ICYMI: A Stack for the End of February

We've collected a whole bunch this week, campers. Let's get cracking.

I Don't Want To Be Liberal

Blue Cereal Education tells a story that seems really familiar. Raised to be conservative, inclined to be conservative, and yet, somehow, forced to be a liberal. 

TN(Not)Ready-- What's Really Changed

Tennessee's testing fiasco and the effects of disorganized, change-your-mind accountability

Who's Raking in the Big Bucks in Charterworld

Just how rich are charter school leaders getting on the backs of a small number of students?

Will Competency Based Learning Rescue the Testocracy

Anthony Cody looks at how Competency Based baloney fits into the arc of reformster policy.

Robbing Public Schools to Pay Private Charters

Former lawmaker Paula Dockery takes on a proposed Florida bill intended to steal more public tax dollars to enrich private schools.

How Charters Get the Students They Want

This Stephanie Simon piece is from three years ago, but it's still essential reading. A vivid picture of just how charters can rig the admission process so that they get only the students they want while still looking as if they're open to all.

Seventh Grade Reflections on Stereotypes and Assumptions

Brief but poignant-- what seventh graders know about the assumptions they are painted with by others.

No, You Cannot Test My Child

Daniel Katz runs the table on arguments that his child should be tested, batting each one down. Perfect reading for anyone psyching themselves up to take the opt-out plunge.

A Light Moment in Senate Ed Committee-- and Some UNlight Reading 

Claudia Swisher catches the OK ALEC crowd trying to deal with someone appropriating their terminology. And she adds an outstanding reading list about vouchers programs.

Robert Marzano Takes on Edublogger

Emily Talmage has been working hard for Maine schools. She is a tireless citizen journalist who has dug and dug and dug some more to uncover some of the ugly roots that Competency Based Education has put down across the country, with those roots running deep in her own state (the decision by somebody, somewhere, to roll out the new CBE in Maine, a quiet little state with a big loud governor, must be an interesting story of its own).

At any rate, if you are not a regular reader of Saving Maine Schools just because you don't live in Maine, don't let that stop you. It should be on your don't-miss list.

Apparently, as we've learned over the last week, one reader is not a fan. Here's the story.

Last Saturday, Talmage took aim at Robert Marzano. Marzano has been at the reformster business for over two decades, hopping on the educonsultant train back in the early nineties when Outcome Based Education first reared its unattractive visage, and he's been at it ever since, with a stew of semi-researched recommendations for school reform, teacher observation, and instructiony ideas.

As an early acolyte of OBE, Marzano must be enjoying seeing his ship come in again. He was apparently not so happy when Talmage stood on the dock and told everyone else a few things about Marzano.

Reaction to her post was immediate and loud-- in twenty years, Marzano has given many, many working educators reason to make a "yuck" face when they hear his name. But that batch of responses brought in news from Detroit that the beleagured and supposedly money-starved district just spent $6 million dollars on Marzano's consulting company. Talmage wrote about that, too.  

Six million freakin' dollars in a spectacularly crumbling school district. Do you know what a district could do with six million dollars?

It was about that time that Talmage noticed two things-- the appearance of an Ohio investigation firms ip in her visitor's list, and much more noticeable, an e-mail threat from Marzano himself. 

I assume you know that while you may state your opinions quite freely, false statements about people that are damaging to their reputation are considered slander. In the blog post I read you have a number of such statements about me. 

Marzano took exception to two assertions in Talmage's posts-- first, that he had never taught in a classroom, and second, the whole six million dollar contract thing.

On point one, Talmage learned that she was in error, though it appears she had to do a great deal of digging on her own to confirm that he had indeed taught, though, well-- she found a document where he listed himself as an "English teacher" in "New York City Schools" in 1967-68,-- he graduated from college in 1968, so I'm not sure how that works. After that he spent two years as English Department Chair in a Seattle private school.

On point two, Talmage asked for and received copies of the contract from the reporter whose FOIA request broke the story. The $6 million company is Learning Sciences International which holds the copyright to some of Marzano's delightful teacher stuff, but which is not technically his company-- they give him money, but he doesn't have to work there.

You can read all of this in greater detail on Talmage's blog. I'm not usually one to do what is essentially a repost of other people's stuff, but this is a story that deserves to spread. Plus I'm just impressed by any blogger who can pull an actual threat from a rich and famous reformster.

I asked her how it felt.

A little scary, but exciting too... If he weren't at least a little concerned, I don't think he would have taken the time to respond ... These big shots need to realize that we are on to them.

I also felt a little sorry for him... I honestly think his companies are getting so many contracts right now that he probably didn't realize Detroit was spending so much on his professional development program ... I wonder if it was a little embarrassing for him to have a teacher point it out?

That sounds about right. It's good to know that they are paying attention, they are hearing us, and they can't just sail on thinking that nobody notices or cares what they're up to. Hats off to Talmage for making Marzano take notice.

Breaking Down the Walls for CBE

In the discussions of Competency Based Learning (or Outcomes Based Education or Performance Based Stuff), a support that emerges from time to time is that CBE will "break down the walls between curriculum and assessment."

On the one hand, I see the appeal. In a perfect world, education shouldn't really have to stop cold for assessment, and the burden really should be on the teacher to discover what the student knows and can do, rather than putting the burden on the student to sing and dance her Proof of Achievement. Just keep learning, students, and the teacher will figure out what you know and what you can do by using the Power of Watching.

This, in fact, is what the best teachers do-- constant monitoring and collection of data, gathered by our eyes and ears, and stored and processed in our brains. That's a huge part of the job, and we've already been doing it for ages.

The unspoken issue here is that it's not enough for some folks that the teacher and the student know what's happening-- it has to be made visible to an assortment of third parties. Some of those third parties like, say, building administrators, are not a stretch. But having to make learning visible to third parties such as Pearson or a far-off government bureaucrat is more of a challenge, not unlike having to prove to a complete stranger that you have a good marriage. Actually doing the thing (teaching, learning, marriaging) is one challenge; giving outward and visible proof of the thing to other separate people is a whole other challenge.

In other words, breaking down the wall between curriculum and assessment for students, teachers, and maybe even building admins-- that's easy. Breaking it down in a way that still leaves a big fat data trail for off-site lookie-loos is more problematic.

Now the data and progress largely carried in my head and my classroom records, folders, portfolios, etc isn't good enough. I have to create some sort of digitized data collection, and that means one of two things has to happen:

1) Data via clerical work. Part of my job becomes data entry, repeatedly and relentlessly and daily plugging the data that I've collected via quiz and worksheet and exercise and observation and clickity-clacking away at my computer to get it all recorded in whatever format the provided software (because you know nobody is letting me pick that out myself-- it'll have to be compatible with all manner of systems) demands of me.

2) Direct data collection. All of the student learning activities are done on computer, so that all the data stirred up by whatever company-provided activities are involved will be automatically harvested while the student works. Doing all of her significant classwork on the computer.

There is a third option--

3) Worst of both worlds. In a nightmare scenario, my district gets a data harvesting system and I am required to digitize all of my teacher-created assignments, quizzes, tests, etc so I get the pleasure of hours and hours of mind-and-finger numbing clerical work, while my students still get to enjoy education-by-screen.

All of these options suck. Option one represents a huge increase in the work hours of a teacher, which means either blowing off your family or cutting back on actual instruction or, most likely, both. More data entry, less actual teaching. This is not a win for teachers or students. Option two has already been tried in various forms, most notably the Rocketship Academies that were going to change the education world by plunking students at computers all day. That was a fail. Creating a system in which all student educational activities must come via computer is expensive, frustrating, and counterproductive.

Both methods of data collection also pressure the process to create materials and activities that fit the limitations of the computers, which means, among other things, no real writing instruction and no critical thinking. Because the center of this system is a number-crunching computer-driven data-gobbling monster, it can't help but replicate all the shortcomings and failings of Big Standardized Tests on a large scale.

Advocates will claim that all this data collection will help teachers teach better. They are full of baloney. Any teacher who is any good at all already does all the data collection possible, and there is nothing that running it through the computer will help that teacher do. Conversely, teachers that are Not So Great will not be improved by giving them big data printouts to examine.

I don't mean to diss this kind of data collection entirely-- there are some very specific, very focused areas in which having the data-crunching assistance of a computer can be helpful for a teacher and her students. But as an approach to the Whole Educational System, it's baloney.

Breaking down the wall between curriculum and assessment is a very worthy goal. That's why teachers have been doing it since the invention of dirt, and all without the benefit of any highly-marketed highly-profitable software.

CBE & The Data Bottleneck

Can you tell I've been doing a lot of reading about Competency Based Education lately?

While some proponents like to point to more human-friendly versions of CBE such as a personalized district in rural Alaska, the more common picture of CBE is of a huge data-mining monstrosity. And while CBE has been rolling steadily at us under various aliases for a few decades now, it is computer technology that has made it look like both achievable and profitable.

In fact, CBE on the ground really does look like one more variation of the old and failed teaching machines, an intent to convert the entire ed system to the failed model of Rocketship Academy or the very failed model of on-line schooling.

You don't have to dig very far for hints about where CBE is headed. One of the flagship groups leading the charge is iNACOL -- which stands for "International Association for K-12 Online Learning." You can find their logo on works like the report presented by CompetencyWorks (what the hell is it with these guys and smooshedtogether group names?) entitled Re-Engineering Information Technology, a report all about how to redesign your IT systems to accommodate CBE.

Like many CBE fans, these guys are wrestling with the challenge of collecting tons of data, crunching it, making it transparent to students and teachers, and using it to make quick decisions about what should happen next in the student's education.

I'm hearing and reading the stories from teachers on the ground, in classrooms that are in part or in full running CBE, and they all seem to be about getting data through the bottleneck. Teachers who spend hours plugging test/quiz/worksheet scores into their platform. Teachers who maintain data walls on steroids so that students can walk into the room and first thing in the morning see where they are on the standards matrix and task completion matrix. Teachers who are directed to keep the students on those iPads for a significant portion of the day.

Computers become attractive in a CBE approach not because they do a better job of teaching (they don't) or because they are more engaging for students (they aren't) but because nothing else can compare for the speed and efficiency of gathering up the data. To wait for a human to process, score, record, and do data entry on class sets of papers-- that's just too long, too inefficient (plus, if those teachers haven't been properly freed from the tyranny of a union, they might balk at being required to put in fourteen hour days just so they can handle their hours of data entry).

So once again, the technology isn't there to serve education or the students, but to serve the people who think their program is magical. Only computers can clear the data bottleneck and get that sweet, sweet data flowing, and if that means we have to design all tests and worksheets and lessons and objectives so that they are the kind of thing that a computer can easily handle as opposed to, say, the kind of things that actually educate students-- well, the needs of the system outweigh the needs of the humans involved in it.

That's why CBE is destined to be nothing but OBE dressed up as the biggest cyber-school ever. It may not be great education, but at least the data trains run on time.

Chugach, Alaska

As reformy advocacy shifts toward promotion of Competency Based Education (or Proficiency Based Learning-- they have really got to settle on the set of buzzwords they want to use), we are going to hear now and then about a magical place in Alaska-- the Chugach School District.

Back in the nineties, when Objective Based Education (the previous iteration of CBE) was all the rage, Chugach signed up in a big way. They developed an OBE system that is now bills itself as the first competency based school district in the country.When edutopia visited in 2007, they found a system that was the pinnacle of performance-based learning. The district had over a thousand standards, and students had to achieve mastery of each before moving on to the next. Students also design their own projects and a "school-to-life" plan. And the Voyage to Excellence program is a self-directed process with a big vocational-technical flavor. The leader of the district during the switch repeated one of the mantras of OBE:

"Time was the constant and learning was the variable -- that's the old model," says Roger Sampson, president of the Education Commission of the States, who led Chugach's transformation as district superintendent in the 1990s. "We switched. What's constant is learning. Time is the variable."

Or as is noted elsewhere in the article:

Even as globalization and media propel our culture -- and our classrooms -- toward modes of production that are bigger, faster, and more alike, Chugach has refocused on an approach to education that is smaller, personalized, and variably paced. As Douglas Penn, the districtwide principal, explains, "Our kids graduate when they're ready. We're not pumping them out the door with D's on their diplomas."

And "graduate when they're ready" means just what it says. When the district won a Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award in 2001, the write-up noted that students might graduate when they fourteen or when they were twenty-one.

The accolades have been steady. Here's a piece from the John Hopkins School of Education, written by Wendy Battino, a teacher-principal with Chugach who went on to join the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition (as well as a career as a life coach). Here's an edsurge paean. But, boy-- nobody loves Chugach like CompetencyWorks.org, which ran a five-part series in January of 2015 (here's part five).

In 2001, then-superintendent Richard DeLorenzo had this to say about the district's vision and their place in the educational firmament:

Education is in a crisis due to the fact that we must now educate all students regardless of their potential or socio-economic status to some degree of excellence. Relying on traditional methodology and practice will only lead to tinkering with mediocrity where we fail to meet the needs of individuals. In order to accomplish excellence we need to radically alter what we teach and how we teach. We at Chugach have undertaken this journey and have dismantled many of the barriers that were once thought unapproachable to reach excellence in education. We have endured many hardships and disappointments and yet we still proceed with this tiresome journey because every student deserves the chance to be successful and share the opportunity to reach their full potential.

So-- yay! Dismantling barriers. The end of "tinkering with mediocrity." I can see the appeal to reformsters. But after twenty years, the system seems to be working in Chugach Schools. Could it be a model system for the rest of us?

Well....

Here are some things to know about the Chugach School District.

* The largely rural district covers about 22,000 square miles, including some square miles which are islands.
* Number of students in the system has ranged from 150 to 300, depending. The district markets itself to students outside its geographical boundaries.
* 77% of the students are homeschooled.
* The district generally employs fewer than twenty full-time faculty.

Let's set aside the argument about "mastery learning" for a moment (at exactly what point does one declare that a student has "mastered" reading?). We'll also set aside some questions about whether Chugach really did involve all stakeholders as their Baldrige write-up suggests, or whether this researcher was correct to conclude that political maneuvering of a ham-fisted "visionary" drove the bus. Let's just check this idea for scaleability.

Let's imagine, for instance, Chicago, where students (public and charter) run around 400,000. Exactly what would a system where 400,000 students pursued 1,000 objectives independently look like? Would we, like Chugach, have 300,000 of those students home schooled, so that their families are responsible for making sure the student stays on task? Chugach requires students working on certain types of projects to contact and get advice from professionals. So if 25,000 Chicago students decide they want to do a photography project, where will all 25K turn for advice?

The system allows students to finish whenever they get there. How would that play out in a poor urban setting where there are already so many obstacles to school completion? What does a bright fourteen year old who has breezed through all the performance tasks and graduated "early" do next?

How does a staff of teachers monitor 400,000 students all working at their own pace? And how do parents react when they learn, as Chugach parents have, that at any given point, every child's report card may look different?

What does it do to the cohesion and culture of a school when students must choose between moving forward to their next standard and staying with their friends? How badly does it crush a child's confidence to be among those "left behind." I'm not asking because I'm afraid students might feel bad, but because I know these kind of blows to the ego and self really interfere with learning. With a predominantly homeschooled population, Chugach provides no window on how this kind of system affects the culture inside a building.

For reformsters who love CBE, Chugach is a model of how paradisey the competency based model can be. But to me, it's just one more example of how one size doesn't fit all, and that the continued search for a magical school approach that can be applied to any district anywhere is a fool's errand. Chugach is very unique system with very unique challenges that has landed on a very unique solution.

Chugach's approach may very well work for Chugach, a very rural district of a very few, predominantly home-schooled students.  But if someone starts telling me that Chugach is a reason to believe that CBE will be awesome everywhere, I'm going to assume that they are more interested in selling snake oil than helping schools.

ICYMI: Some Sunday Edureads

It will be a quickie this week-- I have both of my children home and a grandson's birthday party to attend!

Eva Moskowitz Cannot Help Herself

Daniel Katz provides one of the best overviews of Moskowitz's ongoing meltdown. A study in how privilege, money and power can make you blind to how you're behavior is playing in the real world.

How Twisted Early Childhood Education Has Become

Early childhood ed has arguably been more badly damaged by reformsters than any other segment of the education biz. Sometimes it helps to have someone take a step back, show how far off track we have gotten, and help you realize you're not crazy for thinking we're getting early childhood ed completely wrong at this point.

Competency Based Ed: The Culmination of the Common Core Agenda

A good collection of the many pieces and points of view springing up as CBE becomes the newest topic of the education debates.

Five Perspectives on Student Fragility

At Psychology Today, Peter Gray has been running a series about the increasing fragile nature of our students, including theories about the source. This latest installment is interesting because it includes the many, many reactions from various stakeholders in that discussion.

Are You Being Served?

Nobody combines humor and actual journalism better than Jennifer Berkshire at Edushyster. Here's a look at the facts of which students Boston charter schools are actually serving.