Arne Duncan vs. White Moms

As is spreading rapidly, Arne Duncan put his foot in it again this week with his cogent analysis of why people are not putting on a smile, lying down, and letting the Common Core roll right over them. You can find a full treatment here, but I want to just take a moment to unpack how many kinds of arrogant foolishness are rolled into that one little comment.

“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” 

1) Why are we having this conversation?

Once again, Arne seems to have forgotten one of the central, important fictions of the Common Core-- that they are totally the result of a state initiative, and that they in no way represent a federal attempt to commandeer the state-based control of schools. If this isn't his program, why is he devoting so much time and fervor to defending it? Why aren't a bunch of governors running around defending the program that they developed all on their own that was in no way set up and nursed to life by the feds?

2) Moms? Really??

I thought these days it was supposed to be the GOP that dismissed contrary points of view simply by attaching them to women. "Ha ha. This is the crazy kind of objection you'd expect from one of those women. You know women, with their dumb vaginas and not-very-strong thinky parts. That's who comes up with this kind of stupid objection."


3) Plus "white" and "suburban"?? Did you skip politics 101?

Granted, this is a kind of genius play here. These are people who have it cushy, but they're not truly elite. We're trying to invoke the language of privilege, but not too much because that would land us in Arne's neighborhood. So "white suburban" translates roughly as "privileged but not as great as me." Arne is saying, "People who live on the mean streets-- they get it. People who have risen to the heights of power and wealth on their great merit (like, you know, me) get it. But these out-of-touch suburbanites (did I mention they were women) don't get it."

If you think I'm reading too much into points #2 and #3, imagine how this plays if Arne instead attributes these concerns to "blue collar fathers" or "working class black parents."

4) And then when you think for a second more...

Wait-- so only suburban Moms care about how well their kids are doing at school??

5) It's not me. It's you.

The administration has managed to cave and admit that maybe the ACA rollout didn't come off quite as planned and that maybe-- just maybe-- things weren't quite as originally advertised. (Predicted soon-to-be-meme from the comment section of the WaPo article-- "Obamacore-- you can keep your school and teachers if you like them. Oops!")

But in the world of CCSS, there's still only one explanation for why people are upset about the results. Their perception of their school, the school's teachers, the education that they perceived in THEIR OWN CHILDREN-- all of those were at fault all this time, and now only the magic of the federal  oops-- state standards can finally open their eyes.

Yup-- exposure to their offspring, with whom they presumably live, occasionally share a meal, even exchange the occasional grunts and greetings-- none of that could possibly give a parent an impression of how smart their child is. Only CCSS can reveal-- and surprise them with-- the truth.

In Arne's world, there is no possible way that the bad results are even a teensy bit the result of an untested program poorly rolled out program. And that's why--

6) Randi Weingarten is actually right about something

The WaPo column contains a money quote from the AFT head, saying that the CCSS rollout is even worse than the ACA launch. And she's right. And she's right because the ACA rollout has allowed for course correction, changes based on conditions on the ground, and even an admission that some things need to be tweaked.

But in Arne-world, all problems, all objections, all difficulties with the CCSS have one explanation-- all you dumb civilians who don't know revolutionary genius when you see it. Especially those of you with vaginas.

Where Failed Management Fads Go To Die

When I was working my college summers in private industry, I was introduced to Management By Objectives. It was all the rage-- well, it was all the rage with upper management types who liked to book training sessions for the rest of the company. And it was all the rage with the consultants who made money traveling around the country consulting and seminarring and just generally doing their drive-by rearranging of other peoples' deck chairs.

I don't remember anybody liking MBO very much, and when I played catch-up with my old cronies at the company, I heard that MBO was on its way out. Not only were people tired of it, but it didn't work very well.

Not too long after that, as a college grad with his own teaching certificate, I was introduced to the hot new thing in education-- Teaching By Objectives. I was dumbfounded. It was as if someone had simply taken all the old MBO materials and gone through pasting "teaching" in to cover up every "management."

How could it be? People in industry were already abandoning MBO-- even if you thought schools should or could be run with corporate techniques, why would you pick one that was being dumped as ineffective?

Well, I was young, and new, and just learning one of those Things They Never Tell You in Teacher School.

Public education is the elephant's graveyard of bad management techniques.

Maybe it's that some education leaders have an inferiority complex that leads them to believe that business people know something we don't. Maybe it's just that consultants have to eat, too, and once the private sector won't hire you anymore, where are you going to turn. All I know is that I noticed education was always climbing on the bus just as the private sector was climbing off.

Nothing has changed under the current reform wave. Ten years ago, Jack Welch was all the rage with his bell curve management technique-- rate all your employees and fire the bottom ten percent. But by the end of the two thousand oughts, folks were noticing that besides being hardhearted, arbitrary and just plain mean, the Welch strategy didn't actually work.

And yet in the time since the private sector fell out of love with Jack Welch, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided to score schools and label the bottom 15% as "failing" and thereby targeted for various remediation, vouchering, and take-over. Essentially PA decided to Welch its schools.

Now Microsoft has forsaken stack ranking. They've finally noticed that it creates a toxic atmosphere, kills collaboration, and is just generally bad for the company's health.

Meanwhile, in the elephant's graveyard, what is being pushed? The Danielson model for teacher evaluation, in which the implicit assumption is that a teaching staff should plot out on a bell curve. "Nobody," we are told over and over and over in PA, "will live at the top level." Most of us will live in the unexceptional middle. You know. Like a bell curve.

And every merit pay variation to come down the pike is built on stacking-- if you want that bonus (or, under some systems, not to be fired) you are going to have to beat out your colleagues across the hall. Fellow teacher needs a little help? Just remember, they can't do better without taking away from your success. Best to keep those lesson plan ideas and teacher-made materials under lock and key.

Public education is where failed management techniques go to die. Whenever someone wants to tout an idea as super-dee-duper because it's all the rage in the private sector, remember that the question to answer is, "And how is that working for them?" And by "working," we mean "creating a better product" and not "hornswaggling a bunch of investors into boosting the stock prices."

TFA in Pittsburgh: Adding insult to injury

When contemplating the deployment of TFA forces in Pittsburgh, there's one other aspect of the PA education picture to keep in mind.

Pennsylvania's 14 state-owned universities have been experiencing tough times. The economic forces brought bear on them include budget moves by a governor who is not a friend of education, and simple demographics. The college-age population of PA has been shrinking, and most schools are suffering a corresponding decline in enrollment.

That has led to rumors of cuts, proposals for cuts, and actual cuts. For one example of how this has played out, we can look at the state university in my neighborhood, Clarion.

In August of 2013, Clarion sent out emails to incoming freshmen headed for the education department that their department was probably going to be axed. Their completion of the program was assured, but they would be the last. Later in the month, Clarion unveiled its "right-sizing" plan which did indeed include dissolving its education department. Since that time, University management has backed away from the original scope of the plan, but it is still unclear how much of the backing away represents real change and how much it represents trying to reframe with new, less-alarming language.

Clarion is a particularly disturbing case, because they started out as a "Normal" school; their core mission has always been training teachers. Now that mission is in doubt. (You can read some current news coverage here, and you can watch the whole mess unfold in real time here ) Similar dramas are unfolding across the system, each dealing with the financial pressures in their own way (the one common thread-- music programs are dropping like flies).

Let's hold this up against the backdrop of the TFA assault on Pittsburgh schools.

You're 18 years old and you are thinking about becoming a teacher. You look around at your state system, and you see an uncertain future. Maybe the program you want to (or can afford to) enroll in will still be there; maybe it won't. Maybe it will vanish out from under you midway through your college career.

But meanwhile, we are supposed to believe that Pittsburgh schools have a shortage of teachers, and that PA needs a TFA field office to help draw more non-teachers into teaching.

So as a future PA teacher, you have to wonder if you should even go into a teaching program, and if you do, will you need to compete for scarce jobs with well-connected ivy leaguers?

If there really is a teacher shortage in Pennsylvania, would it not make sense to work on the pipeline, to support and strengthen teacher training programs and give them the tools to recruit and thrive? If Pennsylvania needs teachers, why is Pennsylvania not trying to create more?

Where is the STEM initiative for educators? After all, nobody is saying, "Hey, we don't have enough scientists and engineers, so lets give graduates with humanities degrees a five week course and send them out to make sciency stuff." No, what we said was, "We need more people in this field, so lets beef up the support, funding, training, and recruiting."

TFA in Pittsburgh doesn't just hurt in the short run. In the long run, it exacerbates the very "shortage" it pretends to address. Combined with the downsizing of universities in PA, it send s a clear message to young Pennsylvanians-- "If you were thinking about becoming a teacher, you should probably think about something else instead."

CCSS: Lowering the Bar

College and career ready.

We can discuss the many and varied flaws of the CCSS all day, but those four words are all it takes to shove me off the CCSS bus.

That's it? That's your idea of what an education is for? All we send students to school to do is to get vocational training for a job? Or to go to college, which is just four more years of vocational training for a more impressive job.

I could wax rhapsodic about the value of the whole human experience, about how our minds, bodies and spirits are meant for more than the simple grind of the workplace. I could talk about how nobody ever lay on a deathbed whispering, "Oh, if only I had spent more time getting college and career ready." I could serve up some tasty rhetoric, like "What good is making a living if you don't have a life?"

But instead, let's look at the practical implications of this, and since the pushers of CCSS are practical people, let's ask them these questions repeatedly.

If a young woman's intention is to become a stay at home housewife and mother, should she be allowed to drop out of school?

Does this mean we can drop all arts programs now, because none of our students are going to be making a living as artists and musicians? Well, no, some of them might. But this gets tricky-- a future professional musician needs the experience of playing in an ensemble-- should we force all the future engineers to play an instrument or sing in choir so that our handful of future professional musicians have the appropriate preparatory experience? And by the way-- notice that for that sentence to be clear, I have to write "professional musician" but not "professional engineer." That's because lots of folks can be musicians without being professional musicians-- does being a musician without making a living at it count?

What about shop class and sports programs? And if I'm sure I'm going to pursue a non-science career, can I just drop out of math and science classes?

Of course the answer to that last one is "no" because in CCSS, one size fits all. But how does that work if I'm going to be college and career ready? Are we preparing every single student for exactly the same career? If we are, which career is it? If we aren't, why are we applying the exact same standards to everyone? Ditto the colleges-- are we preparing everyone for exactly the same college with the exact same major? And are we preparing them to be biology majors at Harvard, or English majors at Wassamatta U, or welding at Anywhere Technical Institute? How can the answer be both/either if they are being prepared with exactly the same standards??

And we haven't even started on the "clarification" that the "career ready" portion really means "ready for a career that will provide them with a living above the poverty line." Which means "none of the part-time minimum wage jobs that now drive much of the economy." (Which leads to the question, who will be working at Wal-Mart when all high school graduates are working at the above-poverty jobs that are going to magically appear to receive them?)

"College and career ready" sounds so harmless, so benign, so perfectly reasonable. But it's really a signpost that signals how myopic, ill-thought-out, and contrary to the values of both America and good education the CCSS are. When I look at the CCSS, I know something smells, and I don't have to dig deeply at all to find the source of the stink.

The Data Tree

The official from the Department of Trees stopped by the old farmer's home. "I'm here," he said, "to cut down some trees."

The farmer reluctantly pulled walked out the front door into the yard. He had seen this happen before, and he wasn't optimistic.

"Okay," he said. "which ones have to go?"

The official checked his tablet. "We've been collecting extensive data, so we know which of your trees have been most successful. We'll be chopping down all the others that did not earn a highly effective rating. Starting with this one." And he pointed to one of the oldest trees in the yard.

The farmer scratched his head. "How do you figure that tree needs to be chopped down?"

"Oh, our data is extensive," said the official. "We've tracked the number of fruit produced for the past decade, and this tree lags far behind."

"Well, yes," said the farmer. "That tree is old and doesn't produce many apples these days. But see that tree house up in the branches? Both my kids used to play in that, and now when my grandchildren come to visit, they play there, too. You should hear them laugh when they're up there together. Sound lights up the whole house."

"That may be," said the official. "But we only collect data on the number of fruit. We can't measure anything about happiness or joy, so those data are unimportant." He walked through the yard. "This one, too. It goes."

The farmer stopped in his tracks. "But that's the tree with the swing. My wife and I used to sit out there every evening, drinking cider and going back over the day while the wind blew soft through those branches. That tree's full of experience and memories."

"Be that as it may," said the official, not looking up from his tablet. "The data says the tree is ineffective. It must go."

The official strolled a bit further, then gestured with a bit more energy at a gnarled old monstrosity of a tree. "Cheer up, old timer. It's not all bad news. Our data says that this tree here is highly effective. According to the data, it's highly productive."

"That?" The farmer smiled in spite of himself. "That's a crabapple tree. Hundreds of apples come off that and you can't eat a one of them."

"Well, sir, we aren't able to quantify any of that data. We can only measure quantity, so that's what matters. This tree is your best one on the lot."

"Son," said the farmer. "You are a damned fool. The world is filled with a million kinds of trees for a million kinds of uses. Why you would want to ignore all that just because it doesn't make neat numbers for your computer program is beyond me, but just because you intend to lead such a sad, blinkered life doesn't mean you get to cut down my whole orchard. Get yourself on out of here."

The official might have protested harder as he left, but the truth was, it was his last day on the job and he wouldn't have to deal with any of this ever again. He could hardly wait to start his new work for the Department of Education.

Watch out for Barnacles

Every top-down educational reform initiative has them-- barnacles.

Barnacles are the little extras, the additional clumps of junk that cling to the original body of the Brilliant Idea. When dealing with these reform movements, it's useful to be able to tell the difference between the barnacle and the ship. To that end, consider the three ways in which the barnacles become attached.

1: Fill in the Blanks.

The initiative originates in some bureaucratic office or in the halls of the legislature. Because it has been created so far from the actual place where rubber and road start their renowned blind dae, it is filled with giant gaping holes. But it still has to be implemented, so the process begins of passing it down through layers of bureaucracy.

So High Level Bureaucrat delivers the new program. "Students should eat food."

Mid-level bureaucrat finds this inconclusive, so she asks, "Well, what kind of food?"

HLB doesn't really know, so he just makes his best guess. "I don't know. Dairy food. Students should eat dairy food."

MLB heads off to his own meeting to pass on the Wisdom from the Top. "Students are to eat dairy food."

But now we're getting closer to the level where someone will actually have to make this happen, so they need details. "What kind of dairy food? And how often?"

Pass down through a few more levels and you will find teachers at the in-service where a consultant is telling them, "The new law requires your students to eat Swiss cheese every day for breakfast."

2: My Favorite Things

This starts out as #1 did, but along the way it meets bureaucrats or consultants or college profs or businessmen with an agenda.

"Eat food??!!" this person thinks. "I have always-- deeply believed/had a pet theory/figured I could make a big profit if-- every student were to eat a hamburger with a slice of tomato on it. That would fit perfectly with this new program. I'm just going to graft my pet project right onto this baby and present it as if it had always been built right into this reform movement."

3: Branding, Baby

Remember when HD was the big new things, and marketeers started just slapping "HD" on everything in sight?

We had HD tv's and disc players, but we also had HD radios and rear-view-mirrors and key chains and dog food. In the fifties it was "atomic."

The principle is simple-- you just take whatever merchandise you need to move and slapped that hot new buzz-word on it, and bang! zoom! the goods are flying out and the money is flying in.

Why Do We Care?

CCSS is absolutely covered in barnacles.

Sometimes, when the ship is worth sailing, we need to knock the barnacles off so we can free the vessel.

But CCSS is a boat that can't float. It needs to have giant holes busted through its bow and its anchor cut off and [insert your own extension of my labored boat metaphor here]. And that's why it's important that we don't waste our time attacking the barnacles.

When the tin hat crowd gets up in arms because they've found commie agitprop in second-grade readers, they're attacking barnacles. When we get agitated about opportunistic malarkey like deep reading, we're swinging at barnacles.

It's not that the barnacles deserve to live. They never do. We just have to make sure that we don't let them distract us from the real monstrosity that is CCSS.

CCSS: Taking a Deep Breath

Those of us who spend a lot of time writing and venting and raging and grumbling about the CCSS need to occasionally step back, take a breath, and remember one hugely important thing--

What the CCSS says doesn't really matter.

One of the many things that hasn't changed a bit in the transition from Bush's NCLB to Obama's RttT is one of the worst things-- the absolute reliance on testing as the measure of education, schools, teachers, bus drivers, school lunches and, presumably, the people who paint the parking spaces in the school parking lot. It's testing all the way. High stakes test that collect very little real data, filtered through really shiny software that makes all those beautiful, beautiful data digits glow and sparkle.

Testing is king, and testing will, as always, focus on the things that it can measure, or at least pretend to measure. And that means that big chunks of CCSS will never, ever be tested.

The kind of skills required to read and entire novel, synthesizing the ways in which the author uses character development and other literary techniques to create thematic unity over the course of an entire work? Forget that. We'll still read brief excerpts and bubble in some quick one-answer questions.


The PA version of the core standards includes some lovely language about collaboration. I find the idea of a standardized test that involves collaboration kind of entertaining, but that's never going to happen.

Eventually, states will produce some nice jargon (we used to like "assessment anchors" in PA) that will really mean "the only part of the standards that will be on the test." And then we will all grab our carefully-produced-by-Pearson instructional materials and hone in on those parts of the CCSS with lazer-like test-prep precision.

The rest of the CCSS, even the parts that prompted so much angst and chest-thumping and impassioned argument-- they will be no more important than your appendix, and like your school's arts program, they will fall by the wayside, ignored because they fail the most important test question in the world of corporate education reform-- Is it on the test?

Bottom line? There are parts of the core that just aren't ever going to matter. We can save our energy for other things, like fighting the culture of big tests and little data.