Vouchers, Non-Schools & Second Homes

We're about to kick off school choice week, a week meant to help market private schools celebrate the awesomely swell things school vouchers have done for the US education system, and many of us in the bloggosphere are sharing our own teacher perspectives on what vouchers have done to meant to us.

In PA we mostly don't have a voucher system. Okay, there have been ongoing voucher shenanigans in the Republic of Philadelphia with the DOJ on one side and charters on another and Eric Cantor, champion of Keeping the Federal Gummint Out Of Local matters, on another, but the school business there is its own special animal. In the rest of Pennsylvania (or as those of us who live there call it, "Pennsylvania"), we don't have a traditional voucher program. Except--

Except for cyber schools. Any PA student can drop out of his actual school and sign up for a cyber school, and his home district will be forced to fork over his per-capita $$ (around 10K on average for non-special students, about twice that for special needs students). So when it comes to cyber schools, PA is operating a voucher system in everything but name.

This system has been around for a while. There may be some data, but for reasons I'll get to, I'm not even going to bother looking it up. I do know how the system looks on the ground for the teachers I know.

Here are some of the students served by cybers in PA:

1) A student with a set of individual circumstances and needs that are better met by a cyber school situation than by the bricks-and-mortar school.

2) A student whose parents are tired of paying truancy fines.

3) A student who is tired of all that stupid homework and having to pay attention and taking tests.

4) A student who wants to be free to pursue his own muse, without the terrible constrictions of schedule and other peoples' demands.

5) A student who has trouble getting along with other students.

The first type of student is the reason that cybers should absolutely NOT be wiped from the face of the earth. He will benefit from cyber school greatly, finish school, and earn a degree. Cyber schools are a brilliant and valuable resource for this student. I don't want to minimize that value for a second.

All the rest of these students will be back next year, one year behind. Whose records they hurt will depend on a fun side-effect of the system-- periodically people in guidance offices will sit down at their computers and try to fend cyber attempts to pawn off failing students before they "count." It's a sort of reverse ebay auction where the loser has to count Johnny McCyberfail against their enrollment/success/graduation numbers.

So what do I think about the effect of voucher schools? The free market competition is supposed to make everybody raise their game. Is that working? In a word, no.

Cybervouchers in PA have realized my worst nightmare about what cybers would mean, while providing the proof of the following equation:

Mandatory purchase of X + people who don't want X = large market for bad versions of X.

If Congress passed a law requiring every household to own a coffeemaker, even the people who hate coffee, there would instantly be a huge market for coffee makers that surfed the net and grilled cheese sandwiches and played video games, but just barely made bad coffee (just enough to meet federal requirements).                                   

There is a fair-sized market share of people who don't really want to go to school, or who want to go but not have to work much, or who want to spend the whole week in church, or who want to just play ball, or who want to go for an hour in the afternoon. Choice proponents will argue that public schools are failing to effectively woo these customers. But just as cable channels learned that survival came not from the pursuit of excellence, but by a rush to the lowest common denominator, vouchers open the door to operators who can use lots of appeals other than, "We'll educate you real good." Schools are poorly positioned to compete with day spas for students who would rather not crack a book.

And every one of those non-schools will take money away from public schools. The other thing we've learned in PA is that a poorly regulated voucher system can suck the blood right out of local schools. In my own district, we lost around $800K to send 72 students to cyber school in the same year that we closed two elementary schools to try to realize savings of, you guessed it, around $800K.

Choice advocates have used a wide array of marketing talking points over the year. Currently we seem to favor the notion that by competing, choice schools are really creating --well, we could call it evolutionary pressure if we believed in evolution-- for public schools to get better. That's just nuts, and not just because voucher schools play by different rules on a different field with hand-picked students.

Voucher systems promise that we can run multiple school systems for the exact same money that we previously used to run one system. That's like saying, "Hey, our household budget is getting a little tight. We'd better buy a second house."

So happy school choice week. As we're bombarded by school choice propaganda this week, just hold your nose and think about the day all these school profiteers end their education tourism and move on to their next money-making scheme. It can't come too soon.

Here Comes Efficacy!

I'm not sure who injected "rigor" into the education conversation in this country, but there can be no doubt who decided that we will now be talking about "efficacy"-- Pearson has made the term the centerpiece of their newest corporate initiative. And they've put a ton of their corporate information about the efficacy initiative on line where we all can get a look.

It's fascinating and rather involved reading. Michael Feldstein at e-literate has a great examination of the whole package; it's lengthy but worth the read. Feldstein breaks down much of the impetus behind the movement and encourages us not to jump to conclusions that Pearson is Darth Vadering things up, the better to see what they've really gotten right and wrong with this.

I went into the site looking for one simple answer-- what exactly does Pearson (and therefor, eventually everyone who deals with them) mean by "efficacy"?

Pearson wrote the book on efficacy, and the book is entitled "The Incomplete Guide To Delivering Learning Outcomes." The book includes a chapter entitled "What is efficacy?" and it is that chapter that I'm going to break down for you. The chapter is about ten pages long, so as I tell my students right before I cover the history of The Great European War in fifteen minutes, I may cut a few corners.

Pearson borrowed "efficacy" from the pharmaceuticals industry, specifically as it relates to "medical interventions" being proven through "systematic trials." They identify it as an "aspiration we intend to work toward," which I kind of wish it weren't because now I'm wondering how that would work. Will we have to form whole new reading groups and now instead of bluebirds and robins we will have white rats and placebos? I know there are lots of ethical safeguards and protections built into medical research, which is itself terrifically important. But the education = health care analogy is not one that I think holds up; still, I'll save that for another day and not wander off into the weeds before we're even to our second paragraph of this thing.

Here's our definition: An education product has efficacy if it has a "measurable impact on improving people's lives through learning."

They go on to explain. It's not enough that a student pass a test-- he has to experience some actual positive improvement in his life.

Pearson realizes this is a high standard, but inspired by the medical profession, they want to shoot even higher. After all some patients keep coming back (imagine) and some doctors are "incentivized" to order lots of procedures, because $$. And here we introduce one of the central shifts involved in emphasizing efficacy-- replacing focus on inputs with attention to outputs.

And then, charmingly, they confess to the hopelessness of their vision. Emphasizing outcomes requires tests we don't have and agreement on the subjective qualities of excellence, which we'll never have. But since all of that is off in the future, in the meantime we'll just have to rely on tests and graduation rates and all the same old baloney, while in the meantime argle-blargle with partners blah blah blah toward a bold vision of brighter blerg.

Next up: the Three Factors of Efficacy! They are

1) The student(s) and his/her-their incumbent level of motivation. (I'm giving them a bonus point for working "incumbent" in there)

2) The teacher and/or the technology with his/her/its capacity to make an impact. (Emphasis mine. Just in case you were worried that Pearson thought we couldn't be replaced.)

3) The interaction or relationship between them.

And as an add-on bonus, we also recognize that time on task matters as well.

"If this mix is right, learning should happen." That's a quote. So, if these things are present, six-year-olds will learn quantum physics and Shakespeare, I guess. Also, pay attention to the research (and they name check John Hattie). Leaders of schools, universities or systems (?) are the carburetors of education, properly mixing the fuel for the efficacy engine. PISA scores are cited as a useful tool, somehow.

"The idea of efficacy has a lot of support across Pearson" which I guess is how you talk about these things when you are a small corporate nation unto yourself. But this Framework of Efficacy section is interesting because it's more about how product groups within Pearson will now jockey for position.

It's a puzzler. How do we benchmark products without a "neat mathematical formula that spat out numbers"? If we had been collecting data about lifelong effects of our stuff, we'd be halfway there, but only a few divisions within the company were thinking that way. We've developed this framework based on Michael's work evaluating government programs back when he worked at 10 Downing.

The framework for evaluating very diverse products had to 1) Be constructive and practical 2) Be forward-looking and 3) Enable comparison. And there's a cool chart about mapping/evaluating outcomes, evidence, planning & implementation, and capacity to deliver. And the chapter finishes up with a look at each of these four areas.

I have to echo Michael Feldstein here-- it's kind of extraordinary that here on line we can see how Pearson is going to manage themselves and how, exactly, they will judge their various product groups. Anyway, here are the four subsections:

Goals. You remember Outcome Based Education.Apparently it's now in-house for Pearson. Tell management not just your sales goals, but what outcomes your product will create for the learners. We frankly admit that meeting this standard has been hard for some managers of pre-existing products. Yup. Pearson is here admitting that some product groups have a hard time explaining what a learner would get out using Pearson's product.

Evidence. Can you find a way to prove your stated goals have been achieved? Look at the research. And since there's not a lot of good research out there, Pearson's research division is going to focus on the parts of the education mystery that we keep not having answers to. We need more data so we can create programs with deliverable learner outcomes.

Planning. Pretty self-evident. How are you going to get this made and sold?

Capacity. This part is either creepy or encouraging, depending on how much Pearson alarms you. It starts with the observation that it's no longer enough to drop off the materials you sold and wash your hands of it, saying, "Hey, we delivered perfectly good stuff. If they screwed it up, that's their problem."

Frankly, this is not news in many other industries. I am a yearbook adviser who works with Jostens Publishing, and like most yearbook companies, if you want the sales rep to come in on a regular basis and walk you through every part of the process, they will do it-- because they want you to feel successful with their program. (They will also stay away if you ask, which I find invaluable).

If you want the encouraging view, it's a picture of a Pearson rep in your school helping you succeed with their stuff. If you want the creepy view, it's a picture of a Pearson rep in your school acting like s/he's an administrator there. Those of you who have already had some variation of this experience know the other picture-- a publisher's rep in your building demonstrating his/her ignorance of how to work with students in a classroom.

There's a rosy conclusion about how this new path for business leaders within Pearson will stride together into a great future of efficacy.

I don't think it's all bad news. Imagine, for instance, if this framework had been applied to the creation and implementation of CCSS? And the notion that I should be able to ask a Pearson rep, "So what how will my student actually benefit from this in his life, and how do you know that?" is kind of exhilarating. Yes, they may not be able to tell me, but if they get to pretend this is their corporate policy, I get to act like I expect them to follow it.

Still, it clearly doesn't address any of Pearson's terminally mistaken assumptions about how teaching actually works or the scary anti-wisdom of Pearson's one-world view. I'm not ready to cheer for Pearson's next onslaught, but I appreciate their sharing their plans for it.

#AskArne & Spleen Theater

#AskArne is a video series on youtube that features Arne Duncan spewing baloney answering questions from theoretical teachers and other interested folks. It generally features the sort of straight shooting we've learned to expect from the USDOE, but the newly released "The Role of Private Funds and Interests in Education" could be used to fertilze all the fields in Kansas.

I am not going to be the first or last blogger to take a look at this (in fact, it looks like Anthony Cody and I were typing at the same time, and his version is much more grown-up and facty)  but the point of this blog is me to vent my spleen before I end up with little blown-up spleen parts all over my insides, so I am going to break this down anyway. I watch with the captions on and sound off because I think you get better face and body language reads. Also, I get hives listening to Arne's voice. I'll be using the closed captions as my transcript, so if somebody has bollixed that up, the bollixing will be reflected here.

This may be the toughest seven minutes I've ever watched my way through, but here we go...

Opening logo. I never really noticed before, but what the hell is that thing at the bottom of the tree? A flying snake wearing a beret?

Hey! It's Joiselle Cunningham and Lisa Clarke, teaching fellows from NYC and Washington state. "That means we are teachers on leave from our positions, bringing teacher perspectives to the Department." Oh, honey. I hope you do better work back in your classroom. They are standing at the National Library of Education, a thing I did not realize existed.

They're going to talk about private interests, and they cross fade into thanking Arne for taking the time to talk to them at this arranged interview that they were assigned by his office to conduct. This canned note of acting like he's a gracious guest instead of the ringmaster hits a nice, full false note right off the bat. Arne is sitting at a library table with the ladies in just-a-shirt, as if he's a Regular Guy and not a Very Rich Guy who likes to hang with Extremely Rich Guys.

So Lisa is going to ask the first question. And we leap right into it, asking if corporate-based philanthropists are playing too heavy a role in public education and if there's a corporate agenda at the Department of Education. This is a question she's "heard teachers asking" and the slight smirk that accompanies it suggests that the question reminds her of when her daughter asked if there was a monster in the closet. What I'm seeing is, "Please, Arne, calm the foolish fears of these silly people."

Arne is a good student who dutifully works important words from the prompt into the first sentence of his response. But as for that influence, "Nothing could be further from the truth." Not for the last time, I must applaud the special effects of the film. You cannot see his nose grow at all. "We listen to everybody," he says, and then proceeds to list a bunch of everybody's who are all the types of groups that cynics might call corporate-based philanthropy. "We try and spend a lot of time, "he continues incorrectly (it's "try TO spend"), "with teachers, listening to students, listening to community members." It's at this point that I start talking back to the screen. "Try harder, Arne."I say. My spleen is mollified. "A number of really important decisions we have made recently have been based on those conversations" he says, and then sticks the landing on the talking point about moving away from zero tolerance.

"Arne, let's stay on this for a second," says Joiselle, and I think it's cute the way she pretends to be controlling the flow of this conversation with her patron and boss. Then I hear "as we talk to teachers around the country" and I am momentarily wondering when the heck THAT happened. Was there a USDOE listening tour? Because I'm thinking that would be almost as much fun as a John King CCSS pep rally. Anyway, she's heard somewhere (everywhere?) that there's concern about private corporations and philanthropists that are involved in public education. What is the role of private dollars in public education? Which is a nice phrase, so kudos, uncredited writer.

"Sadly, education is underinvested in the vast majority of places this country." And then he's on to a list of things that schools need money for but I am busy brain-goggling. Wait! What? Because it appears that he is

A) admitting that schools are underfunded and therefor lacking in resources, which is funny, because in his blaming discussions of What's Wrong With Teachers and Schools and Teachers, this problem doesn't get much play  ("We should be amazed and proud that our teachers achieve so much success with so little help from us," said no Arne Duncan ever);

B) that when the government underfunds one of its agencies, the private sector should be picking up the slack. So, as roads and infrastructures crumble in PA, we should be getting corporations to pick up that tab. I myself am really looking forward to "The CIA, brought to you by Proctor and Gamble"

and C) that this private picking up of  public slack is not a civic duty or a contribution, but an investment, aka thing you put money into with the expectation of getting more money out of it.

In short (okay, not really) I'm pretty sure Duncan just said, "Come buy up our public education functions. They're going cheap and offer great ROI."

AND (bonus round) he said it in the process of proving that private dollars do NOT have undue influence on public education. Which I suppose could be true, because "undue" just means inappropriate and (anti-surprise) Duncan thinks "due" influence = "pretty damn much."

So now my spleen is singing "Ride of the Valkyrie" but Arne says that you have to have good smart partnerships and you don't want schools to be isolated from the community, and that's not entirely stupid, so my spleen subsides once again. Schools as community centers. Yes, that's swell too. For example--

BAM. We will now list Swell Things That Corporate Sponsors Have Done. GE Foundation. Ford Foundation helped with labor relations? Joyce Foundation helped with teacher evaluation stuff (and that has been a rousing success, cries my spleen) which comes in the same sentence as reducing gun violence in Chicago which I don't think is meant to be related to teacher evaluations, although who the hell knows these days. Now we'll spend a relatively huge chunk of time on P-Tech (sponsored by IBM).

Then Arne unleashes "Again, all of this should be determined at the local level, not by us." And my spleen is amazed at the special effects, because you can not actually see the room disappear under a giant tidal wave of bovine fecal matter.

That somehow leads directly to a new idea-- that with all of this unmet need, for teachers and schools to bar the door and say that all these people are bad somehow or have an agenda of hurting kids or hurting teachers is just-- well, that has not been his experience. So there you have it. Arne's decision here is completely data-driven by one piece of data-- his experience. And schools need money, and these rich guys have money, so what else do we need to know anyway?

New question. We name check a couple of other Teaching Fellows who heard a question about private interests and the new testing stuff. And my spleen is sad, because it knows this is an important question and it expects to hate the answer a lot. Anyway, Lisa is saying that some people claim the new assessments are just about making money, and could you, Arne, tell us what you think about that, because we, as teaching fellows working here at the USDOE as well as being functioning literate beings on planet earth for the past several years, have no idea what Arne Duncan might say about the role of corporate interests when it comes to testing. And Lisa makes a pouty face, like she is sad to even have to bother this Great Guy with such a mean-spirited inquiry. Seriously. My spleen thinks this is the worst infomercial ever.

Arne thinks that's an interesting question. He thinks the facts don't quite back up the worry and skepticism (so, only mostly back it up?) and here comes what I believe is an actual shiny new talking point. Here's the pitch-- schools have been giving oh-so-many tests anyway, and they were certainly made by companies, and golly, THAT was certainly expensive. But now we've got these consortia that can get those tests for you bulk, and THAT has to be cheaper (because the government always gets stuff for the best price) and economies of scale, dontchaknow. And you'll be glad to know that the test developers are working to some up with something that goes way beyond the bubble tests with critical thinking and writing, too. So yippee! More better tests! Saving money, so we can pump the leftovers back into the classroom. My spleen wants to run over to the pentagon to get a $10,000 hammer to smack Arne in the head.

New question-- Do states have a choice, Arne, with all this? And we are going to pretend that "this" means "tests." At this point my spleen begins to suspect that Pearson shot Arne's face up with a 50-gallon drum of Botox because how else could he get through all this without laughing, but it seems to be wearing off because he finds parts of this answer hilarious, like explaining that states can be part of one or both of the consortia or make their own tests out of everyday objects found around the house. But--again-- don't 50 states have more purchasing power together and also don't we want to be able to compare things all across the country and my spleen and I are vocal again, hollering, "Yes, Arne, I hardly know how to plan my lessons without knowing what the kids in fifth period English out in Medicine Hat, Wyoming, are doing!" Arne thinks states are free to do different things if they want to act like damn fools.

New question-- When guys like Bill Gates or Eli Broad start throwing money around, does that buy them a seat at the table? Joiselle asks this like she's in a hurry to get to the end of the question because it's a dumb question and he needs to kill it with fire. I unkindly suggest that the question is backward and would rather ask what Arne could do to get the USDOE a seat at Gates and Broad's table, but I can see I am living in disappointment here.

Arne says he has great respect for them and appreciates all their money. He smiles like he remembers the time they took him out for smoothies and let him lick their spoons. But no, they don't have a seat at the table. "You guys are the table," says Arne, and I think that's supposed to mean "You guys who are teachers" and not "You guys who are my departmental prop/lackeys" but it doesn't matter because my spleen just exploded in one brightflash of raging incredulity.

Teacher Lisa shares that she knows Gates did some work with teacher leadership stuff and so it's complicated, and I spleenlessly yell that, no, it's not complicated at all, but she goes on to say she'd really like us to engage each other and I'm thinking, yes, because after the many many many many many many many many invitations teachers have received to be part of the CCSSreformy movement, we all just keep turning them down and refusing to offer any insights at all, and she is smiling a little bit like she can't believe she's saying this rotting raccoon carcass of a talking point either, but she'd like this conversation to continue, perhaps on twitter because she heard that worked really well for Michelle Rhee the other day, so let's use #AskArne to do that. And then she thanks Arne for showing up to this PR moment that he ordered, and we're on to credits and I am picking up pieces of my spleen from around the room.

You should not watch this. Nobody should. It is one of the most cynical reality-impaired dog-and-pony-with-a-paper-cone-pretending-to-be-a-unicorn shows ever concocted, and now I have to go lie down.

My NEA Dues at Work-- for USDOE

This week, the NEA proudly announced the first round of recipients for its new Great Public Schools grant program, a program so awesome that it prompted the NEA to shake down its own members raise dues to help fund it. This is the greatest idea since sliced bread. Or since requiring condemned prisoners to buy the rope for their own nooses.

NEA delegates in Atlanta last year voted 54-46 percent (not exactly a landslide) to approve a dues hike for "a special fund to help support projects by state and local affiliates to improve teaching and learning." Turns out that means funding projects to support the spread of CCSS.

That is not me reading between the lines. Here's the NEA's description of the purpose of one grant: California Teachers Association (CTA) was awarded a $250,000 NEA Great Public Schools grant to ensure the successful implementation of the Common Core Standards (CCSS) in the California. (That's cut and paste; the original appears to have dropped a word). Virtually every single grant listed by the NEA is centered on the implementation of CCSS.

Illinois is going to train some CCSS trainers. Local school districts in Maryland will embark on full scale implementation of CCSS because "a key to success in implementing the CCSS, and ensure student success, is to provide teachers with support, training, and resources to assist in instruction." Ohio Education Association will use their grant to "strengthen educators' voices in school improvement while advocating for the effective implementation of Ohio's New Learning Standards" (a rose by any other name). The Massachusetts Teachers Association will engage teachers in helping shape the implementation of CCSS, particularly in helping define the policies around the effective measure of student achievement. And if they get to do that in any meaningful way, they can also open a grooming shop for sparkly unicorns.

Many of the grants are described in that fuzzy kind of bureaucratic arble-garble that would have earned you an F in lesson plan design back in that methods class that Arne Duncan thinks you barely passed. And many of them involve "partnering" with state DOE's or groups with nifty names like Public Education Business Coalition or TeachPlus. One grant is going to a uniServe office.

Only one mentions students. 25K went to Stadium View School in Hannepin County Juvenile Detention Center (Minnesota) for, among other things, publishing the work of students and placing it in the local library. All other grants are aimed at bureaucratic CCSS implementation.

Dennis Van Roekel's love for the CCSS is already well documented. Reporting on a January 23 forum in DC, Stephen Sawchuck quotes DVR, "We created campfires of excellence. What we need is a brushfire." It's an interesting choice of metaphor, and it makes me curious-- what does DVR imagine would be burned up in this brushfire? Who or what, exactly, is the brush? Because in the brushfire that is CCSS, I'm pretty sure we're immolating public school teachers and students. Personally, I would much rather hunker down around a campfire for some S-mores of scholarship.

Sawchuck notes that previous brushfire attempts have not really caught on. A panelist attributes that to the realities of trying to steer such a large organization. Well, yes. Particularly if you're trying to steer it in a direction that it doesn't want to go and which is not in the best interests of its members.

I've been a union president on the local level, and not in soft, easy times. I get that leading a teachers union is not unlike trying to herd cats made out of jello with a ten foot pole. People want to know what's going on, but they don't always want to pay attention. Some union members are like that person who walks in for the last ten minutes of the movie and wants you to explain everything that has happened so far.

It is absolutely necessary to get out ahead of them, to show some leadership, to say, "Look, follow me this way" and not just wait for them to choose a direction on their own. But it comes really seductive to start just viewing them as a faceless mass to be manipulated into whatever form you decide is best for them.

All the signs are there for the national leadership to read. The miles of angry responses on facebook pages and nea site articles. The shrinking membership rolls. The GPS site itself, which is like a cyber-ghost town, all set up to foster dynamic conversations between stakeholders but instead featuring a handful of posts here and there by shills assigned the thankless but not terribly time-consuming task of monitoring the community, like being the sheriff of Wolf Hole, Arizona.

Most of all, the gazillion words written by writers who have done the research, read the documents, heard the speeches, parsed the implications, watched the boots upon the ground, and generally collected all the evidence that tells us plainly that the current wave of reformy goodness is toxic to public school teachers. Careers are being crushed, students are being discarded, and a tradition of great public education is being dismantled for parts in this country, and in this most critical of times, NEA has decided to go to work for the feds.

I cannot think of any time, ever, in US history when a union or professional association took dues from its members in order to help the government implement a program intent on destroying the profession of its members. I am, frankly, flabbergasted. We cannot even call it being sold out anymore, because at least when you are sold out you don't pay for the sale yourself!

I would like to believe that when DVR's tenure as president ends this summer, that will mark a change, but I don't for a minute believe that he has single-handedly engineered the handover of NEA leadership to Arne Duncan. We NEA members had better start educating ourselves, now, about which of our leaders really work for the USDOE, the Gates Foundation and Pearson, and which of our leaders actually represent teachers.

In the meantime, I will mull over just how far I will let the NEA push me before I finally leave the union. It seems I'm angry at them most the time. I've calmed down enough to change the name of this piece. Originally, I was just going to call it "Bite me, NEA." I'm not sure I won't still use that title some time.

A Peek at CCSS 2.0

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.

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.

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.