The Worst That Can Happen

Watch this video. Enjoy how it promises to tear apart the process that brought us CCSS.

http://youtu.be/0fU4S-YymK8

Now, check the credits at the end and notice who's producing it. The Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

We've parsed out the many groups that have joined the call against CCS in a variety of ways, most commonly noticing that both liberals and conservatives have complaints.

But there's another way to divide up the opponents of current reformy stuff. People who think CCSS threatens public education's most basic character and purpose, and people who think CCSS is the ultimate true expression of public education's most basic character and purpose.

When those folks see this film next February, their first response will be, "I told you so." Their second response will be, "See, EVERYBODY needs to get their kids out of public school." The federal over-reach, the unproven experiments performed on school children, the disenfranchisement of parents, teachers and taxpayers, the treatment of students like wheels on an assembly line-- for them, these are all the things they always knew in their gut were going to happen. Not an aberration, but a confirmation. Not public schools being deformed, but showing their true colors.

Those of us who love and support public education have tended to assume that the worst-case scenario of reform is that Pearson and Gates and the rest will have their way. They will destroy public education and build some sort of two-tiered factory-style soulless shell of a privatized education system in its place.

But that's not the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is this-- public education is destroyed, and NOTHING is ever built in its place. Parents see what is happening and instead of trying to save the instutution, they flee it. Citizens unable to distinguish between the people who want to save public education and the people who want to "save" public education attack the whole lot of them. The building is razed, leveled, smashed to the ground, and nothing is ever built in its place.

That's the worst that can happen. We need all the allies we can get, but we have to think past the hoped-for death of the current reform wave, because sometimes the enemy of my enemy is, in the end, my enemy, too.

Same

Sameness. Stultifying standardized straightjacketed sameness.

If I had to put my finger on the one most troubling aspect of the wave of reformy stuff that is currently battering us, it would be this. The standardization. The premise that education is a big machine with interchangeable cogs. The one size fits all. The sameness.

It is troubling because conformity and standardization are seductively appealing to schools and teachers.

In "The Good Student Trap," Adele Scheele lays this out as brilliantly as anyone could. Scheele talks about learning system dependency, because in school, we learn how the system works, and all that is required of us is three steps:

We were learning the Formula.

• Find out what's expected.
• Do it.
• Wait for a response.
And it worked. We always made the grade. Here's what that process means: You took tests and wrote papers, got passing grades, and then were automatically promoted from one year to the next. That is not only in elementary, junior, and senior high school, but even in undergraduate and graduate school. You never had to compete for promotions, write résumés, or rehearse yourself or even know anyone for this promotion. It happened automatically. And we got used to it. 

The formula rewards conformity. It rewards obedience. And it produces a platoon of students moving in lockstep, because each one marches to the same beat of the same drum.

Let's not kid ourselves. That's how many teachers like it. I have talked to teachers who think CCSS is awesome. I have talked to teachers who think scripting is the best thing since sliced bread. I have talked to teachers who wish that certain smart-ass students would stop bringing up questions and ideas that aren't supposed to be part of the program.

I deal every year with honors students who have learned that it is most efficient and expeditious to turn off their brains to deal with school, that assignments go better if you DON'T engage and you DON'T think, but just figure out what's expected and do it. Plenty of students like it. They're good at it, and it's easy.

And I have met far too many students who have come to really believe in this system. They believe that standardized lockstep is how the world works. "Look," I tell my juniors, "You act like you are all running in one race to one finish line and if you win the race, someone pops up and rewards you with a life. That's not it. You are each headed to a different place. You are each running on your own path, to your own finish line." Some of them get it. Some of them do not.

Scheele's good student learns to erase himself. In that three-step formula, there's no place for that individual student's point of view, attitude, personal history, personal goals. A good student learns to ignore her own self. Just find where the lines are and stay within them.

Stay within the lines, and you will be rewarded with safety and success.

This approach of sameness, of standardization, of conformity, or union under the beat of the same big drum is absolutely enshrined by current reformers. Educational programs should be teacher proof, i.e. it shouldn't matter which teacher is delivering the material. Schools should be marching all students down the same CCSS path to the same CCSS destination. Every aspect of education should be measured by the same yardstick. Every student should get the same grade on the same test by giving the same answers.

Every single aspect of current reform, from TFA to charters to most especially CCSS and the testing program to which it is irrevocably tied to the programs being hawked by Pearson et al-- every single aspect is aimed at one thing. Sameness. Standardization. A system in which individual differences, whether they're the differences of students or teachers or schools, do not and can not matter.

This is not right. This is not how we human beings are meant to be in the world. It doesn't even work (let me be the one gazillionth person to point out the irony that most of these reformers would have fought and failed against their own system if they had to come up through it). It's a lie. It's terrible preparation for our students, and it seeks to deny and stamp out the humanity of every teacher and student who passes through a school.

I'm not an anarchist. I'm not here to argue that schools should be centers for anarchic rambling. I've seen open classrooms and fully-student-directed learning and I'm well aware that the population well-served by such set-ups is small. The vast majority of students need some sort of structure, just as the vast majority of teachers need some sort of curriculum direction.

But here's a thought. What if we set up a system where every learner had a personal education professional who saw the student on a daily basis, face to face, and who got to know him well enough to chart a course that factored in the content area, the strengths and weaknesses of the learner, the strengths and weaknesses of the education professional, the individual learner's personal goals, and the unique qualities and history of the place where they were working. It would have to be a very robust and resilient system to accommodate all the zillions of individual differences, but we could achieve that robust resilience by empowering the educational professionals to make any and all adjustments that were necessary to accommodate all the factors listed above.

Or we could just require everybody to cover all the same material at the same time in the same way while ignoring all of the individual factors involved with the live human beings in the room. We could standardize everything. We could make everything the same.

I'm going to vote for the first choice. It has the virtue of reflecting reality, plus it has the virtue of using a system that we already had in place. We just have to put teachers and schools back to where they ought to be.

The Politics of Teaching

We know that closing our doors, teaching in our rooms, and hoping for the best don't work. At least not in a larger global sense. We know that the events outside our doors have become so powerful that our doors are not big enough to keep us safely isolated. There is no seal hermetical enough to block out the odor of the stinky cheese of politics.

So what do we do?

Like many Americans, we have to look at the political parties and say, "None of the above."

The GOP could represent some of our interests-- after all, what is more conservative and retro than the American public school? But because teachers are so often associated in the public mind with unions, GOP-ers are unlikely to view us as allies. Because we are not rich, we're not viewed as members of the club by the business-conservative wing. Because we value education and inquiry, we're viewed with distrust by the tea party wing.

I come from a conservative background myself, and I despair of how the GOP often runs counter to its own values. The GOP ought to love gay marriage; it's a chance to let gays become just as much a conservative, family-oriented, self-sufficient part of society as straights. Nor does it make sense that the GOP is the party insisting that citizens who want to exercise their right to vote should have to get a government-issued id.

But the GOP is not our friends.

In many ways, I find that preferable to the Democrats, who pretend to be our friend and repeatedly stab us in the back. In Pennsylvania, PSEA helped elect Ed Rendell, who proceeded to undermine public schools and chip away at the profession. And many of the biggest name in reform attacks today-- Duncan, Rhee-- are card-carrying Dems. Local levels are often no better. Democrats are raiding pension funds, setting up charter sweetheart deals, promoting TFA.

It is no news that the policies of the Obama administration are simply a continuation of Bush-era NCLB. If Bush had somehow been elected to two more terms, we teachers would not be any worse off than we are now. And the Democrat leadership tendency to think that the fancy shmancy elite in DC know better than the rest of us is not serving the teaching profession well.

At the end of the day, both parties are swimming in a polluted sea of dirty money. Each party, in its own way, serves the interests of the rich and powerful.

The unions are supposed to give us some political clout. They are failing.

I know the arguments. I've heard them from my own past state union chief. They boil down into two basic ideas:

1) We need to earn a place at the table.

2) It could have been so much worse.

I'm no romantic about this stuff. I know political realities often require political sacrifice and bargain-making. But the union leadership has lost its way. They've become so enamored of sitting at that damn table that they are not noticing that nobody else at the damn table is listening to them. And I no longer care that it could be worse, because right now it's really, really bad, and we are not saying so.

I'm not sure I'll ever trust NEA leadership again. Their support of CCSS is an inexcusable betrayal of the members. It's a complete abdication of their role. I will never make a contribution to the political action wing of the union. I do not trust them to spend it on something that will actually benefit the profession.

This is not a hopeful piece. It's entirely possible that we are at a point where teachers have so little political clout and the forces of reform are so intent on climbing over our bodies to get at that big pile of money that we might as well be ants trying to stave off an elephant.

We can keep speaking and acting locally. We can keep joining up with like-minded people. We can hope that at some point we will reach critical mass. But do not say to me, "Politician ______ is our friend. He will help us and make things better." Do not say to me, "We must support this party because they are the teachers' friends."

In the political world, we have few friends, and we have to get smarter about recognizing them. We won't recognize them by political party or union certification. We certainly won't know them by what they say. We'll know them by what they do, by their policy choices, by their willingness to stand up in opposition to policies designed to destroy public education. We'll know them because they understand what our opponents are really saying. We'll know them because they actually support us.

Mobile Effectiveness

While focus shifts back and forth among the many problem areas of the reformy movement (I like Russ Walsh's name for the movement, and I'm going to start borrowing it), there are some issues that lurk in the background. They are the other shoes, waiting to drop. Some of them make me nervous, and while they may never amount to a real concern, I'm going to air my concerns. At the very least, if they actually materialize, I can say that I said so.

Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been manufactured ...er, I mean, tabulated with totally reliable data.

One of the uses for the data is already well known. One district considered using data as an excuse for "dismissal." Aren't words great? "Dismissal" sounds so much more pleasant than "firing" or "canning his ass." But in the report we also find this:  "In one case, Houston’s Effective Teacher Pipeline project, such incentives were paired with efforts to address working conditions in high-need schools by encouraging movement of many effective teachers to a small set of high-priority, high-need schools.

This is an idea that I have sensed sitting in the wings, waiting for its time on stage. More recently, Mathematica released a report studying the idea more directly:The Talent Transfer Initiative was a brain-child of the USDOE.

Could the right amount of money get a well-rated teacher to jump ship and go to a low-score school? And if we got them to move, would it help? And how much additional money would it take to get them to stay there?

The questions are not as complicated as they might have been; the study, in true DOE fashion, defined a high-performing teacher based strictly on VAM scores. So what the study really examined was, "Can a teacher who is good at test prep in this school be equally good at test prep in this crappy school over here?" The short answer was, "Yes, in elementary schools, and not so much in middle schools."

This all speaks to an oft-repeated concern, most commonly expressed as "How do we increase low-achieving students' access to highly effective teachers?"

Like everything reformy, there's a kernel of truth here. Wouldn't high needs students be better off if they had super-duper teachers? But wrapped around that kernel are some more troublesome assumptions.

First, our old favorite teacher-blaming assumption-- all those poor kids really need is a super-great teacher in front of them and they will do just great. With the right Mr. Chips, all their issues of poverty and difficult home lives will be erased! Huzzah!

Second, the notion that teachers and students are basically interchangeable cogs in a large, uniform machine. A teacher from a rural Iowa school will be just as good if we put him in a Philadelphia classroom. After all, a student is a student is a student, and there's no need to know or plug into the local culture and community. Talking to parental units is exactly the same from Hawaii to New Orleans. One size does fit all.

Third-- well, this whole proposition rests on the notion that we can definitely identify the superlative teachers. Now, I'm not a Flat Earth Society guy. I know that some teachers are great, and some teachers kind of suck. What I don't know is that the USDOE, or any of the state DOEs, has the slightest idea how to clearly identify who is Mr. Holland and who is Mr. Vader. Using VAM? Let's be clear-- anyone who thinks that VAM tells us anything useful is a dope.

In short, this program depends on the same assumptions that lead the administration to think that the TFA is a solution to anything at all.

But it keeps coming back, this notion that getting teachers to migrate will make things better. I see it hinted at in dozens of PISA interpretations. Every time a writer suggests that we need to get the best teachers in front of the weakest classrooms, I see it suggested again.

Would it be a bad thing? I guess that depends. If we stick with the idea that bribery is the best motivator, I suppose some teachers can make some serious money being  test-prep Ronins. But I imagine that some teachers who have slogged away for the usual pay for years might resent the New Kid who just got a 20K bonus for doing what the regular teacher has been doing for her whole career.

And if there's no bribery? If states decide (or are strongly prompted to decide by the same feds who volunteered us all for CCSS) to be a bit more directly suggestive about teachers changing jobs, schools, even districts? I realize that may seem like a little Orwellian and paranoid, but these are educationally paranoid times. I considered it unthinkable that a state would just steal a pension fund or wipe our union bargaining power or sell their state department autonomy to the federal government. Telling teachers, "If you want to keep your job, you're going to have to follow it where we send you," just doesn't seem that far-fetched these days.

I graduated from high school in 1975. I remember when the US observed that the support for the Viet Cong was coming from the villages, and so hit on the brilliant solution tat we would make everybody leave their villages and go live in their city. We even burned their villages down so they wouldn't go back. And all that actually made them oppose us more-- quel surprize!

This gives me flashbacks. I hope I turn out to be totally wrong, that the Teacher Relocation Program never happens. But every time I see rhetoric about how we need to put our most successful teachers in front of our least successful students, I flinch a little bit. Here's hoping I never get to say, "I told you so."

The Wrongest Sentence Ever in the CCSS Debate

At Impatient Optimists, a Gates Foundation website, Allan Golston recently wrote a notable piece entitled "America's Businesses Need the Common Core." It's a notable column, not because it has anything new to add to the discussion (it's a rehash of the usual pro-CCSS fluffernuttery), but because it contains this sentence:

Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.

As a semi-professional hack writer and fake journalist, I can tell you that it's a challenge to fit a lot of wrong in just one sentence, but Mr. Golston has created a masterpiece of wrong, a monument of wrong, a mighty two-clause clown car of wrong. Let's just look under the hood.

Output of our schools. Students are not output. They are not throughput. They are not toasters on an assembly line. They are not a manufactured product, and a school is not a factory. In fact, a school does not create "output" at all. Talking about the "output" of a school is like talking about the "output" of a hospital or a counseling center or a summer camp or a marriage. When talking about interactions between live carbon-based life forms (as in "That girl you've been dating is cute, but how's the output of the relationship?"), talking about output is generally not a good thing

Primary consumers. Here's another thing that students are not-- students are not consumer goods. Businesses do not purchase them and then use them until they are discarded or replaced. Students are not a good whose value is measured strictly in its utility to the business that purchased it.

Businesses are the primary consumers. Even if I correct "primary consumers" to mean something more human-friendly, this is STILL wrong. Businesses are NOT the primary recipients of the benefits of well-educated young humans, because the purpose of education is NOT simply to prepare young humans to be useful to their future employers. A good education prepares them to be good citizens, neighbors, voters, parents, and spouses. All of those people are stakeholders, too. And the number one stakeholder when it comes to the student's education-- that would be the student, whose education will prepare that student to get maximum use of his own personal constellation of skills to chart the life path that he chooses.

To shoulder yourself to the front of the great society-large crowd of stakeholders in education and declare boldly, "Yeah, we're more important than anyone else here" is a truly impressive display of ballsiness.

So it's a natural alliance. Let's pretend for a moment that this conclusion isn't predicated on the totally-wrong first clause. If business and education represent a natural alliance, then maybe business could start acting like allies instead of ham-handed paternalistic patronizing bosses. Pick the business of anybody on the Gates Foundation board of directors. Pick any one. Now imagine me, a teacher, showing up at the CEO's office and saying, "Hey, some of us at my high school formed a study group and we've come up with some recommendations about how your business should be run. And if you don't want to listen to us, we'll call up our friends in DC and make you listen to us."

I can imagine lots of responses. None of them would be, "Hey, you must be my ally!"

I thank Mr. Golston for managing to crystallize so much of what's wrong with the Gates-business crowd's view of the entire education and Common Core situation. I would like to also point out that there is some paternalistic elitist BS in this as well, because we're not talking about ALL education. This crowd will gain credibility with me the first time I pick up the paper and read about them marching into the main office of their child's exclusive private school and saying, "I pay good money to you guys in tuition and endowments, and I want YOU to become a pilot program for my school reforms. We're going to put all of these in place, here, where my child goes to school, so that I can show everybody else how great they will be."

No, if a sentence like Golston's turned up in the materials for an elite private school, the phone in that main office would be ringing, and it wouldn't be to deliver congratulations. Nobody would let a sentence this wrong come anywhere near their own child.

Dear Philip Elliot

In the last few days I've seen several writers repeat the official narrative about CCSS-- "The states thought it up, teachers helped develop it, and now it will make education super-duper better; a handful of tea party crazypants are the only ones complaining." But nobody has done a better job this weekend of selling that story than Philip Elliot, who is kicking off a three-part series promoting the swellness of CCSS. I actually left the bulk of this post in a comments section for another article, but I'm going to add and modify just so that I can tweet this response to Mr. Elliot.

I've been gathering links at www.curmudgucation.tumblr.com (though admittedly doing a poor job of cataloging them-- I had no idea the project would get so large). Here are just a few links to take a look at.

Mercedes Schneider has done a huge amount of research and documentation of education issues. Here she takes a look at the Memorandum of Understanding that states signed to apply for Race to the Top and what it has to say about the origins and purpose of CCSS
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/the-common-core-memorandum-of-understanding-what-a-story/

Anthony Cody writes at Education Week and has done lots of solid work regarding the CCSS. Here's his piece about the sixty people who actually wrote the Core
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2009/07/national_standards_process_ign.html?intc=bs&cmp=SOC-SHR-GEN#.UmLaASTJmHs.facebook

Think that only tin hat tea party anti-government people are freaking over CCSS? Here are some other people with problems with them. Alan Singer is one of many writers to address the fundamental educational problem with the reading section of CCSS
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/a-serious-flaw-in-common-_b_4212340.html?utm_source=concierge&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=sailthru+slider+

This interview with a teacher who "worked on" CCSS both underlines the origin story of the standards as well as some of the fundamental educational issues
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/florida_teacher_i_was_among_th.html

And if you think that NEA top brass support means that rank and file teachers also all love the CCSS, skip past this article to the over-200 angry negative comments from actual classroom teachers
http://neatoday.org/2013/10/16/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-common-core/

There are tons more, and as a secondary teacher, I have not followed as closely the developmentally inappropriate standards operating at the elementary level. Standards were created largely with backwards scaffolding. Say you wanted a high school senior to run a four minute mile, and you decided to just work backwards--- a five minute mile as a junior, six minute mile as a sophomore, and on until you arrive at the standard of saying a one-year-old must run his mile in thirty minutes. If you ignore the developmental states of children, scaffolding leads you to dumb standards.

Are many of the stories you tell in your article great teaching stories? You bet they are. Those are mostly great techniques-- which teachers have been using for years. In that respect CCSS is like that boss you hat, the one who shows up after you've been working for years, makes a big show of telling you to do what you were doing anyway, and then takes credit for your success.

I just wish, Mr. Elliot, that you had done a more balanced and thorough round of research before putting together your article. To have this distributed across the country under the respect AP banner will be a disservice to the many teachers who are fighting to provide the best possible education for their students while under attack by the forces of "reform."

Uncle Arne Wants You!

It has occurred to the Department of Education that teaching has a recruiting and retention problem.

"No duh," you think. And then maybe you think, "Well, perhaps that means the DoE will do something about lifting the heavy hand of regulatory oppression form teachers' backs. Maybe that means that the feds will step into the culture wars to defend teachers. Maybe the feds will stop suggesting at every turn that public school teachers suck. Maybe-- just maybe-- this means that the feds will step to take the lead in increasing the esteem and  with which the profession is view. Maybe they will take a second look at how their support of CCSS and charters and TFA and new teacher accountability models are crushing the soul of the profession."

Okay, you probably aren't thinking all that because A) you haven't been living under a rock and B) you aren't delusional.

No, what the feds have given us is a nifty PR campaign and a website that works better than the ACA site, but has far less useful information.

"Make more. Teach" is the name of the campaign, and you can read all about it at teach.org.

The site puts its goals in plain English.

TEACH.ORG provides the information and community support that aspiring
teachers need to design their own path to a rewarding, successful career.

 And its origins are there in black and white as well.

The TEACH campaign originated as a Department of Education initiative to increase awareness of and support for the teaching profession. 

Teach.org is actually almost two years old, but you can be forgiven for not knowing that because nobody has talked much about it, because there's nothing to talk about. A chirpy blog, a slick tumblr-style aggregator, some pretty interviews with teachers, and a many-click series of pages that will tell you less about the requirements to pursue a teaching career than you can learn from your high school guidance counselor. 

The new centerpiece of the...well, one hesitates to call it a "campaign." "Limply promoted  suggestion?" "Better-than-nothing lip service?" Anyway, the new feature is a PSA campaign, in which teaching is described with the kind of dewy-eyed prose usually reserved for missionary work and fine arts. 

The tagline is "Make more. Teach." It is a probably a measure of my curmudgeoniness that what I hear is the same old, "Teaching is so noble that you should be above wanting money and control over your own destiny." It is teaching as missionary work, where you just go where they send you and take what they give you because your noble rewards are so much more important than that other stuff.

The missionary line is annoying because it's not all wrong. If I won the lottery today, I would still go to school to teach and do my job. I would just go there in a nicer car. But at the same time, it's a special kind of insulting that my profession and my workplace are under attack from people who are in the education biz for no reason EXCEPT the money and the power and the control.

Speaking of those folks, the teach.org campaign is a big bed with a bunch of odd bodies sleeping in it. Microsoft and State Farm are the BIG partners with the DoE, with Teach for America right behind. The NEA and the AFT are also there, and while I have no love for their leadership these days, I  get that you win their participation by simply saying, "Think about how it will look if you AREN'T involved in this." Plus an odd assortment of other groups: National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Unite Negro College Fund, American School Counselor Association, 100K in 10, and more.

The PSA gets its theme and voice-over work from Taylor Mali (Mr. What Teachers Make), and of all the things to come out of the Department of Ed, it's certainly by far the most benign. But if Arne wants to "increase awareness and support for the teaching profession," I can think of a few dozen suggestions for him. Actually, I can think of one suggestion for him, and it's the same one as always-- instead of talking as if you respect and value teachers in public education, act as if those words are the truth. Here's one thing that being a teacher and being a Secretary of Education have in common-- talking a good game is not enough.