Fans of Competency Based Education have a few favorite go-to exemplars of their idea in action.
The granddaddy of all exemplars is the school system of Chugach, Alaska. Chugach actually joined in the Outcome Based Education movement of two decades ago and never looked back. But Chugach serves a small population spread over a large more-than-rural area (214 students over 22,000 square miles). And if you start to look at their record of success, it is perhaps not quite as awesome as it first appears.
So for many reasons, maybe not such a great example. Do we have anything closer to home?
Meet Sanborn Regional High School in New Hampshire and its principal, Brian Stack. Stack has spent about six years working on this, and he has written about it with a dedication that I have to respect. His school is regularly featured as an exemplar school, a model school for CBE. A couple of CBE fans have directed me toward his work, so I've been taking a look, and while I can by no means claim to have read everything he has to say about his school's work with CBE, I am prepared to react.
Good Thing: Considering Local History
One thread that runs through Stack's writing about the process of implementing CBE is just how much he considered how things had been done in the past. He appears to have really thought about how CBE could be implemented to address issues that the school already had. In other words, he seemed to have skipped the part of reform where you just drag everyone onto the new track no matter where they already are.
Bad Thing: A Not-very-typical School
The school is located in Kingston, NH, a community of just under 6,000 people. The town's population is 97.97% white, and the median income is a bit over $61K. The school also draws from Fremont and Newton , two slightly smaller towns with nearly identical demographics. The area is rural in the sense that it is neither all developed up or urbanized (Coastal New Hampshire is heavy on the marshland, which is a great inhibitor of development). I drive through the area a couple of times a year, and it most resembles what you imagine when you think of a quaint New England town (Not Near The Ocean division). Kingston is about seven miles away from Exeter (home of Philips Exeter Academy) and a little bit further from the actual ocean.
The student body is only about 750 students, and in some promotional videos for the school, I saw one black student and one Asian student. Sanborn Regional High School is not Finland, but it's certainly doesn't have the cultural or economic mix of many American schools. That means there are many educational challenges that they have neither faced nor overcome.
Good Thing: Actual Personalization
It should be noted that there is no earthly reason to assume that CBE means personalization. Schools can (and have) institute a CBE system in which every student completes exactly the same competencies and the only personalized portion of the education is the student's pace through the checklist of things to do. So I give the state of New Hampshire some credit for emphasizing personalization in the CBE context.
That is set in a fairly broad framework that leaves a great deal of room for interpreting the specifics. Sanborn lists as it values Personalization, Risk-taking, Integrity, Discovery and Empowerment (PRIDE-- get it?) and then lists as their educational goals are to effectively communicate, creatively solve problems, responsibly use information, self-manage learning, produce quality work, and contribute to their community (ECCSPRUIS... never mind). To meet these goals, students are broken down into "learning communities" that pursue these goals in a variety of ways. That would seem to set the stage for personalization.
Bad Thing: That's Not the Way the Wind Is Blowing
There are some problems with personalization if you are a reformster who hopes to make some money scaling all of this up, and don't think folks haven't noticed.
Julia Freeland Fisher works at the Clayton Christensen Institute where she "leads a team that educates policymakers and community leaders on the power of disruptive innovation in the K-12 and higher education spheres through its research." She used to work for the New Schools Venture Fund, an organization that helps hedge funders get their hands on some sweet, sweet education money. She has written about the CBE movement in NH-- here's how she defines it.
...creating opportunities for students to move at a flexible, personalized pace; providing supplemental content for students who are struggling or who want to move ahead; and making assessments more frequent and formative, with a focus on demonstrating mastery in real-world examples and settings.
So now we're back to moving through a single track at different speeds, with the occasional "extra" work to remediate or enrich. We're back to all testing, all the time. This is not so impressive. And what obstacles does Fisher see standing in the way of making CBE really take off in NH?
First, local control still allows districts to interpret these additional mandates to their liking.
Second, scaling the state’s vision of personalized competency-based education will require new academic tools and processes that arm teachers and students with real-time feedback and enable students to move through content at a flexible pace
Fisher says that lots of districts are uncomfortable with their level of freedom and keep asking the state to just go ahead and set competencies for them. And here we find one of the central problems of modern CBE-- it's sold as personalization, but the goal is invariably to create a computer-driven model that manages all the data and assessment. So the goal is completely standardized personalization.
I don't know how this playing out at Sanborn-- in all Stack's writing, he has remarkably little to say about what the actual competencies actually look like, or how the process of personalization actually works. If we look at his letter to his earlier self, most of his "If I knew then" concerns are managerial and cultural (also, he uses "impact" as a verb, for which I give him one demerit).
Big Problem Area: Grading
So how do you do the grade thing if you have a whole bunch of different students doing different things at a different pace? You can try reading pieces like this Quality Performance Assessment article, but holy smokes, it is vague and useless. Stack talks a lot about how he had to implement and enforce a common grading system; he seems to feel that different teachers having their own philosophies and ideas about grading were a problem. Personally, I'm not so sure. Stack is also pretty adamant about not giving zeros and not tying grades to things like homework points, and his policy is that the summative assessments must be 90% of the final grade.
Additionally, the school focuses on reassessment, a rolling grade (no grading periods). But Stack's writing is always a bit oblique about exactly how assessment is done. For example:
The ability to be able to “dig deeper” into what a final grade represents and how it can be used to report learning not only intrigued the admissions officers, but it generated an entire discussion around what else a competency-based grading and reporting system could do for students. Indeed, this model should be the way of the future for all high schools.
Stack never talks about any massive computer-driven test and store data collection, but is that what being able to dig deeper and see more detail means? Tom Vander Ark put the school on the list of thirty to watch, and since TVA is the ultimate lets just hook everyone up to a computer and start data mining technocrat, that really doesn't speak well of Sanborn.
Sanborn uses a grading system that any casual observer will recognize as an A-to-F scale by another name. Here's the sheet that parents are directed to for answers. I'm just not sure how many answers are actually here. I mean, it explains some things, kind of, and I don't find any online record of parental uproar, so it must be working in some way. I'm just left feeling that some aspects of Sanborn's system are mysterious and unclear.
A Greater Tension
So despite some peoples' insistence that looking at Sanborn will help me understand how CBE can be awesome, it doesn't.
It does help focus my mind on one of the built in tensions that emerge between personalization, competency based education, technology-driven test and data collection, and scaling any of this into state-or-nation-wide product. All four of those things are in play here, and none of them HAVE to go together. In fact, some of them operate in direct opposition. True personalized education would begin the day that the teacher meets the child, with nothing pre-created or pre-designed. True competency based education has some serious problems built in, not the least of which is its focus on reducing all learning to a series of money tricks. Hooking students up to the computer for all standardized testing, all day is great for Data Overlords, but not for education. And the degree to which any of this can be scaled up for widespread deployment is in direct opposition to the degree to which it is truly a personalized program. Computerized one size fits all is not personalized education, but places like Sanborn and Chugach suggest that fans of these approaches are trying to pilot in places where one-size-fits-all is likely to work a bit better due to a local lack of diversity.
These different aspects of CBE stand in opposition to each other, and the value of any single program is going to rest on how it settles these "tensions."
Friday, March 25, 2016
Thursday, March 24, 2016
#Te$tBetter Bill of Rights (updated)
Another day, another desperate PR attempt by all the people who depend on the promotion of the Big Standardized Test for their daily bread.
There was supposed to be a big PR launch this morning in New York, but it was canceled due to "scheduling conflicts." Nevertheless, the hot new website is live, various testocrats are pushing the hashtag on schedule, and any minute now the tide will turn and parents all over both New York and the United States will leap up, declaring that they have won the struggle against themselves and that they love the Test.
Central to the new #TestBetter campaign is the Testing Bill of Rights, which is not, as you might first guess, a list of the rights to which a test is entitled (the right to your tax dollars, the right to interrupt your education, the right to your personal information...), also not, apparently, short for Bill O'Frights, but is instead a listing of all the swell rights that students, teachers and parents have. There is no suggestion where exactly these rights came from, but there is a handy list. Let's take a look, shall we?
Not take the test if they don't want to!
Ha! Just kidding. That right appears nowhere on this list.
Tests that provide an objective measure of progress toward college-and career-readiness.
There are two problems with this right. First, while students may want to know if they're progressing toward college or career, there are better ways to find out because, second, there is no test anywhere that provides an objective measure of progress toward college-and-career readiness (yeah, their last hyphen is mistaken). There is arguably no test that is actually objective, and there is inarguably no test that can measure college and career readiness for all students considering all colleges and all careers.
Testing schedules, policies, and practices that contribute to meaningful teaching and learning.
No disagreement here. Of course, the BS Tests does not contribute to any of these characteristics.
Have student learning assessed based on an array of measures.
True-ish, if we define "measures" in the broadest possible way.
An education free of excessive test prep.
Oops. You messed this one up, guys. "An education free of any test prep." There, fixed that for you.
Have their personally identifiable information protected.
You know the best possible way to protect it? Don't collect it in the first place. This would be a good time to remind you of what a lousy job the USED has done safeguarding data. The old adage still applies-- if you want to keep something private or secret, don't tell anybody.
Fair, reliable, and unbiased tests used for their intended purposes.
This would carry more weight if it came with an acknowledgement that reformsters have totally failed on this one. The BS Tests have been neither fair nor reliable, and they have been used for a dozen different purposes beyond what ever intentions may have been attached to them. There's no such thing as an unbiased test.
Tests that provide an objective measure of progress toward college-and career-readiness.
See above. This is like saying teachers have a right to unicorns that poop rainbows.
Timely data that measure what the student has learned, help them diagnose student needs and improve instruction.
Yeah, gee, thanks. I actually do this with my own materials on a daily basis, so, got this covered. Thanks a lot.
Professional development, high quality curricula, and the time and supports needed to teach and prepare their students.
You realize that this has nothing to do with testing, right? This is like putting a line in the US Bill of Rights about banking policy in Uruguay. It's very nice and all, but it's completely off topic. If you think it's not off topic, it's possible that you don't understand curriculum, professional development, teaching, or testing.
Have test scores be only one of an array of measures of student learning in accountability systems.
Oh! Wrong twice. Test scores should not be any part of the array of student learning used in accountability systems, because student learning shouldn't be used in accountability systems. Well, maybe just a little. But then you'll have to figure out how take a measurement of student learning that can legitimately be used in an accountability system. Give us a call when you've figured that out (I am not going to wait by the phone).
Have their personally identifiable information protected.
Again, such data shouldn't need to be protected because it shouldn't be in the system in the first place. Don't think I don't see you assuming the sale here and just skipping over the question of whether such data should be collected instead of opening the floor to teh question of just why our Data Overlords should be hoovering up everyone's personal data in the first place.
Know if their child is making progress each year and on track to graduate from high school ready for college, career and citizenship.
Yup. Good idea. Call your teacher and ask. As previously noted, nobody has a test that can tell you this.
Clear, comparable data about school performance.
Comparable why? Are you telling me that parents need to know if their kid is doing as well as a kid in Idaho? Or is this just the part where you hold onto the idea that a free market needs consumer data, in which case the BS Tests is actually intended to generate marketing data, in which case we can chuck all the rest of this baloney out the window, because the test isn't about measuring student achievement at all.
Know the amount of instructional time being used to deliver and prepare for standardized tests, as well as the purpose and timing of standardized tests.
If the BS Test wasn't happening, we would all know-- zero. As it stands, this "right" is a frank admission that when test preparation is happening, learning is not.
Detailed, clear and timely results from standardized tests.
Absolutely agreed. This would include a release of all the test items, the correct answers, the reasoning behind the correct answers, the methods and results of the test reliability studies, and the methods and personnel used to correct the test. This particular right is not met by a two-page low-data report. Testocrats should, on this point, put up or shut up. If test manufacturers' intellectual property rights are more important than test transparency for parents, stop pretending otherwise.
Have their child’s personally identifiable information protected.
By not allowing anyone to collect it in the first place. There. I fixed that for you.
Regular communication about their child’s progress and well-being.
One more thing that no teacher needs a BS Test to do.
Who made this silliness?
The usual gang of testocrats. CAP. High Achievement New York. Educators 4 Excellence. National PTA. The usual assortment of astro-turfed Gates-funded corporate stooges who are always there to assure us that tests are swell and we should all love them and boy, maybe if they can build this PR campaign sorta kinda around some ideas that are sorta kinda like the ones real people are worked up about, maybe they can get some traction.
However
I will remind you that they are trying hard to make #TestBetter a thing on Twitter. I recommend you head on over and help them out.
Update
D'oh! I can't believe I missed the obvious.
This may be a bit of a PR push, but it is also (and maybe mostly) a mailing list honey trap. Do you think this is swell? Then sign our Bill of Rights. And give us your email address so that we can do more targeted bombarding of people with anti-opt-out propaganda. Well, they will if you give them your real name and email address.
There was supposed to be a big PR launch this morning in New York, but it was canceled due to "scheduling conflicts." Nevertheless, the hot new website is live, various testocrats are pushing the hashtag on schedule, and any minute now the tide will turn and parents all over both New York and the United States will leap up, declaring that they have won the struggle against themselves and that they love the Test.
Central to the new #TestBetter campaign is the Testing Bill of Rights, which is not, as you might first guess, a list of the rights to which a test is entitled (the right to your tax dollars, the right to interrupt your education, the right to your personal information...), also not, apparently, short for Bill O'Frights, but is instead a listing of all the swell rights that students, teachers and parents have. There is no suggestion where exactly these rights came from, but there is a handy list. Let's take a look, shall we?
Students have the right to...
Not take the test if they don't want to!
Ha! Just kidding. That right appears nowhere on this list.
Tests that provide an objective measure of progress toward college-and career-readiness.
There are two problems with this right. First, while students may want to know if they're progressing toward college or career, there are better ways to find out because, second, there is no test anywhere that provides an objective measure of progress toward college-and-career readiness (yeah, their last hyphen is mistaken). There is arguably no test that is actually objective, and there is inarguably no test that can measure college and career readiness for all students considering all colleges and all careers.
Testing schedules, policies, and practices that contribute to meaningful teaching and learning.
No disagreement here. Of course, the BS Tests does not contribute to any of these characteristics.
Have student learning assessed based on an array of measures.
True-ish, if we define "measures" in the broadest possible way.
An education free of excessive test prep.
Oops. You messed this one up, guys. "An education free of any test prep." There, fixed that for you.
Have their personally identifiable information protected.
You know the best possible way to protect it? Don't collect it in the first place. This would be a good time to remind you of what a lousy job the USED has done safeguarding data. The old adage still applies-- if you want to keep something private or secret, don't tell anybody.
Fair, reliable, and unbiased tests used for their intended purposes.
This would carry more weight if it came with an acknowledgement that reformsters have totally failed on this one. The BS Tests have been neither fair nor reliable, and they have been used for a dozen different purposes beyond what ever intentions may have been attached to them. There's no such thing as an unbiased test.
Teachers have the right to...
Tests that provide an objective measure of progress toward college-and career-readiness.
See above. This is like saying teachers have a right to unicorns that poop rainbows.
Timely data that measure what the student has learned, help them diagnose student needs and improve instruction.
Yeah, gee, thanks. I actually do this with my own materials on a daily basis, so, got this covered. Thanks a lot.
Professional development, high quality curricula, and the time and supports needed to teach and prepare their students.
You realize that this has nothing to do with testing, right? This is like putting a line in the US Bill of Rights about banking policy in Uruguay. It's very nice and all, but it's completely off topic. If you think it's not off topic, it's possible that you don't understand curriculum, professional development, teaching, or testing.
Have test scores be only one of an array of measures of student learning in accountability systems.
Oh! Wrong twice. Test scores should not be any part of the array of student learning used in accountability systems, because student learning shouldn't be used in accountability systems. Well, maybe just a little. But then you'll have to figure out how take a measurement of student learning that can legitimately be used in an accountability system. Give us a call when you've figured that out (I am not going to wait by the phone).
Have their personally identifiable information protected.
Again, such data shouldn't need to be protected because it shouldn't be in the system in the first place. Don't think I don't see you assuming the sale here and just skipping over the question of whether such data should be collected instead of opening the floor to teh question of just why our Data Overlords should be hoovering up everyone's personal data in the first place.
Parents have the right to...
Know if their child is making progress each year and on track to graduate from high school ready for college, career and citizenship.
Yup. Good idea. Call your teacher and ask. As previously noted, nobody has a test that can tell you this.
Clear, comparable data about school performance.
Comparable why? Are you telling me that parents need to know if their kid is doing as well as a kid in Idaho? Or is this just the part where you hold onto the idea that a free market needs consumer data, in which case the BS Tests is actually intended to generate marketing data, in which case we can chuck all the rest of this baloney out the window, because the test isn't about measuring student achievement at all.
Know the amount of instructional time being used to deliver and prepare for standardized tests, as well as the purpose and timing of standardized tests.
If the BS Test wasn't happening, we would all know-- zero. As it stands, this "right" is a frank admission that when test preparation is happening, learning is not.
Detailed, clear and timely results from standardized tests.
Absolutely agreed. This would include a release of all the test items, the correct answers, the reasoning behind the correct answers, the methods and results of the test reliability studies, and the methods and personnel used to correct the test. This particular right is not met by a two-page low-data report. Testocrats should, on this point, put up or shut up. If test manufacturers' intellectual property rights are more important than test transparency for parents, stop pretending otherwise.
Have their child’s personally identifiable information protected.
By not allowing anyone to collect it in the first place. There. I fixed that for you.
Regular communication about their child’s progress and well-being.
One more thing that no teacher needs a BS Test to do.
Who made this silliness?
The usual gang of testocrats. CAP. High Achievement New York. Educators 4 Excellence. National PTA. The usual assortment of astro-turfed Gates-funded corporate stooges who are always there to assure us that tests are swell and we should all love them and boy, maybe if they can build this PR campaign sorta kinda around some ideas that are sorta kinda like the ones real people are worked up about, maybe they can get some traction.
However
I will remind you that they are trying hard to make #TestBetter a thing on Twitter. I recommend you head on over and help them out.
Update
D'oh! I can't believe I missed the obvious.
This may be a bit of a PR push, but it is also (and maybe mostly) a mailing list honey trap. Do you think this is swell? Then sign our Bill of Rights. And give us your email address so that we can do more targeted bombarding of people with anti-opt-out propaganda. Well, they will if you give them your real name and email address.
Opting In
During yesterday's professional development session, we were reminded of a fun fact.
In the state of Pennsylvania, you can't give a child an IQ test without parental permission.
The IQ test. Controversial and highly debatable, but well know, moderately well understood, and extensively tested over the decades. Everybody kind of knows what it's for and what it measures. A longstanding part of the educational landscape.
And yet-- the school cannot give your child that test without your permission.
Imagine if we did that with the Big Standardized Test in every state. Imagine if we recognized parental authority when it came to administering Big Standardized Tests to children. Imagine if the state and the school had to get parental permission before administering to your child the PARCC or SBA or PSSA or WhateverTheHellAnagramYourStateIsPlayingAt. Imagine if the people fighting so hard against opt out had to fight to get everyone to opt in.
Could they make a case for the tests? Could they convince parents that there is some useful reason for building an educational system around high stakes testing?
We know the answer. They know the answer. That's why they've kept making sure that the force of law is behind the BS Tests.
But if I have to ask permission to give an IQ test, why not the same for the BS Test?
In the state of Pennsylvania, you can't give a child an IQ test without parental permission.
The IQ test. Controversial and highly debatable, but well know, moderately well understood, and extensively tested over the decades. Everybody kind of knows what it's for and what it measures. A longstanding part of the educational landscape.
And yet-- the school cannot give your child that test without your permission.
Imagine if we did that with the Big Standardized Test in every state. Imagine if we recognized parental authority when it came to administering Big Standardized Tests to children. Imagine if the state and the school had to get parental permission before administering to your child the PARCC or SBA or PSSA or WhateverTheHellAnagramYourStateIsPlayingAt. Imagine if the people fighting so hard against opt out had to fight to get everyone to opt in.
Could they make a case for the tests? Could they convince parents that there is some useful reason for building an educational system around high stakes testing?
We know the answer. They know the answer. That's why they've kept making sure that the force of law is behind the BS Tests.
But if I have to ask permission to give an IQ test, why not the same for the BS Test?
What's So Bad About Competency Based Education?
Competency Based Education (or Proficiency Based Learning or Outcome Based Education) is the new rage, or perhaps the long-simmering pot that is currently coming to boil. Reformsters have shifted emphasis to it, and opponents have become increasingly vocal about it. Casual observers can be forgiven for getting the impression that reform opponents are just reflexively objecting to whatever reformsters like. If Bill Gates ate a cheese sandwich, would some of us be leading a "Keep cheese out of our schools" movement?
After all, is CBE really all that radical or different?
Don't we kinda do this stuff already?
It's a fair question. As I've outlined before, Outcome Based Education popped up decades ago and immediately fell on some hard times, went into hiding, got some plastic surgery, and is now slinking onto the stage with a new name.
But even though OBE was chased off the education stage, certain aspects of it have stuck with us. The much-beloved TSWBAT (that's "the student will be able to..." for those of you outside of education or under thirty) looms like a ghost over most lesson planning and reflects a fundamental shift of education in the late twentieth century, a shift to the notion that an Educated Person is one who can perform every one of the tricks on this master list.
So we plan a unit with an eye toward the assessment at the end, and we do quizzes and informal checks and practice and we watch to see how well students are mastering the particular skill, and when we think most of them have it down, we give a summative assessment, and if most of the students show that they perform the trick on cue, we say, "Okay, most of these guys have it. We can move on."
Starting with that foundation, we also recognize the foolishness of time-based education, that saying that Chris has been exposed to math for one Carnegie unit so that should do it, as if math is a radioactive element or contagious disease and once Chris has been exposed to math for a set time, we can expect that Chris will be properly infected with it. One of the universal issues with the pacing guides and scripted courses that have spread like kudzu during the Common Core era is that they make instructional assumptions based on time-- "All right, you've covered mixed fractions for one twenty minute lesson, so it's time to move on whether your students get it or not."
In other words, mostly all of us mostly agree with some central tenets of OBE-- you should teach students, track their progress, and move on when they've shown they have mastered the material. So what's the big deal again?
Compromise rears its ugly head
We know what it would take to create a perfect education system. We would need resource-rich classes to bring students together for learning, building, and growing socially and interactively, coupled with fully-individualized education with each student working with her own individual teacher (or team of teachers) armed with every conceivable useful educational tool and resource. It would be awesome. It would also be awesomely expensive and require a massive number of trained educators.
We could never afford it. It would be on par with going to war, and hey-- you don't see us spending trillions of dollars we don't have just to go to war, right? Right?
Anyway, we know what it would take to create an awesome educational system, and as country we lack the money and/or will to do it. So our entire educational system is a kluge of compromises, just as a teaching career is a process of trying to cover 100 square feet of ground with 50 square feet of cloth. We don't necessarily strap together groups of 20-30 students to travel through school together because we think it's the best way to do it, but because we don't want to spend the money it would cost for smaller groups and more individualized instruction (Well, we as a society don't want to-- those of us who can afford it go ahead and provide it for our kids).
So we need to understand right up front that what CBE salespersons are selling is not the full-on, full-cost, top-of-the-line, competency based education model. They will show us the bigger fancy models, but what they're really selling is a way to get the full-CBE experience at a low, low price. They are the guys on the sidewalk selling twenty-dollar knockoffs that are Almost Just Like Prada.
So whenever you're looking at an actual CBE system, ask-- What corners were cut? What compromises were made?
Is that it? Am I opposed to CBE just because of possible compromise and corner-cutting?
Fundamental Problems: Features, not Bugs
There are some issues baked into CBE that mean I am never going to be a fan.
Reductio ad Absurd Listium
The premise of CBE is that all learning can be reduced to a collection of performance tasks. This is fine for simple, concrete skills. Identify grammatical sentence parts? Change a tire? Find the measurement for one side of an isosceles triangle? Bake a cake? Sure-- if you can perform each of the separate tasks involved, you can be said to have mastered the larger learning.
But more complex skills don't succumb to merit badge breakdown so easily. You may pass the dribbling test, the passing test, the shooting test, the jumping test, and the blocking test, but does that mean you have achieved mastery of basketball? And does mastery mean that you can play on a YMCA pick-up team, or that you're ready to go head to head with LeBron James? And were the basketball competencies, both the content and the minimum level required to pass them-- did those come from somebody who is knowledgeable about basketball, or from someone who is knowledgeable about designing CBE systems?
And that's talking skills. When we talk knowledge, CBE goes right out the window. How do we reduce an understanding of the critical realist movement in American literature to a series of competencies? We can't-- so we have to bake in two huge mistakes. First, we reduce it to performance tasks-- behaviors-- that somebody somewhere believes are the signs of understanding. The competency is literally not "understand the material" but "act as if you understand the material." Assessing this kind of learning is already a huge challenge for a regular classroom teacher, but CBE adds the element of saying that we will use exactly the same measure for every single student.
Second, using CBE for knowledge learning means that the competencies will always be measured in terms of things we already know. If you are earning your competency badge for "understanding the causes of the Great European War," what you really have to understand is what the people who wrote the competency measure believe were the causes. In other words, CBE demands inside the box thinking-- even for fields in which the box is under considerable debate.
For this reason alone, even under the best of conditions, CBE is extremely limited in what it can actually, really do. And unchecked, CBE wants to reduce everything to a list of competencies-- even all the things that cannot really be reduced to a simple list of competencies.
One and Done?
"This man has collapsed and he's not breathing! Can you perform CPR??"
"Well, yes. I mean, I passed my CPR competency test in 1997, so I'm sure I can."
Step away from the man on the sidewalk. In keeping with the concept of fluid definitions of mastery, we get the idea that some skills need to be honed and repeated over time. CBE likes the one and done approach. Everybody passed the mixed fraction multiplication competency, so we never need to talk about it again. We've now all taken the write a paragraph competency assessment, so now I can count on everybody writing perfect paragraphs forever, right?
No. There's a reason that my writing unit runs for thirty-six weeks.
All can learn all
OBE was big on "all can learn all" and CBE wants to do the same-- assert that every child can learn everything. This is a way to navigate the above problem of defining mastery-- the "mastery" level of a competency has to be set somewhere between "any dope can do this" and "super-duper challenge." Each has its problems, most obvious being the number of bored or frustrated students. So we draw the line in the middle somewhere, and proceed to reject the bell curve. Every child can learn calculus. Every child can learn to play piano. Every child can read War and Peace.
This would just be garden-variety dumb, except that it sets the stage for the defective child fallacy. The defective child fallacy says, "Well, my program is solid, and my teaching is solid, and this child hasn't performed. Every factor that I can control is perfection-- therefor, the only logical conclusion is that this child is defective."
Problematic for older students, CBE also doesn't leave space for the child who says, "I could probably do this, but I don't want to. Today, I do not feel like jumping through my competency hoops to satisfy you." While CBE promises personalization in education, it actually leans toward taking away student agency, as the student is required to navigate an obstacle course over which she has no real control-- except to decide not to move forward when she has had enough.
Impersonal personalization
It is absolutely true that a CBE system can avoid this problem by allowing students a voice in designing their own competencies and assessment tasks. However, let me direct you back up to the portion about expense and compromise. Allowing this kind of flexibility is time-consuming and therefor expensive as hell. Additionally, it provides measures and results that are not easily compared and ranked, which in today's reformy climate is way against the current.
The natural pressure on a CBE system is to create a miniature golf course of education, and while you may let students pick their own clubs and move through the course at whatever speed they like, they're all on the same course, shooting past the same windmills and dancing gorillas. As long as we are in an era that demands that everybody's score from the golf course be comparable and rankable, actual personalization will not be a top priority.
Modern CBE: Extra Bad with some Creepiness on the Side
These are the major issues I have with Competency Based Education no matter where and how it appears. But where and how it is appearing these days is even worse. Much, much worse. The big question about CBE/OBE is why is it coming back now, after being beaten down so badly twenty years ago. The answer appears to be technology. Nobody has spent more time digging up and laying out the who's and why's and wherefore's of this than Emily Talmage, whose blog Save Maine Schools has reach and importance far beyond Maine itself. But since I'm trying for an overview here, let me just hit the highlights.
All Standardized, All the Time
CBE now comes with a huge focus on "new tools" and new applications for learning management systems. What this boils down to is massive software programs to manage all student learning. If we go back to the mini-golf course, we can now design a course of 2,000 holes and manage an individual path through the course for each child. It's big and complicated, but it is still one size fits all, and it still calls for the teacher to be just a meat widget coach, while all the instruction has been created by the company, pre-fabricated by a company that has never met the students.
This is where the CBE advocates managed to ju-jitsu the anti-Big Standardized Test crowd, "Why, yes," they said. "It is foolish to try to evaluate student progress and inform instruction based on a single high stakes test. We really should stop giving one Big Standardized Test every year." And then, while everyone was cheering along. "What we really need is a small standardized test every day!"
And voila! School shifts from being all about preparing students for the BS Tests, and becomes all about checking off the next competency badge on your list.
Big Brother Was a Slacker
You can go back almost exactly two years to read about Knewton, an outfit that is confident that if they know everything, they can control everything. Watch the 2012 clip in which this Pearson-related honcho explains that they should be able to tell you what you should eat for breakfast to do well on the math test-- and he's not kidding. The Data Overlords see in CBE a golden opportunity to get every single thing a child does in school swept straight into a database. When your child steps out of school, the Data Overlords will already have picked the best job for her, and any government or corporate entity that has access to her giant data file will already know alllllllll about her. Remember when your elementary school teacher would warn you that your misbehavior would end up on your permanent record? She had no idea. Now everything you do, every assignment you complete, every disciplinary action, every medical event, every family problem, every event in your life will be part of a record interpreted by people who don't know you and accessible to anyone with the money or power to gain that access.
Seeing Inside Your Heart
I'm frankly puzzled by this, because this is exactly what got Outcome Based education in trouble back in the nineties. But advocates of modern tech-driven have decided that they will also try to teach and measure and record data about non-academic qualities. Here's just one recent example that plans to cover curiosity, initiative, persistence/grit, adaptability, leadership, and social/cultural awareness.
The new CBE school is not just going to try to teach these things, but test for them and record the results in the big pile of data. Which means that the program manufacturers are going to define what these qualities are and define the only program-recognized ways to display those traits. Someone is going to have to create performance tasks that will measure how curious your child is. There will be tests for leadership. And someone will write performance tasks to show if your six year old is sufficiently culturally aware.
The new CBE doesn't just want to record a complete a detailed measure of the child's intelligence-- it wants to measure and record the child's character. The Big Data File will not just decide if the child is a smart person-- the programmers will also decide if the child is a good person.
The Ideal versus the Real
Some advocates of CBE will argue that CBE doesn't have to be about all this creepy Big Brothery datamining tech-dependent cradle-to-grave (you don't really think this is going to stop once you're out of school, do you) monstrosity, and those advocates are correct. It doesn't have to be this way. A teacher with a couple of aids and a small class size and lots of resources could implement CBE, and even do it in a way that minimized the problems that are baked into the CBE model.
But that is not what's happening.
It's like the folks who said, "Look, Common Core is just a set of standards, and classroom teachers are still totally free to teach the curriculum they think is best." In some alternate idealized universe that was kind of true, but those folks belong in the same dustbin of history as scientists developing nuclear power and saying, "So you guys are going to split the atom only for good purposes, right?"
CBE has some inherent problems, and those are reason enough to give pause before leaping into the CBE pool. But on top of those, we now have the problems of Data Overlords using the CBE model to launch a computer-driven assault on privacy and freedom.
And that, boys and girls, is what's so bad about competency based education.
After all, is CBE really all that radical or different?
Don't we kinda do this stuff already?
It's a fair question. As I've outlined before, Outcome Based Education popped up decades ago and immediately fell on some hard times, went into hiding, got some plastic surgery, and is now slinking onto the stage with a new name.
But even though OBE was chased off the education stage, certain aspects of it have stuck with us. The much-beloved TSWBAT (that's "the student will be able to..." for those of you outside of education or under thirty) looms like a ghost over most lesson planning and reflects a fundamental shift of education in the late twentieth century, a shift to the notion that an Educated Person is one who can perform every one of the tricks on this master list.
So we plan a unit with an eye toward the assessment at the end, and we do quizzes and informal checks and practice and we watch to see how well students are mastering the particular skill, and when we think most of them have it down, we give a summative assessment, and if most of the students show that they perform the trick on cue, we say, "Okay, most of these guys have it. We can move on."
Starting with that foundation, we also recognize the foolishness of time-based education, that saying that Chris has been exposed to math for one Carnegie unit so that should do it, as if math is a radioactive element or contagious disease and once Chris has been exposed to math for a set time, we can expect that Chris will be properly infected with it. One of the universal issues with the pacing guides and scripted courses that have spread like kudzu during the Common Core era is that they make instructional assumptions based on time-- "All right, you've covered mixed fractions for one twenty minute lesson, so it's time to move on whether your students get it or not."
In other words, mostly all of us mostly agree with some central tenets of OBE-- you should teach students, track their progress, and move on when they've shown they have mastered the material. So what's the big deal again?
Compromise rears its ugly head
We know what it would take to create a perfect education system. We would need resource-rich classes to bring students together for learning, building, and growing socially and interactively, coupled with fully-individualized education with each student working with her own individual teacher (or team of teachers) armed with every conceivable useful educational tool and resource. It would be awesome. It would also be awesomely expensive and require a massive number of trained educators.
We could never afford it. It would be on par with going to war, and hey-- you don't see us spending trillions of dollars we don't have just to go to war, right? Right?
Anyway, we know what it would take to create an awesome educational system, and as country we lack the money and/or will to do it. So our entire educational system is a kluge of compromises, just as a teaching career is a process of trying to cover 100 square feet of ground with 50 square feet of cloth. We don't necessarily strap together groups of 20-30 students to travel through school together because we think it's the best way to do it, but because we don't want to spend the money it would cost for smaller groups and more individualized instruction (Well, we as a society don't want to-- those of us who can afford it go ahead and provide it for our kids).
So we need to understand right up front that what CBE salespersons are selling is not the full-on, full-cost, top-of-the-line, competency based education model. They will show us the bigger fancy models, but what they're really selling is a way to get the full-CBE experience at a low, low price. They are the guys on the sidewalk selling twenty-dollar knockoffs that are Almost Just Like Prada.
So whenever you're looking at an actual CBE system, ask-- What corners were cut? What compromises were made?
Is that it? Am I opposed to CBE just because of possible compromise and corner-cutting?
Fundamental Problems: Features, not Bugs
There are some issues baked into CBE that mean I am never going to be a fan.
Reductio ad Absurd Listium
The premise of CBE is that all learning can be reduced to a collection of performance tasks. This is fine for simple, concrete skills. Identify grammatical sentence parts? Change a tire? Find the measurement for one side of an isosceles triangle? Bake a cake? Sure-- if you can perform each of the separate tasks involved, you can be said to have mastered the larger learning.
But more complex skills don't succumb to merit badge breakdown so easily. You may pass the dribbling test, the passing test, the shooting test, the jumping test, and the blocking test, but does that mean you have achieved mastery of basketball? And does mastery mean that you can play on a YMCA pick-up team, or that you're ready to go head to head with LeBron James? And were the basketball competencies, both the content and the minimum level required to pass them-- did those come from somebody who is knowledgeable about basketball, or from someone who is knowledgeable about designing CBE systems?
And that's talking skills. When we talk knowledge, CBE goes right out the window. How do we reduce an understanding of the critical realist movement in American literature to a series of competencies? We can't-- so we have to bake in two huge mistakes. First, we reduce it to performance tasks-- behaviors-- that somebody somewhere believes are the signs of understanding. The competency is literally not "understand the material" but "act as if you understand the material." Assessing this kind of learning is already a huge challenge for a regular classroom teacher, but CBE adds the element of saying that we will use exactly the same measure for every single student.
Second, using CBE for knowledge learning means that the competencies will always be measured in terms of things we already know. If you are earning your competency badge for "understanding the causes of the Great European War," what you really have to understand is what the people who wrote the competency measure believe were the causes. In other words, CBE demands inside the box thinking-- even for fields in which the box is under considerable debate.
For this reason alone, even under the best of conditions, CBE is extremely limited in what it can actually, really do. And unchecked, CBE wants to reduce everything to a list of competencies-- even all the things that cannot really be reduced to a simple list of competencies.
One and Done?
"This man has collapsed and he's not breathing! Can you perform CPR??"
"Well, yes. I mean, I passed my CPR competency test in 1997, so I'm sure I can."
Step away from the man on the sidewalk. In keeping with the concept of fluid definitions of mastery, we get the idea that some skills need to be honed and repeated over time. CBE likes the one and done approach. Everybody passed the mixed fraction multiplication competency, so we never need to talk about it again. We've now all taken the write a paragraph competency assessment, so now I can count on everybody writing perfect paragraphs forever, right?
No. There's a reason that my writing unit runs for thirty-six weeks.
All can learn all
OBE was big on "all can learn all" and CBE wants to do the same-- assert that every child can learn everything. This is a way to navigate the above problem of defining mastery-- the "mastery" level of a competency has to be set somewhere between "any dope can do this" and "super-duper challenge." Each has its problems, most obvious being the number of bored or frustrated students. So we draw the line in the middle somewhere, and proceed to reject the bell curve. Every child can learn calculus. Every child can learn to play piano. Every child can read War and Peace.
This would just be garden-variety dumb, except that it sets the stage for the defective child fallacy. The defective child fallacy says, "Well, my program is solid, and my teaching is solid, and this child hasn't performed. Every factor that I can control is perfection-- therefor, the only logical conclusion is that this child is defective."
Problematic for older students, CBE also doesn't leave space for the child who says, "I could probably do this, but I don't want to. Today, I do not feel like jumping through my competency hoops to satisfy you." While CBE promises personalization in education, it actually leans toward taking away student agency, as the student is required to navigate an obstacle course over which she has no real control-- except to decide not to move forward when she has had enough.
Impersonal personalization
It is absolutely true that a CBE system can avoid this problem by allowing students a voice in designing their own competencies and assessment tasks. However, let me direct you back up to the portion about expense and compromise. Allowing this kind of flexibility is time-consuming and therefor expensive as hell. Additionally, it provides measures and results that are not easily compared and ranked, which in today's reformy climate is way against the current.
The natural pressure on a CBE system is to create a miniature golf course of education, and while you may let students pick their own clubs and move through the course at whatever speed they like, they're all on the same course, shooting past the same windmills and dancing gorillas. As long as we are in an era that demands that everybody's score from the golf course be comparable and rankable, actual personalization will not be a top priority.
Modern CBE: Extra Bad with some Creepiness on the Side
These are the major issues I have with Competency Based Education no matter where and how it appears. But where and how it is appearing these days is even worse. Much, much worse. The big question about CBE/OBE is why is it coming back now, after being beaten down so badly twenty years ago. The answer appears to be technology. Nobody has spent more time digging up and laying out the who's and why's and wherefore's of this than Emily Talmage, whose blog Save Maine Schools has reach and importance far beyond Maine itself. But since I'm trying for an overview here, let me just hit the highlights.
All Standardized, All the Time
CBE now comes with a huge focus on "new tools" and new applications for learning management systems. What this boils down to is massive software programs to manage all student learning. If we go back to the mini-golf course, we can now design a course of 2,000 holes and manage an individual path through the course for each child. It's big and complicated, but it is still one size fits all, and it still calls for the teacher to be just a meat widget coach, while all the instruction has been created by the company, pre-fabricated by a company that has never met the students.
This is where the CBE advocates managed to ju-jitsu the anti-Big Standardized Test crowd, "Why, yes," they said. "It is foolish to try to evaluate student progress and inform instruction based on a single high stakes test. We really should stop giving one Big Standardized Test every year." And then, while everyone was cheering along. "What we really need is a small standardized test every day!"
And voila! School shifts from being all about preparing students for the BS Tests, and becomes all about checking off the next competency badge on your list.
Big Brother Was a Slacker
You can go back almost exactly two years to read about Knewton, an outfit that is confident that if they know everything, they can control everything. Watch the 2012 clip in which this Pearson-related honcho explains that they should be able to tell you what you should eat for breakfast to do well on the math test-- and he's not kidding. The Data Overlords see in CBE a golden opportunity to get every single thing a child does in school swept straight into a database. When your child steps out of school, the Data Overlords will already have picked the best job for her, and any government or corporate entity that has access to her giant data file will already know alllllllll about her. Remember when your elementary school teacher would warn you that your misbehavior would end up on your permanent record? She had no idea. Now everything you do, every assignment you complete, every disciplinary action, every medical event, every family problem, every event in your life will be part of a record interpreted by people who don't know you and accessible to anyone with the money or power to gain that access.
Seeing Inside Your Heart
I'm frankly puzzled by this, because this is exactly what got Outcome Based education in trouble back in the nineties. But advocates of modern tech-driven have decided that they will also try to teach and measure and record data about non-academic qualities. Here's just one recent example that plans to cover curiosity, initiative, persistence/grit, adaptability, leadership, and social/cultural awareness.
The new CBE school is not just going to try to teach these things, but test for them and record the results in the big pile of data. Which means that the program manufacturers are going to define what these qualities are and define the only program-recognized ways to display those traits. Someone is going to have to create performance tasks that will measure how curious your child is. There will be tests for leadership. And someone will write performance tasks to show if your six year old is sufficiently culturally aware.
The new CBE doesn't just want to record a complete a detailed measure of the child's intelligence-- it wants to measure and record the child's character. The Big Data File will not just decide if the child is a smart person-- the programmers will also decide if the child is a good person.
The Ideal versus the Real
Some advocates of CBE will argue that CBE doesn't have to be about all this creepy Big Brothery datamining tech-dependent cradle-to-grave (you don't really think this is going to stop once you're out of school, do you) monstrosity, and those advocates are correct. It doesn't have to be this way. A teacher with a couple of aids and a small class size and lots of resources could implement CBE, and even do it in a way that minimized the problems that are baked into the CBE model.
But that is not what's happening.
It's like the folks who said, "Look, Common Core is just a set of standards, and classroom teachers are still totally free to teach the curriculum they think is best." In some alternate idealized universe that was kind of true, but those folks belong in the same dustbin of history as scientists developing nuclear power and saying, "So you guys are going to split the atom only for good purposes, right?"
CBE has some inherent problems, and those are reason enough to give pause before leaping into the CBE pool. But on top of those, we now have the problems of Data Overlords using the CBE model to launch a computer-driven assault on privacy and freedom.
And that, boys and girls, is what's so bad about competency based education.
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
CAP Tries To Be Funny, and Dies
One thing you can say about the Center for American Progress. Well, two things. One is that John Podesta's little hobby lobby advocacy group has been a great holding pen for Clintonian staffers during the interregnum. The other is that they have emerged as the most devotedly pro-Common Core group on the planet. Here at this blog, I have literally run out of headline versions of "CAP says something dumb in an attempt to sell Common Core." (See here, here, here, here and here. For just a few.)
Now CAP has teamed up with Funny or Die in order to promote a whacky new video that hilariously makes fun of a bunch of criticisms of Common Core that nobody has ever made.
In the video, Meredith from the Office (true story-- I once saw her in a Barnes and Noble in LA. Closest I ever came to a celebrity sighting.) and a guy who looks vaguely familiar, sending their daughter off to school, where she will "be starting a new program called Common Core."
They then proceed to throw all her books in the trash and throw away her math computer, because she won't need those. Because with Common Core, math is not important, and all day she'll be filling out standardized tests, and she'll have to wear a disguise and an assumed name, and wear a tin foil hat, and goggles so they won't put a microchip in her eye, and get the chance to join a mutant army, and they give her a disintegrator (which looks rather like a Despicable Me fart gun).
Cue her sister who "went through Common Core years ago" and is now completely normal and carrying textbooks as she headed off to college (so, not actually a "new" program?) for her first day, although her parents don't know that. She has the money line--
No. No. Common Core is just some standards my teachers use, so, you know, we can get into college and get a job and hopefully move out of our cray parents' house.
Which is certainly one of the shortest explanations of the Core. The kicker-- as she leaves, increasingly panicked Dad asks, "What's two plus two? Is it a hundred??!!Is it a hundred??!!!!"
You will be unsurprised to learn that the comment section is currently closed, even though the clip went up just a few hours ago. But if the comments were open, people might be inclined to fill it with actual criticism of Common Core-- you know, the kind of criticism leveled by actual intelligent human beings on both the right and the left.
But no-- the message here is literally that Common Core critics are the tin foil hat crowd. Sigh.
I mean, who is this for? Satire is only effective for an audience that is familiar with what you are satirizing, but anyone who is familiar with Common Core or the criticism of it knows that CAP isn't just taking shots at a straw man, but a picture of a straw man pinned to the straw lapel of a straw suit being worn by a straw man. I mean, I consider myself fairly familiar with the art of mockery, and you can't mock somebody if your mockery doesn't have some sort of root in reality. A good caricature has to be recognizable as the thing being caricatured. And, not to get all wonky, but it doesn't even establish an internally consistent world-- the Core is new, but their college age daughter went through it, although the parents who fear the Core never noticed what was happening with their older daughter, and all of these family members relate to each other as if they're strangers?And what are we to make of the message that parents are dopes?
This simply sidesteps every legitimate criticism ever leveled against Common Core and leaves it untouched, though it certainly does zero right in on all those people who say that Common Core requires you to throw out books or ignore math or has something to do with mutant armies. Really stuck it to those guys, let me tell you. I can't imagine how they failed to lampoon all those people who say Common Core will make your houseplants die.
In a way, it makes sense that CAP and Clinton are so closely tied. Here they are, continuing to spend millions of dollars trying to sell people something they don't want with a sales pitch that is repeatedly tone deaf, patronizing, and unconvincing. And this isn't even funny. This is more like that awkward person who tries to join your joking conversation with your friends by blurting out, "OH yeah, and you have genital wart cancer and are dying! Ha!! Am I funny now??" I'll embed it here so you can check my work, but I suggest you go over to Funny or Die (a site I cannot access from work on my lunch hour) and vote the piece up or down. Well, mostly down.
PS Ha!! No, I won't because "embedding is disabled by request." Now I'm even more curious about what purpose this video is supposed to serve. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for a link.
Now CAP has teamed up with Funny or Die in order to promote a whacky new video that hilariously makes fun of a bunch of criticisms of Common Core that nobody has ever made.
In the video, Meredith from the Office (true story-- I once saw her in a Barnes and Noble in LA. Closest I ever came to a celebrity sighting.) and a guy who looks vaguely familiar, sending their daughter off to school, where she will "be starting a new program called Common Core."
They then proceed to throw all her books in the trash and throw away her math computer, because she won't need those. Because with Common Core, math is not important, and all day she'll be filling out standardized tests, and she'll have to wear a disguise and an assumed name, and wear a tin foil hat, and goggles so they won't put a microchip in her eye, and get the chance to join a mutant army, and they give her a disintegrator (which looks rather like a Despicable Me fart gun).
Cue her sister who "went through Common Core years ago" and is now completely normal and carrying textbooks as she headed off to college (so, not actually a "new" program?) for her first day, although her parents don't know that. She has the money line--
No. No. Common Core is just some standards my teachers use, so, you know, we can get into college and get a job and hopefully move out of our cray parents' house.
Which is certainly one of the shortest explanations of the Core. The kicker-- as she leaves, increasingly panicked Dad asks, "What's two plus two? Is it a hundred??!!Is it a hundred??!!!!"
You will be unsurprised to learn that the comment section is currently closed, even though the clip went up just a few hours ago. But if the comments were open, people might be inclined to fill it with actual criticism of Common Core-- you know, the kind of criticism leveled by actual intelligent human beings on both the right and the left.
But no-- the message here is literally that Common Core critics are the tin foil hat crowd. Sigh.
I mean, who is this for? Satire is only effective for an audience that is familiar with what you are satirizing, but anyone who is familiar with Common Core or the criticism of it knows that CAP isn't just taking shots at a straw man, but a picture of a straw man pinned to the straw lapel of a straw suit being worn by a straw man. I mean, I consider myself fairly familiar with the art of mockery, and you can't mock somebody if your mockery doesn't have some sort of root in reality. A good caricature has to be recognizable as the thing being caricatured. And, not to get all wonky, but it doesn't even establish an internally consistent world-- the Core is new, but their college age daughter went through it, although the parents who fear the Core never noticed what was happening with their older daughter, and all of these family members relate to each other as if they're strangers?And what are we to make of the message that parents are dopes?
This simply sidesteps every legitimate criticism ever leveled against Common Core and leaves it untouched, though it certainly does zero right in on all those people who say that Common Core requires you to throw out books or ignore math or has something to do with mutant armies. Really stuck it to those guys, let me tell you. I can't imagine how they failed to lampoon all those people who say Common Core will make your houseplants die.
In a way, it makes sense that CAP and Clinton are so closely tied. Here they are, continuing to spend millions of dollars trying to sell people something they don't want with a sales pitch that is repeatedly tone deaf, patronizing, and unconvincing. And this isn't even funny. This is more like that awkward person who tries to join your joking conversation with your friends by blurting out, "OH yeah, and you have genital wart cancer and are dying! Ha!! Am I funny now??" I'll embed it here so you can check my work, but I suggest you go over to Funny or Die (a site I cannot access from work on my lunch hour) and vote the piece up or down. Well, mostly down.
PS Ha!! No, I won't because "embedding is disabled by request." Now I'm even more curious about what purpose this video is supposed to serve. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for a link.
Success Academy Proves, Once Again, It Is Not A Public School
No charter school chain demonstrates more definitively than Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy that it is absolutely not a public school. It is a private business funded with public tax dollars.
They have previously gone to court to argue that they are not accountable to any elected officials or the state government itself. And now their team of lawyers has sent out a memo to remind staffers that they are not in any way accountable to anybody outside Success Academy walls.
Politico got its hands on that memo. It's the latest in a string of damage control attempts at the charter chain, which has suffered one bad PR moment after another, from a got-to-go list of students to be forced out , to video of teacher cruelty to a child. They've drawn the unwelcome attention of veteran journalist John Merrow. Eva Moskowitz, who is paid more to head up her private chain of 11,000 students than Carmen Farina is paid to manage the entire New York City school system, has been ineffective in beating back the problems, and mostly seems alternately confused and outraged that she has to bother. Moskowitz is a woman who always seems one bad lapse of impulse control away from barking, "Do you know who I am!!??" Most recently the chain hired the same PR firm that has tried to paper over the Flint water crisis.
But the Success lawyers have some thoughts about how the chain should avoid "mistakes." What do they consider mistakes?
Among the top twenty mistakes--
* Providing information-- any information at all-- to elected officials
* Providing any information to lawyers or the press
* Not contacting the advisory team is any of these people are even in the building
* Letting parents get away with threats of going to the press, police, or elected officials
"If a parent makes this threat, contact advisory. Advisory can help diffuse this situation," the memo reads. "But we cannot let parents 'get away' with these threats. Feel confident in pushing back on these and telling parents that threats are not a productive way to resolve conflict or build the relationship."
The message is clear. Success Academy and Eva Moskowitz answer to nobody-- not parents, not elected officials, not the government, not anybody at all. They are a public school only when they want public tax dollars, but they do not owe the taxpayers a single, solitary word of explanation, and they are in no way to be held accountable for what goes in their business-- not even the parents whose children are their excuse for sucking up those public tax dollars.
Success Academy charters are not accountable schools. They are not even accountable to the invisible hand of the free market (how do parents make informed choices when they are barred from having information). And finally, and most importantly, Success Academy charters are not public schools, and they should stop getting a single, solitary public tax dollar.
They have previously gone to court to argue that they are not accountable to any elected officials or the state government itself. And now their team of lawyers has sent out a memo to remind staffers that they are not in any way accountable to anybody outside Success Academy walls.
Politico got its hands on that memo. It's the latest in a string of damage control attempts at the charter chain, which has suffered one bad PR moment after another, from a got-to-go list of students to be forced out , to video of teacher cruelty to a child. They've drawn the unwelcome attention of veteran journalist John Merrow. Eva Moskowitz, who is paid more to head up her private chain of 11,000 students than Carmen Farina is paid to manage the entire New York City school system, has been ineffective in beating back the problems, and mostly seems alternately confused and outraged that she has to bother. Moskowitz is a woman who always seems one bad lapse of impulse control away from barking, "Do you know who I am!!??" Most recently the chain hired the same PR firm that has tried to paper over the Flint water crisis.
But the Success lawyers have some thoughts about how the chain should avoid "mistakes." What do they consider mistakes?
Among the top twenty mistakes--
* Providing information-- any information at all-- to elected officials
* Providing any information to lawyers or the press
* Not contacting the advisory team is any of these people are even in the building
* Letting parents get away with threats of going to the press, police, or elected officials
"If a parent makes this threat, contact advisory. Advisory can help diffuse this situation," the memo reads. "But we cannot let parents 'get away' with these threats. Feel confident in pushing back on these and telling parents that threats are not a productive way to resolve conflict or build the relationship."
The message is clear. Success Academy and Eva Moskowitz answer to nobody-- not parents, not elected officials, not the government, not anybody at all. They are a public school only when they want public tax dollars, but they do not owe the taxpayers a single, solitary word of explanation, and they are in no way to be held accountable for what goes in their business-- not even the parents whose children are their excuse for sucking up those public tax dollars.
Success Academy charters are not accountable schools. They are not even accountable to the invisible hand of the free market (how do parents make informed choices when they are barred from having information). And finally, and most importantly, Success Academy charters are not public schools, and they should stop getting a single, solitary public tax dollar.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
FL: Ed Commissioner Continues Child Abuse
You may recall that Florida has been the site of some of the most spectacularly abusive testing in the country.
It was in Florida that Ed Commissioner Pam Stewart pursued the testing of Ethan Rediske. Ethan was severely developmentally disabled and-- there's no gentle way to put this-- dying. And yet Stewart and the state insisted on forcing Ethan to take the Big Standardized Test, and put his mother through no small amount of hell to make the case. The sequel to that miserable chapter was to take a bill meant to avoid any such situation ever again and turn it into a big bunch of political gamesmanship.
Stewart is on record multiple times as saying that opt out is not an option with a level of devotion that is as baffling as it is abusive. Is there some value in testing children who are terribly ill and/or severely disabled? If Stewart knows what that value would be, she's failed to explain it. But she sure does believe it, because here she goes again.
Paula Drew would like to excuse her daughter from the test. Her child is mentally developmentally disabled, mostly unable to move, and has to have nutriments pumped directly into her intestines to bypass her malfunctioning stomach. She can communicate "yes" and "no" sort of, with hand gestures that, given her limited control, are hard for even her own mother to interpret.
Does this sound like a child who really needs to take the BS Test?
Drew thought that she could appeal that testing requirement, probably because Florida has a law on the books (Florida Statute 1008.212 ) which says that a parent can ask a hearing officer to hear a motion to overrule Stewart's request. Stewart said no to excusing Drew's child, and she said no to an appeal.
Tom Lyons at the Herald Tribune tried to get an answer from Stewart's office explaining A) how she could say no and B) why she would say no.
What the hell is Stewart thinking? Whose interests is she trying to look out for? Does she want to make sure that Drew's child's school isn't slacking? Does Stewart think that Drew is up late wondering if her child is on the path to college and career success? Does Stewart think that, with all the other challenges she's facing, Drew is worrying that her child hasn't mastered division with mixed fractions? Is it possible that Stewart has an important deal with the test manufacturers and they can't absorb the financial hit of one less kid taking the BS Test? Or maybe Stewart doesn't want to let Drew slide through because then a lot of scofflaw parents would be trying to give their children major challenging disabilities just to thwart the state department of education.
Seriously-- what the hell is Stewart thinking? I didn't understand when she was doing back when she was harassing the Rediske family, andI don't understand now. This is just inexcusable.
It was in Florida that Ed Commissioner Pam Stewart pursued the testing of Ethan Rediske. Ethan was severely developmentally disabled and-- there's no gentle way to put this-- dying. And yet Stewart and the state insisted on forcing Ethan to take the Big Standardized Test, and put his mother through no small amount of hell to make the case. The sequel to that miserable chapter was to take a bill meant to avoid any such situation ever again and turn it into a big bunch of political gamesmanship.
Stewart is on record multiple times as saying that opt out is not an option with a level of devotion that is as baffling as it is abusive. Is there some value in testing children who are terribly ill and/or severely disabled? If Stewart knows what that value would be, she's failed to explain it. But she sure does believe it, because here she goes again.
Paula Drew would like to excuse her daughter from the test. Her child is mentally developmentally disabled, mostly unable to move, and has to have nutriments pumped directly into her intestines to bypass her malfunctioning stomach. She can communicate "yes" and "no" sort of, with hand gestures that, given her limited control, are hard for even her own mother to interpret.
Does this sound like a child who really needs to take the BS Test?
Drew thought that she could appeal that testing requirement, probably because Florida has a law on the books (Florida Statute 1008.212 ) which says that a parent can ask a hearing officer to hear a motion to overrule Stewart's request. Stewart said no to excusing Drew's child, and she said no to an appeal.
Tom Lyons at the Herald Tribune tried to get an answer from Stewart's office explaining A) how she could say no and B) why she would say no.
What the hell is Stewart thinking? Whose interests is she trying to look out for? Does she want to make sure that Drew's child's school isn't slacking? Does Stewart think that Drew is up late wondering if her child is on the path to college and career success? Does Stewart think that, with all the other challenges she's facing, Drew is worrying that her child hasn't mastered division with mixed fractions? Is it possible that Stewart has an important deal with the test manufacturers and they can't absorb the financial hit of one less kid taking the BS Test? Or maybe Stewart doesn't want to let Drew slide through because then a lot of scofflaw parents would be trying to give their children major challenging disabilities just to thwart the state department of education.
Seriously-- what the hell is Stewart thinking? I didn't understand when she was doing back when she was harassing the Rediske family, andI don't understand now. This is just inexcusable.
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