A New Political Party

If you have any doubts about whether or not education debate turns the political spectrum into a giant Ouroborean worm disappearing into its own innards, consider this.


Here's a quote from a website devoted to a particular issue:

Americans need to understand that sacrifice and a hard work ethic are the motherhood of invention and success. If you are not successful or not happy with your lot in life, it is your responsibility to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and clean up the mess.

Now take a guess-- what issue is the writer railing about? How about this one?

When Cedric Jennings was born, the odds were stacked against him. His father was often in jail, and his mother's income barely kept the family fed and housed. They lived in too many places to recall—from short-term rentals, to pull-out couches in relatives' homes, to unheated apartments. Cedric walked home alone from school each day past drug dealers through southeast Washington, D.C., at the height of the city's crack epidemic.
For many children, such circumstances portend unhappy outcomes. Somehow, though, Cedric beat the odds, graduated from high school, and gained acceptance to Brown University, where he graduated with honors on his way to earning graduate degrees from Harvard and the University of Michigan.

The first is from a website promoting David A Bego's book The Devil at our Doorstep, a book meant to sound the alarm against big government and the welfare state. The second comes from an article on the ASCD site discussing the research behind grit.

Paul Ryan says that we have a cycle of non-working black men who have been lulled to sleep in the safety hammock, caught in the poverty trap. Arne Duncan says that the children of white suburban moms have been lulled into laziness; Frank Rich rushes to his defense by noting that children are coddled. To improve America, Paul Ryan and John Boehner want to raise welfare requirements to push Americans to work harder. To improve America, Arne Duncan and Barrack Obama want to raise school requirements to push American children to work harder. After unemployment runs out, no excuses. Which you can learn about at a no excuses school.

Maybe "neo" in "neo-con" and "neo-liberal" means "not so much"? Forget trying to sort parties out. It seems we have a new party in play, covering a broader range than either GOP or Democrats, transcending and including members of both. It's the "What Those Other People Need Is A Good Swift Kick in the Ass" Party, and it's platform on education and welfare is exactly the same.

No wonder we have a hard time figuring out who our friends are.No wonder people are starting to think politics is more about class and money than anything else.

"Mansplaining Reformy Stuff"

Listen, honey, I know it's all very confusing and there's a lot to take in. But don't worry your pretty little head about it. Let me explain the whole what they like to call narrative of school reform.

Back in my day, schools were great. You learned what you needed to learn and as soon as you got out, you were ready to get a job. It wasn't easy-- nosirree-- but we weren't afraid of hard work. I put myself through college working twelve different jobs. Didn't sleep for three and a half years.

But somewhere in the years since I graduated, schools went to pot. Damn teachers unions made it so you couldn't fire someone for being gay or a commie. We started caring how kids feel. What the hell? Nobody cared how I felt! All this nurturing and coddling and babying and recess and food for poor kids and talking about bullying like it's a bad thing-- hell, I was bullied, and it made a man out of me. Go to any school in the country and all you see are a bunch of little children.

And you could see it start to affect the whole country. Unemployment up, Chinese kicking our asses, jobs going to India, and getting beat on these damn whatchamacallit international testy things. No, I don't know how we used to do, and I don't need to look it up. No damn Estonian ever outscored me and my buddies on a test, I can tell you that.

No, the problem is that the country is filling up with lazy stupid people, people who don't have the sense to listen to us who know better.

The whole school system is sloppy and slack and messy. And waste of money?? Billions of dollars just going to waste on teachers and pencils and feely-weely programs. My buddies and I would look and say, "Hell, if that was my business I'd run it a hell of a lot better and make a chunk of change at the same time."

So we figured out how to do it. First we made them cough up the data. In my business, if you can't put it on a spreadsheet, it doesn't matter. At first it looked like reducing education to numbers would be hard, but we just had them measure what was measurable. It doesn't matter. We already knew schools were failing. We just had to prove it.

And once we had the proof, we could start shaping it up. We needed to chase people out of public schools into our private and charter schools. That was easier once we owned all the tests. We give the tests that prove schools are failing AND we make them pay to take them AND we make them pay to try to get ready for them. THAT got the money train running. But that was just with NCLB.

Somebody had the bright idea-- what if we didn't just own the tests, but we owned the standards? What if we could make every school teach what we told them to, and then made them pay us to say if they did it okay or not? We'd own the whole supply chain!

Charter schools are great. We control the actual product there. We can hire and fire teachers on the cheap. At first we thought we'd have to break the teacher unions to cut costs, but we figured out how to work around them-- God bless TFA. That's how teaching should work-- high turnover, low training, easily replaced, and cheap-- just like a McDonald's franchise. And the government should pump money into charters-- we're a better business model. Getting the union to shut up-- easy. Everybody likes money, and we have lots of money to get the right people heard and the rest silenced.

And really-- teachers are a big part of the problem. They suck. They are lazy. They could never survive in the real world. They don't know the first thing about education, and what they do know they won't use. They're a whiny bunch of girls-- literally, a big bunch of girls. Schools could be so much better if teachers would just start committing themselves to teaching, but they just don't care. We are hoping that with enough threats we can get them to start working. And if they won't, we'll replace them. It's not like it's that hard to find someone who can do the job. Particularly once we've idiot-proofed it. Ideally, you just need a warm body to stand there and deliver the program that you've bought from one of our vendors. That way everybody in every classroom will get the exact same results.

It's not just that we wanted to get great ROI-- this was also about straightening out the country. Kids have it too easy, too coddled-- they're too wimpy. Honey, let's face it-- our whole culture is just womanized. Americans just need to man up, grow a pair, get some grit-- and there's no reason it can't start when they're little. They're mostly failures, and they need to hear that. Makes a man step up to the plate when he hears he's a failure.And if he won't step up, then he deserves to fall into the gutter.

Government has been a big help. It's a pain to have to market something to a thousand different customers who want a thousand different things. With the feds to make everybody fall in line, we just need one line of marketing and the feds insure that we're basically selling to just one huge customer. And their work on making every kid's information available in one big on-line database?? That is going to pay off big time in the years ahead. Do you know how much easier it will be to hire the right guy when we can see everything back to his three-year-old pooping schedule?

All you girls just need to get over all this crap you're whining about. Can you see how much money we're making from this? I'm not sure you understand-- we're not greedy, but all that money proves that we're dead right. People only end up rich if they deserve to. The only way to get rich is work hard and play the game, and the only way to know that you're getting your life right is to check finances. Does being poor suck? Sure-- it's supposed to. That's how you get the motivation to stop being poor. Don't like being poor? Then stop being poor.

We can start that lesson in pre-K. Don't like failure? Then suck it up and work harder.

Honey, listen to the people in charge. They wouldn't be in charge if they weren't rich, and they wouldn't be rich if they didn't deserve to be.

Reality Impaired Assessment & Joyce Foundation

Over at Education Week: Teacher, Liana Heitin has rewritten a press release from the Joyce Foundation (if you don't know that name, more shortly) for general consumption. The lede is there in the title: Teachers May Need to Deepen Assessment Practices for Common Core.

The article spins off the work of Olivia Lozano and Gabriela Cardenas, two teachers at the UCLA Lab School in Los Angeles. This teaching team has spent ten years exploring the wonders of formative assessment. One of the handy specifics they have landed on include talking to the students one-on-one or in small groups, asking open-ended questions, and recording all the stuff they find out (copious notes) in a binder. Also, they like to call themselves "teacher researchers."

"More than just a buzzword among savvy educators, formative assessment is the ongoing process of collecting data on what students know or don't know, and changing instruction accordingly." First, hats off to the copywriter at Joyce, who has apparently stepped up from his previous job as a copywriter for JC Penneys. Second, who is the audience for this article? People who slept through all four years of teacher school? People whose teacher training only lasted five weeks? I read this sort of thing and think these people must believe that actual professional teachers are as ignorant of the teaching profession as these reformy types are. Sigh. Moving on...

Formative assessment used to be just quizzes and things, but now that Common Core has arrived to demand stronger thinky skills, we must formatively assess in stronger thinky ways.

The common standards are asking students to do that and more. They are aimed at "building childrens' capacity to think, and analyze, and communicate, and reason," said Margaret Heritage, the assistant director for professional development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA.

"Aimed at"? Yes, and when I was in college, I "aimed at" dating the hot girl in the flute section but I ended up getting pizza by myself. "Aiming at," is a wonderful phrase. I suggest that students taking math assessments indicate that they "aimed at" the correct answer and see if that gets them credit.

At any rate, what we seem to be advocating in the article is taking more time to assess more deeply. "A lot more talking, more focus, more discourse, more depth." Lots and lots of listening, high-quality listening, deep listening, creepy eaves-dropping on the kids listening. Because, again, no teacher has ever thought about listening to students.

In math, instead of "I do, you do, we do" lessons, teachers will need to have discussions about the answers, maybe spending twenty minutes to debate and discuss a single problem.

So, in short, all you need is a ten hour school day and a co-teacher in your classroom. Oh, and the kind of student population that a university lab school gets. Just take this proposal to your school board and suggest it for your entire elementary program; just double the length of the day and the size of the staff. How expensive could it be?

But Joyce--I mean, Heitin-- isn't done drifting through an alternate reality yet. The capper on the article is connecting all of this to the PARCC and SBA. But you will be relieved to know that both consortia will be making formative test materials available to your school! Yes!! Which is a relief because none of the stuff the whole rest of the article talks about will do a thing about preparing your students for the high stakes testing.

This kind of press release is about just one thing-- a credible cover story. It's the least the Joyce Foundation, a group that has its roots in Chicago schools corparateering and hangs out at the same reformy clubs as Gates and Broad, can do for us.

What are we actually going to do? We're going to get the practice tests ("formative assessments") and we're going to use them to teach to the test so that we can try to avoid the punishments threatened for students, teachers, schools, administrators and taxpayers if the students don't do well.

But we can't say we're teaching to the test. So we're offered this option-- pretend that we're doing all this cool stuff advocated by Joyce (if we aren't able to achieve the doubled school model, we can at least say we're "aiming at" it). Use this sparkly rhetoric to sell it to the public. Then send teachers back to their rooms to close the door and use their practice tests to drill students in preparation for the Big Test.

The Conservative Defense of CCSS

Over at the Daily Caller, Robby Soave and Rachel Solzfoos wrote a story in which Michael Brickman of the Fordham Institute labors mightily to construct a conservative defense of the Common Core.

It's a heroic struggle to be sure, as the very first sentence acknowledges, "Conservatives remain deeply skeptical of the Common Core education standards." The Daily Caller's robolinker is not helping; I'm looking at links to a story about how a poor school district wasted money "on lavish Common Core spa trip" and an ad for accredited homeschooling. In this exclusive interview, Brickman tries to combat that conservative blowback and runs directly into one of the central problems of conservatism.

Brickman leads with the "mess of fifty standards" defense of the Core. Many of those standards were just so lacking and students were graduating without necessary proficiencies. The standards "outline types of thinking and skills that students should master by certain grade levels" plus calling for "vigorous high-stakes testing to ensure that kids are actually learning the skills."Lots wrong there, but let's move on.

The article acknowledges the political problems for conservatives and the Core. Although developed by the National Governors Association (a pleasant not-exactly-a-lie, not-exactly-the-truth) and supported by moderate GOP governors like Bush, Jindal and Christie, the CCSS also received support from the Obama administration. That sends up the "protect local control from federal overreach" warning flags for conservatives.

Brickman says the feds should not have coerced the states into accepting the Core, but they are totes worth adopting. This is the modern conservative problem-- there are things you ought to do, but the government should not make you do them. This often comes out as "It's only federal overreach if the feds are making you do something wrong."

Brickman threads the needle and lands on “There are absolutely legitimate, uh, examples of federal overreach from the Obama administration, but I don’t think Common Core is one of them because… It was something that was led by the governors and the state education chiefs.” And nicely played, Daily Caller, in leaving the "uh" in his quote. It's okay-- I don't believe his bullshit story, either.  And anyway, Brickman adds, the feds doing way worse overreach stuff over there. Don't be distracted by the Common Core (when I rather wish you'd be distracted FROM the Common Core instead).

No, conservatives should be clamoring for their local authorities to embrace and preserve the Core. So again-- don't let the feds tell you what to do, but make sure that your local authorities do what the feds want you to do. It's very hard to be a conservative these days.

Next Brickman reminds us that the CCSS are under attack from Tea Partiers and teacher unions. Also, the Monster in your Closet wants to attack it. Booga-booga! A paragraph later he also acknowledges that other members of the Right-ish Thinky Tank Club have also come out against the Core (here's one from just this morning) but Fordham is well paid by Bill Gates sure the others are wrong.

Only in the last paragraph does Daily Caller let Brickman get something right, which is that eradicating CCSS doesn't really solve your wacky bad homework problem or your government mind-control through grammar homework problem.

So the argument fails as a defense and fails as conservatism. In fairness, I haven't seen anybody concoct a good liberal defense for CCSS, either. I'd wager that's because CCSS isn't so much politically charged as it's just bad. Corporate power grabs are pan-political, and Democrats and Republicans of all stripes have been happy to jump on the gravy train. Fordham is a conservative voice that has received a truckload of money from the Gates Foundation. It's funny how sometimes green is a much stronger color than red or blue.

Because It's On the Test

Peter DeWitt wrote a response spun from Marc Tucker's most excellent posting about testing culture and its effects on American education. Tucker's piece scathingly but accurately marks the harmful effects of test-driven education without actually attacking CCSS at all. In his response, DeWitt writes, "It makes me question whether the Common Core is guilty by association, or just plain guilty."

It's one of the most thoughtful versions I've read of the question, "Can CCSS be decoupled from testing? And once decoupled, could CCSS actually turn out to be a force for good?"

Even as recently as a year ago, we might have only guessed what the answer to that question might be. Today, we have a pretty good idea.

With the more widescale implementation of CCSS, we see the same scene repeated in classroom after classroom. A teacher (maybe elementary math, maybe high school reading, maybe some other affected teacher) contemplates a lesson from their CCSS-aligned Pearson-produced materials. "This lesson is terrible. Terribly paced and inappropriate for my students, and the explanation will not make any sense to them," the teacher says, or thinks. "But I have to do this material anyway because it's on the test."

"Because it's on the test" has increasingly become the leading pedagogical rationale since the advent of NCLB. The story of NCLB and RTTT has been the story of crafting an answer to the follow-up question-- "So what if it's on the test?" That answer is, of course, "If you fail the test, we will punish the students, the teachers, the administration, the school, and the taxpayers." And so educational value, pedagogical soundness, time-tested effectiveness, student need-- all of those old ways of planning instruction take a back seat to "because it's on the test."

So "Because it's on the test" is answer enough.

We teach writing badly because that style of writing is on the test. We teach mathematical concepts too early because they are on the early test. We teach a warped version of a single literary analysis technique because that's what's on the test.

Teachers commit any number of acts of educational malpractice in a week because they're on the test. It is literally the ONLY reason that we are doing some of the things we do in the classroom.

The decoupling question is really asking this: What would teachers do if "because it's on the test" were no longer a reason to teach anything?

We already have a hint.

We already do it because of the test. The CCSS has some lovely language about cooperative learning. Nobody's teaching that because it's not on the test. There some nice lip service to questions with multiple correct responses. Also sitting gathering dust, because that's not on the test.

Take away the test, and teachers would rewrite the standards on the ground. Teachers would use their experience and training and professional judgment to adjust the standards to suit the students in their classroom. They would add (without regard for 15%) the standards that are missing. They would adjust the pace and depth of their instruction to match the needs of the students in their classrooms. They would replace "because it is on the test" with "because it best serves the needs of my students."

The coupling of testing and CCSS is, in its own way, the ultimate proof of CCSS's suckiness. Because if the CCSS were good, really good, you know what would happen if we decoupled?

Nothing. Teachers would say, "Thank you for these most excellent standards! I will take them back to my classroom and use them happily! They're so great; I'm not going to change a thing."

But CCSS are a straightjacket, and "because it's on the test" is the padlock that keeps it tight. Like a terrible performer, CCSS can only command a captive audience, and the chains on the door are "because it's on the test."

DeWitt wonders if CCSS is guilty by association, and it's true. Sometimes a nice guy looks like a criminal because he's hanging out with the wrong crowd, and test-driven accountability, as Tucker rightly argues, is one of the ugliest crowds around. But sometimes a guy is hanging out with a bunch of bad guys because he is, himself, a bad guy. With CCSS and test-driven accountability, I don't think it's so much a matter of "guilt by association" as "birds of a feather."

Essay-Grading Software & Peripatetic Penguins

Education Week has just run an article by Caralee J. Adams announcing (again) the rise of essay-grading software. There are so many things wrong with this that I literally do not know where to begin, so I will use the device of subheadings to create the illusion of order and organization even though I promise none. But before I begin, I just want to mention the image of a plethora of peripatetic penguins using flamethrowers to attack an army of iron-clad gerbils. It's a striking image using big words that I may want later. Also, look at what nice long sentences I worked into this paragraph.

Look! Here's My First Subheading!

Speaking for the software will be Mr. Jeff Pence, who apparently teaches middle school English to 140 students. God bless you, Mr. Pence. He says that grading a set of essays may take him two weeks, and while that seems only a hair slow to me, I would certainly agree that nobody is taking 140 7th grade essays home to read overnight.

But Mr. Pence is fortunate to have the use of Pearson WriteToLearn, a product with the catchy slogan "Grade less. Teach more. Improve scores." Which is certainly a finely tuned set of catchy non-sequitors. Pearson's ad copy further says, "WriteToLearn—our web-based literacy tool—aligns with the Common Core State Standards by placing strong emphasis on the comprehension and analysis of information texts while building reading and writing skills across genres." So you know this is good stuff.

Pearson White Papers Are Cool!

Pearson actually released a white paper "Pearson's Automated Scoring of Writing, Speaking, and Mathematics" back in May of 2011 (authors were Lynn Streeter, Jared Bernstein, Peter Foltz, and Donald DeLand-- all PhD's except DeLand).

The paper wears its CCSS love on its sleeve, leading with an assertion that the CCSS "advocate that students be taught 21st century skills, using authentic tasks and assessments." Because what is more authentic than writing for an automated audience? The paper deals with everything from writing samples of constructed response answers (I skipped the math parts) and in all cases finds the computer better, faster, and cheaper than the humans.

Also, Webinar!

The Pearson website also includes a link to a webinar about formative assessment which heavily emphasizes the role of timely, specific feedback, followed by targeted instruction, in improving student writing. Then we move on to why automated assessment is good for all these things (in this portion we get to hear about the work of Peter Foltz and Jeff Pence, who is apparently Pearson's go-to guy for pitching this stuff). This leads to a demo week in Pence's class to show how this works, and much of this looks usable. Look-- the 6+1 traits are assessed. Specific feedback. Helps.

And we know it works because the students who have used the Pearson software get better scores on the Pearson assessment of writing!! Magical!! Awesome!! We have successfully taught the lab rats how to push down the lever and serve themselves pellets.

Wait! What? Not Miraculous??

"Critics," Adams notes drily, "contend the software doesn't do much more than count words and therefor can't replace human readers." They contend a great deal more, and you can read about their contending at the website humanreaders.org, and God bless the internet that is a real thing.

"Let's face the realities of automated essay scoring," says the site. "Computers cannot 'read'." They have plenty of research findings and literature to back them up, but they also have a snappy list of one-word reasons that automated assessors are inadequate. Computerized essay grading is:
            trivial
            reductive
            inaccurate
            undiagnostic
            unfair
            secretive

Unlike Pearson, the folks at this website do not have snappy ad copy and slick production values to back them up. They are forced to resort to research and facts and stuff, but their conclusion is pretty clear. Computer grading is indefensible.

There's History

Adams gets into the history. I'm going to summarize.

Computer grading has been around for about forty years, and yet somehow it never quite catches on.

Why do you suppose that is?

That Was A Rhetorical Question

Computer grading of essays is the very enshrinement of Bad Writing Instruction. Like most standardized writing assessment in which humans score the essays based on rubrics so basic and mindless that a computer really could do the same job, this form of assessment teaches students to do an activity that looks like writing, but is not.

Just as reading without comprehension or purpose becomes simply word calling, writing without purpose becomes simply making word marks on a piece of paper or a screen.

Authentic writing is about the writer communicating something that he has to say with an audience. It's about sharing something she wants to say with people she wants to say it to. Authentic writing is not writing created for the purpose of being assessed.

If I've told my students once, I've told them a hundred times--good writing starts with the right question. The right question is not "What can I write to satisfy this assignment?" The right question is "What do I want to say about this?"

Computer-assessed writing has no more place in the world of humans than computer-assessed kissing or computer-assessed singing or computer-assessed joke delivery. These are all performance tasks, and they all have one other thing in common-- if you need a computer to help you assess them, you have no business assessing them at all.

And There's The Sucking Thing

Adams wraps up from some quotes from Les Perelman, former director of the MIT Writing Across the Curriculum program. He wrote an awesome must-read take-down of standardized writing for Slate, in which, among other things, he characterized standardized test writing as a test of "the ability to bullshit on demand." He was also an outspoken critic of the SAT essay portion when it first appeared, noting that length, big wordiness, and a disregard for factual accuracy were the only requirements. And if you have any illusions about the world of human test essay scoring, reread this classic peek inside the industry.

His point about computer-assessed writing is simple. "My main concern is that it doesn't work." Perelman is the guy who coached two students to submit an absolutely execrable essay to the SAT. The essay included gem sentences such as:

American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting, "the only thing we need to fear is itself," which disdained competition as an alternative to cooperation for success.

That essay scored a five. So when Pearson et al tell you they've come up with a computer program that assesses essays just as well as a human, what they mean is "just as well as a human who is using a crappy set of standardized test essay assessment tools." In that regard, I believe they are probably correct.

To Conclude

Computer-assessed grading remains a faster, cheaper way to enshrine the same hallmarks of bad writing that standardized tests were already promoting. Just, you know, faster and cheaper, ergo better. The good news is that the system is easy to game.  Recycle the prompt. Write lots and lots of words. Make some of them big. And use a variety of sentence lengths and patterns, although you should err on the side of really long sentences because those will convince the program that you have expressed a really complicated thought and not just I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of Estonia; therefor, a bicycle, because a vest has no plethora of sleeves. And now I will conclude by bring up the peripatetic penguins with flamethrowers again, to tie everything up. Am I a great writer, or what?

When Is Your Last Teaching Day of School?

Years ago, the Tax Foundation hit upon a great tool for illustrating how large our individual tax load is-- Tax Freedom Day. Starting from January 1, how many days would Americans (or residents of your state, if you break it down that way) have to work just to pay off taxes.

In a small piece of PR serendipity, Tax Freedom Day falls in April in most states. By some mid-April day, all Americans have earned enough money to pay off the income tax debt.

It makes me wonder, as we enter testing season, when our Last Teaching Day of School would be.

If all standardized testing came at the very end of the year, what would be our last day of school?

How would the pubic react if we handed out final report cards in April (or in some heavily-besieged elementary schools, March) and told parents, "Okay, the teaching year is over. But your child needs to come to school for the next 4/6/8/10 weeks just to take all their tests."

How quickly would the remaining public support for our massive testing status quo evaporate if the tests were no longer hidden and camouflaged among the teaching days of the real school year, but had to stand on their own? I'm guessing pretty quickly. Wherever you are, maybe it would help crystallize things for folks if you could tell them what the Last Teaching Day of the year would be.