Teachscape: Oh, The Humanity!

Poking around on line during another snow delay led me to the wonderland that is Teachscape.

Teachscape (for those who aren't already familiar) is one of those special places where the manufactured crisis in education meets the opportunity to make money from it. It is one of the limbs of the Gates-funded teacher-evaluation push, a path to that special tomorrow where there's a videocam in every classroom and teachers watch videos of other teachers so that they can develop their personal strengths as teachers by teaching the same way other teachers teach.

Teachscape offers training seminars and massive support for teacher evaluation frameworks (Wisconsin teachers, for instance, are learning what it means to relax and enjoy the loving embrace of teachscape in their evaluation process).

Mostly what one sees in cruising the site is that this is the corporate view of education writ large on a website. Teachscape is one more embodiment of the idea that schools can be run exactly like corporations. And while there is much to be learned about that viewpoint by paging through the site, I'm only on a snow delay today and not an actual cancellation, so let's just focus on one subsection. It's a tab on the main page, and it screams corporate louder than anything else, because on that main page you can click to Observation and Evaluation Management, Professional Learning or--

Talent Management. And when you click on THAT, you arrive at the section titled Human Capital Management.

The section starts by posing four scenarios that schools "needlessly" face. 1) A great teacher feels unrecognized and unsupported, so she leaves the profession. 2) A great principal retires and the district has to scramble find someone who will continue the work this leader started. 3) Students in a high-needs school need better teachers to help them make up their behindness. 4) "District administrators want to build accountability and task management into their strategic planning process and include progress reporting at all levels, but aren’t sure where to start." (I directly quoted #4 because it doesn't really translate into English).

But never fear--

With Teachscape’s human capital management solution, leading districts can proactively and strategically align resources and employee goals with overall objectives to plan for situations such as these so the district can be successful in meeting the needs of every one of its students.

Teachscape offers several products-- Teachscape Reflect, Learn and Advance. This is basically Teachscape Tall, Grand, and Venti. 

Reflect appears to offer guidance and help in evaluation and observation, aligned to your district goals. With Learn, we throw in lesson plans, a library of recorded teaching examples, and the video surveillance recording to build a local library. And with Venti we... well, we use all the tools in the other two systems plus some sort of rigorous fairy dust

to move to the next level of human capital management. This talent management system helps the district build organizational effectiveness by managing and developing employee skills, planning for succession in key positions, and assigning goals strategically to improve retention and advance the district’s objectives.

These programs are going to record, evaluate, measure, map and just generally micro-manage the hell out of your school's human capital. It will also strategically develop in-house talent, and when I connect several dots I get the feeling that we're once again assuming that teachers need a career path to advance into administrative or supervisory jobs because they couldn't possibly stay happy in a classroom role.

We can click on a research tab to see how all of this is supported by-- well, wait. We've got a link to some TNTP papers. Apparently Teachscape doesn't seem to know the difference between research and a literature search. Teachscape is the student in your class who writes "Coca-cola is proven to be a superior soft drink" and offers a research link to a Coke ad. So Teachscape fails on research and critical thinking skills. Will it surprise you to learn that elsewhere on the site, Gates Foundation papers are also cited?

I could provide more quotes, but they all read like the stuff above. It's clear that the closest anybody at Teachscape has ever been to a teacher is when photographing them in the wild. It's equally clear that when we want to improve teaching, the last people to consult are actual teachers. And it's clear that somewhere there are several failed companies missing their Human Resource department.

In fact, it's a good thing that "teach" is in the name, because nothing in the copy of the Human Capital Management materials would lead you to think that we were talking about schools or teaching or, least of all, places where young humans were sent to learn and grow as individuals. Teachscape defies satire because it is so ridiculously divorced from the real life activities and concerns of teachers or students or any other human beings that it seems like a joke all on its own. Except that it isn't. Wisconsin teachers, I am so sorry.

Evaluating That

For the past couple of days, touched off (as near as I can tell) by the actions of teachers during the recent Georgia Ice-mageddon, twitter has been flooded by the #evaluatethat hashtag.

If you haven't seen it, go look. What you find is a long list of ways in which teachers do work above and beyond the scope of simply preparing students for a test. A teacher bought a student's family a fan for their apartment during a heat wave. A teacher bough a young lady a prom gown. A teacher paid for a student's physical. Bought books. Took couple to their first restaurant. Bought a family food.

And beyond the looking after physical needs, there are all the emotional items on the list. Counseling students through grief, despair, failure, loss. And the affirmations of a teachers impact. Meeting former students. Getting notes from former students . One of the tweets that will likely stay with me longest-- the students suicide who left a note for family and for the teacher, saying you did make a difference, I just couldn't beat the drugs.

What's the value in the #evaluatethat tag? I don't think of it as a way to get the word out to the non-teaching public. Some of them already know this about us, and some of them won't ever believe it. Some will point out that lots of folks go above and beyond the call of duty, and they aren't wrong. Snow plow drivers, cops, clerks-- there are lots of people out there who do a little more than they have to. I love us, but for me, the gold standard of underpaid, overworked, underappreciated work with humans is still set by nurses.

Of course, part of the issue is the whole notion of "above and beyond." It is true, I guess, that many of these acts are above and beyond the current job description of "being a teacher" (or snowplow operator or nurse or etc). They do not, however, fall outside the job description of "being a decent human person."

It goes back to what's wrong with "college and career ready." Because it is not enough to be good at your job. You need to be good at life. You need to be good at being a human in this world, and that is so much more than a job.

I've maintained for years that teaching is a kind of guerilla warfare, that many of us are fighting in the underground, doing what we can in spite of the authorities. Under the current wave of reformy stuff, this is more true than ever. Education is occupied territory, and we are members of the resistance, not powerful enough to directly oppose the forces that have taken control of our home. Instead, we save who we can when we can, chip away at the occupiers, and work toward the day when we can send them packing.

In the meantime, we have to do what we can to stay in contact with the rest of the underground and remind ourselves what we represent, what we fight for. I don't think #evaluatethat will change much. I think people who are imagining that occupiers will slap their heads and say, "Yes, yes, I've been so blind" are kidding themselves. But for the rest of us, knowing that we are not alone, that other people get it, that other people are also standing up for what is best and brightest, that we are not crazy for thinking that we are in a classroom to help nurture and grow real human people and not to just collect data, read a script and do some test prep-- I think knowing that is golden. Evaluate that, indeed.

Top Down

There are many many many many MANY reasons that top down reformatorium programs are a bad idea. But lets just focus on one for a moment.

Years ago our school had to implement a new graduation project program. Our principal met this challenge by putting a bunch of staff in a room to thrash out the details of how the new program would work. We met and we talked and we talked and we met, and eventually hammered out a whole program for the graduation project.

But we ended up with more than a workable program. We also ended up with a room full of people who understood how the program was supposed to work.

Management training 101 says that you want to give people the illusion of involvement in the creation of a program so that you will also get buy-in. But when you create new programs or reforms from the bottom up, your program creation is also your program training, and that is worth its weight in gold.

Apologists for CCSS keep blaming the various issues on a bad rollout. If only the implementation hadn't been flawed, they say. we would be gamboling through fields of common core daisies. But implementing CCSS from the top down absolutely guaranteed that the rollout would be flawed. The messed-up implementation is not a bug; it's an unavoidable feature.

Top down implementation means that none of the people who actually have to implement the program have any idea of what the program is or how it's supposed to work. Everything has to be explained to everybody, and that's a long process, a process not unlike a long game of telephone.

CCSS has been even worse than the average top-down implementation because it is so jam-packed with its own jargon. Teachers are sitting through training where hours are being devoted simply to getting everyone in the room to use the proscribed definition of "rigor." Teachers are spending days in seminars about "unpacking" the standards themselves, which is a nice-sounding way of saying "trying to figure out what the hell all this gobbledygook is supposed to mean to an actual classroom teacher.":

With bottom-up reform, everyone has been in the room working on a shared language of shared expectations together. That understanding emerges organically while the details are hammered out. But top-down reform has to be passed down in its entirety, all the way down to the actual words being used. The program becomes like bad stereo directions that are passed down as a xerox of a xerox of a xerox ad infinitum, each one presented by someone who has his own maybe-faulty understanding of what he sees on the bad copy that's been handed to him.

If the most genius edu-whizes in the world came up with the best school reform system ever and tried to implement it this way, there would be tremendous problems. Start with a hackneyed mess of garbled muck like CCSS, and you are absolutely guaranteed a flawed implementation.

George Miller Still Doesn't Get It

Rep. George Miller is a forty-year veteran of Congress, has been ranking Democrat on the education committee, and was tagged by the National Journal as one of the seven most liberal members of the House of Rep. He was even on the ground floor of NCLB. He was elected in 1974, one of the "Watergate babies" who were going to help clean up DC. And he's helped push Head Start and early childhood ed. So if this guy doesn't get it, we must be in real trouble.

This guy doesn't get it.

Last week EdSource ran an interview with  Miller by Kathryn Baron.

Miller was an architect of NCLB, and Baron leads with his surprise that NCLB ever brought us to the land of high stakes teaching to the test. And then he went on to defend testing and accountability, saying that the most important part of the law was the requirement for districts to publish data on how well kids were doing.

"In this education system, if you aren't counted, you don't count," says Miller. You remember how in the first Jurassic Park the idea was that T-Rex could not see objects unless they moved? What we have here is a similar condition-- politicians and bureaucrats who can only see data, not human beings. If people aren't generating data, people suffering from this condition cannot see them.

Testing was intended as a way to measure schools’ progress based on how well their students scored and to show schools where they needed to make improvements. Instead, said Miller “the mission became about the test."

And now I want to shake Miller by the shoulders and ask, "What the hell did you think was going to happen??" But that is a recurring theme of this interview-- Miller requests that people smack themselves in the head with a hammer and then professes amazement that there are all these folks running around with hammer-shaped indents in their foreheads. Rep. Miller, you said it yourself-- if it isn't counted, it doesn't count. If nothing is counted but the test score, how do you expect schools to respond?

Miller was "ruffled" when school districts reacted poorly to NCLB's requirement that 100% of students be above average.  

“School districts and states came in, in the first year, and waved the white flag, and said, ‘We can never make the goal,’” recalled Miller. “Their proficiency was like 7 or 8 percent. I said, ‘Come back when you’re at 70 percent.’”

Miller must be a hoot in restaurants. "Yes, I know I ordered this steak well done, but I figured you'd check back with me when it was rare to see what I really wanted you to do."

Miller has stayed in the ed reform business. He's most recently been busy trying to broker a deal between the state of California and Arne Duncan over testing. Miller wants the state to use the Smarter Balance test in the spring to garner great data for schools.

“My position, I think, is that we should extract the data (from the Smarter Balanced field tests) that we can extract because it would be helpful. I think it would be helpful for teachers. If the kids in your classroom didn’t thrive, what would you change for next year?” Miller said. “And from what the people at Smarter Balanced say, they’ve developed a range of data that can be extracted, and supposedly, if this is a road test, you’ve got to bring something back to analyze.”

I'm flabbergasted. That quote shows not a shred of understanding of how tests, teaching, students or classrooms work. It's not that teachers don't ask what they need to change for next year-- every good teacher does that. But what teacher ever said, "After working face to face with my students, grading their papers, watching them in class, talking to them, and seeing the results, what I really need here is a standardized test that they took on just one day to tell me what's happening in my classroom."

Also, Rep Miller, when you're trying to decide how a service provider's work is affecting its customers, you might want to ask the customers rather than the corporation concerned about its multi-million dollar contract.

Miller likes CCSS, and sees it as just a way to track progress. Freshman year of college is too late to consider whether you're college ready or not. What's oddly interesting about Miller's view of reformy stuff is that he expresses it in terms of what the students need, while being surprised that the laws passed to force certain behaviors on schools have unintended consequences. But it's on the subject of teacher evaluation that Miller drops this bomb:

From the very beginning, this was a question of whether or not teachers wanted to be the architect of the system, or they just wanted to be the tenant.

Did I miss the meeting where teachers were invited to be the architects for ANY of this??? Did I miss the chapter in The Reform Saga where teachers walked away from the table, or refused to come to the table, or stole the tablecloth and silverware. Hell, did I miss the part where teachers were even allowed into the room to wait on the table??

The root source of much teacher opposition to evaluation under the current system has been precisely because we had NO opportunity to be the architects, meet the architects or even wave at the architects as they drove by on their way to the table.

Miller is retiring. After the ACA became law, he felt he had done everything he wanted to do. His retirement plans are unclear, but at the very least this interview is a warning for everyone who thinks electing liberal Democrats will improve the reformy climate in DC.

College Ready

One of the linchpins of proof among CCSS supporters is that Kids These Days are not ready for college. This is generally expressed in scholarly tones as "X% of college freshmen were in need of remediation" (and in more rhetorical tones as "OMGZZ!! The college freshmens are soooooo dumb that they need undumbification classes to be in the college!!") And this is proof that We Must Do Something, with "Something" defined as "slap CCSS into place."

Time for a lesson in metrics. This legendary unreadiness is usually expressed as "need remediation" which is turn is measured by "percentage of students taking remedial classes." Remember that.

This always sounds sciency because it comes out as number, but trying to pin down that number turns out to be a challenge. The National Center for Education Statistics has a paper that looks at those numbers for 1999-2000, 2003-2004, and 2007-2008, and while it breaks them down a variety of ways, the overall conclusion is that 1999-2000 was worse than either of the other years sampled, and all of the numbers hovered around the twenties, low or high. But this article from Chicagoland says that over a third of students entering college need remedial help, based on 2008 stats from the government-- same as the previous report. A Harvard professor looking at a 2003 study comes up with one third as well. The Inside Higher Ed Bridge to Nowhere report throws around a 30% number. And I would swear that I recently heard 46% tossed into the remediation soup as well. Most of these sources do not compare the current figures to any from the alleged golden age of non-remediation. So can I at least suggest that the numbers are "controversial" or "contested" or maybe even "pulled out of a variety of different orifices"?

I'm not a scholar in the field. But as a high school teacher I have a buttload of anecdotal evidence that might explain this trend if it in fact exists (which I will concede it very well might).

Explanation #1. The college admissions process.

We used to tell our students, "You need to take college prep classes and do well in them if you want to get into college." We still tell them that, but they laugh at us as if we had just told them that sasquatch will eat them if they don't do their homework.

They laugh because every one of them knows somebody who barely passed non-college prep classes who was still cheerfully accepted into a college. Because at least in PA the college-age market is shrinking dramatically, and colleges are suffering dire financial straights because they can't find enough parents to cut checks enough searchers for higher knowledge and wisdom.

So when a local college prof starts in on "How can you send us these kids" my reply is always, "Look at his courseload and his grades. We told you exactly what you were getting. You accepted him anyway."

Explanation #2 College fund raising.

Funny thing about remedial courses at most colleges. They don't count as credit toward graduation. You do have to pay for them, though. So the more times a college can convince Joe Freshman that he "must" take Remedial Composition or Math or Hygiene, the more extra money they can bank.

For at least a decade I've been hearing stories about perfectly capable students who were told they must take a remedial course. Every once in a while they say, "No, I don't" and it never hurts them a bit. But imagine how many impressionable freshmen, alone in a college office without parental backup or sufficient knowledge of the system, are not able to stand up for themselves.

So have colleges start giving away remedial course for free, just to help their students succeed. Check what the enrollment numbers are like then. At that point, you can get back to me. In the meantime, remedial coursework is a great moneymaker for cash-strapped colleges.

Explanation #3 Marketing

We've been telling everybody that they just have to get a college education no matter what. It has been great marketing. It has brought lots of young folks into the market who are probably not well-served by the market. Meanwhile, America needs welders. Mike Rowe has been doing brilliant work on this issue. Bottom line-- we should stop heavily recruiting people who are 250 pounds and 6'6" to become jockeys.

So I can believe that college readiness is, kind of, an issue. But you'll notice that none of my proposed causes can be addressed by a national one-size-fits-all top-down-imposed curriculum.

[Update: Let me correct this an omission, because I do know better-- in many fairly significant ways, the reform movement has made things worse. For instance, standardized test writing is an abomination and teaching it undoubtedly makes students less ready for college. Just so you know I know.]

Training Day- CCS, DOK, MOUSE

Today the state of Pennsylvania provided me with some CCSS training (well, not exactly, but we'll get to that). This blog post will probably be on the long side and perhaps not as entertaining, but for those of you who are wondering what some of this stuff looks like up close, let me give you a look. Today's training is

Depth of Knowledge through Performance Tasks (presented in partnership with the Common Core Insitute)

Training today involved about seventy teachers and administrators at the Intermediate Unit office (in PA, there are regional field offices for the PA DOE) in the Hemlock Room. Yes, just like the poison you drink if you're an ancient Greek philosopher who wants to kill himself. You can't make this stuff up.

Welcome

The IU lady, who never actually introduced herself nor wore a name tag, started things off with a pep talk for CCSS. "It's not as much about new content as it is new teaching," she said. "We've been going on an efficiency model." She observed that we would now be moving on to effectiveness, and that word reminded her of the new teacher evals in PA. What better way to start the day than a reminder that our professional evaluations are riding on this stuff.

She introduced Ed Heelifeld (my best phonetic rendering) who taught high school math for 12 years but is now a sales and service rep for Common Core Institute. "We help people implement the common core." So, "institute" here means "program sales company." It's a nice touch. I bet in retrospect Ray Kroc wishes he had started the "McDonalds Hamburger and Fries Institute."

Ed turns us over to the lead dog on this CCSS bobsled today-- Jill Stine.

Jill Stine

Jill Stine works for some combination of CCI and the Center for College and Career Readiness. She has a varied background in ed, ranging from teaching deaf classes at Camp Hill Prison to Title I reading to assistant principal. She worked with Bob Marzano in Florida implementing teacher evaluations. She's not shy-- I know all of the above because she told us. She described working with Marzano as "a fun time" in a tone suggesting it was contentious and that she knows not everyone loves her work.

It would be entertaining to describe her as a difficult, unpleasant human being with horns and foul breath, but she came across as fairly straightforward and likeable. She took questions, generally didn't evade, and was willing to engage with those of us who had issues with the program. A quick search suggested that she has occasionally been a bit too forthright in the past. She was reasonable and human, but unapologetically described herself as having "drunk the koolaid."

The First Thing I Did Not Expect

Stine's brief version of the CCSS origin story was a new one on me. In her story, the creators looked across all the state standards to see what standards they had in common. Then they asked if those standards were getting the job done. Then they overlaid another level of complexity to make them more better. Make of that what you will.


Rigor

I'm actually looking forward to the day that "efficacy" takes over. We had a long discussion about what rigor is and is not. She showed us that little bad animation cartoon where the Britishy principal grills the teacher about rigor. She shared the Barbara Blackburn definition of rigor. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas. I must conclude once again that "rigor" is either A) everything we all already knew was a good thing to do as a teacher, or B) magical fairy dust of learning.

I'm Starting To Understand Randi Weingarten

We began the pivot toward the actual point of the by re-affirming that how we teach should be how we assess. Don't do a project and then give a test-- use the project as the actual assessment. Not for the last time today, I could see that if you squint your eyes and look at the good parts of CCSS (what I like to call "things good teachers already do") it provides, all on its own, a pretty strong indictment of the high stakes testing program that is its conjoined twin.

But I can see how, close up, it might look like testing is somehow twisting CCSS all out of shape, and if you could just get the foot of testing off the neck of CCSS, the standards would spring back to life. Because frequently in the session you arrive at a variation on "Well, that would be swell-- except for the test that's coming." I contend that testing has not bent CCSS out of shape-- that IS it's shape. But I can see how, close up, you'd think otherwise. 

I suspect that this is part of the reason that the CCSS reformista package gives so many people gut-level cognitive dissonance even when they don't fully understand it. It's like a bad M C Escher drawing where segments try to be two mutually contradictory things at once. It can't all be true at the same time.

So anyway-- better assessments. Also, kids have changed. Remember that for later.

The Main Event Finally Arrives--Webb's Depth of Knowledge

You know, Bloom's Taxonomy was swell in its day. Nothing wrong with it. But its big weakness was that whole emphasis-on-the-verb thing. You can describe the color of a read ball, and you can describe how you would create a system for playing chess in zero gravity, and both use the verb "describe" but are clearly different levels of operation.

Norman Webb came up with a newer, better tool. The DOK scale (thank goodness he didn't call it depth IN knowledge) delineates four different way that students interact with content:

1- Recall and Reproduction
2- Skills and Concepts
3- Strategic Thinking/Reasoning
4- Extended Thinking

You may be thinking that this sounds an awful lot like a collapsed Bloom's, and I wouldn't argue with you. I actually agree with the Bloom's verby problem, but I'm thinking that's a pretty easy fix. I'm also thinking that nobody is making money teaching people about Bloom's any more, but some folks are making an awful lots of money teaching teachers about Webb's DOK.

We spent much time looking at and categorizing examples of the four levels, and it was at times a tough slog because essentially they're trying to teach us to use a whole new language to talk about things. If you really want to know more about DOK, just google your heart out. There's tons out there.

I will share one insight that I actually found useful. Because DOK focuses on the complexity of the interaction with the material, you can ramp up DOK even with material that's not difficult.

But the real reason you care about DOK is simple-- it's what's being used as a guide by the high stakes test developers. This is why, for instance, we're seeing questions that have the student look at two different works and construct an argument about them based on evidence-- because that would be a DOK 3 or 4 level and will help HST grow beyond the old bubble test stigma.

So we're to be designing performance tasks that represent these different levels because that will better help us bring to life the inner beauty of the CCSS.

More Dissonance

These sorts of performance tasks are supposed to go slow and deep. One sample lesson was going to involve a week spent on one poem. Because we could all just teach 36 short works of literature in high school English classes this year. And elementary teachers with their 180 pre-packaged lessons can totally stretch those out so students can go deep.

Again, what some experts tell us we should do with CCSS and what others tell us we must do with CCSS materials simply don't fit. CCSS is a GPS that gives you directions for driving south toward Pittsburgh and then ends with directions about navigating down town Cleveland.

We also discussed a sample task for third graders and noted that on the HST this sort of thing would require a lot of rigorous time and focused attention for an eight-year-old. The obvious solution-- make sure that your instruction includes long soul-crushing tedious tasks so that your third grader is used to it by the time the test comes. 

A Question I Asked

We were talking about how the PARCC (which PA is apparently still pals with; we mostly don't like the idea of the computer testing, perhaps because we actually tried that a few years ago and it was a clusterfig of mammoth proportions), and how it was going to include these nifty performance tasks for assessments, and I asked, "How will the answers to the complex questions be graded and by whom?" I think a lot of people found that question interesting, but Stine admitted frankly that she had no idea, and that yes, that was probably important. IU Lady made some noises on behalf of the state that were less illuminating.

I may also have squeezed in an explanation of how to game the PA writing test.

We broke for lunch

Afternoon Not-Really-Delight

The afternoon opened with a video clip of Taylor Mali's "Miracle Worker," and I always think that reformers' use of Mali is kind of like politician's use of "Born in the USA" and I want to ask, "Are you really listening to this?" But I had resolved not to be an ass today.

CCI has prepared a nifty 128-page deconstruction of the standards, making them easily referrable and broken down in a way that would make local alignment a slightly less-inconvenient piece of paperwork. We looked at that, and we looked at a performance task that, unfortunately, purported to use Close Reading. It was actually Close Reading 2.0, complete with making sure not tell the students anything before having them read the work. Did I mention that the Taylor Mali poem hinges on the idea "I gave you what you needed before you even knew you needed it?" Close Reading 2.0 instead preaches "I won't give you what you need, even when you're floundering without it."

I give credit to Stine, who not for the first or last time was perfectly willing to engage me one-on-one during group time to trade points of view on these things. I am not sure how much I can learn from her, but she could teach people like Cami Anderson and John King a thing or two.

We spent more time on specific sample lessons. You can find some of this stuff on CCI's website, and each performance task comes with a coaching video to help you understand what you're supposed to do, in case you're somebody who doesn't belong in a classroom.This was also an interesting study in how teachers react to CCSS. In the morning, there was a lot of "Well, this actually seems benign, maybe even helpful" in the room, but the afternoon was more "Wait! What? This is the result? Well, this just doesn't seem right."

Annnnnd we were about done. IU Lady said some more hostessy things which I mostly blocked out, though I did jot down the phrase "really rich and authentic data" because I'm curious about the kind of brain in which that is an actual thing that comes out of CCSS.

Last Dissonance Aside

You may have heard that CCSS (and perhaps your evaluation) really values questions with more than one right answer. We hit that a lot. Also, collaboration is a biggie. And independently researching points that come up in the pursuit of answers. This should be part of what we do all the time. Except when we're taking the high stakes test.

My Last Question

At some point we had circled back around to the idea that you could increase complexity of the DOK level without increasing the level of difficulty of the content. Which I totally dig. But I asked "How do we reconcile that with preparing students for the high stakes test that will increase the level of BOTH?" And there were a lot of words that followed, but none of them added up to an answer. This conundrum still seems to rest on rigorous fairy dust-- we'll get the DOK levels of their brains rigorously ramped up so much that it won't matter that half the vocabulary is unfamiliar to them.

The Second Thing I Did Not Expect

Remember how kids have changed? That came up more than once, in basically a "kids these days" manner. I had never, ever hear this one before, but apparently one of the reasons we need CCSS and DOK levels is that kids these days are helpless and lack initiative. Stine told a story about her child calling to ask "Are we out of butter?" while standing in front of the frige. So, CCSS and rigor. Apparently the CCSS will make kids pull up their pants and get off our lawns.

The Third Thing I Did Not Expect

Remember how I said the state of PA didn't exactly provide the training? Well, that's because the training was sponsored by the folks at Office Depot, who paid our registration fees (160-ish bucks/head). They are corporate partners of the CCI, and two representatives of the company sat in the back of the room all day. At the end, a nice lady from Office Depot told us how important CCSS is and how useful we will find it in our classrooms. And they reminded us that Office Depot could help our schools meet the costs of change by giving them cheaper ways to get supplies. They offered us a swag bag, but I actually forgot to pick it up because I was still wrapping my brain around someone from Office Depot giving me advice on how to do my job.

I was not numb. I've sat through far worse, and there were useful nuggets in this day, including a better understanding of where the CCSS/Testing machine is coming from on some particulars. But still no kool-aid for me.

At the very end we saw an inspiration video about a football coach tricking a kid into doing a death march (crawling on hands and feet with another guy on his back) the full length of a football field. I thought maybe the video would end with the kid collapsing of heat stroke and the coach being fired, but no-- everybody felt better, because in the end you can accomplish really painful, difficult, and pointless tasks if you set your mind to it. It's possible I drew the wrong lesson from the video.

Political Theater and Reality

Tuesday presented an interesting juxtaposition of events.

It began with news of the death of Pete Seeger. Stuck at home for a Polar Vortex Day, I sat and watched clips, everything from interviews to original Weavers clips to the video he made for Amnesty International at age 92. I reread accounts of his life-- living in a house he built with his wife of about 70 years, his blacklisting, his travels with Woody Guthrie, his stand on so many issues. I watched him sing, head tilted back, eyes on... something. Something bigger than himself. And I got choked up, moved by this man who absolutely lived his life and his art as if they were the same thing, who lived with integrity and honesty. I may not have agreed with everything he ever said or did, but damn-- the man absolutely fearlessly lived out his truth.

But as the day wore on, Seeger was pushed out of the cyber world by anticipation of the State of the Union address. If there is a more inauthentic, calculated piece of political theater outside of campaign events, I can't think of it. People spent the day on line speculating and agitating for what issues and elements POTUS might name drop in the SOTU, and at the end of the day of speculation, he gave education a side swiped batch of pointless sidestepping and spin. I didn't watch it, and I wasn't sorry. You can read two fine reactions to it; one by Chris Geurrierri and the other by Valerie Strauss. You can get the gist there. If the SOTU told us anything at all, it told us that no magical fairies visited POTUS during the night to make him understand how messed up his education policies are.

It was empty rhetoric, a fine example of how politicians have become accustomed to controlling the conversation, the audience, the setting, and the rhetoric, leading to the mistaken assumption that all of that equals controlling the audience. My biggest fear about the SOTU is the President Obama believes in his heart that he really accomplished something, that teachers and students are sitting out there thinking, "Well, that's mighty fine. He has my full support now." It's one thing when people pee on us and tell us it's raining; it's somehow worse when they think we believe them.

But not too far away from DC, another politician was having a more authentic experience. Cami Anderson did everything she could to keep the parents and teachers of Newark in line-- small meeting location, make them wait outside, control the agenda. But like John King and his New York Victory Lap of Common Core Wait What No I'm Not Going Back Out There Tour, Cami discovered that when people are authentically outraged, political theater and stage tricks will not keep them in line. She had a no good, very bad, terrible evening.

And like many politicians and reformers before her, she was not just surprised, but really offended that people were not well-behaved enough to stay in their place. It's particularly ironic that a personal barb appears to have been her breaking point, as if her actions and statements have not been personal attacks on the personal families of Newark persons.

And so she stomped out.

We are so steeped in the fake in this country, that our leaders have become focused on crafting fake events instead of dealing with real people, and when they have to deal with real people, they literally do not know how to cope.

And yet, part of the lesson of Pete Seeger is that authentic lives, lives in truth and integrity, create real beauty, perhaps the only kind of real beauty that ever exists. To hide from truth is to hide from what is true and beautiful and awesomely human. It's focusing on creating and controlling a completely artificial relationship and experience that is at the cold and lifeless heart of CCSS and reform.

The State of the Union address was one of the least important things to happen yesterday. Give me more Pete Seeger. Give me more Newark parents. Give me less political theater, especially when it comes to education.