Politics and ESEA

As we come down to the first of many wires on the next of many rewrites of ESEA, Politico provides a nail-biting tale of House Republicans looking to make sure they have the votes, while Andy Smarick has provided a handy chart of the range of political stances, ideas, and versions of a new ESEA.

The pieces are instructive. Smarick in particular shows how the various proposals, from Lamar Alexander's to NGA to FEE to-- hmmm, I don't see anything from Secretary Duncan on here. Almost as if he's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Anyway, it's an easy to size up look at the various political positions on the ESEA rewrite. As such it is somewhat informative and entirely depressing.

Likewise, the Politico piece which approaches the rewriting of ESEA as if it's a political office deserving the same horse-race style coverage of a battle for the job of Mayor of Chicago. Also depressing?

Why depressing? Because both pieces are a reminder that the one thing that is not being discussed with any degree of fervor or intensity or even at all is the educational basis for any of these choices. Many of the policy discussions (say, the desire for an eternal onslaught of standardized testing) could be informed by actual research and facts and stuff, but they won't be. ESEA could be rewritten in an atmosphere in which lawmakers and policy writers sit quietly and listen to what actual teachers and educators and researchers (real researchers, not thinky tank un-peer non-reviewed opinion pieces) have to say.

That's not going to happen, and I'm enough of a big boy to understand that that's not how the world works when it comes to any policy. I understand we've crafted a system where expertise and knowledge are often dwarfed by money and power, and that it's hard to have any kind of political system that tries to organize representative government will tilt in that direction. I'm a grown-up. I get it. I'm not going to sit and moan about how we should be living in some non-political utopia where lions and lambs lie down together and the birds and the bees sing kumbayyah. We live in the real world, and this is part of that.

But, by God, the next time some reformster wants to complain that the opponents of Common Core and standardized testing and charter schools keep politicizing things instead of discussing educational policies on their educational merits, I'm going to refer him back to these two pieces. It's time to watch, once again, how the sausage is made, and it's not made out of educational pieces-parts in an educational sausage factory. It's political sausage made at a political sausagefest.

This is a reminder to teachers who want to stay home and say, "Well, I don't want to get my hands dirty with political stuff" that they are opting out of making the decisions that they have to live with. And it's a reminder that "Why must you make this so political?" is another way to say, "I'd like you to go back to being uninvolved and ineffective, please."

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.

Did Duncan Corrupt Common Core?

One of the recurring narratives among conservative supporters of the Common Core is the Tale of How Duncan and Obama Corrupted the Good and Virtuous Common Core. And no matter how often the tale is debunked, it keeps popping up again.

You can see the tale on display once again at the November gathering of GOP governors. The story always goes something like this:

Once upon a time, the governors (and some of their finest minions) got together and created a set of wonderful, magical standards. But just as they were starting to send these magical standards throughout the land, the Evil Presiden Obama and the wicked Secretary Duncan cast a terrible spell on the beautiful, healthful standards and overnight, the standards grew toxic tests that had to be taught to because of top-down federal intrusion.

I do not know if reformsters don't understand the implications of their own program or if they are purposefully deceptive (I'd guess there are some of each in play). But that fairy tales is not true, and never was.

First of all, there is no version of reality in which the states adopted CCSS on their own. Certainly there's no version of reality in which states would have adoptred the Core sight unseen without the federal leverage escape from the penalties of No Child Left Behind. CCSS fans can complain about feds, but it's the equivalent of complaining about the French-- we may not like them now, but nothing would have gotten off the ground without them.

But let's go back and look at Benchmarking for Success, the position paper for the National Governor's Association and their friends at Achieve. The document is no secret, and is often used to make the same point I'm about to make, but it's worth trotting out again every few months. And it's important remember that this report is from 2008. 2008.

In their roadmap for education reform, Common Core is just one feature of the five recommended actions

1) Upgrade state standards to a common core
2) Use state influence to get textbooks, curricula, and assessments aligned to standards
3) Revise state policies on teacher prep, development and support
4) Accountability for schools and systems
5) Measure state-level achievement

One might look at this list and conclude that to accomplish this sort of large-scale overhaul would require a central planning body with a national reach and the power to back it up. So, you know, something like a federal government. But the authors of the "report" have anticipated that concern, and devote an entire page (well, two, but one is a full page picture of a brown frightened child).

If benchmarking were only about measuring and comparing outcomes, the federal government might be able to play a leading role. However, because benchmarking is also-- and most critically-- about improving policy, states must take the lead.

The authors assert that the states have the "primary authority" over the policy areas that are targetted by the reform. This is not an argument that we need to respect state autonomy; it's an argument that the state's authority stand in the way of the goals. When they write "the states must take the lead," that's not a philosophical imperative-- it's a recognition of a political reality.

They also note that the federal government can help by "playing an enabling role grounded in a new vision for the historic state-federal partnership in education." But the relationship is historic precisely because the feds are in it. The true historic relationship between the feds and the states when it comes to education is no relationship at all.

Nobody connected with this report is arguing, "We must initiate this great reform and keep the feds out of it."

Their specific to-do list for the feds is also not-very-hands-off. The feds should offer funding. They should do research and development. They should help identify the best benchmarks for states to use. They should collect and disseminate assessment materials. In other words, the feds should figure out the right thing to do, the right way to measure it, and decide who should and shouldn't get money.
Furthermore, the feds should "offer a ranged of tiered incentives" and those should include "flexibility in meeting requirements of existing federal education laws." In other words, the federal government should offer deserving states a way around No Child Left Behind.

In short, the federal government should hold the purse string of reform, oversee the definition of "deserving" for reform, and use the penalties of NCLB as leverage. They want the feds to send "support" for reform much like we once sent "advisers" to Vietnam.

Remember-- this report is from 2008. Do you remember who was not President in 2008? The same man who hadn't yet named Arne Duncan Secretary of Education.

Conservatives (and others) can argue that Common Core-related reform is tied to a large and unprecendented extension of federal authority. What they can't argue is that such overreach was the invention or creation of Obama and Duncan. Supporters of the Core got exactly what they asked for, hoped for, and planned for.

The most sobering part of these looks back is not the selective amnesia and political maneuvering among current conservative. It's the realization that the current reformster road map was in place before we even had Presidential candidates, which in turn makes me realize that the 2008 election was probably not going to have any effect on the future of US public education. The big question? Will the election in 2016 make any difference?

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

The Conservative Defense of CCSS

Over at the Daily Caller, Robby Soave and Rachel Solzfoos wrote a story in which Michael Brickman of the Fordham Institute labors mightily to construct a conservative defense of the Common Core.

It's a heroic struggle to be sure, as the very first sentence acknowledges, "Conservatives remain deeply skeptical of the Common Core education standards." The Daily Caller's robolinker is not helping; I'm looking at links to a story about how a poor school district wasted money "on lavish Common Core spa trip" and an ad for accredited homeschooling. In this exclusive interview, Brickman tries to combat that conservative blowback and runs directly into one of the central problems of conservatism.

Brickman leads with the "mess of fifty standards" defense of the Core. Many of those standards were just so lacking and students were graduating without necessary proficiencies. The standards "outline types of thinking and skills that students should master by certain grade levels" plus calling for "vigorous high-stakes testing to ensure that kids are actually learning the skills."Lots wrong there, but let's move on.

The article acknowledges the political problems for conservatives and the Core. Although developed by the National Governors Association (a pleasant not-exactly-a-lie, not-exactly-the-truth) and supported by moderate GOP governors like Bush, Jindal and Christie, the CCSS also received support from the Obama administration. That sends up the "protect local control from federal overreach" warning flags for conservatives.

Brickman says the feds should not have coerced the states into accepting the Core, but they are totes worth adopting. This is the modern conservative problem-- there are things you ought to do, but the government should not make you do them. This often comes out as "It's only federal overreach if the feds are making you do something wrong."

Brickman threads the needle and lands on “There are absolutely legitimate, uh, examples of federal overreach from the Obama administration, but I don’t think Common Core is one of them because… It was something that was led by the governors and the state education chiefs.” And nicely played, Daily Caller, in leaving the "uh" in his quote. It's okay-- I don't believe his bullshit story, either.  And anyway, Brickman adds, the feds doing way worse overreach stuff over there. Don't be distracted by the Common Core (when I rather wish you'd be distracted FROM the Common Core instead).

No, conservatives should be clamoring for their local authorities to embrace and preserve the Core. So again-- don't let the feds tell you what to do, but make sure that your local authorities do what the feds want you to do. It's very hard to be a conservative these days.

Next Brickman reminds us that the CCSS are under attack from Tea Partiers and teacher unions. Also, the Monster in your Closet wants to attack it. Booga-booga! A paragraph later he also acknowledges that other members of the Right-ish Thinky Tank Club have also come out against the Core (here's one from just this morning) but Fordham is well paid by Bill Gates sure the others are wrong.

Only in the last paragraph does Daily Caller let Brickman get something right, which is that eradicating CCSS doesn't really solve your wacky bad homework problem or your government mind-control through grammar homework problem.

So the argument fails as a defense and fails as conservatism. In fairness, I haven't seen anybody concoct a good liberal defense for CCSS, either. I'd wager that's because CCSS isn't so much politically charged as it's just bad. Corporate power grabs are pan-political, and Democrats and Republicans of all stripes have been happy to jump on the gravy train. Fordham is a conservative voice that has received a truckload of money from the Gates Foundation. It's funny how sometimes green is a much stronger color than red or blue.