Opting Options

.@rweingarten Including the right to opt their kids out of public schools (and take the public dollars with them)?

— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) June 18, 2015

Language is funny-- it sometimes creates the illusion of parallels and conections when none, in fact, exist. I could say, for instance, that the fact that you order Chicken McNuggets is proof that you are lacking in bravery, that you are too chicken to stand up for what you believe in, or maybe that you are showing that you are rushing towards consequences, since you are paying for the chance to have the chickens come home to roost.

More than a few folks have observed that opting children out of the Big Standardized Test and opting children out of public school are two things that can be described by using the phrase"opting out." But there are some fairly important differences between the two options for opting.

First, the BS Test and public school are not equivalent. Public education, provided by and paid for by the community, is one of the greater goods upon which this country is built. The door swings both ways. In order for our democracy to function, our citizens have to possess some level of education. Also, as a democracy, we recognize every citizen's right to a full education-- we do not operate on the assumption that some people deserve a good education and other lesser people do not.

A BS Test, on the other hand, is not one of the greater goods at the foundation of this country. There is not even evidence that it is a lesser good, or even a fair-to-middlin' good. There's no indication that it is good at all. Certainly there is no argument to be made that, in order to participate in democracy, every citizen ought to take a standardized test. Nor is there no case to be made that every citizen needs to be tested in order to receive all their rights. "I could have really gone somewhere in life, if only I'd had the chance to take the PARCC," said nobody ever.

Public education is provided for the benefit of the individuals being educated, and it is provided for the benefit of society as a whole. BS Testing benefits test manufacturers.

Furthermore, opting out of the BS Test does not take anything away from anyone else. As currently structured, choice systems always strip resources from the public school for every student who "opts out." The loss to the public school is always in excess of the actual reduction in the public school's costs; ten students fewer does not equate fewer building expenses, fewer teachers, or less heat and light in the building.

I can actually imagine a system with multiple schools to choose from-- but that system only works if every school is fully funded. As long as we insist that we can fund one public school and three charters for the same total cost as one public school, choice will be a zero sum game, and public schools will be the losers. This means that every child who opts out of public school leaves the students in the public school with fewer resources. If Chris opts out, Pat is left in a worsening public school situation-- and Pat has no say in the matter.

Opting out of the BS Tests, however, affects nobody except the opt-outer. The testing experience of the students who are left behind is not affected. If Chris opts out, it doesn't change Pat's testing adventure in the slightest.

Finally, Petrilli is correct in saying that those are public dollars-- and a choice-charter system denies the public any say in how those dollars are spent. Granted, the democracy of elected school boards is sometimes problematic, and as with all political situations, some voices have to work extra hard to be heard. But that is still better than a choice-charter system where decisions are made by folks who don't answer to anybody.

So, no-- these opt outs are not the same. 

Randi, LIly, and Diane at NPE

It was the marquee event of the NPE convention. Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Randi Weingarten sitting down with Diane Ravitch in front of a stuffed-full ballroom. I did not take notes, and the video is not up to rewatch yet, but I want to put my impressions down before they fade too much.

An organizer made one more fruitless attempt to get a room filled with teachers to behave, because when it comes to behaving like good students, teachers are the worst. But as he did so, he informed us that 1,000 people were already online to watch-- so we had to start on time.

Xian Barrett did the introductions, which had to be just a bit nervewracking, but he set a nice tone-- not too formal, but still respecting the weight of the occasion. Nicely done.

My expectations were not high. Both Garcia and Weingarten have carefully staked out and fully fleshed out positions, and while they are the faces of their unions, they are also tied to a big bundle of leadership teams and union bureaucracy. I did not imagine for a minute that either was suddenly going to throw up her hands and say, "Yeah, you know what? I've been wrong about that. I'm going to go ahead and reverse my union's position on the spot."

But it was my first time to see either in person, and I was interested to see how that played out.

Both came in full professional labor leader snappy dress and were whisked to one side moments before the start to don official NPE t-shirts. Garcia by far beats all comes in a hair contest-- it is just a magnificent mane, as iconic as an Elvis DA flip.

The discussion got off to a somewhat plastic start-- Ravitch asked a question and each leader in her turn launched into full-on campaign mode, which led to Ravitch's imposition of a three minute time limit on answers. Ravitch was herself as moderator-- one minute she's a scrappy political veteran and the next she's your grandmother learning how to use a smartphone app.

My not-high expectations were met. Garcia displayed a great grasp of how privatization, crushing unions, dismantling democracy, and test-and-punish all fit together into a larger picture that is bad for teachers, students, and public education. But she either can't or won't see how Common Core is part and parcel of that same drive to break up public education, and her enthusiasm for the Core (there's a great app for the Core! whee!) is both disappointing and intellectually puzzling. Hating testing and loving the Core is like going to the pound and saying, "I want to take home a puppy, but only the end that smiles and licks you on the face. I don't want to take home the end that poops."

Both were support-ish of the opt out movement (Parents should be able to do it; teachers should be able to talk about it). But neither was very strong in denouncing the enshrinement of testing in the ESEA rewrites. You can read a full version of what were essentially Garcia's remarks which boil down to "Less testing, less punishment for test results, and no using tests for purposes for which they weren't created." She is not so much envisioning a world without the Big Standardized Test as a world where the Big Assessment is so swell that everyone welcomes it cheerfully (in part because her imaginary assessment will cover what she considers the good parts of Common Core). She might as well envision a future in which students will ride to school on the backs of brightly colored dinosaurs. The assessment she imagines cannot and will not exist on a national scale.

I did hear Weingarten say one interesting thing (well, two, if you count the part where she said that she had no particular desire to marry her partner). What I believe I heard her say was that testing "has killed" or "has destroyed" the promise of Common Core. I'll be checking the tape-- if I'm correct, then Weingarten just declared Common Core dead, which is not as good as repudiation, but I'll still take it. Her hardest question actually came afterwards, when Mercedes Schneider asked her about that damn robocall to help Cuomo (let's not pretend it wasn't that).

The big moment came with the agreement by both that their unions would no longer take money from Gates. I don't imagine for a moment that they did so on the spot (or that they have the authority, really, to make that decision), but it was still a nice moment.

It was interesting to see their personal styles on display. I have to love Garcia for being quick-witted and snarky; plus, she speaks in a manner that seems completely authentic, like a regular human being. Weingarten is more of an old-school labor leader who suddenly erupts into a hollering bluster that I expect is a measure technique for whipping a crow up into a frenzy, but on Sunday seemed a bit affected and at times over-the-top. But I was born in New England, so maybe that's me.

I know lots of folks who watched from home and in the ballroom were disappointed. I wasn't, but as I said, I wasn't expecting much. Large national unions cannot turn on a dime, and labor leaders live with political realities (we may not like it, but I have heard multiple times from multiple directions that mandatory testing is untouchable in ESEA in part because advocates for civil rights and students with disabilities support testing fervently).

Their support of Common Core is misguided and wrong. Their opposition to test-driven reform-- but not the actual tests-- is befuddling. They have some great things to say about building and defending union power-- but having the power would mean a great deal more if they'd use it for something useful. I haven't liked their position on Common Core and testing

But here's the thing to like about Sunday at NPE.

They were there.

The two leaders of the largest teacher unions in the country agreed to come explain themselves and answer questions in front of a houseful of people who were vocal advocates for public education. Think back less than two years to Dennis Van Roekel dismissing NEA member opposition to Common Core with a flip, "Well, what do you propose to do instead?" That's not where NEA is now.

Even if you're just paying lip service-- you can't do it if you don't know what the answer is supposed to be. Two years ago our union leaders didn't even know that. Before giving her answer about testing, Weingarten acknowledged that some people were going to boo (they didn't, and there wasn't much booing, but there was plenty of hissing at some of the worst)-- she knows that her positions are not popular with advocates for public education.

Two years ago the Network for Public Education barely existed, and the support for public education that it represents was fragmented and invisible to the folks doing political calculus. Not that long ago national union leaders could have easily dismissed NPE and the viewpoint it represents. Today, they cannot.

On so many fronts, the folks who stand up for public education are becoming harder to ignore (looking at you, NY opt outs). Reformsters are spending money to try to rebut and respond to public education advocates. In fact, Peter Cunningham of Education Post, the heavily financed pro-reformster rapid-response PR organization was also at the convention this weekend.

You know the drill. First they ignore you. But eventually, they can't. The movement to defend and support public education has become strong enough that the union presidents came to us to talk about it. Yes, they brought much of their same old baggage. But they came.

As several speakers noted this weekend, this is a long haul. We are not going to turn any of the large organizations involved quickly or abruptly. But we can help them evolve. And the best place to start is with our natural allies, and THAT can't start until they show up to talk to us. Who knows-- maybe next time they'll come to listen to us, too. Baby steps.

Dear Randi: About That ESEA Petition--

You've been kind enough to drop me an email about your position on testing in the might-be-new ESEA, so I wanted to share my reaction with you.

What the hell are you thinking?

You've enumerated four actions you would like Congress to take with the could-be-revamped ESEA (in partnership with CAP which already blew my mind just a little). While they are clearer than the joint-CAP statement, they don't make me feel any better.

End the use of annual tests for high-stakes consequences. Let’s instead use annual assessments to give parents and teachers the information they need to help students grow.

Oh, hell. While we're at it, let's use annual assessments to make pigs fly out of our butts, because that's just about as likely as the test being a useful source of information that I need to help my students grow. Exactly how would this work. Exactly what would I learn from a standardized test given late in the year, results to be released over the summer, that would help me grow those students?

Use the data we collect to provide the federal government with information to direct resources to the schools and districts that need extra support. 

Yes, because that has worked so well so far. The federal government is great about allocating resources on the local level without lots of red tape and strings attached. 

You know what would work better? Actual local control. Actual democracy on the local level. Actual empowerment of the people who have the largest stake in the community's schools. 

Ensure a robust accountability system that judges schools looking at multiple measures—including allowing real evidence of student learning. 

Do you remember when you were on twitter, pushing "VAM is a sham" as a pithy slogan? What the heck happened? How can the head of a national teachers' union take any approach about the widely discredited and debunked test-based evaluation of students other than, "Hell no!" 

And finally, the federal government should not be the human resources department for local schools, and should not be in the business of regulating teacher evaluation from Washington D.C. Teacher evaluation is the district’s job.

Oh, come on. In what universe does the federal government give local school districts resources, oversee their accountability system, but still leave them free to do the job. Answer: they don't. This is local control just like adoption of Common Core was freely adopted by states. This is the feds saying, "You can paint your school any color you want, and we'll buy the paint, just as long as you meet the federal standards that say all schools must be black. But otherwise you're totally freely under local control."

Randi, I have been a fan in the past, but I find this policy package an absolute headscratcher, and no matter how I squint, I cannot see the interests of public education (or the teachers who work there) reflected anywhere in the shiny surface of this highly polished turd. 

So, no. I'm not going to sign your petition, and I'd encourage others to refrain as well. This is just wrong. Wrong and discouraging and a little anger-inducing, and I'm not going to the dark side with you, not even if they have great cookies.

Sincerely,

Peter Greene

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.

AFT Spanks Duncan (Sort Of)

I know this is old news, but I've been out of town. On Sunday, July 13, I was in the air flying toward the very city where the AFT was kind of taking a stand.

The NEA had taken similar steps earlier by calling for the ouster of Arne Duncan, though outbound president Dennis Van Roekel immediately chalked it up to members just being, you know, cranky or in a bad mood, so they just took it out on Arne Duncan. So, to summarize, NEA members called for Duncan's ouster, Duncan indicated that he wasn't going to pay attention, and the president of NEA said that Duncan really didn't need to take it seriously. So, you know, earth-shattering stuff there.

The AFT resolution was marginally more interesting, although, like the NEA resolution, has ceased to matter to anyone at all in less than a week.

Union politics are a fascinating study for anyone who is intrigued by things that call themselves democratic and yet aren't particularly so. All union members are equal, but some are more equal than others, and not much happens at these conventions that isn't carefully stage managed by the most equal union members of all. The AFT is particularly confusing because 1) there are unions within the union and 2) there are loyalty oaths involved that amount to "agree to be assimilated."

I understand the urge to exert these high levels of control over members. I was a union president of a relatively small local, and the Herding Cats aspect can become stressful really quickly. I can easily imagine being a national leader, looking at the giant masses of people coming together from every corner of every point of view and thinking, "Damn, if we don't take some control, this will just be a hellish mess of gooey anarchy" (and, yes, "Hellish Mess of Gooey Anarchy" would be a great band name). I can even understand the feeling of "We are so close to getting Great Things done and we can't let that get derailed" as well as the feeling of "Boy, do I like having power."

But let all those feelings get control of you, and pretty soon you're acting like a representative group that doesn't have much respect for the people it's supposed to be representing. Or you start saying things like "I'll punch you in the face if you try to take away my Common Core,"a statement that really ought to come from someone other than a teacher/union leader.


So AFT's call for President Obama to put Duncan on an improvement plan comes with an interesting backdrop. According to Stephen Sawchuk at EdWeek, some union leaders didn't want to go all in with the NEA's Throw the Bum Out resolution, viewing it as silly and pointless. Michael Mulgrew, who allegedly made to offer to punch people in the face over CCSS, thought that the NEA resolution was beneath him, which raises some questions about how he draws the Beneath Me line.

The AFT resolution has the virtue of setting an example by calling for due process, and I give it points for ignoring the fiction that Obama is somehow disconnected from his own education policies.

On the other hand, it is ineffectual. And AFT president Randi Weingarten echoed Van Roekel in explaining that it basically just meant that teachers are really hurt and pissed off. As Arthur Goldstein tweeted, "I certainly hope they follow this non-demand with a strongly worded letter. That'll show 'em."

And Weingarten went one worse, with a call for teachers to leap on in there and rewrite the Core to show "them" how it should be. This is just an artfully reworded version of Van Roekel's odious comment to the NEA's 2013 convention-- "If you don't like the Common Core, then what do you want to do instead?" I called for Van Roekel's resignation over that one (an act every bit as effective as the NEA and AFT resolutions) because I think it's an indefensible thing to come from a national union leader.

To accept and embrace the Common Core is to accept and embrace the premise of its creation-- that US schools are in trouble because US teachers are lost and ineffectual. If there's anyone who shouldn't be agreeing with that, it's the folks who represent the millions of teachers that the Core is intended to "fix."

Like the NEA, AFT leadership appears to have decided to see if they can't bleed off all that teacher anger about CCSS and the rest of the corporate high-stakes test-driven status quo by focusing it on Arne Duncan (who, after all, won't be damaged by it a bit) so that the precious cargo of Common Core Swellness will remain unthreatened. "Look at that scary thing over there! Go get it! Go stomp on it! No need to look behind this curtain here."

This blog piece is somewhat pointless. Five days later, the AFT resolution is an unimportant gesture of no real importance. What's sad is that leaders had to know that was the case when they let the thing pass in the first place.