What Doesn't Kill You...

Shake it off. Toughen up. Pain is weakness leaving the body. At times as a culture we seem to almost fetishize suffering . In education, that belief in the redemptive power of suffering has found its way into the Cult of Grit. At its best, the field of grittology is a recognition of the need to help children learn to rebound, adapt, recover, weather the storm. At its worst, the field of grittology is an excuse to make no attempt to make life better for children. Instead of taking them an umbrella, standing with them in the storm, or bringing them inside, we sit warm and comfy on the couch and say, "Well, it's good for them. Shows what they're made of. Builds character. Pass the remote."

A recent Washington Post has a moving and honest take on the issue of childhood suffering from Virgie Townsend, a senior editor at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Townsend opens with a memory of a teen in a writing workshop who wrote about her own abuse and rebuffed expressions of "Sorry you had to live that" with "Don't be. It made me who I am."

I also grew up with violence, terrified of a parent who was verbally and physically abusive, and drove drunk with me and my siblings in the backseat. Sometimes this parent would threaten to choke me with a dog collar or would fire off shotgun rounds overhead for the fun of seeing the rest of the family cower. I am glad my classmate found a way to cope with her past, but I can’t be grateful for mine.

I would have been better off without that dog collar, without those years of fear. After such episodes, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. I repeatedly failed state math exams. My immune system was weak. As a child, I had frequent, unexplained fevers, which baffled my pediatrician and led him to test me for cancer.

Townsend goes on to catalog the other effects-- difficulty making friends, constant worry that saying or doing the wrong thing might trigger anger and disgust in any other person.

My first thought is simply how awful that must be. I have had students who were victims of abuse that I knew about, but reading this account reminds me that some abuse victims in my classroom present with other problems that do not obviously scream "abuse victim." About my fifth or sixth thought is that there are folks out there who think that part of the solution to Student Townsend's problems is to fire the math teacher who couldn't get the test scores up.

It’s human nature to believe that our difficulties carry extra meaning, that they are not in vain. Although suffering is undesirable, it’s supposed to help us grow. We want our pain to make sense, to somehow be edifying. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Townsend goes on to catalog, from the Puritans through Teddy Roosevelt through Helen Keller through Oprah, how we love the story of redeeming and clarifying suffering. I would add that it's worth noticing that one of the first things people do in these stories of growth and strength is they stop suffering. It's not like cake. Nobody (well, almost nobody) says, "Wow. That was so good, I think I'll have some more." Suffering in these stories is so good for the hero, and yet the progression, the path, is to move away from it as swiftly as possible. So I'm going to call our attitude confused, at best.

Townsend notes that we all benefit from "life's healthy and normal challenges." But researchers have found that "traumatic incidents often have long-term negative consequences." Childhood abuse or trauma can result in toxic stress-- stress that is literally poison to the body. "In work published in 2012, Harvard researchers found that people who had been mistreated as children had, on average, a 6 percent loss in volume in their hippocampi, a part of the brain involved with learning and memory. Toxic stress also damages the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to social behavior and decision-making, and the cardiovascular and immune systems."

Research suggests that childhood trauma increases the risk of cancer, heart disease,  mental health issues and (surprise) poor school performance.  "A 2009 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported that people who had six or more adverse childhood experiences died, on average, 20 years sooner than those who had none."

The classic story of redemption and strength has also been found to be helpful to children, but only when paired with the support of stable adults. Simply invoking grit or Kelly Clarkson is not enough.

The message is clear. Childhood trauma stacks the deck against the children who suffer through it. Invoking grit or repeatedly firing the teachers who can't work miracles won't help. Repeatedly churning school staff so that school itself is a crazy chaotic place won't help. In fact, shuffling those children off to school while saying, "Well, the schools should fix that" is not enough.

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," is pretty close to "What are you complaining about? You're not dead, yet." It is absolutely true that life comes with difficulty and challenge and hurt and hardship and that people whose goal is to encase their child in a problem-free cocoon are making their own sort of terrible mistake (that's a column for another day). But that's kind of the point-- life comes with plenty of difficulty all on its own. We don't need to be callous about that, and we certainly don't need to add to it, and we certainly shouldn't abandon our smallest, weakest brothers and sisters to suffering on their own because we figure that will be good for them.

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.

The Real Secret of Grit

Grit is a great thing. Of all the various rhetorical footballs that get kicked around in education debates, grit is one that everybody loves. Reformsters love to talk about it, and nobody that I can think of in the Resistance is out there bad-mouthing it. Nobody is saying, "We need wimpier kids with less toughness and resilience. We need kids who will fold under pressure and buckle when things get tough." Well, at least not out loud or on purpose.

We do have confusion and disagreement about where grit comes from and how it works.

Grit is not self-esteem. Self-esteem is about what you think you deserve. Grit is about what you think you can handle.

All of our concerns, all of our worries, all of our fears, anxieties, distress about the future-- they all come down to grit. Every statement we make about a Bad Thing That Could Happen has an unspoken coda. "I might lose my job" or "The house might burn down" or "I might not get into college" or "I might get stranded on an ice floe with a brace of rabid arctic ferrets"-- every one of them is followed by an unspoken "and I wouldn't be able to handle it."

Think about it. All the things you don't worry about, you don't worry about because you know that you can handle them. "The point on my pencil might break," you say without fear because it's followed by, "and then I would sharpen it." But even good things like graduation and marriage can trigger stress, because they trigger the sme question-- "Can I handle what happens next?"

So building grit is about just one thing-- learning that the answer to "Can I handle what comes next?" is "Yes. Yes, I can."

Some grit proponents like to talk about it as a personal quality, by which they seem to mean that you either have grit or you don't. And some grit fans believe that grit emerges magically from the hard dirt of tough times. Just keep punching someone in the face, and if they have what it takes, they'll develop grit.

This is incorrect. Adversity can be part of the mulch from which grit grows, but it's not the whole part. It's not even the most important part (which is why some people who have had soft, cushy lives still manage to be gritty as hell).

The important part of developing grit is becoming convinced that you can handle whatever it is. Developing grit is becoming convinced that, "Yes. Yes, I can." is your answer. And most often our students get that convincing from another human being. And not because that human being keeps punching the student in the face. Every story of grit emerging from adversity includes one common feature-- a person who said, "Stand up. You can do this."

You develop grit in students by standing with them and saying, "You can do this."

Now, that can be tricky business. Different teacher-student combinations require different styles of interaction. In one case, soft, gentle hand-holdy support may be just the thing, but in another case being all soft and gentle may actually communicate, "You are weak and fragile and can't really handle this." Tough love, even when seemingly harsh, can be just the thing because it communicates, "Well, of course you can handle this. I'm so certain of it that I find it ridiculous to suggest otherwise."

You do not help students succeed by making them feel small. You help students succeed by helping them see themselves as bigger than their challenges. How you do that depends on you and the student you're dealing with, but the key is the focus-- helping that student be big. But you don't do it by making them small, by focusing your attention on all the ways they aren't enough. You do not make them gritty by smashing them down.

The concept of grit is too often used as excuse not to help, treating a challenge in life as a test to which grit is the answer, and if you don't have it, well, no cheating and it sucks to be you. But we have a responsibility to help others-- particularly young others-- develop grit. And sometimes we can do it in a moment. Neil Degrasse Tyson talks about the grit and toughness and resilience it took for him to grow up African-American with dreams of becoming a physicist. And he speaks glowingly about how the great scientist Carl Sagan met him, talked to him, and cemented the idea that he could absolutely do it-- that he was just as big and tough as his dreams. Sagan made him feel big enough.

That should be the goal for all of us (and not just teachers)-- to help others be big enough. If we want grit to grow in the garden, we have to tend it-- not just walk away and insist that it somehow grow itself.

Grit Not Solution To Everything

In EdWeek, Sarah Sparks reports that a new study suggests that grit might not actually be the dirt from which all flowers of success may grow. It's a study to file in your Captain Obvious folder, and yet such is the world we live in these days, such studies need to be both performed and noted, because Captain Obvious cannot always vanquish his arch-enemy, Commander Oblivious.

When I was in high school, there was a guy in band who worked harder than anyone. Every study hall, extra lunch time, before and after school, he was in a practice room practicing his instrument over and over and over and over and over again. I think it's safe to say that his Grit Quotient was huge. And yet, he never got any better. His technique was adequate, and he played like he had a brick ear. His horn never sang; it barely spoke. Mostly it just spit out notes in a row. To this day, my schoolmates from that era refer to a syndrome named after him, for people who work and work and work but just don't get anything out of it.

Magdalena G. Grohman at the University of Texas at Dallas could have been studying him.

Her analyses (which, I should note, was apparently performed on subjects of convenience-- college undergrads) suggests that grit, consistency, and perseverance did not predict success in creative endeavors. Instead, creativity seems to relate most closely to openness to new experiences.

At Yale, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle at the Center for Emotional Intelligence, working on a separate study that looked at reports of high school students through peer reports and teacher surveys, discovered much the same thing. Grit had nothing to do with creativity, but creativity correlated strongly with openness and passion for the project.

Pringle has suggested an interesting future line of study-- what about the person who has creative ideas that s/he never gets around to actually producing. Does grit come into play there?

Founding Mother of Grittology, Angela Duckworth, noted that she found all this interesting, but since she never studied any links between creativity and grit, she has no thoughts about how Grohman's and Pringle's work connects to her own.

So grit has limits. Of course, if you're of the opinion that creativity is not required in the worker bees of tomorrow, you might not care.

Grit-- Not Just For Students!

New leaps forward have been made in grittology, the study of that elusive quality, the lack of which gives reformy leaders cause to castigate schoolchildren across the country.

Holly Yettick reports at EdWeek that University of Pennsylvania researchers Claire Robertson-Kraft and Angela Duckworth have published a study of grit as it applies to teachers and the hiring process. The study (the pdf of which is titled "truegrit.pdf," so kudos for the academic humor) opens with this statement of background/context:

Surprisingly little progress has been made in linking teacher effectiveness and retention to factors observable at the time of hire. The rigors of teaching, particularly in low income school districts, suggest the importance of personal qualities that have so far been difficult to measure objectively.

Was it possible, they wondered, to hire teachers who were actually going to be tough enough to stick it out on the job. In short, could we spot the teachers with grit?

Duckworth is the scientist for the job, having coined the term grit back in 2007 (presumably as it applies to education and not sandpaper). As a founding mother of grittology, Duckworth worked on a 2009 study that linked grit to effectiveness in novice teachers, but that study, says Yettick was limited because the subjects self-reported for grittiness (doesn't everybody want to think of themselves as gritty, and can we count on gritty people to be fully self-aware? being a scientist is hard).

So this time the intrepid grittologists looked to see if they could find a way to measure grit objectively. They looked at novice teachers' college activities and gave the teachers scores of 0 through 6 for aspects like years of participation or rising through the ranks of the groups to honored positions. In short, did they make commitments and stick with them?

This was correlated to retention (did the teacher stick around without quitting partway through the year) and to effectiveness (did the --uh-oh. hold on a second). Yeah, we were not quite so sure we could come up with a serious effectiveness measure other than some testing data. So there's that. Conclusion? "Grittier teachers outperformed their less gritty colleagues and were less likely to leave their classrooms mid-year."

There's not a lot of research on how to engrittify teachers, so researcher Matthew Kraft thinks it's better to hire teachers that come with their own grit and then help them if things get tough. "School contexts can support teachers to maximize their potential or undercut their efforts."

 So what have we learned? If you hire people whose application shows that they joined things and stuck with them in college, they are more likely to stick with the job when you hire them. And if you need to make a common sense observation, turn it into number, and then turn it back into an observation, then maybe you shouldn't be involved in hiring people.

I'm just imagining a young man coming back from a date. His friends ask how it went. He tells them to wait, sits down, gets out a calculator and iPad and creates a spreadsheet of the quality and length of the kisses that he and his date shared, converts the observations to a digital data set, plugs the numbers into a formula, collates the data, and looks at the final numbers. He turns to his friends and says, "Well, according to this kissological data rating, our date went well. And this score indicates there's a high probability that we may kiss again soon."

I get that many schools' hiring practices are somewhere between "phone a friend" and "darts tossed blindly at wall." But if you need a data set to tell you how to take an impression of other carbon based life forms, education is probably not the field for you.

But then, there are probably a few other people who need to get that message beyond those doing the hiring.

Vicki Phillips Tries Again

Vicki Phillips last EduWonk PR piece for CCSS sparked plenty of debate. Glancing through the comments and Bill Gates's latest heaping helping of baloney in USA Today, it would seem that it was also used as something of a prompt for the newest wave of CCSS talking points.

So it's only fitting that Phillips is back this month to field test the next wave of CCSS support bullets. Phillips is a Pennsylvania product, starting her admin career in Lancaster before becoming part of Smilin' Ed Rendell's revolving doorload of Ed Secretaries who took on the thankless task of powering through his program of unfunded mandates and terrible tests. When she left to head Portland schools, we were not particularly sad.

She works for the Gates Foundation now as Director of Education, College Ready. And now she's here to talk at us some more about the awesome momentum of  CCSS.

Stick-to-itiveness. Determination. Tenacity. Grit. These are concepts that every teacher tries to impart to his or her students – the importance of not giving up when the going gets tough.

That's the lede, so we know where this train is headed. That ol' grit-- it is one hugely important quality for students to have. So why, Phillips asks, would we risk stopping the forward movement on CCSS, "the most important U.S. education initiatives in decades." And may I just add, "A bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves." But no-- Phillips is not even going to pretend to create any sort of plausible link between grit and the Common Core (they just go together, like a horse and carriage, love and marriage, apples and oranges).

See, as we move forward, we all knew that we would have to be flexible, willing to "adjust and recalibrate." This is one of the shinier talking points these days, in which reformers speak as if they've always expected there to be a need to carefully consider what we were implementing and no, they were not the ones insisting we all follow their orders precisely, no, that wasn't them at all, nuh-uh. No, the newest round of CCSS reformy folks say things like this:

Equally, we must ensure that teachers and students are truly prepared before consequences for not meeting the standards are implemented.

No more impassioned full-speed-ahead, build-the-plane-while-we-fly-it stuff. No, we want to take our time and get it right. And like any good Orwellian overlords, we are not only going to say this with a straight face, but we will not at all acknowledge that we ever said anything else.

Okay, then. In this brave new world, what does Phillips suggest we are supposed to do to maintain the awesome runaway-truckish momentum of CCSS?


First, teachers must play a key role in the Common Core implementation process.

Teachers must play a key role. A "key role" is what you offer somebody when you want to soften then news that they won't be in a leadership role. "Sorry, you didn't get the new management spot, but golly whiz you will have a Key Role in the transition team." Nobody ever uses "key role" in their CV. 

We have apparently seen great success in Cleveland with teacher-created materials. And all around the country teachers are already working "with other education practitioners" and, really, what the hell is an "education practitioner"? This confabulation of teachers and EPs is working "to ensure teachers have access to the high-quality resources and tools they need as the Common Core State Standards are implemented."

And, seriously, as noted in Colin McEnroe's genius column, when somebody talks like this, they are either hiding something or selling something or both.

We'll follow that with a nod to the NEA Master Teacher program, a fully-owned subsidiary of the Gates Foundation, so why wouldn't we be plugging that. It will have a full year's worth of lessons! Districts won't need to hire real teachers with actual skills ever again!! So maybe the "key role" teachers are playing is the role of "making actual teachers obsolete." Thanks for having my back, NEA.

Second, we need to make sure teachers have the time they need to collaborate and prepare for these changes. 

I do not disagree with Phillips here. If we are going to be forced to unpack an Augean Stable's worth of CCSSBS, at least give us a shovel and few extra hours to do the job. We all seem to know something that Phillips is pretending not to know, or has forgotten since she was a district administrator-- time costs money, and school districts don't have an endless Gatesian-sized supply of it. So I think I speak for many superintendents when I say, "Thanks! That's a fabulous idea. More time! I never THOUGHT of THAT!" Also, next year the Gates Foundation will buy ponies for all the poor people in America-- all they have to do is build barns for the ponies to live in. It will be super-easy.

And then we get more lip service about how teachers have to be co-opted so they will buy in recruited as valuable co-leaders in the process. Because, finally, reformies have decided that maybe teachers should be involved in all this reformy stuff after all.

Then a full paragraph devoted to how CCSS will make it easier for children to move from one state to another. Certainly a legitimate reason to upend the US education system. Next year Gates will be reconfiguring the climate of the entire Northern Hemisphere so that children can move from Alaska to Hawaii without experiencing discomfort or needing to buy new clothes.

We round on the home stretch with a link to blog by a teacher who thinks CCSS rocks his world. The link is actually broken, but based on the quotes, I think I can reproduce the gist of the teacher's comments:

I used to teach nothing but rote memorization and I tried never to talk to my students and we just used slates and charcoal to do our endless drill, but then CCSS came along and I was all like, "Woah, you mean we can do thinky things!!?? And all sorts of cool learny activities." So thanks to CCSS I know how to teach because before I didn't know how to do nothing. But now critical thinking and computers. Thanx, CCSS.

Now cue the violins and fireworks for the big finish:

This is what we need to remember every time we hear calls to roll back Common Core. We cannot give up. We owe it to our children to continue to move forward and ensure that every child in this country has a chance to pursue his or her dreams. After all, if we expect our children to show grit in the face of adversity, how can we possibly ask any less of ourselves?

[insert inarticulate roar here] What the hell does the implementation of CCSS with its attendant school of bad program pilot fish have to do with making a better life for our children. Show me one single minute freakin piece of evidence that CCSS has anything at all to do with children pursuing their dreams!  And "grit in the face of adversity"??!! School is not not NOT supposed to be "the face of adversity," not for students, not for teachers, not for parents or administrators or janitors or bus drivers. What sort of bollixed-up brain-deficient balonery equates school with a test of whether students are worthy or having dreams?

I don't know if Lancaster Superintendent Vicki Phillips lost her understanding of actual schools or if she sold it. But this piece of press-ready PR puffery does her no credit. Please may we not have a third Ode to CCSS Momentum.