Searching for Teacher Zero

The latest Anthony Cody blog, which makes good use of the work of the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, shows just how far we've come in piecing together an accurate picture of how the Common Core came to be. But it comes in response to (and attracts comments from) a chorus of backlash-backlash writers out there who are making renewed efforts to counter the criticism of CCSS with some favorite old refrains.

Chief among them is the origin story that David Coleman was bitten by a radioactive scantron-- no, wait. Wrong story. The argument that we're hearing is that yes, indeedy, a room full of Really Smart People and Actual Teachers of School sat down and created the CCSS.

The technique proponents use to make their case is what trained rhetorical artistes call "Insisting Real Hard." One would think that such fans of CCSS would turn to some text-based evidence, or some of those "facts" that often come into play when you're doing that there "critical thinking." But no-- we just get the same repeated insistence that critics are being meanies, and of course there were teachers writing the CCSS cuz we say so and just trust us rich and powerful people wouldn't lie.

This is not really getting them anywhere, which is sad for them because, really, it would take just one press release for them to win their argument. Just one simple new story would force those of us complaining from the cheap seats to sit down and shut up. But for some reason, CCSS backers have not taken the time to write that story. So in the interests of fairness, I've written it for them. All they have to do is fill in some blanks. Since I don't have a name for the subject of the article, we'll just call him Teacher Zero.

"Yes, I was there," said Teacher Zero. "I helped write the Common Core standards for reading."
We sat down with an interview with Teacher Zero in [insert location] at a coffee shop just down the street from where he teaches English at [insert name] High School. He seemed eager to talk to us and clear up some of the misconceptions about Common Core standards.

"I was just into my twentieth year of classroom teaching," he said. "I was looking for a way to advance the profession, when I got a call from the governor, asking me to serve on the committee. It was hard work. We had many meetings at the [location] to pore through research about best practices. We were particularly influenced by the research of [insert names here]."

"After much research and preparation, the day came." said Teacher Zero. "My colleagues and I went into a conference room and started to draft the standards from scratch. I can't say enough about the work of [insert name] from [name] High School, [name] from [name] Elementary School in [location], and [add list of teachers' names and their schools]. We also benefited a lot from the work of Child Development Expert [insert name]."

We asked him if there were any standards that he was particularly proud of. He smiled thoughtfully. "I feel real ownership of all the standards, but I really think the way we handled [insert specific standard] and the way it allows [some sort of educational jargon which can ne translated for the general reader]. And I think all of it feels close to our hearts because as our many conversations unfolded, we were able to distill what was essential and important about the way we, as real teachers, really teach."

"Not that I think all teachers should teach just like me. That would be stupid. But as real working teachers with decades of classroom experience, we were really able to talk about the sorts of standards that would make sense to us and to our students."

"I look forward to traveling around the country and talking to teachers as they try to implement these standards. And I want to thank the governors for their support and trust in us and letting us have such an instrumental voice in developing the standards. Even the people from the publishing and testing companies just stood back and said, 'No, you guys are the experts. We're just here to learn.'"

The day that article runs is the day that many of us who take issue with the CCSS will have to shut up about its origins. If what the mythmakers say is true, this article should be a piece of cake. Just find Teacher Zero and his colleagues, take down the names and information, and just plug it in.

I expect we'll be seeing it in the paper tomorrow. No need to thank me.

Bain of Principals' Existence

I have begun to think that I could keep busy just re-christening this blog as the Educational Hip Boots-- I'll wade through the reformy septic system so that you don't have to. So I guess that will be a regular feature here-- giving you the Reader's Digest version of some of what's lurking out there on the interwebs. Today we'll take a slow brown slosh through this article that might otherwise earn nothing but a TL;DR.

Building pathways: How to develop the next generation of transformational school leaders

It comes from the folks at Bain and Company, a heavy-hitting corporate consulting firm based in Boston. They have a presence in 32 countries, but you may remember them better as "that place Mitt Romney worked in the 90s."

It's a hefty brief, so I'm going to give you a quick tour. The brief sets out to address the management shortage in education, and in all fairness, I'm going to tell you up front that it's not all crap.

It starts out with crap, launching immediately into the premise "Education experts across the ideological spectrum agree that we can and must do a far better job of educating our nation’s youth. Too many students leave our public schools unqualified to compete for jobs in an increasingly global workforce. The result is slipping US competitiveness and a perpetuating cycle of poverty" (AKA "one more slice of the same old baloney.")

"We don't really know," the brief goes on to say, "what in the name of God might actually help, and a lot of people are spending time flapping their jaws about it" (I'm paraphrasing here).

And here comes the lede. "What we do know," Bain says, "is that individual schools can accomplish great stuff even when in the midst of terrible poverty etc etc, and that the explanation for this is the presence of transformational leaders." Good to know, and I suppose, in a way, it's true-- if by "transformational leader" you mean "person willing to sacrifice staff, teachers and any students who don't help get those scores up." At any rate, according to Bain, it's replacing and recruiting those transformational leaders that is the secret of Fixing Schools.

Having established our premise, the Bainsters are now ready to move through a four-point take-down. I will give you the gist of their drift.

1.Introduction: A Random Walk to School Leadership

Main point: the path to school leadership is kind of a random drunkard's walk through a dark and confused forest. We illustrate with two stories.

First, Michael. Michael was good potential leader material as a classroom teacher. Fortunately, his principal decided to mentor him, took him under a friendly wing, and made a successful principal out of him.

Next, the sad story of Kevin. Kevin started into teaching as a TFA body who wanted to, you know, "give something back." Though he became a "standout math teacher," he quickly came to believe that he could "magnify his impact" if he became a principal. Unfortunately for all of us, Kevin had no mentor. In fact, his principal, "impressed with his abilities as a math teacher," was more intent on keeping him in the classroom."

The district has no principal track he could jump on, and Kevin "concluded he’d reached a dead end." Got that? Ending up as a classroom teacher was a dead end. The classroom is just a place one passes through on the journey to greatness. (Kevin left teaching, got an MBA, and is now a rising star in a senior management role at a major retailer.

Someone tell me again about how dedicated TFA bodies are to teaching.

Paragraphs later, the Baininator acknowledges that some teachers are best used, most effective, and most happy staying in the classroom. But there is a problem in education-- there is no clearly defined career path for people who want to, or are suited to, leadership roles. And here, I cannot argue with them.

Fortunately, they have done research at twelve school districts and charter management organizations. And they've learned stuff. There are charts.

For instance, the most talented people in schools don't become principals.


2: Strong Leaders Produce Strong Schools

Okay, even I have trouble wading through this part, so I will summarize really briefly:

Blah blah blah charter schools with rigorous expectations create oases of educational awesome in deserts of poverty and sadness, and they totally do it with awesometastic leaders, not skimming the best students and bouncing the low-performing ones blah blah blah we need more of these strong leaders.

3: Identifying the Roadblocks to Success

Roadblocks, that is, to recruiting and retaining transformational leaders.

Roadblock #1. School systems encourage too few high-performing educators to pursue leadership roles. 80% of those surveyed said they didn't want to be principals. That was split halfies between "I am happier in the classroom" and "the principal's job is unattractive." Actual principals said  that their pursuit of the job depended on some mentor convincing them the job wouldn't suck too much.

Roadblock #2. Lack of stepping stone roles. You're either a teacher or an administrator. There are no baby steps from the classroom to the front office.

Roadblock #3. Aspiring leaders don't get coaching or training with appropriate skills. That may be connected to this chart:


Roadblock #4. Leadership roles are not managed systematically, or with some sort of pipeline or track or defined way to get there. This includes the problem of roadblocks-- teacher leaders who don't want to be principals when they grow up. Shame on them. If you aren't going to be a principal, get back in your damn classroom.

Roadblock #5.  Hiring process is disconnected from performance management. Don't know how things are in your district, but in a few I could name, this is dead on. Principals are hired without anyone hinting what the job expectations are, or how they will be evaluated. Plus (Bain keeps returning to this) they are often hired at the last minute from a panic-induced speed-assembled shallow pool of whatever happens to be available right then.

I don't disagree too strenuously with these five, but so far, they've avoided Giant Honking Roadblock Number One. Let's call it "Fifteen years of corporate reform has turned school administration into a battle with the most hole-ridden dike ever imagined, a battle in which principals can expect to have all of the blame and none of the power and have their careers cut short by some reformy bullshit or other." I think that's a roadblock.

4: A Roadmap for Change




That's the short form. The long form is figure out what you want in a leader, build a pipeline, support it and reap the transformational benefits. But hey-- you know who already does a super-duper job at this? The folks at KIPP. We also like the model used by Denver.

Yes, at the end of a small mountain of verbiage, we arrive at another small mountain, laying out for your consideration what some other people already do. Some of these models make a certain amount of sense, but you may find it hard to imagine them working anywhere but in some parallel universe. For instance, the District of Columbia also has a model for developing transformational leadership, and I trust that, because the DC school system has never had any issues with leadership, right?

No, these are some fine models if you are working with an infinite amount of time and money to invest. That would be the last roadblock that goes unaddressed by Bain-- the fact that leadership development in school districts, like everything else, is done on the cheap.

The Real Opportunity Gap

Here's another piece of rhetoric from the administration that has truck-sized holes in it. Arne Duncan has tossed these ideas around multiple times, but today let's just look at them as they appeared in his December 3 PISA Day remarks, "The Threat of Educational Stagnation and Complacency.

He leads with his analysis of the PISA, framed once again as "OMGZZ! We are stagnating and falling behind! Run away! Run away! It's a direst emergency!" All that is missing is a minion with a blinking red light hollering "WEE-OOO, WEEE-OOO" He cites some of the countries "beating" us, like Latvia. You all remember what a threat Latvia has been to the US international standing, how they've overtaken us economically, industrially, socially. Yeah, Latvia.

This politics of panic stuff is pretty standard. You open with "The sky is falling," as a way of setting up "You're doomed if you don't follow my directives." The PISA panic attack has been addressed pretty well elsewhere (like here and here and we could all use a good link to a chart that shows how disaggregated data shows the US doing just fine, thank you), so I'm going to go ahead and skip on past that upside-down car in the ditch.

The pivot point in Duncan's speech comes here: "That reality is at odds with our aspiration to have the best-educated, most competitive workforce in the world."

After a nod, without discussion, to the notion that poor and minority students might be bringing down the US average, we're ready for this: " We must close what I call the "opportunity gap." The only way to increase social mobility and strengthen the middle class is through high-quality education."

You see where we're going here. People don't have trouble getting an education because they're poor. They're poor because they have trouble getting an education.

Now, some people point out that the US has managed a few lifetimes of robust economic growth, innovation, productivity and entrepreneurship without the benefit of scoring well on a standardized test, I mean, educating every single student to the college level. Duncan says this about that:

"What those skeptics fail to recognize is that education plays a much bigger role today in propelling economic growth than in the 1960s or the 1980s. In a knowledge-based, globally competitive economy, the importance of education has increased enormously. Education is the new currency, and this currency is recognized internationally."

I'm not even going to make fun of "education is currency." I am  not the only teacher in the room who has had a student say, "You know, school is like work and we ought to get paid to come here," and I am probably not the only teacher who ever replied, "Your pay is that you get an education." So I'll go along with "education is currency."

You know what else is currency? Bitcoins. Confederate dollars. Stones with holes drilled in the middle. Currency is only useful if its value is recognized by the people from which you want to buy something.

That brings us up to the more-quoted line from this speech:

"Today, there are basically no good jobs for high-school dropouts. To land a job that pays a living wage, most people will need at least some college."

This echoes one of those special parts of CCSS that occasionally rears its head. Numerous teacher friends of mine have had it explained to them this way-- when the CCSS says "career ready" it really means "a better than minimum wage job which will support you above the poverty line."

And that's when my baloneymeter slips over from "Oh, Come On" to "WTF."

There are many, many reports on poverty and the working poor out there.You can look at US Department of Labor stats, census stats, even business-backed study groups like The Working Poor Families Project. 

The WPFP issued a report in 2011 indicating 46 million Americans lived in low-income working families. In April of this year, the Atlantic published a article surveying just how grim the picture was for college grads. It includes a frank look at the underemployment issue, concluding it might not be as bad as the 54% figure that was thrown around during the Presidential campaign, but there's still a hefty number of college grads who have gone from analyzing deeply researched data to analyzing the relative merits of paper or plastic.

We cam throw more economic indicators around, like the nearly-50% of Americans who don't pay income tax. It's a red-meat talking point meant to say, "Look at all these lazy freeloaders," but every time it's raised, all I hear is "Look at all the people who don't even make enough money to owe income tax on it."

Well, the economic analysis belongs best in the hands of someone other than a high school English teacher. But I'm going to suggest that in a nation where so many are employed in part-time, minimum-wage jobs, job qualifications are not the issue.

Does Duncan imagine that the process will be: 1) an unbroken stream of college grads show up to apply at Wal-Mart and so 2) they are all offered well-paying, full-time, family-supporting jobs? Because he has to know that 1 is already happening and 2 is never going to happen.

What does Duncan's imaginary country look like? Every person has a college degree and works at a family-supporting wage, while all minimum wage jobs have disappeared? All Americans work in high yield office jobs and the low-level jobs like retail and low-training labor are performed by-- who? Thirteen-year-olds? Migrant workers? Robots? Duncan is from Chicago, South Side-- surely he is not one of those city boys who thinks that meat appears in supermarkets already butchered and wrapped in plastic. Surely he knows that meatpacking jobs are a thing, and that somebody has to do them if the rest of us want to get our Safeway steak.

Duncan needs to be schooled in two areas here. First, I recommend that he spend a week marathoning Dirty Jobs and listening to Mike Rowe talk about the jobs "that make civilized living possible for the rest of us." Rowe has become a tireless advocate for working class jobs in this country; Duncan needs to be schooled by him. Second, I recommend that Duncan spend some time shadowing some twenty-something college grads (ones who don't have well-connected, well-heeled parents) as they try to find a career to go with their fine college educations.

When he's done, maybe he'll understand the other opportunity gap, the gap between the kinds of careers that he wants all students to prepare for, and the kinds of jobs that are actually waiting for them as well as the kinds of jobs America needs people to do. It's not just that jobs aren't there for people with career training. We need people to do the work that these days barely pays subsistence wages. These are gaps that won't be closed by implementing CCSS.

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."