Duncan's Legless Duck

I opened my eyes while you were kissing me once more than once
And you looked as sincere as a dog
Just as sincere as a dog does when it’s the food on your lips with which it's in love
                                                      --Fiona Apple "Parting Gift"

When you have to bribe or threaten people to be your friend, you can be sure that your friendship will be short-lived.

Over at EdWeek, Alyson Klein is asking one of the big questions of the moment-- how much political juice does the ED department have in NCLB waiver renewals? The related question is how much juice does the department have in the NCLB reauthorization itself?

The possible and imminent rewrite of ESEA/NCLB makes more obvious what some of us have been saying all long-- the tale of "voluntary" adoption of Common Core, high-stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluations, and the rest of the reformster package was a fiction. States complied with the federal mandates because the feds had everyone's violation of the NCLB ridiculously unattainable goals to threaten the states with, and because they could score some cash doing it.

Reauthorizing ESEA has always been the quick way to short-circuit reformster plans. NCLB has been the gun that the feds held to every state's head. Now Congress is threatening to take out the bullets. Without any bullets, and with the big piles of money running out, the administration is finding it's out of friends.

Arne Duncan can make impassioned speeches about the value of testing and then rerun the text in various publications. It doesn't really matter. Arne Duncan has had six years to prove that he has a vision of how to make US public education strong and vital. He has had six years to convince people that he knows what he's doing,that he knows where he wants to go and how to get there. He has failed. His only hope at this stage would have been a cadre of people saying, "Well, I wasn't sure, but I know I've seen the good his policies can do and the way they've really energized the school district, so I back this guy." There are no such people now. He may have some small input with the Senate committee (Sen. Patty Murray seemed to be parroting many of his talking points), but I don't hear anybody saying, "And of course we want to work closely with the Secretary as we consider this important legislation."

Duncan hasn't made friends in Congress. He hasn't made friends among teachers, which is in some ways his biggest failure; if you think back to the beginning of his time in office, you'll recall that he said many things that teachers thought were great, but then he followed those good statements with terrible policies. And he hasn't made friends among the states. He may have thought he was making friends, but all he was gaining was compliance for as long as held the gun in one hand and the purse strings in the other.

So now, as waiver renewal comes due, Duncan finds himself in the difficult position of negotiating the price of a condo in a development that may never be built and which he doesn't actually own. Someone else (someone who's not even listening to him) is designing the building, and he has to negotiate a deal with future tenants. The administration perhaps thought they were strengthening their hand by making new waiver deals good through 2018, but it's looking like a mistake-- why lock yourself into a long term deal you may not need to make in the first place.

And you'll notice that none of the states are piping up to say, "We would like you to rewrite ESEA so it looks exactly like the waiver requirements, because we think they are swell." Instead, Klein quotes Kentucky ed commissioner Terry Holiday saying that once waivers are dead and gone, "I think we'd all quickly abandon all the work on tying teacher evaluation to test scores."

The waivers exist to free states from the mandates of ESEA, but nobody knows what those mandates will look like after Congress gets through with them. Duncan's position? Make a deal for a waiver or else something might happen, somehow, maybe? 

Klein quotes Anne Hyslop at Bellwether:

"I don't see the department doing much more to really put the hammer down on states to get their evaluation systems in place," she said. "I don't think [renewal] means states are going to change what they're doing or get in trouble if they don't do what the department says. The secretary is saying pretty please do this, and states are saying thanks for your input, but we're going another direction."

Maybe if his programs had possessed some actual merit they would have developed support of their own, but here we are looking at VAMs and test-based accountability and increased charterization and turn-around schools and the feds telling every school in the country what success looks like and none of it-- none of it-- has produced anything resembling successful results. The only real success can be found in the same places as Duncan's remaining friends-- boardrooms and offices of edubiz corporations where the money has been pouring in.

Congress created NCLB in a flurry of bipartisan jolliness, but it was so closely tied to the Bush administration that it is still seen as a Bush law. Whatever comes out of the current move to rewrite, I don't think anyone is going to call it the Obama/Duncan ESEA.

Don't worry about Duncan. His connections have kept him sell-employed for most of his adult life, and I doubt that they'll fail him after he leaves USED. But for the moment he's just a guy trapped on a legless duck without enough food left on his lips to make the dog fake affection.

Feds To Maine: Make Teacher Evals Worse (Or Else)

Maine joins the list of states that have received a spanking from the US Department of Education.

Maine came to the waiver party with the other last-minute slackers of the third wave, still working on passing a plan that they could submit for federal approval in the summer of 2013. The account of that work (including eleven months of negotiation with the USED) is a reminder of how completely state ed departments have become focused not on figuring out the best plan for students of their, but on achieving compliance with the federal USED.

Those negotiations had hit some snags as they came down to the wire. Internally, lawmakers could not agree how to handle the requirement that states base a significant portion of teacher evaluations on student test results.

It seemed that all that was settled, but according to Maine's NPR last week, the work has come undone. The waiver acceptance had included a promise by the Maine legislature to hammer out the details of a fed-acceptable teacher eval system. But after the work was completed last spring and sent off to the Us Department of Education, it came back (albeit slowly) with a big red F. Maine now faces the risk of joining Washington on the list of Naughty States That Didn't Do Exactly What USED Wanted.

"The federal government looked at those and said they don't meet the standard they expect," says Tom Desjardin, who says word of the U.S. Department of Education's misgivings about the state's approach came in a recent letter to former Maine Education Commissioner Jim Rier. Desjardin took over as acting commissioner in December.

Says Desjardin, when it comes to teacher eval, "The big rub is that the federal government wants student assessment scores to be a significant factor - 20, 25 percent."

Maine's evaluation system has the support of its teachers union. MEA president Lois Kilbey-Chesley says the Maine plan "represents what Maine wanted." She also expresses concern that the Maine plan has already begun implementation.

Pro-testing advocates were also happy with the Main plan

State Sen. Brian Langley, an Ellsworth Republican, chairs the Legislature's Education Committee. Langley says those who favor the use of standardized tests in teacher evaluation didn't want to lock districts into a 20 percent threshold either.

Granted, Langley wants to see a system where local districts can go higher than 20% if they wish, so clearly there's some disagreement in the state about the role of testing in teacher evaluation. But the point is that Maine worked out a system that its legislature got behind and which left some flexibility for local control by school districts.

It appears the Maine legislature will get back to the important job of making the US Department of Education happy, though some legislators aren't sure they're ready to get to work yet.

Democratic state Sen. Rebecca Millett, who serves with Langley on the Education Committee, says she finds parts of the U.S. Education Department's letter vague. Millett is asking Congresswoman Chellie Pingree to intervene and find out exactly what changes the federal government wants to see.

And so another state in the union gets to experience the inefficiency of a system in which the USED tries to control state education programs without looking too much like it's controlling state education programs. Maine has to scrap its work and rewrite it to better include a failed policy for teacher evaluation, because state autonomy is so last-century.

Update: Rep. Brian Hubbell has another view of what the letter from USED actually requires (h/t to reader Nancy Hudak).

Recently, the state has received a letter from the federal Department of Education seeking clarification about Maine’s implementation of the compromise amendment on the rules for teacher evaluations that I helped to negotiate last session.

The Maine Department of Education is concerned that this notice jeopardizes the state’s waiver from the onerous and outdated federal requirements of No Child Left Behind.  The Department’s immediate suggestion is to amend the rules to incorporate more uniform standardized assessments and remove the provisions for local flexibility.

But, after consultation with other state educators and staff from Senator King’s office, I believe that the USDoE concerns may be addressed more productively simply by clarifying Maine’s process and providing better explanation of Maine’s efforts to improve both proficiency-based learning and professional development for educators

So, in response to the USDoE letter, in collaboration with the Maine School Management organization and the new state Commissioner of Education, I hope to have a better proposal ready for federal consideration in the next week or two.

Race to the Top Priorities

The giant turkey that is Race to the Top has its neck on the chopping block. I would not celebrate just yet-- a proposed budget is about as solid and secure as the sticker price on a used car. But at the very least, the CRomnibus bill is a shot fired across RttT's bow.

So that (and, you know, Throwback Thursday) make it a great time to go back to this document, the executive summary of RttT. The summary includes a list of judging criteria for RttT applications, including the point value for each one, and while they are arranged by categories, I thought it might be useful to arrange them in point order, form the most points to the least. As with any rubric, the point assignment reveals what the real priorities are. So let's see where RttT's heart really lay.

Articulating State's education reform agenda and LEA's participation in it (65 points)
Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance (58 points)
Developing and adopting common standards (40 points)
Blah blah blah promoting charters (40 points)
Turning around the lowest-achieving schools (40 points)
Building strong statewide capacity to implement, scale up, and sustain plan (30 points)
Demonstrating significant process in raising achievement and closing gaps (30 points)
Ensuring equitable distribution of effective teachers and principals (25 points)
Fully implementing statewide longitudinal system (24 points)
Providing high-quality pathways for aspiring teachers and principals (21 points)
Supporting the transition to enhanced standards and high quality assessments (20 points)
Providing effective support to teachers and principals (20 points)
Using data to improve instruction (18 points)
Improving the effectiveness of teacher and principal preparation programs (14 points)
Bonus points for STEM emphasis (15 points)
Developing and implementing common, high-quality assessments (10 points)
Intervening in the lowest-achieving schools and LEAs (10 points)
Making education funding a priority (10 points)
Accessing and using State data (5 points)
Demonstrating other significant reform conditions (5 points)

You can see that the A #1 priority was to generate a good batch of paperwork and a well-polished application, because paperwork is the lubricant that greases the wheels of government. Close behind is a tautological statement (meaning "improve teacher performance based on performance" because silly bureaucrats are silly) that presumably means "get some kind of VAM system in place." The teacher effectiveness piece was worth more than the bottom six items put together; teacher effectiveness plus good paperwork is about equal to the last ten items on the list. Both are broken down in further detail in the document; the performance criteria boils down to "develop an evaluation system based on student test scores and use it to make personnel decisions (including "removing ineffective tenured and untenured teachers").

Next we get the other linchpins of RttT/waivers-- common core, charters, and turning around failing schools. Note that "turnaround" is worth four times as many points as "intervening." Making the funding for sustaining all of this a priority (which means, what, we promise to make serious faces about it-- how does anyone measure this) comes in close to the bottom. I was surprised that developing and implementing testing comes in close to the bottom, but I suppose you can just buy those, and their necessity is implied by all the top items, anyway.

The "move good teachers around" item (you know-- the one that absolutely nobody has figured out a plan for yet) comes in the middle of the pack. One does wonder what bureaucratic fiddling resulted in making that just one point more important than a statewide longitudinal system. How fascinating must that conversation have been?

These criteria are also arranged into six groups, and if we put those in point order, we get

Great Teachers and Leaders (138 points)
State Success Factors (125 points)
Standards and Assessments (70 points)
General Selection Criteria (55 points)
Turning Around the Lowest Achieving Schools (50 points)
Data Systems to Support Instruction (47 points)

But wait! The document also mentions the Big Priorities, which, as it turns out, don't entirely match the point system listed above, but which are ranked with fun language.

Priority 1:An "absolute" priority. The plan must be comprehensive and LEAs have to be all in.
Priority 2: "Competitive" This is the STEM bonus points.
Priority 3: "Invitational" Improve early learning outcomes. Which means you have to measure them, which means say howdy to standardized tests for four-year-olds
Priority 4: "Invitational" Ramp up your data system. In particular, make it connectable with other states' systems.
Priority 5: "Invitational" P-20 alignment, aka cradle-to-career pipeline.
Priority 6: "Invitational" Allowing school-level reforminess including control of staffing, budget, class alternatives, etc.

There's also a fun glossary of terms which didn't tell us anything new, but are good reminders of what the Department means. For instance, let's chase this definition-

Effective teacher means a teacher whose students achieve acceptable rates (e.g., at least one grade level in an academic year) of student growth (as defined in this notice). States, LEAs, or schools must include multiple measures, provided that teacher effectiveness is evaluated, in significant part, by student growth (as defined in this notice).

Student growth means the change in student achievement (as defined in this notice) for an individual student between two or more points in time. A State may also include other measures that are rigorous and comparable across classrooms.

Student achievement means —
        (a) For tested grades and subjects: (1) a student’s score on the State’s assessments under the ESEA; and, as appropriate, (2) other measures of student learning, such as those described in paragraph (b) of this definition, provided they are rigorous and comparable across classrooms.
         (b) For non-tested grades and subjects: alternative measures of student learning and performance such as student scores on pre-tests and end-of-course tests;student performance on English language proficiency assessments; and other measures of student achievement that are rigorous and comparable across classrooms.

Yes, when lost in the haze of debate and discussion, sometimes it's best to go back to the basics. Here it is-- exactly what the feds wanted. Good paperwork. A teacher rank and rate system based on student test scores that would drive everything from training. More charters. More school takeovers.

While the document says that RttT "will reward states that have demonstrated success in raising student achievement, that's not really what it rewards. It rewards states for remaking their education systems along the lines demanded by the feds. And though the document promised that the best models would spread their reform ideas across the country, five years later, there are no signs of any such spreading infection. But then, there are no signs that any of these federal ideas about fixing schools has actually improved education for any students in this country.

If Congress actually manages to shut this mess down, there will be no cause for tears.

Administration Wants To Lock in Testing Forever

The US Department of Education this week released the guidelines for states getting ready to fill out those waiver applications. Just add this to my "I Told You So" list regarding last months supposed signal of a change in direction by education leaders and Arne Duncan. Once again, what we're seeing is not so much Change of Direction as it is Jam Foot Down On Gas Pedal.

The new guidelines are essentially like the old guidelines, with a hard line emphasis on basing evaluation of teachers, schools, students, principals, bus drivers, landscaping artists and the guy who delivers paper supplies to the school on standardized tests. It was just a month ago that Duncan was shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Dang. I don't know why the heck everyone got so obsessed with testy stuff. I guess it was all of us, huh?" Now he's back to "You will all eat, breathe, live and die by the tests. Or else."

The feds have tightened up the old sub-group requirements. We all remember this from the NCLB days-- a subgroup of twenty-or-so students (depending on your location) will carry the fate of the entire building in their test scores. Students who belong to subgroups may once again look forward to Special schedules featuring five hours of steady test prep. Congratulations, subgroup students.

The new waivers also feature a super-extended feature which will allow states to exist in whatever extra-legal limbo the waivers create well past President Obama's expiration date. This is a really novel stretch of a really novel idea. There is already some debate about whether the waivers are legal in the first place; now we get to ask if they can be made binding on a subsequent administration. I suppose we're fortunate that they didn't try to lock testing in until the tri-centennial.

Perhaps it's an attempt to weight state's consideration about whether to bother or not ("We could just skip the waiver application, and by the time the feds had gotten around to actually doing anything, we'd already be getting new rules from a new President anyway"). Or it could just be a mark of how deeply committed this administration is to the idea that an untested child is a wasted young life. maybe they're sincerely dedicated to making sure that every test maker gets to sell lots of product every child gets to experience the joys of soulcrushing standardized testing. Maybe they are trying to further confirm that it will make no difference how we cast our votes in 2016.

Or maybe they're just trying to give extra inspiration to movements like the one that rendered testing of seniors in Colorado completely moot. Imagine that-- students smart enough to figure out that the testing is a complete waste of time! I guess we're doing something right.

Whatever the case, this new set of waiver guidelines is great news for testing companies and terrible news for everyone who actually cares about public educations and the students who attend public schools. So, thanks a lot, Department of Education.

What Should Arne Do?

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has taken plenty of grief.

He has been criticized by folks on the right who believe he is, at the very least, a hood ornament on the Great Studebaker of Federal Intrusion into education. He has been criticized by folks on the left for being the faceplate on the great machine that is dismantling the US public school system.

Arne is easy to pick apart (I should know-- I've done it here, here, here and here, to give just a few examples), and he invites it with such fumbling footinmouthery like his classic slam on white suburban moms. He buddied up with reformsters like John White and Kevin Huffman, cheered for the winners of the Vergara anti-tenure lawsuit, and called Hurrican Katrina a great step forward for New Orleans.

And so the pile gets bigger and bigger. The NEA called for his resignation. The AFT voted that he be sent to his room to think about what he's done. Conservative CCSS boosters blame his intervention for damaging the Common Core brand. A soon-to-be-published Vanderbilt Law Review article asserts that the signature NCLB waiver program is illegal. NEA president-elect Lily E. Garcia characterized him as well-meaning, sincere, and dead wrong about just about everything. And that's about the nicest thing anyone has had to say about him in a while. 

We've hammered Duncan for what he's gotten wrong. But as teachers, we know that you don't foster improvement by focusing on the negatives. Can we come up with some suggestions for what Duncan should do? Let me give it a shot with the following suggestions.

Meditate in Pursuit of Personal Integration

I'm not kidding. There has to be a serious discontinuity somewhere inside Duncan's head, because one of his defining characteristics as Secretary of Education is that the words that come out of his mouth and the policies that come out of his office don't match.

It has been that way since Day One. Take this quote from his confirmation hearing:

I think the more our schools become community centers, the more they become centers of community and family life, the better our children can do.

There is more in a similar vein. And an admirable vein it is, too, but Duncan's office has been a huge booster of the charter school movement, including the kind of charter-on-steroid action we're seeing places like New Orleans and Newark, the kind of chartery "save kids from their zip code" systems that actively oppose neighborhood and community schools.

Duncan's entire tenure has been more of the same. He uses rhetoric about how teachers deserve more respect and better pay, but he also applauds the death of tenure in California and suggests that educational mediocrity is enabled by the rampant lying of educators. He speaks about the importance of listening to teachers, but he rarely encounters a teacher who hasn't been vetted and screened. Then we have his recent discovery that tests are being over-emphasized in schools across America, a shocking development that he deplores without any recognition that such test reverence is a direct result of his own policies.

When I look at the huge Antarctic-sized gulf between Duncan's words and his actions, I can only conclude one of the following is true

         1) He is dissembling in the political style

         2) He doesn't understand the effects of administration policies

         3) He has in his head a powerful barrier against cognitive dissonance

         4) He is privately wracked with existential angst

         5) He is full of bovine-issued fertilizer

I'll admit that some of these are more likely than others. But whatever the case, Duncan needs to align his words and his policies, because either his policies are a betrayal of his principles, or his words are lies. Either way, he needs to check himself. As a nation, we need to have an honest conversation about the policies the government is actually pursuing, not a pleasing word-massage that has no connection to reality. The honest conversation might not be fun or pleasant, but we still need to have it.

Do the Right Thing

The best positive steps for Duncan to take would be to actually reverse the destructive policies that he has been pursuing. I know high government officials rarely write their own speeches, so let me offer a rough draft that Duncan can feel free to use:

Four years ago, with the best of intentions, we embarked on an attempt to rescue American education from the flawed policies of No Child Left Behind and renew our commitment to our children's education. In pursuing those worthy goals, we made mistakes. I stand before you today to announce that we are prepared to admit those errors and correct our course.

We believed in the promise of charter schools, but we have seen that, unregulated and unmonitored, charters have become a means of bilking taxpayers and destroying communities. We will require all states to return to tight caps on charter creation until we can develop policies that will allow charters to be developed responsibly, and not as get rich quick schemes for educational amateurs.

We believed that the development of national standards would bring consistency to our schools and economies of scale to the educational marketplace, which would in turn make our nation's school system more efficient and economical. We can now see that no such thing occured. One size does not fit all, and the profit motive has no place in the classroom. As of today, we are withdrawing our support for any sort of national standards movement that does not come from the nation's schools themselves.

We believed in the value of testing as a way of measuring educational progress. We have come to understand that tests provide a poor measure of the rich educational experiences we desire for all our children, and that our demand that tests be central to all aspects of education has simply warped and twisted the fabric of American schools. As of today, we will remove all federal standardized testing requirements, and we will ensure that such tests will never be used to evaluate students, teachers or schools ever again.

We recognize at last that the problems of poverty-strained schools cannot be solved by tests, attempts to shuffle teachers around, additional bureaucracy, and an infusion of untrained teacher temps. The solution for these schools is to work for long-term solutions to the problems of poverty, and, in the short term, blunt those effects by making sure that economic and educational resources are directed to those schools that cannot secure such resources on their own.

Finally, we pledge to take a step back and to trust the people of states and local school districts to make wise and well-informed decisions about their own education. We will listen to teachers and local officials.In the coming year, we will not issue a single educational edict from DC except to implement the changes that I have just described. And we will not take a single meeting with corporate executives from any education-based businesses. If they want your business, if they want to exert influence over you, they must come to you-- not to us. We are here to help you. We are going to stop telling you what to do.

See how easy that is? Duncan could be a hero tomorrow. If he needs a quiet place to think it over and get in touch with his better side, I have a spare bedroom and I live right next to a river. He's welcome any time, and I promise not to say a single mean thing to him while he's here.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Another Solution: ESEA

There is, of course, another way out of this.

The tightly wound spring that keeps Race to the Top and waivers (RttR Lite) ticking away is the ESEA. Instead of dealing with the federal mandate-ish sort-of-regulations that have made Common Core and high stakes testing and data collection the kind-of-law of the land, we could address the underlying mess.

The ESEA was first passed in 1965, and periodically is up for "re-authorization" which means the current Congress gets to monkey with it. In 2002, a bipartisan group under George Bush rewrote it into No Child Left Behind. ESEA was due to be re-authorized in 2007, but that ugly step-child of a law was already so toxic that Congress couldn't bring itself to do anything more than sputter and posture. And so ever since, ESEA has been ticking away. (You can get a more complete run-down of the long convoluted mess here.)

Race to the Top and RttT Lite are simply end runs around ESEA, and the only reason anybody bothers to mess with the four federal requirements (CCSS-like standards, high stakes tests, teacher evals linked to HST, and data collection) is because right now, as we sit here, every public school in this country is in violation of NCLB (well, unless you have 100% of your students above average, in which case your school mascot is probably a unicorn).

That is why Washington State schools are being required to send out "We are failure" letters to their parents-- because they lost their waiver because they wouldn't tie teacher evals to test scores, and so now they are back to living under the reality-defying requirements of NCLB.

So we could pull the plug on the whole reformy mess by simply doing what we were supposed to do seven years ago, and re-authorize (and re-write) the ESEA. All it requires is for members of Congress to show their political courage and commitment to properly educating America's children through a public school system. And after they do that, we can all celebrate by riding around on our unicorns. Heck, all we would need if for Congress to do its job and not impose more stupid ed reform rules. How hard could it be?

There is one other possibility, and it could make the next Presidential election interesting. Because the anti-reform Presidential candidate could say, "The Obama waivers are illegal, and the first thing we'll do in office is throw them out." If that happens, Congress would be under tremendous pressure to get on their unicorns and Do Something. Of course, they were under that sort of pressure right up until the point that the waivers were conceived.

This is one huge argument against having the federal government regulate and control public education in this country-- because when they break the system, they break the entire system.

Granted, the re-authorization of the ESEA is a big unicorn hunt. But many of the goals that are proposed, on all sides of the education debates, are unicorn hunts. So let's no overlook the hunt for the biggest, most magical unicorn of all.