David Brooks Gets Everything Wrong

In an attempt to add some nuance to the positioning of Hillary Clinton, David Brooks took to the New York Times to say a series of not-very-wise things, including some deeply confused observations about education.

He sets up the idea of a main camp of Democrats who have believed for some unspecified period of time that by making American workers smarter and more productive, the country can rebuild its middle class.

He creates that notion so that he can explain its opposition--"populist progressives" who argue that education levels is not the root of all inequality. These are the folks who, Brooks observes, say that the game is rigged by the oligarchy, the workers' share is stagnant, and that corporate power has stifled worker gains.

People in this camp point out that inflation-adjusted wages for college grads has been flat for the past 14 years. Education apparently hasn't lifted wages. The implication? Don't focus on education for the bottom 99 percent. Focus on spreading wealth from the top. Don't put human capital first. Put redistribution first.

This is a leap that Evel Knevel would be impressed by. I am not sure who exactly finds that the implication of stagnant wages is that education should be a low priority. Education is awesome, still awesome, always awesome and desirable. But it does not magically transform the economy.

Brooks then leaps to the idea that redistribution will appeal to Clinton because it allows her to hit Wall Street and CEO's, which is kind of like suggesting that Scott Walker is looking for a policy that allows him to strike out against hard right conservatives or Paul Ryan is looking for a good argument to use against Ayn Rand.

But mostly Brooks wants to argue for education as the miracle engine of economic justice. And to make his argument, he trots out the work of Raj Chetty, a piece of research that proves conclusively that even researchers at Harvard can become confused about the difference between correlation and causation. (Chetty, for those of you unfamiliar with the "research," asserts that a good teacher will result in greater lifetime earnings for students. What he actually proves is that people who tend to do well on standardized tests tend to grow up to be wealthier, an unexciting demonstration of correlation best explained by things we already know-- people who score well on standardized tests tend to be from a higher-income background, and people who grow up to be high-income tend to come from a high-income background.)

Brooks also cites magical researcher David Autor of MIT, who believes that if everyone graduated from college with a degree, everyone would make more money because, reasons. Because if everyone had a college degree, flipping burgers would pay more? Because if everyone had a college degree, corporations would suddenly want to hire more people? The continued belief in the astonishing notion that a more educated workforce causes higher-paying jobs to appear from somewhere is big news to a huge number of twenty-somethings who are busy trying to scrape together a living in areas other than the ones they prepared.

Brooks isn't done spouting nonsense:

Focusing on human capital is not whistling past the graveyard...No redistributionist measure will have the same effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.

Because the vast number of high-paying jobs currently going unfilled is..... what?

Brooks says that redistributionists don't get it, that they believe that modern capitalism is fundamentally broken, but that their view is biased by short-term effects of the recession. I have two responses for that pair of thoughtbubbbles.

First, it's not clear whether capitalism is broken or not because we are currently tangled up in some sort of twisted fun-house mirror version of faux capitalism where the free market has been obliterated by a controlled money-sucking machine run by the government on behalf of the oligarchs. I'm actually a fan of capitalism, but what we currently have in this country is not much like capitalism at all.

Second, your argument about the "temporary evidence" of the recession is invalid because the recession was (and is) not the result of some mysterious serious of natural events. The economy went in the tank because the CEOs and Wall Street put it there. The economy broke because the "capitalists" broke it, and consequently the recession itself is Exhibit A in the case against modern faux capitalism and the greedheads who run it.

Throwing all this back at a magical belief in education is simply another way to blame poor people for being poor. So sorry you need food stamps and health care, but if you'd had the guts and character to go to college and get a degree, you wouldn't be in such a mess. Your poverty is just the direct result of your lack of character and quality. Well, that and your terrible teachers. But it certainly has nothing to do with how the country is being run. It's all on you, lousy poor person. And also your teachers.

Aldeman in NYT: Up Is Down

In Friday's New York Times, Chad Aldeman of Bellwether offered a defense of annual testing that is a jarring masterpiece of backwards speak, a string of words that are presented as if they mean the opposite of what they say. Let me hit the highlights.

The idea of less testing with the same benefits is alluring.

Nicely played, because it assumes that we are getting some benefits out of the current annual testing. We are not. Not a single one. The idea of less testing is alluring because the Big Standardized Test is a waste of time, and less testing means less time wasting.

Yes, test quality must be better than it is today.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play. Again, this assumes that there is some quality in the tests currently being used. There is not. They don't need to be improved. They need to be scrapped.

And, yes, teachers and parents have a right to be alarmed when unnecessary tests designed only for school benchmarking or teacher evaluations cut into instructional time. 

A mishmosh of false assumptions. First, there are no "necessary" tests, nor have I ever read a convincing description of what a "necessary" test would be nor what would make it "necessary." And while there are no Big Standardized Tests that are actually designed for school benchmarking and teacher evaluation, in many states that is the only purpose of the BS Test! The only one! So in Aldeman's view, would those tests be okay because they are being used for purposes for which they aren't designed?

But annual testing has tremendous value. It lets schools follow students’ progress closely, and it allows for measurement of how much students learn and grow over time, not just where they are in a single moment.

Wait! What? A test is, in fact, single snapshot from a single day or couple of days-- that doesn't just give a picture of where students are at a single moment? Taking a single moment from four or five consecutive years does not let anybody follow students progress closely. This style of measurement is great for measuring student height-- and nothing else. This is like saying that the best way to assess the health of your marriage is to give your spouse a quiz one day a year.

Aldeman follows with several paragraphs pushing the disagregation argument-- that by forcing schools to measure particular groups, somebody somewhere gets a better picture of how the school is doing. It is, as always, unclear who needs this picture. You're the parent of a child in one of the groups. You believe your child is getting a good education or a bad education based on what you know about your child. How does getting disagregated data from the school change your understanding?

Besides, I thought we said a few paragraphs back that tests for measuring the school were bad and to be thrown out?

And of course that entire argument rests on the notion that the BS Test measures educational quality and there is not a molecule of evidence out there that it does so. Not. One. Molecule.

Coincidentally, the push for limiting testing has sprung up just as we’re on the cusp of having new, better tests. The Obama administration has invested $360 million and more than four years in the development of new tests, which will debut this spring. Private testing companies have responded with new offerings as well.

Oh, bullshit. New, better tests have been coming every year for a decade. They have never arrived. They will never arrive. It is not possible to create a mass-produced, mass-graded, standardized test that will measure the educational quality of every school in the country. It is like trying to use a ruler to measure the weight of a fluid-- I don't care how many times you go back to drawing board with the ruler-- it will never do the job. Educational quality cannot be measured by a standardized test. It is the wrong tool for the job, and no amount of redesign will change that.

Good reminder though that while throwing money at public schools is terrible and stupid, throwing money at testing companies is guaranteed awesome.

Annual standardized testing measures one thing-- how well a group of students does at taking an annual standardized test. That's it. Even Aldeman here avoids saying what exactly it is that these tests (you know, the "necessary ones") are supposed to measure.

Annual standardized testing is good for one other thing-- making testing companies a buttload of money. Beyond that, they are simply a waste of time and effort.

More Fantasy from NYT

In yesterday's New York Times, reformster David Kirp tried to stand up for the Common Core, instead displaying just how weak the argument for the Core has become. It's a short piece, and it won't take long to spot the holes in his argument.

Our first clue of where he's headed comes from his source for the history of Common Core-- the Allie Bidwell puff piece from last February in US News which tried to argue that CCSS was a "carefully thought out educational reform." So Kirp reduces the history of the Core to the idea that in the mid-90's, "education advocates" began arguing that national standards would level the playing field for students. So in 2008, the governors and state school chiefs spearheaded a drive to create "world-class standards." This is perhaps the most stripped-down creation story of the Core yet, omitting Coleman, Gates, and imaginary teachers writing the standards. So both facts and fictions have been pared down.

Kirp also likes the old "CCSS = critical thinking" line, because nobody ever taught critical thinking before. Let me just renew my usual request for somebody, anybody, to point out the critical thinking portion of the standards. Is it right next to the singing unicorns portion?

Kirp belongs to the Blame Obama crowd, saying that administration backing of the standards. "The mishandled rollout turned a conversation about pedagogy into an ideological and partisan debate over high-stakes testing." This is baloney. The Core was created and pushed through ideological and political means. It has ideology and partisanship in its DNA. Without political gamesmanship and ideological leverage, Common Core would not even be a twinkle in someone's eye. The conversation about Common Core was never "turned into" something political and ideological-- it was political and ideological from the first moment. At no point was the push for Common Core fueled by pedagogy. At no point did the CCSS initiative involve educational experts discussing the educational or pedagogical merits of how to launch it.

Kirp also offers this: "The misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread." This is a distinction without a difference. Standards and tests are different things, but CCSS and testing were designed to be strapped together from day one. The Core are standards chosen specifically for their testability, and I don't believe that anyone pushing the Core considered doing it without high stakes testing attached for even five seconds. Advocates of the standards routinely talked about how testing would allow them to enforce the standards and drive curriculumn. Tests and the Core were meant to go hand in hand, and so they have. Without the testing, the standards are pointless bad suggestions. Without the standards, testing would be revealed as the invalid punitive crapshoot that it is. In short, there really is no misconception involved, other than the original conception of national standards and testing that would go hand in hand to control education.

Kirp goes on to catalog the backlash from conservative to lefties, and he includes acknowledgment that VAM is a baloney. But he'd like to work his way around to further indictment of the Obama administration:

The Obama administration has only itself to blame. Most Democrats expected that equity would be the top education priority, with more money going to the poorest states, better teacher recruitment, more useful training and closer attention to the needs of the surging population of immigrant kids. Instead, the administration has emphasized high-stakes “accountability” and market-driven reforms. The Education Department has invested more than $370 million to develop the new standards and exams in math, reading and writing. 

He goes on to note that trying to buck the administration's priorities can get you some trouble, and he hits some highlights from Arne Duncan's Great Moments in Attacking Critics (white suburban moms, anyone?).


Kirp is correct to note that these are all stupid things the administration has done. He is incorrect to suggest that somehow these actions were the administration somehow horning in on an otherwise robust and healthy reform party. They are not. Duncan appears to get just as many marching orders from the leaders of reformsterdom as he does from Obama, and the administration has faithfully performed as leaders of the reformy movement wanted them to, adopting as policy the reform framework laid out by NGA and Achieve.

It’s no simple task to figure out what schools ought to teach and how best to teach it — how to link talented teachers with engaged students and a challenging curriculum. Turning around the great gray battleship of American public education is even harder. It requires creating new course materials, devising and field-testing new exams and, because these tests are designed to be taken online, closing the digital divide. It means retraining teachers, reorienting classrooms and explaining to anxious parents why these changes are worthwhile. 

Go ahead and try to count all of the assumptions piled into that paragraph about what is "required" by public education. Kirp uses it to wind around into his finish-- that this would all be going great if the administration had just listened to the calls for a high stakes testing moratorium. Really? There was one of those during the CCSS rollout? did it happen somewhere between the unicorn choir singing "Somewhere over the rainbow" and the ballet of the dancing ferrets? Because I stepped out then, so maybe I missed it. The only call for a moratorium came last summer when panicked reformsters thought they could manage pushback on their favorite initiatives by pretending to endorse a testing pullback (but not really).

In Kirp's world, that imaginary testing moratorium at roll-out time would have reduced resistance to the Core. Now it will be a "herculean task to get standards back on track." Which gives us one last false assumption, because standards can only get "back" on track if they were ever on track to begin with, or that they have somehow left the tracks they were traveling on.

Nope. Standards got to this place of pushback and association with toxic testing because that is exactly the track they were placed on from day one. There is no right track to get "back" on because the Core were never on that right track to begin with.

But is interesting to see this minimalist stripped-down version of the CCSS narrative and argument. The reformsters are running out of tools, which will make the "herculean task" of saving the Core even harder. We can only hope.