unionsCaroline Bermudez is senior writer and press secretary at Education Post, Peter Cunningham's pro-reform rapid response war room created to help Tell the Reformsters' Story. And this week Bermudez took to Real Clear Education to complain that "Uninformed, Irresponsible Journalism Is Killing Needed Education Reform."
Bermudez wants to call out the anti-reform narrative, the "amalgamation of all the myths spewed forth against education reformers." These pieces are "political propaganda as nuanced as a jackhammer drilling into concrete." But those pieces come from people like Valerie Strauss and Jeff Bryant who, she implies, are eminently dismissable, but it makes her really sad when the New Yorker publishes film critic David Denby's "hollow critique" of the general anti-teacher tenor of education reform. And he did it without any data!! Or reliable evidence!! Bermudez's indignation would be more compelling if "No data or reliable evidence" were not the reformster movement's middle name. Can we talk about how Common Core arrived without a stitch of evidence to its name, not even for the very idea of using national standards to improve education, and it's still prancing around naked today? Or the kind of fake research regularly churned out by groups like TNTP or NCTQ?
But Bermudez is not here simply to register her righteous shock and blah-blah-blah over a major magazine pointing out what millions of teachers already know. She would also like to take a moment to mock all articles that disagree with the reformsters. She calls the anti-reform pieces "endemic" and notes that reformsters "utter familiar groans" when they come across these articles that so often "repeat the same sound bites."
And then she lists the things she's tired of hearing:
1. Education reformers disrespect teachers.
2. Reformers solely blame teachers for educational failure.
3. Poverty goes unacknowledged by reformers.
4. Public education is fine. Reformers are hysterical.
5. Charter schools privatize public education.
6. Reformers reflexively hate unions.
So, I guess the good news is that she has been listening, kind of? The bad news is that Bermudez does not offer any research, data or arguments in response to any of these alleged criticisms. But education reformers do disrespect teachers, from their idea that anybody from the right background can become a teacher with five weeks of training, to their insistence that bad teachers are the root of educational evil, to their steady attempts to reduce teachers to simple "content delivery clerks."
Of course, almost no reform critics claim that reformers only blame teachers (and that includes the article she linked to, which also doesn't claim that), just as no serious reform critic claims that reformsters don't acknowledge poverty at all. There are some good conversations to be had about poverty, its effects as an obstacle to education, and how to deal. But Bermudez is hell-bent on overstating her case in order to make a point, so she says silly things like claiming that pro-public education writers say that public ed is fine and that reformsters are hysterical (once again, the article she links to, which actually has a good deal of charts and data, doesn't actually say what she suggests it says).
Not all of her points are overstatements. Lots of pro-public ed writers point out that charter schools privatize public education, which is kind of like pointing out that the sky is blue and water is wet. I don't think I've read all that many reformsters who even try to claim otherwise.
Union hatred? Well, yes. DFER hates unions with the hot, shiny hatred of a hundred suns. Vergara, Friedrichs, Baby Vergara in New York-- all lawsuits brought by big-money reformsters to roll back the union, just like the arguments about removing tenure and other job protections, all rooted in a general philosophy that a school leader CEO should be free to make choices without having to deal with a union. maybe her point is that reformsters don't hate unions "reflexively," but after lots of thought and careful consideration. Fair enough.
Of course, she also doesn't argue that any of these oft-repeated points is wrong. Just that they're of-repeated.
Bermudez has some specific recommendations. "Ambitious, valuable journalism" does not, for instance, use terms like "corporate reform." Not that she thinks reformsters should never be critiqued:
While our opponents believe we prefer to live in an echo chamber, we
would much rather have our work analyzed—even challenged—thoughtfully
and without an obvious agenda.
So says the woman who handles PR for a website launched with $13 million dollars from Eli Broad and other reformsters in order to make sure that they get their message out there.
The irony is that I actually know several thoughtful reformers with whom it is possible to have thoughtful, productive conversations. But they generally don't open by making unsupported mis-statements of pro-public education arguments. Bermudez is not trying to start a conversation; like many reformsters before her, she is arguing that the other side should by and large be silent.
She is also promoting the old subtext that Education Post and some others are fond of-- the notion that pro-public ed folks are some large, well-coordinated conspiracy, passing talking points back and forth and creating swarms that make it hard for the beautiful truth of reformster policy to be heard, and occasionally infecting real journalists with their mean propaganda. I'll give her credit-- she at least doesn't accuse all pro-public ed writers of being tools or paid shills of the teachers unions. You haven't really arrived in the pro-public ed writing world until you've been accused of being a union shill.
I always want to ask the paid reformsters mouthpieces like Bermudez-- just how much do you believe this stuff. If you were not a paid PR flack for this site, how much of your time and effort would you devote to your cause. Because I'm sitting here tapping one more blog post out for free in the morning hours before I head to work (all day rehearsal-- it's school musical season here). In a couple of months the Network for Public Education will have its third annual convention and some of us won't be there because we can't afford it and nobody pays us to go. Sometimes I just don't think that folks like Bermudez get that we are neither well-funded or well-organized-- we just believe that we see something that has to be called out and resisted. I have no idea how much Bermudez is paid to be Education Post's PR flack, and I don't know how much she got to write this particular article, but I'm responding to it for free.
Of course, Bermudez is not arguing against bloggers so much as decrying that a real paid journalist is picking on ed reform, but she tries to dismiss Denby by lumping him in with the rest of us, by treating all anti-reform writing as if it's one big piece of fluff. But at no point in her piece does she explain where she thinks Denby-Bryant-Strauss-Ravitch-Heilig get it wrong. Maybe coming up with the research and data to support such a view would just be too rigorous, or maybe such work has no place in a pro-reform screed. But if Bermudez knew more about teaching, maybe she'd remember that a good technique for teaching is to model the behavior you want to see.
Showing posts with label Education Post. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education Post. Show all posts
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Friday, May 1, 2015
Edushyster: Peter Cunningham's Woes
I have now met Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire, and I totally get it. I don't believe there is a human being on the planet who, upon sitting down with her, would not want to answer every question just to prolong the conversation and once you're talking, well, lying to the woman would be like kicking a puppy.
So it makes perfect sense that just about anybody would be willing to talk to her, even if she is on the Pro-Public Education side of the fence.
She's just put up an interview with Peter Cunningham, the former Arne Duncan wordifier who now runs Education Post, a pro-reformster political war room style rapid response operation (I knew I'd moved up in the blogging world when they took the time to spank me personally).
I don't imagine there are people who read this blog who do not also read Edushyster, but I'm going to keep linking/exhorting you to head over and check out this interview while I note a few of my own responses here.
There are a couple of eyebrow-raisers in the interview that really underline the differences between the reformsters and the pro-public ed side of these debates. In particular, Cunningham notes that many reformsters feel isolated and under attack. When explaining how Broad approached him about starting EP, Cunningham says
There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side.
Organized?! Organized!!?? It is possible that Broad et al have simply misdiagnosed their problem. Because I'm pretty sure that the pro-public ed advocate world, at least the part of it that I've seen, is not organized at all. But we believe what we are writing, so much so that the vast majority of us do it for free in our spare time (I am eating a bag lunch at my desk as I type this), and we pass on the things we read that we agree with.
In fact, it occurs to me that contrary to what one might expect, we are the people using the Free Market version of distributing ideas-- we create, we put it out there, we let it sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, the reformsters try to mount some sort of Central Planning approach, where they pay people to come up with ideas, pay people to promote those ideas, pay people to write about those ideas, and try to buy the marketplace so that their products can be prominently displayed.
It is the exact same mistake that they have brought to education reform-- the inability to distinguish between the appearance of success and actual success. If students look like they are succeeding (i.e. scoring high on tests they've been carefully prepped for), then they must be learning. If it looks like everybody is talking about our ideas (i.e. we bought lots of website space and hired cool writers and graphics), then we must be winning hearts and minds.
But what is Cunningham to do to save these poor beleaguered millionaires in their cushy offices (who are probably not eating a bag lunch at their desks as I type this-- isolated and alone in my classroom, I might add)?
I’ve created the ability to swarm, because everyone felt like they were being swarmed. We now have people who will, when asked, lean in on the debate, when people feel like they’re just under siege.
"Lean in" is a great way to put it. I've been "leaned in" upon. It just feels kind of mean, and definitely not like an attempt to create a better conversation. Which is, well, odd , because I've actually had some certainly fine conversations with people on the other side of the edu-fence. It's really not impossible, or even difficult.
Cunningham himself has proven capable of critiquing the reformster party line. But he's been hired to do a job, and he's doing it. Which is perhaps part of the problem.
Mind you, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination claiming that I am extra-noble or super-swell because I toil away in unfunded obscurity. There are people (Jennifer is one of them) who do this as their main gig and ought to be getting deservedly rich for it; the fact that I'm not doesn't make me a better person.
But it tells us something about the two sides of the fence that the separate pastures are fertilized with such different-- yeah, let's drop that analogy. It says something that if all the money evaporated from the pro-public ed movement, things wouldn't change much at all. But take away Gates money and Broad money and Walton money, and we wouldn't be having these conversations. Reform has consistently side-stepped both the democratic process and the marketplace of ideas, adopting instead the corporate boss model of, "I'm paying your salary. Do as I say." Since democracy and the market place of ideas started fighting back, reformsters have been trying to adapt. But it's hard. And lonely.
Cunningham notes that by 2012-2013, pro-public ed was "very effectively calling a lot of reform ideas into question." Well, not exactly. They were effectively pointing out that a lot of reform ideas were crap. Marketing and PR do not necessarily beat actual substance. But Cunningham is a man who's been given a giant pile of money to hire swarms and bloggers and a big, shiny website, so he's going to spend it. for at least two more years. Read the edushyster interview.
So it makes perfect sense that just about anybody would be willing to talk to her, even if she is on the Pro-Public Education side of the fence.
She's just put up an interview with Peter Cunningham, the former Arne Duncan wordifier who now runs Education Post, a pro-reformster political war room style rapid response operation (I knew I'd moved up in the blogging world when they took the time to spank me personally).
I don't imagine there are people who read this blog who do not also read Edushyster, but I'm going to keep linking/exhorting you to head over and check out this interview while I note a few of my own responses here.
There are a couple of eyebrow-raisers in the interview that really underline the differences between the reformsters and the pro-public ed side of these debates. In particular, Cunningham notes that many reformsters feel isolated and under attack. When explaining how Broad approached him about starting EP, Cunningham says
There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side.
Organized?! Organized!!?? It is possible that Broad et al have simply misdiagnosed their problem. Because I'm pretty sure that the pro-public ed advocate world, at least the part of it that I've seen, is not organized at all. But we believe what we are writing, so much so that the vast majority of us do it for free in our spare time (I am eating a bag lunch at my desk as I type this), and we pass on the things we read that we agree with.
In fact, it occurs to me that contrary to what one might expect, we are the people using the Free Market version of distributing ideas-- we create, we put it out there, we let it sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, the reformsters try to mount some sort of Central Planning approach, where they pay people to come up with ideas, pay people to promote those ideas, pay people to write about those ideas, and try to buy the marketplace so that their products can be prominently displayed.
It is the exact same mistake that they have brought to education reform-- the inability to distinguish between the appearance of success and actual success. If students look like they are succeeding (i.e. scoring high on tests they've been carefully prepped for), then they must be learning. If it looks like everybody is talking about our ideas (i.e. we bought lots of website space and hired cool writers and graphics), then we must be winning hearts and minds.
But what is Cunningham to do to save these poor beleaguered millionaires in their cushy offices (who are probably not eating a bag lunch at their desks as I type this-- isolated and alone in my classroom, I might add)?
I’ve created the ability to swarm, because everyone felt like they were being swarmed. We now have people who will, when asked, lean in on the debate, when people feel like they’re just under siege.
"Lean in" is a great way to put it. I've been "leaned in" upon. It just feels kind of mean, and definitely not like an attempt to create a better conversation. Which is, well, odd , because I've actually had some certainly fine conversations with people on the other side of the edu-fence. It's really not impossible, or even difficult.
Cunningham himself has proven capable of critiquing the reformster party line. But he's been hired to do a job, and he's doing it. Which is perhaps part of the problem.
Mind you, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination claiming that I am extra-noble or super-swell because I toil away in unfunded obscurity. There are people (Jennifer is one of them) who do this as their main gig and ought to be getting deservedly rich for it; the fact that I'm not doesn't make me a better person.
But it tells us something about the two sides of the fence that the separate pastures are fertilized with such different-- yeah, let's drop that analogy. It says something that if all the money evaporated from the pro-public ed movement, things wouldn't change much at all. But take away Gates money and Broad money and Walton money, and we wouldn't be having these conversations. Reform has consistently side-stepped both the democratic process and the marketplace of ideas, adopting instead the corporate boss model of, "I'm paying your salary. Do as I say." Since democracy and the market place of ideas started fighting back, reformsters have been trying to adapt. But it's hard. And lonely.
Cunningham notes that by 2012-2013, pro-public ed was "very effectively calling a lot of reform ideas into question." Well, not exactly. They were effectively pointing out that a lot of reform ideas were crap. Marketing and PR do not necessarily beat actual substance. But Cunningham is a man who's been given a giant pile of money to hire swarms and bloggers and a big, shiny website, so he's going to spend it. for at least two more years. Read the edushyster interview.
Monday, April 20, 2015
EdPost and VIVA Serve Reheated CCSS Leftovers
In the ongoing search for a Common Core PR bump, Education Post with the use of VIVA Idea Exchange has issued a report, trotted out for the convention of the Education Writers Association (a group that has steadfastly expunged bloggers and other ne'er-do-wells from its consideration, but I'm not bitter).
The report "Common Core State Standards: the Key To Student Success" has a weird retro vibe, like someone stashed it in a drawer in early 2013 and only just now dug it out. But Education Post is a group that has been bankrolled to promote and push the Core (which, among other things, creates the spectacle of a raft of Democratic operatives working hard to smooth Jeb Bush's path to the White House). Peter Cunningham, former mouthpiece for Arne Duncan's USED, reportedly got a cool $12 million to launch the rapid response PR machine, but I am going to go ahead and take a look at their nifty everything-old-is-new-again report for free.
Note: Education Post's name has been carefully omitted from the report itself, but still proudly sits atop the press release for it.
The use of VIVA represents an attempt to involve authentic teacher voices in this report. There are ten authentic teachers listed on the Writing Collective for this, plus one moderator. If you want a picture of how well that flies, scoot on over to Living in Dialogue and Anthony Cody's recent series about how that very thing turned out (spoiler alert: not all that great for authentic teacher voices). The report features four recommendations, all of which will strike you as vaguely familiar.
Recommendation 1: Clearly Acknowledge that the Common Core and Curricula are Two Different Things.
Yes, it's that golden oldie, "The standards aren't curriculum at all." Like many writers in the field, I've addressed this question many times. But the report wants teachers to get out there and convince people that the standards aren't curricula, while sharing all of their CCSS-aligned curricula. But in the meantime, the phrase "common core curriculum" turns up in marketing materials all over the place. Core supporters lost this one over a year ago.
The report shoots itself in the foot by offering an analogy-- all lasagna has the same basic ingredients, but no two chefs make it exactly the same. So.... what? The Core is not restrictive and one size fits all? In Core land, you can eat anything you like and select anything from the vast and exciting array of foods known to humans-- as long as it's lasagna. You can make lasagna with a little more ricotta cheese, or a bit more basil, and you can make it in a rectangular pan or square pan, so you totally have all sorts of freedom. If I had looked for an analogy to show that, when it comes to Common Core, standards vs. curriculum is a distinction without a difference, I could not have done any better myself.
What exactly do they recommend? Get out there and sell the Core, because according to that bogus Edutopia poll, folks love it. Also, make a culture in which teachers are involved "in every part of educational policy-making implementation," which will be hard since the very existence of CCSS means that ship has sailed (and no teachers were allowed). Basically, we really need to get teachers on the team here.
Recommendation 2: Restructure the Way Schools Engage Parents, Families, and Community Members with the Common Core in the Academic, Emotional, and Social Education of Their Children.
In other words, do some community outreach PR for the core. Proposed solutions include "Share Evidence that the Common Core State Standards Provide Opportunities for All Students Regardless of Background or Economic Privilege." Which is tricky since no such evidence exists. And in fact the breakdown for specific actions under this item includes-- well, sharing the PARCC timeline and keeping a blog.
Or how about some five-minute videos of happy children talking about their Common Core success stories. We could show them at "family universities" designed to alleviate frustration. There's a lot of recognition of the need to work with diverse cultural backgrounds and to help overcome the issues of poverty. At times you can almost see where the authentic teacher voices have been grafted right onto the authentic client message that VIVA was hired to articulate.
Recommendation 3: Change the Concept of “School” from Just a Building Where Our Children Sit All Day, to a Place of Community Identity and Opportunity.
"The Core is starting to make children and their families hate school. Try to fix that." They don't get into many concrete recommendations here, but off the top of my head I'm thinking that putting back all the things schools had before CCSS and testing drained resources and forced schools to focus on test prep-- that might be a good start.
But basically we're looking for ways to help parents with their kids' homework, because the Common Core is making parents feel frustrated and dumb. So let's pass on some of the CCSS training that we haven't finished giving to teachers yet. That should do it.
By gifting families with new tools for success, teachers increase school-home communication. In return, teachers get partners who can monitor homework and ensure that students are physically, emotionally, and mentally prepared for active learning throughout the day.
Oh, Core-o-philes! You just never tire of re-inventing the wheel. Communicating with parents! What an idea! But I'm taking a point deduction for the use of "gift" as a verb,
Recommendation 4: Create Opportunities for Sustained CCSS-Based Professional Development that Allows Teachers to Collaborate Regularly and Provide the Resources Necessary to Achieve Success.
Ah, another old fave-- the Core rollout was rocky because we didn't train teachers enough. That was barely credible two years ago. Now that teachers have had a chance to really get to know the Core, pretending that we're victims of our ignorance just doesn't fly. The results are in, and they are that the better teachers know the Core, the less they like it. More PD from Core cheerleaders isn't going to fix that. Also, when you hand a surgeon a rusty can opener, his problems with operating is not because you didn't give the accessories necessary for success-- it's because the main tool you handed him is a lousy tool.
But hey-- let's identify master teachers and have them teach the rest. Let's have PD sessions to surf the resource sites on line. Let's work with the union! Let's do lots of PD so the teachers can teach each other and get on the same page. If we pass the rusty can opener around many times, maybe we'll figure how to better use it!
Recommendation 5: Ensure CCSS-Based Assessments are as Useful as Possible to Students, Educators, the Community, and Policy Leaders.
You will perhaps be surprised to learn the two purposes of assessment: Instructional change, and accountability. Also, here's the goal of Common Core:
The goal of the Common Core is to make children think critically while teaching them how to absorb, process, and use those skills on an everyday basis. The assessments we develop and administer to students should align with that goal.
So add that to your list of explanations for what this is all supposed to be accomplishing.
The report recommends fewer and fairer assessments, so less time spent taking, less test prep, and less pressure and emphasis on them. The detail portion also says we should be clear about the test purpose, but hey-- that's simplified above, so no sweat. Also, only one CCSS test per year, and let's use portfolio assessment too.
Then some editor just let the authentic teacher voices run wild-- let teachers have input on what's on the test, and let us know what texts will be on the test ahead of time, and deliver the results within thirty days, plus creating rubrics. Also, let's scrap grades and move toward competency based education. Also, every child should ride to school on a unicorn. Okay, I made that one up, but what a crazy page. Were the ATV's just carried away with irrational exuberance, or did the VIVA folks miss a page in the edit. Anyway, fun list of things that are never going to happen.
Recommendation 6: Reconsider the CCSS-Based Assessment Schedule
States that haven't rolled out CCSS tests yet should do it in stages, and all I'm thinking is who hasn't rolled out their CCSS tests yet? Anyway, if you've already done it, we've got nothing for you.
So what have we here?
We appear to have a blunt PR object that took some ATV input, wrapped it up in a nice sauce of the client's making, with the hopes that some enterprising education writers (real writers, not those damn bloggers) will write it up and creatively disrupt the already fully-congealed narrative that Common Core is just Dead Program Walking. Cunningham is being paid good money to make sure that people hear that Common Core builds strong bodies twelve ways and is totally grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeaaattt and will cure your bad breath and hair, and since most politicians will no longer even say the Core's name out loud, it needs all the press it an get. In which case I guess they can thank me later-- and I did it for free.
The report "Common Core State Standards: the Key To Student Success" has a weird retro vibe, like someone stashed it in a drawer in early 2013 and only just now dug it out. But Education Post is a group that has been bankrolled to promote and push the Core (which, among other things, creates the spectacle of a raft of Democratic operatives working hard to smooth Jeb Bush's path to the White House). Peter Cunningham, former mouthpiece for Arne Duncan's USED, reportedly got a cool $12 million to launch the rapid response PR machine, but I am going to go ahead and take a look at their nifty everything-old-is-new-again report for free.
Note: Education Post's name has been carefully omitted from the report itself, but still proudly sits atop the press release for it.
The use of VIVA represents an attempt to involve authentic teacher voices in this report. There are ten authentic teachers listed on the Writing Collective for this, plus one moderator. If you want a picture of how well that flies, scoot on over to Living in Dialogue and Anthony Cody's recent series about how that very thing turned out (spoiler alert: not all that great for authentic teacher voices). The report features four recommendations, all of which will strike you as vaguely familiar.
Recommendation 1: Clearly Acknowledge that the Common Core and Curricula are Two Different Things.
Yes, it's that golden oldie, "The standards aren't curriculum at all." Like many writers in the field, I've addressed this question many times. But the report wants teachers to get out there and convince people that the standards aren't curricula, while sharing all of their CCSS-aligned curricula. But in the meantime, the phrase "common core curriculum" turns up in marketing materials all over the place. Core supporters lost this one over a year ago.
The report shoots itself in the foot by offering an analogy-- all lasagna has the same basic ingredients, but no two chefs make it exactly the same. So.... what? The Core is not restrictive and one size fits all? In Core land, you can eat anything you like and select anything from the vast and exciting array of foods known to humans-- as long as it's lasagna. You can make lasagna with a little more ricotta cheese, or a bit more basil, and you can make it in a rectangular pan or square pan, so you totally have all sorts of freedom. If I had looked for an analogy to show that, when it comes to Common Core, standards vs. curriculum is a distinction without a difference, I could not have done any better myself.
What exactly do they recommend? Get out there and sell the Core, because according to that bogus Edutopia poll, folks love it. Also, make a culture in which teachers are involved "in every part of educational policy-making implementation," which will be hard since the very existence of CCSS means that ship has sailed (and no teachers were allowed). Basically, we really need to get teachers on the team here.
Recommendation 2: Restructure the Way Schools Engage Parents, Families, and Community Members with the Common Core in the Academic, Emotional, and Social Education of Their Children.
In other words, do some community outreach PR for the core. Proposed solutions include "Share Evidence that the Common Core State Standards Provide Opportunities for All Students Regardless of Background or Economic Privilege." Which is tricky since no such evidence exists. And in fact the breakdown for specific actions under this item includes-- well, sharing the PARCC timeline and keeping a blog.
Or how about some five-minute videos of happy children talking about their Common Core success stories. We could show them at "family universities" designed to alleviate frustration. There's a lot of recognition of the need to work with diverse cultural backgrounds and to help overcome the issues of poverty. At times you can almost see where the authentic teacher voices have been grafted right onto the authentic client message that VIVA was hired to articulate.
Recommendation 3: Change the Concept of “School” from Just a Building Where Our Children Sit All Day, to a Place of Community Identity and Opportunity.
"The Core is starting to make children and their families hate school. Try to fix that." They don't get into many concrete recommendations here, but off the top of my head I'm thinking that putting back all the things schools had before CCSS and testing drained resources and forced schools to focus on test prep-- that might be a good start.
But basically we're looking for ways to help parents with their kids' homework, because the Common Core is making parents feel frustrated and dumb. So let's pass on some of the CCSS training that we haven't finished giving to teachers yet. That should do it.
By gifting families with new tools for success, teachers increase school-home communication. In return, teachers get partners who can monitor homework and ensure that students are physically, emotionally, and mentally prepared for active learning throughout the day.
Oh, Core-o-philes! You just never tire of re-inventing the wheel. Communicating with parents! What an idea! But I'm taking a point deduction for the use of "gift" as a verb,
Recommendation 4: Create Opportunities for Sustained CCSS-Based Professional Development that Allows Teachers to Collaborate Regularly and Provide the Resources Necessary to Achieve Success.
Ah, another old fave-- the Core rollout was rocky because we didn't train teachers enough. That was barely credible two years ago. Now that teachers have had a chance to really get to know the Core, pretending that we're victims of our ignorance just doesn't fly. The results are in, and they are that the better teachers know the Core, the less they like it. More PD from Core cheerleaders isn't going to fix that. Also, when you hand a surgeon a rusty can opener, his problems with operating is not because you didn't give the accessories necessary for success-- it's because the main tool you handed him is a lousy tool.
But hey-- let's identify master teachers and have them teach the rest. Let's have PD sessions to surf the resource sites on line. Let's work with the union! Let's do lots of PD so the teachers can teach each other and get on the same page. If we pass the rusty can opener around many times, maybe we'll figure how to better use it!
Recommendation 5: Ensure CCSS-Based Assessments are as Useful as Possible to Students, Educators, the Community, and Policy Leaders.
You will perhaps be surprised to learn the two purposes of assessment: Instructional change, and accountability. Also, here's the goal of Common Core:
The goal of the Common Core is to make children think critically while teaching them how to absorb, process, and use those skills on an everyday basis. The assessments we develop and administer to students should align with that goal.
So add that to your list of explanations for what this is all supposed to be accomplishing.
The report recommends fewer and fairer assessments, so less time spent taking, less test prep, and less pressure and emphasis on them. The detail portion also says we should be clear about the test purpose, but hey-- that's simplified above, so no sweat. Also, only one CCSS test per year, and let's use portfolio assessment too.
Then some editor just let the authentic teacher voices run wild-- let teachers have input on what's on the test, and let us know what texts will be on the test ahead of time, and deliver the results within thirty days, plus creating rubrics. Also, let's scrap grades and move toward competency based education. Also, every child should ride to school on a unicorn. Okay, I made that one up, but what a crazy page. Were the ATV's just carried away with irrational exuberance, or did the VIVA folks miss a page in the edit. Anyway, fun list of things that are never going to happen.
Recommendation 6: Reconsider the CCSS-Based Assessment Schedule
States that haven't rolled out CCSS tests yet should do it in stages, and all I'm thinking is who hasn't rolled out their CCSS tests yet? Anyway, if you've already done it, we've got nothing for you.
So what have we here?
We appear to have a blunt PR object that took some ATV input, wrapped it up in a nice sauce of the client's making, with the hopes that some enterprising education writers (real writers, not those damn bloggers) will write it up and creatively disrupt the already fully-congealed narrative that Common Core is just Dead Program Walking. Cunningham is being paid good money to make sure that people hear that Common Core builds strong bodies twelve ways and is totally grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeaaattt and will cure your bad breath and hair, and since most politicians will no longer even say the Core's name out loud, it needs all the press it an get. In which case I guess they can thank me later-- and I did it for free.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Goliath and the Changing Ed Conversation
If you want to see a story confirming that there are, in fact, limits to what one can accomplish with money, power and connections, look no further that Education Post. It's a giant, dusty monument to some of the differences that truly separate the reformsters from the defenders of traditional public education.
Education Post debuted on September 1st to considerable fanfare, including a nice infomercial on the launch in Washington Post. The head honcho was (and still is) Peter Cunningham. Cunningham is an old Chicago hand who traveled to DC with Arne Duncan to become the voice of Duncan's office (some others characterized him as its brains). The site was bankrolled ($12 million) by money from Bloomsburg, Broad and Walton philanthropies. It proposed to make the education debates more civil and pleasant and reasoned and based on facts-not-anecdotes, and all of that noble purpose lasted about as long as it took to post the first handful of articles that established that Education Post would be shilling hard for the Obama administration's reformster agenda. Fittingly enough, their logo features a bulhorn, not ordinarily a weapon of choice for civil, reasoned conversation.
EdWeek covered the launch and tossed up this detail about the site's function:
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
The Washington Post profile included this:
Cunningham said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
So what we're really talking about is a campaign politics style PR attack office determined to blitzkreig its way into control of the narrative. And they followed through swiftly. The very day I ran my first piece about the site, I had two contributors? employees? operatives? whatever you want to call thems all up in my twitter with some spicy "So when did you stop beating your wife?" challenges. Cunningham called out Jose Luis Vilson within the first week on the site.
Three weeks later the site tried to take on Carol Burris, decided to dial it back, and still mounted a weak non-conversational assault. And after that, things just got quiet.
In the first few days, the site had drawn many dissenting posts in the comments section. Those were swiftly erased. In response to the complaints, EdPost tweeted "Hoping for a better conversation. Stay tuned." But that conversation never happened-- not even a chorus of happy sock puppets to sing the praises of the stable of writers. Education Post became one more demonstration that the opposite of love is indifference.
It certainly wasn't that people on either side of the education debates hate to converse. Mike Petrilli, Andy Smarick, and Rick Hess are just three examples of hard-driving reformsters who are perfectly capable of having intelligent conversations with public school advocates.
But Education Post was not really interested in a conversation. Instead, they revealed themselves fairly quickly to be a twelve million dollar troll. They had said they wanted to amplify the voices of reformy success stories, but they also devoted time to playing gotcha with voices on the side of public education. They added a feature where they marked up pro-public-ed documents with red pen, like a petulant schoolmarm, and that didn't seem like a conversation starter, either. But clearly they had hoped that they could be at the center of education policy firestorms, and they had a box of matches and a tank of gasoline already to go but... well, nobody wanted to play. Time and again they set out the bait, grabbed ahold of their club, and waited under their bridge but.... crickets.
This is not the first time reformsters have tried to harness the interwebs and some of that social medias the kids are all tweetering about, and it's not the first time that reformsters have failed miserably doing so (see Jeb Bush/FEE's now defunct "Learn More Go Further" campaign for another example). But this might be the most expensive.
I thought I'd check to see how big the fail was, and plugged some sites into the admittedly-imperfect site Alexa.com, which ranks all the websites in the world by traffic. Here's what I got (we'll stick with US ranks and ignore the international). This is the rank in America as roughly estimated by Alexa:
EducationPost-- 223,516
Diane Ravitch's blog-- 20,380
So, Ravitch, with a staff of one and a budget of maybe a hundred bucks, cleaned their clocks. Is it their politics? Let's see what the very-reformy thinky tank Fordham Foundation site clocks in at:
EdExcellence-- 67,360
So, no, it's possible to draw some attention from their side of the tracks. Maybe other sites rank higher because they've been around longer? How about Living in Dialogue, a pro-public ed website launched at just about the same time, for considerably less that $12 million.
Living in Dialogue-- 138,616
How do they compare to a simple high school English teacher who (even though I've been online longer) just blogs in his spare time with a budget of $0.00?
Curmudgucation-- 119,612
I've checked other independent public ed bloggers, and the results are similar. We can also check metrics like sites linking in to the site-- EducationPost has 81, which is not an impressive number.
Bottom line-- in money spent per number people getting the message, EducationPost is at the bottom of the heap. It's proof once again that while the reformsters can keep outspending everybody else, that doesn't mean they're actually convincing anybody else. The reformster movement is lifted up by a giant bag of hot air, and that air is heated by constantly burning a giant pile of money. When the money runs out, or is withdrawn, the balloon will deflate and the reformster initiative will float back to earth with the rest of us.
It can seem like the reformsters are winning-- they have the pretty sites, the shiny PR, the well-paid PR rapid response operatives. What they don't have are the people who are pouring their blood and sweat and heart and soul into a cause that is bigger than profit and power.
Meanwhile, EducationPost continues to troll hard, most recently going after activist mom/blogger Sarah Blaine (because you have to stop those moms from messing wit the narrative) and Diane Ravitch herself by pointing out that she used to say different things than she does now, trying to discredit today's education activity by bringing up what she said way back in the day, as if Ravitch hadn't already written a book herself explaining what beliefs changed and why. These trolling runs have not made EducationPost a center of conversation. No firestorm. Not even a smokescreen. Just a short quiet correction from Mercedes Schneider. It is possible that EducationPost could be more efficient by simply posting, "Notice Me, Dammit" as a headline.
But it's a 2015 world, and people mostly understand that you don't feed the trolls (which is why you'll find no links in this story, or any of my newer stuff, to the EducationPost website). More than that, defenders of US public education are coming to understand that not every reformster requires or deserves a response. Paul Thomas once called for Phase Three in the resistance, and perhaps this is it-- a phase in which we realize that we are no longer backed into a corner and no longer have to respond to every cockamamie attack on public education, even as some reformsters try to get us to start up the same old fight. Maybe EducationPost is not about trying to go forward to better conversations, but to actually sucker us into the same old dynamic and thereby preserve the narrative that reformsters are the ones with all the power, while we have to fight and scrape to get our point across. They aren't Goliath. They're just a big troll on life support.
If that's the case, than the irrelevance of EducationPost (because, really, does it matter whether they close up shop or not?) is one more true sign that Things Have Changed, that money can't win everything, and that we all need to have real conversations about the future of American public education, not simply a battle of rapid-response PR blitzes and stale talking points.
The premise of EducationPost was that the conversation about public education was their conversation to be held at their table under their terms. But now they are sitting at the table alone, while more important conversations are held elsewhere. Good news for the rest of us, but if I were Bloomberg, Broad and Walton, I'd want my $12 million back.
Education Post debuted on September 1st to considerable fanfare, including a nice infomercial on the launch in Washington Post. The head honcho was (and still is) Peter Cunningham. Cunningham is an old Chicago hand who traveled to DC with Arne Duncan to become the voice of Duncan's office (some others characterized him as its brains). The site was bankrolled ($12 million) by money from Bloomsburg, Broad and Walton philanthropies. It proposed to make the education debates more civil and pleasant and reasoned and based on facts-not-anecdotes, and all of that noble purpose lasted about as long as it took to post the first handful of articles that established that Education Post would be shilling hard for the Obama administration's reformster agenda. Fittingly enough, their logo features a bulhorn, not ordinarily a weapon of choice for civil, reasoned conversation.
EdWeek covered the launch and tossed up this detail about the site's function:
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
The Washington Post profile included this:
Cunningham said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
So what we're really talking about is a campaign politics style PR attack office determined to blitzkreig its way into control of the narrative. And they followed through swiftly. The very day I ran my first piece about the site, I had two contributors? employees? operatives? whatever you want to call thems all up in my twitter with some spicy "So when did you stop beating your wife?" challenges. Cunningham called out Jose Luis Vilson within the first week on the site.
Three weeks later the site tried to take on Carol Burris, decided to dial it back, and still mounted a weak non-conversational assault. And after that, things just got quiet.
In the first few days, the site had drawn many dissenting posts in the comments section. Those were swiftly erased. In response to the complaints, EdPost tweeted "Hoping for a better conversation. Stay tuned." But that conversation never happened-- not even a chorus of happy sock puppets to sing the praises of the stable of writers. Education Post became one more demonstration that the opposite of love is indifference.
It certainly wasn't that people on either side of the education debates hate to converse. Mike Petrilli, Andy Smarick, and Rick Hess are just three examples of hard-driving reformsters who are perfectly capable of having intelligent conversations with public school advocates.
But Education Post was not really interested in a conversation. Instead, they revealed themselves fairly quickly to be a twelve million dollar troll. They had said they wanted to amplify the voices of reformy success stories, but they also devoted time to playing gotcha with voices on the side of public education. They added a feature where they marked up pro-public-ed documents with red pen, like a petulant schoolmarm, and that didn't seem like a conversation starter, either. But clearly they had hoped that they could be at the center of education policy firestorms, and they had a box of matches and a tank of gasoline already to go but... well, nobody wanted to play. Time and again they set out the bait, grabbed ahold of their club, and waited under their bridge but.... crickets.
This is not the first time reformsters have tried to harness the interwebs and some of that social medias the kids are all tweetering about, and it's not the first time that reformsters have failed miserably doing so (see Jeb Bush/FEE's now defunct "Learn More Go Further" campaign for another example). But this might be the most expensive.
I thought I'd check to see how big the fail was, and plugged some sites into the admittedly-imperfect site Alexa.com, which ranks all the websites in the world by traffic. Here's what I got (we'll stick with US ranks and ignore the international). This is the rank in America as roughly estimated by Alexa:
EducationPost-- 223,516
Diane Ravitch's blog-- 20,380
So, Ravitch, with a staff of one and a budget of maybe a hundred bucks, cleaned their clocks. Is it their politics? Let's see what the very-reformy thinky tank Fordham Foundation site clocks in at:
EdExcellence-- 67,360
So, no, it's possible to draw some attention from their side of the tracks. Maybe other sites rank higher because they've been around longer? How about Living in Dialogue, a pro-public ed website launched at just about the same time, for considerably less that $12 million.
Living in Dialogue-- 138,616
How do they compare to a simple high school English teacher who (even though I've been online longer) just blogs in his spare time with a budget of $0.00?
Curmudgucation-- 119,612
I've checked other independent public ed bloggers, and the results are similar. We can also check metrics like sites linking in to the site-- EducationPost has 81, which is not an impressive number.
Bottom line-- in money spent per number people getting the message, EducationPost is at the bottom of the heap. It's proof once again that while the reformsters can keep outspending everybody else, that doesn't mean they're actually convincing anybody else. The reformster movement is lifted up by a giant bag of hot air, and that air is heated by constantly burning a giant pile of money. When the money runs out, or is withdrawn, the balloon will deflate and the reformster initiative will float back to earth with the rest of us.
It can seem like the reformsters are winning-- they have the pretty sites, the shiny PR, the well-paid PR rapid response operatives. What they don't have are the people who are pouring their blood and sweat and heart and soul into a cause that is bigger than profit and power.
Meanwhile, EducationPost continues to troll hard, most recently going after activist mom/blogger Sarah Blaine (because you have to stop those moms from messing wit the narrative) and Diane Ravitch herself by pointing out that she used to say different things than she does now, trying to discredit today's education activity by bringing up what she said way back in the day, as if Ravitch hadn't already written a book herself explaining what beliefs changed and why. These trolling runs have not made EducationPost a center of conversation. No firestorm. Not even a smokescreen. Just a short quiet correction from Mercedes Schneider. It is possible that EducationPost could be more efficient by simply posting, "Notice Me, Dammit" as a headline.
But it's a 2015 world, and people mostly understand that you don't feed the trolls (which is why you'll find no links in this story, or any of my newer stuff, to the EducationPost website). More than that, defenders of US public education are coming to understand that not every reformster requires or deserves a response. Paul Thomas once called for Phase Three in the resistance, and perhaps this is it-- a phase in which we realize that we are no longer backed into a corner and no longer have to respond to every cockamamie attack on public education, even as some reformsters try to get us to start up the same old fight. Maybe EducationPost is not about trying to go forward to better conversations, but to actually sucker us into the same old dynamic and thereby preserve the narrative that reformsters are the ones with all the power, while we have to fight and scrape to get our point across. They aren't Goliath. They're just a big troll on life support.
If that's the case, than the irrelevance of EducationPost (because, really, does it matter whether they close up shop or not?) is one more true sign that Things Have Changed, that money can't win everything, and that we all need to have real conversations about the future of American public education, not simply a battle of rapid-response PR blitzes and stale talking points.
The premise of EducationPost was that the conversation about public education was their conversation to be held at their table under their terms. But now they are sitting at the table alone, while more important conversations are held elsewhere. Good news for the rest of us, but if I were Bloomberg, Broad and Walton, I'd want my $12 million back.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
EdPost Dials It Back, Still Whiffs
Over the last forty-eight hours, the rapid responders from Education Post ran into a rapid response of their own. They decided to go after Carol Burris, and while various bloggers called them on their response out in the bloggosphere, Burris and many other responders descended upon the comments section, particularly for the post by the extremely feisty Ann Whalen.
By the end of the day, Whalen was back with a new post and a different tone.
Whalen's first response ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods...") pretty much called Burris a liar who couldn't make an honest case for her position. The response response addressed Burris directly and took a less combative tone.
I appreciate your quick follow-up and willingness to engage in a conversation about how we can support success for all of our students. We may have different approaches and strategies, but I do believe at the core (pun intended), we all want what’s best for children and schools.
And then she tried to address some of the issues that had been re-raised.
The set-in-stone nature of the Core came up, so she tried to once again sell the notion that, gosh, the states "are firmly in the driver’s seat." They can be just a flexible with their college-and-career-ready standards as they want, and several states have used that flexibility which is true in the sense that some states have found it politically expedient to rewrite some of the verbage of CCSS and find new names to call it. She acknowledges that some states have paid a price for not adopting standards that they can sufficiently prove to the feds are CACR enough, but golly, that's not the feds fault. She tries hard to sell the notion of the feds being all handsy offy on the Core, and I just don't understand how she imagines that Burris or any other sentient human who has been paying attention would believe that's true for a second.
The she tosses out the old baloney about how many students arrive at college needing remediation.
Students who are told they have mastered basic skills and are ready for post-secondary work should not find out the dirty truth in college.
Oh, that dirty truth. Of course, many students are arriving at college who were never told they were ready (and how are "mastered basic skills" and "ready for post-secondary work" the same thing, anyway?) I might suggest that it's just as likely that many students who are not college material have been told repeatedly that they must attend college or else they'll be big losing losers.
Here's another conclusion to reach from the remediation numbers-- the reforms that have been forced on public schools over the past ten-plus years have hurt public education more than helping it.
Whalen doesn't try to prop up any of the other ideas that Burris knocked over. But just when I was going to give her credit for adroitly shifting tone and direction, she finishes with this
While I didn’t see many comments on ways we can continue to move forward and improve support and implementation, I do look forward to learning more about your soon-to-be-released solution. Please let us know when we might learn more of this effort.
Oh, Ann. You were doing so well, but then you had to finish up with a big helping of Dolores Umbrage-style snottiness.
Let me repeat this idea for you. It's not up to supporters of public education to propose a solution, because reformsters have never A) proven that there's a problem in need of solving or B) proven that any of their proposals will improve anything about education.
If you want to perform surgery on a patient, the burden is on you to show that you have the right surgery in mind and that you know how to do it. If you want to take money out of someone else's bank account, the burden is on you to prove that you should be allowed to do it.
We've been waiting for years for you guys to back up some-- any-- of your bright ideas with compelling support. It still hasn't happened. You don't get to change the conversation by saying, "Well, what's your big idea, then?" The burden of proof is on you. And really-- why do we need to submit a "solution" for your approval, anyway? The fact that you're on a $12 million website does not mean that you need to be paid attention or that we are answerable to you.
By the end of the day, Whalen was back with a new post and a different tone.
Whalen's first response ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods...") pretty much called Burris a liar who couldn't make an honest case for her position. The response response addressed Burris directly and took a less combative tone.
I appreciate your quick follow-up and willingness to engage in a conversation about how we can support success for all of our students. We may have different approaches and strategies, but I do believe at the core (pun intended), we all want what’s best for children and schools.
And then she tried to address some of the issues that had been re-raised.
The set-in-stone nature of the Core came up, so she tried to once again sell the notion that, gosh, the states "are firmly in the driver’s seat." They can be just a flexible with their college-and-career-ready standards as they want, and several states have used that flexibility which is true in the sense that some states have found it politically expedient to rewrite some of the verbage of CCSS and find new names to call it. She acknowledges that some states have paid a price for not adopting standards that they can sufficiently prove to the feds are CACR enough, but golly, that's not the feds fault. She tries hard to sell the notion of the feds being all handsy offy on the Core, and I just don't understand how she imagines that Burris or any other sentient human who has been paying attention would believe that's true for a second.
The she tosses out the old baloney about how many students arrive at college needing remediation.
Students who are told they have mastered basic skills and are ready for post-secondary work should not find out the dirty truth in college.
Oh, that dirty truth. Of course, many students are arriving at college who were never told they were ready (and how are "mastered basic skills" and "ready for post-secondary work" the same thing, anyway?) I might suggest that it's just as likely that many students who are not college material have been told repeatedly that they must attend college or else they'll be big losing losers.
Here's another conclusion to reach from the remediation numbers-- the reforms that have been forced on public schools over the past ten-plus years have hurt public education more than helping it.
Whalen doesn't try to prop up any of the other ideas that Burris knocked over. But just when I was going to give her credit for adroitly shifting tone and direction, she finishes with this
While I didn’t see many comments on ways we can continue to move forward and improve support and implementation, I do look forward to learning more about your soon-to-be-released solution. Please let us know when we might learn more of this effort.
Oh, Ann. You were doing so well, but then you had to finish up with a big helping of Dolores Umbrage-style snottiness.
Let me repeat this idea for you. It's not up to supporters of public education to propose a solution, because reformsters have never A) proven that there's a problem in need of solving or B) proven that any of their proposals will improve anything about education.
If you want to perform surgery on a patient, the burden is on you to show that you have the right surgery in mind and that you know how to do it. If you want to take money out of someone else's bank account, the burden is on you to prove that you should be allowed to do it.
We've been waiting for years for you guys to back up some-- any-- of your bright ideas with compelling support. It still hasn't happened. You don't get to change the conversation by saying, "Well, what's your big idea, then?" The burden of proof is on you. And really-- why do we need to submit a "solution" for your approval, anyway? The fact that you're on a $12 million website does not mean that you need to be paid attention or that we are answerable to you.
Friday, September 19, 2014
EdPost Flexes Rapid Response Muscles
Well, it turns out that Education Post will be good for one thing. Its rapid response function (in which apparently a cadre of hired bloggists are ready to grab their keyboards from their mantles and launch like internet minutemen) will allow the rest of us to see when Pro-Public Education folks have scored a palpable hit.
By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams column (on the heels of her online debate win), because EdPost has rapidly deployed three bloggists to spank Burris by name the very next day. How do these rapid responders do? Even though the irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has already taken a look, I can't resist taking one, too.
Headliner AnnWhalen wins the Well That Didn't Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost's highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris") but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
And then she tries to refute Burris's arguements by lying. (Hey-- I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).
She tries to argue that the copyrighted CCSS can and have been changed. She would have been further ahead to point out the obvious-- though the standards are copyrighted and states did agree not to change them, nobody in the current political climate is going to enforce that. Instead, she tries to pretend that the truth is not true and that no such copyrights or agreements exist.
Whalen also tries to argue that the Core do not dictate curriculum, and then best she can do here is go anecdotal with some hand-picked teachers from some hand-picked states. Trying to get in an anecdote war over CCSS is a bad choice. We could get into the whole standards vs. curriculum argument here, but let's just observe that since Core fans argue it's a great idea to have the CCSS nationally because it will make all schools the same and students will be able to switch districts without missing a step-- come on. This is such an intellectually dishonest argument that we can only conclude that Core supporters are not interested in having a real conversation with anybody.
Whalen punts the "internationally benchmarked" and "based on research" issue to Fordham. They aren't. There's not a whit of research to say they are. But she pretends not to get Burris's actual argument here.
Whalen also pretends not to understand any of the arguments about the achievement gap and high-poverty schools, at one point weirdly arguing that the Mass Insight report shows the top students are the toppiest, which is not something I'd bring up when trying show the achievement gap is closing.
And she really earns her Big Fat Liar stripes by pushing the same old tired bullshit about how the standards are not national standards and states totally volunteered to adopt the standards that they totally created and seriously, you know Whalen is fresh from government work because I don't think anybody except a career bureaucrat could type this unvarnished horse pucky with a straight face.
Whalen labels Burris's most inexcusable argument that she didn't propose a solution. Holy crap! Okay, I am going to break into your house at night and start stealing your furniture. You wake up and catch me and tell me to stop and I turn to you and say, "Okay, then. Why don't you offer a better solution?" That's how stupid this argument from Whalen is.
So, EdPost's headliner fails.
Erin Dukeshire takes on the curriculum argument. Her argument is....curious. Burris pointed out in her column that specifying specific skills in the standards did make them awfully lot like a curriculum, but Dukeshire seems to want to say that since the CCSS are really specific, it gives her more freedom and makes them less like a curriculum. She also throws in a bit of "before the Core I was lost" baloney, but basically her argument is that since she can have order a Model A in any color, as long as it's black, she's really free.
I actually find that it’s easier to design a variety of successful learning experiences when the standards name both content and skills. During the past few years, I’ve developed several lessons around a Common Core standard that requires students to integrate text with visuals. Because the Common Core lists important literacy standards for students to develop in the science classroom, I don’t spend precious planning periods guessing at how to incorporate reading into my lessons in a meaningful way.
I think I see her problem. Where she is wasting time guessing about how to incorporate reading into her lessons in a meaningful way, I'm over here using my professional judgment and experience and knowledge of my students to figure that out in a non-guessy way.
Maricela Montoy-Wilson will also stand up for the Core. Like Dukeshire, she is an America Achieves Fellow, and she's been teaching the Core for three years, so she knows what's up. She has a great command of reformster baloney-speak, as witnessed by this fluffernuttery:
The standards do not tell me how to teach, contrary to your point, but rather they serve as a guidepost for me, as the educator, to determine the best instructional strategies to attain the standards. The standards guide me in selecting instructional methods that facilitate true understanding of the fewer, deeper standards. They help me focus on clear-cut needs, which help me identify instructional practices through collaboration, strong coaching, and feedback.
So the standards do not tell her what to do-- they just guide and help, help, help her.
Ultimately, the Common Core standards help us prepare students to enter colleges and the ever-changing workplace. We know that our nation is not up to par in mathematical reasoning, and our classrooms are not adequately responding to the fast-evolving needs of the innovative and technological workplace. Therefore, a shift from doing to understanding was imperative in creating innovators. The Common Core standards offer such a shift.
Well, except we don't actually know any of those things. We don't know that we're not up to par-- we don't even know what par is, or what the consequences of being up to it actually are. Nor do we know about the adequancy of responses (adequate for what purpose) nor do we have any authority to declare an imperative need for innovators. And no, we have absolutely no basis for believing that the Core prepares students for college or the workplace. So, very pretty, and all without foundation.
Montoy-Wilson decides to take on the four flim-flams one at a time.
The standards are a guide, she repeats. Since the standards don't tell her how to teach composing and decomposing numbers (Burris's example), they are just a guide. But she's wrong, because teaching composing and decomposing numbers is what the standards present as how teachers are supposed to teach basic math functions. Montoy-Wilson herself repeats the magic phrase "foundational to deeper understanding"-- which means that the point of learning this technique is because it's a how to understand the functions. So, the point still goes to Burris.
The achievement gap. All these arguments make my brain glaze over because they all depend on smoke and mirrors and pretty words because there is not a single fact to back up what Core fans are trying to say. What specifics Montoy-Wilson mentions are, predictably, things like project based learning that any competent teacher can do and did do for years without any Common Core.
Montoy-Wilson is another Core booster who is seeing magical tests somewhere that none of the rest of us see, tests with performance tasks and other fine features that replace the rote memorization that standardized tests were never about anyway. They're standardized tests. They will create a new test prep industry. They don't measure anything but test-taking skills and, indirectly, socio-economic class.
We are at a crossroads in education policy. We can heed calls to make things “easy” and fail to get at the heart of what our students deserve — or we can buckle down together, accept that there are challenges, that the going is tough, but ultimately the promise of these standards are worth it.
Pretty sure that they aren't. Also pretty sure that there's nothing in these three blogs to convince me otherwise. Lots of things are hard. Shoving a post into your eyeball is hard. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. And promising your children a trip to Disneyland is a great promise, but if you're really driving them to a bombed-out playground, your promise doesn't really matter.
As a rapid-response exercise, EdPost is, at last, fast. But hey-- I often provide next day service and I do my writing at times like 5:30 AM and on my lunch break. Surely $12 million will get you the same level of service that my readers get for $0.00.
Beyond the speed, EdPost continues to reveal its true colors. Completely aligned with the US DOE party line. Just as dismissive and condescending and nasty as anybody in the education debates has ever been, which is not a crime-- it's noteworthy only because EdPost launched with the promise that they would change the conversation.
This is not a new conversation. It's the same old bullshit. Talking points repeated ad infinitum, even if they've been previously debunked and abandoned by thinking people on both sides. Personal attacks and dismissive language. Anecdotes and fancy language to make points (which, again, is not a terrible crime, but EdPost launched claiming it would be all facts and calm rationality).
I mean, damn-- if you're going to go after Carol Burris with accusations of being a liar and a cheat and not understanding how education works, you had better be better armed with something other than high dudgeon and government briefings. EdPost has show us what they're about, but they've also shown how good they are at it, and boy, if that were my $12 million, I'd want some of it back.
[Update. I've refrained from linking to Ed Post for the same reason that I stopped naming She Who Will Not Be Named, but you really need to watch Carol Burris take Whalen to school in the comments section, so here's a link.]
By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams column (on the heels of her online debate win), because EdPost has rapidly deployed three bloggists to spank Burris by name the very next day. How do these rapid responders do? Even though the irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has already taken a look, I can't resist taking one, too.
Headliner AnnWhalen wins the Well That Didn't Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost's highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris") but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
And then she tries to refute Burris's arguements by lying. (Hey-- I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).
She tries to argue that the copyrighted CCSS can and have been changed. She would have been further ahead to point out the obvious-- though the standards are copyrighted and states did agree not to change them, nobody in the current political climate is going to enforce that. Instead, she tries to pretend that the truth is not true and that no such copyrights or agreements exist.
Whalen also tries to argue that the Core do not dictate curriculum, and then best she can do here is go anecdotal with some hand-picked teachers from some hand-picked states. Trying to get in an anecdote war over CCSS is a bad choice. We could get into the whole standards vs. curriculum argument here, but let's just observe that since Core fans argue it's a great idea to have the CCSS nationally because it will make all schools the same and students will be able to switch districts without missing a step-- come on. This is such an intellectually dishonest argument that we can only conclude that Core supporters are not interested in having a real conversation with anybody.
Whalen punts the "internationally benchmarked" and "based on research" issue to Fordham. They aren't. There's not a whit of research to say they are. But she pretends not to get Burris's actual argument here.
Whalen also pretends not to understand any of the arguments about the achievement gap and high-poverty schools, at one point weirdly arguing that the Mass Insight report shows the top students are the toppiest, which is not something I'd bring up when trying show the achievement gap is closing.
And she really earns her Big Fat Liar stripes by pushing the same old tired bullshit about how the standards are not national standards and states totally volunteered to adopt the standards that they totally created and seriously, you know Whalen is fresh from government work because I don't think anybody except a career bureaucrat could type this unvarnished horse pucky with a straight face.
Whalen labels Burris's most inexcusable argument that she didn't propose a solution. Holy crap! Okay, I am going to break into your house at night and start stealing your furniture. You wake up and catch me and tell me to stop and I turn to you and say, "Okay, then. Why don't you offer a better solution?" That's how stupid this argument from Whalen is.
So, EdPost's headliner fails.
Erin Dukeshire takes on the curriculum argument. Her argument is....curious. Burris pointed out in her column that specifying specific skills in the standards did make them awfully lot like a curriculum, but Dukeshire seems to want to say that since the CCSS are really specific, it gives her more freedom and makes them less like a curriculum. She also throws in a bit of "before the Core I was lost" baloney, but basically her argument is that since she can have order a Model A in any color, as long as it's black, she's really free.
I actually find that it’s easier to design a variety of successful learning experiences when the standards name both content and skills. During the past few years, I’ve developed several lessons around a Common Core standard that requires students to integrate text with visuals. Because the Common Core lists important literacy standards for students to develop in the science classroom, I don’t spend precious planning periods guessing at how to incorporate reading into my lessons in a meaningful way.
I think I see her problem. Where she is wasting time guessing about how to incorporate reading into her lessons in a meaningful way, I'm over here using my professional judgment and experience and knowledge of my students to figure that out in a non-guessy way.
Maricela Montoy-Wilson will also stand up for the Core. Like Dukeshire, she is an America Achieves Fellow, and she's been teaching the Core for three years, so she knows what's up. She has a great command of reformster baloney-speak, as witnessed by this fluffernuttery:
The standards do not tell me how to teach, contrary to your point, but rather they serve as a guidepost for me, as the educator, to determine the best instructional strategies to attain the standards. The standards guide me in selecting instructional methods that facilitate true understanding of the fewer, deeper standards. They help me focus on clear-cut needs, which help me identify instructional practices through collaboration, strong coaching, and feedback.
So the standards do not tell her what to do-- they just guide and help, help, help her.
Ultimately, the Common Core standards help us prepare students to enter colleges and the ever-changing workplace. We know that our nation is not up to par in mathematical reasoning, and our classrooms are not adequately responding to the fast-evolving needs of the innovative and technological workplace. Therefore, a shift from doing to understanding was imperative in creating innovators. The Common Core standards offer such a shift.
Well, except we don't actually know any of those things. We don't know that we're not up to par-- we don't even know what par is, or what the consequences of being up to it actually are. Nor do we know about the adequancy of responses (adequate for what purpose) nor do we have any authority to declare an imperative need for innovators. And no, we have absolutely no basis for believing that the Core prepares students for college or the workplace. So, very pretty, and all without foundation.
Montoy-Wilson decides to take on the four flim-flams one at a time.
The standards are a guide, she repeats. Since the standards don't tell her how to teach composing and decomposing numbers (Burris's example), they are just a guide. But she's wrong, because teaching composing and decomposing numbers is what the standards present as how teachers are supposed to teach basic math functions. Montoy-Wilson herself repeats the magic phrase "foundational to deeper understanding"-- which means that the point of learning this technique is because it's a how to understand the functions. So, the point still goes to Burris.
The achievement gap. All these arguments make my brain glaze over because they all depend on smoke and mirrors and pretty words because there is not a single fact to back up what Core fans are trying to say. What specifics Montoy-Wilson mentions are, predictably, things like project based learning that any competent teacher can do and did do for years without any Common Core.
Montoy-Wilson is another Core booster who is seeing magical tests somewhere that none of the rest of us see, tests with performance tasks and other fine features that replace the rote memorization that standardized tests were never about anyway. They're standardized tests. They will create a new test prep industry. They don't measure anything but test-taking skills and, indirectly, socio-economic class.
We are at a crossroads in education policy. We can heed calls to make things “easy” and fail to get at the heart of what our students deserve — or we can buckle down together, accept that there are challenges, that the going is tough, but ultimately the promise of these standards are worth it.
Pretty sure that they aren't. Also pretty sure that there's nothing in these three blogs to convince me otherwise. Lots of things are hard. Shoving a post into your eyeball is hard. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. And promising your children a trip to Disneyland is a great promise, but if you're really driving them to a bombed-out playground, your promise doesn't really matter.
As a rapid-response exercise, EdPost is, at last, fast. But hey-- I often provide next day service and I do my writing at times like 5:30 AM and on my lunch break. Surely $12 million will get you the same level of service that my readers get for $0.00.
Beyond the speed, EdPost continues to reveal its true colors. Completely aligned with the US DOE party line. Just as dismissive and condescending and nasty as anybody in the education debates has ever been, which is not a crime-- it's noteworthy only because EdPost launched with the promise that they would change the conversation.
This is not a new conversation. It's the same old bullshit. Talking points repeated ad infinitum, even if they've been previously debunked and abandoned by thinking people on both sides. Personal attacks and dismissive language. Anecdotes and fancy language to make points (which, again, is not a terrible crime, but EdPost launched claiming it would be all facts and calm rationality).
I mean, damn-- if you're going to go after Carol Burris with accusations of being a liar and a cheat and not understanding how education works, you had better be better armed with something other than high dudgeon and government briefings. EdPost has show us what they're about, but they've also shown how good they are at it, and boy, if that were my $12 million, I'd want some of it back.
[Update. I've refrained from linking to Ed Post for the same reason that I stopped naming She Who Will Not Be Named, but you really need to watch Carol Burris take Whalen to school in the comments section, so here's a link.]
Sunday, September 7, 2014
No, Education Post Is Not About Conversation
Twelve million dollars buys you a big splash. Many of us have launched blogs; very few of us have had heavy press coverage of the launch.
When Anthony Cody, a nationally known education writer and activist left the nest at Education Week to launch Living in Dialogue, a website that features work from many of the top writers in education policy today, the Washington Post did not dispatch Lindsey Layton to cover the new addition to the education conversation. But when Education Post, a site with a similar format (multiple writers cover education issues) and a similar stated mission (further the education conversation), launched last week, it got the royal treatment in other media outlets.
It's telling that Education Post's logo is a bullhorn. Its intention of providing a new education conversation vanishes immediately in its press coverage. In the Washington Post coverage, Bloomberg guy Howard Wolfson said
There hasn’t really been an organization dedicated to sharing the successes of education reform around the country. You have local success, but it isn’t amplified elsewhere.
Bruce Reed, from the Broad Foundation, is even clearer.
One of the goals of Education Post is to publicize what works in public education.
Reed also offers this characterization of the problem voices in the debate
Most of the people in the organizations we work with are too busy starting schools or teaching kids to spend much time to take part in a policy debate about what they do. They're showing up at 7 in the morning to run a school and grading papers late into the night. They're not blogging vicious comments at the bottom of every education news story that gets written. [emphasis mine]
Just for the record, I get to school at 7 AM and grade papers late into the night and a few other things besides. I still make time to burn bandwidth because education is important to me. Just sayin'.
Education Post is not just about its own website. In Mark Walsh's EdWeek piece on the launch, we find this tidbit
Cunningha, said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
In the Washington Post piece, it comes out like this
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
So, not conversation. Now, if reformsters want to put together a site devoted to getting out their message, that fine. When I go to Anthony Cody's site, I expect that I'll find a certain point of view represented, and my policy here at this blog is that I stick to saying things that I believe are true.
But Education Post goes a step beyond a simple bloggy point of view. It's looking a lot more like a well-financed, well-populated political PR rapid response team. And it has already shown its rapid response skills. When I wrote my initial take on the site, I had two twitter accounts associated with the group challenging me by the end of the afternoon, talking points at the ready. The second round of blogs include, along with pieces in praise of standardized testing and the new teacher evaluation models, a piece entitled "I'm All Ears, Jose." It's a response to Jose Luis Vilson, one of the A-list ed bloggers to take an early look at EP, and it reads a little like Peter Cunningham's version of "Was there something you wanted to tell the whole class?"
Again, there's nothing wrong with having a point of view, and nothing wrong with being assertive about it. But these guys are not exploring or conversing; they're selling something, and they are defining "toxic" conversation as words that interfere with their sales pitch. This is not an attempt to have a conversation, but an attempt to shape and control one.
Controlling the narrative is all the rage in these issues. Mercedes Schneider and Paul Thomas have both written recent pieces that show this subtle and powerful technique in action. I say, "So there we were, winning the game with superior skills, when some people got upset, apparently about some foul in the third quarter. We are totally open to discussing that third quarter foul situation," and if you want to engage in the argument about the foul, that's fine with me because we've now sold the notion that my team was winning and that we have superior skill.
EdPost's narrative is that we were all just sitting around, talking pleasantly about how to accomplish great things with these really successful ed reforms, and suddenly the conversation turned ugly and unpleasantly toxic. Now we just need people to calm down so that we can talk about all the great successes of ed reform.
This is disingenuous on two levels. First, it's what people who believe in marketing way too much do. When their Big Poop Sandwich is selling poorly, they work with the assumption that's there's a problem with their messaging and not a problem with trying sell a sandwich filled with poop. Second, they already know when the conversation turned ugly. It was back a few years ago when reformsters refused to listen to any dissenting voices and proceeded to dismiss all critics as cranks and fringe elements and hysterically deluded suburban white moms. Back then a combative tone was okay because they thought they would win that conversation. Now they would like a new choice, please.
There is another secondary story here-- the tale of the former Obama administration figures who have become field operatives for hard-edged reformster promotion. From this PR initiative to the East Coast Vergara lawsuit of Campbell Brown, we're seeing former Obama/Duncan folks resurface as reformster warriors. At the very least, a reminder that it's a mistake to assume that a Democrat is on the side of public education.
Look, I'm all for civil conversation. I count a large number of reformster types with whom I have had plenty of civil exchanges. But those exchanges include honesty and listening and an intention to understand what the other person is saying. Education Post and its extremely well-funded megaphone appear to come up a bit short.
Put another way-- if your neighbor drives a tank into his driveway and parks it next to a few cases of ammo, and then he tells you, "Look! I got a great new sailboat! Pretty soon we'll all be heading out onto the lake together," you'd be right to have a few doubts. Education Post may want to promote itself as a sailboat, but it sure looks like a tank to me.
When Anthony Cody, a nationally known education writer and activist left the nest at Education Week to launch Living in Dialogue, a website that features work from many of the top writers in education policy today, the Washington Post did not dispatch Lindsey Layton to cover the new addition to the education conversation. But when Education Post, a site with a similar format (multiple writers cover education issues) and a similar stated mission (further the education conversation), launched last week, it got the royal treatment in other media outlets.
It's telling that Education Post's logo is a bullhorn. Its intention of providing a new education conversation vanishes immediately in its press coverage. In the Washington Post coverage, Bloomberg guy Howard Wolfson said
There hasn’t really been an organization dedicated to sharing the successes of education reform around the country. You have local success, but it isn’t amplified elsewhere.
Bruce Reed, from the Broad Foundation, is even clearer.
One of the goals of Education Post is to publicize what works in public education.
Reed also offers this characterization of the problem voices in the debate
Most of the people in the organizations we work with are too busy starting schools or teaching kids to spend much time to take part in a policy debate about what they do. They're showing up at 7 in the morning to run a school and grading papers late into the night. They're not blogging vicious comments at the bottom of every education news story that gets written. [emphasis mine]
Just for the record, I get to school at 7 AM and grade papers late into the night and a few other things besides. I still make time to burn bandwidth because education is important to me. Just sayin'.
Education Post is not just about its own website. In Mark Walsh's EdWeek piece on the launch, we find this tidbit
Cunningha, said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
In the Washington Post piece, it comes out like this
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
So, not conversation. Now, if reformsters want to put together a site devoted to getting out their message, that fine. When I go to Anthony Cody's site, I expect that I'll find a certain point of view represented, and my policy here at this blog is that I stick to saying things that I believe are true.
But Education Post goes a step beyond a simple bloggy point of view. It's looking a lot more like a well-financed, well-populated political PR rapid response team. And it has already shown its rapid response skills. When I wrote my initial take on the site, I had two twitter accounts associated with the group challenging me by the end of the afternoon, talking points at the ready. The second round of blogs include, along with pieces in praise of standardized testing and the new teacher evaluation models, a piece entitled "I'm All Ears, Jose." It's a response to Jose Luis Vilson, one of the A-list ed bloggers to take an early look at EP, and it reads a little like Peter Cunningham's version of "Was there something you wanted to tell the whole class?"
Again, there's nothing wrong with having a point of view, and nothing wrong with being assertive about it. But these guys are not exploring or conversing; they're selling something, and they are defining "toxic" conversation as words that interfere with their sales pitch. This is not an attempt to have a conversation, but an attempt to shape and control one.
Controlling the narrative is all the rage in these issues. Mercedes Schneider and Paul Thomas have both written recent pieces that show this subtle and powerful technique in action. I say, "So there we were, winning the game with superior skills, when some people got upset, apparently about some foul in the third quarter. We are totally open to discussing that third quarter foul situation," and if you want to engage in the argument about the foul, that's fine with me because we've now sold the notion that my team was winning and that we have superior skill.
EdPost's narrative is that we were all just sitting around, talking pleasantly about how to accomplish great things with these really successful ed reforms, and suddenly the conversation turned ugly and unpleasantly toxic. Now we just need people to calm down so that we can talk about all the great successes of ed reform.
This is disingenuous on two levels. First, it's what people who believe in marketing way too much do. When their Big Poop Sandwich is selling poorly, they work with the assumption that's there's a problem with their messaging and not a problem with trying sell a sandwich filled with poop. Second, they already know when the conversation turned ugly. It was back a few years ago when reformsters refused to listen to any dissenting voices and proceeded to dismiss all critics as cranks and fringe elements and hysterically deluded suburban white moms. Back then a combative tone was okay because they thought they would win that conversation. Now they would like a new choice, please.
There is another secondary story here-- the tale of the former Obama administration figures who have become field operatives for hard-edged reformster promotion. From this PR initiative to the East Coast Vergara lawsuit of Campbell Brown, we're seeing former Obama/Duncan folks resurface as reformster warriors. At the very least, a reminder that it's a mistake to assume that a Democrat is on the side of public education.
Look, I'm all for civil conversation. I count a large number of reformster types with whom I have had plenty of civil exchanges. But those exchanges include honesty and listening and an intention to understand what the other person is saying. Education Post and its extremely well-funded megaphone appear to come up a bit short.
Put another way-- if your neighbor drives a tank into his driveway and parks it next to a few cases of ammo, and then he tells you, "Look! I got a great new sailboat! Pretty soon we'll all be heading out onto the lake together," you'd be right to have a few doubts. Education Post may want to promote itself as a sailboat, but it sure looks like a tank to me.
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