Should I Be a Teacher?

Every teacher faces that moment when a student announces, sometimes with fear, sometimes with excitement-- "I want to be a teacher!"

This has become a touchy topic. All across the country, teachers are abandoning the profession. Our retention rate for new teachers is terrible, and every day seems to yield one more article entitled "Why I Had To Give Up" or "How I Was Driven from My Job" or "Holy Schiekies on a Schingle, I'm About To Rip All My Hair Out If I Don't Get Out Now." At times, it feels like we are at some creepy cabin in the wood where some monster keeps dragging teachers off into the dark, one by one.

So when some new blood announces his intent to join us in the isolated cabin, even the most dedicated teacher feels at least a small urge to say, "Run away! Save yourself!!"

I get it. I do. Even an only-partly-conscious teacher is aware of how much fire we are under in so many ways. And you don't have to be some kind of grizzled veteran (you know-- the kind we need to fire right away so that we can replace them with enthusiastic young temps) to know that in some ways, this is the worst it's ever been.

But I still feel sad every time I hear about one of my colleagues telling a student, "No, no. Whatever you do, don't become a teacher."

I still believe in teaching. I still believe in public education in this country. But at the same time, I don't think it's for everybody. Here are some warning signs that the profession might not be for you.

I don't like to rock the boat. If the people in charge tell me to jump, I won't even be lippy enough to say "how high?"

There was a time when teaching was a good profession for mild-mannered go-along folks. That time has passed.

It's not just that you are going to have to stand up for yourself when you are directed to do things that are unethical, illegal, or just educational malpractice. At some point in your career, you are going to have to be an advocate-- perhaps the only advocate-- for a child. Filing the right paperwork and trusting the Powers That Be to do the right things will not be enough. That child will need a champion. Most of your students will need a champion.

I'm not advocating that you see yourself as some sort of knight in armor battling monsters under every rock. I'm not suggesting that you view all your interactions with administration as Us vs. Them antagonism-- that's just terrible for everybody. But you are going to be surrounded by allies and obstacles, and you must be ready to push through those obstacles, whatever form they may take.

I always liked [insert subject here] and now I guess what I can do with it is be a teacher.

No no no. Teaching is not a default profession. Not any more. If you think it's something you can just wander in and do because, well, it's a job, then teaching will eat you up and spit you out faster than a vegetarian with a mouthful of cow tongue.

It isn't just that you'll lack the toughness. It's that a teacher has to know what he's doing. By which I mean, you must know why you're teaching what you're teaching. You must know what the point is, what the purpose is. You cannot cover Chapter 2 from the Widget textbook because, well, that's what widget teachers do, you think. You will never be able to teach Chapter 2 effectively until you know why you're teaching it.

It is a long, long road from "I think I'll teach about widgets" to "I am going to teach this concept on page 13 in order to achieve this exact goal for my students." It's not an impossible road to travel, but it is harder than ever because everything that state and federal governments have to say about teaching goals and purpose is messed up and wrong and aimed in all the wrong directions. If you don't know why you're standing in that classroom, there are many many highly authoritative sources just waiting to tell you the wrong answer.

We get summers off, right?

Oh, just go away.

I'll just try it for a while.

The Humane Society won't even let you just try out a puppy for a few weeks. And children are not puppies. The profession does not need drive-by do-gooders or edu-tourists ready to go slumming among the little people for a short time. A school building is just a building. A school is a community of teachers and students, and even the students are just passing through. Schools need teachers who are in it for the long haul, who will provide stability.

So don't date a single parent and tell the kids that you'll just play at being their step-parent for a little while. Don't propose to your girlfriend by saying, "Let's try out this engagement thing for a little while." And don't try being a teacher for a while. Do it, or go away.

So should I be a teacher? Seriously? Can I get an answer?

Teaching is hard work. It is no longer stable and dependable work, and the jobs are drying up. People will call you names and blame you for things you could never do anything about. The pay is not great, and there will not be some great outpouring of love and support to make up the psychic difference. On top of that, you will work in isolated circumstances and sometimes find yourself working for idiots who will evaluate you based on terrible, stupid systems.

Teaching is not the only job in the world that sets less-than-ideal conditions. There are lots of reasons that teaching sucks. But in this respect, it has merely become like many other professions, where the work is hard to get and hard to do. And the answer to "Should I do this" is the same for teaching as it is for jet piloting or deep sea diving or playing in a heavy metal polka band--

Do it if it's what you want to do.

If it's what you want to do-- HAVE to do-- then go for it. There will always be time to give up later if you must, but in the mean time, is this what you want to do? If so, do it! If it's what you must do, if it's what you're driven to do, if it's what you're passionate about doing-- then do it.


I became a teacher because I had to. I had to in the same way that I have to write and I have to make music and have to exercise. Because if I don't, I don't feel myself. Teaching, as crazy-making and challenging and frustrating and miserable as it can be, makes me feel fully me. It hooks me up to my students and my community and the world around me in a way that nothing else can.

It is work that must be done. I think of it a little like jury duty-- do you want this essential job done by somebody who treats it with serious dedication? Are you that person?

If it makes you feel something like that, damn the torpedoes and slap that pedal to the floor. Should you be a teacher? I don't know. If you WANT to be a teacher, then you should not let anything stop you, including grumpy old educators who are worried about the future. Would I do it all over again, if I knew what I know now? I sure as hell would. I am a teacher, dammit. Maybe some day I'll be ready to hang it up, but even if that day comes, I won't regret any of the days that came before. If you can imagine feeling like that, come join me.

Why Big Data

There are many fine fairy tales wrapped up in the big ball of reformy stuff rolling down Education Mountain these days. But one aspect of that reformy mess hasn't yet come up with any sort of plausible cover story at all.

National standards? I get that some people find the idea of country-wide consistency appealing. TFA? The idea that fresh-faced enthusiastic idealists can help in this country, kinda like the Peace Corps is attractive. Charter schools? A great harnessing of the American entrepreneurial spirit to provide unique educational experiences sounds exciting. Most of reformy stuff is sold with fairy tales which, while absolute unvarnished (well, actually, heavily varnished) baloney, have an understandable appeal.

Except Big Data.

Big Data has not even made sort of an attempt to create a rosy picture of our datafied future that would be enticing.

What is the appeal supposed to be? Am I supposed to imagine that I am sitting in my classroom, I am holding my head in hands thinking, "Damn, but after months of seeing these students face to face, I haven't the faintest clue what they have and have not mastered. If only there were a test I could send off to some super-cool data place far from here, and then they would send me back a report, and then I would know how my students are doing. Because what that job needs is somebody who is not in the room with them and never sees them and spends no time with them and is not actually a human being."

No, that's not the Big Data fairy tale.

Maybe it's supposed to be, "Give us all this data and we will be able to tell how students all across the country are doing, thereby effecting better instructional choices." Except that isn't a remotely convincing fairy tale, because in what universe does a classroom teacher say, "I can't really write my lesson plans for next week until I know how students in Alaska and Arkansas did on last spring's test."

Or occasionally we get something about personalized learning, which is just the newest version of the teaching machine idea floating around for decades. Because I can best compute a study program for you if I have information from millions of students who aren't you.

No, there's no convincing fairy tale about Why We Need Big Data, because Big Data has nothing at all to offer students, classroom teachers, or local school districts. There are only two remotely plausible reasons for the wholesale national collection, storage and sifting of student data.

1) Big Data wants the same thing in schools that they want in facebook and google. They want to collect maximum data because they can crunch it, use it for marketing purposes, and sell it to other people who want to do the same.

2) Big Data needs national data to make national decisions about national curriculum and national instructional strategies. The only school district that needs national data to make district instructional decisions is a national one.

We can continue to ask the Big Data giants like inBloom etc how much money they're making, why they get to end-run federal privacy rules, if they have solved any of the security problems, and who is holding the controls to this giant database. But the biggest question that remains unanswered with even the sort of pretty lie used to cover the tracks of other reformy stuffs is this one-- exactly WHY do we need to do this in the first place?

UPDATE:
Within an hour of posting this, I was directed to this article (hat tip to Laura Sanchez) which clarifies one other reason to want Big Data in schools-- by the time you have graduated, Big Data will already be telling future employers whether they want to hire you or not. Big Brother, it turns out, was a slacker.

Close Reading 2.0

Close reading is an example of how misshapen and distorted a teaching technique can become when it enters the gravitational pull of CCSSetc. The specific ways in which it has become misshapen tells us a lot about the shape of CCSS.

Where did close reading come from, anyway?

A search on good old google ngram tells us that the phrase "close reading" has been around since 1800 in some trace amounts, starting to climb post-WWII and steadily growing to a peak around 2000. This is not surprising. Calling a reading technique "close reading" is kind of like announcing your new athletic program, "fast walking."

But close reading as a technique for literary analysis began, according to some sources, in the 1920's under the tutelage of I. A. Richards, a forefather of the New School of criticism. You can google all this and pursue it at greater length. Take away that close reading is old.

It is also...well...vague. Or rather, broadly interpreted by many proponents over the decades. Some critics assert that Richards was taking a Skinnerian view of language, treating it as a behavior. And the path gets tricky because although Richards is sometimes considered important to the New Critics, the New Critics said they rejected much of his work, and then proceeded to pretty much follow it. Add to that the fact that so much of the groundwork was laid in the fertile but often hard-to-translate-into-plain-English soil of academia and high-toned scholarliness, and-- well, for our purposes, let's just note that close reading has been around as a technique for almost 100 years.

How does close reading work?

So what is it? There, too, we find a number of interpretations, and for every one of us who went to college to study Englishy Stuff, it all seems so vaguely familiar. My professors never said, "Okay, we're going to do a close reading of this text. Here's the official list of close reading steps. Follow them." I suspect my experience is not unique.

But on the occasions when I have heard about close reading, I recognized it pretty readily. Look carefully at the writer's language choices-- diction, tone, that good stuff. Know the context of his/her writing. Follow the syntax. In longer works, note the sequencing of words and ideas. Is it narrative or dramatic-- watch for specific choices accordingly.

In short, "close reading" is what many of us think of as  "reading."

In thirty-five years, I've never told my students, "Okay, we're going to do a close reading now." But I direct their attention to how it makes a difference whether Frost writes "to stop without A farmhouse  near" or "to stop without THE farmhouse near." We examine what Longfellow might intend in "Psalm of Life" and how the recent deaths of loved ones might inform that intention. We watch Twain eviscerate Cooper's inexact word choices. We search for allusions in the word choices of William Bradford. We try to pick apart that confounding twentieth chapter of Light in August.

So why is putting close reading with CCSS a big deal?

So when I first heard that close reading was coming to town, a-riding on the CCSS train, I thought, "No big deal. We've been doing that for years." Well, yes and no.

Close Reading 2.0 is a new animal. As Coleen Bondy learned in her LA close reading training, the new, improved, CCSS-ready version has some significant differences from the old-school version we thought we knew.

It's for hard things. In one of many training videos available on youtube, the teacher starts right in by noting that close reading is for hard things. It's kind of an odd assertion. As a teacher of pop culture, my bread and butter has long been giving close readings of ordinary pieces of writing. Twilight may be a work of light fluff, but a close reading of it unpacks how many truly indefensible and odious subtexts are lurking in its gooey pages. But no-- we are hearing repeatedly that we are supposed to use close reading for hard things.

It's for short stuff only. Short poems. Short excerpts. Little things. It's an aspect that I hardly know how to argue with, like a nutritionist who insists that we should only eat red food. I'm pretty sure there is some valuable literature out there that is more than one page long.

It must be read in a vacuum. Of all the cockamamie bits of malpractice that have been attached to reading under CCSS, this is the most cockamamied of all. The examples are legion. Read the Gettysburg Address without knowing anything about the Civil War. Read "A Modest Proposal" without being told anything about Swift or the poor of the time. Read The Sun Also Rises without knowing anything about The Great War (only, of course, don't, because it's a big long novel).

It's an easy game. Any English teacher can rattle off a dozen works that only fully give up their depth and riches if students understand a bit of context. There isn't a real teacher of literature on the planet who thinks this is a good idea. These three restrictions tie the students' hands and force them to do readings that are, contrary to the buzzwords, an inch deep at best. With just a few quick additions, CCSS whizzes have turned Close Reading into Close Reading 2.0, whch is kind of like turning wine into vinegar.

So then why is Close Reading 2.0 here?

Why Close Reading 2.0? Simple. Reading instruction is hereby turned into test prep.

Standardized test excerpts are always short, usually inpenetrably hard (or the kind of dull that passes for difficulty), and always delivered without any context at all, not even the context of the rest of the work from which they've been untimely ripped.

Close Reading 2.0 is proof (piece of evidence #2,098,387) that CCSS was built to feed the testing beast. Close Reading 2.0 is authentic assessment turned on its head. You remember authentic assessment. It was just starting to flourish when NCLB plowed it under over a decade ago. The idea was that if you were trying to teach a particular skill, your assessment should come as close as possible to actually demonstrating that skill.

What we knew back then was that if you wanted to teach reading and interpreting a full, complex work of literature, you couldn't assess that skill with a bubble test. Now, instead, our Educational Overlords say that since the assessment is going to be a machine-scorable standardized test, then that's the skill we must teach. And so instead of actual reading, we are now pushed to teach standardized test reading, and to make it look like legitimate, we'll give it the name of an old and honorable practice.

Close reading? You reformers keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Close Reading 2.0 is crap. Specifically, it is the kind of crap that only people who know nothing about reading or teaching could come up with. It is one more application of the idea that if we are only able to count X, then X must be all that counts. It is teaching redesigned to fit the test. It is educational malpractice. For English teachers, it is one line that we refuse to cross.

Choice & Cable

School choice is the ultimate education zombie, the argument that absolutely will not die. It has been shown time and again that there are so many things wrong with school choice-- soooooooo many things-- and yet from charter school profiteers to governors of New York, people just keep opening up the tomb and letting the corpse ramble around some more.

There are a host of arguments to be made, a raft of reasons to be debated, but today I'm going to focus on just one idea. We can hack on the limbs of this shambling horror some other day. But the whole idea of school choice is, at least publicly, based on a belief in market forces and how they will bring quality. Here's the thing:

Market forces do not foster superior quality. Market forces foster superior marketability.

We are awash in examples. Does anybody think the beer or soda markets are dominated by the companies who have created the best product? Or would you like to talk about VHS vs. Betamax one more time? But let's focus on a more immediate and instructive example. Let's talk about television.

When cable television arrived, it brought with it an explosion of channels. It was exciting-- 500 channels, and something completely different on each one of them. We had choice like never before. Even tv snobs could find quality channels that served their interest. Slowly but surely, all that changed.

The drive for market share created a slow-motion race to mediocrity. So today, A&E (that used to stand for Art and Entertainment) has dumped broadcasts of Broadway classics in favor of millionaire hicks. The History Channel produces less history, more Pawn Stars. Bravo, also started as a haven for the Arts, now is the home of endless trashy drama. Most famously, nobody wants their MTV for musical reasons any more. Channels increasingly tried to create a marketable brand, aimed at a broader sector.

The marketplace did not produce greater quality. It didn't even produce much more variety, but stamped variety out as channels chased the same market shares. And there's more.

That market can't even sustain itself. It turns out that when you offer too much tv choice, the individual choices aren't self-sustaining. That's why your cable company makes you buy bundles-- because if these channels had to sustain themselves with their share of the market, they couldn't. Cut the market up into enough slices, and it won't sustain any of them.

The other long-term effect of the marketplace is to create Big Winners. Because, of course, your 500 channels are all owned by about five corporations. So as in other marketplaces (like, say, the supermarket), you don't have real choices at all. As much as fans of choice love the marketplace, the marketplace hates choice and over time, in every industry, eventually erases it. No corporation sitting on top of the heap has ever said, "We should be sure not to gain too much control of the marketplace, because then we would create less quality." (That includes, especially, Microsoft).

There's an older lesson from TV as well. Remember the Beverly Hillbillies? They were a huge hit in the late sixties, and when they were canceled they were still ranked 33rd in the ratings. But they were canceled because they appealed to the wrong audience. Advertisers wanted to market to a hipper crow. Popular was not good enough. Popular with the right people was required. Not all customers are valued equally in the marketplace (and the value of hick-mocking TV can change in forty years).

There is no example, anywhere, ever, of  the marketplace creating a drive for higher quality and better products. There is a sea of examples of the marketplace pushing for products that are cheaper, have lowest common denominator cookie cutter appeal, and aim at only some of the customers. None of these are characteristics that would enhance US public schools.

StudentsFirst Flashback

A year ago, like many teachers, I was quietly plugging away in my classroom, only slightly aware of the rumblings of CCSS off in the distance. I've found it instructive lately to go back and look at some of what was being said, and how it has panned out since.

One gem I ran across was this piece from the StudentsFirst blog in which Eric Lerum explains why CCSS is super swell and everyone should want to give it a big educational kiss on the lips and addresses the first pushback. How could we have responded if we knew then what we know now? The original text is in italics. My comments will be in red.


Recent efforts to roll back Common Core (our latest Policy Brief on Common Core can be read here) adoption and implementation are troubling. Legislative proposals in Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, and South Carolina threaten the progress already made in these states to ensure schoolchildren are ready to compete with their peers in other states and around the world.
As it turned out, that was just the beginning. At last count, Mercedes Schneider found pushback in 23 states.
 
We've come to expect resistance to change and reform from a variety of special interests over the past few years. That’s because education reform puts students' interests ahead of adults' priorities, often for the first time, and that threatens the adults. What is different -- and concerning -- about the recent pushback against Common Core, however, is that it appears to be motivated not by a desire to protect the status quo, but rather by a desire to deliver on a political agenda at the cost of students.
 The two threads offered here are familiar. First, it's for the children. Even the strongest proponents forget to sing that song, instead offering that we need to stop coddling the children or cutting them off from the excessive confidence of their white suburban mothers. Second, the pushback is just politics. The repeated notion that opponents are confined to Tea Party Tinhat Wing republicans or motivated by Obama Derangement Syndrome still has legs, though more and more media are recognizing that opposition comes from all across the political spectrum.



Let's be clear: retreating from the implementation of Common Core standards puts equity among schoolchildren across the country at risk. Current state standards highlight disparities among expectations for students; what might constitute proficiency in one state is considered failing in another. It makes no sense to continue under a structure that lets U.S. students reach college and compete for jobs in a global workforce unprepared and unable to compete, even when they have done all of their homework and passed all of their graduation requirements.
The StudentsFirst hallmark-- prove your point by asserting really hard. "Let's be clear" means "I am not going to explain how we know this." No links, no data, not even anecdotal evidence. Just assertion. You would think by now, we would be awash in tales of people who finished school but found themselves unemployable on the global scale, or US employers searching fruitlessly for American hires. A year later-- nothing.
 
Moreover, when students in different states are held to different standards, comparative growth is difficult to analyze, which makes improvement in our schools hard to achieve. Common Core makes it possible to measure the progress of students from state to state against the same metrics, enabling policymakers to make better decisions regarding everything from adoption of instructional methods to resource allocations to professional development.
Turns out we already knew this was baloney last year because the Brown Center Report on American Education had already laid out that scoring disparities were worse within states than between states. The rest of this paragraph because it once again tips the reformers' hand. We need national standards so that we can make national comparisons. Why? Asa classroom teacher I have never thought, "Gee, if only I could give my students a test that would allow me to compare them with students in Utah, because then I could make better lesson plans for next week." No, we need the national standards so that we can make national comparisons to inform national decisions about national materials, methods, curriculum, and materials. The real need for national standards and national tests is to better data-drive a national school district.

A 2010 study by the Fordham Institute found the Common Core Standards stronger than 33 states' standards in both English Language Arts and math. Even states like Massachusetts and California, with some of the more rigorous state standards in the nation, chose to adopt the Common Core because the benefits outweighed any risks of switching over (also, notably, up to 15 percent of the state’s standards can be shaped to a state’s own interests and needs; and Massachusetts, as a lead member of an assessment consortium, helps develop the assessments administered to their students).
Most of the arguments propelling the current wave of concern regarding Common Core are unfounded and blatantly misconstrue the facts. First, there is no question that Common Core would improve academic standards for students. All of the states listed above that are considering withdrawal from Common Core or the testing consortia had standards equal to or less rigorous than the Common Core, except for Indiana's ELA standards. In some cases, particularly Idaho and Missouri, their standards were among the worst in the nation.
 Mercedes Schneider has done the definitive take-downs of Fordham and their study. I have nothing to add-- this is all bunk.

Furthermore, Common Core is neither federally imposed nor a national curriculum, where 45 states plus the District of Columbia voluntarily adopted Common Core as a means of raising the quality and rigor of their state academic standards. Common Core establishes high learning expectations for students that are consistent regardless of district or state. This initiative does not prescribe pedagogy and there are no federal bureaucrats telling teachers how to teach the material or prescribing any particular curriculum framework. Instead, Common Core outlines internationally benchmarked skills that students should know and allows districts and schools adopt their own curricula and instructional materials aligned to the standards.
Nobody believes this any more, either. Even supporters have started referring to CCSS as a federal program. Note the careful wording-- "there are no federal bureaucrats telling teachers..." No, there are just state bureaucrats and corporate curriculum writers doing so, as highly incentivized to do so by the feds. And a year later, we still have seen no sign of the international benchmarks that are supposedly a foundation of CCSS.

By focusing on unfounded fears of federal interference, state policymakers are overlooking the huge benefit of Common Core to educators. Teachers have overwhelmingly signed on to the rigorous standards movement. We're already seeing a huge influx of new ideas and innovations for learning materials and professional development tools. Most of these leverage new technology and online platforms that make tools, tips, and lesson plans more accessible to teachers looking to improve their craft and reach students in ways they never have been able to before. Best of all – many of these are teacher-driven. One such site, Achieve the Core, represents a joint effort by the two national teacher unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to supply teachers with Common Core implementation tools.
Yes, those federal interference fears are totally unfounded. Well, unless you count Duncan's attempt to influence local decisions in both California and New York. And NEA and AFT continue to experience anger and agitation from their members. (Check out the comments section of this NEA puff piece on CCSS). And a year later, achievethecore.org is not exactly awash in thousands of lesson ideas.

 Among educators I've talked to about this, there is a tangible excitement about the potential impact these could have in the classroom and on the teaching profession as a whole. Many teachers began implementing Common Core in their lessons as soon as sample standards were released to the public. Legislators and parent groups should support this groundswell of teacher enthusiasm towards bringing rigorous standards and creative lessons to students.
 Yeah, keep saying it and it may be true.

There should be no doubt that with Common Core, states have embarked on the right path. It is true that implementation has been difficult, but states are making progress. The hard work of adopting new standards and assessments is something every state has done in the past, and these transitions are complex. Yet the move to Common Core is notable for something different, even extraordinary. For perhaps the first time, states – and the school leaders, educators, and communities responsible for our children – are able to do this work together. Let's make sure that states' efforts to do the best for our students are not thwarted by those who seek to use unfounded fears to make political points.
There should be no doubt? Why? For fans of data-driven instruction, these folks sure don't want to provide much actual support for what they have to say. Is it extraordinary that states are able to work together, or is that just further proof that this is a federally-driven, corporate-manufactured program?

In some ways this piece can make us all nostalgic for February, 2013, when many of us were still clueless about just how bad CCSSec was, and CCSS supporters were still sure they were being opposed only by a splinter of easily-marginalized political activists. The good news for us is that we have learned a lot since this piece first ran. The bad news for them is that they have not. I have saved one little detail for last.

I did not locate this article through some deep or wandering search. StudentsFirst posted it on their twitter feed just this week. Apparently they think it's still on point. Good for their opponents to know. 

Allies & Opponents

In contentious times like these, who should get our attention? Our support? Our opposition? It seems confusing, but I think I have an answer, or at least what brings clarity for me.

Yesterday the question ripping through the blogosphere was how to sort out allies and opponents. Are the Kochs opposing CCSS just as leverage to destroy public ed? Are progressive CCSS foes being played in this battle?

These are not new questions in the struggle for the soul of public schools. We've already become so accustomed to the current school reformy stuff landscape that we sometimes forget how....odd? unexpected? appalling?.... that public schools are under attack from Democrats, that Rhee and Duncan and Obama are supposed to be progressives. Or that some sharp, insightful criticism of CCSS comes from people who see the details clearly but add them up to get Communist Takeover.

When I was a union president facing a contentious contract negotiation and, ultimately, a strike, I learned that you have to take every idea on its own merit. You cannot look at the people around you, sort them into Friends and Foes, and then always agree with your friends and always disagree with your foes. I also learned that many people really want to have things that simple. Just tell me who I'm supposed to follow, and I'll do it. Don't keep asking me to think or help decide-- just tell me I should follow that guy right there and I will go ahead and imprint on him like a happy little gosling.

Well, we can't do that. As we keep discovering, the territory is confusing and complicated. We have, at least, the following players on the field right now:

People who support CCSSetc as a way to get their hands on the billions of tax dollars connected to education.

People who support CCSS as a way to make schools better; we just have to get rid of testing.

People who oppose CCSSetc because it's trying to privatize public ed.

People who oppose CCSSetc because government schools are the indoctrination wing of a totalitarian government.

People who support CCSSetc because rich people and/or the government must know what they're doing.

People who opposed CCSSetc because rich, powerful amateurs have no place redesigning education

People who oppose CCSSetc because they think the standards and material are lousy education

And the list goes on. Add to it people are simply pretending to be one thing while hiding their true agenda, and now we're down the rabbit hole of astro-turf activist groups and "philanthropists" out to buy their way to success. 

Before you know it, we're into paranoid brain-bending.  Are these guys trying to get us to defend CCSS so that they can accuse us of defending it so that their opponents will force it through? We would be better off trying to guess which glass has the iocane powder in it.

I continue to believe that our best move is to avoid the US political game of tribes and teams, where we "ally" ourselves with someone and agree to support each others' play no matter what. I suspect that is at least part of how teachers ended up betrayed by the national union leadership-- the Democrats are our allies, prominent Democrats say CCSS is swell, therefor, we will support CCSS.

The betrayal of union leadership is a fine example of how political calculations can lead you to betray your core principles. But the school reform has scrambled everything.

Hell, the school reform battle has even scrambled the language. After twelve years (Happy birthday, NCLB), the federally-leveraged enforcement of educational malpractice is not a challenge to the status quo-- it IS the status quo. These Masters of Reforming Our Nations Schools aren't championing reform at all; they've simply repackaged "stay the course" as "reform."

And if language is higgledy-piggledy, then politics are likewise upended. Progressive, conservative, left, right, Democrat, GOP-- none of it means anything. There are people wearing any and all of those labels who vehemently oppose CCSSetc, and there are people wearing any and all of those labels who support it whole-heartedly.

But here's the clarity part.

I think defining the movements in terms of CCSS guarantees confusion, because it lumps together people who want to save public schools, and people who want to see them destroyed. They may look like natural allies because they share an enemy. But their desired outcomes are the exact opposite. 

Instead, let's define ourselves in terms of the real goal, the real intended outcome. Let's talk about what we want to see on the educational landscape when everything is done.

I'm starting to think of myself not as an opponent of CCSS and reformy stuff, but as a supporter of the traditional US public school. I've written about why before and will do so again, but this is already getting rambly. So let's just say that I will continue to support, push, agree with, pass along the words of, cheer for, and do whatever I can to further the work of people who believe in returning the public school system.

Yes, that's a slog, because people have spent so much time denigrating that system, insisting that it failed. We know that's not true, and the fight over the past year has done two things-- it has allowed supporters to amass the writing and analyses that disproves the allegations of failure. It has also allowed Americans to get a taste of the alternative, and it tastes awful. And no, I don't mean I want to go back in time to one-room schoolhouses and McGuffy Readers. The traditional US public school system that I know is vibrant and robust and filled with great teachers who are always growing into the future. One of the strengths of the system was always that it could move forward.

Being a supporter of US public schools rather than just an opponent of CCSSetc has another advantage. Supporters of US public schools are unified in what we want to see. Supporters of reformy stuff have a hundred different outcomes in mind, and the closer they get to the finish line, the more they will pull themselves apart in a hundred different directions. They can steal the pie, but then they have to divide it up.

Divide and conquer. Co-opt and betray. We can make ourselves crazy with this stuff. Instead, let's ignore the labels and keep our eyes on the ultimate goals. As you travel, you'll meet lots of folks who will share the path for a little while. But the best traveling companions are those who are headed to the same destination.

People who want to destroy US public education are not my friends, whether they are supporting CCSS or opposing it. I think it might be that simple. People who think they can support CCSS and support public education at the same time? Well, we need to talk.

Standardized Competition

The average citizen can be excused for not entirely understanding the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools, because they often speak out of both sides of their mouths. For instance, MoRONS are big fans of standardization, but they also like school choice.

Mind you, they know better that to say "school choice" any more, a phrase that has become education politics kryptonite. On google's ngram viewer, "school choice" peaks in 2002 and has been dropping precipitously in popularity ever since. So we don't talk about school choice any more-- we just promote the flowering of charter schools and cyber schools and the creation of a "robust marketplace" where students can have access to quality education blah blah blah. The rhetoric has changed, but the goal has not-- students who can take their portable funding with them as they choose among schools that are vying in the marketplace.

Except, at the same time, we have the rise of Reformy Stuff clustered around the CCSS. Let's skip here for a moment the argument where you say, "Oh, but the CCSS are not a national curriculum." Have CCSS resulted in de facto national curriculum imposed through federal fiat and testing regimens? I suppose we could argue that another day (though frankly at this point I think that argument belongs on the same day that we argue about the flat earth), but for now, even media and supporters are no longer bothering to maintain the non-federal fiction about CCSS.

No, we live now in a world in which people think having every school in the country teaching the same content at the same time is a great idea. It should be possible for a peripatetic pupil to plop down in any classroom in the country and not miss a beat.. In fact, some states really like the idea of scripting. For some educational thought leaders, a perfect world is one in which every teacher is saying exactly the same word at exactly the same moment.

Ignoring for a moment just how creepy that idea is (spoiler alert: very), how, in that brave new standardized world, would schools compete?

Competition has always existed between schools. It's why schools are part of te formula for property values-- do you want a house in the district with the great science department, or the one with the award winning music program?

But in a brave new CCSS world, all schools are teaching the same stuff at the same time in pretty much the same way (maybe reading the same words from the same script), exactly how are schools supposed to compete?

Personalizing the instruction? That can't be it, because "personalized instruction" now means "plunking student down in front of computer to interact with software we've paid a nice licensing fee to use." That experience would be identical at any of the Brave New Schools.

Better teachers? In Brave New School, teachers are just content delivery specialists. Most will only have a shelf life of two-three years and no experience to bring to bear. Everyone now knows that teachers who have been in the classroom for years are the worst and should be pushed out so they can be replaced with enthusiastic new teachers. So I guess Brave New Schools will compete based on staff enthusiasm, though with regular deep staff churn, it's going to be hard to market teachers sight unseen.

Test scores? But but but-- if all schools are doing the same teacher-proof programs, shouldn't all Brave New Schools be getting the same test results? So that's a wash.

School leaders? Perhaps this is the key. A Steve Perry or Michelle Rhee could be the key. They don't need to have actually ever successfully done anything. I have called Rhee a celebrity spokesmodel, the Kim Kardashian of ed reform (and I'm going to keep doing it till it catches on), but the fact is she's making mega bucks for opening her mouth while I'm still blogging and teaching English in obscurity, so really, which one of us really understands how to play this game (spoiler alert: not me). Wave enough money at these guys, and you could recruit some real heavy hitters as school leaders. We've already got sports figures and rap stars in the ed biz. What kid wouldn't want to go to school with The Rock as principal?

Maybe those leaders would come up with new ways for Brave New Schools to compete. "Hey look-- at our school all the content delivery specialists wear funny hats!" Or fun lunches. Or a cooler mascot.

No if Brave New CCSS Schools are all doing the same things, and it really doesn't matter who the teachers are or the students are or where the school is or what kind of population it serves, then there IS no basis for competition in a marketplace.

So it's possible that CCSS and attendant Reformy Stuff actually tolls the death knell of school choice, and that with Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools fully empowered, vouchers and choice and other market-based reform is going to be killed dead deader deadest.

Of course, there's another possibility.

That other possibility is that the rules for Brave New CCSS Schools will not apply to everybody.  It's possible that once we've dumped a giant pile of CCSS fertilizer on public schools, the marketplace will be ruled by schools that can say, "Hey, come over here where we aren't buried under a pile of soul-crushing educationally maladaptive baloney. Come over here where we let teachers teach and students are recognized as actual human beings instead of data-generating drones."

The other possibility is that one goal of Reformy Stuff is to take one group of runners in the race of life and tie their ankles together and duct-tape their hands to their heads so that another group of runners, the special group, the elite group, the group composed of The Right People, can have an unencumbered run at the finish line. The other possibility is that standardization is just for proles and drones, and that real education is to be reserved for only a certain few.