Late last night, the Kansas legislature stripped Kansas teachers of all major job protections.
I suppose you could claim that it wasn't all bad; Kansas ultimately decided NOT to pay parents to home school. But all in all, it was still pretty bad.
It was a textbook example of how politics works these days (and also how it is covered; in Pennsylvania I followed the story in real time on twitter).
On Saturday, teachers who got word of the new attack (attached to a bill that Kansas needed to pass in order to settle the lawsuit they lost about underfunding rural schools) flocked to the capitol, and the legislators simply tried to wait them out. Late Saturday night it appeared that the bill had lost and that legislators couldn't outwait the teachers anymore. At 3 AM, they packed it in.
Except, they didn't. A 4 AM meeting allowed the GOP to regroup and catch their Sunday wind. Meanwhile, the Koch Brothers arrived in Topeka, set up camp in a senator's office, and started chatting with moderate GOP legislators Godfather style. The threat was simple-- you'll vote for this, or you'll be fighting a primary battle against a well-financed more conservative opponent from your own party. Meanwhile, teachers were hilariously posting "while you were out" messages on Governor "I'm For Education Just Not In Doing Anything About It" Brownback, who has yet to open his mouth usefully on this mess.
I would have given a limb yesterday just to fly John Roberts to Topeka so that he could see how rich guys with lots of money pervert and corrupt the political process. Thank you, Supreme Court.
So late last night, the Kansas House and Senate took important steps to "protect excellent teachers" in their state, and to give school administrators the power to fire whoever-the-hell they want.
Is this an ALEC job? At this point, I don't know, and I don't care. I do know this "protect excellent teachers" baloney is popping up everywhere. Students First is already bringing it to Pennsylvania. And of course many states are already there. So is this a fully coordinated effort, or just the current wave in reformy stuff? I don't know. But I do know two things--
One is that this can barely even pretend to be about school reform. Sure, it ploughs the road for cheaper charter operation, and now it will be easy to fast-food-ize staffing at schools. But those are side effects. This is just a direct face-on assault on the teaching profession, on slapping down those uppity teachers and putting them in their place.
The other is sad and chilling. I know that last Friday, Kansas teachers could go about their jobs knowing that even if they refused to teach creationsim, gave the wrong kid a bad grade, went to the wrong church, loved a person of the wrong gender, has the wrong hairstyle, stood up for the wrong kid, or pissed off the wrong administrator, they would still keep their job. This morning they are going to work with no such assurances.
Monday, April 7, 2014
Sunday, April 6, 2014
It's Not the Implementation, Stupid
One of the favorite fallback positions of beleaguered fans of the Common Core has been, "The Standards are actually swell. It's the implementation that's messed up." From national union chiefs to thinky tank wiseguys to people who make their living pushing the Core to-- well, there isn't anybody else. But they are all in agreement-- it's just this one feature of how we've rolled the standards out that created the problem. We could make it all better.
I don't think so. I think the way the CCSS were rolled out is the only way they could have been rolled out. Let me 'splain why each of the usual suspects cannot be convicted of the crime of bad CCSS deployment.
This theory supposes that we just did the whole thing too quickly, and if we just took a year or two more to roll out the Core, it coulda woulda shoulda been as smooth as silk chocolate pie.
But it was never going to wait, and here's why. Folks make a lot of noise about Race to the Top and its roll in shoving CCSS down the states' collective throats. But we need to remember the ticking time bomb that was No Child Left Behind. From the moment that it became clear that Congress was incapable of successfully reauthorizing NCLB, all fifty states knew they were just counting down to the day when every single one of them was going to be in violation of federal law.
That day, of course, is today. This year we were all supposed to have-- by law--schools where 100% of the students were above average. The rollout of CCSS could not wait. It was never going to wait. Its backers didn't WANT to wait. They didn't want discussion, they didn't want comments, and they didn't want states to have time to think about whether this was a good idea or not.
The speedy high-pressure rollout was not a bug. It was a feature. It wasn't an error. It was the plan.
See above. We were not going to take that kind of time. And actually, some companies got out the door pretty quickly with some of those books and materials (almost as if they were the same people who wrote the standards in the first place).
It doesn't matter anyway. the day the actual CCSS tests arrive is the day we throw the CCSS out the window. We already know parts of the CCSS don't matter-- cooperative learning will never be on the test, nor will any true close reading (which takes more than one quick, time-crunched look at a chunk of disconnected text).
What we really need is for the tests not to be linked to student and teacher fates. The fact that the tests will be high stakes (the highest stakes ever for tests in this country) guarantees that we all will, in fact, shortly be teaching to those tests. The CCSS were sold as a good predictor of what would be on the test, but we've already seen this movie, and in it, the tests turn out to be a hodge-podge of badly designed trick questions only nominally related to the standards. Bottom line--tests first, tests last, tests and standards at the same time, we'll still be facing the same problems; making up paperwork to make our curriculum's look aligned while we scramble for any materials that give our students an extra edge on the useless tests.
Well, yes. But there's only one way that would have helped, and that's if teachers had been involved in creating the standards in the first place and can we please for the love of God stop telling that same stupid lie about how they were?
See, here's the logistical problem with top-down initiatives. It's not just that involving the people who will have to implement your stupid idea allows them to say, "Hey, that won't work," and it's not just that you get them to buy in and take ownership so that they actually care whether this lumbering beast succeeds or not.
It's that with top-down initiatives, only the people at the top know what's supposed to happen. The story of the CCSS rollout has been the story of legislators, college professors, consultants, publishers, school administrators, state ed bureaucrats, and all manner of education middle men trying to come up with an answer when classroom teachers ask, "So what exactly is it that I'm supposed to do?" Specifically trying to come up with an answer and either A) failing and shrugging or B) making shit up or C) passing on the answer they got from someone else who didn't really know either.
The brave gallant leaders who cobbled together the CCSS revolution put out the battle cry, and then as the troops assembled, they went home. If you or your school or your state education department want to go talk to the people who created this so that you can get clarification, you literally can't do it. The CCSS are the classic scam where you go back to the guy to whom you wrote that huge check and you find an empty office because he's out working on his next job.
So the only way to implement a top-down program successfully is to stick around to nurse it and train your footsoldiers. The only way to avoid that problem is to involve the footsoldiers in the planning process. Neither of those things was ever going to happen here.
Yeah, sure. You know what else looked great on paper? Communism. Folks in the twenties and thirties loved it. Heck-- George Orwell loved it. Why do you think he was so bitter and angry about how it actually turned out.
Ideas cannot do anything as ideas. A song is not really a song when it's in my head; only when I sing it or play it. Saying, "Well, it's a great melody until you actually hear it" is nonsense. Putting on paper wings and saying, "Well, this would totally work if the laws of physics were different" as you jump off the roof is cold comfort to your broken limbs.
"This would be great except for the ways in which it clashes with how people really act and think and learn and behave and just, you know, reality" is nonsense.
No. Just no. These are "deck chairs on the Titanic" suggestions.
It was never possible, by the very nature of its top-down, ill-conceived, time-pressured, amateur-concocted foolishness, for CCSS to be implemented successfully. We are not experiencing bumps in the road that could or might still be smoothed out with better implementation. We are getting exactly what this Reformy Stuff could be predicted (and was) to give us. You could get in the Wayback Machine and try to re-implement CCSS a thousand times, and every time will turn out just as ugly as this one.
I don't think so. I think the way the CCSS were rolled out is the only way they could have been rolled out. Let me 'splain why each of the usual suspects cannot be convicted of the crime of bad CCSS deployment.
It Was Too Fast
This theory supposes that we just did the whole thing too quickly, and if we just took a year or two more to roll out the Core, it coulda woulda shoulda been as smooth as silk chocolate pie.
But it was never going to wait, and here's why. Folks make a lot of noise about Race to the Top and its roll in shoving CCSS down the states' collective throats. But we need to remember the ticking time bomb that was No Child Left Behind. From the moment that it became clear that Congress was incapable of successfully reauthorizing NCLB, all fifty states knew they were just counting down to the day when every single one of them was going to be in violation of federal law.
That day, of course, is today. This year we were all supposed to have-- by law--schools where 100% of the students were above average. The rollout of CCSS could not wait. It was never going to wait. Its backers didn't WANT to wait. They didn't want discussion, they didn't want comments, and they didn't want states to have time to think about whether this was a good idea or not.
The speedy high-pressure rollout was not a bug. It was a feature. It wasn't an error. It was the plan.
We Should Have Waited for the Tests and Materials To Be Ready
See above. We were not going to take that kind of time. And actually, some companies got out the door pretty quickly with some of those books and materials (almost as if they were the same people who wrote the standards in the first place).
It doesn't matter anyway. the day the actual CCSS tests arrive is the day we throw the CCSS out the window. We already know parts of the CCSS don't matter-- cooperative learning will never be on the test, nor will any true close reading (which takes more than one quick, time-crunched look at a chunk of disconnected text).
What we really need is for the tests not to be linked to student and teacher fates. The fact that the tests will be high stakes (the highest stakes ever for tests in this country) guarantees that we all will, in fact, shortly be teaching to those tests. The CCSS were sold as a good predictor of what would be on the test, but we've already seen this movie, and in it, the tests turn out to be a hodge-podge of badly designed trick questions only nominally related to the standards. Bottom line--tests first, tests last, tests and standards at the same time, we'll still be facing the same problems; making up paperwork to make our curriculum's look aligned while we scramble for any materials that give our students an extra edge on the useless tests.
More Teacher Involvement
Well, yes. But there's only one way that would have helped, and that's if teachers had been involved in creating the standards in the first place and can we please for the love of God stop telling that same stupid lie about how they were?
See, here's the logistical problem with top-down initiatives. It's not just that involving the people who will have to implement your stupid idea allows them to say, "Hey, that won't work," and it's not just that you get them to buy in and take ownership so that they actually care whether this lumbering beast succeeds or not.
It's that with top-down initiatives, only the people at the top know what's supposed to happen. The story of the CCSS rollout has been the story of legislators, college professors, consultants, publishers, school administrators, state ed bureaucrats, and all manner of education middle men trying to come up with an answer when classroom teachers ask, "So what exactly is it that I'm supposed to do?" Specifically trying to come up with an answer and either A) failing and shrugging or B) making shit up or C) passing on the answer they got from someone else who didn't really know either.
The brave gallant leaders who cobbled together the CCSS revolution put out the battle cry, and then as the troops assembled, they went home. If you or your school or your state education department want to go talk to the people who created this so that you can get clarification, you literally can't do it. The CCSS are the classic scam where you go back to the guy to whom you wrote that huge check and you find an empty office because he's out working on his next job.
So the only way to implement a top-down program successfully is to stick around to nurse it and train your footsoldiers. The only way to avoid that problem is to involve the footsoldiers in the planning process. Neither of those things was ever going to happen here.
Well, But, Theoretically
Yeah, sure. You know what else looked great on paper? Communism. Folks in the twenties and thirties loved it. Heck-- George Orwell loved it. Why do you think he was so bitter and angry about how it actually turned out.
Ideas cannot do anything as ideas. A song is not really a song when it's in my head; only when I sing it or play it. Saying, "Well, it's a great melody until you actually hear it" is nonsense. Putting on paper wings and saying, "Well, this would totally work if the laws of physics were different" as you jump off the roof is cold comfort to your broken limbs.
"This would be great except for the ways in which it clashes with how people really act and think and learn and behave and just, you know, reality" is nonsense.
Various Minor Tweaks
No. Just no. These are "deck chairs on the Titanic" suggestions.
It was never possible, by the very nature of its top-down, ill-conceived, time-pressured, amateur-concocted foolishness, for CCSS to be implemented successfully. We are not experiencing bumps in the road that could or might still be smoothed out with better implementation. We are getting exactly what this Reformy Stuff could be predicted (and was) to give us. You could get in the Wayback Machine and try to re-implement CCSS a thousand times, and every time will turn out just as ugly as this one.
Six Heads of the Reformy Hydra
Public education really does have many enemies these days, and while it may sometimes seem like they are a large amorphous mass, there are distinctions to be made. These six groups have come together in a perfect storm to bring us to the mess that is our current high stakes test driven corporate agenda status quo. To defend ourselves, it's best to see each one clearly.
1) Open the market. The government monopoly on school operation needed to be broken so private school operators could be allowed to have a shot at all that money. Let a million charter schools bloom.
2) Unify the market. Trying to sell products and services to thousands of different customers (schools), each with different requirements, wastes time and money. Worse yet, the specter of open-source DIY teaching materials was getting scary-looking. Instead, let's find a way to get all of the customers (schools) to be in the market for the same services with the exact same requirements. CCSS turns all schools in the nation into one market for teaching materials.
3) Cut costs. The challenge of the education biz is that it's very hard to generate more revenue. Instead, focus has to go to cutting costs. Teachers are expensive, and the longer you keep them, the more expensive they become. Tenure and FILO are expensive.
Profiteers have been primarily those who are already filthy rich; to clear a path for their initiatives, they have spent a lot of money making sure that the rules are rewritten to favor their business plans. Pick up a copy of Fast Food Nation and you can see what they're up to. Use legislation to set market rules that favor your business model. Replace all labor with unskilled, regularly turned over employees. And of course, you have to be free to run your business as you see fit, without interference from pesky elected officials.
Profiteers aren't too worried about school quality. In their world, it's not how good a job you're doing-- it's how well you can sell it. Testing is useful because it's a scalable service that makes big $$. Profiteers are practical; not ideologues. Just show them the money. They recognize, however, that you can't just go out in public and announce that you want to make a lot of money, so they have looked for some kind of principled cover story.
Unlike the profiteers, this group is largely composed of people who don't actually run businesses, but are pretty sure they would kick ass if they did. They are fans of economic Darwinism-- businesses that fail should be shut down, and employees who suck should be canned. Competition makes everybody better. If we made every school and teacher fight for their continued existence, education would be great. Dump the losers. Force the low scorers out.
These guys support testing because we need a way to separate winners and losers. We need teacher evaluation so we can separate bad teachers from highly effective ones. CCSS provides a nice clear list of deliverables, a way to keep score. BCFs have been deeply pissed off that we got beaten on the PISA. They would like tenure and FILO to go away because they are an affront to how the world is supposed to work.
BCF are ideologues. Profiteers may find them naive or impractical, but they provide good cover, so profiteers are happy to set BCF's up with their own think tank or congressional seat. Profiteers also find it useful to pretend to be BCFs, but if you wave the right stack of money at them, they'll drop their principles quicker than a well-greased pig.
Their vision is an assembly line in which each content delivery specialist (aka "teacher") is an interchangeable standardized piece of equipment and each student is an interchangeable standardized product who is receiving an identically shiny well-polished program. In the systems world, every classroom looks the same, every teacher acts the same, every student learns the same. On any given minute of any given day, each first grade teacher in the country would be speaking the same words. It has not really occurred to the systems guys that such an image is more horrifying than inspiring.
Individual human behavior and variations just mess up the system. Everything that can be done by computer (including grading essays) should be. Classrooms should be teacher-proof. The perfect educational program will work no matter what the student's background is. We need teacher evaluations to root out non-standard behavior. And it would be ideal to get democratically elected school boards out of the way because they are "unstable." Having all students take the same tests allows us to measure across the system, identifying and correcting any portions of the system that have slipped out of alignment.And while we'll talk about personalized education, what we really mean is an individualized station at which to board the exact same train on the exact same tracks as everyone else.
What would fix all this? Better schools! Better schools would prepare students for college. It would give them proper training for high quality jobs. The achievement gap would close. And because every high school graduate, properly educated, would step right into a better-than-minimum-wage job, poverty would end.
To be honest, I'm not sure that anybody in the Reformy World actually believes this at all. But it is the heart of the shilling for the Common Core-- particularly in poor and urban districts:
"Your crappy schools have failed to teach your children what they need to know to get ahead in this world, so we have whipped up a list of what everybody needs to know in order to succeed, and we are going to require every single school to teach it-- including yours! If they won't or can't, we will close them and replace them with a school that will. Your kids will get access to the exact same tools they need to get ahead in America as every other child in the country. We have failed our children by letting them become weak and stupid. Now we will rigorously beat them into smarterness."
This, more than anything, is the sales pitch of Common Core. To espouse it involves some combination of ignorance and cynicism that I have a hard time imagining, but "there are more things in heaven and earth..." But regardless of its level of sincerity, it provides a shiny cover of respectability for all these other initiatives. And sadly, many people have bought it.
If we knew every detail of every aspect of every person, we could craft a perfect world. If we had "cradle-to-career" data about every child born, we could get the right people into the right jobs (or the right jails). We could become a real-life Hari Seldon and there would be no limits.
So go ahead and whip up some standards-- they will make perfect tags for every piece of data that students generate. And let's get everybody using the same data storage and transfer standards so that we can gather everything. Everything!! And let's rewrite laws because there is some data that is just sitting there that we can't touch now, and we do so much want to touch it and gather it so that we can haz all the dataz.
The oligarchs may believe they have noble motives (I'm just trying to make the world a better place) or venal ones (I'm just trying to get a little more money and power because money and power rock!!), but the problem remains the same-- the belief that money and power are a sign of superior wisdom and importance. Oligarchs are not always profiteers; they aren't trying to collect more points so much as trying to assert their own judgment and control over the world. It may be the same sort of impulse that leads us to go pull weeds out of the lawn in order to make the back yard look the way we want it to, except their back yard is the world and the weeds are the rest of us. It is the impulse to impose our personal will on the world around us.
Democratic process is bad because it lets too many of the wrong people have a say. If teachers were important, they would be rich, so never mind them. When people without privilege argue with us, it's just more proof that they aren't really smart enough to know what's good for them, and we just need to push them aside and move forward. Mostly what the oligarchs want is for everyone to shut up, sit down, and do as they're told. Dissent is so....annoying.
This group attracts hangers-on as well. People who would like have some rich and powerful friends and so maybe get to be a little rich and sort of powerful, too. They might enjoy being right-hand-men, or being given a small fiefdom of their own to rule. These eager-to-please government officials, advocacy group leaders, and thinky tank speakers are often the more visible public face of this group. The message, usually carefully masked, is that the plebes should gratefully to submit to the Brave New World that their Betters are crafting for them.
These six groups have formed a symbiotic relationship that has fed the reformy beast. They serve as the voice, the face, the money, the muscle, maybe even the brains, of Reformy Stuff. All six lead cheers for each other, raise funds for each other, hide behind each other, but they only share a handful of characteristics:
1) They don't know anything about how high quality teaching and learning happen.
2) They don't really care.
Sometimes I imagine that there's strategy to made of attacking one particular group and pulling apart the whole Jenga-pile of mess. I'm pretty sure that the most effective attacks have been made by targeting one particular group; inBloom was one of the Data Overlords, and it was brought down by attacks aimed at the Data Overlord's aims and tactics.
They are big, they are powerful, and they are well-funded. Worst of all, for them American public schools are merely a means to their ends, a speedbump on the path to their real goals.
The Profiteers (money)
The education sector involves of hundreds of billions of dollars that are just sitting there doing nothing when they could be turning profits for operators and investors. To get their hands on that money, profiteers have focused attention on three basic initiatives:
1) Open the market. The government monopoly on school operation needed to be broken so private school operators could be allowed to have a shot at all that money. Let a million charter schools bloom.
2) Unify the market. Trying to sell products and services to thousands of different customers (schools), each with different requirements, wastes time and money. Worse yet, the specter of open-source DIY teaching materials was getting scary-looking. Instead, let's find a way to get all of the customers (schools) to be in the market for the same services with the exact same requirements. CCSS turns all schools in the nation into one market for teaching materials.
3) Cut costs. The challenge of the education biz is that it's very hard to generate more revenue. Instead, focus has to go to cutting costs. Teachers are expensive, and the longer you keep them, the more expensive they become. Tenure and FILO are expensive.
Profiteers have been primarily those who are already filthy rich; to clear a path for their initiatives, they have spent a lot of money making sure that the rules are rewritten to favor their business plans. Pick up a copy of Fast Food Nation and you can see what they're up to. Use legislation to set market rules that favor your business model. Replace all labor with unskilled, regularly turned over employees. And of course, you have to be free to run your business as you see fit, without interference from pesky elected officials.
Profiteers aren't too worried about school quality. In their world, it's not how good a job you're doing-- it's how well you can sell it. Testing is useful because it's a scalable service that makes big $$. Profiteers are practical; not ideologues. Just show them the money. They recognize, however, that you can't just go out in public and announce that you want to make a lot of money, so they have looked for some kind of principled cover story.
The Business Competition Fans (survival of the fittest)
Unlike the profiteers, this group is largely composed of people who don't actually run businesses, but are pretty sure they would kick ass if they did. They are fans of economic Darwinism-- businesses that fail should be shut down, and employees who suck should be canned. Competition makes everybody better. If we made every school and teacher fight for their continued existence, education would be great. Dump the losers. Force the low scorers out.
These guys support testing because we need a way to separate winners and losers. We need teacher evaluation so we can separate bad teachers from highly effective ones. CCSS provides a nice clear list of deliverables, a way to keep score. BCFs have been deeply pissed off that we got beaten on the PISA. They would like tenure and FILO to go away because they are an affront to how the world is supposed to work.
BCF are ideologues. Profiteers may find them naive or impractical, but they provide good cover, so profiteers are happy to set BCF's up with their own think tank or congressional seat. Profiteers also find it useful to pretend to be BCFs, but if you wave the right stack of money at them, they'll drop their principles quicker than a well-greased pig.
The Systems Guys (organization)
These are the engineers and software developers. They believe in orderly, sensible systems. And what they saw when they looked at US public education was a horrid, random, higgledy-piggledy mess, a Rube Goldberg half-baked machine for delivering education to children.
Their vision is an assembly line in which each content delivery specialist (aka "teacher") is an interchangeable standardized piece of equipment and each student is an interchangeable standardized product who is receiving an identically shiny well-polished program. In the systems world, every classroom looks the same, every teacher acts the same, every student learns the same. On any given minute of any given day, each first grade teacher in the country would be speaking the same words. It has not really occurred to the systems guys that such an image is more horrifying than inspiring.
Individual human behavior and variations just mess up the system. Everything that can be done by computer (including grading essays) should be. Classrooms should be teacher-proof. The perfect educational program will work no matter what the student's background is. We need teacher evaluations to root out non-standard behavior. And it would be ideal to get democratically elected school boards out of the way because they are "unstable." Having all students take the same tests allows us to measure across the system, identifying and correcting any portions of the system that have slipped out of alignment.And while we'll talk about personalized education, what we really mean is an individualized station at which to board the exact same train on the exact same tracks as everyone else.
The Social Engineers (uplift for the masses)
These guys are out to fix society. They are alarmed. Students are not prepared for college. Workers are not prepared to be good productive learners. The Chinese and Indians are beating us in the competition for (crappy, lowpaying) jobs. Our children are weak and dumb, and their mothers coddle them and tell them they're awesome. And poor people insist on being poor.
What would fix all this? Better schools! Better schools would prepare students for college. It would give them proper training for high quality jobs. The achievement gap would close. And because every high school graduate, properly educated, would step right into a better-than-minimum-wage job, poverty would end.
To be honest, I'm not sure that anybody in the Reformy World actually believes this at all. But it is the heart of the shilling for the Common Core-- particularly in poor and urban districts:
"Your crappy schools have failed to teach your children what they need to know to get ahead in this world, so we have whipped up a list of what everybody needs to know in order to succeed, and we are going to require every single school to teach it-- including yours! If they won't or can't, we will close them and replace them with a school that will. Your kids will get access to the exact same tools they need to get ahead in America as every other child in the country. We have failed our children by letting them become weak and stupid. Now we will rigorously beat them into smarterness."
This, more than anything, is the sales pitch of Common Core. To espouse it involves some combination of ignorance and cynicism that I have a hard time imagining, but "there are more things in heaven and earth..." But regardless of its level of sincerity, it provides a shiny cover of respectability for all these other initiatives. And sadly, many people have bought it.
Data Overlords (data data data)
If we knew everything, we could do anything.
If we knew every detail of every aspect of every person, we could craft a perfect world. If we had "cradle-to-career" data about every child born, we could get the right people into the right jobs (or the right jails). We could become a real-life Hari Seldon and there would be no limits.
So go ahead and whip up some standards-- they will make perfect tags for every piece of data that students generate. And let's get everybody using the same data storage and transfer standards so that we can gather everything. Everything!! And let's rewrite laws because there is some data that is just sitting there that we can't touch now, and we do so much want to touch it and gather it so that we can haz all the dataz.
The Oligarchs (power)
I must be better than you. How else can you explain this giant mountain of money I've acquired?
The oligarchs may believe they have noble motives (I'm just trying to make the world a better place) or venal ones (I'm just trying to get a little more money and power because money and power rock!!), but the problem remains the same-- the belief that money and power are a sign of superior wisdom and importance. Oligarchs are not always profiteers; they aren't trying to collect more points so much as trying to assert their own judgment and control over the world. It may be the same sort of impulse that leads us to go pull weeds out of the lawn in order to make the back yard look the way we want it to, except their back yard is the world and the weeds are the rest of us. It is the impulse to impose our personal will on the world around us.
Democratic process is bad because it lets too many of the wrong people have a say. If teachers were important, they would be rich, so never mind them. When people without privilege argue with us, it's just more proof that they aren't really smart enough to know what's good for them, and we just need to push them aside and move forward. Mostly what the oligarchs want is for everyone to shut up, sit down, and do as they're told. Dissent is so....annoying.
This group attracts hangers-on as well. People who would like have some rich and powerful friends and so maybe get to be a little rich and sort of powerful, too. They might enjoy being right-hand-men, or being given a small fiefdom of their own to rule. These eager-to-please government officials, advocacy group leaders, and thinky tank speakers are often the more visible public face of this group. The message, usually carefully masked, is that the plebes should gratefully to submit to the Brave New World that their Betters are crafting for them.
These six groups have formed a symbiotic relationship that has fed the reformy beast. They serve as the voice, the face, the money, the muscle, maybe even the brains, of Reformy Stuff. All six lead cheers for each other, raise funds for each other, hide behind each other, but they only share a handful of characteristics:
1) They don't know anything about how high quality teaching and learning happen.
2) They don't really care.
Sometimes I imagine that there's strategy to made of attacking one particular group and pulling apart the whole Jenga-pile of mess. I'm pretty sure that the most effective attacks have been made by targeting one particular group; inBloom was one of the Data Overlords, and it was brought down by attacks aimed at the Data Overlord's aims and tactics.
They are big, they are powerful, and they are well-funded. Worst of all, for them American public schools are merely a means to their ends, a speedbump on the path to their real goals.
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Five Top Duncan Posts
When I started blogging, I had no idea I would post so much so fast so often. But now more company is coming over and it turns out that I am "Below Basic" in curating. So my goal is to do some collection posts for folks who think they'd like to see some of the old stuff, but did not bring their cyber-wading boots.
Nobody fires me up quite like our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Here are links to my top five favorite Arne columns.
I thought these days it was supposed to be the GOP that dismissed contrary points of view simply by attaching them to women. "Ha ha. This is the crazy kind of objection you'd expect from one of those women. You know women, with their dumb vaginas and not-very-strong thinky parts. That's who comes up with this kind of stupid objection."
So there you have it. We'll see if people find a compilation post helpful. Maybe it'll go so well that I'll finally release the black album.
Nobody fires me up quite like our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Here are links to my top five favorite Arne columns.
Seriously, Arne
Arne and I actually agreed on something. He said that we're not serious enough about education in this country, and I tend to agree. But I think we reached that conclusion through different paths. He thinks we're not serious enough about following swell government policies. I'm pretty sure that if we were serious about education, Arne Duncan would not be our Secretary of Education.#AskArne & Spleen Theater
Arne made a video in which some teacher-fellows at the DOE pretend to ask him questions and he pretends to answer them. I had so much spleen to vent that I may have hurt myself. I finished with this advice: "You should not watch this. Nobody should. It is one of the most cynical reality-impaired dog-and-pony-with-a-paper-cone-pretending-to-be-a-unicorn shows ever concocted, and now I have to go lie down."Arne Duncan vs. White Moms
One of Arne's most famous mis-steps (though probably not his worst) was blogger gold. I was just one of many writers dumbfounded that a real government official would say stuff dumber than the things we could make up for them.I thought these days it was supposed to be the GOP that dismissed contrary points of view simply by attaching them to women. "Ha ha. This is the crazy kind of objection you'd expect from one of those women. You know women, with their dumb vaginas and not-very-strong thinky parts. That's who comes up with this kind of stupid objection."
The Real Opportunity Gap
Duncan's response to the PISA tests was just one more opportunity to demonstrate his odd ideas about how the education thing is supposed to work. You give harder tests which you prepare for with great rigoriness, and then everybody gets smart enough to go to college, and then everybody gets a job and our country is rich and powerful again. I believe there are some flaws in that reasoning.Duncan's Pre-K Top Ten
Duncan spoke to the governors to explain why Pre-K is the right political horse to back, and why helping eight-year-olds understand they are failing life will make us a stronger nation. He has ten reasons-- TEN-- for governors to jump on the Pre-K bandwagon, and not one of them makes me feel better about how the government is going to handle Pre-K programs.So there you have it. We'll see if people find a compilation post helpful. Maybe it'll go so well that I'll finally release the black album.
The Ethan Rediske Act: Another Update
Andrea Pratt Rediske is taking a hard-earned weekend break, so this seems like a good time to update folks on where things stand.
Ethan Rediske is the eleven year old boy who was required by the state of Florida to bring a note from his doctor proving he was profoundly disabled and dying before the state would excuse him from The Test. After Ethan's death. his mother Andrea thought it would be a good idea for the state of Florida to pass some legislation so that no other family would be put through such bureaucratic foolishness (the Florida state education head thought it would be a good time to berate parents who wanted to deprive their children of the privilege of taking a state test just because the child might be exceptionally disabled or sick). You can read my previous updates on the story here and here. The most recent update direct from Andrea Rediske is here.
The language of Ethan's Law has been folded into a new larger bill (one which for various reasons is not so popular). Originally it was pretty strong language-- the local superintendent could issue a test waiver for a seriously ill or disabled child. Now THAT language has been "tweaked" so that, according to an aid of Rep. Karen Castor Dentell, there will now be three options:
The first is a one-year exemption which can be approved by the district school superintendent. The second is a one-to-three year exemption coming from the Commissioner’s office, and the final one is a permanent exemption, also to be approved by the Commissioner, and directs the Dep. of Ed. to devise rules to implement.
Senator Andy Gardiner and Senator Kelli Stargell are the powers behind these new amendments, which unnecessarily complicate the new law; ironic that the whole point of the law was to make things easier for parents. There are tons of politics in play here. Having Ethan's name on a bill is not a possibility presently; politicians only like to commemorate victimized children when they didn't do the victimizing, and part of the tricky calculus here is that Florida politicians probably don't want to announce that they previously abused sick kids. Gardiner himself is the father of a child with Downs syndrome, so it would be a mistake to dismiss him as an insensitive jerk who doesn't know what special needs parents go through. But he is also a 44-year-old head of Florida Senate Republicans who just barely survived a coup attempt last December, so he has some political angles to work.
The bottom line is that these Florida politicians need to hear from people about the need to reduce the testing burden on parents of extraordinarily sick and disabled children. Here's Andrea's request:
There are a lot of ugly politics at play here, but we don't have to stoop to their level. Please be civil when contacting these individuals -- we need to help them understand what a tremendous burden it is to care for a severely disabled and medically fragile child and ask them to make one small part of this burden lighter. Please feel free to forward this information to family and friends who might be willing to help.
In the twitterverse and in blogsylvania, things move quickly and that, combined with the American tendency toward short attention spans, can make us forget that most of these battles are marathons, not sprints. Ethan Rediske and his family represent a real example of how just senseless this testing juggernaut has become. Florida needs to pass a law, and it needs to be the right law. Please don't forget, and do please pass the word.
404 South Monroe Street
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1100
404 South Monroe Street
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1100
Ethan Rediske is the eleven year old boy who was required by the state of Florida to bring a note from his doctor proving he was profoundly disabled and dying before the state would excuse him from The Test. After Ethan's death. his mother Andrea thought it would be a good idea for the state of Florida to pass some legislation so that no other family would be put through such bureaucratic foolishness (the Florida state education head thought it would be a good time to berate parents who wanted to deprive their children of the privilege of taking a state test just because the child might be exceptionally disabled or sick). You can read my previous updates on the story here and here. The most recent update direct from Andrea Rediske is here.
The language of Ethan's Law has been folded into a new larger bill (one which for various reasons is not so popular). Originally it was pretty strong language-- the local superintendent could issue a test waiver for a seriously ill or disabled child. Now THAT language has been "tweaked" so that, according to an aid of Rep. Karen Castor Dentell, there will now be three options:
The first is a one-year exemption which can be approved by the district school superintendent. The second is a one-to-three year exemption coming from the Commissioner’s office, and the final one is a permanent exemption, also to be approved by the Commissioner, and directs the Dep. of Ed. to devise rules to implement.
Senator Andy Gardiner and Senator Kelli Stargell are the powers behind these new amendments, which unnecessarily complicate the new law; ironic that the whole point of the law was to make things easier for parents. There are tons of politics in play here. Having Ethan's name on a bill is not a possibility presently; politicians only like to commemorate victimized children when they didn't do the victimizing, and part of the tricky calculus here is that Florida politicians probably don't want to announce that they previously abused sick kids. Gardiner himself is the father of a child with Downs syndrome, so it would be a mistake to dismiss him as an insensitive jerk who doesn't know what special needs parents go through. But he is also a 44-year-old head of Florida Senate Republicans who just barely survived a coup attempt last December, so he has some political angles to work.
The bottom line is that these Florida politicians need to hear from people about the need to reduce the testing burden on parents of extraordinarily sick and disabled children. Here's Andrea's request:
There are a lot of ugly politics at play here, but we don't have to stoop to their level. Please be civil when contacting these individuals -- we need to help them understand what a tremendous burden it is to care for a severely disabled and medically fragile child and ask them to make one small part of this burden lighter. Please feel free to forward this information to family and friends who might be willing to help.
In the twitterverse and in blogsylvania, things move quickly and that, combined with the American tendency toward short attention spans, can make us forget that most of these battles are marathons, not sprints. Ethan Rediske and his family represent a real example of how just senseless this testing juggernaut has become. Florida needs to pass a law, and it needs to be the right law. Please don't forget, and do please pass the word.
Contact information:
Senator Andy Gardiner
20 Senate Office Building404 South Monroe Street
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1100
Phone: (850) 487-5013
Senator Kelli Stargel
324 Senate Office Building404 South Monroe Street
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1100
Phone: (850) 487-5015
Friday, April 4, 2014
Dear WaPo: Opt Out Is NOT the Wrong Answer
Why? Just.... why??
When the media need somebody to comment on modern surgical techniques, editors do not bark out, "Find me a surgeon with a super-high mortality rate who left the profession in disgrace!" ESPN bosses do not holler, "Find me a failed t-ball coach to do commentary for pro football!" And yet, time and again, media outlets call on the queen of mediocre mouth-taping TFA classroom temping, the sultaness of testing shenanigans, a woman who has never done anything successfully in education (except make money), she-who-must-not-be-named, to provide expert commentary on the education issues of the day.
Today it was the Washington Post providing column inches so that she could tell us that Opting Out of Standardized Tests is the Wrong Answer. Regular readers know that I am drawn to this kind of towering pile of wrong like a fly to poop, and yet I am sworn not to give That Woman more bandwidth. So as a compromise with my principles, I will attempt to deconstruct today's exercise in columnar ridiculousness without giving her a name check. Boy, that'll show her.
Let's start with false analogies, shall we:
No, tests are not fun — but they’re necessary. Stepping on the bathroom scale can be nerve-racking, but it tells us if that exercise routine is working. Going to the dentist for a checkup every six months might be unpleasant, but it lets us know if there are cavities to address. In education, tests provide an objective measurement of how students are progressing — information that’s critical to improving public schools.
Except that the current crop of Standardized Tests are not like stepping on a scale or going to the dentist. They are like trying to find out a child's weight by waterboarding him. They are like having your teeth checked by a blind blacksmith. Because, in education, tests NEVER provide an objective measure of anything, because tests are made by people. Yes, tests are useful-- but only good tests. And do you know what good tests are useful for? They are useful for providing information critical to helping further the education of students.
I am not a Systems True Devotee. STDs believe that we just have to create a well-oiled precision machine and it will spit out Smarterer Student Products like toasters off an assembly line. I would stop to further develop the point, but we're only one paragraph in. These woods are dark and deep, but we have miles to go.
From this diving board, That Woman proceeds to register her stunned amazement that in various places, there's a movement that is convincing parents to pull kids out of these tests! Really!!! These marvelous tests that will tell us how schools are doing!! What in the name of God are they thinking!?!?!!?
This makes no sense. All parents want to know how their children are progressing and how good the teachers are in the classroom. Good educators also want an assessment of how well they are serving students, because they want kids to have the skills and knowledge to succeed.
Allow to help you comprehend this, O She. You are correct that parents and educators do want to know these things. Your mistake is in believing that they can only know this by looking at standardized test results.
Yes, the Great and Powerful Woman Who No Longer Has a Curtain To Hide Behind imagines a world where parents sit at home after eight months of school, wringing their hands and saying, "Oh, jehosephat, I wish we knew how Janey was doing in school. But we have no idea." Meanwhile, at school, teachers sit and the lounge and say, "Yeah, I've been with this kid for eight months but I just don't know how he's doing. Thank God we're going to be giving a high stakes high pressure badly written unproven standardized test soon so that I'll know how it's going."
In That Woman's universe, parents and teachers (sorry-- public school parents and teachers) are dumber than dirt. In fact, the list of People Standing in the Way of Educational Excellence gets longer and longer. Parents, teachers, democratically elected school boards-- reformy fans have an enemies list that keeps lengthening.
What’s next: Shut down the county health department because we don’t care whether restaurants are clean? Defund the water-quality office because we don’t want to know if what’s streaming out of our kitchen faucets is safe to drink?
This is She Who Shall Not Be Silenced's specialty-- the argument to refute things that nobody actually said. A direct rebuttal to her would be simply to point out that, no, nobody has suggested either of those things. A counter-thrust of equal sarcastic weight would be, "No, what's next should be couples who take a standardized test to find out if they're in love, or people standing in the rain waiting for the government to tell them whether they're wet or not."
She would also like you to know that these students of today will be competing with Indians and Chinese for the sweatshop jobs of tomorrow. Also, we are getting beat on taking standardized tests, and everyone knows that world supremacy depends on standardized test results. Everyone remembers when Hitler gave up WWII in shame when his SAT scores were revealed to be far below Roosevelt's.
Why do people do this crazy opt-out thing? She gets the concern about over-testing:
My daughter came home from public school one day and said class was a breeze now that “the test” was over. And I thought, “Geez, what are we communicating to our kids if they think the test is the most important thing — and once it’s over, learning ends?”
My cynical side wonders if "one day" is the exact number of days that Her child came home from a public school, but okay, maybe not. She agrees that over-test-happy schools must be reined in, but a new study by Teacher Plus (one more of these hydra-headed pro-reformy groups), testing takes up a minuscule amount of time. Also, getting punched in the face takes up a split second of a twenty-four hour day, so it should not bother you if someone does it.
She Who Must Be Paid observes that your child's grades might not show how she's doing compared to the world, because your child's grades come from incompetent lazy liars.
And now She admits that standardized tests really only provide one small data picture that does not tell the whole story. Can you guess what her absolutely awesome solution is?
We don’t need to opt out of standardized tests; we need better and more rigorous standardized tests in public schools.
Yes!! When you're doing something stupid and bad and non-productive, do it More Harder!!
We also shouldn’t accept the false argument that testing restricts educators too much, stifles innovation in the classroom or takes the joy out of teaching. That line of thought assumes that the test is the be-all and end-all — and if that’s the perspective, the joy is already long gone.
Here's a multiple choice test for you, dear, exhausted reader. Select which statement best reflects the meaning of the above excerpt:
1) Do not assume that the test is the be-all and end-all. It will just be-all the way we decide to end-all teaching careers, school existence, and student futures.
2) You cannot claim that this year's testing is sucking up all the joy of teaching, because we actually drained that lake long ago and killed the fish flopping in the mud with fire and big pointy sticks.
The most valuable teachers are those who impart knowledge, not just information, and do so in a way that engages students and makes school interesting.
I wouldn't have stopped for this sentence except for that last bit-- "makes school interesting." Do you know why I don't have a plan for making water wet? Because it's intrinsically wet! Anyone who thinks you have to MAKE learning interesting doesn't get it. Do you know why I teach stuff with energy and excitement and perhaps a certain freakish intensity-- because the stuff I teach IS interesting. Really interesting. I don't have to make it that way. Just saying. Let's move on.
She Who Shall Not Be Named then moves on to the newest Testing Flavor of the Month, Justification #1428B for Why We Give Tests. Not to evaluate students! No, not at all. We give tests to evaluate schools, to make sure the taxpayers are getting their money's worth. Because, like parents and teachers, taxpayers are brainless slugs who know nothing unless the gummint tells them.
“Okay,” the opt-out crowd replies, “what about kids who are stressed out and suffering from anxiety because of standardized tests?” You know what? Life can be stressful; it can be challenging. The alternative is to hand out trophies just for participating, give out straight A’s for fear of damaging a kid’s ego — and continue to fall further and further behind as a country. I reject that mind-set.
No. No, no, no. Those are NOT the only alternatives. Our two choices are not A) punch kids in the face and tell them to suck it up or B) give them ponies and never let them be sad ever. And no, a refusal to choose A does not mean we fall further and further behind in international test-taking supremacy. I am GLAD that you "reject that mind-set," if by "that mind-set" you mean "a mind-set that only believes in two equally stupid possible choices." My God in Heaven, woman-- if somebody gives you a puppy do you look at it and say, "Well, only two choices here. Either I can tie it to the bumper and make it drag along behind the car, or I can feed it caviar and let it sleep on my bed while I go stay on the couch." (See? I can build big fat straw men, too)
How about-- and I'm just talking crazy here-- but how about we give our students reasonable and useful challenges and then we work side by side with them to help them succeed? How about we hire a whole bunch of trained and experienced professionals to personally oversee young peoples' intellectual development and then give them the tools, trust and autonomy to do that job well? We could skip both the part where we subject children to pointless, unproductive, stressful wastes of time that generate next-to-zero useful data (but lots of useful profits) and the part where we raise children in a bubble. We could, I don't know, put the needs of the students first!
She Who Must Be Paid wraps it up:
Rather than encouraging parents to opt out of testing, it would be much more productive for the leaders of this distracting movement to help improve the assessments. Make the exams more rigorous and more reflective of student learning. Ultimately, students and educators need test data — opting out does a disservice to both. And it risks endangering the progress that all of our children need.
So, what? Tell the children, "Just go in there and get punched in the face, because next year it won't be so bad"? Oh, and stop using that word "rigorous"-- I do not think it means what you think it means. Opting out doesn't endanger a damn thing, and ultimately nobody anywhere at all on God's green earth needs the kind of useless invalid squeezed out of children under stress and duress faux data that these tests are generating.
Damn. All this space wasted and once again, She Who Must Not Be Named doesn't get much of anything right. And she gets space in the Washington Freaking Post while millions of teachers who know better are still trying to get someone to listen to them. What a world, what a world. I'm nobody; just a classroom teacher. Nobody is paying me to write this, and nobody is going to pay me to go speak about education somewhere (and they wouldn't have to do either), but somehow She Who Is The Kim Kardashian of Ed Reform gets a big platform to spew a bunch of Wrong into the universe. I'm no education thought leader or great writer, but I still know education better than to write something so ridiculous.
When the media need somebody to comment on modern surgical techniques, editors do not bark out, "Find me a surgeon with a super-high mortality rate who left the profession in disgrace!" ESPN bosses do not holler, "Find me a failed t-ball coach to do commentary for pro football!" And yet, time and again, media outlets call on the queen of mediocre mouth-taping TFA classroom temping, the sultaness of testing shenanigans, a woman who has never done anything successfully in education (except make money), she-who-must-not-be-named, to provide expert commentary on the education issues of the day.
Today it was the Washington Post providing column inches so that she could tell us that Opting Out of Standardized Tests is the Wrong Answer. Regular readers know that I am drawn to this kind of towering pile of wrong like a fly to poop, and yet I am sworn not to give That Woman more bandwidth. So as a compromise with my principles, I will attempt to deconstruct today's exercise in columnar ridiculousness without giving her a name check. Boy, that'll show her.
Let's start with false analogies, shall we:
No, tests are not fun — but they’re necessary. Stepping on the bathroom scale can be nerve-racking, but it tells us if that exercise routine is working. Going to the dentist for a checkup every six months might be unpleasant, but it lets us know if there are cavities to address. In education, tests provide an objective measurement of how students are progressing — information that’s critical to improving public schools.
Except that the current crop of Standardized Tests are not like stepping on a scale or going to the dentist. They are like trying to find out a child's weight by waterboarding him. They are like having your teeth checked by a blind blacksmith. Because, in education, tests NEVER provide an objective measure of anything, because tests are made by people. Yes, tests are useful-- but only good tests. And do you know what good tests are useful for? They are useful for providing information critical to helping further the education of students.
I am not a Systems True Devotee. STDs believe that we just have to create a well-oiled precision machine and it will spit out Smarterer Student Products like toasters off an assembly line. I would stop to further develop the point, but we're only one paragraph in. These woods are dark and deep, but we have miles to go.
From this diving board, That Woman proceeds to register her stunned amazement that in various places, there's a movement that is convincing parents to pull kids out of these tests! Really!!! These marvelous tests that will tell us how schools are doing!! What in the name of God are they thinking!?!?!!?
This makes no sense. All parents want to know how their children are progressing and how good the teachers are in the classroom. Good educators also want an assessment of how well they are serving students, because they want kids to have the skills and knowledge to succeed.
Allow to help you comprehend this, O She. You are correct that parents and educators do want to know these things. Your mistake is in believing that they can only know this by looking at standardized test results.
Yes, the Great and Powerful Woman Who No Longer Has a Curtain To Hide Behind imagines a world where parents sit at home after eight months of school, wringing their hands and saying, "Oh, jehosephat, I wish we knew how Janey was doing in school. But we have no idea." Meanwhile, at school, teachers sit and the lounge and say, "Yeah, I've been with this kid for eight months but I just don't know how he's doing. Thank God we're going to be giving a high stakes high pressure badly written unproven standardized test soon so that I'll know how it's going."
In That Woman's universe, parents and teachers (sorry-- public school parents and teachers) are dumber than dirt. In fact, the list of People Standing in the Way of Educational Excellence gets longer and longer. Parents, teachers, democratically elected school boards-- reformy fans have an enemies list that keeps lengthening.
What’s next: Shut down the county health department because we don’t care whether restaurants are clean? Defund the water-quality office because we don’t want to know if what’s streaming out of our kitchen faucets is safe to drink?
This is She Who Shall Not Be Silenced's specialty-- the argument to refute things that nobody actually said. A direct rebuttal to her would be simply to point out that, no, nobody has suggested either of those things. A counter-thrust of equal sarcastic weight would be, "No, what's next should be couples who take a standardized test to find out if they're in love, or people standing in the rain waiting for the government to tell them whether they're wet or not."
She would also like you to know that these students of today will be competing with Indians and Chinese for the sweatshop jobs of tomorrow. Also, we are getting beat on taking standardized tests, and everyone knows that world supremacy depends on standardized test results. Everyone remembers when Hitler gave up WWII in shame when his SAT scores were revealed to be far below Roosevelt's.
Why do people do this crazy opt-out thing? She gets the concern about over-testing:
My daughter came home from public school one day and said class was a breeze now that “the test” was over. And I thought, “Geez, what are we communicating to our kids if they think the test is the most important thing — and once it’s over, learning ends?”
My cynical side wonders if "one day" is the exact number of days that Her child came home from a public school, but okay, maybe not. She agrees that over-test-happy schools must be reined in, but a new study by Teacher Plus (one more of these hydra-headed pro-reformy groups), testing takes up a minuscule amount of time. Also, getting punched in the face takes up a split second of a twenty-four hour day, so it should not bother you if someone does it.
She Who Must Be Paid observes that your child's grades might not show how she's doing compared to the world, because your child's grades come from incompetent lazy liars.
And now She admits that standardized tests really only provide one small data picture that does not tell the whole story. Can you guess what her absolutely awesome solution is?
We don’t need to opt out of standardized tests; we need better and more rigorous standardized tests in public schools.
Yes!! When you're doing something stupid and bad and non-productive, do it More Harder!!
We also shouldn’t accept the false argument that testing restricts educators too much, stifles innovation in the classroom or takes the joy out of teaching. That line of thought assumes that the test is the be-all and end-all — and if that’s the perspective, the joy is already long gone.
Here's a multiple choice test for you, dear, exhausted reader. Select which statement best reflects the meaning of the above excerpt:
1) Do not assume that the test is the be-all and end-all. It will just be-all the way we decide to end-all teaching careers, school existence, and student futures.
2) You cannot claim that this year's testing is sucking up all the joy of teaching, because we actually drained that lake long ago and killed the fish flopping in the mud with fire and big pointy sticks.
The most valuable teachers are those who impart knowledge, not just information, and do so in a way that engages students and makes school interesting.
I wouldn't have stopped for this sentence except for that last bit-- "makes school interesting." Do you know why I don't have a plan for making water wet? Because it's intrinsically wet! Anyone who thinks you have to MAKE learning interesting doesn't get it. Do you know why I teach stuff with energy and excitement and perhaps a certain freakish intensity-- because the stuff I teach IS interesting. Really interesting. I don't have to make it that way. Just saying. Let's move on.
She Who Shall Not Be Named then moves on to the newest Testing Flavor of the Month, Justification #1428B for Why We Give Tests. Not to evaluate students! No, not at all. We give tests to evaluate schools, to make sure the taxpayers are getting their money's worth. Because, like parents and teachers, taxpayers are brainless slugs who know nothing unless the gummint tells them.
“Okay,” the opt-out crowd replies, “what about kids who are stressed out and suffering from anxiety because of standardized tests?” You know what? Life can be stressful; it can be challenging. The alternative is to hand out trophies just for participating, give out straight A’s for fear of damaging a kid’s ego — and continue to fall further and further behind as a country. I reject that mind-set.
No. No, no, no. Those are NOT the only alternatives. Our two choices are not A) punch kids in the face and tell them to suck it up or B) give them ponies and never let them be sad ever. And no, a refusal to choose A does not mean we fall further and further behind in international test-taking supremacy. I am GLAD that you "reject that mind-set," if by "that mind-set" you mean "a mind-set that only believes in two equally stupid possible choices." My God in Heaven, woman-- if somebody gives you a puppy do you look at it and say, "Well, only two choices here. Either I can tie it to the bumper and make it drag along behind the car, or I can feed it caviar and let it sleep on my bed while I go stay on the couch." (See? I can build big fat straw men, too)
How about-- and I'm just talking crazy here-- but how about we give our students reasonable and useful challenges and then we work side by side with them to help them succeed? How about we hire a whole bunch of trained and experienced professionals to personally oversee young peoples' intellectual development and then give them the tools, trust and autonomy to do that job well? We could skip both the part where we subject children to pointless, unproductive, stressful wastes of time that generate next-to-zero useful data (but lots of useful profits) and the part where we raise children in a bubble. We could, I don't know, put the needs of the students first!
She Who Must Be Paid wraps it up:
Rather than encouraging parents to opt out of testing, it would be much more productive for the leaders of this distracting movement to help improve the assessments. Make the exams more rigorous and more reflective of student learning. Ultimately, students and educators need test data — opting out does a disservice to both. And it risks endangering the progress that all of our children need.
So, what? Tell the children, "Just go in there and get punched in the face, because next year it won't be so bad"? Oh, and stop using that word "rigorous"-- I do not think it means what you think it means. Opting out doesn't endanger a damn thing, and ultimately nobody anywhere at all on God's green earth needs the kind of useless invalid squeezed out of children under stress and duress faux data that these tests are generating.
Damn. All this space wasted and once again, She Who Must Not Be Named doesn't get much of anything right. And she gets space in the Washington Freaking Post while millions of teachers who know better are still trying to get someone to listen to them. What a world, what a world. I'm nobody; just a classroom teacher. Nobody is paying me to write this, and nobody is going to pay me to go speak about education somewhere (and they wouldn't have to do either), but somehow She Who Is The Kim Kardashian of Ed Reform gets a big platform to spew a bunch of Wrong into the universe. I'm no education thought leader or great writer, but I still know education better than to write something so ridiculous.
Bush, FEE, The Chamber & How Not To Tweet
Have corporations learned how to make social media work for them yet? Well......
Last week we noted that Jeb Bush's FEE (Foundation for Excellence in Education) and the Higher States Standards Partnership (a group funded by the US Chamber of Commerce and a few others well explained here by Erin Osborne) were launching a shiny new Common Core promotional blitz. (And by "shiny" I mean "shiny in the same way that artificial turf is shiny.")
And somebody in the launching team apparently said, "Hey, let us use some of the social media that I hear is very hip these days. The social media with the viral things-- we should use some of that, because I hear it is big with the young persons. (Also, with the rap music.)"
To anchor this blitz-ish like sort-of onslaught, the marketing team deployed four teachers as the face of "Learn More. Go Further." The four include a Florida DOE teacher ambassador (and previous virtual school instructor), two charter school teachers, and a pubic school reading specialist recently promoted to assistant principal. Beyond the obvious non-public-school slant, there's the more subtle slant involved in choosing four ladies; no secondary man teachers. The designers of the program did select one apparently-Latina lady; the other three are looking mighty white. I'm not suggesting any of these choices reveal nefarious purposes, but given that they had to be deliberate marketing choices, I find them.... interesting.
More puzzling is the fact that the four ladies resemble each other pretty closely in physical type. Some people have made observations about the type, and I want to be clear that using a woman's body type as a basis for criticizing her is just unacceptable uber-jerk behavior, and those people need to either grow up or shut up. But regardless of what configuration we're talking about, these four women look very much the same. I'm reduced to telling them apart by hair style. If four women look like each other, I don't see that as a sign of dark conspiracy-- but this is somebody's deliberate choice, and the messaging was supposed to be, "Look-- a wide variety of teachers support Common Core," then somebody failed.
At any rate. LMGF has set these four up with their own twitter accounts, because, you know, the social media. I've been following their progress. Let's see how they're doing.
@USTeacherFaye first tweeted in March 15. She has 33 tweets as I type this and each one is a promotional comment. Here's a typical tweet:
My passion for kids is what inspired me to be a teacher. My passion for their success is why I support Common Core: http://bit.ly/1fMIS5g
I can call this "typical" because she has actually tweeted it twice. Ditto for "Students face so many challenges. Academic standards shouldn't be one of them. Support Common Core." She usually tweets once or twice a day, but not on weekends. She has three re-tweets (two from LMGF and one from a Tom Greene at AEI). She has not once tweeted at anyone else, and she has not responded to any of the tweets directed at her, which seem to cover a wide range of Core-related crankiness.
@USTeacherRian lists herself as a government and economics teacher. Her first tweet is also March 15. She has 36 tweets and two retweets (one from LMGF and one from USTeacherFaye inviting people to follow the four spokesladies). She is also a one-or-two-a-weekday tweetress, but she was feeling feisty on April 2nd and responded to two critical tweets (CCSS is not a curriculum, y'all).
@USTeacherBeth is "excited to help more students go further to college and great careers." 33 tweets since March 15. I'll confess that I love Teacher Beth best of all. For one thing, she actually took a break from posting advertising copy with links to throw in an Emerson quote (“The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.”). For another, she has a whopping five posts in reply to others, and one of them is to me. I'd tweeted a variety of more substantive challenges to the ladies and was becoming sad at the lack of response, so I tweeted to all four that I was beginning to suspect that they were bots, or paid interns. Awesomely, Teacher Beth tweeted me the following reply:
"Neither."
So now I have a huge twitcrush on her and her minimalist post-modern sniptweeting.
@USTeacherAngela is the group slacker. With a mere 20 tweets, I think we can agree she's just not trying very hard. No tweets addressed to anyone, no responses to her critics. Come on, Teacher Angela. Step up your game.
Now, I said I'd get back to the ladies' critics, because I think there's important information to be gleaned there.
See, these four accounts are being promoted, as is the initiative and the ads that go with it. If like me you visit some of these materials, you'll start seeing links for LMGF fill your browser ad spaces, and the four ladies will be appearing regularly as promoted twitter feeds. Online marketing allows very carefully directed marketing-- so can we guess at whom FEE and HSSP are aiming themselves?
There are two types of criticism aimed at the ladies. One is from teachers; in many cases, specifically BATS. I suspect that has something to do with some posting I did on the BATs facebook page. But listen to some of the other posts:
"You are communist dupes" (seriously-- I'm not making this up)
"Fell [sic] free to be interviewed by someone like @GerriWillisFBN from @FoxBusiness otherwise this is just propaganda."
"#CommonCore is more engaging & focuses on the Gov. Master. That's why progressives and unions support it."
So, boys and girls, using our context clues, which audience seems to have been the recipient of LMGF's media attention? If you're guessing "conservatives," I'm with you. The freshly scrubbed friendly (mostly) white ladies (who are US teachers!) and an American flag-quoting logo are beginning to suggest to me that Learn More. Go Further is not really concerned with selling CCSS to everybody, but is mostly about trying, again, to get conservatives on board with the Core. After a close reading of the four twitter accounts, I'm concluding two things:
1) The folks behind this think that once you set up a twitter account and pay to promote it, buzz just sport of magically appears, even if you don't really do anything with it or engage anybody.
2) Jeb Bush is really worried that hard right conservatives will kneecap his White House dreams if he doesn't somehow get them to drink the CCSS Koolaid.
Judging from much of what the conservative press are writing (like this recent Michelle Malkin piece), these four ladies and the massive well-funded media machine they are stapled to the front of-- well, they've all got their work cut out for them.
[Update: The folks at Integrity in Education directed my attention to the fact that the women have EIGHT accounts-- each has one as a USTeacher and one as FLTeacher. Not a surprise as many aspects of the initiative still have FL pieces stuck from when this Florida specific program was scaled up to national level.
The FLTeacher accounts are pretty much the same story-- same time frame, same style of tweets, though a bit more chatty tone. Oddest difference-- the FL accounts give the ladies last names.
So my apologies for missing that part of the story. I'll do better faux journalism in the future.]
Last week we noted that Jeb Bush's FEE (Foundation for Excellence in Education) and the Higher States Standards Partnership (a group funded by the US Chamber of Commerce and a few others well explained here by Erin Osborne) were launching a shiny new Common Core promotional blitz. (And by "shiny" I mean "shiny in the same way that artificial turf is shiny.")
And somebody in the launching team apparently said, "Hey, let us use some of the social media that I hear is very hip these days. The social media with the viral things-- we should use some of that, because I hear it is big with the young persons. (Also, with the rap music.)"
To anchor this blitz-ish like sort-of onslaught, the marketing team deployed four teachers as the face of "Learn More. Go Further." The four include a Florida DOE teacher ambassador (and previous virtual school instructor), two charter school teachers, and a pubic school reading specialist recently promoted to assistant principal. Beyond the obvious non-public-school slant, there's the more subtle slant involved in choosing four ladies; no secondary man teachers. The designers of the program did select one apparently-Latina lady; the other three are looking mighty white. I'm not suggesting any of these choices reveal nefarious purposes, but given that they had to be deliberate marketing choices, I find them.... interesting.
More puzzling is the fact that the four ladies resemble each other pretty closely in physical type. Some people have made observations about the type, and I want to be clear that using a woman's body type as a basis for criticizing her is just unacceptable uber-jerk behavior, and those people need to either grow up or shut up. But regardless of what configuration we're talking about, these four women look very much the same. I'm reduced to telling them apart by hair style. If four women look like each other, I don't see that as a sign of dark conspiracy-- but this is somebody's deliberate choice, and the messaging was supposed to be, "Look-- a wide variety of teachers support Common Core," then somebody failed.
At any rate. LMGF has set these four up with their own twitter accounts, because, you know, the social media. I've been following their progress. Let's see how they're doing.
@USTeacherFaye first tweeted in March 15. She has 33 tweets as I type this and each one is a promotional comment. Here's a typical tweet:
My passion for kids is what inspired me to be a teacher. My passion for their success is why I support Common Core: http://bit.ly/1fMIS5g
I can call this "typical" because she has actually tweeted it twice. Ditto for "Students face so many challenges. Academic standards shouldn't be one of them. Support Common Core." She usually tweets once or twice a day, but not on weekends. She has three re-tweets (two from LMGF and one from a Tom Greene at AEI). She has not once tweeted at anyone else, and she has not responded to any of the tweets directed at her, which seem to cover a wide range of Core-related crankiness.
@USTeacherRian lists herself as a government and economics teacher. Her first tweet is also March 15. She has 36 tweets and two retweets (one from LMGF and one from USTeacherFaye inviting people to follow the four spokesladies). She is also a one-or-two-a-weekday tweetress, but she was feeling feisty on April 2nd and responded to two critical tweets (CCSS is not a curriculum, y'all).
@USTeacherBeth is "excited to help more students go further to college and great careers." 33 tweets since March 15. I'll confess that I love Teacher Beth best of all. For one thing, she actually took a break from posting advertising copy with links to throw in an Emerson quote (“The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.”). For another, she has a whopping five posts in reply to others, and one of them is to me. I'd tweeted a variety of more substantive challenges to the ladies and was becoming sad at the lack of response, so I tweeted to all four that I was beginning to suspect that they were bots, or paid interns. Awesomely, Teacher Beth tweeted me the following reply:
"Neither."
So now I have a huge twitcrush on her and her minimalist post-modern sniptweeting.
@USTeacherAngela is the group slacker. With a mere 20 tweets, I think we can agree she's just not trying very hard. No tweets addressed to anyone, no responses to her critics. Come on, Teacher Angela. Step up your game.
Now, I said I'd get back to the ladies' critics, because I think there's important information to be gleaned there.
See, these four accounts are being promoted, as is the initiative and the ads that go with it. If like me you visit some of these materials, you'll start seeing links for LMGF fill your browser ad spaces, and the four ladies will be appearing regularly as promoted twitter feeds. Online marketing allows very carefully directed marketing-- so can we guess at whom FEE and HSSP are aiming themselves?
There are two types of criticism aimed at the ladies. One is from teachers; in many cases, specifically BATS. I suspect that has something to do with some posting I did on the BATs facebook page. But listen to some of the other posts:
"You are communist dupes" (seriously-- I'm not making this up)
"Fell [sic] free to be interviewed by someone like @GerriWillisFBN from @FoxBusiness otherwise this is just propaganda."
"#CommonCore is more engaging & focuses on the Gov. Master. That's why progressives and unions support it."
So, boys and girls, using our context clues, which audience seems to have been the recipient of LMGF's media attention? If you're guessing "conservatives," I'm with you. The freshly scrubbed friendly (mostly) white ladies (who are US teachers!) and an American flag-quoting logo are beginning to suggest to me that Learn More. Go Further is not really concerned with selling CCSS to everybody, but is mostly about trying, again, to get conservatives on board with the Core. After a close reading of the four twitter accounts, I'm concluding two things:
1) The folks behind this think that once you set up a twitter account and pay to promote it, buzz just sport of magically appears, even if you don't really do anything with it or engage anybody.
2) Jeb Bush is really worried that hard right conservatives will kneecap his White House dreams if he doesn't somehow get them to drink the CCSS Koolaid.
Judging from much of what the conservative press are writing (like this recent Michelle Malkin piece), these four ladies and the massive well-funded media machine they are stapled to the front of-- well, they've all got their work cut out for them.
[Update: The folks at Integrity in Education directed my attention to the fact that the women have EIGHT accounts-- each has one as a USTeacher and one as FLTeacher. Not a surprise as many aspects of the initiative still have FL pieces stuck from when this Florida specific program was scaled up to national level.
The FLTeacher accounts are pretty much the same story-- same time frame, same style of tweets, though a bit more chatty tone. Oddest difference-- the FL accounts give the ladies last names.
So my apologies for missing that part of the story. I'll do better faux journalism in the future.]
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