At the wrap-up from last weekend's Network for Public Education conference in Austin, TX, the leaders of the national pro-public education (I realize that alignment should be obvious from the title, but these days you can't assume these things) issued a call for Congressional hearings " to investigate the over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor
implementation of high-stakes standardized testing in the nation’s K-12
public schools."
NPE offered a list of eleven essential questions for Congress to ask, but I'd offer those questions to anyone who is questioning test-based high stakes education in their schools. There will be, I hope, plenty written about this, but the word needs to be spread far and wide.These are questions that need to be answered, in public, loudly.
Do the tests promote skills our children and our economy need? Is there a big market for professional bubblers, or people who can take tests that are easy to score with a computer? If we need creative thinkers, problem solvers and collaborators for the future, do these tests foster or measure any of those abilities? Tests promote certain values by virtue of saying "This is what counts." Are the tests aligned with the skills we really value?
What is the purpose of these tests? Couldn't be to help me teach, because the students in my class who take them will be gone by the time I see my highly generalized results. Nor will my students get any kind of useful feedback from them. So why do we need to take these again?
How good are the tests? Take a look at them. This may take some work, because test security is high, almost as if the test-makers knew that their work couldn't stand the light of day. "Tests are not scientific instruments like barometers; they are commercial products that are subject to multiple errors."
Are tests being given to children who are too young? Let be plain-- if you are giving a standardized test to a kindergartner, you are a dope. If you are giving a timed test that requires keyboarding to an eight-year-old, you are a dope. And an abusive dope at that.
Are tests culturally biased? Do we even have to ask? Standardized tests universally correlate to socio-economic class. That tells us either that a) class is completely a function of intellect and all rich people are rich because of their superior merit or b) tests include a class bias. Take your pick.
Are tests harmful to students with disabilities? The horror stories of dying children being forced to take standardized tests are terrible in and of themselves, but they underline a larger point-- the people pushing this stuff really haven't thought things through. At worst, testing is damaging to students with disabilities. At best, the tests have been rushed through so quickly and haphazardly that adaptations that might allow disabled students to actually be measured by the tests have been completely overlooked.
How have the frequency and quantity of testing increased? Testing time has an opportunity cost. A day spent testing is a day not spent playing in band or drawing art or playing in phys ed. It's a day not spent studying history or science. Increased testing has the effect of shortening the school year. What would you say if your child's school announced that the year would be over in March? That is effectively what increased testing is doing in some schools.
Does testing harm teaching? Are teachers in your district so worried about the test scores that they have narrowed their instruction? Do you have teachers who are buckling under the stress of possible bad evaluations because of test scores that, in many cases, they can't even control?
How much money does it cost? Again, don't just look at the expense-- look at the opportunity costs. LA schools spent $1 billion on ipads for their students as part of a testing initiative. If someone had given LAUSD $1 billion dollars and they had said, "What's the best stuff we could get with this money?" would over-priced ipads have carried the day? Districts are looking at the cost of tests, pre-tests, hiring test prep coaches, and in some states, technology upgrades to make testing possible. What is this costing you?
Are there conflicts of interest in testing policies? Not really a question here. By working all sides of this issue-- producing the test, producing the aligned materials, producing the legislation and standards that drive it all-- corporations are creating both the demand and the supply. \
Was it legal for the U.S. Department of Education to fund two testing consortia for the Common Core State Standards? Okay, so this question really is for Congress. But the feds are barred from directing local education, and the last twelve years sure look like a clever end-run around that legality. Is this administration even worse with legalities? Before you answer too loudly, you may want to keep in mind that the current administration believes it's legal to kill a US citizen who in their opinion represents a threat to our country.
On one level, I'm not that excited about asking Congress to look into this (that would be the level that believes the current Congress is not capable of getting much right, as well as the level that believes the federal government needs to just get out of the education biz). But on another level, I welcome anything that puts the current test-driven high stakes status quo under scrutiny. There's so much going on that can't stand the light of day any better than a light-sensitive cockroach, so anything that throw light toward it is welcome.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Opportunity Cost: Distance Learning & Best Ravitch Line from NPE Conference
In the midst of show weekend with my students here in PA, it was interesting to try to follow the Network for Public Education Conference in Austin this weekend. I have two initial takeaways from the experience.
Distance Learning Is Even Worse Than Phone Sex
I followed lots of folks on twitter, watched some of the streamed video, viewed video clips as soon as anyone put them up. This conference left a huge footprint on the interwebs, with #npeconference leading the twitter trend list both days on weekend that included rising tensions in the Ukraine and preparations for tonight's Oscar bash. Beyond getting a few more sessions in front of the live streaming or hiring someone to carry around video devices, I'm not sure how much more digitally covered the conference could have been.
And I have to tell you-- it wasn't nearly enough. I caught some of the meat, got to see the real faces and hear the real speech cadences of many people that I've come to know online, read many of the best lines form the weekend-- but in the end, I still felt like a bunch of my friends had had a really cool party and group experience and I had missed out on it. So much energy and excitement leaked through the sad tiny pipeline that is the internet-- I can't quite imagine how much there was in the real place.
Which made me think-- if this was how it felt to try to distance-follow an event in which I was primed to be engaged and which was accessible to me by a whole array of current technology, how terribly inadequate distance learning, cyber-schooling and all the other computer-based substitutes for a real live teacher in the same room as students must be.
Like phone sex (I imagine), the experience lived somewhere in the land between better-than-nothing and painful-because-it-reminds-you-of-what-you're-missing. In the end, I come down on better-than-nothing, but my feelings that distance learning must be terribly inadequate are now even more confirmed.
My Favorite Ravitch Point of The Weekend
I got the keynote address in bits and pieces through twitter (set strike was today), so I know there were plenty of applause lines there. But I definitely caught the truncated video of the NPE press conference, and that call for Congress to get involved again some more in the Giant Testing Mess (which leaves me with some mixed feelings because, hey, there's no way THAT could end badly) included a phrase we ought to hear much more often in this debate.
Opportunity cost.
"Opportunity cost" used to be a semi-obscure economics term. Basically it underlines that buying a candy bar for a dollar doesn't cost you a dollar-- it costs you all the other things you COULD have spent the dollar on. By spending money here, you lose the opportunity to spend it over there.
This is the perfect way to frame the debate over testing and test prep. We keep talking about ytime, about how much time the tests take, how much time we spend preparing, how much time goes into testing.
But it's not just time. As Diane correctly noted, we're really talking about opportunity costs. A week of test prep means students lose the opportunity to play in band or sing in choir or draw in art or play a game in phys ed. A week of testing costs students the opportunity to spend that week doing something else.
We could pay the cost of testing simply in time. We could say, "Look, these tests are so important that we are going to add two months to the school year just to get ready for the tests and then take them." We could actually pay the cost in time pretty easily. But if we paid it that way, we'd know exactly what it was costing us (summer vacations, angry phone calls from angry parents).
But opportunity costs we can hide. And we have. We've hidden them because we are pros at that and have been for years. We add new units about health and safety and nutrition and adopting dogs and fold it into the year as if the school year is a big accordion-shaped squeezebox of fluid infinite time. We never talk about opportunity costs.
So it is dead-on correct to call for a study of opportunity costs. It is dead-on correct to ask what we are taking away to do this unholy regime of pointless testing.
Because when something costs time, there's the illusion that there's always more time. We can get it back. But opportunities lost are gone for good. And talking about opportunity costs force us to ask hard questions.
Talking about value is easy. Did I get good value for what I spent? Is this a decent dollar's worth of candy bar?
But talking about opportunity cost-- that's another thing. Because now the question is-- of all the things I could have spent this dollar on, is this candy bar the best?
Proponents of the high stakes test-based education status quo (another thing that Ravitch got dead-on correct-- this IS the status quo, not a challenge to it) don't just need to prove that their testing regimen has some value or may serve some useful purpose. What they need to prove is this-- looking at the resources spent, the money spent, the hours of young lives spent, the work of education professionals spent-- looking at all those costs, were there better opportunities? What opportunities did we give up to pursue the big ball of testing wax, and would some of those opportunities have been a better use of our resources? What opportunities are we and our students going to have tomorrow, and which ones should we pursue? Is the high stakes test-based status quo really the best thing we can think of to spend our time and effort on? I may not have been there, but I bet everybody who was in Austin knows the answer.
Distance Learning Is Even Worse Than Phone Sex
I followed lots of folks on twitter, watched some of the streamed video, viewed video clips as soon as anyone put them up. This conference left a huge footprint on the interwebs, with #npeconference leading the twitter trend list both days on weekend that included rising tensions in the Ukraine and preparations for tonight's Oscar bash. Beyond getting a few more sessions in front of the live streaming or hiring someone to carry around video devices, I'm not sure how much more digitally covered the conference could have been.
And I have to tell you-- it wasn't nearly enough. I caught some of the meat, got to see the real faces and hear the real speech cadences of many people that I've come to know online, read many of the best lines form the weekend-- but in the end, I still felt like a bunch of my friends had had a really cool party and group experience and I had missed out on it. So much energy and excitement leaked through the sad tiny pipeline that is the internet-- I can't quite imagine how much there was in the real place.
Which made me think-- if this was how it felt to try to distance-follow an event in which I was primed to be engaged and which was accessible to me by a whole array of current technology, how terribly inadequate distance learning, cyber-schooling and all the other computer-based substitutes for a real live teacher in the same room as students must be.
Like phone sex (I imagine), the experience lived somewhere in the land between better-than-nothing and painful-because-it-reminds-you-of-what-you're-missing. In the end, I come down on better-than-nothing, but my feelings that distance learning must be terribly inadequate are now even more confirmed.
My Favorite Ravitch Point of The Weekend
I got the keynote address in bits and pieces through twitter (set strike was today), so I know there were plenty of applause lines there. But I definitely caught the truncated video of the NPE press conference, and that call for Congress to get involved again some more in the Giant Testing Mess (which leaves me with some mixed feelings because, hey, there's no way THAT could end badly) included a phrase we ought to hear much more often in this debate.
Opportunity cost.
"Opportunity cost" used to be a semi-obscure economics term. Basically it underlines that buying a candy bar for a dollar doesn't cost you a dollar-- it costs you all the other things you COULD have spent the dollar on. By spending money here, you lose the opportunity to spend it over there.
This is the perfect way to frame the debate over testing and test prep. We keep talking about ytime, about how much time the tests take, how much time we spend preparing, how much time goes into testing.
But it's not just time. As Diane correctly noted, we're really talking about opportunity costs. A week of test prep means students lose the opportunity to play in band or sing in choir or draw in art or play a game in phys ed. A week of testing costs students the opportunity to spend that week doing something else.
We could pay the cost of testing simply in time. We could say, "Look, these tests are so important that we are going to add two months to the school year just to get ready for the tests and then take them." We could actually pay the cost in time pretty easily. But if we paid it that way, we'd know exactly what it was costing us (summer vacations, angry phone calls from angry parents).
But opportunity costs we can hide. And we have. We've hidden them because we are pros at that and have been for years. We add new units about health and safety and nutrition and adopting dogs and fold it into the year as if the school year is a big accordion-shaped squeezebox of fluid infinite time. We never talk about opportunity costs.
So it is dead-on correct to call for a study of opportunity costs. It is dead-on correct to ask what we are taking away to do this unholy regime of pointless testing.
Because when something costs time, there's the illusion that there's always more time. We can get it back. But opportunities lost are gone for good. And talking about opportunity costs force us to ask hard questions.
Talking about value is easy. Did I get good value for what I spent? Is this a decent dollar's worth of candy bar?
But talking about opportunity cost-- that's another thing. Because now the question is-- of all the things I could have spent this dollar on, is this candy bar the best?
Proponents of the high stakes test-based education status quo (another thing that Ravitch got dead-on correct-- this IS the status quo, not a challenge to it) don't just need to prove that their testing regimen has some value or may serve some useful purpose. What they need to prove is this-- looking at the resources spent, the money spent, the hours of young lives spent, the work of education professionals spent-- looking at all those costs, were there better opportunities? What opportunities did we give up to pursue the big ball of testing wax, and would some of those opportunities have been a better use of our resources? What opportunities are we and our students going to have tomorrow, and which ones should we pursue? Is the high stakes test-based status quo really the best thing we can think of to spend our time and effort on? I may not have been there, but I bet everybody who was in Austin knows the answer.
"If not CCSS, then what?"
If not the CCSS, then what?
This refrain comes back and back and back again, echoing this morning over the interwebs all the way from the NPE conference in Austin. Today it's Randi Weingarten, but it could just as easily be Dennis Van Roekel (well, if he ever went to anything or spoke to anybody outside of NEA PR work) or any number of people in the Reluctant CCSS Warrior Crowd (see also The It's Just An Implementation Problem crowd).
This question has become the big rhetoric conversation nuker, just like "So which children do you think we should leave behind" used to shut down NCLB opponents. So let me offer some possible answers you might want to use the next time someone unloads this cannon d'argument on you.
Locally-developed standards.
Put your districts key teachers, key parents, key administrators in a room. Send out some questionnaires if you like. Talk to former students, local employers. Make a selection of stakeholders consistent with the needs, priorities, history, desires of your local district. Let all those people put their heads together to decide what standards are appropriate and desired for your local district.
It's a measure of how screwed up we are these days that even I can hear how radical that sounds, but really, why should it? This is local control, the way we did this for ages. And what the hell does somebody in a state capital or DC know about the needs of your students that local people do not?
"Well, then, we'll have some school in Texas teaching that Jesus rode a dinosaur," is the complaint. To which I say, "So what?" If it really bothers you, institute a simple "Thou shalt not teach any really dumb crap" law at the state level. Otherwise, leave those people alone. Yes, I think they're dead wrong, but at what point do we finally say in this country, "What those people over there do is none of my damn business?"
Because here's the problem with central standards. You may intend to hamstring the people who want to do dumb things, but at the same time, you are also hamstringing the people who don't want to do stupid things. Not only that, but you know who will ignore your hamstringing and just go on ahead anyway-- the people who want to do stupid things.
And even worse, increasingly the people who want to do stupid things have realized that if a central government is writing the rules, all they have to do is capture that central office, and they are not only free to do all the stupid things they want, but they can make other people do them, too.
So-- leave local standards in the hands of local control.
Local accountability
Some folks want national standards so they can have national accountability.
I refuse to engage in trying to prove that we should have local accountability instead. Anyone who wants to argue for national accountability is carrying the burden of proof. Why does Arne Duncan need to know what the students in my third period class are doing and how well they're doing it? Why does the federal government need a national database of all students and their various academic achievements?
Nobody-- not one single solitary person-- has made so much as a feeble argument for this kind of national oversight. I suspect that's because this is not about accountability-- it's about marketing. Well, no. You don't get to argue that my students should live in this new national straightjacket so that you can more easily market programs and materials today and collect data on customers and employees to use against them tomorrow.
No parent of a local school district ever needed to consult some sort of federal report to know how well their child is doing or which teachers is the one you want to get for fourth grade. We have accountability covered, and we always have. Unless you can come up with a good argument for why the feds should butt in, they should butt out.
Anarchy of the Professionals
Look, I'm really not a national standards guy. If I go to the doctor, I don't want him to consult some federal bureaucrat's instructions on how to properly rotate my spleen. I want him to use his best judgment about me, my situation, my health, and my spleen. I want him to make choices based on his professional judgment about what is best for me, not what is best for his standing with various state and federal bureaucrats and oversight agencies.
Ditto for teachers. I'm a professional. Let me work. Let me do my job. Let me make professional judgments based on my knowledge of the material and the students and make choices based on what would be best for those students. Nobody anywhere on the planet is in a better position than I am to know best what that student needs in my classroom. Okay-- parents in most cases are right up there, too. "Oh, if only I had a set of federally mandated tests and standards that I could consult," said no parent or teacher ever.
And if none of these answers are useful, do not forget this one--
Why are you assuming we need anything at all?
"If not CCSS, then what?" assumes that we need something.
Maybe we're assuming a giant educational crisis, only we know that no such crisis exists.
Maybe we're assuming that there is a political problem, that various government folks and the corporate sponsors who own them have mustered enough political clout to pose a threat, and what our leaders really mean by this question is "We are about to be mugged-- what's the best way to avoid serious injury?" That's a legitimate concern and question, but please-- let's not start with the assumption that the mugger has a legitimate claim on our wallet and jewelry. Let's address the real problem-- that we are taking serious political fire from all sides, including the sides that we thought we could trust.
Maybe we're assuming there's some sort of teaching crisis, and that teachers are now so terrible that they can no longer be defended. In which case, we should not be leading a national teacher union. If someone else is making the "teachers are so terrible" assumption, then once again we're dealing with a low-information arguer, and the injection of facts might be called for.
I'm bone tired of this question. It has no validity, no basis in fact, no foundation in assumptions that deserve to be assumed. This question deserves to be questioned. Not attacked, because when people start attacking questioners and questions nobody ever hears or learns anything, but questioned directly and responded to clearly. There is no "need" for CCSS, and there never was, so there is no "need" to come up with an alternative.
This refrain comes back and back and back again, echoing this morning over the interwebs all the way from the NPE conference in Austin. Today it's Randi Weingarten, but it could just as easily be Dennis Van Roekel (well, if he ever went to anything or spoke to anybody outside of NEA PR work) or any number of people in the Reluctant CCSS Warrior Crowd (see also The It's Just An Implementation Problem crowd).
This question has become the big rhetoric conversation nuker, just like "So which children do you think we should leave behind" used to shut down NCLB opponents. So let me offer some possible answers you might want to use the next time someone unloads this cannon d'argument on you.
Locally-developed standards.
Put your districts key teachers, key parents, key administrators in a room. Send out some questionnaires if you like. Talk to former students, local employers. Make a selection of stakeholders consistent with the needs, priorities, history, desires of your local district. Let all those people put their heads together to decide what standards are appropriate and desired for your local district.
It's a measure of how screwed up we are these days that even I can hear how radical that sounds, but really, why should it? This is local control, the way we did this for ages. And what the hell does somebody in a state capital or DC know about the needs of your students that local people do not?
"Well, then, we'll have some school in Texas teaching that Jesus rode a dinosaur," is the complaint. To which I say, "So what?" If it really bothers you, institute a simple "Thou shalt not teach any really dumb crap" law at the state level. Otherwise, leave those people alone. Yes, I think they're dead wrong, but at what point do we finally say in this country, "What those people over there do is none of my damn business?"
Because here's the problem with central standards. You may intend to hamstring the people who want to do dumb things, but at the same time, you are also hamstringing the people who don't want to do stupid things. Not only that, but you know who will ignore your hamstringing and just go on ahead anyway-- the people who want to do stupid things.
And even worse, increasingly the people who want to do stupid things have realized that if a central government is writing the rules, all they have to do is capture that central office, and they are not only free to do all the stupid things they want, but they can make other people do them, too.
So-- leave local standards in the hands of local control.
Local accountability
Some folks want national standards so they can have national accountability.
I refuse to engage in trying to prove that we should have local accountability instead. Anyone who wants to argue for national accountability is carrying the burden of proof. Why does Arne Duncan need to know what the students in my third period class are doing and how well they're doing it? Why does the federal government need a national database of all students and their various academic achievements?
Nobody-- not one single solitary person-- has made so much as a feeble argument for this kind of national oversight. I suspect that's because this is not about accountability-- it's about marketing. Well, no. You don't get to argue that my students should live in this new national straightjacket so that you can more easily market programs and materials today and collect data on customers and employees to use against them tomorrow.
No parent of a local school district ever needed to consult some sort of federal report to know how well their child is doing or which teachers is the one you want to get for fourth grade. We have accountability covered, and we always have. Unless you can come up with a good argument for why the feds should butt in, they should butt out.
Anarchy of the Professionals
Look, I'm really not a national standards guy. If I go to the doctor, I don't want him to consult some federal bureaucrat's instructions on how to properly rotate my spleen. I want him to use his best judgment about me, my situation, my health, and my spleen. I want him to make choices based on his professional judgment about what is best for me, not what is best for his standing with various state and federal bureaucrats and oversight agencies.
Ditto for teachers. I'm a professional. Let me work. Let me do my job. Let me make professional judgments based on my knowledge of the material and the students and make choices based on what would be best for those students. Nobody anywhere on the planet is in a better position than I am to know best what that student needs in my classroom. Okay-- parents in most cases are right up there, too. "Oh, if only I had a set of federally mandated tests and standards that I could consult," said no parent or teacher ever.
And if none of these answers are useful, do not forget this one--
Why are you assuming we need anything at all?
"If not CCSS, then what?" assumes that we need something.
Maybe we're assuming a giant educational crisis, only we know that no such crisis exists.
Maybe we're assuming that there is a political problem, that various government folks and the corporate sponsors who own them have mustered enough political clout to pose a threat, and what our leaders really mean by this question is "We are about to be mugged-- what's the best way to avoid serious injury?" That's a legitimate concern and question, but please-- let's not start with the assumption that the mugger has a legitimate claim on our wallet and jewelry. Let's address the real problem-- that we are taking serious political fire from all sides, including the sides that we thought we could trust.
Maybe we're assuming there's some sort of teaching crisis, and that teachers are now so terrible that they can no longer be defended. In which case, we should not be leading a national teacher union. If someone else is making the "teachers are so terrible" assumption, then once again we're dealing with a low-information arguer, and the injection of facts might be called for.
I'm bone tired of this question. It has no validity, no basis in fact, no foundation in assumptions that deserve to be assumed. This question deserves to be questioned. Not attacked, because when people start attacking questioners and questions nobody ever hears or learns anything, but questioned directly and responded to clearly. There is no "need" for CCSS, and there never was, so there is no "need" to come up with an alternative.
Selling Is Not Doing
In yesterday's New York Times, Suzanne Mettler provided one more explanation of why school choice doesn't-- and won't-- work.
Mettler is looking at how college has become the "great unleveler," an education system that reinforces a caste system instead of breaking down walls. That's in no small part because the percentage of household income required to send a child to college has skyrocketed for the lower classes since 1971 (for the bottom fifth, it now takes 114% of annual household income to send a child to college),
"But wait," you say (particularly if you haven't tried to finance someone's college education lately), "Don't we have a system that makes grants, or at least loans, available to folks who need financial help for college?" The first part of the answer is "Not so much as we used to," and that part of the discussion is best served by Mettler's article.
The second part of the answer is, "Yes, we do, some, and how that plays out tells us about how vouchers really work."
As a graph in Mettler's article vividly illustrates, for profit colleges represent a voucher-fied, market-based business model. Management at Phoenix, Corinthian, Kaplan and others have realized a powerful insight about how to make it in the biz.
Selling is not doing.
There are a whole bunch of folks out there who have control of a big chunk of money for college. The money might be grants or it might be loans-- it really doesn't matter to me if I'm setting up a for-profit. What matters, what I must absolutely grasp, is that my business is not providing a service. My business is selling a service. My business is convincing those people to give me the chunk of money that they control.
Are they later dissatisfied? Doesn't matter-- I already have that money. And this isn't a used car lot. I don't need them to come back again and again for the rest of their lives.
Selling a service and providing a quality service are two entirely different operations, and only one of them provides immediate cash flow for my business.
Phoenix, Kaplan, Corinthian, Education Management and DeVry all reap over 80% of their revenue from government loans and grants-- higher education vouchers. Convincing customers to fork over those $$ isn't crucial to their business model. It IS their business model. Vouchers aren't the key to their survival; it's their reason for existing.
Selling is not doing. We know this already. We collectively observe every four years, for instance, that the skills needed to be an effective President are not exactly the same ones needed to win a Presidential election. We know that we'd better google that guy who took our sister on such a fabulous first date.
Every time we buy Coke or Pepsi, we give them a little extra money so that they can spend it on marketing aimed at convincing us to give them more money.
Selling is not doing, and selling is a separate budget category. The next time someone says, "What's wrong with schools making a profit if they educate kids?" Tell them this: Every cent that schools have to spend on marketing is a cent that doesn't get spent on actually doing the education thing. And every cent they spend on students is one less cent to spend on selling. Voucher and choice schools must screen out high-overhead students because they need that extra money for marketing.
Market forces do not foster superior quality. Market forces foster superior marketability.
The more we open education to market forces, the more money we will waste on marketing schools, the fewer resources we will devote to actual education, and the more educational snake-oil salesmen we will find working their way into the school biz. Sure, the marketplace will sort some of them out-- we're seeing some of that already in places like Ohio, where charter schools have the same life span as tse-tse flies. But how much student education, how many years of students' lives, do we want to throw away as cannon fodder for the invisible hand?
There is no place for hucksterism in education. Schools should be doing, not selling.
Mettler is looking at how college has become the "great unleveler," an education system that reinforces a caste system instead of breaking down walls. That's in no small part because the percentage of household income required to send a child to college has skyrocketed for the lower classes since 1971 (for the bottom fifth, it now takes 114% of annual household income to send a child to college),
"But wait," you say (particularly if you haven't tried to finance someone's college education lately), "Don't we have a system that makes grants, or at least loans, available to folks who need financial help for college?" The first part of the answer is "Not so much as we used to," and that part of the discussion is best served by Mettler's article.
The second part of the answer is, "Yes, we do, some, and how that plays out tells us about how vouchers really work."
As a graph in Mettler's article vividly illustrates, for profit colleges represent a voucher-fied, market-based business model. Management at Phoenix, Corinthian, Kaplan and others have realized a powerful insight about how to make it in the biz.
Selling is not doing.
There are a whole bunch of folks out there who have control of a big chunk of money for college. The money might be grants or it might be loans-- it really doesn't matter to me if I'm setting up a for-profit. What matters, what I must absolutely grasp, is that my business is not providing a service. My business is selling a service. My business is convincing those people to give me the chunk of money that they control.
Are they later dissatisfied? Doesn't matter-- I already have that money. And this isn't a used car lot. I don't need them to come back again and again for the rest of their lives.
Selling a service and providing a quality service are two entirely different operations, and only one of them provides immediate cash flow for my business.
Phoenix, Kaplan, Corinthian, Education Management and DeVry all reap over 80% of their revenue from government loans and grants-- higher education vouchers. Convincing customers to fork over those $$ isn't crucial to their business model. It IS their business model. Vouchers aren't the key to their survival; it's their reason for existing.
Selling is not doing. We know this already. We collectively observe every four years, for instance, that the skills needed to be an effective President are not exactly the same ones needed to win a Presidential election. We know that we'd better google that guy who took our sister on such a fabulous first date.
Every time we buy Coke or Pepsi, we give them a little extra money so that they can spend it on marketing aimed at convincing us to give them more money.
Selling is not doing, and selling is a separate budget category. The next time someone says, "What's wrong with schools making a profit if they educate kids?" Tell them this: Every cent that schools have to spend on marketing is a cent that doesn't get spent on actually doing the education thing. And every cent they spend on students is one less cent to spend on selling. Voucher and choice schools must screen out high-overhead students because they need that extra money for marketing.
Market forces do not foster superior quality. Market forces foster superior marketability.
The more we open education to market forces, the more money we will waste on marketing schools, the fewer resources we will devote to actual education, and the more educational snake-oil salesmen we will find working their way into the school biz. Sure, the marketplace will sort some of them out-- we're seeing some of that already in places like Ohio, where charter schools have the same life span as tse-tse flies. But how much student education, how many years of students' lives, do we want to throw away as cannon fodder for the invisible hand?
There is no place for hucksterism in education. Schools should be doing, not selling.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Sharp-Minded Van Roekel and Rhee Join Debate Club
US News has a feature called "Debate Club" which presents "a meeting of the sharpest minds on the day's most important topic." Yesterday they decided to collect some sharp minds to debate the Common Core. And among other things, we learned that Van Roekel's "course correction" lasted about a week.
The choice of sharp minds is telling. Arguing against the Core are Neal McClusky (Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom), Matt Kibbe (FreedomWorks), and Mike McShane (American Enterprise Institute). So we're going with the "CCSS is opposed by some right-wingy types" narrative.
Arguing for are Charles Barron (Democrats for Education Reform), Jack Markell (Delaware Governor and co-chair of CCSS initiative), Michelle Rhee (educational dilettante), and Dennis Van Roekel (sound of my hand slapping my forehead).
Van Roekel Unchanges Course
All of these sharp minds deserve attention, but it's DVR's offering that is most illuminating. You may recall that just over a week ago DVR "corrected course." His offering to the debate club is literally just an edited down version of his course-correction letter, but it's what he has cut in the edit that is most damning.
Still here: Calling himself a teacher. NEA members always thought national standards a great idea. Critics on right and left oppose them. Implementation train wreck. National standards are better than patchwork. Roll-out sucked because teachers not involved. Books and tests should match standards. Globally competitive blah blah blahdy blah.
Not here: DVR's "botched implementation" letter included specific recommendations, including putting a hold on CCSS while teachers on the state level examined and rewrote the standards as they deemed necessary. DVR's debate club edit shows no trace of this. In fact, we've completely backed off backing off. The headline-grabbing course change is no more. It took just a week for DVR to walk back everything significant he said in his course correction letter; now we're back to "the core is totally awesome and we just need to tweak implementation a little bit."
Note that, given the length of some of the other arguments, DVR did not have to cut the action items from his own piece. The only reason for his earlier, stronger statements not to be here is because he wanted to cut them out. It took DVR just eight days to weasel-step himself backwards.
In the interests of transparency, I admit to having said nice things about DVR when he offered the course correction. I suppose, like most of the good reformy folks, I could just erase that blog and pretend I never said it. So, well played DVR, well played. Also, bite me.
What Other Sharp Minds Have To Say
While the DVR double-reverse is the big takeaway here, I can't skip over the other sharp-minded offerings in the debate club. Here, in no particular order, are these wise observations.
Mike McShane thinks national standards are super-fine. But states went after them too quickly, which was a big problem, and then they signed on for uber-computer-techy-testing, which was just foolhardy and expensive as all get out. CCSS botched the implementation so badly that the whole business has been undermined.
Jack Markell believes in the Big Mo of CCSS and warns us not to panic. Improve implementation and wait patiently while several years' worth of students have their education wasted as we figure this out. He claims to have met first grade teachers who have used data analysis and CCSS to make themselves more effective, and I'm probably not supposed to conclude from that that these teachers sucked terribly before CCSS, but that's the only conclusion I can reach. Markell also scores points for nerve by actually using the phrase "staying the course" without irony.
Neal McClusky comes out of the gate with the headline "Common Core Treats Students Like Soulless Widgets" and wraps up with the sentence "It is a federally coerced, one-size-fits-all regime that ignores basic, human reality." Everything in between is icing on that cake.
Charles Barone reminds me that I want so badly for his group's full name to be "Democrats for Education Reform Programs," because then their acronym would be DERP and justice would be served. Barone provides a pretty spectacular goulash of goonery. He says in some states CCSS is becoming the "Vietnam of education issues" and isn't that a rich and curious analogy for a CCSS proponent to use. He depicts opposition is "all-purpose right-wing fringe arguments" and lumps opponents with "small bands of tea partiers." He blames the rash of testing in New York on Randi Weingarten and the AFT. And then, as God is my witness, he descends into a series of disconnected sentences that argue against CCSS. These perhaps are meant to support his main point, which seems to be that CCSS intentions are beautiful but implementation is undermining that. In which case, DERP is a well-earned title.
For the finish, Barone, incredibly, goes back to Vietnam! This is an apt metaphor apparently not for "never should have been there in the first place" or "mess created by tissue of government lies" but instead we're reaching for "quagmire" or "place everybody left after they figured it was not cost-effective to stay." Not making things better, Charles.
Matt Kibbe argues that all attempts at national standardization are doomed to fail, that all federal attempts to intervene in education have failed miserably, and that the federal government is a really awful terribly money-sucking black hole that consumes all things bright and good. He offers an interesting new summation of CCSS-- "Common Core represents a set of national standards with the aim of imposing uniformity on the country’s schools through rigorous testing requirements." Then he offers further observations about how badly federal government sucks, notes that children are individuals, says conservatives should hate this, and brings it all home with a call for School Choice.
Michelle Rhee hasn't accomplished much of value in her adult life, but boy does she have her talking points polished to bright sheen. Her argument is personal-- she uses the word "I" a great deal-- and familiar. The states wrote the CCSS. Teachers (75% of them) love it. We have to fight the status quo because Estonia is kicking our ass. She constructs a barely-made-of-straw man and then kicks it down (straw men are the only people Rhee will debate). Rhee feels all the feelings. She's outraged. She's appalled. She has some false statistics to back her feelings up. Also, high tech companies are pushing for more foreign work visas because we don't have enough engineers in this country (willing to work cheap). She is no stranger to how change is hard in education reform. She is all about the kids. That's why from now on she is going to donate her massive speaker fees to charities that work with children. Okay, I made that last part up. She's totally going to keep making money hand over fist talking about how much she wants to look out for the kiddies.
Who won the debate? You can still click on over there and cast a vote. Unfortunately, you can't vote on how badly you think US News stacked the debate against a full examination of CCSS, nor can you vote for which debater made the most ridiculous points or most egregiously stabs his own union members in the back.
The choice of sharp minds is telling. Arguing against the Core are Neal McClusky (Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom), Matt Kibbe (FreedomWorks), and Mike McShane (American Enterprise Institute). So we're going with the "CCSS is opposed by some right-wingy types" narrative.
Arguing for are Charles Barron (Democrats for Education Reform), Jack Markell (Delaware Governor and co-chair of CCSS initiative), Michelle Rhee (educational dilettante), and Dennis Van Roekel (sound of my hand slapping my forehead).
Van Roekel Unchanges Course
All of these sharp minds deserve attention, but it's DVR's offering that is most illuminating. You may recall that just over a week ago DVR "corrected course." His offering to the debate club is literally just an edited down version of his course-correction letter, but it's what he has cut in the edit that is most damning.
Still here: Calling himself a teacher. NEA members always thought national standards a great idea. Critics on right and left oppose them. Implementation train wreck. National standards are better than patchwork. Roll-out sucked because teachers not involved. Books and tests should match standards. Globally competitive blah blah blahdy blah.
Not here: DVR's "botched implementation" letter included specific recommendations, including putting a hold on CCSS while teachers on the state level examined and rewrote the standards as they deemed necessary. DVR's debate club edit shows no trace of this. In fact, we've completely backed off backing off. The headline-grabbing course change is no more. It took just a week for DVR to walk back everything significant he said in his course correction letter; now we're back to "the core is totally awesome and we just need to tweak implementation a little bit."
Note that, given the length of some of the other arguments, DVR did not have to cut the action items from his own piece. The only reason for his earlier, stronger statements not to be here is because he wanted to cut them out. It took DVR just eight days to weasel-step himself backwards.
In the interests of transparency, I admit to having said nice things about DVR when he offered the course correction. I suppose, like most of the good reformy folks, I could just erase that blog and pretend I never said it. So, well played DVR, well played. Also, bite me.
What Other Sharp Minds Have To Say
While the DVR double-reverse is the big takeaway here, I can't skip over the other sharp-minded offerings in the debate club. Here, in no particular order, are these wise observations.
Mike McShane thinks national standards are super-fine. But states went after them too quickly, which was a big problem, and then they signed on for uber-computer-techy-testing, which was just foolhardy and expensive as all get out. CCSS botched the implementation so badly that the whole business has been undermined.
Jack Markell believes in the Big Mo of CCSS and warns us not to panic. Improve implementation and wait patiently while several years' worth of students have their education wasted as we figure this out. He claims to have met first grade teachers who have used data analysis and CCSS to make themselves more effective, and I'm probably not supposed to conclude from that that these teachers sucked terribly before CCSS, but that's the only conclusion I can reach. Markell also scores points for nerve by actually using the phrase "staying the course" without irony.
Neal McClusky comes out of the gate with the headline "Common Core Treats Students Like Soulless Widgets" and wraps up with the sentence "It is a federally coerced, one-size-fits-all regime that ignores basic, human reality." Everything in between is icing on that cake.
Charles Barone reminds me that I want so badly for his group's full name to be "Democrats for Education Reform Programs," because then their acronym would be DERP and justice would be served. Barone provides a pretty spectacular goulash of goonery. He says in some states CCSS is becoming the "Vietnam of education issues" and isn't that a rich and curious analogy for a CCSS proponent to use. He depicts opposition is "all-purpose right-wing fringe arguments" and lumps opponents with "small bands of tea partiers." He blames the rash of testing in New York on Randi Weingarten and the AFT. And then, as God is my witness, he descends into a series of disconnected sentences that argue against CCSS. These perhaps are meant to support his main point, which seems to be that CCSS intentions are beautiful but implementation is undermining that. In which case, DERP is a well-earned title.
For the finish, Barone, incredibly, goes back to Vietnam! This is an apt metaphor apparently not for "never should have been there in the first place" or "mess created by tissue of government lies" but instead we're reaching for "quagmire" or "place everybody left after they figured it was not cost-effective to stay." Not making things better, Charles.
Matt Kibbe argues that all attempts at national standardization are doomed to fail, that all federal attempts to intervene in education have failed miserably, and that the federal government is a really awful terribly money-sucking black hole that consumes all things bright and good. He offers an interesting new summation of CCSS-- "Common Core represents a set of national standards with the aim of imposing uniformity on the country’s schools through rigorous testing requirements." Then he offers further observations about how badly federal government sucks, notes that children are individuals, says conservatives should hate this, and brings it all home with a call for School Choice.
Michelle Rhee hasn't accomplished much of value in her adult life, but boy does she have her talking points polished to bright sheen. Her argument is personal-- she uses the word "I" a great deal-- and familiar. The states wrote the CCSS. Teachers (75% of them) love it. We have to fight the status quo because Estonia is kicking our ass. She constructs a barely-made-of-straw man and then kicks it down (straw men are the only people Rhee will debate). Rhee feels all the feelings. She's outraged. She's appalled. She has some false statistics to back her feelings up. Also, high tech companies are pushing for more foreign work visas because we don't have enough engineers in this country (willing to work cheap). She is no stranger to how change is hard in education reform. She is all about the kids. That's why from now on she is going to donate her massive speaker fees to charities that work with children. Okay, I made that last part up. She's totally going to keep making money hand over fist talking about how much she wants to look out for the kiddies.
Who won the debate? You can still click on over there and cast a vote. Unfortunately, you can't vote on how badly you think US News stacked the debate against a full examination of CCSS, nor can you vote for which debater made the most ridiculous points or most egregiously stabs his own union members in the back.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
VAM for Dummies
If you don't spend every day with your head stuck in the reform toilet, receiving the never-ending education swirly that is school reformy stuff, there are terms that may not be entirely clear to you. One is VAM-- Value-Added Measure.
VAM is a concept borrowed from manufacturing. If I take one dollar's worth of sheet metal and turn it into a lovely planter that I can sell for ten dollars, I've added nine dollars of value to the metal.
It's a useful concept in manufacturing management. For instance, if my accounting tells me that it costs me ten dollars in labor to add five dollars of value to an object, I should plan my going-out-of-business sale today.
And a few years back, when we were all staring down the NCLB maw requiring that 100% of our students be above average by this year, it struck many people as a good idea-- let's check instead to see if teachers are making students better. Let's measure if teachers have added value to the individual student.
There are so many things wrong with this conceptually, starting with the idea that a student is like a piece of manufacturing material and continuing on through the reaffirmation of the school-is-a-factory model of education. But there are other problems as well.
1) Back in the manufacturing model, I knew how much value my piece of metal had before I started working my magic on it. We have no such information for students.
2) The piece of sheet metal, if it just sits there, will still be a piece of sheet metal. If anything, it will get rusty and less valuable. But a child, left to its own devices, will still get older, bigger, and smarter. A child will add value on its own, out of thin air. Almost like it was some living, breathing sentient being and not a piece of raw manufacturing material.
3) All piece of sheet metals are created equal. Any that are too not-equal get thrown in the hopper. On the assembly line, each piece of metal is as easy to add value to as the last. But here we have one more reformy idea predicated on the idea that children are pretty much identical.
How to solve these three big problems? Call the statisticians!
This is the point at which that horrifying formula that pops up in these discussion appears. Or actually, a version of it, because each state has its own special sauce when it comes to VAM. In Pennsylvania, our special VAM sauce is called PVAAS. I went to a state training session about PVAAS in 2009 and wrote about it for my regular newspaper gig. Here's what I said about how the formula works at the time:
PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
Here's how it's supposed to work. The magic formula will factor in everything from your socio-economics through the trends over the past X years in your classroom, throw in your pre-testy thing if you like, and will spit out a prediction of how Johnny would have done on the test in some neutral universe where nothing special happened to Johnny. Your job as a teacher is to get your real Johnny to do better on The Test than Alternate Universe Johnny would.
See? All that's required for VAM to work is believing that the state can accurately predict exactly how well your students would have done this year if you were an average teacher. How could anything possibly go wrong??
And it should be noted-- all of these issues occur in the process before we add refinements such as giving VAM scores based on students that the teacher doesn't even teach. There is no parallel for this in the original industrial VAM model, because nobody anywhere could imagine that it's not insanely ridiculous.
If you want to know more, the interwebs are full of material debunking this model, because nobody-- I mean nobody-- believes in it except politicians and corporate privateers. So you can look at anything from this nifty three minute video to the awesome blog Vamboozled by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley.
This is one more example of a feature of reformy stuff that is so top-to-bottom stupid that it's hard to understand. But whether you skim the surface, look at the philosophical basis, or dive into the math, VAM does not hold up. You may be among the people who feel like you don't quite get it, but let me reassure you-- when I titled this "VAM for Dummies," I wasn't talking about you. VAM is always and only for dummies; it's just that right now, the dummies are in charge.
VAM is a concept borrowed from manufacturing. If I take one dollar's worth of sheet metal and turn it into a lovely planter that I can sell for ten dollars, I've added nine dollars of value to the metal.
It's a useful concept in manufacturing management. For instance, if my accounting tells me that it costs me ten dollars in labor to add five dollars of value to an object, I should plan my going-out-of-business sale today.
And a few years back, when we were all staring down the NCLB maw requiring that 100% of our students be above average by this year, it struck many people as a good idea-- let's check instead to see if teachers are making students better. Let's measure if teachers have added value to the individual student.
There are so many things wrong with this conceptually, starting with the idea that a student is like a piece of manufacturing material and continuing on through the reaffirmation of the school-is-a-factory model of education. But there are other problems as well.
1) Back in the manufacturing model, I knew how much value my piece of metal had before I started working my magic on it. We have no such information for students.
2) The piece of sheet metal, if it just sits there, will still be a piece of sheet metal. If anything, it will get rusty and less valuable. But a child, left to its own devices, will still get older, bigger, and smarter. A child will add value on its own, out of thin air. Almost like it was some living, breathing sentient being and not a piece of raw manufacturing material.
3) All piece of sheet metals are created equal. Any that are too not-equal get thrown in the hopper. On the assembly line, each piece of metal is as easy to add value to as the last. But here we have one more reformy idea predicated on the idea that children are pretty much identical.
How to solve these three big problems? Call the statisticians!
This is the point at which that horrifying formula that pops up in these discussion appears. Or actually, a version of it, because each state has its own special sauce when it comes to VAM. In Pennsylvania, our special VAM sauce is called PVAAS. I went to a state training session about PVAAS in 2009 and wrote about it for my regular newspaper gig. Here's what I said about how the formula works at the time:
PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
Here's how it's supposed to work. The magic formula will factor in everything from your socio-economics through the trends over the past X years in your classroom, throw in your pre-testy thing if you like, and will spit out a prediction of how Johnny would have done on the test in some neutral universe where nothing special happened to Johnny. Your job as a teacher is to get your real Johnny to do better on The Test than Alternate Universe Johnny would.
See? All that's required for VAM to work is believing that the state can accurately predict exactly how well your students would have done this year if you were an average teacher. How could anything possibly go wrong??
And it should be noted-- all of these issues occur in the process before we add refinements such as giving VAM scores based on students that the teacher doesn't even teach. There is no parallel for this in the original industrial VAM model, because nobody anywhere could imagine that it's not insanely ridiculous.
If you want to know more, the interwebs are full of material debunking this model, because nobody-- I mean nobody-- believes in it except politicians and corporate privateers. So you can look at anything from this nifty three minute video to the awesome blog Vamboozled by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley.
This is one more example of a feature of reformy stuff that is so top-to-bottom stupid that it's hard to understand. But whether you skim the surface, look at the philosophical basis, or dive into the math, VAM does not hold up. You may be among the people who feel like you don't quite get it, but let me reassure you-- when I titled this "VAM for Dummies," I wasn't talking about you. VAM is always and only for dummies; it's just that right now, the dummies are in charge.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Duncan, Civil Rights, & Highly Qualified Teachers
Whether you're David Welch (StudentsMatter) financing the Vergara lawsuit in California, or Arne Duncan, crafting new shiny policies and talking points in DC, turning classroom teachers into a civil rights issue is all the rage. I owe thanks to Michele McNeil and Alyson Klein for some of the reporting on which this column is based.
Coming Attraction and Policy Balloons
Assistant Secretary Deb Delisle did some talking shortly after the State of the Union address about the new 50-state strategy regarding highly qualified teachers, presenting a kind of coming attractions trailer of possible policy. Fans of reformy stuff will remember that NCLB put a deadline on putting a highly-qualified teacher in front of every student in the country, and NCLB waivers initially kept that requirement in place, but the Obama administration has since quietly dropped that. George Miller, retiring top Democrat of House Education committee, NCLB co-architect, and bi-partisan educational twit, even squawked a bit about that.
This notion has floated to the surface of reformy soup at various points. There are folks who believe that we just find the Highly Effective Teachers and move them around so that they are covering the most challenging classrooms, and then a million education flowers will bloom. This policy has not yet been deemed ready for prime time because of that "move them around" part. How would that work? Would districts move teachers from school to school, or would states move teachers from district to district? Would teachers be offered bribes incentives to move, or would they just be forced? Various folks have dipped their toes in these waters, but nobody's really ready to take a swim yet.
But the new 50-state plan redefines teachers as a civil rights issue by harnessing the enforcement power of the Office of Civil Rights to ensure that poor children will have just as many highly qualified teachers in front of them as anybody else. Predictably, not everyone thinks this idea is super-swell.
Ineffective Teaching: A Highly Effective Definition
Discussion of teaching of a civil right often circles back around to the assertion that poor students have more lousy teachers than non-poor students. This assertion rests primarily on a model of circular reasoning. Follow along.
A) Teachers are judged low-performing because their students score poorly on tests.
B) Students low test scores are explained by the fact that they have low-performing teachers.
Or, framed another way, this argument defines a low-quality teacher as any teacher whose students don't do well on standardized tests. The assumption is that teachers are the only single solitary explanation for student standardized test scores. Nothing else affects those scores. Only teacher behavior explains the low scores. That's it.
Ergo, the best runners are runners who run down hills. Runners who are running uphill are slow runners, and must be replaced by those good runners-- the ones we find running downhill. Or, the wettest dogs are the ones who are out in the rain, while the driest ones are the ones indoors. So if we take the indoor dogs outside, we will have drier dogs in the yard. While it rains.
As long as we define low-quality teachers as those who teach low-achieving students (who we know will mostly be the children of poor folk), low-achieving students will always be taught by low-quality teachers. It's the perfect education crisis, one that can never, ever be solved.
One More Growth Opportunity for TFA
Remember the budget deal last fall? You may have forgotten that part of the deal was an early Christmas gift for Teach for America-- a redefinition of "highly qualified" to include TFAers. Because passing a PRAXIS and taking a five-week summer training session are pretty much the same deal.
So TFA bodies are eligible to be foot soldiers in this battle to put effective teachers into the classroom. Now, despite their glowing PR, there's no reason to believe that TFA bodies can magically erase the effects of poverty, but by the time test data has been gathered up to indicate their ineffectiveness, they will have moved on anyway. An endless revolving door churn through a black hole of teacher ineffectiveness perfectly suits the TFA model.
You might imagine that two years as an "ineffective" teacher might be a black mark on the record of a blossoming young Master of the Universe, but take heart-- Michelle Rhee was ineffective as a classroom teacher and disastrous as a school leader, but that has not slowed her rise to lucrative fame as an education thought leader and celebrity spokesmodel one bit. You only have to be able to say you were in a classroom; it doesn't matter to your career if you were great or terrible.
Hold on There a Second!
So one can reasonably conclude that redefining an effective teacher as a civil right might not be a big win for public education. But fear not-- there are people in Congress willing to stand up for teachers and public schools and those people are--- Republicans!
Representatives John Kline and Todd Rokita have sent a letter to Duncan asking for clarification (Congress-ese for "You got some 'splainin' to do, Lucy"). Their questions are (I'm paraphrasing here):
1) Exactly how do you figure the Office of Civil Rights has legal authority over teachers?
2) How's this going to work, actually. Details, please.
3) When is this going to be released to the public and how will you be handling feedback from the stakeholders? Which is polite talk for "You'd best not be thinking you can unilaterally just slip this by everybody involved."
4) How many stakeholders have you talked to about this, and what feedback did you get? Which is polite talk for "We're betting the answers are 'zero' and 'none.'"
5) How are you going to incorporate comments and concerns into your final proposals? Which is polite talk for "We've noticed that this administration doesn't listen to anybody about anything."
The five questions could also be entitled "Five things we plan to lambaste you about when you formally propose this, so you might want to get your bullshit story straight and your cover in place." And the letter concludes with a directive to contact a staffer "immediately" to set up a meeting to talk about all this.
I don't know that much about Kline and Rokita, but these two GOP Reps and the not-a-minute-too-soon departing Miller are a reminder that teachers should never assume that Republicans are a threat and Democrats have our backs.
In the meantime, watch for the more-final-ish version of the 50-states proposal for turning the Office of Civil Rights into the Bad Teacher SWAT Unit.
Coming Attraction and Policy Balloons
Assistant Secretary Deb Delisle did some talking shortly after the State of the Union address about the new 50-state strategy regarding highly qualified teachers, presenting a kind of coming attractions trailer of possible policy. Fans of reformy stuff will remember that NCLB put a deadline on putting a highly-qualified teacher in front of every student in the country, and NCLB waivers initially kept that requirement in place, but the Obama administration has since quietly dropped that. George Miller, retiring top Democrat of House Education committee, NCLB co-architect, and bi-partisan educational twit, even squawked a bit about that.
This notion has floated to the surface of reformy soup at various points. There are folks who believe that we just find the Highly Effective Teachers and move them around so that they are covering the most challenging classrooms, and then a million education flowers will bloom. This policy has not yet been deemed ready for prime time because of that "move them around" part. How would that work? Would districts move teachers from school to school, or would states move teachers from district to district? Would teachers be offered
But the new 50-state plan redefines teachers as a civil rights issue by harnessing the enforcement power of the Office of Civil Rights to ensure that poor children will have just as many highly qualified teachers in front of them as anybody else. Predictably, not everyone thinks this idea is super-swell.
Ineffective Teaching: A Highly Effective Definition
Discussion of teaching of a civil right often circles back around to the assertion that poor students have more lousy teachers than non-poor students. This assertion rests primarily on a model of circular reasoning. Follow along.
A) Teachers are judged low-performing because their students score poorly on tests.
B) Students low test scores are explained by the fact that they have low-performing teachers.
Or, framed another way, this argument defines a low-quality teacher as any teacher whose students don't do well on standardized tests. The assumption is that teachers are the only single solitary explanation for student standardized test scores. Nothing else affects those scores. Only teacher behavior explains the low scores. That's it.
Ergo, the best runners are runners who run down hills. Runners who are running uphill are slow runners, and must be replaced by those good runners-- the ones we find running downhill. Or, the wettest dogs are the ones who are out in the rain, while the driest ones are the ones indoors. So if we take the indoor dogs outside, we will have drier dogs in the yard. While it rains.
As long as we define low-quality teachers as those who teach low-achieving students (who we know will mostly be the children of poor folk), low-achieving students will always be taught by low-quality teachers. It's the perfect education crisis, one that can never, ever be solved.
One More Growth Opportunity for TFA
Remember the budget deal last fall? You may have forgotten that part of the deal was an early Christmas gift for Teach for America-- a redefinition of "highly qualified" to include TFAers. Because passing a PRAXIS and taking a five-week summer training session are pretty much the same deal.
So TFA bodies are eligible to be foot soldiers in this battle to put effective teachers into the classroom. Now, despite their glowing PR, there's no reason to believe that TFA bodies can magically erase the effects of poverty, but by the time test data has been gathered up to indicate their ineffectiveness, they will have moved on anyway. An endless revolving door churn through a black hole of teacher ineffectiveness perfectly suits the TFA model.
You might imagine that two years as an "ineffective" teacher might be a black mark on the record of a blossoming young Master of the Universe, but take heart-- Michelle Rhee was ineffective as a classroom teacher and disastrous as a school leader, but that has not slowed her rise to lucrative fame as an education thought leader and celebrity spokesmodel one bit. You only have to be able to say you were in a classroom; it doesn't matter to your career if you were great or terrible.
Hold on There a Second!
So one can reasonably conclude that redefining an effective teacher as a civil right might not be a big win for public education. But fear not-- there are people in Congress willing to stand up for teachers and public schools and those people are--- Republicans!
Representatives John Kline and Todd Rokita have sent a letter to Duncan asking for clarification (Congress-ese for "You got some 'splainin' to do, Lucy"). Their questions are (I'm paraphrasing here):
1) Exactly how do you figure the Office of Civil Rights has legal authority over teachers?
2) How's this going to work, actually. Details, please.
3) When is this going to be released to the public and how will you be handling feedback from the stakeholders? Which is polite talk for "You'd best not be thinking you can unilaterally just slip this by everybody involved."
4) How many stakeholders have you talked to about this, and what feedback did you get? Which is polite talk for "We're betting the answers are 'zero' and 'none.'"
5) How are you going to incorporate comments and concerns into your final proposals? Which is polite talk for "We've noticed that this administration doesn't listen to anybody about anything."
The five questions could also be entitled "Five things we plan to lambaste you about when you formally propose this, so you might want to get your bullshit story straight and your cover in place." And the letter concludes with a directive to contact a staffer "immediately" to set up a meeting to talk about all this.
I don't know that much about Kline and Rokita, but these two GOP Reps and the not-a-minute-too-soon departing Miller are a reminder that teachers should never assume that Republicans are a threat and Democrats have our backs.
In the meantime, watch for the more-final-ish version of the 50-states proposal for turning the Office of Civil Rights into the Bad Teacher SWAT Unit.
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