Competitive Baloney & Rehabilitating RTTT

At the Stanford SOCIAL INNOVATION Review (I don't know why the yell the middle of their name), Joanne Weiss has unleashed an astonishing stack of deep-fried baloney that attempts to retro-actively legitimize the destructive power-and-money test-and-punish legacy of Race to the Top. "Competing Principles" is truly audacious.

Joanne Who??

Weiss has a powerful pedigree. She put in years as an ed tech honcho before going to work for NewSchools Venture Fund, an investment firm for hedge fundies to get their paws in the education biz and that sweet, sweet mountain of public tax dollars. In conjunction with that gig, she served on the boards of Aspire, Green Dot, Rocketship and Leadership charter outfits, to name just a few.

All of this made her perfectly positioned to become Arne Duncan's Chief of Staff and the lead dog for Race to the Top. Are you starting to understand why that program was such a mess?

But when Weiss looks at RttT, she does not see mess, and in this article, she paints with rosy hues the many fine lessons to be learned from the administration's signature education program.

She opens with a brief fantasy-filled recap of RttT's impact (43 states now have super-magical tests that can measure critical thinking), and then moves on to the Eight Big Design Lessons of Race to the Trough.

Create a Real Competition

The administration was not sure that the initiative would be "compelling." But golly gee, 46 states ponied up to give it a try. Weiss believes that the secret was "our decision to leverage the spirit of competition." How, one may ask, does one harness this mysterious and mystical force?

First, they set a very high bar, allowed for very few winners, and offered very big rewards. She forgets to mention another important step-- launch your competition when states have just been hammered by an economically debilitating recession and are desperate for money. Weiss's spirit of competition can also be leveraged by starving some people for two weeks, throwing them in a pit, and waving juicy steaks while announcing that only one person who climbs out of the pit gets to eat.

Second, she writes, they kept politics out of the process, and I am wondering (not for the last time) whether Weiss is incredibly cynical or incredibly dense. There was a review panel of experts. No politics. Nosirree. Just a score indicating how well the states matched the definition of "excellence" created by politicians in DC.

Third, they "placed governors at the center of the application process." So, the top politicians were invited "to use their political capital." As God is my witness "no politics" and "use top politicians political muscle" appear within two adjacent paragraphs.

Weiss acknowledges, sort of, the problem near the center of this aspect-- that RttT promoted competition in an arena that should be collaborative. Weiss addresses this by saying, essentially, no, we didn't, and also, we were right to do so.

She completely ignores the huge issue at the center of the competitive aspect of the program-- a declaration of the federal government that they will only provide help and support to some states. This is like saying to your family, "I know you've all been hungry and undernourished, and we're going to fix that. We're going to feed some of you, most likely the strongest ones who least need it. For those of you who are too weakened to compete, screw you. You get nothing." The competitive grant nature of Race to the Top was an absolute abdication of federal responsibility, and the Obama administration should be ashamed of the program for that reason alone.

Pursue Clear Goals (in a Flexible Way)

Weiss admits to flubbing this one, producing a program with so many goals that no state could successfully address all of them. With a do-over, she'd recommend "leaner, more focused rules."

Tomato, tomahto. The effect is the same. If I give my students vague instructions, they'll say, "Can you give an example." Once I provide an example, they'll give me work exactly like it, because thanks to my vague instructions, my example is the only thing they know is safe to try. Ditto RttT and features like, say, Common Core.

This section does feature one more reality-defying side note. In suggesting that this really was successful because states really bought in to their new plans, Weiss writes:

In fact, even many states that did not win the competition proceeded with the reform efforts that they had laid out in their application. 

Do you suppose the explanation was that states were staring down the barrel of NCLB's punitive sanctions and hoping the feds promised waiver program was their chance to avoid trouble?

Drive Alignment Through the System

The overall goal of the competition was to promote approaches to education reform that would be coherent, systemic, and statewide.

That's why we drove each state to have all its main players sign Memos of Understanding, pledging their allegiance and compliance to what, as folks who remember those years may recall, was a fuzzy and undefined set of requirements. We just kept waving money at them.

I do remember that time in PA. The state hollering "sign these agreements" and folks like teacher unions and local administrators saying "But what the heck are we agreeing to?" and the state saying "But look! Money!! You must sign!" It was a long conversation. PA did not win any RttT bux.

Encourage Broad Stakeholder Buy-in 

Weiss has a funny idea about what "encourage" means:

First, we forced alignment among the top three education leaders in each participating state—the governor, the chief state school officer, and the president of the state board of education—by requiring each of them to sign their state’s Race to the Top application. In doing so, they attested that their office fully supported the state’s reform proposal.

 Second, they asked for signatures from district officials. Third, they waved more piles of money "tangible incentives" at community leaders. Fourth, we made state leaders come submit to personal interviews.

We imposed this requirement largely to verify that those in charge of implementing their state's plan were knowledgeable about the plan and fully committed to it.

It's funny, but none of this sounds like "encourage buy-in," so much as it sounds like "required obeisance and pledges of compliance because we couldn't trust any of these bastards." I find it oddly soothing that the administration had no more faith in governors than it had in teachers.

Promote Change from the Start

We were really pleased at how quickly states starting auditioning and sucking up for our money from even before Day One. We were particularly gratified that many actually changed their laws just for us. Yay, us.

Enable Transparency

From its earliest days, Race to the Top received a high degree of scrutiny and faced pressure to be above reproach. We decided that the best way to handle this pressure was to keep a firewall between our decisions and any of the rabble who wanted to cause trouble, in hopes that we could get the whole thing up and running before anybody had a chance to pry too much.

Ha ha. Okay, I rewrote part of that quote. Weiss is really going to try to sell her audience on the idea that transparency had anything to do with Race to the Top. And that "commitment to transparency" brought all sorts of benefits.

First, everyone did super-high-quality work because it would be under public scrutiny. Hey, have I mentioned that I have not seen Common Core mentioned once in this article? Boy, there was a piece of high quality totally transparent work that rode the coattails of Race to the Top. Well, except for how everyone was lying about it being teacher-written and internationally benchmarked. Or maybe that's the high-quality work involved in selling untested teacher evaluation based on unvalid (and at the time non-existent) testing.

Second, "participants developed a common vocabulary for talking about education reform" because nothing promotes transparency like specialized insider jargon.

Third, the Race to the Top website became a-- wait! what?? There was such a thing? Does she mean this place, with all the government PR?

Fourth, the information about RttT became "crowdsourced" (those are her air quotes) with all sorts of folks checking out and critiquing applications. Researcher "will be mining this trove of data for years to come." I'm pretty sure she's just making shit up now.

Build a Climate of Support

Yes, nothing builds a climate of support like a battle royale over zero-sum monetary rewards.

Her point is that the government was supportive of applying states, and I kind of think she means that this all created an atmosphere in which many helpful consultants and think tanks and publishers and other edubizpreneurs could descend upon states to start hoovering up some of that aforementioned sweet sweet money.

Ensure Accountability

Turns out that people in a life-or-death competition will over-promise, and while the department did its best to rein that in (including requiring a note from State Attorney Generals that the "proof" was accurate-- seriously), it was still an issue. So in the future, the agencies managing the grant money should never take their hands entirely off of it.

And that's eight.

I Need To Sit Down

Once again, reformsters provide a glimpse of some alternate reality. This is certainly a different picture of Race to the Top than, say, "We used a big pile of money to get states to actually compete for the privilege of giving us control of their pubic education systems" or "We went out and bought a bunch of friends for Common Core while bribing states to implement untested, unproven half-baked ideas about evaluating teachers."

But others have already hit the comments section of this piece of retroactive fluffernuttery.

Leonie Haimson points out that another super-duper effect of RttT was to create such a huge backlash that all versions of the ESEA rewrite include sections that tell the Secretary of Education to go sit in the corner and think about what he's done.

Christopher Chase just rips the living daylights, from secretly produced standards to the use of this all as cover for privatizing and charterizing schools. Chase's response is worth reading even if you can't bear to read Weiss's article.

At the end, Weiss writes "We will not know the full impact of Race to the Top for several more years." And that's probably true, but we can take a shot at the broad strokes.

Race to the Top kick-started the process of foisting an unproven, unsupportable standards created by amateurs, test manufacturers, and book publishers on an unsuspecting public.

Race to the Top gave the test-and-punish policies of No Child Left Behind a giant shot of steroids, promising a level of testing quality that has still not been delivered while simultaneously chaining the professional future of teachers to that unproven testing system.

Race to the Top set out to create winners and losers among the states, declaring that the federal government only needed to help some American students be educated. At the same time, it gave a jolt of support to the process of declaring individual schools losers and turning those schools into profit-making opportunities for charter privateers who echoed the new mission-- educate only some of the students, but do it with everyone's public tax dollars.

Race to the Top created a huge backlash that damaged the political careers of many individuals who realized only too late what a giant load of underthought overreaching baloney it was.

It's true we'll not find out just how much damage was done for years, but we've got a general sense of the impact of RttT on US public education, but we already know that it was similar to the impact of an falling elephant on a wounded eagle. It wasn't good, and all the pretty PR in the world won't change that.

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.

Race to the Top Priorities

The giant turkey that is Race to the Top has its neck on the chopping block. I would not celebrate just yet-- a proposed budget is about as solid and secure as the sticker price on a used car. But at the very least, the CRomnibus bill is a shot fired across RttT's bow.

So that (and, you know, Throwback Thursday) make it a great time to go back to this document, the executive summary of RttT. The summary includes a list of judging criteria for RttT applications, including the point value for each one, and while they are arranged by categories, I thought it might be useful to arrange them in point order, form the most points to the least. As with any rubric, the point assignment reveals what the real priorities are. So let's see where RttT's heart really lay.

Articulating State's education reform agenda and LEA's participation in it (65 points)
Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance (58 points)
Developing and adopting common standards (40 points)
Blah blah blah promoting charters (40 points)
Turning around the lowest-achieving schools (40 points)
Building strong statewide capacity to implement, scale up, and sustain plan (30 points)
Demonstrating significant process in raising achievement and closing gaps (30 points)
Ensuring equitable distribution of effective teachers and principals (25 points)
Fully implementing statewide longitudinal system (24 points)
Providing high-quality pathways for aspiring teachers and principals (21 points)
Supporting the transition to enhanced standards and high quality assessments (20 points)
Providing effective support to teachers and principals (20 points)
Using data to improve instruction (18 points)
Improving the effectiveness of teacher and principal preparation programs (14 points)
Bonus points for STEM emphasis (15 points)
Developing and implementing common, high-quality assessments (10 points)
Intervening in the lowest-achieving schools and LEAs (10 points)
Making education funding a priority (10 points)
Accessing and using State data (5 points)
Demonstrating other significant reform conditions (5 points)

You can see that the A #1 priority was to generate a good batch of paperwork and a well-polished application, because paperwork is the lubricant that greases the wheels of government. Close behind is a tautological statement (meaning "improve teacher performance based on performance" because silly bureaucrats are silly) that presumably means "get some kind of VAM system in place." The teacher effectiveness piece was worth more than the bottom six items put together; teacher effectiveness plus good paperwork is about equal to the last ten items on the list. Both are broken down in further detail in the document; the performance criteria boils down to "develop an evaluation system based on student test scores and use it to make personnel decisions (including "removing ineffective tenured and untenured teachers").

Next we get the other linchpins of RttT/waivers-- common core, charters, and turning around failing schools. Note that "turnaround" is worth four times as many points as "intervening." Making the funding for sustaining all of this a priority (which means, what, we promise to make serious faces about it-- how does anyone measure this) comes in close to the bottom. I was surprised that developing and implementing testing comes in close to the bottom, but I suppose you can just buy those, and their necessity is implied by all the top items, anyway.

The "move good teachers around" item (you know-- the one that absolutely nobody has figured out a plan for yet) comes in the middle of the pack. One does wonder what bureaucratic fiddling resulted in making that just one point more important than a statewide longitudinal system. How fascinating must that conversation have been?

These criteria are also arranged into six groups, and if we put those in point order, we get

Great Teachers and Leaders (138 points)
State Success Factors (125 points)
Standards and Assessments (70 points)
General Selection Criteria (55 points)
Turning Around the Lowest Achieving Schools (50 points)
Data Systems to Support Instruction (47 points)

But wait! The document also mentions the Big Priorities, which, as it turns out, don't entirely match the point system listed above, but which are ranked with fun language.

Priority 1:An "absolute" priority. The plan must be comprehensive and LEAs have to be all in.
Priority 2: "Competitive" This is the STEM bonus points.
Priority 3: "Invitational" Improve early learning outcomes. Which means you have to measure them, which means say howdy to standardized tests for four-year-olds
Priority 4: "Invitational" Ramp up your data system. In particular, make it connectable with other states' systems.
Priority 5: "Invitational" P-20 alignment, aka cradle-to-career pipeline.
Priority 6: "Invitational" Allowing school-level reforminess including control of staffing, budget, class alternatives, etc.

There's also a fun glossary of terms which didn't tell us anything new, but are good reminders of what the Department means. For instance, let's chase this definition-

Effective teacher means a teacher whose students achieve acceptable rates (e.g., at least one grade level in an academic year) of student growth (as defined in this notice). States, LEAs, or schools must include multiple measures, provided that teacher effectiveness is evaluated, in significant part, by student growth (as defined in this notice).

Student growth means the change in student achievement (as defined in this notice) for an individual student between two or more points in time. A State may also include other measures that are rigorous and comparable across classrooms.

Student achievement means —
        (a) For tested grades and subjects: (1) a student’s score on the State’s assessments under the ESEA; and, as appropriate, (2) other measures of student learning, such as those described in paragraph (b) of this definition, provided they are rigorous and comparable across classrooms.
         (b) For non-tested grades and subjects: alternative measures of student learning and performance such as student scores on pre-tests and end-of-course tests;student performance on English language proficiency assessments; and other measures of student achievement that are rigorous and comparable across classrooms.

Yes, when lost in the haze of debate and discussion, sometimes it's best to go back to the basics. Here it is-- exactly what the feds wanted. Good paperwork. A teacher rank and rate system based on student test scores that would drive everything from training. More charters. More school takeovers.

While the document says that RttT "will reward states that have demonstrated success in raising student achievement, that's not really what it rewards. It rewards states for remaking their education systems along the lines demanded by the feds. And though the document promised that the best models would spread their reform ideas across the country, five years later, there are no signs of any such spreading infection. But then, there are no signs that any of these federal ideas about fixing schools has actually improved education for any students in this country.

If Congress actually manages to shut this mess down, there will be no cause for tears.

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.

Another Solution: ESEA

There is, of course, another way out of this.

The tightly wound spring that keeps Race to the Top and waivers (RttR Lite) ticking away is the ESEA. Instead of dealing with the federal mandate-ish sort-of-regulations that have made Common Core and high stakes testing and data collection the kind-of-law of the land, we could address the underlying mess.

The ESEA was first passed in 1965, and periodically is up for "re-authorization" which means the current Congress gets to monkey with it. In 2002, a bipartisan group under George Bush rewrote it into No Child Left Behind. ESEA was due to be re-authorized in 2007, but that ugly step-child of a law was already so toxic that Congress couldn't bring itself to do anything more than sputter and posture. And so ever since, ESEA has been ticking away. (You can get a more complete run-down of the long convoluted mess here.)

Race to the Top and RttT Lite are simply end runs around ESEA, and the only reason anybody bothers to mess with the four federal requirements (CCSS-like standards, high stakes tests, teacher evals linked to HST, and data collection) is because right now, as we sit here, every public school in this country is in violation of NCLB (well, unless you have 100% of your students above average, in which case your school mascot is probably a unicorn).

That is why Washington State schools are being required to send out "We are failure" letters to their parents-- because they lost their waiver because they wouldn't tie teacher evals to test scores, and so now they are back to living under the reality-defying requirements of NCLB.

So we could pull the plug on the whole reformy mess by simply doing what we were supposed to do seven years ago, and re-authorize (and re-write) the ESEA. All it requires is for members of Congress to show their political courage and commitment to properly educating America's children through a public school system. And after they do that, we can all celebrate by riding around on our unicorns. Heck, all we would need if for Congress to do its job and not impose more stupid ed reform rules. How hard could it be?

There is one other possibility, and it could make the next Presidential election interesting. Because the anti-reform Presidential candidate could say, "The Obama waivers are illegal, and the first thing we'll do in office is throw them out." If that happens, Congress would be under tremendous pressure to get on their unicorns and Do Something. Of course, they were under that sort of pressure right up until the point that the waivers were conceived.

This is one huge argument against having the federal government regulate and control public education in this country-- because when they break the system, they break the entire system.

Granted, the re-authorization of the ESEA is a big unicorn hunt. But many of the goals that are proposed, on all sides of the education debates, are unicorn hunts. So let's no overlook the hunt for the biggest, most magical unicorn of all.

Duncan Tries To Hear Teachers

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is here with some back-to-school blogging to assure folks that he is totes listening to somebody. His back-to-school conversation comes with two messages.

First, he wants to send out a big thank you to all the folks who helped create some super-duper data points last year-- specifically, the high school graduation rate and the college enrollment rate. I might be inclined to wonder about A) the reality behind those juicy stats and B) what it actually means. But Arne knows what it means:

These achievements are also indications of deeper, more successful relationships with our students. All of us who’ve worked with young people know how much they yearn for adults to care about them and know them as individuals.

Reading Duncan's words always induces an odd sort of vertiginous disorientation as one tries to take in the huge measured-in-light-years distance between the things he says and the policies he pursues. What in the four requirements of Race to the Top would possibly indicate that Duncan's administration is pursuing policies that develop these kind of relationships or satisfy these alleged yearnings? Is it the way teachers fates have a federally mandated dependency on student test scores? Is it the sweet embrace of one-size-fits-all national standards? Maybe it's the grueling program of punishing tests.


Which brings us to the second message.

Duncan says he's been having many many conversations with teachers, "often led by Teacher and Principal Ambassador Fellows" (those teachy folks who have been carefully vetted and selected by the DOE, so you know they're a real collection of widely varied viewpoints). And in those conversations, he's picked a little something something about standardized testing. Which he still thinks is basically swell.

Assessment of student progress has a fundamental place in teaching and learning – few question that teachers, schools and parents need to know what progress students are making.

Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. Sure, classroom assessment is important. But recognizing that importance has nothing at all to do with making a case for standardized testing, particularly of the current brand. "Medicine is important" is true, but it's no justification for jamming aspirin into somebody's compound fracture.

Anyway, Arne has picked up three specific concerns:

1. It doesn’t make sense to hold them [educators] accountable during this transition year for results on the new assessments – a test many of them have not seen before – and as many are coming up to speed with new standards.
2. The standardized tests they have today focus too much on basic skills, not enough on critical thinking and deeper learning.
3. Testing – and test preparation – takes up too much time.

Duncan is shocked-- shocked!!-- that anyone would think it's a good idea to make a high stakes test the measure of student achievement or teacher effectiveness.  "Growth is what matters. No teacher or school should be judged on any one test, or tests alone –" And here comes the vertiginous woozies (dibs on this as a band name) again, because that would be a heartening quote if it did not come from the very same office which decreed that by order of the federal government high stakes tests must be used as a measure of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Duncan is talking about this test-based evaluation of students and teachers as if it just spontaneously occurred, like some sort of weird virus suddenly passed around at state ed department sleepover camp, and not a rule that Duncan's office demanded everyone follow. Has Duncan forgotten that he just made the entire state of Washington declare itself a Failing School Disaster Zone precisely because they refused to use high stakes tests as a measure of student achievement and teacher effectiveness?

No test will ever measure what a student is, or can be. It’s simply one measure of one kind of progress. Yet in too many places, testing itself has become a distraction from the work it is meant to support.

You know what one might conclude from that? One might conclude that the testing is a doing an ever-so-crappy job of supporting "the work it is meant to support."

States will have the opportunity to request a delay in when test results matter for teacher evaluation during this transition. As we always have, we’ll work with them in a spirit of flexibility to develop a plan that works...

I would like to check with someone from Washington to see what it feels to be flailed with that spirit of flexibility. But Duncan is opening the door to states postponing the most painful consequences of testing for one year, because, you know, teachers' voices.


Anthony Cody has correctly pointed out that one other voice has spoken up in favor of this-- the voice of Bill Gates. Unfortunately, we'll never know for certain how this all played out. Did Duncan decide to obey the Call of Gates and try to use it to mollify teachers? Is the Voice of Gates so powerful that it blasted the wax from Arne's ears and he could hear teachers finally? Is he bending to political realities, or trying to do damage control.

I have a question I'm more interested in-- what difference will a year make?

Duncan seems to think that some time will improve the tests themselves.

Many educators, and parents, have made clear that they’re supportive of assessment that measures what matters – but that a lot of tests today don’t do that – they focus too much on basic skills rather than problem solving and critical thinking. That’s why we’ve committed a third of a billion dollars to two consortia of states working to create new assessments that get beyond the bubble test, and do a better job of measuring critical thinking and writing.

Never going to happen. National standardized test means test that can be quickly checked and graded at large scale and low cost (or else the testmakers can't profit from it). The college board has had decades to refine their craft, and their refined craft looks like-- a bubble test.



As far as Duncan's other concerns go-- a year will not matter. Much of what he decries is the direct result of making the stakes of these tests extremely high. Student success, teacher careers, school existence all ride on The Test. As long as they do, it is absurd to imagine that The Test will not dominate the school landscape. And that domination is only made worse by the many VAMtastic faux formulas in circulation.

Too much testing can rob school buildings of joy, and cause unnecessary stress. This issue is a priority for us, and we’ll continue to work throughout the fall on efforts to cut back on over-testing.

Oh, the woozies. Duncan's office needs to do one thing, and one thing only-- remove the huge stakes from The Test. Don't use it to judge students, don't use it to judge teachers, don't use it to judge schools and districts. It's that attachment of huge stakes-- not any innate qualities of The Test itself-- that has created the test-drive joy-sucking school-deadening culture that Duncan both creates and criticizes. If the department doesn't address that, it will not matter whether we wait one year or ten-- the results will be the same.

Time Political Reporter Flubs CCSS Story

At Time, Alex Altman has written a piece about Common Core's new role as GOP election kryptonite. He gets the kryptonite part right. The Common Core piece, not so much.

Over the past several months, the state education standards developed by a bipartisan group of governors and educators have become one of the conservative movement’s biggest bugbears. Common Core is now “radioactive,” as Iowa GOP Gov. Terry Branstad put it recently.

That's a somewhat abbreviated version of the CCSS origin story.  For the full version of how Bill Gates bankrolled the CCSS revolution, turn to this piece by Lyndsey Layton at the Washington Post. And here's the list of "educators" who developed the standards. If we're defining "educator" as "person who makes a living selling materials to schools," then we're still on solid ground. If we're thinking the more common understanding of "educator" as "teacher or professional who otherwise works right with students," then we're going to need another word to describe the CCSS creators.

Altman continues with a fair listing of conservative hopefuls who have been backpedaling away from CCSS faster than Miss Muffet retreating from a large, hairy tarantula.

Altman blames this on "the (inaccurate) perception that Common Core is a federal takeover of education foisted on the states."

Perhaps Altman has a special meaning for "foisted" in mind, but for the average English speaker's understanding, I think "foisted" is an excellent choice. Let me remind you, and Altman, how the foisting worked.

By 2010, states were looking straight at the ticking time bomb that was (and actually still is) No Child Left Behind. Under NCLB, the improvement curve required of schools was a gradual slope until 2008, at which point it took off like a bad mushroom payment, spiking upward toward the magic year, 2014, when all states must make all their students above average or else lose to support of the federal government.

Congress was unable to muster enough unity/organization/wits to "re-authorize" (aka "rewrite) the ESEA (the fancy legislative name under which NCLB is filed) and so the Obama administration hatched a great idea to do an end run around the whole mess.

Stage One was Race to the Top, which offered the states a big fat federal bribe if they would institute certain fed-approved reforms. The feds couldn't legally mandate Common Core exactly, so the states were free to install any standards, as long as they were pretty much exactly like Common Core.

Stage Two was NCLB waivers. For states that wouldn't play the RttT game, the feds offered to give states an get-out-of-NCLB free card as long as they implemented the same set of reforms that RttT favored.

It is true that states always had a choice. They could choose to forgo both programs and just lose a bunch of federal education money. They could also decide that instead of adopting the CCSS that were already just sitting there, they could invest a truckload of money developing their own standards (which they would have to do, like, yesterday).

So, yeah. States had a choice. You also have a choice when your mortgage bill comes. But it's a choice that's not very hard to sort out. Supporters of CCSS more recently have taken to blaming President Obama for putting the stamp and stench of federal intervention on the standards, but without federal intervention, the standards would have just sat there, adopted by a couple of states and ignored as a costly waste of time by the rest.

It is also worth noting that Race to the Top was not a forever grant, and that this upswell of withdrawal co-incides with the end of the federal funds going to RttT states. In other words, it's worth looking at which places we find the CCSS love and the money running out at about the same time.

Altman thinks conservatives ought to like the Core. "Hey, look!" he says, "The AFT is distancing themselves from it." Which I guess means... something. Does it matter that it took them years to distance themselves, or that the "distance" is not really enough to protect an elephant from a radioactive flea? The AFT and NEA national leadership still love Common Core pretty deeply.

But shouldn't conservatives love the high standards or the state-drawn currricula  or the teacher accountability? Maybe they should, except that the Common Core standards are not particularly high except in ways that don't make sense (unless you think eight year olds have been getting off too easy in life). And many states already had perfectly good state standards, and we're not getting state created curricula so much as state-purchased curricula, because part of the point of the Core was to make it possible to market the same materials to all schools across the country. And teacher accountability isn't happening; all we're getting is widely debunked, test-score linked baloney that doesn't hold teachers accountable for any of the things parents and communities actually care about.

So, should conservatives love Common Core for all the qualities it doesn't actually possess. I'm going to go with "probably not."

I could spend much more time addressing all three of those points (and do throughout the rest of this blog), but instead I'll note that with his third item, Altman has strayed away from Common Core into other reform territory entirely. He's just kind of confused about what's being supported and who is supporting it. That's okay, Mr. Altman. Lots of people have that problem. It gets easier if, instead of looking at conservative vs. liberal, you look at "people who see education as a great untapped chance to make money" vs "people who look at education as a great way to give young people an education," or vs "people who don't want their children's education sold out from under them."

Still, his basic premise is correct. Common Core is now election kryptonite, and if you want to look like Superman come ballot time, you should not be seen holding it.

Duncan Checks in with Race Results

The US DOE released reports Wednesday, March 19, to update us on how well the Race to the Top winners are doing (because in US education, we only want some states to be winners). The full collection of reports is here, but Arne wanted to let everyone know about his four superstars in Top Racing.

This year is the final year for implementing RTTT, and at this point we might expect to see some payoff from the investment of $4 Billion-with-a-B. According to Michele McNeil at EdWeek, Duncan says we are seeing those investments "enter the classroom" despite some "contention and chaos" in various states.

The area of improvement that needs the most improvement in its area is, apparently, teacher improvement. For improvement in this area, Duncan singled out North Carolina and Delaware.

This is astonishing. North Carolina has become the poster child for teacher beat-downs in the Eastern US, a state where teachers are leaving by busloads, floundering in debt after years without a raise, and facing the end of any sorts of job protection. This is the state where new teacher pay went up, but not anybody else's. This is the state where districts have been directed to offer their top 25% of teachers $500 in exchange for giving up tenure.This is the state whose leaders have seriously considered putting a twenty-year cap on the length of a teacher's career. This is the state that Virginia has started poaching teachers from simply by offering a decent wage and work conditions.

If this is a state that matches Duncan's idea of how to improve the profession, heaven help us all.

Beyond these four awesome examples of how to up teachers' games, US DOE displayed concern over some other states.

Ohio cannot interest districts in the state's great ideas. Florida's new evaluation system didn't give any different results from its old system, so clearly it's not working, because a new evaluation system apparently should show that there are lots of lousy teachers in the state. DC apparently no longer basks in the warm glow of Rhee-initiated teacher fixiness. Georgia is the very back of the pack-- so far back that they might lose their 9-million-dollar grant.

The DOE is allowing freebie extensions for a fifth year; eleven of the twelve have applied so far.

The full report offers a state-by-state reports that will take a little time and attention to unpack. I look forward to the data nuggets contained therein.