Over the past few months I have attended two public hearings in two separate school districts about the closing of two separate rural elementary schools, and they show pretty clearly the giant disconnect that allows the assault on public education to continue unchecked.
The closing of schools is rampant in my part of PA, and we aren't alone. We're a region of not-very-wealthy rural districts, but not-very-wealthy urban districts like Philly and York have also cut schools like a machete in a bamboo forest.
It is not a matter of declining student population, and it is not a matter of districts falling on tough times. It's a widespread financial crisis, and it's manufactured.
How to manufacture a statewide financial crisis.
Cut state funding. This puts the making-up-the-difference pressure on local taxpayers.
Take a ton of money away from public schools and give it to charters.
Create a huge pension funding crisis. This is its own kind of challenge, but the quick explanation is this-- pre-2008, invest in really awesome stuff, and when that all tanks and districts suddenly have huge payments to make up, tell the districts they can just wait till later and hope for magic financial fairies to fix it. It is now later, there are no fairies, and a small district with an $18 million budget is looking at pension payments that go up $500K every year.
Oh, and pass a law that says districts can't raise taxes more than a smidge in any given year.
Add political gamesmanship.
Governor Tom Wolf announced his budget proposal, including increased funding for schools and an end to the charter leeching. The GOP legislators at the state capitol sent out a letter saying, "Don't start counting on that. We'll make sure it never happens." The new secretary of education sent superintendents a letter saying, "By mid-May, I want a list of all the things you're going to spend your new money on." The legislators sent the secretary a letter and cc'ed superintendents saying, "What are you talking about! How dare you make them account for imaginary money we'll never let them have."
The end result
School districts are looking down the barrel of million-plus-dollar deficits. The two deficits for which I have now been a power point audience can both be entirely explained by the formula:
Charter Payments + Pension Payments + Other Tiny Obscure Cuts = District Deficit
In other words, a district that had a fiscally responsible year last year, that didn't do anything crazy or odd or unusual and just left everything alone when planning for this year-- that district is still facing huge deficits in their current budgeting cycle, unrelated to any choices that they made in managing their own local district.
But here comes the twist ending
In PA, districts have to have public hearings before they can close a school. The board is not really supposed to respond-- just listen. So the superintendent starts with a power point presentation, and then taxpayers line up to speak their minds, offer suggestion, and comment on what they think is wrong with the proposal.
Can you guess how many people step up to blame the lobbyists and legislators in Harrisburg?
They tell the board it's a bad board for putting finances ahead of education. They complain about the tax increases they imagine the board is going to vote for next. They suggest that teacher wages should be frozen and the superintendent should work for $1.98. They make emotional, tearful, sometimes child-delivered pleas for the board not to hurt their beloved community school. They hint that the school board has some dark, secret motive.
But nobody steps up to the mic and says, "People! We all need to go home and make phone calls and send e-mails to our representatives and senators and demand that they stop ripping the financial guts out of our school district. We need to hit them with all the emotional heavy artillery that we brought to this meeting and make them really feel our pain, because they are the ones who caused this crisis. They are the ones that create the policies that take our tax dollars away from our district. They are the ones who put our school board in the position of either cutting services or trying to plant a magical money tree in the back yard. They are the ones who are closing our schools."
It is some sort of amazing Jedi mind trick-- citizens and taxpayers are looking right past the causes of schools' financial problems and decided to blame it all on local school boards. This is like when your Dad gets a pay cut and has to sell one of the cars, so you yell at him. This is like complaining to a shooting victim for getting blood all over your coat. This is like having someone pick your pocket and demanding that the police arrest your pants.
I feel their pain. I really feel their pain. But I also know that school boards can't spend money they don't have just because they want to spend it on really important things. And I also know that closing a community school is a terrible thing that is bad for education, the community, and the students. And I also know that some districts have are led by creative problem solvers and some are led by hapless problem creators. But Pennsylvania's leaders have created an environment that requires either A) a miracle worker or B) a district full of wealthy people.
As educators, we have a big educating task in front of us. People have got to apply political leverage where it matters-- on the legislators and policymakers who create these ugly messes. Public education is being starved, and somehow we've got people blaming the bowl, the spoon, the table, the starving person herself-- everyone except the real culprits. If we can't change that, the forces arrayed against public education will win.
Monday, March 23, 2015
Who's Scoring the Test?
A sharp-eyed BAT spotted this ad, one more example of a genre that has become almost cliche-- the Craigslist advertisement for test scoring work.
Do You Have a College Degree?
Thank you for your interest in employment with Measurement Incorporated. We are a diverse company engaged in educational research, test development, and scoring tests that are administered throughout the world. Our company has grown to be a leader in the industry by providing consistent and reliable results to our clients. We are able to do this through the professional efforts of a flexible staff, and we welcome your interest in becoming a member.
Measurement Incorporated boasts ten scoring centers, which is a good thing because "to guarantee test security, all work has to be done at one of our Scoring Centers in Tennessee, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington or from a secure work station in your home."
The ad, which went up ten days ago, is part of a recruiting drive for the test-correction high season of March and April. "These projects may include scoring test items in reading, math, science, social studies, or written essays. The tests come from many different states representing students at all grade levels."
The job starts at $11.20. After logging 450 hours, workers are eligible to bump up to $11.95. Day and night shifts are available, and workers are expected to put in five days a week.
Their employment website provides more details of the job in language that is apparently designed to sift out the better-educated prospects who can speak corporate balonese:
Within the field of performance assessment scoring, MI has distinguished itself by relying on an extensive and disciplined approach to training and monitoring a carefully selected workforce of qualified readers that is unparalleled in the industry. Due to the seasonal nature of scoring, MI hires and offers paid training to hundreds of temporary, highly-skilled, and well-educated employees to score tests on a project-by-project basis while maintaining strict guidelines for accuracy and quality control.
Commenters on the job-rating site indeed made many comments about the seasonal nature of the work and the fact that it was an unreliable income. While they were mostly positive about working for MI (can I be amused that the corporate initials just take me back to a million medical tv shows and myorcardial infarctions?) it's clear that this is not a line of work for someone who has a real job. I suppose the labor pool of well-educated college grads who can't find a real job is fairly well-stocked at the moment, if employment ever does pick up in this country, the test-scoring industry could be in trouble. Well, more trouble.
This is, of course, one of the great undiscussed and unsolved issues of national-level Big Standardized Tests-- who the heck is going to grade it? The question is not just qualifications, but quantity-- how do you round up the human hours needed to score several million tests?
So how does MI stay in business if they're doing seasonal work. The NC-based company has some other products, including a service for providing test items and an AI program named PEG for assessing writing, because the computer-graded essay-scoring field can always use one more program that can't actually do the job. MI also has a writing instruction program; maybe I'll look at that another day.
I expect we'll continue to see many of these smaller companies scarfing up sub-contracts for the Big Guys and handling the business of hiring part-timers to help make decisions about the fate of America's children, teachers, and schools. Only one of two things can be true here-- either the system is so simplified and so user-proof that it doesn't really matter who's doing the scoring work (in which case it's a dopey system that gives back very little information and is easy to game) or it does matter who's doing the scoring (in which case, the use of part-time temps who are available only because they couldn't find a real job is not exactly comforting). Either way, this is one more big fat reminder that the Big Standardized Test is a dumb way to assess any part of America's education system.
Do You Have a College Degree?
Thank you for your interest in employment with Measurement Incorporated. We are a diverse company engaged in educational research, test development, and scoring tests that are administered throughout the world. Our company has grown to be a leader in the industry by providing consistent and reliable results to our clients. We are able to do this through the professional efforts of a flexible staff, and we welcome your interest in becoming a member.
Measurement Incorporated boasts ten scoring centers, which is a good thing because "to guarantee test security, all work has to be done at one of our Scoring Centers in Tennessee, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington or from a secure work station in your home."
The ad, which went up ten days ago, is part of a recruiting drive for the test-correction high season of March and April. "These projects may include scoring test items in reading, math, science, social studies, or written essays. The tests come from many different states representing students at all grade levels."
The job starts at $11.20. After logging 450 hours, workers are eligible to bump up to $11.95. Day and night shifts are available, and workers are expected to put in five days a week.
Their employment website provides more details of the job in language that is apparently designed to sift out the better-educated prospects who can speak corporate balonese:
Within the field of performance assessment scoring, MI has distinguished itself by relying on an extensive and disciplined approach to training and monitoring a carefully selected workforce of qualified readers that is unparalleled in the industry. Due to the seasonal nature of scoring, MI hires and offers paid training to hundreds of temporary, highly-skilled, and well-educated employees to score tests on a project-by-project basis while maintaining strict guidelines for accuracy and quality control.
Commenters on the job-rating site indeed made many comments about the seasonal nature of the work and the fact that it was an unreliable income. While they were mostly positive about working for MI (can I be amused that the corporate initials just take me back to a million medical tv shows and myorcardial infarctions?) it's clear that this is not a line of work for someone who has a real job. I suppose the labor pool of well-educated college grads who can't find a real job is fairly well-stocked at the moment, if employment ever does pick up in this country, the test-scoring industry could be in trouble. Well, more trouble.
This is, of course, one of the great undiscussed and unsolved issues of national-level Big Standardized Tests-- who the heck is going to grade it? The question is not just qualifications, but quantity-- how do you round up the human hours needed to score several million tests?
So how does MI stay in business if they're doing seasonal work. The NC-based company has some other products, including a service for providing test items and an AI program named PEG for assessing writing, because the computer-graded essay-scoring field can always use one more program that can't actually do the job. MI also has a writing instruction program; maybe I'll look at that another day.
I expect we'll continue to see many of these smaller companies scarfing up sub-contracts for the Big Guys and handling the business of hiring part-timers to help make decisions about the fate of America's children, teachers, and schools. Only one of two things can be true here-- either the system is so simplified and so user-proof that it doesn't really matter who's doing the scoring work (in which case it's a dopey system that gives back very little information and is easy to game) or it does matter who's doing the scoring (in which case, the use of part-time temps who are available only because they couldn't find a real job is not exactly comforting). Either way, this is one more big fat reminder that the Big Standardized Test is a dumb way to assess any part of America's education system.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Imagining National Assessment
I write a lot about what I oppose, so as a sort of thought
experiment, today I'll try to imagine if there are ways to accomplish
reformster goals that I could live happily with. The posts in the series
include Imagining Charters, Imagining Teach for America, Imagining National Standards, Imagining Vouchers and Choice, Imagining Teacher Evaluation, and Imagining National Assessments.
And I have left this one till last. Regular readers of the blog know that I am a standardized test denier; I remain convinced that there's not much value in a standardized test administered and scored on a national scale. To assess anything worthwhile on a national level would represent an impossible task in terms of scoring and turnaround. Any test that has been made simple enough to score a few hundred thousand copies in even a month is not going to measure anything really worth measuring, and certainly nothing that couldn't be better measured on the local level.
And in fact nobody can even claim, at this point, to have come up with a full size all-student all-states assessment. Of all the reformster dreams, the dream of a single national assessment is most clearly dead and gone.
So what could we come up with?
First, we'd have to know what the assessment was for. To provide a comparable measure of all students across and within all state lines? To measure how well a school, district, or state was doing at teaching....well, something? To evaluate teachers? To see which education programs or teachniques are most effective?
All of those have been offered as reasons for the Big Standardized Test, but we can't do them all at once, and so we haven't come close to doing any of them well.
Measuring a range of students is hard. As student ability tops or bottoms out, the useful information from the test disappears into noise (IOW, if every student in my class gets a 0% or a 100% on a test, I don't get very detailed information about their grasp of the material). So, national tests given in bands? I know adaptive testing is supposed to handle this, but it also appears to be teaching students that it pays to purposely blow questions on computerized tests.
We can't test critical thinking on a standardized test-- not and get results back before a decade has gone by. Computer-scored essays are still as far away as siri-assisted surgery.
If the tests are going to be scored in any kind of speedy manner, the questions have to be machine-scoreable. If the questions are machine-scoreable, they have to be some variation of a multiple choice question, and if the questions are some variation on the classic bubble test, they are not testing anything of any depth of value, no matter what purpose we're pretending the test serves.
I can imagine a lot of things, but I cannot imagine a useful national-scale standardized test that does anything valuable except generate huge revenue streams for test manufacturers. Fortunately, I also cannot imagine any purpose for which we would ever need such a test.
Do we need to be able to compare a sophomore in Iowa with a sophomore in Georgia? I can't think of a reason, unless they are cousins vying for the best seat at Grandma's Christmas breakfast table. Do we need to be able to stack rank schools? I can't think of any reason, unless we're trying to label some failures in order to crack open a valuable market. Do we need to provide information about student understanding to parents and teachers? Sure, but why do all students need to take the same test to do that? And where are these teachers and parents who are too dumb to know how the student is doing without a national BS Test? Do we need feedback on teacher results in order to punish educators into excellence? I can't think of any reason, unless-- no, I can't think of any reason. If you think teachers became teachers because they weren't interested in students or education, I can't imagine how I could get you to understand otherwise.
So no-- on this one I'm stumped. I can't think of a way to create a useful national standardized test nor a reason to want to. I guess my imagining is done for the day.
And I have left this one till last. Regular readers of the blog know that I am a standardized test denier; I remain convinced that there's not much value in a standardized test administered and scored on a national scale. To assess anything worthwhile on a national level would represent an impossible task in terms of scoring and turnaround. Any test that has been made simple enough to score a few hundred thousand copies in even a month is not going to measure anything really worth measuring, and certainly nothing that couldn't be better measured on the local level.
And in fact nobody can even claim, at this point, to have come up with a full size all-student all-states assessment. Of all the reformster dreams, the dream of a single national assessment is most clearly dead and gone.
So what could we come up with?
First, we'd have to know what the assessment was for. To provide a comparable measure of all students across and within all state lines? To measure how well a school, district, or state was doing at teaching....well, something? To evaluate teachers? To see which education programs or teachniques are most effective?
All of those have been offered as reasons for the Big Standardized Test, but we can't do them all at once, and so we haven't come close to doing any of them well.
Measuring a range of students is hard. As student ability tops or bottoms out, the useful information from the test disappears into noise (IOW, if every student in my class gets a 0% or a 100% on a test, I don't get very detailed information about their grasp of the material). So, national tests given in bands? I know adaptive testing is supposed to handle this, but it also appears to be teaching students that it pays to purposely blow questions on computerized tests.
We can't test critical thinking on a standardized test-- not and get results back before a decade has gone by. Computer-scored essays are still as far away as siri-assisted surgery.
If the tests are going to be scored in any kind of speedy manner, the questions have to be machine-scoreable. If the questions are machine-scoreable, they have to be some variation of a multiple choice question, and if the questions are some variation on the classic bubble test, they are not testing anything of any depth of value, no matter what purpose we're pretending the test serves.
I can imagine a lot of things, but I cannot imagine a useful national-scale standardized test that does anything valuable except generate huge revenue streams for test manufacturers. Fortunately, I also cannot imagine any purpose for which we would ever need such a test.
Do we need to be able to compare a sophomore in Iowa with a sophomore in Georgia? I can't think of a reason, unless they are cousins vying for the best seat at Grandma's Christmas breakfast table. Do we need to be able to stack rank schools? I can't think of any reason, unless we're trying to label some failures in order to crack open a valuable market. Do we need to provide information about student understanding to parents and teachers? Sure, but why do all students need to take the same test to do that? And where are these teachers and parents who are too dumb to know how the student is doing without a national BS Test? Do we need feedback on teacher results in order to punish educators into excellence? I can't think of any reason, unless-- no, I can't think of any reason. If you think teachers became teachers because they weren't interested in students or education, I can't imagine how I could get you to understand otherwise.
So no-- on this one I'm stumped. I can't think of a way to create a useful national standardized test nor a reason to want to. I guess my imagining is done for the day.
Imagining Vouchers and Choice
I write a lot about what I oppose, so as a sort of thought
experiment, today I'll try to imagine if there are ways to accomplish
reformster goals that I could live happily with. The posts in the series
include Imagining Charters, Imagining Teach for America, Imagining National Standards, Imagining Vouchers and Choice, Imagining Teacher Evaluation, and Imagining National Assessments.
This is one of the biggest challenges in the series-- can I imagine circumstances under which I would be okay with vouchers?
Here's the thing about vouchers-- they are fundamentally undemocratic. They directly disenfranchise a whole host of taxpayers. I'll grant you that in many areas, taxpayers don't exactly get a big voice in the operation of their school district, the promise of democracy is not that every single person gets to decide every single issue.
But with a voucher system, only parents control purse strings. And that's just not good for anybody.
Voucher fans tend to forget that government money comes with government strings attached. And they certainly overlook another completely predictable side effect-- when you tell people that they don't get any say in how their school tax dollars are spent, they are going to be far less inclined to agree when politicians come looking for more of those tax dollars. "Why should I care? I don't have a kid in school." becomes a serious political hurdle under a voucher system.
Beyond the impracticality, it's just wrong. It is literally taxation without representation. True, voters might still get to elect school board members, but those school board members now have far less control over how the district's money is spent.
So I can only imagine supporting vouchers under one condition-- politicians who wanted to push a voucher program would have to fully fund it with money over and above the tax dollars collected to fund the public school system. They will need to go to the voters and explain that taxes need to be raised so that Chris's parents can send Chris to any school of their choice. If they can sell that to the voters, then we can have vouchers.
And if we are going to sell vouchers as a means of escape from failing public schools (a popular urban justification) then the vouchers must be equal to the task. Either make the voucher enough high enough or force schools to accept the voucher amount as full tuition. But claiming you'll help Chris escape by giving a $1,000 voucher to spend on a $20,000 tuition school is useless; it's simply a taxpayer-funded rebate for the parents who could already afford to send their child there.
Also, school's choice is not school choice. If we're letting students pick a school, the school doesn't get to select. And about the marketing that helps filter-- well, I'll be generous. Any non-public school that wants voucher students may spend as much on marketing as the local public school does.
I recognize that capacity is a problem. I don't see any solution except truly random lotteries. Though choice schools can pick up some slack by filling every vacant seat just as soon as it becomes vacant.
This is one of the biggest challenges in the series-- can I imagine circumstances under which I would be okay with vouchers?
Here's the thing about vouchers-- they are fundamentally undemocratic. They directly disenfranchise a whole host of taxpayers. I'll grant you that in many areas, taxpayers don't exactly get a big voice in the operation of their school district, the promise of democracy is not that every single person gets to decide every single issue.
But with a voucher system, only parents control purse strings. And that's just not good for anybody.
Voucher fans tend to forget that government money comes with government strings attached. And they certainly overlook another completely predictable side effect-- when you tell people that they don't get any say in how their school tax dollars are spent, they are going to be far less inclined to agree when politicians come looking for more of those tax dollars. "Why should I care? I don't have a kid in school." becomes a serious political hurdle under a voucher system.
Beyond the impracticality, it's just wrong. It is literally taxation without representation. True, voters might still get to elect school board members, but those school board members now have far less control over how the district's money is spent.
So I can only imagine supporting vouchers under one condition-- politicians who wanted to push a voucher program would have to fully fund it with money over and above the tax dollars collected to fund the public school system. They will need to go to the voters and explain that taxes need to be raised so that Chris's parents can send Chris to any school of their choice. If they can sell that to the voters, then we can have vouchers.
And if we are going to sell vouchers as a means of escape from failing public schools (a popular urban justification) then the vouchers must be equal to the task. Either make the voucher enough high enough or force schools to accept the voucher amount as full tuition. But claiming you'll help Chris escape by giving a $1,000 voucher to spend on a $20,000 tuition school is useless; it's simply a taxpayer-funded rebate for the parents who could already afford to send their child there.
Also, school's choice is not school choice. If we're letting students pick a school, the school doesn't get to select. And about the marketing that helps filter-- well, I'll be generous. Any non-public school that wants voucher students may spend as much on marketing as the local public school does.
I recognize that capacity is a problem. I don't see any solution except truly random lotteries. Though choice schools can pick up some slack by filling every vacant seat just as soon as it becomes vacant.
Imagining Teacher Evaluation
I write a lot about what I oppose, so as a sort of thought
experiment, today I'll try to imagine if there are ways to accomplish
reformster goals that I could live happily with. The posts in the series
include Imagining Charters, Imagining Teach for America, Imagining National Standards, Imagining Vouchers and Choice, Imagining Teacher Evaluation, and Imagining National Assessments.
This one is easy, because I've actually addressed it directly before. In fact, years ago I started working up this model and would have started at least half-heartedly refining and pitching it, but by the time I was ready to give it a shot, here came No Child Left Behind and the idea that we didn't need a complex or sophisticated measure of teacher quality-- just check the test results.
You can read about my thoughts in greater detail right here. Let me hit the highlights.
First, the evaluation technique has to do three things:
1) Provide clear expectations to the teacher.
2) Provide useful feedback and remediation.
3) Provide the district with clear information on whether they need to retain, retrain or refrain from hiring permanently.
I've always been focused on the first point-- teaching can be crazy-making because nobody ever tells you what, exactly, they want you to do. We've learned under the "We want you to raise test scores and that's it" regime of reformsterism that a bad answer is actually worse than no answer, and no answer can be kind of liberating. But I've watched a lot of teachers over the years blindsided by discovering that administration was not happy with the teacher's job performance because reasons.
The thing is, your community probably has teacher standards of a sort. In the grocery store, on the corner, in the car pool, people have a pretty good shared idea of what "being a good teacher" means. But it's a complicated constellation of qualities, so the first big challenge of a teacher evaluation system is teasing out of your community what exactly it is that they want from their teaching staff.
Once you've done that (which I admit is like saying "once you've built your faster-than-light propulsion device"), you come up with a form, and you put it in the hands of every single stakeholder of the school, which means staff, taxpayers, parents, students, teachers, alumni-- and you start crunching numbers.
And hey-- if your community tells you, "Never mind anything else-- all we want to know about is how the kids do on the standardized test" you can go ahead and use that.
That's how I imagine it working-- clear expectations, clear evaluation.
I also like the Peer Assistance and Review model, which has the virtue of not requiring a gazillion dollars and umpy-zillion human-hours (that requirement is admittedly a drawback to my model, but this is an exercise in imagining).
I also offered an alternative plan, which I still think is the best one:
Hire a really good principal and let him do his job.
This one is easy, because I've actually addressed it directly before. In fact, years ago I started working up this model and would have started at least half-heartedly refining and pitching it, but by the time I was ready to give it a shot, here came No Child Left Behind and the idea that we didn't need a complex or sophisticated measure of teacher quality-- just check the test results.
You can read about my thoughts in greater detail right here. Let me hit the highlights.
First, the evaluation technique has to do three things:
1) Provide clear expectations to the teacher.
2) Provide useful feedback and remediation.
3) Provide the district with clear information on whether they need to retain, retrain or refrain from hiring permanently.
I've always been focused on the first point-- teaching can be crazy-making because nobody ever tells you what, exactly, they want you to do. We've learned under the "We want you to raise test scores and that's it" regime of reformsterism that a bad answer is actually worse than no answer, and no answer can be kind of liberating. But I've watched a lot of teachers over the years blindsided by discovering that administration was not happy with the teacher's job performance because reasons.
The thing is, your community probably has teacher standards of a sort. In the grocery store, on the corner, in the car pool, people have a pretty good shared idea of what "being a good teacher" means. But it's a complicated constellation of qualities, so the first big challenge of a teacher evaluation system is teasing out of your community what exactly it is that they want from their teaching staff.
Once you've done that (which I admit is like saying "once you've built your faster-than-light propulsion device"), you come up with a form, and you put it in the hands of every single stakeholder of the school, which means staff, taxpayers, parents, students, teachers, alumni-- and you start crunching numbers.
And hey-- if your community tells you, "Never mind anything else-- all we want to know about is how the kids do on the standardized test" you can go ahead and use that.
That's how I imagine it working-- clear expectations, clear evaluation.
I also like the Peer Assistance and Review model, which has the virtue of not requiring a gazillion dollars and umpy-zillion human-hours (that requirement is admittedly a drawback to my model, but this is an exercise in imagining).
I also offered an alternative plan, which I still think is the best one:
Hire a really good principal and let him do his job.
Imagining Teach for America
I write a lot about what I oppose, so as a sort of thought
experiment, today I'll try to imagine if there are ways to accomplish
reformster goals that I could live happily with. The posts in the series
include Imagining Charters, Imagining Teach for America, Imagining National Standards, Imagining Vouchers and Choice, Imagining Teacher Evaluation, and Imagining National Assessments.
Admit it. When you first heard about TFA, you thought it was kind of a cool idea. Then it turned out to be not quite so cool in practice. And then, once reformsters smelled a great opportunity for busting up the teaching profession, TFA overdosed on corporate cash and completely lost sight of any useful mission it might have ever had.
But could a Teach for America program exist in some sort of useful form? What would it take?
Clearly, something would have to be done about the less-than-a-joke training. I'd suggest a summer's worth of teacher boot camp directed, designed, controlled, and taught by actual teachers. It will not be perfect, but if you asked real teachers, "What would you teach someone in just twelve weeks to get them ready for classroom work," you'd get an answer and it wouldn't be "five weeks of baloney."
Next, we'd restrict the program to places that actually need more teachers. If we can't find any such place, we thank our recruits for playing and send them on their way. Pro tip: if you're a major urban district that just fired several hundred teachers just because you could, you are not experiencing a teacher shortage. Granted, computing a shortage is a challenge-- in many areas (like, say, my own) there's a race going on between the plummeting enrollment in teacher programs and the plummeting number of actual teacher jobs in districts. But bottom line-- this program will be used only in districts that cannot fill their spots.
Our teacher corps members will all work under the supervision of an actual certified and working teacher-- lesson plans, assignments, grading and correcting paper will all be checked and subject to approval of the master teacher. The teacher will be paid for doing the job of backstopping the newbie, and that backstopping will continue as long as the corps member works in a classroom. If this leaves them chomping at the bit and wishing for a classroom that they could run all by themselves then good for them-- their next step is to go back to college and get a teaching degree.
Incidentally-- because the district will be paying the master teacher a good chunk of money to basically team teach with the corps member on top of her regular duties, the total cost of hiring a corps member will actually be greater than hiring a certified teacher to fill the spot. The district will be financially motivated to fill the job with a certified teacher.
Corps members will also be forever barred from using the phrase "I was a teacher" in any biographical materials ever.
That's a TFA corps I could live with.
Admit it. When you first heard about TFA, you thought it was kind of a cool idea. Then it turned out to be not quite so cool in practice. And then, once reformsters smelled a great opportunity for busting up the teaching profession, TFA overdosed on corporate cash and completely lost sight of any useful mission it might have ever had.
But could a Teach for America program exist in some sort of useful form? What would it take?
Clearly, something would have to be done about the less-than-a-joke training. I'd suggest a summer's worth of teacher boot camp directed, designed, controlled, and taught by actual teachers. It will not be perfect, but if you asked real teachers, "What would you teach someone in just twelve weeks to get them ready for classroom work," you'd get an answer and it wouldn't be "five weeks of baloney."
Next, we'd restrict the program to places that actually need more teachers. If we can't find any such place, we thank our recruits for playing and send them on their way. Pro tip: if you're a major urban district that just fired several hundred teachers just because you could, you are not experiencing a teacher shortage. Granted, computing a shortage is a challenge-- in many areas (like, say, my own) there's a race going on between the plummeting enrollment in teacher programs and the plummeting number of actual teacher jobs in districts. But bottom line-- this program will be used only in districts that cannot fill their spots.
Our teacher corps members will all work under the supervision of an actual certified and working teacher-- lesson plans, assignments, grading and correcting paper will all be checked and subject to approval of the master teacher. The teacher will be paid for doing the job of backstopping the newbie, and that backstopping will continue as long as the corps member works in a classroom. If this leaves them chomping at the bit and wishing for a classroom that they could run all by themselves then good for them-- their next step is to go back to college and get a teaching degree.
Incidentally-- because the district will be paying the master teacher a good chunk of money to basically team teach with the corps member on top of her regular duties, the total cost of hiring a corps member will actually be greater than hiring a certified teacher to fill the spot. The district will be financially motivated to fill the job with a certified teacher.
Corps members will also be forever barred from using the phrase "I was a teacher" in any biographical materials ever.
That's a TFA corps I could live with.
Imagining National Standards
I write a lot about what I oppose, so as a sort of thought
experiment, today I'll try to imagine if there are ways to accomplish
reformster goals that I could live happily with. The posts in the series
include Imagining Charters, Imagining Teach for America, Imagining National Standards, Imagining Vouchers and Choice, Imagining Teacher Evaluation, and Imagining National Assessments.
On the subject of national standards, I am bit more out there than some other public school advocates. I don't support the Common Core. I don't support national standards of any kind. But can I imagine under what conditions I would support them? Let me try.
We'd be trying to come up a list of all the things that every single student in America needs to know. That's either a very long and specific list, or a very short and vague one ("student must know how to properly use a parallel structure in a sentence constructed to provide organization and emphasis in a longer essay" vs. "student should be able to write well.") The long specific one would spark a million arguments, while the short and vague one would not be very helpful when it came time to evaluate mastery. So that's our first hurdle.
Our second hurdle would be actually coming up with the list. To do something like this on a national scale means calling together Big Time Experts, and the problem is that you end up calling together experts in the art of managing a national scale commission on educationy stuff instead of actual educational experts. A project of this scope is exactly what the government is excellent at doing badly. Heck, even David Coleman and his buddies understood this when they bypassed any sort of democratic government involvement and just whipped up Common Core alone in their garages. Of course, that ends up highlighting the problem with that approach which is that you end up with a product that represents the biases and inclinations of the small group of writers (double-problematic if they don't really know anything about education).
Is there a way past this? Well, we do have the internet-- would it be possible to crowd-source a set of standards by plugging in seven million teachers plus a few hundred thousand more edu-scholars? You could probably cut those numbers down by getting 50-70% of the teachers to say, "I trust Mrs. McSwellteach. She can speak for me." It might be doable.
You'd need some sort of review process, which would mean hiring a office full of people to just mind the standards store-- take feedback, push it out to a review board, manage some sort of regular QA process.
Plus we've established that there's a problem with publishers who claim to be following the standards but are just making shit up. So somebody would have to be in place to review materials and keep an eye on that.
Of course, all the review process stuff could happen at the state level, because I think it would be necessary for each state to have the freedom to adopt or not, alter or not, the standards. Now, if you put them together with actual representation from all over (and not just, say, some guy out in his garage), there would be considerable more bottom-up pressure to adopt, but I think you have to leave the states free to accept, reject, or rewrite. That would also keep the standards vibrant as each state performed its own little experiments that spread through success.
These standards would be designed to help teachers teach; they would not be designed to be measured. Many of the standards that we would agree on would be untestable. That's okay. The object of these standards would not be to try to measure and compare success; the purpose of these standards would be to give each teacher in the nation a comparable guide to where they should be and what they should be trying to do. It's up to each state, district and school to decide how they'll determine if the standards were met or not. This may not make the people who want to evaluate and stack-rank schools on a national scale happy. Too bad. My national standards are not for them-- for many reasons, not the least of which is that having assorted bureaucrats able to rank and compare schools does not help teachers teach.
Granted, I am talking about an "if" the size of Uranus, but if we could do all that, we might have national standards that would be both useful and supportable.
On the subject of national standards, I am bit more out there than some other public school advocates. I don't support the Common Core. I don't support national standards of any kind. But can I imagine under what conditions I would support them? Let me try.
We'd be trying to come up a list of all the things that every single student in America needs to know. That's either a very long and specific list, or a very short and vague one ("student must know how to properly use a parallel structure in a sentence constructed to provide organization and emphasis in a longer essay" vs. "student should be able to write well.") The long specific one would spark a million arguments, while the short and vague one would not be very helpful when it came time to evaluate mastery. So that's our first hurdle.
Our second hurdle would be actually coming up with the list. To do something like this on a national scale means calling together Big Time Experts, and the problem is that you end up calling together experts in the art of managing a national scale commission on educationy stuff instead of actual educational experts. A project of this scope is exactly what the government is excellent at doing badly. Heck, even David Coleman and his buddies understood this when they bypassed any sort of democratic government involvement and just whipped up Common Core alone in their garages. Of course, that ends up highlighting the problem with that approach which is that you end up with a product that represents the biases and inclinations of the small group of writers (double-problematic if they don't really know anything about education).
Is there a way past this? Well, we do have the internet-- would it be possible to crowd-source a set of standards by plugging in seven million teachers plus a few hundred thousand more edu-scholars? You could probably cut those numbers down by getting 50-70% of the teachers to say, "I trust Mrs. McSwellteach. She can speak for me." It might be doable.
You'd need some sort of review process, which would mean hiring a office full of people to just mind the standards store-- take feedback, push it out to a review board, manage some sort of regular QA process.
Plus we've established that there's a problem with publishers who claim to be following the standards but are just making shit up. So somebody would have to be in place to review materials and keep an eye on that.
Of course, all the review process stuff could happen at the state level, because I think it would be necessary for each state to have the freedom to adopt or not, alter or not, the standards. Now, if you put them together with actual representation from all over (and not just, say, some guy out in his garage), there would be considerable more bottom-up pressure to adopt, but I think you have to leave the states free to accept, reject, or rewrite. That would also keep the standards vibrant as each state performed its own little experiments that spread through success.
These standards would be designed to help teachers teach; they would not be designed to be measured. Many of the standards that we would agree on would be untestable. That's okay. The object of these standards would not be to try to measure and compare success; the purpose of these standards would be to give each teacher in the nation a comparable guide to where they should be and what they should be trying to do. It's up to each state, district and school to decide how they'll determine if the standards were met or not. This may not make the people who want to evaluate and stack-rank schools on a national scale happy. Too bad. My national standards are not for them-- for many reasons, not the least of which is that having assorted bureaucrats able to rank and compare schools does not help teachers teach.
Granted, I am talking about an "if" the size of Uranus, but if we could do all that, we might have national standards that would be both useful and supportable.
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