Who Loves the Core?

The architects and salesmen of Common Core have tried repeatedly to marginalize CCSS opponents.

Last summer, the narrative, pushed hard by Arne Duncan and picked up by many press outlets, was that the opposition to CCSS was a handful of Tea Party tin hat crazies. But as opposition to the core has spread, Coronistas have scrambled to find a characterization of their foes that would stick and resonate.

Late in 2013, Arne tried characterizing opponents as suburban white mom. The explicit point here was that they were sad that CCSS revealed their children and schools were not as great as they had previously believed. The implicit point was that middle class whites want to deny poor blacks the benefit of these awesome new standards. This approach did not work out so well.

Most recently, the frequent narrative is that CCSS is opposed by conservatives worried about government overreach and lefties who are concerned about damage to teachers. But this is not helpful enough to Coronistas, so they keep searching for characterizations of the opposition that makes it clear how dismissable CCSS haters are. Teachers' complaints can be dismissed because, poor dears, they've just been overwhelmed by a bad rollout, and once we fix that, they'll be all hunky dory. Fordham characterized Diane Ravitch as "a kook." And Bill Gates took the opportunity at the NBPTS conference to suggest that opposition is coming from people who haven't actually read the standards.

What is truly, deeply, profoundly remarkable about CCSS and its attendant "reforms" is that not once, not one single solitary time, has a major criticism of the program been greeted with, "You know, that's actually a valid point, and we should probably sit down and look at that." CCSS is remarkable for being the first national-scale program ever to be delivered letter-perfect, flawless right out of the box. No conceivable criticism could be valid, ever.

But let's set critics aside for a moment. Who are Common Core's friends? Who lervs it? I don't just mean people who say, "Yeah, it might be fine," but the people who push it forward with the same ardor with which many of us push back?

Well, of course there's Arne Duncan and Bill Gates, but every father loves his children, so that's to be expected. The USDOE has many CCSS fans like the newby Ted Mitchell, who has been amassing a pile of money by working in the private/charter school industry. In fact, an awful lot of CCSS fans, from Michelle Rhee to Jeb Bush to Brookings Institution have close to ties to folks who are in the business of collecting big chunks of money in the new wide-open you-too-can-help-yourself-to-these-tax-monies world of education.

Most recently the US Chamber of Commerce and Business Round Table have committed themselves to producing a series of pro-CCSS ads as well as calling on members to "work their connections" (aka "cash in those election contribution iou's") to keep CCSS from being derailed by any of the bills popping up in states to delay, defuse, defang or otherwise deepsix the Core. (Imagine-- legislation proposed without first being vetted by ALEC).

In fact, the GOP split on CCSS bears a striking resemblance to the GOP split on issues such as the various debt ceiling showdowns-- on one side, Republicans who like business and money and using business to make money, and on the other side, Republicans who hate government and wish it would go away.

This is mirrored by the Democrat split, where the dividing line looks a lot like the dividing line on Wall Street and banking reform-- on one side, Democrats who like business and money and using business to make money, and on the other side, Democrats who wish the government would look out for the interests of its citizens, including and especially the ones who can't afford to buy their own slice of government.

Virtually all divisions between groups that are otherwise on the same political page are explained by money. Thomas B. Fordham and the Heritage Foundation are both conservative-ish thinky tanks, but only TBF has been well-paid by Gates to promote the CCSS, and only TBF does so. Leaders of the two major teachers unions have been staunch defenders of the core; their members, not so much. It will be interesting to see if Randi Weingarten holds true to the AFT's pledge not to accept any more Gates money and if their previously unwavering support for the Core then wavers.

There are non-rich, non-invested supporters of CCSS that I have encountered. They share a couple of characteristics. 1) They believe that the standards can stand on their own. 2) They see things in the standards that are not there. 3) For both those reasons, they may also believe that CCSS can be a tool for social justice. I believe two things about these CCSS-simplex believers-- they are wrong, and the promoters we're talking about do not agree with them. For promoters like Bush and Duncan et al, the CCSS aren't worth doing unless the standards come linked to a full barrage of tests and test-based evals and test-based programs and test-based school closings. The CCSS promoters do not believe in CCSS-simplex, but in the full-on CCSS regime. That's what they support and fight to promote.

The fact that CCSS regime supporters are mostly the rich and powerful does not automatically make them wrong. But it does call into question how much they believe in their cause. I look at the many pro-public-ed activitsts I am getting to know (none of them wearing a tin hat), and I look at the amount of time and travel and money they are pouring into the fight, and even if I don't agree with 100% of what they have to say, I know they are sincere. I look at how a Michelle Rhee will speak up for her cause-- for a price-- and I have to question how badly she really wants to make her point. I look at CCSS leaders who send their children to non-CCSS schools and I have to question how much they really believe that CCSS is good for children. And if they don't believe it, why should I.

CCSS has opponents of every age, size, stripe, class and political persuasion. CCSS promoters either have a huge vested interest in CCSS success, or they don't know what they're talking about (and I don't mean that as a figure of speech-- I mean that every CCSS supporter I have met on the ground has changed her mind once she really saw what was in them. So Gates has it backwards on this one.)

Feed the Dog

On Saturdays I am sometimes have a chance to check in with #satchat, a Saturday twitter conversation about education. If you are a denizen of the twitterverse, I recommend you check it out. Today this question was posed by moderator Peter DeWitt:

In an era of accountability, how can we be change agents for student learning?

My answer is that we have to feed the dogs of accountability with one hand and teach with the other.

Which is pithy and tweetable, but perhaps not entirely clear. So let me illustrate one metaphor with another metaphor.

Sometimes, when your child doesn't want to eat something nasty tasting, you hide it in the good stuff. Hide broccoli in the mashed potatoes. Cut liver up into really tiny pieces that go into a casserole. Put bacon on everything bad.

Many of us have been trying to do the same thing in our classrooms. We've been trying to mask the bitter taste of test prep and test taking by mixing it in and making it seem like just one part of the otherwise tasty dish that is Going To School.

The problem is, you can hide a little bit of liver in a yummy casserole (if you love liver, I'm sorry-- feel free to substitute a less-beloved food here). But once you have a couple of pounds of liver to his in a pound of casserole, the hiding no longer works. In fact, the bad taste starts to overwhelm the good. Instead of saying, "Hey, when you put it in the casserole, liver doesn't taste so bad," your child starts thinking, "I hate this casserole. It tastes just as bad as liver."

Under the current status quo of high stakes test-driven accountability, the testing regime has become a couple of pounds of liver. It has become a carload of liver, a slab of liver that could only have come from a Brobdingnagian moose or Godzilla himself. And it is making the school casserole taste terrible.

One of the Big Fictions about the current test regime is that The Big Test just measures what we're doing anyway. Do our jobs and do them well and great test scores will magically occur, which is true only in the sense that if such a thing happened, full-on magic would be involved. In truth, for many elementary teachers and some secondary subject teachers, test prep has become a whole new subject in our school program.

My thought? Stop trying to hide it. Stop trying to pretend that it is an equal part of everything that we do. Stop trying to mask it with the rest of the casserole.

In front of students and parents, call it by its name. "Okay, we're done learning for today. It is time to start drilling for the Big Test." Don't integrate it, either in instruction, nor (if you're a brave administrator) on your report card.

The reaction is predictable. Set the liver out by itself on the plate, and watch how much your child will fight not to eat it, complain about it, curse it and call it names, sneak in out of your freezer in the middle of the night and throw it out into the backyard for some unlucky skunk to steal away. You may want to avoid this ugly confrontation, but really, once the liver becomes unmaskable, don't you have this confrontation anyway?

Are we not seeing across the country the strong reactions as parents and students finally get a strong taste of the testing regime and what it is doing to their classroom? Sometimes people don't start to fight back until they start to see what they're being hit by. And in our case, isn't that a good thing.

But it's not the best thing. The best thing is that once you stop hiding the liver in it, the casserole goes back to tasting great. It regains all the flavor and pleasant enjoyment that it used to have, and your kids chow down with enthusiasm.

We've been trying to feed the dog and teach the students with both hands, at the same time, all the time, as if we can somehow teach the students and pacify the dogs all at the same time. We can't. The dogs are too big and ugly and demanding, and the students need our undivided attention. Trying to do two jobs with two hands at one time results in a half-assed result for both. I don't care so much about half-assed accountability, but we are letting the call for accountability compromise our teaching.

So separate them. They never went together anyway. Teaching students and satisfying test-happy bureaucrats are two separate activities, no more compatible than making love to your wife and repairing the septic tank.

I've said for years, even pre-NCLB, that teaching has become guerilla warfare. One of our functions is now to protect our students and, as best we can, keep the dogs from taking a bite out of them. I don't think it's easy, and depending on your administration, it may not be possible (which is just one more reason that so many teachers are leaving the field), but it's my real answer to the question of the day.

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."