EdReports: Almost All Publishers Fail Common Core Math

EdReports.org is a reformster non-profit set up to be the Consumer Reports of educational materials in the Age of Common Core. I wrote about them back in August of 2014, when they first hit the collective radar, and back then it looked easy to see where this was headed-- a well-connected group funded and backed by the Usual Suspects would presumably provide great "impartial" marketing cover for the major publishers.

Well, fast forward to now, and watch me eat my words. EdReports has stood up proud and tall and kicked the major edupublishers right where it hurts.

You can get the quick view in this handy chart.

EdReports looked at all the major publishers of math series. They checked for alignment with the Common Core and only one publisher met expectations across the board. Two partially met expectations, and McGraw-Hill was a winner in grades 4-5. All the rest failed their Common Core alignment test.

Holt McDougal. Fail.

Math in Focus. Fail.

Saxon. Fail.

And yes, Pearson's series only partially didn't fail.

The only series deemed to successfully align with Common Core was Eureka Math. From K-8, they are the only series that EdReports says will meet the requirements of Common Core.

EdReports also looked at Focus and Coherence, and again, many of the major players failed. Yes, including Pearson.

The executive director of EdReports is Eric Hirsch, and if you're guessing he's taking a few heated calls lately, you'd appear to be correct. Liana Heitin is covering this story in the latest print version of Education Week under the headline "Backlash Brews Over Critical Review of Math Materials," and that backlash appears to be from a whole bunch of grumpy parents who are upset that their pride and joy, their bouncing baby math books, are being stuck in the Remedial Group.

Methodology has been questioned and will be debated at length, but the rundown at the EdReports suggests at the very least that this is not a quick, ugly glance. At the very least, I'm figuring that if EdReports knew they were going to call out Pearson et al, they would make sure they'd done their homework.

This is kind of extraordinary because, again, this is not an anti-reform outfit. They were bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, as well as Hewlett and Hemsley money, and director Hirsch comes from the New Teacher Center and the Center for Teacher Quality. I think less of myself for experiencing a little wiggle of happiness when I see reformsters devouring each other; I'm going to start working on that tomorrow.

Diane Briars, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics thinks EdReports blew it. But Morgan Polikoff of USC and William Schmidt at Michigan State agree, according to Heitin, that "claims of common-core alignment are generally unfounded."

So if you're using Eureka Math, congratulations. If you own stock in Eureka Math, double congratulations. Everybody else-- it turns out you're not really doing the core after all. One more example of how the core standards are a botch as standards from top to bottom. And now they may stop working as even a passable marketing strategy.

Boston Consulting Group: Another Dark Horseman

Word went out today that immediately after Arkansas decided to make Little Rock Schools non-public, the Walton family called a "focus group" meeting "in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group. This is worse than finding the slender man in the back of your family portrait. For a public school system, this is finding the grim reaper at your front door. And he's not selling cookies.

The Boston Consulting Group is often referred to as " management consulting group." That's not entirely accurate. BCG is one of The Big Three consulting groups-- the other two are McKinsey and Bain. People love working there, and the people who work there are recruited heavily from the very toppest universities. These are the guys that Fortune 500 companies call for help making money. Forbes lists them as America's 112th largest private company. Gutting and stripping school districts does not even require a tenth of their power or attention. They are officially scary.

Read up on BCG and you find they have mainly three big claims to fame, and all of them are deeply bad news for public education.

 

This is the growth-share matrix, used to help a corporation to decide how to allocate resources (aka how to figure out which losers could be starved out). Sound familiar?

The experience curve is even simpler. The more a task is performed, the lower the cost of performing it. In other words, if you can reduce a process (manufacturing, service, whatever) to a series of simple tasks that will be repeated over and over, you can reduce the cost of the process. Sound familiar?

This advantage matrix lets us divide businesses into one of four types in order to figure out which strategy best lets us cash in. For instance, when a business is scaleable but hard to do differentiation in, the answer is volume volume volume. Sound familiar?

BCG's arrival in Little Rock is unsurprising; they've been around the education block several times. They were in the news just last week when Parents United finally won a long court case to be allowed to see BCG's super-duper secret plans for Philadelphia schools, drawn up way back when Philly was first turned into one of the nation's largest non-public school systems, run by state-appointed executives rather than an elected board.

A major feature of BCG's plan for Philly seems to be standard for them-- close this bunch of schools, and open up some nifty charters. In other words, cut off resources to the dogs. As a top consulting group, BCG doesn't come cheap-- their consulting fee in Philly was reportedly $230,000 per week. That's just under $33,000 per day. That's a little less than the starting salary for a teacher in Philly. Per day. 

BCG has proposed a similar program in Memphis. Reportedly Cleveland, Seattle, Arizona, and New Orleans have also felt the loving BCG touch. BCG also has close friends in the charter world, with several folks hopping back and forth between BCG and the board of KIPP. BCG joined up with many of the big players (Gates, Joyce) to form Advance Illionois. And they helped write North Carolina's Race to the Top bid (all these painful details and more can be found in this 2012 article at The Common Errant). Strive in Cincinnati-- that's BCG, too. And last fall, they were spotted doing development planning for Connecticut's education sector.

A year ago, BCG teamed up with the Gates Foundation and the Harvard Business School; for their first magic trick, they produced "America's Education System at a Crossroads: New Research and Insights on Business-Educator Partnerships in PreK-12 Education." (If that language sounds vaguely familiar, it could be because Arne Duncan's Big Important Speech about ESEA reauthorization was entitled "America's Educational Crossroads"). The BCG "report" put forth three recommendations:

• Laying the policy foundations for education innovation: Business action is urgently needed to ensure Common Core State Standards are actually put into practice, for example.
• Scaling up proven innovations: Business leaders can partner with educators to scale up innovations that are already showing results.
• Reinventing the local education ecosystem: Business can help educators set and implement comprehensive strategies to upgrade education in specific cities and towns. 

 Yeah, that all sounds familiar, too. Their second piece of reportage, "Partial Credit: How America's School Superintendents See Business As a Partner" (because why talk about teachers-- these kinds of important dealings don't involve The Help who will do as their told when it's time to tell them), offers some concrete advice:

“Strengthening our schools is a big challenge. To get this job done, we must all work together. From designing new classroom tools to engaging with businesses, our educators must not just be included in the process, they must help lead it,” said Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

That all reaches a fuller pitch in "Lasting Impact: A Business Leader's Playbook for Supporting America's Schools"  (another BCG-Gates-Harvard joint production). It starts with an introduction that quotes the "rising tide of mediocrity," stops at "fortunately, we don't have to settle for incrementalism any more" and barrels down to more detailed discussion of the three strategies listed above.I may take you on a more detailed tour of this twenty-seven page tome, but for the moment, I don't have the heart to add one more gloomy chapter to this dark tale. Suffice it to say that it is a veritable bible for the corporate reformster. 

Bottom line? Say a little prayer for the formerly public schools of Little Rock, because BCG is in town and they're sharpening their axe.

Spotting Bad Science

This item comes via my old friend and Chicago nursing queen Deb Burdsall. Its original source is Andy Brunning at chemistry site Compound Interest, but it certainly brings to mind some of the "science" that floats around the education world.

So here is the rough guide to spotting bad science:

 

1) Sensationalized headlines are not always the fault of the researchers when their work is glommed up by the media, but when headlines like "Good teachers are as important as small class size" or "Calculus can make you rich?" are not a good sign.

2) Misinterpreting results. How many times have you followed up on an piece of research only to find it doesn't actually prove what the article says it proves.

3) Conflict of interests. As in, funding research specifically to prove that your pet theory is correct. Just google Gates Foundation.

4) Correlation and causation. This one is everywhere, but nowhere has it been more damaging than in all the policy decisions by the current administration deciding that since low standardized test scores and poverty go together, low test scores must cause poverty. And more research that concludes that teachers cause low test scores.

5) Speculative language. Again, we are living with a boatload of policies based on how we think things ought to work. The infamous Chetty study about future earnings is loaded with suppositions.

6) Sample size too small. Is this still a problem? I just remember looking up studies in college and discovering the "research" was performed on thirty college sophomores. 

7) Unrepresentative samples. Chalk this one up for every piece of "research" that proves the effectiveness of a charter school.

8) No control group used. A built-in limitation of education research. We can't really assign a group of tiny humans to have no education so we can see what difference a teacher makes.

9) No blind testing used. Also a limitation. I'm not sure I can even think of how to use blind testing of educational techniques. Blind teacher? Students wrapped in plain brown paper? We get a pass on this one, too.

10) Cherry-picked results. Well, yes. Easiest to do if you're doing charter research and you cherry-pick the test subjects to begin with.

11) Unreplicable results. Sort of like the way VAM scores never come out the same way twice. In fact, VAM fills the bill for most of these indicators of bad science.

12) Journals and Citations. My favorite thing about thinky tank "research" is how it provides nice citation pages filled with references to other papers from thinky tanks. Or this ACT report with footnotes from other ACT reports.

VAM is perhaps the leading source of junk science in the education field, but there are so many fine examples. Print out the handy graphic above and keep it nearby the next time your are perusing the latest in educational "research." 

Also, I am going to use this as an excuse to post this picture (one of my faves)

Gates vs. Teachers in Pittsburgh

Chris Potter has a great piece of journalism in this morning's Pittsburgh Post Gazette covering the amped-up anti-teacher advocacy in the burgh. Mostly what I have to say is, "Go read it." But there are just a couple of moments in the article that I want to highlight.

Pittsburgh schools had previously won accolades and some Gates money by committing to a model for data-based teacher improvement created by the district and the teachers together. That's a story of its own for another day.

But one of the players in the Pittsburgh ed scene is A+ Schools, whose major project was an annual report laying out all the data for the city's schools. But in the last few years, they've decided "not just to report on conditions, but to reshape them." And they've retooled their strategic plan to say they will advocate for certain positions on school reform. They've pulled a couple of pages from the standard reformy handbook, with a big serving of Teacher Thunderdome (let's stack-rank teachers and when layoffs come, use stack rankings to make the call) with a side order of achievement gap rhetoric.

The article looks at the A+ "shift" toward advocacy, and it considers the possibility of a Gates factor in the shift-- about the time A+ was becoming more reformy, Gates was handing them a cool million. This may be a chicken-egg problem, but pursuing it pulls an interesting quote from a Gates spokesperson:

Mr. Brown, of the Gates Foundation, agreed that once evaluations are created, “a lot of folks will have questions” if they aren’t used in personnel decisions. “Our perspective was, ‘You said you’d use this information to [ensure kids had] access to the best educators.’"

So, the whole point of teacher evaluation is to rank teachers and the whole point of ranking teachers is to fire the ones at the bottom of the stack.

Mr. Brown added that Gates makes grants to “thought partners” like A+ Schools to ensure education remains in the public eye.

 Also, Jessie Ramey of Yinzercation makes it into the article with this on-point quote:

“When you are talking about evaluating teachers,” Ms. Ramey added, “you’re really inflicting more testing on students,” which disrupts learning, and whose results are “highly dependent on poverty.”

The one aspect of this approach that Potter misses is the Thunderdome ideal-- a system that stack ranks teachers and makes employment decisions based on those rankings pits teachers against each other in a battle to the professional death. It makes student and class assignments critical to a teacher's future, and it turns offering a helping hand to a colleague a matter of professional self-destruction. This is why Microsoft ultimately abandoned stack ranking-- it creates an ugly anti-collegial culture. It's no way to run a school.

Potter also looks at the state capital, where unions are spending big money, but where we also find A+ huddled up with StudentsFirst and PennCAN (just in case you had any doubts about A+'s "neutrality").

The article is well worth your attention. Read and share!

Bill Gates: "I was pretty naive"

Just before Christmas, the Seattle Times provided coverage of the Gates Foundation's report about their decade's worth of progress with their goal of fixing the world (the Grand Challenge). After a billion dollars spent on improving lives and health care in the developing world, Gates had to report, "I was pretty naive about how long the process would take."

In his quest to make the world a better place, Gates invested in all sorts of research. But it turns out that research can only happen as fast as it can happen. Sometimes science takes time.

Not only did he underestimate some of the scientific hurdles, Gates said. He and his team also failed to adequately consider what it would take to implement new technologies in countries where millions of people lack access to basic necessities such as clean water and medical care.

The foundation has tweaked the Grand Challenges approach in a variety of ways, but still doesn't really know whether any of it is actually succeeding. In many cases, they know it is not. There are several examples, but let's look at toilets.

Gates funded high-tech toilets in the Indian city of Raichur, at a cost of $8,000 each. These beauties have automatic sensors that run lights, fans and FM radio when a patron uses them. Some prototypes in the toilets project wing of Grand Challenges also throw in solar power and other amenities. But in Raichur, the rollout had some technical difficulties, and then- the public just didn't use them.

As it turns out, there are already people working on the toilet problem, but not with high tech answers. Jason Kass, founder of Toilets for People (which, as a name-- really? to distinguish them from Toilets for Cattle?) took Gates to task in a New York Times piece "Bill Gates Can't Build a Toilet" in which he notes, “If the many failed development projects of the past 60 years have taught us anything, it’s that complicated, imported solutions do not work."

But Gates is a technocrat with a deep commitment to techno-solutions to problems, like a plan to stop Dengue Fever by injecting bio-engineering mosquitoes to with bacteria that block disease transmission, instead of more directly addressing the living conditions and general health of the affected regions.

Drawing a line between Gates's naivete about fixing world health problems and his naivete about education systems is like shooting fish in a barrel, but some fish just need to be shot.

My impression of Gates is not a power-hungry greed-hound who is somehow trying to leverage the world's suffering into personal gain, but someone who is blinded to any view of the world but his own. He's used to being the smartest guy in the room, the boss, the man. It would be understandable if he had succumbed to a belief that he's fundamentally better, wiser, cleverer than most other people. He is a computer engineering systems guy. Systems are his hammer and everything in the world is a nail.

With much of his health initiative, you see the same basic outline-- technology will allows us to set up this awesome system, and because it is so obviously the Right Way To Do Things, people will just fall in line, and if they won't we'll just have to find a way to get them to. It's the same pattern some techno-critics see in many Microsoft failed products-- this is how people ought to want to do things, so this should work (and if it doesn't, it's the people, not our product). How any of you got a Zune for Christmas?

Gates wants to use systems to change society, but his understanding of how humans and culture and society and communities change is faulty. It's not surprising that Gates is naive-- it's surprising that he is always naive in the same way. It always boils down to "I really thought people would behave differently." And although I've rarely seen him acknowledge it print, it also boils down to, "There were plenty of people who could have told me better, but I didn't listen to them."

The non-success of Grand Challenges is just like the failure of the Gates Common Core initiative. Gates did not take the time to do his homework about the pre-existing structures and systems. He did not value the expertise of people already working in the field, and so he did not consult it or listen to it. He put an unwarranted faith in his created systems, and imagined that they would prevail because everyone on the ground would be easily assimilated into the new imposed-from-outside system. He became frustrated by peoples' insistence on seeing things through their own point-of-view rather than his. And he spent a huge amount of money attempting to impose his vision on everybody else.

We can say, "He's a rich guy. He can spend his money on what he wants," and that's true. But the opportunity cost here is staggering. Imagine what could be done if we started with, "Here's a billion dollars. Let's get the experts together and decide how it could best be spent." Instead of "Here's a billion dollars that we're going to spend on my solution no matter what."

I keep wondering when the light bulb is going to go off. After the failure of his small schools initiative, Gates had the chance to say either "This small schools things didn't work" or "My whole approach to finding solutions for education is messed up," and he seems to have chosen the former. It's nice that he can occasionally look back and call himself naive. It would be nicer if he could look around and recognize when he's doing it again, right now. It would be best if he could really recognize what he's being naive about.

Core Ready Schools, Aspen and Achieve

So you want to know how your district is doing on the implementation of the Common Core? Well, the folks at Achieve and the Aspen Institute have a tool for you. It's Core Ready Schools, 
a handy tool for evaluating your school's progress in implementation that only misses one huge, gigantic, Uranus-sized indicator. But let me work up to it.

There is a whole 90-minute rollout presentation on video right here and I know I usually watch these things for you, but I couldn't quite get through all of it. But let me tell you about what I did get through, and if you actually want to watch the whole thing, drop me a note in the comments and let me know how it was. Because who knows-- it might not have been quite as mind-numbing as I began to fear it was.

The video opens with a nice lady from Aspen who covers a bunch of specs and screenshots about the-- well, she keeps calling it an app, but it appears to be a website. Also big thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and their Program Officier, which I infer is a person from the foundation who comes and works with you on your program so that you don't have to do that nasty application process, and for some reason I'm thinking of the Roman system of local governors, but maybe we should leave this for another day. What's this thing actually for? Well, it's not an accountability tool (I know because she said so). Let's bring up Mike Cohen from Achieve to talk.

Mike from Achieve talks about Achieve's Core cred and says "I feel like the Home Depot of the Common Core" Nobody laughed and he took that to mean that nobody got that joke at all."It's a tough crowd this morning"

Anyway, Achieve was concerned about a lack of data and tools to monitor implementation. They needed a way to get data on how implementation was going on state level. First tries they gave up as too hard. But then somehow we all realized that Aspen had already kind of done the work, with their handy transition guide for school leaders and so the Core Ready Schools app-site-tool covers similar ground.

Core Ready Schools ia aimed at things you would want to monitor, and that chiefs at CCSSO would commit to using. Something lightweight, but with depth. Balance of common across states but flexible enough for individual states. Here are the seven factors Mike says (the site calls them "levers") the tool is designed to consider.

1) Is leadership focusing on CCSS as part of school improvement
2) Is instruction being aligned with it
3) Is ongoing professional development supporting CCSS
4) Do you have an aligned assessment system?
5) Do you have aligned instruction resources and curriculum in school
6) Do you have mechanisms for engaging families and communities (because you're going to have to get them to buy into this, so by "engage" we seem to mean "talk to" and not "listen to.")
7) And are there sufficient resources and staffing (technology)

The tool is supposed to allow for different states' emphasis and ways to collect data. Mike tells a story about how one school chief was just going to ask superintendents how things were going and not dig any deeper. "Don't you think there will be inflation" "Yes, but then they'll have a harder time explaining results on assessments." So, give a principal enough rope? With this not-an-accountability tool?

Mike also says, "They desperately need it to know what's going on-- there's no debate about that." I would be happy to debate him. Also, though this started as Common Core thing, but they've been flexing it to handle states other CACR standards. Because we'd hate to get left behind when the Core is dumped.

Do you know what we haven't talked about?

I said there was a glaring omission. So far it appears that when we're assessing the success of our Common Core implication, we are not going to ask if the students in the schools seem to be getting a better education. That seems to be primarily because we assume that if Common Core is well-implemented, it will automatically lead to better test scores (what? is there some other way to measure how well children are being educated?) But no-- at no point in this entire process do we actually look at the affect of Core implementation on student learning.

Who is this for again?

This tool fits the whole reformster style because it assumes that superintendents simply can't know what is going on in their own districts, presumably because of some combination of stupidity and lying subordinates. Also, of course, information is far more informationny when it's in number form.

The big selling point here is that this tool will be useful inside of districts, helping leaders tell how well the implementation is going on inside the district. This skips over the question of whether we should implement CCSS in the first place, plus it skips over another question-- when school leaders are implementing a program because it has been mandated and they had no say in it, how much time to they spend worrying about implementing it well? Or, on the deeper philosophical level, how much commitment to doing a bad thing well is a good amount of commitment to doing a bad thing well. Or, if you prefer classic filmic references, exactly whom should we be rooting for in Bridge on the River Kwai?

Never mind that for a moment, because I'd like to offer for your consideration the user agreement from the Core Ready Schools website:

By clicking the button below, you agree to have your anonymized survey results recorded by Anabliss Design + Brand Strategy and shared with the Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute reserves the right to utilize the data in research, analysis, and reporting on the implementation of the CCSS and other education-related trends; however, the Aspen Institute agrees that any data disclosed will be anonymized data that is not tied to specific users and is not released in any manner that could identify an individual, school, or school district.

So, NOT just collecting data for your district. You're also collecting data for Aspen and their friends. You are volunteering for a walk-on roll for the next production of "How the Implementation of Common Core Is Going in Our Schools." Yes, it's one more great chance to do free grunt work for our Data Overlords.

More fun with websites

One cool things about Core Ready Schools? Anybody can log in and create an account. You could, for instance, sign in and start the account for your school or district; I did that, and I'm sure my superintendent will be calling to thank me if she ever hears about it. I suppose you could log in and start an account for any school-- even fake ones-- although if a lot of people did that, it might make Aspen's aggregated numbers less accurate, and that would be a shame, I imagine.

You're allowed to take the survey ten times over five years. I found the questions simple and the interface easy to navigate. There are just a handful of self-assessment questions for each "lever," and most of them are unexceptional. The program occasionally reveals its blind spots. One of the questions about instruction asks about how well teachers understand and use the Core, and it does not allow for the possibility that teachers are familiar with the Core but don't use it because they don't want to. Everything in the survey assumes that we all want to welcome the Core into our home and make it happy here and that its success will naturally flow into educational awesomeness and joy for all. There is no "You're not my real mom" option.

The whole effect is very Borgian, and it reveals an extremely specific view of exactly how a school should be assimilated into the Core universe. This is no surprise. Since the Core is a one-size-fits-all prescription for students, why would it not come with a one-size-fits-all school districts to implement it? Yes, Aspen is promising customizable versions of this tool (for a price), but this is customizable in the same manner as a fast food burger-- you can change the balance of the elements a bit, but you'll be choosing how to tweak the ingredients that the restaurant has chosen for you. So, not very customizable at all (kind of like that "personalized" education we keep hearing about).

So if your school district decides to sign on to this handy tool, God bless you and have fun. Thank you for making a contribution to the giant holding cells of our Data Overlords.And remember-- student learning is irrelevant to the process.

Time Political Reporter Flubs CCSS Story

At Time, Alex Altman has written a piece about Common Core's new role as GOP election kryptonite. He gets the kryptonite part right. The Common Core piece, not so much.

Over the past several months, the state education standards developed by a bipartisan group of governors and educators have become one of the conservative movement’s biggest bugbears. Common Core is now “radioactive,” as Iowa GOP Gov. Terry Branstad put it recently.

That's a somewhat abbreviated version of the CCSS origin story.  For the full version of how Bill Gates bankrolled the CCSS revolution, turn to this piece by Lyndsey Layton at the Washington Post. And here's the list of "educators" who developed the standards. If we're defining "educator" as "person who makes a living selling materials to schools," then we're still on solid ground. If we're thinking the more common understanding of "educator" as "teacher or professional who otherwise works right with students," then we're going to need another word to describe the CCSS creators.

Altman continues with a fair listing of conservative hopefuls who have been backpedaling away from CCSS faster than Miss Muffet retreating from a large, hairy tarantula.

Altman blames this on "the (inaccurate) perception that Common Core is a federal takeover of education foisted on the states."

Perhaps Altman has a special meaning for "foisted" in mind, but for the average English speaker's understanding, I think "foisted" is an excellent choice. Let me remind you, and Altman, how the foisting worked.

By 2010, states were looking straight at the ticking time bomb that was (and actually still is) No Child Left Behind. Under NCLB, the improvement curve required of schools was a gradual slope until 2008, at which point it took off like a bad mushroom payment, spiking upward toward the magic year, 2014, when all states must make all their students above average or else lose to support of the federal government.

Congress was unable to muster enough unity/organization/wits to "re-authorize" (aka "rewrite) the ESEA (the fancy legislative name under which NCLB is filed) and so the Obama administration hatched a great idea to do an end run around the whole mess.

Stage One was Race to the Top, which offered the states a big fat federal bribe if they would institute certain fed-approved reforms. The feds couldn't legally mandate Common Core exactly, so the states were free to install any standards, as long as they were pretty much exactly like Common Core.

Stage Two was NCLB waivers. For states that wouldn't play the RttT game, the feds offered to give states an get-out-of-NCLB free card as long as they implemented the same set of reforms that RttT favored.

It is true that states always had a choice. They could choose to forgo both programs and just lose a bunch of federal education money. They could also decide that instead of adopting the CCSS that were already just sitting there, they could invest a truckload of money developing their own standards (which they would have to do, like, yesterday).

So, yeah. States had a choice. You also have a choice when your mortgage bill comes. But it's a choice that's not very hard to sort out. Supporters of CCSS more recently have taken to blaming President Obama for putting the stamp and stench of federal intervention on the standards, but without federal intervention, the standards would have just sat there, adopted by a couple of states and ignored as a costly waste of time by the rest.

It is also worth noting that Race to the Top was not a forever grant, and that this upswell of withdrawal co-incides with the end of the federal funds going to RttT states. In other words, it's worth looking at which places we find the CCSS love and the money running out at about the same time.

Altman thinks conservatives ought to like the Core. "Hey, look!" he says, "The AFT is distancing themselves from it." Which I guess means... something. Does it matter that it took them years to distance themselves, or that the "distance" is not really enough to protect an elephant from a radioactive flea? The AFT and NEA national leadership still love Common Core pretty deeply.

But shouldn't conservatives love the high standards or the state-drawn currricula  or the teacher accountability? Maybe they should, except that the Common Core standards are not particularly high except in ways that don't make sense (unless you think eight year olds have been getting off too easy in life). And many states already had perfectly good state standards, and we're not getting state created curricula so much as state-purchased curricula, because part of the point of the Core was to make it possible to market the same materials to all schools across the country. And teacher accountability isn't happening; all we're getting is widely debunked, test-score linked baloney that doesn't hold teachers accountable for any of the things parents and communities actually care about.

So, should conservatives love Common Core for all the qualities it doesn't actually possess. I'm going to go with "probably not."

I could spend much more time addressing all three of those points (and do throughout the rest of this blog), but instead I'll note that with his third item, Altman has strayed away from Common Core into other reform territory entirely. He's just kind of confused about what's being supported and who is supporting it. That's okay, Mr. Altman. Lots of people have that problem. It gets easier if, instead of looking at conservative vs. liberal, you look at "people who see education as a great untapped chance to make money" vs "people who look at education as a great way to give young people an education," or vs "people who don't want their children's education sold out from under them."

Still, his basic premise is correct. Common Core is now election kryptonite, and if you want to look like Superman come ballot time, you should not be seen holding it.

Going into Gates Territory

Over in Seattle center you'll find fun things like the famous space needle, the EMP (a sort of SF museum housed in a 1950s vision of what 1990 would look like), and across the street from the EMP, an unassuming little building that houses the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Visitors Center. I sometimes tell you that I've read or watched something so you don't have to. Well, this time, I visited a place so that you don't have to.

Out front the sidewalk has some sculptures of books, vaccines and other good things, with quick data points on the big windows.

The center is free, and there's a front desk and pleasant welcome lady right there once you enter.

Then there's an entire room that's pretty much devoted to faces.

This face motif runs through the entire rest of the center. The entire space is open and clean, separated more into different sections than actual rooms. Each section has a family of displays, like this one

There's even a piece of display addressing the question of disagreement with the foundation's work, though it doesn't specifically name their education initiatives

One display focuses on education and vaccination. It includes one of several panels that can be toggled back and forth between two different talking heads.

 In this case, we have a choice between Melinda Gates on vaccinations or this guy on education (specifically, teacher effectiveness).

There were several panels that rotated quotes. I snapped shots of several of the education quotes.

 

Are students happy? Are they getting something of value? That's a really interesting pair of questions to answer, both relying on hugely subjective judgments. Happy by whose standards? Value as assigned by whom?

 

Well, that was back in 2012. I don't think charter operators ever got the memo.

 

Yes, projector Bill Gates is still saying this, even though real Bill Gates has since dropped the idea.

 

As is often the case, the key here is some form of standardization of students.

 

Interesting word here-- "assigned." Some Higher Authority just needs to put teachers where they should be (and the Higher Authority knows where that would be).

 

There are also several displays dedicated to getting drinkable water for folks all over the world, and some interactive displays for all ages. One offers folks a chance to offer their ideas about improving education. I admit that it was pure snark that led me to photograph this one, which was not working when we were there.

 

The place in its entirety can be toured pretty quickly. It's modestly sized, not glitzy, and a little bit retro in style. It's hard to gauge whether it's the product of someone close to the Gates or a group of summer interns.

So, no, the visitors' center did not look like Darth Vader's lair or an evil mind-control facility. And I'm sure I could slam it for being a self-aggrandizing ego shrine, but if it didn't exist, I could slam the foundation for their secrecy or lack of transparency. So let's stipulate that if you hate the Gates Foundation, it's easy to spin the center to prove how awful they are, and move on.

It didn't particularly change my perception of Gates, which has never been that he is some sort of evil nefarious genius. When I read his writing and watch videos of him, I'm always left with two impressions:

1) This is a man who has been completely in charge of a large operation for basically his entire adult life. He literally has no idea how things work in a setting which people him aren't automatically going to follow his instructions. And he's pretty sure that people do as he says because he's right. I get no sense of a man who pays people to agree with him-- he pays people to get things done, and he knows what things need to be done. I think he's ruthless, but I don't think he's power hungry for the same reason that I am rarely food-hungry-- he has always had power, and when things interfere with it, it's like when you or I get a sleeve snagged on the corner of a desk. Just yank it free and move on.

It's instructive to look at his first run-in with DC (over the Microsoft monopoly issue). He's not outraged that he's being questioned. He's more puzzled-- I'm right, so why can't you guys see that I'm right? He's learned a lot since then about how to smooth his path, but he's not trying to take over the world-- he's just trying to get the world to see that he's right about what the world should do.

The critical thing about people like this (and Gates is not the only one who exists) is that they do not believe they are being selfish. They are trying to help. They are trying to Make Things Right. Can they help it if they happen to have a vision of how to do that? You can see it in his flummoxed reaction to Lindsey Layton's interview question. Gates is just different from other People of Vision in that he has always possessed the resources to pursue his vision and people who are disinclined to tell him his vision is faulty.

The visitors center reflects all of that. It really isn't about how great Melinda and Bill are, but how great their vision for Making the World Right is.

2) Gates is a systems guy. I've written about this before, but here's the basic idea. Systems guys like nice neat systems, and they will give you one that works properly just as soon as they get all the parts lined up and in their places.

Hence the quest for scalable standardized solutions. If everybody would just act the right way, the system would work. If we could find a way to remove all the individual variation, the system should run smoothly. If every cog in the machine is properly manufactured and installed, the machine should hum along and do just what it needs to do.

The old education was so messy, had so many non-standardized parts. That sort of thing bothers systems guys just like a persistently out-of-tune singer makes a perfect-pitch musician nuts. It's like riding in a car while your grandmother drives. Good lord in heaven, if you would just let me fix this thing right here!!!

Again, it's not "I want this so I'm going to get it." It's "Can't you see how wrong this is??"

Now, I think these two aspects of Gates make him blind to many things, including the motives of some of the people who have hopped on his school reform gravy train. And those blind spots are potentially highly corrosive to someone's moral center. They also make someone more potentially destructive than an authentically evil person, because someone who's on a Righteous Crusade neither listens to nor stops for anyone who disagrees with them, and they're usually plenty comfortable with all manner of collateral damage in pursuit of a Higher Good, while authentic evil tends to pay attention to cost-benefits analyses. 

And I am acutely aware that I am making huge suppositions on the basis of exactly zero firsthand knowledge. But what's a blog for, if not for WAGs? Still, I could be dead wrong. Gates could be Darth Vader with a goofy smile or the most evil, manipulative, power-hungry bastard ever or a completely misunderstood guy. If you're ever in Seattle, take a look yourself.

TNTP Lost on Search for Truth

Any time TNTP writes a blog piece with "truth" in the title, you know we are about to go down the rabbit hole. But not surprisingly, an unnamed contributor over at TNTP has decided to clue us in on "The Truth About Teacher Pay." How can that possibly end badly? Let's see what truths they have uncovered!

Fact: Most districts now have multiple high quality options beyond experience and credentials for making pay decisions.

At first they start out well:


Setting teachers’ pay strictly on factors like experience or academic credentials may have been the only option before most districts had tools in place to assess teachers’ performance.

Unfortunately, they immediately head into the weeds. The correct next sentence is "We still don't have any other reliable measures of teacher performance in place, but when someone comes up with those some day, we should jump right on those. Anybody working on a real teacher eval system? Anybody?"

Instead, they compare "lockstep pay" (which is emerging as the preferred reformster term for the traditional system) to paying basketball players by height. This could have been fun if they had gone to explain how their idea (evaluating teachers for "talent, hard work, and performance") resembles the way basketball players are actually paid, but, no. Also, shed a tear for all those students who had great young teachers untimely ripped away from them.

Which is a hard drum to keep beating, since one-year-experience teachers are the largest sector of the teaching pool, and also the section mostly likely to quit the profession. If we worried about that loss of bright young things, perhaps we could talk about retention, or at least see what the numbers are when we stack the Number of Teachers Who Are Unjustly Laid Off next to the Number of Teachers Who Get Out of Dodge Early. Do you have those Numbers of Truth handy, TNTP?

Fact: Very few districts have tried true performance-based pay, but where it’s been tried it seems to be working.

Who knew?  DC schools have made it possible to earn 100K in year four, and so teacher pay has dropped as a leading reason to get the hell out of DC schools. Wait. Doesn't that help prove that performance pay doesn't help retain teachers? And supposedly it's really helping in Tennessee, where this big report that, frankly, I'm still too jet-lagged to read in its entirety, but check out the abstract:

We report findings from a quasi-experimental evaluation of the recently implemented $5000 retention bonus program for effective teachers in Tennessee’s priority schools. We estimate the impact of the program on teacher retention using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We exploit a discontinuity in the probability of treatment conditional on the composite teacher effectiveness rating that assigns bonus eligibility. Point estimates for the main effect of the bonuses are consistently positive across all specifications, and for teachers of tested subjects the program appears to have an effect that is generally both statistically and substantively significant. Implementation concerns, including the timing of application process and observed noncompliance in bonus distribution, present obstacles for both the program’s effectiveness and its evaluation

Oh, guys, stop. You had me at "fuzzy regression discontinuity design."

Fact: Performance-based pay can easily be structured to value experience when it is accompanied by strong performance.

Hey! It's an actual fact. Way to go, TNTP!


Fact: The research base has become much stronger in recent years on the question of distinguishing levels of teacher performance. Evaluation systems that use multiple measures to rate teacher performance can help school systems recognize and reward those who are getting the best results in the classroom.

So much for facty stuff. Our single link of "proof" here takes us to that golden oldie, the Gates Foundation MET study. TNTP tells us that we need multiple measures (a phrase they use so often that I imagine it cropping up in odd contexts, like a reformy version of "that's what she said.") and to check with the community and make sure that administrators know what they're doing and give teachers a way to up their game and, hey, I already have that system finished. When is my gazillion dollar grant coming, anyway?

Fact: Teachers in the same school won’t be competing with one another for slices of a static pay pie because performance-based pay isn’t a zero-sum game.

Oh, TNTP. Mostly this blog of your has been an exercise of fuzzy discontinuity with the truth, but this is just a lie. Or you are dumb as rocks. One of those two. Your explanation is so short that I suspect you figured you'd better get out quick before you started laughing.

TNTP says "There is no cap." I look forward to watching them explain that to taxpayers. I want TNTP to come to a school district and stand before taxpayers to say, "There are so many awesome teachers in your district that you have no choice but to raise taxes ten mills to fund their performance-based pay levels." In referendum states, that will be particularly entertaining.

Or maybe we'll get to enjoy watching TNTP explain to a district, "We had to cut the arts program because the English teachers all get super-huge capless performance based pay."

Of course performance-based pay is a zero-sum game. School districts do not make more money when they do well. The pie is fixed by the tax rate. Performance-based pay means we must all get out the knives, either for the pie or each other.

Fact: School systems can implement performance-based pay by re-allocating existing funds.

See above.

This does get closer to the real motivation behind the new fix-the-pay initiative. See, we move to evaluation-based employment decisions. We up pay at the lowest levels. We rig the system to favor people who don't want to have a teaching career, because it reduces overall costs both in obvious and unobvious ways.

When we look at the spread of TFA, we tend to focus on how cheap they are to hire. Sometimes we forget the ticking time bomb in many states that is teacher pensions. Teaching temps aren't just cheap now-- they're cheap later, because No Pension Costs!

See, TNTP, when you say stuff like this:

School systems that decide to pay for great teaching can afford to do it because they will no longer be constrained by the rigid boundaries of lockstep compensation. 

It's hard to take you seriously. We're going to get rid of all the imaginary legions of allegedly crappy teachers and replace them with the best and the brightest, and we're going to pay all the best and brightest top dollar no matter how long they've been there.

IOW, it would be like a district under the current system where all teachers are long-timers who are on the top step.

How can that not be expensive as hell? Only if the top step becomes lower than it is under the current system, or if the school cuts programs, or raises taxes, or hires fewer teachers, or has no pension funding liabilities because all teachers leave within five years.

So thank you, nameless TNTP functionary, for searching for the truth for us. But I suggest you get back out there are search some more, because what you have brought back looks kind of old and dead and also smells funny.

A Mercedes Schneider Reader

When it comes to fired-up scholarship, passionate digging out of detail, and supplying simple facts for the Resistance, it is hard to beat Mercedes Schneider.

Schneider has one of the most varied backgrounds in the field. She started out as a classroom teacher of German and English, then acquired a PhD in applied statistics and research methods from the University of Northern Colorado and moved to Indiana to teach at Ball State. But there were curves yet to negotiate; Katrina hit her family head on. She decided to go home, and took a job teaching high school English in 2007. The university let her know that professors don't get to recover from that sort of step backwards. Writes Schneider, "But I love to teach.  High school, I decided, would be fine with me."

When I started wading into the school reform swamp, I realized that many of the posts that I kept returning to for facts, data, numbers, details, context and sequence-- so many of them were on her blog. Schneider has a book coming out sometime this month, and I have no doubt that it will be valuable and necessary reading for everyone who cares about public education and what is happening to it.  But until it arrives, I've collected some of my favorite Schneider pieces. If you are not a regular Schneider reader, you should be, and these are a fine place to start.

Cheating as We Worship: The Almighty Standardized Test

A personal but still fact-loaded reflection on the many ways in which the worship of The Test leads everybody involved to cheat in a variety of creative and not-always-obvious ways.

Twelve Embarrassing Years of NCLB and RTTT: Time for Arne to Blame USDOE

Schneider examines the long list of people that Arne likes to blame for the alleged problems in education, from moms to teachers to lawmakers to-- well, you name it. And then she lays out exactly how each of those attempts to shift blame is a lie.

Success Academy Tax Documents: Moskowitz Can Afford the Rent

Here's an example of what Schneider does so well. While everyone else was trading allegations and rhetoric about what Eva Moskowitz could or couldn't afford and her charters did or didn't need, Schneider went to the paperwork, dug through the publicly available tax records, and published the real numbers.

NCTQ Letter Grades and the Reformer Agenda–Part VIII

After this piece had run, NCTQ removed Michelle Rhee from its board of directors, but this remains one of the best dissection of Rhee's dismal career, going back to her own stories about her failed attempt to be a TFA classroom body.

The Common Core Memorandum of Understanding: What a Story

 Still one of the most jaw-dropping narrative-destroying pieces of investigative journalism anyone has done about the genesis of the Common Core. Schneider unearth's the memorandum of understanding that lays out who will create them and how they will be implemented. This is your go-to link for every time someone tries to tell you that the Core are the result of a state-led initiative.

Gates Money and Common Core– Part VI

I'll give you part six so you can work your way backward through the links to the other sections. Schneider has done massive amounts of work tracking the Gates money and discovering where it went. Who did Gates pay off? This series lays it out for you, thanks to what had to be long and tedious research.

 

More on the Common Core: Achieve, Inc., and Then Some

More on the core and the roots from which it emerged, with particular attention to Achieve as well as some of the principle architects.

 

Beware of Data Sharing Cheerleaders Offering Webinars

An example of the kind of respect and attention that Schneider draws in the education world. Come for this column, but stay for the comments in which the some of the top scholars and business leaders of the data mining world get into a spirited discussion of the issues at hand. You could pay for a fancy webinar and not see a discussion this exciting and illuminating.

 

There are plenty of other classics-- some great work on the data track miners and a whole cast of reformy characters whose names you may not know. Schneider employs her tireless research and her scathing wit on each. Read these, explore some more, and get ready to grab a copy of her book the moment it becomes available.

 

 

 

 

 

Vicki Phillips Tries Again

Vicki Phillips last EduWonk PR piece for CCSS sparked plenty of debate. Glancing through the comments and Bill Gates's latest heaping helping of baloney in USA Today, it would seem that it was also used as something of a prompt for the newest wave of CCSS talking points.

So it's only fitting that Phillips is back this month to field test the next wave of CCSS support bullets. Phillips is a Pennsylvania product, starting her admin career in Lancaster before becoming part of Smilin' Ed Rendell's revolving doorload of Ed Secretaries who took on the thankless task of powering through his program of unfunded mandates and terrible tests. When she left to head Portland schools, we were not particularly sad.

She works for the Gates Foundation now as Director of Education, College Ready. And now she's here to talk at us some more about the awesome momentum of  CCSS.

Stick-to-itiveness. Determination. Tenacity. Grit. These are concepts that every teacher tries to impart to his or her students – the importance of not giving up when the going gets tough.

That's the lede, so we know where this train is headed. That ol' grit-- it is one hugely important quality for students to have. So why, Phillips asks, would we risk stopping the forward movement on CCSS, "the most important U.S. education initiatives in decades." And may I just add, "A bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves." But no-- Phillips is not even going to pretend to create any sort of plausible link between grit and the Common Core (they just go together, like a horse and carriage, love and marriage, apples and oranges).

See, as we move forward, we all knew that we would have to be flexible, willing to "adjust and recalibrate." This is one of the shinier talking points these days, in which reformers speak as if they've always expected there to be a need to carefully consider what we were implementing and no, they were not the ones insisting we all follow their orders precisely, no, that wasn't them at all, nuh-uh. No, the newest round of CCSS reformy folks say things like this:

Equally, we must ensure that teachers and students are truly prepared before consequences for not meeting the standards are implemented.

No more impassioned full-speed-ahead, build-the-plane-while-we-fly-it stuff. No, we want to take our time and get it right. And like any good Orwellian overlords, we are not only going to say this with a straight face, but we will not at all acknowledge that we ever said anything else.

Okay, then. In this brave new world, what does Phillips suggest we are supposed to do to maintain the awesome runaway-truckish momentum of CCSS?


First, teachers must play a key role in the Common Core implementation process.

Teachers must play a key role. A "key role" is what you offer somebody when you want to soften then news that they won't be in a leadership role. "Sorry, you didn't get the new management spot, but golly whiz you will have a Key Role in the transition team." Nobody ever uses "key role" in their CV. 

We have apparently seen great success in Cleveland with teacher-created materials. And all around the country teachers are already working "with other education practitioners" and, really, what the hell is an "education practitioner"? This confabulation of teachers and EPs is working "to ensure teachers have access to the high-quality resources and tools they need as the Common Core State Standards are implemented."

And, seriously, as noted in Colin McEnroe's genius column, when somebody talks like this, they are either hiding something or selling something or both.

We'll follow that with a nod to the NEA Master Teacher program, a fully-owned subsidiary of the Gates Foundation, so why wouldn't we be plugging that. It will have a full year's worth of lessons! Districts won't need to hire real teachers with actual skills ever again!! So maybe the "key role" teachers are playing is the role of "making actual teachers obsolete." Thanks for having my back, NEA.

Second, we need to make sure teachers have the time they need to collaborate and prepare for these changes. 

I do not disagree with Phillips here. If we are going to be forced to unpack an Augean Stable's worth of CCSSBS, at least give us a shovel and few extra hours to do the job. We all seem to know something that Phillips is pretending not to know, or has forgotten since she was a district administrator-- time costs money, and school districts don't have an endless Gatesian-sized supply of it. So I think I speak for many superintendents when I say, "Thanks! That's a fabulous idea. More time! I never THOUGHT of THAT!" Also, next year the Gates Foundation will buy ponies for all the poor people in America-- all they have to do is build barns for the ponies to live in. It will be super-easy.

And then we get more lip service about how teachers have to be co-opted so they will buy in recruited as valuable co-leaders in the process. Because, finally, reformies have decided that maybe teachers should be involved in all this reformy stuff after all.

Then a full paragraph devoted to how CCSS will make it easier for children to move from one state to another. Certainly a legitimate reason to upend the US education system. Next year Gates will be reconfiguring the climate of the entire Northern Hemisphere so that children can move from Alaska to Hawaii without experiencing discomfort or needing to buy new clothes.

We round on the home stretch with a link to blog by a teacher who thinks CCSS rocks his world. The link is actually broken, but based on the quotes, I think I can reproduce the gist of the teacher's comments:

I used to teach nothing but rote memorization and I tried never to talk to my students and we just used slates and charcoal to do our endless drill, but then CCSS came along and I was all like, "Woah, you mean we can do thinky things!!?? And all sorts of cool learny activities." So thanks to CCSS I know how to teach because before I didn't know how to do nothing. But now critical thinking and computers. Thanx, CCSS.

Now cue the violins and fireworks for the big finish:

This is what we need to remember every time we hear calls to roll back Common Core. We cannot give up. We owe it to our children to continue to move forward and ensure that every child in this country has a chance to pursue his or her dreams. After all, if we expect our children to show grit in the face of adversity, how can we possibly ask any less of ourselves?

[insert inarticulate roar here] What the hell does the implementation of CCSS with its attendant school of bad program pilot fish have to do with making a better life for our children. Show me one single minute freakin piece of evidence that CCSS has anything at all to do with children pursuing their dreams!  And "grit in the face of adversity"??!! School is not not NOT supposed to be "the face of adversity," not for students, not for teachers, not for parents or administrators or janitors or bus drivers. What sort of bollixed-up brain-deficient balonery equates school with a test of whether students are worthy or having dreams?

I don't know if Lancaster Superintendent Vicki Phillips lost her understanding of actual schools or if she sold it. But this piece of press-ready PR puffery does her no credit. Please may we not have a third Ode to CCSS Momentum.