PARCC Is Certifiably Ready

When the folks at PARCC say that their tests will help determine if your child is college and career ready, that's not just rhetoric. As of October 2012 (revised February, 2013), PARCC is ready to officially certify your student, and I've been looking at the document that shows how this will work. If you're wondering what "college ready" means to the PARCC folks, here's the explanation.

The meaning of the CCR determination is one bureaucratic Godzilla of a sentence:

A student who is determined to be College and Career Ready through performance on the PARCC high school assessments is one who has demonstrated the academic knowledge, skills and practices in ELA/literacy or mathematics necessary to enter directly into and succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing courses in those content areas in programs leading to a credential or degree which may be aligned to the student's career aspirations, from two- and four-year public institutions of higher learning.

The document goes on to note that academic knowledge and skills are not the only factors in college and career readiness; persistence, motivation and time management are also important. PARCC notes this so that we can understand that their estimation of a student's CCR score cannot be 100% accurate.

Benefit of Earning a PARCC College- and Career-Ready Determination

There appears to be just one. One of PARCC's "primary objectives" is to have PARCC-certified students from having to take placement tests when entering college. Well, only placement tests related to possible remediation. PARCC certification is not meant to "inform postsecondary admission decisions."

Criteria Used To Make College- and Career-Ready Determination

Students will need to score a Level 4 on ELA/literacy, Algebra II or Mathematics III.

Determining and Validating College- and Career-Ready Threshold Scores

PARCC is going to establish a standard-setting process for establishing cut scores.There will be five performance levels; Level 4 will be the college-ready score. No mention here if career-ready will be a different level.  But there will be a "standard-setting event" (which hits me sort of like "extinction level event") in the summer of 2015-- right after the first round of PARCCs are given.

The 2015 standard-palooza will "result in identification of the threshold scores for all PARCC performance levels" and will use all sorts of info including the judgment of K-12 and higher ed "professionals," so that could be anybody from custodians to test corporation executives. Here's the statement that will be used to "inform tha judgments of the panelists and to conduct validation studies of the efficacy" of PARCC certification in the future.

Students who earn a College-and Career-Ready Determination by performing at level 4 in ELA/literacy and enroll in College English Composition, Literature, and technical courses requiring college- level reading and writing have approximately a 0.75 probability of earning college credit by attaining at least a grade of C or its equivalent in those courses.

Students who earn a PARC College-and Career-Ready Determination by performing at level 4 in mathematics and enroll in College Algebra, Introductory College Statistics, and technical courses requiring an equivalent level of mathematics have approximately a 0.75 probability of earning college credit by attaining at least a grade of C or its equivalent in those courses.

 
The 0.75 probability of earning a C was chosen because

1) A C is generally what you need to earn the credit

2) After a lot of discussion, the committee decided that 0.75 was high enough to be high, but no so high that it would be too high. So, science.

3) It accounts for those non-measurable features. In other words, there's a 0.25 probability that your other-wise smart student will flunk out of college because he's a slacker.

Performance  Level Descriptors

The next section of the paper deals with the specifics of the levels. This takes a good nine pages of the text, and some of it is boring, and some of it is ugly in an illuminating way.

The leveling is basically illuminated by the use of adjectives. Seriously. Level 5 is "distinguished command." Level 4 is "strong command." Level 3 is "moderate command." Level 2 is "partial command," and Level 1 is "minimal command." There follows "general content claims" and this where the bright ugly light shines. A Level 5 for ELA/literacy means demonstration of the following:

*Full comprehension of a range of complex literary and informational texts by drawing relevant evidences from texts to construct effective arguments and analyses

*Use of context to effectively determine the meaning of words and phrases

* Highly effective writing when using and analyzing sources, with comprehensive development of the claim, topic, and/or narrative elements by using clear and convincing reasoning, details, text-based evidence, and/or description; the development and organization are consistently appropriate to the task, purpose, and audience

*Highly effective command of the conventions of standard English consistent with effectively edited writing

*Highly effective ability to build and present knowledge through integration, comparison, and synthesis of complex ideas.

I've taken the liberty of bolding every point at which PARCC certification involves a subjective judgment, points at which the test is going to present something as objective or scientific when it is in fact open to debate. How big a range? How full of what sort of comprehension? Relevant according to whom?

And don't even start me on "effective"? Effective to whom? Effective according to what effect? How the heck does someone who is neither the audience nor the author gauge the effectiveness of a piece of writing? I bet the author of this PARCC bulletin thinks it is written in a highly effective manner, and yet I find that it fails completely to effectively convince me of anything.

This is why presenting the PARCC (or any other standardized test) as an objective measure is a crock; at all critical junctures, the test will be based on its designers' personal beliefs about what is effective, what is clear, what is appropriate, and what details are correctly chosen.

And as an English teacher, I'm going to note that this certification that Pat McStudent is ready to skip a college Intro to English course says nothing at all about what literature Pat is or is not familiar with.

So this is what states are being sold as "college readiness," and this is what PARCC CEO Laura McGiffert Slover says marks the end of test prep. One more reason that everybody needs to jump off the PARCC train ASAP-- because it is in fact certifiable.

PARCC Discovers Unicorn Farm!

Over at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, PARCC CEO Laura McGiffert Slover has breathlessly announced the discovery of a special farm where unicorns dance and sing and give rides to little winged cherubs while singing sonnets in Latin.

Okay, not really, but I would have found that more credible than Slover's actual announcement, which is that PARCC heralds the end of test prep.

PARCC states are creating tests worth taking, made up of texts worth reading and problems worth solving. They are designed to give teachers information and tools they can use to customize teaching and learning for each student, and give students test questions and tasks that are meaningful –the kind that great teachers routinely ask students.

This kind of ad copy creates an existential dilemma for me. Should I accept that Slover actually believes this stuff, and thereby conclude that the head of one of the largest testing companies in the nation is so woefully ignorant of how standardized tests actually work? Or should I conclude that Slover is so astonishingly cynical that she can shovel out baldfaced bovine fecal matter and expect the public to eat it up like caviar?

She of course tosses in "as a former teacher," but looking at her bio, it's hard to tell when. Slover was a board member in DC during the Rhee era, a honcho at Achieve, and sat on the committee that wrote the CCSS math standards. Slover is a fine example of a person who has figured out how to make the revolving doors of corporate government work for her. She wrote the rules with Achieve and the CCSS; now she's cashing in with PARCC.

None of that really matters as long she's willing to write such dumb things. Let's look.

The PARCC assessments mark the end of “test prep.” Good instruction will be the only way to truly prepare students for the assessments. Memorization, drill and test-taking strategies will no longer siphon time from instruction.

My existential dilemma is compounded here, because I find it hard to believe that anybody could be either that stupid or that big a liar. But let's pretend for a moment that somewhere, somehow, there is a person who could actually seriously consider the above statement.

All standardized tests are susceptible to, and therefor encouraging of, test prep. All of them. Always. Forever.

The whole guiding principle of a standardized test-- particularly one that is designed to be administered by computer AND to generate crunchable large-scale data-- is to force students to choose from a certain portion of the broad world of possible responses to any problem. As Slover writes, "Results will also finally make student performance comparable across states..." The person who is writing the question-- the live breathing subjective human being-- will embed certain values in that question and the only acceptable answer to it.

Let's pretend that the problem is to find a way to get from my house here in Western PA to downtown Cleveland. Let's go to the Arcade, because I like the Arcade.

Every parameter I put on a correct answer represents a value judgment. Did I say you have to get there within three hours? That means you have to travel by car, and you can't go by way of Pittsburgh. Should you travel through Amish country, or use an Interstate? Did you end up at the right place-- because if you don't know Cleveland, you probably don't know what I mean by the Arcade. Of course, if you know Cleveland well, you know there are several arcades and I might be asking a trick question.

It doesn't matter how sophisticated or simple the problem is. The problem has nothing to do with test prep. It's the solution. As long as your test model involves saying, "Out of all the possible solutions, we are only considering these four, and out of these four only one is correct," then your test is preppable. I can study what kinds of answers the testmakers like. I can study what kind of false answers they favor.

Standardized tests always reflect the values of the test makers. Learning to reflect and mimic those values is what test prep is all about.

Standardized tests are also eternally preppable because they are such hugely artificial tasks. For my "drive to Cleveland" problem, the most authentic task would be to actually drive to Cleveland. But we can't do that, so we are going to create an artificial task that, the test-makers believe/hope, will measure the same skills and knowledge.

Except that it won't. It never does. I will end up with a test question that involves choosing between four maps, or identifying landmarks that I would see on the way, or doing some other in-authentic act that is not exactly like driving to Cleveland at all. And all of that requires tests prep; my best chauffeur may be a terrible map reader.

We already know that the New Test Regime likes items that purport to rank high on the Webb Depth of Knowledge scale, which means we'll see lots of "Here are two things. Make a connection between them," or as the test preppers will say, "Spot the connection that they want you to find between these two selections."

This is what all standardized testing comes down to. "They" want you to come up with a particular answer. The Tests measure one skill-- can you figure out what "they" want you to say, and then say it? Because the PARCC doesn't change that fact of testing life in the slightest, it can be test-prepped. Because the PARCC is tied to such high stakes, teachers will do test prep for it.

Let me frame it another way. Any test you can train an uneducated minimum wage temp to score is a test that can be gamed, and any test that can be gamed is a test that students can be coached to take. So, test prep.

When I want to assess my students' understanding beyond basic recall and simple skills, I use some sort of open-ended assessment. If I want them, say, to compare and contrast two works of literature, I typically assign a paper, and there is no answer key. There is no prescribed format or organization. It is not the student's job to present the answer I want in the format that I want it. It's my job to take the student's essay on terms set by the student, and then to assess if she managed to successfully make her point to me. But key to this process is that it be student centered-- not teacher centered and certainly not test centered. If I want to know if the student really understands, really sees, really has something to say and can say it, there is no other way.

I can't bring myself to slog through Slover's baloney about how teachers are providing valuable feedback and the tests are being created by a coalition of thousands of educationny folks. Also, blah blah blah the test results for questions you will never see for the students you had last year will really help you with your instruction. How does her keyboard not simply melt in shame? But Slover's Big Finish underlines the fundamental problem at the heart of the PARCC test.

So, yes, the numbers matter, but what really matters is that these students—and a million others participating in the field tests, their teachers and administrators, and the PARCC states that are developing and field testing the new assessments—are making history.

Got that? What's really important here is that the students and teachers across the country are doing something great for PARCC.

Tests like the PARCC do not serve students or teachers. Students and teachers serve the PARCC. The only kind of assessment that can be prepared only with good instruction are those assessments that are student-centered. Not only can you do test prep for any standardized test, but that will always be the best way to get better results.

Trials of the Traveling Student

What about the students who move?

It's a question often raised in support of the CCSS, or just national standards in general. Don't we need national standards so that students who move won't be thrown for a loop when they change schools, even across state lines? I'm unconvinced by this argument.

I'll admit up front that, as both my regular readers know, I am not a believer in national standards at all. But let me try to walk you through my unconvincedness in the face of the traveling student.

How many are there?

This seems to be a point of some debate. Several readers have directed me to a study cited here which suggests a whopping 15-20% students moved within the previous year. That's a fairly fuzzy number, and the previous year in question is 2003. It also doesn't address the nature of the moves-- across town? across state? across country? The study is interesting in that it points out that outside of a small smattering of military families, the traveling students come from families that are migrant workers, homeless, or poor. Reminds me of decades ago when a poor student explained his families regular moves as seasonal-- cold weather months in apartments that included utilities, warm-weather months in places that did not (with the clear implication that rent was not always paid).

The more commonly cited percentage is 1.7% of 5-17 year olds move across state lines. The source for that number is this chart from the US Census Bureau, so it's probably mostly somewhat accurate-ish. In all fairness, I should note that this works out to 915,328 students, which is not an insignificant number. We also can add to that 2.2% moving within the state, and 9.4% moving within the county. Students moving in from abroad is .5%, or one third the number moving across state lines. I note that number because one of the question the issue raise is why do interstate movements merit imposition of national standards, but international do not. Is it a matter of principal, or is there somewhere between .5% and 1.7% a cutoff line under which the number of student adjustment issues doesn't merit consideration.

One of the pieces of information that no set of information seems to address is the when. Are we talking about students who change schools between school years? Experience and anecdotal info suggests not-- that many of these traveling students travel during the course of the school year itself. I promise to care about this point further down the page.

The Devil in the Detail

I am not unsympathetic to the problems that come with moving to a new school. It's just that I don't think a national scope and sequence necessarily helps, and certainly doesn't help to a degree that justifies the effects on the education of the 98.3% of non-interstate students. To manage this kind of consistency within even a state, a single district, or single building, requires certain adjustments that may be neither feasible nor worthwhile.

I'm going to stick with English, which in many ways is more difficult than math because the study of math has its own built in sequencing to an extent that the study of English does not. Let's consider for our hypotheticals, two old mainstays of 9th grade English across the country-- Romeo and Juliet and Great Expectations.

Track Mobility

Should there be ease of mobility between tracks? A low-level group might study R&J with the goal of simply knowing the plot and characters and being able to discuss the play as it relates to modern social patterns. They might even use one of the many modern-language parallel texts to help them deal with the Scary Shakespeare Words problem. On the other hand, a high level class would likely have many additional goals, including delving into the Shakespearean language, writing more academic formal papers.

Students who, in the process of switching schools, also switch tracks will find this difficult. Are their adjustment problems a consideration, or do we write that off as another matter entirely?

Chaining Opportunity

I have a class that is primarily females, so as we study R&J, we veer off extensively into the role of women in Elizabethan society and in the world of the play. One day in discussion several students introduce the topic of women's frustrations over the lack of control they have over their own destiny, and start to use that to inform their own ideas about interpreting characters such as Lady Capulet and the Nurse as well as Juliet herself. As a particularly canny educator (or a fair-to-middlin' one having a good day), I see an opportunity here to bank and set up discussion points for the female characters of Great Expectations.

Should I shut all of that down because it will be unfair and confusing for the hypothetical student who might be moving into my classroom sometime between now and the beginning of Great Expectations?

Should I generally avoid anything "extra," or in a math class should I avoid moving ahead swiftly just because we can, because that will give us material coverage that we are not supposed to have, putting my students too far ahead of the hypothetical transfer student who might be arriving any day now from a school that didn't get that extra material?

It's the same conversation we had for NCLB-- is there really any way to keep students on the same page that doesn't invove holding back those who are ready to zip on ahead?

Eating Dust

On the other end of the scale, we have the slower students. Do I say to them at the end of six weeks, "I know we're only at the end of Act III, and I'm proud of you for hammering this out and making sense of it, and I know that some of you are now really into this and want to see how it all turns out. But according to the Big Master Schedule, we are done with Romeo & Juliet now. So our test on the entire play will be this Friday. Good luck."

Different Strokes

Chris just came into my class from a school where the English teacher approaches R&J strictly from a performance standpoint, but all of my instruction and building activities have been geared toward textual analysis. So while Chris knows the characters and the plot, Chris is not really prepared for any of the sorts of activities that we are doing. Is that Chris's problem, or the educational system's?

Look, I Wasn't Trying To Get This Picky. I Just Think That Every Kid in the Country Ought To Get the Same X, Y and Z.

It's fair to say that all of the above was simply getting excessively picky about the issues of student mobility. But my point is that it's impossible not to get that level of picky, even if your intent is pretty simple.

Let's say that your national standard says that every 9th grade class covers the same list of material (including R&J and GE). That seems simple. But remember-- some not-inconsiderable percentage of the raveling students travel during the school year. So if your school covers R&J in the fall and my class does it in the spring, a student who switches from your school to mine gets R&J twice. A student who switches from mine to yours gets R&J none times.

So a list isn't good enough. To accomplish the goal of making life easier for the traveling student, we have to prescribe not only a list of content, but a schedule for it as well. So by decree, October is now R&J month across America. Except that now we're back to the question of faster and slower classes.

AND that's proscribing content, but we might all use the same content to teach entirely different competencies, so we'd better proscribe exactly what skills will be taught with the content.

And before you know it, in order to make life better for 1.7% of all students, we have written a very specific national curriculum-- not standards, but curriculum. Except that writing a federal curriculum is illegal. But nothing less than a national curriculum is going to accomplish the goal you're after. Anything less will keep us right there in the land of When You Switch To a New School You Have To Deal With Them Covering Different Material in Different Ways.

National Curriculum

Can't be done. It's not just illegal; it's large scale educational malpractice that would destroy any semblance of usefulness of US public education as well as violating some of our most sacred national values.

Or, to be brief, I think it's a bad idea.

What Do You Want, Anyway?

Part of what makes this goal so elusive is that it's so fuzzy. What do you want every freshman in America to know about Romeo and Juliet? Do you want them to recognize that it's a play by some Shakespeare fella? Do you want them to be able to quote passages? Do you want them to recognize key plot points? Do you want them to be able to argue the relative merits of Leonard Whiting and Leonardo DiCaprio? Do you want them to be able to write iambic pentameter? Do you want them to know how it's related to West Side Story? Do you want them to be able to discuss the use of blood and heat as recurring images in the play? Do you want them to know who Queen Mab was? Do you want them to have a theory about where Benvolio disappeared to? Do you want them to be able to explain what the play said to them about their own conception of young love? Do you want them to know all the dirty parts? Do you want them to be able to discuss the various uses of dramatic irony? Do you want them to use the play to discuss the ickiness of sex with thirteen-year-old girls? Do you want them to know that "wherefor" means "why," not "where"?

And once you've selected from the iceberg of ideas and competencies that the last paragraph shows only the tip of, do you want them to display absolute command, bare competence, or passing familiarity with the idea you've tagged.

When you say "I want every class to have covered some of the same basics," what exactly do you mean?

So.....?

When people move, their situation changes. They live in different surroundings. They cope with different weather. They adjust to different local fashion trends. They learn to understand different accents. They learn to eat new regional foods, and they do without the food they used to enjoy. They learn different traffic patterns. They learn about different sports teams.

They learn to do all this because different places are different. (And this is what we've come to in current education debate-- the point where simple tautologies pass for controversial statements).

Different places are different. That's not a flaw. It's a virtue. Yes, it can create challenges for the traveling students but

A) different places are different and

B) your proposed solution isn't really a solution

Why Should I Study This, Anyway?

Never once during a football game so athletes stop chasing the ball, lie down on their backs, and compete to bench press the most weight. And yet all those football players spend hour after hour in the weight room.

You probably aren't going to marry that woman you're dating right now, so what's the point in trying to learn how to talk to her or how to work out the finer points of your relationship. Why bother to learn what you do or don't require in a relationship if this one is just going to end? Just wait until you meet the woman you're actually going to marry.

When I was younger, I knew with absolute certainty that I would work in a darkroom when I grew up. So I ignored every aspect of education that didn't deal directly with working with film and photographic paper and processing with chemicals, because what else could I possibly need to know. How could that end badly?

If you are going to be a concert flautist, you should avoid any musical training not related to playing a flute. Why learn to read piano music, or anything on bass clef? Why listen to any music ever except music played by flautists?

Looking back on the previous NFL season, we can see that any games not involving the Seahawks or the Broncos were a waste of time, because only those two teams played for the championship. We should have saved money and time and not played any of the other games.

Paintings by guys like Van Gogh and Monet and Da Vinci are dumb because the canvas is too thin and fragile to keep the cold out of a house, and too small to make any kind of useful structure. You can't build a house out of them, so what good are they?


These are all my replies to the multiple variations on that same stupid meme-- the one that says something like "School is dumb because it taught me that stupid Pythagorean theorum and I ain't never used it. So dumb, school."

You know what's dumb? Judging educational content strictly on utilitarian values.

You know what's dumb? Thinking that you can use a rear-view mirror to steer a forward-traveling path.

You know what's dumb? Thinking that preparation for the future involves practicing the exact literal tasks you will do and not developing skills and muscles that will help with multiple tasks.

You know who I've never met? The person who says, "Yes, my life would have been so great, if only I had known less. But having too much education just ruined everything."

CCSS Politics Make the Daily Beast Sad

Nobody can accuse the Daily Beast of being unclear about its position. "The Incredibly Stupid War on the Common Core" says the headline, followed by the subheading, "An unholy alliance between the Tea Party and the teachers' unions threatens to derail the most promising education reform in decades." So right off the bat, we know where Charles Upton Sahm is headed (though it should be noted that writers rarely get to write their own headlines).

The lead graph compares CCSS to Rocky being pummeled in the early rounds, then quotes Diane Ravitch, the Heritage Foundation, and Glenn Beck. Sahm then goes on to catelog the CCSS setbacks, from Bobby Jindal's backpedaling to Andy Cuomo's blasting of the implementation and creation of a review panel and Indiana (and others) pulling out of the standards. It's an odd list, counting as it does several moves that were about the cosmetics of political theater and not actual changes in position. Does Sahm think the Cuomo review panel was a Real Thing. Surely he didn't miss their findings ("It's all good!"). And it doesn't take much research to note that in many states, nothing has changed about Common Core except the name on the label.

This is a new type of spin. From bluster and confidence ("momentary, meaningless setbacks or no consequence") we've moved to playing the underdog ("boy, we are really on the ropes now"). What's the play here? Are we trying to get CCSS opponents to put up their gloves and go home for a victory celebration? Or are we trying to win the sympathy of the crowd so that they'll shower their support on poor beleagured Rocky "Common Core" Balboa?

Sahm also mentions the AFT and NEA, once enthusiastic supporters, are now distancing themselves, notes the NYSUT bailed, but he parenthetically chalks this up to concerns over the "new, more difficult tests."

This is worth noting because these days The Test never leaves the house without "more difficult" by its side. The implication is always that these new tests are more difficult, more challenging and that's why they bother people. "More difficult" is a useful weasel phrase because everybody assumes that it's a legitimate "more difficult." It's more difficult to go into the boxing ring against an opponent who's bigger and stronger than you are. Of course, it's also more difficult to go into the boxing ring with ferrets crazy-glued to your eyebrows and a dozen angry hamsters in your shorts, but people don't think along those lines because we wouldn't actually describe the ferret-and-hamster option as "more difficult" but would instead call it "crazy unreasonable stupid." By constantly describing the new tests as more difficult, writers keep directing peoples' attention away from the ferrets and hamsters.

Sahm says that "unfortunately" the debate about the Core is more about politics than education. Well, duh. The Core has been more about politics than education from day one. Why would today be any different. If the Core were about education, the conversation about it would have included educators. But it was created by politicians and businessmen for politicians and businessmen. Honest to Stallone, Charles-- teachers have been trying to make the debate about education for several years now, but nobody in power seems to want to do that.

And we go straight from unfortunately politics to Peggy Noonan handicapping Jeb Bush because he has stapled his Presidential hopes to CCSS.

"So what's all this hysteria about?" asks Sahm, and, wow, buddy, I see what you did there. "Hysteria" from the Latin "crazy-ass women with their silly vaginas and not-too-strong thinky parts be getting all worked up over some stupid thing that smart penissy men know better than to emote over."

Sahm does a quick recap of the Standard Issue History of CCSS, starting with "A Nation at Risk" and moving through the governors getting "curriculum experts" and as always I'm amazed at these folks who are unfamiliar with how the internet works. So click here to watch David Coleman explain that the Core was written by a "collection of unqualified people." So, not curriculum experts. (Also-- why do we need curriculum experts to create something that isn't a curriculum?)

This is also the CCSS story that notes retrospectively that President Obama's support in 2009 was a Bad Thing that created a political liability with people on the Right. This part of the narrative is intriguing; I am wondering how, in a non-federalized CCSS alternate universe, the CCSS ever is adopted. First, in that universe, what mysterious force makes the corporate backers/writers of the Core sit back and say, "Yeah, we probably shouldn't use every tool at our disposal to get every state to adopt these. If just a few adopt them, that will be good enough for us." Second, in that universe, why do states adopt the CCSS? I mean--  who would be selling it? Who would be going state to state saying, "Yes, it will make your schools awesome and only cost you a gazillion dollars to implement, and it's totally voluntary!"

CCSS supporters can complain about the damage done to their cause by federal push for CCSS adoption, but without that federal bribery (RTTT) and extortion (NCLB waivers), CCSS would be sitting in a dusty binder somewhere. This is why it's a political debate, Charles-- because it was politically created and politically pushed into states. CCSS has depended on political power for every breath it has taken in its short, wasteful life.

Sahm goes on to tell us what the standards are supposed to do in math and English (he does not bother to say how we know that the standards will accomplish these things, but it's a short article). He points out that they are not a national curriculum, just an outline of what students should learn. So, totally different things. And he grabs the low-hanging fruit of debunking the complaint about non-fiction vs. fiction.

Overall, some claim that the standards are too weak; some argue that they are too rigorous, especially in the early grades. But the Common Core is intended as a floor, not a ceiling. They represent a benchmark for what an average, well-educated student on track for college should know. Even critics agree that, in most cases, the Common Core is an improvement over the weak and haphazard state standards they are replacing. Some states are now tweaking the standards and dumping the “Common Core” label. This is fine. The important thing is that for the first time in decades states are taking a serious look at content and curriculum.

What a paragraph!! People can't even agree on whether the standards are too hard or too easy-- those dopes! The CCSS is a floor for what every average student on track for college should learn, and watch Sahm just sail straight past the assumption that every single student in this country should be prepared for college, or that where you have an average student, you must also have a below-average student. Because every student here in Lake Woebegone should be getting ready for college. Some critics agree that the CCSS is better than old standards, and I guess Sahm wore out his googler finding those quotes for the lead paragraph, so here we'll just have to take his word for it. He admits that some states are monkeying around with the CCSS (why no mention of the copyright, Charles?), and says it's great that we're at least talking about content and curriculum, which is odd because I hear that even some supporters of the Common Core agree that it's not actually a curriculum.

He deploys the current talking point about how implementation is rocky and that's totally expectable and no reason to get all wigged out, and that whether the CCSS work or not will totally be up to the states' implementations.

For the finish, lets' quote David Brooks' lamebrained NYT piece and insist that people who don't love the Core are misinformed and opposing a perfectly sensible program because of hysterical-- oh, that word again. Let's throw in an appeal to the sensible center, and return to our Rocky image of the Core being battered and bruised but still game.

You know what everybody always forgets about the first Rocky movie? At the end of the big climactic boxing match, Rocky loses.

Why Are Teachers So Quiet?

Some recent comments on this blog took teachers to task. A parent activist noted her own work against the current reformy regime and then added "and teachers as a profession and individually refused/refuse to step up and do their share of push back - paychecks were/are more important than the principles at stake and our children's wellbeing."

Recently, Susan Ohanian, a respected voice in education who was ringing the public ed fire alarm years before most folks even smelled smoke, expressed frustration that a White House petition calling for the removal of high stakes testing from current ed policies was sitting and languishing. All these vocal teachers raging about the state of education, and the petition barely creaked its way to 5000 signatures (yes, I signed).

The Bad Ass Teachers are excited about having 44,000 members. It's unclear how many of those are actually teachers; it's also unclear how many of those actually take part in BAT actions. There's no question that the group makes a noise and is vastly preferable to the silence within the teaching world just a year ago, but one has to wonder, given the state of education these days, why there are only 44,000 BATs.

Why are teachers so quiet? I can think of a couple of explanations.

Some are worried about their paychecks. Teachers have mortgage payments and children who like to eat food and wear clothes and all the other sorts of responsibilities that folks have in the real world, and in many corners of the country, they can lose all that on an administrator's whim. Not everybody has the stamina to risk raising their family in a car on a matter of principle.

The fear of losing a job isn't just about the paycheck. Keeping your job also means keeping your relationship with your students, staying to do as much for them as you are able. In some areas, sure, you could stand on the front steps of the school and refuse to administer the PARCC-- but the only result will be that you'll be replaced by somebody who will administer the test. It's not just that taking a big stand is scary-- in some settings it's also ineffective. This is a difficult calculation to make; I wouldn't want to have to make it, and I'm glad that I don't have to. Which brings us to another factor.

For all the reading and writing I do about the public ed issues of the day, I personally don't have it bad at all. I work in a decent district for good bosses. If I were not paying much attention to what's going on in the rest of education world, I might conclude, based on my own immediate experience, that things were bad, but not all that bad. Many teachers have reached that conclusion.

Teachers are generally Good Boys and Girls. This one drives me crazy, but I remember my own slow change from well-behaved good boy to cranky PITA. Teachers believe in rules. Teachers believe that when the Person In Charge says "Jump," you should jump (and not say "how high" because that's just being sassy). If our administrators or union chiefs tell us to follow these instructions, we follow just as obediently as we would expect our students to follow us. Teachers do not want to Get In Trouble.

Teachers are disproportionately conflict-averse. Everyone who's ever worked with a union knows this-- for every one teacher who will holler and fight and rant in a strategy meeting, there are ten who will quietly see you after the meeting to say that they understand why everyone is so upset, but couldn't we just be nicer about the whole business? These teachers are certain that any time somebody gets too angry, somebody is going to Get In Trouble.

Teachers don't know where to make the noise. One of the things that has changed under the new status quo is that the old lines of trust are gone. Maybe you can trust your administration; maybe you can't. The Democratic party always supported teachers; now in some parts of the country, they are teachers' biggest foes. The national unions have sold us out; can you trust your state group? And within that group, are there individuals that you trust and others that you cannot?

Teachers can no longer automatically assume that someone in a particular position or wearing a particular label automatically deserves trust. I have limited sympathy with this problem, but I remind myself that people grow up at their own speed in their own time. But we are living in a 1984 world where the person that you thought would be your big savior turns out to be your biggest enemy, and if you are going to be a grown-up, you are going to have to see people as what they are-- and what they aren't.  Simply joining a group isn't an answer, and simply trusting someone who seems to have An Answer isn't the way, either.

Most likely you are going to have to sift through stuff, bits and pieces at a time. It's always a mistake to accept or reject someone's point of view 100%-- you have to look and examine and think and decide for yourself. Some people (and some are teachers) just hate to decide for themselves, but there is no other way to live in difficult and interesting times. Some teachers remain reluctant to do so.

Anthony Cody put out the call for reluctant warriors earlier this month (and I added my own thoughts), but I don't expect millions of teachers to get noisy overnight. Those of us who have already become noisy in our own ways can help the process by spreading the word and explaining the situation repeatedly and clearly, and particularly by building relationships of trust with folks we have contact with. It is not easy to make teachers noisy, but I am pretty sure that this is a marathon, not a sprint, so we need to just keep plugging away.

How To Do Real Teacher Evaluation

The fans of Reformy Stuff are not wrong about everything. For example, they are correct that the general state of teacher evaluation in this country was pretty useless. Their mistake was replacing Inertly Useless with Actively Destructive. The old system was a simple two step process (1- check for teacher pulse; 2- award perfect score [edit--or, in some Bad Places To Work, award lousy score just because you want to]) while the new step is a little more involved (1- apply random groundless unproven mathematical gobbledeegook to big bunch of bad data; 2- award randomly assigned bad score).

Years ago, frustrated with the old mostly-useless model and before the current looney tunes empire took hold, a friend and I had started to rough out an evaluation system. Let me sketch out the basics for you.

What Should a Good Teacher Eval System Do?

1) Provide clear expectations to the teacher. One of the wacky things about teaching is that everybody is sure that everybody knows what a teacher's exact job description is, and yet it invariably turns out that nobody agrees. In many districts, teachers enter their classrooms with no job description and no really clear idea of what is expected of them.

2) Provide useful feedback and remediation. That includes setting the stage for meaningful remediation if it's called for. Only a small percentage of new teachers will be awesome right out of the box or clearly hopeless. Most are waiting to be guided toward either excellence or despair, and most districts depend on a system that I like to call "Blind Luck." I swear there are teachers out there whose careers could have gone a completely different direction if they had just eaten lunch with a different set of veteran teachers in their first few years.

3) Provide the district with clear information on whether they need to retain, retrain or refrain from hiring permanently.

Assumptions in Building the Eval System

1) Precise, observable data is the enemy of real, useful information. In the hands of hard data overlords, traits like "maintains good communication with parents" ends up being some numerical observable, such as "calls at least two parents every five days." Hard data fans like really precise measures, and so their data may be precise, but their conclusion is always wrong. Mr. McSwellteach may personally visit 150 parents a month or sing in a church choir with half of his total parental units. He may rely more on e-mail because that's what his students' parents prefer. He may have an absolutely uncanny sense of when to contact the parents and when to leave them alone. He may, in short, be a pretty awesome parent communicators, but since the metric focuses on one specific, concrete, observable, measurable piece of data out of a thousand possible factors, it completely misses the real information here.

2) People may not be able to explain a good teacher, but they generally know one when they see her.

3) The best way to correct for individual bias in a survey is to collect information from many, many individuals. And anyway...

4) You're trying to evaluate subjective qualities. This is like trying to evaluate husbands. Your husband from hell may be her perfect dreamboat. There are certainly some rough patterns of qualities that will emerge, clustered around a statistical strange attractor of some sort, but you will not be able to draw a box around a configuration and say, "Everything inside the line is good, and everything outside is bad." If that violates your world view or makes you uncomfortable, just suck it up and put on your Big Person Pants.

The Short Method for Real Teacher Evaluation

Hire a really good principal and let him do his job.

The Method Proposed for the Other 98% of Schools

The first step actually occurs before your district even gets started. This is where our consulting firm start-up was going to have to do some real work. Basically, you need a giant list, a huge constellation of teacher qualities arranged around some master categories such as Knowledge, Community Interaction, Classroom Management-- mostly the basic main qualities that we're familiar with. For each of the master qualities, a truckload of specifics, from "dresses up for work" to "enthusiastic with kids." Not that mostly these will not be specific enough for some of you-- it will be more "communicate well with parents" and not at all "makes two parent phone calls every four days." This massive menu of teacher qualities is where we start and launch into the following steps.

1) Pull together a large committee. It will include teachers, students, administrators, community members, parents, business folks-- as much of a broad representation of the stakeholders as you can gather up. And then using one of any of the many fine models for this kind of group work out there, your group is going to take the master list of traits and customize it.

2) Customizing will cover two factors-- what to include, and how to weight it. It's here where your folks will decide, for instance, that in your community dressing up to teach doesn't matter at all, and that being kind to students is twice as important as being funny. You'll work this out on two levels-- which micro-traits will contribute what percent of the score for the categories (eg "strict disciplinarian" will make up 4% of the "Classroom management" category). And you will work out the relative weight of the master categories. You'll do this on the school level-- Content Knowledge may be 50% of your expectation for secondary teachers but only 30% for elementary, whereas Parent Relationship might run the other way. And hey-- if you want "Prepares students thoroughly for standardized tests" to be a huge factor, you can go ahead and do that.

3) Congratulations. The process was long and hard and involved lots and lots and LOTS of discussion, some of it probably heated, but once you're done you have created a fairly detailed job description, a picture of what your stakeholders expect from a teacher in the district. Imagine, teachers, if on your first day someone had handed you a multi-page detailed and weighted list of the qualities and behaviors they expected you to display instead of a room key and hearty "Good luck!"

4) Hey look! That big involved job description is also the evaluation form. All we have to do is give you a score for each line item, and we have already figured out how much weight that carries in your final evaluation.

5) Who fills out your eval form? Well, some of you won't like this, but our answer was "Everybody." Other teachers, current students, former students (we thought it important to keep alumni in the loop for decades after graduation), admins, parents, anybody we can think of.

The eval forms can be filled with simple number scores, but we allow for narrative to be added if they wish. Will there be outliers-- cranky parent, jerk student, someone who just has an axe to grind? Sure-- but if our sample is large, small outliers won't screw anybody up, and the same software that's going to crunch (and possibly collect) all this data can also be taught to toss out small left-field samples. We could probably even teach the program to block folks who are consistently mischief-makers.

We had never quite figured out weighting as it applied to this portion. I'm pretty sure the principal should carry more weight than Billy-Bob Schnoodleman in 5th grade art class, but we hadn't quite worked out that kink when we stopped working on this. Put it in the to-do pile.

6) Hey look! The evaluation results tell you exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are! And part of this process will involve establishing a in-school remediation work group-- folks who can be mentor and help other teachers with particular weaknesses that match up with their particular strengths. There's a piece for deciding when someone is, well, hopeless, but our focus is on strengthening people. But we'll stop there before I start in on my plan for creating teaching schools that work like teaching hospitals for doctors.

Why This Is Better Than What State and Federal Authorities Want To Do

1) The goal is to help people improve rather than firing our way to excellence. FOWTE creates an ugly atmosphere in a building, and it doesn't really help because the replacement hire is only going to require you to start from scratch again. I know some reformy types think we can churn and turn TFA-style forever, but those people are idiots. With emphasis on building strength, we not only get better teachers, but we automatically build the atmosphere of collegiality, support, and quality work that makes a school a better place.

2) The data comes from many many observations over much time, and not one forty-five minute squat and squint by just one guy. No evaluation system in the world can protect a teacher from an incompetent vindictive principal if he's the only guy who has a say.

3) The data does not come from a bad standardized test that measures little of value and is useless as a teacher measurement tool.

4) The system is transparent. Unlike VAM, which cannot be successfully explained and is apparently created by magic gnomes in a castle under the South Pole, this system is created and weighted in plain sight. Everybody knows what's going on.

5) The system reflects local values. What's the story we keep hearing with the current crop of test-based VAMified evals-- that Mrs. McWunderteach has gotten a terrible rating even though everybody knows that she's an awesome teacher. We should be tapping the source of that "everybody knows," not the Data Overlord system. Does this mean that Teacher Excellence will look different from district to district? Well, yes. Of course it will-- because IT DOES!!

National Standards

I am aware that this system does not really give us a model for teacher evaluation and excellence that scales to the national level. That's one of the reasons I like it. It's actually a bit of a compromise, because if every single district used it, they would still be able to talk to each other, but they would still be free to do what seemed best in their own district ("Oh, is that how you scaled and weighted Content Knowledge for elementary? Here's what our sheet ended up looking like").

Yes, an Excellent Teacher in Buford, Montana might be a different set of measures and paperwork than an Excellent Teacher in Nicetown, Tennessee-- but each of those districts would have what they believed to be examples of excellent teachers. What would be better than that?

At any rate, we had this system well past halfway done when the New Evaluations started to emerge. But it still represents my idea of how a useful, authentic teacher evaluation would work, and is definitely my answer to, "Well, if you don't want to use this awesome teacher evaluation system of VAm and test scores and Danielson rubrics, then what DO you want to do?" This. I want to do this.