If you haven't seen this yet, see it now:
One size does not fit all. Making everything or everyone to the same standard does not produce beautiful music. Variety, difference, deviation from the same single standard is a good thing, not a problem.
Showing posts with label Standardization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Standardization. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Sunday, February 14, 2016
The Flawed Premises of Reform
In Friday's Washington Post, Mike Petrilli and Chester Finn, the current and former chiefs of the right-tilted thinky tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, set out to create a quick, simple history of modern education reform. It's aimed mostly at saying, "Look, we have most of the bugs worked out now!" But it also lays bare just what failed assumptions have been behind fifteen years of failed reformster ideas.
They start by throwing our gaze back a decade to when "US education policies were a mess." Then:
At the core of the good idea was the common-sense insight that if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning, measure whether our kids are meeting them and hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.
And there are most of the problems with the reformsters approach, laid out in one sentence.
if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning
Yeah, that sounds sort of sensible, but the problem that first lurked in the background and then erupted with the advent of Common Core is that the way to make expectations clear is to make them specific, and before you know it, you have one-size-fits-all standards, and one-size-fits-all standards suck in the same way that making all US school students wear a one-size-fits-all uniform and eat one-size-fits-all food.
It is like saying that we can fix the divorce problem in this country by setting clear expectations for getting married and holding everyone to those expectations. Fordham sages tried to get around this with their "tight-loose" formulation, but they failed. Meanwhile, the standards themselves are amateur-hour constructions that take a definite side in arguments that experts don't find at all as neatly settled as the standards assume (e.g. is reading a complex relationship between reader and text, or a set of skills and behaviors-- the Core insists on the latter, but actual educators favor the former).
if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... measure whether our kids are meeting them
Also sounds sort of sensible, and yet we do not know how to do it. It really is as simple as that-- we do not have a large-scale, standardized instrument that can measure all learning for all students in a standardized, one-size-measures-all manner. Instead of asking, "What's the best way to measure critical thinking" test manufacturers have asked "What's something we could do on a standardized mass-administered test that would pass for a critical thinking measure?"
The Fordham has just released a report that tries to argue that the latest next-generation tests are achieving great feats of measurement. They aren't. And trying to measure student learning as if it occurs in just two dimensions on a single track is just such a meager, inadequate, stunted approach as to be useless. Well, worse than useless, because doing it leads some people to think they're actually accomplishing something.
if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.
"Outcomes" just means "test scores," and that, again, is such a truncated, inadequate vision of the mission of US public schools. Ask a taxpayer, "What are you paying schools and teachers to do?" I doubt that you will hear the answer, "Why, just to have students get good test scores. That's it. That's what I'm paying them to do."
This is not to claim or pretend that there are not schools that are failing to fulfill the promise of public education. But that failure belongs not to the schools alone-- student success exists at the confluence of teachers, schools, communities, and local, state, and national leadership. Reformsters have been enthusiastic in their calls to hold teachers and schools accountable, but when it's time to hold state and federal governments accountable for bad regulations, unfunded mandates, and grotesquely inequitable funding of schools, reformsters fall silent. The fans of ed reform could, for instance, devote themselves to ferreting out districts where local and state authorities have underfunded schools to the point that students attend in unsafe crumbling buildings, but that's just not happening.
We know beyond the remotest shadow of a doubt that poverty is a huge factor in education. Not insurmountable, not inescapable, not hopelessly overpowering-- but still a major factor. We know that teachers are a large factor inside schools. But somehow we want to a big accountability hammer to land on teachers, but when it comes to holding anyone "accountable" for poverty, reformsters have nothing to say (well, except for those who suggest that the only people accountable for poverty are poor people).
And about that common-sense insight...
The notion that all of these things-- the clear and specific standards being measured by a test leading to "accountability" measures taken against the schools that come up short-- are common sense? Well, we have to call them "common sense" because we can't call them "evidence based" or "scientifically proven" or even "sure seemed to work well over in Location X" because none of those things are true. They haven't worked anywhere else, and now that we've been trying it for over a decade, we can see pretty clearly that they don't work here, either.
The best we get from reformsters is a circular argument-- "this tool is a valid measure and means of improvement, because when I measure the progress of this tool by using this tool, I see success."
There are other unfounded assumptions underlying the reformster approach that depend on these other bad assumptions. For instance, the whole idea that the power of the free market can be unloosed to improve education rests on the idea that we can measure definitively which are the best schools producing the best students who are taught by the best teachers. But we can no more do that than we can list the hundred best marriages in America, or the hundred best friends.
They remain convinced that we must have one-size-fits-all standards so that we can measure all students against them so that we can compare all students and schools so that we can.... what? We still don't have a real answer. It's common sense. It's something you just have to do, because not doing it clashes with reformsters beliefs about how the world is supposed to work. They literally do not understand how education works, and when they approach the world of education, they feel like OCD sufferers in a museum where all the paintings are hung crooked. They want to "fix" it, and they want to ask the people who work there, "How can you possibly function like this?" They can't see that the paintings aren't crooked at all.
The whole reformster approach is based on measuring a cloud with a meter stick, measuring the weather with a decibel meter, measuring love with a spoon.
Reformsters want to drive the school bus by setting a brick on the gas pedal and strapping the steering when into place, and every time the bus hits a tree, they say, "Oh, well, we just need a next-generation brick, and to fine-tune where we strap the steering wheel into place." They will tweak and improve and re-tweak, and they will keep failing because their approach is fundamentally wrong.
They start by throwing our gaze back a decade to when "US education policies were a mess." Then:
At the core of the good idea was the common-sense insight that if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning, measure whether our kids are meeting them and hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.
And there are most of the problems with the reformsters approach, laid out in one sentence.
if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning
Yeah, that sounds sort of sensible, but the problem that first lurked in the background and then erupted with the advent of Common Core is that the way to make expectations clear is to make them specific, and before you know it, you have one-size-fits-all standards, and one-size-fits-all standards suck in the same way that making all US school students wear a one-size-fits-all uniform and eat one-size-fits-all food.
It is like saying that we can fix the divorce problem in this country by setting clear expectations for getting married and holding everyone to those expectations. Fordham sages tried to get around this with their "tight-loose" formulation, but they failed. Meanwhile, the standards themselves are amateur-hour constructions that take a definite side in arguments that experts don't find at all as neatly settled as the standards assume (e.g. is reading a complex relationship between reader and text, or a set of skills and behaviors-- the Core insists on the latter, but actual educators favor the former).
if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... measure whether our kids are meeting them
Also sounds sort of sensible, and yet we do not know how to do it. It really is as simple as that-- we do not have a large-scale, standardized instrument that can measure all learning for all students in a standardized, one-size-measures-all manner. Instead of asking, "What's the best way to measure critical thinking" test manufacturers have asked "What's something we could do on a standardized mass-administered test that would pass for a critical thinking measure?"
The Fordham has just released a report that tries to argue that the latest next-generation tests are achieving great feats of measurement. They aren't. And trying to measure student learning as if it occurs in just two dimensions on a single track is just such a meager, inadequate, stunted approach as to be useless. Well, worse than useless, because doing it leads some people to think they're actually accomplishing something.
if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should... hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.
"Outcomes" just means "test scores," and that, again, is such a truncated, inadequate vision of the mission of US public schools. Ask a taxpayer, "What are you paying schools and teachers to do?" I doubt that you will hear the answer, "Why, just to have students get good test scores. That's it. That's what I'm paying them to do."
This is not to claim or pretend that there are not schools that are failing to fulfill the promise of public education. But that failure belongs not to the schools alone-- student success exists at the confluence of teachers, schools, communities, and local, state, and national leadership. Reformsters have been enthusiastic in their calls to hold teachers and schools accountable, but when it's time to hold state and federal governments accountable for bad regulations, unfunded mandates, and grotesquely inequitable funding of schools, reformsters fall silent. The fans of ed reform could, for instance, devote themselves to ferreting out districts where local and state authorities have underfunded schools to the point that students attend in unsafe crumbling buildings, but that's just not happening.
We know beyond the remotest shadow of a doubt that poverty is a huge factor in education. Not insurmountable, not inescapable, not hopelessly overpowering-- but still a major factor. We know that teachers are a large factor inside schools. But somehow we want to a big accountability hammer to land on teachers, but when it comes to holding anyone "accountable" for poverty, reformsters have nothing to say (well, except for those who suggest that the only people accountable for poverty are poor people).
And about that common-sense insight...
The notion that all of these things-- the clear and specific standards being measured by a test leading to "accountability" measures taken against the schools that come up short-- are common sense? Well, we have to call them "common sense" because we can't call them "evidence based" or "scientifically proven" or even "sure seemed to work well over in Location X" because none of those things are true. They haven't worked anywhere else, and now that we've been trying it for over a decade, we can see pretty clearly that they don't work here, either.
The best we get from reformsters is a circular argument-- "this tool is a valid measure and means of improvement, because when I measure the progress of this tool by using this tool, I see success."
There are other unfounded assumptions underlying the reformster approach that depend on these other bad assumptions. For instance, the whole idea that the power of the free market can be unloosed to improve education rests on the idea that we can measure definitively which are the best schools producing the best students who are taught by the best teachers. But we can no more do that than we can list the hundred best marriages in America, or the hundred best friends.
They remain convinced that we must have one-size-fits-all standards so that we can measure all students against them so that we can compare all students and schools so that we can.... what? We still don't have a real answer. It's common sense. It's something you just have to do, because not doing it clashes with reformsters beliefs about how the world is supposed to work. They literally do not understand how education works, and when they approach the world of education, they feel like OCD sufferers in a museum where all the paintings are hung crooked. They want to "fix" it, and they want to ask the people who work there, "How can you possibly function like this?" They can't see that the paintings aren't crooked at all.
The whole reformster approach is based on measuring a cloud with a meter stick, measuring the weather with a decibel meter, measuring love with a spoon.
Reformsters want to drive the school bus by setting a brick on the gas pedal and strapping the steering when into place, and every time the bus hits a tree, they say, "Oh, well, we just need a next-generation brick, and to fine-tune where we strap the steering wheel into place." They will tweak and improve and re-tweak, and they will keep failing because their approach is fundamentally wrong.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Good vs. Uniform
There's an interesting and fairly well-balanced article in February's Forbes about Pearson, focusing on CEO John Fallon. "Everybody Hates Pearson" is worth a read, but I'm going to pull a pair of quotes from it today.
At one point, writer Jennifer Reingold says this about Fallon:
He emphasizes that the company’s goal is to help students succeed...
That's not entirely true. Part of Pearson's job as the international behemoth of education is to define what "succeed" means. Which is precisely why an international behemoth of education poses a danger to education. Earlier in the article, Reingold offers this quote:
“It doesn’t matter to us whether our customers are hundreds of thousands of individual students and their parents in China, or thousands of school districts in America,” says Fallon. “What we’re trying to do is the same thing—to help improve learning outcomes.”
There's your problem. If you're trying to do "the same thing," for a a student in the US and a student in China, and if "it doesn't matter" to you which is which, then something is wrong.
A Pearson fan is going to protest, "Well, not exactly the same thing. No, obviously not that." And I'm sure that Pearson makes sure to change the language of the test and adjust the price for the local currency. But if your focus is on a fundamental sameness, if you are looking to create a uniform approach to education that can be used all across the globe, then you're doing it wrong.
What we're talking about is uniformity, standardization-- and uniformity is the enemy of excellence.
Jack Teagarden, George Brunis, and J. J. Johnson were great jazz trombone players, and it takes me about two seconds of listening to a recording to know which one I'm hearing play, because they are completely different. All excellent. All different.
Now, I could say that they're all essentially doing the same thing-- playing jazz trombone. But as soon as I try to come up with an "objective" measure of good jazz trombone playing, one that would fit all three of them plus Miff Mole or Urbie Green or some guy in China that I don't even know about, I would choose one of two options.
A) Declare that one behavior is defined as success, in which case I could end up declaring that Teagarden is not a great jazz trombonist because he doesn't use Johnson's be-bop licks. Any system that calls Teagarden a failure as a jazz player is patently absurd.
B) Select a definition of success that includes only traits that all jazz trombonists share. Or to put it another way, come up with a definition of success that deliberately excludes all the traits that make particular jazz trombonists great. This is also deeply backwards.
Uniformity and standardization do not just fail to embrace excellence; they actively reject it. Excellence, difference, variation, individuality-- all must be marked as failure because all violate the standard of uniformity.
When a cook at a McFastfood McRestaurant cooks a stunning chicken cordon bleu, he doesn't get a commndation. He gets fired. When a flight attendant shows up for work in uniform clothing that she has torn up and resewn into a stylish gown, she doesn't get a special prize.
There's only one way to create an educational system that can be marketed all around the globe, only one way to create a system that doesn't care whether you're using it in Nanking or Omaha. The only way to create such a system is to define success as something uniform, bland, and mediocre. The only way to create such a system is to use a definition of success that rejects excellence or any other sort of difference.
You can have an educational system that is good, or one that is uniform. You can't have both.
At one point, writer Jennifer Reingold says this about Fallon:
He emphasizes that the company’s goal is to help students succeed...
That's not entirely true. Part of Pearson's job as the international behemoth of education is to define what "succeed" means. Which is precisely why an international behemoth of education poses a danger to education. Earlier in the article, Reingold offers this quote:
“It doesn’t matter to us whether our customers are hundreds of thousands of individual students and their parents in China, or thousands of school districts in America,” says Fallon. “What we’re trying to do is the same thing—to help improve learning outcomes.”
There's your problem. If you're trying to do "the same thing," for a a student in the US and a student in China, and if "it doesn't matter" to you which is which, then something is wrong.
A Pearson fan is going to protest, "Well, not exactly the same thing. No, obviously not that." And I'm sure that Pearson makes sure to change the language of the test and adjust the price for the local currency. But if your focus is on a fundamental sameness, if you are looking to create a uniform approach to education that can be used all across the globe, then you're doing it wrong.
What we're talking about is uniformity, standardization-- and uniformity is the enemy of excellence.
Jack Teagarden, George Brunis, and J. J. Johnson were great jazz trombone players, and it takes me about two seconds of listening to a recording to know which one I'm hearing play, because they are completely different. All excellent. All different.
Now, I could say that they're all essentially doing the same thing-- playing jazz trombone. But as soon as I try to come up with an "objective" measure of good jazz trombone playing, one that would fit all three of them plus Miff Mole or Urbie Green or some guy in China that I don't even know about, I would choose one of two options.
A) Declare that one behavior is defined as success, in which case I could end up declaring that Teagarden is not a great jazz trombonist because he doesn't use Johnson's be-bop licks. Any system that calls Teagarden a failure as a jazz player is patently absurd.
B) Select a definition of success that includes only traits that all jazz trombonists share. Or to put it another way, come up with a definition of success that deliberately excludes all the traits that make particular jazz trombonists great. This is also deeply backwards.
Uniformity and standardization do not just fail to embrace excellence; they actively reject it. Excellence, difference, variation, individuality-- all must be marked as failure because all violate the standard of uniformity.
When a cook at a McFastfood McRestaurant cooks a stunning chicken cordon bleu, he doesn't get a commndation. He gets fired. When a flight attendant shows up for work in uniform clothing that she has torn up and resewn into a stylish gown, she doesn't get a special prize.
There's only one way to create an educational system that can be marketed all around the globe, only one way to create a system that doesn't care whether you're using it in Nanking or Omaha. The only way to create such a system is to define success as something uniform, bland, and mediocre. The only way to create such a system is to use a definition of success that rejects excellence or any other sort of difference.
You can have an educational system that is good, or one that is uniform. You can't have both.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Iowa Teacher of Year Offers Dopey Common Core Quote
“If you go to any college basketball game anywhere in the nation, the court is going to be the same width, the same length and the hoop is going to be same height – and that’s all the Iowa Core outlines for us."
2014 Iowa State Teacher of the Year Jane Schmidt in an interview in the Daily Nonpariel (Stewart). (And picked up by me from the US Dept of Ed "Teachers Edition" newsletter.)
Let's just count the ways in which this metaphor fails.
If I go to any college basketball game, I am stuck watching basketball. I cannot watch football or curling or gymnastics or a performance of a Beethoven Symphony or an art exhibit. But basketball isn't the only game in town. Does Schmidt think only basketball should be standardized, or does she think every public sports and performance venue in the nation should be built to the standardized measurements of a basketball court?
If I go to any college basketball game, I will see a group of carefully screened and selected players. I will not see people who are lousy at basketball. That standardized court does not fit all possible players-- the players are screened to find the small, select group of people who can play well on that court.
Schmidt also needs to declare whether we're watching men or women's ball, because the standards actually are not the same. And if we traced the feeder programs for that team, we would not eventually trace our way back to five year olds playing basketball on that college-ball-standardized court. Even if we ignore that one sport does not fit all athletes, surely we can't ignore that one size court does not fit every person of every age to play that sport.
If I go to any college basketball game, I will see a standardized court built to measurements that are the carefully considered judgment of people who knew and worked in the game for years and years, testing and considering the best dimensions based on expert knowledge. I am not looking at dimensions selected by a bunch of rich amateurs who walked in one day and said, "We've decided what size court you guys should play on."
I went back to the original article to see if it provided a better context for this quote. All I found was this:
We all across Iowa are playing on the same court with the same
dimensions, but it’s how you put the team out there and how you coach it
that is the local control.
It didn't help. Look-- sports metaphors make terrible ways to describe public education. Sports have winners and losers and people who are cut from the team and people whose talents are in other sports entirely, or even (gasp) no sports at all.
I am sure that you don't get to be Iowa State Teacher of the Year by being bad at your job or a terrible person. Elsewhere in the article, Schmidt notes that she feels the Common Core and Iowa State Standards (which are as different as night and later that same night) are just misunderstood. If she wants them to be better or more favorably understood, she's going to need a better metaphor.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Living in a Non-Standardized World
My school was closed today. We're closed every year on this day because it is the weekend of our local small town festival. This is our local holiday.
Like many small town festivals, we have hung ours on a thinnish peg. John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, lived here for a while in the distant past, and so our festival is Applefest.
We close down the main drag on Saturday and Sunday. There's a 5K race down the main street of the city and back. There's a car show on Sunday which fills that same street. There are roughly a gazzillion vendors in the park, selling everything from Ecuadorian sweaters to handcrafted clocks to Jesus painted on roof slate. There's a whole street of local service group vendors, right across from the farmers' market. The local theater group schedules a Big Show for this weekend (this year it's Chicago, which I'm directing but must modestly admit that, thanks to my cast and orchestra, it kicks ass). Last night my school sponsored our high school hall of fame induction dinner. Today my wife and I got up early to go to the apple pancake breakfast at the Catholic church.
Applefest was partly invented and has partly grown organically. When I was a tadpole, it was an afternoon of small crafty booths. Now it's a three day festival that shuts down the whole town and brings in tens of thousands of visitors. Maybe hundreds of thousands. There's not any good way to judge.
Why am I talking about this? Because it's an example of how life in a non-standardized world looks.
No amount of "town festival standards and practices" guidelines would have helped a bit, either ijn the creation of the festival nor in its growth and execution. Most especially, it would not have improved the experience of it.
There are thousands of small town festivals like ours (and a few hundred big city festivals trying to capture the same small town feel). They all have many similar features, and yet they are all different. If you teleport me into the middle of any of them, there isn't the slightest chance that I would mistake it for our festival here. They are all specific to place. You cannot just move seamlessly from one to another without it making a difference.
But they are most of all specific to people. Folks come back for Applefest to see people. In an hour of walking, I will touch on a hundred different relationships. This morning I saw dozens of current students. I saw some old friends and classmates of my own. I saw a student from a decade ago who wanted to tell me that she is now a middle-school English teacher and she sometimes channels me in class. I do remember her from back in the day, and her story becomes one more to add to the file of "People do grow up and turn out okay even if that future is not obvious when they're sixteen" stories.
So when people start talking about standardization in schools as if it is self-evident that standardization is a Good Thing, Applefest is the kind of human experience I think about. How can standardization possibly make human experience better? Why would it be any sort of improvement to be able to move from one place to another without it making a difference? Why is it a good idea to make human experiences more the same? And how, in a world where the foundation of all human activity is the relationship and interactions between various specific individual human beings-- how can standardization even happen without trying to render unimportant the very things that make us human?
If there's anything Applefest doesn't need, it certainly doesn't need a state or federal or "expert" authority to come in with some sort of standards for how to do this better. We don't need to standardize the events or the experience or the people. My experience this morning of walking around town with my wife was unique and singular and absolutely unstandardized.
Schools are a a product of the place in which they exist and the people who walk their halls. Some may struggle, and some may face large challenges. Standardization is not the solution to any of those challenges. Standardization is not what makes the world go round. Standardization is not what makes life rich and full and worth living. And if standardization does not enhance the experience of being human in the world, how could it possibly enhance the experience of school.
Like many small town festivals, we have hung ours on a thinnish peg. John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, lived here for a while in the distant past, and so our festival is Applefest.
We close down the main drag on Saturday and Sunday. There's a 5K race down the main street of the city and back. There's a car show on Sunday which fills that same street. There are roughly a gazzillion vendors in the park, selling everything from Ecuadorian sweaters to handcrafted clocks to Jesus painted on roof slate. There's a whole street of local service group vendors, right across from the farmers' market. The local theater group schedules a Big Show for this weekend (this year it's Chicago, which I'm directing but must modestly admit that, thanks to my cast and orchestra, it kicks ass). Last night my school sponsored our high school hall of fame induction dinner. Today my wife and I got up early to go to the apple pancake breakfast at the Catholic church.
Applefest was partly invented and has partly grown organically. When I was a tadpole, it was an afternoon of small crafty booths. Now it's a three day festival that shuts down the whole town and brings in tens of thousands of visitors. Maybe hundreds of thousands. There's not any good way to judge.
Why am I talking about this? Because it's an example of how life in a non-standardized world looks.
No amount of "town festival standards and practices" guidelines would have helped a bit, either ijn the creation of the festival nor in its growth and execution. Most especially, it would not have improved the experience of it.
There are thousands of small town festivals like ours (and a few hundred big city festivals trying to capture the same small town feel). They all have many similar features, and yet they are all different. If you teleport me into the middle of any of them, there isn't the slightest chance that I would mistake it for our festival here. They are all specific to place. You cannot just move seamlessly from one to another without it making a difference.
But they are most of all specific to people. Folks come back for Applefest to see people. In an hour of walking, I will touch on a hundred different relationships. This morning I saw dozens of current students. I saw some old friends and classmates of my own. I saw a student from a decade ago who wanted to tell me that she is now a middle-school English teacher and she sometimes channels me in class. I do remember her from back in the day, and her story becomes one more to add to the file of "People do grow up and turn out okay even if that future is not obvious when they're sixteen" stories.
So when people start talking about standardization in schools as if it is self-evident that standardization is a Good Thing, Applefest is the kind of human experience I think about. How can standardization possibly make human experience better? Why would it be any sort of improvement to be able to move from one place to another without it making a difference? Why is it a good idea to make human experiences more the same? And how, in a world where the foundation of all human activity is the relationship and interactions between various specific individual human beings-- how can standardization even happen without trying to render unimportant the very things that make us human?
If there's anything Applefest doesn't need, it certainly doesn't need a state or federal or "expert" authority to come in with some sort of standards for how to do this better. We don't need to standardize the events or the experience or the people. My experience this morning of walking around town with my wife was unique and singular and absolutely unstandardized.
Schools are a a product of the place in which they exist and the people who walk their halls. Some may struggle, and some may face large challenges. Standardization is not the solution to any of those challenges. Standardization is not what makes the world go round. Standardization is not what makes life rich and full and worth living. And if standardization does not enhance the experience of being human in the world, how could it possibly enhance the experience of school.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Is Standardization a Virtue?
One of my largest points of disagreement with the champions of reformy stuff is on the value of standardization.
For instance, lots of folks (including some who don't like the Common Core) will observe as an article of faith that it would be better to have national standards than have different standards from state to state. To them, it seems as obvious as air that this is true. To me, it seems as obvious as dirt that it is not.
I am not in favor of some anarchic Land of Do As You Please, but I also see nothing inherently good about a standardized educational system. I've made my case against standardization itself many times before. But I'm going to argue that beyond any inherent value or lack thereof, standardization cannot help but become toxic in any system where it is viewed as the biggest value.
Many reformsters live by the rule, "Anything worth doing is worth doing at scale." Arne Duncan often discusses measuring the value of an educational program by whether it can be scaled up or not. "If we can't make it work for everybody," he seems to suggest, "then it's not a real success."
But if your guiding value is It Must Be Excellent, you will have to make some compromises on how easily it can be standardized for an entire country, deliver scalability, and be mass-reproduced. However, if your primary value is It Must Be Mass-Reproducable and Standardizable, then you will make compromises on excellence.
If you go to a painter and say, "Make me a painting that painters all across the country can reproduce within certain narrow tolerances," you will not get the Sistine Chapel or Starry Night. If you go to a great jazz musician and say, "Play me something, but make it one that any musician in the country could re-play on any instrument" you will not get "Anthropology" or "Two Tickets to Georgia." If you go to a great chef and say, "Make me something delicious, but make it something that can be made pretty much the same in any kitchen in the country," you do not get Gordon Ramsey's Greatest Hits.
And if you put publishers, thought leaders, politicians, and bureaucrats in a room and say, "Create a revolutionary system of education, but it has to be one that's the same for everybody and can be implemented in every classroom in America with little variation," you do not get excellence. Even if you really want excellence, if your primary value is standardization, you cannot get excellence.
Excellence is specific. It is specific to time, place and people, and it is often different, and usually at the end of a new path, and only people who have the freedom and nimbleness to adjust for ever-changing situations can hope to pursue it. And if the excellence involves providing a service for other humans, the variability increases exponentially.
Standardization does not drive the bus to The Valley of Awesome. If standardization is your primary value, your prized virtue, your guiding star, your metric for achievement, you will never achieve excellence. You can't throw out all standards, or simply flail randomly, but building an national educational system based on national standardization is a fool's game. It is not what we need, and not what our students deserve.
For instance, lots of folks (including some who don't like the Common Core) will observe as an article of faith that it would be better to have national standards than have different standards from state to state. To them, it seems as obvious as air that this is true. To me, it seems as obvious as dirt that it is not.
I am not in favor of some anarchic Land of Do As You Please, but I also see nothing inherently good about a standardized educational system. I've made my case against standardization itself many times before. But I'm going to argue that beyond any inherent value or lack thereof, standardization cannot help but become toxic in any system where it is viewed as the biggest value.
Many reformsters live by the rule, "Anything worth doing is worth doing at scale." Arne Duncan often discusses measuring the value of an educational program by whether it can be scaled up or not. "If we can't make it work for everybody," he seems to suggest, "then it's not a real success."
But if your guiding value is It Must Be Excellent, you will have to make some compromises on how easily it can be standardized for an entire country, deliver scalability, and be mass-reproduced. However, if your primary value is It Must Be Mass-Reproducable and Standardizable, then you will make compromises on excellence.
If you go to a painter and say, "Make me a painting that painters all across the country can reproduce within certain narrow tolerances," you will not get the Sistine Chapel or Starry Night. If you go to a great jazz musician and say, "Play me something, but make it one that any musician in the country could re-play on any instrument" you will not get "Anthropology" or "Two Tickets to Georgia." If you go to a great chef and say, "Make me something delicious, but make it something that can be made pretty much the same in any kitchen in the country," you do not get Gordon Ramsey's Greatest Hits.
And if you put publishers, thought leaders, politicians, and bureaucrats in a room and say, "Create a revolutionary system of education, but it has to be one that's the same for everybody and can be implemented in every classroom in America with little variation," you do not get excellence. Even if you really want excellence, if your primary value is standardization, you cannot get excellence.
Excellence is specific. It is specific to time, place and people, and it is often different, and usually at the end of a new path, and only people who have the freedom and nimbleness to adjust for ever-changing situations can hope to pursue it. And if the excellence involves providing a service for other humans, the variability increases exponentially.
Standardization does not drive the bus to The Valley of Awesome. If standardization is your primary value, your prized virtue, your guiding star, your metric for achievement, you will never achieve excellence. You can't throw out all standards, or simply flail randomly, but building an national educational system based on national standardization is a fool's game. It is not what we need, and not what our students deserve.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Brookings Hits the Bathroom Scale
When it comes to amateurs dabbling in education, it's hard to beat the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Perhaps it's inevitable that economists want to weigh in education, since economics is another area in which everybody and his brother believes themselves expert.
But Thomas Kane offers some grade A baloney with a side of ill-considered metaphor with "Never Diet Without a Bathroom Scale and Mirror: The Case for Combining Teacher Evaluation and the Common Core."
Given that title, it's only natural that the essay start with this sentence: "Given the nature of the job, school superintendents are master jugglers." So, now I'm mentally watching myself in the mirror as I juggle on my bathroom scales. Kane goes on to let us know that he knows how tough it is to implement new teacher evaluation systems because he headed up the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching Project.
Kane calls education reform "a massive adult behavior change exercise" that requires us to "change what adults do every day inside their classrooms."
Yet, as anyone who has ever tried to lose five pounds or to be a better parent or spouse knows, adult behavior change is hard work. And it simply does not happen without regular feedback. When the current attempts to implement new teacher evaluations fall short—as they certainly will, given the long history of box-checking—we must improve them.
So, the changes teachers allegedly need to make are analogous to losing fat or being a better spouse.
Teaching to higher standards involves much more complex behavior change than simply putting down one’s fork before dessert. And it will be more difficult to achieve. Those who propose “more investments in professional development” as an alternative to teacher evaluation are posing a false choice. Investing in professional development without an evaluation system in place is like launching a Weight Watchers group without any bathroom scales or mirrors.
The bathroom scale image is brave, given the number of times folks in the resistance have pointed out that you do not change the weight of a pig by repeatedly measuring it. But I am wondering now-- why do I have to have scales or a mirror to lose weight? Will the weight loss occur if it is not caught in data? If a tree's weight falls in the forest but nobody measures it, does it shake a pound?
This could be an interesting new application of quantum physics, or it could be another inadvertent revelation about reformster (and economist) biases. Because I do not need a bathroom scale to lose weight. I don't even need a bathroom scale to know I'm losing weight-- I can see the difference in how my clothes fit, I can feel the easier step, the increase in energy. I only need a bathroom scale if I don't trust my own senses, or because I have somehow been required to prove to someone else that I have lost weight. Or if I believe that things are only real when Important People measure them.
Kane envisions the Core and new evaluations going hand in hand, leading to more successful implementation of the Core (he does not address the question of why a successful Core is a Good Thing, Much To Be Desired). And his vision of how evaluation will provide a connection to standards as well as the kind of continuous feedback by people who don't know what they're doing and whose judgment can't be trusted.
First, curriculum teams will develop, in conjunction with their supervisors, a specific detailed list of instructional changes to address standards gaps. Then...
Schools should focus teacher evaluation and feedback efforts on the specific instructional changes required for the gap standards. They should schedule classroom observations for the days when the new standards are to be taught. They should focus post-observation conferences on the adjustments demanded by the new standards. And they should use student performance on interim and end-of-year assessments—especially on the gap standards—to measure progress and to identify and celebrate successes. Even one successful cycle will lay the foundation for the next round of instructional improvement.
I'm pretty sure that this requires a team of twelve administrators, none of whom spend any time doing any of the other things required to keep a school running. But there's more, predicated again on the notion that we're trying to help teachers who are absolutely clueless about what they or their students are doing. Notes. Copious notes. Videos. And let's throw in student evaluation and feedback as well (plus, of course, test scores).
Finally, the wrap-up:
The norm of autonomous, self-made, self-directed instruction—with no outside feedback or intervention—is long-standing and makes the U.S. education system especially resistant to change. In most high-performing countries, teachers have no such expectations. The lesson study in Japan is a good example. Teachers do not bootstrap their own instruction. They do not expect to be left alone. They expect standards, they expect feedback from peers and supervisors and they expect to be held accountable—for the quality of their delivery as well as for student results. Therefore, a better system for teacher evaluation and feedback is necessary to support individual behavior change, and it’s a tool for collective culture change as well.
Oh, the assumptions. The assumption that our school culture needs to be changed. The assumption that teacher autonomy is a problem, not a strength. The implication that US teachers don't like feedback or standards or being held accountable-- that's a little snotty as well.
But I am reminded of the management training that suggests that the fewer levels you have between decision making and decision implementation, the better off you are. Kane seems to be suggesting that the classroom teacher needs to be directed from on high, and his ideas are reminiscent of the worker who can't get a project done because he has to keep going to meetings about getting the project done.
My experience is that every good teacher I've ever known is involved in a constant, daily cycle of reflection and self-examination, using a rich tapestry of directly-observed data to evaluate her own performance, often consulting with fellow professionals. It's continuous and instantly implemented, then instantly evaluated and modified as needed. It's nimble, and it involves the professional judgment of trained experts in the field. That seems like a pretty good system to me.
But Thomas Kane offers some grade A baloney with a side of ill-considered metaphor with "Never Diet Without a Bathroom Scale and Mirror: The Case for Combining Teacher Evaluation and the Common Core."
Given that title, it's only natural that the essay start with this sentence: "Given the nature of the job, school superintendents are master jugglers." So, now I'm mentally watching myself in the mirror as I juggle on my bathroom scales. Kane goes on to let us know that he knows how tough it is to implement new teacher evaluation systems because he headed up the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching Project.
Kane calls education reform "a massive adult behavior change exercise" that requires us to "change what adults do every day inside their classrooms."
Yet, as anyone who has ever tried to lose five pounds or to be a better parent or spouse knows, adult behavior change is hard work. And it simply does not happen without regular feedback. When the current attempts to implement new teacher evaluations fall short—as they certainly will, given the long history of box-checking—we must improve them.
So, the changes teachers allegedly need to make are analogous to losing fat or being a better spouse.
Teaching to higher standards involves much more complex behavior change than simply putting down one’s fork before dessert. And it will be more difficult to achieve. Those who propose “more investments in professional development” as an alternative to teacher evaluation are posing a false choice. Investing in professional development without an evaluation system in place is like launching a Weight Watchers group without any bathroom scales or mirrors.
The bathroom scale image is brave, given the number of times folks in the resistance have pointed out that you do not change the weight of a pig by repeatedly measuring it. But I am wondering now-- why do I have to have scales or a mirror to lose weight? Will the weight loss occur if it is not caught in data? If a tree's weight falls in the forest but nobody measures it, does it shake a pound?
This could be an interesting new application of quantum physics, or it could be another inadvertent revelation about reformster (and economist) biases. Because I do not need a bathroom scale to lose weight. I don't even need a bathroom scale to know I'm losing weight-- I can see the difference in how my clothes fit, I can feel the easier step, the increase in energy. I only need a bathroom scale if I don't trust my own senses, or because I have somehow been required to prove to someone else that I have lost weight. Or if I believe that things are only real when Important People measure them.
Kane envisions the Core and new evaluations going hand in hand, leading to more successful implementation of the Core (he does not address the question of why a successful Core is a Good Thing, Much To Be Desired). And his vision of how evaluation will provide a connection to standards as well as the kind of continuous feedback by people who don't know what they're doing and whose judgment can't be trusted.
First, curriculum teams will develop, in conjunction with their supervisors, a specific detailed list of instructional changes to address standards gaps. Then...
Schools should focus teacher evaluation and feedback efforts on the specific instructional changes required for the gap standards. They should schedule classroom observations for the days when the new standards are to be taught. They should focus post-observation conferences on the adjustments demanded by the new standards. And they should use student performance on interim and end-of-year assessments—especially on the gap standards—to measure progress and to identify and celebrate successes. Even one successful cycle will lay the foundation for the next round of instructional improvement.
I'm pretty sure that this requires a team of twelve administrators, none of whom spend any time doing any of the other things required to keep a school running. But there's more, predicated again on the notion that we're trying to help teachers who are absolutely clueless about what they or their students are doing. Notes. Copious notes. Videos. And let's throw in student evaluation and feedback as well (plus, of course, test scores).
Finally, the wrap-up:
The norm of autonomous, self-made, self-directed instruction—with no outside feedback or intervention—is long-standing and makes the U.S. education system especially resistant to change. In most high-performing countries, teachers have no such expectations. The lesson study in Japan is a good example. Teachers do not bootstrap their own instruction. They do not expect to be left alone. They expect standards, they expect feedback from peers and supervisors and they expect to be held accountable—for the quality of their delivery as well as for student results. Therefore, a better system for teacher evaluation and feedback is necessary to support individual behavior change, and it’s a tool for collective culture change as well.
Oh, the assumptions. The assumption that our school culture needs to be changed. The assumption that teacher autonomy is a problem, not a strength. The implication that US teachers don't like feedback or standards or being held accountable-- that's a little snotty as well.
But I am reminded of the management training that suggests that the fewer levels you have between decision making and decision implementation, the better off you are. Kane seems to be suggesting that the classroom teacher needs to be directed from on high, and his ideas are reminiscent of the worker who can't get a project done because he has to keep going to meetings about getting the project done.
My experience is that every good teacher I've ever known is involved in a constant, daily cycle of reflection and self-examination, using a rich tapestry of directly-observed data to evaluate her own performance, often consulting with fellow professionals. It's continuous and instantly implemented, then instantly evaluated and modified as needed. It's nimble, and it involves the professional judgment of trained experts in the field. That seems like a pretty good system to me.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
The Opposite of Excellence
It's not really news, and it has certainly been commented on a million times, but I don't think we can be reminded too many times. We've heard it, but it's a slippery well-greased pig of a fact, a detail so unbelievably stupid that it literally numbs the mind and slips away like a half-remembered dream. Unconsciously, our brain's filter says, "Well, that can't be right," and we go back to arguing about bigger picture details.
But at the root of everything-- the attempts to measure teacher effectiveness, the programs to regulate student advancement between grades, the declarations of college readiness, the shutting down of public schools because they aren't good enough-- is a simple definition.
Excellence is high scores on standardized tests of reading and math.
That's it. That is how the current corporation-serving high-stakes test-driven reformster status quo defines excellence for every single child in America (well, almost every child-- as always, children of the rich are exempt).
Think about that. Think. About. That.
If you are a teacher, think about every student you've ever taught that you would have called excellent. The outstanding musician who went on to a creative career entertaining and uplifting thousands. The gifted welder who was in such demand that he had his pick of cities to travel to. The student with such exceptional people skills you knew she would be an awesome doctor. The student who could jump higher and run faster than anybody, or the student who competed athletically on the state level. The student who was a genius at coding.
None of them can be called excellent-- unless they also score well on a standardized math and reading test.
If you are a person living in this world on this planet, think of everybody you know who you would call excellent. The single parent who manages to raise several healthy, happy, capable children while working hard to provide them with a stable life. The married parents who make an awesome team while creating a home for their children. The community volunteer whose donation of hours and time and sweat makes your corner of the world a better place. The local politicians or business leaders who set aside their own lives to work at making everybody's lives better. The doctor. The lawyer. The garage mechanic. The chef. The artist. The ambulance driver. The plumber. Hell, even the teacher.
A vast tapestry of people bringing varied, rich, awesome talents and accomplishments to make the world a better place to be. A great gallumphing mass of individuals who let us understand what it means to be fully human, to fully realize what we can best do with the precious moments given to us. to show the myriad ways in which we grasp our lives and create bright beautiful displays of who we are, what we are, what we can be, what we can settle on for our own purpose, even as we help other people realize their own unique vision for their own unique future.
And the best we can come up with for measuring everything great and excellent in human beings is some scores on a standardized reading and math test (and not even good tests, at that).
Reformsters like to talk about raising the bar and really creating high standards for our young people, because, you know, young people, you may have all sorts of dreams and aspirations and talents and hopes and strengths that you want to realize and express but, really, you know-- what you need to be thinking about is your standardized test scores.
Raising the bar, my ass.
What CCSS and its attendant clamoring kudzu of reforms really offers is a tiny, cramped vision of humanity. We should be taking our young people to the edge of the Grand Canyon and saying, "Your life is out there somewhere. Let's go explore." Instead, reformers hold out a suitcase and say, "Okay, get in here. Just curl up and make yourself as small as possible."
Human beings are huge. We contain multitudes. CCSS and its various slices of baloney are devoted to making students small, to measuring them with the tiniest of rulers.
Remember. When they talk about highly effective teachers and excellent schools and proficient students, all they are talking about is the scores on a standardized math and reading test. That's it. It would be a joke if it weren't twisting American public education out of shape. Because if life really is a multiple choice test, it's one with a gazillion answers, and every one of them could be correct. But reformsters want us to bubble in just one. And that is the opposite of excellence.
But at the root of everything-- the attempts to measure teacher effectiveness, the programs to regulate student advancement between grades, the declarations of college readiness, the shutting down of public schools because they aren't good enough-- is a simple definition.
Excellence is high scores on standardized tests of reading and math.
That's it. That is how the current corporation-serving high-stakes test-driven reformster status quo defines excellence for every single child in America (well, almost every child-- as always, children of the rich are exempt).
Think about that. Think. About. That.
If you are a teacher, think about every student you've ever taught that you would have called excellent. The outstanding musician who went on to a creative career entertaining and uplifting thousands. The gifted welder who was in such demand that he had his pick of cities to travel to. The student with such exceptional people skills you knew she would be an awesome doctor. The student who could jump higher and run faster than anybody, or the student who competed athletically on the state level. The student who was a genius at coding.
None of them can be called excellent-- unless they also score well on a standardized math and reading test.
If you are a person living in this world on this planet, think of everybody you know who you would call excellent. The single parent who manages to raise several healthy, happy, capable children while working hard to provide them with a stable life. The married parents who make an awesome team while creating a home for their children. The community volunteer whose donation of hours and time and sweat makes your corner of the world a better place. The local politicians or business leaders who set aside their own lives to work at making everybody's lives better. The doctor. The lawyer. The garage mechanic. The chef. The artist. The ambulance driver. The plumber. Hell, even the teacher.
A vast tapestry of people bringing varied, rich, awesome talents and accomplishments to make the world a better place to be. A great gallumphing mass of individuals who let us understand what it means to be fully human, to fully realize what we can best do with the precious moments given to us. to show the myriad ways in which we grasp our lives and create bright beautiful displays of who we are, what we are, what we can be, what we can settle on for our own purpose, even as we help other people realize their own unique vision for their own unique future.
And the best we can come up with for measuring everything great and excellent in human beings is some scores on a standardized reading and math test (and not even good tests, at that).
Reformsters like to talk about raising the bar and really creating high standards for our young people, because, you know, young people, you may have all sorts of dreams and aspirations and talents and hopes and strengths that you want to realize and express but, really, you know-- what you need to be thinking about is your standardized test scores.
Raising the bar, my ass.
What CCSS and its attendant clamoring kudzu of reforms really offers is a tiny, cramped vision of humanity. We should be taking our young people to the edge of the Grand Canyon and saying, "Your life is out there somewhere. Let's go explore." Instead, reformers hold out a suitcase and say, "Okay, get in here. Just curl up and make yourself as small as possible."
Human beings are huge. We contain multitudes. CCSS and its various slices of baloney are devoted to making students small, to measuring them with the tiniest of rulers.
Remember. When they talk about highly effective teachers and excellent schools and proficient students, all they are talking about is the scores on a standardized math and reading test. That's it. It would be a joke if it weren't twisting American public education out of shape. Because if life really is a multiple choice test, it's one with a gazillion answers, and every one of them could be correct. But reformsters want us to bubble in just one. And that is the opposite of excellence.
Friday, March 21, 2014
In Praise of Non-Standardization
It is hard for me to argue with fans of national standards, because we hold fundamentally different values.
I'm opposed to CCSS, but unlike many other CCSS opponents, I'm opposed to any national standards at all. But it's hard to have that conversation because it comes down to this not-very-helpful exchange:
Standards fan: But if we had national standards, everyone would be on the same page. The system would be standardized. That's a good thing.
Me: No, it's not.
I'm not advocating the destruction of all rules and order. I'm not calling for the Land of Do-As-You-Please. But let me speak in praise of non-standardization.
Standardization is safe. It's predictable. We can walk into any McDonald's in the country and it will be just like any other and we will know exactly what we will get. I am not excited about that prospect. Let me plop you into the center of any mall in the country and defy you to guess where you are. That's not a good thing.
Complete organization and standardization is complete boredom. A canvas painted by Monet is interesting precisely because it is disorganized. There's more of some paint over here, less of the other paint over there. A wall painted by Bob's House Painting is perfectly orderly and organized. It's also flat and featureless and nobody particularly wants to look at it; in fact, once it has dried, the homeowners will break up its monotony by hanging photos or decorations or a print of a Monet painting.
Take a glass of water and drop one drop of food coloring into it. At first it will be a group of stark swirls against a clear background. It will be disorganized, disorderly. It will also be cool, interesting. After a while, it will be completely organized and orderly. And boring and uniform.
Chaos and information theories tell us that disorder and entropy are not necessarily best buds, that in fact achieving order and increasing entropy actually go hand in hand. Progress and creation arise out of chaos.
We don't have to be all philosophysicsy about this. Look at the arts. Watch the following process repeat over and over and over again:
1) The prevailing standard has become moribund and stultifying.
2) A large group of alternatives suddenly arise, almost simultaneously providing a whole host of exciting alternatives
3) Eventually one or two emerge as the "winners."
4) The winners cement their status as the new standard by becoming more orderly, more formalized, more organized (but less energetic)
5) See step 1. Rinse and repeat.
This covers everything from the French Impressionist movement to the rise of varied forms of Rock and Roll and Pop in response to the easy listening of the fifties. Or the arc of the computer software and app industry.
It is not just that the non-standard makes the world beautiful and interesting. It is the non-standard that is necessary for human beings to rise and advance. It is the non-standard that allows us to be our best selves, to express whatever unique blend of human qualities that birth and circumstances bring to us.
The goal of standardization is the exact opposite of what is, I would argue, the business of human life. We exist as human beings to make our mark, to make a difference, to be agents of change, to put our unique fingerprints on the things we touch. The goal of the standardized human is to not make a difference, to not leave a mark, to interact in the world in such a way that it would not have made the slightest difference if some other standardized human had been there in our place.
Some loose standardization greases the wheels of society, gives us a common foundation to develop our individual differences. But to imagine that standardization is in and of itself a high and desirable virtue is to imagine that a foundation is the only thing we need in a house. So no, I don't see some sort of national standard as a worthy goal.
I'm opposed to CCSS, but unlike many other CCSS opponents, I'm opposed to any national standards at all. But it's hard to have that conversation because it comes down to this not-very-helpful exchange:
Standards fan: But if we had national standards, everyone would be on the same page. The system would be standardized. That's a good thing.
Me: No, it's not.
I'm not advocating the destruction of all rules and order. I'm not calling for the Land of Do-As-You-Please. But let me speak in praise of non-standardization.
Standardization is safe. It's predictable. We can walk into any McDonald's in the country and it will be just like any other and we will know exactly what we will get. I am not excited about that prospect. Let me plop you into the center of any mall in the country and defy you to guess where you are. That's not a good thing.
Complete organization and standardization is complete boredom. A canvas painted by Monet is interesting precisely because it is disorganized. There's more of some paint over here, less of the other paint over there. A wall painted by Bob's House Painting is perfectly orderly and organized. It's also flat and featureless and nobody particularly wants to look at it; in fact, once it has dried, the homeowners will break up its monotony by hanging photos or decorations or a print of a Monet painting.
Take a glass of water and drop one drop of food coloring into it. At first it will be a group of stark swirls against a clear background. It will be disorganized, disorderly. It will also be cool, interesting. After a while, it will be completely organized and orderly. And boring and uniform.
Chaos and information theories tell us that disorder and entropy are not necessarily best buds, that in fact achieving order and increasing entropy actually go hand in hand. Progress and creation arise out of chaos.
We don't have to be all philosophysicsy about this. Look at the arts. Watch the following process repeat over and over and over again:
1) The prevailing standard has become moribund and stultifying.
2) A large group of alternatives suddenly arise, almost simultaneously providing a whole host of exciting alternatives
3) Eventually one or two emerge as the "winners."
4) The winners cement their status as the new standard by becoming more orderly, more formalized, more organized (but less energetic)
5) See step 1. Rinse and repeat.
This covers everything from the French Impressionist movement to the rise of varied forms of Rock and Roll and Pop in response to the easy listening of the fifties. Or the arc of the computer software and app industry.
It is not just that the non-standard makes the world beautiful and interesting. It is the non-standard that is necessary for human beings to rise and advance. It is the non-standard that allows us to be our best selves, to express whatever unique blend of human qualities that birth and circumstances bring to us.
The goal of standardization is the exact opposite of what is, I would argue, the business of human life. We exist as human beings to make our mark, to make a difference, to be agents of change, to put our unique fingerprints on the things we touch. The goal of the standardized human is to not make a difference, to not leave a mark, to interact in the world in such a way that it would not have made the slightest difference if some other standardized human had been there in our place.
Some loose standardization greases the wheels of society, gives us a common foundation to develop our individual differences. But to imagine that standardization is in and of itself a high and desirable virtue is to imagine that a foundation is the only thing we need in a house. So no, I don't see some sort of national standard as a worthy goal.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Why the Hell Are We Racing Anywhere?
Race to the Top had been rather quiet as a brand until President Obama revived it in his new budget proposal. Unfortunately, the new iteration underlines the metaphorical problems with the nom de regulation. For a guy who launched his career by being a moving speaker, Obama has hit on a real tone-deaf clunker here.
This time, we are racing for equity, which means, I guess, that we are going to Race To The Top To The Middle. Seriously, how does this metaphor even sort of work? How does a race for equality work, exactly?
My first thought is that we are about to see a real-life Diana Moon Glampers to preside over a race in which the swift are properly held back. But no-- we're clearly supposed to be competing for excellence. Excellence in...not being any more or less excellent than anybody else??
But the metaphorical muddle that is Race To The Top To The Middle only raises a more important question which is-- why were we ever racing anywhere?
Competition in pursuit of excellence is highly overrated.
First of all, we only compete with other teams. The five members of a basketball team do not compete with each other to score the most baskets; if they did, they would be a terrible team and they would lose very much, and nobody would say, "Wow, those guys are really excellent!" Not even if they competed with great rigor.
So who is supposed to be the other team in this race? Other schools? We are supposed to beat other schools and teachers and students and leaving them whipped and beaten and in this way we will achieve excellence?
Or is it just possible that, in the education game, every American public school that uses teachers to educate American children-- that every one of those schools is on the same team and not in competition at all?
Second of all, even in economics and business, competition is really great until it isn't. Rockefeller created Standard Oil by absorbing competition, by buying up every last one of his competitors. At no point did he say, "You know what? For me to be really excellent, I need to have some competition." No-- he said, "In order for me to be really excellent, I need to control and organize most of this big, messy industry. Competition must go away." You know who else thought ending competition would be a good business strategy? Bill Gates.
Granted, Gates and a few others toyed with making their workers compete with each other. They stopped doing it, because it was bad for the team.
So don't tell me the business world loves competition, because they don't. At best, the people who are losing pay it lip service which lasts right up until they aren't losing any more.
And they aren't wrong. Rockefeller and Gates both brought order to industries that were messy and wasteful, industries that were throwing away valuable resources and opportunities fighting against each other. Competition did not improve the industry; it made it sloppy and inefficient.
Obama et al seem to believe that races advance all racers, just like Reagan's rising tide raised all boats (or trickled down on submarines, or something). They remain convinced that the folks in the back of the pack are only there because they are slackers, lazy, unmotivated, and that somehow the shame of losing will spur them to finally get their acts together. We've heard about compassionate conservatives. Here we see loveless liberals, compassion-free with a Nietzschian disregard for the under-menschen.
"But," they are going to protest, "we can't keep giving medals to everybody no matter what." And you know what? I agree. The self-esteemy movement to reward students just for having a pulse was a mistake. But our mistake was not giving medals to everyone. Our mistake was giving unearned medals to everyone.
"But," they are going to mansplain, "in the race of life, there are winners and losers." And I am going to say, not in school there aren't.
This is the problem with people who play too many sports. I'm a musician. You know what happens when you go to a concert and everybody plays their very very best? We don't declare one a winner and one a loser no matter what. We applaud like crazy, because when everybody does a great job, it's freakin' awesome!
In my classroom, there is no useful purpose for having a race. There is no useful purpose in declaring winners and losers. If all my students learn today, today everybody wins. And we don't have to race for that to happen.
Racing is a terrible awful no good very bad metaphor for what should be happening in schools. It is a stupid way to frame the whole business and cheap besides. Competition will not improve education-- not on the macro-national scale, not on the district scale, not on the building scale, not on the classroom scale.
We are not racers. We are builders. And building takes time and care and attention. It takes an understanding of your materials and the place in which you are building. It requires time and care and harmony and craft and attention. And every beam, every bolt, every square inch of surface matters. Every aspect of the building rests on and supports other aspects. And if you build a great building next to mine, it does not diminish me, but adds to my work.
Mr. President, I reject the language of scarcity, the language that says we will only support those who finish the race first, the language says that we are not a team, but a country of competitors in a dog-eat-dog world where there is only enough to support a chosen few. I am not going to race to any damn where.
This time, we are racing for equity, which means, I guess, that we are going to Race To The Top To The Middle. Seriously, how does this metaphor even sort of work? How does a race for equality work, exactly?
My first thought is that we are about to see a real-life Diana Moon Glampers to preside over a race in which the swift are properly held back. But no-- we're clearly supposed to be competing for excellence. Excellence in...not being any more or less excellent than anybody else??
But the metaphorical muddle that is Race To The Top To The Middle only raises a more important question which is-- why were we ever racing anywhere?
Competition in pursuit of excellence is highly overrated.
First of all, we only compete with other teams. The five members of a basketball team do not compete with each other to score the most baskets; if they did, they would be a terrible team and they would lose very much, and nobody would say, "Wow, those guys are really excellent!" Not even if they competed with great rigor.
So who is supposed to be the other team in this race? Other schools? We are supposed to beat other schools and teachers and students and leaving them whipped and beaten and in this way we will achieve excellence?
Or is it just possible that, in the education game, every American public school that uses teachers to educate American children-- that every one of those schools is on the same team and not in competition at all?
Second of all, even in economics and business, competition is really great until it isn't. Rockefeller created Standard Oil by absorbing competition, by buying up every last one of his competitors. At no point did he say, "You know what? For me to be really excellent, I need to have some competition." No-- he said, "In order for me to be really excellent, I need to control and organize most of this big, messy industry. Competition must go away." You know who else thought ending competition would be a good business strategy? Bill Gates.
Granted, Gates and a few others toyed with making their workers compete with each other. They stopped doing it, because it was bad for the team.
So don't tell me the business world loves competition, because they don't. At best, the people who are losing pay it lip service which lasts right up until they aren't losing any more.
And they aren't wrong. Rockefeller and Gates both brought order to industries that were messy and wasteful, industries that were throwing away valuable resources and opportunities fighting against each other. Competition did not improve the industry; it made it sloppy and inefficient.
Obama et al seem to believe that races advance all racers, just like Reagan's rising tide raised all boats (or trickled down on submarines, or something). They remain convinced that the folks in the back of the pack are only there because they are slackers, lazy, unmotivated, and that somehow the shame of losing will spur them to finally get their acts together. We've heard about compassionate conservatives. Here we see loveless liberals, compassion-free with a Nietzschian disregard for the under-menschen.
"But," they are going to protest, "we can't keep giving medals to everybody no matter what." And you know what? I agree. The self-esteemy movement to reward students just for having a pulse was a mistake. But our mistake was not giving medals to everyone. Our mistake was giving unearned medals to everyone.
"But," they are going to mansplain, "in the race of life, there are winners and losers." And I am going to say, not in school there aren't.
This is the problem with people who play too many sports. I'm a musician. You know what happens when you go to a concert and everybody plays their very very best? We don't declare one a winner and one a loser no matter what. We applaud like crazy, because when everybody does a great job, it's freakin' awesome!
In my classroom, there is no useful purpose for having a race. There is no useful purpose in declaring winners and losers. If all my students learn today, today everybody wins. And we don't have to race for that to happen.
Racing is a terrible awful no good very bad metaphor for what should be happening in schools. It is a stupid way to frame the whole business and cheap besides. Competition will not improve education-- not on the macro-national scale, not on the district scale, not on the building scale, not on the classroom scale.
We are not racers. We are builders. And building takes time and care and attention. It takes an understanding of your materials and the place in which you are building. It requires time and care and harmony and craft and attention. And every beam, every bolt, every square inch of surface matters. Every aspect of the building rests on and supports other aspects. And if you build a great building next to mine, it does not diminish me, but adds to my work.
Mr. President, I reject the language of scarcity, the language that says we will only support those who finish the race first, the language says that we are not a team, but a country of competitors in a dog-eat-dog world where there is only enough to support a chosen few. I am not going to race to any damn where.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Mercedes Schneider Rips CCSS in Five Minutes
I don't reblog a lot of other people's stuff here, mostly because I am a small, low rung on the edublog ladder, and if you're reading me, you've probably read most of what I have. But if I can add just five more views to this video, I've served a useful purpose today.
Mercedes Schneider is one of my teacher heroines. We've never met, but she's taught me a ton about what is really going on, and she's taught me a lot about how to be an activist-writer while still serving your students in a classroom.
At last weekend's Network for Public Education conference, she sat on a panel about CCSS and used her five minutes to hit many of the same fatal flaws that I hate in CCSS. Most of all, the intent to completely cut my professional classroom teacher I'm-actually-standing-in-front-of-these-live-human-students judgment out of the educational loop. I also recognize the notion that a classroom teacher's role now includes serving as a buffer between students and what the Powers That Be want to inflict on them.
So take five minutes and listen to what a passionate fan of public education and teaching the way it was meant to be has to say.
Mercedes Schneider is one of my teacher heroines. We've never met, but she's taught me a ton about what is really going on, and she's taught me a lot about how to be an activist-writer while still serving your students in a classroom.
At last weekend's Network for Public Education conference, she sat on a panel about CCSS and used her five minutes to hit many of the same fatal flaws that I hate in CCSS. Most of all, the intent to completely cut my professional classroom teacher I'm-actually-standing-in-front-of-these-live-human-students judgment out of the educational loop. I also recognize the notion that a classroom teacher's role now includes serving as a buffer between students and what the Powers That Be want to inflict on them.
So take five minutes and listen to what a passionate fan of public education and teaching the way it was meant to be has to say.
Friday, February 21, 2014
Standardized Testing Sucks
I am not a testing scientist. There are bloggers and writers and people who frequent the comments section of Diane Ravitch's blog who can dissect the science and the stats and the proper creation and forming and parsing of testing and testlettes and testicles (okay, maybe not those). I'm not one of those people; Mercedes Schneider has undoubtedly forgotten more about testing that I ever learned in the first place.
But I do believe standardized testing, testing that operates on a level beyond the local, sucks. And I don't just mean that it is unkind or obnoxious or oppressive. I mean that it just doesn't work. It does not do what it sets out to do.
Years and years ago, Pennsylvania launched state-wide testing. Not the PSSAs, but the PSAs. One of the first to be rolled out was the PSA writing test. Students in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade across the state responded to a nifty prompt. These were all gathered up, and the state assembled a Holiday Inn's worth of Real Live Teachers to score papers for a weekend.
I was there for two of those years. It was kind of awesome in a way that only an English teacher could find awesome. We received some training on the kind of holistic rubric scoring that we all now know and-- well, know. And then we sat at tables and powered through. In exchange, we received a free weekend at a nice hotel with food and a chance to meet other teachers from across the state (one year we also received a "I scored 800 times in Harrisburg" pin-- again, English teacher geek awesomeness).
But the PSAs ran up against a problem from the get-go-- students recognized that there was no reason to take them seriously.
And so the state started looking for ways to FORCE students to take the state tests seriously. Make schools count them as grades. Give cool diploma stickers to the best scorers. Make the tests graduation requirements. And hire a company, not actual teachers, to score the test. Students of history will note that these ideas never quite went away.
But when you have to force somebody to take you seriously, when you have to threaten or bully people into treating something as if it's important, you've already acknowledged that there is no good reason for them to take you seriously. And that is why standardized testing sucks.
I am not opposed to data collection and assessment. I do it all the time in my room, both formally and informally. I don't test very much; mostly my students do what we're now calling performance tasks-- anything from writing papers to designing websites to standing up and presenting to the class. My students generally do these without much fuss, and I think that's because they can see the point. Sometimes they can see me design the task in front of them ("Our discussion of the novel headed off in this direction, so let's make the paper assignment about this idea...").
My students know an inauthentic bogus bullshit assessment task when they see one. They know the SAT is bogus, but they have been led to believe it holds their future ransom, so they do it anyway (and we know that after all these years of development, it still doesn't predict college success better than high school grades-- do PARCC and SBA really think they'll do better). And the state has tried to place the High Stakes Test between students and graduation so that students will take the test seriously, but they still recognize it as inauthentic malarkey. If you hold someone hostage and agree to release her if she kisses you, you are a fool to turn around and claim that the kiss is proof that she loves you.
Standardized testing is completely inauthentic assessment, and students know that. The young ones may blame themselves, but students of all ages see that there is no connection between the testing and their education, their lives, anything or anyone at all in their real existence. Standardized test are like driving down a highway on vacation where every five miles you have to stop, get out of the car, and make three basketball shot attempts from the free throw line-- annoying, intrusive, and completely unrelated to the journey you're on. If someone stands at the free throw line and threatens you with a beating if you miss, it still won't make you conclude that the requirement is not stupid and pointless.
And so the foundation of all this data generation, all this evaluation, all this summative formative bibbitive bobbitive boobosity, is a student performing an action under duress that she sees as stupid and pointless and disconnected from anything real in life. What are the odds that this task under these conditions truly measures anything at all? And on that tissue-thin foundation, we build a whole structure of planning students's futures, sculpting instruction, evaluating teachers. There is nothing anywhere that comes close in sheer hubritic stupidity.
To make matters worse, the structure that we've built is built of bad tests. Even if students somehow decided these tests were Really Important, the data collected would still be bad because the tests themselves are poorly-designed untested unvalidated abominations.
It is great to see the emergence of Testing Resistance & Reform Spring, a new coalition of some of the strongest voices in education on the testing issue. They've come out in favor of three simple steps:
These three goals are an essential part of taking back our public schools and dislodging the most toxic of the reformy stuff that has infected education over the past decade. It's a movement that deserves widespread support. Let's get back to assessment that really means something.
But I do believe standardized testing, testing that operates on a level beyond the local, sucks. And I don't just mean that it is unkind or obnoxious or oppressive. I mean that it just doesn't work. It does not do what it sets out to do.
Years and years ago, Pennsylvania launched state-wide testing. Not the PSSAs, but the PSAs. One of the first to be rolled out was the PSA writing test. Students in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade across the state responded to a nifty prompt. These were all gathered up, and the state assembled a Holiday Inn's worth of Real Live Teachers to score papers for a weekend.
I was there for two of those years. It was kind of awesome in a way that only an English teacher could find awesome. We received some training on the kind of holistic rubric scoring that we all now know and-- well, know. And then we sat at tables and powered through. In exchange, we received a free weekend at a nice hotel with food and a chance to meet other teachers from across the state (one year we also received a "I scored 800 times in Harrisburg" pin-- again, English teacher geek awesomeness).
But the PSAs ran up against a problem from the get-go-- students recognized that there was no reason to take them seriously.
And so the state started looking for ways to FORCE students to take the state tests seriously. Make schools count them as grades. Give cool diploma stickers to the best scorers. Make the tests graduation requirements. And hire a company, not actual teachers, to score the test. Students of history will note that these ideas never quite went away.
But when you have to force somebody to take you seriously, when you have to threaten or bully people into treating something as if it's important, you've already acknowledged that there is no good reason for them to take you seriously. And that is why standardized testing sucks.
I am not opposed to data collection and assessment. I do it all the time in my room, both formally and informally. I don't test very much; mostly my students do what we're now calling performance tasks-- anything from writing papers to designing websites to standing up and presenting to the class. My students generally do these without much fuss, and I think that's because they can see the point. Sometimes they can see me design the task in front of them ("Our discussion of the novel headed off in this direction, so let's make the paper assignment about this idea...").
My students know an inauthentic bogus bullshit assessment task when they see one. They know the SAT is bogus, but they have been led to believe it holds their future ransom, so they do it anyway (and we know that after all these years of development, it still doesn't predict college success better than high school grades-- do PARCC and SBA really think they'll do better). And the state has tried to place the High Stakes Test between students and graduation so that students will take the test seriously, but they still recognize it as inauthentic malarkey. If you hold someone hostage and agree to release her if she kisses you, you are a fool to turn around and claim that the kiss is proof that she loves you.
Standardized testing is completely inauthentic assessment, and students know that. The young ones may blame themselves, but students of all ages see that there is no connection between the testing and their education, their lives, anything or anyone at all in their real existence. Standardized test are like driving down a highway on vacation where every five miles you have to stop, get out of the car, and make three basketball shot attempts from the free throw line-- annoying, intrusive, and completely unrelated to the journey you're on. If someone stands at the free throw line and threatens you with a beating if you miss, it still won't make you conclude that the requirement is not stupid and pointless.
And so the foundation of all this data generation, all this evaluation, all this summative formative bibbitive bobbitive boobosity, is a student performing an action under duress that she sees as stupid and pointless and disconnected from anything real in life. What are the odds that this task under these conditions truly measures anything at all? And on that tissue-thin foundation, we build a whole structure of planning students's futures, sculpting instruction, evaluating teachers. There is nothing anywhere that comes close in sheer hubritic stupidity.
To make matters worse, the structure that we've built is built of bad tests. Even if students somehow decided these tests were Really Important, the data collected would still be bad because the tests themselves are poorly-designed untested unvalidated abominations.
It is great to see the emergence of Testing Resistance & Reform Spring, a new coalition of some of the strongest voices in education on the testing issue. They've come out in favor of three simple steps:
1) Stop high-stakes
use of standardized tests;
2)
Reduce the number of standardized exams, saving time and money for real
learning; and
3) Replace multiple-choice tests with
performance-based assessments and evidence of learning from students’ ongoing
classwork (“multiple measures”).
These three goals are an essential part of taking back our public schools and dislodging the most toxic of the reformy stuff that has infected education over the past decade. It's a movement that deserves widespread support. Let's get back to assessment that really means something.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Why I'm Anti-Standard (TL;DR)
The school reformy landscape is wide. Toward the center you'll find "the CCSS are valuable, but must be delinked from testing." A bit past them is"the CCSS are good, but the implementation was bad." Further down the road you'll find "the CCSS are flawed, and we need a better standard to replace them." And way over there at the end of the dirt road and out in that left-most field, you'll find "no national standards, ever." I'm with those guys.
I'm not an anarchist. And I completely understand why reasonable, intelligent people would like the idea of national educational standards. I don't. My objections come in two flavors-- 1) why I think they can't work and 2) why I think they are wrong. I'll leave #1 for another day; today I want to explain #2. And to do that I have to explain what I think standards are.
Standards are an attempt to codify values. They want to look objective, but they are not. They are simple instructions for acting as if you shared the values of the people who created the standards.
Let's take the go-to metaphor for standards-- the yardstick.
When I hand you a yardstick to measure an object, it doesn't matter if you like to measure things in cubits or hands or meters or along the curved edge. You are going to measure that object as if you shared my value-- inches, feet, yards, and straight-line distances. As long as you use my yardstick, you will measure as if you value what I value. It's a standard, and it's consistent, but it's not some sort of objective values-free judgment, as anybody who lives in the metric-speaking entire rest of the world can tell you.
Standards throughout history have been set to codify both admirable and terrible values. Jim Crow laws were passed to set and preserve standards of racial behavior; so was the Civil Rights Act.
Now, standards are useful, even necessary, for communication (I told you-- I'm not an anarchist). If we all measured by whatever standard we wished, we wouldn't be able to have any meaningful conversations about the results. But we can't lose sight of what the standards actually are-- a way to get other people to act as if they value what we value.
Imagine, for instance, that we were going to write standards for that most universal of experiences-- marriage. Oh, wait-- never mind. We've already been having this argument forever. It's not just our most recent arguments-- is the standard that marriage must involve one man and one woman?-- but the arguments before then. Can marriage involve mixing races? Must parents be married? Must married people be parents? What sort of official is required to certify it? Does it involve two people who love each other? Do they have to be of a particular age?
Today, in 2014, if a man walks up to you and says, "Why, yes, I'm married," you can make virtually no assumptions about what situation is waiting for him at home. For some folks, that is a sign that we have lost our standards as a society, and it is a Very Bad Thing.
Should we have standards? For individual, I believe standards are absolutely necessary. To be a human being in the world, you need to have some idea of how you act out your values in your life. Having standards, a way of measuring your actions against your values, is the foundation of living with integrity.
But that's as an individual. As soon as you start creating standards for other people, you are telling them what values they should live by.
That's not automatically evil. I'm okay with imposing a value that says human life matters and taking it away is not okay. But imposing values on other people, particularly young, impressionable people, will always be operating close to a difficult moral line, and it takes deliberate thought to avoid drifting across that line.
The CCSS are bad because they encode bad values. From the very start, where they casually define education's purpose as college and career readiness, they impose a set of values that rub many of us the wrong way. Some of us choose to read them as if they say what we wish they said. Some of us deal by imagining that, as with NCLB, we'll be largely able to close our classroom door and disregard them. And some of us think that if we could revise, rewrite or replace them, we'd be okay.
I disagree. As soon as you try to write national education standards, you are deciding what every child in the country should value in his or her education. This is a guaranteed fail. You are not just declaring a one-size-fits-all set of school activities, but a one-size-fits-all set of values for every single living human being in the country. It cannot be done any more than you can set national standards for what marriage must be. And not only can't it be done, but it shouldn't be done.
"Don't we all need to use the same yardstick so that we know what we're all talking about?" Actually, no. Because once we settle on that yardstick for everybody, we've declared that project in art class must be one that can be measured along straight edges in increments of inches.
Standards become less useful the further away they move form the individual. Standards that exist to help me understand myself are valuable. Standards that exist so that somebody else can measure me for their own benefit are not valuable.
I know, I know. If the government can more accurately measure everybody with the same yardstick, the government will be able to do a better job of educating them. I disagree. The damage inflicted by trying to get everybody to line up with that yardstick, by the imposition of somebody else's values on each and every young human mind-- that damage far outweighs any possible benefit that might accrue from bureaucratic data management. It is killing the goose that could have laid a lifetime of golden eggs.
We could set a marriage standard in hopes of knowing what Mr. I'm Married means by that, but that would just take us back to a day when peoples' personal lives were all twisted up in order to fit the standards of their time. Who are we to demand that their personal values be pushed aside and mulched up so that we have the illusion of a tidier world to live in?
So while I get the desire for national educational standards, it's an area in which I always expect to be pushing in the other direction. I don't expect to win, but I don't expect to give in, either. Yes, we will always have to be accountable, and we should be, but that's a matter of transparency and reporting-- not a matter of standards. I respect your right to stand where you will on this issue (and I respect you even more if you actually read this whole post), but this is where I stand today.
I'm not an anarchist. And I completely understand why reasonable, intelligent people would like the idea of national educational standards. I don't. My objections come in two flavors-- 1) why I think they can't work and 2) why I think they are wrong. I'll leave #1 for another day; today I want to explain #2. And to do that I have to explain what I think standards are.
Standards are an attempt to codify values. They want to look objective, but they are not. They are simple instructions for acting as if you shared the values of the people who created the standards.
Let's take the go-to metaphor for standards-- the yardstick.
When I hand you a yardstick to measure an object, it doesn't matter if you like to measure things in cubits or hands or meters or along the curved edge. You are going to measure that object as if you shared my value-- inches, feet, yards, and straight-line distances. As long as you use my yardstick, you will measure as if you value what I value. It's a standard, and it's consistent, but it's not some sort of objective values-free judgment, as anybody who lives in the metric-speaking entire rest of the world can tell you.
Standards throughout history have been set to codify both admirable and terrible values. Jim Crow laws were passed to set and preserve standards of racial behavior; so was the Civil Rights Act.
Now, standards are useful, even necessary, for communication (I told you-- I'm not an anarchist). If we all measured by whatever standard we wished, we wouldn't be able to have any meaningful conversations about the results. But we can't lose sight of what the standards actually are-- a way to get other people to act as if they value what we value.
Imagine, for instance, that we were going to write standards for that most universal of experiences-- marriage. Oh, wait-- never mind. We've already been having this argument forever. It's not just our most recent arguments-- is the standard that marriage must involve one man and one woman?-- but the arguments before then. Can marriage involve mixing races? Must parents be married? Must married people be parents? What sort of official is required to certify it? Does it involve two people who love each other? Do they have to be of a particular age?
Today, in 2014, if a man walks up to you and says, "Why, yes, I'm married," you can make virtually no assumptions about what situation is waiting for him at home. For some folks, that is a sign that we have lost our standards as a society, and it is a Very Bad Thing.
Should we have standards? For individual, I believe standards are absolutely necessary. To be a human being in the world, you need to have some idea of how you act out your values in your life. Having standards, a way of measuring your actions against your values, is the foundation of living with integrity.
But that's as an individual. As soon as you start creating standards for other people, you are telling them what values they should live by.
That's not automatically evil. I'm okay with imposing a value that says human life matters and taking it away is not okay. But imposing values on other people, particularly young, impressionable people, will always be operating close to a difficult moral line, and it takes deliberate thought to avoid drifting across that line.
The CCSS are bad because they encode bad values. From the very start, where they casually define education's purpose as college and career readiness, they impose a set of values that rub many of us the wrong way. Some of us choose to read them as if they say what we wish they said. Some of us deal by imagining that, as with NCLB, we'll be largely able to close our classroom door and disregard them. And some of us think that if we could revise, rewrite or replace them, we'd be okay.
I disagree. As soon as you try to write national education standards, you are deciding what every child in the country should value in his or her education. This is a guaranteed fail. You are not just declaring a one-size-fits-all set of school activities, but a one-size-fits-all set of values for every single living human being in the country. It cannot be done any more than you can set national standards for what marriage must be. And not only can't it be done, but it shouldn't be done.
"Don't we all need to use the same yardstick so that we know what we're all talking about?" Actually, no. Because once we settle on that yardstick for everybody, we've declared that project in art class must be one that can be measured along straight edges in increments of inches.
Standards become less useful the further away they move form the individual. Standards that exist to help me understand myself are valuable. Standards that exist so that somebody else can measure me for their own benefit are not valuable.
I know, I know. If the government can more accurately measure everybody with the same yardstick, the government will be able to do a better job of educating them. I disagree. The damage inflicted by trying to get everybody to line up with that yardstick, by the imposition of somebody else's values on each and every young human mind-- that damage far outweighs any possible benefit that might accrue from bureaucratic data management. It is killing the goose that could have laid a lifetime of golden eggs.
We could set a marriage standard in hopes of knowing what Mr. I'm Married means by that, but that would just take us back to a day when peoples' personal lives were all twisted up in order to fit the standards of their time. Who are we to demand that their personal values be pushed aside and mulched up so that we have the illusion of a tidier world to live in?
So while I get the desire for national educational standards, it's an area in which I always expect to be pushing in the other direction. I don't expect to win, but I don't expect to give in, either. Yes, we will always have to be accountable, and we should be, but that's a matter of transparency and reporting-- not a matter of standards. I respect your right to stand where you will on this issue (and I respect you even more if you actually read this whole post), but this is where I stand today.
Friday, December 6, 2013
Same
Sameness. Stultifying standardized straightjacketed sameness.
If I had to put my finger on the one most troubling aspect of the wave of reformy stuff that is currently battering us, it would be this. The standardization. The premise that education is a big machine with interchangeable cogs. The one size fits all. The sameness.
It is troubling because conformity and standardization are seductively appealing to schools and teachers.
In "The Good Student Trap," Adele Scheele lays this out as brilliantly as anyone could. Scheele talks about learning system dependency, because in school, we learn how the system works, and all that is required of us is three steps:
We were learning the Formula.
• Find out what's expected.
• Do it.
• Wait for a response.
And it worked. We always made the grade. Here's what that process means: You took tests and wrote papers, got passing grades, and then were automatically promoted from one year to the next. That is not only in elementary, junior, and senior high school, but even in undergraduate and graduate school. You never had to compete for promotions, write résumés, or rehearse yourself or even know anyone for this promotion. It happened automatically. And we got used to it.
The formula rewards conformity. It rewards obedience. And it produces a platoon of students moving in lockstep, because each one marches to the same beat of the same drum.
Let's not kid ourselves. That's how many teachers like it. I have talked to teachers who think CCSS is awesome. I have talked to teachers who think scripting is the best thing since sliced bread. I have talked to teachers who wish that certain smart-ass students would stop bringing up questions and ideas that aren't supposed to be part of the program.
I deal every year with honors students who have learned that it is most efficient and expeditious to turn off their brains to deal with school, that assignments go better if you DON'T engage and you DON'T think, but just figure out what's expected and do it. Plenty of students like it. They're good at it, and it's easy.
And I have met far too many students who have come to really believe in this system. They believe that standardized lockstep is how the world works. "Look," I tell my juniors, "You act like you are all running in one race to one finish line and if you win the race, someone pops up and rewards you with a life. That's not it. You are each headed to a different place. You are each running on your own path, to your own finish line." Some of them get it. Some of them do not.
Scheele's good student learns to erase himself. In that three-step formula, there's no place for that individual student's point of view, attitude, personal history, personal goals. A good student learns to ignore her own self. Just find where the lines are and stay within them.
Stay within the lines, and you will be rewarded with safety and success.
This approach of sameness, of standardization, of conformity, or union under the beat of the same big drum is absolutely enshrined by current reformers. Educational programs should be teacher proof, i.e. it shouldn't matter which teacher is delivering the material. Schools should be marching all students down the same CCSS path to the same CCSS destination. Every aspect of education should be measured by the same yardstick. Every student should get the same grade on the same test by giving the same answers.
Every single aspect of current reform, from TFA to charters to most especially CCSS and the testing program to which it is irrevocably tied to the programs being hawked by Pearson et al-- every single aspect is aimed at one thing. Sameness. Standardization. A system in which individual differences, whether they're the differences of students or teachers or schools, do not and can not matter.
This is not right. This is not how we human beings are meant to be in the world. It doesn't even work (let me be the one gazillionth person to point out the irony that most of these reformers would have fought and failed against their own system if they had to come up through it). It's a lie. It's terrible preparation for our students, and it seeks to deny and stamp out the humanity of every teacher and student who passes through a school.
I'm not an anarchist. I'm not here to argue that schools should be centers for anarchic rambling. I've seen open classrooms and fully-student-directed learning and I'm well aware that the population well-served by such set-ups is small. The vast majority of students need some sort of structure, just as the vast majority of teachers need some sort of curriculum direction.
But here's a thought. What if we set up a system where every learner had a personal education professional who saw the student on a daily basis, face to face, and who got to know him well enough to chart a course that factored in the content area, the strengths and weaknesses of the learner, the strengths and weaknesses of the education professional, the individual learner's personal goals, and the unique qualities and history of the place where they were working. It would have to be a very robust and resilient system to accommodate all the zillions of individual differences, but we could achieve that robust resilience by empowering the educational professionals to make any and all adjustments that were necessary to accommodate all the factors listed above.
Or we could just require everybody to cover all the same material at the same time in the same way while ignoring all of the individual factors involved with the live human beings in the room. We could standardize everything. We could make everything the same.
I'm going to vote for the first choice. It has the virtue of reflecting reality, plus it has the virtue of using a system that we already had in place. We just have to put teachers and schools back to where they ought to be.
If I had to put my finger on the one most troubling aspect of the wave of reformy stuff that is currently battering us, it would be this. The standardization. The premise that education is a big machine with interchangeable cogs. The one size fits all. The sameness.
It is troubling because conformity and standardization are seductively appealing to schools and teachers.
In "The Good Student Trap," Adele Scheele lays this out as brilliantly as anyone could. Scheele talks about learning system dependency, because in school, we learn how the system works, and all that is required of us is three steps:
We were learning the Formula.
• Find out what's expected.
• Do it.
• Wait for a response.
And it worked. We always made the grade. Here's what that process means: You took tests and wrote papers, got passing grades, and then were automatically promoted from one year to the next. That is not only in elementary, junior, and senior high school, but even in undergraduate and graduate school. You never had to compete for promotions, write résumés, or rehearse yourself or even know anyone for this promotion. It happened automatically. And we got used to it.
The formula rewards conformity. It rewards obedience. And it produces a platoon of students moving in lockstep, because each one marches to the same beat of the same drum.
Let's not kid ourselves. That's how many teachers like it. I have talked to teachers who think CCSS is awesome. I have talked to teachers who think scripting is the best thing since sliced bread. I have talked to teachers who wish that certain smart-ass students would stop bringing up questions and ideas that aren't supposed to be part of the program.
I deal every year with honors students who have learned that it is most efficient and expeditious to turn off their brains to deal with school, that assignments go better if you DON'T engage and you DON'T think, but just figure out what's expected and do it. Plenty of students like it. They're good at it, and it's easy.
And I have met far too many students who have come to really believe in this system. They believe that standardized lockstep is how the world works. "Look," I tell my juniors, "You act like you are all running in one race to one finish line and if you win the race, someone pops up and rewards you with a life. That's not it. You are each headed to a different place. You are each running on your own path, to your own finish line." Some of them get it. Some of them do not.
Scheele's good student learns to erase himself. In that three-step formula, there's no place for that individual student's point of view, attitude, personal history, personal goals. A good student learns to ignore her own self. Just find where the lines are and stay within them.
Stay within the lines, and you will be rewarded with safety and success.
This approach of sameness, of standardization, of conformity, or union under the beat of the same big drum is absolutely enshrined by current reformers. Educational programs should be teacher proof, i.e. it shouldn't matter which teacher is delivering the material. Schools should be marching all students down the same CCSS path to the same CCSS destination. Every aspect of education should be measured by the same yardstick. Every student should get the same grade on the same test by giving the same answers.
Every single aspect of current reform, from TFA to charters to most especially CCSS and the testing program to which it is irrevocably tied to the programs being hawked by Pearson et al-- every single aspect is aimed at one thing. Sameness. Standardization. A system in which individual differences, whether they're the differences of students or teachers or schools, do not and can not matter.
This is not right. This is not how we human beings are meant to be in the world. It doesn't even work (let me be the one gazillionth person to point out the irony that most of these reformers would have fought and failed against their own system if they had to come up through it). It's a lie. It's terrible preparation for our students, and it seeks to deny and stamp out the humanity of every teacher and student who passes through a school.
I'm not an anarchist. I'm not here to argue that schools should be centers for anarchic rambling. I've seen open classrooms and fully-student-directed learning and I'm well aware that the population well-served by such set-ups is small. The vast majority of students need some sort of structure, just as the vast majority of teachers need some sort of curriculum direction.
But here's a thought. What if we set up a system where every learner had a personal education professional who saw the student on a daily basis, face to face, and who got to know him well enough to chart a course that factored in the content area, the strengths and weaknesses of the learner, the strengths and weaknesses of the education professional, the individual learner's personal goals, and the unique qualities and history of the place where they were working. It would have to be a very robust and resilient system to accommodate all the zillions of individual differences, but we could achieve that robust resilience by empowering the educational professionals to make any and all adjustments that were necessary to accommodate all the factors listed above.
Or we could just require everybody to cover all the same material at the same time in the same way while ignoring all of the individual factors involved with the live human beings in the room. We could standardize everything. We could make everything the same.
I'm going to vote for the first choice. It has the virtue of reflecting reality, plus it has the virtue of using a system that we already had in place. We just have to put teachers and schools back to where they ought to be.
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