Press release from 2015
The United States Department of Education (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pearson International) is pleased to announce the new, improved version of the Common Core State Standards. Some of the highlights of this new set of standards include:
*We're pretty sure that Kindergarten simply isn't early enough to start the reading process, so we are proud to announce a program that starts this important educational experience as soon after conception as possible. Our problem with backwards scaffolding has been that we stopped too soon. How can we hope to compete internationally when our newborns have not yet been exposed to a dynamic and robust reading curriculum. Phonics for Fetuses closes that gap.
*DIBELS broke new ground with its program of having small children read gibberish. But why stop there. The new SHMIBELS program will require students to write gibberish. Students must produce ten pages of lettering without creating a single recognizable word (yet all completely pronounceable). The writing will be timed and matched against the Pearson master SHMIBELS list to see if students have produced the correct gibberish and not just any random gibberish. (Note: this program is expected to help target many future USDOE employees).
*Now that we have first graders writing multi-sentence essays, it's time to step up our game. Novels for Nine-year-olds brings the writing process to your fourth grade classroom. Students will follow a simple 450-page step by step guide that will help them create a novel that is page-for-page pretty much exactly like every other novel being written for the program. Rigor without creativity-- just the way we like it. (Note: Pearson will retain the publishing rights to all works created in this program)
*In response to continued complaints that focus on testing has squeezed out many valuable phys ed and arts programs, we are proud to introduce the Physical Arts program. For this program, offered during one day of the 9th grade year, students will draw a picture of a pony on a tuba and then throw the tuba as far as possible.
*By pushing subject matter further down the sequence, we expect to free up the entire 10th grade year for testing. Nothing but testing, every single day, all day. With that much testing, our students are certain to become the kinds of geniuses who can trounce our historic enemies, the South Koreans and the Estonians. We anticipate this becoming a rite of passage and popular cultural milestone as families look forward with joy and anticipation to the Year of the Tests. To those critics who claim that we have not offered support in the literature for this testing, we want to note that we have closely followed the writings of Suzanne Collins and Franz Kafka.
*CCSS 2.0 will feature even more improved data management. Infants will be fitted with a Gates Foundation data chip, while their social security number will allow us to link the vital health data with all on-line and economic activity. At the end of Year of the Tests, we expect to present each student with a document explaining what jobs he will hold, where he will live, who he is likely to marry, if he will be allowed to reproduce, and when he should expect to die (and of which causes).
Schools that manage to become fully certified in CCSS 2.0 will be designated a Primary Testing School District. We intend to make sure these are so wide-spread that every student will be able to have a PTSD experience. When every student in America has experienced some PTSD, then our nation will be truly great.
Please note that these standards are a totally legal state initiative, and our involvement is just as a supportive federal agency that thinks what you states are doing is swell. However, state participation in CCSS 2.0 is voluntary. States need not join up.
In related news, the administration would like to announce Race to the Trough. State will have the chance to compete for the right to receive their usual funding for schools, roads, airport staff, as well as any consideration for relief in the event of any future emergency. States may compete by being one of the first fifty to announce that all state department of ed functions are being handed over to the USDOE. Thank you for your support.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Are You the Keymaster?
There have always been stupid ideas around education. Always. Mostly from one of these sources.
1) Highly educated amateurs.
You remember that moment from student teaching. You were about to implement one of those great ideas that you were taught in methods class, and your co-op either explained to you why you should never, ever, do that, or she let you go ahead and try and you went down in flames.
College professors, both in and out of education departments, have always had their pet theories and core ideas that they felt could be implemented in a classroom. That was if they had ever been in a classroom at all, it had been years ago (and research--mine-- suggests that it takes roughly two years to erase every memory of what a classroom had actually been like). So college professors are forever coming up with ideas for the classroom that ought to be right, based on their favorite theories. Sometimes these theories are even "research-based," meaning that they've been tried out on a group of 19-year-old college students being paid to be test subjects, which is of course totally representative of your classroom.
Highly educated amateurs get us everything from management techniques like having low function eleventh graders run a discussion of nature-based symbols in Romantic literature by tossing a rubber ball to each other for speaking privileges, to New Math (best explained here by Tom Lehrer, animation and a bad lip synch, and which may seem vaguely familiar these days).
2) Regular old amateurs.
Everybody in the world has ideas about how to teach The Right Way (frequently best defined as "How I Was Taught"). Traditional grammar and diagramming persist because everybody who ever learned it thinks everybody else ought to.
In low-education communities this often comes up in statements that begin with, "I don't know why you bother teaching..." In high-status communities, it's more commonly "Don't you think the children should be learning about...?"
Sometimes this leads to actual assistance, as in "Your students would probably enjoy doing the double-slit experiment and I just happen to have a mobile quantum physics lab at the house. Why don't I bring it over for you." More often it involves the less possible, as in "Buffy's studies of Shakespeare won't really be complete unless you stage a full performance of Rome & Juliet with her in the lead at Madison Square Garden."
3) Vendors and other snake oil salesmen.
Have you met Collins Writing? If you have, God bless you friend. If you haven't, here's the pitch-- some guy named Collins (I will not give him the benefit of looking up his name) took a bunch of conventional best practices in writing instruction, slapped his own labels on things, added some pointless proprietary rigermarole (have students skip every other line when writing), and marketed it as a "program" to schools for a nice pile of greenbacks.
His ilk have been around forever, but have blossomed in the computer age. If you were in the classroom when computers first arrived, you remember the basic sales pitch from every software vendor;
Vendor: This will be a great piece of software once you change the whole way you teach in your classroom.
Teacher: But what I do now works. I don't see any benefits to my students in changing things to match your software. In fact, I'll get less done.
Vendor: But it's a computer! See!! Computer! Shiny!
4) Private industry.
Public education is where failed management techniques go to die. When a management consultant has finally milked the industrial market dry, there's only one thing left to do-- cover up all those "Management by Objective" stickers with "Teach by Objectives" stickers and hit the school circuit.
So if bad ideas have always been around, why are we so besieged by them now?
Because in the past, we were the gatekeepers of our classrooms. We were the deciders. All of these rivers of crap flowed to our doors, but we were the dam, the filter, and the treatment plant. One of our jobs was to protect our students and their education from dumb ideas.
Oh, we tested them and tried them. Every teacher is, and has always been, a top-notch educational researcher. Every year we collect tons of data and develop a picture of what will and will not work with our students in that classroom.
Reform has been eating away at that, thanks to software salesmen and Texas. Software salesmen learned early on that when making a sale to industry, you don't need to sell to the end user-- you need to sell to the person who makes the purchase (thus, hundreds of engineers working on lousy CAD software purchased by somebody up the chain). And Texas taught textbook creators that if the buyer is the whole state instead of a hundred districts, there's money to be made easily.
Put them together and you get two idea in motion. We need to be able to sell to the boss, and the fewer bosses there are, the more lucrative the deal. So let's set up a system where there's just one boss of everybody and that boss can drive the market. We'll pretty the boss up and make it something harnless-seeming, like a set of national standards for educational awesomeness.
End result of school reform-- we are no longer the gatekeepers of our classrooms. We are no longer the keymasters. Some of greatest frustration teachers are now feeling is the inability to protect our students from bad, stupid, harmful programs. Today's ideas aren't any stupider or more plentiful-- they're just more unavoidable. Bad ideas have achieved great power in the marketplace, and we are increasingly losing the power to stop the sludge from flowing into our classrooms.
1) Highly educated amateurs.
You remember that moment from student teaching. You were about to implement one of those great ideas that you were taught in methods class, and your co-op either explained to you why you should never, ever, do that, or she let you go ahead and try and you went down in flames.
College professors, both in and out of education departments, have always had their pet theories and core ideas that they felt could be implemented in a classroom. That was if they had ever been in a classroom at all, it had been years ago (and research--mine-- suggests that it takes roughly two years to erase every memory of what a classroom had actually been like). So college professors are forever coming up with ideas for the classroom that ought to be right, based on their favorite theories. Sometimes these theories are even "research-based," meaning that they've been tried out on a group of 19-year-old college students being paid to be test subjects, which is of course totally representative of your classroom.
Highly educated amateurs get us everything from management techniques like having low function eleventh graders run a discussion of nature-based symbols in Romantic literature by tossing a rubber ball to each other for speaking privileges, to New Math (best explained here by Tom Lehrer, animation and a bad lip synch, and which may seem vaguely familiar these days).
2) Regular old amateurs.
Everybody in the world has ideas about how to teach The Right Way (frequently best defined as "How I Was Taught"). Traditional grammar and diagramming persist because everybody who ever learned it thinks everybody else ought to.
In low-education communities this often comes up in statements that begin with, "I don't know why you bother teaching..." In high-status communities, it's more commonly "Don't you think the children should be learning about...?"
Sometimes this leads to actual assistance, as in "Your students would probably enjoy doing the double-slit experiment and I just happen to have a mobile quantum physics lab at the house. Why don't I bring it over for you." More often it involves the less possible, as in "Buffy's studies of Shakespeare won't really be complete unless you stage a full performance of Rome & Juliet with her in the lead at Madison Square Garden."
3) Vendors and other snake oil salesmen.
Have you met Collins Writing? If you have, God bless you friend. If you haven't, here's the pitch-- some guy named Collins (I will not give him the benefit of looking up his name) took a bunch of conventional best practices in writing instruction, slapped his own labels on things, added some pointless proprietary rigermarole (have students skip every other line when writing), and marketed it as a "program" to schools for a nice pile of greenbacks.
His ilk have been around forever, but have blossomed in the computer age. If you were in the classroom when computers first arrived, you remember the basic sales pitch from every software vendor;
Vendor: This will be a great piece of software once you change the whole way you teach in your classroom.
Teacher: But what I do now works. I don't see any benefits to my students in changing things to match your software. In fact, I'll get less done.
Vendor: But it's a computer! See!! Computer! Shiny!
4) Private industry.
Public education is where failed management techniques go to die. When a management consultant has finally milked the industrial market dry, there's only one thing left to do-- cover up all those "Management by Objective" stickers with "Teach by Objectives" stickers and hit the school circuit.
So if bad ideas have always been around, why are we so besieged by them now?
Because in the past, we were the gatekeepers of our classrooms. We were the deciders. All of these rivers of crap flowed to our doors, but we were the dam, the filter, and the treatment plant. One of our jobs was to protect our students and their education from dumb ideas.
Oh, we tested them and tried them. Every teacher is, and has always been, a top-notch educational researcher. Every year we collect tons of data and develop a picture of what will and will not work with our students in that classroom.
Reform has been eating away at that, thanks to software salesmen and Texas. Software salesmen learned early on that when making a sale to industry, you don't need to sell to the end user-- you need to sell to the person who makes the purchase (thus, hundreds of engineers working on lousy CAD software purchased by somebody up the chain). And Texas taught textbook creators that if the buyer is the whole state instead of a hundred districts, there's money to be made easily.
Put them together and you get two idea in motion. We need to be able to sell to the boss, and the fewer bosses there are, the more lucrative the deal. So let's set up a system where there's just one boss of everybody and that boss can drive the market. We'll pretty the boss up and make it something harnless-seeming, like a set of national standards for educational awesomeness.
End result of school reform-- we are no longer the gatekeepers of our classrooms. We are no longer the keymasters. Some of greatest frustration teachers are now feeling is the inability to protect our students from bad, stupid, harmful programs. Today's ideas aren't any stupider or more plentiful-- they're just more unavoidable. Bad ideas have achieved great power in the marketplace, and we are increasingly losing the power to stop the sludge from flowing into our classrooms.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
John King Really Did That
John King yesterday managed to score a bank shot of marketing opportunism by using both Martin Luther King Jr and Abraham Lincoln as props for one more tired CCSS sales pitch.
In the NY Post, king (to avoid confusion, let's call Martin Luther King "King" and John King "king") hitched his sales-pitch wagon to King's 1962 speech commemorating the centenary of Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Let me break this down for you.
He actually starts out with a few harmless paragraphs. Historical context. Link to audio file of original speech (pretty cool, that). Then we get to the lede:
It is also, for me, a rallying cry for us to continue our efforts to transform our public schools.
That's your takeaway from King's speech? Public school reform? Please explain.
king proceeds to note that while progress has been made since the speech (which came even before the Civil Rights Act of 1964), there is still much work to do. Here comes the pivot, where we are going to staple together our two main threads:
Yet despite that progress, true equality of opportunity remains elusive — in no small part because we as a country have not yet found a way to provide all of our children with an education that prepares them for success in college and careers...
...while we cannot ignore and indeed must address the challenges posed by economic hardship, inadequate access to healthcare, housing and the like, the single best tool we have to advance opportunity is education
Got that, folks? Poor folks would have access to better health care and housing if only they had better economic opportunity, and that will happen primarily through education.
There are two problems here, one obvious, one not so much.
Obvious problem has been stated many times. Greater education of individuals will not make good jobs appear. Go grab any number of stats about the under- and un-employed college grads out there.
Less obvious problem is this-- the assumption here is not that we must make healthcare, housing and economic opportunity to the lowest parts of our society, but that people who are stuck down there must somehow lift themselves up. This is not a call for the US to provide, say, decent health care for the poor-- it's a call for the poor to get busy, get a good job, and get themselves some decent health care. We can argue the wisdom of that some other day-- all I want to ask today is "Does that sound like anything Dr. King said, ever??"
From there, king descends into standard boilerplate from the "Lies About CCSS" playbook.
It will be rigorous and use close reading and other cool buzzwords.
It was created by teachers. (Do people still buy this one?)
It was created with backwards scaffolding. Supporters keep saying this like it's a good thing. I always explain it this way: You want a high school senior to be able to run a ten minute mile. If you allow for getting one minute faster each year, that means you just need to make five year olds run a twenty-four minute mile. Or twenty-seven when they're three. Or a thirty-minute mile when they're newborn. Makes perfect developmental sense. That's how well backwards scaffolding works.
The Common Core offers a path to the precise reading, writing and thinking skills that will help propel their children and children across the state to success. Yet some now want us to delay, or even abandon, our efforts to raise standards.
I say no. As King said in that speech a little more than fifty years ago, “We do not have as much time as the cautious and the patient try to give us.”
So, in closing, Dr. King wants CCSS to be supported, and right now.
So let us all pledge today — Dr. King’s birthday — to do whatever we can to make real the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, the promise of King’s words and the promise of equal educational opportunity for all.
Don't be distracted by king's mistaken placement of King's birthday (it's the 15th) Note the really important part. The Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King's great speeches are equal in importance to the Common Core. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and David Coleman all belong chiseled on the side of a mountain somewhere. It's only January, but I am all ready to award John King the Biggest, Brassiest Balls Award for 2014.
In the NY Post, king (to avoid confusion, let's call Martin Luther King "King" and John King "king") hitched his sales-pitch wagon to King's 1962 speech commemorating the centenary of Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Let me break this down for you.
He actually starts out with a few harmless paragraphs. Historical context. Link to audio file of original speech (pretty cool, that). Then we get to the lede:
It is also, for me, a rallying cry for us to continue our efforts to transform our public schools.
That's your takeaway from King's speech? Public school reform? Please explain.
king proceeds to note that while progress has been made since the speech (which came even before the Civil Rights Act of 1964), there is still much work to do. Here comes the pivot, where we are going to staple together our two main threads:
Yet despite that progress, true equality of opportunity remains elusive — in no small part because we as a country have not yet found a way to provide all of our children with an education that prepares them for success in college and careers...
...while we cannot ignore and indeed must address the challenges posed by economic hardship, inadequate access to healthcare, housing and the like, the single best tool we have to advance opportunity is education
Got that, folks? Poor folks would have access to better health care and housing if only they had better economic opportunity, and that will happen primarily through education.
There are two problems here, one obvious, one not so much.
Obvious problem has been stated many times. Greater education of individuals will not make good jobs appear. Go grab any number of stats about the under- and un-employed college grads out there.
Less obvious problem is this-- the assumption here is not that we must make healthcare, housing and economic opportunity to the lowest parts of our society, but that people who are stuck down there must somehow lift themselves up. This is not a call for the US to provide, say, decent health care for the poor-- it's a call for the poor to get busy, get a good job, and get themselves some decent health care. We can argue the wisdom of that some other day-- all I want to ask today is "Does that sound like anything Dr. King said, ever??"
From there, king descends into standard boilerplate from the "Lies About CCSS" playbook.
It will be rigorous and use close reading and other cool buzzwords.
It was created by teachers. (Do people still buy this one?)
It was created with backwards scaffolding. Supporters keep saying this like it's a good thing. I always explain it this way: You want a high school senior to be able to run a ten minute mile. If you allow for getting one minute faster each year, that means you just need to make five year olds run a twenty-four minute mile. Or twenty-seven when they're three. Or a thirty-minute mile when they're newborn. Makes perfect developmental sense. That's how well backwards scaffolding works.
The Common Core offers a path to the precise reading, writing and thinking skills that will help propel their children and children across the state to success. Yet some now want us to delay, or even abandon, our efforts to raise standards.
I say no. As King said in that speech a little more than fifty years ago, “We do not have as much time as the cautious and the patient try to give us.”
So, in closing, Dr. King wants CCSS to be supported, and right now.
So let us all pledge today — Dr. King’s birthday — to do whatever we can to make real the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, the promise of King’s words and the promise of equal educational opportunity for all.
Don't be distracted by king's mistaken placement of King's birthday (it's the 15th) Note the really important part. The Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King's great speeches are equal in importance to the Common Core. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and David Coleman all belong chiseled on the side of a mountain somewhere. It's only January, but I am all ready to award John King the Biggest, Brassiest Balls Award for 2014.
Civil Rights and CCSS
It was predictable that Martin Luther King Jr Day would involve repeated invocation of one of the newer mantras in the halls of the Reformatorium: school reform is the civil rights issue of our time.
Like many of the great lies of history, this one resonates because it could be true. It ought to be true.
We really should be moving heaven and earth to provide better education for our nation's poor. But to do that, we would have to ask questions like, "What would it take to help these students succeed in getting a great education?" But instead, we're mounting a sales pitch familiar to any street vendor who ever tried to sell a fake Rolex.
"Look," he says. "Isn't it shiny. Just like a real one. Why should those fat cats uptown be the only ones to have a nice watch? Don't you have just as much right to a nice watch like this?" And once again, the sales pitch ought to be true. Except for one thing-- the watch is fake. It's nothing but a sales pitch and some sparkle.
To be sure, the reformatorium pitch throws in two other wrinkles.
Our CCSS street vendor doesn't just sell to the folks on the street. He's gone to his rich Uncle Sam and said, "Sammy, what you should be doing is buying these for everybody, no matter their race, color, creed or income. You should get one of these for everybody and make them wear it!" And our vendor gets Sammy to make a massive purchase deal on a few million fake Rolexes. And everybody should wear the same make and model, no matter what they do during the day, from hair dressers to steel workers to artists to scuba divers. (Of course, the richest folks, the ones who have authentic, expensive Rolexes already-- they'll quietly demure and Sammy will let them).
There's another wrinkle. Our CCSS street vendors don't really understand watches, and so many of them really sincerely believe that their fake Rolex is just as good as the real thing. It has a face with hands, and the band is shiny. True, the hands don't actually move and the numbers are in the wrong places, but those are just the complaints of so-called "experts" and what do they know. Our CCSS street vendors don't know a thing about what makes a watch work, but they still are pretty sure that their fake Rolex that doesn't tell time is better than a solid Timex that does. And we should all be using the same watch, so Uncle Sammy says give up your Timex.
Look, I'm a middle class white guy who has lived most his life in small town/urban areas. What I know about being black in America wouldn't fill a thimble. But I do know this: the state of schools in our poorest urban areas is shameful. And I also know that from sharecropping onward, our country has a bad history of offering poor African-Americans fake versions of success, one false promise after another, meant only to enrich those already steeped in privilege.
Should we be addressing the obstacles that stand between poor blacks and browns and anyone else, and a good education? We sure as hell should be. Do the Common Core Standards do that? Do rich kids with no training wandering into classroom for a year or two do that? Do charter schools erected in the lot where neighborhood schools have been bulldozed do that? Does the insistence that poverty and its effects are just excuses that will not be accepted (but will instead be punished) do that? No. No, they do not.
When reformers say that education is the civil rights issue of our time, they are telling the truth. Everything that comes after that statement, however, is a lie.
Like many of the great lies of history, this one resonates because it could be true. It ought to be true.
We really should be moving heaven and earth to provide better education for our nation's poor. But to do that, we would have to ask questions like, "What would it take to help these students succeed in getting a great education?" But instead, we're mounting a sales pitch familiar to any street vendor who ever tried to sell a fake Rolex.
"Look," he says. "Isn't it shiny. Just like a real one. Why should those fat cats uptown be the only ones to have a nice watch? Don't you have just as much right to a nice watch like this?" And once again, the sales pitch ought to be true. Except for one thing-- the watch is fake. It's nothing but a sales pitch and some sparkle.
To be sure, the reformatorium pitch throws in two other wrinkles.
Our CCSS street vendor doesn't just sell to the folks on the street. He's gone to his rich Uncle Sam and said, "Sammy, what you should be doing is buying these for everybody, no matter their race, color, creed or income. You should get one of these for everybody and make them wear it!" And our vendor gets Sammy to make a massive purchase deal on a few million fake Rolexes. And everybody should wear the same make and model, no matter what they do during the day, from hair dressers to steel workers to artists to scuba divers. (Of course, the richest folks, the ones who have authentic, expensive Rolexes already-- they'll quietly demure and Sammy will let them).
There's another wrinkle. Our CCSS street vendors don't really understand watches, and so many of them really sincerely believe that their fake Rolex is just as good as the real thing. It has a face with hands, and the band is shiny. True, the hands don't actually move and the numbers are in the wrong places, but those are just the complaints of so-called "experts" and what do they know. Our CCSS street vendors don't know a thing about what makes a watch work, but they still are pretty sure that their fake Rolex that doesn't tell time is better than a solid Timex that does. And we should all be using the same watch, so Uncle Sammy says give up your Timex.
Look, I'm a middle class white guy who has lived most his life in small town/urban areas. What I know about being black in America wouldn't fill a thimble. But I do know this: the state of schools in our poorest urban areas is shameful. And I also know that from sharecropping onward, our country has a bad history of offering poor African-Americans fake versions of success, one false promise after another, meant only to enrich those already steeped in privilege.
Should we be addressing the obstacles that stand between poor blacks and browns and anyone else, and a good education? We sure as hell should be. Do the Common Core Standards do that? Do rich kids with no training wandering into classroom for a year or two do that? Do charter schools erected in the lot where neighborhood schools have been bulldozed do that? Does the insistence that poverty and its effects are just excuses that will not be accepted (but will instead be punished) do that? No. No, they do not.
When reformers say that education is the civil rights issue of our time, they are telling the truth. Everything that comes after that statement, however, is a lie.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Tests for Choice Schools
There as been a flap going on in the conservative edu-bloggoverse about testing and transparency for what Jay P. Greene and folks from his market-loving corner of the eduspectrum like to call "choice schools."
Apparently it has just started to occur to some folks (starting most notably with those dancing fools at Fordham Institute) that when you take government money, it's likely to come with big honking strings attached. In other breaking news, the sun is expected to rise in the East tomorrow. I'm sad now that I didn't start edu-blogging years ago, because I've been telling my pro-voucher friends for years, "You do not want to do this. You hate the government, and as soon as you start taking their money, they will start telling you what you may or may not do. The government does not give anybody free money ever. You do NOT want to do this."
I live just up the road from Grove City College, a small, private liberal arts college that many of my friends attended. They made some small news in 1984 with Grove City v Bell. Grove City had always refused all direct federal aid to avoid all the federal strings, but the feds maintained that since they had students on campus who received federal aid, the school still had to abide by Title IX. In the college's defense, they were not particularly intent on enforcing gender discrimination and the government never claimed a single incident of that discrimination; the college mostly seemed to want to avoid having to open a new Office of Federal Paperwork Maintenance. The case resulted in a sort of split decision-- Grove City would have to comply, but only in the financial aid department, and not the school as a whole.
Until 1987, when the feds passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, which plugged the hole that Grove City had squeaked through.
The moral of the story-- if you want the government to hand you tax dollars, expect paperwork, strings, and meddling bureaucrats to follow.
Which brings us back to our story. Fordham's observation that voucher and choice schools have some 'splainin' and testing and transparency to do, has started a conversation notable for its level of high dudgeon. You can find a look at this conversation (including Rick Hess's latest self-pretzelizations) over at Geauxteacher. I want to spend a few words on Jay P. Greene's argument.
Jay P. Greene (who is not, as far as I know, a relative of mine, which is probably just as well because I think together we would make Thanksgiving at least a bit awkward) has recently discovered some important insights about the new waves of testing produced by the reformatorium.
The term choice school is used to distinguish between Greene's favored schools and old-school private school about which Greene previously wrote this
Existing private schools are not the voice of entrepreneurial innovation. They are the rump left behind by the crowding out of a real private school marketplace; they are niche providers who have found a way to make a cozy go of it in the nooks and crannies left behind by the state monopoly. They are protecting their turf against innovators just as much as the state monopoly.
So "choice schools" schools being pioneered by true entrepreneurs, who, I presume, are properly devoted to cashing in in the service sector, and not so much distracted by that whole educating thing. The market will tell them if they're getting it right.
Therefor, high stakes tests, which Greene has previously argued are extremely valuable and necessary for public schools, are simply not okay for choice schools. And in this piece, he focuses on three important arguments against testing choice schools.
1) The tests don't fully measure the benefits of these schools.
2) High stakes testing does not actually raise the student or school performance.
3) The argument that we should test anyway, despite #2, is silly.
Do those arguments look familiar to anybody?
In another column, Greene responds to Hess's suggestion that his argument is a startling yet magnificent monument to hypocrisy and double-think (I'm paraphrasing), given Greene's history of slamming public schools for low scores on these tests. His argument here is a bit more complex, but the heart of it is that choice schools don't need testing to tell how they're doing because the market will tell them.
In other words, the parents know how well the school is serving their students with out any stupid testing. Add that to your list of familiar arguments that Jay P. Greene now embraces. It's nice to see him embrace the arguments that we have been making for years in defense of our own schools, even if our own schools are not so choice. Welcome to the fight, Jay!
Apparently it has just started to occur to some folks (starting most notably with those dancing fools at Fordham Institute) that when you take government money, it's likely to come with big honking strings attached. In other breaking news, the sun is expected to rise in the East tomorrow. I'm sad now that I didn't start edu-blogging years ago, because I've been telling my pro-voucher friends for years, "You do not want to do this. You hate the government, and as soon as you start taking their money, they will start telling you what you may or may not do. The government does not give anybody free money ever. You do NOT want to do this."
I live just up the road from Grove City College, a small, private liberal arts college that many of my friends attended. They made some small news in 1984 with Grove City v Bell. Grove City had always refused all direct federal aid to avoid all the federal strings, but the feds maintained that since they had students on campus who received federal aid, the school still had to abide by Title IX. In the college's defense, they were not particularly intent on enforcing gender discrimination and the government never claimed a single incident of that discrimination; the college mostly seemed to want to avoid having to open a new Office of Federal Paperwork Maintenance. The case resulted in a sort of split decision-- Grove City would have to comply, but only in the financial aid department, and not the school as a whole.
Until 1987, when the feds passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, which plugged the hole that Grove City had squeaked through.
The moral of the story-- if you want the government to hand you tax dollars, expect paperwork, strings, and meddling bureaucrats to follow.
Which brings us back to our story. Fordham's observation that voucher and choice schools have some 'splainin' and testing and transparency to do, has started a conversation notable for its level of high dudgeon. You can find a look at this conversation (including Rick Hess's latest self-pretzelizations) over at Geauxteacher. I want to spend a few words on Jay P. Greene's argument.
Jay P. Greene (who is not, as far as I know, a relative of mine, which is probably just as well because I think together we would make Thanksgiving at least a bit awkward) has recently discovered some important insights about the new waves of testing produced by the reformatorium.
The term choice school is used to distinguish between Greene's favored schools and old-school private school about which Greene previously wrote this
Existing private schools are not the voice of entrepreneurial innovation. They are the rump left behind by the crowding out of a real private school marketplace; they are niche providers who have found a way to make a cozy go of it in the nooks and crannies left behind by the state monopoly. They are protecting their turf against innovators just as much as the state monopoly.
So "choice schools" schools being pioneered by true entrepreneurs, who, I presume, are properly devoted to cashing in in the service sector, and not so much distracted by that whole educating thing. The market will tell them if they're getting it right.
Therefor, high stakes tests, which Greene has previously argued are extremely valuable and necessary for public schools, are simply not okay for choice schools. And in this piece, he focuses on three important arguments against testing choice schools.
1) The tests don't fully measure the benefits of these schools.
2) High stakes testing does not actually raise the student or school performance.
3) The argument that we should test anyway, despite #2, is silly.
Do those arguments look familiar to anybody?
In another column, Greene responds to Hess's suggestion that his argument is a startling yet magnificent monument to hypocrisy and double-think (I'm paraphrasing), given Greene's history of slamming public schools for low scores on these tests. His argument here is a bit more complex, but the heart of it is that choice schools don't need testing to tell how they're doing because the market will tell them.
In other words, the parents know how well the school is serving their students with out any stupid testing. Add that to your list of familiar arguments that Jay P. Greene now embraces. It's nice to see him embrace the arguments that we have been making for years in defense of our own schools, even if our own schools are not so choice. Welcome to the fight, Jay!
Sunday, January 19, 2014
A Question for CCSS Fans
There are teachers who like the CCSS. I try not to judge-- it's a long journey from hope to crankiness, and we all have to travel it in our own way in our own time. But when I encounter someone, whether in bloggosphere, facebookland, or meatworld, and I hear about how CCSS has really freed them up to do awesome new teachery things, I have just one question I want to ask:
What are you able to do now in a classroom that you could not do before CCSS?
See, this is one of the things I don't get. Were teachers seriously sitting in their rooms thinking, "Yes, I would like to dig deeper and work further into this reading material, but darn it, without some federal standards telling me to do it, I just can't"? Were there teachers who really wanted to push the envelope of education, but without some vaguely-worded bureaucratic edu-documents they just couldn't do it?
When someone tells me about the educational stuff I can now go ahead and do in my classroom, the close reading, the extensive writing, the deeper responses, the [fill in your favorite educational activity here], I can only respond, "What the heck do you think I've been doing for all these years?"
That is one of the truly insulting parts of CCSS-- some amateur shows up to tell me how to do something that i already do. "Hey, you could like, you know, have your students use evidence and facts and stuff when they are trying to prove a point?" Can I? Oh, can I? What a genius idea, because previously I just had them smear a few dead bugs on the paper and draw arrows to where the signs in the insect entrails supported their thesis statement! Thank you, oh thank you, for showing me how to do this!!
I'm lucky to be teaching high school English. If I were an elementary math teacher, CCSS would in fact be telling me to do things I never did before. And CCSS leaves out giant chunks of stuff that we all know are best practices. Generally, CCSS is about as freeing as a straightjacket. But if you are going to tell me that CCSS freed you up, liberated you, made it possible for you to be a better teacher than you ever were before, I have just one question:
What are you able to do now in a classroom that you could not do before CCSS?
What are you able to do now in a classroom that you could not do before CCSS?
See, this is one of the things I don't get. Were teachers seriously sitting in their rooms thinking, "Yes, I would like to dig deeper and work further into this reading material, but darn it, without some federal standards telling me to do it, I just can't"? Were there teachers who really wanted to push the envelope of education, but without some vaguely-worded bureaucratic edu-documents they just couldn't do it?
When someone tells me about the educational stuff I can now go ahead and do in my classroom, the close reading, the extensive writing, the deeper responses, the [fill in your favorite educational activity here], I can only respond, "What the heck do you think I've been doing for all these years?"
That is one of the truly insulting parts of CCSS-- some amateur shows up to tell me how to do something that i already do. "Hey, you could like, you know, have your students use evidence and facts and stuff when they are trying to prove a point?" Can I? Oh, can I? What a genius idea, because previously I just had them smear a few dead bugs on the paper and draw arrows to where the signs in the insect entrails supported their thesis statement! Thank you, oh thank you, for showing me how to do this!!
I'm lucky to be teaching high school English. If I were an elementary math teacher, CCSS would in fact be telling me to do things I never did before. And CCSS leaves out giant chunks of stuff that we all know are best practices. Generally, CCSS is about as freeing as a straightjacket. But if you are going to tell me that CCSS freed you up, liberated you, made it possible for you to be a better teacher than you ever were before, I have just one question:
What are you able to do now in a classroom that you could not do before CCSS?
Van Roekel Needs Our Help
Mercedes Schneider has put out the call to assist the sadly confused Dennis Van Roekel. In an EdWeek article, Van Roekel is quoted here:
"When I sit on panels and someone chastises us for supporting the common core, I always ask: 'Are there specific things you believe should not be there?' I never get an answer," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said. "Second, I ask, "What's missing?' I don't get an answer. And the third thing I ask is, 'What is the alternative? What do you want? Standards all over the ballpark, tests all over the ballpark?' "
In point of fact, Van Roekel continued, "the Common Core State Standards are our best guess of what students need to know to be successful, whether they choose college or careers. If someone has a better answer than that, I want to see it."
I'm ashamed to admit that Van Roekel is my president, but I'll be happy to offer my assistance here. Let me try to answer some of his questions.
What is the alternative?
When I teach logical fallacies, we call this a "complex question." In the sales world it's called "assuming the sale." Either way, it is (and has been) the most odious part of DVR's rhetorical strategy. Because "what's the alternative" assumes that we need one.
It tacitly accepts the reformatorium assumption that US public ed is a hodge-podged mess of incompetent educators who don't know what they are doing and who desperately need guidance and direction. What I would expect from my union president is something along the lines of, "Hey! My members are doing great work!" and NOT "Yeah, I need something to help these poor dopes that I'm president of."
This question, and the assumptions imbedded in it, skip over one hugely massively crucial point. The people who insist we must have CCSS have not offered one shred of evidence that national standards-- not just CCSS but ANY national standards-- work. Nothing. I get that from up on Mount DC, things would look neater and it would be a lot easier to run a national school district if everybody were on the same page. But that is not about providing the best possible education for every student in America; it's about providing a better management experience for government bureaucrats.
This is like having a doctor say, "Well, since your headaches are so bad, I guess we could take out your spleen." And when you protest that you don't want your spleen removed, the doctor says, "Well, what do you want me to take out instead. It's just a hodgepodge of organs in there. Which one do you want removed." And then he can tell you that this is his best guess, and in a decade or so we'll see if it pays off.
So, DVR, this question is void. The burden is not on me to provide an alternative national standards program. The burden is on you to prove to me that this national standards program (or ANY such program) would be beneficial. And that will require more than just calling CCSS your "best guess."
Are there specific things you believe should not be there?
With my big picture rant out of the way, I can move on to other questions. I'm going to limit my response here, because I don't want to break the internet, and hope that other bloggers take up Schneider's call. Let's just focus on two standards from W.9-10.3, the narrative writing cluster.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.3a Engage and orient the reader by setting out a problem, situation, or observation, establishing one or multiple point(s) of view, and introducing a narrator and/or characters; create a smooth progression of experiences or events.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.3e Provide a conclusion that follows from and reflects on what is experienced, observed, or resolved over the course of the narrative.
These are fine standards if you want to teach sophomores to writer Aesop's fables. They are typical of the language assumptions built into CCSS-- that there is one right way to do writing. Here the assumption is that narrative always flows exactly according to the tried-and-true plot curve, with exposition in the front and some sort of denouement in the back.
Like many of the reading and writing standards, it presents a curious disconnect because although we're touting these as 21st Century standards, in this narrative writing unit, Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky get an A, and William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemmingway flunk.
The narrative writing standards need to be yanked and rewritten entirely.
What's missing?
Again, I don't want to break the internet. Let me pick one specific item and one global issue.
The literature standards in grades 9-12 complete ignore any study of the cultural context or background from which the literature emerges. This fits with CCSS ties to a twisted version of Close Reading, a vision of literature that exists in a cultural vacuum. In this world, we are supposed to read "A Modest Proposal" without knowing why Swift would suggest such terrible things, read The Great Gatsby with no knowledge of the 1920s, read Animal Farm without hearing about the Bolshevik Revolution, and read the Gettysburg Address without talking about Lincoln or the Civil War. (In short, we are to read all literature as if it's practice for cold reading excerpts on a standardized test).
In this respect, the reading standards are grossly inadequate. And the need to "fix" them underlines the global issue.
There is no review process, no revision process, no process whatsoever to revise or improve the standards.
The strategic planning process employed by both local school districts and multi-national corporations, includes a review process, a means by which the stakeholders periodically take the document out and assess how well it's working. No company can earn an ISO 9-Whateverwe'reuptonow certification without it.
CCSS has nothing. No feedback process, no number to call and say, "Hey, about this one standard..." Viewed as a product, CCSS has the worst customer service ever, and no quality assurance process at all. There is no mechanism for feedback, no process for assessment of the standards. Just the CCSS, sealed in copyright-cemented amber, to sit unchanged and unchangeable (save the meager 15% we're all "allowed" to "add") and defended to the death by its corporate owners.
At a local manufacturing firm, there is a process by which guys on the assembly floor can go back to the engineering department and say, "Hey, this one thing you drew? When it come time to put it together, I think you need to look at how this works out." In fact, there's a process by which the engineers go to the assembly floor and ask them. That's how they've stayed at the top of their particular industry.
But there is no process for improving or fine-tuning the CCSS. And that is a huge thing to be missing.
I hope this answers your questions, at least a bit. I hope other bloggers will be along to add some more. And if you aren't getting this sort of information whenever you sit on panels, I suggest you get on line and look at the many well-researched, well-written, well-thought out blogs that are addressing all of these questions every day. If you really want to find out what teachers are thinking about these questions, I bet you could find out without too much trouble.
"When I sit on panels and someone chastises us for supporting the common core, I always ask: 'Are there specific things you believe should not be there?' I never get an answer," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said. "Second, I ask, "What's missing?' I don't get an answer. And the third thing I ask is, 'What is the alternative? What do you want? Standards all over the ballpark, tests all over the ballpark?' "
In point of fact, Van Roekel continued, "the Common Core State Standards are our best guess of what students need to know to be successful, whether they choose college or careers. If someone has a better answer than that, I want to see it."
I'm ashamed to admit that Van Roekel is my president, but I'll be happy to offer my assistance here. Let me try to answer some of his questions.
What is the alternative?
When I teach logical fallacies, we call this a "complex question." In the sales world it's called "assuming the sale." Either way, it is (and has been) the most odious part of DVR's rhetorical strategy. Because "what's the alternative" assumes that we need one.
It tacitly accepts the reformatorium assumption that US public ed is a hodge-podged mess of incompetent educators who don't know what they are doing and who desperately need guidance and direction. What I would expect from my union president is something along the lines of, "Hey! My members are doing great work!" and NOT "Yeah, I need something to help these poor dopes that I'm president of."
This question, and the assumptions imbedded in it, skip over one hugely massively crucial point. The people who insist we must have CCSS have not offered one shred of evidence that national standards-- not just CCSS but ANY national standards-- work. Nothing. I get that from up on Mount DC, things would look neater and it would be a lot easier to run a national school district if everybody were on the same page. But that is not about providing the best possible education for every student in America; it's about providing a better management experience for government bureaucrats.
This is like having a doctor say, "Well, since your headaches are so bad, I guess we could take out your spleen." And when you protest that you don't want your spleen removed, the doctor says, "Well, what do you want me to take out instead. It's just a hodgepodge of organs in there. Which one do you want removed." And then he can tell you that this is his best guess, and in a decade or so we'll see if it pays off.
So, DVR, this question is void. The burden is not on me to provide an alternative national standards program. The burden is on you to prove to me that this national standards program (or ANY such program) would be beneficial. And that will require more than just calling CCSS your "best guess."
Are there specific things you believe should not be there?
With my big picture rant out of the way, I can move on to other questions. I'm going to limit my response here, because I don't want to break the internet, and hope that other bloggers take up Schneider's call. Let's just focus on two standards from W.9-10.3, the narrative writing cluster.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.3a Engage and orient the reader by setting out a problem, situation, or observation, establishing one or multiple point(s) of view, and introducing a narrator and/or characters; create a smooth progression of experiences or events.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.3e Provide a conclusion that follows from and reflects on what is experienced, observed, or resolved over the course of the narrative.
These are fine standards if you want to teach sophomores to writer Aesop's fables. They are typical of the language assumptions built into CCSS-- that there is one right way to do writing. Here the assumption is that narrative always flows exactly according to the tried-and-true plot curve, with exposition in the front and some sort of denouement in the back.
Like many of the reading and writing standards, it presents a curious disconnect because although we're touting these as 21st Century standards, in this narrative writing unit, Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky get an A, and William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemmingway flunk.
The narrative writing standards need to be yanked and rewritten entirely.
What's missing?
Again, I don't want to break the internet. Let me pick one specific item and one global issue.
The literature standards in grades 9-12 complete ignore any study of the cultural context or background from which the literature emerges. This fits with CCSS ties to a twisted version of Close Reading, a vision of literature that exists in a cultural vacuum. In this world, we are supposed to read "A Modest Proposal" without knowing why Swift would suggest such terrible things, read The Great Gatsby with no knowledge of the 1920s, read Animal Farm without hearing about the Bolshevik Revolution, and read the Gettysburg Address without talking about Lincoln or the Civil War. (In short, we are to read all literature as if it's practice for cold reading excerpts on a standardized test).
In this respect, the reading standards are grossly inadequate. And the need to "fix" them underlines the global issue.
There is no review process, no revision process, no process whatsoever to revise or improve the standards.
The strategic planning process employed by both local school districts and multi-national corporations, includes a review process, a means by which the stakeholders periodically take the document out and assess how well it's working. No company can earn an ISO 9-Whateverwe'reuptonow certification without it.
CCSS has nothing. No feedback process, no number to call and say, "Hey, about this one standard..." Viewed as a product, CCSS has the worst customer service ever, and no quality assurance process at all. There is no mechanism for feedback, no process for assessment of the standards. Just the CCSS, sealed in copyright-cemented amber, to sit unchanged and unchangeable (save the meager 15% we're all "allowed" to "add") and defended to the death by its corporate owners.
At a local manufacturing firm, there is a process by which guys on the assembly floor can go back to the engineering department and say, "Hey, this one thing you drew? When it come time to put it together, I think you need to look at how this works out." In fact, there's a process by which the engineers go to the assembly floor and ask them. That's how they've stayed at the top of their particular industry.
But there is no process for improving or fine-tuning the CCSS. And that is a huge thing to be missing.
I hope this answers your questions, at least a bit. I hope other bloggers will be along to add some more. And if you aren't getting this sort of information whenever you sit on panels, I suggest you get on line and look at the many well-researched, well-written, well-thought out blogs that are addressing all of these questions every day. If you really want to find out what teachers are thinking about these questions, I bet you could find out without too much trouble.
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