The Ed Week account of a snippy meeting between Randi Weingarten, Dennis van Roekel, and the CCSSO included one quote that came roaring out at me. Randi and Dennis, bless their hearts, were just trying to deliver the news that the CCSS are not playing well in Peoria. The CCSSO, co-sponsors of the standards, were just not having it. The unions should get their people in line. The public wasn't getting the correct picture.
Melody Schopp, South Dakota Ed Secretary, was bemoaning the lack of press coverage for positive CCSS success stories. Mike Cohen, from Achieve (the accountable-to-nobody organization that helped birth, groom and market CCSS) chimed in that too much of the positive CCSS spin was anecdotal, and then let loose with this gem.
"We don't have any kind of good metrics" for measuring common-core implementation's success.
What??!! Really? Because I am pretty sure the sales pitch for CCSS involved the following:
1) See how bad our test scores are?!
2) Creating and installing CCSS will make our test scores not suck.
3) The success of CCSS will be obvious because test scores will rise.
The PARCC and SBA tests have been sold specifically on their merits as a metric for measuring the success of the CCSS. If that's not what they're measuring, why the heck are we bothering with them??
Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with Cohen. It's possible there is no metric that could measure the success of CCSS. I can think of two possible reasons:
1) It is hard to measure the height of magical unicorns or Bigfoot.
2) It is hard to tell when a child abuse has been "successful."
But that's not the most important point-- the most important point is this:
Mr. Cohen-- if we have no metric for measuring the success of CCSS, that means we never had a metric for measuring the need for it, either.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Duncan Checks in with Race Results
The US DOE released reports Wednesday, March 19, to update us on how well the Race to the Top winners are doing (because in US education, we only want some states to be winners). The full collection of reports is here, but Arne wanted to let everyone know about his four superstars in Top Racing.
This year is the final year for implementing RTTT, and at this point we might expect to see some payoff from the investment of $4 Billion-with-a-B. According to Michele McNeil at EdWeek, Duncan says we are seeing those investments "enter the classroom" despite some "contention and chaos" in various states.
The area of improvement that needs the most improvement in its area is, apparently, teacher improvement. For improvement in this area, Duncan singled out North Carolina and Delaware.
This is astonishing. North Carolina has become the poster child for teacher beat-downs in the Eastern US, a state where teachers are leaving by busloads, floundering in debt after years without a raise, and facing the end of any sorts of job protection. This is the state where new teacher pay went up, but not anybody else's. This is the state where districts have been directed to offer their top 25% of teachers $500 in exchange for giving up tenure.This is the state whose leaders have seriously considered putting a twenty-year cap on the length of a teacher's career. This is the state that Virginia has started poaching teachers from simply by offering a decent wage and work conditions.
If this is a state that matches Duncan's idea of how to improve the profession, heaven help us all.
Beyond these four awesome examples of how to up teachers' games, US DOE displayed concern over some other states.
Ohio cannot interest districts in the state's great ideas. Florida's new evaluation system didn't give any different results from its old system, so clearly it's not working, because a new evaluation system apparently should show that there are lots of lousy teachers in the state. DC apparently no longer basks in the warm glow of Rhee-initiated teacher fixiness. Georgia is the very back of the pack-- so far back that they might lose their 9-million-dollar grant.
The DOE is allowing freebie extensions for a fifth year; eleven of the twelve have applied so far.
The full report offers a state-by-state reports that will take a little time and attention to unpack. I look forward to the data nuggets contained therein.
This year is the final year for implementing RTTT, and at this point we might expect to see some payoff from the investment of $4 Billion-with-a-B. According to Michele McNeil at EdWeek, Duncan says we are seeing those investments "enter the classroom" despite some "contention and chaos" in various states.
The area of improvement that needs the most improvement in its area is, apparently, teacher improvement. For improvement in this area, Duncan singled out North Carolina and Delaware.
This is astonishing. North Carolina has become the poster child for teacher beat-downs in the Eastern US, a state where teachers are leaving by busloads, floundering in debt after years without a raise, and facing the end of any sorts of job protection. This is the state where new teacher pay went up, but not anybody else's. This is the state where districts have been directed to offer their top 25% of teachers $500 in exchange for giving up tenure.This is the state whose leaders have seriously considered putting a twenty-year cap on the length of a teacher's career. This is the state that Virginia has started poaching teachers from simply by offering a decent wage and work conditions.
If this is a state that matches Duncan's idea of how to improve the profession, heaven help us all.
Beyond these four awesome examples of how to up teachers' games, US DOE displayed concern over some other states.
Ohio cannot interest districts in the state's great ideas. Florida's new evaluation system didn't give any different results from its old system, so clearly it's not working, because a new evaluation system apparently should show that there are lots of lousy teachers in the state. DC apparently no longer basks in the warm glow of Rhee-initiated teacher fixiness. Georgia is the very back of the pack-- so far back that they might lose their 9-million-dollar grant.
The DOE is allowing freebie extensions for a fifth year; eleven of the twelve have applied so far.
The full report offers a state-by-state reports that will take a little time and attention to unpack. I look forward to the data nuggets contained therein.
Inauthentic Assessment
One more factor that highlights how artificial and inauthentic the current testing regimen has become is the proliferation of rules for proctors.
Faced with the spreading realization of just how invalid the tests are, testmakers and state officials have issued a truckload of proctor leash laws.
Some rules are no-brainers. "Don't erase wrong answers and replace them with the correct ones" (let's call that the Secret of Michelle Rhee's Success Rule) seems fairly reasonable. But many other instructions that teachers are receiving make far less sense.
Don't give the kids pep talks. Don't encourage the children to stay on task. Don't encourage the children to answer all the questions. Don't encourage the children at all. Don't smile and tip your head in a way that might be construed as saying, "Hey, buddy, get to work on that."
I get the goal. The goal is for the teacher to be completely neutral, to not affect the child's performance in any way. And like much of what the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools do, this shows a fundamental lack of understanding about teaching specifically and about the relationships between human beings in general.
You're six years old. You are facing this weird bubble test thing that may go on for an hour or more. Your teacher, the adult in the room that you have come to know and trust and maybe even love in the long year so far-- that trusted person will now not help you, not encourage you, not smile at you. The person who usually gives you support, who helps you believe that everything is going to be okay, that you can handle the challenges at hand, has shut you off.
What do you think? How do you feel? I am going to guess that six-year-old you does not think, "Well, good. This is an opportunity to demonstrate my grit and independence. Thank goodness my school is providing me with real life experience in what to do if the people I count on abandon me. Good. I don't need anybody. I am going to kick this test's ass."
Look. The teacher has a relationship with the child. The teacher cannot not make a difference.
I have a stock answer to the old question, "What difference can one person make?" My answer is that that's the wrong question. You can't avoid making a difference. The only choice you have is the kind of difference you're going to make. Walk down the street and smile at someone-- you've made a difference in his day. Walk past him and don't smile-- that makes a difference, too. Anytime you are in a relationship with someone, even for a split second, you will make a difference. You just get to choose positive or negative. Teachers can't make no difference. The testing mavens are demanding that we make a negative one.
I understand part of the intent. I've worked at the school where every child who takes their test in the support room turns out to be ten times smarter than he was doing the same work in my classroom, and it's annoying.
But these rules that try to cut the teacher completely out of the equation simply raise the inauthenticity quotient of the whole experience, turning standardized testing into even more of a wholey artificial experience that doesn't relate to anything that real humans do in the real world. It is one more step that insures that the only thing the standardized test measures, at all, is the students' ability to take that standardized test (and golly bob howdy, we know how important those standardized test taking skills are to America's international standing and our continued efforts to replace Estonia as world leaders in standardized test taking, on which our entire economic future rests).
Developing a supportive relationship with a caring adult is useful. Tapping into that relationship for support and encouragement when times get hard is also useful, and healthy. Knowing that there are people you can count on does not have to undermine your sense of self-sufficiency, but it can bring a sense of security and stability into worlds that lack both those qualities.
There is nothing to be gained by the draconian student-abandonment rules being enforced at testing time. The rules exist only to attempt to preserve any semblance of validity of the Almighty Test, one more attempt to force everyone not to look at the man behind the curtain.
Faced with the spreading realization of just how invalid the tests are, testmakers and state officials have issued a truckload of proctor leash laws.
Some rules are no-brainers. "Don't erase wrong answers and replace them with the correct ones" (let's call that the Secret of Michelle Rhee's Success Rule) seems fairly reasonable. But many other instructions that teachers are receiving make far less sense.
Don't give the kids pep talks. Don't encourage the children to stay on task. Don't encourage the children to answer all the questions. Don't encourage the children at all. Don't smile and tip your head in a way that might be construed as saying, "Hey, buddy, get to work on that."
I get the goal. The goal is for the teacher to be completely neutral, to not affect the child's performance in any way. And like much of what the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools do, this shows a fundamental lack of understanding about teaching specifically and about the relationships between human beings in general.
You're six years old. You are facing this weird bubble test thing that may go on for an hour or more. Your teacher, the adult in the room that you have come to know and trust and maybe even love in the long year so far-- that trusted person will now not help you, not encourage you, not smile at you. The person who usually gives you support, who helps you believe that everything is going to be okay, that you can handle the challenges at hand, has shut you off.
What do you think? How do you feel? I am going to guess that six-year-old you does not think, "Well, good. This is an opportunity to demonstrate my grit and independence. Thank goodness my school is providing me with real life experience in what to do if the people I count on abandon me. Good. I don't need anybody. I am going to kick this test's ass."
Look. The teacher has a relationship with the child. The teacher cannot not make a difference.
I have a stock answer to the old question, "What difference can one person make?" My answer is that that's the wrong question. You can't avoid making a difference. The only choice you have is the kind of difference you're going to make. Walk down the street and smile at someone-- you've made a difference in his day. Walk past him and don't smile-- that makes a difference, too. Anytime you are in a relationship with someone, even for a split second, you will make a difference. You just get to choose positive or negative. Teachers can't make no difference. The testing mavens are demanding that we make a negative one.
I understand part of the intent. I've worked at the school where every child who takes their test in the support room turns out to be ten times smarter than he was doing the same work in my classroom, and it's annoying.
But these rules that try to cut the teacher completely out of the equation simply raise the inauthenticity quotient of the whole experience, turning standardized testing into even more of a wholey artificial experience that doesn't relate to anything that real humans do in the real world. It is one more step that insures that the only thing the standardized test measures, at all, is the students' ability to take that standardized test (and golly bob howdy, we know how important those standardized test taking skills are to America's international standing and our continued efforts to replace Estonia as world leaders in standardized test taking, on which our entire economic future rests).
Developing a supportive relationship with a caring adult is useful. Tapping into that relationship for support and encouragement when times get hard is also useful, and healthy. Knowing that there are people you can count on does not have to undermine your sense of self-sufficiency, but it can bring a sense of security and stability into worlds that lack both those qualities.
There is nothing to be gained by the draconian student-abandonment rules being enforced at testing time. The rules exist only to attempt to preserve any semblance of validity of the Almighty Test, one more attempt to force everyone not to look at the man behind the curtain.
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Who Is Diane Ravitch?
At Reclaiming Public Education 101 (my website for ed reform neophytes), I'm trying to create and collect materials to answer some of the questions newby ed reform students might have. I'm not a fan of cults of personality-- any time I'm in a group that drops its mission to sing a hymn of praise to its leaders, I get itchy. But I also know that many folks who are not fully involved--yet-- in the issue of education reform don't really know the best-known players beyond simple name recognition. Part of learning your way around this stuff is knowing who's who, and Diane Ravitch seems like the place to start.
If you are a regular reader of Curmudgucation, you probably know who Diane Ravitch is. But you would be surprised how many people do not, and do not know what the big deal is. Let me draw the broad outline.
Ravitch was born in 1938 in Houston, Texas. She attended Wellesley College, did graduate work at Columbia, established herself as an education historian and cemented her professional reputation with the 1974 book The Great School Wars, a history of New York City schools.
Five years after the release of A Nation at Risk, the 1983 critique of US public schools, she co-authored with Chester Finn What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know, marking her as part of the conservative chorus calling for higher standards and tougher classical content.
President George H. W. Bush's administration made her an assistant secretary of education. She wrote books and articles touting charter schools and lifting up the accountability movement. She helped found the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. She worked with NAEP (the testing people). She was a hard-core fan of charters and testing, and when No Child Left Behind was launched, she was there on the docks cheering loudly.
In short, when the current wave of school reform was starting, Ravitch was there helping it take shape. But then a few years went by, and something happened.
Ravitch looked at the reforms she had championed, and she concluded that they weren't helping. They were making the school world worse.
Ravitch did two extraordinary things. She recognized that the actual events on the ground were proving her wrong. And then she said so.
She said so in books. (The Death and Life of the Great American School System, and Reign of Error are the most recent). She said so on twitter and in blogs, ahead of the curve on using technology to make her voice heard. And when reporters started looking for a credible voice of criticism of faux reformers like Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan, she talked to the press.
Ravitch has never been a teacher, and she spent most of her adult life on the reformer's side of education. Critics have called her as opportunistic and self-promoting, but it's worth remembering that if Ravitch had wanted to become rich, famous, and secure, her best move would have been to keep her mouth shut and stay put. She walked out on the side of the debate that has most of the money and power, and there was no reason for her to expect that she would be greeted with open arms by her erstwhile opponents. I wasn't there, and I don't spend much time in the halls of power, but it seems to me that all she could have reasonably expected was that her erstwhile allies would cast her out and cut her down. DC has never been a friendly town for people who turn on their patrons. Ravitch took a leap with no predictable benefit except knowing that she'd done the right thing.
Put another way, the backers of school reform have all been assured that they'll make a good living by supporting it; Ravitch's choice of sides has never provided that assurance. There was no way of knowing her next book would be a best-seller, or that she would become a major voice of the movement to reclaim public education.
Ravitch looks like your grandmother, but she talks like your high school football coach and she writes like a Bible-thumping preacher. She tweets and blogs with a sixteen-year-old's regularity (and straight through her vacations and travels). She is not tireless-- she had to take a health break a while ago-- but she is relentless.
She is a fan of facts. She can sling rhetoric, but her books are heavily researched and thoroughly fact-based. She is passionate about American public education and defending it from the ongoing attempt to privatize it, dismantle it, and profit from the parts. Her blog is widely read (over ten million reads and growing) and she is generous with that platform. Following that one blog will bring you in contact with most of the voices and news of the education reform world; for an opportunistic self-promoter, she spends a lot of time aiming her spotlight at other people.
Diane Ravitch has lived on every side of the current education debate. She knows all the key players, she knows the data, and she knows what's at stake. She has made a choice. The nature of that choice speaks to her sincerity, and that sincerity speaks to the many people who listen to what she has to say.
Opponents criticize her for flip-flopping, for following a meandering path, but it seems that she's always followed a path marked by devotion to public education and a willingness to confront the facts whatever they may say. She is uniquely qualified to be a voice for what has always been best and good about American public education.
If you are a regular reader of Curmudgucation, you probably know who Diane Ravitch is. But you would be surprised how many people do not, and do not know what the big deal is. Let me draw the broad outline.
Ravitch was born in 1938 in Houston, Texas. She attended Wellesley College, did graduate work at Columbia, established herself as an education historian and cemented her professional reputation with the 1974 book The Great School Wars, a history of New York City schools.
Five years after the release of A Nation at Risk, the 1983 critique of US public schools, she co-authored with Chester Finn What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know, marking her as part of the conservative chorus calling for higher standards and tougher classical content.
President George H. W. Bush's administration made her an assistant secretary of education. She wrote books and articles touting charter schools and lifting up the accountability movement. She helped found the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. She worked with NAEP (the testing people). She was a hard-core fan of charters and testing, and when No Child Left Behind was launched, she was there on the docks cheering loudly.
In short, when the current wave of school reform was starting, Ravitch was there helping it take shape. But then a few years went by, and something happened.
Ravitch looked at the reforms she had championed, and she concluded that they weren't helping. They were making the school world worse.
Ravitch did two extraordinary things. She recognized that the actual events on the ground were proving her wrong. And then she said so.
She said so in books. (The Death and Life of the Great American School System, and Reign of Error are the most recent). She said so on twitter and in blogs, ahead of the curve on using technology to make her voice heard. And when reporters started looking for a credible voice of criticism of faux reformers like Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan, she talked to the press.
Ravitch has never been a teacher, and she spent most of her adult life on the reformer's side of education. Critics have called her as opportunistic and self-promoting, but it's worth remembering that if Ravitch had wanted to become rich, famous, and secure, her best move would have been to keep her mouth shut and stay put. She walked out on the side of the debate that has most of the money and power, and there was no reason for her to expect that she would be greeted with open arms by her erstwhile opponents. I wasn't there, and I don't spend much time in the halls of power, but it seems to me that all she could have reasonably expected was that her erstwhile allies would cast her out and cut her down. DC has never been a friendly town for people who turn on their patrons. Ravitch took a leap with no predictable benefit except knowing that she'd done the right thing.
Put another way, the backers of school reform have all been assured that they'll make a good living by supporting it; Ravitch's choice of sides has never provided that assurance. There was no way of knowing her next book would be a best-seller, or that she would become a major voice of the movement to reclaim public education.
Ravitch looks like your grandmother, but she talks like your high school football coach and she writes like a Bible-thumping preacher. She tweets and blogs with a sixteen-year-old's regularity (and straight through her vacations and travels). She is not tireless-- she had to take a health break a while ago-- but she is relentless.
She is a fan of facts. She can sling rhetoric, but her books are heavily researched and thoroughly fact-based. She is passionate about American public education and defending it from the ongoing attempt to privatize it, dismantle it, and profit from the parts. Her blog is widely read (over ten million reads and growing) and she is generous with that platform. Following that one blog will bring you in contact with most of the voices and news of the education reform world; for an opportunistic self-promoter, she spends a lot of time aiming her spotlight at other people.
Diane Ravitch has lived on every side of the current education debate. She knows all the key players, she knows the data, and she knows what's at stake. She has made a choice. The nature of that choice speaks to her sincerity, and that sincerity speaks to the many people who listen to what she has to say.
Opponents criticize her for flip-flopping, for following a meandering path, but it seems that she's always followed a path marked by devotion to public education and a willingness to confront the facts whatever they may say. She is uniquely qualified to be a voice for what has always been best and good about American public education.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Another Style of CCSS Profiteering
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"
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"
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.
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