I'm not going to add much of anything to Mercedes Schneider's post except to say that, in case you missed it-- you should read it.
The New Orleans story is one of the charter-choice golden narratives. It is the place where the reformsters got everything they wanted, so it has to be a success narrative because if they can't make it there, they can't make it anywhere.
Schneider is one of most invaluable researchers in true world of public school defenders, and she has done yet another piece of invaluable research. One chapter of the NOLA magical success tale is "The Story of How Charter-Choice Raised Graduation Rates." Turns out, not so much.
Reformsters tell that story wit a pre-Recovery School District graduation rate of 54.4% (because made up numbers are more credible when they're very specific). But out turns out that the pre-RSD rate was identical (or perhaps better) than then RSD rate. And looking at her methodology,
So read her post. Bookmark her post. Share her post. And whenever someone tries to tell you how the Recovery School District totally fixed New Orleans education, please acquaint them with some actual facts.
Showing posts with label Mercedes Schneider. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mercedes Schneider. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2015
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Common Core's Sad Birthday
Man, there's nothing quite as sad as having a birthday that everybody ignores. Nobody throws you a party, nobody sings you a song, nobody even plunks a candy in a store-bought cupcake.
You may have missed it, but June 2 was technically the Common Core State Standards fifth birthday.
You may have missed it because nobody threw the Core a party. The closest we got was a piece in Huffington Post in which Rebecca Klein did a listicle of five of the sillier arguments made against the Core. It was an odd piece, a nostalgic call-back to the days when Core opponents could be broad-brushed with the image of tin-hat reactionaries.
Mercedes Schneider responded with her own birthday piece, reminding us of such highlights as Common Core's enthusiastic adoption by states before it was even actually written. Schneider's piece also recaps the various bogus claims (it will emphasize critical thining!), its tortured creation by a small group of not-teachers, and its odd ownership and copyright by a pair of lobbying groups. Oh, and it's sponsorship by Bill Gates and super-but-totally-not-illegal support form the feds.
This is not the sort of valedictory salute that we'd expect for a five-year-old piece of policy that was going to revitalize public education in this country. But it's not exactly a surprise.
First of all, in order to have that kind of celebration, you need to be able to point to your big successes. And as we survey the five-plus years of Common Core, we can see... well, nothing. The CCSS advocates can't point to a single damn accomplishment. Nothing.
Yes, we get the periodic pieces from classroom teachers lauding the standards. These pieces follow a simple outline:
1) It used to be that I didn't know what the heck I was doing in the classroom, but then
2) I discovered Common Core and so I
3) Began doing [insert teaching techniques that any competent teacher already knew about long before the Core ever happened]
These aren't convincing a soul, and other than these various testimonials, we have been treated to exactly zero evidence that US education has been improved in any way by the Core.
Second, it's hard to throw a party for someone who has no friends. The game has tilted against the Core, and the same "friends" who embraced it when such embraces served a political purpose have now dis-embraced it for the same reason. In fact, the Core has been pierced repeatedly by the same swords it once wielded; for example, having used politics to get the Core installed, supporters now routinely complain that politics are being used against it. So yeah, some of the complaints against the Core are, in fact, crazy and unfounded and even bizarre (CCSS has been created by the One World Order to turn everyone into a gay atheist Commie, etc)-- but the Core boosters created a playing field where that kind of foolishness was fair game, and now they get to pay the price.
Even the Core's reformy allies have dumped it. The Core was going to be useful to push charters, but they no longer need it. Test manufacturers are getting more traction from civil rights rhetoric and the "college and career ready" line. Data overlords have been thwarted by direct opposition and the collapse of the National Test Dream; though they aren't giving up any time soon, the Core is no longer as useful a tool for them.
With the exception of Jeb Bush who, God bless him, may not be right, but at least he's loyal, the Core is out of high profile friends who will so much as speak its name in public.
We come not to praise the Core, but to bury it
As I noted back in March, the term "Common Core" is now essentially meaningless. It means whatever people in a particular place and time want it to mean, and because its creators have moved on to other profitable jobs, there isn't anybody to keep an eye on how the term is used.
We have multiple tests all claiming to be CCSS aligned, none of which are able to assess all the standards. Except for the ones that are aligned to state standards that are kind of the same as Common Core and kind of not. We have a mountain of textbooks claiming to be Common Core aligned with varying degrees of accuracy. We have a whole host of people who have fuzzied up the question of whether it is standards or curriculum. We have tens of thousands of local versions of the Core and programs allegedly aligned. And we have the Core itself swathed in lies like "internationally benchmarked."
Ze'ev Wurman, from the Bush administration, pointed out in Breitbart that the Core is dead because states have slowly but surely reclaimed their right to local control, effectively ending the dream of having every state on the same educational page. He's right in particular because the real driver of curriculum and standards is the Big Standardized Test, and states have been slowly but surely stepping away from the Big National Test dream and installing their own version of a large pointless standardized test that gathers no real useful data but does waste lots of time and money (because all the cool kids want one). Since the test is the curriculum and standards guide, different tests means different standards and curriculum.
So happy fifth birthday and/or wake, Common Core. I could say we never knew you, but the truth is, the better we got to know you, the less we liked you (and we didn't like you very much to begin with). There will be a variety of educational initiatives floating around that take your name in vain, but as a national policy uniting the country behind a single set of clear standards, you are dead as a month-old smear of roadkill.
You may have missed it, but June 2 was technically the Common Core State Standards fifth birthday.
You may have missed it because nobody threw the Core a party. The closest we got was a piece in Huffington Post in which Rebecca Klein did a listicle of five of the sillier arguments made against the Core. It was an odd piece, a nostalgic call-back to the days when Core opponents could be broad-brushed with the image of tin-hat reactionaries.
Mercedes Schneider responded with her own birthday piece, reminding us of such highlights as Common Core's enthusiastic adoption by states before it was even actually written. Schneider's piece also recaps the various bogus claims (it will emphasize critical thining!), its tortured creation by a small group of not-teachers, and its odd ownership and copyright by a pair of lobbying groups. Oh, and it's sponsorship by Bill Gates and super-but-totally-not-illegal support form the feds.
This is not the sort of valedictory salute that we'd expect for a five-year-old piece of policy that was going to revitalize public education in this country. But it's not exactly a surprise.
First of all, in order to have that kind of celebration, you need to be able to point to your big successes. And as we survey the five-plus years of Common Core, we can see... well, nothing. The CCSS advocates can't point to a single damn accomplishment. Nothing.
Yes, we get the periodic pieces from classroom teachers lauding the standards. These pieces follow a simple outline:
1) It used to be that I didn't know what the heck I was doing in the classroom, but then
2) I discovered Common Core and so I
3) Began doing [insert teaching techniques that any competent teacher already knew about long before the Core ever happened]
These aren't convincing a soul, and other than these various testimonials, we have been treated to exactly zero evidence that US education has been improved in any way by the Core.
Second, it's hard to throw a party for someone who has no friends. The game has tilted against the Core, and the same "friends" who embraced it when such embraces served a political purpose have now dis-embraced it for the same reason. In fact, the Core has been pierced repeatedly by the same swords it once wielded; for example, having used politics to get the Core installed, supporters now routinely complain that politics are being used against it. So yeah, some of the complaints against the Core are, in fact, crazy and unfounded and even bizarre (CCSS has been created by the One World Order to turn everyone into a gay atheist Commie, etc)-- but the Core boosters created a playing field where that kind of foolishness was fair game, and now they get to pay the price.
Even the Core's reformy allies have dumped it. The Core was going to be useful to push charters, but they no longer need it. Test manufacturers are getting more traction from civil rights rhetoric and the "college and career ready" line. Data overlords have been thwarted by direct opposition and the collapse of the National Test Dream; though they aren't giving up any time soon, the Core is no longer as useful a tool for them.
With the exception of Jeb Bush who, God bless him, may not be right, but at least he's loyal, the Core is out of high profile friends who will so much as speak its name in public.
We come not to praise the Core, but to bury it
As I noted back in March, the term "Common Core" is now essentially meaningless. It means whatever people in a particular place and time want it to mean, and because its creators have moved on to other profitable jobs, there isn't anybody to keep an eye on how the term is used.
We have multiple tests all claiming to be CCSS aligned, none of which are able to assess all the standards. Except for the ones that are aligned to state standards that are kind of the same as Common Core and kind of not. We have a mountain of textbooks claiming to be Common Core aligned with varying degrees of accuracy. We have a whole host of people who have fuzzied up the question of whether it is standards or curriculum. We have tens of thousands of local versions of the Core and programs allegedly aligned. And we have the Core itself swathed in lies like "internationally benchmarked."
Ze'ev Wurman, from the Bush administration, pointed out in Breitbart that the Core is dead because states have slowly but surely reclaimed their right to local control, effectively ending the dream of having every state on the same educational page. He's right in particular because the real driver of curriculum and standards is the Big Standardized Test, and states have been slowly but surely stepping away from the Big National Test dream and installing their own version of a large pointless standardized test that gathers no real useful data but does waste lots of time and money (because all the cool kids want one). Since the test is the curriculum and standards guide, different tests means different standards and curriculum.
So happy fifth birthday and/or wake, Common Core. I could say we never knew you, but the truth is, the better we got to know you, the less we liked you (and we didn't like you very much to begin with). There will be a variety of educational initiatives floating around that take your name in vain, but as a national policy uniting the country behind a single set of clear standards, you are dead as a month-old smear of roadkill.
Monday, January 12, 2015
Schneider on Evaluation
Regular readers here know that I'm a huge fan of Mercedes Schneider, whose attention to detail, relentless research skills, and sharply analytical mind are an inspiration. Also, she once called me the Erma Bombeck of education bloggers, so I kind of love her for that, too.
I read her blog regularly and repeatedly, and while all of it is indispensible, a recent post of hers about Doug Harris and the promotion of VAM contains these pure gold paragraphs about teacher evaluation. I'm copying them out here mostly so that I can find them whenever I want to, but you should read them and take them to heart, to.
Point systems for “grading” the teacher-student (and school-teacher-student) dynamic will always fall short because the complex nature of that dynamic defies quantifying. If test-loving reformers insist upon imposing high-stakes quantification onto schools and teachers, it will backfire, a system begging to be corrupted by those fighting to survive it.
It is not that I cannot be evaluated as a teacher. It’s just that such evaluation is rooted a complex subjectivity that is best understood by those who are familiar with my reality. This should be true of the administrators at one’s school, and I am fortunate to state that it is true in my case.
There are no numbers that sufficiently capture my work with my students. I know this. Yes, I am caught in a system that wants to impose a numeric values on my teaching. My “value” to my students cannot be quantified, nor can my school’s value to my students, no matter what the Harrises of this world might suggest in commissioned reports.
I read her blog regularly and repeatedly, and while all of it is indispensible, a recent post of hers about Doug Harris and the promotion of VAM contains these pure gold paragraphs about teacher evaluation. I'm copying them out here mostly so that I can find them whenever I want to, but you should read them and take them to heart, to.
Point systems for “grading” the teacher-student (and school-teacher-student) dynamic will always fall short because the complex nature of that dynamic defies quantifying. If test-loving reformers insist upon imposing high-stakes quantification onto schools and teachers, it will backfire, a system begging to be corrupted by those fighting to survive it.
It is not that I cannot be evaluated as a teacher. It’s just that such evaluation is rooted a complex subjectivity that is best understood by those who are familiar with my reality. This should be true of the administrators at one’s school, and I am fortunate to state that it is true in my case.
There are no numbers that sufficiently capture my work with my students. I know this. Yes, I am caught in a system that wants to impose a numeric values on my teaching. My “value” to my students cannot be quantified, nor can my school’s value to my students, no matter what the Harrises of this world might suggest in commissioned reports.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
More on Rochester Charter Wunderkind (Or: How Hard Is It To Do Your Job, Anyway?)
It has only been a day since the story of Ted Morris, Jr., Rochester's 22-year-old charter school phenom and new holder of a NY State charter school authorization, began to unravel.
I did some quick research and wrote about it. Mercedes Schneider turned her research mojo loose. Leonie Haimson turned up some inconsistencies in his CV. And Diane Ravitch covered the story as well, drawing out a note from his alleged former principal shooting more holes in his story.
The Democrat & Chronicle has... well, "updated" would be an understatement and "finally did the legwork they should have done the first time" might be too mean. At any rate, a whole new version of the story appears here.
Turns out that young "Dr." Morris might have overstated his resume a bit.
Elaine Comarella, the [Hickock] center's CEO, said his title was actually administrative assistant, and that the responsibilities he listed in the resume were "a little overshot."
His high school administrators remember him as someone who was a great talker and very sociable, but not real big on attending classes. Morris allows as he just wasn't challenged enough. And at this point it's not really clear where he did or did not get his college degrees. It does seem that none of his diplomas involved interacting directly with humans.
My favorite new detail may be that he found his board of trustees mostly through LinkedIn, Craigslist and a website for nonprofits.
You can find even more here at Mercedes Schneider's update from today. The information just keeps rolling in.
Justin Murphy, the reporter covering the story, clearly did some real legwork and talked to many of the parties involved (though some have yet to return his calls), and it's great that he did. But here's what I want to underline.
Twenty four hours.
It took a handful of bloggers and one reporter twenty-four hours to find the holes from which the fishlike smell emanates from this story. I don't know how much time Mercedes, Leonie and Diane spent following up on this, but I used the twenty-five minutes left over after I finished my cafeteria sub on Monday. A computer, some search terms, google, and twenty-five minutes.
The New York Board of Regents has had considerably more than that. The guy has been sending in letters of intent for this charter since January of 2010! Did nobody at the Board of Regents do even a cursory background check? If I take care of filling out the paperwork carefully for him, can my dog get authorization to run a charter school in New York?!!
I mean, I want to do a small tsk tsk to reporter Murphy, but I know that sometimes a nice press release lands on your desk and a quick seemingly harmless feel-good story writes itself without you having to exert much effort, and that's kind of irresistible. Also, it's becoming clear that Morris got a PhD in shmoozing from somewhere. But Murphy at least went back, did his job, and made things right.
Will the New York Board of Regents do the same?
[Update-- because this story just never stops-- My hat is off to Murphy-- I was hard on him above but he has been on this story like a boos all day--
What will that mean in terms of his total involvement with "his" school? Stay tuned, campers!
Still unrolling-- Dr. Kozik apparently has a specialty in adapting CCSS for students with disabilities. Here's his presentation-- from EngageNY.
And here's his LinkedIn recommendation for Dr. Ted
Ted has done an outstanding job as the Executive Director of the Greater Works Charter School where I serve on the Founding Board of Directors. He listens exceptionally well, is extremely detail oriented, and has balanced many complex tasks in developing an application for the charter school successfully. He is bright, gracious, and works well beyond what's required to ensure the success of the group. He is a talented team builder as well as a "team player." I recommend him unequivocally for any position for which he is qualified.
So the whole thing should be in great hands now. Holy smokes-- is this any way to run a school??
I did some quick research and wrote about it. Mercedes Schneider turned her research mojo loose. Leonie Haimson turned up some inconsistencies in his CV. And Diane Ravitch covered the story as well, drawing out a note from his alleged former principal shooting more holes in his story.
The Democrat & Chronicle has... well, "updated" would be an understatement and "finally did the legwork they should have done the first time" might be too mean. At any rate, a whole new version of the story appears here.
Turns out that young "Dr." Morris might have overstated his resume a bit.
Elaine Comarella, the [Hickock] center's CEO, said his title was actually administrative assistant, and that the responsibilities he listed in the resume were "a little overshot."
His high school administrators remember him as someone who was a great talker and very sociable, but not real big on attending classes. Morris allows as he just wasn't challenged enough. And at this point it's not really clear where he did or did not get his college degrees. It does seem that none of his diplomas involved interacting directly with humans.
My favorite new detail may be that he found his board of trustees mostly through LinkedIn, Craigslist and a website for nonprofits.
You can find even more here at Mercedes Schneider's update from today. The information just keeps rolling in.
Justin Murphy, the reporter covering the story, clearly did some real legwork and talked to many of the parties involved (though some have yet to return his calls), and it's great that he did. But here's what I want to underline.
Twenty four hours.
It took a handful of bloggers and one reporter twenty-four hours to find the holes from which the fishlike smell emanates from this story. I don't know how much time Mercedes, Leonie and Diane spent following up on this, but I used the twenty-five minutes left over after I finished my cafeteria sub on Monday. A computer, some search terms, google, and twenty-five minutes.
The New York Board of Regents has had considerably more than that. The guy has been sending in letters of intent for this charter since January of 2010! Did nobody at the Board of Regents do even a cursory background check? If I take care of filling out the paperwork carefully for him, can my dog get authorization to run a charter school in New York?!!
I mean, I want to do a small tsk tsk to reporter Murphy, but I know that sometimes a nice press release lands on your desk and a quick seemingly harmless feel-good story writes itself without you having to exert much effort, and that's kind of irresistible. Also, it's becoming clear that Morris got a PhD in shmoozing from somewhere. But Murphy at least went back, did his job, and made things right.
Will the New York Board of Regents do the same?
[Update-- because this story just never stops-- My hat is off to Murphy-- I was hard on him above but he has been on this story like a boos all day--
Breaking: Ted Morris, he of suspicious resume, resigns from board of trustees of Greater Works Charter School. #ROC
— Justin Murphy (@CitizenMurphy) November 26, 2014
Morris submitted his resignation shortly after this story was published: http://t.co/nUwNTgo6rD #ROC
— Justin Murphy (@CitizenMurphy) November 26, 2014
School trustee Peter Kozik, a Keuka College prof, takes over. "It was too much of a distraction." School will still open.
— Justin Murphy (@CitizenMurphy) November 26, 2014
What will that mean in terms of his total involvement with "his" school? Stay tuned, campers!
Still unrolling-- Dr. Kozik apparently has a specialty in adapting CCSS for students with disabilities. Here's his presentation-- from EngageNY.
And here's his LinkedIn recommendation for Dr. Ted
Ted has done an outstanding job as the Executive Director of the Greater Works Charter School where I serve on the Founding Board of Directors. He listens exceptionally well, is extremely detail oriented, and has balanced many complex tasks in developing an application for the charter school successfully. He is bright, gracious, and works well beyond what's required to ensure the success of the group. He is a talented team builder as well as a "team player." I recommend him unequivocally for any position for which he is qualified.
So the whole thing should be in great hands now. Holy smokes-- is this any way to run a school??
Friday, September 19, 2014
EdPost Flexes Rapid Response Muscles
Well, it turns out that Education Post will be good for one thing. Its rapid response function (in which apparently a cadre of hired bloggists are ready to grab their keyboards from their mantles and launch like internet minutemen) will allow the rest of us to see when Pro-Public Education folks have scored a palpable hit.
By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams column (on the heels of her online debate win), because EdPost has rapidly deployed three bloggists to spank Burris by name the very next day. How do these rapid responders do? Even though the irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has already taken a look, I can't resist taking one, too.
Headliner AnnWhalen wins the Well That Didn't Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost's highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris") but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
And then she tries to refute Burris's arguements by lying. (Hey-- I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).
She tries to argue that the copyrighted CCSS can and have been changed. She would have been further ahead to point out the obvious-- though the standards are copyrighted and states did agree not to change them, nobody in the current political climate is going to enforce that. Instead, she tries to pretend that the truth is not true and that no such copyrights or agreements exist.
Whalen also tries to argue that the Core do not dictate curriculum, and then best she can do here is go anecdotal with some hand-picked teachers from some hand-picked states. Trying to get in an anecdote war over CCSS is a bad choice. We could get into the whole standards vs. curriculum argument here, but let's just observe that since Core fans argue it's a great idea to have the CCSS nationally because it will make all schools the same and students will be able to switch districts without missing a step-- come on. This is such an intellectually dishonest argument that we can only conclude that Core supporters are not interested in having a real conversation with anybody.
Whalen punts the "internationally benchmarked" and "based on research" issue to Fordham. They aren't. There's not a whit of research to say they are. But she pretends not to get Burris's actual argument here.
Whalen also pretends not to understand any of the arguments about the achievement gap and high-poverty schools, at one point weirdly arguing that the Mass Insight report shows the top students are the toppiest, which is not something I'd bring up when trying show the achievement gap is closing.
And she really earns her Big Fat Liar stripes by pushing the same old tired bullshit about how the standards are not national standards and states totally volunteered to adopt the standards that they totally created and seriously, you know Whalen is fresh from government work because I don't think anybody except a career bureaucrat could type this unvarnished horse pucky with a straight face.
Whalen labels Burris's most inexcusable argument that she didn't propose a solution. Holy crap! Okay, I am going to break into your house at night and start stealing your furniture. You wake up and catch me and tell me to stop and I turn to you and say, "Okay, then. Why don't you offer a better solution?" That's how stupid this argument from Whalen is.
So, EdPost's headliner fails.
Erin Dukeshire takes on the curriculum argument. Her argument is....curious. Burris pointed out in her column that specifying specific skills in the standards did make them awfully lot like a curriculum, but Dukeshire seems to want to say that since the CCSS are really specific, it gives her more freedom and makes them less like a curriculum. She also throws in a bit of "before the Core I was lost" baloney, but basically her argument is that since she can have order a Model A in any color, as long as it's black, she's really free.
I actually find that it’s easier to design a variety of successful learning experiences when the standards name both content and skills. During the past few years, I’ve developed several lessons around a Common Core standard that requires students to integrate text with visuals. Because the Common Core lists important literacy standards for students to develop in the science classroom, I don’t spend precious planning periods guessing at how to incorporate reading into my lessons in a meaningful way.
I think I see her problem. Where she is wasting time guessing about how to incorporate reading into her lessons in a meaningful way, I'm over here using my professional judgment and experience and knowledge of my students to figure that out in a non-guessy way.
Maricela Montoy-Wilson will also stand up for the Core. Like Dukeshire, she is an America Achieves Fellow, and she's been teaching the Core for three years, so she knows what's up. She has a great command of reformster baloney-speak, as witnessed by this fluffernuttery:
The standards do not tell me how to teach, contrary to your point, but rather they serve as a guidepost for me, as the educator, to determine the best instructional strategies to attain the standards. The standards guide me in selecting instructional methods that facilitate true understanding of the fewer, deeper standards. They help me focus on clear-cut needs, which help me identify instructional practices through collaboration, strong coaching, and feedback.
So the standards do not tell her what to do-- they just guide and help, help, help her.
Ultimately, the Common Core standards help us prepare students to enter colleges and the ever-changing workplace. We know that our nation is not up to par in mathematical reasoning, and our classrooms are not adequately responding to the fast-evolving needs of the innovative and technological workplace. Therefore, a shift from doing to understanding was imperative in creating innovators. The Common Core standards offer such a shift.
Well, except we don't actually know any of those things. We don't know that we're not up to par-- we don't even know what par is, or what the consequences of being up to it actually are. Nor do we know about the adequancy of responses (adequate for what purpose) nor do we have any authority to declare an imperative need for innovators. And no, we have absolutely no basis for believing that the Core prepares students for college or the workplace. So, very pretty, and all without foundation.
Montoy-Wilson decides to take on the four flim-flams one at a time.
The standards are a guide, she repeats. Since the standards don't tell her how to teach composing and decomposing numbers (Burris's example), they are just a guide. But she's wrong, because teaching composing and decomposing numbers is what the standards present as how teachers are supposed to teach basic math functions. Montoy-Wilson herself repeats the magic phrase "foundational to deeper understanding"-- which means that the point of learning this technique is because it's a how to understand the functions. So, the point still goes to Burris.
The achievement gap. All these arguments make my brain glaze over because they all depend on smoke and mirrors and pretty words because there is not a single fact to back up what Core fans are trying to say. What specifics Montoy-Wilson mentions are, predictably, things like project based learning that any competent teacher can do and did do for years without any Common Core.
Montoy-Wilson is another Core booster who is seeing magical tests somewhere that none of the rest of us see, tests with performance tasks and other fine features that replace the rote memorization that standardized tests were never about anyway. They're standardized tests. They will create a new test prep industry. They don't measure anything but test-taking skills and, indirectly, socio-economic class.
We are at a crossroads in education policy. We can heed calls to make things “easy” and fail to get at the heart of what our students deserve — or we can buckle down together, accept that there are challenges, that the going is tough, but ultimately the promise of these standards are worth it.
Pretty sure that they aren't. Also pretty sure that there's nothing in these three blogs to convince me otherwise. Lots of things are hard. Shoving a post into your eyeball is hard. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. And promising your children a trip to Disneyland is a great promise, but if you're really driving them to a bombed-out playground, your promise doesn't really matter.
As a rapid-response exercise, EdPost is, at last, fast. But hey-- I often provide next day service and I do my writing at times like 5:30 AM and on my lunch break. Surely $12 million will get you the same level of service that my readers get for $0.00.
Beyond the speed, EdPost continues to reveal its true colors. Completely aligned with the US DOE party line. Just as dismissive and condescending and nasty as anybody in the education debates has ever been, which is not a crime-- it's noteworthy only because EdPost launched with the promise that they would change the conversation.
This is not a new conversation. It's the same old bullshit. Talking points repeated ad infinitum, even if they've been previously debunked and abandoned by thinking people on both sides. Personal attacks and dismissive language. Anecdotes and fancy language to make points (which, again, is not a terrible crime, but EdPost launched claiming it would be all facts and calm rationality).
I mean, damn-- if you're going to go after Carol Burris with accusations of being a liar and a cheat and not understanding how education works, you had better be better armed with something other than high dudgeon and government briefings. EdPost has show us what they're about, but they've also shown how good they are at it, and boy, if that were my $12 million, I'd want some of it back.
[Update. I've refrained from linking to Ed Post for the same reason that I stopped naming She Who Will Not Be Named, but you really need to watch Carol Burris take Whalen to school in the comments section, so here's a link.]
By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams column (on the heels of her online debate win), because EdPost has rapidly deployed three bloggists to spank Burris by name the very next day. How do these rapid responders do? Even though the irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has already taken a look, I can't resist taking one, too.
Headliner AnnWhalen wins the Well That Didn't Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost's highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris") but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
And then she tries to refute Burris's arguements by lying. (Hey-- I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).
She tries to argue that the copyrighted CCSS can and have been changed. She would have been further ahead to point out the obvious-- though the standards are copyrighted and states did agree not to change them, nobody in the current political climate is going to enforce that. Instead, she tries to pretend that the truth is not true and that no such copyrights or agreements exist.
Whalen also tries to argue that the Core do not dictate curriculum, and then best she can do here is go anecdotal with some hand-picked teachers from some hand-picked states. Trying to get in an anecdote war over CCSS is a bad choice. We could get into the whole standards vs. curriculum argument here, but let's just observe that since Core fans argue it's a great idea to have the CCSS nationally because it will make all schools the same and students will be able to switch districts without missing a step-- come on. This is such an intellectually dishonest argument that we can only conclude that Core supporters are not interested in having a real conversation with anybody.
Whalen punts the "internationally benchmarked" and "based on research" issue to Fordham. They aren't. There's not a whit of research to say they are. But she pretends not to get Burris's actual argument here.
Whalen also pretends not to understand any of the arguments about the achievement gap and high-poverty schools, at one point weirdly arguing that the Mass Insight report shows the top students are the toppiest, which is not something I'd bring up when trying show the achievement gap is closing.
And she really earns her Big Fat Liar stripes by pushing the same old tired bullshit about how the standards are not national standards and states totally volunteered to adopt the standards that they totally created and seriously, you know Whalen is fresh from government work because I don't think anybody except a career bureaucrat could type this unvarnished horse pucky with a straight face.
Whalen labels Burris's most inexcusable argument that she didn't propose a solution. Holy crap! Okay, I am going to break into your house at night and start stealing your furniture. You wake up and catch me and tell me to stop and I turn to you and say, "Okay, then. Why don't you offer a better solution?" That's how stupid this argument from Whalen is.
So, EdPost's headliner fails.
Erin Dukeshire takes on the curriculum argument. Her argument is....curious. Burris pointed out in her column that specifying specific skills in the standards did make them awfully lot like a curriculum, but Dukeshire seems to want to say that since the CCSS are really specific, it gives her more freedom and makes them less like a curriculum. She also throws in a bit of "before the Core I was lost" baloney, but basically her argument is that since she can have order a Model A in any color, as long as it's black, she's really free.
I actually find that it’s easier to design a variety of successful learning experiences when the standards name both content and skills. During the past few years, I’ve developed several lessons around a Common Core standard that requires students to integrate text with visuals. Because the Common Core lists important literacy standards for students to develop in the science classroom, I don’t spend precious planning periods guessing at how to incorporate reading into my lessons in a meaningful way.
I think I see her problem. Where she is wasting time guessing about how to incorporate reading into her lessons in a meaningful way, I'm over here using my professional judgment and experience and knowledge of my students to figure that out in a non-guessy way.
Maricela Montoy-Wilson will also stand up for the Core. Like Dukeshire, she is an America Achieves Fellow, and she's been teaching the Core for three years, so she knows what's up. She has a great command of reformster baloney-speak, as witnessed by this fluffernuttery:
The standards do not tell me how to teach, contrary to your point, but rather they serve as a guidepost for me, as the educator, to determine the best instructional strategies to attain the standards. The standards guide me in selecting instructional methods that facilitate true understanding of the fewer, deeper standards. They help me focus on clear-cut needs, which help me identify instructional practices through collaboration, strong coaching, and feedback.
So the standards do not tell her what to do-- they just guide and help, help, help her.
Ultimately, the Common Core standards help us prepare students to enter colleges and the ever-changing workplace. We know that our nation is not up to par in mathematical reasoning, and our classrooms are not adequately responding to the fast-evolving needs of the innovative and technological workplace. Therefore, a shift from doing to understanding was imperative in creating innovators. The Common Core standards offer such a shift.
Well, except we don't actually know any of those things. We don't know that we're not up to par-- we don't even know what par is, or what the consequences of being up to it actually are. Nor do we know about the adequancy of responses (adequate for what purpose) nor do we have any authority to declare an imperative need for innovators. And no, we have absolutely no basis for believing that the Core prepares students for college or the workplace. So, very pretty, and all without foundation.
Montoy-Wilson decides to take on the four flim-flams one at a time.
The standards are a guide, she repeats. Since the standards don't tell her how to teach composing and decomposing numbers (Burris's example), they are just a guide. But she's wrong, because teaching composing and decomposing numbers is what the standards present as how teachers are supposed to teach basic math functions. Montoy-Wilson herself repeats the magic phrase "foundational to deeper understanding"-- which means that the point of learning this technique is because it's a how to understand the functions. So, the point still goes to Burris.
The achievement gap. All these arguments make my brain glaze over because they all depend on smoke and mirrors and pretty words because there is not a single fact to back up what Core fans are trying to say. What specifics Montoy-Wilson mentions are, predictably, things like project based learning that any competent teacher can do and did do for years without any Common Core.
Montoy-Wilson is another Core booster who is seeing magical tests somewhere that none of the rest of us see, tests with performance tasks and other fine features that replace the rote memorization that standardized tests were never about anyway. They're standardized tests. They will create a new test prep industry. They don't measure anything but test-taking skills and, indirectly, socio-economic class.
We are at a crossroads in education policy. We can heed calls to make things “easy” and fail to get at the heart of what our students deserve — or we can buckle down together, accept that there are challenges, that the going is tough, but ultimately the promise of these standards are worth it.
Pretty sure that they aren't. Also pretty sure that there's nothing in these three blogs to convince me otherwise. Lots of things are hard. Shoving a post into your eyeball is hard. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. And promising your children a trip to Disneyland is a great promise, but if you're really driving them to a bombed-out playground, your promise doesn't really matter.
As a rapid-response exercise, EdPost is, at last, fast. But hey-- I often provide next day service and I do my writing at times like 5:30 AM and on my lunch break. Surely $12 million will get you the same level of service that my readers get for $0.00.
Beyond the speed, EdPost continues to reveal its true colors. Completely aligned with the US DOE party line. Just as dismissive and condescending and nasty as anybody in the education debates has ever been, which is not a crime-- it's noteworthy only because EdPost launched with the promise that they would change the conversation.
This is not a new conversation. It's the same old bullshit. Talking points repeated ad infinitum, even if they've been previously debunked and abandoned by thinking people on both sides. Personal attacks and dismissive language. Anecdotes and fancy language to make points (which, again, is not a terrible crime, but EdPost launched claiming it would be all facts and calm rationality).
I mean, damn-- if you're going to go after Carol Burris with accusations of being a liar and a cheat and not understanding how education works, you had better be better armed with something other than high dudgeon and government briefings. EdPost has show us what they're about, but they've also shown how good they are at it, and boy, if that were my $12 million, I'd want some of it back.
[Update. I've refrained from linking to Ed Post for the same reason that I stopped naming She Who Will Not Be Named, but you really need to watch Carol Burris take Whalen to school in the comments section, so here's a link.]
Thursday, April 10, 2014
A Mercedes Schneider Reader
When it comes to fired-up scholarship, passionate digging out of detail, and supplying simple facts for the Resistance, it is hard to beat Mercedes Schneider.
Schneider has one of the most varied backgrounds in the field. She started out as a classroom teacher of German and English, then acquired a PhD in applied statistics and research methods from the University of Northern Colorado and moved to Indiana to teach at Ball State. But there were curves yet to negotiate; Katrina hit her family head on. She decided to go home, and took a job teaching high school English in 2007. The university let her know that professors don't get to recover from that sort of step backwards. Writes Schneider, "But I love to teach. High school, I decided, would be fine with me."
When I started wading into the school reform swamp, I realized that many of the posts that I kept returning to for facts, data, numbers, details, context and sequence-- so many of them were on her blog. Schneider has a book coming out sometime this month, and I have no doubt that it will be valuable and necessary reading for everyone who cares about public education and what is happening to it. But until it arrives, I've collected some of my favorite Schneider pieces. If you are not a regular Schneider reader, you should be, and these are a fine place to start.
Schneider has one of the most varied backgrounds in the field. She started out as a classroom teacher of German and English, then acquired a PhD in applied statistics and research methods from the University of Northern Colorado and moved to Indiana to teach at Ball State. But there were curves yet to negotiate; Katrina hit her family head on. She decided to go home, and took a job teaching high school English in 2007. The university let her know that professors don't get to recover from that sort of step backwards. Writes Schneider, "But I love to teach. High school, I decided, would be fine with me."
When I started wading into the school reform swamp, I realized that many of the posts that I kept returning to for facts, data, numbers, details, context and sequence-- so many of them were on her blog. Schneider has a book coming out sometime this month, and I have no doubt that it will be valuable and necessary reading for everyone who cares about public education and what is happening to it. But until it arrives, I've collected some of my favorite Schneider pieces. If you are not a regular Schneider reader, you should be, and these are a fine place to start.
Cheating as We Worship: The Almighty Standardized Test
A personal but still fact-loaded reflection on the many ways in which the worship of The Test leads everybody involved to cheat in a variety of creative and not-always-obvious ways.Twelve Embarrassing Years of NCLB and RTTT: Time for Arne to Blame USDOE
Schneider examines the long list of people that Arne likes to blame for the alleged problems in education, from moms to teachers to lawmakers to-- well, you name it. And then she lays out exactly how each of those attempts to shift blame is a lie.Success Academy Tax Documents: Moskowitz Can Afford the Rent
Here's an example of what Schneider does so well. While everyone else was trading allegations and rhetoric about what Eva Moskowitz could or couldn't afford and her charters did or didn't need, Schneider went to the paperwork, dug through the publicly available tax records, and published the real numbers.NCTQ Letter Grades and the Reformer Agenda–Part VIII
After this piece had run, NCTQ removed Michelle Rhee from its board of directors, but this remains one of the best dissection of Rhee's dismal career, going back to her own stories about her failed attempt to be a TFA classroom body.The Common Core Memorandum of Understanding: What a Story
Still one of the most jaw-dropping narrative-destroying pieces of investigative journalism anyone has done about the genesis of the Common Core. Schneider unearth's the memorandum of understanding that lays out who will create them and how they will be implemented. This is your go-to link for every time someone tries to tell you that the Core are the result of a state-led initiative.Gates Money and Common Core– Part VI
I'll give you part six so you can work your way backward through the links to the other sections. Schneider has done massive amounts of work tracking the Gates money and discovering where it went. Who did Gates pay off? This series lays it out for you, thanks to what had to be long and tedious research.
More on the Common Core: Achieve, Inc., and Then Some
More on the core and the roots from which it emerged, with particular attention to Achieve as well as some of the principle architects.
Beware of Data Sharing Cheerleaders Offering Webinars
An example of the kind of respect and attention that Schneider draws in the education world. Come for this column, but stay for the comments in which the some of the top scholars and business leaders of the data mining world get into a spirited discussion of the issues at hand. You could pay for a fancy webinar and not see a discussion this exciting and illuminating.
There are plenty of other classics-- some great work on the data track miners and a whole cast of reformy characters whose names you may not know. Schneider employs her tireless research and her scathing wit on each. Read these, explore some more, and get ready to grab a copy of her book the moment it becomes available.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Gates Goes Shopping
Why shouldn't Bill Gates spend his money terraforming the education landscape? Why shouldn't rich guys use their power and influence to promote the issues that they care about? Haven't rich powerful guys always done so?
These are not easy questions to answer. After all, Rockefeller, Carnegie and others made hugely important contributions to the American landscape, legacies that have continue to benefit Americans long after these dead white guys had moved on to Robber Baron Heaven.
How is Gates different? This post by Mercedes Schneider (whose blog you should already be following), helped me see one significant difference.
Rockefeller and Carnegie (the dead white guy philanthropists I'm most familiar with) helped invent modern philanthropy by discovering some basic issues. Mostly, they discovered that when people hear you want to give away money, the wold beats a path to your door. So they set up various entities whose job was to accept, filter and respond to the applications for big bucks that various groups sent to them, based on a set of criteria that the rich guys developed out of A) their own set of concerns and B) the opinions of knowledgeable people in their fields. That's how Rockefeller, a white guy who believed in homeopathic medicine, ended up revolutionizing the study of medical science and building a higher education system for African-Americans.
This is not how the Gates Foundation does business.
Where classic philanthropy says, "Come make your pitch and if we like your work, we will help support you," the Gates Foundation says, "We have a project we want to launch.Let's go shopping for someone to do that for us."
From the Gates Foundation Grantseeker FAQ:
Q. How do I apply for a grant from the foundation? A. We do not make grants outside our funding priorities. In general, we directly invite proposals by directly contacting organizations.
There is also this:
Q: Who makes decisions on investments and when?
A: As part of its operating model, the foundation continues delegate decision making on grants and contracts to leaders across the organization. With our new process, decision makers are identified at the early stage of an investment. Check-in points are built in to help ensure that decision makers are informed about and can raise questions during development, rather than holding all questions until the end.
I know it says "investments," but we're still on the foundations Grantseeker FAQ page, in the section that talks about how various data and progress reports will be used along the way as grant recipients complete whatever project Gates is funding.
We pick the project, we approach the people we want to have do it, we bankroll it, and we supervise it until completion. The Gates Foundation model looks less like a philanthropy and more like corporate subcontracts.
This model explains a few issues about the Gates approach.
Why do so many edu-groups funded by Gates seem to have no existence outside of doing Gates work? Because Gates isn't looking to find people already running proven programs that can use a financial boost, but instead is looking to sow money and reap groups doing exactly what Gates wants to have done. "I've got a gabillion dollars here to give to a group that will pilot and promote an unproven educational technique! I'd like to pay you guys to set that up for us?"
Occasionally Gates does work with a pre-existing group, but often this is a matter of shopping for someone who can provide brand recognition, like AFT or NEA. But those "grants" are still predicated on "I have a project I want you to do for us" and not "Let me help support the good work you're already doing."
This is far different from Rockefeller's "I've got a gabillion dollars to spend promoting Black education in the South. Find me some people who are doing good work in the field that I can help expand with this money."
The Gates Foundation model is astroturf philanthropy.
Look, if you're a rich guy who loves anchovy pizza and you want to use your clout, that's fine. If you open the door for successful anchovy pizza makers to apply for grants so they can expand, that's super. But if you decide that you are going to fund a whole new anchovy pizza plant, and hire health department inspectors to get all other pizza makers condemned, and hire consultants to flood the media with bogus reports about the healthful effects of anchovy pizza, and create other consulting firms to push legislation outlawing everything except anchovies on pizza-- if you do all that, you are not a philanthropist. You're just a guy using money and power to make people do what you want them to.
Rockefeller, Carnegie and the rest were not saints, and it's arguable whether their philanthropic benefits offset their robber baronical misbehavior. But when it came to running a corporate-based oligarchy, they were small-timers compared to the folks at the Gates.
These are not easy questions to answer. After all, Rockefeller, Carnegie and others made hugely important contributions to the American landscape, legacies that have continue to benefit Americans long after these dead white guys had moved on to Robber Baron Heaven.
How is Gates different? This post by Mercedes Schneider (whose blog you should already be following), helped me see one significant difference.
Rockefeller and Carnegie (the dead white guy philanthropists I'm most familiar with) helped invent modern philanthropy by discovering some basic issues. Mostly, they discovered that when people hear you want to give away money, the wold beats a path to your door. So they set up various entities whose job was to accept, filter and respond to the applications for big bucks that various groups sent to them, based on a set of criteria that the rich guys developed out of A) their own set of concerns and B) the opinions of knowledgeable people in their fields. That's how Rockefeller, a white guy who believed in homeopathic medicine, ended up revolutionizing the study of medical science and building a higher education system for African-Americans.
This is not how the Gates Foundation does business.
Where classic philanthropy says, "Come make your pitch and if we like your work, we will help support you," the Gates Foundation says, "We have a project we want to launch.Let's go shopping for someone to do that for us."
From the Gates Foundation Grantseeker FAQ:
Q. How do I apply for a grant from the foundation? A. We do not make grants outside our funding priorities. In general, we directly invite proposals by directly contacting organizations.
There is also this:
Q: Who makes decisions on investments and when?
A: As part of its operating model, the foundation continues delegate decision making on grants and contracts to leaders across the organization. With our new process, decision makers are identified at the early stage of an investment. Check-in points are built in to help ensure that decision makers are informed about and can raise questions during development, rather than holding all questions until the end.
I know it says "investments," but we're still on the foundations Grantseeker FAQ page, in the section that talks about how various data and progress reports will be used along the way as grant recipients complete whatever project Gates is funding.
We pick the project, we approach the people we want to have do it, we bankroll it, and we supervise it until completion. The Gates Foundation model looks less like a philanthropy and more like corporate subcontracts.
This model explains a few issues about the Gates approach.
Why do so many edu-groups funded by Gates seem to have no existence outside of doing Gates work? Because Gates isn't looking to find people already running proven programs that can use a financial boost, but instead is looking to sow money and reap groups doing exactly what Gates wants to have done. "I've got a gabillion dollars here to give to a group that will pilot and promote an unproven educational technique! I'd like to pay you guys to set that up for us?"
Occasionally Gates does work with a pre-existing group, but often this is a matter of shopping for someone who can provide brand recognition, like AFT or NEA. But those "grants" are still predicated on "I have a project I want you to do for us" and not "Let me help support the good work you're already doing."
This is far different from Rockefeller's "I've got a gabillion dollars to spend promoting Black education in the South. Find me some people who are doing good work in the field that I can help expand with this money."
The Gates Foundation model is astroturf philanthropy.
Look, if you're a rich guy who loves anchovy pizza and you want to use your clout, that's fine. If you open the door for successful anchovy pizza makers to apply for grants so they can expand, that's super. But if you decide that you are going to fund a whole new anchovy pizza plant, and hire health department inspectors to get all other pizza makers condemned, and hire consultants to flood the media with bogus reports about the healthful effects of anchovy pizza, and create other consulting firms to push legislation outlawing everything except anchovies on pizza-- if you do all that, you are not a philanthropist. You're just a guy using money and power to make people do what you want them to.
Rockefeller, Carnegie and the rest were not saints, and it's arguable whether their philanthropic benefits offset their robber baronical misbehavior. But when it came to running a corporate-based oligarchy, they were small-timers compared to the folks at the Gates.
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