Camp Philos! Take Me Away!!

You may have seen the ad for this. Maybe you even received an invitation (but I bet you didn't). It's Camp Philos, "a philosopher's camp on education reform," the first ever, and it looks absolutely awesome!!

Embark on three spring days of fun, fellowship and strategy with the nation's thought leaders on education reform. The exquisite and secluded Whiteface Lodge, which ranks among North America's top luxury destinations, is nestled in the majestic woods of our country's largest wilderness park.

I have got to go to this thing! It says right here that it's just like in 1858, when Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowes retreated to the mountains "for respite in kindred company." Okay, they probably meant James Russell Lowell, but these are big important people and they can't be troubled with picky details like spelling. That's not how their kindred company rolls.

These are thought leaders. Thought leaders!!

Who are these thought leaders? Well, Andy Cuomo is the honorary chairman big cheese of these philosophical thought leaders, and you know he's going to be pumped because he just scored a major philosophical victory by getting the NY legislators to vote to make NYC Mayor DeBlasio kiss Eva's charter school ring and hand her the keys to whatever she wants. So Cuomo is seeing first hand what a few million dollars' worth of philosophy can buy you!

And Joe Williams-- the big guy from DERP (see-- I can spell philosophically, too). And Senator Mary Landrieu and Mayor Michael Hancock and Mayor Kevin Johnson and Russlynn Ali and--- OMGZ!! that great and awesomely wise educational philosopher M. Night Shyamalan! I hear he's proposing a new school program where at the end of the year the students discover their teacher was actually dead and they've been instructed by angry trees all year, or something.

The Whiteface Lodge is-- wait. Really??!! White face?? Could they not book the Wealthy Patricians Spa, or Camp Ogliarch? Boys, you have really got to think this stuff through. Thank goodness you invited Shyamalan. Do you suppose they have special screens to keep out black flies? Anyway, the Lake Placid lodge is uber-fancy. You can check it out here. And it's not just a lodge-- it's a spa, too. Get yourself a philosophical education thought leader hot towel while you're there. 

The schedule of the conference looks promising. On the first day (Sunday, May 4) there will be a three-hour opening dinner followed by two-and-a-half hours of "open networking." This sounds more fun than when I chaperone Prom!

On Monday, the heavy-duty philosophizing day, we have "Up, Down and Sideway: Building an Effective School Reform Coalition." Cool. I always wanted to build a school reform coalition, but don't seem to be able to do it with simple objects I can find around the house. And there's also "Tight-Loose Models for Ensuring All Kids Have Access to a Great Education." Here I could make about being a crack about being tight with your own money and loose with tax dollars, but I recognize the tight-loose thing as a favorite line of The Fordham Institution Thinky Tank crowd. So there's one more hint about what sorts of philosophizing will be discussed. (Although if Mike Petrilli is going to dance for the assembled philosophers, that would be an extra treat.)

Later on Monday (well, 3:30-- a day of philosophy is apparently not quite as jam-packed as a teacher professional development day), we have "break and optional outdoor activities" which seems wise as the outdoors is always more appealing when it's optional.

Tuesday wraps it up with breakfast and a closing session. The scheduling is fortuitous as Sunday evening the weekenders will be clearing out and by Tuesday the long-weekers will only just be showing up. So the resort should be clear of the plebes for the conference. And of course running it on Monday insures that no actual teachers will actually attend. Nothing messes up a reformy stuff philosophy session than actual teachers. 

Unfortunately, there is more keeping me away than just the scheduling. Attendance is $1,000 a head. Unless you have a VIP head, in which case it will cost you $2,500. That's just the event fee; I suppose I could cut corners by sleeping in my car for those two nights. My head is not really important enough to wrap itself around either of those numbers for any sleepover situation not involving my wife, some champagne, and a hot tub made of gold.

Still, I believe that in the interests of pursuing educational reform philosophy, I could round up some of the kindred company to attend this. I'm thinking of putting together a kickstarter to send a couple of the edublogoverse's finest journalists. I would particularly like to take a female colleague, because I think it would go over like the mouse in the circus elephant tent in Dumbo. (I'm thinking that between the two of us, Edushyster and I could cover this with all the seriousness it deserves).

But I don't want you to think that I am only mocking this ridiculous exercise in self-important over-inflated language-based bloviation weakly masking the venal money grabbing corporate destruction of public education. In fact, right on the front of the promotional site is a bold, three word slogan that I rather fancy.

REFORM

RELAX

RETREAT

I totally support reform, although these guys probably don't realize that at this point they are the champions of the status quo, and those fighting to reclaim the promise of American public education are the real reformers. Still, thumbs up on reform. Then if these guys would actually relax they might be better people. And I'm sure if they would just call a collective retreat, US public education would be all the better for it.

"Mansplaining Reformy Stuff"

Listen, honey, I know it's all very confusing and there's a lot to take in. But don't worry your pretty little head about it. Let me explain the whole what they like to call narrative of school reform.

Back in my day, schools were great. You learned what you needed to learn and as soon as you got out, you were ready to get a job. It wasn't easy-- nosirree-- but we weren't afraid of hard work. I put myself through college working twelve different jobs. Didn't sleep for three and a half years.

But somewhere in the years since I graduated, schools went to pot. Damn teachers unions made it so you couldn't fire someone for being gay or a commie. We started caring how kids feel. What the hell? Nobody cared how I felt! All this nurturing and coddling and babying and recess and food for poor kids and talking about bullying like it's a bad thing-- hell, I was bullied, and it made a man out of me. Go to any school in the country and all you see are a bunch of little children.

And you could see it start to affect the whole country. Unemployment up, Chinese kicking our asses, jobs going to India, and getting beat on these damn whatchamacallit international testy things. No, I don't know how we used to do, and I don't need to look it up. No damn Estonian ever outscored me and my buddies on a test, I can tell you that.

No, the problem is that the country is filling up with lazy stupid people, people who don't have the sense to listen to us who know better.

The whole school system is sloppy and slack and messy. And waste of money?? Billions of dollars just going to waste on teachers and pencils and feely-weely programs. My buddies and I would look and say, "Hell, if that was my business I'd run it a hell of a lot better and make a chunk of change at the same time."

So we figured out how to do it. First we made them cough up the data. In my business, if you can't put it on a spreadsheet, it doesn't matter. At first it looked like reducing education to numbers would be hard, but we just had them measure what was measurable. It doesn't matter. We already knew schools were failing. We just had to prove it.

And once we had the proof, we could start shaping it up. We needed to chase people out of public schools into our private and charter schools. That was easier once we owned all the tests. We give the tests that prove schools are failing AND we make them pay to take them AND we make them pay to try to get ready for them. THAT got the money train running. But that was just with NCLB.

Somebody had the bright idea-- what if we didn't just own the tests, but we owned the standards? What if we could make every school teach what we told them to, and then made them pay us to say if they did it okay or not? We'd own the whole supply chain!

Charter schools are great. We control the actual product there. We can hire and fire teachers on the cheap. At first we thought we'd have to break the teacher unions to cut costs, but we figured out how to work around them-- God bless TFA. That's how teaching should work-- high turnover, low training, easily replaced, and cheap-- just like a McDonald's franchise. And the government should pump money into charters-- we're a better business model. Getting the union to shut up-- easy. Everybody likes money, and we have lots of money to get the right people heard and the rest silenced.

And really-- teachers are a big part of the problem. They suck. They are lazy. They could never survive in the real world. They don't know the first thing about education, and what they do know they won't use. They're a whiny bunch of girls-- literally, a big bunch of girls. Schools could be so much better if teachers would just start committing themselves to teaching, but they just don't care. We are hoping that with enough threats we can get them to start working. And if they won't, we'll replace them. It's not like it's that hard to find someone who can do the job. Particularly once we've idiot-proofed it. Ideally, you just need a warm body to stand there and deliver the program that you've bought from one of our vendors. That way everybody in every classroom will get the exact same results.

It's not just that we wanted to get great ROI-- this was also about straightening out the country. Kids have it too easy, too coddled-- they're too wimpy. Honey, let's face it-- our whole culture is just womanized. Americans just need to man up, grow a pair, get some grit-- and there's no reason it can't start when they're little. They're mostly failures, and they need to hear that. Makes a man step up to the plate when he hears he's a failure.And if he won't step up, then he deserves to fall into the gutter.

Government has been a big help. It's a pain to have to market something to a thousand different customers who want a thousand different things. With the feds to make everybody fall in line, we just need one line of marketing and the feds insure that we're basically selling to just one huge customer. And their work on making every kid's information available in one big on-line database?? That is going to pay off big time in the years ahead. Do you know how much easier it will be to hire the right guy when we can see everything back to his three-year-old pooping schedule?

All you girls just need to get over all this crap you're whining about. Can you see how much money we're making from this? I'm not sure you understand-- we're not greedy, but all that money proves that we're dead right. People only end up rich if they deserve to. The only way to get rich is work hard and play the game, and the only way to know that you're getting your life right is to check finances. Does being poor suck? Sure-- it's supposed to. That's how you get the motivation to stop being poor. Don't like being poor? Then stop being poor.

We can start that lesson in pre-K. Don't like failure? Then suck it up and work harder.

Honey, listen to the people in charge. They wouldn't be in charge if they weren't rich, and they wouldn't be rich if they didn't deserve to be.

Why the Hell Are We Racing Anywhere?

Race to the Top had been rather quiet as a brand until President Obama revived it in his new budget proposal. Unfortunately, the new iteration underlines the metaphorical problems with the nom de regulation. For a guy who launched his career by being a moving speaker, Obama has hit on a real tone-deaf clunker here.

This time, we are racing for equity, which means, I guess, that we are going to Race To The Top To The Middle. Seriously, how does this metaphor even sort of work? How does a race for equality work, exactly?

My first thought is that we are about to see a real-life Diana Moon Glampers to preside over a race in which the swift are properly held back. But no-- we're clearly supposed to be competing for excellence. Excellence in...not being any more or less excellent than anybody else??

But the metaphorical muddle that is Race To The Top To The Middle only raises a more important question which is-- why were we ever racing anywhere?

Competition in pursuit of excellence is highly overrated.

First of all, we only compete with other teams. The five members of a basketball team do not compete with each other to score the most baskets; if they did, they would be a terrible team and they would lose very much, and nobody would say, "Wow, those guys are really excellent!" Not even if they competed with great rigor.

So who is supposed to be the other team in this race? Other schools? We are supposed to beat other schools and teachers and students and leaving them whipped and beaten and in this way we will achieve excellence?

Or is it just possible that, in the education game, every American public school that uses teachers to educate American children-- that every one of those schools is on the same team and not in competition at all?

Second of all, even in economics and business, competition is really great until it isn't. Rockefeller created Standard Oil by absorbing competition, by buying up every last one of his competitors. At no point did he say, "You know what? For me to be really excellent, I need to have some competition." No-- he said, "In order for me to be really excellent, I need to control and organize most of this big, messy industry. Competition must go away." You know who else thought ending competition would be a good business strategy? Bill Gates.

Granted, Gates and a few others toyed with making their workers compete with each other. They stopped doing it, because it was bad for the team.

So don't tell me the business world loves competition, because they don't. At best, the people who are losing pay it lip service which lasts right up until they aren't losing any more.

And they aren't wrong. Rockefeller and Gates both brought order to industries that were messy and wasteful, industries that were throwing away valuable resources and opportunities fighting against each other. Competition did not improve the industry; it made it sloppy and inefficient.

Obama et al seem to believe that races advance all racers, just like Reagan's rising tide raised all boats (or trickled down on submarines, or something). They remain convinced that the folks in the back of the pack are only there because they are slackers, lazy, unmotivated, and that somehow the shame of losing will spur them to finally get their acts together. We've heard about compassionate conservatives. Here we see loveless liberals, compassion-free with a Nietzschian disregard for the under-menschen.

"But," they are going to protest, "we can't keep giving medals to everybody no matter what." And you know what? I agree. The self-esteemy movement to reward students just for having a pulse was a mistake. But our mistake was not giving medals to everyone. Our mistake was giving unearned medals to everyone.

"But," they are going to mansplain, "in the race of life, there are winners and losers." And I am going to say, not in school there aren't.

This is the problem with people who play too many sports. I'm a musician. You know what happens when you go to a concert and everybody plays their very very best? We don't declare one a winner and one a loser no matter what. We applaud like crazy, because when everybody does a great job, it's freakin' awesome!

In my classroom, there is no useful purpose for having a race. There is no useful purpose in declaring winners and losers. If all my students learn today, today everybody wins. And we don't have to race for that to happen.

Racing is a terrible awful no good very bad metaphor for what should be happening in schools. It is a stupid way to frame the whole business and cheap besides. Competition will not improve education-- not on the macro-national scale, not on the district scale, not on the building scale, not on the classroom scale.

We are not racers. We are builders. And building takes time and care and attention. It takes an understanding of your materials and the place in which you are building. It requires time and care and harmony and craft and attention. And every beam, every bolt, every square inch of surface matters. Every aspect of the building rests on and supports other aspects. And if you build a great building next to mine, it does not diminish me, but adds to my work.

Mr. President, I reject the language of scarcity, the language that says we will only support those who finish the race first, the language says that we are not a team, but a country of competitors in a dog-eat-dog world where there is only enough to support a chosen few. I am not going to race to any damn where.

How Green Are Your Roots?

The world of reformy stuff has altered my life; specifically, it has changed my daily routine. In the morning before school, I read. At lunch, I read. And sometimes in the evening, I read. And when I need a break from reading, I write.

There are soooooo many powerful writers out there covering the world of education, the high stakes test-driven status quo, and the many fronts in the ongoing battle to reclaim public education. The long list to the right of this column only scratches the surface. And to stay fully informed, I also read the work of the corporate champions of the high stakes test-driven status quo, the various organizations that fight and claw to keep the dream of educorporate schooling alive. So I've had plenty of opportunity to see what separates the two groups, what distinguishes the Network for Public Education from, say, StudentsFirst or TFA or any of the groups that shoehorn "Education" and "Quality" into their names.

The difference is money.

So many of the supporters of Reformy Stuff are bought and paid for. So many of the opponents are not.

If the Gates Foundation woke up tomorrow and discovered that all its money had turned into, I don't know, expired gift certificates for a free breakfast at Denny's, support for CCSS would collapse. If the Common Core and Teach for America and the Charter Movement had to survive on actual merit, this whole fight would be over in a week. If rich white guys couldn't buy studies and then buy other groups to study the studies and then buy organizations to praise the studies, the support for Reformy Stuff would evaporate.

You would think that the acolytes of meritocracy would want to say, "Look, if our concepts cannot survive in the marketplace of ideas strictly on their merit, then they don't deserve to live." But they are fans of another sort of meritocracy, one in which money proves one is a virtuous person, and therefor one's every idea must have merit and deserve to be rolled up in twenty dollar bills that are then shoved down less virtuous throats.

I watched and read about the Network for Public Education conference, and I can't help noticing that it does not include any people who are getting rich off fighting reformy stuff. In fact, I see quite a lot of people spending their own money and uncompensated time to fight this fight.

In the meantime, "I completely waived my speakers fee today and traveled at my own expense because I really believe in my message," said no Michelle Rhee ever. "Fixing schools" is making some people wealthy.

Time after time, Gates Foundation and other sources like it plant money in the ground and a group springs forth, ready to say whatever they are paid to say. People are making very good livings pushing this stuff.

But others of us are fighting it for free. I'd love to say something moving about how our righteous virtue in the support of a good cause gives us a homespun Davidian strength that no Goliath-like corporate heartless hucksters can overcome, but I don't think so.

I think Diane Ravitch has it right. They have to lose. The Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools are like farmers who have had to fill their field with plants that they bought at the store and transplanted on their own. When those plants die, they go back to the store and buy more. But every plant they buy and transplant fails.

They have bought (and bought and rebought and bought again) the illusion that they know how to raise those crops, but the truth is that they haven't a clue and every thing they have tried has failed, turned dry and dusty in the hard sun of reality. The successes they have enjoyed depend on nothing but a large supply of money, and eventually they will either run out or simply tire of spending it. What success can they point to that they did not prop up with money-based illusion? What words of support can they point to that haven't been paid for? What would happen to it all if the money went away?

The Reformy Stuff movement has no roots. Where roots should be there is only a large and impressive supply of money. But for those of us on the other side, there are roots that go deep, roots that were already planted by our love and passion for education and that have driven deep long before the fake foundation farmers came along. They can only keep this up as long as they can afford to pay for it. We can only keep this up as long as we have breath and brains, fingers to type, voices to speak.

It's not that their dependence on money makes them evil or dirty. Their dependence on money makes their movement unsustainable. But those of us fighting back and teaching and blogging and talking? We can keep this up all day, every day.

Opportunity Cost: Distance Learning & Best Ravitch Line from NPE Conference

In the midst of show weekend with my students here in PA, it was interesting to try to follow the Network for Public Education Conference in Austin this weekend. I have two initial takeaways from the experience.

Distance Learning Is Even Worse Than Phone Sex

I followed lots of folks on twitter, watched some of the streamed video, viewed video clips as soon as anyone put them up. This conference left a huge footprint on the interwebs, with #npeconference leading the twitter trend list both days on weekend that included rising tensions in the Ukraine and preparations for tonight's Oscar bash. Beyond getting a few more sessions in front of the live streaming or hiring someone to carry around video devices, I'm not sure how much more digitally covered the conference could have been.

And I have to tell you-- it wasn't nearly enough. I caught some of the meat, got to see the real faces and hear the real speech cadences of many people that I've come to know online, read many of the best lines form the weekend-- but in the end, I still felt like a bunch of my friends had had a really cool party and group experience and I had missed out on it. So much energy and excitement leaked through the sad tiny pipeline that is the internet-- I can't quite imagine how much there was in the real place.

Which made me think-- if this was how it felt to try to distance-follow an event in which I was primed to be engaged and which was accessible to me by a whole array of current technology, how terribly inadequate distance learning, cyber-schooling and all the other computer-based substitutes for a real live teacher in the same room as students must be.

Like phone sex (I imagine), the experience lived somewhere in the land between better-than-nothing and painful-because-it-reminds-you-of-what-you're-missing. In the end, I come down on better-than-nothing, but my feelings that distance learning must be terribly inadequate are now even more confirmed.

My Favorite Ravitch Point of The Weekend

I got the keynote address in bits and pieces through twitter (set strike was today), so I know there were plenty of applause lines there. But I definitely caught the truncated video of the NPE press conference, and that call for Congress to get involved again some more in the Giant Testing Mess (which leaves me with some mixed feelings because, hey, there's no way THAT could end badly) included a phrase we ought to hear much more often in this debate.

Opportunity cost.

"Opportunity cost" used to be a semi-obscure economics term. Basically it underlines that buying a candy bar for a dollar doesn't cost you a dollar-- it costs you all the other things you COULD have spent the dollar on. By spending money here, you lose the opportunity to spend it over there.

This is the perfect way to frame the debate over testing and test prep. We keep talking about ytime, about how much time the tests take, how much time we spend preparing, how much time goes into testing.

But it's not just time. As Diane correctly noted, we're really talking about opportunity costs. A week of test prep means students lose the opportunity to play in band or sing in choir or draw in art or play a game in phys ed. A week of testing costs students the opportunity to spend that week doing something else.

We could pay the cost of testing simply in time. We could say, "Look, these tests are so important that we are going to add two months to the school year just to get ready for the tests and then take them." We could actually pay the cost in time pretty easily. But if we paid it that way, we'd know exactly what it was costing us (summer vacations, angry phone calls from angry parents).

But opportunity costs we can hide. And we have. We've hidden them because we are pros at that and have been for years. We add new units about health and safety and nutrition and adopting dogs and fold it into the year as if the school year is a big accordion-shaped squeezebox of fluid infinite time. We never talk about opportunity costs.

So it is dead-on correct to call for a study of opportunity costs. It is dead-on correct to ask what we are taking away to do this unholy regime of pointless testing.

Because when something costs time, there's the illusion that there's always more time. We can get it back. But opportunities lost are gone for good. And talking about opportunity costs force us to ask hard questions.

Talking about value is easy. Did I get good value for what I spent? Is this a decent dollar's worth of candy bar?

But talking about opportunity cost-- that's another thing. Because now the question is-- of all the things I could have spent this dollar on, is this candy bar the best?

Proponents of the high stakes test-based education status quo (another thing that Ravitch got dead-on correct-- this IS the status quo, not a challenge to it) don't just need to prove that their testing regimen has some value or may serve some useful purpose. What they need to prove is this-- looking at the resources spent, the money spent, the hours of young lives spent, the work of education professionals spent-- looking at all those costs, were there better opportunities? What opportunities did we give up to pursue the big ball of testing wax, and would some of those opportunities have been a better use of our resources? What opportunities are we and our students going to have tomorrow, and which ones should we pursue? Is the high stakes test-based status quo really the best thing we can think of to spend our time and effort on? I may not have been there, but I bet everybody who was in Austin knows the answer.

"If not CCSS, then what?"

If not the CCSS, then what?

This refrain comes back and back and back again, echoing this morning over the interwebs all the way from the NPE conference in Austin. Today it's Randi Weingarten, but it could just as easily be Dennis Van Roekel (well, if he ever went to anything or spoke to anybody outside of NEA PR work) or any number of people in the Reluctant CCSS Warrior Crowd (see also The It's Just An Implementation Problem crowd).

This question has become the big rhetoric conversation nuker, just like "So which children do you think we should leave behind" used to shut down NCLB opponents. So let me offer some possible answers you might want to use the next time someone unloads this cannon d'argument on you.

Locally-developed standards.

Put your districts key teachers, key parents, key administrators in a room. Send out some questionnaires if you like. Talk to former students, local employers. Make a selection of stakeholders consistent with the needs, priorities, history, desires of your local district. Let all those people put their heads together to decide what standards are appropriate and desired for your local district.

It's a measure of how screwed up we are these days that even I can hear how radical that sounds, but really, why should it? This is local control, the way we did this for ages. And what the hell does somebody in a state capital or DC know about the needs of your students that local people do not?

"Well, then, we'll have some school in Texas teaching that Jesus rode a dinosaur," is the complaint. To which I say, "So what?" If it really bothers you, institute a simple "Thou shalt not teach any really dumb crap" law at the state level. Otherwise, leave those people alone. Yes, I think they're dead wrong, but at what point do we finally say in this country, "What those people over there do is none of my damn business?"

Because here's the problem with central standards. You may intend to hamstring the people who want to do dumb things, but at the same time, you are also hamstringing the people who don't want to do stupid things. Not only that, but you know who will ignore your hamstringing and just go on ahead anyway-- the people who want to do stupid things.

And even worse, increasingly the people who want to do stupid things have realized that if a central government is writing the rules, all they have to do is capture that central office, and they are not only free to do all the stupid things they want, but they can make other people do them, too.

So-- leave local standards in the hands of local control.

Local accountability

Some folks want national standards so they can have national accountability.

I refuse to engage in trying to prove that we should have local accountability instead. Anyone who wants to argue for national accountability is carrying the burden of proof. Why does Arne Duncan need to know what the students in my third period class are doing and how well they're doing it? Why does the federal government need a national database of all students and their various academic achievements?

Nobody-- not one single solitary person-- has made so much as a feeble argument for this kind of national oversight. I suspect that's because this is not about accountability-- it's about marketing. Well, no. You don't get to argue that my students should live in this new national straightjacket so that you can more easily market programs and materials today and collect data on customers and employees to use against them tomorrow.

No parent of a local school district ever needed to consult some sort of federal report to know how well their child is doing or which teachers is the one you want to get for fourth grade. We have accountability covered, and we always have. Unless you can come up with a good argument for why the feds should butt in, they should butt out.

Anarchy of the Professionals

Look, I'm really not a national standards guy. If I go to the doctor, I don't want him to consult some federal bureaucrat's instructions on how to properly rotate my spleen. I want him to use his best judgment about me, my situation, my health, and my spleen. I want him to make choices based on his professional judgment about what is best for me, not what is best for his standing with various state and federal bureaucrats and oversight agencies.

Ditto for teachers. I'm a professional. Let me work. Let me do my job. Let me make professional judgments based on my knowledge of the material and the students and make choices based on what would be best for those students. Nobody anywhere on the planet is in a better position than I am to know best what that student needs in my classroom. Okay-- parents in most cases are right up there, too. "Oh, if only I had a set of federally mandated tests and standards that I could consult," said no parent or teacher ever.

And if none of these answers are useful, do not forget this one--

Why are you assuming we need anything at all?

"If not CCSS, then what?" assumes that we need something.

Maybe we're assuming a giant educational crisis, only we know that no such crisis exists.

Maybe we're assuming that there is a political problem, that various government folks and the corporate sponsors who own them have mustered enough political clout to pose a threat, and what our leaders really mean by this question is "We are about to be mugged-- what's the best way to avoid serious injury?" That's a legitimate concern and question, but please-- let's not start with the assumption that the mugger has a legitimate claim on our wallet and jewelry. Let's address the real problem-- that we are taking serious political fire from all sides, including the sides that we thought we could trust.

Maybe we're assuming there's some sort of teaching crisis, and that teachers are now so terrible that they can no longer be defended. In which case, we should not be leading a national teacher union. If someone else is making the "teachers are so terrible" assumption, then once again we're dealing with a low-information arguer, and the injection of facts might be called for.

I'm bone tired of this question. It has no validity, no basis in fact, no foundation in assumptions that deserve to be assumed. This question deserves to be questioned. Not attacked, because when people start attacking questioners and questions nobody ever hears or learns anything, but questioned directly and responded to clearly. There is no "need" for CCSS, and there never was, so there is no "need" to come up with an alternative.

Selling Is Not Doing

In yesterday's New York Times, Suzanne Mettler provided one more explanation of why school choice doesn't-- and won't-- work.

Mettler is looking at how college has become the "great unleveler," an education system that reinforces a caste system instead of breaking down walls. That's in no small part because the percentage of household income required to send a child to college has skyrocketed for the lower classes since 1971 (for the bottom fifth, it now takes 114% of annual household income to send a child to college),

"But wait," you say (particularly if you haven't tried to finance someone's college education lately), "Don't we have a system that makes grants, or at least loans, available to folks who need financial help for college?" The first part of the answer is "Not so much as we used to," and that part of the discussion is best served by Mettler's article.

The second part of the answer is, "Yes, we do, some, and how that plays out tells us about how vouchers really work."

As a graph in Mettler's article vividly illustrates, for profit colleges represent a voucher-fied, market-based business model. Management at Phoenix, Corinthian, Kaplan and others have realized a powerful insight about how to make it in the biz.

Selling is not doing.


There are a whole bunch of folks out there who have control of a big chunk of money for college. The money might be grants or it might be loans-- it really doesn't matter to me if I'm setting up a for-profit. What matters, what I must absolutely grasp, is that my business is not providing a service. My business is selling a service. My business is convincing those people to give me the chunk of money that they control.

Are they later dissatisfied? Doesn't matter-- I already have that money. And this isn't a used car lot. I don't need them to come back again and again for the rest of their lives.

Selling a service and providing a quality service are two entirely different operations, and only one of them provides immediate cash flow for my business.

Phoenix, Kaplan, Corinthian, Education Management and DeVry all reap over 80% of their revenue from government loans and grants-- higher education vouchers. Convincing customers to fork over those $$ isn't crucial to their business model. It IS their business model. Vouchers aren't the key to their survival; it's their reason for existing.

Selling is not doing. We know this already. We collectively observe every four years, for instance, that the skills needed to be an effective President are not exactly the same ones needed to win a Presidential election. We know that we'd better google that guy who took our sister on such a fabulous first date.

Every time we buy Coke or Pepsi, we give them a little extra money so that they can spend it on marketing aimed at convincing us to give them more money.

Selling is not doing, and selling is a separate budget category. The next time someone says, "What's wrong with schools making a profit if they educate kids?" Tell them this: Every cent that schools have to spend on marketing is a cent that doesn't get spent on actually doing the education thing. And every cent they spend on students is one less cent to spend on selling. Voucher and choice schools must screen out high-overhead students because they need that extra money for marketing.

Market forces do not foster superior quality. Market forces foster superior marketability.

The more we open education to market forces, the more money we will waste on marketing schools, the fewer resources we will devote to actual education, and the more educational snake-oil salesmen we will find working their way into the school biz. Sure, the marketplace will sort some of them out-- we're seeing some of that already in places like Ohio, where charter schools have the same life span as tse-tse flies. But how much student education, how many years of students' lives, do we want to throw away as cannon fodder for the invisible hand?

There is no place for hucksterism in education. Schools should be doing, not selling.

A Quick Duncan-DVR Question

I have a simple question for Dennis Van Roekel.

Would you please list five points on which you disagree with Arne Duncan and the USDOE?

I ask because I realized this morning that I can't think of any, and that in my own mind, you and Arne Duncan have become like different manifestations of the same person. So I'm wondering.

I understand that disagreeing with the USDOE is not automatically a good thing, and I do not want to propose that union leadership should be judged based on how much they argue with the government. I even confess that I do not believe the government is always wrong. I also recognize that you are just about out the door, but I don't imagine that you single-handed set the tone and direction for NEA leadership.

However, if NEA leadership is simply traveling in lockstep with the current administration with no critical or independent views, I'm betting that's not A Good Thing. If NEA's policy is, "Hey, if it comes out of Duncan's office, that's good enough for us," it's not good enough for me.

I've been trying to think of a time you criticized an administration policy, a time when you said, "Mr. Duncan is just wrong on this," a time at which you said, "While it might be politically expedient to stay silent, on this matter I must speak up against the administration and on behalf of my members." I can't think of any.

Now, my memory is not as sharp as it-- well, my memory has never been sharp. So maybe I'm just forgetting something. In which case, you or someone can correct me. And I'm really hoping you will.

Because if there are no points of significant disagreement between the USDOE and the NEA, what exactly do we need the NEA for?

So I'll ask again-- can you name five significant policy points on which you disagree with Arne Duncan?

Duncan's Pre-K Top 10

On Monday, February 23, Arne Duncan laid down some speaks on the National Governor's Association Winter Meeting. His prepared remarks touched on many areas of education, but he devoted much of his speaking to the issue of Pre-K.

Mind you, Duncan did not speak about why Pre-K is a good idea or a valuable idea, nor did he speak about what Pre-K done right would look like. In fact, he didn't really talk about the educational aspects of Pre-K at all. What he addressed was its political inevitability.

So let's see what the compelling reasons for welcoming Pre-K might be. Here's Arne's Top Ten List.

#10: There is much greater public awareness today of the importance of the early years to the long-term health, learning, and success of our children and our communities--and it is coupled with widespread public support for a big expansion of early learning.

The political ground is fertile for the planting of Pre-K support. Lots of people believe this is a good thing, although most of them are imagining something completely different from our vision. You can win votes by backing this. Also, doesn't this sound much more attractive then testing and drilling four-year-olds?

#9: A powerful, bipartisan coalition of governors are funding expansions in the states—in some cases, big expansions—of high-quality early learning programs.

There is a big bunch of money pushing this. People are going to want to be your buddy when you have the power to make them rich. Also, note the new buzzword "high-quality," which means roughly, "carrying the USDOE seal of approval (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pearson, Inc)"

#8: There is a remarkably diverse and robust coalition of law enforcement officials, military leaders, clergy, CEOs, unions, parents, and others that strongly support expanding high-quality early learning opportunities.

Again, there is political support out there for this, from all sorts of folks. It's true that all these folks know next to nothing about the needs of four-year-olds, but they know plenty about the needs of politicians.


#7: The old arguments that states should have no role in providing low- and moderate-income families with voluntary access to early learning and child care have lost force.

We have broken down the traditional desire for local control.

#6: There is a growing recognition that quality matters tremendously when it comes to early learning. 

We have no idea what "quality" means, but it tests positive with all our focus groups. Some people think "quality" means games and fun and being a child while learning some stuff, instead of drilling and testing. We can use these people. And as long as we control the meaning of "quality," we control the Pre-K franchise.

#5: For the first time, a majority of the states are now assessing the school readiness of children when they enter kindergarten.

Testing five-year-olds will help generate the kind of fear and panic that are great for motivating people. Let's just skip over the question of what in the hell a five-year-old needs to be tested on, or the developmental appropriateness of making Kindergarten the new First Grade. Is your four-year-old writing complex historical analyses and reading Faulkner? Then get thee to Pre-K. And don't forget-- no child is ready for school without a working knowledge of politics in Mesopotamia.

#4: The enactment of third grade reading laws in many of your states is going to propel an expansion of high-quality early learning.

We're going to start labeling your eight-year-olds failures if they can't pass a standardized reading test. Again, don't ask why. Just relish the highly motivational panic this will create in your electorate.

#3: America is way behind high-performing countries in our provision of early learning--and there is a growing awareness that high-quality early learning is critical to sustaining our international economic competitiveness.

Actually, we're just making stuff up now. This talking point has been constructed without the use of a single verifiable fact. But yeah-- Estonia is going to bury us economically if our four-year-olds don't know fifty sight words!! OMGZZ!!

#2: America is currently in the midst of an unprecedented wave of innovation and capacity-building when it comes to early learning--and a new federal-state partnership helped unleash this wave of innovation.

Key word here is "capacity building." Somebody is going to have to create all those Pre-K schools and programs. Do you smell that? It's the smell of money just waiting to be made.

#1: The enormous unmet need and demand for high-quality early learning.    

Unmet, unverified, and unsubstantiated. But okay. We are doing our best to help create the illusion of need in order to drive a real demand.

The speech is directed at politicians, so the political nature is understandable, but I am still struck by how completely and utterly Duncan ignores the question of what "quality" looks like in a Pre-K program, which is exactly the conversation we should be having.

Look, I'm a high school teacher. But it sure looks to me like we are creating-- inventing from scratch-- a whole new grade of school, pushed on our most vulnerable citizens and promoted without the slightest conversation about what a new grade of school for four year olds should look like. What would be developmentally appropriate? What would best serve the needs of the children?  Everything we know about the USDOE, Duncan, CCSS, and the implementation of reformy stuff indicates that the USDOE doesn't know the answers and doesn't particularly care.

Declaring Pre-K "inevitable" for any number of reasons is irresponsible for a Secretary of Education. We should be talking about whether it should be evitable. We should be talking about what form it must take if we're going to allow it to happen.Set some policy. Ask not if it IS inevitable, but whether or not it SHOULD be.

Duncan ought to be saying things like, "Before we make any attempt to take very young children out of home to participate in new educational programs, we'd better make damn sure that every aspect of that program is carefully designed and vetted by educational and developmental experts." Instead, he's out cheerleading about a unique opportunity for investors and politicians. As with CCSS, children are just cannon fodder.

Gates Goes Shopping

Why shouldn't Bill Gates spend his money terraforming the education landscape? Why shouldn't rich guys use their power and influence to promote the issues that they care about? Haven't rich powerful guys always done so?

These are not easy questions to answer. After all, Rockefeller, Carnegie and others made hugely important contributions to the American landscape, legacies that have continue to benefit Americans long after these dead white guys had moved on to Robber Baron Heaven.

How is Gates different? This post by Mercedes Schneider (whose blog you should already be following), helped me see one significant difference.

Rockefeller and Carnegie (the dead white guy philanthropists I'm most familiar with) helped invent modern philanthropy by discovering some basic issues. Mostly, they discovered that when people hear you want to give away money, the wold beats a path to your door. So they set up various entities whose job was to accept, filter and respond to the applications for big bucks that various groups sent to them, based on a set of criteria that the rich guys developed out of A) their own set of concerns and B) the opinions of knowledgeable people in their fields. That's how Rockefeller, a white guy who believed in homeopathic medicine, ended up revolutionizing the study of medical science and building a higher education system for African-Americans.

This is not how the Gates Foundation does business.

Where classic philanthropy says, "Come make your pitch and if we like your work, we will help support you," the Gates Foundation says, "We have a project we want to launch.Let's go shopping for someone to do that for us."

From the Gates Foundation Grantseeker FAQ:

Q. How do I apply for a grant from the foundation? A. We do not make grants outside our funding priorities. In general, we directly invite proposals by directly contacting organizations.

There is also this:

Q: Who makes decisions on investments and when?

A: As part of its operating model, the foundation continues delegate decision making on grants and contracts to leaders across the organization.  With our new process, decision makers are identified at the early stage of an investment.  Check-in points are built in to help ensure that decision makers are informed about and can raise questions during development, rather than holding all questions until the end.

I know it says "investments," but we're still on the foundations Grantseeker FAQ page, in the section that talks about how various data and progress reports will be used along the way as grant recipients complete whatever project Gates is funding.

We pick the project, we approach the people we want to have do it, we bankroll it, and we supervise it until completion. The Gates Foundation model looks less like a philanthropy and more like corporate subcontracts.

This model explains a few issues about the Gates approach.

Why do so many edu-groups funded by Gates seem to have no existence outside of doing Gates work? Because Gates isn't looking to find people already running proven programs that can use a financial boost, but instead is looking to sow money and reap groups doing exactly what Gates wants to have done. "I've got a gabillion dollars here to give to a group that will pilot and promote an unproven educational technique! I'd like to pay you guys to set that up for us?"

Occasionally Gates does work with a pre-existing group, but often this is a matter of shopping for someone who can provide brand recognition, like AFT or NEA. But those "grants" are still predicated on "I have a project I want you to do for us" and not "Let me help support the good work you're already doing."

This is far different from Rockefeller's "I've got a gabillion dollars to spend promoting Black education in the South. Find me some people who are doing good work in the field that I can help expand with this money."

The Gates Foundation model is astroturf philanthropy.

Look, if you're a rich guy who loves anchovy pizza and you want to use your clout, that's fine. If you open the door for successful anchovy pizza makers to apply for grants so they can expand, that's super. But if you decide that you are going to fund a whole new anchovy pizza plant, and hire health department inspectors to get all other pizza makers condemned, and hire consultants to flood the media with bogus reports about the healthful effects of anchovy pizza, and create other consulting firms to push legislation outlawing everything except anchovies on pizza-- if you do all that, you are not a philanthropist. You're just a guy using money and power to make people do what you want them to.

Rockefeller, Carnegie and the rest were not saints, and it's arguable whether their philanthropic benefits offset their robber baronical misbehavior. But when it came to running a corporate-based oligarchy, they were small-timers compared to the folks at the Gates.

What's Not To Love About Pre-K

One of the most recent ed-issues du jour is Pre-K. There's a great deal of political and public support for earlier childhood education these days, but I find much of it far more troubling than encouraging. While the data on the success of pre-K programs could be called mixed, there are a motivations behind the current push that indicate it should be feared and resisted.

Investment Opportunity

One of the appeals of Pre-K for investors is that there is no pre-existing institution that has to be bulldozed first.

Turning public education into an investment opportunity has been a long, arduous process. Discrediting public schools, buying up enough political clout to dismantle the public system, aggressive marketing to steal public ed "customers"-- it has taken a lot of time to break down a cherished American institution in order to create investment opportunities.

But the Pre-K landscape is only occupied by a handful of relative lightweights. It's the difference between building your new Mega-Mart on an empty lot and having to condemn and clear a residential neighborhood. Easy pickings!

Brand Extension

Yes, I see what you did there. We've stopped calling it Pre-School because that would indicate that it isn't going actually going to be school. But that's not where the push is going.

Instead, we have politicians deciding that since Kindergartner's are having trouble meeting the developmentally inappropriate standards of CCSS, the problem must be that they aren't "ready" for kindergarten. So we have the spectacle of people seriously suggesting that what four-year-olds need is some rigorous instruction, and of course THAT means that we'll need to give those four-year-olds standardized tests in order to evaluate how well the program is going.

It's like some sort of unholy alliance between people who won't be happy until they're selling eduproduct to every child in this country and people who won't be happy until we've made certain that no child in this country is ever wasting time playing and enjoying life.

More Pipeline

The Big Data machine needs more data. Right now we can only plug your child in when she reaches age five. Oh, but if we could only get our hands on those children sooner. Even a year sooner would be an improvement. Pre-K programs will allow more data collection and fatter file for each child.

Don't you want to know what career your four-year-old is best suited for? Don't you want to be certain that your four-year-old is on track for college? The let us add another link to the Big Data Pipeline.

There's no question that, done correctly, Pre-K can be a Good Thing. Anecdotally, I tell friends who are obsessing over it that I could never look at my eleventh grade classroom and tell you which students had pre-school and which did not. But, still, putting a small child in a rich environment to play and socialize and learn a few things couldn't hurt.

However, I'm convinced that a vast number of the people currently pushing Pre-K have no intention whatsoever of doing things right. Instead, what many politicians and thought leaders and hedgucators are supporting is an extension of CCSS/reformy stuff baloney to four-year-olds.

So support Pre-K if you wish, but be damn sure that the people you're agreeing with are people you are actually agreeing with.

Testing Resistance & Reform Spring: Three Simple Goals

There's a new coalition in the ed world, one that you should be hearing more about. Here's the meat from their first press release:
 

Widespread resistance to the overuse and misuse of standardized testing is exploding across the nation. Testing Resistance & Reform Spring (TRRS) is an alliance of organizations that have come together to expand these efforts in order to win local, state and national policy changes: Less testing, more learning. 

To ensure that assessment contributes to all students having full access to an equitable, high-quality education, we unite around three goals:

            1) Stop high-stakes use of standardized tests;

            2)  Reduce the number of standardized exams, saving time and money for real learning; and

            3)  Replace multiple-choice tests with performance-based assessments and evidence of learning from students’ ongoing classwork (“multiple measures”).

 There's a lot to love about this. Let me look at those three goals:

STOP HIGH STAKES USE OF STANDARDIZED TESTS

There is no justification for this use of standardized tests. There never has been. The high stakes use of the test exists for only one purpose-- to force students and teachers to take the tests seriously. Making these tests high stakes is the last desperate action of a speaker who can't get the crowd to9 listen, so he finally threatens to shoot them if they won't shut up.

REDUCE THE NUMBER OF STANDARDIZED EXAMS

Is there seriously anybody who doesn't think this is a good idea? Other than, of course, the people who make money selling exam programs to schools. This year, because we have moved PA's Big Test from 11th to 10th grade at my school, I will get to teach my students an entire unit more than I have been able to include since we started testing. They will get at least two week's worth of additional education.

There are reformers claiming that we need to lengthen the school day or the school year. But we can just as easily put more hours back into education by wasting less time on costly, time-consuming tests.

REPLACE BUBBLE TESTS WITH REAL ASSESSMENT

Fans of the High Stakes Testing sometimes speak as if there would be no measuring of students at all if not for the big bubble tests. But of course classroom teachers are already doing constant, complex, nuanced assessment that is directly tied to what is being taught. Is it so crazy to suggest that we could just use it? 

TRRS has an action website and an impressive list of members, including Fair Test, United Opt Out, Parents Across America, Save Our Schools, and the Network for Public Education. It has a clear mission, and as more parents get to meet PARCC, SBA, and their bastard cousins, more communities are realizing that the mega-testing program cannot stand as is.

When people are up to no good, or simply don't know what they're talking about, you get twisted overblown jargonized gobbledygook. Compare the rhetoric of testing fans to the three simple goals laid out above. The time has come to make this happen. Proponents have said, "Well, don't tell us what you're against. What are you for?" There it is. Plain and simple. Come join the resistance.

DVR Corrects Course

Dennis Van Roekel today let loose on the NEA Today website with what represents a big set of admissions for him, and what for many of us wins a Captain Obvious merit badge. Regarding the CCSS:

I am sure it won’t come as a surprise to hear that in far too many states, implementation has been completely botched

Well, the "no surprise to hear part" is pretty obvious. And we've been saying the rest for a while. So how big a shift does today's commentary actually represent.


The opening paragraphs can be dismissed, I think, as face-saving revisionist history. New lipstick on the same ugly damn pig. "The CCSS came out and educators leapt forward like good soldiers, embracing the standards with joy blah blah blah but it turns out the bureaucrats muffed the implementation, and you know, we told them not to do that!!" Okay, fine. That, combined with the note of "like a good life long learner, I've been listening to teachers and learning what it looks like on the ground" is probably the closest we'll get to an apology, and I'm okay with that. Politics. It's what's for breakfast, and he still washes it down with the koolaid.

But gone is the factoid about widespread teacher support. Now we're talking about widespread teacher non-preparation for the core, and the non-support teachers are getting with implementation. It sounds a lot like the standard "The standards are swell; it's just an installation problem" so far, but somewhat feistier than in the past.

A few grafs later, he arrives at the sixty million dollar question:

Where do we go from here?

DVR acknowledges that lots of folks want NEA to call for scrapping the standards. And it would be easy to go along with the critics on the left and the right (one bonus point for admitting they all exist), but we don't want to go backwards. Specifically, we don't want to go back to the bad old days of NCLB and teaching to tests and bad bubbling.

DVR, you do know that there were schools before NCLB. We could go back a mere fourteen years and find ourselves back in the age of authentic assessment, an approach that had potential but was snuffed out by NCLB. So, minus one point for ignoring the full range of options.

He moves on to some specifics. Work with teachers. Stop giving old bubble tests that don't match the new standards. Involve teachers in developing some of this stuff.

And in fact the whole thing would be way too weak to mean much (other than DVR is sliding one step closer to living on the same reality as the rest of us), except for one thing. And I am going to hold DVR to that one thing, because if we get that, none of the rest matters.

DVR has a list of seven items NEA wants from "policymakers" (DVR first artfully sidesteps the issue of whether it's states, feds, or corporations that are driving this bus), and at the number one spot, we find this:

1. Governors and chief state school officers should set up a process to work with NEA and our state education associations to review the appropriateness of the standards and recommend any improvements that might be needed.

Can we just tattoo that across the sky? Paint it on DVR's face?

The other six are just arble-garble about testing and proper field-testing and accountability and probably ploughing the road for NEA's Helmsley-fund financed partnership with PARCC and SBA, but I don't care and I'm willing to ignore it, because if we get a do-over on the standards, if we get a state-level method of revising the standards to suit that state with teachers in an actual position to affect the process-- I would do the kind of happy dance that would embarrass grandchildren that aren't even born yet. Rewrite the standards? With the states, not the USDOE? I have to say, I don't hate that idea.

There will be a ton of parsing of DVR's release today, but for me, that one point is the bombshell. Because the standards are the foundation of everything else. And, done correctly, everything else must wait for the standards to be finished and fixed. I have no illusions about the likelihood of that happening easily or even at all. I'm just happy that my national union has even just one thing on the table that I can support. There's an awful lot of platitudinous baloney on this new plate, but for the moment, I'm going to ignore it and focus on the yummy chocolate chip cookie that I can see.

I am already reading the cries that it is too weak and too late, and there's absolutely no question that it's both. But at this point, there are only two options-- being too late, or staying too wrong. You can't fix Too Late. Absent a time machine, DVR can't undo his ongoing period of wrong-headed quackery. At this point the best we could get would be Too Late But Absolutely Right.  Too Late But Slightly Less Wrong isn't perfect, but it's still better than Still Dead Wrong And Unwilling To Talk About It. Sometimes better is all you get. 

UPDATE : Well, it took DVR about a week to backtrack on this and walk back the most interesting and worthwhile parts. Here's the scoop on that.

You Keep Using That Word...

Status quo.

The Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools keep railing about the status quo. The current crisis in education requires us to break the mold, change our course, do something different. the status quo, we're told repeatedly, is not working.

Here's the thing.

A Nation at Risk came out in 1983, kicking off the current generation of mania for waving one sort of magical stick or another at schools. "OMGZZ," said the risk-threatened nation. "We had better get wise men in DC a-fixin' this, toot the sweet!" (I'm paraphrasing here.)

No Child Left Behind became law in 2001, becoming effective at the start of 2002 and thereby enshrined the notion of top-down, federal-controlled, test-based, punitive, centrally-designed management of the nation's educational system. NCLB's ridiculous and unreachable requirement that 100% of the nation's students be above average was used as leverage to push states into a more top-down, more federally-controlled, more test-based, more punitive, more centrally-designed system of public schooling under Race to the Top and Common Core.

So when somebody says that we need to change the status quo, I completely agree, because you know what the status quo is?? This. This test-worshipping teacher-punishing student-hating one-size-fits-all mockery of a school system is our status quo.

Every single child now in America's school has encountered only this "reformed" version of public schooling. We have now inflicted this foolishness on an entire generation.

Every criticism of public schools, every test score offered as "proof," every "we have to do better" political press release is not not NOT an indictment of the traditional model of American public schooling. That model has been, depending on your location, something between crippled and crushed for over a decade, buried under the bulk of NCLBRTTT baloney for over a decade.

No, if you want to criticize the State of Education in this country, you will need to direct that to the current keepers of the status quo flame, the folks formerly known as "reformers." We've been living and teaching in their world for over a decade. They have had control of education for the entire school life of our current students. They cannot whine that they are outsiders, bravely trying to pull down the ramparts of the status quo, because they ARE the status quo. And in the words of that great philosopher, Dr. Phil, I have to as, "How's that working for you?" If the car's wrapped around a tree, and you're the one who demanded the driver's seat, don't start blaming the hostages you stuffed in the trunk.

We will have to wait for the language to catch up. What we've been calling "reform" or "reformy stuff" or "that miserable pile of polished turds pushed off on us by corporate tools" is, in fact, the status quo. It is those of us who want to reclaim traditional American public education who are the rebels, the reformers.

In the meantime, every time those folks complain about the need to disrupt the status quo, I will remember the words of the other great philosopher, Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Revenge of the Hall Monitors

There's a strikingly odd generational irony that underlies the world of reformy stuff.

The architects of this wave of top-down, rigidly created and enforced educational control-freakery, from the legislative creators of NCLB to the corporate underwriters of CCSS are largely Baby Boomers. Bush, Clinton, Obama, Duncan, Gates-- boomers all. Other generations are represented (e.g. David "Babyface" Coleman and Eli "Elder Statesman" Broad), but school reform remains largely one more attempt by my generation to rewrite the rules of society.

It seems so unexpected. How did the generation that rejected its parents' desire for a stable, solid structure, a generation that found a thousand ways to stand for non-conformity-- how did that generation end up demanding that its own children shape up and snap to? How can it be that middle-aged men are now getting out their well-worn vinyl copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall and thinking that those children's chorus singing "Teacher, leave those kids alone" really needs some rigorous educational pummeling? We were going to fight The Man. Somehow, some of us grew up to be The Man on steroids.

Part of the answer is, of course, that no generation is homogenous. For every kid running through the halls of the school and trying to fight The Power with his scruffy jeans and tie-dye (cause The Power hated tie-dye), there was a kid from the same class, neatly dressed, working as a hall monitor and telling people to be quiet and get to class. Nor have all of us grown up to believe that Kids These Days are slack-brained degenerates who need to be pummeled into obedience.

But, as often noted, Bill Gates was not exactly a young Republican afraid to cross the street without parental permission. Nor was George Bush exactly Exhibit A for How To Properly Pursue an Education.

So what has happened? Is this the revenge of the hall monitors, who have finally secured positions of power and are now finally going to make Those Darn Kids behave? Did we decide that little boxes made of ticky tacky are actually desirable-- at least for other people? Is this just the Boomer's well-documented tendency to believe we have Grasped an Important Righteous Truth and must now make everyone else see?

I don't know. I mean, I really don't know, and I am really puzzled. Has the most individualistic, do-your-own-thing generation in modern memory literally forgotten what it means to be a young human searching for your own place in a one size fits all world? How have we decided that our own experience growing up is one that our own children (or at least other people's own children) absolutely must not have?

In The Lego Movie [mild spoiler alert], Will Ferrell is a father who has created an awesome and amazing Lego world. He forbids his son to touch it, and begins gluing it into place so that those blocks can never, ever take another shape. When he realizes what he is doing to his son, and that he has become the villain in his son's story, he relents, and the two begin to create together. (Also, you should totally go see this movie, because it is absolutely fun in the best way-- children laugh at some spots, adults laugh at other spots, and everybody goes home humming that earworm of a theme song).

We need a moment like that. The leaders of reformy stuff need to look some real, live human children in the eye and start creating with them instead of experimenting on them. They need to stop performing Orwellian gymnastics that use the language of opportunity and choices to describe the reality of straightjacketed one-size-fits-all limits.

Most of all, we need to remember what there was to love about our own lives and challenge ourselves to give our children more. Somehow, reformy boomers have grown up, not to be our parents, but something even worse. We do not create a better world with our children by way of "no" and "less," even if we cloak it with the language of "yes" and "more."

More Defective Children

A story out of Pittsburgh Sunday and subsequently picked up by the AP highlights the growing problem with the growing number of children diagnosed with ADHD. This is not a new trend; there have been numerous stories over the past year or two characterizing the diagnoses as everything from an uptick to an epidemic.

Most peoples' attitudes about ADHD are heavily influence by personal anecdotes. We know the student who couldn't function in class until he was put on ritalin. Or we know the student who claims ADHD when he doesn't want to do work, but can sit in his tree stand motionless and silent for three hours waiting for a deer. Or we know the student who has been drugged into a zombie state so that he'll behave. Our experience with labeled students leads us to reach a variety of conclusions about how whether ADHD is real disorder that requires medical intervention or a psycho-scam perpetrated by the parents of students who just need to shape up.

I'm an ADHD skeptic. I believe it exists, but I believe that some fairly large percentage of students so labeled have been labeled incorrectly. And I think that problem is going to get worse.

I remember my son in Kindergarten. We had what could be charitably called a student-teacher mis-match, and we found ourselves at several school meetings to discuss his problem. See if you can guess what his problem was. He would arrive for school about 20-30 minutes before class started. The teacher expectation was that he would spend that time sitting quietly at his desk, doing nothing. That's right-- my son's problem was he was a five year old boy.

We soldiered through the year with forbearance that I wish I could retroactively withdraw. Given it all to do over again, I would fight harder for my son. But we did hold the line on one point-- the hint that maybe perhaps he had a medical problem that should be addressed. It would have been easy, had we been less-informed or less confident, to decide that we needed to investigate the possibility of my son having ADHD. We didn't. And on that point, I don't need a do-over.

Early in my career, I read an article that turned a big fat light bulb on for me, and I wish I could credit it now. But I still remember the main idea.

When we are supremely confident in our programming at school, a really bad thing happens. Here I am, in my classroom, delivering a perfect lesson, using perfect materials, teaching like a boss. Chris is not learning. But it can't be me, it can't be my materials, and it can't be my instruction. If everything I'm doing is right, and Chris isn't learning, there can only be one explanation--- Chris is defective.

Let me predict one side-effect of the current reformy wave. As teachers proceed to deliver perfect Pearson-crafted lessonry in CCSS-approved formats, we're going to find ourselves wit a new wave of ADHD and Learning Disability diagnoses.

When we make nine-year-olds sit and do 90-minute-long projects to properly rigorfy them, we will find that many just can't do it, and where we are absolutely confident that our programs are flawless, there will be only one possible conclusion-- we have many, many defective nine-year-olds to diagnose.

We can already see the tip of this iceberg. As Kindergartners struggle with what used to be First Grade demands, the cries are going out. No, not the cries of "this material is developmentally inappropriate." The cries of "Our five-year-olds are not properly prepared for Kindergarten!" And you white suburban moms already know why your children are flunking.

If we're going to demand that developmentally inappropriate programs be implemented, and we refuse to ever examine the possibility that there is something wrong with the program, then we must look elsewhere to explain failure. Right now, we like teachers as an explanation for that failure, but as we put more TFA bodies and fully-scripted teacher-proof programs in place, we won't be able to blame teachers any more. There will be no choice but to blame the children.

CCSS reformy stuff is already delivering the "news" that American children are far dumber than anybody who doesn't work at Pearson or the USDOE had ever suspected. Soon, it will also reveal a previously-unnoticed epidemic of children who are defective in other ways. Your third grader has trouble operating a computer for testing? Kid must be learning disabled. Your first grader can't sit and read for an hour and then write long essays about what he's read? He must be ADHD.

And don't forget-- the plan is that these labels will be attached to your child, via the cloud, until they day they die. George Orwell had no idea.

Top Down

There are many many many many MANY reasons that top down reformatorium programs are a bad idea. But lets just focus on one for a moment.

Years ago our school had to implement a new graduation project program. Our principal met this challenge by putting a bunch of staff in a room to thrash out the details of how the new program would work. We met and we talked and we talked and we met, and eventually hammered out a whole program for the graduation project.

But we ended up with more than a workable program. We also ended up with a room full of people who understood how the program was supposed to work.

Management training 101 says that you want to give people the illusion of involvement in the creation of a program so that you will also get buy-in. But when you create new programs or reforms from the bottom up, your program creation is also your program training, and that is worth its weight in gold.

Apologists for CCSS keep blaming the various issues on a bad rollout. If only the implementation hadn't been flawed, they say. we would be gamboling through fields of common core daisies. But implementing CCSS from the top down absolutely guaranteed that the rollout would be flawed. The messed-up implementation is not a bug; it's an unavoidable feature.

Top down implementation means that none of the people who actually have to implement the program have any idea of what the program is or how it's supposed to work. Everything has to be explained to everybody, and that's a long process, a process not unlike a long game of telephone.

CCSS has been even worse than the average top-down implementation because it is so jam-packed with its own jargon. Teachers are sitting through training where hours are being devoted simply to getting everyone in the room to use the proscribed definition of "rigor." Teachers are spending days in seminars about "unpacking" the standards themselves, which is a nice-sounding way of saying "trying to figure out what the hell all this gobbledygook is supposed to mean to an actual classroom teacher.":

With bottom-up reform, everyone has been in the room working on a shared language of shared expectations together. That understanding emerges organically while the details are hammered out. But top-down reform has to be passed down in its entirety, all the way down to the actual words being used. The program becomes like bad stereo directions that are passed down as a xerox of a xerox of a xerox ad infinitum, each one presented by someone who has his own maybe-faulty understanding of what he sees on the bad copy that's been handed to him.

If the most genius edu-whizes in the world came up with the best school reform system ever and tried to implement it this way, there would be tremendous problems. Start with a hackneyed mess of garbled muck like CCSS, and you are absolutely guaranteed a flawed implementation.

George Miller Still Doesn't Get It

Rep. George Miller is a forty-year veteran of Congress, has been ranking Democrat on the education committee, and was tagged by the National Journal as one of the seven most liberal members of the House of Rep. He was even on the ground floor of NCLB. He was elected in 1974, one of the "Watergate babies" who were going to help clean up DC. And he's helped push Head Start and early childhood ed. So if this guy doesn't get it, we must be in real trouble.

This guy doesn't get it.

Last week EdSource ran an interview with  Miller by Kathryn Baron.

Miller was an architect of NCLB, and Baron leads with his surprise that NCLB ever brought us to the land of high stakes teaching to the test. And then he went on to defend testing and accountability, saying that the most important part of the law was the requirement for districts to publish data on how well kids were doing.

"In this education system, if you aren't counted, you don't count," says Miller. You remember how in the first Jurassic Park the idea was that T-Rex could not see objects unless they moved? What we have here is a similar condition-- politicians and bureaucrats who can only see data, not human beings. If people aren't generating data, people suffering from this condition cannot see them.

Testing was intended as a way to measure schools’ progress based on how well their students scored and to show schools where they needed to make improvements. Instead, said Miller “the mission became about the test."

And now I want to shake Miller by the shoulders and ask, "What the hell did you think was going to happen??" But that is a recurring theme of this interview-- Miller requests that people smack themselves in the head with a hammer and then professes amazement that there are all these folks running around with hammer-shaped indents in their foreheads. Rep. Miller, you said it yourself-- if it isn't counted, it doesn't count. If nothing is counted but the test score, how do you expect schools to respond?

Miller was "ruffled" when school districts reacted poorly to NCLB's requirement that 100% of students be above average.  

“School districts and states came in, in the first year, and waved the white flag, and said, ‘We can never make the goal,’” recalled Miller. “Their proficiency was like 7 or 8 percent. I said, ‘Come back when you’re at 70 percent.’”

Miller must be a hoot in restaurants. "Yes, I know I ordered this steak well done, but I figured you'd check back with me when it was rare to see what I really wanted you to do."

Miller has stayed in the ed reform business. He's most recently been busy trying to broker a deal between the state of California and Arne Duncan over testing. Miller wants the state to use the Smarter Balance test in the spring to garner great data for schools.

“My position, I think, is that we should extract the data (from the Smarter Balanced field tests) that we can extract because it would be helpful. I think it would be helpful for teachers. If the kids in your classroom didn’t thrive, what would you change for next year?” Miller said. “And from what the people at Smarter Balanced say, they’ve developed a range of data that can be extracted, and supposedly, if this is a road test, you’ve got to bring something back to analyze.”

I'm flabbergasted. That quote shows not a shred of understanding of how tests, teaching, students or classrooms work. It's not that teachers don't ask what they need to change for next year-- every good teacher does that. But what teacher ever said, "After working face to face with my students, grading their papers, watching them in class, talking to them, and seeing the results, what I really need here is a standardized test that they took on just one day to tell me what's happening in my classroom."

Also, Rep Miller, when you're trying to decide how a service provider's work is affecting its customers, you might want to ask the customers rather than the corporation concerned about its multi-million dollar contract.

Miller likes CCSS, and sees it as just a way to track progress. Freshman year of college is too late to consider whether you're college ready or not. What's oddly interesting about Miller's view of reformy stuff is that he expresses it in terms of what the students need, while being surprised that the laws passed to force certain behaviors on schools have unintended consequences. But it's on the subject of teacher evaluation that Miller drops this bomb:

From the very beginning, this was a question of whether or not teachers wanted to be the architect of the system, or they just wanted to be the tenant.

Did I miss the meeting where teachers were invited to be the architects for ANY of this??? Did I miss the chapter in The Reform Saga where teachers walked away from the table, or refused to come to the table, or stole the tablecloth and silverware. Hell, did I miss the part where teachers were even allowed into the room to wait on the table??

The root source of much teacher opposition to evaluation under the current system has been precisely because we had NO opportunity to be the architects, meet the architects or even wave at the architects as they drove by on their way to the table.

Miller is retiring. After the ACA became law, he felt he had done everything he wanted to do. His retirement plans are unclear, but at the very least this interview is a warning for everyone who thinks electing liberal Democrats will improve the reformy climate in DC.

Reform and Engineering Systems

Peter DeWitt ran a column last week on NBC's Education Nation advertising site leaping off from the question of how to chart a course through the middle of this debate. I feel his pain. Education has become another area in US life where it is no longer enough to believe that the people you disagree with are wrong-- you must view them as your mortal enemies, motivated by some combination of evil, greed, and stupidity. "Moderate" doesn't just mean a central position on the issues, but also refers to the degree of heat one brings to the argument table.

After some thoughts that you really should go read, DeWitt arrives at this:

 If we stop debating on who is right or wrong and actually work together to figure out how to move forward, we may find that our end goals are the same, and only our means are different. Perhaps I’m too idealistic. 

And that got me thinking, not for the first time, about the different goals in play in education reform and reclamation these days.

I think of myself as a moderate. I don't see any value in having national education standards, of any sort, at all, ever. But I do understand why some people think such standards have merit, and I don't assume that they are horrible people.

But I am afraid, despite DeWitt's hopes, we don't all have the same goals. I'm not talking about the profiteers. Lightyears of words have been strung together to tell that story, and I'm not going to address to that today. I think something else is driving the architects of school reform, and I think that explains, even more than greed, why we're pulling in different directions.

I've lived most of my life around engineers and their modern offspring, computer systems guys (as an English teacher, I'm a bit of an anomaly). And here are two things I know about folks in those fields:

1) They love neat, pretty systems.

2) Human beings often fail to behave the way they think human beings ought to behave.

Point #1 is important to understand. Engineers like elegant systems. Whatever it is-- stereo equipment, a way to move dirt in the back yard, a system for remote access a particular program-- they love to design a smooth, elegant means of accomplishing it. That is the goal. Given the choice between a sloppy cobbled-together system that gets the job done and a sleek elegant system that doesn't-- but should --they will pick the elegant non-functional system every time.

Who has not had this conversation with their tech department?

Teacher: This hardware/software you set up isn't parsing the widgets for me.

Tech guy: Really? That should work. [accusing tone] Are you sure you didn't mess up the fribulator?

Teacher: Didn't touch it. This thing doesn't work. Can you just do a workaround so I can finish

Tech guy: No no no. This should work. [followed by hunching over equipment having prolonged conversation with himself]

Three weeks later the tech guy is still trying to tweak the setup. Meanwhile, you've parsed your widgets with a pencil and some 3x5 notecards. File this with all the times you were going to use that cool hookup in your class and 95% of the period was wasted with tech guys trying to get things to work the way they were supposed to.

I don't know Bill Gates, but given my experience with engineers and computer guys, I wonder-- does he want to rule the world and make money from it, or does he just want to organize. I wonder if he and other engineery types don't look at our traditional education system and see a system that is so higgledy-piggledy, haphazard, random, and messy that it gives them hives.

I think it's possible they just want to see a smooth, elegant system.

Do they care about results or students or teachers or communities? Probably, but their core belief is this: if you get the proper system in place, the results will take care of themselves.

So if it seems as if the architects are talking about teachers and students and schools as if we're all just cogs in some big shiny machine-- well, yes. To them, we are. And as soon as the machine is properly tweaked and aligned and calibrated and set-up, we will all be whirring along, happy, productive cogs who are getting everything we ever wanted.

They're wrong. Human beings don't operate well as cogs, and system perfection is largely inachieveable. The day will never come when every single student will successfully take Smarter Balance test online in one day without a glitch. "But it should happen." And rather than bust out paper and pencil and do what works, the engineers will keep striving for perfection. And because our goal is to perfect the system, it doesn't matter if the clock is still running and years are wasted for the students while the machine is set up.

In the meantime, engineers see humans in the education system as functions-- teachers are Content Delivery Specialists and students are Data Generation Units. And all functions must be standardized to certain tolerances in order for the system to run smoothly. Worst case, engineers can see humans as a problem. By refusing to behave the way they ought to, humans will keep messing the system up. Either those cogs must be brought into compliance or replaced with other cogs that do what they're supposed to. For the good of the system.

So no, Dr. DeWitt, in the end I don't think we want the same things, and the differences in what we want end up being rather critical. In the best of times, when the system is running smoothly and the students are prospering, there's no conflict. But when crisis time comes (or is created artificially), and we have to decide where to focus our dwindling resources, it makes a critical difference whether our imperative is "Save the kids" or "Save the system."


I don't think the engineers are malevolent (though I think some profiteers are using them to break trail). But I don't think they get it. And I'm not sure how to help them get it, because the other obstacle to dialogue here is a power differential. The architects aren't speaking to us, and they don't have to. At least, not yet. I don't think it's hopeless-- I know several engineery types who get along quite well with other carbon-based life forms, so I know it's possible. So in the respect at least, Dr. DeWitt, I share your idealism.