The Washington Post's Moral Imperative

Last week the Washington Post editorial board came out in favor of No Child Left Behind, headlining it as a moral imperative and inadvertently highlighting one of the problems with journalism these days.

They open with Duncan's story about the illiterate black "B" student. And they follow with this paragraph about the bad old, pre-NCLB days:

In those years, no one was held accountable for student achievement, and schools routinely ignored and concealed the problems of struggling students, especially poor black and Hispanic students. Returning to that way of operating should be unthinkable, but that is unquestionably what will happen if testing and accountability requirements are gutted from federal law.

So once again we get the notion that the only possible way to root out schools that systematically rob poor and minority students of their education, the only possible way that such a situation can be brought to light, is through a standardized test. This is lazy enough reasoning from other folks, but from a major metropolitan newspaper, it's worse. Because you know what else could root out any problems in poor schools?

Journalists.

There are huge problems in our poor urban schools, problems with unsafe conditions and broken down buildings and lacks of resources and a hundred other issues that we would know more about if newspapers only bothered to cover poor neighborhoods with the same fervor that they follow the boardrooms and cocktail part circuit.

The Washington Post is worried that educational failures will be "swept under the rug." A simple antidote that a major newspaper could offer might be to less time talking to chancellors and other members of the power elite and more time talking to the teachers, students, parents and community members who have first-hand knowledge of what's happening in those under-funded, neglected schools.

Hell, instead of simply repeating Duncan's story, some journalist could have done the legwork to find out what has since happened to that student.

Is the Washington Post saying that it wants another government report to simplify the education beat. Is some editor really saying, "We need the government to send us over some numbers so nobody actually has to go into those neighborhoods and visit the actual schools." I'm trying to imagine Woodward and Bernstein calling up the Nixon White House to say, "Yeah, just send us over your thoughts about that Watergate thing and we'll just print 'em." Running tests scores is not reporting on the state of schools, and being a consistent cheerleader for an embattled school chancellor instead of doing some actual investigation and reporting is as huge an example of under-rug sweepage as you'll ever find.

Let me be clear-- schools should be accountable for what they do with tax dollars, and schools should not be allowed to systematically rob any students of their educational opportunities. But for a major newspaper to claim that standardized testing is the answer while ignoring their own role and responsibility for investigation and informing of the public is baloney.

The editorial goes on to offer some other slices of baloney as well. The Post claims that NCLB is threatened by an "unholy alliance" of anti-fed conservatives and teachers unions (because they don't want to be accountable for anything). The Post also boldly asserts that "the law has worked," and weasels around the truth with this carefully crafted sentence:

The performance of poor and minority students has improved in the past 10 to 15 years. The Education Trust, advocates for closing the achievement gap, has catalogued the evidence in the performance of minority and low-income students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress...

Follow the link and read very plainly that the achievement gap has widened, and the Post didn't lie about that-- they just encouraged you to read something between their lines that isn't there.

There's not enough space here to catalog all the ways in which the law has not worked, but has in fact failed on a spectacular level, failings students, teachers, parents, and communities.

There is a moral imperative to make certain that students, particularly poor and minority students who have been underserved for too long, are not ignored. Providing support for those who are already there fighting on those front lines and doing that work on a daily basis as well as making their stories known-- that would be a good place to start. Making sure that those communities are empowered and involved instead of silencing them and ignoring them would be another great step. Shining a light on the ways the system has short-changed them would be another good move.

The Post deserves considerable praise for supporting the work of Lindsey Layton and the indispensable Valerie Strauss. But ordering up another round of tests and offering support for a failed law? That is not the way to meet the moral imperative.


(Note: In the original edit I somehow lost my acknowledgement of Post all-stars Layton and Strauss. It's back in now)

USED: Nothing-Burger with Cheese

According to Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, the Obama administration on Monday once again paid lip service to one of its less noted but more dumb ideas. They would like to shuffle teachers around. This is not a new thing-- I wrote about it last December:

Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been manufactured ...er, I mean, tabulated with totally reliable data.

One of the ideas is, basically, to make your certified crappy teachers and your certified excellent teachers trade places. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, starting with the fact that we still don't have any useful way of identifying excellent (or not-so-excellent) teachers. So instead of trying to solve that riddle, states are declaring, as required by the Department of Education's NCLB/RTTT-fueled extortion waiver, that teachers will be evaluated at least in part based on standardized test results. Of course, we also know that poverty and poorly funded schools leaded inexorably to low standardized test results, so voila!-- teachers working in high poverty schools are far more likely to be teaching low-score students, and therefor far more likely to be "discovered" to be less excellent teachers. It's not that our most struggling students don't deserve excellent teachers-- it's that we don't have any real reason to believe that many of those excellent teachers are not already there.

I have explained this before. If you remove the roof from a classroom, whoever is in the classroom will get wet when it rains. If you say, "Hey, this teacher is all wet-- send me another one," it will make no difference. When the new teacher arrives, she will get wet, too.

You cannot improve this situation with threats. If you say, "Hey! The next wet teacher I find in this room is gonna get fired!" you will not get miraculously dry teachers standing in the rain. What you will get are teachers who want to keep their jobs saying, "No, I am NOT going to go teach in the roofless room, thankyouverymuch." And your roofless wet room will be occupied primarily by young teachers who didn't have other options or who believe that they'll be kept dry by their youth and enthusiasm and job offers from hedge funds for after they've finished.

This seems so obvious and yet clearly it isn't-- creating extra performance pressure without addressing the root causes of poor student performance absolutely guarantees to do the OPPOSITE of recruiting teachers to those situations. "Don't you want to come here and risk your teaching career in difficult wet room with no support" is NOT a great recruiting line.

However, the Ed Department occasionally notices that No Child Left Behind (which is still actually the law governing education, as opposed to the pseudo-laws of Race to the Top waivers) requires every state to have an equity plan-- a plan for how we're going to shuffle around those teachers to get the great ones in the wet rooms.

The rest of why this law is stupid is because nobody knows how to do it. When it comes to moving excellent teachers to low-performing classrooms, there are only a few possibilities:

Guilt trip: Your nation needs you. It's the right thing to do. There is no more important work in our country today. On the one hand, this has the advantage of being related to actual truth. On the other hand, it is a challenge for state and federal education officials to convey that they actually believe any of it. Nevertheless, their best bet is probably to convince teachers to take one for the team.

Bribery: Offer them obscene amounts of money to do it. And I mean pro football obscene. This actually makes sense. We pay pro athletes huge amounts of money because they are basically drawing their entire career salary in a few years, because their careers will probably be over by the time they're thirty. Same thing here. If we're going to ask teachers to work in career-ending classrooms, let's pay them their entire career salary for it. But I'll go cheap-- let's say $350,000 a year. The problem, of course, is that reformsters want to pay most teachers less rather than more.

Extortion: Pull teacher credentials at random and tell them they have to teach in low performing schools or else they will lose their teaching certification (Massachusetts got confused and is proposing the reverse-- teach at a low-performing school and then we'll take your certificate.)

Trickery: Tell teachers they've won a trip to Bermuda or Alaska or that nice farm where families send their very old dogs. When they discover they've actually ended up in a low-performance school, it will be too late.

Rendering: Wait outside a teacher's classroom. Tie a bag over her head and throw her in a van. Easy peasy. If anybody asks questions, just explain that she moved to that nice farm where families send their very old dogs.

There may also be a possibility of implementing indentured servitude, but essentially the law and every succeeding administration to work under it is forced to depend on wishful thinking and hopeful thoughts to implement the Great Educator Shift. 

Fortunately, nobody is really asking states to actually do anything. There is a deadline for submitting a plan, but no requirement that the plan be actually feasible, nor any requirement that said plan actually be implemented.

Michael Petrilli gets the quote-of-the-day award. "This is a nothing-burger," said the president of the Fordham Institute. Which I think pretty much nails it, except that not only can we not find the beef, but I'm pretty sure there's no bun, though there is plenty of cheese.

Jennifer Rubin Strikes Out

Over at the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin took her turn at propping up the ever-besieged conservative defense of Common Core. She did not succeed. (even though I'm giving her an extra swing or two).

Strike One

Rubin starts out with the old standard "We were getting totes whupped on the PISA by all the other kids on the playground, which was completely a crisis because we're worse than Korea and the Netherlands." She crunches some of the subdivisions with a bit more style than the classic version of this argument, but she still fails to spackle over the giant hole in this argument, to wit:

Exactly what is the linkage between standardized test supremacy and anything? Where is the evidence that greater standardized test scores are linked to economic prosperity or military supremacy or better symphony orchestras or happier, more attractive children?

Foul Ball

She points out that the Core is NOT curriculum, as in, it is not responsible for those evil lessons trying to brainwash children into thinking the federal government is better than your mom. She is not wrong here, though she misses the nuance that CCSS made the widespread distribution of such baloneyicious school material far more likely.

She airs out the new talking point-- this should be a pedagogical debate, not a political one. Which is true. It was true back when many of us were saying so, but the pro-Core folks had the political upper hand so they pooh-poohed the pedagogical points. Live/die by sword, and all that.

Strike Two

You have to propose an alternative. Personally, I reject this argument. If a doctor wants to cut out my lungs for no good reason, I do not have to answer the question, "Well then, what other organ do you want me to cut out instead?" It's the Reformsters who wanted to change the education world; it's the Reformsters who have to make a case for doing so.

But I accept that the game has already started. Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives out there. Some states had perfectly good standards before we started, so they could use those. There is a very interesting open source approach out there. Even I have a proposal for standards. Plus guys like Tom Hoffman who can explain the issues in great detail.

Rubin is okay with states coming up with their own standards, though she figures they'll just be cribbed from the CCSS like the Indiana standards are. I'm not sure if she realizes the reason for that (hint: it's not a pedagogical reason-- it's the other one).

Strike Three

Rubin's other big point is that the Core is already happening, and so we just can't stop. This is a particularly entertaining argument from a conservative right now, and I look forward to hearing conservatives bring it up as a defense of the Affordable Care Act. Or will their argument be, "It's really bad so I don't care how far the train is out of the station, we have to stop it before it causes more damage." I'm betting on door number two.

She reminds conservatives that they like standards and rules, and they like businessy stuff, and I think she is maybe half right there, depending on which conservatives we're talking to. But hey-- lots of states are doing things, and "the economies of size are unfolding " which means corporations are heavily into financial foreplay as they begin disrobing the national market for education stuff and you don't want to stop them in the middle of that! You don't want to be THAT guy!

Beanball

Rubin actually writes this sentence in her conclusion. "But the results will speak for themselves." This is worth remembering because we've been at this long enough for results to start talking, and what they're saying is "No signs of success around here, buddy!" Nothing about CCSS and its attendant reforms smells like anything other than flop sweat. In fact, the more results we see, the more people seem to get the sense that the results are saying, "Run away!" The only people who are seeing success anywhere in the neighborhood of the CCSS regime are the people making money from it. And that is a small, select, and increasingly outnumbered group.