This Is How Congress Annoys the Rest of Us

.@SenAlexander: This is a tough subject to deal with. If it were easy, it woulda been done years ago. Thanks committee for improving bill
— Politics K-12 (@PoliticsK12) April 15, 2015

That tweet came over at 4:30, after a long day of Congressional wrangling over the new ESEA. It's a perfectly harmless sort of thing to say after a bunch of work, and it's a perfect example of how government types see things differently than those of us who work for a living.

Let's look at that for a second, and then think about other peoples' work.

I mean, teaching is pretty tough, and the work that goes with it is a challenge to deal with. But I don't remember any of my colleagues ever looking at a new batch of students and saying, "Damn, this looks like a tough bunch to deal with. Let's put it off for seven or eight years."

In fact, you know what has made my job extra tough? All the fallout from a law that set unattainable standards that not a single human being thought could actually be met but, because Congress couldn't do its job, stayed in place and created leverage for even more terrible education pseudo-law.

And it's not just teachers.

Surgeons don't walk into an operating room, look at an injury or illness and say, "Damn, this is going to be hard to deal with. Let's just set it aside for seven or eight years."

Pastors don't look at parishioners who are dealing with extremely tough issues and say, "Wow, this will be hard to deal with. I'll just put it off for seven or eight years."

In fact, pretty much nobody gets up in the morning and says, "My job is going to be really hard to do today. I think I'll just put it off for seven or eight years."

No, for most folks, the rule is , when you have a job to do, you do it, and you do it when it needs to be done. People do hard things every day in this country. Every. Day. Do not give yourselves a ribbon for this.

Look, Congressing is hard. Senatoring is extremely difficult. I couldn't do it (regular readers can confirm that my diplomatic skills are lacking). But you folks signed up for it. You paid good money to be elected. Senators Alexander and Murray should be proud that their committee came closer to accomplishing something that eight years worth of previous Congressy folks.

And I do appreciate-- hugely appreciate-- the attempt to turn ESEA into something less trainwrecky and destructive than NCLB. It's important work, valuable work, work that I'm glad the Senate is doing (even if I disagree with plenty of the substance, I believe they're by and large trying to help).

But the correct thing to say at 4:30 today was, "Thank you for doing the job that we've been failing to do for seven years. On behalf of the several Congresses, we'd like to apologize for failing so long to do this necessary work. We are pleased that we are moving forward, but we are also ashamed that it took us so long to get the job done, while the old bad law continued to wreak havoc on the entire American education system. We are pleased to announce progress, and ashamed that we failed for so long to do so while teachers and students showed up every day to make the best of a bad law that we failed to address. You have done your jobs; now we are going to finally try to do ours."

He might even have added, "Boy, we can be so oblivious to what goes on out in the rest of the country, sometimes!"

That's what Senator Alexander should have had to say at 4:30 today.

Senate Proposal Cuts Duncan Off At Knees

The bipartisan proposal from the Senate Education Committee is settled and ready to see the light of day. There's some good news for public education and some bad news for the Obama administration.

Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) expressed a big ole bi-partisan hug of support for this baby, un-euphoniously entitled The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 (just once I would like to send a poet to DC). Let's look under the hood (you can find a handy summary of the bill here).

The (Partial) Defanging of Testing

Tests are still mandated entirely too often (every grade 3-8 and once in high school), but the bill leaves it to the states to decide what to do with the "data" that tests generate. States must use them in their accountability system, somehow, but it's up to the state to decide how. States will also be given flexibility "to pilot innovative assessment systems." The dream of a single national test, which was already for all intents and purposes dead-- that dream now has a fork in it.

States must keep parents informed and disaggregate data so that subgroups are not lost, so critics who are afraid that nobody would know that poor urban schools are in trouble without test results can now relax. But states must design their own system for intervening in failing schools, and as long as those systems fall within federal parameters, the states can do as they please. In fact, the feds are forbidden to interfere in the whole process. "The federal government is prohibited from determining or approving state standards."

Suck It, Arne

That "Hands off, feds" attitude runs throughout the bill. State plans are acceptable unless proven naught by the USED, and the feds only have 90 days to do so. The Secretary must approve a state plan within the 90 days unless the department "can present substantial evidence that clearly demonstrates that such State plan does not meet the bill's requirements." To whom will such evidence be presented? A peer review board composed of "experts and practitioners with school-level and classroom experience."

Yes, unlike the waiver system that requires state bureaucrats to bow and scrape for Duncan's official okey-dokey, now the secretary must go before actual educators and prove to their satisfaction that a state plan is not acceptable. And if they say it's not, the state still gets to appeal and resubmit. This strikes me a huge shift of the balance of power.

Also, "the bill affirms that states decide what academic standards they will adopt, without interference from Washington." The feds can't mandate a set of standards, and they can't "incentivize" one, either. "States will be free to decide what academic standards they will maintain in their states."

And! The bill does away with any federal requirement for states to develop and implement a teacher evaluation system. It even axes the definition of a highly qualified teacher.

State May Not Slack

The Title IV section appears to say, in brief, that this federal hands-offiness is not license for states to do a half-assed job providing education to their citizens.

Charter Chain Christmas

While the ECAA does include some language encouraging strong charter laws and strong charter transparency and strong charter community connection, the cheers in charter headquarters have to be for the strong and unequivocal endorsement of charters as part of the education landscape. It puts three charter grant programs into law.

Two endorse the launching of charters, with particular attention to "replicating" the successes of "high-quality" charter schools, which of course means that charter chains are hearing the merry ka-ching-a-ling-a-ling of Christmas morning.

The third grant program is also awesome if you are a charter profiteer-- the feds would like a grant program to help pay for the buildings that charters squat in. No word on whether Senators Alexander and Murray considered a bill to cut up charter operators food for them or hire federal agents to wipe the charter CEO's chin when he's drooling with glee.

Oh, Also, Bite Me, Arne

Down among the less-exciting Titles we find support for rural schools (basically releasing them from spending requirements that don't make sense in rural schools). Under Title IX we have additional assurance that states use federal money to help shore up state and local spending.

Also under Title IX, this:

This bill prohibits the Secretary from mandating additional requirements for states or school districts seeking waivers from federal law. The bill also limits the Secretary’s authority to disapprove a waiver request.

And For the Children

An extra point-- federal money may be used for early childhood education. So any and all of the above can be applied to Early Childhood education. So not the requirement for Pre-K that some folks were hoping for, but full permission to turn the federal money hose on the little ones.

So, What Do We Think?

All in all, this is a more pointed rebuke of the Obama administration's ed farfegnugen than I might have expected, but while it still keeps those stupid, worthless Big Standardized Tests enshrined, it frees states to make their own peace with them (and that testing requirement might reduce the possibility that the test manufacturers would loose their lobbying dogs to oppose the bill-- they can rest happy now because their payday is intact). Now, that will mean different things in different states-- I'm pretty sure Andrew Cuomo will be a giant ass to education whether the feds are pushing him to or not.

And while Common Core is all but dead, this certainly frees everyone up to slap it around some more. This bill wouldn't end the ongoing education debate, but it would break it up into fifty little arguments and if that doesn't do anything more than divide up the reformsters money and forces, that's a good thing.

Of course, we still have the onslaught of amendments and the bill from the House and the President's desk to get past. And the enshrinement of the rapacious charter school industry is not good news. So this is by no means perfect.

But most of all, a new ESEA completely chops the back-door lawmaking of USED waivers off at the knees. If Congress can actually pull this off, it will be a gamechanger. There's much to hate about the new game, but there are some pieces of hope as well. Let's just see what happens next.

Sen. Alexander's Choice

A reminder that if you've been thinking that Lamar Alexander is going to emerge as a public school champion, well, not so much.

Alexander spoke at Brookings (never a good sign, because what Brookings doesn't understand about education would fill a Death Star) at the release of their Education Choice and Competition Index. Arianna Prothero provides a handy short version of his remarks over at EdWeek, and the even shorter version of those remarks is "School choice is awesome and magical."

Alexander would like to "put money in the kid's backpack," because of course education is not a public trust for all citizens of the country, but a private service for families that just happens to be funded by public tax dollars.

Alexander also lays out four Things The Feds Should Do To Help School Choice.

1. Allow states to use federal dollars to create scholarships to follow low-income students to any school of their choice;
2. Allow students with disabilities to spend the federal dollars allocated to them on schools of their choice;
3. Expand the District of Columbia's school voucher program, called the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which is funded by Congress;
4. Encourage the expansion of high-quality charter schools in the states through federal grant programs.

The first three are the same old same old charter policies that have been around long enough to prove themselves, but haven't yet. The fourth could be roughly translated as "throw money at charter schools," because we continue to believe that throwing money at public schools is a terrible, useless thing, throwing money at private businesses is awesome and makes wonderful things happen.

But I want to go back to the first two for a second, because I think they have a backhanded kind of promise.

Note the phrase "of their choice."

As we've been noting for some time, school choice usually turns out to actually mean school's choice. Only Mike Petrilli at the Fordham is honest enough to 'fess up to this, but most charters reserve the right to determine who is deserving.

Imagine what might happen if the feds threw their weight behind that "of their choice" language. Imagine what might happen if charters could not turn away students who wanted to attend, no matter what. Imagine what would happen if a low-income student or a student with disabilities could not be turned down, if they could say, "I choose this charter school" and the charter school could not say no or chase them away or counsel them out or push them toward the door. Imagine if that were part of federal charter law.

I don't expect that charter operators would let such a thing happen without a fight, but it would be an awfully hard point to argue in public. Such a rule would be disastrous for modern charters, whose whole model of success rests on their ability to take and keep only the students they pick and choose.

I am no fan of school choice. But in most places we don't even have that; we have a charter system that allows the schools to do the choosing and the students just have to take what they are given, and as much as a school choice system would stink, a school's choice system is even worse.

Let's see if Alexander wants to take a real whack at that problem.

CAP Scolds Lamar Alexander

CAP has rushed to the defense of the reformy status quo and takes a moment to try to school Lamar Alexander with the pearl-clutching headline, "5 Reasons Why Sen. Alexander's Draft Education Bill Fails Parents." Let's take a look at their five compelling slices of baloney.

1) Lowers academic standards.

Today, all states have academic standards that are aligned to career and college readiness.

Man, if you're going to lie, be big and bold. Their is not a shred of evidence anywhere that the Common Core (which oddly enough CAP does not mention by name once in this article-- oh, where has the love gone) or any of the versions of it actually align to college and career readiness. In fact, I'd be delighted for CAP to show us all where any such "college and career readiness" exists to be aligned to.

Nor is there a shred of evidence that Common Core standards are high standards. None.

2) Prevents parents from making informed decisions about where to send their children to school.

Yes, an ESEA rewrite could undercut the marketing programs for privatizers and takeover artists, and will create a major revenue gap for the corporations that are hoovering up billions of tax dollars on the backs of federal testing requirements. Of course, the premise here once again is that parents are dopes, completely unable to judge how well a school is doing without helpful government documents to straighten them out.

Then again, given the number of parents who find themselves being shafted, snowed, and just generally abandoned by various charter operators, perhaps some sort of consumer protection is in order. Given the number of charter schools that can't manage to keep a simple sales promise like "we'll stay open till your child finishes," maybe ESEA does need some beefing up in this department.

But the assertion that parents have no idea how their child is doing without a federally-mandated standardized test-- that's both patronizing and stupid.

3. Allows low-performing schools to languish.

The other recurring theme? States are terrible and stupid and can't be trusted. I've always found this argument in favor of federal centralism odd-- didn't most of the people working in DC get their political starts in states? Were they shiftless, untrustworthy, and dopey when they worked on the state level, but when they breathed in the air of DC they were suddenly imbued with wisdom?

But the argument here is that "states could design and implement almost any system they want with no federal checks or guardrails." And that would be bad because....? Yes, I know that states have not always exercised superior judgment in the past, but neither have the feds, and when the feds screw it up, they screw it up for a whole country-- not just one state. If you are really concerned about this, set a low bar that you won't let a state sink below. If they sink below it, then the feds can step in. Otherwise, the feds can leave them alone.

Here's the thing-- the feds have been taking steps to not allow low-performing schools to languish for over a decade, and how has that worked? Name me ten schools that used to suck and are now doing great because of federal intervention. Name me five. You can name me lots of schools and districts where federal intervention allowed some charter chains and educorporations to make a bundle, but that's it, and it's certainly not enough.

4. Eliminates federal funding for before- and after-school programs.

Well, it eliminates one funding stream for them. This is small potatoes, easily fixed by legislators if it's an actual issue across the nation.

5. Fails to provide parents with protection from substantial school budget cuts.

The concern here is about a stream of Title I funding, which is an intriguing concern coming from reformsters who have happily held Title I funds hostage in order to arm-twist states into accepting federal control of state-level education.

Without this provision, states would have free rein to cut their education budgets. As a result, children would face larger class sizes and under-resourced schools.

Because states don't have the ability to cut education budgets now? Because I'm in Pennsylvania and over the past few years we sliced off a few billion budget bucks without any trouble at all. I'm not seeing how this provision mysteriously ties state budgetary hands.

But if such cuts become a problem, you know what might help balance it out? Not having to spend billions of dollars on federally mandated tests or billions of dollars on federally mandated new curricular materials or billions of dollars on computers and infrastructure just to take federally mandated tests. If you are really deeply concerned about states having enough money, there are all sort of revenue-leeching bloodsuckers attached to the public education teats-- lend a hand and scrape them off.

Bottom line?

CAP's tale is a story of nefarious states and hapless parents, tragic situation that can only be fixed by federal mandates and bureaucrats (and their dear, close friends at Pearson et al who make a convenient bundle from the one-stop-shopping opportunity that is federally-controlled public education).

Lamar Alexander may well manage to fail parents before he's over, but it sure won't be because he failed to listen to the compassionate humanitarians at CAP. Of all the criticisms of the new draft version of ESEA out there, these are five of the lamest and least valid.

The Biggest Failure: Defining Success

Time magazine ran an interview with Senator Lamar Alexander, discussing the future of testing and the ESEA. It concludes with this quote:

What I know is the biggest failure of No Child Left Behind is the idea that Washington should tell 100,000 public schools and their teachers whether they’re succeeding, whether they’re failing and what the consequences of that should be. That hasn’t worked.

I think that's close, but perhaps not dead-on. Because implied by the idea of DC telling the public schools whether or not their succeeding is the idea of DC telling the schools what success really means.

No Child Left Behind didn't just legislate the idea that the feds would tell schools and teachers how well they were doing. It redefined what "success" means in education.

Defining success has always been one of the great challenges in education. Through the early part of my career (I graduated from college in 1979), there was a steady trend toward authentic assessment, because everything we knew and were learning about education said that an objective test was by far the worst way to decide how well a student was acquiring skills and knowledge.

If you are of a certain age, you recognize and tremble at these initials-- TSWBAT.

For you youngsters, that's "The Student Will Be Able To," and it meant that your lesson plans would focus on what the student could actually do at the end of instruction. So if you were trying to teach a student the knowledge and skills necessary to analyze a full modern novel or write a complete analytical essay or assemble a carburetor or successfully bid out a hand of bridge, you weren't going to give some sort of bubble test. The student was going to demonstrate outcomes by doing the thing. That would be success.

The focus on outcomes was leading us to student portfolios. No longer would a test or two or ten define the student's achievements. Instead, a portfolio would be assembled showing progress, development, achievement, and success in a year's worth of projects, assignments, and accomplishments. That was going to be success.

And just as we were out in the trenches coming to grips with how exciting and terrifying it would be to come up with a portfolio system and they could be electronic portfolios, because with computer tech we could include videos and demonstrations and oh holy smokes on a shingle this would be completely individualized so that each student would graduate with twelve years' worth of broad, varied authentic achievements that would paint a completely personal picture of all the strengths and depths and awesomeness of that individual human being--- just as we were starting to get a grip on that, the feds stepped in, dragged the needle across the vinyl and said, "Nope-- we got your definition of success right here."

Success is a good score on a standardized test. And it looks exactly the same for every student.

And Race to the Top and RttT Lite (less filling, more waivery) doubled down on that by adding one-size-fits-all non-sequitorian justification. Success is a good score on a standardized test because success is a college education and a well-paying job.

Being an outstanding musician or welder? Not success. Being a middling student but a stand-up person who makes their community a better place? Not a success. Screwing up as a freshman and turning your life around to graduate after five years? Not a success.

Marching to the beat of a different drum? Hey, kid. Who said you could have a drum? Everybody in this band plays clarinet, and to be a success, you must take the standardized bubble test on clarinterry.

The most stunning obtusity, the most spectacular failure of NCLB/RTTT is the manner in which it has turned the goal and purpose of education into something small, cramped, meager and unvaried.

Success is a good score on a standardized test.

What a sad, tiny, uninspired definition of success. But NCLB introduced it and tied us all to it, like eagles chained to a stuffed turtle on the desk of the world's least ambitious accountant. The biggest failure of NCLB was to take the whole vast continent of possibilities, the promise and varied range of humanity that has always characterized this country-- to look at all that and say, "No, we're just going to say that success is a good score on a standardized test that only covers a couple of subjects, badly. And we'll demand that everyone achieve it at the same time in the same way. That's success."

That's the biggest failure of No Child Left Behind. If you see Senator Alexander, you can tell him I said so.

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.