At FiveThirtyEight, economics writer Ben Casselman has concocted one of the saddest revisionary apologias for No Child Left Behind.
Even the headline/subhead combo signal that this is going to be a tough ride. "No Child Left Behind Worked: At Least in One Important Way." And then Casselman goes on to explain how NCLB really didn't work.
Casselman buries the lede about four paragraphs down:
Nearly a decade and a half later, No Child Left Behind is often described as a failure, and there is no question that the law fell short of many of its most ambitious goals. Most schools didn’t come close to achieving the 100-percent-proficiency mandate, which experts never considered a realistic target. Subsequent research found that the law’s penalties did little to improve student performance, and may have done more harm than good in some schools. Large achievement gaps remain, in part because Congress didn’t provide all of the billions of dollars in additional education funding that the law’s backers envisioned.
And that's why Casselman's "at least" is also a fail. It's worth talking about, because it is the same "at least" that many folks like to tack on NCLB, as in, "Well, at least it accomplished this one great thing."
The "at least" is "at least NCLB made schools disagregate data so that they would discover the little previously-ignored pockets of failure." Casselman even opens with the story of an affluent suburban Massachusetts school that was shocked to "discover" through test results that they were a failure (who knows-- maybe this neighborhood was the home of Arne Duncan's storied white moms)
This is the narrative that helps maintain support for test-and-punish as education policy. But there are several problems with it.
First of all-- nobody is surprised by test results. No local school district in this country has ever, in the last decade-plus of NCLB and NCLB Jr., gotten test results back and said, "Holy smokes! We had no idea that this batch of students was doing poorly!!" Not once. The Big Standardized Tests have told us nothing we didn't know, unless it was that we occasionally discovered that some otherwise great students were lousy test takers.
Second of all-- and Casselman acknowledges this one-- test-and-punish was definitely not test-and-rescue or test-and-assist. NCLB told districts, "Hey, you have a problem right here. Good luck fixing it!" And where test-and-punish turned into test-and-send-students-off-to-charters, the message was "Fix your problems with fewer resources than you had when you got into them in the first place."
Casselman has read up on this-- he devotes a few paragraphs to the research showing that the penalties of NCLB made it harder for schools to get better. Economist-researcher Jacob Vigdor compared the ever-ratcheting punishments to yelling at a failing kid: "You might succeed in scaring the Dickens out of the kid, but you’re not going to help them pass algebra."
So, in other words, NCLB's "success" was to tell districts what they already knew and to offer punishment without assistance.
Casselman also wants to make a case for the "success" of transparent data.
But for all its failures, No Child Left Behind had at least one significant — and, experts say, lasting — success: It changed the way the American educational system collects and uses data. The law may not have achieved the promise of its title, but it did force schools across the country to figure out which students were being left behind, and to make that information public.
Well, the "collect and use" data is true-- schools now collect a bunch of test data that is useful for doing test prep so that we can collect more data. It's a change in the sense that professional baseball would be changed if, between each inning, one team dug holes on the field and then the other team filled them in. It's a waste of everybody's time, but boy are they busy Doing Something (and the shovel companies make a mint).
And no school in the country needed help finding out who was left behind, but then, that's not really the point, is it. It's the "make the information public," because test-and-punish also includes test-and-shame. Because a premise of both NCLB and NCLB 2.0 (Duncan-Obama) was always that schools are big fat lying liars who lie. And it would only be natural that Casselman would pick up that idea, because now many paragraphs in, we discover who one of his his "experts" is. CAP.
“There’s a very long history of states and school districts and schools essentially hiding behind the average performance of their students,” said Scott Sargrad, a former Education Department official in the Obama administration who is now a researcher at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “That masks really significant differences between kids who are more affluent, who are white, who don’t have disabilities, whatever it is, and their peers who are more disadvantaged.”
What a swell quote. First, of districts were "hiding," one might ask what they were hiding from and why (I'm going with "dumb, punitive federal and state policies that get in the way of doing the actual work of educating students"). Second, please notice that even this CAP tool doesn't talk about this in terms of achievement or education or learning or skill and ability levels, but in terms of affluence, race and disabilities. Even he doesn't think that test-and-punish has an educational purpose or reveal educational results. Testing is all about race and class, and nothing about actual education. Which evokes a hilarious scene in a district office somewhere with administrators poring over test results and exclaiming, "Hey, I think some of these kids might be poor-- in fact, I think some of them are poor and black! man, I'm glad we got these test results so we could figure this out."
Ultimately, Casselman is left with "we handle data differently" and that, by the end of the article, is whittled down to "we can track individual student data year to year" (not everyone's idea of a Good Thing) and "we use specific figures instead of averages." I'm pretty sure we could have moved away from averages on our government reports without up-ending the entire education system with untested, unproven educational malpractice baloney. If that's the best we can offer, I think we can keep right on saying that No Child Left Behind was a complete and utter failure.
Showing posts with label NCLB. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NCLB. Show all posts
Saturday, January 9, 2016
Saturday, December 12, 2015
NCLB Revisionism
Well, that didn't take long.
Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.
Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.
In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.
Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...
As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it.
What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's bizarrely unrealistic and innumerate goal of having 100% of American students score above average on the Big Standardized Test.
[Update: Aldeman disagrees that "proficient" is the same as "above average," and there was some argument at the time about what "proficient" really meant and whether it was "just good enough" or "ready for college." Here's what the state of PA was saying in 2006:
Students are identified as performing in one of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced – meaning that they have mastered Pennsylvania’s assessment anchor content standards at their grade level.
"At grade level" is a tricky construct, but "grade level" frequently means "average."]
NCLB guaranteed that as we approached 2014, we would have only two types of schools in this country-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. Success was literally impossible. And that guaranteed that the number of failing schools would increase and that the public, as they saw the failure label hit schools that they knew damn well were good schools-- that public was going to push back and politicians were going to join in.
Aldeman notes the history of Obama waivers. And he notes the irony of the GOP's love of federal intrusion when it came to education policy.
But Aldeman is also bleary-eyed when it comes to the history of intervention in "failing" schools.
Perhaps worst of all, a strategy focused on fixing the toughest problems hinges on the desire and ability to actually do something about poor performance. The Obama administration, to its credit, did allocate significant resources to chronically low-performing schools through its School Improvement Grants program. And in exchange, it required tough and aggressive interventions in those schools. Although the results of those efforts are still uncertain, they represent a real attempt to shake up persistently poor-performing schools.
No, the results of the SIG program are not uncertain. They're a full-on failure, and all Aldeman has to do is walk across the hall to his Bellwether colleague Andy Smarick hear about it.
Aldeman is unhappy that ESSA is not draconian enough in its approach to "failing" schools. He misses the bigger problem with his aims. Neither NCLB nor the Obama Waiver program had a clue of how to accurately locate failing schools, nor do policy-makers have a clue about how to fix a failing school once they find it. All we've gotten from the last fifteen years of reformsterism is a means of using "failed" schools as a means for creating markets for charter operators and ed-related corporate money grabs.
Like many victims of nostalgia, Aldeman is sad to lose things that we never had. I can think of plenty of reasons not to love ESSA, but a belief that we actually lost some things that NCLB got right-- that does not make the list of objections.
Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.
Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.
In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.
Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...
As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it.
What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's bizarrely unrealistic and innumerate goal of having 100% of American students score above average on the Big Standardized Test.
[Update: Aldeman disagrees that "proficient" is the same as "above average," and there was some argument at the time about what "proficient" really meant and whether it was "just good enough" or "ready for college." Here's what the state of PA was saying in 2006:
Students are identified as performing in one of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced – meaning that they have mastered Pennsylvania’s assessment anchor content standards at their grade level.
"At grade level" is a tricky construct, but "grade level" frequently means "average."]
NCLB guaranteed that as we approached 2014, we would have only two types of schools in this country-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. Success was literally impossible. And that guaranteed that the number of failing schools would increase and that the public, as they saw the failure label hit schools that they knew damn well were good schools-- that public was going to push back and politicians were going to join in.
Aldeman notes the history of Obama waivers. And he notes the irony of the GOP's love of federal intrusion when it came to education policy.
But Aldeman is also bleary-eyed when it comes to the history of intervention in "failing" schools.
Perhaps worst of all, a strategy focused on fixing the toughest problems hinges on the desire and ability to actually do something about poor performance. The Obama administration, to its credit, did allocate significant resources to chronically low-performing schools through its School Improvement Grants program. And in exchange, it required tough and aggressive interventions in those schools. Although the results of those efforts are still uncertain, they represent a real attempt to shake up persistently poor-performing schools.
No, the results of the SIG program are not uncertain. They're a full-on failure, and all Aldeman has to do is walk across the hall to his Bellwether colleague Andy Smarick hear about it.
Aldeman is unhappy that ESSA is not draconian enough in its approach to "failing" schools. He misses the bigger problem with his aims. Neither NCLB nor the Obama Waiver program had a clue of how to accurately locate failing schools, nor do policy-makers have a clue about how to fix a failing school once they find it. All we've gotten from the last fifteen years of reformsterism is a means of using "failed" schools as a means for creating markets for charter operators and ed-related corporate money grabs.
Like many victims of nostalgia, Aldeman is sad to lose things that we never had. I can think of plenty of reasons not to love ESSA, but a belief that we actually lost some things that NCLB got right-- that does not make the list of objections.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Spellings Remains Steadfastly Wrong
US News ran another of its nifty Debate Club features on Monday, this time tackling the question, "Does No Child Left Behind's Testing Regime Work?"
Arguing "no" were the presidents of America's two large teachers' unions. Sticking up for NCLB's test-and-punish regime were Cheryl Oldham from the US Chamber of Commerce, and Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush's secretary of education.
Spellings uses her time at the debate podium to demonstrate that she remains steadfastly devoted to the same bad policy ideas that she promoted back in the day, still without support. But her piece lets her tick off all the standard bad arguments for keeping NCLB on its same doomed path of educational destruction.
The success of every student in reading and doing math on grade level is vital to the future success of our nation.
That's the very first sentence, and while it's a piece of the NCLB canon, after all these years, there still isn't a lick of proof that it's true. It certainly wasn't true in the past, where large chunks of the US population could not do either of those things and yet the country still did pretty well. She may well want to argue that times have changed, and I wouldn't disagree-- but there's still no proof that there's any linkage between eight-year-olds who read on grade level and national success (and what do we mean by "success" anyway).
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card, show that No Child Left Behind has added to the focus on poor and minority students and resulted in increases in their achievement.
Lots of smart people have looked at the same data and failed to see the improvement that Spellings likes to tout.
Prior to the federal requirement for annual assessments that was instituted in 2002, few states had assessments in place. That means that few students had the necessary information to truly meet the needs of each and every child.
Because....? Teachers were incapable of evaluating student progress? No educational measure known to man could possibly be as awesome as a big fat federal test?
Annual, comparable, valid, reliable statewide assessments give educators and policymakers the ability to focus resources on problem areas, find strategies that work and reward results.
After an over a decade, educators and policymakers have not managed to do any of those things (unless, by "focus resources" you mean "unleash privatizers upon"). I have a standing offer for any reformster to name a single pedagogical strategy that has been discovered by the testing program and then scaled up into schools across the nation. The closest thing we have is fairly widespread adoption of test prep techniques, but all those do is teach students how to do better on tests. Is test-taking our nation's educational aspiration?
Spellings also likes the tale of how, pre-NCLB, nobody knew anything about how schools that served poor and minority students were under-served, under-resourced, and under-funded. Once test results came out, minority children could no longer fall through the cracks. Perhaps you remember that year that state and federal government unleashed a wave of financial support, delivering on the promise that our poorest schools would be funded just as well as our richest ones. Oh, wait. That never actually happened.
Did (and do) some of our nation's schools do a terrible job of serving poor and minority students? Absolutely. But NCLB 1) did not find troubled schools that nobody ever knew were troubled nor 2) lead to a redirection of resources to those schools.
According to the Nation’s Report Card, Hispanic and African-American nine-year-olds grew by two grade levels in reading between 1999 and 2008.
Did they? What was the rate of improvement prior to 1999? And why are we counting from 1999 when NCLB didn't take effect until 2003? How much of the wonderful gainage she cites came before NCLB even had a chance to affect student results?
Our main concern must be students. Timely and transparent reporting of data is the only way to keep the focus where it belongs, on increasing student achievement. How else will we know whether they are prepared for college or a good job after high school? How else will we ensure that they aren’t being pushed through the system by those who were elected to ensure they received the best possible education and opportunity for the future?
"Increased student achievement" simply means "higher standardized test scores." And all those "How else" questions? Standardized test scores don't provide answers to any of them. This is like declaring "We must keep polishing our bicycles. How else will we know if our vest still has no sleeves?"
The Texas Senate Education Committee recently unanimously approved legislation that would let high school kids receive their diploma without having demonstrated that they have the basic skills and knowledge to be successful in attending college, work or in life.
Did anybody know how to measure those things with a test? Any proof that such a test exists? Because I'd bet that if any such test exists, it is stapled to a Yeti riding on the back of a centaur.
The argument for it is that nearly 30,000 seniors will be unable to pass the exams and therefore will be limited in their future opportunities. But when we eliminate the requirement that assesses their college and job readiness, how successful can we expect their future opportunities to be? It is a cruel trick to suggest they are ready for life when the data show otherwise.
It is also a cruel trick to insist that you know whether they will be successful or not when there is in fact no proof, evidence, research or tea leaf reading to support the idea that the single narrow test of some math and reading skills is an accurate predictor of a child's future.
Also, what was the plan for those 30K seniors. They were going to flunk high school and then.... what? Not take the GED (nobody is passing the new Pearsonized GED these days). Take an entire senior year over again just to take a single test?
The question we should be asking is why the same student who cannot pass a ninth or tenth grade level test is receiving passing grades in the classroom.
Orrrr.... we could ask why a test claims a passing student is actually failing. If a large number of students fail a test in my class, particularly if all other indicators show they're doing well with the material, then I don't look at the students-- I look at the test.
We must use this opportunity to move education forward and not dilute the progress that has been made.
The "we can't turn back and waste our accomplishments so far" argument is special because it is an argument used to oppose NCLB back in the day and Common Core more recently. But somehow back then the reformsters thought that new and awesome things were worth a little chaos and disorder. Now suddenly they are huge fans of inertia. It should not be news to anybody that when you are doing something that doesn't work, you should think about not doing it any more.
Look, some of these would be great things to say if they represented reality. But the standardized test does not become an accurate measure of a student's entire life prospects just because you say so, and while it would be nice if the test results were used to improve education for underserved students, we've been at this for over a decade and it hasn't happened yet.
Spelling's paean to NCLB testing is a news broadcast from an alternate universe. Read the pieces by Garcia and Weingarten instead.
Arguing "no" were the presidents of America's two large teachers' unions. Sticking up for NCLB's test-and-punish regime were Cheryl Oldham from the US Chamber of Commerce, and Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush's secretary of education.
Spellings uses her time at the debate podium to demonstrate that she remains steadfastly devoted to the same bad policy ideas that she promoted back in the day, still without support. But her piece lets her tick off all the standard bad arguments for keeping NCLB on its same doomed path of educational destruction.
The success of every student in reading and doing math on grade level is vital to the future success of our nation.
That's the very first sentence, and while it's a piece of the NCLB canon, after all these years, there still isn't a lick of proof that it's true. It certainly wasn't true in the past, where large chunks of the US population could not do either of those things and yet the country still did pretty well. She may well want to argue that times have changed, and I wouldn't disagree-- but there's still no proof that there's any linkage between eight-year-olds who read on grade level and national success (and what do we mean by "success" anyway).
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card, show that No Child Left Behind has added to the focus on poor and minority students and resulted in increases in their achievement.
Lots of smart people have looked at the same data and failed to see the improvement that Spellings likes to tout.
Prior to the federal requirement for annual assessments that was instituted in 2002, few states had assessments in place. That means that few students had the necessary information to truly meet the needs of each and every child.
Because....? Teachers were incapable of evaluating student progress? No educational measure known to man could possibly be as awesome as a big fat federal test?
Annual, comparable, valid, reliable statewide assessments give educators and policymakers the ability to focus resources on problem areas, find strategies that work and reward results.
After an over a decade, educators and policymakers have not managed to do any of those things (unless, by "focus resources" you mean "unleash privatizers upon"). I have a standing offer for any reformster to name a single pedagogical strategy that has been discovered by the testing program and then scaled up into schools across the nation. The closest thing we have is fairly widespread adoption of test prep techniques, but all those do is teach students how to do better on tests. Is test-taking our nation's educational aspiration?
Spellings also likes the tale of how, pre-NCLB, nobody knew anything about how schools that served poor and minority students were under-served, under-resourced, and under-funded. Once test results came out, minority children could no longer fall through the cracks. Perhaps you remember that year that state and federal government unleashed a wave of financial support, delivering on the promise that our poorest schools would be funded just as well as our richest ones. Oh, wait. That never actually happened.
Did (and do) some of our nation's schools do a terrible job of serving poor and minority students? Absolutely. But NCLB 1) did not find troubled schools that nobody ever knew were troubled nor 2) lead to a redirection of resources to those schools.
According to the Nation’s Report Card, Hispanic and African-American nine-year-olds grew by two grade levels in reading between 1999 and 2008.
Did they? What was the rate of improvement prior to 1999? And why are we counting from 1999 when NCLB didn't take effect until 2003? How much of the wonderful gainage she cites came before NCLB even had a chance to affect student results?
Our main concern must be students. Timely and transparent reporting of data is the only way to keep the focus where it belongs, on increasing student achievement. How else will we know whether they are prepared for college or a good job after high school? How else will we ensure that they aren’t being pushed through the system by those who were elected to ensure they received the best possible education and opportunity for the future?
"Increased student achievement" simply means "higher standardized test scores." And all those "How else" questions? Standardized test scores don't provide answers to any of them. This is like declaring "We must keep polishing our bicycles. How else will we know if our vest still has no sleeves?"
The Texas Senate Education Committee recently unanimously approved legislation that would let high school kids receive their diploma without having demonstrated that they have the basic skills and knowledge to be successful in attending college, work or in life.
Did anybody know how to measure those things with a test? Any proof that such a test exists? Because I'd bet that if any such test exists, it is stapled to a Yeti riding on the back of a centaur.
The argument for it is that nearly 30,000 seniors will be unable to pass the exams and therefore will be limited in their future opportunities. But when we eliminate the requirement that assesses their college and job readiness, how successful can we expect their future opportunities to be? It is a cruel trick to suggest they are ready for life when the data show otherwise.
It is also a cruel trick to insist that you know whether they will be successful or not when there is in fact no proof, evidence, research or tea leaf reading to support the idea that the single narrow test of some math and reading skills is an accurate predictor of a child's future.
Also, what was the plan for those 30K seniors. They were going to flunk high school and then.... what? Not take the GED (nobody is passing the new Pearsonized GED these days). Take an entire senior year over again just to take a single test?
The question we should be asking is why the same student who cannot pass a ninth or tenth grade level test is receiving passing grades in the classroom.
Orrrr.... we could ask why a test claims a passing student is actually failing. If a large number of students fail a test in my class, particularly if all other indicators show they're doing well with the material, then I don't look at the students-- I look at the test.
We must use this opportunity to move education forward and not dilute the progress that has been made.
The "we can't turn back and waste our accomplishments so far" argument is special because it is an argument used to oppose NCLB back in the day and Common Core more recently. But somehow back then the reformsters thought that new and awesome things were worth a little chaos and disorder. Now suddenly they are huge fans of inertia. It should not be news to anybody that when you are doing something that doesn't work, you should think about not doing it any more.
Look, some of these would be great things to say if they represented reality. But the standardized test does not become an accurate measure of a student's entire life prospects just because you say so, and while it would be nice if the test results were used to improve education for underserved students, we've been at this for over a decade and it hasn't happened yet.
Spelling's paean to NCLB testing is a news broadcast from an alternate universe. Read the pieces by Garcia and Weingarten instead.
Arne's Dumb Expectations
Andrea Mitchell, always a reliable amplifier of administration PR, gave Arne Duncan yet another opportunity to try to peddle his wares recently.
Arne wanted to stand up for Common Core in the face of the GOP pre-pre-primary beat-em-up on the standards. As reported by Ben Kamisar at The Hill, Duncan is framing his pitch with one of his favorite spins-- it's all about the expectations.
“When you dumb down expectations to make politicians look good, that's one of the most insidious things that happens.”
Of course, another insidious thing that happens is when politicians raise expectations to make themselves look good, but don't actually deliver any of the support needed to meet those expectations.
It's also insidious when politicians raise expectations and back them up by holding other people responsible for meeting them. Imagine how different education would reform would play out if we just changed half of the following sentence. Instead of
Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold teachers and school districts responsible for their failure to properly teach those students
we could instead say
Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold politicians responsible for their failure to properly support those schools with needed resources.
Duncan's belief in the magic of expectations is well-documented. It just isn't well-founded in reality. High expectations are great-- when realistic. High expectations are great-- when they are applied to the people and government agencies that are supposed to provide the resources needed to meet those expectations.
But among the many things that Duncan fails to grasp is the result not of high expectation, but the placement of blame and punishment when those expectations are not met.
When a child fails to meet expectations that were set unreasonably high by politicians, who should be held responsible?
When a child struggles to meet expectations because her school and community are starved for the resources needed to help her achieve, who should be held responsible?
Duncan continues to fail to understand the system that he has perpetuated. Politicians did not lower expectations "to look good" under NCLB-- they did it to avoid losing badly-needed money for poor, struggling schools. Duncan continues to ask as if public education has twisted itself into a test-obsessed mis-directed pretzel on some sort of random whim, and not as a predictable and not-irrational response to the policy of test-and-punish pursued with gusto by this administration.
Arne wanted to stand up for Common Core in the face of the GOP pre-pre-primary beat-em-up on the standards. As reported by Ben Kamisar at The Hill, Duncan is framing his pitch with one of his favorite spins-- it's all about the expectations.
“When you dumb down expectations to make politicians look good, that's one of the most insidious things that happens.”
Of course, another insidious thing that happens is when politicians raise expectations to make themselves look good, but don't actually deliver any of the support needed to meet those expectations.
It's also insidious when politicians raise expectations and back them up by holding other people responsible for meeting them. Imagine how different education would reform would play out if we just changed half of the following sentence. Instead of
Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold teachers and school districts responsible for their failure to properly teach those students
we could instead say
Where we find failing schools and students, we must hold politicians responsible for their failure to properly support those schools with needed resources.
Duncan's belief in the magic of expectations is well-documented. It just isn't well-founded in reality. High expectations are great-- when realistic. High expectations are great-- when they are applied to the people and government agencies that are supposed to provide the resources needed to meet those expectations.
But among the many things that Duncan fails to grasp is the result not of high expectation, but the placement of blame and punishment when those expectations are not met.
When a child fails to meet expectations that were set unreasonably high by politicians, who should be held responsible?
When a child struggles to meet expectations because her school and community are starved for the resources needed to help her achieve, who should be held responsible?
Duncan continues to fail to understand the system that he has perpetuated. Politicians did not lower expectations "to look good" under NCLB-- they did it to avoid losing badly-needed money for poor, struggling schools. Duncan continues to ask as if public education has twisted itself into a test-obsessed mis-directed pretzel on some sort of random whim, and not as a predictable and not-irrational response to the policy of test-and-punish pursued with gusto by this administration.
Monday, February 16, 2015
The Governors Want Their Schools Back
Last week the National Governor's Association (NGA) released their idea of what the new ESEA should look like. The document is only six pages long, but it has some remarkable features, and while the NGA may not ultimately carry a great deal of weight in this discussion, they certainly don't carry any less weight than Arne Duncan and the USED, and we've talked about their ideas. So fair is fair.
NGA, you may recall, is notable for being the copyright holders of the Common Core as well as being one of the groups that supposedly hired David Coleman, Jason Zimba, and some other gifted amateurs to punch up the nation's education system. So the first thing that we'll note is that the phrase "Common Core" does not appear anywhere in their proposal.
So what's the major upshot of this proposal from the folks who helped start the ball rolling on the federal take-over of fifty separate public education systems? The major upshot is this:
Give us back our schools.
Here are the more specific breakdowns of the proposal.
Governance and Educational Alignment
Governors and state legislatures believe that a student's success is determined by much more than time spent in elementary and high school. Students need a supportive, seamless progression from preschool through college to lifelong learning and successful employment.
So there's your fetus-to-fertilizer pipeline. The NGA loves it-- they just don't think it can be managed very well from DC. After all, he's called Big Brother, not Big Uncle or Big Second Cousin Once Removed on Your Mother's Side. Race to the Top was great for modernizing the approach to education, but "it is time to take the next step" by rewriting ESEA so that it "supports students in all phases of life." Yeah, that's not creepy and stalkery at all.
Does it seem like I'm over-reacting by thinking that this proposes to make the schools a cog in the worker supply chain? Well, here's a quote from their press release:
“The Elementary and Secondary Education Act will allow states to align our needs through early education to higher education with the needs of our innovative businesses, developing a stronger workforce development pipeline, expanding opportunity for all of our people and ensuring that students are prepared for success in all phases of life,” said New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, vice chair of the committee.”
Specifically, the NGA recommends that ESEA gives state-level leaders the authority to align, leverage, and finance their way to greater efficiency. Give states the tools to lump pre- and post- secondary education into the mix, as well as workforce development; break down silos, and allow flexibility for "public-private partnership." So, loosen up the rules so we can outsource to whatever vendor suits us.
Accountability and Testing
NGA would like to move away from "label and punish" and get with a more supportive framework-- for each student. For accountability to work, "federal prescriptions must be replaced with a federal, state and local partnership that makes certain every child counts."
So keep the public reporting of progress, and keep disaggregating results. But dump the "rigid structure" of Annual Measurable Objectives and Adequate Yearly Progress and let the states come up with their own systems that ensure ambitious targets, use multiple measures, account for college and career readiness, check districts' annual progress, gets public input from all constituencies, and allows states to cut a deal with individual districts.
Also, the state's assessment system should be one that "prohibits the US Secretary of Education from influencing or dictating the state's development of goals under ESEA." So, memo from NGA to Arne Duncan: Suck it.
The states should also get to create their own intervention process that does not necessarily hold Title I funds hostage, allows the state to partner with a failing district, but requires the state to flat out intervene after things stay too bad too long. The Title I non-hostage clause would be enough all by itself to get the federal monkey off the states' back.
Also, states should be able to pick or substitute their own alternatives to any federally-required assessments, and they should be able to do it without seeking the permission of the Secretary of Education. So, again-- Arne, suck it.
High Quality Education for All Students
Governors and state legislators want students to succeed and believe that all can (at high levels). We still think the transparency and disaggregatiness of NCLB are just fine, thanks.
So NGA advocates ensuring a high-quality education for all by continuing testing and reporting results, which is kind of backwards, like saying we'll make sure you get a good meal by cleaning the plates afterwards. NGA also advocates allowing some fancy footwork with aggregating, and getting rid of "cumbersome" government paperwork.
Also (I don't know why this is hiding here), they want you to know that "states" include US territories and outside regions. So, congratulations Kwajalein-- you get a piece of this, too.
NGA also recommends that students with disabilities not be left out of this, as well as English language learners. As with the rest of the high-quality delivery system, the states want flexibility to sort things out.
School Improvement
States have been researching ways to "lift up" failing schools like crazy and even trying ways to keep those that are circling the drain from failing. The feds should help us fund scaling up these various techniques (I presume that NGA meant to add "in case we ever find one that actually works, other than obvious things like getting money and resources to schools in trouble"). "The current limited federal menu of options for school improvement" keeps us from doing what we think we'd rather.
However, the feds should still send money. We may want to change other parts of this, but that sending money part? We would like to keep doing that. Then we will spend the money on turnaround specialists or state partnerships with the district or a menu of strategies. Also, we'd like to let successful districts export their ideas to unsuccessful ones (presumably NGA imagines strategies other than "build your school in a wealthy neighborhood" coming to light).
Districts might also use that funding to recruit some awesome high-quality school leaders and then gift them with flexible resources (aka folding money).
Schools would have three years to turn things around, unless they "partnered" with the state, in which case the time frame is open to negotiation. The state will figure out which data markers will determine success.
Empowering Teachers and School Leaders
Teachers and school leaders and the state should be co-developers of an evaluation system and professional development. Districts should be able to use federal money to build partnerships with postsecondary partners (because we all teach in districts right next to colleges).
The feds should scrap their definition of a highly qualified teacher and let the states go back to determining that for themselves. The evaluation system will likewise be a state thing that would give "meaningful weight" to "multiple-measures of teacher and principal performance" (I do not know what the hyphen is doing in there) as well as evidence of student learning and "contributing factors" to student growth. The state, working with educators at all levels, would decide what to do with evaluation results.
Also, "the Secretary may not dictate or require any methodology as part of a state's teacher and school leader evaluation system." So, a third time, NGA says suck it, Arne.
NGA says fine on retaining the requirement to distribute teachers equitably across the state (an requirement that nobody has ever even pretended to implement) but they would like the freedom to spend the money for that on, well, pretty much anything. "Efforts" to increase number of great teachers in a school-- heck, I can fob anything of as an "effort" to do anything.
State and Local Flexibility
States and schools must be given increased flexibility to meet the individual needs of students and prepare them to compete in a highly-skilled workforce.
Well, that certainly lowers the bar for what we want from an educated public, doesn't it. Just get 'em ready for a job. If their future employers are happy, that's all we need? The entire US public education system isn't here to serve students or parents or taxpayers-- it's here to serve businesses?
This part of the proposal is about flexibility in how states have to deal with the feds.
For instance, we spend a third of a page talking about federal approval of the state plan request. The Secretary must have a team to review these plans. The Secretary may not add academic requirements. The Secretary get the plan reviewed and back in sixty days or it is automatically approved. And the Secretary cannot disapprove a plan unless he can "provide substantive, research-based evidence that the plan will negatively affect children's education."
And in the event that we're still doing waivers, the Secretary is again given a list of restrictions, finishing with being forbidden to deny a waiver "for conditions outside the scope of the waiver request," nor may he add additional requirements not covered in ESEA. So in other words, under NGA's version of the law, the current waiver requirements that Arne has saddled everyone with would be illegal (or, if you like, more clearly illegal than they already are).
So, once more, and with gusto, Arne is cordially invited to suck it.
Two Thoughts
Two things occur to me reading this document (well, three, if you count how very much the governors want Arne to get bent).
One is that the governors don't seem to have a great deal of faith in the authority of the state. It seems that if they were really feeling their oats, they would just do some of the things on this list instead of asking if the feds might allow them a small cup of rights. "Please, sir, may I have some more," hardly seems like the stance for a full-scale American governor.
Second, the NGA seems surprised to be here, as if they can't imagine how education ever got in such a heavily-federalized mess. They've tried selling this "Who, us?" narrative before, but it was the governors who laid out what would be the framework of Race to the Top, and they did it back in 2008, before Duncan and Obama had made their unsuccessful attempt to get ESEA rewritten, before Race to the Top was devised as an end run around it. If the governor's don't like the current reformy scenery, well, we've arrived exactly where they wanted to take us. A piece of my heart will go out to any US Congress member who calls the governors on that.
The best final word on the NGA Christmas list comes from Anne Gassel at Missouri Education Watchdog, so I'll let her wrap this up by putting this newest reformy proposal in its proper context:
Outcome Based Education, School To Work, Goals 2000, NCLB are all signs that the federal government is incapable of drafting workable or effective laws regarding education. Reform at this level will not work. Such laws, by the very fact that they require central control (and accountability), are destined not to work for education and need to be eliminated. Unfortunately our Governors don’t recognize that they already have all the authority they need to do what they want and instead are asking for permission, thereby granting control to the feds. This is not leadership Governors. This is middle management at best.
NGA, you may recall, is notable for being the copyright holders of the Common Core as well as being one of the groups that supposedly hired David Coleman, Jason Zimba, and some other gifted amateurs to punch up the nation's education system. So the first thing that we'll note is that the phrase "Common Core" does not appear anywhere in their proposal.
So what's the major upshot of this proposal from the folks who helped start the ball rolling on the federal take-over of fifty separate public education systems? The major upshot is this:
Give us back our schools.
Here are the more specific breakdowns of the proposal.
Governance and Educational Alignment
Governors and state legislatures believe that a student's success is determined by much more than time spent in elementary and high school. Students need a supportive, seamless progression from preschool through college to lifelong learning and successful employment.
So there's your fetus-to-fertilizer pipeline. The NGA loves it-- they just don't think it can be managed very well from DC. After all, he's called Big Brother, not Big Uncle or Big Second Cousin Once Removed on Your Mother's Side. Race to the Top was great for modernizing the approach to education, but "it is time to take the next step" by rewriting ESEA so that it "supports students in all phases of life." Yeah, that's not creepy and stalkery at all.
Does it seem like I'm over-reacting by thinking that this proposes to make the schools a cog in the worker supply chain? Well, here's a quote from their press release:
“The Elementary and Secondary Education Act will allow states to align our needs through early education to higher education with the needs of our innovative businesses, developing a stronger workforce development pipeline, expanding opportunity for all of our people and ensuring that students are prepared for success in all phases of life,” said New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, vice chair of the committee.”
Specifically, the NGA recommends that ESEA gives state-level leaders the authority to align, leverage, and finance their way to greater efficiency. Give states the tools to lump pre- and post- secondary education into the mix, as well as workforce development; break down silos, and allow flexibility for "public-private partnership." So, loosen up the rules so we can outsource to whatever vendor suits us.
Accountability and Testing
NGA would like to move away from "label and punish" and get with a more supportive framework-- for each student. For accountability to work, "federal prescriptions must be replaced with a federal, state and local partnership that makes certain every child counts."
So keep the public reporting of progress, and keep disaggregating results. But dump the "rigid structure" of Annual Measurable Objectives and Adequate Yearly Progress and let the states come up with their own systems that ensure ambitious targets, use multiple measures, account for college and career readiness, check districts' annual progress, gets public input from all constituencies, and allows states to cut a deal with individual districts.
Also, the state's assessment system should be one that "prohibits the US Secretary of Education from influencing or dictating the state's development of goals under ESEA." So, memo from NGA to Arne Duncan: Suck it.
The states should also get to create their own intervention process that does not necessarily hold Title I funds hostage, allows the state to partner with a failing district, but requires the state to flat out intervene after things stay too bad too long. The Title I non-hostage clause would be enough all by itself to get the federal monkey off the states' back.
Also, states should be able to pick or substitute their own alternatives to any federally-required assessments, and they should be able to do it without seeking the permission of the Secretary of Education. So, again-- Arne, suck it.
High Quality Education for All Students
Governors and state legislators want students to succeed and believe that all can (at high levels). We still think the transparency and disaggregatiness of NCLB are just fine, thanks.
So NGA advocates ensuring a high-quality education for all by continuing testing and reporting results, which is kind of backwards, like saying we'll make sure you get a good meal by cleaning the plates afterwards. NGA also advocates allowing some fancy footwork with aggregating, and getting rid of "cumbersome" government paperwork.
Also (I don't know why this is hiding here), they want you to know that "states" include US territories and outside regions. So, congratulations Kwajalein-- you get a piece of this, too.
NGA also recommends that students with disabilities not be left out of this, as well as English language learners. As with the rest of the high-quality delivery system, the states want flexibility to sort things out.
School Improvement
States have been researching ways to "lift up" failing schools like crazy and even trying ways to keep those that are circling the drain from failing. The feds should help us fund scaling up these various techniques (I presume that NGA meant to add "in case we ever find one that actually works, other than obvious things like getting money and resources to schools in trouble"). "The current limited federal menu of options for school improvement" keeps us from doing what we think we'd rather.
However, the feds should still send money. We may want to change other parts of this, but that sending money part? We would like to keep doing that. Then we will spend the money on turnaround specialists or state partnerships with the district or a menu of strategies. Also, we'd like to let successful districts export their ideas to unsuccessful ones (presumably NGA imagines strategies other than "build your school in a wealthy neighborhood" coming to light).
Districts might also use that funding to recruit some awesome high-quality school leaders and then gift them with flexible resources (aka folding money).
Schools would have three years to turn things around, unless they "partnered" with the state, in which case the time frame is open to negotiation. The state will figure out which data markers will determine success.
Empowering Teachers and School Leaders
Teachers and school leaders and the state should be co-developers of an evaluation system and professional development. Districts should be able to use federal money to build partnerships with postsecondary partners (because we all teach in districts right next to colleges).
The feds should scrap their definition of a highly qualified teacher and let the states go back to determining that for themselves. The evaluation system will likewise be a state thing that would give "meaningful weight" to "multiple-measures of teacher and principal performance" (I do not know what the hyphen is doing in there) as well as evidence of student learning and "contributing factors" to student growth. The state, working with educators at all levels, would decide what to do with evaluation results.
Also, "the Secretary may not dictate or require any methodology as part of a state's teacher and school leader evaluation system." So, a third time, NGA says suck it, Arne.
NGA says fine on retaining the requirement to distribute teachers equitably across the state (an requirement that nobody has ever even pretended to implement) but they would like the freedom to spend the money for that on, well, pretty much anything. "Efforts" to increase number of great teachers in a school-- heck, I can fob anything of as an "effort" to do anything.
State and Local Flexibility
States and schools must be given increased flexibility to meet the individual needs of students and prepare them to compete in a highly-skilled workforce.
Well, that certainly lowers the bar for what we want from an educated public, doesn't it. Just get 'em ready for a job. If their future employers are happy, that's all we need? The entire US public education system isn't here to serve students or parents or taxpayers-- it's here to serve businesses?
This part of the proposal is about flexibility in how states have to deal with the feds.
For instance, we spend a third of a page talking about federal approval of the state plan request. The Secretary must have a team to review these plans. The Secretary may not add academic requirements. The Secretary get the plan reviewed and back in sixty days or it is automatically approved. And the Secretary cannot disapprove a plan unless he can "provide substantive, research-based evidence that the plan will negatively affect children's education."
And in the event that we're still doing waivers, the Secretary is again given a list of restrictions, finishing with being forbidden to deny a waiver "for conditions outside the scope of the waiver request," nor may he add additional requirements not covered in ESEA. So in other words, under NGA's version of the law, the current waiver requirements that Arne has saddled everyone with would be illegal (or, if you like, more clearly illegal than they already are).
So, once more, and with gusto, Arne is cordially invited to suck it.
Two Thoughts
Two things occur to me reading this document (well, three, if you count how very much the governors want Arne to get bent).
One is that the governors don't seem to have a great deal of faith in the authority of the state. It seems that if they were really feeling their oats, they would just do some of the things on this list instead of asking if the feds might allow them a small cup of rights. "Please, sir, may I have some more," hardly seems like the stance for a full-scale American governor.
Second, the NGA seems surprised to be here, as if they can't imagine how education ever got in such a heavily-federalized mess. They've tried selling this "Who, us?" narrative before, but it was the governors who laid out what would be the framework of Race to the Top, and they did it back in 2008, before Duncan and Obama had made their unsuccessful attempt to get ESEA rewritten, before Race to the Top was devised as an end run around it. If the governor's don't like the current reformy scenery, well, we've arrived exactly where they wanted to take us. A piece of my heart will go out to any US Congress member who calls the governors on that.
The best final word on the NGA Christmas list comes from Anne Gassel at Missouri Education Watchdog, so I'll let her wrap this up by putting this newest reformy proposal in its proper context:
Outcome Based Education, School To Work, Goals 2000, NCLB are all signs that the federal government is incapable of drafting workable or effective laws regarding education. Reform at this level will not work. Such laws, by the very fact that they require central control (and accountability), are destined not to work for education and need to be eliminated. Unfortunately our Governors don’t recognize that they already have all the authority they need to do what they want and instead are asking for permission, thereby granting control to the feds. This is not leadership Governors. This is middle management at best.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Standardized Tests: Bitter But Necessary Medicine?
At EdWeek, Cristina Duncan Evans had this to say about standardized testing:
What's worse than annual standardized testing? Not having it at all.
Well, no. I don't think so. Her argument is not an unusual one.
What would happen if we no longer had to take the bitter pill of standardized testing? At the most basic level, it would become much harder to figure out which schools aren't doing an adequate job of reaching students.
I don't think so. I don't believe that standardized tests are telling us that now, so this is kind of like arguing that closing down the telegraph company would be bad because I would never get any more phone calls from that guy who never calls me on the phone.
There are at least two disconnects. One, the tests aren't telling us about how adequate schools are and two, they never will, because they can't.
Politicians and bureaucrats could game statistics to make achievement gaps disappear in order to appeal to voters who don't know what is going on in their local schools.
Yes, because the past decade of test-driven accountability has kept politicians so honest.
In fact, we've been treated to a decade of politicians gaming statistics in order to make schools look like failures in order to justify initiatives for charts, vouchers, turnaround scammers and other folks lined up to get their mitts on the goose that lays golden taxpayer-financed eggs. If there's anything standardized tests have NOT been used for, it's to let people know what's going on in their local schools.
And, as always, I have a problem with the idea that local folks have no knowledge of what's going on in schools unless a government bureaucrat with a test results spread sheet tells them.
Without comparisons, failing schools would face little pressure to improve.
Really? Nobody would know they were failing? Not students nor parents nor teachers working there? And the only clue, the only possible hint that they were failing would be standardized test results? A click-and-bubble test that narrowly measures slim aspects of two disciplines is the best measure we can think of for telling whether a school is failing or not?
The needs of historically underserved populations would go unnoticed beyond their classrooms.
I just addressed this, so I'll be brief. This is a legitimate concern, but after a decade-plus of NCLB, there is no evidence that standardized tests help with the issue in the slightest, and plenty of evidence that they hurt.
Without standardized testing, successful schools with a strong sense of mission would continue to thrive, but would their lessons be adopted for all students?
Because other teachers aren't interested in hearing about what works, or because they have no means of contacting fellow professionals? And why does success need to be scaleable? Can it be scaleable? What makes you think that something that works at my school with my students when implemented by me will work at your school in your classroom with your students? I think I'm a pretty good husband to my wife. Does it follow that my statement is only true if I would be a great husband to every straight woman and gay man in America?
In the comments, Evans goes on to underline that she believes we need to be able to compare schools so that we know if students are getting a good education. This makes no sense. Do I need to compare my performance as a husband to that of other husbands to know whether I have a good marriage or not, or can my wife and I depend on our own judgment of our own circumstances. Every student should get a good education, and that means something different in every situation. Comparison has nothing to do with it.
Then in the comments Evans adds this:
That's why I favor fewer, better tests that are well designed and that align with not just standards, but our values. If we value critical thinking, creativity, and depth of knowledge, then we need to design assessments that measure those things. Would that be expensive? Certainly. Would such assessments be computer graded? Almost certainly not.
Sigh. I favor magical unicorns flying in on rainbow wings to lick my head and make my hair magically grow back. But it's not going to happen. I agree that the tests she describes would be useful, but we don't have those tests, and we are never, ever, ever, EVER going to have those tests. Instead we have tests that devalue and disincetivize the qualities she lists. She really lost me here-- it's like saying we'd like a really great house paint for our home, but until we can have that, we'll just have to bathe the walls in flames instead.
Finally, this:
I don't trust schools and states to equitable teach ALL of their students without some oversight, because historically, that just doesn't tend to happen in this country.
In this, we agree. But I don't think standardized tests help with this problem in the slightest. In fact, they make things worse by creating the illusion that the issue is being addressed and take resources away from initiatives that actually would help. Standardized tests are not the solution, not in the slightest.
What's worse than annual standardized testing? Not having it at all.
Well, no. I don't think so. Her argument is not an unusual one.
What would happen if we no longer had to take the bitter pill of standardized testing? At the most basic level, it would become much harder to figure out which schools aren't doing an adequate job of reaching students.
I don't think so. I don't believe that standardized tests are telling us that now, so this is kind of like arguing that closing down the telegraph company would be bad because I would never get any more phone calls from that guy who never calls me on the phone.
There are at least two disconnects. One, the tests aren't telling us about how adequate schools are and two, they never will, because they can't.
Politicians and bureaucrats could game statistics to make achievement gaps disappear in order to appeal to voters who don't know what is going on in their local schools.
Yes, because the past decade of test-driven accountability has kept politicians so honest.
In fact, we've been treated to a decade of politicians gaming statistics in order to make schools look like failures in order to justify initiatives for charts, vouchers, turnaround scammers and other folks lined up to get their mitts on the goose that lays golden taxpayer-financed eggs. If there's anything standardized tests have NOT been used for, it's to let people know what's going on in their local schools.
And, as always, I have a problem with the idea that local folks have no knowledge of what's going on in schools unless a government bureaucrat with a test results spread sheet tells them.
Without comparisons, failing schools would face little pressure to improve.
Really? Nobody would know they were failing? Not students nor parents nor teachers working there? And the only clue, the only possible hint that they were failing would be standardized test results? A click-and-bubble test that narrowly measures slim aspects of two disciplines is the best measure we can think of for telling whether a school is failing or not?
The needs of historically underserved populations would go unnoticed beyond their classrooms.
I just addressed this, so I'll be brief. This is a legitimate concern, but after a decade-plus of NCLB, there is no evidence that standardized tests help with the issue in the slightest, and plenty of evidence that they hurt.
Without standardized testing, successful schools with a strong sense of mission would continue to thrive, but would their lessons be adopted for all students?
Because other teachers aren't interested in hearing about what works, or because they have no means of contacting fellow professionals? And why does success need to be scaleable? Can it be scaleable? What makes you think that something that works at my school with my students when implemented by me will work at your school in your classroom with your students? I think I'm a pretty good husband to my wife. Does it follow that my statement is only true if I would be a great husband to every straight woman and gay man in America?
In the comments, Evans goes on to underline that she believes we need to be able to compare schools so that we know if students are getting a good education. This makes no sense. Do I need to compare my performance as a husband to that of other husbands to know whether I have a good marriage or not, or can my wife and I depend on our own judgment of our own circumstances. Every student should get a good education, and that means something different in every situation. Comparison has nothing to do with it.
Then in the comments Evans adds this:
That's why I favor fewer, better tests that are well designed and that align with not just standards, but our values. If we value critical thinking, creativity, and depth of knowledge, then we need to design assessments that measure those things. Would that be expensive? Certainly. Would such assessments be computer graded? Almost certainly not.
Sigh. I favor magical unicorns flying in on rainbow wings to lick my head and make my hair magically grow back. But it's not going to happen. I agree that the tests she describes would be useful, but we don't have those tests, and we are never, ever, ever, EVER going to have those tests. Instead we have tests that devalue and disincetivize the qualities she lists. She really lost me here-- it's like saying we'd like a really great house paint for our home, but until we can have that, we'll just have to bathe the walls in flames instead.
Finally, this:
I don't trust schools and states to equitable teach ALL of their students without some oversight, because historically, that just doesn't tend to happen in this country.
In this, we agree. But I don't think standardized tests help with this problem in the slightest. In fact, they make things worse by creating the illusion that the issue is being addressed and take resources away from initiatives that actually would help. Standardized tests are not the solution, not in the slightest.
Monday, January 26, 2015
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
The Washington Post's Moral Imperative
Last week the Washington Post editorial board came out in favor of No Child Left Behind, headlining it as a moral imperative and inadvertently highlighting one of the problems with journalism these days.
They open with Duncan's story about the illiterate black "B" student. And they follow with this paragraph about the bad old, pre-NCLB days:
In those years, no one was held accountable for student achievement, and schools routinely ignored and concealed the problems of struggling students, especially poor black and Hispanic students. Returning to that way of operating should be unthinkable, but that is unquestionably what will happen if testing and accountability requirements are gutted from federal law.
So once again we get the notion that the only possible way to root out schools that systematically rob poor and minority students of their education, the only possible way that such a situation can be brought to light, is through a standardized test. This is lazy enough reasoning from other folks, but from a major metropolitan newspaper, it's worse. Because you know what else could root out any problems in poor schools?
Journalists.
There are huge problems in our poor urban schools, problems with unsafe conditions and broken down buildings and lacks of resources and a hundred other issues that we would know more about if newspapers only bothered to cover poor neighborhoods with the same fervor that they follow the boardrooms and cocktail part circuit.
The Washington Post is worried that educational failures will be "swept under the rug." A simple antidote that a major newspaper could offer might be to less time talking to chancellors and other members of the power elite and more time talking to the teachers, students, parents and community members who have first-hand knowledge of what's happening in those under-funded, neglected schools.
Hell, instead of simply repeating Duncan's story, some journalist could have done the legwork to find out what has since happened to that student.
Is the Washington Post saying that it wants another government report to simplify the education beat. Is some editor really saying, "We need the government to send us over some numbers so nobody actually has to go into those neighborhoods and visit the actual schools." I'm trying to imagine Woodward and Bernstein calling up the Nixon White House to say, "Yeah, just send us over your thoughts about that Watergate thing and we'll just print 'em." Running tests scores is not reporting on the state of schools, and being a consistent cheerleader for an embattled school chancellor instead of doing some actual investigation and reporting is as huge an example of under-rug sweepage as you'll ever find.
Let me be clear-- schools should be accountable for what they do with tax dollars, and schools should not be allowed to systematically rob any students of their educational opportunities. But for a major newspaper to claim that standardized testing is the answer while ignoring their own role and responsibility for investigation and informing of the public is baloney.
The editorial goes on to offer some other slices of baloney as well. The Post claims that NCLB is threatened by an "unholy alliance" of anti-fed conservatives and teachers unions (because they don't want to be accountable for anything). The Post also boldly asserts that "the law has worked," and weasels around the truth with this carefully crafted sentence:
The performance of poor and minority students has improved in the past 10 to 15 years. The Education Trust, advocates for closing the achievement gap, has catalogued the evidence in the performance of minority and low-income students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress...
Follow the link and read very plainly that the achievement gap has widened, and the Post didn't lie about that-- they just encouraged you to read something between their lines that isn't there.
There's not enough space here to catalog all the ways in which the law has not worked, but has in fact failed on a spectacular level, failings students, teachers, parents, and communities.
There is a moral imperative to make certain that students, particularly poor and minority students who have been underserved for too long, are not ignored. Providing support for those who are already there fighting on those front lines and doing that work on a daily basis as well as making their stories known-- that would be a good place to start. Making sure that those communities are empowered and involved instead of silencing them and ignoring them would be another great step. Shining a light on the ways the system has short-changed them would be another good move.
The Post deserves considerable praise for supporting the work of Lindsey Layton and the indispensable Valerie Strauss. But ordering up another round of tests and offering support for a failed law? That is not the way to meet the moral imperative.
(Note: In the original edit I somehow lost my acknowledgement of Post all-stars Layton and Strauss. It's back in now)
They open with Duncan's story about the illiterate black "B" student. And they follow with this paragraph about the bad old, pre-NCLB days:
In those years, no one was held accountable for student achievement, and schools routinely ignored and concealed the problems of struggling students, especially poor black and Hispanic students. Returning to that way of operating should be unthinkable, but that is unquestionably what will happen if testing and accountability requirements are gutted from federal law.
So once again we get the notion that the only possible way to root out schools that systematically rob poor and minority students of their education, the only possible way that such a situation can be brought to light, is through a standardized test. This is lazy enough reasoning from other folks, but from a major metropolitan newspaper, it's worse. Because you know what else could root out any problems in poor schools?
Journalists.
There are huge problems in our poor urban schools, problems with unsafe conditions and broken down buildings and lacks of resources and a hundred other issues that we would know more about if newspapers only bothered to cover poor neighborhoods with the same fervor that they follow the boardrooms and cocktail part circuit.
The Washington Post is worried that educational failures will be "swept under the rug." A simple antidote that a major newspaper could offer might be to less time talking to chancellors and other members of the power elite and more time talking to the teachers, students, parents and community members who have first-hand knowledge of what's happening in those under-funded, neglected schools.
Hell, instead of simply repeating Duncan's story, some journalist could have done the legwork to find out what has since happened to that student.
Is the Washington Post saying that it wants another government report to simplify the education beat. Is some editor really saying, "We need the government to send us over some numbers so nobody actually has to go into those neighborhoods and visit the actual schools." I'm trying to imagine Woodward and Bernstein calling up the Nixon White House to say, "Yeah, just send us over your thoughts about that Watergate thing and we'll just print 'em." Running tests scores is not reporting on the state of schools, and being a consistent cheerleader for an embattled school chancellor instead of doing some actual investigation and reporting is as huge an example of under-rug sweepage as you'll ever find.
Let me be clear-- schools should be accountable for what they do with tax dollars, and schools should not be allowed to systematically rob any students of their educational opportunities. But for a major newspaper to claim that standardized testing is the answer while ignoring their own role and responsibility for investigation and informing of the public is baloney.
The editorial goes on to offer some other slices of baloney as well. The Post claims that NCLB is threatened by an "unholy alliance" of anti-fed conservatives and teachers unions (because they don't want to be accountable for anything). The Post also boldly asserts that "the law has worked," and weasels around the truth with this carefully crafted sentence:
The performance of poor and minority students has improved in the past 10 to 15 years. The Education Trust, advocates for closing the achievement gap, has catalogued the evidence in the performance of minority and low-income students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress...
Follow the link and read very plainly that the achievement gap has widened, and the Post didn't lie about that-- they just encouraged you to read something between their lines that isn't there.
There's not enough space here to catalog all the ways in which the law has not worked, but has in fact failed on a spectacular level, failings students, teachers, parents, and communities.
There is a moral imperative to make certain that students, particularly poor and minority students who have been underserved for too long, are not ignored. Providing support for those who are already there fighting on those front lines and doing that work on a daily basis as well as making their stories known-- that would be a good place to start. Making sure that those communities are empowered and involved instead of silencing them and ignoring them would be another great step. Shining a light on the ways the system has short-changed them would be another good move.
The Post deserves considerable praise for supporting the work of Lindsey Layton and the indispensable Valerie Strauss. But ordering up another round of tests and offering support for a failed law? That is not the way to meet the moral imperative.
(Note: In the original edit I somehow lost my acknowledgement of Post all-stars Layton and Strauss. It's back in now)
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Time To Speak Up
This week the Big Noise About NCLB kicks off in DC with a hearing on Wednesday, Jan 21 entitled "Fixing No Child Left Behind: Testing and Accountability." Heaven only knows who will be speaking at it-- the featured guest list will be one more set of tea leaves we can look at to see which way this new wind is blowing. But of course, we already know whose voices will not be prominently featured at the hearings.
Teachers.
So why we're all busy doing the actual work of educating America's children, a bunch of folks in DC will talk about how we ought to be doing that job.
However, that doesn't mean we can't put our voices out there.
Sen. Lamar Alexander has issued a press release that gives you all the tools you need. There's a link to the draft version of the legislation and an email address to send your comments to.
FixingNCLB@help.senate.gov
Send an email. Send an email. Send. An. Email.
You do not have to be brilliant or super-articulate. Just speak from the heart. Don't write Moby Dick in email form. Keep it brief (aka "readable") and if you have a lot more to say, send several emails. If you just have a sentence or two and can't figure out how to add to that, just send that. If you've read something that really said it for you, email a link to the piece and write "Read this. I believe it's true."
But whatever you do, don't sit silently hoping that Congress does the right thing. You can bet the farm that DC is swarming with lobbyists and "activists" who are making certain that their point of view is heard up close and personal. We know that the unions that are supposed to represent the teacher point of view are unlikely to do so.
It's on us. It's time to speak up. It's time to speak your truth. Will they hear us and listen to us? Who knows, But I do know this-- there is no possibility that they will hear us if we don't speak.
I am going to spend a little less time blogging this weekend and divert my torrent of words into emails to the committee. I implore you, beg you, to do the same.
Send an email.
Speak up.
This is the biggest opportunity we've had to be heard in the education debates since the federal government first stuck their nose in. We have no excuse not to use it, and shame on us if we don't.
Teachers.
So why we're all busy doing the actual work of educating America's children, a bunch of folks in DC will talk about how we ought to be doing that job.
However, that doesn't mean we can't put our voices out there.
Sen. Lamar Alexander has issued a press release that gives you all the tools you need. There's a link to the draft version of the legislation and an email address to send your comments to.
FixingNCLB@help.senate.gov
Send an email. Send an email. Send. An. Email.
You do not have to be brilliant or super-articulate. Just speak from the heart. Don't write Moby Dick in email form. Keep it brief (aka "readable") and if you have a lot more to say, send several emails. If you just have a sentence or two and can't figure out how to add to that, just send that. If you've read something that really said it for you, email a link to the piece and write "Read this. I believe it's true."
But whatever you do, don't sit silently hoping that Congress does the right thing. You can bet the farm that DC is swarming with lobbyists and "activists" who are making certain that their point of view is heard up close and personal. We know that the unions that are supposed to represent the teacher point of view are unlikely to do so.
It's on us. It's time to speak up. It's time to speak your truth. Will they hear us and listen to us? Who knows, But I do know this-- there is no possibility that they will hear us if we don't speak.
I am going to spend a little less time blogging this weekend and divert my torrent of words into emails to the committee. I implore you, beg you, to do the same.
Send an email.
Speak up.
This is the biggest opportunity we've had to be heard in the education debates since the federal government first stuck their nose in. We have no excuse not to use it, and shame on us if we don't.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Duress Tests Stress Kress Best
“Why [states and districts] chose to have tests on top of tests on top of tests” instead of improving instruction “is beyond me”
Those words come from an NCLB architect, lawyer Sandy Kress, courtesy of a quick interview by Politico's Morning Education. It represents one more example of a special brand of clueless that we've seen again and again. Almost a year ago, NCLB co-author George Miller told EdSource the same thing-- can't imagine how NCLB could possibly have led to all this testing frenzy.
These are not dumb guys. But they are making some dumb assumptions.
Kress's comment was directed at the schools who load their students down with practice tests in preparation for the Big Standardized Test (the BS Test). Now, Kress used to work as a lobbyist for Pearson, so I'm betting just a quick look through his own memory bank would reveal to him some of the sales pitches used to convince school districts to buy the very tests he's complaining about.
But even if he had selectively forgotten all of that, he could still figure this out. Here's another quote from Politico:
Kress argues that the federal testing and accountability provisions were designed to prod district bureaucracies into demanding more qualified teachers, better instruction and top-notch materials. Instead, he said, administrators took the easy way out and bought loads of practice tests and test prep products in a frenzied rush to boost student scores.
There has to be some kind of Rule that covers this, but if not, let's write it now and call it the Kress Rule, so that Sandy can remember it.
Whenever you use brute force to require compliance with a bad proxy for your real goal, you will elicit completely different sets of behavior.
If you decide you want a woman to love you, but you decide that her saying the words will be your proxy for success, and you hold a gun to her head and demand that she say, "I love you," you would be an idiot to be sitting there later, handcuffed in the squad car, saying, "I don't understand why she took the easy way out and lied to me instead of actually falling in love with me."
Tell your thirteen-year-old child, "I expect you to take pride in your room's cleanliness and I'm going to come in there in one hour and see if everything is off the floor. If I can't see the floor, you will be grounded for a month." In an hour, you will probably see a clean floor. Would you like to make a bet about what you'll find in the closet?
There are two problems with Kress's complaint, problems that have been embedded in NCLB since Day One.
Problem one is the idea that you can prod, cajole, threaten, or punish people into agreement. Duress, at best, gets you just one thing-- compliance. And if I'm complying with you under duress, I am looking for the way to make my compliance create the least interference with my own values in particular and life in general.
Problem two is forcing compliance with a proxy that is unrelated to your actual goal. NCLB designers were sure that the BS Test would measure how well schools did all that swell other educational stuff. Schools, by their behavior, have been telling educrats for years that it's just not so.
The stakes have been high. If following the standards, getting great teachers, and using top-notch materials actually resulted in better scores on the BS Test, don't you think schools would be doing it? But schools learned quickly that only one thing reliably raises BS Test scores-- test prep. We've been at this for over a decade-- if test prep didn't work (and work best), we would have stopped doing it!
Kress uses the old, reliable weighing the pig metaphor-- but that's not really it. What we have under NCLB and RttT is a scenario where the government has announce that it's going to weigh the pig by having the pig whistle "Dixie." We could work on getting the pig's weight up, and because we care about the pig and got into the biz because we want to help pigs, we probably will. But at the end of the year, the pig's weight is going to be judged by how well it whistles that damn song and so if we want to pass that test, the pigs had better spend a little less time eating and a little more time puckering up.
I am absolutely dumbfounded that Kress finds any of this remotely mysterious. Lots of reformsters make serious mistakes because they don't understand schools or education, but this kind of baloney requires someone who doesn't understand humans. If this is how well our NCLB architects understand carbon based life forms, it's no wonder federal education policy is a terrible mess.
Those words come from an NCLB architect, lawyer Sandy Kress, courtesy of a quick interview by Politico's Morning Education. It represents one more example of a special brand of clueless that we've seen again and again. Almost a year ago, NCLB co-author George Miller told EdSource the same thing-- can't imagine how NCLB could possibly have led to all this testing frenzy.
These are not dumb guys. But they are making some dumb assumptions.
Kress's comment was directed at the schools who load their students down with practice tests in preparation for the Big Standardized Test (the BS Test). Now, Kress used to work as a lobbyist for Pearson, so I'm betting just a quick look through his own memory bank would reveal to him some of the sales pitches used to convince school districts to buy the very tests he's complaining about.
But even if he had selectively forgotten all of that, he could still figure this out. Here's another quote from Politico:
Kress argues that the federal testing and accountability provisions were designed to prod district bureaucracies into demanding more qualified teachers, better instruction and top-notch materials. Instead, he said, administrators took the easy way out and bought loads of practice tests and test prep products in a frenzied rush to boost student scores.
There has to be some kind of Rule that covers this, but if not, let's write it now and call it the Kress Rule, so that Sandy can remember it.
Whenever you use brute force to require compliance with a bad proxy for your real goal, you will elicit completely different sets of behavior.
If you decide you want a woman to love you, but you decide that her saying the words will be your proxy for success, and you hold a gun to her head and demand that she say, "I love you," you would be an idiot to be sitting there later, handcuffed in the squad car, saying, "I don't understand why she took the easy way out and lied to me instead of actually falling in love with me."
Tell your thirteen-year-old child, "I expect you to take pride in your room's cleanliness and I'm going to come in there in one hour and see if everything is off the floor. If I can't see the floor, you will be grounded for a month." In an hour, you will probably see a clean floor. Would you like to make a bet about what you'll find in the closet?
There are two problems with Kress's complaint, problems that have been embedded in NCLB since Day One.
Problem one is the idea that you can prod, cajole, threaten, or punish people into agreement. Duress, at best, gets you just one thing-- compliance. And if I'm complying with you under duress, I am looking for the way to make my compliance create the least interference with my own values in particular and life in general.
Problem two is forcing compliance with a proxy that is unrelated to your actual goal. NCLB designers were sure that the BS Test would measure how well schools did all that swell other educational stuff. Schools, by their behavior, have been telling educrats for years that it's just not so.
The stakes have been high. If following the standards, getting great teachers, and using top-notch materials actually resulted in better scores on the BS Test, don't you think schools would be doing it? But schools learned quickly that only one thing reliably raises BS Test scores-- test prep. We've been at this for over a decade-- if test prep didn't work (and work best), we would have stopped doing it!
Kress uses the old, reliable weighing the pig metaphor-- but that's not really it. What we have under NCLB and RttT is a scenario where the government has announce that it's going to weigh the pig by having the pig whistle "Dixie." We could work on getting the pig's weight up, and because we care about the pig and got into the biz because we want to help pigs, we probably will. But at the end of the year, the pig's weight is going to be judged by how well it whistles that damn song and so if we want to pass that test, the pigs had better spend a little less time eating and a little more time puckering up.
I am absolutely dumbfounded that Kress finds any of this remotely mysterious. Lots of reformsters make serious mistakes because they don't understand schools or education, but this kind of baloney requires someone who doesn't understand humans. If this is how well our NCLB architects understand carbon based life forms, it's no wonder federal education policy is a terrible mess.
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Ten Moments in Duncan's ESEA Speech
Much will be written about Arne Duncan's January 12 speech about ESEA. I'm not going to attempt any big analysis (for reasons I'll get to), but I can't pass up a chance to register some quick impressions.
Opening with a shout out to Kaya Henderson, chancellor of DC schools. Just in case you're still wondering whether Arne is fully aligned with reformster interests or not.
Duncan throws in the LBJ story of taking a break from college to teach in a tiny underfunded elementary school. This means, I guess, that LBJ was actually the first Teach For America volunteer. So that's some historical perspective.
*********************************************************
Duncan uses LBJ's story to set up a black-and-white choice on ESEA rewrite-- Congress faces the choice LBJ faced. "One path continues to move us towards that life-transforming promise of equity; the other walks away from it." Because it's that kind of all-or-nothing thinking that has always made American government super-effective. Either that or Duncan's opening with a bid that he doesn't even believe himself. Either way, not an auspicious beginning to the political wrangling that is coming.
**********************************************************
Duncan can still talk pretty at times.
What we, as parents, want for our kids is an education that isn’t just about knowledge – it’s about those moments of excitement that we hear about at dinner at the end of the day, about creativity and wonder and curiosity.
Fundamentally, we want our kids to have wonderful choices in their lives.
But after so many years of hearing meaningless mouth noises, I still don't know if Duncan is a cynical liar or truly doesn't grasp the disconnect between the word salad he serves up and the policies that he pursues. I mean, how do you parse this-- "We want our kids to have wonderful choices, which is why we must subject them all to one-size-fits-all programs and testing that only measures one narrow sliver of the great breadth of human knowledge and achievement"?
**********************************************************
The speech hits me as confused. It's the Elementary and Secondary act, but Duncan wants to talk pre-school. We are making very real progress on a list of great achievements (one or two of which are actually true), but "everyone in this room knows we are not even close." And Duncan can't decide whether he thinks NCLB is a terrible mess or a wonderful achievement.
He has a long list of things he believes, and again, they are a very pretty list in some places ("every single child is entitled to an education that sets her up for success in careers, college and life") and the same old baloney in other places (states should choose high standards "as they always have").
**********************************************************
Duncan offers a new, extraordinarily limited rationale for The Big Standardized Test. Students need to take a test so they know if they're ready for college, because too many are getting to college and discovering that they aren't, and that's sad.
So congratulations, future tradespersons and stay-at-home parents! You don't need to take the Big Standardized Test at all! Woo hoo!
********************************************************
Man. Duncan is so full of baloney on testing that it will take a whole separate post just to deal with it. Incredibly, pretty much nothing that he says about testing here is 1) connected to reality or 2) not transparently crap. It's an impressive when a major government official can be so thoroughly and relentlessly wrong.
**********************************************************
Duncan is happy to report that everybody is a fan of charter schools. Great. Nice to know that there's bipartisan support for privateers getting rich off of public tax dollars.
**********************************************************
Duncan makes an impassioned pleas-- well, a string of questions, anyway (some intern really loves him some parallel structure)-- for working together, which hints at his biggest problem in this speech.
********************************************************
Man. The writing bot must have been tired after a while, because after many pretty sentences, Duncan drops this clunker into the mix:
This country can’t afford to replace “the fierce urgency of now” with the soft bigotry of “It’s somehow optional.”
If you're going to make an impassioned plea for "the federal government should totally tell the states what to do without allowing room for argument, dissent or difference," you're going to need a way better sentence than that one.
**********************************************************
Duncan reminds us that turning back the clock would be Very Bad, because back in the day things were Terrible. So let's all work together to do what Duncan wants us to.
Which again brings us to the central problem of Duncan's speech. Nobody cares.
Seriously. Is there a Republican anywhere in DC who thinks that he really needs to sit down and talk turkey with Duncan? Is there anybody of any part in any place in country who thinks of Duncan as an important leader in the field of education? If Obama is a lame duck, Duncan is plucked and stuffed and ready to serve.
Opening with a shout out to Kaya Henderson, chancellor of DC schools. Just in case you're still wondering whether Arne is fully aligned with reformster interests or not.
Duncan throws in the LBJ story of taking a break from college to teach in a tiny underfunded elementary school. This means, I guess, that LBJ was actually the first Teach For America volunteer. So that's some historical perspective.
*********************************************************
Duncan uses LBJ's story to set up a black-and-white choice on ESEA rewrite-- Congress faces the choice LBJ faced. "One path continues to move us towards that life-transforming promise of equity; the other walks away from it." Because it's that kind of all-or-nothing thinking that has always made American government super-effective. Either that or Duncan's opening with a bid that he doesn't even believe himself. Either way, not an auspicious beginning to the political wrangling that is coming.
**********************************************************
Duncan can still talk pretty at times.
What we, as parents, want for our kids is an education that isn’t just about knowledge – it’s about those moments of excitement that we hear about at dinner at the end of the day, about creativity and wonder and curiosity.
Fundamentally, we want our kids to have wonderful choices in their lives.
But after so many years of hearing meaningless mouth noises, I still don't know if Duncan is a cynical liar or truly doesn't grasp the disconnect between the word salad he serves up and the policies that he pursues. I mean, how do you parse this-- "We want our kids to have wonderful choices, which is why we must subject them all to one-size-fits-all programs and testing that only measures one narrow sliver of the great breadth of human knowledge and achievement"?
**********************************************************
The speech hits me as confused. It's the Elementary and Secondary act, but Duncan wants to talk pre-school. We are making very real progress on a list of great achievements (one or two of which are actually true), but "everyone in this room knows we are not even close." And Duncan can't decide whether he thinks NCLB is a terrible mess or a wonderful achievement.
He has a long list of things he believes, and again, they are a very pretty list in some places ("every single child is entitled to an education that sets her up for success in careers, college and life") and the same old baloney in other places (states should choose high standards "as they always have").
**********************************************************
Duncan offers a new, extraordinarily limited rationale for The Big Standardized Test. Students need to take a test so they know if they're ready for college, because too many are getting to college and discovering that they aren't, and that's sad.
So congratulations, future tradespersons and stay-at-home parents! You don't need to take the Big Standardized Test at all! Woo hoo!
********************************************************
Man. Duncan is so full of baloney on testing that it will take a whole separate post just to deal with it. Incredibly, pretty much nothing that he says about testing here is 1) connected to reality or 2) not transparently crap. It's an impressive when a major government official can be so thoroughly and relentlessly wrong.
**********************************************************
Duncan is happy to report that everybody is a fan of charter schools. Great. Nice to know that there's bipartisan support for privateers getting rich off of public tax dollars.
**********************************************************
Duncan makes an impassioned pleas-- well, a string of questions, anyway (some intern really loves him some parallel structure)-- for working together, which hints at his biggest problem in this speech.
********************************************************
Man. The writing bot must have been tired after a while, because after many pretty sentences, Duncan drops this clunker into the mix:
This country can’t afford to replace “the fierce urgency of now” with the soft bigotry of “It’s somehow optional.”
If you're going to make an impassioned plea for "the federal government should totally tell the states what to do without allowing room for argument, dissent or difference," you're going to need a way better sentence than that one.
**********************************************************
Duncan reminds us that turning back the clock would be Very Bad, because back in the day things were Terrible. So let's all work together to do what Duncan wants us to.
Which again brings us to the central problem of Duncan's speech. Nobody cares.
Seriously. Is there a Republican anywhere in DC who thinks that he really needs to sit down and talk turkey with Duncan? Is there anybody of any part in any place in country who thinks of Duncan as an important leader in the field of education? If Obama is a lame duck, Duncan is plucked and stuffed and ready to serve.
Friday, January 9, 2015
Duncan Calls for NCLB Repeal
Last night, Politico ran a story announcing that Arne Duncan will on Monday issue a call "for repealing and replacing the nation’s landmark federal education law, No Child Left Behind." They characterize this "joining Republicans in Congress." I would characterize it as trying to jump on the bus before somebody throws him under it.
"Repeal NCLB" just means "rewrite and reauthorize ESEA" and that job has been due since 2007. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been around since 1965, regularly reauthorized/rewritten to reflect the current administration policies. NCLB is just the version we're currently stuck with.
NCLB is the foundation for the administration's current reformster program. The universal failure of states to meet the NCLB requirement that all students be above average by 2014-- that failure is the engine that drives RttT and waivers. Remove NCLB, and you remove the chief motivation for states to accept Common Core (a motivation so powerful, you will recall, that states signed up for CCSS before it was even finished).
But rewrite it as what?
The Obama administration has always known what their vision of a rewritten ESEA would be, and we are living it. The administration's ed program appeared first as Race to the Top in 2009, then next appeared as its proposed "Blueprint for Reform" aka proposed ESEA/NCLB rewrite in 2010; both highlighted Common Core (or something just like it), data collection, teacher evaluation based on tests, more charters. When the administration was unsuccessful in rewriting ESEA their way, they created the waiver program as an end run around the law.
So there is nothing shocking about a Duncan call to rewrite ESEA/NCLB. The administration has essentially already done it by the use of waivers.
Why is he doing it now, when he's had his way for the past several years? The answer is obvious-- if the GOP really rewrites ESEA, all of Duncan and Obama's reformy work will be trashed. Duncan's announcement is not a clarion call to change a single comma of the administration's policy-- it's an announcement that he intends to preserve it against the GOP onslaught that's about to begin. For all intents and purposes, Duncan has had the ESEA rewrite he's wanted for five years, and the GOP is threatening to take it away from him. Duncan is jumping on the bus before he is thrown under it, but there will now be a hell of a battle over who's going to drive and where the bus is going to go.
"Repeal NCLB" just means "rewrite and reauthorize ESEA" and that job has been due since 2007. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been around since 1965, regularly reauthorized/rewritten to reflect the current administration policies. NCLB is just the version we're currently stuck with.
NCLB is the foundation for the administration's current reformster program. The universal failure of states to meet the NCLB requirement that all students be above average by 2014-- that failure is the engine that drives RttT and waivers. Remove NCLB, and you remove the chief motivation for states to accept Common Core (a motivation so powerful, you will recall, that states signed up for CCSS before it was even finished).
But rewrite it as what?
The Obama administration has always known what their vision of a rewritten ESEA would be, and we are living it. The administration's ed program appeared first as Race to the Top in 2009, then next appeared as its proposed "Blueprint for Reform" aka proposed ESEA/NCLB rewrite in 2010; both highlighted Common Core (or something just like it), data collection, teacher evaluation based on tests, more charters. When the administration was unsuccessful in rewriting ESEA their way, they created the waiver program as an end run around the law.
So there is nothing shocking about a Duncan call to rewrite ESEA/NCLB. The administration has essentially already done it by the use of waivers.
Why is he doing it now, when he's had his way for the past several years? The answer is obvious-- if the GOP really rewrites ESEA, all of Duncan and Obama's reformy work will be trashed. Duncan's announcement is not a clarion call to change a single comma of the administration's policy-- it's an announcement that he intends to preserve it against the GOP onslaught that's about to begin. For all intents and purposes, Duncan has had the ESEA rewrite he's wanted for five years, and the GOP is threatening to take it away from him. Duncan is jumping on the bus before he is thrown under it, but there will now be a hell of a battle over who's going to drive and where the bus is going to go.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Do Special Ed Advocates Want To Use Students
Over at EdWeek, Alyson Klein examines one possible source of resistance to big changes in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka ESEA, aka No Child Left Behind, aka NCLB).
The source is not a surprise, because we've seen it before. Klein says that some special education advocates are strongly opposed to removing the Big Time Testing component of ESEA.
Back in October, as the testing issue was beginning to heat up in Washington, the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, which includes the Council for Exceptional Children, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, Easter Seals and other organizations, sent a letter to the leaders of the House education committee opposing legislation that would have scaled back the number of tests required in the law.
I'm not surprised. Every time I have written about the testing of students with special needs, I have heard from advocates who argue strenuously tat such testing be continued. The argument is always some variation of this one:
The NCLB law, which requires states to break out student achievement data by particular groups of students, including those in special education, "has provided so much good information we never had before about how students with disabilities are really performing," said Lindsay Jones, the director of public policy and advocacy for the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
There is also the occasional reference to how testing will help the students achieve-- Klein includes one such quote in her piece:
There is a great need for educators to have access to actionable, relevant, and timely information about student performance so that they can help students achieve.
However, that sentence is followed by this one:
With transparent, easy-to-access, annual data on student performance, parents and educators are armed with the information needed to promote effective solutions to systemic issues at the school, district and policy levels.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that The Big Test will help teachers help students with special needs. Most teachers of students with special needs have a huge battery of regular assessments that they already use. No-- the actual argument is this--
We need to have students with special needs to take these tests so that we can use the data points to help us lobby.
I do not doubt that in many, if not most, cases, we are talking about advocates with good intent, who truly want to find ways to get students with special needs the kind of support and resources that those students need and richly deserve.
Nevertheless, what we're advocating here is not testing for some direct, educational purpose. We are talking about using students to generate data for advocacy and lobbying purposes. We are talking about making students suffer through these tests so that their failure can be used to lobby for more resources. We are talking about punishing them with these tests so that somebody can go to a state capital and wave the results in some lawmakers' face.
There's a legitimate conversation to be had about whether these ends (appropriate resources blasted out of the steely grip of legislatures) justifies these ends (putting students through punitive and inappropriate testing), but to have it, we have to start by being honest. I can respect the desire to not have students with special needs disappear into a sea of collected data, but let's not pretending that generating disaggregated data serves any educational purpose. The people arguing that ESEA must keep the Big Test in place because of students with special needs are not advocating for something that has actual direct educational value. They want to use the students to make a point, and they need to be honest enough to say so.
The source is not a surprise, because we've seen it before. Klein says that some special education advocates are strongly opposed to removing the Big Time Testing component of ESEA.
Back in October, as the testing issue was beginning to heat up in Washington, the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, which includes the Council for Exceptional Children, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, Easter Seals and other organizations, sent a letter to the leaders of the House education committee opposing legislation that would have scaled back the number of tests required in the law.
I'm not surprised. Every time I have written about the testing of students with special needs, I have heard from advocates who argue strenuously tat such testing be continued. The argument is always some variation of this one:
The NCLB law, which requires states to break out student achievement data by particular groups of students, including those in special education, "has provided so much good information we never had before about how students with disabilities are really performing," said Lindsay Jones, the director of public policy and advocacy for the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
There is also the occasional reference to how testing will help the students achieve-- Klein includes one such quote in her piece:
There is a great need for educators to have access to actionable, relevant, and timely information about student performance so that they can help students achieve.
However, that sentence is followed by this one:
With transparent, easy-to-access, annual data on student performance, parents and educators are armed with the information needed to promote effective solutions to systemic issues at the school, district and policy levels.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that The Big Test will help teachers help students with special needs. Most teachers of students with special needs have a huge battery of regular assessments that they already use. No-- the actual argument is this--
We need to have students with special needs to take these tests so that we can use the data points to help us lobby.
I do not doubt that in many, if not most, cases, we are talking about advocates with good intent, who truly want to find ways to get students with special needs the kind of support and resources that those students need and richly deserve.
Nevertheless, what we're advocating here is not testing for some direct, educational purpose. We are talking about using students to generate data for advocacy and lobbying purposes. We are talking about making students suffer through these tests so that their failure can be used to lobby for more resources. We are talking about punishing them with these tests so that somebody can go to a state capital and wave the results in some lawmakers' face.
There's a legitimate conversation to be had about whether these ends (appropriate resources blasted out of the steely grip of legislatures) justifies these ends (putting students through punitive and inappropriate testing), but to have it, we have to start by being honest. I can respect the desire to not have students with special needs disappear into a sea of collected data, but let's not pretending that generating disaggregated data serves any educational purpose. The people arguing that ESEA must keep the Big Test in place because of students with special needs are not advocating for something that has actual direct educational value. They want to use the students to make a point, and they need to be honest enough to say so.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
What Didn't Happen in 2014?
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
We're reaching the end of 2014, close enough that there's nothing left for policymakers to do except a few trying-to-stay-below-the-radar gestures. (Hey, Connecticut! Your governor just gave his appointees an up-to-12 percent raise! Merry Christmas!) But the big events of the year are past us, and I think it's safe to put together our list of Things That Did Not Happen in 2014.
Common Core Did Not Garner More Love
The groundswell of grass roots support for common core seems to have gotten lost in the same dark hole as missing socks, the Iraqis waiting to greet us as liberators, and my hair. There has been more than ample opportunity for teachers across the country to say, "Well, now I can see this is actually awesome," and for opponents of the national standards movement to say, "I have to admit; now that I can see it in action, I might have been too hasty to condemn."
That has not happened. The biggest proponents of the core are still the folks who make a living advocating for the reform movement (and the biggest opponents are folks who don't make a living in the Resistance). There's a related question that remains unanswered this year—if reformsters like Gates and Walton stopped pumping money into CCSS support, would it be able to survive strictly on merit and grassroots love?
Administration Did Not Come Out In Support of Public Education
Duncan and the rest of the Obama administration occasionally make mouth noises that would seem to support public education, but can anybody point to a single policy or action of the department this year (ever, actually, but I'm just writing about this year) that was an unequivocal move in favor of U.S. public education?
They've worked hard for charters. They've gone to the wall and helped cut deals for education corporations. They made sure that predatory for-profit college operators stay afloat. But at no point did Duncan et al advocate for public education or the people who work there.
Next Generation Tests Still Haven't Arrived
It's possible they're just in the mail, because folks have been saying these are coming any minute now for, well, many many minutes. But the tests our students are all taking still encourage test prepping and then measure an inch deep and an inch wide. The only way reformsters get away with the "no more bubble tests" line is because now students click on the multiple choice answer with a mouse instead of bubbling it in with a pencil.
The closest we've gotten to a next generation is the insistence that we can now score essay writing with a computer (spoiler alert: no, we can't).
America Did Not Hit 100% Mark
2014 was, of course, the magical year in which No Child Left Behind would create an America in which 100 percent of our students were above average. We did not do that (we also did not, as a nation, spin straw into gold or master cold fusion or open successful unicorn farms).
Apparently we were not even close. While some states have backed away from Race to the Top and NCLB waivers, they cited reasons such as Evil Federal Overreaching Pinko Naughtiness. Nobody looked at the waivers and said, "No, thanks, but we have this 100 percent of students above average thing totally under control, so NCLB doesn't scare us at all."
Will any of these events finally occur in 2015? Are there other Important Education Events that still haven't happened, despite all our anticipation? Share your list in the comments section.
We're reaching the end of 2014, close enough that there's nothing left for policymakers to do except a few trying-to-stay-below-the-radar gestures. (Hey, Connecticut! Your governor just gave his appointees an up-to-12 percent raise! Merry Christmas!) But the big events of the year are past us, and I think it's safe to put together our list of Things That Did Not Happen in 2014.
Common Core Did Not Garner More Love
The groundswell of grass roots support for common core seems to have gotten lost in the same dark hole as missing socks, the Iraqis waiting to greet us as liberators, and my hair. There has been more than ample opportunity for teachers across the country to say, "Well, now I can see this is actually awesome," and for opponents of the national standards movement to say, "I have to admit; now that I can see it in action, I might have been too hasty to condemn."
That has not happened. The biggest proponents of the core are still the folks who make a living advocating for the reform movement (and the biggest opponents are folks who don't make a living in the Resistance). There's a related question that remains unanswered this year—if reformsters like Gates and Walton stopped pumping money into CCSS support, would it be able to survive strictly on merit and grassroots love?
Administration Did Not Come Out In Support of Public Education
Duncan and the rest of the Obama administration occasionally make mouth noises that would seem to support public education, but can anybody point to a single policy or action of the department this year (ever, actually, but I'm just writing about this year) that was an unequivocal move in favor of U.S. public education?
They've worked hard for charters. They've gone to the wall and helped cut deals for education corporations. They made sure that predatory for-profit college operators stay afloat. But at no point did Duncan et al advocate for public education or the people who work there.
Next Generation Tests Still Haven't Arrived
It's possible they're just in the mail, because folks have been saying these are coming any minute now for, well, many many minutes. But the tests our students are all taking still encourage test prepping and then measure an inch deep and an inch wide. The only way reformsters get away with the "no more bubble tests" line is because now students click on the multiple choice answer with a mouse instead of bubbling it in with a pencil.
The closest we've gotten to a next generation is the insistence that we can now score essay writing with a computer (spoiler alert: no, we can't).
America Did Not Hit 100% Mark
2014 was, of course, the magical year in which No Child Left Behind would create an America in which 100 percent of our students were above average. We did not do that (we also did not, as a nation, spin straw into gold or master cold fusion or open successful unicorn farms).
Apparently we were not even close. While some states have backed away from Race to the Top and NCLB waivers, they cited reasons such as Evil Federal Overreaching Pinko Naughtiness. Nobody looked at the waivers and said, "No, thanks, but we have this 100 percent of students above average thing totally under control, so NCLB doesn't scare us at all."
Will any of these events finally occur in 2015? Are there other Important Education Events that still haven't happened, despite all our anticipation? Share your list in the comments section.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
What Do We Do About NCLB
The return of a GOP majority to DC has renewed talk of the Great White Whale of education reform-- completing the long-overdue rewrite of ESEA, currently commonly known as No Child Left Behind.
Lest we forget, NCLB is an actual law, and every state in the union is in violation. At this point the early predictions about the law are true-- every school is either failing or cheating. It's that universal violation that makes the extra-legal legerdemain of Race to the Top/waivers possible. Change the law so that it no longer requires 100% of US students to be above average, and the waivers become unnecessary, and the current administration's legisltion-free rewrite of US education collapses. If I were cynical, I might conclude that it's that chance to hand the President a policy defeat, and not a desire to restore the promise of public education, that motivates some GOPpers on this issue.
But an ESEA rewrite brings us up against the same obstacle that has been clogging the pipes since 2007-- what to put in its place? Nobody has yet found the proper education enema to get things moving.
Recently Andy Smarick and Jack Schneider took on the question, and while they are both bright and learned men, I find that I disagree with both of them in some substantial ways.
Smarick, both in the EdWeek piece and in his writing elsewhere, has recognized that education now falls into a classic conservative conundrum-- on the one hand, conservatives want government to leave people alone and stop telling them what to do, but on the other hand, when government leaves people alone, they often run out and start doing things conservatives think they ought not to.
Smarick writes that "when states made virtually all K-12 decisions absent federal accountability rules--call this the "pre-NCLB" era--our nation didn't get the results we wanted." Schneider questions whether that's actually true. I'd like to ask who "we" are.
Smarick is concerned that "too many disadvantaged kids were not well-served" in pre-NCLB America. That's a legitimate concern, but at this stage of the game, there's no sign that NCLB/RttT made anything better.
And while I get his concern that a government that hands over giant honking bales of cash can reasonably expected to hear the banging of its bucks, all that gets us is an influx of companies that are good at filling out accountability paperwork.
This is part of what Schneider likes about NCLB-- transparent school accountability, and disaggregation of data. I'm not convinced, because the "data" we're talking about are inevitably test scores. The breaking out of sub-groups has had some deeply unpleasant side effects. For instance, the common practice of pre-testing students and targetting the failures. This gives us a two-tier system; pre-test winners get a full, rich day of varied class offerings, while pre-test losers (or last year's test losers) get a day filled with math and English and math and English and test prep and more test prep.
In my area, where our most common sub-groups are low-income students, we would be further ahead to hire enough of those parents at well-paying jobs doing anything at all, so that their children were no longer part of the subgroup and we could make the sub-group small enough not to destroy our numbers.
So here's my rewrite of NCLB:
The federal government will distribute its giant mountain of imaginary education-cash in a manner designed to offset the varied levels of poverty across the US.
Somebody can punch up the language. But that's it. In all other respects, the federal government will butt out of the education biz.
Oh, I know I'm fantasizing. If they rewrite it, it will be yet again a labyrinthian mess of federal overrreach and mandated malpractice. Here's why--
Any federal law about education will be written not by people who are good at education, but by people who are good at the business of politics and regulation. Accountability will continue to be based on a politically-favored business model, which will reward people who are good at business and government accountability paperwork. At no point will the rewrite be under the control or direction of people who will be primarily concerned with the educational aspects of the bill.
Look at NCLB. The insane Lake Woebegone clause (that all students will be made above average) was all about politics, and even today, Smarick was trotting out the old "If you don't want it to be 100%, then you go ahead and pick out which students will be left behind" which is all about political leverage and not one iota about education. The politicians who put it there created a time bomb that they never expected to go off. The steep climb of the AYP wasn't scheduled to start until 2008, after Pres. Bush was done and after Congress was supposed to rewrite the bill. But 2007 came and they couldn't get the job done.
When Congress set that reality-impaired goal, they weren't over-estimating teachers. They were over-estimating themselves. Politics stuck us with an idea that was political gold, but educationally impossible (and the only support ever offered is essentially a political dare-- "go ahead and say something that can be used against you.")
Revise ESEA? The feds can't do this job right (and maybe not even at all). The best solution, the solution that would actually take US education forward, is for the feds to back up and get out of the business of doing anything except trying to level the financial playing field.
Federal involvement in education has not solved a single problem, or fixed a single broken thing. If you think the states do a lousy job of handling education, please note that federal involvement has only made things worse. The problems of big city schools are problems of politics and money; NCLB and RttT have simply injected more money-fueled politics into state-level education, and it has gotten us nothing good. Nothing. Urban schools are a problem in search of a solution, but the solution does not lie in ESEA. Nor has the unending, ever-growing mountain of reporting to the federal government helped anybody fix anything, with the possible exception of increased employment for administrators and administrative assistants hired by school districts to cope with government reporting requirements.
My solution is both radical and reactionary. The cry of fans of federalism is, "Without accountability and reporting to the federal government, how will we know that schools are doing well." My response is-- who needs to know? Who, beyond the teachers and administrators and local taxpayers and parents, needs to know how a particular school is doing, and what could the federal government do to inform them? My answers-- nobody, and nothing. It is, in fact, the system that allowed us the robust freedom and flexibility that coincided with the 20th century rise of the US as a world power.
All I want to do with NCLB is blow it up. I realize I'm dreaming, but so is anyone who thinks we can have 100% above average students or who thinks that free market forces could possibly help education. I like my dream better.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Lest we forget, NCLB is an actual law, and every state in the union is in violation. At this point the early predictions about the law are true-- every school is either failing or cheating. It's that universal violation that makes the extra-legal legerdemain of Race to the Top/waivers possible. Change the law so that it no longer requires 100% of US students to be above average, and the waivers become unnecessary, and the current administration's legisltion-free rewrite of US education collapses. If I were cynical, I might conclude that it's that chance to hand the President a policy defeat, and not a desire to restore the promise of public education, that motivates some GOPpers on this issue.
But an ESEA rewrite brings us up against the same obstacle that has been clogging the pipes since 2007-- what to put in its place? Nobody has yet found the proper education enema to get things moving.
Recently Andy Smarick and Jack Schneider took on the question, and while they are both bright and learned men, I find that I disagree with both of them in some substantial ways.
Smarick, both in the EdWeek piece and in his writing elsewhere, has recognized that education now falls into a classic conservative conundrum-- on the one hand, conservatives want government to leave people alone and stop telling them what to do, but on the other hand, when government leaves people alone, they often run out and start doing things conservatives think they ought not to.
Smarick writes that "when states made virtually all K-12 decisions absent federal accountability rules--call this the "pre-NCLB" era--our nation didn't get the results we wanted." Schneider questions whether that's actually true. I'd like to ask who "we" are.
Smarick is concerned that "too many disadvantaged kids were not well-served" in pre-NCLB America. That's a legitimate concern, but at this stage of the game, there's no sign that NCLB/RttT made anything better.
And while I get his concern that a government that hands over giant honking bales of cash can reasonably expected to hear the banging of its bucks, all that gets us is an influx of companies that are good at filling out accountability paperwork.
This is part of what Schneider likes about NCLB-- transparent school accountability, and disaggregation of data. I'm not convinced, because the "data" we're talking about are inevitably test scores. The breaking out of sub-groups has had some deeply unpleasant side effects. For instance, the common practice of pre-testing students and targetting the failures. This gives us a two-tier system; pre-test winners get a full, rich day of varied class offerings, while pre-test losers (or last year's test losers) get a day filled with math and English and math and English and test prep and more test prep.
In my area, where our most common sub-groups are low-income students, we would be further ahead to hire enough of those parents at well-paying jobs doing anything at all, so that their children were no longer part of the subgroup and we could make the sub-group small enough not to destroy our numbers.
So here's my rewrite of NCLB:
The federal government will distribute its giant mountain of imaginary education-cash in a manner designed to offset the varied levels of poverty across the US.
Somebody can punch up the language. But that's it. In all other respects, the federal government will butt out of the education biz.
Oh, I know I'm fantasizing. If they rewrite it, it will be yet again a labyrinthian mess of federal overrreach and mandated malpractice. Here's why--
Any federal law about education will be written not by people who are good at education, but by people who are good at the business of politics and regulation. Accountability will continue to be based on a politically-favored business model, which will reward people who are good at business and government accountability paperwork. At no point will the rewrite be under the control or direction of people who will be primarily concerned with the educational aspects of the bill.
Look at NCLB. The insane Lake Woebegone clause (that all students will be made above average) was all about politics, and even today, Smarick was trotting out the old "If you don't want it to be 100%, then you go ahead and pick out which students will be left behind" which is all about political leverage and not one iota about education. The politicians who put it there created a time bomb that they never expected to go off. The steep climb of the AYP wasn't scheduled to start until 2008, after Pres. Bush was done and after Congress was supposed to rewrite the bill. But 2007 came and they couldn't get the job done.
When Congress set that reality-impaired goal, they weren't over-estimating teachers. They were over-estimating themselves. Politics stuck us with an idea that was political gold, but educationally impossible (and the only support ever offered is essentially a political dare-- "go ahead and say something that can be used against you.")
Revise ESEA? The feds can't do this job right (and maybe not even at all). The best solution, the solution that would actually take US education forward, is for the feds to back up and get out of the business of doing anything except trying to level the financial playing field.
Federal involvement in education has not solved a single problem, or fixed a single broken thing. If you think the states do a lousy job of handling education, please note that federal involvement has only made things worse. The problems of big city schools are problems of politics and money; NCLB and RttT have simply injected more money-fueled politics into state-level education, and it has gotten us nothing good. Nothing. Urban schools are a problem in search of a solution, but the solution does not lie in ESEA. Nor has the unending, ever-growing mountain of reporting to the federal government helped anybody fix anything, with the possible exception of increased employment for administrators and administrative assistants hired by school districts to cope with government reporting requirements.
My solution is both radical and reactionary. The cry of fans of federalism is, "Without accountability and reporting to the federal government, how will we know that schools are doing well." My response is-- who needs to know? Who, beyond the teachers and administrators and local taxpayers and parents, needs to know how a particular school is doing, and what could the federal government do to inform them? My answers-- nobody, and nothing. It is, in fact, the system that allowed us the robust freedom and flexibility that coincided with the 20th century rise of the US as a world power.
All I want to do with NCLB is blow it up. I realize I'm dreaming, but so is anyone who thinks we can have 100% above average students or who thinks that free market forces could possibly help education. I like my dream better.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Defending The Test
Feeling feisty after a successful election run, Republicans are reportedly gunning for various limbs of the reformster octopus, and reformsters are circling the wagons for strategic defense of those sucker-covered limbs.
People are finally remembering that it's the ESEA, due to be transformed from No Child Left Behind into something new since 2007, which gives current reformster wave of waivers its power. Fix the ESEA properly and you cut the legs out from under the current non-laws governing K-12 education in this country. At Ed Week, Klein and Camera report that some GOP aides are already drafting a version of an ESEA rewrite that removes the federal testing mandate. I'm a fan of the idea; months ago, I picked high stakes testing as the reformy thing I'd most like to see die.
Massive high stakes testing is at the center of the reformster program, but it's also one of the most visible and widely hated features of reformsterism. Duncan and other bureaucrats have been issuing word salads aimed at changing the optics since last summer, but nothing of substance has been done to lessen the impact of high stakes testing. Duncan saying, "Schools shouldn't focus on testing so much" without changing any of the policies related to testing is like a mugger saying, "Don't be so pre-occupied with my gun" while he continues to take your wallet.
Our current system is positively Kafkaesque, or possibly Dilbertesque. Schools have literally stopped doing our jobs full time so that we can devote more time to generating reports on how well we're doing our job. Even if the Big Test were an accurate measure of how well we're doing our job (which they are most certainly not), the current set-up is unequivocally absolutely stupid. It is like having welders spend half as many hours welding so that they can write up reports on output of the welding unit in the factory. It's like having your boyfriend go on half as many dates so that he can stay home and write notes about how much he misses you. It's like feeding your baby half as many meals because you need to keep him on the scale to check if he's gaining enough weight.
Actually-- it's worse than all of those. It is supervisory bureaucrats believing that their part of the process-- checking on how the work is going-- is more important than actually doing the work.
Objections to cutting testing all fall into that category. They are all variations on, "But if testing is cut, how will my office know what is going on in classrooms." Well, dipstick, we are trying to tell you what is going on in classrooms-- teachers regularly stop doing actual teaching so that they can prepare for and take your damn tests.
People propose local tests. Reformsters complain that local people just don't know how to make sexy, rigorous tests as well as corporate sponsors like Pearson. People propose staggering the tests, taking only one a year, or one every couple of years. Reformsters claim that this would make it easier to game the system, as if the testing system is not one giant game right now.
In his defense of testing, Andy Smarick offers this list of benefits of annual testing:
Smarick shares with Andrew Saultz and others the belief that testing is also necessary in order to target failing schools. I call baloney on this. Smarick has been a critic of lousy urban schooling for a while; I don't believe for a second that he needed standardized test scores to conclude that some poor urban schools were doing a lousy job. If my hand is resting on a red-hot electric range, and the flesh is sizzling and smoke is curling up from my hand, I'm not standing there saying, "Hey, could someone bring me a thermometer so I could check this temp? I might have a problem here."
The one argument I can concede is that terrible test scores might allow activists to light a fire under the butts of non-responsive politicians (who would not notice a burning hand unless it was holding a thick stack of $100 bills). But we've had time for that to work, and it isn't happening. Lousy scores in poor urban schools are not being used to funnel resources, make infrastructure improvements or otherwise improve poor urban schools-- results are just being used to turn poor urban schools into investment and money-making opportunities for charter operators and investors, and after a few years those outfits have no successes to point to that aren't the result of creaming or creative number-crunching. So this pro-test argument is also invalid.
Mike Petrilli has also stepped up to defend testing. Responding to the reported rewrite initiatives he asks,
Do Republicans really want to scrap the transparency that comes from measuring student (and school and district) progress from year to year and go back to the Stone Age of judging schools based on a snapshot in time? Or worse, based on inputs, promises, and claims? Are they seriously proposing to eliminate the data that are powering great studies and new findings every day on topics from vouchers to charters to teacher effectiveness and more?
The biggest problem with Petrilli's defense is that the current battery of bad standardized tests are not accomplishing any of those things. They are not providing transparency; they are just providing more frequent bad data than the "stone age" technique. The current Big Tests get their own authority and power from nothing more than "inputs, promises and claims." For-profit corporations are really good at creating that kind of marketing copy, but that doesn't make it so. And if data from the Big Tests are powering great studies and new findings, I'd like to see just one of them, because I read up pretty extensively, and I haven't seen a thing that would match that description.
Petrilli does, however, have one interesting idea-- "kill the federal mandate around teacher evaluation and much of the over-testing will go away."
I've always said that Petrilli is no dummy (I"m sure he feels better knowing I've said it). Tying teacher (and therefore school, and, soon, the college from which the teachers graduated) evaluation to both The Test and to the teachers' career prospects guarantees that schools will be highly motivated to center much of everything around that test. This is an aspect of the testing biz that Arne either doesn't understand or is purposefully ignoring. I tend toward the latter; if we go back to the Race to the Top program, we see that teacher evaluation linked to test results is the top policy goal.
If the test result mandate didn't come from the feds, each state would come up with its own version. It might not be any better than the current situation, but we'd have fifty interesting fights instead of one big smothering federal blanket. And each state would still have to come up with some sort of answer to the question of how to evaluate a fifth grade art teacher with third grade math test results.
Of course, there's a trade-off with reducing pressure to do all testing, all the time. The less pressure associated with The Big Test, the more students will not even pretend to take the tests a little bit seriously, and the less valid the results will be (and as invalid as the results are now, there's plenty of room left for that to go further south).
Tests are going stay under the gun because they are at once both the most visible and most senseless part of reformsterism. They are an even easier target for Republicans that the Common Core itself because unlike CCSS, everybody knows exactly what they are and whether or not they've been rolled back, and their supporters can't point at a single concrete benefit to offset the anxiety, counter-intuitive results, and massive waste of school time. And tests have reached into millions of American homes to personally insult families ("You may think your child is bright and worthy, but I'm an official gummint test here to tell you that your kid is a big loser").
But tests will be vigorously defended because-- Good God!! Look at that mountain of money!! The business plan of Pearson et al is about way more testing, not less. Test data is important to create charter marketing and support voucher programs. And because technocrats need data to drive their vision of reform, so they can never admit that the emperor not only has no clothes, but also is not actually an emperor but rather a large hairless rat that has learned to walk on its hind legs.
In short, The Big Test may turn out to be the front line, the divider between people who are worried about actual live human children and people who are worried about programs and policies and -- Good God!! That mountain of money is sooooo huge!!! You can bet that as we speak, lobbyists and their ilk are being dispatched toot suite to do some 'splaining to those GOP politicians who are after the bread and butter. Keep your eyes peeled as we enter the new year to see how this plays out.
People are finally remembering that it's the ESEA, due to be transformed from No Child Left Behind into something new since 2007, which gives current reformster wave of waivers its power. Fix the ESEA properly and you cut the legs out from under the current non-laws governing K-12 education in this country. At Ed Week, Klein and Camera report that some GOP aides are already drafting a version of an ESEA rewrite that removes the federal testing mandate. I'm a fan of the idea; months ago, I picked high stakes testing as the reformy thing I'd most like to see die.
Massive high stakes testing is at the center of the reformster program, but it's also one of the most visible and widely hated features of reformsterism. Duncan and other bureaucrats have been issuing word salads aimed at changing the optics since last summer, but nothing of substance has been done to lessen the impact of high stakes testing. Duncan saying, "Schools shouldn't focus on testing so much" without changing any of the policies related to testing is like a mugger saying, "Don't be so pre-occupied with my gun" while he continues to take your wallet.
Our current system is positively Kafkaesque, or possibly Dilbertesque. Schools have literally stopped doing our jobs full time so that we can devote more time to generating reports on how well we're doing our job. Even if the Big Test were an accurate measure of how well we're doing our job (which they are most certainly not), the current set-up is unequivocally absolutely stupid. It is like having welders spend half as many hours welding so that they can write up reports on output of the welding unit in the factory. It's like having your boyfriend go on half as many dates so that he can stay home and write notes about how much he misses you. It's like feeding your baby half as many meals because you need to keep him on the scale to check if he's gaining enough weight.
Actually-- it's worse than all of those. It is supervisory bureaucrats believing that their part of the process-- checking on how the work is going-- is more important than actually doing the work.
Objections to cutting testing all fall into that category. They are all variations on, "But if testing is cut, how will my office know what is going on in classrooms." Well, dipstick, we are trying to tell you what is going on in classrooms-- teachers regularly stop doing actual teaching so that they can prepare for and take your damn tests.
People propose local tests. Reformsters complain that local people just don't know how to make sexy, rigorous tests as well as corporate sponsors like Pearson. People propose staggering the tests, taking only one a year, or one every couple of years. Reformsters claim that this would make it easier to game the system, as if the testing system is not one giant game right now.
In his defense of testing, Andy Smarick offers this list of benefits of annual testing:
- It makes clear that every student matters.
- It makes clear that the standards associated with every tested grade and subject matter.
- It forces us to continuously track all students, preventing our claiming surprise when scores are below expectations.
- It gives us the information needed to tailor interventions to the grades, subjects, and students in need.
- It gives families the information needed to make the case for necessary changes.
- It enables us to calculate student achievement growth, so schools and educators get credit for progress.
- It forces us to acknowledge that achievement gaps exist, persist, and grow over time.
- It prevents schools and districts from “hiding” less effective educators and programs in untested grades.
Smarick shares with Andrew Saultz and others the belief that testing is also necessary in order to target failing schools. I call baloney on this. Smarick has been a critic of lousy urban schooling for a while; I don't believe for a second that he needed standardized test scores to conclude that some poor urban schools were doing a lousy job. If my hand is resting on a red-hot electric range, and the flesh is sizzling and smoke is curling up from my hand, I'm not standing there saying, "Hey, could someone bring me a thermometer so I could check this temp? I might have a problem here."
The one argument I can concede is that terrible test scores might allow activists to light a fire under the butts of non-responsive politicians (who would not notice a burning hand unless it was holding a thick stack of $100 bills). But we've had time for that to work, and it isn't happening. Lousy scores in poor urban schools are not being used to funnel resources, make infrastructure improvements or otherwise improve poor urban schools-- results are just being used to turn poor urban schools into investment and money-making opportunities for charter operators and investors, and after a few years those outfits have no successes to point to that aren't the result of creaming or creative number-crunching. So this pro-test argument is also invalid.
Mike Petrilli has also stepped up to defend testing. Responding to the reported rewrite initiatives he asks,
Do Republicans really want to scrap the transparency that comes from measuring student (and school and district) progress from year to year and go back to the Stone Age of judging schools based on a snapshot in time? Or worse, based on inputs, promises, and claims? Are they seriously proposing to eliminate the data that are powering great studies and new findings every day on topics from vouchers to charters to teacher effectiveness and more?
The biggest problem with Petrilli's defense is that the current battery of bad standardized tests are not accomplishing any of those things. They are not providing transparency; they are just providing more frequent bad data than the "stone age" technique. The current Big Tests get their own authority and power from nothing more than "inputs, promises and claims." For-profit corporations are really good at creating that kind of marketing copy, but that doesn't make it so. And if data from the Big Tests are powering great studies and new findings, I'd like to see just one of them, because I read up pretty extensively, and I haven't seen a thing that would match that description.
Petrilli does, however, have one interesting idea-- "kill the federal mandate around teacher evaluation and much of the over-testing will go away."
I've always said that Petrilli is no dummy (I"m sure he feels better knowing I've said it). Tying teacher (and therefore school, and, soon, the college from which the teachers graduated) evaluation to both The Test and to the teachers' career prospects guarantees that schools will be highly motivated to center much of everything around that test. This is an aspect of the testing biz that Arne either doesn't understand or is purposefully ignoring. I tend toward the latter; if we go back to the Race to the Top program, we see that teacher evaluation linked to test results is the top policy goal.
If the test result mandate didn't come from the feds, each state would come up with its own version. It might not be any better than the current situation, but we'd have fifty interesting fights instead of one big smothering federal blanket. And each state would still have to come up with some sort of answer to the question of how to evaluate a fifth grade art teacher with third grade math test results.
Of course, there's a trade-off with reducing pressure to do all testing, all the time. The less pressure associated with The Big Test, the more students will not even pretend to take the tests a little bit seriously, and the less valid the results will be (and as invalid as the results are now, there's plenty of room left for that to go further south).
Tests are going stay under the gun because they are at once both the most visible and most senseless part of reformsterism. They are an even easier target for Republicans that the Common Core itself because unlike CCSS, everybody knows exactly what they are and whether or not they've been rolled back, and their supporters can't point at a single concrete benefit to offset the anxiety, counter-intuitive results, and massive waste of school time. And tests have reached into millions of American homes to personally insult families ("You may think your child is bright and worthy, but I'm an official gummint test here to tell you that your kid is a big loser").
But tests will be vigorously defended because-- Good God!! Look at that mountain of money!! The business plan of Pearson et al is about way more testing, not less. Test data is important to create charter marketing and support voucher programs. And because technocrats need data to drive their vision of reform, so they can never admit that the emperor not only has no clothes, but also is not actually an emperor but rather a large hairless rat that has learned to walk on its hind legs.
In short, The Big Test may turn out to be the front line, the divider between people who are worried about actual live human children and people who are worried about programs and policies and -- Good God!! That mountain of money is sooooo huge!!! You can bet that as we speak, lobbyists and their ilk are being dispatched toot suite to do some 'splaining to those GOP politicians who are after the bread and butter. Keep your eyes peeled as we enter the new year to see how this plays out.
Monday, December 1, 2014
Forbes Fab Five by Five (Part II)
In our last installment, Forbes called a summit of Many Very Rich People to lay out what it would cost to fulfill the Must Have list for remaking American education. Now, we're going to sit around with some alleged representatives of education stakeholders. And we should note that it's happening in the department of Forbes.
Paul Tudor Jones (founder of the Robin Hood Foundation) will be directing traffic as Andy Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Kay Henderson (DC school chancellor) jaw about this. I should note that I'll be walking you through the Short and Marginally Sweeter transcript; apparently there is a longer version, but I just can't bring myself to go there.
You can read the account of what Forbes decided US education Really Needed at this post. The basic list of five critical elements of an educational overhaul are:
1) Teacher efficacy-- recruit best and brightest
2) Universal Pre-K-- because childhood is too long
3) School leadership-- give principals greater power over staff
4) Blended learning-- broadband and computers for everybody
5) Common Core/ College Readiness-- insert all classic baloney arguments here
So, let's begin.
Jones: "We have literally, the pillars of education in the US" here today. Our first question is a request to comment on the five...well, I guess we're going to call them Big Ideas. Which is biggest?
Weingarten goes first. Sigh. She thinks the five big ideas are really big and must all get done together. She sticks up for the Common Core some more, as if the whole foundational assumption of Common Core is that Weingarten's constituents can't do their jobs. I've made the same complaint about my own NEA many times-- would it be too much to ask that the head of a teachers' union stick up for teachers. Today, apparently, it is.
Henderson thinks that control of teaching staff and Common Core are the secret of DC's imaginary leap forward.
Arne thinks all five are swell, and all must be done at the same time and at scale. There are days when I think Arne is just a life-sized See 'N Say-- pull a string and some combination of his usual word salad comes out. Name checks his favorite Places Where Things Are Going Great (DC, Indiana, Tennessee). Thinks what's needed are leaders who will buck their own party orthodoxy-- so, Republicans who will cheerfully welcome federal control and Democrats who will screw teachers and public schools. Which brings us to
Cuomo agrees that we need all five. He decries the dual system of good schools for some and bad schools for others, as if he hasn't been working hard to spread that two-tier system. Andy says the big problem is that we're moving too slow and we're okay with that. Guess that's one more hint about what NY teachers can look forward to, and soon.
Jones asks which of the five can be controlled, and which can't. Weingarten makes noises about co-operating on local level, and Henderson allows that she has great power but she Gets Things Done when she works with her union partners, gets money from her government partners, and gets even more money from philanthropists.
Duncan goes with great teachers, great principals, high standards. Then someone pulls his string and something comes out from some alternate universe:
We found obviously that federal mandates don’t work well. Where we’ve had the most success is around incentives. And lots of carrots. Not mandate, not have sticks, but put money out there where we can to reward excellence–and that’s a hard sell on both sides in Congress. They’d much prefer straight formula funding. So we’re always fighting to have just a little bit of money to put out there as carrots.
Wait! What? I'm pretty sure the entire foundation of the waiver-based RttT system is sticks. Sticks to thump on states, evaluatory sticks to thump teachers, mandated testing, mandated school closings, do what we tell you or we'll let the wratch of NCLB rain down on your head-- maybe Arne just doesn't know what the difference is between a carrot and a stick. I mean, they're both shaped about the same. Maybe he's just completely confused.
Cuomo observes that he didn't get anything done by being nice, so he made everybody's money contingent on how well they follow his orders and he hasn't had any problems since. Money buys compliance! He has it all figured out, except maybe the part where purchasing compliance gets you nice paperwork and reports and people who are undercutting you every single chance they get. It gets you a mandate that never arrives because you were only able to buy just enough support to win, but not enough to win in a Presidential timbre manner.
Jones wants to know how philanthropists. Randi says "we're starting to learn what works" and this whole sad performance is one more example of how it's useless to get a seat at the table if you're not going to say anything useful once you get there. Honestly-- if you erased the names and titles, you would never read this article and guess that one of the participants was the head of the second-biggest teacher's union in the US.
Henderson gives Arne some strokes for being the only government guy who will fund innovation, and I think we can all agree that using a bureaucratic waiver maneuver to create new laws without the benefit of Congress is pretty innovative. The guillotine was also hot new stuff in its day.
Arne will now deliver more History from an Alternative Universe:
Having a common way of measuring success is just so basic and fundamental to all of your businesses–that’s a radical concept in education. We need to get to that point of having a high bar and having clear ways of measuring how everybody is stacking up against that bar. Under No Child Left Behind, about 20 states dummied-down their standards, they reduced their standards. Why? To make politicians of both parties look good. It was terrible for children. Not one person challenged those politicians. Until [philanthropic leaders] and the broader citizenry hold politicians accountable, we’ll continue to be mired in mediocrity.
It's true. In thirty-plus years of teaching, I have never measured success in any manner. Just throw darts at a board and call it a day. But states did not dummy down under NCLB to make politicians look good. They did it to save their states' school from punishment under the heavy brainless hand of top-down federal mandates. They did it to avoid an unavoidable punishment that was inevitable because the feds set standards that nobody believed could be met, but they set them anyway. The dummying down was a completely predictable result of the perverse incentives built into a unsustainable punishment-based test-driven system created by educational amateurs in Washington DC. Dammit, Arne, if you want to learn a lesson from NCLB, learn that one, and learn it in some manner other than repeating the same damn mistakes.
As I said, there's a longer version of this somewhere. But as much as I love you all, that is a hit I'm not ready to take for the team.
Paul Tudor Jones (founder of the Robin Hood Foundation) will be directing traffic as Andy Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Kay Henderson (DC school chancellor) jaw about this. I should note that I'll be walking you through the Short and Marginally Sweeter transcript; apparently there is a longer version, but I just can't bring myself to go there.
You can read the account of what Forbes decided US education Really Needed at this post. The basic list of five critical elements of an educational overhaul are:
1) Teacher efficacy-- recruit best and brightest
2) Universal Pre-K-- because childhood is too long
3) School leadership-- give principals greater power over staff
4) Blended learning-- broadband and computers for everybody
5) Common Core/ College Readiness-- insert all classic baloney arguments here
So, let's begin.
Jones: "We have literally, the pillars of education in the US" here today. Our first question is a request to comment on the five...well, I guess we're going to call them Big Ideas. Which is biggest?
Weingarten goes first. Sigh. She thinks the five big ideas are really big and must all get done together. She sticks up for the Common Core some more, as if the whole foundational assumption of Common Core is that Weingarten's constituents can't do their jobs. I've made the same complaint about my own NEA many times-- would it be too much to ask that the head of a teachers' union stick up for teachers. Today, apparently, it is.
Henderson thinks that control of teaching staff and Common Core are the secret of DC's imaginary leap forward.
Arne thinks all five are swell, and all must be done at the same time and at scale. There are days when I think Arne is just a life-sized See 'N Say-- pull a string and some combination of his usual word salad comes out. Name checks his favorite Places Where Things Are Going Great (DC, Indiana, Tennessee). Thinks what's needed are leaders who will buck their own party orthodoxy-- so, Republicans who will cheerfully welcome federal control and Democrats who will screw teachers and public schools. Which brings us to
Cuomo agrees that we need all five. He decries the dual system of good schools for some and bad schools for others, as if he hasn't been working hard to spread that two-tier system. Andy says the big problem is that we're moving too slow and we're okay with that. Guess that's one more hint about what NY teachers can look forward to, and soon.
Jones asks which of the five can be controlled, and which can't. Weingarten makes noises about co-operating on local level, and Henderson allows that she has great power but she Gets Things Done when she works with her union partners, gets money from her government partners, and gets even more money from philanthropists.
Duncan goes with great teachers, great principals, high standards. Then someone pulls his string and something comes out from some alternate universe:
We found obviously that federal mandates don’t work well. Where we’ve had the most success is around incentives. And lots of carrots. Not mandate, not have sticks, but put money out there where we can to reward excellence–and that’s a hard sell on both sides in Congress. They’d much prefer straight formula funding. So we’re always fighting to have just a little bit of money to put out there as carrots.
Wait! What? I'm pretty sure the entire foundation of the waiver-based RttT system is sticks. Sticks to thump on states, evaluatory sticks to thump teachers, mandated testing, mandated school closings, do what we tell you or we'll let the wratch of NCLB rain down on your head-- maybe Arne just doesn't know what the difference is between a carrot and a stick. I mean, they're both shaped about the same. Maybe he's just completely confused.
Cuomo observes that he didn't get anything done by being nice, so he made everybody's money contingent on how well they follow his orders and he hasn't had any problems since. Money buys compliance! He has it all figured out, except maybe the part where purchasing compliance gets you nice paperwork and reports and people who are undercutting you every single chance they get. It gets you a mandate that never arrives because you were only able to buy just enough support to win, but not enough to win in a Presidential timbre manner.
Jones wants to know how philanthropists. Randi says "we're starting to learn what works" and this whole sad performance is one more example of how it's useless to get a seat at the table if you're not going to say anything useful once you get there. Honestly-- if you erased the names and titles, you would never read this article and guess that one of the participants was the head of the second-biggest teacher's union in the US.
Henderson gives Arne some strokes for being the only government guy who will fund innovation, and I think we can all agree that using a bureaucratic waiver maneuver to create new laws without the benefit of Congress is pretty innovative. The guillotine was also hot new stuff in its day.
Arne will now deliver more History from an Alternative Universe:
Having a common way of measuring success is just so basic and fundamental to all of your businesses–that’s a radical concept in education. We need to get to that point of having a high bar and having clear ways of measuring how everybody is stacking up against that bar. Under No Child Left Behind, about 20 states dummied-down their standards, they reduced their standards. Why? To make politicians of both parties look good. It was terrible for children. Not one person challenged those politicians. Until [philanthropic leaders] and the broader citizenry hold politicians accountable, we’ll continue to be mired in mediocrity.
It's true. In thirty-plus years of teaching, I have never measured success in any manner. Just throw darts at a board and call it a day. But states did not dummy down under NCLB to make politicians look good. They did it to save their states' school from punishment under the heavy brainless hand of top-down federal mandates. They did it to avoid an unavoidable punishment that was inevitable because the feds set standards that nobody believed could be met, but they set them anyway. The dummying down was a completely predictable result of the perverse incentives built into a unsustainable punishment-based test-driven system created by educational amateurs in Washington DC. Dammit, Arne, if you want to learn a lesson from NCLB, learn that one, and learn it in some manner other than repeating the same damn mistakes.
As I said, there's a longer version of this somewhere. But as much as I love you all, that is a hit I'm not ready to take for the team.
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