Vicki Phillips Tries Again

Vicki Phillips last EduWonk PR piece for CCSS sparked plenty of debate. Glancing through the comments and Bill Gates's latest heaping helping of baloney in USA Today, it would seem that it was also used as something of a prompt for the newest wave of CCSS talking points.

So it's only fitting that Phillips is back this month to field test the next wave of CCSS support bullets. Phillips is a Pennsylvania product, starting her admin career in Lancaster before becoming part of Smilin' Ed Rendell's revolving doorload of Ed Secretaries who took on the thankless task of powering through his program of unfunded mandates and terrible tests. When she left to head Portland schools, we were not particularly sad.

She works for the Gates Foundation now as Director of Education, College Ready. And now she's here to talk at us some more about the awesome momentum of  CCSS.

Stick-to-itiveness. Determination. Tenacity. Grit. These are concepts that every teacher tries to impart to his or her students – the importance of not giving up when the going gets tough.

That's the lede, so we know where this train is headed. That ol' grit-- it is one hugely important quality for students to have. So why, Phillips asks, would we risk stopping the forward movement on CCSS, "the most important U.S. education initiatives in decades." And may I just add, "A bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves." But no-- Phillips is not even going to pretend to create any sort of plausible link between grit and the Common Core (they just go together, like a horse and carriage, love and marriage, apples and oranges).

See, as we move forward, we all knew that we would have to be flexible, willing to "adjust and recalibrate." This is one of the shinier talking points these days, in which reformers speak as if they've always expected there to be a need to carefully consider what we were implementing and no, they were not the ones insisting we all follow their orders precisely, no, that wasn't them at all, nuh-uh. No, the newest round of CCSS reformy folks say things like this:

Equally, we must ensure that teachers and students are truly prepared before consequences for not meeting the standards are implemented.

No more impassioned full-speed-ahead, build-the-plane-while-we-fly-it stuff. No, we want to take our time and get it right. And like any good Orwellian overlords, we are not only going to say this with a straight face, but we will not at all acknowledge that we ever said anything else.

Okay, then. In this brave new world, what does Phillips suggest we are supposed to do to maintain the awesome runaway-truckish momentum of CCSS?


First, teachers must play a key role in the Common Core implementation process.

Teachers must play a key role. A "key role" is what you offer somebody when you want to soften then news that they won't be in a leadership role. "Sorry, you didn't get the new management spot, but golly whiz you will have a Key Role in the transition team." Nobody ever uses "key role" in their CV. 

We have apparently seen great success in Cleveland with teacher-created materials. And all around the country teachers are already working "with other education practitioners" and, really, what the hell is an "education practitioner"? This confabulation of teachers and EPs is working "to ensure teachers have access to the high-quality resources and tools they need as the Common Core State Standards are implemented."

And, seriously, as noted in Colin McEnroe's genius column, when somebody talks like this, they are either hiding something or selling something or both.

We'll follow that with a nod to the NEA Master Teacher program, a fully-owned subsidiary of the Gates Foundation, so why wouldn't we be plugging that. It will have a full year's worth of lessons! Districts won't need to hire real teachers with actual skills ever again!! So maybe the "key role" teachers are playing is the role of "making actual teachers obsolete." Thanks for having my back, NEA.

Second, we need to make sure teachers have the time they need to collaborate and prepare for these changes. 

I do not disagree with Phillips here. If we are going to be forced to unpack an Augean Stable's worth of CCSSBS, at least give us a shovel and few extra hours to do the job. We all seem to know something that Phillips is pretending not to know, or has forgotten since she was a district administrator-- time costs money, and school districts don't have an endless Gatesian-sized supply of it. So I think I speak for many superintendents when I say, "Thanks! That's a fabulous idea. More time! I never THOUGHT of THAT!" Also, next year the Gates Foundation will buy ponies for all the poor people in America-- all they have to do is build barns for the ponies to live in. It will be super-easy.

And then we get more lip service about how teachers have to be co-opted so they will buy in recruited as valuable co-leaders in the process. Because, finally, reformies have decided that maybe teachers should be involved in all this reformy stuff after all.

Then a full paragraph devoted to how CCSS will make it easier for children to move from one state to another. Certainly a legitimate reason to upend the US education system. Next year Gates will be reconfiguring the climate of the entire Northern Hemisphere so that children can move from Alaska to Hawaii without experiencing discomfort or needing to buy new clothes.

We round on the home stretch with a link to blog by a teacher who thinks CCSS rocks his world. The link is actually broken, but based on the quotes, I think I can reproduce the gist of the teacher's comments:

I used to teach nothing but rote memorization and I tried never to talk to my students and we just used slates and charcoal to do our endless drill, but then CCSS came along and I was all like, "Woah, you mean we can do thinky things!!?? And all sorts of cool learny activities." So thanks to CCSS I know how to teach because before I didn't know how to do nothing. But now critical thinking and computers. Thanx, CCSS.

Now cue the violins and fireworks for the big finish:

This is what we need to remember every time we hear calls to roll back Common Core. We cannot give up. We owe it to our children to continue to move forward and ensure that every child in this country has a chance to pursue his or her dreams. After all, if we expect our children to show grit in the face of adversity, how can we possibly ask any less of ourselves?

[insert inarticulate roar here] What the hell does the implementation of CCSS with its attendant school of bad program pilot fish have to do with making a better life for our children. Show me one single minute freakin piece of evidence that CCSS has anything at all to do with children pursuing their dreams!  And "grit in the face of adversity"??!! School is not not NOT supposed to be "the face of adversity," not for students, not for teachers, not for parents or administrators or janitors or bus drivers. What sort of bollixed-up brain-deficient balonery equates school with a test of whether students are worthy or having dreams?

I don't know if Lancaster Superintendent Vicki Phillips lost her understanding of actual schools or if she sold it. But this piece of press-ready PR puffery does her no credit. Please may we not have a third Ode to CCSS Momentum. 

Children Just Don't Understand

CCSS reformy stuff ignores what we know about child development when it comes to the ability to grasp certain concepts and think in various abstract ways. But it also ignores what we know about children emotionally. In particular, it ignores what we know about how children deal with failure.

In adults, failure can trigger one of a couple of positive adaptive behaviors.

The one the Masters of Reforming Our Nations' Schools seem to be thinking of is the one where, after failure, you dust yourself off, dig down into your rigorous grit, you suck it up, and you work harder.

This is the response lionized by Horatio Alger. It's the kind of grit displayed by men like Arne Duncan, who, when he needed work, dug deep into his rolodex for a solution, or Bill Gates, who, when confronted by a US Congress that spanked him for his throttling of the software biz, dug deep into his bank account and bought the influence he would need to protect his interests.

And it is, to be fair, a really good response to failure and adversity. The stories of people who overcame failure on their road to success are legion, and many of them are actually true. So the grit response is a good one to have.

Also popular is the rejection response, the understanding that you have just failed at something not worth succeeding at. People who become really wise about this learn to recognize situations that do not deserve their attention and never become invested in the first place.

Both of these responses are tools we use for measuring and defining our own success, thereby protecting and maintaining our own emotional cores. These response both help us ultimately succeed and let us hold onto a solid sense of self.

And they are both beyond the emotional repertoire of a child.

We know about one of the worst effects of child abuse. The average abused child does not think, "I am going to dig down and find the grit to hold on through this miserable situation." Nor does that child think, "This is happening because my abusive parent is a horrible person who makes bad choices." Sure, there are some young children who do latch onto these thoughts. And Mozart composed music at age 5.

No, what the average abused child thinks is, "This is happening because of me. This is my fault. I am bad."

Why do we try so hard to protect children from certain sorts of experiences? Because in some situations, children learn the wrong lesson. And a young child who's forced into a situation where she is made to fail does not think, "Well, I'll just have to be grittier next time" or "Wow, these adults sure have unreasonable expectations of me." A child's default assumption is that the world she is experiencing is the normal, right, the Way It Is Supposed To Be. Those elementary students do not conclude "This test is stupid" or "This assignment is stupid" or even "I have serious questions about the pedagogical methodology of this summative assessment." Those students conclude "I am stupid. I am bad."

An adult square peg confronting a round hole will think, "Well, this hole must be messed up" or "I am going to get my hammer and square this hole up." A child square peg will think, "Oh no! I am defective. I am wrong. I am a bad peg."

The MoRONS imagine that children can be tested into a state of gritty rigor, that you get a six year old to do three impossible things before lunch by simply demanding repeatedly that she do them. They are so wrong in so many ways. The stress and anguish and frustration and rage being felt by teachers and parents across the country, especially at testing time, comes because we know that every weeping child is weeping part because they feel not just like a person who's having trouble with a math problem, but like a person who is somehow unfit to live on this planet. These are the tears of little people who believe they are looking at what Life Really Is and discovering they are unfit for it.

This is reformers great triumph-- to trigger massive existential crises for six-year-olds.

I don't know the answer. I can only imagine my rage and frustration if my children were in this system at present. I wrote a decade ago that I have some sympathy with homeschoolers, because what some of them want is to protect their children from bad government choices, and teachers can no longer guarantee that kind of safety in our classrooms. Today I feel that times 100.

Even the most mediocre teacher understands that if most of the children in your class have trouble with a test, it's not them-- it's you. But small children don't understand that. And apparently neither do the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools.

How sad that one of the biggest challenges of the teaching profession today is to get students through mandatory bad government/corporate testing without having their spirits battered. How sad that in a nation that has more than enough resources to provide children with the kind of safe nurturing childhoods that some neighborhoods and nations only dream of, we actually deploy those resources to insure that our children don't get that.

Yeah, I can hardly wait to see what the USDOE has in mind for Pre-K.

More Defective Children

A story out of Pittsburgh Sunday and subsequently picked up by the AP highlights the growing problem with the growing number of children diagnosed with ADHD. This is not a new trend; there have been numerous stories over the past year or two characterizing the diagnoses as everything from an uptick to an epidemic.

Most peoples' attitudes about ADHD are heavily influence by personal anecdotes. We know the student who couldn't function in class until he was put on ritalin. Or we know the student who claims ADHD when he doesn't want to do work, but can sit in his tree stand motionless and silent for three hours waiting for a deer. Or we know the student who has been drugged into a zombie state so that he'll behave. Our experience with labeled students leads us to reach a variety of conclusions about how whether ADHD is real disorder that requires medical intervention or a psycho-scam perpetrated by the parents of students who just need to shape up.

I'm an ADHD skeptic. I believe it exists, but I believe that some fairly large percentage of students so labeled have been labeled incorrectly. And I think that problem is going to get worse.

I remember my son in Kindergarten. We had what could be charitably called a student-teacher mis-match, and we found ourselves at several school meetings to discuss his problem. See if you can guess what his problem was. He would arrive for school about 20-30 minutes before class started. The teacher expectation was that he would spend that time sitting quietly at his desk, doing nothing. That's right-- my son's problem was he was a five year old boy.

We soldiered through the year with forbearance that I wish I could retroactively withdraw. Given it all to do over again, I would fight harder for my son. But we did hold the line on one point-- the hint that maybe perhaps he had a medical problem that should be addressed. It would have been easy, had we been less-informed or less confident, to decide that we needed to investigate the possibility of my son having ADHD. We didn't. And on that point, I don't need a do-over.

Early in my career, I read an article that turned a big fat light bulb on for me, and I wish I could credit it now. But I still remember the main idea.

When we are supremely confident in our programming at school, a really bad thing happens. Here I am, in my classroom, delivering a perfect lesson, using perfect materials, teaching like a boss. Chris is not learning. But it can't be me, it can't be my materials, and it can't be my instruction. If everything I'm doing is right, and Chris isn't learning, there can only be one explanation--- Chris is defective.

Let me predict one side-effect of the current reformy wave. As teachers proceed to deliver perfect Pearson-crafted lessonry in CCSS-approved formats, we're going to find ourselves wit a new wave of ADHD and Learning Disability diagnoses.

When we make nine-year-olds sit and do 90-minute-long projects to properly rigorfy them, we will find that many just can't do it, and where we are absolutely confident that our programs are flawless, there will be only one possible conclusion-- we have many, many defective nine-year-olds to diagnose.

We can already see the tip of this iceberg. As Kindergartners struggle with what used to be First Grade demands, the cries are going out. No, not the cries of "this material is developmentally inappropriate." The cries of "Our five-year-olds are not properly prepared for Kindergarten!" And you white suburban moms already know why your children are flunking.

If we're going to demand that developmentally inappropriate programs be implemented, and we refuse to ever examine the possibility that there is something wrong with the program, then we must look elsewhere to explain failure. Right now, we like teachers as an explanation for that failure, but as we put more TFA bodies and fully-scripted teacher-proof programs in place, we won't be able to blame teachers any more. There will be no choice but to blame the children.

CCSS reformy stuff is already delivering the "news" that American children are far dumber than anybody who doesn't work at Pearson or the USDOE had ever suspected. Soon, it will also reveal a previously-unnoticed epidemic of children who are defective in other ways. Your third grader has trouble operating a computer for testing? Kid must be learning disabled. Your first grader can't sit and read for an hour and then write long essays about what he's read? He must be ADHD.

And don't forget-- the plan is that these labels will be attached to your child, via the cloud, until they day they die. George Orwell had no idea.

The New CCSS SAT

I just got a peek at the new Colemanized CCSS-enriched SATs.

Not a precise peek. I am a member on several take-a-survey sites (for a little click and scroll, I earn us some magazine subscriptions), and because I'm registered as a high school teacher, I just got to take a market survey about the SAT tests.

Understand that what I saw were market research questions, and therefor may represent things which may or may not come to fruition. But these were not "is this a good idea" questions-- these were "what's the most appealing way to word this" questions. Here's what I saw.

After making sure I knew what the SAT was and what it stands for (there seems to be some question about whether to keep having the letters stand for something, kind of like KFC), the first round of questions asked me to consider some naming possibilities for two new tests-- 

·  Grade 8/9 - a low-stakes college and career readiness assessment for early high school planning

·  Grade 10/11 - a college and career readiness assessment for mid-high school planning

So, two new products to roll out.

Then we moved on to some new language to consider for the revised version of the SAT test. There were questions that involved the same boilerplate language we've seen with CCSS. Most of these were asked twice-- first to gauge whether a description of the new test items was appealing, and second to consider specific language. Here's one sample:

The revised SAT will be based on the skills and knowledge that research shows to be essential for students’ college and career readiness and success. These are the same skills and knowledge that teachers focus on today in __________ classrooms. The revised SAT will be more focused than ever and support teachers in their work by encouraging students’ daily practice of the work that matters most.

Your four fill-in-the-blank choices are:

*the best

*the most effective

*the most challenging

*the most rigorous 

Another fill-in-the-blank question included this language:

We revised the SAT using a robust research base and in partnership with high school teachers.

Their point-- the revised SAT will reflect the best instruction going on in classrooms, so taking the very best classes will be the very best preparation. Remember that point.

More language about the new test:

The {new/revised/etc} SAT will be based on the skills and knowledge that research shows to be essential for students' college and career readiness and success. These are the same skills and knowledge that teachers focus on today in the most effective classrooms.

David Coleman (architect of the language side of CCSS) is doing his best to lock down the very definition of what good teaching is. Good teaching is what the SAT measures, and the SAT measures good teaching. The word you're looking for is tautology.

All of this was pretty much expected, but there were two fun wrinkles additionally.

One is simply marketing. Language of another question indicates that the PSAT (which will "help students take advantage of the opportunities they have created through their hard work") will also now include access to APO Potential, a service that will tell students about the AP course "in which they would be likely to succeed." Yes, the PSAT (a College Board product) will now include marketing for AP courses (another College Board product).

The other surprise for me was in that 8th grade PPPPSAT. Language in a question described it as a tool for determining if your child is on track to be college-ready. 

Got that? Somebody thinks they have a test that can actually predict whether a thirteen year old is going to be successful in college or not. 

Remember how we always argue that comparing US education to other country's is unfair because other countries track their students into college and career paths from an early age? Apparently the College Board has figured out how to fix that.

The overall picture is the same one I've expected since Coleman moved to the College Board-- their testing programs will be one more attempt to lock all of US public education into the CCSS worldview. Do we need more tests, aligned in unproven ways to the unresearched standards? No, no we don't. But I don't think it will be too much longer before the College Board folks are doing their best to convince us otherwise. Given the growing blowback on CCSS in general and testing linked to it in particular, these could be interesting times. Get your seat early, because the emperor is about to bet the farm on a motorcycle ride in his new clothes.

Why I'm Anti-Standard (TL;DR)

The school reformy landscape is wide. Toward the center you'll find "the CCSS are valuable, but must be delinked from testing." A bit past them is"the CCSS are good, but the implementation was bad." Further down the road you'll find "the CCSS are flawed, and we need a better standard to replace them." And way over there at the end of the dirt road and out in that left-most field, you'll find "no national standards, ever." I'm with those guys.

I'm not an anarchist. And I completely understand why reasonable, intelligent people would like the idea of national educational standards. I don't. My objections come in two flavors-- 1) why I think they can't work and 2) why I think they are wrong. I'll leave #1 for another day; today I want to explain #2. And to do that I have to explain what I think standards are.

Standards are an attempt to codify values. They want to look objective, but they are not. They are simple instructions for acting as if you shared the values of the people who created the standards.

Let's take the go-to metaphor for standards-- the yardstick.

When I hand you a yardstick to measure an object, it doesn't matter if you like to measure things in cubits or hands or meters or along the curved edge. You are going to measure that object as if you shared my value-- inches, feet, yards, and straight-line distances. As long as you use my yardstick, you will measure as if you value what I value. It's a standard, and it's consistent, but it's not some sort of objective values-free judgment, as anybody who lives in the metric-speaking entire rest of the world can tell you.

Standards throughout history have been set to codify both admirable and terrible values. Jim Crow laws were passed to set and preserve standards of racial behavior; so was the Civil Rights Act.

Now, standards are useful, even necessary, for communication (I told you-- I'm not an anarchist). If we all measured by whatever standard we wished, we wouldn't be able to have any meaningful conversations about the results. But we can't lose sight of what the standards actually are-- a way to get other people to act as if they value what we value.

Imagine, for instance, that we were going to write standards for that most universal of experiences-- marriage. Oh, wait-- never mind. We've already been having this argument forever. It's not just our most recent arguments-- is the standard that marriage must involve one man and one woman?-- but the arguments before then. Can marriage involve mixing races? Must parents be married? Must married people be parents? What sort of official is required to certify it? Does it involve two people who love each other? Do they have to be of a particular age?

Today, in 2014, if a man walks up to you and says, "Why, yes, I'm married," you can make virtually no assumptions about what situation is waiting for him at home. For some folks, that is a sign that we have lost our standards as a society, and it is a Very Bad Thing.

Should we have standards? For individual, I believe standards are absolutely necessary. To be a human being in the world, you need to have some idea of how you act out your values in your life. Having standards, a way of measuring your actions against your values, is the foundation of living with integrity.

But that's as an individual. As soon as you start creating standards for other people, you are telling them what values they should live by.

That's not automatically evil. I'm okay with imposing a value that says human life matters and taking it away is not okay. But imposing values on other people, particularly young, impressionable people, will always be operating close to a difficult moral line, and it takes deliberate thought to avoid drifting across that line.

The CCSS are bad because they encode bad values. From the very start, where they casually define education's purpose as college and career readiness, they impose a set of values that rub many of us the wrong way. Some of us choose to read them as if they say what we wish they said. Some of us deal by imagining that, as with NCLB, we'll be largely able to close our classroom door and disregard them. And some of us think that if we could revise, rewrite or replace them, we'd be okay.

I disagree. As soon as you try to write national education standards, you are deciding what every child in the country should value in his or her education. This is a guaranteed fail. You are not just declaring a one-size-fits-all set of school activities, but a one-size-fits-all set of values for every single living human being in the country. It cannot be done any more than you can set national standards for what marriage must be. And not only can't it be done, but it shouldn't be done.

"Don't we all need to use the same yardstick so that we know what we're all talking about?" Actually, no. Because once we settle on that yardstick for everybody, we've declared that project in art class must be one that can be measured along straight edges in increments of inches.

Standards become less useful the further away they move form the individual. Standards that exist to help me understand myself are valuable. Standards that exist so that somebody else can measure me for their own benefit are not valuable.

I know, I know. If the government can more accurately measure everybody with the same yardstick, the government will be able to do a better job of educating them. I disagree. The damage inflicted by trying to get everybody to line up with that yardstick, by the imposition of somebody else's values on each and every young human mind-- that damage far outweighs any possible benefit that might accrue from bureaucratic data management. It is killing the goose that could have laid a lifetime of golden eggs.

We could set a marriage standard in hopes of knowing what Mr. I'm Married means by that, but that would just take us back to a day when peoples' personal lives were all twisted up in order to fit the standards of their time. Who are we to demand that their personal values be pushed aside and mulched up so that we have the illusion of a tidier world to live in?

So while I get the desire for national educational standards, it's an area in which I always expect to be pushing in the other direction. I don't expect to win, but I don't expect to give in, either. Yes, we will always have to be accountable, and we should be, but that's a matter of transparency and reporting-- not a matter of standards. I respect your right to stand where you will on this issue (and I respect you even more if you actually read this whole post), but this is where I stand today.

When Good People Love Bad Standards

It's fun to write big ranty posts in response to people who I think are just full of it. But where I learn more is in reading and responding to people with whom I share some values. If you and I agree about many educational values, can I figure out why you think the CCSS are swell and I would rather dance with a one-legged zombie? That's when I can learn something.

Starr Sackstein guest-wrote a column for Peter DeWitt this week. Sackstein and I agree on many things, but Sackstein thinks the CCSS are just fine. I started to respond  in the comments section, but I have a verbal diarrhea problem, so the response is here instead. I think her column is meant to argue against bubble testing, but for me it runs aground on the shoals of CCSS Island and never quite recovers.

The intro ends with this: Creativity and innovation must be the end goal, nurturing the symbiotic relationship so we can all become better together. This cannot be assessed with short answers or multiple choice. And I am absolutely on board. But then we hit our first subheading:

Teach with purpose rather than complain about the test.

I agree absolutely that we must teach with a purpose (you know I believe it because I just blogged about it ), but how do you say "Don't worry about the test" to teachers whose professional future depends on those test results? "Value learning over test numbers" are words I'd like on a t-shirt or a billboard, but how do you propose to stand up for that value in the current climate? That's not a rhetorical question-- teachers need hard, practical specific ideas about how to main that value in a script-drill-test world. 

As long as there is meaningful, transparent learning happening, the test will take care of itself.

I think I've heard this roughly a zillion times. Teachers like to hear it from administrators because it means, "Your job is not test prep." But we already have our NCLB experiences to tell us that such administrative attitude lasts only until the test scores start coming in too low.

It's a point of view I appreciate and understand, but it involves a level of faith in The Test that I simply don't share. Badly designed tests get bad results, whether it's a matter of terribly-constructed reading questions, requirements for small children to use fine motor skills for unfamiliar tasks, or writing evaluations based on bad ideas about writing.

Learning is a life experience, not a cram session with a finite number of things to know; it is nuance and individuality and freedom to explore both of those however the student sees fit.

And boy do I ever agree with that. But the challenge for today's teacher is how to make that real in a classroom that is marching in rigid lockstep to the point where a high stakes test will decide the fate of any number of people (students, teachers, admins, etc).

Don't be a hater, understand the Common Core

The Common Core didn't do anything to you, why do you hate it so much? Standards are inherently positive and create a structure by which to assess our students. These particular standards are focused cross-discipline and skill based - what's bad about that?

Oh boy. First of all, standards are not inherently positive. Historically, policies from the Holocaust to Jim Crow rest on a foundation of standards.  The whole point of standards is to codify values, to create a yardstick so that even people who don't share the underlying values can act as if they do. So standards are only as positive as the values that they encode. And standards additionally codify one other value-- the idea that there is value in getting other people to follow the values that you want them to.

The Common Core codify values that, in my eyes, contradict much of what you've said so far. There is no standard in CCSS for "nuance and individuality and freedom to explore both of these as the student sees fit."


The challenges that have arisen are mostly due to poor implementation or vision myopically focused on excessive testing, closely tying teacher success to student success on these unbalanced exams.

And other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln? The implementation is not a bug; it's a feature. The base assumption of CCSS is that everyone MUST do this, and that means very tool in the bag MUST be used to FORCE them to do it. Again, nuance and individuality have no place here.

This is a central point, and it has been addressed all over the internet, so I'm not going to recap it to death here. But for me, CCSS and the bad implementation and the bad testing are no more separable than twins conjoined at the heart. 

Collaborate across content to insure skill development

Writing and reading skills don't just happen in an English classroom; students utilize these skills in all classes, so why not work together to scaffold and practice them. 

Absolutely dead on. I so want to work in a school where this happens, and we a\have been getting there step by step for the last twenty years. It is absolutely the right way to go.

Making students college and career ready

When are we going to accept as a society that testing and grading or any other quantitative means associated with learning will only quash the intrinsic value of curiosity and creativity? We keep saying that we want innovation yet we breed standardized clones studiously pursuing a meaningless number... the highest one which ultimately doesn't serve to actually tell us anything about what they know.

Again, I'm on the same page. A score on a bubble test tells us nothing useful at all about how ready a student is for college or career. So what do you think we should do about living in a world where the belief in the power of the test is central to the reformy education picture? What should we tell students whose scores will be tucked into their cloud-based data profile to follow them quite possibly for the rest of their lives, to be consulted by future colleges and/or employers?


Graduate students life ready

But that's not the goal set out by the standards. The CCSS are quite explicit on this point-- the purpose of education, as the standards have it, is to prepare students for college or career (and as further explained by some experts, a career is work that will support you well with more than minimum wage).

In one of your earlier defenses of CCSS, you wrote "If each of us is trying to prepare students for life, why not have a common set of standards nationally that help to define what those standards are?" My answer is that the CCSS is not that set of standards, and it doesn't even claim to be. The CCSS says nothing about preparing a student "for life."

I suspect that you, like me, have the privilege of working in a setting where circumstances and administrators have kept the heavy hand of CCSS standardization off teachers' backs. But you have to know that our circumstance is not everyone's. I also think you and I share many core values about teaching, and while it is important to take those out to examine and confirm them, these days we also have to be thinking and talking about how to live out those values in a system that is increasingly hostile to them.

If Not for Those Darn Kids

I was in a CCSS training, and the trainer stopped to make an observation about how Kids These Days lack discipline and order. She even illustrated it with a story about her own child. And  light bulb went on for me.

I have long considered that the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools view children as widgets, as little programmable devices, as interchangeable gears, as nothing more than Data Generation Units. I had considered that these MoRONS were indifferent to children. What I had not considered was that reformers are actively hostile to children.

I have certainly heard people in the ed world complain about Those Darn Kids, and I have taught in the building with more than one person who blames all their classroom woes on terrible awful no good pretty bad students. I try to be understanding. If I hear it once or twice, I assume somebody is having a bad day. If I hear it many times, I assume somebody is a bad teacher.

But a hostile teacher is one thing. A movement that institutionalizes that hostility is a whole other level of awful.

After I wrote about my experience, other teachers shared more of the same. Tales of trainers talking about how Kids These Days need to be rigorously rigored into a state of rigor. And as I reread old materials, I could see the hostility bubbling beneath the surface.

Sometimes it is misplaced and out of date. There are still education commentators railing against the self esteem movement, and while I don't disagree with some of the criticism, it's like complaining that too many Kids These Days are spending too much time on their new computers and listening to the rap music. That ship has sailed, Grampa.

Sometimes it is not even beneath the surface. What is a "no excuse" school, except a school founded on the premise that Kids These Days are all hooligans that will take a mile if you give them an inch. Or even one of those new-fangled millimeters. And when Arne Duncan suggests that those suburban white moms have over-inflated images of the abilities of their coddled children, isn't he already suggesting that those over-protective parents need to step aside so their kids can be whipped into shape.

Or Frank Bruni's op-ed that unambiguously declared Duncan correct and opponents of CCSS a raft of child-coddlers:

Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless? Isn’t stress an acceptable byproduct of reaching higher and digging deeper? Aren’t certain fixed judgments inevitable? And isn’t mettle established through hard work? 

The narrative here is not a new one. See if you can recognize some of the key points. We live in a meritocracy that rewards hard work and grit. Therefor, anyone who is poor and unsuccessful must have failed to show merit, hard work, and grit. If we have a lot of poor people, it's because they are all slackers-- and it starts when they're kids. If we could get to them when they were little and whip them into shape, then poverty would be gone. Fixing education would cure poverty.

So to fix poverty, we have to toughen these little slackers up. They need to be toughly uncoddled with rigorous excuse-free punches to their tiny brains. These children are one of the big obstacles to fixing our society (along with the teachers who won't properly kick their little asses). And just look at how dumb and lazy they are! Look at all the factoids about the things they don't know, and the low test scores they get! Back in my day, students got such much better scores and, buddy, we knew stuff. These kids have to be brought up to snuff.

Is your kid wasting time playing? Stop coddling. Did a lesson make him so frustrated he burst into tears? Good-- maybe he'll start taking school seriously now. Did he fail his big test? Let that be a wake-up call for you. Is his spirit being crushed? Then his spirit is too weak and whiny, and his spirit needs to get its act together.

That this sort of program should originate in the halls of power and privilege is unsurprising. These are men who must believe that their own vast success is the result of their own merit and awesomeness, not luck, timing, underhanded gamesmanship or simply the result of a privileged background. Nor is it surprising that they don't subject their own children to Reformed School, because they know that their own children already possess the qualities of virtue that they are so ardently trying to beat into Other People's Children.

Is this is some sort of bizarro generational theater in which Boomers are trying to fix the children they believe Millenials are unfit to raise? Are Americans having another Calvinist flashback?

I don't know. What I do believe is that the reformy movement carries a strong thread of anti-child fervor (or at least anti-Other People's Children), and that this belief that children should be beaten into shape rather than cherished and nurtured.

Look, if you ask my students if I coddle them, they will laugh at you and tell you that I am the least warm, most unfuzzy teacher they've ever dealt with. I believe in many of the virtues that these virtuous crusaders espouse. I even believe that sometimes love means facing hard, painful things.

But I had a superintendent once who used to tell a story about a horse trainer who was asked about the secret of his success. He asked his inquisitors what they thought the first step was, and they made many guesses, all dealing with technical horse trainy actions. Said the trainer, "First, you have to love the horse."

How we can possibly teach students we don't love or respect or value is beyond me. How we enter a classroom with a program that assumes they are unworthy, weak, and fundamentally deficient, and then teach effectively is a mystery. And how we start with the belief that our students are essentially worthless until a hero teacher fixes them-- well, that encompasses so much arrogant, wrong-headed, ineffective and just plain evil mess. If that's our attitude-- or the attitude that we are supposed to embrace-- I know one more reason that CCSS reformy stuff is destined to fail.