NY: Cuomo's Common Core Nothing Sundae

They said it couldn't be done, but today NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's Common Core Task Force delivered a big old report in less time than it takes my students to complete their major research project. And it's a big ole Nothing Sundae with a few scoops of Fluff on the side, with a cherry on top.

The announcement came with the same stock photo student we've seen before, and I want with all my heart to believe that his expression of, "Heh. Yeah, this is some ridiculous baloney" is the blow struck by whatever intern had to cobble this together. But the nothing in this announcement announces its nothingness right off the bat. Here's the head of the Task Force, Richard Parsons, Senior Advisor, Providence Equity Partners, LLC and former Chairman of Citigroup (because when you want to look at education policy, you call a banker):

While adoption of the Common Core was extremely well intentioned, its implementation has caused confusion and upheaval in classrooms across New York State. We believe that these recommendations, once acted on, provide a means to put things back on the right track and ensure high quality standards that meet the needs of New York’s kids. The recommendations will provide the foundation to restore public trust in the education system in New York and build on the long history of excellence that preceded this period.

So there you have it-- the purpose of the report is "to restore public trust." Which is a little different than "meet educational needs."

But that's the PR. How does the report look? Let's just see.

Getting Started 

The report kicks off with a the short summary (for those who want to skip straight to the highlights) and a recap of what the Common Core is (spoiler alert: it's exactly what all the PR from Common Core says it is, apparently, so you already know this part). From there we move to the bulk of the report, which is the findings and twenty-one recommendations. Let's see what the task force came up with, shall we? The recommendations are grouped by specific issues.

Issue One: Establish New High Quality New York Standards

Well, if you had any doubts about how deeply the task force was going to dig and how carefully they were going to probe to reach heretofore undiscovered frontiers of understanding, just look at this sentence:

The Task Force has learned that New York educators had limited input into the Common Core before their formal adoption in New York.

Stay tuned for the moment in which the Task Force learns that the sun does not revolve around the sun.

The Task Force accepted input for a whole month and heard from 10,500 respondents.But they single out the Council for a Strong America, the New York State Business Council, and an unnamed NY higher education administrator. Many people are unhappy, yet somehow there is widespread agreement that the goals of CCSS are all swell.

Recommendation One: Adopt some high quality NY standards with all stakeholders in a transparent process.

Mind you, they need to be high standards that promote college and career readiness. And they shouldn't just be a name change, and they should be New Yorky.

But-- the changes should include all the "key instructional shifts set forth in the Common Core Standards." So they should be totally different from the Core, but they should do exactly what the Core does. Got that? NY will rewrite the standards without questioning any of the foundation or goals of the standards. So, more than a name change-- there will also be wording changes. Probably fine changes, too. Just no changes to the actual goals and substance of the standards, Which will make it hard to do

Recommendation Two: Fix the early grade standards.

Well, not fix exactly. The Task Force doesn't want to lower the standards, but recognizing that children develop at different rates, they recommend "banding" to give teachers a wider time range in which to drag tony students across the finish line. They're talking Pre-K through 2. Up through grade 2, everyone can move more or less at their own pace, but by grade 3 the little slackers should be on point and meeting those one-size-fits-all standards. So what we'd like to take those special moments where live humans meet incorrectly written standards and just sort of move them to a later point in the students' lives.

Recommendation Three: Some kind of flexibility for special populations.

Basically, let's make sure that students with disabilities and ELL have more than just the option of vocational certificates instead of a regents diploma. But every student should be prepared to succeed after high school. Convene some experts and figure something out.

Recommendation Four: Ensure standards do not lead to the narrowing of the curriculum or diminish the love of reading and joy of learning.

The Task Force hasn't the foggiest notion how to actually do this, but they recognize it's an issue to many people. So they recommend that the new standards just kind of do this, somehow. It does not occur to them, for instance, that focusing all measurement of schools, teachers, and students on the results of a couple of standardized tests might have the effect of narrowing the curriculum. Nope. Like Arne Duncan, they have no idea how this happened, but they recommend that it stop happening, right now.

Recommendation Five: Establish transparent review and revision process for standards.

It's a mark of just how far the Common Core has driven us down the Crazyland Turnpike that this idea-- that there should be a way to review the standards and change what needs to be changed-- qualifies as a new recommendation. No, David Coleman saw his Creation, and he saw that it was Good, and he decreed that nobody could or should ever change it. The Task Force is not wrong, but the state of New York and a whole lot of other folks are dopes for having waiting till the end of 2015 to come up with this.

Issue Two: Develop Better Curriculum Guidance and Resources

Bzzzzt!! Wrong "issue." The issue is not, "how can the state do a better job of micromanaging classroom teachers." The issue is, "how can the state back itself up and let teachers do their jobs." But the closest the Task Force can come is acknowledging that "teachers develop and select elements of curriculum within the context of student learning goals and objectives established by state and local authorities." So while in their straightjackets, teachers are free to wiggle their noses and roll their eyes.

The Task Force also notes that EngageNY is being used as mandated curriculum in many districts, even though NYSED swears up and down it told people not to do that. Also, many people think the EngageNY modules and website suck.

Also, the Task Force is one more group that is fuzzy on the difference between standards and curriculum. For all these reasons, the following recommendations pretty much miss the point.

Recommendation Six: Educators and local districts should be free to develop and tailor curriculum to the standards.

And you can get a Model T in any color, as long as it's black. The TF actually notes that high-performing schools give teachers autonomy. And yet, somehow the recommendation "Give teachers autonomy" does not make it onto the list.

Recommendation Seven: Release New! Improved! curriculum resources.

Make a new, more better EngageNY. Oh, and occasionally collect feedback on it, just in case it's not more betterer enough.

Recommendation Eight: Set up a digital platform for teacher sharing.

Another moment of candor breaks out. "Teachers and students are not one-size-fit-all. So why are our modules?" Yeah! So let's see if teachers want to fill in the huge gaps in our materials offerings, for free. Let's see if teachers and schools want to give away materials that might help other teachers and schools beat them in the stack rankings. Using the interwebs!

Recommendation Nine: More better Professional Development 

Responding to the complaint that the Core were implemented without enough explanation of How To Do It, the TF suggests that lots of super-duper PD be deployed so that people will totally know how to do it the next time. Because implementation is always the explanation. Hey, question. Do you think anybody out there is researching better ways to spread cholera? Or could it be that some things can't be implemented well because they are inherently flawed and un-implementable?

Issue Three: Significantly Reducing Testing Time and Blah Blah Blahdy Blah

Tests are inevitable and universal, we say. People apparently have complained about Common Core testing. A lot. Who knew? (Oh, wait-- everybody who's read that at least 250,000 students in NY refused to take the test). The Task Force is aware that Pearson has been replaced and that the education chief has launched an initiative to get test compliance back up, complete with a hilariously handy propaganda kit. The Task Force is aware that nobody thinks they're getting useful information from the tests. Of course, the Task Force also accepts NYSED's estimate of how much time any of this testification sucks up, and they think that the President's Test Action Plan actually said something useful and meaningful.

Of course, the way to significantly reduce testing time, a goal everyone allegedly supports, would have been for the ESSA to NOT require the same amount of standardized testing as previously mandated. But under ESSA, states that really wanted to do something about the testing juggernaut could push the boundaries of what the tests are and what they are used for (because test prep would be less prevalent if everybody's future weren't riding on test results). But (spoiler alert) the Task Force is not going to recommend any of these obvious means of achieving their alleged goal. They are like a spouse who, caught cheating with somebody they picked up in a bar, promises not to go to that particular bar on Wednesdays.

Recommendation Ten: Involve all sorts of stakeholders in reviewing the state standardized tests.

Interesting. Does this mean that teachers and other stakeholders will actually be allowed to see test questions? I don't think this recommendation will make it past the test manufacturing lobby.

Recommendation Eleven: Gather student feedback on tests.

Good idea. I suggest checking twitter starting roughly five minutes after the test is handed out.

Recommendation Twelve: Provide ongoing transparency,

They call for releasing test items (good luck with that), the standards weighting and more detail in student scores. I'd suggest adding to the list how the tests are scored, how the test items were validated (if at all), and how the cut scores are set.

Recommendation Thirteen: Reduce number of days and duration for standardized tests

Sure. Good idea. Next, reduce punitive uses of test results so that nobody feels compelled to spend half the year doing test prep.

Recommendation Fourteen: Provide teacher flexibility to use authentic formative assessment.

What?! Trust teachers to do their jobs??!! That's crazy talk, Task Force. Unless.... Uh-oh.

The State and local school districts must support the use of standards-based formative assessments and authentic assessments woven into the routine curriculum along with periodic diagnostic and benchmark testing. The goal of these assessments is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback throughout the school year that teachers can use to improve instruction and students can use to improve learning.

Okay. That could mean "let teachers teach" or it could mean "bring on the highly profitable Competency Based Education."

Recommendation Fifteen: Check out an untimed approach

Another surprising finding. When you give students a high stakes test with a time limit, they get anxious.

Recommendation Sixteen: Provide flexibility for students with disabilities.

Recommendation Seventeen: Protect and enforce accommodations for students with disabilities.

Recommendation Eighteen: Explore alternative options to assess the most severely disabled students.

These are aimed directly at the feds, who, as part of their ongoing program to make all disabilities to vanish by just expecting real hard, denied New York's request to make testing accommodations for students with disabilities. It's hard to predict how hard Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King (whose previous job, you may recall, was making a hash of education policy in New York) may push back on this, and the real battle will come down to the future Secretary of Ed.

Recommendation Nineteen: Prevent students from being stuck in academic intervention based on one test.

Once again, we are mystified by how anybody ever put sooooo much emphasis on one standardized test. How did such a thing happen? It;s a puzzlement. But a student definitely shouldn't be automatically put in a remediation just because she did poorly on the test used to rate schools and teachers. A more holistic approach is called for, with parents and teachers working together to determine what is in the best interests of the child. And nobody should ever tell a student that the student is too unsatisfactory a student based on just one test (unless it's the state making that determination based on one test, in which case it's totes okee dokee).

Recommendation Twenty: Eliminate double testing for ELL students

New York has an exam for English Language Learners to take. The feds only give a one-year exemption for ELL students, leaving ELL students often taking double tests-- during the years that they have not yet shown English proficiency. The Task Force thinks this is dumb. They are correct.

Issue Four and Recommendation Twenty-One

"The implementation of the Common Core in New York was rushed and flawed," says the task force, which does not go one to say, "because the Common Core were the rushed, flawed work of amateurs, and you can't do a good job of implementing a bad policy." So they have this half right.

But they recommend that "until the new system is fully phased in" (which will be determined how, exactly?) test results should only be advisory and not used for any teacher or student evaluating. They are assuming it will take till 2019-2020 to get everything up to speed, which is pretty awesome, because that gives many governors, many legislatures, and many various policymakers and lobbyists ample time to do God knows what in the meantime. Might as well pick any old year, since nobody knows how long such an undertaking should, would or has taken ever.

Bottom line?

So the Task Force has basically hit three areas. They have lots of ideas to clean up the administration of testing, but nothing that addresses the fundamental problems with the testing. They have several ideas for trying to clean up the curriculum and pedagogy tied to the standards, but nothing that addresses the incorrect assumptions and ideas underlying the state's approach. And they have an idea about rewriting new standards, but nothing that would address any of the foundational problems and incorrect assumptions underlying the Common Core.

So, change without change. We'll keep the same twisted frame and try to drape it with pretty new cloth. It's a big bowl of nothing, and it's not even a new bowl.

ICYMI: Top Edublogging of the Week (7/26)

As always, this is neither all-inclusive nor based on any criteria other than my own. But here are some things you should read from last week.


When candidates talk education, media rarely go beyond buzzwords

Well, in all fairness, the media don't do any better with other issues, but here's a great look at the side tracks that keep appearing in coverage of candidate edubloviation.

Dumbing down kids

If you want to get angry over EngageNY and canned teaching programs all over again, here's the piece. Detailed, specific, and incisive.

Who's actually running America's charter schools

You actually need a double dose of School Finance 101 this week. Start with this look at which groups are actually getting most of the charter business. Then move onto this explanation of just one of the crazy twists in charter financing. It's a little wonky, but clear and thorough.

ALEC now says school vouchers are for kids in suburbia

This one's important, and charts the shift in the voucher sales pitch. We knew this was coming-- now it's here. Vouchers are no longer pitched as a way to rescue those poor kids in failing urban schools. Now some folks would like to expand the market.

People of the Paperwork; Final Lessons of Rochester

It looks as if, at least for the time being, the saga of Ted Morris, Jr., the 22-year-old wunderkind and his charter school in Rochester seems to have reached, if not an end, at least an intermission, but there's still one big lesson to be learned.

Small Lessons and Predictions

There are also several smaller lessons, such "The internet is a thing that many people have." After Morris hit the news, a handful of bloggers used the magic of the internet to check his story, and once the reporter on the ground in Rochester started digging, everything fell apart. The Democrat and Chronicle was unimpressed enough to also give Morris an editorial spanking. Apparently Morris figured he could just say stuff and nobody would ever notice if much of the stuff was just a flat-out pile of lies.

It remains to see what the sequel to this tale might be. Morris's replacement is Peter Kozik, a college professor (who appears to have actual credentials) at Keuka College (previously at Syracuse) who has done some work for EngageNY in the business of packaging CCSS for students with special needs. In Syracuse he presented on the subject of Pre-K expansion. And he once published a poem entitled "Matryrdon Is For The Young." And he still intends to open the school in the fall.

There are two likely theories about what really comes next. Some folks are guessing that this is simply a strategic retreat and that Morris will quietly re-emerge to continue running his pet project charter. That's certainly highly likely, but for myself, I see one other possibility. I've known a young con man or two, and they tend to follow a pattern. At first their new friends find them charming, with a confidence that suggests they really know what they're doing. And then reality intrudes, the vision unravels, and the new friends back (or run) away (or to a lawyer). One detail in Morris's story sticks out for me-- even though he's supposedly been a fixture in Rochester his entire life, working in leadership roles since the age of 10, his board of trustees for the charter are new friends, people he dug up, literally, on the internet. Where are the people who have known him his whole life? Why are they not clamoring to help him out?  It's possible that his retreat is a dodge, but I think it's also possible that his new friends are just now realizing that they've been had by a confident young scam artist from whom they will now try to detach themselves with the haste.

Bigger Lesson

There's a more important lesson to be learned about the reformsters, and it appears in this D&C follow-up story (reporter Justin Murphy has been working his ass off on this thing) in which he tried to see if he could find somebody on the NY state level who would take responsibility for handing this young liar a school charter (spoiler alert: no). Here's Meryl Tisch on the subject:

"When it comes to the board, it comes with an endorsement from (NYSED) and the local regents," she said. "What we hear is whether ... they've put together a sound application. There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, and I think people in (NYSED) need to address that with you."

Or this quote from the Rochester-based regents

"We rely on a considerable amount of data and information provided by applicants, along with conducting many in-person interviews before reaching a decision. If it were to turn out that we were deliberately provided misleading information by an applicant, that would of course call for further review of the issuance of the charter."

NYSED doesn't appear to have commented yet (blizzard + holiday = nobody in office). But the regents' defense is simple-- his paperwork looked fine.

Here's one of the core beliefs of reformsters-- it's all in the paperwork. The paperwork is king. The paperwork is god. In New York, we'll give you paperwork from EngageNY to make sure you do the right thing, and we'll make you submit paperwork in the form of tests to prove you've done what you're supposed to.

People who believe in the Great God Paperwork always make the same mistake-- believing that the paperwork is a true and faithful representation of reality. The paperwork is always reliable, and surely everybody everyone else takes the paperwork just as seriously as the Acolytes of Paperwork do. This is the great frustration of trying to earn almost any grant. Grants are not awarded for some need or merit in the actual world; grants are awarded for doing the best job of filling out the grant application form.

Business, government, even churches are laced with these People of the Paperwork, who believe that reality can only be seen and understood through paperwork, and not through looking at it directly. The People of the Paperwork love CCSS, and especially love high stakes testing, because it generates paperwork, and when we look at paperwork, golly bob howdy, then and only then do we see reality.

And that's why the People of the Paperwork are the easiest people in the world to lie to-- because they never lift their heads out of the paperwork to ask if the beloved charts and graphs and forms and charter school applications actually represent reality.

When the People of the Paperwork get their mitts into education reform, people in schools understand that our job is no longer to actually educate students-- it's to make sure that the paperwork looks good. Ted Morris may not know a damn thing about school (really-- not even how to graduate from it), but he clearly understood one thing-- if the paperwork is right, the bureaucrats in charge will go for it.

When Tisch says that she sees no reason that Morris's charter can't open right on schedule, she's behaving as a true Paperwork Acolyte. After all, Morris himself may turn out to be a fake and a fraud, but his school's paperwork still all looks good. What else matters?

Granddad Learns About The Common Core

[Update: As you can now see, the video has gone away. The Youtube account "Common Core," a group of filmmakers from around the country, has shut down after only three days. Probably their best move, all things considered. If I can find a link to the video anywhere on the interwebs, I'll be sure to repost.]

[Update: We'll see how long this lasts, but God bless stlgretchen for preserving this piece of video idiocy. So now, you, too, can enjoy this piece of self-defeating PR]

[Well, that was fun while it lasted. But Six One Seven is apparently determined to bury this!]





As your grandad would not say, "OMG!"

The media group 617 has produced a video in support of the Core that is apparently intended to embarrass its opponents into silence. It has decidedly not worked out that way-- you will have a hard time finding the video, which seems to have suffered its own attack of embarrassment, but you can read about the reaction over at Missouri Education Watchdog. They were not pretty.

The video features a Cartoon Old Guy, who's insulting on so many levels. He's dismissive of the kid. He is wrapped up in his own stupid stories. He can't remember the teacher's name (aging brain function-- hilarious). He's ethnic. He's an ignorant war vet of some war-- he looks like a stereotypical WWII vet, but that would make him ninety-ish. Could be Korea, which would make him seventy-ish. He thinks Gates runs Apple (har!) and he measures the value of his grandson's ability to "figure" in how it can calculate money. Oh, and he plays the lottery.

He's worried about the Common Core stuff he's heard about on TV, and I'm wondering where on TV he's hearing bad things about the Core, because Core proponents have that media pretty well locked up.

The message here? Common Core critics are uninformed fools. Note that the nice teacher lady does not actually offer a single piece of fact-based data about the Core to contradict Old Bat-brained Granddad. She doesn't have to (though she might have mention that Hector will have to put a stop to figuring out math problems in his head). He's so obviously a dope that we are meant to simply discount his complaints because, well, he's a dope. He is truly the most wondrous animatronic straw grampaw ever.

This is not much of a coup for whoever hired Six One Seven Studios, a production company located just outside Boston and dedicated to "providing our clients with the most innovative, engaging and authentic visual content. We combine our artistry with the latest technology and a deep understanding of your work to create powerful stories"

The video broke over at Politico, and one has to assume that someone associated with the video sent it to politico hoping for some buzz. According to Politico, the firm made this epic video all on its own:

Executive Producer Bryan Roberts said the firm self-funded the video after learning about the Common Core debate through work with clients including the New York and Rhode Island state education departments and EngageNY, a website that provides curriculum resources to New York teachers. “Too many of the pro-Common Core videos were PowerPoints and talking heads,” Roberts said. “So we put out this video to help folks see the power of telling a fun but simple story with real people.” He has more planned.

More? The mind reels.

The studio has many swell clients. You know who one of those clients is?

The Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Yup. An almost-as-hilarious video of exTREMEly earnest teachers (wait-- is that Miss Jenkins??!!) produced by the company is featured on the MTA website in their promo for the Teacher Leadership Initiative. My favorite part-- the very last teacher, who says "Teacher" and then pauses (Wait a beat. Waaaiiiit a beeeat)  and finally lands on "Leading." Though I enjoy the part where several of the teachers appear to have been jolted to life by cattle prods.

I don't know who really prompted Bryan Roberts to create this masterpiece of terrible. Maybe it was one of the reformy conversation changers. But we've sailed way past "hugely insulting" all the way to "ridiculous." I hope Roberts didn't pay himself much, and I hope it hasn't taken up too much time to scrub the negative comments off their various pages. I look forward to more entries in the Granddad series, such as "Granddad Learns About Fluoridation," "Granddad Sets The Clock on His VCR," "Granddad Finds Out Where Grandma Went When She Went For Groceries Forty Years Ago and Didn't Come Back," and "Granddad Finds Out About That Those Gay Fellas Won't Give Him Cooties." There's no limit to how ignorantly patronizing this could get.

The engageNY CCSS Primer

In which engageNY provides a brief explanation of why the Core is baloney

That one-stop-shopping for fully sliced Core baloney, engageNY, has a simple chart that can be used to see why the Core is, along with all its other flaws, not particularly necessary.

"Pedagogical shifts demanded by the Common Core State Standards" is a handy list of twelve shifts (six math, six ELA) that teachers implementing the Core must make "to be truly aligned with it in terms of curricular materials and classroom instruction." There are only twelve, so let's have a look, shall we?

Balancing Informational and Literary Texts

Just so you know, this is just a short chart, so there will be no support for any of this. David Coleman just thinks that students would benefit from rich texts about non-fiction subjects because, well, he thinks so.

Knowledge of the Disciplines

That's what the heading says. The "explanation" says "students build knowledge about the world (domains/content areas) through TEXT rather than the teacher or activities." So apparently one "pedagogical shift" will be for teachers to stop pedagogying. "Here's a book, kid. Go get smart."

Staircase of Complexity

"Students read the central grade appropriate text around which instruction is centered." Other than the "grade appropriate" part ("Stop whining, Chris. Just because you can only read at third grade level, that's no reason for you not to just read this seventh grade level text. I don't want to hear about your frustration"), is there anything here that we needed a national standards movement to establish. But wait-- there's more--

"Teachers are patient, create more time and space and support in the curriculum for close reading." As an interesting side note, "and support" seems to have been added in an edit. So remember teachers-- be patient and supportive. Stop being impatient and abusive which, apparently, was the previous pedagogical standard in NY? You heard it here first. Also, remember to give each a student area open enough to have to turn the books' pages.

Text Based Answers

"Students engage in rich and rigorous evidence based conversations about text." This remains one of the great Hallmarks of Stupid in the Annals of Core Lunacy. Remember, when discussing The Sun Also Rises, never mention The Great European War. When covering "The Gettysburg Address" you certainly don't want to mention the Battle of Gettysburg.

And when teaching smaller children, definitely never allow them to make connections between what you're reading and their lives. Which is kind of hilarious, because I teach high school but my wife teaches first grade, and I know what happens in first grade as soon as you say, "So, this puppy is brown. Does anybody know anything about brown puppies?" But remember-- it's never too early to explain to students that their own lives, experiences, and knowledge are unimportant and not worth sharing or consulting. Just what's on the page, kids.

Writing from sources

Yes, absolutely. Previously teachers have just told students, "When you write a paper about this subject, just make stuff up." Remember: when making an argument, your ideas have no value. (Unless you are David Coleman)

Academic vocabulary

This represents a bit of a Common Core head fake, because we're all supposed to be taking academic vocabulary OUT of instruction because David Coleman has decreed that it will be taken out of the SAT. But I do think it's fun that jargon is now a pedagogical shift. A good thing once again, as I have been teaching writing students to just "look at that thingy with the stuff in that lump of wordy things."

Now, the other six are math shifts, but I think even I, an English teacher, can spot the problems here.

Focus

Do less, more deeply. I never understand how this is supposed to work in math. Isn't math fundamentally sequential? Will slowing the sequence down not ultimately reduce the amount of actual math involved in a high school education?

Coherence

This one says, I kid you not, "Principals and teachers carefully connect the learning within and across grades so that students can build new understanding onto foundations built in previous years." And I'm thinking that even if your previous math curriculum planning was "Let's buy a math textbook series and use it across all the years of our school" you already had this covered. This is a shift??!! A big, new change that CCSS will usher in? What the hell have you guys in New York been doing??

Fluency

Students are supposed to have speed and accuracy for simple calculations, and teachers are to make time for them to memorize core functions (not Core functions). Now THIS is good, old-fashioned state-level response to a New Education Program. You take what you want to do, and then blame it on the NEP. If there's anything that's been clear about CCSS, it's that memorization is out, and doing simple things in long convoluted ways to show that you Really Understand what's going on is in. Way to be an old school rebel, engageNY.

Deep Understanding

Here we go. Students don't just learn "the trick" to getting the right answer. They understand the math. Because getting the right answer is just a trick. Would that we had more tricky people in the world.

Application

Students are expected to use math and choose the right application even when not prompted to do so. So, after teaching them for years that every problem should engender multiple responses, the more arcane the better, students should conclude that this means there is really just one right approach to pick.

Dual Intensity

Students are practicing and understanding. Both of them. Again-- a shocking, radical shift, but only in the sense that if this represents a shift, what the hell were teachers doing before?

So there you have it, in brief. EngageNY's interpretation of the Core-- one part useless foolishness, one part stuff that isn't actually in the CCSS, and one part pedagogy that any non-brain-dead teacher was already using. Thank goodness the CCSS are here to save us.

John King's Story

Listening to people tell their story often gives us a clue what they are thinking about, how they do the connecting of certain dots. That was my reaction to watching this video from a Manhattan Institute appearance by John King. Sometimes people who are sincere about wanting to fix education in this country (I do not assume all reformsters are cynical profiteering greedhounds) make connections between things that simply don't make sense. But by looking at their stories, sometimes we can see what The Dream is for education.

The whole business is introed by Charles Sahm, a deputy director at the Institute with whom I've had some entirely pleasant email correspondence, and his intro contains one notable nugget-- apparently the Manhattan Institute is planning to release rankings of every school in the country next year. Swell.

Norman Atkins Leads Off

But next up, to introduce John King, is Norman Atkins of the Relay Graduate School of Education and Uncommon Schools. Between his intro and the beginning of John King's speech, we get a full version of the John King Story.

Atkins opens by observing that "teacher training" is now a "politically incorrect" phrase. "So we have to be careful with our language." He's just saying, I guess.

Atkins sets up an analogy by referring to the group that launched Uncommon Schools as a dream team, and John King was Michael Jordan. But he's going to tell a story.

Labor Day, 1999. John King (who would have been about 24) and Evan Ruttle (sp?) were getting ready to open Roxberry Prep, one of the country's most swell charter schools. John had worked for two or three years (my sources say two) at City on the Hill Charter School. So it's been a long day, but late in the day, they noticed that the student name stickers on the lockers were "put up in a really sloppy fashion." King declared that unacceptable, so in the wee hours, they were fixing the stickers on the lockers. And while they were doing that, King was describing the vision for teaching each of the core subjects at Roxberry, based on all the work they had done preparing the school. In Atkins telling, this involved scouring the international standards and national standards "such as they were" and Massachusetts standards. King had figured out the arc of lessons and units and "was narrating this with tremendous energy and detail." And at that moment, Roxberry Prep was born.

So here's one piece of The Dream-- a school that is squeaky-perfect, completely planned and controlled by the people who run it. Also note-- given all the illustrative stories Atkins could pick to show how King injected greatness into Roxberry, he picks a story without any teachers or students in it.

Classroom Is Key

Atkins quotes Sol Stern to Sol Stern, saying "the primal scene of all education reform is in the classsroom." One of the reasons we're in so much trouble in American education, says Atkins, is many of the people in charge of education haven't spent time in the classroom." But we are blessed in New York to have a leader "who knows instruction and what goes on in the classroom better than anybody."

Someday I'll have a chance to send out a reformster questionnaire, and one of the questions I'll ask is "How do you think people best acquire knowledge of how to do classroom instruction?" Because on the one hand reformsters think teachers (particularly experienced ones) have no knowledge worth consulting. On the other hand, John King, who taught in a public classroom a grand total ONE year, and only two more in a charter classroom, somehow knows more about classroom instruction than God. 

Atkins says that one of the reasons that King is beloved is that he would plan down to every small detail the instruction for the entire year in his school and our schools. He would do this with high standards, and plan the entire year in detail for the students to achieve that.

Well, one can certainly see how that might lead to an education commissioner who likes the idea of canned online day-by-day lessons on engageNY. But what reason do we have to believe that this is good teaching? Certainly I should not walk into the classroom and pull today's lesson out of my butt, but if know exactly what I'm doing on the 150th day of school before I have even met my students on the first, I am NOT a great teacher. I am a content delivery specialist, and my students are little cogs who are supposed to mold themselves to fit my program. I have already built my square hole; all you pegs had better shape up, no matter what shape you started out as.

Educational Rock Star

Also, according to Atkins, King was out and about in his schools a great deal, popping into every classroom on a daily basis, "managing instruction." He continues to do this as commissioner. He isn't just watching teachers, but his eye is on the students, seeing what they're learning and if they're learning. He's asking would this class be good enough for my kids. He is also a master at giving feedback; his visits are not evaluative with your career on the line, but a way to get better. Imagine having someone "so brilliant" come into your room and give you "incredible" feedback.

This is another part of The Dream. A necessary ingredient for excellent schools is rock star leaders, educational geniuses who can lead all the lesser beings. Reformsters like to talk about teams, but what they invariably describe is a benevolent monarchy. A brilliant creates and directs a vision, and the rest of the plebes fall in line and implement it.

I expect this is why King has spent his whole career gravitating to charters-- because in a charter, the ability to control everything, every detail, every teacher, every student, is so much greater. You can teach exactly the kind of students you want with exactly the teachers you want teaching exactly as you want.

Boosting Common Core

John asks questions, and the core question is "Is this good enough?" Always positive, but never satisfied. And always told the truth. Being the "captain" for education is hard, but we need a truth teller because we are lying to ourselves. 80% think other people's schools are failing, but our own schools are great. "There's something not right about that." By plugging CCSS, King is exposing that what we're doing isn't good enough.

Why is that a good idea? Again, I'm no fan of building educational camels in committee, but what if there aren't enough geniuses to go around? What if the genius isn't right all of the time? What if somebody passes themselves off as a genius but is actually a gigantic tool? And doesn't this tend to result in schools that are organized around the genius and not the students?

Atkins now attaches King to the tradition of Horace Mann. Mann wanted common schools for everyone; King wants Common Core for everyone. Atkins defines Common Core as "highest possible standards for all our children." Atkins name-checks Steiner and Cerf who both suggested that John's intro include a reference to his courage. When other states are ducking away from CCSS, King has the courage to stay the course.

King Tells His Story

The Dream is always of high standards, and we continue to cling to the unexamined (by reformsters) assumption that CCSS represent high standards, not to mention the unexamined assumption that such a thing as a single set of standards that will fit our entire nation of children is even do-able, or could even bring about results. None of those assumptions have been proven correct. Repeatedly pushing them forward is not the same as proving them.

King leads off with his story. And make no mistake-- King's story is a hell of a story. Mother passed away when he was eight, leaving King with a father who was dying of Alazheimers, King credits public school teachers with saving him. And he doesn't do it in a vague, general way-- he routinely names the guy. Mr. Osterweil was challenging and exciting and King says that in his class, they had the Common Core before it was the Common Core. They studied Shakespeare. They would read the New York Times every day and summarize the articles, and King benefited forever after from the academic work and the discipline. They had a classroom that was stable, challenging, and nurturing.

It is a great story, even if usually skips over the part where he was thrown out of Phillips Andover ivy league prep school. And the fact that King equates Common Core with Mr. Osterweil's class shows yet another disconnect in the CCSS love-fest. Because, of course, Mr. Osterweil's class was like that because Mr. Osterweil was free to do what he judged best for his roomful of students.

What I wish King would ask himself is, what would happen to Mr. Osterweil today? How many of those lessons that King cherishes would be put aside for test prep. How much time would he have to spend teaching the required lessons from the state; would Principal King let Mr. Osterweil set his own program, or would King have the lessons all planned out in detail, first day through last, before Mr. Osterweil even came back from summer break? How stable and nurturing would the class be when Mr. Osterweil had to guide his charges through this week's punishing and demoralizing test. I'd bet that King is confident that Mr. Osterweil would be found highly effective on his modern evaluation, but I'm not so confident. If Mr. Osterweil had the wrong assortment of students, or was unable to use his most effective techniques because Principal King's program didn't allow for them, would it turn out that King's favorite life-saving teacher was rated ineffective?

Just how many more Mr. Osterweil's are out there, and what is Commissioner King doing to make sure that they be the best classroom teachers they can be?