arne Duncan: Suck it.
The states should also get to create their own intervention process that does not necessarily hold Title I funds hostage, allows the state to partner with a failing district, but requires the state to flat out intervene after things stay too bad too long. The Title I non-hostage clause would be enough all by itself to get the federal monkey off the states' back.
Also, states should be able to pick or substitute their own alternatives to any federally-required assessments, and they should be able to do it without seeking the permission of the Secretary of Education. So, again-- Arne, suck it.
High Quality Education for All Students
Governors and state legislators want students to succeed and believe that all can (at high levels). We still think the transparency and disaggregatiness of NCLB are just fine, thanks.
So NGA advocates ensuring a high-quality education for all by continuing testing and reporting results, which is kind of backwards, like saying we'll make sure you get a good meal by cleaning the plates afterwards. NGA also advocates allowing some fancy footwork with aggregating, and getting rid of "cumbersome" government paperwork.
Also (I don't know why this is hiding here), they want you to know that "states" include US territories and outside regions. So, congratulations Kwajalein-- you get a piece of this, too.
NGA also recommends that students with disabilities not be left out of this, as well as English language learners. As with the rest of the high-quality delivery system, the states want flexibility to sort things out.
School Improvement
States have been researching ways to "lift up" failing schools like crazy and even trying ways to keep those that are circling the drain from failing. The feds should help us fund scaling up these various techniques (I presume that NGA meant to add "in case we ever find one that actually works, other than obvious things like getting money and resources to schools in trouble"). "The current limited federal menu of options for school improvement" keeps us from doing what we think we'd rather.
However, the feds should still send money. We may want to change other parts of this, but that sending money part? We would like to keep doing that. Then we will spend the money on turnaround specialists or state partnerships with the district or a menu of strategies. Also, we'd like to let successful districts export their ideas to unsuccessful ones (presumably NGA imagines strategies other than "build your school in a wealthy neighborhood" coming to light).
Districts might also use that funding to recruit some awesome high-quality school leaders and then gift them with flexible resources (aka folding money).
Schools would have three years to turn things around, unless they "partnered" with the state, in which case the time frame is open to negotiation. The state will figure out which data markers will determine success.
Empowering Teachers and School Leaders
Teachers and school leaders and the state should be co-developers of an evaluation system and professional development. Districts should be able to use federal money to build partnerships with postsecondary partners (because we all teach in districts right next to colleges).
The feds should scrap their definition of a highly qualified teacher and let the states go back to determining that for themselves. The evaluation system will likewise be a state thing that would give "meaningful weight" to "multiple-measures of teacher and principal performance" (I do not know what the hyphen is doing in there) as well as evidence of student learning and "contributing factors" to student growth. The state, working with educators at all levels, would decide what to do with evaluation results.
Also, "the Secretary may not dictate or require any methodology as part of a state's teacher and school leader evaluation system." So, a third time, NGA says suck it, Arne.
NGA says fine on retaining the requirement to distribute teachers equitably across the state (an requirement that nobody has ever even pretended to implement) but they would like the freedom to spend the money for that on, well, pretty much anything. "Efforts" to increase number of great teachers in a school-- heck, I can fob anything of as an "effort" to do anything.
State and Local Flexibility
States and schools must be given increased flexibility to meet the individual needs of students and prepare them to compete in a highly-skilled workforce.
Well, that certainly lowers the bar for what we want from an educated public, doesn't it. Just get 'em ready for a job. If their future employers are happy, that's all we need? The entire US public education system isn't here to serve students or parents or taxpayers-- it's here to serve businesses?
This part of the proposal is about flexibility in how states have to deal with the feds.
For instance, we spend a third of a page talking about federal approval of the state plan request. The Secretary must have a team to review these plans. The Secretary may not add academic requirements. The Secretary get the plan reviewed and back in sixty days or it is automatically approved. And the Secretary cannot disapprove a plan unless he can "provide substantive, research-based evidence that the plan will negatively affect children's education."
And in the event that we're still doing waivers, the Secretary is again given a list of restrictions, finishing with being forbidden to deny a waiver "for conditions outside the scope of the waiver request," nor may he add additional requirements not covered in ESEA. So in other words, under NGA's version of the law, the current waiver requirements that Arne has saddled everyone with would be illegal (or, if you like, more clearly illegal than they already are).
So, once more, and with gusto, Arne is cordially invited to suck it.
Two Thoughts
Two things occur to me reading this document (well, three, if you count how very much the governors want Arne to get bent).
One is that the governors don't seem to have a great deal of faith in the authority of the state. It seems that if they were really feeling their oats, they would just do some of the things on this list instead of asking if the feds might allow them a small cup of rights. "Please, sir, may I have some more," hardly seems like the stance for a full-scale American governor.
Second, the NGA seems surprised to be here, as if they can't imagine how education ever got in such a heavily-federalized mess. They've tried selling this "Who, us?" narrative before, but it was the governors who laid out what would be the framework of Race to the Top, and they did it back in 2008, before Duncan and Obama had made their unsuccessful attempt to get ESEA rewritten, before Race to the Top was devised as an end run around it. If the governor's don't like the current reformy scenery, well, we've arrived exactly where they wanted to take us. A piece of my heart will go out to any US Congress member who calls the governors on that.
The best final word on the NGA Christmas list comes from Anne Gassel at Missouri Education Watchdog, so I'll let her wrap this up by putting this newest reformy proposal in its proper context:
Outcome Based Education, School To Work, Goals 2000, NCLB are all signs that the federal government is incapable of drafting workable or effective laws regarding education. Reform at this level will not work. Such laws, by the very fact that they require central control (and accountability), are destined not to work for education and need to be eliminated. Unfortunately our Governors don’t recognize that they already have all the authority they need to do what they want and instead are asking for permission, thereby granting control to the feds. This is not leadership Governors. This is middle management at best.
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
ESEA Hearing: What Wasn't Answered
The first Senate hearing on the NCLB rewrite focused on testing and accountability. Discussion at and around the hearing has centered on questions of the Big Standardized Test. How many tests should be given? How often should the test be given? Should it be a federal test or a state test? Who should decide where to draw the pass-fail line on the test?
These are all swell questions to ask, but they are absolutely pointless until we answer a more fundamental question:
What do the tests actually tell us?
Folks keep saying things such as "We need to continue testing because we must have accountability." But that statement assumes that tests actually provide accountability. And that is a gargantuan assumption, leading Congress to contemplate building a five-story grand gothic mansion of accountability on top of a foundation of testing sand in a high stakes swamp.
The question did not go completely unaddressed. Dr. Martin West led off with some observations about the validity of the test. And then he trotted out Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff (2014) a study that piles tautology (we define good teachers as those with good test results, and then we discover that those good teachers get good test results; also, red paint is red) on top of correlation dressed up as causation. If you like your Chetty debunking with a more scholarly flair, try this. If you like it with Phineas and Ferb references, try this.
Then West piled up more correlation dressed as causation. Citing Deming et al (2014), West takes a stand for the predictive power of testing, and in doing so, he himself makes clear why his support of testing validity is actually no support at all.
Predictive power is not causation. Let's take a stroll through a business district and meet some random folks. I'll bet you that the quality of their shoes is predictive of the quality of their cars and their homes. Expensive shoes predict a Lexus parked in front of a five story grand gothic mansion.
It does not follow, however, that if I buy really nice shoes for all the homeless people in that part of town, they will suddenly have expensive homes and fancy cars.
And here's how test-based accountability works. People off in some capital tell local authorities, "We want to end homelessness. So we expect pictures of all your homeless wearing nice shoes. And if the number doesn't go up, we will dock your pay, kill your dog, and take away your dessert for a year." The local authorities will get those pictures (even if they have to use fake shoes or the same shoes on multiple feet), send off the snapshots to the capital, the capital folks will congratulate themselves for ending poverty, and the homeless people will still be sleeping under a bridge and not in a fancy gothic mansion.
Another version of the same central question that was neither asked nor answered at the hearing would be:
What would give us the best, most complete, most accurate sense of how well educated a young person might be? How many people would seriously answer, "Oh, given the need to measure the full range of a person's skills, knowledge and aptitudes, I would absolutely depend on a bubble test covering just two thin slivers out of the whole pizza of that person." When you think of a well-educated person, do you automatically think of a person who does really well on standardized tests of certain math and reading skills?
Oddly enough, it was a nominally pro-test witness whose testimony underlined that. Paul Leather, of the New Hampshire Department of Education, testified at some length about the granite state's extensive work in developing something more like a whole-child, full-range assessment-- something that is robust and flexible and individual and authentic and basically everything that a standardized mass-produced test is not.
Congress put the cart not only before the horse, but before the wheels came back from the blacksmith shop. What they need to do is bring in the testing whizzes of Pearson/PARCC/SBA/etc and ask them to show how the Big Standardized Test measures anything other than a student's ability to take the Big Standardized Test. And I have not even addressed the question of whether or not the Big Standardized Test accurately measures even the slim slice of skills that it claims to assess-- but that question needs to be asked as well. We're missing serious discussions of testing's actual results, like this one. Instead, Congress engaged in a long discussion of how best to clean and press the emperor's new clothes.
There is no point in discussing what testing program best provides accountability if the tests do not actually measure any of the things we want schools to be accountable for. You can build your big gothic mansion in the swamp, but it will be sad, scary and dangerous for any people who have to live there.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
These are all swell questions to ask, but they are absolutely pointless until we answer a more fundamental question:
What do the tests actually tell us?
Folks keep saying things such as "We need to continue testing because we must have accountability." But that statement assumes that tests actually provide accountability. And that is a gargantuan assumption, leading Congress to contemplate building a five-story grand gothic mansion of accountability on top of a foundation of testing sand in a high stakes swamp.
The question did not go completely unaddressed. Dr. Martin West led off with some observations about the validity of the test. And then he trotted out Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff (2014) a study that piles tautology (we define good teachers as those with good test results, and then we discover that those good teachers get good test results; also, red paint is red) on top of correlation dressed up as causation. If you like your Chetty debunking with a more scholarly flair, try this. If you like it with Phineas and Ferb references, try this.
Then West piled up more correlation dressed as causation. Citing Deming et al (2014), West takes a stand for the predictive power of testing, and in doing so, he himself makes clear why his support of testing validity is actually no support at all.
Predictive power is not causation. Let's take a stroll through a business district and meet some random folks. I'll bet you that the quality of their shoes is predictive of the quality of their cars and their homes. Expensive shoes predict a Lexus parked in front of a five story grand gothic mansion.
It does not follow, however, that if I buy really nice shoes for all the homeless people in that part of town, they will suddenly have expensive homes and fancy cars.
And here's how test-based accountability works. People off in some capital tell local authorities, "We want to end homelessness. So we expect pictures of all your homeless wearing nice shoes. And if the number doesn't go up, we will dock your pay, kill your dog, and take away your dessert for a year." The local authorities will get those pictures (even if they have to use fake shoes or the same shoes on multiple feet), send off the snapshots to the capital, the capital folks will congratulate themselves for ending poverty, and the homeless people will still be sleeping under a bridge and not in a fancy gothic mansion.
Another version of the same central question that was neither asked nor answered at the hearing would be:
What would give us the best, most complete, most accurate sense of how well educated a young person might be? How many people would seriously answer, "Oh, given the need to measure the full range of a person's skills, knowledge and aptitudes, I would absolutely depend on a bubble test covering just two thin slivers out of the whole pizza of that person." When you think of a well-educated person, do you automatically think of a person who does really well on standardized tests of certain math and reading skills?
Oddly enough, it was a nominally pro-test witness whose testimony underlined that. Paul Leather, of the New Hampshire Department of Education, testified at some length about the granite state's extensive work in developing something more like a whole-child, full-range assessment-- something that is robust and flexible and individual and authentic and basically everything that a standardized mass-produced test is not.
Congress put the cart not only before the horse, but before the wheels came back from the blacksmith shop. What they need to do is bring in the testing whizzes of Pearson/PARCC/SBA/etc and ask them to show how the Big Standardized Test measures anything other than a student's ability to take the Big Standardized Test. And I have not even addressed the question of whether or not the Big Standardized Test accurately measures even the slim slice of skills that it claims to assess-- but that question needs to be asked as well. We're missing serious discussions of testing's actual results, like this one. Instead, Congress engaged in a long discussion of how best to clean and press the emperor's new clothes.
There is no point in discussing what testing program best provides accountability if the tests do not actually measure any of the things we want schools to be accountable for. You can build your big gothic mansion in the swamp, but it will be sad, scary and dangerous for any people who have to live there.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Monday, February 2, 2015
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.
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.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
My ESEA Letter
(Well, one of them. I've sent several.)
I am concerned first of all with the speed with which this is being done. The pattern of the last decade's worth of education reform is to put new rules and regulations in place, to mandate standards and approaches before any real work has been done to determine whether the right choices are being made. It is true that we have been laboring under the bad choices of No Child Left Behind for too long. Replacing old bad choices with new bad choices is not really an improvement.
Let's take our time and get it right.
The reauthorization of ESEA represents a perfect opportunity to do what folks have declared cannot be done-- for the federal government to actually let go of some of the power that it has gathered to itself and send that power back to the states. It needs to be done, not because of some ideological or political stance, but because trying to control local education from DC simply does not work.
Controlling local education from DC is like trying to use a piece of gum and a ten foot pole to pick up a dime. DC is simply too far removed from the nation's classrooms to be able to effective aid the teachers who work there. Trying to set standards, establish a definition of success, and impose a vision of what every single child in the nation should want to be-- these are beyond the scope of any single body, federal or otherwise.
Give us financial support. Give us a list of do-nots (do not discriminate based on gender, race or anything else). Require us to function in a transparent manner so that folks can see how we're doing just by looking. And stop supporting the creation of means by which public schools can be undercut and stripped of resources.
We have been living with the ramped-up version of ESEA for over a decade. Has anybody gotten what they wanted? Have we closed the achievement gap or provided better educational opportunities for poor and minority children? Do legislators and bureaucrats believe that they now have a clearer picture of how well students are doing across the nation? Do teachers and local districts feel that they have better guidance or information to do their jobs?
The answer for everybody is no. Over a decade of more centralized control, accountability and oversight, and we have nothing to show for it.
This experiment has failed. It's time to end it.
I am concerned first of all with the speed with which this is being done. The pattern of the last decade's worth of education reform is to put new rules and regulations in place, to mandate standards and approaches before any real work has been done to determine whether the right choices are being made. It is true that we have been laboring under the bad choices of No Child Left Behind for too long. Replacing old bad choices with new bad choices is not really an improvement.
Let's take our time and get it right.
The reauthorization of ESEA represents a perfect opportunity to do what folks have declared cannot be done-- for the federal government to actually let go of some of the power that it has gathered to itself and send that power back to the states. It needs to be done, not because of some ideological or political stance, but because trying to control local education from DC simply does not work.
Controlling local education from DC is like trying to use a piece of gum and a ten foot pole to pick up a dime. DC is simply too far removed from the nation's classrooms to be able to effective aid the teachers who work there. Trying to set standards, establish a definition of success, and impose a vision of what every single child in the nation should want to be-- these are beyond the scope of any single body, federal or otherwise.
Give us financial support. Give us a list of do-nots (do not discriminate based on gender, race or anything else). Require us to function in a transparent manner so that folks can see how we're doing just by looking. And stop supporting the creation of means by which public schools can be undercut and stripped of resources.
We have been living with the ramped-up version of ESEA for over a decade. Has anybody gotten what they wanted? Have we closed the achievement gap or provided better educational opportunities for poor and minority children? Do legislators and bureaucrats believe that they now have a clearer picture of how well students are doing across the nation? Do teachers and local districts feel that they have better guidance or information to do their jobs?
The answer for everybody is no. Over a decade of more centralized control, accountability and oversight, and we have nothing to show for it.
This experiment has failed. It's time to end it.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Duncan's Legless Duck
I opened my eyes while you were kissing me once more than once
And you looked as sincere as a dog
Just as sincere as a dog does when it’s the food on your lips with which it's in love
--Fiona Apple "Parting Gift"
When you have to bribe or threaten people to be your friend, you can be sure that your friendship will be short-lived.
Over at EdWeek, Alyson Klein is asking one of the big questions of the moment-- how much political juice does the ED department have in NCLB waiver renewals? The related question is how much juice does the department have in the NCLB reauthorization itself?
The possible and imminent rewrite of ESEA/NCLB makes more obvious what some of us have been saying all long-- the tale of "voluntary" adoption of Common Core, high-stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluations, and the rest of the reformster package was a fiction. States complied with the federal mandates because the feds had everyone's violation of the NCLB ridiculously unattainable goals to threaten the states with, and because they could score some cash doing it.
Reauthorizing ESEA has always been the quick way to short-circuit reformster plans. NCLB has been the gun that the feds held to every state's head. Now Congress is threatening to take out the bullets. Without any bullets, and with the big piles of money running out, the administration is finding it's out of friends.
Arne Duncan can make impassioned speeches about the value of testing and then rerun the text in various publications. It doesn't really matter. Arne Duncan has had six years to prove that he has a vision of how to make US public education strong and vital. He has had six years to convince people that he knows what he's doing,that he knows where he wants to go and how to get there. He has failed. His only hope at this stage would have been a cadre of people saying, "Well, I wasn't sure, but I know I've seen the good his policies can do and the way they've really energized the school district, so I back this guy." There are no such people now. He may have some small input with the Senate committee (Sen. Patty Murray seemed to be parroting many of his talking points), but I don't hear anybody saying, "And of course we want to work closely with the Secretary as we consider this important legislation."
Duncan hasn't made friends in Congress. He hasn't made friends among teachers, which is in some ways his biggest failure; if you think back to the beginning of his time in office, you'll recall that he said many things that teachers thought were great, but then he followed those good statements with terrible policies. And he hasn't made friends among the states. He may have thought he was making friends, but all he was gaining was compliance for as long as held the gun in one hand and the purse strings in the other.
So now, as waiver renewal comes due, Duncan finds himself in the difficult position of negotiating the price of a condo in a development that may never be built and which he doesn't actually own. Someone else (someone who's not even listening to him) is designing the building, and he has to negotiate a deal with future tenants. The administration perhaps thought they were strengthening their hand by making new waiver deals good through 2018, but it's looking like a mistake-- why lock yourself into a long term deal you may not need to make in the first place.
And you'll notice that none of the states are piping up to say, "We would like you to rewrite ESEA so it looks exactly like the waiver requirements, because we think they are swell." Instead, Klein quotes Kentucky ed commissioner Terry Holiday saying that once waivers are dead and gone, "I think we'd all quickly abandon all the work on tying teacher evaluation to test scores."
The waivers exist to free states from the mandates of ESEA, but nobody knows what those mandates will look like after Congress gets through with them. Duncan's position? Make a deal for a waiver or else something might happen, somehow, maybe?
Klein quotes Anne Hyslop at Bellwether:
"I don't see the department doing much more to really put the hammer down on states to get their evaluation systems in place," she said. "I don't think [renewal] means states are going to change what they're doing or get in trouble if they don't do what the department says. The secretary is saying pretty please do this, and states are saying thanks for your input, but we're going another direction."
Maybe if his programs had possessed some actual merit they would have developed support of their own, but here we are looking at VAMs and test-based accountability and increased charterization and turn-around schools and the feds telling every school in the country what success looks like and none of it-- none of it-- has produced anything resembling successful results. The only real success can be found in the same places as Duncan's remaining friends-- boardrooms and offices of edubiz corporations where the money has been pouring in.
Congress created NCLB in a flurry of bipartisan jolliness, but it was so closely tied to the Bush administration that it is still seen as a Bush law. Whatever comes out of the current move to rewrite, I don't think anyone is going to call it the Obama/Duncan ESEA.
Don't worry about Duncan. His connections have kept him sell-employed for most of his adult life, and I doubt that they'll fail him after he leaves USED. But for the moment he's just a guy trapped on a legless duck without enough food left on his lips to make the dog fake affection.
And you looked as sincere as a dog
Just as sincere as a dog does when it’s the food on your lips with which it's in love
--Fiona Apple "Parting Gift"
When you have to bribe or threaten people to be your friend, you can be sure that your friendship will be short-lived.
Over at EdWeek, Alyson Klein is asking one of the big questions of the moment-- how much political juice does the ED department have in NCLB waiver renewals? The related question is how much juice does the department have in the NCLB reauthorization itself?
The possible and imminent rewrite of ESEA/NCLB makes more obvious what some of us have been saying all long-- the tale of "voluntary" adoption of Common Core, high-stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluations, and the rest of the reformster package was a fiction. States complied with the federal mandates because the feds had everyone's violation of the NCLB ridiculously unattainable goals to threaten the states with, and because they could score some cash doing it.
Reauthorizing ESEA has always been the quick way to short-circuit reformster plans. NCLB has been the gun that the feds held to every state's head. Now Congress is threatening to take out the bullets. Without any bullets, and with the big piles of money running out, the administration is finding it's out of friends.
Arne Duncan can make impassioned speeches about the value of testing and then rerun the text in various publications. It doesn't really matter. Arne Duncan has had six years to prove that he has a vision of how to make US public education strong and vital. He has had six years to convince people that he knows what he's doing,that he knows where he wants to go and how to get there. He has failed. His only hope at this stage would have been a cadre of people saying, "Well, I wasn't sure, but I know I've seen the good his policies can do and the way they've really energized the school district, so I back this guy." There are no such people now. He may have some small input with the Senate committee (Sen. Patty Murray seemed to be parroting many of his talking points), but I don't hear anybody saying, "And of course we want to work closely with the Secretary as we consider this important legislation."
Duncan hasn't made friends in Congress. He hasn't made friends among teachers, which is in some ways his biggest failure; if you think back to the beginning of his time in office, you'll recall that he said many things that teachers thought were great, but then he followed those good statements with terrible policies. And he hasn't made friends among the states. He may have thought he was making friends, but all he was gaining was compliance for as long as held the gun in one hand and the purse strings in the other.
So now, as waiver renewal comes due, Duncan finds himself in the difficult position of negotiating the price of a condo in a development that may never be built and which he doesn't actually own. Someone else (someone who's not even listening to him) is designing the building, and he has to negotiate a deal with future tenants. The administration perhaps thought they were strengthening their hand by making new waiver deals good through 2018, but it's looking like a mistake-- why lock yourself into a long term deal you may not need to make in the first place.
And you'll notice that none of the states are piping up to say, "We would like you to rewrite ESEA so it looks exactly like the waiver requirements, because we think they are swell." Instead, Klein quotes Kentucky ed commissioner Terry Holiday saying that once waivers are dead and gone, "I think we'd all quickly abandon all the work on tying teacher evaluation to test scores."
The waivers exist to free states from the mandates of ESEA, but nobody knows what those mandates will look like after Congress gets through with them. Duncan's position? Make a deal for a waiver or else something might happen, somehow, maybe?
Klein quotes Anne Hyslop at Bellwether:
"I don't see the department doing much more to really put the hammer down on states to get their evaluation systems in place," she said. "I don't think [renewal] means states are going to change what they're doing or get in trouble if they don't do what the department says. The secretary is saying pretty please do this, and states are saying thanks for your input, but we're going another direction."
Maybe if his programs had possessed some actual merit they would have developed support of their own, but here we are looking at VAMs and test-based accountability and increased charterization and turn-around schools and the feds telling every school in the country what success looks like and none of it-- none of it-- has produced anything resembling successful results. The only real success can be found in the same places as Duncan's remaining friends-- boardrooms and offices of edubiz corporations where the money has been pouring in.
Congress created NCLB in a flurry of bipartisan jolliness, but it was so closely tied to the Bush administration that it is still seen as a Bush law. Whatever comes out of the current move to rewrite, I don't think anyone is going to call it the Obama/Duncan ESEA.
Don't worry about Duncan. His connections have kept him sell-employed for most of his adult life, and I doubt that they'll fail him after he leaves USED. But for the moment he's just a guy trapped on a legless duck without enough food left on his lips to make the dog fake affection.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
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
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
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Testing Success Stories
If test-based accountability were going to be a great boon to public education, wouldn't we know it by now?
We've been doing this federally-mandated get-good-scores-or-else thing for over a decade now. If it were working, wouldn't we know about it?
I mean, we're teachers. When things work, we pass them around. I can remember the spread of process writing and the six traits approach to writing, both of which entered my corner of the world because somebody tried them, found them useful, recommended them to colleagues. Yes, they eventually they turned up in textbooks-- but that was because the publishing companies had heard from teachers that this was the hot new thing, not because the federal government told them that if they wanted to sell books, they'd have to include these new processes. Or else.
Every classroom is an education laboratory, and every teacher is a scientist, forming hypotheses, experimenting, evaluating and then adopting, adapting or rejecting techniques. And when things work well, our excited and helpful nature means we'll be telling folks. "Wait till you hear about this thing I tried today! It was cool. We were rock stars!"
So where are the breathless tales of standardized test success?
Where are the tales from North Codswallop School District about how they used standardized tests to completely turn the district around?
I don't mean tales of how they used the standardized tests to get better scores on the standardized tests. Those tales are out there, but they're not so much "Wow, I really reached children and had an awesome teachable moment." They're more like "Well, we bought ourselves another year free from one sort of government punishment or another.
I mean, we're graduating students who have never known anything but high-stakes testing, from NCLB through RttT. Shouldn't we be hearing the great groundswell of noise about how this new tested generation is faster, smarter, stronger, happier, better?
Shouldn't we be hearing tales of large urban areas where the achievement gap has been closed and educational equity is an exciting real thing?
Heck, we've even had time to try out Plan B-- when testing doesn't transform a public system, at least it can be used to declare failure and bring in turnaround specialists and charters. Plenty of charter chains have had ample time to build a reputation as educational miracle workers, and yet when we listen not to the ad copy, but the real grapevine where real praises would really spread like wildfire if they actually existed-- crickets. Really sad crickets.
Where's the transformation? Where's the revitalization? The future promised back in 2002 is now here, and yet none of us have to wear shades.
Federally mandated standardized testing has had its chance. Its supporters have had every opportunity to try things their way. They have no successes to point to. Tautological success does not count-- I can say, "I will prove my students are great by counting the number of capital letters they use and then teach them to use capital letters which will prove they've become great" but that doesn't prove a damn thing.
No, if federally-mandated standardized tests were really helping teachers, really fixing schools, really helping students find success and fulfillment in numbers previously unheard of, we'd all know about it.
Tests had their chance. They failed. Time to move on.
We've been doing this federally-mandated get-good-scores-or-else thing for over a decade now. If it were working, wouldn't we know about it?
I mean, we're teachers. When things work, we pass them around. I can remember the spread of process writing and the six traits approach to writing, both of which entered my corner of the world because somebody tried them, found them useful, recommended them to colleagues. Yes, they eventually they turned up in textbooks-- but that was because the publishing companies had heard from teachers that this was the hot new thing, not because the federal government told them that if they wanted to sell books, they'd have to include these new processes. Or else.
Every classroom is an education laboratory, and every teacher is a scientist, forming hypotheses, experimenting, evaluating and then adopting, adapting or rejecting techniques. And when things work well, our excited and helpful nature means we'll be telling folks. "Wait till you hear about this thing I tried today! It was cool. We were rock stars!"
So where are the breathless tales of standardized test success?
Where are the tales from North Codswallop School District about how they used standardized tests to completely turn the district around?
I don't mean tales of how they used the standardized tests to get better scores on the standardized tests. Those tales are out there, but they're not so much "Wow, I really reached children and had an awesome teachable moment." They're more like "Well, we bought ourselves another year free from one sort of government punishment or another.
I mean, we're graduating students who have never known anything but high-stakes testing, from NCLB through RttT. Shouldn't we be hearing the great groundswell of noise about how this new tested generation is faster, smarter, stronger, happier, better?
Shouldn't we be hearing tales of large urban areas where the achievement gap has been closed and educational equity is an exciting real thing?
Heck, we've even had time to try out Plan B-- when testing doesn't transform a public system, at least it can be used to declare failure and bring in turnaround specialists and charters. Plenty of charter chains have had ample time to build a reputation as educational miracle workers, and yet when we listen not to the ad copy, but the real grapevine where real praises would really spread like wildfire if they actually existed-- crickets. Really sad crickets.
Where's the transformation? Where's the revitalization? The future promised back in 2002 is now here, and yet none of us have to wear shades.
Federally mandated standardized testing has had its chance. Its supporters have had every opportunity to try things their way. They have no successes to point to. Tautological success does not count-- I can say, "I will prove my students are great by counting the number of capital letters they use and then teach them to use capital letters which will prove they've become great" but that doesn't prove a damn thing.
No, if federally-mandated standardized tests were really helping teachers, really fixing schools, really helping students find success and fulfillment in numbers previously unheard of, we'd all know about it.
Tests had their chance. They failed. Time to move on.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Time To Speak Up
This week the Big Noise About NCLB kicks off in DC with a hearing on Wednesday, Jan 21 entitled "Fixing No Child Left Behind: Testing and Accountability." Heaven only knows who will be speaking at it-- the featured guest list will be one more set of tea leaves we can look at to see which way this new wind is blowing. But of course, we already know whose voices will not be prominently featured at the hearings.
Teachers.
So why we're all busy doing the actual work of educating America's children, a bunch of folks in DC will talk about how we ought to be doing that job.
However, that doesn't mean we can't put our voices out there.
Sen. Lamar Alexander has issued a press release that gives you all the tools you need. There's a link to the draft version of the legislation and an email address to send your comments to.
FixingNCLB@help.senate.gov
Send an email. Send an email. Send. An. Email.
You do not have to be brilliant or super-articulate. Just speak from the heart. Don't write Moby Dick in email form. Keep it brief (aka "readable") and if you have a lot more to say, send several emails. If you just have a sentence or two and can't figure out how to add to that, just send that. If you've read something that really said it for you, email a link to the piece and write "Read this. I believe it's true."
But whatever you do, don't sit silently hoping that Congress does the right thing. You can bet the farm that DC is swarming with lobbyists and "activists" who are making certain that their point of view is heard up close and personal. We know that the unions that are supposed to represent the teacher point of view are unlikely to do so.
It's on us. It's time to speak up. It's time to speak your truth. Will they hear us and listen to us? Who knows, But I do know this-- there is no possibility that they will hear us if we don't speak.
I am going to spend a little less time blogging this weekend and divert my torrent of words into emails to the committee. I implore you, beg you, to do the same.
Send an email.
Speak up.
This is the biggest opportunity we've had to be heard in the education debates since the federal government first stuck their nose in. We have no excuse not to use it, and shame on us if we don't.
Teachers.
So why we're all busy doing the actual work of educating America's children, a bunch of folks in DC will talk about how we ought to be doing that job.
However, that doesn't mean we can't put our voices out there.
Sen. Lamar Alexander has issued a press release that gives you all the tools you need. There's a link to the draft version of the legislation and an email address to send your comments to.
FixingNCLB@help.senate.gov
Send an email. Send an email. Send. An. Email.
You do not have to be brilliant or super-articulate. Just speak from the heart. Don't write Moby Dick in email form. Keep it brief (aka "readable") and if you have a lot more to say, send several emails. If you just have a sentence or two and can't figure out how to add to that, just send that. If you've read something that really said it for you, email a link to the piece and write "Read this. I believe it's true."
But whatever you do, don't sit silently hoping that Congress does the right thing. You can bet the farm that DC is swarming with lobbyists and "activists" who are making certain that their point of view is heard up close and personal. We know that the unions that are supposed to represent the teacher point of view are unlikely to do so.
It's on us. It's time to speak up. It's time to speak your truth. Will they hear us and listen to us? Who knows, But I do know this-- there is no possibility that they will hear us if we don't speak.
I am going to spend a little less time blogging this weekend and divert my torrent of words into emails to the committee. I implore you, beg you, to do the same.
Send an email.
Speak up.
This is the biggest opportunity we've had to be heard in the education debates since the federal government first stuck their nose in. We have no excuse not to use it, and shame on us if we don't.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)