The Work We Have To Do

Even if you've only read this blog once or twice, you're aware that I am a noisy supporter of traditional public education in this country. But that doesn't mean my loyalty is unquestioning.

As much as it pains me to say it, as much as I hate what modern reformsters have brought us in public education, if I'm being honest, I must admit that we asked for some of it. Well, maybe we didn't ask for it-- but we certainly left the door wide open for it to come waltzing in.

It's worth talking about these things because even if the entire reformster movement dried up and blew away today, tomorrow we would still be facing these issues.

Teacher Training

Much of what passes for teacher training is a joke. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that teacher training is in the hands of not-teachers. How many co-operating teachers help their student teacher stage a fake lesson to make the visiting drive-by supervisor happy? How many future teachers' careers have been decided for good or bad by the random luck of the student teaching draw? How many college hours are wasted studying teaching "techniques" developed but untested by somebody who has no idea what he's talking about? How many college ed programs wouldn't flunk a candidate unless he was caught on video feeding chopped up puppies to orphans?

How many teachers are good teachers in spite of their college training instead of because of it? The door for some foolish program like TFA has always been standing wide open.

Quality

Everybody knows that some teachers are better than others. But our line in the profession for decades has been, "That's hard. We aren't going to talk about it."

It's true that assaults on tenure and pushes for stack ranking teachers are all about the money, about making a school a more profitable enterprise for an investor. But those assaults would never have gotten traction if there were not a great untapped well of resentment and frustration out there over a system that doesn't seem to do anything about differentiating or improving when it comes to less-than-awesome teachers.

Equity and Justice

When civil rights groups spoke up last week in favor of keeping a federal testing mandate in ESEA, many folks were shocked and upset. But civil rights groups and community leaders in poor black neighborhoods have been supporting the reformster agenda for years.

Instead of exclaiming "How can they do that" rhetorically, we should be asking, "Why do they do that" critically and sincerely.

The promise of reformsters has been, "We will create a program that gets every kid ready for success, and we will make it federal law that every school in every city must have that program in place. We'll have a test that proves whether that program is in place or not, and we will give exactly the same test to every student, white or black, rich or poor, in this country."

Do not dismiss that promise because it's empty. Recognize that the promise is powerful because our country includes a whole lot of people to whom no such promise has been made before.

Look. If you offer someone a piece of spoiled tofu sculpted to look like a bad piece of fish, and they eat it up quickly, and then you start lecturing them about can't they see it's not really fish and the tofu is actually spoiled and did somebody pay them to eat that awful stuff-- you are missing the most important piece of information. That person was hungry enough to be excited about a bad tofu fish. You can take away the bad tofu fish and feel good about how you're protected that person, but she's still hungry, and until you get her some actual food, you're not helping.

Poor and minority schools need resources and support, the kinds of programs and materials that wealthier schools take for granted. They need support. Their students need to see teachers who look like them in the building (and, I would argue, people who live and grew up in the neighborhood). They need to be in a system that respects their culture and background. They need to be in a system that is neither overtly nor subtly racist.

We can bitch and moan about the reformsters and privateers and charteristas all pretending to care about equity and civil rights as a way to grab some power and money, but we should look in the mirror and ask what it means that Pretending To Care about Equity is enough to make someone stand out these days.

We can sweep the reformsters and their faux solutions away, but unless we're prepared to look for real solutions, we won't be moving forward. We supporters of public education must remember that even if the reformsters are thrown out and shut down, there are still problems in our schools-- problems that nobody was particularly working on when reformsters stepped in to take advantage of real needs. We must always remember that even when the conflict with reformsters is over, there is still work we have to do.

Brookings: "Poor Kids Suck"

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When it comes to slick-looking research of questionable results in fields outside their area of expertise, you can always count on the folks at Brookings. They have a new report out entitled The Character Factor: Measures and Impact of Drive and Prudence, and it has some important things to tell us about the kinds of odd thoughts occupying reformster minds these days.

The whole report is thirty-five pages long, but don't worry-- I've read it so that you don't have to. Fasten your seatbelts, boys and girls (particularly those of you who can be scientifically proven to be character-deficient)-- this will be a long and bumpy ride.

Character Is Important

Yes, some of this report is clearly based on work previously published in The Journal Of Blindingly Obvious Conclusions. And we announce that in the first sentence:

A growing body of empirical research demonstrates that people who possess certain character strengths do better in life in terms of work, earnings, education and so on, even when taking into account their academic abilities. Smarts matter, but so does character. 

In all fairness, the next sentence begins with "This is hardly a revelation." That sentence goes on to quietly define what "character" means-- "work hard, defer gratification, and get along with others." But we push right past that to get to Three Reasons This Field of Study Is Now a Thing.

1) There's concrete evidence to back it up, a la Duckworth et. al.
2) That evidence suggests that character is as important as smartness for life success
3) Given that importance, policymakers ought to be paying more attention to "cultivation and distribution of these skills."

Now, at first I thought point 3 meant that policymakers need to develop better character themselves, and I was ready to get on board-- but no. Instead, Brookings wants character building to be something that policymakers inflict on other people (and they have a whole other article about it). I am less excited about that.

Also, "non-cognitive skills" is nobody's idea of what to call this stuff.

Narrowing Our Focus, Muddying the Water

Let's further define our terms, and distinguish between moral character (qualities needed to be ethical) and performance character (qualities needed to " realize one's potential for excellence").  Some scholars apparently argue that the distinction is not clear cut and/or unhelpful. It appears to me that performance character could be defined as "the kind of character one could have and still be a sociopath," which, in terms of anything called "character," seems problematic.

For this report, Brookings is going to go with performance character. Specifically, they're going to stick with Duckworth's work, defining performance character as a composite of the tendency to stick with long term goals and self control. They reference her revered grit scale and other products of Grittological Studies .

At any rate, for the purpose of this report, we are going to pretend that sticktoitivity and self-control are the key to understanding character. Or, alternately, we could say that we are going to study these two small qualities and do our damndest to pretend that they have broader implications. And to complete this process of obfuscatorial magnification, we're going to give these two qualities new names-- "drive" and "prudence."

We'll define "drive" as the ability to apply oneself to a task and stick to it. We'll define "prudence" as the ability to defer gratification and look to the future. And we will establish the importance of our definitions by, I kid you not, putting them in table form.

Bizarre Side Trip #1

Brookings uses a footnote to cover why they call these things "character strengths" instead of traits. It is totally NOT because that attaches a positive value judgment to them, but because it shows they are deeper than skills and more malleable than traits. Not quite simply born with them, but deeper than simple learned behavior. Remember that for later.

The footnote also has this rather sad observation: "It is hard to learn kindness, but somewhat easier to learn self-control." No particular research base is offered for that extraordinary observation, but it is sheer poetry in terms of efficiently describing the sad inner lives of some folks. Dickens could not have better described the broken soul of Ebenezer Scrooge. But here, as throughout pretty much the whole report, we're going to take the personal experience of one select sampling and assume it to be true for all human beings.

How Much Does Drive Matter?

Here Brookings will throw a bunch of research projects at the wall to see what sticks. They include, for instance, the classic grittological studies that showed that people who tend to complete long projects will tend to complete long projects (because every Department of Grittology needs a Professor of Tautological Studies). "Drive appears to be related to college completion," they observe, and back it up by saying it does better at predicting college completion that SAT or ACT scores, which is a mighty low bar to clear. We're a little fuzzy on how we determined drive ratings for the individuals in these studies; if they have anything to do with high school GPA, then of course they're good predictors. It's like saying that knowing how far your eyeballs are above the ground is a good predictor of your height.

They do have some interesting data from the ASVAB test, which includes some sections that test a student's resistance to mind-numbingly dull tasks (really). And they cite themselves in another paper to prove that non-cognitive skills (sorry-- they backslid, not I) correlate to economic mobility. If I personally had a higher drive rating, I would go read that paper too and report back, but alas, I am not that drivey.

And What About Prudence?

Can I just say how much I love that we're talking about prudence, because it's such a lovely word, steeped in the aroma of maiden aunts and pilgrims. Prudence. Just breathe it in for a moment.

K. For this, we're going to trot out the old four year olds vs. marshmallows research. There has been some great research in the last forty years to parse out what this hoary old study might actually mean and might actually miss. I like this one in particular from Rochester, because it finds a huge difference factor in the environment. Some researchers behaved like unreliable nits, while others proved true to their words, and the result was a gigantic difference in the children's wait time. This is huge because it tells us something extremely important--

It's much easier to defer gratification till later if you can believe that you'll actually get it later. If you believe that deferring gratification means giving it up entirely-- you are less likely to defer. Brookings does not include the new research in their report.

Brookings concludes this section with

Drive and prudence contribute to higher earnings, more education, better health outcomes
and less criminal behavior.And as long as we're just making stuff up:

We can also easily imagine that they are important for marriage, parenting, and community involvement.

Plus, we can imagine that they give you better hair, firmer muscle tone, and fresher smelling breath. Plus, you probably won't get cancer. But as unsupported as these suppositions are, they are still a critical part of the foundation for what comes next.

Yes, Rich People Really Are Better

Brookings now bravely turns to the question of how class is related to these character strengths. And I can't accuse them of burying the lede:

If character strengths significantly impact life outcomes, disparities in their development may matter for social mobility and equality. As well as gaps in income, wealth, educational quality, housing, and family stability, are there also gaps in the development of these important character strengths?

This is followed by some charts that suggest that poor kids do worse on "school-readiness measures of learning-related behavior." Another chart shows a correlation between income and the strengts of persistence and self-control through the school years.

About Those Numbers

Brookings moves straight from the charts to a whole section addressing the fact that there aren't any "widely accepted tests for character strengths." So here's some of the measures and data that they massaged, including some cool stuff from KIPP, "a highly successful national network of charter schools" which-- surprise-- currently employs one of the authors of this paper. Anyway, KIPP has those cool character report cards, so you know they must have a handle on this whole character thing. Well, performance character. Moral character is outside our scope here.

Anyway, they used surveys, behaviors and tests. They also figured out how to crunch large data sets with a nifty punnett square that crosses direct-indirect with broad-narrow, to get four sorts of character markers. Indirect and broad, which is something like "risky sexual behavior" is a one start marker, while direct and narrow, like the grit scale, is the tops.

Using that rating system, they ploughed through acres of US Data Sets, rating each one based on how well it would indicate character strengths (or the lack thereof), and created a few pages worth of charts. I am impressed by the amont of drive and prudence it must have taken to do all this. Bottom line-- most of these from the Fragile Families Survey to National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Adults, don't provide the kind of awesome data that standardized subject tests provide for cognitive skills (choke). So they would like more direct acquisition of data please. We need more standardized character tests in schools.

So, Let's Just Go There

So after sorting through all those data sets, they selected some faves. Their first choice was perhaps unfortunate-- from the Behavior Problems Index, they plucked the hyperactive scale. Now, they would like us to know that this does not certainly does not "necessarily indicate that a child is medically hyperactive (that is, has a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). In this sense, the terminology here is unhelpful."

Well, yes. Suggesting that a behavior problem (particularly one tied to a medical problem) is a sign of a character deficit would be unhelpful. Is there any way we could make this even more unhelpful?

Sure there is. Let's link scoring low on the hyperactive scale and therefor demonstrating a lack of character-- let's link that to socio-economic class! Yes, this character deficit ties most closely to being born into the bottom quintile-- also teen mom, especially if she's a high school dropout. (The good news, I suppose, is that the researchers see no link in their meta-analyses to race as a factor.)


They also worked backwards, starting with good outcomes and looking to see how the data feeding into those incomes looked. The same picture emerged-- good things (including not getting pregnant and finishing school) were less likely to happen to the poor kids.

Micro-Macro

The study notes that the BPI hyperactivity rating connected to five specifics

• Has difficulty concentrating/paying attention
• Is easily confused, seems in a fog
• Is impulsive or acts without thinking
• Has trouble getting mind off certain thoughts
• Is restless, overly active, cannot sit still

These five very specific traits connected to the BPI hyperactivity score (a small slice of the larger BPI) which we used as a marker of the two qualities that we picked as representative of the one kind of character that we're studying as the stand-in for the full range of non-cognitive skills. So basically we're doing that thing where we look at an elephants eyelash and use it to make pronouncements about the status of all endangered animal species on the African continent.


Oops

Brookings, who don't always seem to get all of the reformster memos, go a page too far now by suggesting (with charts!) that their prudence and drive measures (which would be a half-decent band name) are as good a predictor of success as cognitive/academic measures. Which means that we can totally scrap the PARCC and the SBA tests and just check to see if the kid is able to sit still and wait fifteen minutes for a marshmallow. I will now predict that this is NOT the headline that will be used if leading reformster publications decide to run this story.

What Does It All Mean?

Brookings is not going to put their other foot in it, so it is not clear whether they want to say that lack of character strengths causes poverty or if poverty causes a character strength deficit. They are clear once again at the conclusion that character is a necessary element of success.

Character matters. Children who learn and can exhibit character strengths attain more years of education, earn more, and likely outperform other individuals in other areas of life. Of course, many other factors matter a great deal, too – most obviously cognitive skills, but also a host of cultural, social and education attributes.

Also, capabilities don't automatically equal motivation to act. And there's other stuff that could be important, too. Including, I kid you not, self-esteem. But we need more data for research. Also, we can build character, so we need more programs to do that, too.

Did I Miss Something?

Well, somebody did. Best case scenario-- we've re-demonstrated that people who come from a high socio-economic background tend to be successful in school, and those who don't, don't. Stapel on some tautologies as a side show and call it an insight.

Or maybe this is a report that buttresses old farts everywhere by suggesting that if your kid can't learn to sit still, he probably lacks character and is likely to fail at life.

And remember up above when we decided to call these "character strengths." That meant these behaviors are deeper than simple learned behaviors, but not quite genetically hardwired. So we're stopping just short of saying that poor kids are born with a lack of character.

But at worst-- at worst-- this is codified cultural colonialism. This is defining "success" as "making it in our dominant culture, which we will define as normal for all humans." And then declaring that if you want to make it as (our version of) a normal human, you must learn to adopt our values. This is going to Africa and saying, "Well, of course these people will never amount to anything-- they don't wear trousers."

Whether character strengths can be developed through explicit public policy is quite another, and here the answer appears to be: we don’t know. Policymakers often fall into the trap of what philosopher Jon Elster describes as ‘willing what cannot be willed.’ But as we learn more about the importance of character strengths, and disparities in their development, the need to move forward – if only through more research and evaluations of existing character-development programs – becomes more urgent, not least in terms of boosting social mobility. For greater mobility, we need not only to increase opportunities, but also to insure that people are able to seize them.

The authors miss a third, important need-- the need to increase opportunities which can be grasped by the people who we'd like to see grasp them. You don't really increase cutting opportunities for left handed children by setting out a larger supply of right-handed scissors. Nor do you help them out by trying to beat them into being right-handed. The best solution is to meet them where they are-- buy some left-handed scissors.

There are so many things wrong with this report-- sooooooo many things-- and I'm about stumped for wrapping it all up in a neat conclusion. It is such a thin tissue of supposition, weak arguments, cultural biases, part-for-the-whole fallacies and poorly reasoned conclusions that I get rather lost in it myself. I can only hope that as of this post, I'm the only person who's really paid this much attention to it.

Tenure Is a Civil Rights Issue

I keep trying to write this out, and I keep getting bogged down in the many intricacies and side issues. I'm going to try once again to lay out how the people who insist that getting rid of tenure is a great leap forward for civil rights get things exactly backwards.

First, it's not even close to impossible to fire bad teachers.

Do you want to fire bad teachers? Okay-- how will you identify them, and just how bad do they have to be in order to be fire-worthy? How many people have to agree that they are bad? Remember, in the Vergara case one student's example of a terrible teacher who didn't deserve tenure was a woman who was named Teacher of the Year in her district.

The "solution" proposed by reformy types is to define teacher effectiveness (teacher goodness or the lack thereof) by looking at how well students learned. But "how well students learned" really means "how well students scored on the big state tests."

Keep in mind that the Big State Tests often test only math and reading. Do you think you can judge the quality of an eleventh grade phys ed teacher by the tenth graders' scores on a reading test?

Also keep in mind that multiple studies show that scores on those tests correlate directly to the amount of poverty in a school. Poor, urban, and/or minority students will predictably score lower on the big state tests, which means whoever teaches them will automatically pull low evaluation scores, which means volunteering to teach in high-poverty schools is volunteering to have a low (and potentially fire-worthy) effectiveness score. What do you think would be the best way to recruit teachers for those jobs?

But aren't there Value Added Measure formulas that can correct for all that? The short answer is, no, there are not. There is not a shred of evidence that those formulas do what they're supposed to, and plenty of evidence that they do not.

Which means that, despite all the noise about tenure repeal reform being a civil rights issue, the types of due process derailing being promoted will (by design or not) directly attack the quality of the teaching staffs in the schools that can least withstand these attacks. Linking teacher job security and pay to student test scores makes it harder to recruit and retain teachers for the urban schools already socked in by poverty and suffering from the instability that comes from steady staff churn.

These are also the schools in which teachers have to fight for their students, and fight hard, for everything from getting books for the classroom to speaking up about big-district policies that are unfair to the students, policies created and implemented by leaders who couldn't find their way to the school in question unless it was with a chauffeur and a GPS.

You build up any school by recruiting and retaining teachers, by building a staff that provides stability and security for the students there. You do not recruit teachers for high-poverty, low-achievement classroom jobs by saying, "Come work here. We'll chase you out the first time we get the chance, or the first time you annoy us." You recruit and retain teachers by saying, "We are investing in you for the long haul. We will work with you if you need help, and we will give you the support you need to do the job. We've got your back, and we're committed to you for the long haul. We promise that, barring actual malpractice,  you'll keep this job as long as you wish, even when we find you annoying. We hope you'll think of this school as your home for decades to come."

You build up any school by committing to a relationship with the people who work there, not by letting them know that you'll only keep them around as long as they're useful to you. If you want to protect the civil rights of the poor and minority students in this country, you protect the rights of their teachers.

David Coleman To Fix Inequality in America

David Coleman is here (well, not here here-- he's actually in Aspen) to explain how the College Board is going to recapture market share by synergistically monetizing its products break down the walls of inequality in education.

David Coleman (Common Core writer and current president of the College Board) is deeply concerned with fairness. Huffington Post has a report from the Aspen Institute (because "let's solve America's social problems" is so often associated with "let's go to Aspen") on Coleman's "conversation" with Jane Stoddard Williams of Bloomberg EDU, and the excerpts presented give us a picture of how Coleman plans to boost the College Board's bottom line bring educational equality to the US.

He is sure to tout his free test prep deal with Kahn Academy, by which the College Board will get a foot firmly in every door of the market make test preparation available to every student in America. (Perhaps the new SAT will include references to pieces of 21st Century wisdom such as the new idea that when it comes to websites, if you're not paying for it, the product is you.)

But Coleman's not here primarily to tout the new means of amassing data on every college-bound student in America free SAT prep, though he says it's an example of how the College Board is "leaning into" challenges. There's also a hefty chunk of conversation where Coleman artfully inserts himself in an imaginary conversation between imaginary test critics and imaginary test proponents; it's a pretty clever way to position himself as a perfectly reasonable guy trying to find a middle way in the midst of this contentious and imaginary debate. But that's not why he's here. He's here to talk about AP.


When we worry, perhaps rightly, that assessment can discriminate, let's remember that there's another thing that we know ... that can discriminate more, which is adults.

Yup. That's the problem. Because Coleman says he has learned from "my work in K-12" that we've got to change our game. And that test anxiety is bad. And, using one of his new marketing slogans educational insights, American students don't need more tests, they need more opportunities.

And let's give Coleman credit-- he hasn't said anything that's particularly wrong. What the most capable of reformsters understand is this simple process:

       1) Say something true as a premise
       2) Do something awful that does not actually follow from #1 at all

Coleman's genius marketing idea solution to educational inequality is to take human bias out of the equation and replace it with hidden human bias and testing.

See, he's worried that African-Americans and women and Latinos are missing out on the chance to give College Board their money the opportunity to take AP courses. But it turns out that a great predictor of AP success is the PSAT!! So let's use the previously maligned and increasingly skipped-over PSAT as a marketing booster for AP a means of finding worthy students. AP, we are to understand, is a massive cash cow for the College Board a doorway to opportunity, and if we get more students into AP courses it will be a great payday for the College Board step forward for America.

So let's use the PSAT to generate sales leads AP course recommendations. Let's send letters to parents and lists to guidance departments and let's get students moved into those courses by the carload.

Look, the lack of minorities and women in certain fields is a legitimate problem, and it's a problem the education world should be addressing, and addressing aggressively. But the fact that Coleman can correctly diagnose the disease does not mean we should keep listening when he says, "So you should buy a bottle of Dr. Coleman's Miracle Cure, made of oil squeezed from the finest snakes in Arabia."

We knew this was coming. The Coleman College Board is a business that has leveraged some genius marketing strategies; who else has found the giant brass balls to get their product made part of state policy (well, other than Common Core-- one more reason Coleman's new job makes sense). And if AP were as great as it says, or at least benign, that would be swell. But even as the College Board struggles to regain market share, they are also working feverishly to mess with their products. The SAT has been redesigned to match the Core, and AP courses have begun a transition from loosely structured high-quality courses to CCSS-aligned tightly structured products in a box.

But Coleman's recasting of the College Board quest for new markets as a drive for social justice is the work of a master salesman. Coleman may not know jack about education, but he can sling bullshit like a pro probably change the world with his audacious plan to sell the solution to reviving College Board's revenue stream social and economic justice.

Details on New Teacher Equity Equality Plan

This aspect of school reform has been lurking around the edges for some time-- the notion that once we find the super-duper teachers, we could somehow shuffle everybody around and put the supery-duperest in front of the neediest students. But though reformsters have occasionally floated the idea, the feds have been reluctant to really push it.

Now that the current administration has decided to bring that federal hammer down on this issue, you're probably wondering what they have in mind for insuring that the best teachers will be put in front of the students who have the greatest need. I'm here to tell you what some of the techniques will be.

Before Anything Else, Mild Brain Damage Required

Any program like this requires the involved parties to believe that teachers are basically interchangeable cogs in a huge machine. We will have to assume that a teacher who is a great teacher of wealthy middle school students will be equally successful with students in a poor urban setting. Or vice-versa, as you will recall that Duncan's pretty sure it's the comfy suburban kids who are actually failing. We have to assume that somebody who has a real gift for connecting with rural working class Hispanic families will be equally gifted when it comes to teaching in a high-poverty inner city setting.

And, of course, as always, we'll have to assume that teachers who are evaluated as "ineffective" didn't get that rating for any reason other than their own skills-- the students, families, resources and support of the school, administration, validity of the high stakes tests, the crippling effects of poverty-- none of those things contributed to the teacher's "success" or lack thereof.

Once everybody is on board with this version of reality, we can start shuffling teachers around.

Financial Incentives

Schools with great need and challenge often have trouble attracting top teachers, so let's throw money at them. And since an underlying problem for high needs schools is that they don't have money to throw at their problems, we'll have to use tax money from the state. Which means that wealthy school districts will fork over extra tax money to help convince the teachers at those wealthy schools to leave and go elsewhere. I don't anticipate any complaints about this at all.

Bait and Switch

Simply tell new teacher grads that they have been hired by Big Rich High School and drive them over to Poor Underfunded High School instead. With any luck, you can get some work out of them before they figure it out.

Indentured Teachitude

The federal government will pay for your teacher education, but you then owe them seven years of teaching at the school of their choice. As I type this, I'm thinking it has actual promise. Sure, they won't know if you're great at first, but once you've taught a year or two, they'll have an idea and if you are a really great teacher they'll ship you to one of the underfunded, collapsing schools with high populations of students who are at risk, but if you turn out to be lousy, they'll stick you in some cushy already-successful school where...oh, wait. Never mind.

Rendering

Teams visit the homes of excellent teachers in the middle of the night, tie a bag over their heads and throw them into a van. Days later, the excellent teachers wake up in their new classroom.

The Draft

All the teachers in the state go in a giant pool. The schools of the state will go in reverse order of success last year and draft teachers. We could also do this as a Chinese auction. Chinese auctions are fun.


The Lottery

All the effective teachers' names go in a giant drum, from which they are drawn for assignment. May the odds be ever in their favor.

Note

For both the draft and the lottery, no teachers ever buy homes or settle into communities. Under these systems, states may want to offer teachers good deals on nice campers, fancy Winnebagos, or modified school buses. At last, every teacher can live like a rock star (I'm a Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem guy myself).

One Other Alternative

States could take the actions necessary to make sure that every single school had all the resources it needed, that it was fully staffed, fully funded as well as clean and safe and fully functional. States could take the actions necessary to make teaching an attractive profession with job security, great pay, and the kind of autonomy and power that makes a profession attractive to intelligent grown-ups. States could offer incentives and support for college students who pursue teaching. States could provide support and assistance for teachers, so that great teachers were free to be great and teachers struggling to find their way could become great. State and federal government could reduce the burden of dumb regulations, destructive mandates, and wasteful, punishing tests (reducing to "none" would be the best goal here). In short, states could invest the money and resources to make all schools so attractive that so many teachers want to work there that every administrator in every building in the state gets to choose from among the best and the brightest to find the very best fit for the students.

Fun Puzzle

Among these alternatives I have included one that nobody in power is even remotely considering right now. Can you guess which one it is?

Ineffective Forever

This old piece of reformster wisdom has been popping up again in the wake of Vergara.

I've explained this before, but let me lay out for you once again how the new interpretation of "ineffective" or "low-performing" guarantees that there will always be an endless supply of ineffective teachers.

The new definition of "ineffective teacher" is "teacher whose students score poorly on test."

Add to that the assumption that a student only scores low on a test because of the student had an ineffective teacher.

You have now created a perfect circular definition. And the beauty of this is that in order to generate the statistics tossed around in the poster above, you don't even have to evaluate teachers!

At Rich White Kid Academy, 50 out of 1000 students scored Below Basic on The Big Test. At Poor Brown Kid High, 100 out of 1000 scored Below Basic. Because the only admitted explanation for a Below Basic score is ineffective teaching, the only reason PBKH could have twice as many failing scores is because they have twice as many ineffective teachers! Voila! See how easy it is??

Look, I don't know what methodology these guys used. It's entirely possible that they inserted the extra step of doing actual teacher evaluations. It doesn't matter. As long as you don't consider the possibility that low-income students do poorly on standardized tests because they go to schools with chaotic administrations, high staff turnover, crumbling facilities, lack of resources, dangerous neighborhoods, and backgrounds that do not fit them for culturally-biased standardized tests-- as long as you don't consider any of that, one thing remains certain--

Low-income students will always be taught by ineffective low-performing teachers.

If you define "bad teacher" as "whoever is standing in front of these low-testing students," it doesn't matter who stands there. Whoever it is, he's ineffective.

It is like concluding that the people running up the side of the mountain are slower runners than the people running down the mountain. It is like concluding that people who stand outside in the rain are worse at keeping their clothes dry than inside-standers. It is like concluding that people who are standing in ten-foot holes have poorer distance vision than people who are standing on ladders.

You can have people trade places all day-- you will always find roughly the same distribution of slow/fast, wet/dry. good/bad vision.

It is literally--literally-- like drawing an X on a classroom floor and saying, "Any teacher who stands here is an ineffective teacher."

How do reformsters think this approach will affect their stated plan of putting a great teacher in front of those low-income students? How many teachers (or TFA temp bodies) do they plan to run through that meat grinder before they admit that other factors might be in play? And how do they plan to recruit teachers to stand on that big X, to volunteer for an "ineffective" rating?

So am I saying the poverty and chaos and crumbling building and all the rest is an excuse?

I am not. In fact, once we realize it's not an excuse, we can start to see that for those schools, the situation is actually worse than what I've described so far.

Because that allegedly ineffective teacher may be, by virtue of connecting with students and hard work and love and, yes, even grit, may be accomplishing great things in the face of tremendous odds-- just not super-duper standardized test scores.

Because I've talked so far about all these people as if they are easily interchangeable when in fact they are not. A teacher who is awesomely effective in one school setting might be meh in another. That teacher you've rated "ineffective" because of test scores might, in fact, be the most awesomely perfect person for the job. They might have accomplished great things in spite of the chaos and crumbling and underfunding and lack of admin support and resources, and if you had just fixed any of those things, that teacher would have accomplished miracles for you. But instead you want to fire her and replace her with someone who may have no idea how to face the specific challenges of that classroom.

In other words, by focusing on a bogus definition of effectiveness, you actually have no idea of which teachers are great for a particular classroom. It's not just that the reformster definition of effective is unjust and unfair; its innate wrongness will actively thwart any attempts to make anything better. It's almost-- almost-- as if reformsters actually want public schools to fail.

CAP Serves Some CCSS Baloney

The Center for American Progress came down hard for the Common Core last week, providing yet another field test for the 100% baloney sandwich that is the Core's urban poor talking point menu.

In "The Common Core Is An Opportunity for Educational Equity,", CAP asserts, "The Common Core State Standards hold promise for low-income students, students of color, English language learners, and students with disabilities, who traditionally perform significantly worse than their peers." And you know that this is a serious position paper because it has footnotes and stuff. What it doesn't have is sense.

Quality Control

The standards will act as a "quality-control check," and let's just stop right there, because do you know, CAPsters, how a quality control check works? Because this seems to be a point on which many CCSS supporters are really fuzzy.

Quality control does not mean that every piece that rolls down the assembly line is now suddenly up to standard. What quality control means is that we check every piece on the line, and when we find pieces that don't meet the standard we throw them away. Quality control does not mean every toaster will be perfect-- it means that every toaster that makes it out of the factory will be perfect.

Using Common Core standards as quality control can only mean one thing-- we will find the students who don't meet the standards and we will throw them away. This is really, really wrong and completely counter to the point of American public education and I can't believe I even have to type that out, but apparently I do.

Out of the Stone Age

Students will explore concepts deeply, work together to solve complex problems, and engage in project-based learning—instead of focusing on worksheets and rote memorization. 

Yes, because no teacher in the history of teacherdom ever knew how to teach concepts or cooperative learning or anything except worksheets before CCSS.


Highlighting Educational Gaps

In this section, CAP notes that low-income students and students of color are less likely to have access to higher-level courses, are more likely to have inexperienced or out-of-area teachers, and along with ELL and students with disabilities are less likely to graduate on time. They have footnotes, and I have no reason to doubt that these are all true facts.

Students of Color and Low Income Students Have Lower College Outcomes

Fewer of these students attend college and a high percentage of them need remedial courses. Again, I believe that by and large this is all true.

And Now That We've Wound Up, The Pitch!

So having established the need, I expect we're now going to make a case for how the implementation of CCSS will help address these issues and-- wait! What? Ummm... no, this is the whole conclusion, verbatim:

The Common Core will improve education quality for all students—particularly traditionally underserved students. Raising standards and preparing all students for college and careers will help reduce the disparities identified for low-income students, students of color, ELLs, and students with disabilities.

But-but-but--HOW!! Fairy dust! Magic beans! I mean, hell, I can type "Eating a baloney sandwich every day will make me grow tall, handsome and wise," but that doesn't make it so! Are you not even going to TRY to explain how Common Core will help? Not even try a teensy weensy bit??

Because-- and I don't think you need me to tell you this, but I want you to know that I know-- those are serious issues that you've laid out. Inequality of opportunity, of education, of employment, or health care-- this is a bit of a national shame. The fact that schools intended for the urban poor are underserved, underresourced, underfunded, understaffed-- I mean, all those things you listed as gapos and problems are things that we really ought to be trying to fix.

But here we are in the hospital ER looking at a patient who has been hit by a truck, who is broken and bleeding, and you want to offer him a magical baloney sandwich??!! Come on, CAP. You can do better than this.