NYT: Value Not Added

Our old friend Kevin Carey popped up in the New York Times this week, using the death of William Sanders as a case to soft-pedal VAM. The article has some interesting points to make about VAM, and it also unintentionally reveals some of the reasons that Value-Added Measuring of teacher performance is a fool's game.

Carey is the education policy program director for the New America Foundation. NAF bills itself as a non-partisan thinky tank based in DC. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is chair of the NAF board. Their over-a-million-dollar funders include the Gates Foundation and the US State Department. So their objectivity in these matters is suspect. In the past Carey has turned up trying to support Common Core, attacking public education, using shoddy research to slam higher ed, and helping spread PR for Mark Zuckerberg's AltSchool.

Carey apparently met Sanders and talked to the inventor of the Value Added Measure (specifically, the one known these days as VAAS--  the one that a Houston court just threw out). That provides a fascinatingly specific tale of what started Sanders, who had a doctorate in statistics and quantitative genetics, on the path to evaluating teacher performance:

“In 1945, the United States government set off an atomic bomb.”

That’s how Mr. Sanders began telling me the story of his life, when we met several years ago....

Nuclear weapons tests had released clouds of radiation that had drifted with the weather. Sometime later, farm animals downwind began to die. Did the first event, a mushroom cloud, cause the second event, dead sheep? Or did one merely follow the other coincidentally? Solving this problem required expertise in both statistical probability and livestock biology. Oak Ridge hired Bill Sanders.

So, VAM is tied to nukes. Somehow that seems right.

Another fun factoid: Lamar Alexander was offered the VAM idea when he was governor of Tennessee, but he passed. I would love to hear the story of how he decided not to use Sander's idea.

How easy is it to take shots at Sanders for trying to evaluate teachers based on his work with radioactive cows? Pretty easy-- but it really is striking how little he seemed to grasp the complexity of the whole teaching-learning thing:

To fairly evaluate teachers, Mr. Sanders argued, the state needed to calculate an expected growth trajectory for each student in each subject, based on past test performance, then compare those predictions with their actual growth. Outside-of-school factors like talent, wealth and home life were thus baked into each student’s expected growth. Teachers whose students’ scores consistently grew more than expected were achieving unusually high levels of “value-added.” Those, Mr. Sanders declared, were the best teachers.

It's that simple! The test scores the students produced in previous years make this year's score completely predictable, and any difference must be because of the teacher because no other factor could possible account for a deviation from the predicted student path. Seriously? Sanders had children of his own, so he's definitely met young humans. And yet this overly-simplistic model of human growth and behavior (students just keep progressing along this fully-predictable line unless some teacher disrupts that path) is the mechanical inhuman heart of his system.

But Carey's piece also shows how simple innumeracy has driven the adoption of Sander's work. Sanders tried out his model and found it distributed teacher performance over a "normal" bell curve (kind of like the student achievement fits on a bell curve-- almost as if the teacher bell curve is just an echo of the student one, and not a measurement of something else entirely). Here's how Carey describes the reaction to that curve:

Reformers also looked at the right-hand side of the bell curve, where the effective teachers were, and thought, “What if we could have a lot more of those?” 

Sigh. It's a frickin' bell curve. You can't make the right hand side bigger or the left hand side smaller. You can't, in short, have a system in which all the teachers are above average.

Carey offers the more recent picture of Sanders as a guy who hung back from the argu8ments about policy, but if we look at this friendly profile of Sanders from 2000, we see that in the early days he was a busy eVAMgelist, hitting the road and preaching the Word of Data. That was just before he left the university to join SAS, a data-crunching company that has made a bundle by selling VAAS as a useful product. Presenting Sanders as a kindly old farmer with a PhD glides past the fact that he was employed by a company that made its living selling people on this giant slab of data baloney.

Carey reaches for a valedictory conclusion:

While the use of value-added ratings to hire, fire and pay teachers may have been limited by political pressure, the importance of the value-added bell curve itself continues to grow — less like a sudden explosion than a chime whose resonance gains in power over time. 

Oh, let's tell the truth. VAM systems have also been limited by the fact that they're junk, taking bad data from test scores, massaging them through an opaque and improbable mathematical model to arrive at conclusions that are volatile and inconsistent and which a myriad educators have looked at and responded, "Well, this can't possible be right."

You'll never find me arguing against any accountability; taxpayers (and I am one) have the right to know how their money is spent. But Sander's work ultimately wasted a lot of time and money and produced a system about as effective as checking toad warts under a full moon-- worse, because it looked all number and sciencey and so lots of suckers believed in it. Carey can be the apologist crafting it all into a charming and earnest tale, but the bottom line is that VAM has done plenty of damage, and we'd all be better off if Sanders had stuck to his radioactive cows.

ICYMI: I'm More Grown Up Edition (5/21)

Yesterday was my birthday, but I wouldn't forget to give you your Sunday reading list. Remember-- if you like it, pass it on.

A Tour of Stock Photo Academy

The British blog Othmar's Trombone takes us on a tour of Stock Photo Academy, and it's just so special. This is your fun and games reading assignment for the week.

My Response to the NYT Google Article

A reply from Morna McDermott to the Times' love note to the tech giant.

The Privatization Prophets

Jennifer Berkshire in the Jacobin lays out what DeVos and friends are working toward.

For Families with Special Needs, Vouchers Bring Choices, Not Guarantees

At NPR, Anya Kamenetz lays out how choice systems fail to serve students with special needs, who end up with neither a guarantee of good education or even any choice at all.

New York State's Early Childhood Ed Shakedown

Bianca Tanis with a look at how New York went after early childhood education, and why it has made for bad policy for the littles.

Robbing Peter To Pay Paul

Andre Perry looks at how DeVos hopes to gut some parts of education in order to fund her own pet policies.

The Zeal and Inexperience of Betsy DeVos

From back in January, but only just now brought to my attention. Another insightful view of how politics and religion drive DeVos's policy ideas.

U-Ark Screws Up Charter Revenue Study, AGAIN

Jersey Jazzman offers a two-part explanation of why the widely read University of Arkansas study of charter funding is just plain wrong. This link will take you to Part II, and from there you can hop to Part I. As always, hard data presented in plain English.

My 16 Rules

Today I turn sixty, so it's time for one of those posts. These are the rules. Mind you, they are not a sign of any particular wisdom or smartitude on my part-- I have learned about these rules in the same way a somewhat dim cow learns about an electric fence.

About 59 years ago. My typing skills have not improved

1. Don't be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection and hurt in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more.

2. Do better.

You are not necessarily going to be great. But you can always be better. You can always do a better job today than you did yesterday. Make better choices. Do better. You can always do better.

3. Tell the truth.

Words matter. Do not use them as tools with which to attack the world or attempt to pry prizes out of your fellow humans (see Rule #1). Say what you understand to be true. Life is too short to put your name to a lie. This does not mean that every word out of your mouth is some sort of Pronouncement from God. Nor does it mean you must be unkind. But you simply can't speak words that you know to be untrue.

4. Seek to understand.

Do not seek comfort or confirmation. Do not simply look for ways to prove what you already believe. Seek to understand, and always be open to the possibility that what you knew to be true yesterday must be rewritten today in the light of new, better understanding. Ignoring evidence you don't like because you want to protect your cherished beliefs is not good.

5. Listen and pay attention.

Shut up, listen, watch, and pay attention. How else will you seek understanding? Watch carefully. Really see. Really hear. People in particular, even the ones who lie, will tell you who they are if you just pay attention. Your life is happening right now, and the idea of Special Moments just tricks us into ignoring a million other moments that are just as important.

6. Be grateful.

You are the recipient of all sorts of bounty that you didn't earn. Call it the grace of God or good fortune, but be grateful for the gifts you have been given. You did not make yourself. Nobody owes you anything, but you owe God/the Universe/fate everything. I have been hugely fortunate/blessed/privileged; I would have to be some sort of huge dope to grab all that life has given me and say, "This is mine. I made this. It's all because I'm so richly deserving." I've been given gifts, and the only rational response I can think of is to be grateful.

7. Mind the 5%

95% of life is silly foolishness that humans just made up and then pretended had some Great Significance. Only about 5% really matters, has real value. Don't spend energy, worry, fret, concern, time, stress on the other 95%.  The trick is that every person has a different idea of what constitutes the 5%.

8. Take care of the people around you.

"What difference can one person make" is a dumb question. It is impossible for any individual human to avoid making a difference. Every day you make a difference either for good or bad. People cross your path. You either makes their lives a little better or you don't. Choose to make them better. The opportunity to make the world a better place is right in front of your face every day; it just happens to look like other people (including the annoying ones).

9. Commit.

If you're going to do it, do it. Commitment lives on in the days when love and passion are too tired to get off the couch. Also, commitment is like food. You don't eat on Monday and then say, "Well, that takes care of that. I don't need to think about eating for another week or so. " Commitment must be renewed regularly.

10. Shut up and do the work

While I recognize there are successful people who ignore this rule, this is my list, so these are my rules. And my rule is: Stop talking about how hard you're working or what a great job you're doing or what tremendous obstacles you're overcoming. In short, stop delivering variations on, "Hey, look at me do this work! Look at me!" Note, however, there is a difference between "Hey, lookit me do this work" and "Hey, look at this important work that needs to be done." Ask the ego check question-- if you could don the work under the condition that nobody would ever know that you did it, would you still sign up? If the answer isn't "yes," as yourself why not.

11.  Assume good intent.

Do not assume that everyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid. They may well be either, or both-- but make them prove it. People mostly see themselves as following a set of rules that makes sense to them. If you can understand their set of rules, you can understand why they do what they do. Doesn't mean you'll like it any better, but you may have a basis for trying to talk to them about it. And as a bare minimum, you will see yourself operating in a world where people are trying to do the right thing, rather than a hostile universe filled with senseless evil idiots. It's a happier, more hopeful way to see the world. But yeah-- there are still evil dopes in the world.

12. Don't waste time on people who are not serious.

Some people are just not serious people. They don't use words seriously. They don't have a serious understanding of other people or their actions or the consequences of those actions. They can be silly or careless or mean, but whatever batch of words they are tossing together, they are not serious about them. They are not guided by principle or empathy or anything substantial. Note: do not mistake grimness for seriousness and do not mistake joy and fun for the absence of seriousness.

13. Don't forget the point.

Whatever it is you're doing, don't lose sight of the point. Don't lose sight of the objective. It's basic Drivers Ed 101. If you look a foot in front of the car, you'll wander all over the road. If you stare right at the tree you want to miss, you will drive right into it. Where you look is where you go. Keep your eye on the goal. Remember your purpose.

14. Nobody sucks all the time forever

People grow up. People learn things. People have a day in which their peculiar batch of quirks is just what the day needs. Nobody can be safely written off and ignored completely. Corollary: nobody can be unquestioningly trusted and uncritically accepted all the time. People are a mixed mess of stuff. Trying to sort folks into good guys and bad guys is a fool's game.

15. Say "yes."

Doors will appear on your path. Open them even if they are not exactly what you were expecting or looking for. Don't simply fight or flee everything that surprises or challenges you (but don't be a dope about it, either). Most of what I've screwed up in life came from reacting in fear-- not sensible evaluation of potential problems, but just visceral fear. Most of what is good about my life has come from saying "yes." And most of that is not at all what I would have expected or planned for.

16. Make something.

Music, art, refurbished furniture, machinery. Something.





Sixteen is kind of bulky to be a good listicle. And yet it will probably expand in the years ahead, because there's always more to figure out.

PA: Cyber School Court-Ordered Crowded Clown Car

Pennsylvania has been a big, fat profitable garden of cyber schools, taking an early lead over even California in letting virtual education take root. And there are so many aspects of cyber-schooling in Pennsylvania that we could discuss. As always, I'll preface this by saying that there are students fro whom cyber-schooling is a useful option. But the modern cyber charter industry is not aimed at them. It is aimed at money-- as much money as they could cram into a crowded clown car. When we talk about cybers in PA, there is so uch to discuss.

We could talk about how some are linked through not-entirely-admirable means to Pearson, the great money-grabbing educorporation.

We could talk about the astonishing amount of profit generated by cybers like K12, the school founded by an ex-Goldman Sachs exec. Or that chain's rather loose association with ethical behavior and telling the truth.

We could talk about how cyber charters have performance so lousy that even other supporters of the charter industry talk smack on them and call for them to be more heavily regulated. We could talk about how the widespread failure of cyber schools is obvious enough to make it into even mainstream media.

We could talk about massive cyber-school fraud, like the case of Nicholas Trombetta of Pennsylvania Cyber School, who was convicted of siphoning off $8 million of the tax dollars funneled to him from PA taxpayers.

And while we're talking about Trombetta, we could also talk about the fact that Pennsylvania laws are so lax that Trombetta was finally brought down by federal authorities. The Commonwealth of PA would have let him go on indefinitely. That's probably one reason why PA State Auditor General Eugene A. DePasquale has called Pennsylvania's charter laws the worst in the nation. And yet, our legislature has consistently tried to make life even easier for charters and cyber-charters.

We could talk about the huge amount of charter lobbying money being spent in Harrisburg.In fact, K12 and Connections have spent more money on Harrisburg than on any other state in the union. That might fit in with the same discussion involving PA being the most cyber-friendly state in the union.

We could even talk about the problems of cyber schools accounting (or not) for students and the rare but horrifying issues that emerge from that gap.

We could even get out into rural areas like mine where folks can tell you (not that you'll ever read much actual coverage of this) about how an insane but hugely profitable cyber-charter reimbursement formula is gutting public school budgets.If you imagine that cyber schools are a money-saver for taxpayers because, obviously, their costs are far less than bricks-and-mortar schools-- well, think again. Cybers are reimbursed at a hefty rate based on the price-per-pupil of any other school. Ka-ching.

And if you want to believe that Big Standardized Test results mean anything (in PA, instead of the PARCC and SBA, we have PSSA and Keystone exams), then we could talk about this chart:

That's right-- not a single Pennsylvania cyber charter has ever achieved a "passing" grade. Not one.

And yet, somehow, they persist. The newest version of the charter sort-of kinda reform bill lets cybers sail on unhampered by things like rules and oversight.

And now, courts have sided with one more cyber-operator who wants to join Pennsylvania's virtual clown car. Well, sort of one more school, which is kind of the point. Insight PA Cyber Charter School has been battling its way forward over the last four years. The state department of education and the charter review board have both determined that Insight would basically be a sock puppet for K12, and so they rejected the application. In the process, Insight accused the state of engaging in an "effective moratorium" since 2012, which I think they mean to suggest is a bad thing-- but we've got fourteen cyber charter schools operating in the state, and they all stink. So a moratorium seems like a pretty mild response when the most appropriate response is to shut them all down.

Insight/K12 are proposing the oldest trick in the charter book. Insight will be non-profit, but it will buy its supplies, services, etc, from the very for-profit K12. It will, in effect, serve as a K12 money funnel.

The state's allegation was that, among other things, the relationship between Insight and K12 (which took in almost $1 billion-with-a-B dollars in 2014) would be so close that taxpayer dollars would be buying supplies and services from only K12, whether there were better, more competitive bids out there or not. Insight's counter-argument was that the state department of ed had been mean when they rejected previous application.

But when you're collecting a billion-with-a-b dollars a year, you can afford to keep throwing things against the wall until something sticks. What stuck was a lawsuit, and the wall was the Commonwealth Court, which decided "There is no evidence in the record of this case that Insight’s board lacks independence from K12."

The case could be bumped up to the state supreme court, where some sort of rational decision might be made. Because there's no evidence that Insight's plan would be a terrible idea except for K12's entire shabby history and the well-documented failure of their business.  Or-- and here's a crazy thought-- state legislators could start listening to something other than the sound of corporate money raining on the capital, and do the right thing, which is, at a minimum, slapping a strong leash on the education-flavored scam that is the cyber school industry.

So Now Failure Is Okay, Apparently

"Fail better," says Michael Q. McShane (Show-Me Institute, AEI) in a piece at US News, arguing to reformsters for the virtue of admitting failure and building upon it. Part of his point is vaid, part is hugely self-serving and part of it is just plain annoying.

Policy ideas like charter schools, teacher evaluation and high standards first exist in the abstract. When they are actually implemented, they look quite different from state to state or district to district. What one state calls "charter schooling" might look different from charter schooling in another state. So if charter schools struggle in one state, it isn't necessarily an indictment on the idea as a whole. It might just be that the particular manifestation didn't match the context of the specific environment where it was tried. In an ideal world, we'd learn from that, and do better.

In other words,even when a policy has been tested and it has failed, that doesn't mean it's not a great policy that we should keep trying in new and different markets. This is just a variation of that golden oldie that folks used to defend Common Core-- "The policy is brilliant; you're just implementing it wrong." The policy may look like an utter failure, even after over a decade of reforminess, but honest-- any day now it's finally going to work the way we imagined it would.

This is part of a valid idea. But his list of possible causes for failure is missing one critical possibility-- your policy idea is a bad policy idea, and that sad pig won't fly no matter what shade of lipstick you try smearing on it.

He does offer a good description of the process often involved with reformy policy failures:

When a new study comes out that says a policy has "failed," we man the ramparts. Opponents (who were against the policy before any data were available) come out and tut-tut at advocates, telling them to "follow the data" or not to "cling to ideology." Advocates circle the wagons. They spin the findings or pettifog the implications. They counter with personal stories or impugn the motives of critics. Rinse and repeat.

I sense that McShane is leaning toward the use of data to really determine whether a policy is a failure or not, but that's a self-defeating inclination because so many education policies are tangled up in the question of what data we'll use, how we'll collect it, what it actually shows, and whether or not the entire data set that we're dependent on is a heaping pile of junk (spoiler alert: in the education world, mostly we're looking at the heaping pile).

But the rightest thing McShane says is in the final paragraph:

Anyone who has spent more than a day in front a classroom knows that failure is an essential part of learning.

Yes-- that's absolutely true. Failure is a necessary part of exploration and exploration is a necessary part of education. One can't help but wonder, however, if learning offers a legitimate parallel with concocting, pushing and implementing policy.

But I don't want to pick at that-- it's absolutely correct and I'm only tempted to nitpick because of my huge irritation over McShane's reformy central point.

Failure is super-okay! It's how we get better! It's a necessary part of the process!

Which is all great-- but where the heck has tis attitude been for the last twenty years.

Reformers have stapled "failed" onto "public schools" relentlessly, occasionally swapping it with "failing" for variety's sake. Public schools are "failure factories." The public school system is a "dead end," a "failed model." Students are 'trapped" in these "failing" schools, and must be liberated ASAP, because the "failure" constitutes a state of emergency that must be rectified immediately because the Fail is just So Very Bad! Nothing to learn from-- just run away from the Fail.

Now, all of sudden, failure is cool? Failure is okay? Failure is to be not only tolerated, but embraced?

McShane and Jay Greene are going to have a whole conference, a day-long celebration of the fail,
which somehow still works on the premise that public schools are to be avoided and replaced, not embraced.

Once upon a time, reformers wanted to blow up the status quo, but now that they are the status quo, somehow it has to be massaged, embraced, studied, tweaked, and lovingly nursed to hoped-for health. I am ceaselessly amazed at how one of the defining characteristics of the education reform movement is a steady and repeated redefining of term, repeated changing of objectives, constant moving of the goal posts. It is useful only in that, as everything else changes, we can see more clearly what the true values and goals of some within the movement are.

But that's a discussion for another day. Right now I'm trying to wrap my head around the news that failure is now awesome. I will wait with bated breath for that new fail love to be extended to public schools.

The Geography of Reform

It's an oft-repeated reformster refrain.

Students trapped by zip code in failed schools. Paul Ryan offering a lifeline for trapped students.  And here's Betsy DeVos at a recent speech, explaining some of the fundamental flaws of our terrible awful no good very bad public education system:

The system assigns your child to a school based solely upon the street on which you live.

We get these repeated versions of the same question-- why can't students leave their zip code to attend a quality school?

I believe that's the wrong question. Here's the one we should be asking--

Why can't every single student attend a great school without leaving their own community?

Really. Why should a student have to leave her friends, neighbors, the familiar sights and sounds of her neighborhood? Why should she have to travel far from home to get a good education? Why shouldn't every community get the chance to create and support a great school that reflects the community and serves every child in it?

That's the promise of public education-- that every community will get to create its own school to serve all of its students, even as it strengthens the ties that bind that community together.

But why not give non-wealthy students the choice that wealthier families get? Sure-- but when those families get to choose, what do they choose? They choose to attend a good school in their own community. So I agree-- let's give that choice to everyone.

I know the counterarguments. My ideas is great, but we already know that many communities are not living up to that promise. Reformsters used to say, "Children can't wait for us to fix those schools." They stopped saying that so much about the same time they started saying that charters should have three or five or ten years to get their acts together. They stopped saying it about the time they started arguing that regardless of education quality, choice is its own excuse for being. Choice for choice's sake is good enough. Except that people don't choose choice; they choose a good school in their own community.

And we're past the point of arguing that a charter school Somewhere Else knows a secret about education that couldn't possibly be implemented in the community's own public school. There is no secret sauce-- just lots of money, plenty of resources, and a carefully selective student body.

Which brings us back to another flaw of choice. Nobody in the choice camp ever says, "Let's rescue ALL of the students who are trapped in that failing zip code." No, we're just going to liberate some trapped students, leaving the rest still trapped there while we let the failing school keep failing, or even failing harder as resources are stripped from it.

And while not all reformsters are guilty, we have to acknowledge the ugliest idea behind the geography of reform-- some reformsters believe that some communities deserve their crappy schools, and that while there may be a few worthwhile strivers worth liberating that zip code, by getting them the hell out of there, we certainly don't want our tax dollars going to improve the community for Those (brown, black, and/or poor) People.

None of this really answers my question-- why can't every child attend a good school in her own community? Too expensive? Too hard? Nobody actually knows how to do it? Some communities don't deserve it? We don't want to? Those all seem like lousy, particularly for a nation that put a man on the moon and an army in Afghanistan.

Why can't every child have a good school in her own community?

Why can't every child have a good school in her own community?

I'll keep asking till I hear a good answer.

Petrilli Pokes Personalized Processing

Mike Petrilli, head honcho of the ever-reformy Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has taken a look at the future of Personalized Learning, and he has some concerns. He's read the PR, and he knows about the appeal of super-flexible differentiation, the varied student-customized pathways to excellence. However:

Hooray for all that. But after seeing a version of personalized learning in action recently, I’m worried that it may be reinforcing some of the worst aspects of standards-based, data-driven instruction. Namely: It might be encouraging a reductionist type of education that breaks learning into little bits and scraps and bytes of disparate skills, disconnected from an inspiring, coherent whole.

What he's noting here is the ways in which Personalized Learning has become the cojoined twin of Competency Based Education. Saying that PL/CBE "might be" encouraging reductionist, list-based, disjointed education is like saying that Betsy DeVos "might be" leaning toward school choice as a policy approach to education.

We have had versions of this conversation before. Back in the day when folks bothered to talk about Common Core, defenders frequently countered the real-life problems of CCSS with explanations of how it was "supposed" to be. Even people who wrote it would argue that people were misusing their beautiful creation and that's not how it was supposed to look at all. It wasn't supposed to be top-down or prescriptive or rigid or a straightjacket on both curriculum and instruction. And yet, in the real world, it was absolutely all those things.

Over the past years, I have had multiple conversations with CBE fans who direct me to things like the CBE work in Chugach, Alaska, as a sign that CBE doesn't have to be an Outcome-Based Education retread with lists to check off and "outcomes" reduced to simple, easily measured mini-tasks. Yet, that is exactly what's being sold-- often with the additional phrase "in any environment" because part of the pitch is that competencies can be acquired at any time, which means they competencies will be taught and assessed by computer software, which means that the competencies must be assessed with an instrument that computer software can do, which means no writing and no critical thinking. This fits nicely with choice on steroids, the a la carte choice system where students just select particular competencies from an online supermarket.

Likewise, Personalized Learning is sold as just an extension of the IEPs that students with special needs already get. Just super-differentiation, which doesn't sound scary at all, and yet it always turns into a discussion of how AI software will chart an individualized path for each student.

Folks all the way up to our Secretary of Education see the CBE/PL system as tied to technology. iNACOL sees both as a wide-open market opportunity for techsters. Petrilli already knows this.

Picture an elementary school. Yes, there’s a long list of skills that kids need to master and for which an individualized approach would work fine: decoding; spelling; writing letters and numbers; counting to one hundred; keyboarding; and so forth. Measuring children’s progress in learning these skills is the sort of thing that assessments like iReady’s can readily do, and then point teachers and parents toward learning modules that will help them take the next step.

And he's aware of the limits:


Yet there’s so much else that we also want young children to experience and that’s hard—maybe impossible—to break down into little bits.

 Well, yes-- it is impossible. But that is exactly what the very marketplace that the Fordham has championed  for years is pushing toward. But he is either ignoring or in denial about the implications of what he has been pushing. Here he is imagining how a standards-based classroom should work:

Teachers would stop projecting the day’s standards-to-be-tackled on the board; they would stop asking students to determine whether they have mastered a particular standard, and how to know when they’ve mastered it—practices I saw at the school I visited. They would stop planning lessons by “back-mapping” from the standards. They would simply adopt a great curriculum that is aligned to the standards, then forget about the standards and teach the curriculum instead.

But that's not what happened. And Petrilli chooses to address the elephant in the classroom, which is test-centered accountability, a feature of reform that has absolutely guaranteed that schools would teach to the standards-based-ish tests. This oversight matters. Here's Petrilli on what he think has gone wrong:

That’s hard to do, though, in a personalized classroom, if the model is premised on the idea that we can break knowledge and skills into discreet standards and progressions, and if teacher-led discussions are discouraged. Perhaps that works for math. But for English? History? Science? Art and music? Character, values, and self-control?

No, no,no, no and no. And as for character traits, I refer Petrilli to the death of OBE, which was in no small part to strong reactions against the proposal that government would train students to be the Right Sort of People. 

But the problematic premises of PL/CBE are not just that we can break complex knowledge and skills into tiny pieces, but that we can use computer software to measure those pieces, and that we must measure those people, and that the ongoing measure of those pieces should drive the system, determining what module a student should work on next. PL/CBE takes the worst feature of reform so far-- test-centered accountability-- and drives it even deeper into the bones of the system. It takes the already-failing Big Standardized Test system we've been using to measure everything from student achievement to teacher effectiveness even as it has narrowed and gutted the education system-- it gets rid of that once-a-year travesty and replaces it with standardized testing, all day, every day.

Petrilli worries that the ideas will be taken to a bad extreme. The solution is the same one as ever-- take the reins out of the hands of corporations, investors, and all the other amateurs who have gathered to make a buck. Consider-- just consider-- involving trained professional educators in some of these decisions.

Petrilli visited a PL school and was not encouraged by what he saw. Little teaching, standards obsession, and "everything looked like distilled and fragmented test prep." Well, yes. That was not an aberration or mistake. It was not a bug-- it was a feature. Every piece of PL/CBE is aimed toward that product, and he can't be surprised or shocked, because he helped make that, and some of us, for years, have been telling him and others like him that this is what they are building.