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.
Showing posts with label Lyndsey Layton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lyndsey Layton. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
Arne Talks Pre-K; I Have Questions
Monday Education Secretary Arne Duncan was hanging out in a bilingual pre-school in Maryland and Lydsey Layton of the Washington Post was covering it because, reasons?
Duncan is unhappy with the speed of adoption of Pre-K. He has a whole shelf of the stuff, and people just aren't buying. He "unveiled" a new report (was he carrying it around prior to that all draped in a veil? what color was the veil? sorry, but sometimes I get to looking at words thinking, "What the heck." anyway, I guess that's why he was there and being covered-- so he could use children as a presser backdrop) from the National Institute for Early Education Research, a group attached to Rutgers that is not so much a research institute as an advocacy that uses research to support their position. Does anybody do research without deciding what they want the answer to be ahead of time?
Anyway, the report said only 29% of four year olds and 4% of three year olds are in pre-school.
Somehow, this is a surprise to Duncan. It has been many, many years since my children were three years old, but that's not long enough to make me imagine that I would have considered pre-school a worthwhile choice back then. Of course, as always, I am troubled by the nagging gut feeling that Arne really thinks that Those Poor Folks are the ones who need to get their children out of the home and into a pre-school ASAP.
Layton reminds us that the feds have been trying hard to get pre-K promoted to headline status in the ESEA rewrite. Duncan asked for full-out grants and got competitive grants instead (which, given the administrations previous deep wet-kissing-with-tongue love for competitive grants is some kind of poetic justice). But anyway...
And whether that bill eventually will be passed by the full Senate and the House and become law is unclear. And it is likely to make a small dent in a “tremendous, unmet need,” Duncan said.
See, here's one of my questions-- what unmet need? What exactly is the need that school for three year olds must meet? Because I'm deathly afraid that the "unmet" need is the need for three-year-olds to open their books and start studying calculus so they can take a Pearson-manufactured standardized test to measure their sentence-writing skills. In which case, there is no unmet need.
Duncan notes that it would take 75 years at this rate to kid all the children into pre-school. Arne's explanation for why things are moving slowly is, well, not a good one. “We need more resources. We need Congress to invest, to partner with states to expand access," he says. Yes, and the Edsel wasn't sold in enough car lots. And New Coke didn't have enough marketing support.
When people aren't buying what you're selling (or in this case, trying to essentially give away), doesn't that mean you need to look at your product and the market and ask yourself if you're not trying to sell something that nobody wants?
I'll admit to mixed feelings about pre-school. I am sure that there are many ways that it could be handled that would really enrich life for children and their families, but at this point, I feel in my bones that the USED would like to do pre-school in the wrongest ways possible, for all the wrong reasons, and do it badly.
But in the meantime, what Arne is complaining about is simply all those delightful and beloved market forces doing their thing.
The piece was not a total waste, however. Layton totally got a picture of Arne roaring like a lion. I'm pretty sure that was worth the trip to Maryland all by itself.
Duncan is unhappy with the speed of adoption of Pre-K. He has a whole shelf of the stuff, and people just aren't buying. He "unveiled" a new report (was he carrying it around prior to that all draped in a veil? what color was the veil? sorry, but sometimes I get to looking at words thinking, "What the heck." anyway, I guess that's why he was there and being covered-- so he could use children as a presser backdrop) from the National Institute for Early Education Research, a group attached to Rutgers that is not so much a research institute as an advocacy that uses research to support their position. Does anybody do research without deciding what they want the answer to be ahead of time?
Anyway, the report said only 29% of four year olds and 4% of three year olds are in pre-school.
Somehow, this is a surprise to Duncan. It has been many, many years since my children were three years old, but that's not long enough to make me imagine that I would have considered pre-school a worthwhile choice back then. Of course, as always, I am troubled by the nagging gut feeling that Arne really thinks that Those Poor Folks are the ones who need to get their children out of the home and into a pre-school ASAP.
Layton reminds us that the feds have been trying hard to get pre-K promoted to headline status in the ESEA rewrite. Duncan asked for full-out grants and got competitive grants instead (which, given the administrations previous deep wet-kissing-with-tongue love for competitive grants is some kind of poetic justice). But anyway...
And whether that bill eventually will be passed by the full Senate and the House and become law is unclear. And it is likely to make a small dent in a “tremendous, unmet need,” Duncan said.
See, here's one of my questions-- what unmet need? What exactly is the need that school for three year olds must meet? Because I'm deathly afraid that the "unmet" need is the need for three-year-olds to open their books and start studying calculus so they can take a Pearson-manufactured standardized test to measure their sentence-writing skills. In which case, there is no unmet need.
Duncan notes that it would take 75 years at this rate to kid all the children into pre-school. Arne's explanation for why things are moving slowly is, well, not a good one. “We need more resources. We need Congress to invest, to partner with states to expand access," he says. Yes, and the Edsel wasn't sold in enough car lots. And New Coke didn't have enough marketing support.
When people aren't buying what you're selling (or in this case, trying to essentially give away), doesn't that mean you need to look at your product and the market and ask yourself if you're not trying to sell something that nobody wants?
I'll admit to mixed feelings about pre-school. I am sure that there are many ways that it could be handled that would really enrich life for children and their families, but at this point, I feel in my bones that the USED would like to do pre-school in the wrongest ways possible, for all the wrong reasons, and do it badly.
But in the meantime, what Arne is complaining about is simply all those delightful and beloved market forces doing their thing.
The piece was not a total waste, however. Layton totally got a picture of Arne roaring like a lion. I'm pretty sure that was worth the trip to Maryland all by itself.
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.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
USED: Nothing-Burger with Cheese
According to Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, the Obama administration on Monday once again paid lip service to one of its less noted but more dumb ideas. They would like to shuffle teachers around. This is not a new thing-- I wrote about it last December:
Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been manufactured ...er, I mean, tabulated with totally reliable data.
One of the ideas is, basically, to make your certified crappy teachers and your certified excellent teachers trade places. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, starting with the fact that we still don't have any useful way of identifying excellent (or not-so-excellent) teachers. So instead of trying to solve that riddle, states are declaring, as required by the Department of Education's NCLB/RTTT-fueledextortion waiver, that teachers will be evaluated at least in part based on standardized test results. Of course, we also know that poverty and poorly funded schools leaded inexorably to low standardized test results, so voila!-- teachers working in high poverty schools are far more likely to be teaching low-score students, and therefor far more likely to be "discovered" to be less excellent teachers. It's not that our most struggling students don't deserve excellent teachers-- it's that we don't have any real reason to believe that many of those excellent teachers are not already there.
I have explained this before. If you remove the roof from a classroom, whoever is in the classroom will get wet when it rains. If you say, "Hey, this teacher is all wet-- send me another one," it will make no difference. When the new teacher arrives, she will get wet, too.
You cannot improve this situation with threats. If you say, "Hey! The next wet teacher I find in this room is gonna get fired!" you will not get miraculously dry teachers standing in the rain. What you will get are teachers who want to keep their jobs saying, "No, I am NOT going to go teach in the roofless room, thankyouverymuch." And your roofless wet room will be occupied primarily by young teachers who didn't have other options or who believe that they'll be kept dry by their youth and enthusiasm and job offers from hedge funds for after they've finished.
This seems so obvious and yet clearly it isn't-- creating extra performance pressure without addressing the root causes of poor student performance absolutely guarantees to do the OPPOSITE of recruiting teachers to those situations. "Don't you want to come here and risk your teaching career in difficult wet room with no support" is NOT a great recruiting line.
However, the Ed Department occasionally notices that No Child Left Behind (which is still actually the law governing education, as opposed to the pseudo-laws of Race to the Top waivers) requires every state to have an equity plan-- a plan for how we're going to shuffle around those teachers to get the great ones in the wet rooms.
The rest of why this law is stupid is because nobody knows how to do it. When it comes to moving excellent teachers to low-performing classrooms, there are only a few possibilities:
Guilt trip: Your nation needs you. It's the right thing to do. There is no more important work in our country today. On the one hand, this has the advantage of being related to actual truth. On the other hand, it is a challenge for state and federal education officials to convey that they actually believe any of it. Nevertheless, their best bet is probably to convince teachers to take one for the team.
Bribery: Offer them obscene amounts of money to do it. And I mean pro football obscene. This actually makes sense. We pay pro athletes huge amounts of money because they are basically drawing their entire career salary in a few years, because their careers will probably be over by the time they're thirty. Same thing here. If we're going to ask teachers to work in career-ending classrooms, let's pay them their entire career salary for it. But I'll go cheap-- let's say $350,000 a year. The problem, of course, is that reformsters want to pay most teachers less rather than more.
Extortion: Pull teacher credentials at random and tell them they have to teach in low performing schools or else they will lose their teaching certification (Massachusetts got confused and is proposing the reverse-- teach at a low-performing school and then we'll take your certificate.)
Trickery: Tell teachers they've won a trip to Bermuda or Alaska or that nice farm where families send their very old dogs. When they discover they've actually ended up in a low-performance school, it will be too late.
Rendering: Wait outside a teacher's classroom. Tie a bag over her head and throw her in a van. Easy peasy. If anybody asks questions, just explain that she moved to that nice farm where families send their very old dogs.
There may also be a possibility of implementing indentured servitude, but essentially the law and every succeeding administration to work under it is forced to depend on wishful thinking and hopeful thoughts to implement the Great Educator Shift.
Fortunately, nobody is really asking states to actually do anything. There is a deadline for submitting a plan, but no requirement that the plan be actually feasible, nor any requirement that said plan actually be implemented.
Michael Petrilli gets the quote-of-the-day award. "This is a nothing-burger," said the president of the Fordham Institute. Which I think pretty much nails it, except that not only can we not find the beef, but I'm pretty sure there's no bun, though there is plenty of cheese.
Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been
One of the ideas is, basically, to make your certified crappy teachers and your certified excellent teachers trade places. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, starting with the fact that we still don't have any useful way of identifying excellent (or not-so-excellent) teachers. So instead of trying to solve that riddle, states are declaring, as required by the Department of Education's NCLB/RTTT-fueled
I have explained this before. If you remove the roof from a classroom, whoever is in the classroom will get wet when it rains. If you say, "Hey, this teacher is all wet-- send me another one," it will make no difference. When the new teacher arrives, she will get wet, too.
You cannot improve this situation with threats. If you say, "Hey! The next wet teacher I find in this room is gonna get fired!" you will not get miraculously dry teachers standing in the rain. What you will get are teachers who want to keep their jobs saying, "No, I am NOT going to go teach in the roofless room, thankyouverymuch." And your roofless wet room will be occupied primarily by young teachers who didn't have other options or who believe that they'll be kept dry by their youth and enthusiasm and job offers from hedge funds for after they've finished.
This seems so obvious and yet clearly it isn't-- creating extra performance pressure without addressing the root causes of poor student performance absolutely guarantees to do the OPPOSITE of recruiting teachers to those situations. "Don't you want to come here and risk your teaching career in difficult wet room with no support" is NOT a great recruiting line.
However, the Ed Department occasionally notices that No Child Left Behind (which is still actually the law governing education, as opposed to the pseudo-laws of Race to the Top waivers) requires every state to have an equity plan-- a plan for how we're going to shuffle around those teachers to get the great ones in the wet rooms.
The rest of why this law is stupid is because nobody knows how to do it. When it comes to moving excellent teachers to low-performing classrooms, there are only a few possibilities:
Guilt trip: Your nation needs you. It's the right thing to do. There is no more important work in our country today. On the one hand, this has the advantage of being related to actual truth. On the other hand, it is a challenge for state and federal education officials to convey that they actually believe any of it. Nevertheless, their best bet is probably to convince teachers to take one for the team.
Bribery: Offer them obscene amounts of money to do it. And I mean pro football obscene. This actually makes sense. We pay pro athletes huge amounts of money because they are basically drawing their entire career salary in a few years, because their careers will probably be over by the time they're thirty. Same thing here. If we're going to ask teachers to work in career-ending classrooms, let's pay them their entire career salary for it. But I'll go cheap-- let's say $350,000 a year. The problem, of course, is that reformsters want to pay most teachers less rather than more.
Extortion: Pull teacher credentials at random and tell them they have to teach in low performing schools or else they will lose their teaching certification (Massachusetts got confused and is proposing the reverse-- teach at a low-performing school and then we'll take your certificate.)
Trickery: Tell teachers they've won a trip to Bermuda or Alaska or that nice farm where families send their very old dogs. When they discover they've actually ended up in a low-performance school, it will be too late.
Rendering: Wait outside a teacher's classroom. Tie a bag over her head and throw her in a van. Easy peasy. If anybody asks questions, just explain that she moved to that nice farm where families send their very old dogs.
There may also be a possibility of implementing indentured servitude, but essentially the law and every succeeding administration to work under it is forced to depend on wishful thinking and hopeful thoughts to implement the Great Educator Shift.
Fortunately, nobody is really asking states to actually do anything. There is a deadline for submitting a plan, but no requirement that the plan be actually feasible, nor any requirement that said plan actually be implemented.
Michael Petrilli gets the quote-of-the-day award. "This is a nothing-burger," said the president of the Fordham Institute. Which I think pretty much nails it, except that not only can we not find the beef, but I'm pretty sure there's no bun, though there is plenty of cheese.
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