Status quo.
The Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools keep railing about the status quo. The current crisis in education requires us to break the mold, change our course, do something different. the status quo, we're told repeatedly, is not working.
Here's the thing.
A Nation at Risk came out in 1983, kicking off the current generation of mania for waving one sort of magical stick or another at schools. "OMGZZ," said the risk-threatened nation. "We had better get wise men in DC a-fixin' this, toot the sweet!" (I'm paraphrasing here.)
No Child Left Behind became law in 2001, becoming effective at the start of 2002 and thereby enshrined the notion of top-down, federal-controlled, test-based, punitive, centrally-designed management of the nation's educational system. NCLB's ridiculous and unreachable requirement that 100% of the nation's students be above average was used as leverage to push states into a more top-down, more federally-controlled, more test-based, more punitive, more centrally-designed system of public schooling under Race to the Top and Common Core.
So when somebody says that we need to change the status quo, I completely agree, because you know what the status quo is?? This. This test-worshipping teacher-punishing student-hating one-size-fits-all mockery of a school system is our status quo.
Every single child now in America's school has encountered only this "reformed" version of public schooling. We have now inflicted this foolishness on an entire generation.
Every criticism of public schools, every test score offered as "proof," every "we have to do better" political press release is not not NOT an indictment of the traditional model of American public schooling. That model has been, depending on your location, something between crippled and crushed for over a decade, buried under the bulk of NCLBRTTT baloney for over a decade.
No, if you want to criticize the State of Education in this country, you will need to direct that to the current keepers of the status quo flame, the folks formerly known as "reformers." We've been living and teaching in their world for over a decade. They have had control of education for the entire school life of our current students. They cannot whine that they are outsiders, bravely trying to pull down the ramparts of the status quo, because they ARE the status quo. And in the words of that great philosopher, Dr. Phil, I have to as, "How's that working for you?" If the car's wrapped around a tree, and you're the one who demanded the driver's seat, don't start blaming the hostages you stuffed in the trunk.
We will have to wait for the language to catch up. What we've been calling "reform" or "reformy stuff" or "that miserable pile of polished turds pushed off on us by corporate tools" is, in fact, the status quo. It is those of us who want to reclaim traditional American public education who are the rebels, the reformers.
In the meantime, every time those folks complain about the need to disrupt the status quo, I will remember the words of the other great philosopher, Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Monday, February 17, 2014
12 Reasons To Resist TFA
1. Five Weeks.
Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Five weeks of training. My flightiest fifteen-year-old students have longer relationships. The gestation period of a guinea pig is longer. Phileas Fogg could not even get halfway around the world. And even the "five weeks" is overstating it, because as numerous TFA escapees have noted, a large chunk of that five weeks is not actual training, but simply being dumped in front of a faux class to flail away.
The go-to analogy here is "Would you hire a doctor/lawyer who had only five weeks of training," but we don't have to get that fancy. I wouldn't let a five-week plumber touch my pipes or a five-week mechanic touch my car. When I worked a summer as a catalog order phone sales rep, I was trained for two entire weeks, and closely supervised for another month. The only jobs where five weeks of training are adequate involve either "Do you want fries with that" or "Paper or plastic?"
2. Stability.
Schools need it. Schools serving poor and at-risk populations need it even more. Those students need to know that their school is stable, dependable, and there for them every day. Stability is not enhanced by a teaching staff that turns over every single year comprised of teachers who are just passing through. School is where students should meet adults who care enough about the children to stick around for the long haul.
3. A Solution with No Problem.
Maybe once upon a time there was a shortage of teachers (and by "once upon a time" I mean 50-60 years ago), but there sure as heck isn't one now. I find unemployment figures from 6% to 9% for education, and the anecdotal info matches that.
I can believe that Wendy Kopp's mission was noble twenty years ago. But twenty years ago I was married to a different woman, and that's not who I'm going home to tonight. Today's world does not need the TFA solution from twenty years ago.
4. TFA (among others) Doesn't Understand Economics
There are, to be sure, districts that have trouble recruiting teachers. The entire state of North Carolina is doing its best to drive teachers away. But economics tells us how to fix the issue. Heck, we're all instructed in this issue every time some criminal CEO gets a raise.
If you want the right people for a particular job, you have to pay what the invisible hand of the market says you have to pay. If you can't get anybody to work for you shoveling fertilizer for minimum wage, you have to pay more. At the very least, you have to make the job more attractive.
People who squawk about attracting and retaining top quality highly effective teachers keep acting as if this is some mystery. It's not. If you want to get people to do a job, make it worth their while. That doesn't necessarily mean money-- people work for autonomy and a sense of value-- but it certainly doesn't mean you throw up your hands and grab some 22-year-old temp with no training.
5. So Discover a New Problem, or Else
Since no teacher shortage exists anywhere, TFA has massaged its message. Because how are they going to stay in business if they simply announce, "You know what? The teacher shortage of two decades ago is over. Problem solved. We can all go home now." Nope. Instead, TFA has quietly changed its mission to something else entirely.
In this, TFA reveals itself to be a status-quo loving institution just like any other. Because the number one mission of every hidebound dinosaur of an institution, the ironclad law of the institutional jungle, is Self Preservation. And TFA has arrived at that magical spot where the mission is "Say whatever you need to, but keep our directors employed and the money rolling in."
6. Its New Mission Is More Bogus That the Old One
Points for honesty-- we're not even pretending that TFA is aiming itself at education, really. Notice that "teach" doesn't appear anywhere except in their name. And we're going to find these special snowflakes and place them in a classroom-- what they do once they're placed there is anybody's guess.
TFA has repositioned itself as an engine for equality. Twitter is awash in TFA tweetage about getting black teachers in classrooms, and TFA has made "diversity" one of its core values. TFA is hustling like crazy to get black men into the classroom, and of all the ways in which TFA has rewritten/tweaked its mission, this is one of the least objectionable. But its mission remains the same-- recruit the elite, the people who are just better than everyone else, and give them some classroom experience. Just by placing these superior humans in a classroom with, well, inferior humans, the inferior humans will be elevated. Why? Well...
Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Five weeks of training. My flightiest fifteen-year-old students have longer relationships. The gestation period of a guinea pig is longer. Phileas Fogg could not even get halfway around the world. And even the "five weeks" is overstating it, because as numerous TFA escapees have noted, a large chunk of that five weeks is not actual training, but simply being dumped in front of a faux class to flail away.
The go-to analogy here is "Would you hire a doctor/lawyer who had only five weeks of training," but we don't have to get that fancy. I wouldn't let a five-week plumber touch my pipes or a five-week mechanic touch my car. When I worked a summer as a catalog order phone sales rep, I was trained for two entire weeks, and closely supervised for another month. The only jobs where five weeks of training are adequate involve either "Do you want fries with that" or "Paper or plastic?"
2. Stability.
Schools need it. Schools serving poor and at-risk populations need it even more. Those students need to know that their school is stable, dependable, and there for them every day. Stability is not enhanced by a teaching staff that turns over every single year comprised of teachers who are just passing through. School is where students should meet adults who care enough about the children to stick around for the long haul.
3. A Solution with No Problem.
Maybe once upon a time there was a shortage of teachers (and by "once upon a time" I mean 50-60 years ago), but there sure as heck isn't one now. I find unemployment figures from 6% to 9% for education, and the anecdotal info matches that.
I can believe that Wendy Kopp's mission was noble twenty years ago. But twenty years ago I was married to a different woman, and that's not who I'm going home to tonight. Today's world does not need the TFA solution from twenty years ago.
4. TFA (among others) Doesn't Understand Economics
There are, to be sure, districts that have trouble recruiting teachers. The entire state of North Carolina is doing its best to drive teachers away. But economics tells us how to fix the issue. Heck, we're all instructed in this issue every time some criminal CEO gets a raise.
If you want the right people for a particular job, you have to pay what the invisible hand of the market says you have to pay. If you can't get anybody to work for you shoveling fertilizer for minimum wage, you have to pay more. At the very least, you have to make the job more attractive.
People who squawk about attracting and retaining top quality highly effective teachers keep acting as if this is some mystery. It's not. If you want to get people to do a job, make it worth their while. That doesn't necessarily mean money-- people work for autonomy and a sense of value-- but it certainly doesn't mean you throw up your hands and grab some 22-year-old temp with no training.
5. So Discover a New Problem, or Else
Since no teacher shortage exists anywhere, TFA has massaged its message. Because how are they going to stay in business if they simply announce, "You know what? The teacher shortage of two decades ago is over. Problem solved. We can all go home now." Nope. Instead, TFA has quietly changed its mission to something else entirely.
In this, TFA reveals itself to be a status-quo loving institution just like any other. Because the number one mission of every hidebound dinosaur of an institution, the ironclad law of the institutional jungle, is Self Preservation. And TFA has arrived at that magical spot where the mission is "Say whatever you need to, but keep our directors employed and the money rolling in."
6. Its New Mission Is More Bogus That the Old One
Teach For America works to eliminate this injustice by finding,
training, and supporting individuals who are committed to equality and
placing them in high-need classrooms across the country. Through this
experience, they become lifelong leaders for a better world.
Points for honesty-- we're not even pretending that TFA is aiming itself at education, really. Notice that "teach" doesn't appear anywhere except in their name. And we're going to find these special snowflakes and place them in a classroom-- what they do once they're placed there is anybody's guess.
TFA has repositioned itself as an engine for equality. Twitter is awash in TFA tweetage about getting black teachers in classrooms, and TFA has made "diversity" one of its core values. TFA is hustling like crazy to get black men into the classroom, and of all the ways in which TFA has rewritten/tweaked its mission, this is one of the least objectionable. But its mission remains the same-- recruit the elite, the people who are just better than everyone else, and give them some classroom experience. Just by placing these superior humans in a classroom with, well, inferior humans, the inferior humans will be elevated. Why? Well...
7. TFA Doesn't Understand Mobility
The average TFA body's success story goes something like this.
"I was born into a rich family and grew up in a rich neighborhood. My family's connections got me into a top private school, and connections and money made it possible for me to attend a select ivy league college. Now I'm going to go help poor kids get a good education, because the most important factor to getting ahead in this world is education."
Or: "I was born on third base, which makes me uniquely qualified to teach people how to hit triples."
8. TFA Has An Arrogance Problem
TFA has built itself around recruiting and retaining people who are Just Better Than Everyone Else. And then it devotes tons of internal communication to reminding its people that they are Just Better Than Everyone Else. Consequently, many TFAers do not play well with others. They enter schools convinced that the professional teachers who already work there are the problem, and should be ignored. The best schools, even the most not-too-bad schools, depend on collegiality and cooperation. When TFA says "team," they mean their team, not the public school team.
TFA knows they have a problem. Another core value that they've added is "respect & humility."
9. TFA Wastes the Good Intentions of Good People
Many, many TFAers join up for the very best of reasons with the very best of intentions. These are people who really want to help make the world a better place for children who face tough obstacles. Instead, they are made part of a program that sets them up for failure in the classroom and wastes all their good intentions on simply enriching TFA itself. Some of these people actually end up staying in teaching for good, and God bless those people. But how many more of those good people would still be teachers if they had actually gotten involved in, I don't know-- a teaching program.
10. A Classroom Is Not An "Experience."
The classic Onion column said it best. These are real live students with real needs and desires and hopes and dreams and needs. They do not exist simply so that some future Master of the Universe can say, "Hey, I once spent a year in a classroom with some poor people."
Here's one way to understand Being a Professional: when you are doing your job, it's not about you. At all. When you are a doctor in an operating theater, your personal wants and dreams are the least important thing in the room. When you are a lawyer in court, you leave your personal issues for the day outside. And when you are a teacher in a classroom, the very last thing you should be wondering is "What am I going to get out of this?"
Students are not there to provide you with an experience. You are there to provide them with an education.
11. TFA Isn't Very Interested in Teaching
In addition to those already listed, TFA's Core Values are Leadership, Team and Transformational Change. Nothing about teaching. They talk about leadership a great deal, about establishing a culture of excellence, about how it is all challenging. TFA is interested in how the experience will foster your leadership skills and make you a better person when you finally get to your real job.On TFA's website, the verb "teach" rarely appears. Beyond the official materials, there's a lot of talk about TFA as a great resume-builder. But not a lot of talk about teaching.
I had a student teacher once who struggled a great deal. What became clear was that he didn't really want to be a teacher-- he just wanted to be the smartest guy in the classroom. TFA materials remind me of him a great deal. No talk of teaching techniques, pedagogical approaches, breaking down materials into manageable chunks, developmental appropriateness. TFA's pedadgogical approach appears to be, "Arrive in classroom. Be awesome. Demand excellence. Watch education magically occur. Quit and go to grad school for MBA."
12. TFA Diminishes the Profession
TFA institutionalizes the very idea that teaching is so idiot-simple that anybody can do it. Well, at least anybody from among the elite. That feeds very nicely into the newly-reformed conception of teachers as Content Delivery Units. If the teacher's job is just to unpack the unit from Pearson's shipping carton and read the script to the students-- well, yes, if teaching were that simple, any idiot COULD do it.
Or if we decided that the only real job a teacher has is to insure good scores on The Test, well, most idiots could probably do that as well. In the end, TFA has solved its own first problem. If five weeks of training is insufficient to prepare someone to teach, well, then, let's ramp down the professional requirements of a teacher until it's something that you CAN be trained for in five weeks.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Revenge of the Hall Monitors
There's a strikingly odd generational irony that underlies the world of reformy stuff.
The architects of this wave of top-down, rigidly created and enforced educational control-freakery, from the legislative creators of NCLB to the corporate underwriters of CCSS are largely Baby Boomers. Bush, Clinton, Obama, Duncan, Gates-- boomers all. Other generations are represented (e.g. David "Babyface" Coleman and Eli "Elder Statesman" Broad), but school reform remains largely one more attempt by my generation to rewrite the rules of society.
It seems so unexpected. How did the generation that rejected its parents' desire for a stable, solid structure, a generation that found a thousand ways to stand for non-conformity-- how did that generation end up demanding that its own children shape up and snap to? How can it be that middle-aged men are now getting out their well-worn vinyl copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall and thinking that those children's chorus singing "Teacher, leave those kids alone" really needs some rigorous educational pummeling? We were going to fight The Man. Somehow, some of us grew up to be The Man on steroids.
Part of the answer is, of course, that no generation is homogenous. For every kid running through the halls of the school and trying to fight The Power with his scruffy jeans and tie-dye (cause The Power hated tie-dye), there was a kid from the same class, neatly dressed, working as a hall monitor and telling people to be quiet and get to class. Nor have all of us grown up to believe that Kids These Days are slack-brained degenerates who need to be pummeled into obedience.
But, as often noted, Bill Gates was not exactly a young Republican afraid to cross the street without parental permission. Nor was George Bush exactly Exhibit A for How To Properly Pursue an Education.
So what has happened? Is this the revenge of the hall monitors, who have finally secured positions of power and are now finally going to make Those Darn Kids behave? Did we decide that little boxes made of ticky tacky are actually desirable-- at least for other people? Is this just the Boomer's well-documented tendency to believe we have Grasped an Important Righteous Truth and must now make everyone else see?
I don't know. I mean, I really don't know, and I am really puzzled. Has the most individualistic, do-your-own-thing generation in modern memory literally forgotten what it means to be a young human searching for your own place in a one size fits all world? How have we decided that our own experience growing up is one that our own children (or at least other people's own children) absolutely must not have?
In The Lego Movie [mild spoiler alert], Will Ferrell is a father who has created an awesome and amazing Lego world. He forbids his son to touch it, and begins gluing it into place so that those blocks can never, ever take another shape. When he realizes what he is doing to his son, and that he has become the villain in his son's story, he relents, and the two begin to create together. (Also, you should totally go see this movie, because it is absolutely fun in the best way-- children laugh at some spots, adults laugh at other spots, and everybody goes home humming that earworm of a theme song).
We need a moment like that. The leaders of reformy stuff need to look some real, live human children in the eye and start creating with them instead of experimenting on them. They need to stop performing Orwellian gymnastics that use the language of opportunity and choices to describe the reality of straightjacketed one-size-fits-all limits.
Most of all, we need to remember what there was to love about our own lives and challenge ourselves to give our children more. Somehow, reformy boomers have grown up, not to be our parents, but something even worse. We do not create a better world with our children by way of "no" and "less," even if we cloak it with the language of "yes" and "more."
The architects of this wave of top-down, rigidly created and enforced educational control-freakery, from the legislative creators of NCLB to the corporate underwriters of CCSS are largely Baby Boomers. Bush, Clinton, Obama, Duncan, Gates-- boomers all. Other generations are represented (e.g. David "Babyface" Coleman and Eli "Elder Statesman" Broad), but school reform remains largely one more attempt by my generation to rewrite the rules of society.
It seems so unexpected. How did the generation that rejected its parents' desire for a stable, solid structure, a generation that found a thousand ways to stand for non-conformity-- how did that generation end up demanding that its own children shape up and snap to? How can it be that middle-aged men are now getting out their well-worn vinyl copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall and thinking that those children's chorus singing "Teacher, leave those kids alone" really needs some rigorous educational pummeling? We were going to fight The Man. Somehow, some of us grew up to be The Man on steroids.
Part of the answer is, of course, that no generation is homogenous. For every kid running through the halls of the school and trying to fight The Power with his scruffy jeans and tie-dye (cause The Power hated tie-dye), there was a kid from the same class, neatly dressed, working as a hall monitor and telling people to be quiet and get to class. Nor have all of us grown up to believe that Kids These Days are slack-brained degenerates who need to be pummeled into obedience.
But, as often noted, Bill Gates was not exactly a young Republican afraid to cross the street without parental permission. Nor was George Bush exactly Exhibit A for How To Properly Pursue an Education.
So what has happened? Is this the revenge of the hall monitors, who have finally secured positions of power and are now finally going to make Those Darn Kids behave? Did we decide that little boxes made of ticky tacky are actually desirable-- at least for other people? Is this just the Boomer's well-documented tendency to believe we have Grasped an Important Righteous Truth and must now make everyone else see?
I don't know. I mean, I really don't know, and I am really puzzled. Has the most individualistic, do-your-own-thing generation in modern memory literally forgotten what it means to be a young human searching for your own place in a one size fits all world? How have we decided that our own experience growing up is one that our own children (or at least other people's own children) absolutely must not have?
In The Lego Movie [mild spoiler alert], Will Ferrell is a father who has created an awesome and amazing Lego world. He forbids his son to touch it, and begins gluing it into place so that those blocks can never, ever take another shape. When he realizes what he is doing to his son, and that he has become the villain in his son's story, he relents, and the two begin to create together. (Also, you should totally go see this movie, because it is absolutely fun in the best way-- children laugh at some spots, adults laugh at other spots, and everybody goes home humming that earworm of a theme song).
We need a moment like that. The leaders of reformy stuff need to look some real, live human children in the eye and start creating with them instead of experimenting on them. They need to stop performing Orwellian gymnastics that use the language of opportunity and choices to describe the reality of straightjacketed one-size-fits-all limits.
Most of all, we need to remember what there was to love about our own lives and challenge ourselves to give our children more. Somehow, reformy boomers have grown up, not to be our parents, but something even worse. We do not create a better world with our children by way of "no" and "less," even if we cloak it with the language of "yes" and "more."
Friday, February 14, 2014
"Why I Heart Common Core"
Hey. Everybody else is writing one. Why not me? Here's my teacher-cheerleading CCSS letter.
As everybody knows, US education has been descending into failure of Biblical proportions, leading to an entire generation of students who don't know enough to come in out the rain. We were facing world domination by Estonia and South Korea. Thank goodness a bunch of teachers got together, possibly teaming up with parents, to produce the Common Core State Standards which were totally not created by a bunch of guys from the major testing corporations. These life-changing and nation-rescuing standards were voluntarily adopted by 45 states who were in no way influenced by their desire to get their federal ed money and avoid the impending NCLB crash. In fact, these 45 states were so excited about voluntarily adopting CCSS, some of them did it before the standards were actually published.
Some wacko
In my own classroom, Common Core Standards have been pedagogically transformative in a dynamically epistomological kind of way. My students are involved in deep and thoughtful activities that involve interaction, reflection, and involvement. We do projects. We have discussions. We use critical thinking. We read books, and when we do, we read carefully and deeply and discuss ideas about the book while using details from the book to back these up. We even write stuff, and sometime use computers and techy things.
These may sound like activities that teachers have been doing in classrooms since the dawn of time, but before CCSS, I made my students learn everything by rote and repetition. We used pieces of slate that we drew on with charcoal. If we used novels at all, we simply let them sit on the desk and gained insights into the contents by consulting our spirit animals. I mean, I had no idea that critical thinking even was a thing! It used to take me three months just to introduce regular old thinking. Also, grit and rigor. We are awash in grit and rigor, and I can see with my own eyes that the grit and rigor is transforming my useless young hooligans into future investment bankers. It's awesome.
CCSS has liberated me. Once I open my Pearson test book and set up the lesson that is carefully aligned to the standards for that exact day of the school year, I am free to put my own personal spin on it. I could deliver the lesson with a red shirt on, or I could wear a blue shirt. I could recite the opener with a thoughtful face or a happy face. I can part my hair on whatever side I choose. Teachers who say that the Core is restrictive are just cray cray. Because freedom is slavery.
Of course, teachers need time to adjust to these new standards of awesomeness, time to plan lessons around our new materials, and time to adjust students to having just skipped an entire grade of instruction. And maybe we could hold off on the tests until, you know, some are actually written-- though the tests are a necessary part of the learning experience. Also, seeing results from last year's single test will totally tell me what I need to emphasize with next year's students.
But even though the standards have never been tested, we can all be assured that they will make all students gritty and rigorous and college ready. Whether students want to grow up to be artists, welders, scientists, writers, actors, engineers, or stay-at-home parents, don't they all deserve to have the exact same preparation for those futures? But by giving them rigorous tests now, we can unlock all their dreams for the future. Because dreams, rigor, common sense, and effectiveness.
I am a more effective teacher now that I have a set of government and corporate documents to tell me how to do my job. Also, ignorance is strength.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
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 beco-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.
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
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
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.
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.
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