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.

Sharp-Minded Van Roekel and Rhee Join Debate Club

US News has a feature called "Debate Club" which presents "a meeting of the sharpest minds on the day's most important topic." Yesterday they decided to collect some sharp minds to debate the Common Core. And among other things, we learned that Van Roekel's "course correction" lasted about a week.

The choice of sharp minds is telling. Arguing against the Core are Neal McClusky (Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom), Matt Kibbe (FreedomWorks), and Mike McShane (American Enterprise Institute). So we're going with the "CCSS is opposed by some right-wingy types" narrative.

Arguing for are Charles Barron (Democrats for Education Reform), Jack Markell (Delaware Governor and co-chair of CCSS initiative), Michelle Rhee (educational dilettante), and Dennis Van Roekel (sound of my hand slapping my forehead).

Van Roekel Unchanges Course

All of these sharp minds deserve attention, but it's DVR's offering that is most illuminating. You may recall that just over a week ago DVR "corrected course." His offering to the debate club is literally just an edited down version of his course-correction letter, but it's what he has cut in the edit that is most damning.

Still here: Calling himself a teacher. NEA members always thought national standards a great idea. Critics on right and left oppose them. Implementation train wreck. National standards are better than patchwork. Roll-out sucked because teachers not involved. Books and tests should match standards. Globally competitive blah blah blahdy blah.

Not here: DVR's "botched implementation" letter included specific recommendations, including putting a hold on CCSS while teachers on the state level examined and rewrote the standards as they deemed necessary. DVR's debate club edit shows no trace of this. In fact, we've completely backed off backing off. The headline-grabbing course change is no more. It took just a week for DVR to walk back everything significant he said in his course correction letter; now we're back to "the core is totally awesome and we just need to tweak implementation a little bit." 

Note that, given the length of some of the other arguments, DVR did not have to cut the action items from his own piece. The only reason for his earlier, stronger statements not to be here is because he wanted to cut them out. It took DVR just eight days to weasel-step himself backwards.

In the interests of transparency, I admit to having said nice things about DVR when he offered the course correction. I suppose, like most of the good reformy folks, I could just erase that blog and pretend I never said it. So, well played DVR, well played. Also, bite me.

What Other Sharp Minds Have To Say

While the DVR double-reverse is the big takeaway here, I can't skip over the other sharp-minded offerings in the debate club. Here, in no particular order, are these wise observations.

Mike McShane thinks national standards are super-fine. But states went after them too quickly, which was a big problem, and then they signed on for uber-computer-techy-testing, which was just foolhardy and expensive as all get out. CCSS botched the implementation so badly that the whole business has been undermined.

Jack Markell believes in the Big Mo of CCSS and warns us not to panic. Improve implementation and wait patiently while several years' worth of students have their education wasted as we figure this out. He claims to have met first grade teachers who have used data analysis and CCSS to make themselves more effective, and I'm probably not supposed to conclude from that that these teachers sucked terribly before CCSS, but that's the only conclusion I can reach. Markell also scores points for nerve by actually using the phrase "staying the course" without irony.

Neal McClusky comes out of the gate with the headline "Common Core Treats Students Like Soulless Widgets" and wraps up with the sentence "It is a federally coerced, one-size-fits-all regime that ignores basic, human reality." Everything in between is icing on that cake.

Charles Barone reminds me that I want so badly for his group's full name to be "Democrats for Education Reform Programs," because then their acronym would be DERP and justice would be served. Barone provides a pretty spectacular goulash of goonery. He says in some states CCSS is becoming the "Vietnam of education issues" and isn't that a rich and curious analogy for a CCSS proponent to use. He depicts opposition is "all-purpose right-wing fringe arguments" and lumps opponents with "small bands of tea partiers." He blames the rash of testing in New York on Randi Weingarten and the AFT. And then, as God is my witness, he descends into a series of disconnected sentences that argue against CCSS. These perhaps are meant to support his main point, which seems to be that CCSS intentions are beautiful but implementation is undermining that. In which case, DERP is a well-earned title.

For the finish, Barone, incredibly, goes back to Vietnam! This is an apt metaphor apparently not for "never should have been there in the first place" or "mess created by tissue of government lies" but instead we're reaching for "quagmire" or "place everybody left after they figured it was  not cost-effective to stay." Not making things better, Charles.

Matt Kibbe argues that all attempts at national standardization are doomed to fail, that all federal attempts to intervene in education have failed miserably, and that the federal government is a really awful terribly money-sucking black hole that consumes all things bright and good. He offers an interesting new summation of CCSS-- "Common Core represents a set of national standards with the aim of imposing uniformity on the country’s schools through rigorous testing requirements." Then he offers further observations about how badly federal government sucks, notes that children are individuals, says conservatives should hate this, and brings it all home with a call for School Choice.

Michelle Rhee hasn't accomplished much of value in her adult life, but boy does she have her talking points polished to bright sheen. Her argument is personal-- she uses the word "I" a great deal-- and familiar. The states wrote the CCSS. Teachers (75% of them) love it. We have to fight the status quo because Estonia is kicking our ass. She constructs a barely-made-of-straw man and then kicks it down (straw men are the only people Rhee will debate). Rhee feels all the feelings. She's outraged. She's appalled. She has some false statistics to back her feelings up. Also, high tech companies are pushing for more foreign work visas because we don't have enough engineers in this country (willing to work cheap). She is no stranger to how change is hard in education reform. She is all about the kids. That's why from now on she is going to donate her massive speaker fees to charities that work with children. Okay, I made that last part up. She's totally going to keep making money hand over fist talking about how much she wants to look out for the kiddies.

Who won the debate? You can still click on over there and cast a vote. Unfortunately, you can't vote on how badly you think US News stacked the debate against a full examination of CCSS, nor can you vote for which debater made the most ridiculous points or most egregiously stabs his own union members in the back.

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."

On Studentfirst Grades

I'm pretty sure that Michelle Rhee, celebrity spokesmodel for ed reformy stuff, is a Kim Kardashian kind of problem. The best response to today's ridiculous grade release, as with most of what Rhee does, is to not talk about it as if it is the most important things that happened in the education world today, stop linking to it, and generally stop turning her into the most successful clickbait on the interwebs since Justin Bieber danced with a panda cub.

Seriously. Kids were shot up today in NM, and the internet is burning up with the latest Rhee-volting development. The woman has never successfully done anything, at all, and yet every time we react to her like someone just slapped us with an armadillo, it makes her look like a Really Important Voice. What might happen if we all just refused to mention her for a week?

That is all.

StudentsFirst Flashback

A year ago, like many teachers, I was quietly plugging away in my classroom, only slightly aware of the rumblings of CCSS off in the distance. I've found it instructive lately to go back and look at some of what was being said, and how it has panned out since.

One gem I ran across was this piece from the StudentsFirst blog in which Eric Lerum explains why CCSS is super swell and everyone should want to give it a big educational kiss on the lips and addresses the first pushback. How could we have responded if we knew then what we know now? The original text is in italics. My comments will be in red.


Recent efforts to roll back Common Core (our latest Policy Brief on Common Core can be read here) adoption and implementation are troubling. Legislative proposals in Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, and South Carolina threaten the progress already made in these states to ensure schoolchildren are ready to compete with their peers in other states and around the world.
As it turned out, that was just the beginning. At last count, Mercedes Schneider found pushback in 23 states.
 
We've come to expect resistance to change and reform from a variety of special interests over the past few years. That’s because education reform puts students' interests ahead of adults' priorities, often for the first time, and that threatens the adults. What is different -- and concerning -- about the recent pushback against Common Core, however, is that it appears to be motivated not by a desire to protect the status quo, but rather by a desire to deliver on a political agenda at the cost of students.
 The two threads offered here are familiar. First, it's for the children. Even the strongest proponents forget to sing that song, instead offering that we need to stop coddling the children or cutting them off from the excessive confidence of their white suburban mothers. Second, the pushback is just politics. The repeated notion that opponents are confined to Tea Party Tinhat Wing republicans or motivated by Obama Derangement Syndrome still has legs, though more and more media are recognizing that opposition comes from all across the political spectrum.



Let's be clear: retreating from the implementation of Common Core standards puts equity among schoolchildren across the country at risk. Current state standards highlight disparities among expectations for students; what might constitute proficiency in one state is considered failing in another. It makes no sense to continue under a structure that lets U.S. students reach college and compete for jobs in a global workforce unprepared and unable to compete, even when they have done all of their homework and passed all of their graduation requirements.
The StudentsFirst hallmark-- prove your point by asserting really hard. "Let's be clear" means "I am not going to explain how we know this." No links, no data, not even anecdotal evidence. Just assertion. You would think by now, we would be awash in tales of people who finished school but found themselves unemployable on the global scale, or US employers searching fruitlessly for American hires. A year later-- nothing.
 
Moreover, when students in different states are held to different standards, comparative growth is difficult to analyze, which makes improvement in our schools hard to achieve. Common Core makes it possible to measure the progress of students from state to state against the same metrics, enabling policymakers to make better decisions regarding everything from adoption of instructional methods to resource allocations to professional development.
Turns out we already knew this was baloney last year because the Brown Center Report on American Education had already laid out that scoring disparities were worse within states than between states. The rest of this paragraph because it once again tips the reformers' hand. We need national standards so that we can make national comparisons. Why? Asa classroom teacher I have never thought, "Gee, if only I could give my students a test that would allow me to compare them with students in Utah, because then I could make better lesson plans for next week." No, we need the national standards so that we can make national comparisons to inform national decisions about national materials, methods, curriculum, and materials. The real need for national standards and national tests is to better data-drive a national school district.

A 2010 study by the Fordham Institute found the Common Core Standards stronger than 33 states' standards in both English Language Arts and math. Even states like Massachusetts and California, with some of the more rigorous state standards in the nation, chose to adopt the Common Core because the benefits outweighed any risks of switching over (also, notably, up to 15 percent of the state’s standards can be shaped to a state’s own interests and needs; and Massachusetts, as a lead member of an assessment consortium, helps develop the assessments administered to their students).
Most of the arguments propelling the current wave of concern regarding Common Core are unfounded and blatantly misconstrue the facts. First, there is no question that Common Core would improve academic standards for students. All of the states listed above that are considering withdrawal from Common Core or the testing consortia had standards equal to or less rigorous than the Common Core, except for Indiana's ELA standards. In some cases, particularly Idaho and Missouri, their standards were among the worst in the nation.
 Mercedes Schneider has done the definitive take-downs of Fordham and their study. I have nothing to add-- this is all bunk.

Furthermore, Common Core is neither federally imposed nor a national curriculum, where 45 states plus the District of Columbia voluntarily adopted Common Core as a means of raising the quality and rigor of their state academic standards. Common Core establishes high learning expectations for students that are consistent regardless of district or state. This initiative does not prescribe pedagogy and there are no federal bureaucrats telling teachers how to teach the material or prescribing any particular curriculum framework. Instead, Common Core outlines internationally benchmarked skills that students should know and allows districts and schools adopt their own curricula and instructional materials aligned to the standards.
Nobody believes this any more, either. Even supporters have started referring to CCSS as a federal program. Note the careful wording-- "there are no federal bureaucrats telling teachers..." No, there are just state bureaucrats and corporate curriculum writers doing so, as highly incentivized to do so by the feds. And a year later, we still have seen no sign of the international benchmarks that are supposedly a foundation of CCSS.

By focusing on unfounded fears of federal interference, state policymakers are overlooking the huge benefit of Common Core to educators. Teachers have overwhelmingly signed on to the rigorous standards movement. We're already seeing a huge influx of new ideas and innovations for learning materials and professional development tools. Most of these leverage new technology and online platforms that make tools, tips, and lesson plans more accessible to teachers looking to improve their craft and reach students in ways they never have been able to before. Best of all – many of these are teacher-driven. One such site, Achieve the Core, represents a joint effort by the two national teacher unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to supply teachers with Common Core implementation tools.
Yes, those federal interference fears are totally unfounded. Well, unless you count Duncan's attempt to influence local decisions in both California and New York. And NEA and AFT continue to experience anger and agitation from their members. (Check out the comments section of this NEA puff piece on CCSS). And a year later, achievethecore.org is not exactly awash in thousands of lesson ideas.

 Among educators I've talked to about this, there is a tangible excitement about the potential impact these could have in the classroom and on the teaching profession as a whole. Many teachers began implementing Common Core in their lessons as soon as sample standards were released to the public. Legislators and parent groups should support this groundswell of teacher enthusiasm towards bringing rigorous standards and creative lessons to students.
 Yeah, keep saying it and it may be true.

There should be no doubt that with Common Core, states have embarked on the right path. It is true that implementation has been difficult, but states are making progress. The hard work of adopting new standards and assessments is something every state has done in the past, and these transitions are complex. Yet the move to Common Core is notable for something different, even extraordinary. For perhaps the first time, states – and the school leaders, educators, and communities responsible for our children – are able to do this work together. Let's make sure that states' efforts to do the best for our students are not thwarted by those who seek to use unfounded fears to make political points.
There should be no doubt? Why? For fans of data-driven instruction, these folks sure don't want to provide much actual support for what they have to say. Is it extraordinary that states are able to work together, or is that just further proof that this is a federally-driven, corporate-manufactured program?

In some ways this piece can make us all nostalgic for February, 2013, when many of us were still clueless about just how bad CCSSec was, and CCSS supporters were still sure they were being opposed only by a splinter of easily-marginalized political activists. The good news for us is that we have learned a lot since this piece first ran. The bad news for them is that they have not. I have saved one little detail for last.

I did not locate this article through some deep or wandering search. StudentsFirst posted it on their twitter feed just this week. Apparently they think it's still on point. Good for their opponents to know.