Common Core profiteers are becoming wise to the ways of the interwebs.
There at the top of my search results was a paid ad-- in large letters "Blame Common Core" with the link to the blamecommoncore.com website and the single line of copy "What's wrong with Common Core? Is it as bad as you have heard?"
Interesting point #1. My google search terms were "common core standards." Nothing negative. Just a search based on those three terms. Yet this ad was primed to attract my attention by playing to my imagined dislike and distrust of the CCSS. Even the website name and address is set to appeal to CCSS non-fans. This tells me that even the market knows that the prevailing winds are not blowing in a CCSSesterly direction.
So where does blamecommoncore.com take us? Well, it's not a place that wants to blame the Core for much of anything.
The site is actually entitled "Blame Common Core? Common Sense for the Common Core." And once we get past that, it's koolaid all the way. The site is basically a blog, and its articles are deeply devoted to serving up all the standard talking points that we've all come to know and love.
Are you smarter than a 2nd grader? Bert Zahniser is disgusted when adults use children as pawns. And by that he means the people who take pictures of weeping children struggling with CCSS homework. No word about how he feels when charter school operators ship all their students to the state capital to lobby for privatization.
Confusing the curriculum with the Common Core. Steve Klugewicz says shame on people who conflate the standards with the materials used to push them. CCSS is totally not a curriculum.
Common Core and the big picture. Dr. Kevin T. Brady is pretty sure that people who object to the ELA standards have no idea what the standards say. CCSS is not content, peoples.
Dr. Kevin T. Brady is also the author of my favorite title on the site: Common Core destroys "creativity"? The so-called "creativity" is that of the teacher. He's responding to Matthew Altieri, a thirty-year teacher in Wallingfor CT who is, for some reason, a favorite target of Dr. Brady. "Pshaw," says Dr. Brady. "CCSS doesn't tell you what to do or how to do it. You can pretend to be as fake creative as you want to be." (I'm paraphrasing).
So who is this working so hard to not blame the Common Core?
It's Cicero Systems, a group in Swedesboro, NJ, and they have some services they'd like to sell you. Specifically, Common Core Professional Development, Curricula Services (including audits and alignments), a monthly webinar (Talking Common Core), online beyond-the-textbook resources, and even field study trips for teachers which seem to focus on historical sites.
That emphasis makes sense because these guys used to be the American Institute for History Education. The Cicero name is a nod to Important Ancient Dead White Guy Cicero, just one example of the important pieces of classic education going unappreciated today. Dr. Kevin T. Brady is the founder and president, and with Steve Klugewicz has gotten in on the ground floor of the growing Trying To Sell CCSS to Conservatives Movement.
At "The Imaginative Conservative," Brady and Klugewicz make their case for a conservative embrace of CCSS.* Their argument, severely summarized, goes as follows:
CCSS is wide open in terms of content. Conservatives who are afraid CCSS will be used to push a liberal agenda are short-sighted, because schools are chock-full of agenda-pushing liberals already. "There exists, then, an opportunity for conservatives to bring
substantive content knowledge to teachers who so desperately need it." With CCSS, conservatives have a chance to finally teach liberals all the classics that they are so ignorant of.
This is not a new drum for Dr. Brady to beat. Old editions of the AIHE newsletter often return to the refrain of history being under-appreciated, inadequately taught, and insufficiently tested. "American history is not a core-content subject tested under the No Child Left Behind Law," wrote Dr. Brady in 2010. "That alone shows us that American history is not as highly valued in America as other core-content subjects that are mandatorily tested." And I feel his pain-- history is a hugely important discipline that is getting unjustly short-changed by the standards movement.
Well, history is no more tested now than it ever was, but somehow Dr. Brady has transformed his group into a go-to CCSS resource with special history topping. This opportunism is not a new phenomenon. Every time The Next Big Thing shows up in education, it is accompanied by a host of people who are sure that their personal pet project dovetails perfectly with The Thing. Cicero has seen a way to make a buck AND push their own favorite snake oil flavor, and I guess we can't really blame them. But we should remember not to focus so closely on the big sharks that we fail to notice the little piranhas.
*Hat tip to Adam Laats at the awesomely named "I Love You But You're Going To Hell"
Monday, March 17, 2014
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Uncle Arne Wants You-- Again!!
Arne just announced an exciting new program to create teacher leaders
to help promote the Ugly Mess O'Reform backed by the USDOE these days.
Actually, it's the same ugly mess that they've been promoting all along, but someone in the Messaging Office has sent out the memo that we have to call it something else. So these days only Bill Gates has the nerve to say the words "Common Core." For ordinary bureaucratic mortals, the Voldemortian "Common Core" has been replaced with references to raising standards, higher standards, super-duper standards. etc.
But whatever it is, Uncle Arne (and Bill Gates) would like us to help him sell it. He would like to team up with the National Board to raise up a host of High Standard Teacher Warriors to make the sales pitch he would like us to make.
I would make fun of Arne for having the epiphany that the whole reformy crapsicle might go over better if authentic teacher voices (and not paid-for TOY's paraphrasing pre-written press releases) were involved-- I would make fun of that epiphany, except that he keeps having it.
The pitch for Teach to Lead acknowledges its predecessor, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, which had similar hopes and dreams:
The purpose of the RESPECT Project is to directly engage with teachers and principals all across America in a national conversation about teaching.
RESPECT was going to transform the teaching profession. Today it's a website with a link to a year-old youtube clip that has only been viewed 9,700 times. Its press release tab simply brings a list of USDOE's press releases. There's a pdf of the "Blueprint for R.E.S.P.E.C.T." which contains the same old bureaucratic baloney that the USDOE has been cranking out like a prize heifer with IBS.
Or we could go back to the TEACH campaign, now about two years old, determined to recruit and retain super-duper teachers who would express their teaching joy by telling the world about how wise and correct the USDOE is. Over at teach.org, you can find all sorts of techy gold, like a blog that hasn't had a new post since November of 2013. TEACH also gave us the strikingly ill-chosen motto "Make more. Teach" and the attempt to co-opt the work of Taylor Mali, allowing the program to make fun of itself with a deeply sweet obliviousness.
This sort of foolishness extends all across the high stakes test-driven accountability status quo landscape. NEA put its logo on the "Great Public Schools" initiative, generally acronymated as GPS (you know-- that thing you use when you've lost your way). You can check it out at gpsnetwork.org, where you'll find a large discussion board community consisting largely of CCSS shills periodically trying to start chirpy "So what are YOUR favorite ways in which CCSS has facilitated fully actualized pedagogical blurgy blurgy blurg" conversations and failing because there are next-to-zero actual teachers participating.
It didn't work. None of them worked. They have never worked. They set up the tables with donuts and pretty brochures and wait for us to stop by so they can "engage" us and get us to pick up the talking points and carry them out into the world. And they end up feeding the donuts to the crickets and pasting new logos onto the brochures for the next round.
I'm trying to find a witty way to phrase this, but I can't-- these people are so damn stupid!
What we keep seeing are repeated attempts to involve teacher voices without actually having to listen to teacher voices. "We would like teachers to lead, and we would like them to do what we tell them to. We want teachers to be empowered, but only with just as much power as we give them (and can take away if they get unruly). And in all cases, pretending to listen to teachers should work just as well as actually listening, right? I mean, they can't tell the difference, can they?"
Are these guys just uniformly terrible managers of other human beings, or do they think we are as dumb as they keep insisting we are? I don't know, but I'm surely going to wait a bit before I rush to sign up for Teach to Lead.
Actually, it's the same ugly mess that they've been promoting all along, but someone in the Messaging Office has sent out the memo that we have to call it something else. So these days only Bill Gates has the nerve to say the words "Common Core." For ordinary bureaucratic mortals, the Voldemortian "Common Core" has been replaced with references to raising standards, higher standards, super-duper standards. etc.
But whatever it is, Uncle Arne (and Bill Gates) would like us to help him sell it. He would like to team up with the National Board to raise up a host of High Standard Teacher Warriors to make the sales pitch he would like us to make.
I would make fun of Arne for having the epiphany that the whole reformy crapsicle might go over better if authentic teacher voices (and not paid-for TOY's paraphrasing pre-written press releases) were involved-- I would make fun of that epiphany, except that he keeps having it.
The pitch for Teach to Lead acknowledges its predecessor, R-E-S-P-E-C-T, which had similar hopes and dreams:
The purpose of the RESPECT Project is to directly engage with teachers and principals all across America in a national conversation about teaching.
RESPECT was going to transform the teaching profession. Today it's a website with a link to a year-old youtube clip that has only been viewed 9,700 times. Its press release tab simply brings a list of USDOE's press releases. There's a pdf of the "Blueprint for R.E.S.P.E.C.T." which contains the same old bureaucratic baloney that the USDOE has been cranking out like a prize heifer with IBS.
Or we could go back to the TEACH campaign, now about two years old, determined to recruit and retain super-duper teachers who would express their teaching joy by telling the world about how wise and correct the USDOE is. Over at teach.org, you can find all sorts of techy gold, like a blog that hasn't had a new post since November of 2013. TEACH also gave us the strikingly ill-chosen motto "Make more. Teach" and the attempt to co-opt the work of Taylor Mali, allowing the program to make fun of itself with a deeply sweet obliviousness.
This sort of foolishness extends all across the high stakes test-driven accountability status quo landscape. NEA put its logo on the "Great Public Schools" initiative, generally acronymated as GPS (you know-- that thing you use when you've lost your way). You can check it out at gpsnetwork.org, where you'll find a large discussion board community consisting largely of CCSS shills periodically trying to start chirpy "So what are YOUR favorite ways in which CCSS has facilitated fully actualized pedagogical blurgy blurgy blurg" conversations and failing because there are next-to-zero actual teachers participating.
It didn't work. None of them worked. They have never worked. They set up the tables with donuts and pretty brochures and wait for us to stop by so they can "engage" us and get us to pick up the talking points and carry them out into the world. And they end up feeding the donuts to the crickets and pasting new logos onto the brochures for the next round.
I'm trying to find a witty way to phrase this, but I can't-- these people are so damn stupid!
What we keep seeing are repeated attempts to involve teacher voices without actually having to listen to teacher voices. "We would like teachers to lead, and we would like them to do what we tell them to. We want teachers to be empowered, but only with just as much power as we give them (and can take away if they get unruly). And in all cases, pretending to listen to teachers should work just as well as actually listening, right? I mean, they can't tell the difference, can they?"
Are these guys just uniformly terrible managers of other human beings, or do they think we are as dumb as they keep insisting we are? I don't know, but I'm surely going to wait a bit before I rush to sign up for Teach to Lead.
Another Standards Anniversary
I stumbled upon a government website that has a few things to say in support of the move to develop standards.
It opens by pointing out that in airplane piloting and Olympic athletes, we want people who have been trained to the highest standards. Ditto with students.
When we do not hold all students to high academic standards, the result can be low achievement and the tragedy of children leaving school without ever having been challenged to fulfill their potential.
But fear not . Hope and change are coming--
But a historic change is now taking place in American education: the development of model standards that will clearly identify what all students should know and be able to do to live and work in the 21st century. These standards will be designed to be internationally competitive.
So why do we need these standards at all?
Establishing high standards lets everyone in the education system know what to aim for. They allow every student, every parent, and every teacher to share in common expectations of what students should know and be able to accomplish. Students will learn more when more is expected of them, in school and at home. And standards will help create coherence in educational practices by aligning teacher education, instructional materials, and assessment practices.
How did the movement begin? With a meeting between the President and many governors just five years ago, and a series of grants made to various scholarly and professional organizations. The standards framework is voluntary on the state level, with states retaining the ability to adapt the standards as they see fit.
Wait! What?
Here's the punchline. The President at the earlier meeting in question was George H. W. Bush. One of the governors at the meeting was Bill Clinton. The website is archived information from October of 1994.
There isn't a huge point to make here, other than we didn't get into the current mess overnight or with one particular set of leaders. But our leaders, over the last twenty years, did change their minds about just how coercive the standards initiative needed to be, and just how useful some rich corporate partners might be in selling the whole thing. Goals 2000 also had the lofty idea of setting standards for many subject areas and not just math and English. Guess we decided that would be too hard as well.
It opens by pointing out that in airplane piloting and Olympic athletes, we want people who have been trained to the highest standards. Ditto with students.
When we do not hold all students to high academic standards, the result can be low achievement and the tragedy of children leaving school without ever having been challenged to fulfill their potential.
But fear not . Hope and change are coming--
But a historic change is now taking place in American education: the development of model standards that will clearly identify what all students should know and be able to do to live and work in the 21st century. These standards will be designed to be internationally competitive.
So why do we need these standards at all?
Establishing high standards lets everyone in the education system know what to aim for. They allow every student, every parent, and every teacher to share in common expectations of what students should know and be able to accomplish. Students will learn more when more is expected of them, in school and at home. And standards will help create coherence in educational practices by aligning teacher education, instructional materials, and assessment practices.
How did the movement begin? With a meeting between the President and many governors just five years ago, and a series of grants made to various scholarly and professional organizations. The standards framework is voluntary on the state level, with states retaining the ability to adapt the standards as they see fit.
Wait! What?
Here's the punchline. The President at the earlier meeting in question was George H. W. Bush. One of the governors at the meeting was Bill Clinton. The website is archived information from October of 1994.
There isn't a huge point to make here, other than we didn't get into the current mess overnight or with one particular set of leaders. But our leaders, over the last twenty years, did change their minds about just how coercive the standards initiative needed to be, and just how useful some rich corporate partners might be in selling the whole thing. Goals 2000 also had the lofty idea of setting standards for many subject areas and not just math and English. Guess we decided that would be too hard as well.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
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.)
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.
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.
Friday, March 14, 2014
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)