Hats off to the folks at Fordham who have added a new feature to their site-- it's Eduwatch 2016, and it is a handy compendium of education quotes from each Presidential candidate. We'll be turning to that more than a few times, I'm quite certain.
They attracted my attention with what is actually the ninth installment in the series, featuring ten quotes from Jeb Bush. They don't entitle it "Ten Things That Jeb Gets Wrong About Education" or even "One More Attempt To Mitigate Jeb's Common Core Conservative Problem," but they might as well have. I'm going to call it "Ten Reasons People Who Care About Public Education Should Not Vote For Jeb Bush."
1) Common Core as a floor, not a ceiling. Here's a Jebby quote about how states should "aim even higher, be bolder" and just keep raising standards forever. It sounds pretty except for two problems. First, it's reinforces a childishly simple two-dimensional model of school, where education is like a flagpole and you can choose higher or lower and that's it. Education is more like a four-dimensional galaxy, expanding and growing in all directions through space and time. Second, it ignores the question of whether the Core even makes a decent floor (spoiler alert: it doesn't).
2) States are in charge. This quote oddly acknowledges that the Common Core brand has become a fuzzy meaningless mess, so that no two people using it may mean the same thing. But from there Jebby somehow gets to "The federal government should play no role in this, either in the creation of standards, content, or curriculum." Which-- well, first, that ship has sailed, and second, if that's the case, why is a Presidential candidate talking about it? Will some journalist please ask Jebby, "Knowing what we know now, would you have signed off on No Child Left Behind?"
3) School choice. “Consumer choice created the most innovative and powerful economy in the
world....Choice rewards success and weeds out stagnation, inefficiency,
and failure." Wrong, and wrong. The fact that people have been repeating this mantra for decades does not make it so. Coke and Pepsi. Microsoft. Standard Oil. Cable television.
4) Class size. He cites the Harvard study on class size. He should probably take a look at what we could loosely call "all the other research" on this subject. Class size matters. Do note, however, that he also says "We have spent billions of dollars on more buildings and for more teachers with no evidence this policy produced better results." I can only hope he plans to apply the Dollars Spent To No Results metric to charter schools, Common Core and Big Standardized Testing.
5) Teacher pay. There was a time I might have let this one go ("Pay our best, great teachers more") but I have come around to the way of thinking favored by Michael Fullan and many others-- the myth of the Hero Teacher is bad news. Believing that a great school is one with room after room captained by a Hero Teacher just leads us to the idea that we don't have to look at the system or the supports or the processes we've put in place to help each teacher grow and improve-- we just have to fire Bad Teachers and hire Hero Teachers. It's lazy, it's unrealistic, and guys like the Jebster like it because what they really imagine is a couple of well-paid Hero Teachers teaching 200 kids each, for a net payroll savings of big, big bucks.
6) Preschool. Here's my rule about pushing preschool-- preschool can be a great thing, but if you can't get anything else about education right, you're going to muck up preschool, too. Jeb thinks the magic formula is choice (marketing), early literacy focus (developmentally ignorant), measure and report (test test test), focus on outcomes not inputs (test test test test). This absolutely guarantees that Jeb is the worst person in the world to set up a preschool.
7) The achievement gap. Poor minority students should get better test scores. It is up to the school to fix all the problems of society; there is no obligation for society to address problems so that kids can more easily get a better education. Well, not an education-- just better test scores.
8) Course access. This is cutting edge reformster stuff. Choice on steroids-- you don't just choose a school, but you put your education program together course by course, from a wide variety of vendors who are peeing themselves with delight because they don't have to provide a full program, just whatever niche market material they're pushing. An almost-interesting idea until you spend even five seconds trying to think about how it would actually work. It really is choice on steroids-- misshapen, unhealthy, and prone to sudden fits of rage and/or heart failure.
9) Education and technology. "The main challenge facing the country is how to redesign education around what technology allows us to do." Man, that is so perfectly and utterly backwards. We do not need to redesign education to fit the tech; we need to design the tech to fit education.
10) Raising expectations in education. “Some in the education community complain that every
time they achieve the results expected of them, we raise expectations,
and school grades drop as a result. That was our goal. We have learned
that students and teachers rise to the new challenge, and the school
grades go back up because everyone rises to the challenge. This formula
is how you drive success in any endeavor.” That's really inspiring, but it always raises the same question for me-- if expectations are so powerful, why aren't we unleashing their power everywhere? Instead of saying "Colleges have to give too many remedial courses," why don't we say, "Colleges, just expect more from your freshmen." Instead of saying "We need young people to be better prepared for the workplace," why don't we say, "Employers, if you just raise your expectations, you can hire anybody."
It tells us something about the political-educational landscape that Arne Duncan would be perfectly suited to serve as Jeb's Secretary of Education-- they don't disagree on anything (and they both have that lanky, slightly-confused look). There are many things about a Jeb Presidency that would be uncertain, but one thing is clear-- we would get four more years just like the last sixteen years of anti-public education policy.
Showing posts with label Jeb Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeb Bush. Show all posts
Friday, May 22, 2015
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Conservative Core Mythology And Iowa
This week the Common Core Standards entered the GOP primary via the premiere of ad buys in Iowa, marking yet another attempt to beat back conservative opposition to the Core.
The group behind the ads is the Collaborative for Student Success, a group that bills itself as a "grant-making organization" and which lists as its partners and supporters all of the usual suspects from Gates and Broad through Achieve and Stand for Children. As laid out by Mercedes Schneider, this group's efforts to look grass rooty are even lazier than most.
Follow their links and watch some of the videos they're produced, and you find that CFSS is closely linked to Conservatives for Higher Standards. Here's how the CFSS website explains CFHS:
While support for Common Core runs through all political spectrums, the Foundation for Excellence in Education created Conservatives for Higher Standards to lay out the conservative arguments in favor of Common Core, and demonstrate the strong support for the higher standards among Republican leaders, such as Gov. Christie and former Govs. Bush and Huckabee.
Give the Jebster credit-- he knows that his Common Core support is a stumbling block on his path to the White House, but rather than make the politically expedient move of other Core-ophiles like Bobby Jindal and Arne Duncan and simply pretend he no longer likes or knows what Common Core is, Bush is going to just keep throwing money at organizations to spin Core PR.
To pave the GOP primary path, Bush and his various allies have to sell yet another narrative about the Core that will make it palatable to conservative voters. And if we take a look at the CFHS myths vs. facts page, we can get a view of this sad mess of a bedtime story.
MYTH: The standards are federally mandated.
Nosirree, say CFHS. States entered into the Core voluntarily and can check out any time they like. This story point is a fail-- the Senate committee showed they get it in their rewrite when they used the word "coerce" to describe what the feds will no longer be allowed to do when trying to impose policy. The CFHS story is a hairsplit that nobody believes.
MYTH: CCSS aren't any better than state standards.
CFHS cites that old Fordham study, which is kind of like citing a Tobacco Institute study proving smoking is not so bad. Even then, they have to hem-haw their way around Fordham's finding that CCSS is only better than some state standards.
MYTH: State standards are sufficient for today's students.
An oddly-phrased myth. Do they mean that every state had good-enough standard, or that state-level standards should be sufficient. Either way, their rebuttal is a non-sequitor, citing ACT finding that three-quarters of college freshmen weren't "adequately prepared," which is again, like citing auto industry figures proving that more people need to drive brand new cars. This college ready baloney deserves its own full discussion.
MYTH: State tests aren't broken. Common Core should not try to fix them.
Oh, man. Are you sure you guys are PR professionals? Common Core testing is the most visible, most obviously screwed up and time-wasty part of Common Core and supporters have been trying to separate the idea of the standards from the terrible standardized testing regime for a while now, claiming they're two entirely different things. They're full of it, but I would think you'd want to follow in their footsteps. They throw some baloney about NAEP in here, but it's weak sauce and nobody is listening after the confirmation that those terrible tests are part of Common Core. Fail, boys.
MYTH: Common Core dictates what texts teachers can use.
The Core actually "preserves" freedom of choice for teachers, because it's just a list of what students must know, not how it must be taught. This is disingenuous at best, but the simplest problem with this is that Common Core may not dictate what texts teachers may use, but it sure does dictate what texts are available to buy.
MYTH: Common Core includes scary science stuff.
A win-- sort of. CFHS notes that there is nothing at all in the Core about science, and they are correct. Hold your breath and wait for the follow-up question-- if CCSS is supposed to help us catch up with the rest of the world and help us keep our edge, why does it ignore science entirely, thereby encouraging schools to teach less science so they can spend more time on math and reading test prep?
MYTH: Common Core will also take control of private, charter, religious, Catholic and home schools.
A straight-up noon-answer answer. Because the standards are internationally benchmarked (which I think we could charitably call a baldfaced lie), all of those non-public school types will find Core perfectly swell. Assimilation will be painless. Also, how accountable they'll be will be up to the states. So this answer to this myth is, it's not a myth. Again, good luck trying to find major published teaching material not aligned to CCSS (although much of that alignment is also a lie, so there's that). And while I get it, it also makes me smile a little to see "religious" and "Catholic" listed as separate categories.
MYTH: Common Core will cost more by requiring training, tests, etc
CFHS short answer is, "Yes. Yes, it will." (I'm paraphrasing.) The long answer is that it will make "economic sense." Because better education will get people off welfare and keep them out of prison and the US will be competitive. The Core will save taxpayers money because no more costly remediation at college, and it will lead to competition in the education marketplace, driving down costs. That's a fascinating idea. Maybe these guys now think that charters are part of the Common Core.
MYTH: CCSS is an intrusion into student privacy.
Again, the short answer is, "Yes. Yes, it is." Also, the states are collecting a buttload of data about your child anyway, whether they Core it up or not, but it's totally not broken down by person and you can totally trust them to keep it safe. There's nothing to worry about.At least, not anything that isn't already happening and isn't already beyond your power to do anything about.
MYTH: The feds will take control of the Common Core initiative.
No. The initiative was state led and will remain so. Actually, this is a novel item on the list, because both myths are wrong. Actually, nobody is leading or in charge of the initiative. Anybody anywhere can declare themselves a Common Core spokesperson and there isn't anybody on the planet who can whip up a cease and desist letter. Not only are we building the plane in mid-air, but there is nobody piloting it.
MYTH: The feds threatened to withhold money from anyone who didn't Core it up.
Totally not true. The feds offered to give money to only those states that did adopt the Core. Totally different thing. I didn't say I wouldn't give you your allowance if you didn't do your chores-- I just said you would only get your allowance if you did do your chores.
MYTH: The reading in CCSS is 50% non-fiction, which opens the door to lots of political stuff.
Weird assumption about what is or is not political (Grapes of Wrath, anybody?) But the answer here, like many of the answers, seems to assume that conservative voters are, in fact, morons. To the "myth" that CCSS requires 50% "informational" text, CFHS respondes, "But no-- the CFHS requires 50% of reading be fiction!" Also, informational texts can include America-loving works like de Tocqueville and the Declaration and also politics-free stuff like maps.
The Collaborative for Student Success has some other points they like to make as well, like the idea that the Common Core is really great for helping military families and for making our armed forces stronger, somehow. Gone are some of the old, failed stories (remember when we still had to argue about whether or not teachers helped write the Core?).
But those are the broad outlines of what is supposed to be the conservative-friendly narrative of Common Core. Will we be pushing this in Iowa to try to force the field to support Common Core, or could it be that we are trying to prepare the ground for one particular Core-loving candidate? Next week, when the Collaborative is supposed to be moving beyond radio ads and onto Iowans' tv screens, we may get a hint. But if Jeb is basing his Presidential hopes on these weak arguments, he needs to get himself some new strategists.
The group behind the ads is the Collaborative for Student Success, a group that bills itself as a "grant-making organization" and which lists as its partners and supporters all of the usual suspects from Gates and Broad through Achieve and Stand for Children. As laid out by Mercedes Schneider, this group's efforts to look grass rooty are even lazier than most.
Follow their links and watch some of the videos they're produced, and you find that CFSS is closely linked to Conservatives for Higher Standards. Here's how the CFSS website explains CFHS:
While support for Common Core runs through all political spectrums, the Foundation for Excellence in Education created Conservatives for Higher Standards to lay out the conservative arguments in favor of Common Core, and demonstrate the strong support for the higher standards among Republican leaders, such as Gov. Christie and former Govs. Bush and Huckabee.
Give the Jebster credit-- he knows that his Common Core support is a stumbling block on his path to the White House, but rather than make the politically expedient move of other Core-ophiles like Bobby Jindal and Arne Duncan and simply pretend he no longer likes or knows what Common Core is, Bush is going to just keep throwing money at organizations to spin Core PR.
To pave the GOP primary path, Bush and his various allies have to sell yet another narrative about the Core that will make it palatable to conservative voters. And if we take a look at the CFHS myths vs. facts page, we can get a view of this sad mess of a bedtime story.
MYTH: The standards are federally mandated.
Nosirree, say CFHS. States entered into the Core voluntarily and can check out any time they like. This story point is a fail-- the Senate committee showed they get it in their rewrite when they used the word "coerce" to describe what the feds will no longer be allowed to do when trying to impose policy. The CFHS story is a hairsplit that nobody believes.
MYTH: CCSS aren't any better than state standards.
CFHS cites that old Fordham study, which is kind of like citing a Tobacco Institute study proving smoking is not so bad. Even then, they have to hem-haw their way around Fordham's finding that CCSS is only better than some state standards.
MYTH: State standards are sufficient for today's students.
An oddly-phrased myth. Do they mean that every state had good-enough standard, or that state-level standards should be sufficient. Either way, their rebuttal is a non-sequitor, citing ACT finding that three-quarters of college freshmen weren't "adequately prepared," which is again, like citing auto industry figures proving that more people need to drive brand new cars. This college ready baloney deserves its own full discussion.
MYTH: State tests aren't broken. Common Core should not try to fix them.
Oh, man. Are you sure you guys are PR professionals? Common Core testing is the most visible, most obviously screwed up and time-wasty part of Common Core and supporters have been trying to separate the idea of the standards from the terrible standardized testing regime for a while now, claiming they're two entirely different things. They're full of it, but I would think you'd want to follow in their footsteps. They throw some baloney about NAEP in here, but it's weak sauce and nobody is listening after the confirmation that those terrible tests are part of Common Core. Fail, boys.
MYTH: Common Core dictates what texts teachers can use.
The Core actually "preserves" freedom of choice for teachers, because it's just a list of what students must know, not how it must be taught. This is disingenuous at best, but the simplest problem with this is that Common Core may not dictate what texts teachers may use, but it sure does dictate what texts are available to buy.
MYTH: Common Core includes scary science stuff.
A win-- sort of. CFHS notes that there is nothing at all in the Core about science, and they are correct. Hold your breath and wait for the follow-up question-- if CCSS is supposed to help us catch up with the rest of the world and help us keep our edge, why does it ignore science entirely, thereby encouraging schools to teach less science so they can spend more time on math and reading test prep?
MYTH: Common Core will also take control of private, charter, religious, Catholic and home schools.
A straight-up noon-answer answer. Because the standards are internationally benchmarked (which I think we could charitably call a baldfaced lie), all of those non-public school types will find Core perfectly swell. Assimilation will be painless. Also, how accountable they'll be will be up to the states. So this answer to this myth is, it's not a myth. Again, good luck trying to find major published teaching material not aligned to CCSS (although much of that alignment is also a lie, so there's that). And while I get it, it also makes me smile a little to see "religious" and "Catholic" listed as separate categories.
MYTH: Common Core will cost more by requiring training, tests, etc
CFHS short answer is, "Yes. Yes, it will." (I'm paraphrasing.) The long answer is that it will make "economic sense." Because better education will get people off welfare and keep them out of prison and the US will be competitive. The Core will save taxpayers money because no more costly remediation at college, and it will lead to competition in the education marketplace, driving down costs. That's a fascinating idea. Maybe these guys now think that charters are part of the Common Core.
MYTH: CCSS is an intrusion into student privacy.
Again, the short answer is, "Yes. Yes, it is." Also, the states are collecting a buttload of data about your child anyway, whether they Core it up or not, but it's totally not broken down by person and you can totally trust them to keep it safe. There's nothing to worry about.At least, not anything that isn't already happening and isn't already beyond your power to do anything about.
MYTH: The feds will take control of the Common Core initiative.
No. The initiative was state led and will remain so. Actually, this is a novel item on the list, because both myths are wrong. Actually, nobody is leading or in charge of the initiative. Anybody anywhere can declare themselves a Common Core spokesperson and there isn't anybody on the planet who can whip up a cease and desist letter. Not only are we building the plane in mid-air, but there is nobody piloting it.
MYTH: The feds threatened to withhold money from anyone who didn't Core it up.
Totally not true. The feds offered to give money to only those states that did adopt the Core. Totally different thing. I didn't say I wouldn't give you your allowance if you didn't do your chores-- I just said you would only get your allowance if you did do your chores.
MYTH: The reading in CCSS is 50% non-fiction, which opens the door to lots of political stuff.
Weird assumption about what is or is not political (Grapes of Wrath, anybody?) But the answer here, like many of the answers, seems to assume that conservative voters are, in fact, morons. To the "myth" that CCSS requires 50% "informational" text, CFHS respondes, "But no-- the CFHS requires 50% of reading be fiction!" Also, informational texts can include America-loving works like de Tocqueville and the Declaration and also politics-free stuff like maps.
The Collaborative for Student Success has some other points they like to make as well, like the idea that the Common Core is really great for helping military families and for making our armed forces stronger, somehow. Gone are some of the old, failed stories (remember when we still had to argue about whether or not teachers helped write the Core?).
But those are the broad outlines of what is supposed to be the conservative-friendly narrative of Common Core. Will we be pushing this in Iowa to try to force the field to support Common Core, or could it be that we are trying to prepare the ground for one particular Core-loving candidate? Next week, when the Collaborative is supposed to be moving beyond radio ads and onto Iowans' tv screens, we may get a hint. But if Jeb is basing his Presidential hopes on these weak arguments, he needs to get himself some new strategists.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Presidential Magical Misery Tour
Man, do I not look forward to the upcoming Presidential race. Or the already-started race. Whatever you want to call it.
On the GOP side, we've already got Ted Cruz deciding to distinguish himself by getting out ahead of the Silly Pack. That's fine. The sooner he burns out, the better for America.
But the Jebster's irony-drenched and self-awareness-parched campaign has been chugging along for a while, including his nifty Super-PAC, the Right to Rise. This PAC is established to "support candidates who want to restore the promise of America with a positive, conservative vision of reform and renewal." Apparently those candidates are all wrapped up in just one guy-- the Jebbinator, Bush III, the Littlest Shrub of All. What do they absolutely and unironically believe?
We believe passionately that the Right to Rise — to move up the income ladder based on merit, hard work and earned success — is the central moral promise of American economic life.
Because if there's anything that the Bush story tells us, it's that anybody born into riches and power can climb the ladder of ivy league connections to a position of even more wealth and power. Jeb's staff the completely independent operators of Right to Rise do acknowledge that the playing field no longer seems to be level and that the recovery did not raise all boats.
We believe the income gap is real, but that only conservative principles can solve it by removing the barriers to upward mobility. We will celebrate success and risk-taking, protect liberty, cherish free enterprise, strengthen our national defense, embrace the energy revolution, fix our broken and obsolete immigration system, and give all children a better future by transforming our education system through choice, high standards and accountability. We will strive to put our fiscal house back in order, re-limit government and ensure that America is a welcoming society.
So there's Jebby's plan, comfortingly vague except for the doubling down on reformster principles. But Jeb is stuck between two wings of the GOP-- the GOP well-paid-bv-corporate-interests wing and the still-attached-to-conservative-values wing. As a teacher, I'm not excited.
I am no more excited about the Democratic side. We're saying that the nomination is in Hillary Clinton's bag (hmmm... have I heard this before??) and the press is trying hard to shape a narrative in which she represents a struggle between the wings of the Democratic party- the Democratic well-paid-for-by-corporate-interests wing and the still-attached-to-liberal-values wing. You see how this is shaping up. The New York Times portrays her as torn between teachers and Democratic hedge fund guys and Democrats for Education Reform, a group the New York Times describes as "left-leaning" and which I would describe as about as Democratic as the Harvard Boat Club.
Leonie Haimson (of Class Size Matters) pulled up this quote from DFER honcho Whitney Tilson's film manifesto, "A Right Denied," and it should be pulled out every time DFER appears. It explains how DFER decided to be Democrats.
“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”
I'm not looking for Hillary to align herself with teachers. Maybe with the national teachers union, but of course we're still trying to get NEA and AFT to align more tightly with teachers, so that's an issue.
It was Hillary Clinton who way back in the day received the infamous Mark Tucker letter outlining how public education could be retooled into a cradle-to-career pipeline, managed by the government and devoted to tracking and training children for their proper place in society. Now, if we held everyone accountable for every letter they ever received, I'd be a sweepstake winner many times over. But that was in 1998, and neither Clinton has exactly stepped up to say, "No, that's just crazy talk and wrong." Clinton's support for traditional US public education has been pretty much invisible.
That may seem like picking at the nits, but here's the thing-- the last guy I voted for said all sorts of wonderful things about public education and about schools and teachers, and that all turned out to be baloney. I vote for Barrack Obama once with enthusiasm and once while holding my nose, and nothing that happened after either vote convinced me that I would have been any worse off somehow putting George Bush II in the White House.
My distrust of Democrats at this point is huge, enormous, massive, a yawning chasm into which we could dump every beanie baby ever manufactured sealed in its own Iowa-sized vacuum container. The Democrat slogan has become, "You probably figure the GOP will be absolutely terrible, so we're banking that you'll vote for us because we're only horrible."
I've never not voted in an election (any election) and I hate the idea of throwing away a symbolic vote, but I have truly had it. I will never again vote for a national candidate who can't convince me that s/he will support public education. And it's already looking as if I'll have to do a lot of searching for 2016.
On the GOP side, we've already got Ted Cruz deciding to distinguish himself by getting out ahead of the Silly Pack. That's fine. The sooner he burns out, the better for America.
But the Jebster's irony-drenched and self-awareness-parched campaign has been chugging along for a while, including his nifty Super-PAC, the Right to Rise. This PAC is established to "support candidates who want to restore the promise of America with a positive, conservative vision of reform and renewal." Apparently those candidates are all wrapped up in just one guy-- the Jebbinator, Bush III, the Littlest Shrub of All. What do they absolutely and unironically believe?
We believe passionately that the Right to Rise — to move up the income ladder based on merit, hard work and earned success — is the central moral promise of American economic life.
Because if there's anything that the Bush story tells us, it's that anybody born into riches and power can climb the ladder of ivy league connections to a position of even more wealth and power.
We believe the income gap is real, but that only conservative principles can solve it by removing the barriers to upward mobility. We will celebrate success and risk-taking, protect liberty, cherish free enterprise, strengthen our national defense, embrace the energy revolution, fix our broken and obsolete immigration system, and give all children a better future by transforming our education system through choice, high standards and accountability. We will strive to put our fiscal house back in order, re-limit government and ensure that America is a welcoming society.
So there's Jebby's plan, comfortingly vague except for the doubling down on reformster principles. But Jeb is stuck between two wings of the GOP-- the GOP well-paid-bv-corporate-interests wing and the still-attached-to-conservative-values wing. As a teacher, I'm not excited.
I am no more excited about the Democratic side. We're saying that the nomination is in Hillary Clinton's bag (hmmm... have I heard this before??) and the press is trying hard to shape a narrative in which she represents a struggle between the wings of the Democratic party- the Democratic well-paid-for-by-corporate-interests wing and the still-attached-to-liberal-values wing. You see how this is shaping up. The New York Times portrays her as torn between teachers and Democratic hedge fund guys and Democrats for Education Reform, a group the New York Times describes as "left-leaning" and which I would describe as about as Democratic as the Harvard Boat Club.
Leonie Haimson (of Class Size Matters) pulled up this quote from DFER honcho Whitney Tilson's film manifesto, "A Right Denied," and it should be pulled out every time DFER appears. It explains how DFER decided to be Democrats.
“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”
I'm not looking for Hillary to align herself with teachers. Maybe with the national teachers union, but of course we're still trying to get NEA and AFT to align more tightly with teachers, so that's an issue.
It was Hillary Clinton who way back in the day received the infamous Mark Tucker letter outlining how public education could be retooled into a cradle-to-career pipeline, managed by the government and devoted to tracking and training children for their proper place in society. Now, if we held everyone accountable for every letter they ever received, I'd be a sweepstake winner many times over. But that was in 1998, and neither Clinton has exactly stepped up to say, "No, that's just crazy talk and wrong." Clinton's support for traditional US public education has been pretty much invisible.
That may seem like picking at the nits, but here's the thing-- the last guy I voted for said all sorts of wonderful things about public education and about schools and teachers, and that all turned out to be baloney. I vote for Barrack Obama once with enthusiasm and once while holding my nose, and nothing that happened after either vote convinced me that I would have been any worse off somehow putting George Bush II in the White House.
My distrust of Democrats at this point is huge, enormous, massive, a yawning chasm into which we could dump every beanie baby ever manufactured sealed in its own Iowa-sized vacuum container. The Democrat slogan has become, "You probably figure the GOP will be absolutely terrible, so we're banking that you'll vote for us because we're only horrible."
I've never not voted in an election (any election) and I hate the idea of throwing away a symbolic vote, but I have truly had it. I will never again vote for a national candidate who can't convince me that s/he will support public education. And it's already looking as if I'll have to do a lot of searching for 2016.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Bush's Fuzzy Wall
Jeb Bush took to the Washington Post last Friday to try to clarify his education policy ideas. We can probably look forward to many repeats of this process, because Candidate Bush has a powerful need to keep clarifying his education policies until he can find some version of them that isn't hated by voters both inside and outside his party.
His WaPo piece intends to clarify the line on federalism. People in his party hate Common Core, and they hate it at least in part because they see it as federal intrusion on state functions, so it would be useful for Bush III if he could find a way to convince voters that he likes a big, strong wall between the lovely garden of state powers and the big scary snake of federal intrusion.
He's going to need some more clarifying, because this version of the wall is fuzzy and porous.
He starts out with a simple chicken-wire wall foundation, trying to blame the intrusiony part of Common Core Etc on the Obama administration. For those who have followed the Core closely, this will not be particularly convincing, as what the Obama administration gave the Core Creators was pretty much what they asked for. There was never pure, pristine version of the Core somewhere back before Obama got his hands on it. The administration did not pervert CCSS; they fulfilled its every dream.
But Bush III is clear-- "the federal government's role in elementary and secondary education should be limited." That seems like a nice, clear, solid, snake-resistant wall. But then he clarifies what he means.
It should work to create transparency so that parents can see how their local schools measure up; it should support policies that have a proven record; and it should make sure states can’t ignore students who need extra help. That’s it.
Oops. This is not so much a snake-resistant wall as a special snake door leading to snake tunnel that leads directly to the garden.
We could take a shortcut by simply pointing out that all of these policy ideas are exactly what got the fat federal fingers all over education in the last few years, but let's pretend we're starting from scratch. Why do these three supposedly clear policy divides make a better open door than a closed window?
Transparency. This formulation is stupid. It presumes that schools are ordinarily giant opaque black boxes, mysterious and secret fortresses whose walls no parents' gaze can pierce. Parents sit at home for 180 days, scratching their heads and wondering how their children are doing, too foolish and helpless to gather any information.
But if by "measure up" Bush means "measure their school in comparison to some other school many states away," then there is no way to accomplish that without federal intrusion. There's no way to create such a cross country report card without having the federal government declare what should be taught, when it should be taught, and how the teaching of that material should be measured.
You can't have a national report card without a national curriculum and national testing. Federal intrusion doesn't get much intrudier than that.
Support policies that have a proven record. Proven to do what? Proven to whose satisfaction? As long as the feds are setting the rules for what counts as success, they are (again) setting the curriculum and evaluation agenda for the country.
Make sure states can't ignore students who need extra help. This one assumes ill intent by the states, and that certainly doesn't bode well for the feds stepping back. If we're pre-emptively accusing the states of ignoring some students, then the only way this works is if the feds decide which students need extra help. That means determining which students aren't where they should be, and that can only be done if the feds decide where those students should be, which means, once again, that in order to do this supposedly simple federal task, the feds have to set a curriculum, a scope and sequence, and impose a federal level assessment, and that assessment will mean a federal-level school record for each student. How can the feds say, "Yo, state-- you are not doing right by Chris" unless the feds know exactly how Chris is doing?
What Bush has laid out is a fuzzy out-of-focus picture of a wall that is barely pretending to cover up a giant, neon THIS WAY sign with blinking arrow for every federal snake in the area. There is no way for Bush's Three Little Tasks to be truly accomplished without the federal government taking a central and controlling role in education.
He's going to need to clarify his education policy some more, because this isn't going to soothe anybody.
His WaPo piece intends to clarify the line on federalism. People in his party hate Common Core, and they hate it at least in part because they see it as federal intrusion on state functions, so it would be useful for Bush III if he could find a way to convince voters that he likes a big, strong wall between the lovely garden of state powers and the big scary snake of federal intrusion.
He's going to need some more clarifying, because this version of the wall is fuzzy and porous.
He starts out with a simple chicken-wire wall foundation, trying to blame the intrusiony part of Common Core Etc on the Obama administration. For those who have followed the Core closely, this will not be particularly convincing, as what the Obama administration gave the Core Creators was pretty much what they asked for. There was never pure, pristine version of the Core somewhere back before Obama got his hands on it. The administration did not pervert CCSS; they fulfilled its every dream.
But Bush III is clear-- "the federal government's role in elementary and secondary education should be limited." That seems like a nice, clear, solid, snake-resistant wall. But then he clarifies what he means.
It should work to create transparency so that parents can see how their local schools measure up; it should support policies that have a proven record; and it should make sure states can’t ignore students who need extra help. That’s it.
Oops. This is not so much a snake-resistant wall as a special snake door leading to snake tunnel that leads directly to the garden.
We could take a shortcut by simply pointing out that all of these policy ideas are exactly what got the fat federal fingers all over education in the last few years, but let's pretend we're starting from scratch. Why do these three supposedly clear policy divides make a better open door than a closed window?
Transparency. This formulation is stupid. It presumes that schools are ordinarily giant opaque black boxes, mysterious and secret fortresses whose walls no parents' gaze can pierce. Parents sit at home for 180 days, scratching their heads and wondering how their children are doing, too foolish and helpless to gather any information.
But if by "measure up" Bush means "measure their school in comparison to some other school many states away," then there is no way to accomplish that without federal intrusion. There's no way to create such a cross country report card without having the federal government declare what should be taught, when it should be taught, and how the teaching of that material should be measured.
You can't have a national report card without a national curriculum and national testing. Federal intrusion doesn't get much intrudier than that.
Support policies that have a proven record. Proven to do what? Proven to whose satisfaction? As long as the feds are setting the rules for what counts as success, they are (again) setting the curriculum and evaluation agenda for the country.
Make sure states can't ignore students who need extra help. This one assumes ill intent by the states, and that certainly doesn't bode well for the feds stepping back. If we're pre-emptively accusing the states of ignoring some students, then the only way this works is if the feds decide which students need extra help. That means determining which students aren't where they should be, and that can only be done if the feds decide where those students should be, which means, once again, that in order to do this supposedly simple federal task, the feds have to set a curriculum, a scope and sequence, and impose a federal level assessment, and that assessment will mean a federal-level school record for each student. How can the feds say, "Yo, state-- you are not doing right by Chris" unless the feds know exactly how Chris is doing?
What Bush has laid out is a fuzzy out-of-focus picture of a wall that is barely pretending to cover up a giant, neon THIS WAY sign with blinking arrow for every federal snake in the area. There is no way for Bush's Three Little Tasks to be truly accomplished without the federal government taking a central and controlling role in education.
He's going to need to clarify his education policy some more, because this isn't going to soothe anybody.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
What's The Matter With Indiana
In the modern era of education reform, each state has tried to create its own special brand of educational dysfunction. If the point of Common Core related reforms was to bring standardization to the country's many and varied state systems, it has failed miserably by failing in fifty different ways.
What Indiana provides is an example of what happens when the political process completely overwhelms educational concerns. If there is anyone in the Indiana state capitol more worried about education students than in political maneuvering and political posturing, it's not immediately evident who that person might be.
The current marquee conflagration of the moment is the announcement of a new Big Standardized Test that will take twelve hours to complete. This announcement has triggered a veritable stampede from responsibility, as every elected official in Indianapolis tries to put some air space between themselves and this testing disaster. And it brings up some of the underlying issues of the moment in Indiana.
Currently, all roads lead to Glenda Ritz.
Back before the fall of 2012, Indiana had become a reformster playground. They'd made early strides solving the puzzle of how to turn an entire urban school district over to privatizers, and they loved them some Common Core, too. Tony Bennett, buddy of Jeb Bush and big-time Chief for Change, was running the state's education department just the way reformsters thought it should be done. And then came the 2012 election.
Bennett was the public face of Indiana education reform. He dumped a ton of money into the race. And he lost. Not just lost, but looooooooosssssssssst!!! As is frequently noted, Glenda Ritz was elected Superintendent for Public Instruction with more votes than Governor Mike Pence. I like this account of the fallout by Joy Resmovits mostly because it includes a quote from Mike Petrilli that I think captures well the reaction of reformsters when Bennett lost.
"Shit shit shit shit shit," he said. "You can quote me on that."
After Ritz became a Democrat education in a GOP administration, Republican politicians decided that given her overwhelming electoral victory, they'd better just suck it up and find a way to honor the will of the people by working productively with her to fashion bi-partisan educational policies that put the needs of Indiana's students ahead of political gamesmanship. Ha! Just kidding. The GOP started using every trick they could think of to strip Ritz of her power.
As Scott Elliot tells it in this piece at Chalkbeat, things actually started out okay, with Ritz and the Pence administration carving out some useful compromises. Elliot marks the start of open warfare at Bennettgate-- the release of emails showing that Tony Bennett had gamed the less-than-awesome Indiana school grading system to favor certain charter operators.
Certainly Ritz and pence have different ideas about how to operate an education system. Mike Pence particularly loves charters-- so much so that he has taken the unusual move of proposing that charter schools be paid $1,500 more per student than public schools (so forget all about that charters-are-cheaper business).
Indiana has also created a complicated relationship with the Common Core, legislating a withdrawal from the Core, but one that required the state to do it without losing their federalbribes payments. The result was a fat-free Twinkie of education standards-- not enough like the original for some people and too much like it for others.
The Indiana GOP has been trying to separate Ritz from any power. They cite any number of complaints about her work style and competence (the GOP president of the Senate famously commented "In all fairness, Superintendent Ritz was a librarian, okay?") and most of the complaints smell like nothing but political posturing.
It's understandable that the state Board of Education would be a cantankerous group. Consider this op-ed piece from Gordon Hendry, newest member of the board, Democrat, attorney, business exec, and director of economic development under former Indianapolis mayor and current charter profiteer Bart Peterson. Hendry opens with, "To me, education policy is economic policy" (pro tip, Mr. Hendry-- education policy is education policy). After castigating Ritz for not running pleasant, orderly meetings (because her job is, apparently, to make alleged grownups behave like actual grownups), Hendry works up to this:
As a Democrat, I don't know why the superintendent insists on creating conflict where rational debate should instead exist.
That just sets off the bovine fecal detector into loud whoops. First, we've got an accusation buried as an assumption (she's the one creating conflict). Combine that with playing the feigned ignorance card-- I just have no idea why she could be so touchy! Really, dude? I'm all the way over here in Pennsylvania, and I can tell why she might be involved in some crankypants activity. I'm pretty sure winning an election and being forced to work with people who dismiss you and try to cut you out of power-- I'm pretty sure that would put someone in a bad mood. So I can understand finding her ideas obnoxious and disagreeing with how she runs a meeting, but when you claim her point of view is incomprehensible, that tells me way more about you than about her.
Most of the statements I read coming out of Indiana are like that-- they carry a screaming barely-subtext of "I am just stringing words together in a way that I've calculated might bring political advantage, but I am paying no real attention to what they actual mean to real humans."
I have no idea how good at her job Glenda Ritz actually is, but the political statement represented by her landslide election seems clear enough, and it's a little astonishing that Indiana's leaders are so hell bent on thwarting the will of the electorate. But damned if the legislature isn't trying to strip her of chairmanship of the Board of Education.
Meanwhile, the fat-free Twinkie standards have spawned some massive tumor of a test, coming in at an advertised length of twelve hours which breaks down to A) weeks of wasted classroom time and B) at least six hours worth of frustrated and bored students making random marks which of course gets Indiana C) results even more meaningless than the usual standardized test results although D) McGraw-Hill will still make a mountain of money for producing it. Whose fault is that? Tom LoBianco seems close to the answer when he says, basically, everyone. (Although Pence has offered a gubernatorial edict that the test be cut to six hours, so, I don't know- just do every other page, kids? Not sure exactly how one cuts a test in half in about a week, but perhaps Indiana is a land of miracles.*) But it's hard for me not see Ritz and Indiana schools as the victims of a system so clogged and choked with political asshattery that it may well be impossible to get anything done that actually benefits the students of Indiana.
UPDATE: On February 11, the Senate Education Committee gave the okay to a bill that would exempt voucher schools from taking the same assessment as public schools. In fact, the voucher schools can just go ahead and create a test of their own. It is remarkable that the State of Indiana has not just closed all public schools, dumped all the education money in a giant Scrooge McDuck sized vault, and sold tickets to just go in a dive around in it.
There's going to be a rally at the Statehouse on Monday, February 16th. If I were an Indiana taxpayer-- hell if I were a live human who lived considerably closer-- I would be there. This is a state that really hates its public schools.
* Edit-- I somehow lost the sentence about the shortening of the test in posting. I've since put the parenthetical point back.
What Indiana provides is an example of what happens when the political process completely overwhelms educational concerns. If there is anyone in the Indiana state capitol more worried about education students than in political maneuvering and political posturing, it's not immediately evident who that person might be.
The current marquee conflagration of the moment is the announcement of a new Big Standardized Test that will take twelve hours to complete. This announcement has triggered a veritable stampede from responsibility, as every elected official in Indianapolis tries to put some air space between themselves and this testing disaster. And it brings up some of the underlying issues of the moment in Indiana.
Currently, all roads lead to Glenda Ritz.
Back before the fall of 2012, Indiana had become a reformster playground. They'd made early strides solving the puzzle of how to turn an entire urban school district over to privatizers, and they loved them some Common Core, too. Tony Bennett, buddy of Jeb Bush and big-time Chief for Change, was running the state's education department just the way reformsters thought it should be done. And then came the 2012 election.
Bennett was the public face of Indiana education reform. He dumped a ton of money into the race. And he lost. Not just lost, but looooooooosssssssssst!!! As is frequently noted, Glenda Ritz was elected Superintendent for Public Instruction with more votes than Governor Mike Pence. I like this account of the fallout by Joy Resmovits mostly because it includes a quote from Mike Petrilli that I think captures well the reaction of reformsters when Bennett lost.
"Shit shit shit shit shit," he said. "You can quote me on that."
After Ritz became a Democrat education in a GOP administration, Republican politicians decided that given her overwhelming electoral victory, they'd better just suck it up and find a way to honor the will of the people by working productively with her to fashion bi-partisan educational policies that put the needs of Indiana's students ahead of political gamesmanship. Ha! Just kidding. The GOP started using every trick they could think of to strip Ritz of her power.
As Scott Elliot tells it in this piece at Chalkbeat, things actually started out okay, with Ritz and the Pence administration carving out some useful compromises. Elliot marks the start of open warfare at Bennettgate-- the release of emails showing that Tony Bennett had gamed the less-than-awesome Indiana school grading system to favor certain charter operators.
Certainly Ritz and pence have different ideas about how to operate an education system. Mike Pence particularly loves charters-- so much so that he has taken the unusual move of proposing that charter schools be paid $1,500 more per student than public schools (so forget all about that charters-are-cheaper business).
Indiana has also created a complicated relationship with the Common Core, legislating a withdrawal from the Core, but one that required the state to do it without losing their federal
The Indiana GOP has been trying to separate Ritz from any power. They cite any number of complaints about her work style and competence (the GOP president of the Senate famously commented "In all fairness, Superintendent Ritz was a librarian, okay?") and most of the complaints smell like nothing but political posturing.
It's understandable that the state Board of Education would be a cantankerous group. Consider this op-ed piece from Gordon Hendry, newest member of the board, Democrat, attorney, business exec, and director of economic development under former Indianapolis mayor and current charter profiteer Bart Peterson. Hendry opens with, "To me, education policy is economic policy" (pro tip, Mr. Hendry-- education policy is education policy). After castigating Ritz for not running pleasant, orderly meetings (because her job is, apparently, to make alleged grownups behave like actual grownups), Hendry works up to this:
As a Democrat, I don't know why the superintendent insists on creating conflict where rational debate should instead exist.
That just sets off the bovine fecal detector into loud whoops. First, we've got an accusation buried as an assumption (she's the one creating conflict). Combine that with playing the feigned ignorance card-- I just have no idea why she could be so touchy! Really, dude? I'm all the way over here in Pennsylvania, and I can tell why she might be involved in some crankypants activity. I'm pretty sure winning an election and being forced to work with people who dismiss you and try to cut you out of power-- I'm pretty sure that would put someone in a bad mood. So I can understand finding her ideas obnoxious and disagreeing with how she runs a meeting, but when you claim her point of view is incomprehensible, that tells me way more about you than about her.
Most of the statements I read coming out of Indiana are like that-- they carry a screaming barely-subtext of "I am just stringing words together in a way that I've calculated might bring political advantage, but I am paying no real attention to what they actual mean to real humans."
I have no idea how good at her job Glenda Ritz actually is, but the political statement represented by her landslide election seems clear enough, and it's a little astonishing that Indiana's leaders are so hell bent on thwarting the will of the electorate. But damned if the legislature isn't trying to strip her of chairmanship of the Board of Education.
Meanwhile, the fat-free Twinkie standards have spawned some massive tumor of a test, coming in at an advertised length of twelve hours which breaks down to A) weeks of wasted classroom time and B) at least six hours worth of frustrated and bored students making random marks which of course gets Indiana C) results even more meaningless than the usual standardized test results although D) McGraw-Hill will still make a mountain of money for producing it. Whose fault is that? Tom LoBianco seems close to the answer when he says, basically, everyone. (Although Pence has offered a gubernatorial edict that the test be cut to six hours, so, I don't know- just do every other page, kids? Not sure exactly how one cuts a test in half in about a week, but perhaps Indiana is a land of miracles.*) But it's hard for me not see Ritz and Indiana schools as the victims of a system so clogged and choked with political asshattery that it may well be impossible to get anything done that actually benefits the students of Indiana.
UPDATE: On February 11, the Senate Education Committee gave the okay to a bill that would exempt voucher schools from taking the same assessment as public schools. In fact, the voucher schools can just go ahead and create a test of their own. It is remarkable that the State of Indiana has not just closed all public schools, dumped all the education money in a giant Scrooge McDuck sized vault, and sold tickets to just go in a dive around in it.
There's going to be a rally at the Statehouse on Monday, February 16th. If I were an Indiana taxpayer-- hell if I were a live human who lived considerably closer-- I would be there. This is a state that really hates its public schools.
* Edit-- I somehow lost the sentence about the shortening of the test in posting. I've since put the parenthetical point back.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Public Education: Political Orphan
Last week's Senate hearing on NCLB underscores what may be old news for some and a growing sick revelation for others-- the Democrats are no longer the party of public education or public school teachers.
Many supporters of the public school system and the teachers who work there have been in denial for a while. They've tried to dismiss nominally Democratic voices touting reformster policy as outlier, or Democrats in Name Only. DFER is so clearly part of a privatizing agenda-- surely that's not what Democrats stand for. And last summer union members agitated for a resolution condemning Arne Duncan and calling for his ouster, as if Duncan were some sort of rogue agent and some day Barack Obama would wake up, read a Department of Education briefing and exclaim, "He's doing what!!?! We'll have to do something about that right away!"
But the names and the stories just keep stacking up and stacking up. After six years, we can no longer pretend that Arne Duncan is doing anything other than what the President, our biggest-name Democrat, wants him to do. A recent New Yorker profile reminds us that among those who have praised Jeb Bush's "work" in education are Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. Arguably the highest-profile Democratic governor in the country, Andrew Cuomo of New York, has announced in no uncertain terms his intention to break public education and the unions that work there. Randi Weingarten, head of the AFT and so representative of a traditional partnership between organized labor and the Democratic party, has come out in favor of the reformster agenda of testing and VAM-style evaluation.
Well, maybe House and Senate Democrats will ride to the defense of public education? Last Wednesday's hearing reminds us that no, that's not going to happen.
Ranking Democrat Sen. Patty Murray spouted the usual reformster lines. "Assessments help parents and communities hold schools accountable," she said as the hearing opened, repeating the reformster notion that without a big standardized tests, the quality of a school is somehow a mystery. Murray also opened the hearings with the need to get rid of redundant and bad tests, a meaningless assertion that simply serves as a weak manner for insisting that the Big Standardized Tests are necessary and excellent. Murray also threw in a reference to how hard other countries are working to out-compete us in education (because China is a nation whose culture, educational and otherwise, the US should really aspire to.)
What about Elizabeth Warren, who has emerged as a Democrat's Democrat, an alternative to the corporate clubby Hillary Clinton? Nope-- Warren is also of the opinion that when the federal government gives monetary support to local schools, in the name of not having said money wasted, it should get to exercise full oversight in the form of high stakes testing. The subtext of such oversight is, of course, that those of us who work in public education can't be trusted, not to mention a failure to recognize that huge amounts of money are being wasted right now. Senator Al Franken? As Jeff Bryant reported, Franken made
wondered if the whole darn mess could be cleared up by using “computer adaptive assessments.” (Maybe, if you want to spend a whole lot of time and money, a witness replied.)
The lone education friendly set of words came from Rhode Island's junior senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, a career politician and former US Attorney and AG in Rhode Island. I'm going to give you Bryant's version of these comments in their entirety, because they're the only high point of the hearings:
“My experience in the education world is that there are really two worlds in it. One is the world of contract and consultants and academics and experts and plenty of officials at the federal state and local level. And the other is a world of principals and classroom teachers who are actually providing education to students. What I’m hearing from my principals’ and teachers’ world is that the footprint of that first world has become way too big in their lives to the point where it’s inhibiting their ability to do the jobs they’re entrusted to do.”
Indeed, the footprint made by education policy leaders in classrooms has left behind a form of mandated testing that is “designed to test the school and not the student,” Whitehouse stated, and he described a dysfunctional system in which teachers don’t get test results in a timely fashion that makes it possible for them to use the results to change instruction. Instead, educators spend more time preparing for the tests and encouraging students to be motivated to take them, even though the tests have no bearing on the students’ grades, just how the school and the individual teachers themselves are evaluated.
Whitehouse urged his colleagues to consider more closely the purpose of testing – not just how many tests and how often but how assessments are used. He concluded, “We have to be very careful about distinguishing the importance of the purpose of this oversight and not allow the purpose of the oversight to be conducted in such an inefficient, wasteful, clumsy way that the people who we really trust to know to do this education – the people who are in the classroom – are not looking back at us and saying, ‘Stop. Help. I can’t deal with this. You are inhibiting my ability to teach.’”
So, among all the various Democrats in power, we've got one who gets it.
It seems that it's past time to pretend that the Democrats attacking American public education are aberrations or outliers. The reverse is true. The bright lights, the mainstream public faces of the Democratic Party have abandoned public education, combining the kind of pro-corporate privatizing agenda usually associated with the GOP with a cartoon-Democrat affection for government overreach.
Does that mean we should turn to the GOP? Doubtful. Committee Chair Senator Lamar Alexander is an opponent of much of the current administration's education policy, but he also loves him some charter and voucher programs, so he's not exactly a public education BFF either. And while most GOP politicians are now treating the words "Common Core" as if they are highly radioactive, that doesn't mean they are looking to support public education, either.
In terms of policy, the biggest difference between the parties may be that Democrats still occasionally feel the need to hide their druthers behind language designed to keep teachers and other public school advocates from deserting them, whereas Republicans don't try to pretend that teachers, their work, and their union matter factor in GOP political calculations.
Somehow US public education in just one short decade has transformed from the baby that every politician was ready to kiss into the ugly kid that nobody wants to go to Prom with. In this environment, I'm honestly not sure who there is to speak up for public education in the political world, but I hope we can figure it out soon, because the hearings last week were one more reminder that there is no cavalry coming any time soon.
Many supporters of the public school system and the teachers who work there have been in denial for a while. They've tried to dismiss nominally Democratic voices touting reformster policy as outlier, or Democrats in Name Only. DFER is so clearly part of a privatizing agenda-- surely that's not what Democrats stand for. And last summer union members agitated for a resolution condemning Arne Duncan and calling for his ouster, as if Duncan were some sort of rogue agent and some day Barack Obama would wake up, read a Department of Education briefing and exclaim, "He's doing what!!?! We'll have to do something about that right away!"
But the names and the stories just keep stacking up and stacking up. After six years, we can no longer pretend that Arne Duncan is doing anything other than what the President, our biggest-name Democrat, wants him to do. A recent New Yorker profile reminds us that among those who have praised Jeb Bush's "work" in education are Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. Arguably the highest-profile Democratic governor in the country, Andrew Cuomo of New York, has announced in no uncertain terms his intention to break public education and the unions that work there. Randi Weingarten, head of the AFT and so representative of a traditional partnership between organized labor and the Democratic party, has come out in favor of the reformster agenda of testing and VAM-style evaluation.
Well, maybe House and Senate Democrats will ride to the defense of public education? Last Wednesday's hearing reminds us that no, that's not going to happen.
Ranking Democrat Sen. Patty Murray spouted the usual reformster lines. "Assessments help parents and communities hold schools accountable," she said as the hearing opened, repeating the reformster notion that without a big standardized tests, the quality of a school is somehow a mystery. Murray also opened the hearings with the need to get rid of redundant and bad tests, a meaningless assertion that simply serves as a weak manner for insisting that the Big Standardized Tests are necessary and excellent. Murray also threw in a reference to how hard other countries are working to out-compete us in education (because China is a nation whose culture, educational and otherwise, the US should really aspire to.)
What about Elizabeth Warren, who has emerged as a Democrat's Democrat, an alternative to the corporate clubby Hillary Clinton? Nope-- Warren is also of the opinion that when the federal government gives monetary support to local schools, in the name of not having said money wasted, it should get to exercise full oversight in the form of high stakes testing. The subtext of such oversight is, of course, that those of us who work in public education can't be trusted, not to mention a failure to recognize that huge amounts of money are being wasted right now. Senator Al Franken? As Jeff Bryant reported, Franken made
wondered if the whole darn mess could be cleared up by using “computer adaptive assessments.” (Maybe, if you want to spend a whole lot of time and money, a witness replied.)
The lone education friendly set of words came from Rhode Island's junior senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, a career politician and former US Attorney and AG in Rhode Island. I'm going to give you Bryant's version of these comments in their entirety, because they're the only high point of the hearings:
“My experience in the education world is that there are really two worlds in it. One is the world of contract and consultants and academics and experts and plenty of officials at the federal state and local level. And the other is a world of principals and classroom teachers who are actually providing education to students. What I’m hearing from my principals’ and teachers’ world is that the footprint of that first world has become way too big in their lives to the point where it’s inhibiting their ability to do the jobs they’re entrusted to do.”
Indeed, the footprint made by education policy leaders in classrooms has left behind a form of mandated testing that is “designed to test the school and not the student,” Whitehouse stated, and he described a dysfunctional system in which teachers don’t get test results in a timely fashion that makes it possible for them to use the results to change instruction. Instead, educators spend more time preparing for the tests and encouraging students to be motivated to take them, even though the tests have no bearing on the students’ grades, just how the school and the individual teachers themselves are evaluated.
Whitehouse urged his colleagues to consider more closely the purpose of testing – not just how many tests and how often but how assessments are used. He concluded, “We have to be very careful about distinguishing the importance of the purpose of this oversight and not allow the purpose of the oversight to be conducted in such an inefficient, wasteful, clumsy way that the people who we really trust to know to do this education – the people who are in the classroom – are not looking back at us and saying, ‘Stop. Help. I can’t deal with this. You are inhibiting my ability to teach.’”
So, among all the various Democrats in power, we've got one who gets it.
It seems that it's past time to pretend that the Democrats attacking American public education are aberrations or outliers. The reverse is true. The bright lights, the mainstream public faces of the Democratic Party have abandoned public education, combining the kind of pro-corporate privatizing agenda usually associated with the GOP with a cartoon-Democrat affection for government overreach.
Does that mean we should turn to the GOP? Doubtful. Committee Chair Senator Lamar Alexander is an opponent of much of the current administration's education policy, but he also loves him some charter and voucher programs, so he's not exactly a public education BFF either. And while most GOP politicians are now treating the words "Common Core" as if they are highly radioactive, that doesn't mean they are looking to support public education, either.
In terms of policy, the biggest difference between the parties may be that Democrats still occasionally feel the need to hide their druthers behind language designed to keep teachers and other public school advocates from deserting them, whereas Republicans don't try to pretend that teachers, their work, and their union matter factor in GOP political calculations.
Somehow US public education in just one short decade has transformed from the baby that every politician was ready to kiss into the ugly kid that nobody wants to go to Prom with. In this environment, I'm honestly not sure who there is to speak up for public education in the political world, but I hope we can figure it out soon, because the hearings last week were one more reminder that there is no cavalry coming any time soon.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Bush: Nuanced and Wrong
As Jeb Bush's Reformapalooza gets under way, Bush himself is tap-dancing carefully to stick with his beloved Common Core without letting it actually stomp on the toes of his Presidential hopes.
At the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton gives us a look at his opening speech and gives him credit for slathering on the nuance. Perhaps. Let's look.
Bush includes a comparison to the Chinese, because when it comes to cultures we want to emulate, you can't beat the Chinese. This is one of the wonders of modern education reform-- that we've come to a place where some conservatives idolize the world's largest repressive Communist regime. Anyway, he compares this to his mischaracterization of the Florida district that imposed a 50% floor for grades (I'll tackle that subject another day). Shanghai gets higher scores than we do, says Jeb, "So let's get real." If we're talking about ways to emulate the production of high test scores, Bush may be suffering from a little reality disconnect himself.
“We have built a nationwide reform movement based on a set of proven principles,” Bush told the gathering of several hundred state policy leaders, charter school managers and executives from education companies.
“Of course, choice is at the center of our reform efforts. But there are others: High standards. Rigorous, high-quality assessments. Accountability for school leaders. Early childhood literacy and ending social promotion. Digital and distance learning. Transparency for parents to see whether their schools are getting better or getting worse.”
Speaking of getting real, Bush might want to reconsider calling anything on his wish list a "proven principle." None of those have been proven to be effective.
“If we were designing our school system from scratch, what would it look like? I know one thing: We wouldn’t start with more than 13,000 government-run, unionized and politicized monopolies who trap good teachers, administrators and struggling students in a system nobody can escape. We would be insane if we recreated what we have today.”
That's an interesting way to approach it. It would be interesting to see him finish the thought. Would we be insane to try to create a system that provides a free education for every single child in the United States as long as the country exists? Does he imagine that a free market choice approach could do that? Because if he does, I believe he's nuts. A free market will gladly provide an education for the students who can be profitably served, for as long as it pleases the vendor to do so. A free market will gladly discard any children it doesn't think it can make a buck educating. That would be an insane system.
“In my view, every education dollar should depend on what the child needs, not what the federal bureaucrat wants,” he said. “Where the child goes, the dollars should go as well. When that happens, we’ll see major reforms and major gains for America’s children and the federal government will go back to playing the supportive and completely secondary role it should be playing.”
A talking point straight from the charter school marketing bible. It makes two hugely incorrect assumptions:
1) It costs no more to educate 100 students in 100 schools than it does to educate 100 students in a single school. This is self-evidently bunk.
2) That the only two parties with a stake in education are the child and the federal government. School tax money is not a stipend paid to each individual child. It is an investment by the community in the community. I agree-- the feds should play a secondary, or even quaduciary role, in education. Particularly when federal ed policy is being dictated by the kind of anti-public-ed amateurs we've been subjected to for at least two administrations (and probably the next one, too). But local communities and, to a lesser extent, states should be hugely involved.
Choice and charters are, of course, all about cutting local control and community investment out of the picture. That is simply wrong, and bad for education as well.
Bush may be nuancing himself from CCSS cheerleading back to charter champion, but he's still bad for education.
At the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton gives us a look at his opening speech and gives him credit for slathering on the nuance. Perhaps. Let's look.
Bush includes a comparison to the Chinese, because when it comes to cultures we want to emulate, you can't beat the Chinese. This is one of the wonders of modern education reform-- that we've come to a place where some conservatives idolize the world's largest repressive Communist regime. Anyway, he compares this to his mischaracterization of the Florida district that imposed a 50% floor for grades (I'll tackle that subject another day). Shanghai gets higher scores than we do, says Jeb, "So let's get real." If we're talking about ways to emulate the production of high test scores, Bush may be suffering from a little reality disconnect himself.
“We have built a nationwide reform movement based on a set of proven principles,” Bush told the gathering of several hundred state policy leaders, charter school managers and executives from education companies.
“Of course, choice is at the center of our reform efforts. But there are others: High standards. Rigorous, high-quality assessments. Accountability for school leaders. Early childhood literacy and ending social promotion. Digital and distance learning. Transparency for parents to see whether their schools are getting better or getting worse.”
Speaking of getting real, Bush might want to reconsider calling anything on his wish list a "proven principle." None of those have been proven to be effective.
“If we were designing our school system from scratch, what would it look like? I know one thing: We wouldn’t start with more than 13,000 government-run, unionized and politicized monopolies who trap good teachers, administrators and struggling students in a system nobody can escape. We would be insane if we recreated what we have today.”
That's an interesting way to approach it. It would be interesting to see him finish the thought. Would we be insane to try to create a system that provides a free education for every single child in the United States as long as the country exists? Does he imagine that a free market choice approach could do that? Because if he does, I believe he's nuts. A free market will gladly provide an education for the students who can be profitably served, for as long as it pleases the vendor to do so. A free market will gladly discard any children it doesn't think it can make a buck educating. That would be an insane system.
“In my view, every education dollar should depend on what the child needs, not what the federal bureaucrat wants,” he said. “Where the child goes, the dollars should go as well. When that happens, we’ll see major reforms and major gains for America’s children and the federal government will go back to playing the supportive and completely secondary role it should be playing.”
A talking point straight from the charter school marketing bible. It makes two hugely incorrect assumptions:
1) It costs no more to educate 100 students in 100 schools than it does to educate 100 students in a single school. This is self-evidently bunk.
2) That the only two parties with a stake in education are the child and the federal government. School tax money is not a stipend paid to each individual child. It is an investment by the community in the community. I agree-- the feds should play a secondary, or even quaduciary role, in education. Particularly when federal ed policy is being dictated by the kind of anti-public-ed amateurs we've been subjected to for at least two administrations (and probably the next one, too). But local communities and, to a lesser extent, states should be hugely involved.
Choice and charters are, of course, all about cutting local control and community investment out of the picture. That is simply wrong, and bad for education as well.
Bush may be nuancing himself from CCSS cheerleading back to charter champion, but he's still bad for education.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Jeb's National Education Summit
It's almost November and that means it's time to start making our plans to attend Bush III's National Education Summit, brought to you by your friends at Jeb Bush for President 2016 Foundation for Excellence in Education. It's a giant reformsterpalooza. (For some great stories from previous summits, read here and here.)
This year's theme is Unlocking Student Achievement: Choice * Accountability and it provides a great template for how we can peddle all of the regular reformster wares even as we completely scrub them of any reference to the Common Core. Bush III has been scrubbing all of theroyal presidential educational advocacy materials lately, having noticed that being a Common Core Adorer is not winning him big love from the conservative wing of the GOP. Note this fundraising letter that completely avoids any mention of Bush III's previous policy BFF.
The national conference may be Common Core Free, but it is still stacked tall with reformy baloney. Here are the sessions you can expect to enjoy if you attend, and to save you time, I'll go ahead and predict the takeaways for each right now.
After Bush III's opening keynote (still working on a title, I guess), will be followed by these strategy sessions:
Measurement 2.0: Elevating students by testing what you teach
"States are adopting more rigorous academic standards" is about as close as we get to acknowledging that the Core exist (though if we're talking in present tense "dumping and distancing themselves from" might make a better sentence middle here).
But add to your stack of 1001 Statements That Prove CCSS and Tests Cannot Be Decoupled this sentence:
A standard without accurate measurement and strong accountability quickly becomes optional.
You can't kill the tests without killing the standards, and don't think for a moment that reformsters don't understand that. At any rate, this session focuses on the search for a super-duper test that is impervious to test prep and rote learning, and which measures critical thinking and depth of understanding. We will hear from four states about their search for this mythical test. Since the four states are Kentucky, Idaho, Mississippi and Florida (Pam Stewart will be there, perhaps to explain why tests should be administered to dying children), so I think we can cut to the chase, which is that nobody yet has the slightest clue how to create this mythically awesome tests.
Autonomy vs. Accountability: The right mix for school choice programs
We're talking about private school choice programs here. Michael McShane will be leading the panel, which includes leaders from FEE, Step Up for Students, and Alliance for School Choice. Let's go ahead and predict that the right mix is "Let them do whatever the hell they want."
Communicating Reform Part 1: Crafting e-messages people will read and watch
Given the short life and sad demise of the "Learn More. Go Further" PR campaign that Bush and Friends launched. complete with sad sponsored teacher twitter accounts, I'm not sure FEE is the group to give advice about this. But somebody must because " we are confronted by an organized and well-funded opposition dedicated to maintaining the status quo." All I can say is-- somebody had better cough up my share of this well-fundedness, because I am clearly not getting a cut of the money that is buying other public education advocates their summer homes and fancy dijon mustard on their fancy ham sandwiches. I am literally sitting here at my desk in pajamas with a toasted bagel perched atop my desk mess, and shortly the dog is going to demand to go poop in the back yard and I will have to take him myself. I wonder if Jeb Bush has to take his own dog to poop in the back yard. I wonder how all of these reformsters dogs will cope when their owners are all in DC for two days.
In short, "organized and well-funded," my ass.
But @TeacherFaye is going to be here on the panel, so I'm pretty sure the takeaway will be, "Yes, go on and use the twitter on the interwebs, and the young persons will see your message and become convinced by the twitness."
"because we won't let them" should probably be the rest of the title. FEE has beaten this drum since the first national convention in 2010, and the short form is simple-- flunk all third graders who can't pass your state's standardized reading test. The panel includes Mississippi State Senator Tollson and Ohio Superintendent Richard Ross; if you are expecting to hear the slightest lick of research por evidence that this test and punish retention plan is a sound and helpful idea, you should just go wait in line with the people waiting to see Sasquatch riding a unicorn across the Bridge to Atlantis.
Takeaway: we should flunk third graders who flunk the state test because eight year olds need to be whipped into shape. Uphill, both ways.
Innovation in the Certification Process: Rethinking teacher licensure
"Rethinking" is a great word. I am rethinking taking my dog out to poop because my wife is now up and if I rethink it long enough, I might get out of doing it. While I do not mean to compare teacher licensure to dog poop, I think the rethinking process is similar. The panel also seems to be interested in rethinking tenure and FILO. It includes John King, so you know this will totally not be about how to rethink your way to an easily managed, low paid, non-licensed teaching workforce.
Making Schools Better Instead of Just More Expensive: How to make your education dollars count
"Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is still widespread belief that school success is tied to school funding," begins this description. "So this panel will discuss how they cut the budgets of high achieving schools in rich neighborhoods down to level of low-achieving schools in poor neighborhoods because it shouldn't make any difference." Ha! Just kidding. This panel is led by Chester Finn. This panel will discuss how to "direct funds where they will do the most good" or, as I read it, how to rewrite funding rules so that generating good test scores gets you funding, because directing funding away from struggling schools so that they can be declared failures and closed is bad education, but damn fine business.
The Next Chapter in Educational Choice: Education Savings Accounts
aka "Maybe If We Try Legislating Vouchers This Way, We Can Finally Get Them Past the Courts."
Not Your Daddy’s Woodshop: Career and technical education in the 21st century
Possibly not stupid-- somebody has noticed that we have a problem filling high skills blue collar jobs. Since we haven't yet figured out how to make jobs like, say, welding as low-skills as making fries, we'll have to come up with a way to train these peoples. "This is definitely not your daddy's woodshop," they say, stopping just short of "And of course your mommy would never take wood shop because, no penis." The head of the US Chamber, heavy promoters of Common "Everyone Has To Go To College" Core will head this panel, so I hope he's taking his cognitive dissonance pills.
Accountability Works Workshop: A-F school grading
Another Bush III fave with no actual facts to back it up. Presumably we'll skip the unit on How To Tweak the System So You Don't Embarrass Your Charter School Friends.
Day II Starts with:
The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time: Access to a Quality Education
This general session is moderated by famous civil rights activist and educational expert Campbell Brown. Since she's only the moderator, presumably she will not deliver her speech on "How to squash uppity black ladies who try to horn in on your civil rights lawsuit action."
For actual panelists we get Andrew Malone of Harlem Success Academy, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Patrick Dobard or the New Orleans Recovery School District. The blurb suggests that this will be a demonstration of how to appropriate the language of civil rights to promote your business interests as you cash in in the education sector.
Communicating Reform Part 2: Delivering effective messages
Marketing strategy. This is about "how to effectively reach your target audiences with tailored messages." So I'm expecting an update of the classic Charter Messaging Bible.And it should be a good one-- one of the panelists is Felix Schein, president of RALLY, the PR firm that created the successful astroturf group Students Matter for David Welch. Expect some practical branding and messaging advice here.
Bridging the Access Gap: How to bring the best courses to every student, in every state
I last encountered this idea in Michael McShane's walk-and-talk video-- why voucherize entire schools when you can really unbundle and voucherize by individual classes. Charter operators, you should attend this session so that you can understand that when some reformsters look into the future of education, they don't see you.
Building Trust in the Classroom: Protecting student data privacy and security
The big question is why this is not entitled "Doing the Right Thing: Protecting student data and privacy." But in reformsterland, data security is a PR problem, not an actual problem. This session promises to address all the data security issues except the main ones. We're going to talk about securing your on-line gradebook, but apparently not for the wholesale collection, sharing and selling of the data gathered from high stakes testing.
And there you have it
The confab runs from early morning, Thursday, November 20, through Friday afternoon, thereby guaranteeing that the doors will not be darkened by anybody who actually works in a public school classroom. Registration for the event is $499, though you can apply for a scholarship. The conference will be held at the Washington Marriot Wardman Park, so, fancy.
But the organizers want you to know: "Attendees leave the National Summit armed with the knowledge and networks to advance bold education reform in their states." They call it an "uncommon conference" which is kind of hilarious because they have scrubbed every reference to certain common thing, so it is literally un-commoned. At any rate, it "serves as a catalyst for energizing and accelerating the reform movement across the nation. Be there or be left behind."
I would love to be there to watch and learn and write down things I could blog about in a well-funded and organized way later, but I actually lack the funding and I am using my personal days this year to visit my soon-to-be-newborn grandson. Also, somebody has to be here to take the dog out to poop. Priorities, you know.
This year's theme is Unlocking Student Achievement: Choice * Accountability and it provides a great template for how we can peddle all of the regular reformster wares even as we completely scrub them of any reference to the Common Core. Bush III has been scrubbing all of the
The national conference may be Common Core Free, but it is still stacked tall with reformy baloney. Here are the sessions you can expect to enjoy if you attend, and to save you time, I'll go ahead and predict the takeaways for each right now.
After Bush III's opening keynote (still working on a title, I guess), will be followed by these strategy sessions:
Measurement 2.0: Elevating students by testing what you teach
"States are adopting more rigorous academic standards" is about as close as we get to acknowledging that the Core exist (though if we're talking in present tense "dumping and distancing themselves from" might make a better sentence middle here).
But add to your stack of 1001 Statements That Prove CCSS and Tests Cannot Be Decoupled this sentence:
A standard without accurate measurement and strong accountability quickly becomes optional.
You can't kill the tests without killing the standards, and don't think for a moment that reformsters don't understand that. At any rate, this session focuses on the search for a super-duper test that is impervious to test prep and rote learning, and which measures critical thinking and depth of understanding. We will hear from four states about their search for this mythical test. Since the four states are Kentucky, Idaho, Mississippi and Florida (Pam Stewart will be there, perhaps to explain why tests should be administered to dying children), so I think we can cut to the chase, which is that nobody yet has the slightest clue how to create this mythically awesome tests.
Autonomy vs. Accountability: The right mix for school choice programs
We're talking about private school choice programs here. Michael McShane will be leading the panel, which includes leaders from FEE, Step Up for Students, and Alliance for School Choice. Let's go ahead and predict that the right mix is "Let them do whatever the hell they want."
Communicating Reform Part 1: Crafting e-messages people will read and watch
Given the short life and sad demise of the "Learn More. Go Further" PR campaign that Bush and Friends launched. complete with sad sponsored teacher twitter accounts, I'm not sure FEE is the group to give advice about this. But somebody must because " we are confronted by an organized and well-funded opposition dedicated to maintaining the status quo." All I can say is-- somebody had better cough up my share of this well-fundedness, because I am clearly not getting a cut of the money that is buying other public education advocates their summer homes and fancy dijon mustard on their fancy ham sandwiches. I am literally sitting here at my desk in pajamas with a toasted bagel perched atop my desk mess, and shortly the dog is going to demand to go poop in the back yard and I will have to take him myself. I wonder if Jeb Bush has to take his own dog to poop in the back yard. I wonder how all of these reformsters dogs will cope when their owners are all in DC for two days.
In short, "organized and well-funded," my ass.
But @TeacherFaye is going to be here on the panel, so I'm pretty sure the takeaway will be, "Yes, go on and use the twitter on the interwebs, and the young persons will see your message and become convinced by the twitness."
Education Begins with K-3 Literacy: If kids can’t read, they can’t graduate
"because we won't let them" should probably be the rest of the title. FEE has beaten this drum since the first national convention in 2010, and the short form is simple-- flunk all third graders who can't pass your state's standardized reading test. The panel includes Mississippi State Senator Tollson and Ohio Superintendent Richard Ross; if you are expecting to hear the slightest lick of research por evidence that this test and punish retention plan is a sound and helpful idea, you should just go wait in line with the people waiting to see Sasquatch riding a unicorn across the Bridge to Atlantis.
Takeaway: we should flunk third graders who flunk the state test because eight year olds need to be whipped into shape. Uphill, both ways.
Innovation in the Certification Process: Rethinking teacher licensure
"Rethinking" is a great word. I am rethinking taking my dog out to poop because my wife is now up and if I rethink it long enough, I might get out of doing it. While I do not mean to compare teacher licensure to dog poop, I think the rethinking process is similar. The panel also seems to be interested in rethinking tenure and FILO. It includes John King, so you know this will totally not be about how to rethink your way to an easily managed, low paid, non-licensed teaching workforce.
Making Schools Better Instead of Just More Expensive: How to make your education dollars count
"Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is still widespread belief that school success is tied to school funding," begins this description. "So this panel will discuss how they cut the budgets of high achieving schools in rich neighborhoods down to level of low-achieving schools in poor neighborhoods because it shouldn't make any difference." Ha! Just kidding. This panel is led by Chester Finn. This panel will discuss how to "direct funds where they will do the most good" or, as I read it, how to rewrite funding rules so that generating good test scores gets you funding, because directing funding away from struggling schools so that they can be declared failures and closed is bad education, but damn fine business.
The Next Chapter in Educational Choice: Education Savings Accounts
aka "Maybe If We Try Legislating Vouchers This Way, We Can Finally Get Them Past the Courts."
Not Your Daddy’s Woodshop: Career and technical education in the 21st century
Possibly not stupid-- somebody has noticed that we have a problem filling high skills blue collar jobs. Since we haven't yet figured out how to make jobs like, say, welding as low-skills as making fries, we'll have to come up with a way to train these peoples. "This is definitely not your daddy's woodshop," they say, stopping just short of "And of course your mommy would never take wood shop because, no penis." The head of the US Chamber, heavy promoters of Common "Everyone Has To Go To College" Core will head this panel, so I hope he's taking his cognitive dissonance pills.
Accountability Works Workshop: A-F school grading
Another Bush III fave with no actual facts to back it up. Presumably we'll skip the unit on How To Tweak the System So You Don't Embarrass Your Charter School Friends.
Day II Starts with:
The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time: Access to a Quality Education
This general session is moderated by famous civil rights activist and educational expert Campbell Brown. Since she's only the moderator, presumably she will not deliver her speech on "How to squash uppity black ladies who try to horn in on your civil rights lawsuit action."
For actual panelists we get Andrew Malone of Harlem Success Academy, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Patrick Dobard or the New Orleans Recovery School District. The blurb suggests that this will be a demonstration of how to appropriate the language of civil rights to promote your business interests as you cash in in the education sector.
Communicating Reform Part 2: Delivering effective messages
Marketing strategy. This is about "how to effectively reach your target audiences with tailored messages." So I'm expecting an update of the classic Charter Messaging Bible.And it should be a good one-- one of the panelists is Felix Schein, president of RALLY, the PR firm that created the successful astroturf group Students Matter for David Welch. Expect some practical branding and messaging advice here.
Bridging the Access Gap: How to bring the best courses to every student, in every state
I last encountered this idea in Michael McShane's walk-and-talk video-- why voucherize entire schools when you can really unbundle and voucherize by individual classes. Charter operators, you should attend this session so that you can understand that when some reformsters look into the future of education, they don't see you.
Building Trust in the Classroom: Protecting student data privacy and security
The big question is why this is not entitled "Doing the Right Thing: Protecting student data and privacy." But in reformsterland, data security is a PR problem, not an actual problem. This session promises to address all the data security issues except the main ones. We're going to talk about securing your on-line gradebook, but apparently not for the wholesale collection, sharing and selling of the data gathered from high stakes testing.
And there you have it
The confab runs from early morning, Thursday, November 20, through Friday afternoon, thereby guaranteeing that the doors will not be darkened by anybody who actually works in a public school classroom. Registration for the event is $499, though you can apply for a scholarship. The conference will be held at the Washington Marriot Wardman Park, so, fancy.
But the organizers want you to know: "Attendees leave the National Summit armed with the knowledge and networks to advance bold education reform in their states." They call it an "uncommon conference" which is kind of hilarious because they have scrubbed every reference to certain common thing, so it is literally un-commoned. At any rate, it "serves as a catalyst for energizing and accelerating the reform movement across the nation. Be there or be left behind."
I would love to be there to watch and learn and write down things I could blog about in a well-funded and organized way later, but I actually lack the funding and I am using my personal days this year to visit my soon-to-be-newborn grandson. Also, somebody has to be here to take the dog out to poop. Priorities, you know.
Sunday, May 18, 2014
FEE & FL Spew Out Silly Test Advice
Are your students worried about big stupid standardized tests? Well, Jeb Bush's shiny ed initiative has some help for you.
You may recall that Jeb Bush has been scaling up the Learn More Go Further campaign. The educational reformy initiative has been scaled up for a national audience-- it's almost as if Jeb is trying to prepare for some sort of national campaign of some sort. Learn More Go Further is what you would get if you set out to collect every bit of numbskullery ever said about the Common Core. You can read about this nifty initiative here, and follow it up with this account of their sad attempt to make use of that twitter thingy all the young folks are talking about.
My earlier attempts at shaming them notwithstanding (it's almost as if they aren't really worried about what some D-list blogger says about them), the LMGF folks have continued to crank out educational whiz-bangery including this-- a special printout guide for students who are concerned about whatever cockamamie test they are about to be subjected to.
Page one has a header of two chipper young (10-ish) students holding their bright yellow pencils-- wait! what? Are they not getting ready to take their FCATs on line? Are we not all planning to take our Big Tests on line? Maybe our intent is not to scare the children, but if that's the case, we run into trouble in the very first paragraph, which is this:
Over the past 15 years, Florida has successfully taken steps to implement policies to
increase the quality of education for students. This has resulted in vast academic improvements, made evident through the state surging upwards in national rankings.
Yes, I'm imagining the conversation between millions of third graders on their way to school on test day.
Chris: Hey, are you ready to do some surging upwards today?
Pat: Yeah, baby! Watch me take some successful steps to implement this policy!
Okay, so nobody talks like the ad copy on this flier, but you know who especially doesn't talk like that? The students that these fliers are theoretically aimed at. Perhaps it gets better, you say? Oh, honey.
Along with the hard work of teachers, students and parents, Florida’s transformation is largely rooted in accountability and assessments. A commitment to higher academic standards and aligned assessments are the next steps. By creating smarter, more efficient tests that push students to apply knowledge, students will develop greater critical thinking and analytical skills to prepare them for life after high school.
Two paragraphs in and we still haven't said a single thing that would be spoken by a real live human being, AND we've managed to wrap this verbacious gobbledeegook around utter bullshit. The impressive achievement here is that there isn't a single verifiable, supportable, non-baloney claim in this paragraph. What transformation? How do you trace the cause and effect? What is a smarter, more efficient test, and how exactly does it make students better thinkers? And why is any of this on a flier whose intended audience is students?????
And then-- oh, dear reader, oh sweet lord in heaven-- there is this. In the flier version it's just text, but Kris Nielsen located this awesome suitable-for-hanging poster version
I give the LMGF folks credit for just one thing-- it looks like they might have recognized that one of the great giant gaping holes in the narrative of test-based accountability is that students can't see any earthly reason to give so much as one half of a gluteus rattus about testing. But hey kids-- testing is a part of life! All these professionals-- all they do is just take a test and pass it and they are ready to fly a plane into surgery.
Well, that's page one. Page two has the actual tips for students facing a test. And first, to remind you that this whole thing was written by someone who has never met an actual child, we start with "While tests may seem scary, and some associated nervousness is normal, there are ways you can properly prepare to reduce stress." Yes, many's the time that teachers all the way from K through 12 have sat their students down and reassured them by looking them in the eye and saying soft, soothing tones, "Some associated nervousness is normal." I think Teddy Ruxpin used to have a chip programmed with that line.
Tips? We've got tips!
Before the test, approach the test with confidence. Get a good night's sleep. And-- as God is my witness I am not making this shit up-- "Strive for a relaxed state of concentration." Perhaps the writer chose the elevated diction to hide the ridiculousness of the advice-- work real hard to be relaxed. And also, don't take the test on an empty stomach. Fresh fruits and vegetables help reduce stress, so pound back some broccoli for breakfast on test day. (We'll ignore the traditional advice, which is don't eat out of the ordinary because it will make you drowsy).
After the test, check your answers and make sure you didn't make any silly mistakes. Then celebrate your achievement. I'm not sure if that means on the spot, like dancing in the aisle, or after school, when you try to share broccoli farts on the bus.
What about during the test? That's the biggest list. Read and follow the directions. Don't get frustrated and/or quit. Skip hard ones and come back. Use process of elimination (which it goes on to explain, as if this specific technique isn't routinely drilled into students' heads during the weeks of test prep prior to the test). And this-- "Don’t panic when other students appear to be finished. There’s no reward for finishing first." This is true; there will, however, be punishments for finishing at the bottom of the pack, so think about doing what you can to distract and sabotage your classmates, because their success will be your failure thanks to the magic of test results stack ranking.
Presumably LMGF envisions this handout being given to every testing student in Florida. It underlines, once again, twice, how much groups like this are envisioning imaginary children taking tests under imaginary conditions that will produce results of imaginary validity.
You may recall that Jeb Bush has been scaling up the Learn More Go Further campaign. The educational reformy initiative has been scaled up for a national audience-- it's almost as if Jeb is trying to prepare for some sort of national campaign of some sort. Learn More Go Further is what you would get if you set out to collect every bit of numbskullery ever said about the Common Core. You can read about this nifty initiative here, and follow it up with this account of their sad attempt to make use of that twitter thingy all the young folks are talking about.
My earlier attempts at shaming them notwithstanding (it's almost as if they aren't really worried about what some D-list blogger says about them), the LMGF folks have continued to crank out educational whiz-bangery including this-- a special printout guide for students who are concerned about whatever cockamamie test they are about to be subjected to.
Page one has a header of two chipper young (10-ish) students holding their bright yellow pencils-- wait! what? Are they not getting ready to take their FCATs on line? Are we not all planning to take our Big Tests on line? Maybe our intent is not to scare the children, but if that's the case, we run into trouble in the very first paragraph, which is this:
Over the past 15 years, Florida has successfully taken steps to implement policies to
increase the quality of education for students. This has resulted in vast academic improvements, made evident through the state surging upwards in national rankings.
Yes, I'm imagining the conversation between millions of third graders on their way to school on test day.
Chris: Hey, are you ready to do some surging upwards today?
Pat: Yeah, baby! Watch me take some successful steps to implement this policy!
Okay, so nobody talks like the ad copy on this flier, but you know who especially doesn't talk like that? The students that these fliers are theoretically aimed at. Perhaps it gets better, you say? Oh, honey.
Along with the hard work of teachers, students and parents, Florida’s transformation is largely rooted in accountability and assessments. A commitment to higher academic standards and aligned assessments are the next steps. By creating smarter, more efficient tests that push students to apply knowledge, students will develop greater critical thinking and analytical skills to prepare them for life after high school.
Two paragraphs in and we still haven't said a single thing that would be spoken by a real live human being, AND we've managed to wrap this verbacious gobbledeegook around utter bullshit. The impressive achievement here is that there isn't a single verifiable, supportable, non-baloney claim in this paragraph. What transformation? How do you trace the cause and effect? What is a smarter, more efficient test, and how exactly does it make students better thinkers? And why is any of this on a flier whose intended audience is students?????
And then-- oh, dear reader, oh sweet lord in heaven-- there is this. In the flier version it's just text, but Kris Nielsen located this awesome suitable-for-hanging poster version
Well, that's page one. Page two has the actual tips for students facing a test. And first, to remind you that this whole thing was written by someone who has never met an actual child, we start with "While tests may seem scary, and some associated nervousness is normal, there are ways you can properly prepare to reduce stress." Yes, many's the time that teachers all the way from K through 12 have sat their students down and reassured them by looking them in the eye and saying soft, soothing tones, "Some associated nervousness is normal." I think Teddy Ruxpin used to have a chip programmed with that line.
Tips? We've got tips!
Before the test, approach the test with confidence. Get a good night's sleep. And-- as God is my witness I am not making this shit up-- "Strive for a relaxed state of concentration." Perhaps the writer chose the elevated diction to hide the ridiculousness of the advice-- work real hard to be relaxed. And also, don't take the test on an empty stomach. Fresh fruits and vegetables help reduce stress, so pound back some broccoli for breakfast on test day. (We'll ignore the traditional advice, which is don't eat out of the ordinary because it will make you drowsy).
After the test, check your answers and make sure you didn't make any silly mistakes. Then celebrate your achievement. I'm not sure if that means on the spot, like dancing in the aisle, or after school, when you try to share broccoli farts on the bus.
What about during the test? That's the biggest list. Read and follow the directions. Don't get frustrated and/or quit. Skip hard ones and come back. Use process of elimination (which it goes on to explain, as if this specific technique isn't routinely drilled into students' heads during the weeks of test prep prior to the test). And this-- "Don’t panic when other students appear to be finished. There’s no reward for finishing first." This is true; there will, however, be punishments for finishing at the bottom of the pack, so think about doing what you can to distract and sabotage your classmates, because their success will be your failure thanks to the magic of test results stack ranking.
Presumably LMGF envisions this handout being given to every testing student in Florida. It underlines, once again, twice, how much groups like this are envisioning imaginary children taking tests under imaginary conditions that will produce results of imaginary validity.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Bush, FEE, The Chamber & How Not To Tweet
Have corporations learned how to make social media work for them yet? Well......
Last week we noted that Jeb Bush's FEE (Foundation for Excellence in Education) and the Higher States Standards Partnership (a group funded by the US Chamber of Commerce and a few others well explained here by Erin Osborne) were launching a shiny new Common Core promotional blitz. (And by "shiny" I mean "shiny in the same way that artificial turf is shiny.")
And somebody in the launching team apparently said, "Hey, let us use some of the social media that I hear is very hip these days. The social media with the viral things-- we should use some of that, because I hear it is big with the young persons. (Also, with the rap music.)"
To anchor this blitz-ish like sort-of onslaught, the marketing team deployed four teachers as the face of "Learn More. Go Further." The four include a Florida DOE teacher ambassador (and previous virtual school instructor), two charter school teachers, and a pubic school reading specialist recently promoted to assistant principal. Beyond the obvious non-public-school slant, there's the more subtle slant involved in choosing four ladies; no secondary man teachers. The designers of the program did select one apparently-Latina lady; the other three are looking mighty white. I'm not suggesting any of these choices reveal nefarious purposes, but given that they had to be deliberate marketing choices, I find them.... interesting.
More puzzling is the fact that the four ladies resemble each other pretty closely in physical type. Some people have made observations about the type, and I want to be clear that using a woman's body type as a basis for criticizing her is just unacceptable uber-jerk behavior, and those people need to either grow up or shut up. But regardless of what configuration we're talking about, these four women look very much the same. I'm reduced to telling them apart by hair style. If four women look like each other, I don't see that as a sign of dark conspiracy-- but this is somebody's deliberate choice, and the messaging was supposed to be, "Look-- a wide variety of teachers support Common Core," then somebody failed.
At any rate. LMGF has set these four up with their own twitter accounts, because, you know, the social media. I've been following their progress. Let's see how they're doing.
@USTeacherFaye first tweeted in March 15. She has 33 tweets as I type this and each one is a promotional comment. Here's a typical tweet:
My passion for kids is what inspired me to be a teacher. My passion for their success is why I support Common Core: http://bit.ly/1fMIS5g
I can call this "typical" because she has actually tweeted it twice. Ditto for "Students face so many challenges. Academic standards shouldn't be one of them. Support Common Core." She usually tweets once or twice a day, but not on weekends. She has three re-tweets (two from LMGF and one from a Tom Greene at AEI). She has not once tweeted at anyone else, and she has not responded to any of the tweets directed at her, which seem to cover a wide range of Core-related crankiness.
@USTeacherRian lists herself as a government and economics teacher. Her first tweet is also March 15. She has 36 tweets and two retweets (one from LMGF and one from USTeacherFaye inviting people to follow the four spokesladies). She is also a one-or-two-a-weekday tweetress, but she was feeling feisty on April 2nd and responded to two critical tweets (CCSS is not a curriculum, y'all).
@USTeacherBeth is "excited to help more students go further to college and great careers." 33 tweets since March 15. I'll confess that I love Teacher Beth best of all. For one thing, she actually took a break from posting advertising copy with links to throw in an Emerson quote (“The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.”). For another, she has a whopping five posts in reply to others, and one of them is to me. I'd tweeted a variety of more substantive challenges to the ladies and was becoming sad at the lack of response, so I tweeted to all four that I was beginning to suspect that they were bots, or paid interns. Awesomely, Teacher Beth tweeted me the following reply:
"Neither."
So now I have a huge twitcrush on her and her minimalist post-modern sniptweeting.
@USTeacherAngela is the group slacker. With a mere 20 tweets, I think we can agree she's just not trying very hard. No tweets addressed to anyone, no responses to her critics. Come on, Teacher Angela. Step up your game.
Now, I said I'd get back to the ladies' critics, because I think there's important information to be gleaned there.
See, these four accounts are being promoted, as is the initiative and the ads that go with it. If like me you visit some of these materials, you'll start seeing links for LMGF fill your browser ad spaces, and the four ladies will be appearing regularly as promoted twitter feeds. Online marketing allows very carefully directed marketing-- so can we guess at whom FEE and HSSP are aiming themselves?
There are two types of criticism aimed at the ladies. One is from teachers; in many cases, specifically BATS. I suspect that has something to do with some posting I did on the BATs facebook page. But listen to some of the other posts:
"You are communist dupes" (seriously-- I'm not making this up)
"Fell [sic] free to be interviewed by someone like @GerriWillisFBN from @FoxBusiness otherwise this is just propaganda."
"#CommonCore is more engaging & focuses on the Gov. Master. That's why progressives and unions support it."
So, boys and girls, using our context clues, which audience seems to have been the recipient of LMGF's media attention? If you're guessing "conservatives," I'm with you. The freshly scrubbed friendly (mostly) white ladies (who are US teachers!) and an American flag-quoting logo are beginning to suggest to me that Learn More. Go Further is not really concerned with selling CCSS to everybody, but is mostly about trying, again, to get conservatives on board with the Core. After a close reading of the four twitter accounts, I'm concluding two things:
1) The folks behind this think that once you set up a twitter account and pay to promote it, buzz just sport of magically appears, even if you don't really do anything with it or engage anybody.
2) Jeb Bush is really worried that hard right conservatives will kneecap his White House dreams if he doesn't somehow get them to drink the CCSS Koolaid.
Judging from much of what the conservative press are writing (like this recent Michelle Malkin piece), these four ladies and the massive well-funded media machine they are stapled to the front of-- well, they've all got their work cut out for them.
[Update: The folks at Integrity in Education directed my attention to the fact that the women have EIGHT accounts-- each has one as a USTeacher and one as FLTeacher. Not a surprise as many aspects of the initiative still have FL pieces stuck from when this Florida specific program was scaled up to national level.
The FLTeacher accounts are pretty much the same story-- same time frame, same style of tweets, though a bit more chatty tone. Oddest difference-- the FL accounts give the ladies last names.
So my apologies for missing that part of the story. I'll do better faux journalism in the future.]
Last week we noted that Jeb Bush's FEE (Foundation for Excellence in Education) and the Higher States Standards Partnership (a group funded by the US Chamber of Commerce and a few others well explained here by Erin Osborne) were launching a shiny new Common Core promotional blitz. (And by "shiny" I mean "shiny in the same way that artificial turf is shiny.")
And somebody in the launching team apparently said, "Hey, let us use some of the social media that I hear is very hip these days. The social media with the viral things-- we should use some of that, because I hear it is big with the young persons. (Also, with the rap music.)"
To anchor this blitz-ish like sort-of onslaught, the marketing team deployed four teachers as the face of "Learn More. Go Further." The four include a Florida DOE teacher ambassador (and previous virtual school instructor), two charter school teachers, and a pubic school reading specialist recently promoted to assistant principal. Beyond the obvious non-public-school slant, there's the more subtle slant involved in choosing four ladies; no secondary man teachers. The designers of the program did select one apparently-Latina lady; the other three are looking mighty white. I'm not suggesting any of these choices reveal nefarious purposes, but given that they had to be deliberate marketing choices, I find them.... interesting.
More puzzling is the fact that the four ladies resemble each other pretty closely in physical type. Some people have made observations about the type, and I want to be clear that using a woman's body type as a basis for criticizing her is just unacceptable uber-jerk behavior, and those people need to either grow up or shut up. But regardless of what configuration we're talking about, these four women look very much the same. I'm reduced to telling them apart by hair style. If four women look like each other, I don't see that as a sign of dark conspiracy-- but this is somebody's deliberate choice, and the messaging was supposed to be, "Look-- a wide variety of teachers support Common Core," then somebody failed.
At any rate. LMGF has set these four up with their own twitter accounts, because, you know, the social media. I've been following their progress. Let's see how they're doing.
@USTeacherFaye first tweeted in March 15. She has 33 tweets as I type this and each one is a promotional comment. Here's a typical tweet:
My passion for kids is what inspired me to be a teacher. My passion for their success is why I support Common Core: http://bit.ly/1fMIS5g
I can call this "typical" because she has actually tweeted it twice. Ditto for "Students face so many challenges. Academic standards shouldn't be one of them. Support Common Core." She usually tweets once or twice a day, but not on weekends. She has three re-tweets (two from LMGF and one from a Tom Greene at AEI). She has not once tweeted at anyone else, and she has not responded to any of the tweets directed at her, which seem to cover a wide range of Core-related crankiness.
@USTeacherRian lists herself as a government and economics teacher. Her first tweet is also March 15. She has 36 tweets and two retweets (one from LMGF and one from USTeacherFaye inviting people to follow the four spokesladies). She is also a one-or-two-a-weekday tweetress, but she was feeling feisty on April 2nd and responded to two critical tweets (CCSS is not a curriculum, y'all).
@USTeacherBeth is "excited to help more students go further to college and great careers." 33 tweets since March 15. I'll confess that I love Teacher Beth best of all. For one thing, she actually took a break from posting advertising copy with links to throw in an Emerson quote (“The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.”). For another, she has a whopping five posts in reply to others, and one of them is to me. I'd tweeted a variety of more substantive challenges to the ladies and was becoming sad at the lack of response, so I tweeted to all four that I was beginning to suspect that they were bots, or paid interns. Awesomely, Teacher Beth tweeted me the following reply:
"Neither."
So now I have a huge twitcrush on her and her minimalist post-modern sniptweeting.
@USTeacherAngela is the group slacker. With a mere 20 tweets, I think we can agree she's just not trying very hard. No tweets addressed to anyone, no responses to her critics. Come on, Teacher Angela. Step up your game.
Now, I said I'd get back to the ladies' critics, because I think there's important information to be gleaned there.
See, these four accounts are being promoted, as is the initiative and the ads that go with it. If like me you visit some of these materials, you'll start seeing links for LMGF fill your browser ad spaces, and the four ladies will be appearing regularly as promoted twitter feeds. Online marketing allows very carefully directed marketing-- so can we guess at whom FEE and HSSP are aiming themselves?
There are two types of criticism aimed at the ladies. One is from teachers; in many cases, specifically BATS. I suspect that has something to do with some posting I did on the BATs facebook page. But listen to some of the other posts:
"You are communist dupes" (seriously-- I'm not making this up)
"Fell [sic] free to be interviewed by someone like @GerriWillisFBN from @FoxBusiness otherwise this is just propaganda."
"#CommonCore is more engaging & focuses on the Gov. Master. That's why progressives and unions support it."
So, boys and girls, using our context clues, which audience seems to have been the recipient of LMGF's media attention? If you're guessing "conservatives," I'm with you. The freshly scrubbed friendly (mostly) white ladies (who are US teachers!) and an American flag-quoting logo are beginning to suggest to me that Learn More. Go Further is not really concerned with selling CCSS to everybody, but is mostly about trying, again, to get conservatives on board with the Core. After a close reading of the four twitter accounts, I'm concluding two things:
1) The folks behind this think that once you set up a twitter account and pay to promote it, buzz just sport of magically appears, even if you don't really do anything with it or engage anybody.
2) Jeb Bush is really worried that hard right conservatives will kneecap his White House dreams if he doesn't somehow get them to drink the CCSS Koolaid.
Judging from much of what the conservative press are writing (like this recent Michelle Malkin piece), these four ladies and the massive well-funded media machine they are stapled to the front of-- well, they've all got their work cut out for them.
[Update: The folks at Integrity in Education directed my attention to the fact that the women have EIGHT accounts-- each has one as a USTeacher and one as FLTeacher. Not a surprise as many aspects of the initiative still have FL pieces stuck from when this Florida specific program was scaled up to national level.
The FLTeacher accounts are pretty much the same story-- same time frame, same style of tweets, though a bit more chatty tone. Oddest difference-- the FL accounts give the ladies last names.
So my apologies for missing that part of the story. I'll do better faux journalism in the future.]
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