It has become a matter of conventional wisdom that the Common Core State Standards are a federal program in everything but name, even as the Arne Duncan and the administration keep making mouth noises about how it's totally not federal at all. Because that would be politically inexpedient. Also, it would be illegal.
The definitive Duncan statement on strategy and tactics of CCSS dispersal is still his speech last summer to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In that speech, Duncan laid out the narrative that he wanted to associate with the Core. His argument that the CCSS are not federal boils down to a few points.
Schools Were Bad. Also, Liars.
Back in the day, our schools were lowering standards and lying to students. And you know what? He's not entirely wrong. He's just neglecting to mention what they were lying about, and why.
Back before CCSS, No Child Left Behind had a big gun to the head of every state education system in the country. If schools didn't show improvement on The Big Test, a huge handcart of hurt was going to be delivered unto them. Because ultimately, under NCLB, there were going to be two kinds of schools-- failing schools, and cheating schools.
So, yes. Some states sought to game the system by loosening standards to push back the day of reckoning. Some states found ways to lie to the feds about how well their students were doing. Because that seemed preferable to having their federal $$ support cut off. There was a huge lesson to be learned from this, but the current administration failed to learn it--
When the federal government puts huge life-or-death pressure into a system of high stakes testing, bad things happen to education.
But the feds learned a different lesson. If you don't have enough leverage, you can't force the states to react the way you want them to. So get more leverage. Because the schools are bad, and liars, too. So it's totally justified. The law is just a technicality, a speedbump, to be honored in letter, but not spirit.
Read the Fine Print
What Duncan told the Editors he has repeated since:
The federal government didn’t write them, didn’t approve them and
doesn’t mandate them, and we never will. Anyone who says otherwise is
either misinformed or willfully misleading.
He challenged the editors to find a single standard written by a federal hand, and he is correct in saying they never will. He does not observe that having federal authorities write statutes and regulations is so old school, anyway. CCSS was written the same way our food statutes, or military procurement statutes, our banking regulations, and lord knows what else-- they were written by the corporations that stand to profit from them.
Nor did the feds mandate them. The feds just made the states an offer that they couldn't refuse. Or, in Duncan's alternate universe, the states saw the standards and saw that the standards were Good, and so they adopted them out of sheer love of the education of children. States (that want their money and/or not to face penalties for being in violation of the NCLB laws) can choose any standards they want-- as long as the feds approve them. Go ahead and pick, states-- behind Door #1 are CCSS, already pre-approved by the feds or behind Door #2, your own standards, which may or may not pass muster and will cost your own money to develop. You are free to choose.
By Your Enemies Ye Shall Know Them
The continued reference to CCSS opponents as Tea Party fringe crazies is not just about marginalizing them. It's not just about marginalizing critics of the Core or trying to deflect attention away from the many non-crazy non-right wing critics that the Core has. It's not merely about the ludicrous suggestion that Diane Ravitch and Mercedes Schneider and Anthony Cody and 40,000 Bad Ass Teachers and the hundreds of thousands of letter-writing, opting-out, capitol-storming deeply upset Americans are all, somehow, members of the Tea Party Tin Hat Crowd.
It's also about deflecting attention away from the support that CCSS does in fact have from certain elements of the right. The Kochs and the ALECs and the portions of the hard right tat have figured out that there is serious money to be made. This administration would really rather not have you notice that some of their best collaborators on this signature initiative are in fact people who thought George Bush was too far center. (And those folks would probably just as soon not be noticed collaborating with Evil Socialist Obama.) Working with the Right? No, not us-- see the Right hates us!
But it is also-- also-- about discrediting the federal argument against CCSS. It is about saying, "Look-- you know who says that CCSS is federal overreach by a DC-run program to erase local control of schools? The Tea Party. And you know those guys are crazy pants. So if they're saying it, it must not be true."
Even conservative apologists for the Core like Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) and Michael Brickman (Fordham Institute) are making a bank shot of this argument. "The rollout was botched," they say, "because the administration made too much noise and woke up the crazy fringe people. If they had just kept their hands off it, those folks would have stayed out of it, and all would be fine." See, it's NOT federal, but federal enthusiasm for the Core made it LOOK federal.
And Yet
The number one government cheerleader for CCSS remains the United States Secretary of Education. The face most associated with this initiative that was totes created by governors is... not one of those governors. Nope. The top federal schools guy. He's the one who tells newspaper editors how to cover it. Scolds California when they start to go off script. Wags a finger at any state that threatens to get away from the program. Makes every public appearance about how great CCSS are. Reminds us all that we must stay the course.
And the President is torn. Core supporters such as Hess suggested he NOT name check CCSS in the State of the Union Address (and why would he, since it's a state initiative), but he couldn't resist the urge to bring it up in substance, if not in name.
Where are the governors and teachers-- you know, the ones who personally wrote this? If I'd created something this influential, important and inspiring-- if I had built it with my own hands and sweat and blood, I would be by God on a leave of absence touring the country to preach and preach about how great it was. And yet, with the exception of Jeb "Looking For a National Issue To Build My Campaign On" Bush, we have no governors remotely approaching Duncan for the CCSS Sales Award.
The Other Narrative
However, if you want to see the administration admit that CCSS are federal, just look at the other narrative. The Civil Rights Issue of Our Generation Narrative.
Duncan was singing this song as far back as 2010, and to my ear it goes something like this:
Education is what is keeping poor minorities down. This administration has made a special commitment to lifting black folks out of poverty, and just as the federal government had to trample some states rights to stop Jim Crow, we may have to trample some states rights to get your children the same rigorous key-to-success education that those white suburban moms want for their kids.
They were lying to you for years, telling you they were educating your children when they didn't do a damn thing. We are going to make them stop. You want the best teachers and the best schools-- we are going to get them for you. You want your children given the same tools to get out of poverty that those white suburban moms get for their kids-- we are going to get them for you. Yes, this is a federal program-- it damn well has to be if it's going to work.
And it's here that the Tea Party Foes message fits again. The CCSS initiative bills itself as help for poor minority urban folk. You know who wants to trash it, make sure that those folks never get it? That would be white suburban moms and the Tea Party-- and we all know those Tea Party folks are not known for diversity or tolerance. If CCSS is the new Civil Rights Movement, then the Tea Party is the newest version of the same old enemies-- the people who scream states right as a cover for oppression, the enemies of a just and equal society.
It's a powerful message, and I'm not sure everybody in the anti-CCSS sphere fully grasps how powerful it is. It's a strong message, mostly because it really ought to be true. We have done a lousy job in some parts of some urban school districts, and there really should be a resolve to do better. But opponents of are so focused on how clearly the CCSS are a hollow lie, the fool's gold at the end of a fake educational rainbow, that we may not understand how appealing the promise they've been wrapped in can be, or that what they pretend to address in this narrative is a real problem that needs real solutions.
And this second narrative will not be expressed straight out, because--well, because federal control of education is illegal. But I can't imagine that anybody can believe that anything different is going on. The good news is that all Big Lies rest on a foundation made of smaller lies, and breaking down those lies is the best way to destroy the foundation for the big one.
The vulnerable lie here? The lie that opponents are a small group of fringe crazies (who are probably racists) is the vulnerable piece of foundation under the big lie, and as more and more people stand up and say, "I want a better education for all American children, and CCSS is not the way" or "I stand against CCSS, but not with the Tea Party," the harder it will be to maintain the fiction at the base of the Big Lie.
Monday, April 7, 2014
What the Hell Happened in Kansas?
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.
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.
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.
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