A Message from Andrea Rediske

It's a tough contest these days to determine which state legislature is most hostile to public education, but Florida legislators (motto "Finding New Ways To Make Things Worse") has been giving it the old college and career ready try.

Nobody knows that better than the family of Ethan Rediske. His mother Andrea has been working tirelessly to insure that extraordinarily challenged children and their families will not in the future be subjected to the kind of abuse and bureaucratic harassment that her family went through, all in the name of The Almighty Test.

At a time when she could excused for simply staying home and mourning her recently-deceased child, Andrea has been standing up to all manner of indignities, from a bullying letter penned by the state education head, to stripping her son's name from the legislation proposed in his memory. In retrospect, the latter is predictable-- while legislators usually like to name bills after the victims of abuse, it seems less likely they'd do it when they themselves were the victimizers. The "We Used To Torture Sick and Dying Children As a Matter of Policy, But Now We're Going To Knock It Off" Bill is not one lawmakers would like to sign off on.

So things are ugly, messy, and stalled. I'm passing on Andrea Rediske's message here to you. Read it all the way through, please, and then note the call for help.

Early in February 2014, Orange County Public Schools and the Florida Department of Education harassed our family by requiring documentation that my son was dying and in hospice care to prove that he was unable to take state-mandated standardized tests.  In order to receive the waiver for testing the previous year, I had to submit a mountain of paperwork, including details of his medical history, and a letter from his doctor.  We were assured at his IEP meeting this school year that the waiver would be granted without problems.  Obviously, this wasn’t the case.  Shortly after I came forward with our story, State Representative Karen Castor-Dentel proposed HB 895 entitled the Ethan Rediske Act, that would make it easier for severely disabled and medically fragile children to receive waivers for standardized testing.  According to the language of HB 895, the process to receive a waiver for standardized testing would go through the local district superintendent rather than requiring approval from the State Commissioner of Education.  I felt so humbled, grateful, and delighted to see that my son’s struggles with standardized testing were not in vain and that he would leave a legacy for other students like him in Florida.  I was so hopeful that families like ours would be relieved of a very small part of the burden that they carry every day.  I felt at the time that the Florida legislature would see the need for this type of legislation, and that its passage would sail through the House and the Senate.  Ethan passed away on February 7, 2014.  We were overwhelmed with the love and support of so many in the wake of our son’s death, and Ethan’s story has been broadcast around the country. 

Sadly, the Ethan Rediske Act has become the center of an ugly political battle, and HB 895 as it was written will not be passed.  Shortly after Ethan’s funeral, I addressed the Florida Department of Education and the Commissioner of Education at a local meeting here in Orlando, explaining what we had been through and urging them to support this legislation.  A few days after I spoke to the FLDOE, Pam Stewart, the Commissioner of Education wrote a letter that was sent to every teacher in the state of Florida, tacitly accusing me of using our personal tragedy to fulfill my “political agenda.”  She also stated in her letter that she approved 16 out of only 30 requests for waivers that had been requested – a little more than a 50% approval rate.

Senator Andy Gardiner submitted a competing bill (SB 1512), which, in addition to providing legislation supporting vouchers for charter schools, provides permanent waivers for all standardized testing of disabled children, but which requires the approval of the Commissioner of Education, who has a track record of only approving 50% of these requests.  He has a child with Down Syndrome who has been mainstreamed into public school – I completely understand why he is invested in seeing this legislation pass.  However, Senator Gardiner is completely against the Ethan Rediske act, and was instrumental in stopping the bill from ever making it onto the K-12 subcommittee agenda for discussion.  Representative Karen Castor-Dental had to negotiate verbiage of the Ethan’s Act being attached to another bill – HB 7117 that includes legislation for school accountability – most of which does not receive support from parents, teachers, or schools.  Sadly, because Ethan’s Act has so much support, the other parts of this bill will get passed along with it.  Ethan’s name has been removed from the bill entirely – many legislators do not want his name associated with the legislation because it shows that there were measures in place in the legislature that hurt disabled children.

Even if HB 7117 passes the Florida House, it is in danger of being gutted or stopped by Senator Gardiner.  Without being completely privy to all of the political machinations at play right now, it seems that both Senator Andy Gardiner and Commissioner Pam Stewart are holding all the cards.  They have powerful allies and are protected on many fronts and have the power to stop this legislation.  Pam Stewart is an appointee of Governor Rick Scott and was not elected to her position.  Senator Andy Gardiner, according to his Wikipedia entry has been voted by Orlando Magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Florida for 5 years.  These two individuals hold tremendous political power and seem to be very determined to stop this legislation from passing.

I can’t fully convey the depth of my anguish over this.  I had such high hopes that Florida legislators would see what my sweet son has been through, they would understand the need to protect children like him and support families like ours, and do the right thing by passing the Ethan Rediske Act.  My only hope now is that the immense support we have received over the original bill can be channeled into influencing these individuals in positions of incredible political power to somehow change their minds and their hearts and support this legislation. 

If you feel moved to write to them, please be articulate and civil.  Anything that they perceive as an attack will likely be met with more resistance.  Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your help and support.

Senator Andy Gardiner:  gardiner.andy.web@flsenate.gov

Commissioner of Education Pam Stewart:  Comissioner@FLDOE.org

An online petition against SB 1512 that includes a boilerplate message that will be sent to all Florida legislators on the Education Committee considering this bill:  http://takeaction.fundeducationnow.org/page/speakout/debit-cards-for-vouchers

Camp Philos! Take Me Away!!

You may have seen the ad for this. Maybe you even received an invitation (but I bet you didn't). It's Camp Philos, "a philosopher's camp on education reform," the first ever, and it looks absolutely awesome!!

Embark on three spring days of fun, fellowship and strategy with the nation's thought leaders on education reform. The exquisite and secluded Whiteface Lodge, which ranks among North America's top luxury destinations, is nestled in the majestic woods of our country's largest wilderness park.

I have got to go to this thing! It says right here that it's just like in 1858, when Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowes retreated to the mountains "for respite in kindred company." Okay, they probably meant James Russell Lowell, but these are big important people and they can't be troubled with picky details like spelling. That's not how their kindred company rolls.

These are thought leaders. Thought leaders!!

Who are these thought leaders? Well, Andy Cuomo is the honorary chairman big cheese of these philosophical thought leaders, and you know he's going to be pumped because he just scored a major philosophical victory by getting the NY legislators to vote to make NYC Mayor DeBlasio kiss Eva's charter school ring and hand her the keys to whatever she wants. So Cuomo is seeing first hand what a few million dollars' worth of philosophy can buy you!

And Joe Williams-- the big guy from DERP (see-- I can spell philosophically, too). And Senator Mary Landrieu and Mayor Michael Hancock and Mayor Kevin Johnson and Russlynn Ali and--- OMGZ!! that great and awesomely wise educational philosopher M. Night Shyamalan! I hear he's proposing a new school program where at the end of the year the students discover their teacher was actually dead and they've been instructed by angry trees all year, or something.

The Whiteface Lodge is-- wait. Really??!! White face?? Could they not book the Wealthy Patricians Spa, or Camp Ogliarch? Boys, you have really got to think this stuff through. Thank goodness you invited Shyamalan. Do you suppose they have special screens to keep out black flies? Anyway, the Lake Placid lodge is uber-fancy. You can check it out here. And it's not just a lodge-- it's a spa, too. Get yourself a philosophical education thought leader hot towel while you're there. 

The schedule of the conference looks promising. On the first day (Sunday, May 4) there will be a three-hour opening dinner followed by two-and-a-half hours of "open networking." This sounds more fun than when I chaperone Prom!

On Monday, the heavy-duty philosophizing day, we have "Up, Down and Sideway: Building an Effective School Reform Coalition." Cool. I always wanted to build a school reform coalition, but don't seem to be able to do it with simple objects I can find around the house. And there's also "Tight-Loose Models for Ensuring All Kids Have Access to a Great Education." Here I could make about being a crack about being tight with your own money and loose with tax dollars, but I recognize the tight-loose thing as a favorite line of The Fordham Institution Thinky Tank crowd. So there's one more hint about what sorts of philosophizing will be discussed. (Although if Mike Petrilli is going to dance for the assembled philosophers, that would be an extra treat.)

Later on Monday (well, 3:30-- a day of philosophy is apparently not quite as jam-packed as a teacher professional development day), we have "break and optional outdoor activities" which seems wise as the outdoors is always more appealing when it's optional.

Tuesday wraps it up with breakfast and a closing session. The scheduling is fortuitous as Sunday evening the weekenders will be clearing out and by Tuesday the long-weekers will only just be showing up. So the resort should be clear of the plebes for the conference. And of course running it on Monday insures that no actual teachers will actually attend. Nothing messes up a reformy stuff philosophy session than actual teachers. 

Unfortunately, there is more keeping me away than just the scheduling. Attendance is $1,000 a head. Unless you have a VIP head, in which case it will cost you $2,500. That's just the event fee; I suppose I could cut corners by sleeping in my car for those two nights. My head is not really important enough to wrap itself around either of those numbers for any sleepover situation not involving my wife, some champagne, and a hot tub made of gold.

Still, I believe that in the interests of pursuing educational reform philosophy, I could round up some of the kindred company to attend this. I'm thinking of putting together a kickstarter to send a couple of the edublogoverse's finest journalists. I would particularly like to take a female colleague, because I think it would go over like the mouse in the circus elephant tent in Dumbo. (I'm thinking that between the two of us, Edushyster and I could cover this with all the seriousness it deserves).

But I don't want you to think that I am only mocking this ridiculous exercise in self-important over-inflated language-based bloviation weakly masking the venal money grabbing corporate destruction of public education. In fact, right on the front of the promotional site is a bold, three word slogan that I rather fancy.

REFORM

RELAX

RETREAT

I totally support reform, although these guys probably don't realize that at this point they are the champions of the status quo, and those fighting to reclaim the promise of American public education are the real reformers. Still, thumbs up on reform. Then if these guys would actually relax they might be better people. And I'm sure if they would just call a collective retreat, US public education would be all the better for it.

Van Roekel/NEA CCSS Update

It's been almost six whole weeks since Dennis Van Roekel stepped up to make the announcement that CCSS implementation has been botched, and to suggest some startling ideas for correcting course. It' a month and two days since he took to the US News debate club to issue a rewritten version of his statement about the botch that walked back most of the exciting parts.

DVR called for all sorts of change. Some of it, like teacher involvement in a standards review process, he backed away from almost immediately. But some of it he actually said twice (and given how rarely DVR issues words to members or the public, twice is a veritable torrent). He was particularly direct on the misalignment of current teaching tools. There are teachers, he noted, who are working with old materials that aren't connected to the Core at all. And as we wade through Testing Season, we want to remember this:

Even more disturbing is that most states are requiring teachers to administer old tests that don’t line up with what is being taught.

That was a month ago. Now that teachers are dealing with these very tests, I thought I'd check to see what DVR has been up to since making these two public statements. Has he been traveling the country to talk to teachers and buck them up? Has he been delivering speeches calling for politicians to make the necessary changes? Has he thrown his weight behind the current petition to have government call a halt to inappropriate high stakes testing? Having scoured the NEA websites and driven the googlemobile around the internet block a few times, I'm ready to let you know what else DVR has said or done about these issues. Here it comes:
























































Yeah, that's pretty much it.

I don't know. Maybe he saw his shadow and went back to sleep for six weeks. Or maybe NEA is still being run by people who think that talking to their members is beneath them. At least teachers know that in difficult and discouraging times, we can all absolutely count on our national leadership to be silent, disengaged, and unhelpful.

Jeb Bush's Shiny Campaign

If you wanted to find all of the bullshit talking points about the CCSS Reformy Complex, you'd be hard pressed to do better than clicking on over to Learn More. Go Further.

It takes a little clicking to learn that LMGF is brought to you by the Foundation for Excellence in Education (and I'm sure I'll be neither the first nor last person to point out how appropriate it is that these champions of privatization have chosen FEE as their acronym), and FEE is founded and led by that champion of reformy stuff, Jeb Bush. And FEE is here to sell you all the wonders that are the Common Core.

One gets the impression that this is a work in progress. In some corners of the site one finds the name "Learn More. Go Further Florida." And there is a definite Florida-centric nature to some portions, while other portions take a more nation-spanning view. It's almost as if somebody connected to the site had a strategy to take a local story and upscale it as a sort of national platform for some sort of major nation-wide undertaking, an undertaking so large that it might not come to full flower for another two years, a project that could stretch all the way from Florida to New Hampshire and Iowa. Though in fairness, I'll note that Jeb's mug is absent from this shiny shiny ad campaign.

The site is slick. And if nothing else, it is an interesting study in what research and focus groups must be telling the folks who want to market a Presidential candidate an educational vision, and the corporate sponsors that back them (more about that at the bottom).

For one thing, we can deduce that they have totally gotten the memo that lots of folks don't think that teachers like Common Core very much. They have lined up four freshly scrubbed teachers, all women, none with a mention of TFA in sight, and all four with branny new twitter accounts that made their first noise on March 15. All four have tweeted since then with a string of advertising copy for the core, some of which are nearly identical for each of the women. You may well have seen them; this morning their accounts are appearing as promoted "Who To Follows" on my twitter page.

Were I supremely cynical, I might conclude that these women were a magical combination of stock photography and an ed department intern, but I'm a cynic with a computer, so I dug just a bit. Here are our four teacher voices for FEE (see what I did there? Jeb, you should not make it so easy).

Rian Meadows is a teacher ambassador at the Florida Dept of Ed. It appears that at least in 2011, she was an economics instructor at Florida Virtual School (FLVS) — the nation's first-ever statewide virtual public high school. Faye Adams is a charter school teacher in Pasco County. Angela Anchors is a charter school teacher. And Beth Smith seems to actually work at an honest-to-God public school, where she has only just been promoted to Assistant Principal from her previous job as reading specialist. 

There's a whole other point to be made about exactly how these women are being used as props-- their twitter accounts are @USteacher[firstname]. So we've picked women who teach elementary school and reduced them to first names, like Miss Mary on Romper Room. They appear in ads in classrooms, with children.

You can click on an ask-a-teacher link, and cut-out pop-up clips of these women will appear to read answers in a manner that will do nothing to dispel the impression that they are Stepford Educators. Ask "Are teachers excited about Florida Core Standards" and one (I think it's Beth) pops up to say earnestly, "We sure are." And then we get the usual line about how the Core will free teachers to teach creatively because, gosh darn it, there's already just too much teaching to the test, and under the Core, those testing days are over.

I offer that as a representative sample of the site's content, because taking us through all of it would be like repeatedly punching you in the heart. The site depends heavily on spin, equivocation, and just plain flat out lying. As I said at the top-- every piece of bullshit you've ever heard about the CCSS regime of reform is here, in slickly well-designed webullar glory. 

Teachers totally helped write the Core. It totally leaves local school boards in complete control. It is not a curriculum. Critical thinking out the wazoo. Competitive in a global market. The only time the site deviates from the standard baloney is when it goes for even bigger piles of baloney-- in reply to the "myth" that the states' tests weren't broken site asserts "Many states had reading proficiency standards that would qualify their students as functionally illiterate by international standards."

And there is copy devoted to promoting the Florida miracle, because claiming that the state has achieved miraculous advances in education has been a proven winner for members of the Bush family in the past. These claims are similar to what we used to call the "Texas miracle" in that they are not really based on what we used to call "facts." Head over to Integrity in Education to read the breakdown of how reality-impaired these claims are.

There is along page of supportive quotes from all the usual subjects: Petrelli and Brickman from the Fordham, Kramer and Villaneuva from TFA, and (ex-)Mayor Bloomberg all check in with words of support for the Core.

There are slick ads that I'm sure some of you are seeing already; these assure us that what's at stake is everything. Those are paid for by the Higher States Standards Partnership, a group with their own website; the HSSP brings together a coalition of the Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce and a whole long list of individual corporate sponsors. So if we know one thing from this campaign, it's that corporate interests are willing to spend even more money to buy their access to great public ed money pile. [Update: Erin Osborne has done the research and broken down the folks behind HSSP and put it all in a chart. It's amazing, and there's not an actual teacher in sight.]

There is good news for disruptive types. The site includes both a place to "tell your story" and the opportunity to ask questions of these four educational spokemavens. Knock yourselves out, folks.

Students First presents a Tragedy in 4 Acts

Students First, an advocacy group that believes passionately in the power of educational advocacy to make some people more wealthy, recently released a video aimed at Pennsylvania and entitled "Protect Excellent Teachers in Pennsylvania." Clocking in at just under two minutes, it's a gripping and compelling tale. Seriously. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll kiss common sense goodbye. Let's enjoy each moving chapter together, shall we?

What Is the Value of an Excellent Teacher?

Ohhh! It's a cartoon, with an animated chart!! I love cartoons.

Oh, but this is a sad story. If a child has an ineffective first grade teacher, she will learn less. She will be behind for the rest of her life! "Probably." Oh, but if she has an effective teacher, she will learn more! Oh, no, sorry. She "can" learn more. She will be ahead!! Forever!! All the way through college!

There's some math in this part. Students of Slowpants McBadteacher will probably learn half as much, and the student of Mr. Hilee F. Ective can be "moved through" twice as much . Therefor, we know that an effective teacher can "produce" three times as much learning. And it is possible that I don't understand that math only because I have not received CCSS math training.

But I don't care about the mathy part because I am excited about this quantifying of learning. Yes, we can talk about how much learning, just like how much bread did you get at the store or how much money did Students First spend to produce this. Unfortunately, the video does not reveal what the Unit O' Learning might be, so I'm going to go ahead and name it Smarty. Apparently an ineffective teacher gives students too few smarties while highly effective teachers have smarties flying around the room like those little twitchy fairy things in Harry Potter.

This is exciting, because here I was thinking that trying to compare, say, learning in math class to learning in band to learning in science to learning in wood shop might be hard, seeing as how those kind of look like completely different things. But no-- we can measure "learning" by weight.

This could have real implications for, say, colleges. Do English majors acquire the same load of smarties as Business majors? And can a college start charging by the Smarty weight instead of credits? Will students start saying things like, "You should sign up for that twenty-smarty course"? This is interesting stuff. But on with our story.

Are You Aware That Pennsylvania Does Not Protect Excellent Teachers?!

It's true. In the "unfortunate case of layoffs," the excellent teachers might be out of a job! Despite the fact that they would have made these little cartoon children have happiness and success later in life!?

There's a thing called "First In, Last Out" and it is bad. Declining enrollment or a budget deficit (both of which are causes of layoffs that have nothing to do with actions of the state or federal government) might force layoffs, and that means schools will be forced to let some of their best teachers go. Because the young inexpensive teachers are awesome and the old costly ones suck.

Seniority based layoffs don't make sense, and they are bad for our students. (And at this point our narratress's voice takes on a kind of snarky tone that makes me expect her at any moment to excleim, "Omigod! like, that is totes gnarly!")

And you know, when I was struggling to get and hold a job, FILO annoyed me a bit, too, except for the part about knowing that when I finally landed a job, I would have job security and not have to worry about sneezing wrong or voting wrong or having to choice between getting a raise or keeping my job or any other things that might otherwise have led me to lose that job, so I guess maybe that's why FILO didn't bother me all that much. But you know that brings up the curtain on our next act--

In Pennsylvania, Teachers Get Tenure After Three Years in the Classroom

Which is a little confusing to me, because if the young teachers are mostly awesome and effective, shouldn't we simplify the tenure process to the following:

Superintendent: Are you under 27?

Teacher: Yes

Superintendent: Congratulations. You have tenure!

But no, our heroes want to extend the process so that more data can be collected over time to know their true excellence. I can think of two reasons this might make sense:

1) People who need three-to-twelve hours to tell whether or not an eight-year-old can read probably do need five-to-ten years to tell whether a teacher can teach.

2) Any year more than three is a year closer to "never" for granting tenure, so it's a win.

Act Now!!!!!!!

Get ahold of your policymakers. Tell them that tenure should only be awarded for a proven record of student test scores, because the only excellent teacher is one who can get students to bubble in the right letters on standardized tests. Now that's excellence, baby. In fact, I would not be surprised if, once teachers are tagged for their standardized test prepping capabilities, private schools started snapping them up. Yessirreebob-- I hear Philips Exeter is absolutely looking for teachers who are tops in standardized test prep. And they will probably recruit them by saying, "Come work for us! We will provide no job security and fire you if you ever become expensive," because that's the best recruiting pitch ever!!

Also, we must protect excellent teachers from seniority based layoffs. You can learn more by visiting studentsfirst.org/pennsylvania.

I would encourage you to go watch this video (I include a link only so doubters can check my work) and tell them how much you appreciate all their hard work, but tragically, the comments are turned off for this particular clip. Go figure.
 

Personalized Learning

One of the benefits promised repeatedly by our Data Overlords and Standards Bearers is the personalization of education.

We will collect the data and crunch the numbers and analyze the results and cross check the strengths and weaknesses against a thousand points of light and lo and behold, the System will spit out a personalized Pearson-produced educational program on the Pearson software loaded on the student's personal computer.

This is one of those reformy things that has real appeal for some folks, but it does raise the question of how one has individualized instruction in a standardized system. Let me lay it out for you.

Here's Chris. Chris has a personal chef. When Chris is feeling hungry for seafood, he asks his personal chef to whip something up. The chef knows Chris's moods and preferences, knows what's been going on in Chris's life, knows how hungry Chris is likely to be that day. The chef also knows Chris's tolerance for new and experimental. So factoring all that in, Chris's chef whips up a personal meal for Chris.

Here's Pat. Pat is standing in McDonalds, looking at the menu. He's thinking he'd rather have a burger than McNuggets, and he'd rather have Diet Coke than Full Fat Coke, but he's not in the mood for a large, so he'll take a medium. So that's what Pat orders.

We can say that both Pat and Chris have had a personalized, individualized dining experience. But it's fundamentally different.

Now let's go to school.

Chris is a bright ten year old who turns out to have a love for dinosaurs and fashion design. Chris is a little ahead of the class on reading skills, so the teacher finds Chris some books about dinosaurs and fashion. The teacher also gives Chris the job of mentoring one of the shyer low-skills readers in class, and puts Chris together with a student who's very interested in computers to create a presentation software project about dresses. Chris has some issues with writing, so the teacher develops some materials that harnesses Chris's love of dinosaurs to help remediate the organizational issues that Chris experiences with writing.

Pat's teacher has a list of 100 items that all students must master. Pat's pre-test indicates that Pat succeeds in fifty-seven of those. Therefor, Pat's instruction will focus on the remaining forty-three. Pat's teaching kit includes a video, a manipulative and a practice worksheet for each item. Pat's data indicates which of the three Pat should use.

We can say that both Chris and Pat have personalized, individualized educational experiences. But Chris has a teacher who is responding in a personal way with a wildly broad range of possibilities, selecting choices based on Chris's strengths, weaknesses, interests, and passions. Pat's teacher has a checklist. Chris's teacher may never teach another student in exactly the same way ever again. Pat's teacher can make no such claim.

The program from Pat's teacher looks individualized, but it's not. In that classroom, every student is traveling the exact same path-- the only difference is how fast or slow or which parts they just skip past. Chris's teacher allows all students to travel their own individual path. To use another metaphor, Pat is traveling on a train on a track driven by a conductor; he might walk around on the cars on the train, but he's on a train going to exactly the same station as every other passenger. Chris has been handed the keys to a four-wheeler and a few hundred acres to explore.

So personalized learning systems, like many other treats in Reformy Stuff World, sound like they could hold promise. But as with all the treats, we need to pay close attention to what is actually attached to the label.

Poop Sandwich

If you wanted to trick someone into eating poop, you would not just hand them a bowl of poop unless you also had a gun to point at the person's head.

No, it would be easier to trick them by hiding the poop inside something yummy like soup or a casserole. Or you could make a poop sandwich. Just hide the poop between two perfectly good slices of tasty bread (white, rye, pumpernickel-- for purposes of this metaphor you can use whatever bread you like, as I have no idea which bread would go best with poop).

Recently I wrote about (and by "wrote about," I mean "made fun of") the burgeoning science of grittology. In that piece, I used a quote from Dr. Robert A. Martinez, a guy who seems to be trying to make a go out of something he calls "transformational resiliency." Dr. Martinez dropped by my comments section to convey that he's a sincere guy (actually, he appears online as "resiliencyguy") who wants to make the world and education a little better for people. And I'm inclined to believe him; I've seen his three-minute video which has an earnest shot-in-his-office production value combined with reading-from-a-script-setting-next-to-the-camera delivery. I believe Dr. Martinez is sincere.

Because here's the thing-- grit is not entirely a bad concept. I think many of my students could use a little more toughness, a little more faith in their own strength, a little more willingness to bounce back from disappointments and failures.

But grit as it is being presented these days is a big poop sandwich. The perfectly good bread of personal toughness and resiliency is being used to hide a bunch of poop about how schools and employers and corporations and government don't have to show any sensitivity or support to human beings-- if people can't handle being abused and mistreated, then it's their fault for not being gritty enough. Grit as it is currently being presented in the world of Reformy Stuff is just a big poop sandwich.

Standards are not an innately bad thing. But the CCSS are using the value of standards to mask some terrible one-size-fits-all badly-framed poorly-written poop. Having high standards? Also a good thing, but that value is used to hide the crazypants untested wrongheaded standards of CCSS. Having smart young people spend some time helping strengthen schools is not a terrible thought and teaching really is a noble profession, but TFA is using those values to hide an agenda of destroying the profession and aiding profiteering. Assessment is a necessary part of teaching students, but the values of assessment are being used to justify the most wretchedly awful program of high-stakes testing ever seen in human history. Teachers should be accountable to the taxpayers who pay our salaries, but that value is being used to mask an abusive anti-teacher evaluation program that is about destroying teaching as a career.

Those of us who argue against Reformy Stuff often find ourselves in some variation of the same conversation; we are pointing out the evils of some aspect of the whole wretched mess to someone who keeps saying, "But this part of it right here is totally okay!" It's just a variation on this conversation:

Pro-public school advocate: Do not eat that poop sandwich! It's a poop sandwich!!"

Other guy: But the bread looks totally okay.

People are coming around, slowly. They are lifting up the bread and declaring, "Hey! This is poop in here!" And reformers, getting greedy and sloppy, keep putting less and less bread with more and more poop, making their poopiness more and more obvious.

Of course, the next hard part comes later, because when you make a poop sandwich, you end up ruining a lot of perfectly good bread.