New leaps forward have been made in grittology, the study of that elusive quality, the lack of which gives reformy leaders cause to castigate schoolchildren across the country.
Holly Yettick reports at EdWeek that University of Pennsylvania researchers Claire Robertson-Kraft and Angela Duckworth have published a study of grit as it applies to teachers and the hiring process. The study (the pdf of which is titled "truegrit.pdf," so kudos for the academic humor) opens with this statement of background/context:
Surprisingly little progress has been made in linking teacher effectiveness and retention to factors observable at the time of hire. The rigors of teaching, particularly in low income school districts, suggest the importance of personal qualities that have so far been difficult to measure objectively.
Was it possible, they wondered, to hire teachers who were actually going to be tough enough to stick it out on the job. In short, could we spot the teachers with grit?
Duckworth is the scientist for the job, having coined the term grit back in 2007 (presumably as it applies to education and not sandpaper). As a founding mother of grittology, Duckworth worked on a 2009 study that linked grit to effectiveness in novice teachers, but that study, says Yettick was limited because the subjects self-reported for grittiness (doesn't everybody want to think of themselves as gritty, and can we count on gritty people to be fully self-aware? being a scientist is hard).
So this time the intrepid grittologists looked to see if they could find a way to measure grit objectively. They looked at novice teachers' college activities and gave the teachers scores of 0 through 6 for aspects like years of participation or rising through the ranks of the groups to honored positions. In short, did they make commitments and stick with them?
This was correlated to retention (did the teacher stick around without quitting partway through the year) and to effectiveness (did the --uh-oh. hold on a second). Yeah, we were not quite so sure we could come up with a serious effectiveness measure other than some testing data. So there's that. Conclusion? "Grittier teachers outperformed their less gritty colleagues and were less likely to leave their classrooms mid-year."
There's not a lot of research on how to engrittify teachers, so researcher Matthew Kraft thinks it's better to hire teachers that come with their own grit and then help them if things get tough. "School contexts can support teachers to maximize their potential or undercut their efforts."
So what have we learned? If you hire people whose application shows that they joined things and stuck with them in college, they are more likely to stick with the job when you hire them. And if you need to make a common sense observation, turn it into number, and then turn it back into an observation, then maybe you shouldn't be involved in hiring people.
I'm just imagining a young man coming back from a date. His friends ask how it went. He tells them to wait, sits down, gets out a calculator and iPad and creates a spreadsheet of the quality and length of the kisses that he and his date shared, converts the observations to a digital data set, plugs the numbers into a formula, collates the data, and looks at the final numbers. He turns to his friends and says, "Well, according to this kissological data rating, our date went well. And this score indicates there's a high probability that we may kiss again soon."
I get that many schools' hiring practices are somewhere between "phone a friend" and "darts tossed blindly at wall." But if you need a data set to tell you how to take an impression of other carbon based life forms, education is probably not the field for you.
But then, there are probably a few other people who need to get that message beyond those doing the hiring.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Sunday, March 9, 2014
What We Don't Know About Normal
I only just heard about Joe Henrich and his groundbreaking work, but I plan to educate myself further. Henrich's work has implications for anyone who works with human beings and their brains. So, teachers.
Let me try to simplify Henrich's work and then I'll try to explain why we should care.
Normal Isn't
Henrich was doing anthropology grad school field work in Peru in 1995 when he decided to rerun a well-worn economics study game. In the Ultimatum Game, one person receives a chunk of money and then offers a chunk to a second person. If person #2 refuses the offer, both people lose all the money. Both players know the rules.
This is a classic in its field, one of many experiments that is used to argue for certain cognitive consistencies across all human beings, how it is normal to enforce certain standards of fair play. And when Henrich tried it with the residents of the remote village, it didn't turn out the way it was supposed to, at all.
Repeated attempts with various distant groups revealed that this experiment which had long been used to illustrate something basic and normal about all human beings in fact did no such thing. He got a MacArthur Grant and some Presidential recognition, but he couldn't get hired in anthropology. So he went to work at the University of British Columbia, where they split him between economics and psychology.
If you want to read more in detail about his career, here's a great article for that. In short, he and his colleagues have been unraveling a boatload of allegedly normal cognitive issues. For instance-- this optical illusion?
Let me try to simplify Henrich's work and then I'll try to explain why we should care.
Normal Isn't
Henrich was doing anthropology grad school field work in Peru in 1995 when he decided to rerun a well-worn economics study game. In the Ultimatum Game, one person receives a chunk of money and then offers a chunk to a second person. If person #2 refuses the offer, both people lose all the money. Both players know the rules.
This is a classic in its field, one of many experiments that is used to argue for certain cognitive consistencies across all human beings, how it is normal to enforce certain standards of fair play. And when Henrich tried it with the residents of the remote village, it didn't turn out the way it was supposed to, at all.
Repeated attempts with various distant groups revealed that this experiment which had long been used to illustrate something basic and normal about all human beings in fact did no such thing. He got a MacArthur Grant and some Presidential recognition, but he couldn't get hired in anthropology. So he went to work at the University of British Columbia, where they split him between economics and psychology.
If you want to read more in detail about his career, here's a great article for that. In short, he and his colleagues have been unraveling a boatload of allegedly normal cognitive issues. For instance-- this optical illusion?
Yeah, it's not normal to see an optical illusion. Turns out that lots of folks have no trouble at all seeing two lines of equal length. Turns out that whether you grow up in houses or in fields affects how your brains manages visual information. This "illusion" is not universal-- it's cultural.
Henrich, working with Steven Heine and Ara Norenzaya, was realizing that spatial reasoning, categorization, moral reasoning, inferences about other people, boundaries between self and others-- these and other areas of cognition are hugely shaped by culture and experience. Our experience and culture has a huge impact on how our brains work.
On top of that, as they charted the range of human perception, they found one group of people consistently off in their own little corner. For that group they coined the term WEIRD-- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
What That Means To Teachers
One of the implications of Henrich's work are simple but profound-- an awful lot of previous research is crap.
This is not entirely a new insight. When scientists work with subjects of convenience, we get meaningless results. The education field is filed with studies that are useless (unless you really need some insights into how the minds of college sophomores at one particular university work). But Henrich's work forces us to look at just how unjustified many of our ideas about normal are.
We think science has been studying human beings, but it has really been studying human beings from our own culture.
So anybody starts telling you that X is a cognitive quality normal to all human beings, your bovine fecal matter detection software should be going off.
What That Means To Education Reform
To review: people who have grown up in different cultures end up with differently-wired brains.
Now. Do you know where you find people who have grown up in completely different cultures living side by side? Yes, that would be America. Folks have been saying, loudly, for a while now, that people living in poverty do not see the world the same way as the rest of us. Now we have research from a completely different angle confirming the same thing.
Chasing Finland and Estonia is a pointless activity because they are different cultures. They do not perceive the world the same way we do.
My position on standardization is pretty simple-- I think it's bunk. Standardization is a simple process by which we declare that X is Normal, and we then measure everything by that idea of Normal. Our educational status quo is a one-size-fits-all approach to both teaching and the measuring of that teaching. Everyone should learn the same thing the same way and then demonstrate their understanding in the same way. Because all of those same things are normal, right?
Wrong. There is no normal. And a nation founded on the notion of combining many cultures and backgrounds and worldviews should be the absolute last place that we insist everybody be Normal. Particularly when the research suggests that we are the least Normal peoples in the world.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
How Did CCSS Happen?
My wife is a smart person, and great and committed teacher. But she rarely reads this blog because mostly she says that it's over her head. She's a reminder to me that for every one of us who have been wading in this stuff for what feels like ages, there are many other concerned professionals who feel like they just walked in on the second season finale of Game of Thrones and aren't sure how to figure out what the hell is going on.
So I'm making a commitment to create and curate material for those folks. These occasional columns will be different from my usual stuff. Straightforward titles, clear explanations, basic materials for smart, interested people who are just coming in on the middle of this Nightmare on School Reform Street movie festival.
To keep myself honest, I'm going to imagine this first entry as a conversation between me and my wife. To all readers who are actually married to me, let me just say that this will be done with nothing but love and respect.
So where did Common Core come from anyway?
Well, back in 1983 with A Nation at Risk--
You promised this would not be like six seasons of How I Met Your Mother
Right. No Child Left Behind put school districts under a lot of pressure. We had to get a certain percentage of students to get above average scores on a standardized test every year. The above-average percentage ramped a little every year until 2009, when it ramped up like a sumbitch.
Same year George Bush was out of office, right?
Exactly. We were supposed to hit 100% this year, which meant that everybody was either going to be failing or lying. Schools were feeling highly motivated to do something else. It turned out that something else was already waiting in the wings. In 2009, the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Operators formed a committee to write standards. This whole process was pretty murky because A) it was done in secret and B) it involved people and groups that had already been working on this stuff for years. If you want to get into more detail, you can find it here and here. Most of the shadowy previous work was connected to a group named Achieve.
There were two groups that did the writing. Those 25 people included folks from the College Board, the ACT, and Achieve. There was also a feedback group of 35 people; 34 college profs and 1 classroom teacher. Some of those people quit in protest during the process.
They say these are so all students will be college and career ready. How do they know that?
At this point, nobody has seen a shred of the research or data that supports that. The Gates Foundation has paid the bills for most of the support for CCSS that you see, and Bill called this a "best guess" and that we would have to wait ten years to find out if it was right.
So why do they keep saying teachers worked on the Common Core?
As near as anyone can tell, some teachers were allowed to see drafts and provide comments. There's no shred of evidence to suggest that anybody paid any attention to what the teachers said. By the time they saw it, the work was already done.
And the states?
Yeah, they didn't have a leadership role here, either. You'll noticed people don't make the state-led, teacher-involved claim quite so much any more. Everybody who follows this stuff knows that it was federally pushed without the benefit of research or teacher input.
So if the states didn't really develop the Core, why did they adopt it?
You remember they were in a tight place, NCLB-wise. The Obama administration offered them a way out. Two, actually.
First, they could compete for free federal money by joining the Race to the Top. We didn't hear much about that in PA because it required a whole lot of people to sign off on the application, and in PA, they wouldn't. They wouldn't because there was a whole lot of mystery language in it. But if you wanted to compete you had to agree to do a couple of things:
1) You had to agree to collect a boatload of data.
2) You had to agree to being measured by beaucoups testing.
3) You had to agree to evaluate teachers by using testing data at least a little.
4) You had to adopt some college and career ready standards and pretend that you were helping develop them. (You can read about that whole business here.) This also meant in some cases that you were agreeing to them sight unseen.
Wasn't it only a few states that won Race to the Top? What about the rest?
It was only a few. But that No Child Left Behind kept squeezing, and it became obvious that nobody in Congress was going to rewrite the law. Even though everyone could see we were headed for a cliff, nobody wanted to touch the stupid thing. But the administration said states could get a waiver and be excused from NCLB 100% above average requirements.
I bet the list of requirements to get a waiver sounds familiar.
Good bet.
So can't states just rewrite it to suit themselves?
The Common Core State Standards are actually copyrighted. States aren't allowed to change a thing, and can only add 15%. Now, whether that would just void the warranty or invoke fines or lose federal money or put a sheriff on the statehouse steps I don't think anybody knows. But you can't mess with them.
Can anybody ask them to change the standards?
Nope. There's no toll-free service number, no appeal process, no feedback system, no nothing. I don't know about the math, but the guy who wrote the English standards has a completely different job at this point.
So if this really wasn't the states bringing a bunch of teachers together to develop standards that would make sense for everybody, then why did this happen? Why would anybody do this?
The short answer is money and power and who knows. The long answer is a piece of writing for another day.
So I'm making a commitment to create and curate material for those folks. These occasional columns will be different from my usual stuff. Straightforward titles, clear explanations, basic materials for smart, interested people who are just coming in on the middle of this Nightmare on School Reform Street movie festival.
To keep myself honest, I'm going to imagine this first entry as a conversation between me and my wife. To all readers who are actually married to me, let me just say that this will be done with nothing but love and respect.
So where did Common Core come from anyway?
Well, back in 1983 with A Nation at Risk--
You promised this would not be like six seasons of How I Met Your Mother
Right. No Child Left Behind put school districts under a lot of pressure. We had to get a certain percentage of students to get above average scores on a standardized test every year. The above-average percentage ramped a little every year until 2009, when it ramped up like a sumbitch.
Same year George Bush was out of office, right?
Exactly. We were supposed to hit 100% this year, which meant that everybody was either going to be failing or lying. Schools were feeling highly motivated to do something else. It turned out that something else was already waiting in the wings. In 2009, the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Operators formed a committee to write standards. This whole process was pretty murky because A) it was done in secret and B) it involved people and groups that had already been working on this stuff for years. If you want to get into more detail, you can find it here and here. Most of the shadowy previous work was connected to a group named Achieve.
There were two groups that did the writing. Those 25 people included folks from the College Board, the ACT, and Achieve. There was also a feedback group of 35 people; 34 college profs and 1 classroom teacher. Some of those people quit in protest during the process.
They say these are so all students will be college and career ready. How do they know that?
At this point, nobody has seen a shred of the research or data that supports that. The Gates Foundation has paid the bills for most of the support for CCSS that you see, and Bill called this a "best guess" and that we would have to wait ten years to find out if it was right.
So why do they keep saying teachers worked on the Common Core?
As near as anyone can tell, some teachers were allowed to see drafts and provide comments. There's no shred of evidence to suggest that anybody paid any attention to what the teachers said. By the time they saw it, the work was already done.
And the states?
Yeah, they didn't have a leadership role here, either. You'll noticed people don't make the state-led, teacher-involved claim quite so much any more. Everybody who follows this stuff knows that it was federally pushed without the benefit of research or teacher input.
So if the states didn't really develop the Core, why did they adopt it?
You remember they were in a tight place, NCLB-wise. The Obama administration offered them a way out. Two, actually.
First, they could compete for free federal money by joining the Race to the Top. We didn't hear much about that in PA because it required a whole lot of people to sign off on the application, and in PA, they wouldn't. They wouldn't because there was a whole lot of mystery language in it. But if you wanted to compete you had to agree to do a couple of things:
1) You had to agree to collect a boatload of data.
2) You had to agree to being measured by beaucoups testing.
3) You had to agree to evaluate teachers by using testing data at least a little.
4) You had to adopt some college and career ready standards and pretend that you were helping develop them. (You can read about that whole business here.) This also meant in some cases that you were agreeing to them sight unseen.
Wasn't it only a few states that won Race to the Top? What about the rest?
It was only a few. But that No Child Left Behind kept squeezing, and it became obvious that nobody in Congress was going to rewrite the law. Even though everyone could see we were headed for a cliff, nobody wanted to touch the stupid thing. But the administration said states could get a waiver and be excused from NCLB 100% above average requirements.
I bet the list of requirements to get a waiver sounds familiar.
Good bet.
So can't states just rewrite it to suit themselves?
The Common Core State Standards are actually copyrighted. States aren't allowed to change a thing, and can only add 15%. Now, whether that would just void the warranty or invoke fines or lose federal money or put a sheriff on the statehouse steps I don't think anybody knows. But you can't mess with them.
Can anybody ask them to change the standards?
Nope. There's no toll-free service number, no appeal process, no feedback system, no nothing. I don't know about the math, but the guy who wrote the English standards has a completely different job at this point.
So if this really wasn't the states bringing a bunch of teachers together to develop standards that would make sense for everybody, then why did this happen? Why would anybody do this?
The short answer is money and power and who knows. The long answer is a piece of writing for another day.
College Loan Sharks
President Obama is stumping for FAFSA again, the ubiquitous all-purpose college loan/family finances proctological exam that is the gateway to college financial aid.
In a White House PR piece about the President's visit to Florida on Friday, Obama is quoted being concerned that we still need to get more students in college. “Unfortunately, there are still a lot of young people all across the country who say the cost of college is holding them back,”he said. There are families worrying about how to find the money. FAFSA is the answer, says the President, as he challenges every single child in America to fill out a FAFSA whether they think they're going to college or not.
It's natural that the big FAFSA push should come this time of year-- it's paperwork time. The theme this year seems to be "money on the table," as in "many students didn't get government loans last year and left a bunch of money on the table." I would personally like to see this table, with its prodigious piles of money. I also can't help wondering if this is the same table at which Bill Gates allegedly doesn't have a seat.
But mostly the renewed hard sell on college loans reminds me of this news from last November: that in 2013, the US Government cleared $41.3 billion in profits from student loans. If government student loans were a corporation, it would have been the third most profitable in the world, behind only Exxon and Apple.
So the feds being sad that more students can't afford college is kind of like a used car salesman expressing disappointment that more people can't afford his great cars as he settles into his giant mansion and washes his dogs with gold-encrusted champagne.
If you are setting the price for a service so that you make massive profit, you can't convincingly puzzle over how that service might be provided more inexpensively.
If the President and Arne are worried about the high cost of college-- well, the government is helping decide set that cost. Message to the White House and USDOE: If you're worried about students affording college, you guys don't need a federal investigation or a better sales pitch- you just need a mirror. If you are concerned about the loan sharks who are holding onto the massive amount of student debt in this country, you can reach them through federal inter-office mail.
Duncan's USDOE did respond to these numbers, sort of, back when they were released. The responses seem to have been:
1) We are charging less than many high priced loan sharks, so families are still winning.
2) There are many types of accounting systems and they are very confusing. We would rather use one that says we didn't make a profit on these loans.
3) "It's actually neither accurate nor fair to characterize the student loan program as making a profit," said Duncan. So, you know, that settles it.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren suggested that student loan rates be set near the borrowing rates paid to the Federal Reserve by giant banks (you know, the ones where the criminals who trashed our economy still work at their own tables of money). As of today, the administration does not seem to be considering that proposal. (Periodically we also hear a proposal to just forgive student loans; even I think that's dumb.)
So, lip service aside, it seems that college loans are one more economic sector where the administration is fighting hard for the interests of the big guys. That money on the table is money that students will have to give back, with more money, so it can sit on a huge banquet table of cash somewhere in the back where ordinary citizens don't get to see.
There are many reason, complicated reasons, that college has become so fantastically expensive. None of those issues are addressed by an administration that encourages students to rack up more debt while ignoring its own role in the ever-spiraling costs.
In a White House PR piece about the President's visit to Florida on Friday, Obama is quoted being concerned that we still need to get more students in college. “Unfortunately, there are still a lot of young people all across the country who say the cost of college is holding them back,”he said. There are families worrying about how to find the money. FAFSA is the answer, says the President, as he challenges every single child in America to fill out a FAFSA whether they think they're going to college or not.
It's natural that the big FAFSA push should come this time of year-- it's paperwork time. The theme this year seems to be "money on the table," as in "many students didn't get government loans last year and left a bunch of money on the table." I would personally like to see this table, with its prodigious piles of money. I also can't help wondering if this is the same table at which Bill Gates allegedly doesn't have a seat.
But mostly the renewed hard sell on college loans reminds me of this news from last November: that in 2013, the US Government cleared $41.3 billion in profits from student loans. If government student loans were a corporation, it would have been the third most profitable in the world, behind only Exxon and Apple.
So the feds being sad that more students can't afford college is kind of like a used car salesman expressing disappointment that more people can't afford his great cars as he settles into his giant mansion and washes his dogs with gold-encrusted champagne.
If you are setting the price for a service so that you make massive profit, you can't convincingly puzzle over how that service might be provided more inexpensively.
If the President and Arne are worried about the high cost of college-- well, the government is helping decide set that cost. Message to the White House and USDOE: If you're worried about students affording college, you guys don't need a federal investigation or a better sales pitch- you just need a mirror. If you are concerned about the loan sharks who are holding onto the massive amount of student debt in this country, you can reach them through federal inter-office mail.
Duncan's USDOE did respond to these numbers, sort of, back when they were released. The responses seem to have been:
1) We are charging less than many high priced loan sharks, so families are still winning.
2) There are many types of accounting systems and they are very confusing. We would rather use one that says we didn't make a profit on these loans.
3) "It's actually neither accurate nor fair to characterize the student loan program as making a profit," said Duncan. So, you know, that settles it.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren suggested that student loan rates be set near the borrowing rates paid to the Federal Reserve by giant banks (you know, the ones where the criminals who trashed our economy still work at their own tables of money). As of today, the administration does not seem to be considering that proposal. (Periodically we also hear a proposal to just forgive student loans; even I think that's dumb.)
So, lip service aside, it seems that college loans are one more economic sector where the administration is fighting hard for the interests of the big guys. That money on the table is money that students will have to give back, with more money, so it can sit on a huge banquet table of cash somewhere in the back where ordinary citizens don't get to see.
There are many reason, complicated reasons, that college has become so fantastically expensive. None of those issues are addressed by an administration that encourages students to rack up more debt while ignoring its own role in the ever-spiraling costs.
Friday, March 7, 2014
Brookings Wins Gold in "Most Clueless CCSS Commentary" Olympics
Brookings Institution released a paper yesterday by Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West entitled "In Defense of the Common Core Standards." Do they have anything useful to add to the conversation? And will I be able to understand a paper written by economists?
Their starting point is simple. The CCSS "are under attack from the right and the left. Liberals fear that policy makers will use the standards to punish teachers. Conservatives believe the Common Core is an attempt by the federal government to take over schools." Oversimplified version of the opposition, but okay. Their goal is to mount "a fresh defense of the Common Core."
They explain how educational standards are supposed to work in paragraphs that seem designed to explain human schools to Martians (or, perhaps, economists). They summarize many of the objections to the CCSS, and get most of the major ones into a few sentences, including referencing the research that shows no connection between standards and student achievement.
And then this "fresh defense" goes off the rails.
"Common Core will succeed where past standards based reform efforts have failed," they boldly declare. Why, you ask? Sadly for this "fresh defense," you already know all the answers.
The CCSS were designed with teacher, researcher, and pedagogy expert feedback. This is duly cited with a reference to the CCSS website, so you know it must be true. A recent analysis of standards show that the Core are better than many states (citing the Fordham Institute research bought and paid for by CCSS backers).
The CCSS assessments are better. You can even take them on computers! The authors argue that this is better because computer testing is cheaper (!), it eliminates written answers (hard to score!) and can include accommodations for special needs students (someday, probably). And those tests can be adaptive so that they match the skill level of the student. Not a word about test validity, but hey-- at least they're cheap, right?
The cost of CCSS implementation is difficult to predict. I would recommend addressing it in an easily-scorable multiple choice tests; select between a) a bunch, b) very much, c) holy smokes, and d)Oh my God!! Brookings here repeats the talking point about how states currently buy separate tests, and their combined buying power will totally drive costs down. You know-- like buying standardized tests at Costco.
Next comes a technical discussion of economics and standards. This involves a long explanation of how standards work in many fields, leading up to a conclusion I'll summarize as "Educational standards don't work anything like all these others." So thanks for that explanation, Brookings. Also, standards' effects on books can be better predicted than their effect on teaching. I'm beginning to suspect these boys may be better with books than with carbon-based life forms.
Next come the benefits of standards. This again begins with a general discussion of how standards work in economics, which leads to some writing about the Great Baltimore Fire which is quite zippy and seems to have been written by an actual live human being, in contrast to the rest of the paper. The fire was an unnecessary mess because of 600 different fire hose couplings in the country. So, standards.
Eventually we arrive at a point. "Standards...are meant to simplify complicated problems." And here's our next standard talking point. "We ask too much of teachers. It is unreasonable to give them a classroom full of students and take full responsibility for teaching them on their own." And I'll take a moment here to get a glass of water so I can do a spit take. Yes, teachers-- we need CCSS because our jobs are too hard for us. Why, gosh, thanks, boys.
There will be indirect network effects for individuals and for district who adopt the standards. I think we're back to massive buying power because we're all getting the same textbooks at Costco. And this sentence: "Minimum quality standards can help ameliorate information asymmetries." I can't tell if districts will have better info for buying books, or students will have better info for selecting schools. Maybe both. Myself, I'm just excited about going out this weekend with the wife and ameliorating some information asymmetries, if that's what the kids are calling it these days.
Standards can help because we'll reach a tipping point and then everybody will have the standards. So standards are good because they'll get people to have them? Also, personalized learning systems will be totally awesome and perhaps the best thing to come out of standards. [Insert standard PR about personal learning systems here.]
Finally, some policy recommendations.
1) Common Core should enforce their licensing so that textbook publishers can't randomly slap "CCSS aligned" on anything and everything. Protect your brand. Try not to think about SONY and Betamax.
2) The feds should offer more money for CCSS adoption. Ideally they could put this in a reauthorized version of the ESEA. Great idea, Brookings. You should probably call for the reauthorized ESEA to include ponies for everyone, plus snowmobiles for traversing hell (because that's when ESEA will be reauthorized by Congress-- har!).
3) Government (all levels) should be curriculum agnostics and standards fundamentalists. Give schools more money for implementation, if they need it. Can I have a show of hands for needing it?
4) "The leaders of the Common Core need to engage teacher unions." Wait-- there are leaders of Common Core? Is that a real job description. Because if we could find guys who would actually claim that title, I think it might be kind of awesome. Oh no wait-- it gets better. "Formal support of the Common Core from the NEA and the AFT would serve as a huge boon to the process of national standards. Government officials ought to make the compromises necessary to gain such support."
Okay, first I'm going to get a bucket of water so I can do a triple spit take. Then, I will borrow from my colleague from South Carolina, look at these Brookings boys and say, "Oh, aren't you sweet." How can you not know that the unions have been giving CCSS big wet kisses, or that government compromise wasn't nearly so necessary as Giant Gates Foundation Grants. I'm beginning to imagine that Brookings Institute is just a big collection of guys like the ones on Big Bang Theory.
I actually scrolled back to make sure I wasn't accidentally reading something from five years ago. But no-- yesterday's date. So with that, I award Brookings the gold medal for Most Clueless CCSS Commentary of 2014. Boys, sadly. your "fresh defense" is a collection of time-worn, over-used, discredited CCSS talking points. I mean, it does have the virtue of cramming as many of them into one space as I have ever seen. But fresh? I've seen fresher things on the Sci-Fi channel on a Saturday afternoon.
Their starting point is simple. The CCSS "are under attack from the right and the left. Liberals fear that policy makers will use the standards to punish teachers. Conservatives believe the Common Core is an attempt by the federal government to take over schools." Oversimplified version of the opposition, but okay. Their goal is to mount "a fresh defense of the Common Core."
They explain how educational standards are supposed to work in paragraphs that seem designed to explain human schools to Martians (or, perhaps, economists). They summarize many of the objections to the CCSS, and get most of the major ones into a few sentences, including referencing the research that shows no connection between standards and student achievement.
And then this "fresh defense" goes off the rails.
"Common Core will succeed where past standards based reform efforts have failed," they boldly declare. Why, you ask? Sadly for this "fresh defense," you already know all the answers.
The CCSS were designed with teacher, researcher, and pedagogy expert feedback. This is duly cited with a reference to the CCSS website, so you know it must be true. A recent analysis of standards show that the Core are better than many states (citing the Fordham Institute research bought and paid for by CCSS backers).
The CCSS assessments are better. You can even take them on computers! The authors argue that this is better because computer testing is cheaper (!), it eliminates written answers (hard to score!) and can include accommodations for special needs students (someday, probably). And those tests can be adaptive so that they match the skill level of the student. Not a word about test validity, but hey-- at least they're cheap, right?
The cost of CCSS implementation is difficult to predict. I would recommend addressing it in an easily-scorable multiple choice tests; select between a) a bunch, b) very much, c) holy smokes, and d)Oh my God!! Brookings here repeats the talking point about how states currently buy separate tests, and their combined buying power will totally drive costs down. You know-- like buying standardized tests at Costco.
Next comes a technical discussion of economics and standards. This involves a long explanation of how standards work in many fields, leading up to a conclusion I'll summarize as "Educational standards don't work anything like all these others." So thanks for that explanation, Brookings. Also, standards' effects on books can be better predicted than their effect on teaching. I'm beginning to suspect these boys may be better with books than with carbon-based life forms.
Next come the benefits of standards. This again begins with a general discussion of how standards work in economics, which leads to some writing about the Great Baltimore Fire which is quite zippy and seems to have been written by an actual live human being, in contrast to the rest of the paper. The fire was an unnecessary mess because of 600 different fire hose couplings in the country. So, standards.
Eventually we arrive at a point. "Standards...are meant to simplify complicated problems." And here's our next standard talking point. "We ask too much of teachers. It is unreasonable to give them a classroom full of students and take full responsibility for teaching them on their own." And I'll take a moment here to get a glass of water so I can do a spit take. Yes, teachers-- we need CCSS because our jobs are too hard for us. Why, gosh, thanks, boys.
There will be indirect network effects for individuals and for district who adopt the standards. I think we're back to massive buying power because we're all getting the same textbooks at Costco. And this sentence: "Minimum quality standards can help ameliorate information asymmetries." I can't tell if districts will have better info for buying books, or students will have better info for selecting schools. Maybe both. Myself, I'm just excited about going out this weekend with the wife and ameliorating some information asymmetries, if that's what the kids are calling it these days.
Standards can help because we'll reach a tipping point and then everybody will have the standards. So standards are good because they'll get people to have them? Also, personalized learning systems will be totally awesome and perhaps the best thing to come out of standards. [Insert standard PR about personal learning systems here.]
Finally, some policy recommendations.
1) Common Core should enforce their licensing so that textbook publishers can't randomly slap "CCSS aligned" on anything and everything. Protect your brand. Try not to think about SONY and Betamax.
2) The feds should offer more money for CCSS adoption. Ideally they could put this in a reauthorized version of the ESEA. Great idea, Brookings. You should probably call for the reauthorized ESEA to include ponies for everyone, plus snowmobiles for traversing hell (because that's when ESEA will be reauthorized by Congress-- har!).
3) Government (all levels) should be curriculum agnostics and standards fundamentalists. Give schools more money for implementation, if they need it. Can I have a show of hands for needing it?
4) "The leaders of the Common Core need to engage teacher unions." Wait-- there are leaders of Common Core? Is that a real job description. Because if we could find guys who would actually claim that title, I think it might be kind of awesome. Oh no wait-- it gets better. "Formal support of the Common Core from the NEA and the AFT would serve as a huge boon to the process of national standards. Government officials ought to make the compromises necessary to gain such support."
Okay, first I'm going to get a bucket of water so I can do a triple spit take. Then, I will borrow from my colleague from South Carolina, look at these Brookings boys and say, "Oh, aren't you sweet." How can you not know that the unions have been giving CCSS big wet kisses, or that government compromise wasn't nearly so necessary as Giant Gates Foundation Grants. I'm beginning to imagine that Brookings Institute is just a big collection of guys like the ones on Big Bang Theory.
I actually scrolled back to make sure I wasn't accidentally reading something from five years ago. But no-- yesterday's date. So with that, I award Brookings the gold medal for Most Clueless CCSS Commentary of 2014. Boys, sadly. your "fresh defense" is a collection of time-worn, over-used, discredited CCSS talking points. I mean, it does have the virtue of cramming as many of them into one space as I have ever seen. But fresh? I've seen fresher things on the Sci-Fi channel on a Saturday afternoon.
The Barriers to Dialogue (TL;DR)
This is a piece that got completely away from me, but I've left it because it fulfills the primary purpose of this blog-- to help me get stuff off my chest and out of my head. While simplifying issues is my stock in trade, sometimes I have to back up and try to see a bigger picture first. TL;DR. Or at least read at your own risk.
A guest writer on Peter DeWitt's blog this morning issued about the fifty gazillionth educational essay on the general topic of "Can't We All Just Get Along?" I sympathize. I am by nature a peacemaker. I don't like conflict and I hate confrontation. But over the years, fatherhood, failing at marriage, and leading a striking local have taught me some things about how and when and why conflict and confrontation have to be dealt with.
I wish that we were having a dialogue about the current state of American public education, but by and large we are not, no matter how much we'd like to be. Here's why we're not having a discussion now, and why we likely will be soon.
Can Reasonable People Disagree
Let's take care of this first. People can share values and goals and still disagree. In education we know this because it is how we live our professional lives. From staff meeting to department meeting to teachers' lounges, we regularly argue about the best way to educate students.
But you know what? We are not the ones saying, "If you really understand what's going on, you'll understand that the only correct conclusion is ours." That would be a reformer line. No room for deviation. Standards set in stone. Follow your script. Lifetime educators know that disagreement is not only okay, it's normal and necessary. It is the reformeisters who have declared their ideas beyond discussion.
We Don't Want the Same Things
From the WSJ reporter who told Diane Ravitch, "There are people on both sides looking to make money" to the invocation of "Curse of Knowledge" in the above-mentioned column, people keep suggesting that all the involved parties really want the same thing and all we have here is a failure to communicate.
This isn't a surprise. False equivalency is apparently now a regular course of study in journalism school. We are regularly told that all sides of debates are equally valid and so science and creationsim, flat earth and round earth, paper and plastic are all just different points of view. We just need to talk about it.
What we are experiencing in American public education is not a communication problem. We do not all want the same thing.
Some of us want what's best for students. Some of us want to make a bundle of money. Some of us want to create a streamlined efficient system of education. Some of us enjoy the exercise of power.
If the reformers really wanted the best for students, they would do what the best teachers have always done-- search far and wide through acres of materials for Things That Work. Instead, they imposing a system that values control and power and profit over students.
Clearest evidence? The reformers do not want these reformy things for their own children. That's not just a rhetorical flourish of an observation. I believe there is one value we do all share-- we want the best for our own children. And when it's time to make that choice, the reformy folks do not choose their own programs. Those programs are for other peoples' children.
When people vandalize your home, when they are spray-painting your front door and setting fire to your car, the problem is not a failure to communicate. The problem is that there are vandals attacking your home. You do not all want the same thing. You do not all value the same things. A conversation is not going to fix this.
They Don't Need To Listen
When teachers are told that we need to dialogue about reformy stuff, we get cranky because one of our major complaints is that we have been ignored through every step of this process. CCSS was created without any meaningful teacher input. Implementation has been hammered through without any meaningful teacher input. When teachers are even talked about, it has only been to complain that we are a barrier to education in this country.
Coleman, Gates, Broad, Duncan, Rhee-- the list goes on for people who have no real experience or training in education. What they do have are rich and powerful friends.
A while back I made fun of Mike Petrilli at Fordham Institute over a video he made. He and some Fordham folk read it and did not threaten to squash me like a bug, but rather did some quick joshing in return and moved on. They didn't need to seriously bother with me because today Mike Petrilli is going to put on a nice suit and go to work in a nice office where he can call powerful, influential people and enjoy an expensive lunch. I am going to go to my classroom where I will try to get 16-year-olds to write some decent paragraphs and wonder how I'm going to finance the emergency hot water heater replacement I had to do yesterday (true story). Nobody's going to offer me a fat speaker's fee or a book deal, and when I finally post this later, probably only a couple hundred people will read it.
The Powers That Be haven't been talking to us. They haven't been listening to us. They don't need to.
That was one of the lessons of NCLB. When it first hit, the state would send trainers who fervently tried to get us to drink the kool-aid, but gradually, they decided they didn't need to bother. Nowadays, the trainers' attitude is, "Drink or don't drink. We don't care. You're doing this."
I don't imagine Gates Foundation executives tossing and turning at night, wondering if teachers are upset with them. I don't imagine thinkee tank guys fretting, "Oh, I hope this next repor goes over well with teachers." In some cases, I'm certain that teacher displeasure is viewed as proof that the reformers are on the right track. If we're unhappy, they must be doing the right thing.
The hard political truth is that you only have to talk to people who can help you or hurt you. The folks driving the reformy bus decided years ago that teachers can do neither. Make some contributions to the national unions, fund some "teacher of the year" contests as a sort of spokesperon audition, and that should be enough.
Saying teachers should talk more to reformers is like saying that ants should do a better job of explaining themselves to elephants.
We've been talking all along. We won't shut up. Granted, some of us are yelling in rage. This is to be expected. People want to be heard; when they don't think they are being heard, they will just keep raising their voices. Even if it means rage-yelling. A few folks get it-- if somebody is rage-yelling at you, it's because they don't think you hear them. If you want them to back off, a good first step is to show that you hear them, even if all you can get is "Boy, you are angry."
Will There Be Dialogue?
I think so. And I think sooner rather than later. Because soon, the "reformers" are going to need us.
The Common Core is becoming shakier by the minute. Bad testing and bad materials are awakening public opposition to CCSS, and supporters are starting to waver. "Oh, it's just a bad implementation" is taking its place alongside "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play" in the Gallery of Hilariously Clueless Responses to Bad Situations. From Dennis Van Roekel to the Brookings Institute, folks are starting to suggest that some tweaking is needed. The new party line is, "Well, of course we're going to need to be flexible in implementation," as if they had never previously declared that no deviation would be allowed.
Let's delay the tests. Let's delay evaluation. Let's delay some inconsequential piece of paperwork. Reformy fans are trying to negotiate, hoping that they can save the whole structure by giving up a piece. But the structure of reformy stuff is composed of so many shaky spires leaning against each other and resting on shifting foundation of money. Any piece that goes will take the rest with it.
Soon the reformers will be looking for help, trying to save some portion of their tottering edifice. They will be ready to talk. The trick will be for them to propose talks while they still have the power left to compel educators to come to the table they've been so long barred from.
The dialogue will also depend on the structure of the resistance at that moment. Like any other movement, the public education resistance movement contains a full range of voices. Out on the wings, we have some crazy-pants ragers, balanced by a full wing of quieter and calmer heads. Both have their place. The craziest person in the room may, as the old political saw suggests, set the agenda, but it's the cooler heads that run the meeting and settle the issues.
The ragers create help create the pressure to talk. They just don't excel at the actual talking. The corporate raiders will not want to give up an inch of profitable territory. The politicians will want to angle for a winning side. The professional bureaucrats will want to protect their incomes. When the conversation finally comes, it's going to be messy and complex. I hope there are some folks who have the strength to manage that mess when it finally arrives.
A guest writer on Peter DeWitt's blog this morning issued about the fifty gazillionth educational essay on the general topic of "Can't We All Just Get Along?" I sympathize. I am by nature a peacemaker. I don't like conflict and I hate confrontation. But over the years, fatherhood, failing at marriage, and leading a striking local have taught me some things about how and when and why conflict and confrontation have to be dealt with.
I wish that we were having a dialogue about the current state of American public education, but by and large we are not, no matter how much we'd like to be. Here's why we're not having a discussion now, and why we likely will be soon.
Can Reasonable People Disagree
Let's take care of this first. People can share values and goals and still disagree. In education we know this because it is how we live our professional lives. From staff meeting to department meeting to teachers' lounges, we regularly argue about the best way to educate students.
But you know what? We are not the ones saying, "If you really understand what's going on, you'll understand that the only correct conclusion is ours." That would be a reformer line. No room for deviation. Standards set in stone. Follow your script. Lifetime educators know that disagreement is not only okay, it's normal and necessary. It is the reformeisters who have declared their ideas beyond discussion.
We Don't Want the Same Things
From the WSJ reporter who told Diane Ravitch, "There are people on both sides looking to make money" to the invocation of "Curse of Knowledge" in the above-mentioned column, people keep suggesting that all the involved parties really want the same thing and all we have here is a failure to communicate.
This isn't a surprise. False equivalency is apparently now a regular course of study in journalism school. We are regularly told that all sides of debates are equally valid and so science and creationsim, flat earth and round earth, paper and plastic are all just different points of view. We just need to talk about it.
What we are experiencing in American public education is not a communication problem. We do not all want the same thing.
Some of us want what's best for students. Some of us want to make a bundle of money. Some of us want to create a streamlined efficient system of education. Some of us enjoy the exercise of power.
If the reformers really wanted the best for students, they would do what the best teachers have always done-- search far and wide through acres of materials for Things That Work. Instead, they imposing a system that values control and power and profit over students.
Clearest evidence? The reformers do not want these reformy things for their own children. That's not just a rhetorical flourish of an observation. I believe there is one value we do all share-- we want the best for our own children. And when it's time to make that choice, the reformy folks do not choose their own programs. Those programs are for other peoples' children.
When people vandalize your home, when they are spray-painting your front door and setting fire to your car, the problem is not a failure to communicate. The problem is that there are vandals attacking your home. You do not all want the same thing. You do not all value the same things. A conversation is not going to fix this.
They Don't Need To Listen
When teachers are told that we need to dialogue about reformy stuff, we get cranky because one of our major complaints is that we have been ignored through every step of this process. CCSS was created without any meaningful teacher input. Implementation has been hammered through without any meaningful teacher input. When teachers are even talked about, it has only been to complain that we are a barrier to education in this country.
Coleman, Gates, Broad, Duncan, Rhee-- the list goes on for people who have no real experience or training in education. What they do have are rich and powerful friends.
A while back I made fun of Mike Petrilli at Fordham Institute over a video he made. He and some Fordham folk read it and did not threaten to squash me like a bug, but rather did some quick joshing in return and moved on. They didn't need to seriously bother with me because today Mike Petrilli is going to put on a nice suit and go to work in a nice office where he can call powerful, influential people and enjoy an expensive lunch. I am going to go to my classroom where I will try to get 16-year-olds to write some decent paragraphs and wonder how I'm going to finance the emergency hot water heater replacement I had to do yesterday (true story). Nobody's going to offer me a fat speaker's fee or a book deal, and when I finally post this later, probably only a couple hundred people will read it.
The Powers That Be haven't been talking to us. They haven't been listening to us. They don't need to.
That was one of the lessons of NCLB. When it first hit, the state would send trainers who fervently tried to get us to drink the kool-aid, but gradually, they decided they didn't need to bother. Nowadays, the trainers' attitude is, "Drink or don't drink. We don't care. You're doing this."
I don't imagine Gates Foundation executives tossing and turning at night, wondering if teachers are upset with them. I don't imagine thinkee tank guys fretting, "Oh, I hope this next repor goes over well with teachers." In some cases, I'm certain that teacher displeasure is viewed as proof that the reformers are on the right track. If we're unhappy, they must be doing the right thing.
The hard political truth is that you only have to talk to people who can help you or hurt you. The folks driving the reformy bus decided years ago that teachers can do neither. Make some contributions to the national unions, fund some "teacher of the year" contests as a sort of spokesperon audition, and that should be enough.
Saying teachers should talk more to reformers is like saying that ants should do a better job of explaining themselves to elephants.
We've been talking all along. We won't shut up. Granted, some of us are yelling in rage. This is to be expected. People want to be heard; when they don't think they are being heard, they will just keep raising their voices. Even if it means rage-yelling. A few folks get it-- if somebody is rage-yelling at you, it's because they don't think you hear them. If you want them to back off, a good first step is to show that you hear them, even if all you can get is "Boy, you are angry."
Will There Be Dialogue?
I think so. And I think sooner rather than later. Because soon, the "reformers" are going to need us.
The Common Core is becoming shakier by the minute. Bad testing and bad materials are awakening public opposition to CCSS, and supporters are starting to waver. "Oh, it's just a bad implementation" is taking its place alongside "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play" in the Gallery of Hilariously Clueless Responses to Bad Situations. From Dennis Van Roekel to the Brookings Institute, folks are starting to suggest that some tweaking is needed. The new party line is, "Well, of course we're going to need to be flexible in implementation," as if they had never previously declared that no deviation would be allowed.
Let's delay the tests. Let's delay evaluation. Let's delay some inconsequential piece of paperwork. Reformy fans are trying to negotiate, hoping that they can save the whole structure by giving up a piece. But the structure of reformy stuff is composed of so many shaky spires leaning against each other and resting on shifting foundation of money. Any piece that goes will take the rest with it.
Soon the reformers will be looking for help, trying to save some portion of their tottering edifice. They will be ready to talk. The trick will be for them to propose talks while they still have the power left to compel educators to come to the table they've been so long barred from.
The dialogue will also depend on the structure of the resistance at that moment. Like any other movement, the public education resistance movement contains a full range of voices. Out on the wings, we have some crazy-pants ragers, balanced by a full wing of quieter and calmer heads. Both have their place. The craziest person in the room may, as the old political saw suggests, set the agenda, but it's the cooler heads that run the meeting and settle the issues.
The ragers create help create the pressure to talk. They just don't excel at the actual talking. The corporate raiders will not want to give up an inch of profitable territory. The politicians will want to angle for a winning side. The professional bureaucrats will want to protect their incomes. When the conversation finally comes, it's going to be messy and complex. I hope there are some folks who have the strength to manage that mess when it finally arrives.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
TFA One Step Closer To ... Something
On March 4, TFA Co-CEOs Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva delivered a huge one-two punch of speeches to a huge audience of TFA faithful that signaled the possibility of some significant changes for the 24-year-old organization. Those changes to the TFA program appeared in a context that was somewhat less encouraging, so I turned to the printed text of the speeches for a closer look.
Historical Framework
Kramer's speech opened with everything there is to loathe about the hubris and arrogance of the organization. Kramer frames his own personal journey from Junior Master of the Universe to Education Guy as nothing less than a cosmic mission assigned to him by the universe itself. The universe! And he's still here to fight--FIGHT!-- "for our children and our communities, and for our integrity." Kramer is doing Really Important Work.
Next it's time for a look back. TFA is in 48 regions, 35 states. 11,000 corps members. 32,000 alumni are out there, and they surveyed them. 10,000 are teaching, 750 are "school leaders," 1,000 are assistant principals or deans, 600 are instructional specialists, 185 are school system leaders, 70 are elected officials and 100 are union leaders. By my count that comes in a little under 13,000. The rest? Social services, law, medicine and other fields. "Nearly 90% of the 32,000 alumni of Teach For America are working full time for our kids." Once again, TFA conflation of teaching and non-teaching jobs reveals a bias that the Real Work of education really doesn't take place in a classroom.
The speech opened with all the things that TFA-haters hate. The arrogance. The self-importance. The odd elisions-- even as TFA leaders talk about how challenging teaching is, they rarely-if-ever talk about joining in with the hard-working teachers who are already out there, but address teaching as if it is a field they invented, a foreign land that nobody else has ever set foot upon. Nor is there any word in this speech about the original mission-- to fill empty teaching jobs for which there were no teachers.
So it would be easy to check out at this point. But wait-- there's more.
New Stuff for Headlines
Kramer and his Co-CEO went on a listening tour. They heard some things, and they formulated some commitments to areas for improvement. Better listening. Approaches based on local needs instead of national strategy. Temper data-driven nature with greater appreciation for human stories. More support for corps members. Organizationally more limber with more local decision-making. And this is where we turn to the two new programs that have been making modest headlines.
First, the longer training.
Without ever saying, "Yeah, that five week training thing is ridiculous," TFA is poised to launch a senior-year-long program to rain in learning theory, pedagogy, cultural stuff, and some actual in-class practice.
This is exactly what some teacher training programs provide. My teacher training (Allegheny College, Meadville, PA) was non-traditional. I majored in English, took ed courses senior year, student taught in an urban setting with huge training support while in the field. It was very similar to what TFA is describing, so that could be good. Of course, TFA's rather broad description could also describe a couple of loose meetings of a non-credit no-grade study group. So this will be one of those proof is in the pudding things.
The other new program is not really a program at all. It's a suggestion? thought? promise to back you up? that TFAers might want to stick around for more than two years. Kramer says that nowadays most corps members teach beyond two years, an assertion which is supported by a Harvard study, though only 15% stuck it out for five years. Interestingly, non-white TFAers were more likely to stick around. The study also reports "the top reasons TFA corps members said they left teaching were to pursue a position other than K–12 teacher (34.93 percent), to take courses to improve their career opportunities within education (11.79 percent), to take courses to improve their career opportunities outside of education (10.26 percent), and poor administrative leadership at their school (9.83 percent)."
So, TFA is prepared to provide more support up front and past the second year, which means that TFA is edging closer to the traditional teacher prep programs that it circumvents.
Red Meat
After Kramer, Villanueva delivered a pep talk that was more in keeping with the TFA tradition of unvarnished baloney. "We are a force for good," she repeatedly asserted. She talked about dedication to kids and how they are not numbers or statistics and a few other things that every working teacher in the country would agree with. It's the standard TFA template that always leaves me wondering two things.
1) With whom do they think they're arguing? Villanueva laid out some pretty controversial assertions, like "children are important," as if she is taking a radical hard-core challenge to The Man. One of the reasons TFA raises traditional teacher hackles is that they so often combine telling us things we already know with chastising us for things we never said.
2) I cannot decide if TFA is deluded or disingenuous. I agree that students are not a number or statistic, but I'm not the one supplying ground troops for the people who treat students like data-generation units. Either TFA's leaders don't know who their supporters are, or they know and they're committed to lying about it.
This is why it's hard to trust announcements of Big Changes-- because I can never decide whether TFA is just deluded or if TFA is wildly dishonest. Are they guileless tools or manipulative collaborators?
So...?
If TFA is really going to move closer to providing real teacher training, that's not a bad thing. One of the most inexcusable acts committed by TFA over the years is the wasting of strong, committed young people who could have made great teachers, but were thrown into tough classrooms without adequate preparation or support. Fixing that is the very very least that TFA could redeem itself. Now if they used their money and clout to provide support, promotion, and recruitment for already-existing teacher programs, we'd really have something useful.
The changes proposed, if they are really done and really done right, could make TFA bodies somewhat more functional in classrooms (they could also render TFA redundant to actual teacher programs). But if they really want to convince me they #dontbackdown, they'll need to commit to an actual lifetime of teaching. Schools need stability and the teaching profession needs people who want to be there. Lord knows that some teacher training programs are terrible. But the solution is not half-baked training for short-term temps.
Historical Framework
Kramer's speech opened with everything there is to loathe about the hubris and arrogance of the organization. Kramer frames his own personal journey from Junior Master of the Universe to Education Guy as nothing less than a cosmic mission assigned to him by the universe itself. The universe! And he's still here to fight--FIGHT!-- "for our children and our communities, and for our integrity." Kramer is doing Really Important Work.
Next it's time for a look back. TFA is in 48 regions, 35 states. 11,000 corps members. 32,000 alumni are out there, and they surveyed them. 10,000 are teaching, 750 are "school leaders," 1,000 are assistant principals or deans, 600 are instructional specialists, 185 are school system leaders, 70 are elected officials and 100 are union leaders. By my count that comes in a little under 13,000. The rest? Social services, law, medicine and other fields. "Nearly 90% of the 32,000 alumni of Teach For America are working full time for our kids." Once again, TFA conflation of teaching and non-teaching jobs reveals a bias that the Real Work of education really doesn't take place in a classroom.
The speech opened with all the things that TFA-haters hate. The arrogance. The self-importance. The odd elisions-- even as TFA leaders talk about how challenging teaching is, they rarely-if-ever talk about joining in with the hard-working teachers who are already out there, but address teaching as if it is a field they invented, a foreign land that nobody else has ever set foot upon. Nor is there any word in this speech about the original mission-- to fill empty teaching jobs for which there were no teachers.
So it would be easy to check out at this point. But wait-- there's more.
New Stuff for Headlines
Kramer and his Co-CEO went on a listening tour. They heard some things, and they formulated some commitments to areas for improvement. Better listening. Approaches based on local needs instead of national strategy. Temper data-driven nature with greater appreciation for human stories. More support for corps members. Organizationally more limber with more local decision-making. And this is where we turn to the two new programs that have been making modest headlines.
First, the longer training.
Without ever saying, "Yeah, that five week training thing is ridiculous," TFA is poised to launch a senior-year-long program to rain in learning theory, pedagogy, cultural stuff, and some actual in-class practice.
This is exactly what some teacher training programs provide. My teacher training (Allegheny College, Meadville, PA) was non-traditional. I majored in English, took ed courses senior year, student taught in an urban setting with huge training support while in the field. It was very similar to what TFA is describing, so that could be good. Of course, TFA's rather broad description could also describe a couple of loose meetings of a non-credit no-grade study group. So this will be one of those proof is in the pudding things.
The other new program is not really a program at all. It's a suggestion? thought? promise to back you up? that TFAers might want to stick around for more than two years. Kramer says that nowadays most corps members teach beyond two years, an assertion which is supported by a Harvard study, though only 15% stuck it out for five years. Interestingly, non-white TFAers were more likely to stick around. The study also reports "the top reasons TFA corps members said they left teaching were to pursue a position other than K–12 teacher (34.93 percent), to take courses to improve their career opportunities within education (11.79 percent), to take courses to improve their career opportunities outside of education (10.26 percent), and poor administrative leadership at their school (9.83 percent)."
So, TFA is prepared to provide more support up front and past the second year, which means that TFA is edging closer to the traditional teacher prep programs that it circumvents.
Red Meat
After Kramer, Villanueva delivered a pep talk that was more in keeping with the TFA tradition of unvarnished baloney. "We are a force for good," she repeatedly asserted. She talked about dedication to kids and how they are not numbers or statistics and a few other things that every working teacher in the country would agree with. It's the standard TFA template that always leaves me wondering two things.
1) With whom do they think they're arguing? Villanueva laid out some pretty controversial assertions, like "children are important," as if she is taking a radical hard-core challenge to The Man. One of the reasons TFA raises traditional teacher hackles is that they so often combine telling us things we already know with chastising us for things we never said.
2) I cannot decide if TFA is deluded or disingenuous. I agree that students are not a number or statistic, but I'm not the one supplying ground troops for the people who treat students like data-generation units. Either TFA's leaders don't know who their supporters are, or they know and they're committed to lying about it.
This is why it's hard to trust announcements of Big Changes-- because I can never decide whether TFA is just deluded or if TFA is wildly dishonest. Are they guileless tools or manipulative collaborators?
So...?
If TFA is really going to move closer to providing real teacher training, that's not a bad thing. One of the most inexcusable acts committed by TFA over the years is the wasting of strong, committed young people who could have made great teachers, but were thrown into tough classrooms without adequate preparation or support. Fixing that is the very very least that TFA could redeem itself. Now if they used their money and clout to provide support, promotion, and recruitment for already-existing teacher programs, we'd really have something useful.
The changes proposed, if they are really done and really done right, could make TFA bodies somewhat more functional in classrooms (they could also render TFA redundant to actual teacher programs). But if they really want to convince me they #dontbackdown, they'll need to commit to an actual lifetime of teaching. Schools need stability and the teaching profession needs people who want to be there. Lord knows that some teacher training programs are terrible. But the solution is not half-baked training for short-term temps.
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