USED: King's Big Fail

It took Danny Harris's collapse to draw many people's attention. We should have been paying attention sooner.

Harris is the Chief Information Officer for the Department of Education. Prior to taking on that job in 2008, he was with the department's CFO office. He is a government lifer. And he was in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform because the US Department of Education is a big fat cyber-mess.

By late last year, in the wake of the huge security breach at Office of Personnel Management computers, Congress was checking the locks on the doors all around the federal government. And the Department of Education was spectacularly lousy. The Inspector General reported that her office found they could hack their way into USED systems with no particularly great effort. The department's data includes at least 139 million different social security numbers (so, almost half the US population), along with oversight of a trillion dollars.

Congress worked Harris like a chew toy back in November, at which time he did himself no favors by giving his department a 7 out of 10 when everyone else was giving the department F's and D's. So his recent collapse-inducing appearance in front of the House committee is the latest in a series.

The House Oversight Committee is headed by Jason Chaffetz. Chaffetz is an interesting story in his own right. The Utah Representative arrived at Brigham Young as a Jewish Democrat and left as a Mormon Republican. He earned early attention as one of the legislators who slept on a cot in his office rather than renting pricey DC digs. He's the guy who barely let the head of Planned Parenthood get a word in edgewise and ginned up the misleading cancer care vs. abortions chart. He's taken on the Secret Service, and he's also the guy who threatened to have US Marshalls hunt down Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley and drag him before Congress. And he's the guy leading the attempted interrogation of that odious pharma-troll Martin Shkreli this week. All in all, it seems safe to say that Chaffetz isn't afraid of a little tussle, though he is noted by many as a Representative who can play well bipartisanly, particularly within his committee.

All of this bode poorly for the Department of Ed in general and Danny Harris in particular when Chaffetz decided that Harris was the problem, both in terms of managerial skills and professional ethics. This last hearing was an odd mish-mosh of continued grilling about cyber-security, the ethical problems of Harris running a side business, and rigged awarding of department contracts to Harris's friend. Outside vendors are an issue for USED-- of the 184 data systems they manage, 120 are actually run by contracted vendors.

Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King had to put in an appearance and while it has been chronicled in many press accounts, nothing captures just how painful it is to watch King fumble and stonewall. One clip that is making the rounds starts with Harris's attempt to explain that although he was the program manager, he didn't lead the project-- so he was in charge, but not in charge, when his friend landed a contract.

Then he moves on to King. Chaffetz has laid out the contract irregularities, and by this point in proceedings, Harris has admitted that he failed to properly report the income from his side business to either the department or the IRS. Chaffetz will now try to get King to say that Harris's behavior was unethical and illegal (the full video is posted below, if you think you can stand it-- this starts at about the 3:15 mark).

Chaffetz: So Mr. King, how is that not a violation of regulation, policy or the law? He admitted that he had outside income above the two hundred dollar threshold and he did not report it either to the IRS nor on the ethics form. How is that not a violation of law, regulation or policy?

King: As you know the general council's role is to review-- our chief career ethics officer, her job is to review the findings from the inspector general and to determine whether or not there has been a violation of law or regulation or policy. General counsel advised--

Chaffetz: But you're asked to review that. You're the one that's supposed to look at that. You're not just supposed to read and say "Hey, that's what they say" and you still to this day believe that Mister Harris has done nothing wrong?

King: A-As I indicated previously, general counsel may--

Chaffetz: No, I want to know what you believe. All this evidence we've thrown out there, you still believe that there is nothing he's done wrong?

King: My responsibility is to rely on the guidance--

Chaffetz: No, your responsibility is to make a judgment--

King: to review the evidence--

Chaffetz: You're hired for your judgment. You're the acting secretary--

King: And based on the recommendation of the general counsel, based on the review that was conducted Deputy Secretary Miller when these incidents first occurred, Deputy Secretary Shelton, after further review of the inspector general's report, after review of the addendum which indicated that the Department of Justice declined further action, based on all those recommendations and the recommendations of our staff, yes, I believe that the department's actions in this case have been appro--

Chaffetz: I asked you if you believed that he had done anything wrong. To this day, do you believe he's done anything wrong?

King: I believe there were significant lapses of judgment. Counsel--

Chaffetz: To your mind is that doing something wrong?

King: Those significant lapses of judgment-- I counseled him on those and they ended by 2013.

Chaffetz: Is it a violation of policy or regulation or law to have outside income and not disclose.

King: The specific determination of whether--

Chaffetz: No no no no no--

King: evidence--

Chaffetz: Mr. King. With all due respect. You're a smart guy. You're in this position for a reason. I'm asking you, is it appropriate, because everybody at the Department of Education is watching you and what you're doing and there's a reason why you're scoring near the bottom of the heap, bottom ten percent of everybody in government. Every single key metric we look at is going down and it's your leadership that's on the line. I'm asking you is it appropriate, is it a violation of law or regulation or policy to have outside income purposely not disclose it?

King: Based on the recommendation of (our) general counsel I do not believe that there was a violation of law, regulation or policy--

Chaffetz: He admitted that he didn't do it-- he admitted that he didn't do it. You don't think that's--

That's eight times that Chaffetz tries to get an answer pried out of King. On the last attempt, King gets around to trying to defend his department about the charges of sucking at cyber security. Chaffetz will try once more at least to get King to say something like, "Yes, what he did was wrong." But he will try in vain. King will steadfastly assert that the general counsel said this was fine and somebody wrote out this cool talking point that he will hold onto like life itself.

Now, I think it's worth looking at this because I don't just see a guy who is stonewalling to protect one of his career bureaucrats. King here is a guy who clearly thinks that exercising judgment is not part of his job.

That's worth noting. We've seen all along that reformsters envision a world where classroom teachers exercise no personal or professional judgment, but simply follow procedures and structures handed down from faceless authorities. But watching King here, I'm realizing that it's not just a vision of how a classroom should work, but how the whole world should work. As long as your oversight policies don't set off alarms, as long as the program says you're okay, there is no responsibility or even need to look at something and say, based on your own human experience and judgment, "This is wrong."

As long as the bureaucracy is functioning in its bureaucratic way, no actual human thought or judgment, neither moral, ethical, professional or personal-- none of it is either needed or desired. That would seem to be Chaffetz's point-- in a department where nobody wants to talk about right and wrong, it is predictable that all sorts of things would come off the rails.

It's clear that King didn't singlehandedly create this mess (Arne Duncan supposedly only met with Harris about security issues once a month). It's equally clear that King is not the man to clean it up. And it is clearest of all that the Department is a drifting ship loaded with valuable cargo that it has no idea of how to protect.

USED Supports Unicorn Testing (With an Irony Saddle)

Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King has offered further guidance as a follow-up to last year's Testing Action Plan, and it provides a slightly clearer picture of the imaginary tests that the department wants to see.

Here are the characteristics of the Big Testing Unicorn that King wants to see:

Worth taking: By "worth taking," King means aligned to the actual classroom, and requiring "the same kind of complex work students do in an effective classroom and the real world, and provide timely, actionable feedback." There are several things to parse here, not the least of which is "timely, actionable feedback" for whom, and for what purpose? Is King's ideal test a formative assessment, and if so, is the implication that it shouldn't be used for actions such as grading at all?

"Worth taking" is one of those chummy phrases that sounds like it means something until you are pinned between the rubber and the road trying to figure out what it means exactly. In my own classroom, I certainly have standards for whether or not an assessment is worth giving, but that decision rests heavily on my particular students, the particular subject matter, and the particular place we are in our journey, all of which also connects to how heavily weighted the grade is and if, in fact, there will be a grade at all.

But King's vision of a test aligned to both classroom and the real world is a bit mysterious and not very helpful.

High quality: This means we hit the full range of standards and "elicits complex student demonstrations of knowledge" and is supposed to measure both achievement and growth. That is a huge challenge, since complex constellations of skills and knowledge are not always easily comparable to each other. Your basketball-playing child got better at foul shots and dribbling, but worse at passing and footwork. She scores more points but is worse at teamwork. Is she a better player or not?

Time-limited: "States and districts must determine how to best balance instructional time and the need for high-quality assessments by considering whether each assessment serves a unique, essential role in ensuring all students are learning."

So, wait. The purpose of an assessment is to ensure that all students learn? How exactly does a test ensure learning? It can measure it, somewhat. But ensure it?  Do you guys still not get that testing is not teaching?

This appears to say, "Don't let testing eat up too much instructional time." Sure. Of course, really good testing eats up almost no instructional time at all. On this point, the Competency Based Learning folks are correct.

Fair: The assessments are supposed to "provide fair measures of what all students, including students with disabilities and English learners, are learning." So this uber-test will accurately assess all levels of ability, from the very basement to the educational penthouse. King doesn't have any idea of how to do this, but he does throw the word "robust" in here.

Fully transparent to students and parents: King lists every form of transparency except the one that matters-- showing exact item by item results that include te question, the answers, and an explanation of why the test manufacturer believes their answer is the correct one. What KIng wants to make transparent is the testing PR-- reasons for the test, source of the mandate for the test, broad ungranulated reports of results, what parents can do even though we won't tell them exactly how their child's test went.

BS Tests currently provide almost no useful information, primarily because the testing system is organized around protecting the intellectual property rights of the test manufacturers. Until we address that, King's call for transparency is empty nonsense.

Just one of multiple measures: No single assessment should decide anything important. I look forward to the feds telling some states that they are not allowed to hold third graders back because of results on the BS reading test.

Tied to improved learning: "In a well-designed testing strategy, assessment outcomes should be used not only to identify what students know, but also to inform and guide additional teaching, supports, and interventions." No kidding. You know what my unattainable unicorn is? A world in which powerful amateurs don't make a big deal out of telling me what I already know as if they just discovered it themselves.

And your saddle of irony: Every working teacher reading this or the original letter has had exactly the same thought-- BS Tests like the PARCC and SBA and all the rest of them absolutely fail this list. The BS Tests don't measure the full range of standards, don't require complex, higher-order responses, suck up far too much time, cannot measure the full range of student ability, are supremely opaque, are given way too much weight as single measures, and are useless as tools for improving instruction. They are, in fact, not worth taking at all. Under this test action plan, they should be the first to go.

More swell ideas.

The letter comes with a five-page PS, ideas from the feds about how to improve your testing picture, or at least ways to score money from the department for that alleged purpose.

You could audit your state tests. You could come up with cool data-management systems, because bad, useless data is always magically transformed when you run it through computer systems. You might train teachers more in "assessment literacy," because we am dummies who need to learn how to squint at the ugly tests in order to see their beauty. You could increase transparency, but you won't. You could increase the reliability and validity of the tests-- or at least check and see if they have any at all to start with.

Or you could just take a whole bunch of testing materials and smack yourself over the head with them. Any of these seem like viable options for running your own personal state-level unicorn farm.

John King's Problem

The Washington Post put Lindsey Layton and Emma Brown together to create a profile of John King, former NY Ed Chieftain and future US Ed Department Temporary Faux Secretary. It's worth reading as a compendium of what many sources have already said about King.

There is apparently some sort of federal regulation saying that if one writes about King, one must treat his personal story as The Central Thing To Know about John King, and Brown, Layton, and the headine writer have observed that law assiduously. They also repeat some of the success claims for King's Uncommon School charters uncritically, but the profile is worth reading. I just want to focus on two quotes from it because they capture perfectly what I find so weirdly disconnected about King.

First, King's oft-mentioned reference to teachers saving his life as a boy:

One of them was Alan Osterweil at P.S. 276 in Brooklyn, who encouraged King to read the New York Times and Shakespeare in elementary school. “He was sort of a crazy guy — an ex-hippie who wore two-inch platform shoes,” King wrote in the Huffington Post in 2009. “But he was an amazing teacher.”

King was in Mr. Osterweil’s fourth-grade class when his mother, a Puerto Rico native and public school teacher, died of a heart attack. “The next morning, the only thing I insisted I wanted to do was go to school, your classroom,” King told Osterweil in an interview for the oral history project StoryCorps. “It felt like the most comfortable place to be.”

And now, looking at his implementation of standards and tests in New York:

Teachers said they didn’t have the training or materials to teach what children needed to know. They also felt pressure to raise scores to protect their jobs, and parents said that their children were bearing the brunt of that pressure as schools devoted more time and resources to test prep...

He also refused to slow down, saying that the pace of change was warranted given the numbers of children who were graduating without the skills they needed, or were not graduating at all.

This is what I find incomprehensible about King-- how he completely fails to make a connection between a formative experience that shaped him, and the experiences that he is shaping for students today. How could Mr. Osterweil's classroom possibly have survived Adult John King's reforms? I have no doubt that New York is still filled with teachers who would accommodate, welcome, and care for a small child whose mother had died just last night-- but for them it would have to be an act of rebellion to say, "Screw the pacing guide and the standards requirement and the canned test prep. Let's just make sure this classroom is a safe, welcoming, and supportive place."

I imagine Young John King arriving at the classroom where Adult John King stands behind Mr. Osterweil saying, "You can't slow down. You must maintain pace."

I just don't get it. And I don't get how John King doesn't get it, either.

Setting Cut Scores

Benchmark is originally a surveying term. Benchmarks are slots cut into the side of stone (read "permanent") structures into which a bench (basically a little shelf) can be inserted for surveying purposes. We know they're at a certain level because they've been measured in relation to another marker which has been measured in relation to another marker and so on retrogressively until we arrive at a Mean Sea Level marker (everything in surveying is ultimately measured in relation to one of those).

Surveying markers, including benchmarks, are literally set in stone. Anybody with the necessary training can find them always in the same place and measure any other point in relation to them.

This metaphorical sense of unwavering objective measure is what many folks carry with them to their consideration of testing and cut scores. Passing, failing, and excellence, they figure, are all measured against some scholarly Mean Sea Level marker by way of benchmarks that have been carefully measured against MSL and set in stone.

Sorry, no. Instead, cut scores represent an ideal somewhere between a blindfolded dart player with his fingers duct-taped together, and the guy playing against the blindfolded dart player who sets the darts exactly where he wants them.

Writing in the Stamford Advocate, Wendy Lecker notes that the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium members (including Connecticut's own committed foe of public education Commissioner Stefan Pryor) set cut scores for the SBA tests based on stale fairy dust and the wishes of dying puppies.

People tend to assume that cut scores-- the borderline between Good Enough and Abject Failure-- mean something. If a student fails The Test, she must be unready for college or unemployable or illiterate or at the very least several grades behind where she's Supposed To Be (although even that opens up the question "Supposed by whom?")

In fact, SBAC declares that the achievement levels "do not equate directly to expectations for `on-grade' performance" and test scores should only be used with multiple other sources of information about schools and students. 

Furthermore, "SBAC admits it cannot validate whether its tests measure college readiness until it has data on how current test takers do in college."

If you are imagining that cut scores for the high-stakes accountability tests are derived through some rigorous study of exactly what students need to know and what level of proficiency they should have achieved by a certain age-- well, first, take a look at what you're assuming. Did you really think we have some sort of master list, some scholastic Mean Sea Level that tells us exactly what a human being of a certain age should know and be able to do as agreed upon by some wise council of experty experts? Because if you do, you might as well imagine that those experts fly to their meetings on pink pegasi, a flock of winger horsies that dance on rainbows and take minutes of the Wise Expert meetings by dictating to secretarial armadillos clothed in shimmering mink stoles.

Anyway, it doesn't matter because there are no signs that any of these people associated with The Test are trying to work with a hypothetical set of academic standards anyway. Instead, what we see over and over (even back in the days of NCLB), is educational amateurs setting cut scores for political purposes. So SBAC sets a cut score so that almost two thirds of the students will fail. John King in New York famously predicted the percentage of test failure before the test was even out the door-- but the actual cut scores were set after the test was taken.

That is not how you measure a test result against a standard. That's how you set a test standard based on the results you want to see. It's how you make your failure predictions come true. According to Carol Burris, King also attempted to find some connection between SAT results and college success prediction, and then somehow graft that onto a cut score for the NY tests, while Kentucky and other CCSS states played similar games with the ACT.

Setting cut scores is not an easy process. Education Sector, a division of the thinky tank American Institutes for Research (they specialize in behavioral sciency thinking, and have a large pedigree in the NCLB era and beyond), issued an "explainer" in July of 2006 about how states set passing scores on standardized tests. It leads off its section on cut scores with this:

On a technical level, states set cut scores along one of two dimensions: The characteristics of the test items or the characteristics of the test takers.It is essential to understand that either way is an inescapably subjective process. Just as academic standards are ultimately the result of professional judgment rather than absolute truth, there is no “right” way to set cut scores, and different methods have various strengths and weaknesses.

The paper goes on to talk about setting cut scores, and some of it is pretty technical, but it returns repeatedly to the notion that at various critical junctures, some human being is going to make a judgment call.

Educational Testing Service (ETS) also has a nifty "Primer on Setting Cut Scores on Tests of Educational Achievement."  Again, from all the way back in 2006, this gives a quick compendium of various techniques for setting cut scores-- it lists eight different methods. And it also opens with some insights that would still be useful to consider today.

The first step is for policymakers to specify exactly why cut scores are being set in the first place. The policymakers should describe the benefits that are expected from the use of cut scores. What decisions will be made on the basis of the cut scores? How are those decisions being made now in the absence of cut scores? What reasons are there to believe that cut scores will result in better decisions? What are the expected benefits of the improved decisions? 

Yeah, those conversations have not been happening within anyone's earshot. Then there is this:

It is important to list the reasons why cut scores are being set and to obtain consensus among stakeholders that the reasons are appropriate. An extremely useful exercise is to attempt to describe exactly how the cut scores will bring about each of the desired outcomes. It may be the case that some of the expected benefits of cut scores are unlikely to be achieved unless major educational reforms are accomplished. It will become apparent that cut scores, by themselves, have very little power to improve education. Simply measuring a child and classifying the child’s growth as adequate or inadequate will not help the child grow. 

 Oh, those crazy folks of 2006. Little did they know that in a few years education reform and testing would be fully committed and devoted to the notion that you can make a pig gain weight by weighing it. All this excellent advice about setting cut scores, and none of it appears to be getting use these days.

I'm not going to go too much more into this document from a company that specializes in educational testing, except to note that once again, the paper frequently notes that personal and professional judgment is a factor at several critical junctures. I will note that they include this step--

The next step is for groups of educators familiar with students in the affected grades and familiar with the subject matter to describe what students should know and be able to do to reach the selected performance levels. 

They also are clear that selecting the judges who will set cut scores means making sure they are qualified, have experience, and reflect a demographic cross section. They suggest that policymakers consider fundamental questions such as is it better to pass a student who should fail, or fail a student who should pass? And they are also clear that the full process of setting the cut scores should be documented in painstaking detail, including the rationale for methodology and qualifications of the judges.

And they do refer uniformly to the score-setters as judges, because the whole process involves-- say it with me-- judgment.

People dealing with test scores and test results must remember that setting cut scores is not remotely like the process of surveying with benchmarks. Nothing is set in stone, nothing is judged based on its relationship to something set in stone, and everything is set by people using subjective judgment, not objective standards. We always need to be asking what a cut score is based on, and whether it is any better than a Wild Assed Guess. And when cut cores are set to serve a political purpose, we are right to question whether they have any validity at all.

Cuomo to Teachers: Drop Dead

If you have not yet seen the letter from Cuomo aid Jim Malatras to ed leaders Tisch and King, you can find a copy right here. If you want to see just how direct and ugly an attack by a governor on his own state's public education system can be, you should read it. If you are a teacher in New York, you should read it twice.

I'll hit the highlights, not because the letter's particularly hard to parse, but because some things are just so ugly, they need to be held up to the light as much and as often as possible.

It opens with the observation that New York's low success percentages for proficiency on the Big Test are simply "unacceptable" and therefore Cuomo will make sure that the cut scores are set at more acceptable levels as determined by educators and not politicians. Ha! Just kidding. He's going to pretend that those proficiency numbers represent something other than political gamesmanship by the governor's office.

Speaking of proficiency, the next paragraph opens with this sentence:

Governor Cuomo believes in public education it can open up unlimited opportunity to our students.

I believe Malatras he is not a careful proofreader. I sympathize. I am the king of speedy mistakes, as my readers can attest. But I'm not on the state payroll, writing documents of record.

Malatras goes on to say that "virtually everyone" thinks the system must be reformed and improved, and I wonder if he's counting the people who believe that reformation and improvement start with getting Cuomo's grabby hands off public education's neck. But no-- three guesses where efforts to fix schools must be focused:

Part of the package will be to strengthen one of our most important professions teaching. While some seek to demonize teachers, Governor Cuomo believes the exact opposite wanting to reward excellence in teaching and by recruiting the best and brightest into the profession. 

(Yes, the letter is riddled with mistakes. No further comment). Those damn teachers. those stupid incompetent teachers that Cuomo loves so very much.

Malatras goes on to note that the governor doesn't have a lot of control over education, and that this represents a wise and rational distribution of power in running a state. Ha! No, kidding again. Cuomo doesn't have that kind of power, so he's going to use the budget process to just take it. He's asking Tisch and King for their input on Cuomo's ideas as matter of policy (leave the politicking to the legislature). Here are Cuomo's Twelve Awesome Thoughts, with a bit of translation. You're welcome.

1) The teacher evaluation system sucks because it's not failing enough teachers. How can we jigger it so that more teachers are failed by it?

2) It's too hard to fire bad teachers. Hard work is hard. How can we make it less hard to get rid of the teachers that we'll be failing more of once we straighten out the evalouation process?

3) How can we make becoming a teacher harder? Because if we make it really hard to become a teacher, then teachers will be better. Can we give them all a competency test? Recruiting best and brightest would be cool.

4) Cuomo would still like to get merit pay up and running, because the fact that it has never worked anywhere doesn't change his love for how it would reduce payroll costs. Because recruiting teachers (point 3) goes better when you tell them they might get well paid if you feel like paying them more.

5) Could we make the pre-tenure period longer, and could we make their certification temporary so that they have to get re-approved every couple of years. We need to make them stop thinking of teaching as a lifetime career, because that's how you recruit the best and the brightest.

6) What can we do about schools that suck? Particularly Buffalo, because we would really like to accelerate the hand-over of Buffalo schools to charter operators, who make much better campaign contributions than low-paid teachers.

7) Charters? Charters charters charters. Can we just increase the cap in NYC? A whole lot?

8) Education special interests have resisted using courses delivered by computer. Could we just go ahead and do that anyway? Because one college instructor with a computer = 143 high school teachers we could fire.

9) What about mayoral control? It looked like a great idea in NYC until they elected some bozo who didn't get the deal with charters until Cuomo had the legislature rough him up a bit. Mayoral control is better than a damn elected board, but mayors are also elected and those damn voters are a pain in my ass.

10) Should we combine some of the 700 school districts in New York? (This might be the only thing on the list that isn't either evil or stupid. I would make fun of 700 different school districts in New York, but I'm in PA and we aren't any better).

11) The damn regents are appointed by the legislature. Do you think we should fix that, because having to work with people not under his direct control is a real problem for the governor.

12) We're about to replace Dr. King. Is there a way to have a transparent process to replace him with someone I pick?

Oddly enough, the Cuomo office has no interest in looking at rampant testing, craptastic canned curriculum, or widely unpopular standards. I would have said that it was hard to blame these not-beloved-by-teachers programs on teachers, but since Rudy Giuliani found a way to blame the death of Eric Garner on teachers, I'm going to accuse Cuomo of slacking on this department.

Several weeks ago Governor Cuomo said that improving education is thwarted by the monopoly of the education bureaucracy. The education bureaucracy's mission is to sustain the bureaucracy and the status quo and therefore it is often the enemy of change. The result is the current system perpetuates the bureaucracy but, fails our students in many ways.Tackling these questions with bold policy and leadership could truly transform public education and finally have it focus on the student as opposed to the bureaucracy. 

Because having power centered in places that aren't the governor's office is just, you know, bad.

In a charming coda, Malatras notes that King might now give even better advice now that he is unshackled from the political demands of his office, because you know that John King-- he was always so constrained by his deep concern about public opinion, and his willingness to listen to the public just tied him up. Now as a federal bureaucrat hired outside any sort of approval system, he'll be free to disregard public opinion entirely. Because A) that's a good thing and B) it's not at all how he conducted himself in his New York job.

Man, I just hope all those New York teacher union officials who carried Cuomo's water throughout the primary season are really enjoying this unfettered direct attack against the profession and the public schools. Tisch and King are supposed to get back to Cuomo with their advice on how best to kick New York's teachers in the teeth by December 31, so to all my NY teacher neighbors, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Enjoy the holidays, because 2015 will bring open season on public school teachers in the Empire State.

John King Joins DOPE

Look, let's just stop calling it the Department of Education, because Duncan does not lead a team of educators, and US public education is not their concern.

Let's call them what they are-- the Department of Privatizing Education. DOPE.

John King is just the latest addition, and his entry to the department is emblematic of how the department is now run.

It's not just that he has zero public education experience. It's not just that he was so remarkably awful in New York, with everything from pre-determining the failure rate for NY testing to refusing to meet with parents when they insisted on expressing opinions and speaking even when they hadn't been spoken to. It's not just that he's one more reformster whose clear priority is gutting public education and selling off the parts to privateers. It's not even that he managed to get the union to give him a vote of No Confidence.

This much is just business as usual at DOPE, where appointments are made based, not on educational qualifications, but on business resumes. His hiring represents one more step away from a government model toward a business model.

In government, people fill particular jobs. They need to get approval to fill those particular jobs. And they have a set of duties that go with that particular job. But in business, you can get hired just for being you. When Warren Buffet calls up Bob's Investment Hut and offers some help, Bob doesn't worry about whether he has an opening-- he just hires Buffet for being Buffet. Being hired for just being you also means your track record doesn't matter-- you may have failed at every undertaking you've ever undertaken, but if your cronies believe you're a Good Person from the Right Background, as God is your witness, you will never be hungry again (call it the Rhee Effect).

It is exactly the sort of oversight-free non-accountable model that DOPE likes, where Important People can just hire and fire whoever the hell they like because, hey, they're Important Businessmen. So now, in a move that allows them to skirt any kind of review, discussion, or accountability, they've hired John King to be John King. What will his job be, and how will he be held accountable for doing it (or not)? Shut up, taxpayers-- that's none of your business. Accountability is for peons; Important People should not be tied down by that sort of foolishness.

DOPE is not a government agency. It is not an organization devoted to maintenance and support of a public good. It's a business outpost, and its business is privatizing education. Viewed in its proper light, DOPE's hiring of the clueless, hapless, experience-free, public school unfriendly John King makes perfect sense. Even the use of Shakira as a celebrity spokesperson (yes, that was a thing) makes an odd sort of sense. Duncan's DOPE is only confusing if you expect them to behave like a government agency tasked with preserving and supporting American public education, but that makes as much sense as expecting PepsiCo to behave like a government agency devoted to promoting good nutrition. Just think of John King as the new Special Attache for Fatty Foods.

(Meanwhile, he'll be replaced by the NY regents-- the same folks who gave Ted Morris a charter because his paperwork looked just fine.)

John King's Story

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

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

Norman Atkins Leads Off

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

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

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

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

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

Classroom Is Key

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

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

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

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

Educational Rock Star

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

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

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

Boosting Common Core

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

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

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

King Tells His Story

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

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

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

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

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