CAP: The Promise of Testing

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

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

Who is CAP, again?

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

History Lesson from Alternate Universe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The state of testing

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

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

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

Methodology

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

What did they find out? 

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

Parents want better tests.

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

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

Teachers do not get the time and support they need

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

Communications to stakeholders is weak 

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

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

The Test lacks value for individual students

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

End-of-year summatives are not aligned to instruction

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

Too much test prep is occuring

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

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

Weak logistics and testing windows and nutsy bolty things

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

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

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

Here's what states should do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should local districts do? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should schools do?

Make testing less torturous. Let students go pee.

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

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

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

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

How about the feds?

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

And the final recommendation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duncan Remains Relentlessly Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

ESSA Will Not Solve Anything

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.

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.

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.

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.