Robert Putnam and Cage Busting

It was probably because I was reading Robert Putnam's Our Kids and Rick Hess's Cage Busting Teachers, but in Putnam's book, this section leapt out at me. Putnam is describing social capital, the "informal ties to family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances involved in civic associations, religious institutions, athletic teams, volunteer activities, and so on."

Social capital has repeatedly been shown to be a strong predictor of well-being both for individuals and for communities. Community bonds and social networks have powerful effects on health, happiness, educational success, economic success, public safety and (especially) child welfare. However, like financial capital, social capital is distributed unevenly...

Contrary to romanticized images of close-knit communal life among the poor, lower-class Americans today, especially if they are nonwhite, tend to be socially isolated, even form their neighbors.

Perhaps more important, more educated Americans also have many more "weak ties," that is, connections to wider, more diverse networks. The reach and diversity of these social ties are especially valuable for social mobility and educational and economic advancement, because such ties allow educated, affluent parents and their children to tap a wealth of expertise and support that is simply inaccessible to parents and children who are less well off. 

Now, that speaks to me as a teacher learning about students-- but it also speaks to me just plain as a teacher. Putnam is talking about how the lack of social capital gives poor students a disadvantage, but it got me to thinking about teachers' social capital.

Hess's book talks about authority and power-- but what if the issue Hess is talking about is really social capital?

After all-- one of the side effects of working almost exclusively with children is that teachers don't develop the kind of network of soft ties that other professionals do. In fact, teachers early in their careers are often so busy doing the work that they don't get out, don't join community groups, don't volunteer, don't become part of a "more diverse network." Even things as simple as meeting someone for lunch are not do-able in teacherville.

We've talked a lot about how reformsters have access to a great deal of money, but it's social capital as well. When David Coleman and his buds decided that they had the blueprint for re-inventing American education, they cashed in some social capital and got a meeting with Bill Gates. When I have new ideas about how to revolutionize education, I can...um... tell other faculty in the lounge. Guys like Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli and Arne Duncan have powerful and important people in their phone directory. Guys like me do not.

Weak ties get things done for people with social capital. My child or I have an interest or concern? I know a guy. For the poor, informal weak ties are supplemented with formal government agencies. If a socially capitalized parent is worried that his kid is sick, he cashes in some capital to get an unofficial medical opinion. For the poor, the only solution is a trip to a clinic; they don't have access to a doctor's home number. Likewise, the union often substitutes for teacher weak ties. I may not know how to get connected with a political figure, but my union does.

So when Hess spends time talking about earning moral authority by doing the right thing, when he talks about how to effectively approach the People In Charge to get their permission and support, isn't he perhaps talking about building (or substituting for) social capital?

What is mentoring except offering to share a wealth of social capital with someone who hasn't had a chance to build any yet?

Imagine a world in which every rich and powerful player adopted not schools, but teachers. Imagine if every rich and powerful person decided to become socially connected to four or five classroom teachers, connected well enough that they felt comfy calling him any time.

Of course, it's hard to imagine because what would the teachers offer the rich and powerful player? Because they don't have any social capital to offer him in return. But if such ties became the norm, eventually teachers would become an integral part of a larger network. Heck. Imagine a world where rich and powerful folks connected to each other through their teachers.

But teachers-- because we are isolated in our classrooms, interacting mostly with children, don't build the kind of powerful social capital accounts that other professionals do. Our biggest source of social capital is our students and their families, which means in poor communities the teachers end up with less social capital to "spend" on behalf of their students. In upscale schools, teachers get to grow capital through parent connections, and through former students who go on to be Big Deals.

Seen through this lens, perhaps part of Hess's message is that teachers have more social capital than they think they do, and they should start using it and building it. I think of my colleague Jennifer Berkshire, who's not a teacher, but who gets to interview all sorts of people through the revolutionary technique of calling them up and asking. Sometimes we grossly underestimate the amount of social capital that we have at our disposal.

Maybe the big secret of cage busting is finding ways to build social capital, to create connections, to accumulate the kind of weak ties that make life run better for those who have them. Maybe the cage is not actually a cage, but a kind of null space created by the lack of connections to anything, and we don't need so much to bust the cage as we need to bridge the gap and build connections across that empty zone.

I'm still thinking this stuff through. Maybe when Putnam and Hess give me a call and invite me to sit down with them over lunch to talk about it, I'll flesh it out some more. If they can meet with me for thirty minutes during fifth period.

Cage Busting Teachers?

One of my summer reads was Rick Hess's book The Cage-Busting Teacher. Hess comes to us from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-tilted free-market-loving thinky tank, but Hess is no dummy and has shown at times his willingness to think things through, whether that thinking leads him into disagreement with reformster orthodoxy or not.

This new book of his deals the question of the cages that teachers inhabit, what makes the cages, what keeps the teachers in the cages, and how they can get out. It's a challenging book, because parts of it are dead on and parts of it are dead wrong. But I've read it, so you don't have to (or so that you can decide if you want to).

First, the Very Short Version

Teachers complain of being thwarted, boxed in, bottled up, and just plain caged. Hess spent some time talking to lots of folks, and concluded that while teachers lack the organizational authority to bust a cage (we don't control budgets, staffing, scheduling, etc), teachers can make use of the authority of expertise and moral authority. Using those, teachers can shift the culture of their buildings and create concrete solutions to institutional problems.


The more teachers do that, the more trust they'll win, the more policy makers will back off, and the more room they will have to put their expertise and passion to work. That has the promise to flip today's vicious cycle, where micromanagement leads to resistance, which lead to more micromanagement, which leads to more resistance. Cage-busters can create a virtuous cycle in which problem-solving educators earn the trust of lawmakers and administrators, yielding more autonomy and more opportunity to make smart decisions for kids.

Remember that paragraph, because it contains most of what is right and wrong about Hess's idea.

So What Is the Cage? 

The cage consists of the routines, rule4s and habits that exhaust teachers' time, passion, and energy. The cage is why educators close their classroom doors and keep their heads down.

Hess gets more specific. An avalanche of well-intentioned directives. The casual and thoughtless wasting of teachers' time with everything from potty duty to pointless assemblies to --well, just stuff. Every teacher knows the drill. No systemic rewards for excellence. And being "blindsided by accountability," where Hess admits that testing culture is a bit out of control.

And it is so pervasive that teachers have come to accept feeling alienated, disempowered and frustrated. Hess notes the disconnect between surveys showing that teachers think their boss is doing a good job, but feel their work environment is not open and trusting and that they are not treated with respect. Hess's conclusion is that teachers not only work in the cage, but accept that the cage is an inescapable part of the job.

Hess goes on to point out some of the mindsets that keep teachers in the cage. The MacGyver trap, where some teachers just make miracles out of stretching what they have-- but wearing themselves out and keeping others from finding actual real non-gum-and-paper-clip solutions. Hiding in the classroom, disconnected from the full school system. Getting too angry about the big picture to accomplish things locally. Simply waiting for the flavor of the month to pass, rather than dealing with it. And fear-- fear of rocking the boat, causing trouble, being That Guy, making a mistake.

This part of Hess's construct is his strongest, the part where, mostly, he has a point.

Who Are the Busters?

Hess is clear that CBT are not about specific classroom techniques, but simply seeing their world a little differently. Here are some of the things that Hess's cagebuster believes.

* actions, not words, change culture
* teachers can have influence, but have to earn it
* management's job is to root out mediocrity, but teachers should pressure them to do so
* "teacher leadership" is chirpy nonsense unless it comes with real power
* precision and clarity are important
* problem-solving and responsibility are the teachers' tools for creating change
* the lucky get luckier
* that "this stuff is hard" and that mistakes will be made

Cage Busting Teachers wield their authority of expertise by being experts in their field and knowing what the heck they're doing. They get and use their moral authority by being guardians of the public good. Moral authority is earned.

Hess spends a lot of time throughout the book trying to describe this complex of stuff. What I see him saying is, basically, a teacher who is self-directed and intrinsically motivated, who knows what the right thing to do is and does it.

So, How Does One Bust

I'm going to really oversimplify this part, but contained in it is the best part of Hess's book.

Teachers in the cage tend to be compliant, well-behaved, institutional team players who stay in place. As Hess says, there are many reasons for that, but he's onto something when he observes that one way to get out of the cage is... just to walk out of the cage. I was reminded of C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, describing how there are no actual barriers keeping the damned in Hell. They could walk right out at any time, but for a variety of reasons, they have convinced themselves that they can't, and so they stay there, suffering.

It starts with cage-busting teachers. It starts with teachers earning, employing and leveraging the authority that will make them masters of their fate. It's about a new deal, where teachers embrace responsibility for what schools do and how students fare.

Instead of seeing themselves as other-directed cogs, a CBT would act on the belief that this is our house. A CBT steps up and solves problems. And as the CBT establishes herself as a strong agent of responsibility, administrators invest more trust and responsibility in her, giving her more power to influence the system.

And that's actually pretty much it. The rest is a matter of working out the details.

Contentious Issues 

Hess spends an entire chapter on "The Union Question." Hess knows his history-- he knows that teachers have suffered a variety of historical abuses such as being fired for stupid reasons, and that the union did not just spring up because a bunch of teachers wanted more beer money.

Ultimately, his position here vis-a-vis the CBT is that a CBT does not necessarily take a particular side on the question. Hess is never a fan of over-simplifying some issues: "Cage-busting teachers eschew sweeping generalizations..." So unions can be good or bad, depending on members and leadership.

But Hess's handling of difficult issues gets in the way of his cage-busting vision. He suggests, for instance, that while teachers should be vocal and intolerant when it comes to crappy colleagues, the business of how exactly to identify bad teachers is an issue that the CBT doesn't need to get all wrapped up in-- even though I would argue that it's hugely important and all his talk about getting rid of the chaff and rewarding excellence is meaningless if we have no way to identify either.

And in fact, Hess's CBT is bold and courageous and outspoken and willing to exercise her authority-- but always in a proper non-controversial way. For a while I thought that Hess was advocating his version of "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission," until he specifically wrote that he wasn't.

And There's Hess's Big Problem

The book is filled with dozen of examples of CBTs who identified a problem, figured out a way to address it, and worked the problem until they managed a solution. They are all great stories. And yet every single solitary CBT story ultimately rested on a cooperative administrator. Some had to be convinced at first, but not one of them actively attempted to thwart the CBT.

In Hess's universe, many teachers are not making great enough use of the power that they have at their disposal-- and on this I agree with him 100%. But in Hess's universe, the power structure, the entire system surrounding schools and government oversight thereof-- that is all just as it should be. The right people are in charge, right where they belong.

Teachers "earn" trust. The people in power "yield" some authority to teachers. And all of that earning of trust and power is done on the terms set by those in authority. He even includes big chunks of information about how to get those in authority to say yes to your cage-busting ideas (and he's not entirely wrong-- some teachers are very bad at that sort of thing). But in Hess's world, teachers never have more authority than is given to them by the people in charge. Hess looks at the public education system and sees the Catholic Church, with all power flowing down from above. He sees a feudal society where things run smoothly as long as everyone stays in their place. Teachers who behave themselves and please their rightful bosses can earn a longer leash.

Hess's universe is an inverted version of mine. In my universe, I'm the professional who knows what the hell he's doing (mostly, on most days-- I ain't Superman). If you want to come into my world and tell me what I'm supposed to do, you're going to earn the right to have me take you seriously and consider following your "suggestions" about my classroom and my school. I mean-- I'll listen to almost anything, because I'm always ready to steal be influenced by a new idea. But just because, say, you had some success selling computers or winning an election or running a thinky tank or selling a textbook, I'm not automatically going to recognize your authority in my workplace. Not until you earn it. Sure, you can get control of all or some of the government and pass laws and create some rules, and you may be able to force my compliance-- but that's not authority. It's just blunt force.

It may be that Hess is just offering practical realpolitik. And I absolutely agree that many teachers sit in cages that have lockless doors and bars made of tin foil, cages that don't even need to be busted-- just walked right out of.

But there are administrators, officials, bureaucrats, meddlers, policymakers, and other cage builders out there who are resistant problems, massive obstacles to educational progress, and a polite and proper approach to them isn't going to budge a thing. Hess's whole model depends on cooperation from the people who have positional authority, and the educational landscape is filled with people who aren't letting go of an ounce of their control, no matter how deserving and earning a CBT acts.

In fact, if we just think back, we can recall that during every wave of reformsterism, including NCLB, RTTT, Common Core and everything else that has dropped on us in the last fifteen years, there have been plenty of teachers around with plenty of professional and moral authority, and they were resoundingly ignored. Well, that's not true-- when some tried to speak up, they were belittled and dismissed.

I think Hess's book is worth reading-- there's a lot to think about, even when you're disagreeing with it. But at the end of the day, Cage-busting Teaching is about being a little bit of a rebel, just enough of a self-starter, and not-inappropriately independent. I think some of his ideas are actually useful-- but more so when taken further than he wants to take them, because ultimately, in Hess's world, outside of the cage is another, bigger cage. That is, perhaps, reality, but Hess still ends up with an oddly limited message of, "Stand up for education, as long as you, you know, get permission and don;t get too unruly."

I actually have one other big thought about the book, but I'm going to deal with that separately. In the meantime, maybe Hess will return my favor and give my book a plug.

Rick Hess's Cage-Busting Lessons

Rick Hess has been busy promoting his book about Cage-Busting Teachers, and he reported ten lessons that he learned out on the circuit. As always I find Hess worth paying attention to because (unlike some of his reformy brethren) he's not sloppy or lazy in his thinking. So what did he learn (and, by extension, think the rest of us should get)?

1) Schools and leaders are hungry for teacher leadership. Well, they say they are. Which, of course, is often the problem. Most of us have had encounters with administrators who project a clear message of, "I would love to see some teachers step up and become leaders in pursuit of exactly what I tell them to pursue." This is a recurring issue that I have with Hess's cage-busting model. Sometimes the cages are built strong, wired with electricity, and coated in poisonous venom.

2) Advocates on all sides of the reform/public ed issue love the idea of cage busting teachers. I think that's probably true, but only if we get that there's a wide number of ideas about what a CBT is and what obstacles need to be busted.

3) Hess agrees. Everybody likes CBT, but nobody knows how to grow them. I have some thoughts. But Step One is for administrators to let go of the notion that teacher leadership has to look like they want it to and result in the outcomes they demand.

4) Reformers have focused too much on getting rid of bad teachers, while teachers have not focused on it enough, but everybody should focus more on giving great teachers what they need. Hess is landing near the Hero Teacher Fallacy here, but he's not completely wrong. Guys like Andy Cuomo who believe that there are a gazillion terrible teachers who just need to be found and jettisoned are wasting their time.

5) Veteran teachers are used to a culture that has no respect for excellence. Yes, I'd say that's true. And this:

I've been struck at how enthusiastically these educators describe the lift provided by modest recognition, and how appreciative they are for some of the perks that twenty-something policy types take for granted.

Yup. I've argued for years that money discussion would be less contentious at contract time if districts just offered to treat teachers like respected grown-ups. But they don't.

6) Teachers don't code switch. Sigh. I hate it, but I know he's right. Too many teachers don't get how to function in places that aren't their classroom, and are bad at the most essential part of dealing with people-- understanding what those peoples' priorities and foci are. The most cringeworthy argument I hear teachers make to advocate against a policy is offering some version of, "But this makes me sad.."

At the same time, it's hard not to resent the underlying power dynamic here-- to be heard, teachers have to learn to speak the language of policymakers and boardrooms and suits and even think tanks. Why is it that none of these people have bothered to try learning our language?

7) Reasonable and polite teachers should speak up. We know that Hess prefers his cage busters polite and genteel and not speaking up loudly, rudely or at inappropriate moments. This remains the weakest part of Hess's position-- he's concern trolling and tone police in one, worried that if teachers speak up too loudly or too rudely, gosh, they just won't be taken seriously by the People Who Matter. I won't deny that there are some teachers who are in a seemingly permanent state of High Dudgeon (and reformsters who are stuck in a state of Righteous Crusading Against Infidels). But I'm reminded of something I've said often-- if people don't believe they are being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voice. If someone is yelling at me, nine times out of ten it's because they don't believe I hear them. If I don't like being yelled at, it is often within my power to stop it. It's not that I'll listen to them when they adopt a proper tone; it's that when they know I'm listening, they'll get quieter on their own. Just saying.

8) While Hess reminds us that reformsters by and large mean well, he reminds reformsters that teachers actually have to make all these bright ideas work.

That power and precision accorded to accountability systems, teacher evaluation systems, turnaround models, and the rest is sometimes disturbingly disconnected from an interest in how this affects the actual work of the teachers who are expected to make these deliver.

9) Teachers surprise Hess by actually being quite open to New Stuff. Well, yes. We're always looking at new stuff, trying new things, and experimenting like Doofenshmirtz hunting for a great new Teachinator. Reformsters have made this mistake over and over and over and over again, assuming that because we don't like their stupid new idea, we don't like any new ideas at all. Reformsters consistently fail to ask the question that teachers, experimenting in our classroom every day, always ask-- Does this actually work? Does this actually help me teach students?

10) Policymakers and Other Important People listen to teachers better when teachers provide concrete specific examples of what they're talking about. Fair enough.

My cage busting problem (and I freely confess that I have not yet read the book) is that Hess's whole model seems to assume a maintenance of a certain power status, with teachers on the bottom. In the wrong light, Hess starts to sound like a solicitous parent saying, "Of course, you can come sit at the grown-up table, just as soon as you act grown-up and show us that you can handle it."

What he says sounds reasonable, and it may in fact be a clear dose of Realpolitik, but to get at what troubles me, let me propose an alternative book. In this book Hess (or someone) says, "For too long we've been trying to keep teachers locked up and constrained, forcing them into the shape we demand of them. So let's release them from the cage we've built for them. Let's stop talking to them about how to do their job, shut our mouths, sit down and listen to the experts, the teachers who have devoted their lives to education. And maybe after we have listened and learned, we can prove to them that we deserve to be listened to and our ideas deserve to be considered. But first we need to free them to do the work they know." The author of this imaginary book could call it Cage-Busting Policymakers.

But that's not the book he wrote. And while teachers do need to step up and are (and have been) doing most of the heavy lifting of the teaching world, Hess's assumption that of course policymakers, whether elected or self-appointed, are rightfully in charge, and teachers are, by default, rightfully not.

Hess's best insight is that too many teachers are so used to being caged and powerless that they don't test the limits and they don't break through some bars that are weak and pointless and deserve to be busted. But he is disingenuous to avoid acknowledging where those cages came from in the first place, or the huge number of new cages that have been built in the last fifteen years.

Damn. I'm going to have to read his book.

The Cage-Busting Life

If you have been anywhere remotely in the neighborhood of Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, you've heard the phrase "cage-busting teacher." Hess has a book by that title coming out, and he's been preparing the ground for the seeds that book is meant to plant. You can find bits and pieces of the cage-busting idea in various bits of his writing lately, but a good cage-busting primer is on AEI's website, with excerpts from the book itself.

Busting Cages by Leaning in with Gritty Bootstraps

Cage-busting shares a great deal with the conservative ideas expressed by proponents of grittology and the book Leaning In. The underlying idea-- that people should step up, get tough, exert their power, and generally stop waiting for help is a hard one to talk about.

"Get tough. Find a way. Set a goal and work toward it. Don't depend on help. Figure out a solution you can pursue with the tools at hand."

As advice to yourself, this can be powerful and exceptionally useful. As advice to others, particularly others over whom you have power and administrative control, it can be dismissive and unhelpful. As an excuse to withhold assistance and support from those who need it, this stance is morally and ethically reprehensible.

As self-talk, this is useful stuff. "What can I do with the goals that I have and the resources that are available to me?" is powerful, far more powerful than "Well, there's no use trying because I'm boxed in on all sides." For decades, I have described teaching as a kind of guerilla warfare, where there are many people who don't want you to do your job (including people who should be supporting you and who are, technically, in charge of you) so you have to be willing to get your job done through whatever means you can come up with. So it's possible that I am already a cage-buster of sorts.

And yet I have misgivings about Hess's description. While I have seen him occasionally acknowledge that some teachers inhabit cages that are wrapped in barbed wire, covered by machine guns, and electrified, mostly he doesn't. His examples include a teacher who defied a school policy of only giving ACT info to top students via the guidance office by handing out ACT info himself to any and all students who asked. The story has a happy ending-- even though the guidance counselor was furious, the administration ultimately shifted stance. But the end of the story could have as easily ended with the teacher being ripped a new one by a principal and charges of insubordination.

Hess's examples are, in fact, pretty tame, and likely to remind many teachers of the time an administrator "empowered" them by saying, "You can address this issue with any ideas you like as long as you do the work on your own time and it doesn't cost the district a cent." That's not nothing, but it's not exactly earth-shattering, either.

Cage-Busting Entrepreneurs

While Hess likes classroom teachers whose cage busting nibbles around the edges of policy, he really loves cage-busters who are entrepreneurs finding great new programs to market ideas to shift education. He says that "cage-busters know they sometimes need to step out of their schools or classrooms to do their best work." His examples are the founders of EMERGE and LearnZillion, and they illustrate the difficult gap between cage busting and just plain cage leaving. Of LearnZillion founder Eric Westendorf, Hess writes:

Sure, Westendorf has left the classroom to tackle this problem. But a cage-buster would have a hard time suggesting that he’s left schools, teachers, or students behind.

Okay. But is the problem unintentionally revealed here that teachers have to leave the classroom to have real effects on schools?

One Person's Cage-Buster

Cage-busting and rabble-rousing are, for Hess, two different animals. In a recent interview with the Colorado edition of Chalkbeat, Hess has this to say.

…[W]hat’s happened is to a large extent…there are these teachers out there who are doing amazing things and speaking up, there are lot of teachers who are just doing their thing in the middle, and then you have teachers who are disgruntled and frustrated. These teachers in the backend, the 10 percent, they’re the teachers the reformers and policymakers envision when they think about the profession. They’re the ones who are rallying and screaming and writing nasty notes at the bottom of New York Times stories.

Now, make no mistake-- when it comes to calling out fellow reformsters on their bad choices, their misreading of the field, and their just plain lies, Hess is in the forefront. His picture of the education field is complex and careful, but absolutely geared toward the corporate conservative values that he and AEI back. But he does not reflexively slam teachers, nor does he automatically support anyone who is on His Team.

But he does seem to prefer his cage-busting within certain boundaries. When Newark students, frustrated with a school superintendent who literally refused to meet with the citizens and students of Newark-- when those students followed Cami Anderson to an AEI event to confront her, Hess was not impressed by their cage-busting spirit. Instead, he called them rabble-rousers.

Nor do I look for him to come out in support of teachers supporting the opt-out movement as a way to try to effect policy change. Hess's cage-busters seem to be primarily supporters of favored reform programs.

In fact, most of Hess's examples seem to be ways in which teachers can step up and help the school more effectively pursue the policies it is already pursuing. Hess's Cage-Busting comes perilously close to Cage-Redecorating.


So, Can We Bust a Cage

Hess's basic advice-- step up, do what you can with the resources you have, and don't be afraid to cross some lines to do it-- that's advice I endorse. I'm not sure that Hess fully endorses it, or really wants teachers to bust only certain cages only in certain ways, but that's okay-- the fact that he might not fully embrace the implications of his own advice doesn't make the advice bad. We can still take cage-busting steps.

Teachers really do ask for permission more often than we need to. One of the best ways I know to sell a program is to do what you can with what you've got and then present it to the Powers That Be, saying "See how successful we were with peanuts! Don't you want to give us more resources so we can do more?"

Private industry is loaded with people who fight the system. Teachers often have a natural reluctance to break the rules, even when we know they need to be broken. But sometimes in the service of education or our students, we need to just go ahead and work around the system, push the system, find ways to coax the system into new shapes, or just plain poke holes in the system.

But you have to know the territory. You have to know which line-crossing will lead to Very Bad Consequences, not just because VBC are hard on the recipient, but because you won't achieve your objectives if the VBC are raining down.

You have to recognize the possible consequences. As with Hess, lots of people like the idea of a rebel, as long as they're rebelling against the right things in a proper politely rebellious manner.

And while I appreciate that Hess's book is directed at teachers and not, say, policymakers, I would hate to see it used by policymakers as an excuse. Grit, leaning in, cage-busting-- these are all ideas that are sometimes used by people in power to avoid facing their own responsibility for finding solutions. The value of bootstrapping strategies depend completely on context. Deciding, "We'll just eat rats and plants," is a fine survival strategy for a starving person to choose for himself. But looking down at a starving person from your seat at the Endless Buffet and saying, "Well, you should just eat rats and plants" is indefensible.

Teachers should be problem-solvers who take initiative regardless of what resources and support they may or may not have. As Hess acknowledges, every school in the country has cage-busting teachers in it and always has. But the existence of cage-busting teachers does not excuse cage-welding administrators, politicians, and policymakers from their own obligations to help solve (and to not create more) problems.

What Does It Take for Teachers To Lead?

Rick Hess has been trying to answer this question for a while with many pieces grouped around his concept of a Cage-Busting Teacher (soon to be a book). Here he is answering it again at EdWeek, complete with a quote from me.

Hess has been wrestling with a balanced view of teacher leadership for a while, and I don't know that he's exactly close to an answer, but I'll give him credit for spotting most of the obstacles.

He is correct in noting that one obstacle is the fault of teachers themselves. Many of us have made variations of that same observation-- teachers are so inclined to play nice, follow the rules, avoid making waves, avoid upsetting the main office, and keep their heads down in their rooms that they are often terrible advocates for what they know is right. Every single union leader can tell you the story about the teacher who wants the union to get in there and fight for her, but would you please not mention her name because she doesn't want to have anybody upset with her.

Hess suggests that teachers are also complicit in covering for our less-able colleagues. I don't agree. Most of us are in no position to either cover for or put pressure on our fellow teachers. In fact, most commonly we do the one thing we do have the power to do, which is try to help our less-able colleagues do better. That's as much a practical consideration as a compassionate one. The compassionate part is important-- every teacher has vivid memories of being a lousy teacher for at least a day. But the practical part matters too. About the only other thing I can do to another teacher who I feel is not pulling his weight is to be a dick to him-- criticize him to his face or behind his back, or I could refuse to talk to him, help him, or ever answer any of his questions. That might make me feel like a righteous warrior, but it won't help my school be any better. I can only accomplish that by trying to help. Even there, I'm limited-- he does not answer to me.

It's an interesting thought-- what would it look like to have a system set up so that teachers were accountable to each other.

Critics forever complain about how unions "protect bad teachers." This is like complaining about the existence of defense lawyers. The only alternative is a system in which people can be punished because one person with power is really sure that they deserve punishment.

Hess also notes that the system, including the various new reformster flavors of the week, does not always (or even often) support teacher input. There's a reason that teachers feel conditioned to sit down and shut up.

Some of it is very formalized. My contract with my school district is very explicit-- for me to make statements in public critical of my administrators is contractually forbidden, a fire-able offense. That makes a pretty powerful statement about who gets to decide what is discussed, and how, and when, and by whom.

Teachers are also familiar with this common school district planning approach.

Administrator: Welcome to the first meeting of the District Widget Committee. We really want to hear input from all of you, and we hope that you will feel completely empowered to develop a district widget policy that will really carry the district forward.

Committee chair (one year later): We've put in hundreds of man-hours in research and meetings, and after drafting and redrafting this policy, we think we've come up with something that will really enhance the district.

Administrator: You didn't really come up with the policy we wanted, so we're just going to throw out your work and implement the policy we always wanted.

This of course assumes that the committee wasn't simply stacked with people who were prepped and ready to come up with the "correct" answer in the first place.

When Common Core and its attendant pilot fish or reform arrived, anybody who had been in the teaching biz for a while recognized the drill from the first PD. Like NCLB and a dozen other initiatives before it, this might have been introduced in sessions that began with a large booming announcement: "We are here to tell you what to do, not to listen to you. So shut up, sit down, and do as you're told."

Hess wants teachers to speak up; he also wants them to earn the right to be listened to. But neither particularly matters if local, state or national leadership are unwilling to let either happen. We are working in an environment in which the federal government told the state of Illinois to tell Chicago Public Schools that they were not free to make local decisions about testing. In that environment, I'm not sure what sort of cage-busting any teacher can do.

It is true that some teachers are wayyyyy too sensitive about being so much as frowned at by their administration. It is true that some human beings would rather whine about a problem than try to solve it. But it is also true that some administrations take cage-busting teachers out to the front door and drop-kick them to the street. Hess says that teachers have no obligation to "turn a blind eye to goofily constructed or not-ready-for-prime time evaluation system," but the fact is that it doesn't matter what kind of eye teachers turn to or from those systems-- teachers only have as much say about the matter as their administrators allow them to have. Let me refer you again to my contract-- if I were to post in this blog that I thought my boss was pursuing an evaluation system that was poorly constructed and a threat to the quality education of students in my school district, I could be fired. My only hope would be that my administrator was willing to listen to me; if not, I would have no other recourse.

To be a teacher leader, you have to have followers (or at least collaborators), and teachers who are required to follow one master are not free to be led by somebody else. Hess suggests (not for the first time) that the ed reform wars have been about communication and trust, but they have also been about power (and money) and there is only so much power that teachers can claim before the people who have the power and insist on keeping the power simply get to building a bigger cage.

Conservative Brake Shoes

Andy Smarick just rolled out Part VII in his series of thoughtful considerations of the role of conservatism in education reform. It has been a carefully crafted series as Smarick strikes a careful balance as Smarick surveys many sides of the public education debates then turns to the folks on his own side of the rhetorical ravine and says, gently and carefully, "Some of you guys really aren't any better than some of the yahoos over there."

In this installment, Smarick considers how conservatives (meaning, as he hinted in earlier installments, real conservatives) can be a benefit in revolution by serving as a set of brakes. Some conservatives in those times may seem like wet blankets, but when a fire is threatening to burn our of control, a wet blanket can be just the thing.

But when a group is of one opinion and convinced of the righteousness of its cause, virtues can distort into vices. Unified becomes monolithic; principled becomes doctrinaire; daring becomes rash; confident becomes unrepentant; progressive becomes unrestrained.

Accordingly, opponents can actually aid reformers. They can serve as a ballast helping to ground the reformer, serving as a moderating influence on his proclivity for excess. A reasonable opponent helps reveal the location of the middle and the fringe; her centripetal force pulls the reformer back from the latter.

It's an interesting extension of the idea-- opposition actually serves the cause of conservatism simply by slowing down the race to, well, anything.

Smarick spins this from the book The Founding Conservatives (which I have not read myself) that apparently argues that some of the quiet conservative figures of our own revolution were the necessary wet blankets that kept our revolution from descending into the crazy-pants bloodthirsty excess of the French revolution. He underlines the all-too-often ignored point that the Founding Fathers disagreed tremendously on a great many things. I wish more people remembered this piece of history-- anyone who talks about "what the framers intended" is historically illiterate. The only thing the framers absolutely agreed on was that certain other framers ought to smacked upside the head.

As usual in these pieces, Smarick makes sure his readers know he hasn't defected by being sure to indict the opponents of reformsterism for their own excesses. Those examples show how thinly drawn is the line he's trying to define.

For instance, he offers "You want to destroy public education" as one overstatement, and that is in my estimation just a hair over the line-- some reformsters may not want to destroy public education, or may use words like "transform" or "disrupt," but the end effect of the policies they pursue would, in fact, destroy public education. When one considers the attempt to hand the entire York, PA public school system over to a private for-profit charter operator, it's hard to see that as anything other than the destruction of a public school system.

But he moves on to mark the excesses of reformsters as well (it's probable that Condoleezza Rice is over the line when she claims that charter opponents are the true racists).

Ultimately, he argues that it's the conservatives who keep movements from spinning out of control by offering internal brakes.

Education reform is fantastic at articulating eternal principles, acting with urgency, and speaking in lofty rhetoric. But—as we consider huge federal programs, value-added algorithms, national standards and tests, and other “game changers”—it is worth considering whether we prize prudence, respect experience, or preserve time-tested institutions.

Smarick doesn't offer any names of people who exert such a conservative restraining effect upon the reformster movement. I can think of some reasons they may be hard to find on both sides.

Ben Franklin was one such example. Franklin did not become a radical overnight. He was for years a strong voice for unity with Britain and for retaining the traditional bonds that held the colonies tightly to the empire. Franklin, by many accounts, bowed under his final straw when on a diplomatic mission to Parliament, where he came to understand that there would be no compromise, no recognition of colonial rights.

Franklin could have been a voice for moderation and peace. He could have been an ally of the British. Instead, they made him into a radical enemy.

Likewise, I didn't start out as a hammerfingered blogger. Even a few years ago, I would not have envisioned myself routinely calling out the United States Secretary of Education. Now, I'm more radical than I ever was before. By some standards, I'm not particularly radical at all, and some days I'm actually pretty reasonable. But I didn't get here because of any new impulse within myself. I got here because the more I saw and read and listened to, the more I realized that there are people in this country using their power and money to remake public education, to use the force of law to require me to commit educational malpractice, to trample on the professional expertise and personal commitment of me and my fellow teachers, to put profits and power above the best interests of my students. Some are thoughtlessly destructive, some are maliciously destructive, and some sincerely believe that they are wielding a sledgehammer in a good cause. But the end result is much the same.

Franklin became radicalized because he faced men who believed their authority and power meant they did not have to bend, listen or care about what the lesser humans living in the colonies knew or felt or wanted.

There's an oft-overlooked irony at the heart of our country's revolution. The taxes that we so quickly grew to hate were not capricious or pointless-- not at first. The fighting of what we call the French and Indian War had run up a huge bill, and the British felt that since the bill had been run up protecting us, it was not unreasonable to try to collect from us some of the money that they had spent saving our colonial posteriors. You lend your brother-in-law your car for an emergency and he uses all your gas and dents your fender; it doesn't seem like such a stretch to ask him to help chip in.

But it all descended quickly into an assertion of power. The colonies would do as their betters told them to. They would behave. They would fall in line, or else Parliament would punish them harder until they finally broke and knelt before their rightful masters.

We can argue that eventually more conservative voices gathered enough power on both sides to cool things down. But that was not until after a decade in which no voices could provide enough ballast to offset the pressures that gave rise to radical moves all around.

The biggest issue that Smarick doesn't really address is that all sides in some disputes are not created equal. People on a particular side of an issue might not be evil, malicious, purposefully malignant monsters of ill intent-- but that doesn't mean they aren't wrong. The British Parliament may have had their reasons; they may not have intended to start or war or abuse their own brothers and sisters across the sea, and it may have been unfair to ascribe malicious intent to them-- but they were still wrong.

Conservative voices could have tempered their behavior, but would it really have mattered if they had been dead wrong in a more slow, well-considered, thoughtful manner?

Ultimately, I believe that many reformster programs and policies are dead wrong. I believe the current unregulated spread of money-sucking charters does not need to be modulated; it needs to be stopped cold. I believe that Common Core and the testing to which it is stapled are not policies that can be slowed down and carefully managed; they just need to stop. I believe the attempts to convert schools to a business-style model where a CEO can hire and fire and set pay at will are woefully wrong and destructive to education. I could go on; you get the idea.

It's generally a bad idea to slam the gas pedal down and drive hell bent for angry leather into the dark. But if you are headed straight for a cliff that beetles o'er its base into the sea, I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of difference if you drive more slowly.

Oddly enough, Smarick's piece dovetails nicely with Rick Hess's piece this week suggesting that real education debates are going to require much more than a circus-style desire to smack down the opponent.

Second, the measure of one's seriousness ought to be one's willingness to presume the goodwill of those who disagree, forego the insults and boilerplate, and seek principled points of agreement. This means not just citing evidence that one happens to like and dismissing studies that don't help one's cause. It means recognizing that big, complicated policy questions involve winners and losers, values, and unanticipated consequences; they are never simple questions of "what works" and are hardly ever going to be settled by a series of academic studies. It means acknowledging how incredibly complex these issues are, abandoning the search for pat answers, and recognizing that we're inevitably making fraught judgments about what policies are more likely to do more good for more children--and about which of tens of millions of youth deserve priority (and how much more of a priority they should be than their peers) when it comes to a given decision at a given point in time.  If we're being the least bit honest with ourselves and each other, we're inevitably going to disagree about a lot of this. And it seems to me that we need to see that as okay--and not as prima facie evidence of someone else's broken moral compass. 

As with Smarick's piece, I mostly agree-- but...

In this case, the but is that some participants in the education debates (circus division) have shown other evidence beyond their policy positions that their moral compass is, if not broke, at least tuned to something other than True North. My default position is to assume that other human beings are well-intentioned and can be taken seriously. Some folks wearing the Reformster team uniform have convinced me that they cannot and should not be taken seriously at all, like a uninspired debater who simply beats his shoe on the lectern and tells repeated and baldfaced lies.

No amount of conservative tempering is going to fix that. Nor can tempering and assumption of good will easily bridge the gaps created by completely different values. There are folks, for instance, who believe that orderly standardization of education across all fifty states is a thing that in and of itself has value and virtue. I don't agree. There are people who believe that free market competition makes everything better. I think they operate from a fundamental misunderstanding of How the World Works.

I'm not an ideologue, and if there's anything I've learned in fifty-seven years, it's that I am completely capable of being wrong. But at the same time, I know what I know, and everything I know about the field I've dedicated my professional life to tells me that the reformster agenda is fundamentally destructive to the things I value most. It is as if a physician insisted that she must inject Drano into my daughter's veins; her intentions don't matter all that much, because the Drano injection things is not happening as long as I'm capable of standing up to it, and I'm not sure what reasonable discussion will get us.

I share Hess and Smarick's sense that there is a gulf in the education debates that is keeping us from having discussions that need to be had and which have led people to say a lot of foolish things and often treat other human beings in less-than-exemplary manners. But I see a really huge gulf between the sides, and I don't see it being bridged in any substantial way.

I don't know. Maybe if the conservative brakes get thrown, we can have Hess's honest and difficult conversations. I'm not sure what that will get us.

Years ago, when I was the president of a striking union, while the strike was actually going on, I had regular breakfast meetings with the school board president (in total violation of our respective counsel's advice, so we just didn't tell them). We commiserated, including shaking our heads over the old saying that you can sometimes choose your enemies, but you don't always get to choose your friends, and God save you from some of those friends. We talked only a little about the contractual issues, and we never did a thing that really affected the ultimate shape of the contract. But I think it reminded us regularly that we were both real, live human beings, and probably led us to encourage our own allies to remember the same thing. Even if it didn't actually solve any of the real problems we were facing, it probably kept us all a little more decent and human in a difficult time. Maybe tha5t was enough.

Will 2015 Be Another Rough Year For the Core?

We've had ample time to collect the education predictions for the coming year, and it's an interesting batch. Most of them follow a fairly simple format:

"I love hammers. I predict that in 2015, everything will be a nail!"

Arne Duncan's list is modest-- more kids in pre-school, more graduates from high school, more students with internet access, more students getting pulled into college. It all boils down to, "I predict that our more modest policy initiatives will actually work."

NPR ran an entire list of people predicting that in 2015, those people would turn out to be right. People who like data think there will be data in abundance. People who like school choice think there will be school choice. People who run corporations devoted to certain initiatives such as game-based learning or "snackable" learning predict those things will be doing great.

Of course, with ESEA renewal on the line, people are lining up to make predictions about Common Core. Foes of CCSS are belatedly coming to grips with ESEA's roles in standards adoption. No Child Left Behind (the current version of ESEA) is still the law of the land, and it's a law that virtually every state is currently violating. Only the magic power of Duncan's Magical Waivers is keeping the hammer of NCLB from falling on 50 scofflaw states, and Common Core is one of the ingredients needed to make the magical waiver potion. Take away the hammer and you can arrange it so that nobody actually needs Common Core any more. Add this to the people who want to take a bite out of the Core on the state level, and it becomes clear that the legislation will be worked on this year. Probably.

Anthony Rebora and Ross Brenneman did their own tea leaf meta-analysis this week, and came up with what is undoubtedly the safest summation:

So, in 2015, something is definitely going to happen with the common core ... but it's hard figure out what that might be.

The fate of Common Core is becoming harder to track because the actual words "Common Core" are being abandoned by supporters. Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan have both stopped using brand name publicly, and in general "Common Core" is joining the ranks of "politically correct" as a term that is always used to smear someone else, and never claimed as a brag ("I am proud to be just as politically correct as possible," said nobody ever in the last decade).

Yet some supporters still have hope. In the NPR round-up, Carmel Martin of the Center for American Progress allows that this is the year that legislators lose their interest in CCSS and simply let it be. And while many politicians have abandoned the brand, they will still be pushing a no-name version, calling for high college-and-career-ready standards.

The Common Core battle is further confused by the fact that nobody can tell which side is which. Both political parties are fractured between Pro-Core and Anti-Core, and when you drill down it gets even more confusing (some people hate the Core because they love public education and some people hate the Core because they hate "government schools").

I agree with Andy Smarick's prediction of rough waters ahead, though I think he misses some of the opposition. He points out that many schools of conservatives still feel little love for the standards. Some resent distant technocrats who have pushed aside time-tested standards and approaches on a local scale. Free-market conservatives dislike a one-size-fits-all imposed single system. And small government conservatives are Very Unhappy about the federal overreach involved in CCSS.

And Smarick doesn't even get to the people on the Left who, well, hate many of the same things, including the substitution of government control for democracy while imposing unproven standards. Go figure.

And this is all just the frontal assault on Common Core. There is a huge storm a-brewin' for High Stakes Testing, despite the attempt to mollify critics. From the mockery of Rick Hess's own predictions list ("In a stunning development, the researchers will discover that much school time is not devoted to reading or math--and that many parents aren't even all that focused on reading and math scores") to scathing testimony by local parents like Sarah Blaine, the full court press is on for testing. While folks may like to pretend that tests like the PARCC and SBA are separate issues from the core, these test are the Core's teeth, spine and testicles. Without the tests, the Core standards are suggestions that have to win compliance based on their actual educational merit, and few people are ready to take that bet. Without The Big Test, CCSS is a paper tiger, and not even a good heavy glossy bond, but more like a thin recycled tissue paper.

The Core still has rich and powerful supporters. It also has attackers who undermine the opposition to the Core with crazy-pants "this incomprehensible common core math is trying to turn my son into a communist dupe" arguments. And the "let's just re-name the damn thing" approach has been, so far, pretty successful.

So I'm not going to predict 2015 as the Year That Common Core Goes To That Great Filing Cabinet In The Sky. But I do believe that those supporters who imagine the bumpiest waters are behind are kidding themselves, and should probably grab an oar, because win or lose, they are about to have a very bumpy ride.

Christmas Truce (Part II)

As a guest blogger over at Rick Hess's EdWeek blog (everyone still with me?), Mike McShane started last week with a call for a Christmas truce. You can find a link to that original piece here in my response to it.

McShane promised a follow-up, and he delivered. It was kind of a disappointment; if the first truce call wasn't really a call for a truce, the second is even less of one.

McShane is an edu-guy at AEI, home of conservative market-style education advocacy. You can see him walk-and-talk his way through some ideas about how to gut public education right here.

In Part I, McShane floated the idea that people on different sides of the education debate share a desire to disempower large stupid impersonal institutional approaches to education. In Part II, he's going to offer some concrete steps to turn that philosophical alignment into real world action. It's a couple of winners and a huge whiff.

1. Dig deeper than the party label

Win. "If you are interested in understanding where the real fault lines are in education debates, party ID will probably not help you." Many of us have said as much in a variety of ways. There are plenty of reformsters wearing a Democrat label, and there are plenty of Republicans who actually value the traditional institution of public education. You have to pay attention to what people actually do if you are going to identify your allies.

2. Argue on the right terms

Win. McShane argues that the debate about what works has become a hopeless mess with the toxic side-effect of testing run amok. We need to refocus on the question of who needs to know what and how we could best collect and distribute that information. I suspect McShane and i have huge disagreement about the answers to that question, but I agree that it's a better to start with that question than to continue insisting that a couple of high stakes tests will provide useful information about students, teachers, schools, programs and educational techniques that can be put to good use by teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, government agencies and parents.

3. Let old wounds heal

Win. This is really another version of #1. Being opposed to anything that Talky McBlabsalot says because you've decided he's always wrong, and besides, that son-of-a-bitch once wrote something that really hurt and pissed you off-- that's always a mistake. It is always a mistake to evaluate what somebody says before they actually say it. There are reformsters who I suspect are going to be wrong 99.9% of the time, but I will still hear them out. Ideas should rise and fall on their own value, not on the value of their source.

4. Choice might be the answer

Fail. After all this fairly well-reasoned and thoughtful writing, McShane wraps up by veering off into choice territory. In other words, the final part of McShane's argument is "The way to achieve truce is for you to recognize that my side is actually correct." His analysis of the argument over choice is fair:

But, in order to find common ground, liberals have got to internalize that many conservatives support charter schools and school vouchers because they see them as an opportunity for community organizations to get involved and create new schools in neighborhoods. They like churches and non-profits and want to empower them to help serve kids. To put it another way, in school choice they see Edmund Burke, not Gordon Gekko. It would also help if more conservatives understood that most liberals oppose school choice programs for the exact same reasons. They think that school boards are a better guarantor of community input and values than markets are. They worry that for-profit companies or even far-away non-profit entities are trying to invade communities and instill their values and their vision on children, whether families like it or not. They see charter schools or voucher systems as cold, impersonal, and destructive.

He has missed a point or two here. First, while "many conservatives" may pursue choice out of these values, many conservatives are, in fact, Gordon Gekkoing all over the ed business. The biggest players in the charter school biz are not community groups-- they are hedge fund operators.  And that has led to the spread of charter and choice schools that are devoted to making money, and specifically by making money by serving only a portion of the community. There is a huge gulf between the mission of serving some students and serving all students, and public and choice systems sit on opposite sides of that gulf.

McShane offers three "safeties" to make charters more palatable and representative of the shared values he believes are there.

First, vouchers or stipends or whatever we're going to call the money that follows kids around has to be scaled to the kids. In other words, the high cost students that charters currently dump would come with more money to make them less dump-likely. Second, community groups get "first crack" at charters, before the outside operators come in. Third, schools should be free to do as they wish pedagogically; students will vote with their feet.

Why that doesn't work for me

That still doesn't close the gap for me, though I'm going to keep mulling over that sliding cost scale for students. I've written tons about this, but let me see if I can hit my main objections in short lines.

In my universe, any charter operator must contract for an extended period. Twenty, thirty, fifty years-- I'm not sure I can think of a period that would be too long. No shutting down after two years or one year or six months because it just isn't making enough money any more. Public schools don't just promise to educate every child-- they promise to be there for every child that ever lives in that community in the years to come. "We'll be right here as long as it suits us," is an unacceptable vision for a public school.

In my universe, we do not disenfranchise the taxpayers. Every choice and voucher system ever created has one thing in common-- it tells all childless taxpayers that they are no longer stakeholders in public education. That's wrong. Dead wrong, completely wrong, absolutely unjustifiable. Every citizen of this nation is a stakeholder in public education. Are parents stakeholders? Certainly. Are they the only stakeholders? Absolutely not. Charter advocates keep trying to shade this with the market-tested idea of having the money follow the child so that families can choose the educational option they prefer. That's baloney.

Christmas is over

So, I don't think we're getting a truce, exactly. Personally, I'll keep reading and listening and trying to make sense of people all over the map on the issue of public education, so maybe I've already been observing a kind of truce all along (and that may also be affected by the fact that I have no real power or ammunition other than whacking away at this blog).

I appreciate the effort, Mr. McShane, and I think you've drawn some important connections, but no truce yet.

Hess's History of Common Core's Failure

Rick Hess, one of my favorite writers that I often disagree with, has been scolding CCSS backers pretty severely of late. In the fall issue of National Affairs, he presents a pretty thorough explanation of how Common Core went wrong, and it's well worth a look. Hess has long been a serious reformster (as an AEI guy, he's more the free market reform type), but he's generally a sharp thinker and willing to call shenanigans even people from his own side of the reformy tracks. So his opinion of how the Core came off those rails is worth considering.

Here's his thesis:

The trouble with the Common Core is not that it was the handiwork of anti-American ideologues or anti-teacher dogmatists, but that it was the work of well-meaning, self-impressed technocrats who fudged difficult questions, used federal coercion to compel rapid national adoption, and assumed that things would work out... In reality, the disingenuous manner in which the enterprise has been pursued has ensured tepid buy-in. This, coupled with the entirely foreseeable politicization of the issue, has created a mess for America's students.

Let's take a look at how he lays out his case.

Early Success

Hess covers the early days of CCSS, from "A Nation at Risk" on through Bush I's governors' summit of  '89. He even name checks the spectacular 1995 defeat of national history standards in the Senate (99 to 1). Then on through NCLB and its entirely predictable but largely unpredicted pressure to fudge numbers any which way the states could. Then Achieve, Benchmarking for Success, and ultimately the CCSS.

Hess presents some selected standards to say, "See? Just a simple checklist of educational goals." But he also repeats his criticism that CCSS advocates were speaking out their butts when they threw around phrases like "internationally benchmarked," "evidence-based," and "college- and career-ready."

Early seeds of failure were also sown, Hess suggests, by the adoption path involving a stealth blitzkreig endrun around the democratic process, making the adoption of CCSS both "astonishing and unsurprising." By trying to look mild and harmless, the Common Core was able to slip past checkpoints without raising alarms. The public simply wasn't paying attention. But while advocates may have thought they were bypassing objections and disagreement, they had merely postponed it until the day when the public noticed.

Once the public started to pay attention, and the advocates' carefully crafted talking points were exposed to the harsh reality of implementation, support for the Common Core began to unravel.

Broad Impact (And a Dynamite Sentence)

Hess notes that "straight-talking advocates" (like Chester Finn and Mike Petrilli at the core-loving Fordham) have always acknowledged that standards can end up about as dusty and useless as a corporate mission statement. And then he unloads this sentence:

The real power of standards lies in their ability to change what is tested, and thus to change how curricula and textbooks are written, how teachers teach, and how students learn.

That's as clear, brief and direct explanation as anyone has written (including me, and I've tried more than a few times) of why CCSS and high-stakes testing are not made to be decoupled. The Core drives the testing, and the testing drives the curriculum.

Hess then moves on to advocate for standards and testing, particularly as tools for comparing schools, students and educators (I disagree, but I recognize that reasonable people can believe as Hess does). Standards and testing also ease the marketplace for providers of school materials and for edtruepreneurs like charter operators to work across state lines, as if standardized curricullum and testing somehow erases the regional differences between Florida and Alaska.

And then Hess tries to use the manufacturing standards argument, which is beneath him. Instead of railroad gauges or electrical outlets, he goes with pipe fittings. It doesn't matter. Students are human beings, not manufactured goods. And educational standards have nothing in common with manufacturing standards except the same set of letters.

Here Comes the "I" Word Again

Hess sees the seeds of serious suckage sown in (surprise) implementation. Here's how.

First, the Core was "neither necessary nor sufficient" for fixing the problem of test-gaming that had resulted from NCLB. The NAEP tests were already right there, usable for state-gauging purposes, but instead, CCSS came attached to slackadaisical testing guidelines from the feds that allowed gamesmanship to continue polluting the small pond of barely-useful data.

Second, the states that are committed to the Core just aren't that committed. Yep-- when you pay somebody to be your friend, you end up with a pretty lousy friendship. States committed to not liking federal ed money. But the standards themselves...meh. This has led to sloppy implementation. aThe fast pace (which was required to get the standards accepted at all) guarantees that technology, materials, tests, etc will lurch forward in a discombobulated keystone coppian mess.

Third, the CCSS push hurt a bunch of other reformy priorities. For instance, the race to attach the tests to teacher eval reform involved missteps guaranteed to make critical links like, say, teaching staffs hate them ("See this crappy test that you had no chance to prepare for? We're going to set cut scores really high, make the tests really hard, and decide your career based on the results! How do you like them standards now??")It has also wedged some reformster co-alitions. There's a hilarious bit here where Hess calls DFER a left-leaning group, but he does correctly note that turning CCSS into political kryptonite has sent many previously-cooperative GOP politicians running away from the Core like lightning.

Fourth, the whole Core initiative has become a lever for federal over-reaching into state education programs. The feds have pushed their nose into just about everything from charter schools to testing to teacher evaluation. Advocates of the Core have left their own flanks open by failing to do simple tings like creating a means of commenting on and revising the standards. Leaving gaps like that is just an open invite for the Dept of Education to step in.

Common Core in the Classroom

The ambiguity that suffuses the Common Core was not an accident: The enterprise's early success was fueled by the conviction that it was simultaneously a technical, apolitical exercise not requiring public scrutiny and that it was the engine that would transform American schooling. Because the Common Core had no practical import at first and because it received little media scrutiny, advocates were able to peddle both claims successfully.

In other words, the Core started out being whatever you thought it was. But once the rubber met the road and specifics started emerging, the public took off their beer goggles and started muttering "Good God, what have we done!"


First, there's the Ridiculous Lesson problem. This was so predictable. Every education reform in ever has the same problem-- by the time it filters down to the classroom, college profs and consultants and book publishers have stapled on their own ideas about what it should be, and some of those ideas are terrible. Hess has a great line here when considering the wide-open gates of CCSS: "It hardly seems misguided to question whether the champions of rigor are likely to beat back the forces of faddism." Is it an irony overload to note that rigor is itself a fad?

Second, advocates only care about the supposedly sharp line between standards and curriculum when it suits them, and it hasn't suited them many times. If the Core isn't curriculum, it is certainly detailed instructions on how to write one.

Third, the Core is hell on history and social studies (and art and music and everything else not on the test, but Hess holds himself to the history complaint).

Fourth, the Core poses a threat to the study of literature, no matter what its advocates say.

In short, advocates have tried to wave off concerns by even well-researched and well-thought critics, who, Hess says, often have a better intuitive sense of the messy reality of CCSS "than do the self-confident technocrats who blandly promise that everything will be fine."

The Way Forward

Hess believes that the Core could be okay, particularly if it were pursued "on a practical (rather than political) timeline." It could have been tested by willing states. It could have developed a groundswell of enthusiasm and market-conquering momentuym. It could have been a contender. Hess sees the flaws as based more in hubris than ideology, and a big lack of guts. The proponents didn't trust the public or their own PR departments, so they went all federal-powered stealth (Hess is silent on the role of big-pockets backers like Gates).

Hess believes that scaled down Common Core could still fly. Here's how he thinks that would work.

First, states should actually take the lead. Right. Because there might be one or two states left where taking point on Common Core wouldn't be political suicide. Hess says somebody would have to repudiate the feds, renounce their previous probably-illegal behavior, and promise to shoe them away should they try to get involved again. Meanwhile, the Department of Education would have to scrub all standards talk from the NCLB waivers (or, you know, Congress could finally get off its collective fat ass and re-authorize the ESEA).

Second, Hess says that CCSS advocates would have to get serious. They have failed to put mechanisms in place to insure that the standards are "professionally governed" and that tests are actually reliable. Hess language is a bit opaque in this section, but it appears that he would like to de-politicize the whole business, and put it in the hands of a governance board that would oversee the standards, the tests, and the interpretation thereof (set cut scores, etc). Who, I wonder, would be on such a board? It sounds kind of noble and all, but I'm imagining something more like the military-industrial complex or the revolving door between Monsanto and food regulation agencies.

Third, states should make the whole business more transparent. There should be evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence for every cockamamie thing someone wants to do in the name of Common Core education.

Real Reform

Hess pulls out the "Obamacore" sobriquet, saying that it's not without merit. Two attempts to rewrite giant chunks of American life, done quickly, sloppiliy, mysteriously. And federally.

What ultimately matters is not whether states stay signed on to the empty words of the Common Core standards, but whether those standards are used to engineer the deep, sustained change that advocates seek. 

Hess acknowledges that his idea is unlikely to happen, that in fact there are plenty of still fully-hubrised-up advocates who think they can stay the course, gut it out, and still stick it to those fershlugginer opponents. And that insight was underlined a few days later as Hess considered the responses to this piece, which he says did include Core advocates calling him a big wimpy sell-out traitor (I'm paraphrasing).

So?

Hess sees promise in the Core that I do not. But I do not disagree with most of his assessment of how things went wrong. I don't see an alternate universe where they could have gone differently-- the corporate backers (who are oddly absent from Hess's history lesson) were not interested in waiting for payday, nor were the politicians who were looking for an easy win back in the days of economic meltdown and no-consequence bankster malfeasance.

Fast was the only way CCSS was going to happen at all; anything slower would have simply allowed opponents to gather the same arguments we're unleashing now, and advocates wouldn't have been able to cry "But we've already invested so much in it." Without speed, stealth, corporate investment, and federal arm twisting, I feel certain that the Core would have been DOA.

Because it wasn't just the implementation. It was the idea of national standards. And that they weren't very great standards, but the work of rich amateurs. And that they came handcuffed to high stakes testing. And that there's no reason to believe that national standards in education accomplish much of anything. And that they represented a huge dollar cost to cash-strapped districts.

And now the bar is higher, because we've had them, and still no advocates can point to signature success that the Core has reaped.

So I think there's a lot more to CCSS failure than Hess has laid out. But what he has laid out is useful and mostly on point. And remember-- if you think he's out there and not tough enough on the Core, there are Core advocates in the world who think he's a big soft squish on the subject.

Rick Hess Joins the Resistance

This week Rick Hess took to the National Review Online to punch Common Core in the nose.

Hess has always been a well-connected reform advocate. He's the education guy at American Enterprise Institute, and an executive editor at Education Next, an outfit run by Paul Peterson and sponsored by the Thomas Fordham Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School. He's a conservative writer whose work is often sharp and to the point; I've called him one of my favorite writers that I disagree with. But I certainly agreed with him this time.

His critique hits the Core for five "big half-truths."

Internationally benchmarked?  "What the Common Core authors did is more 'cutting-and-pasting' than 'benchmarking.'"

Evidence-based?  "In fact, what advocates mean is that the standards take into account surveys asking professors and hiring managers what they thought high-school graduates should know, as well as examinations of which courses college-bound students usually take."

College- and career-ready? "The result adds up to something less than the recipe for excellence that the marketing suggests. "

Rigor? "More often than not, the case for the Common Core’s superiority rests on the subjective judgment of four evaluators hired by the avidly pro–Common Core Thomas B. Fordham Institute."

Leading nations have national standards?  "Advocates have made a major point of noting that high-performing nations all have national standards. What they’re much less likely to mention is that the world’s lowest-performing nations also all have national standards."

And for a final swing. " As much as Common Core boosters celebrate 'evidence,' they ought to be able to provide something more than, 'We’re smart, and here’s what we think.'"

The small swipe at the Fordham (Hess later on twitter called it a characterization, not a criticism) is striking because Hess and Petrilli always seem (from out here in the cheap seats) like BFF's.

I agree mostly with his critique, though I think the problems with college- and career-ready are a little different than his diagnosis that they are too limp. And my criticism of rigor is that it's a dumb, vague, magical-thinking concept.

But still, it's interesting to see Hess rip into the Core with such gusto, even as he prepares to be teamed with Carol Burris to represent the Anti- side in an upcoming CCSS debate. Between this and the semi-conciliatory tone of the Petrilli-McClusky CCSS op-ed, one wonders if there's something in the air in conservative thinky tank land.

What does it all mean? Hess has never shown a tendency to go easy on people just because they're on "his side." His reformy focus has generally been on the privatizing side of the debate; one can argue that Common Core is becoming more of a liability to corporate interests than a tool for pushing privatizing.

Whatever the case, Hess left the Dark Side (and, presumably, its cookies) to join us on the Light Side for a day or two (what do we have? waffles, maybe?) Who knows? Maybe he'll stay a while.

UPDATE: Mike Petrilli responded to Hess with five questions. Greg Forster (over at Jay P Greene's blog) answers those five questions and hammers the Core even more. Read it here.

Hess: Free Press Charter Stories "Unhelpful"

The Detroit Free Press recently ran a huge, extensively researched and reported story on Michigan's charter schools. They concluded, among other things, that charters hoover up a billion dollars with little transparency, that many charters are simply an ATM for family and friends of operators, that even really bad charters have stayed open for decade, and that charters don't do any better at educating students than public schools. It's a great report, and well worth the read.

Frederick Hess, however, is not feeling the love. In his column of July 3, Hess characterized the Free Press report as a "crude, unhelpful slam" on charters. Do his criticisms have merit? Let's take a look.

He leads his response with a quote:

As Chuck Fellows, president of the FlexTech High School Board of Directors, argued in a Free Press op-ed, "Traditional schools spend $11 billion annually and have a graduation rate ranging from 70% to 79%, according to a 2006 Gates Foundation report. Does that mean that $2 billion to $3 billion is wasted each year?"

I realize that we have limited data available, but we all of us need to stop citing school research from seven, eight, ten, twenty years ago. Ten are years are a hundred regular years in terms of how much the culture and function inside a building work.

But we also have to stop using graduation rate as a point of comparison between charter and public schools. When a charter student doesn't graduate from a charter school, all that means is that he goes back on the public school rolls. The only meaningful statistic for measuring charters is cohort completion. Here's 100 students in your freshman class of 2010-- how many of the 100 were handed diplomas at that school in 2014?

But I will make a deal with Mr. Fellows-- I will give him that $2-3 billion to any charter that agrees to take on and keep every one of the twenty-some percent of future non-grads.

Hess then moves on to a quick item by item rebut.

A] Charters are spending less per student than are traditional district schools.

Here's something that I think all smart charter operators know-- not all students cost the same to educate. The per-student costs we see cited are averages. Some students just require the basic services and education, but some students have special needs, special requirements, and special compliance with various regulations. I can drop the per student costs in any school-- all we have to do is cut special services.

B] Even the paper's reporting concludes that charters are doing similarly while spending less money.

So, separate but more or less equal? Of course, we don't know that charters are doing similarly. What we know is that they are generating similar test scores. We don't know if the charters are providing no phys ed, no arts, no music, no food, and a miserable soul-crushing environment-- we just know their test scores are in the ballpark. To be fair, we also don't know if the charter is providing superlative arts programs, either. But-- and I cannot say this enough-- test scores do not even begin to give the full picture of a school.

C) Charter schools have no guarantee. Some crappy ones aren't closed aggressively enough. Charter authorizers and advocates are working on the problem. Are public schools doing the same?

I'm going to go with "yes," although undoubtedly more effectively in some quarters than others. I'll call this one a tie.

D) Responding to the charge that Michigan has more for-profits running schools than any other state. Hess says basically, "So what?" What difference does the tax status make?

I agree that for-profit vs. non-profit in the charter world is a distinction without a difference. People like to assume that non-profit means "losing money for altruistic purposes" when it just means "we don't have to share the money we're raking in with stockholders." I've outlined my argument at greater length elsewhere, by the basic point is this: when every cent I spend providing education in my school is a cent I don't get to put in my own pocket, the students are my opponents, not my customers, and not my reason for being in business. They are just a means to the end of my own $$, and I find it impossible to believe that such a system favors providing quality education.

E) If charter board members were forced out because they asked for financial reports, that is bad. But I'm not sure you got the whole story. But if you did, I hope you're chasing naughty public school board members, too.

Sure.

F] If the law doesn't prevent "insider dealing" or "self-enrichment," and that's a problem, then legislators can and should change the law. But I found the series peculiar in the way the Free Press tried to beat up on charters for doing things that are currently acceptable under Michigan law.

Really? This is feeling kind of graspy. "Currently acceptable under the law" is setting the bar remarkably low. I will not bother to include every objectionable act ever completed that was acceptable under the law, other than to note that the list would include pretty much every instructional choice made by a teacher in a public school and every tax increase ever imposed by a governing body.


Throughout, Hess seems to be struggling with this rebuttal. Hess's conclusion is especially ironic. He points out a fundamental flaw in how the press covers charter schools:

It's that reporters and editors tend to hold choice programs up to some imaginary standard of high-quality, equitable provisions, rather than to the options that actually exist.

Where did people, in the press and elsewhere, get the idea that choice programs would be super-awesome and high-quality? I'm going to go with "from the proponents of choice programs." I don't have the resources to check every single PR and ad campaign out there, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no charter or voucher school ever approached parents or the public or lawmakers by saying, "If you just give us the chance, we will do a completely adequate job that is not particularly better than what your public schools are doing now." (If someone has seen that campaign, please send it along, and I'll retract.)

At a minimum, you might have expected an awareness that the chance to rethink and reimagine K-12 schooling comes with bumps in the road.

Except what we're seeing is not anything that rethinks or re-imagines schooling, other than to imagine schools that don't have to serve certain sectors of the student population, don't have to deal with challenging students, and don't have to account for what they do with public tax dollars. If this is the kind of "re-imagining" we have to do in order to get schools that provide results indistinguishable from the schools we already have, I fail to see the advantage.