Regular readers of this blog (I believe there are at least three, now) probably expected that the headline was setting up some sort of sarcastic satirical rant. But no-- that's not where I'm going today.
Because I do, in fact, actually love my job.
Sometimes it's the obvious stuff. A few weeks back I was hustling in overdrive overtime to pull together a hundred-plus students into a production of the annual variety show, standing in that big pre-show circle at all those faces excited and committed and simultaneously part of something brand new and also an eighty-four year tradition at our school. They had worked so hard and they were so excited and they created such a special night for hundreds of audience members and it was not possible for me to be any prouder of how each put his or her personal stamp of sweat and inspiration and talent and spark to those performances. How could anybody not love that?
Sometimes it's not so obvious. Today I was up in class and we were seguing straight from the difference between jazz hands and spirit fingers into what turned out to be an infomercial for the three uses of semi-colons (three! count 'em, three!) and we are all just enjoying ourselves while we nail this stupid punctuation nuance and I am thinking, damn, I have the best job in the world (although I'll admit I can see how not everybody would necessarily love that part).
Sometimes it pays off for decades. I teach in a small town district, and while many of our grads leave the area, many do not, and many stay in touch. To see these people strive and grow and sometimes fall but then find a way-- it's an awesome thing. To see the many amazing ways in which a person's life can unfold, unexpected and not according to plan, and yet eventually finding its own way-- I tell you, it's watching my students grow up and go into the world that has reassured me more than anything else in life that ultimately, for most people, things turn out okay.
And the generations. I see families unfold through generations and through years, see parents pass their own struggles and strength onto their children. I see parents and children trying so hard to figure out how to love and support each other, and I get to know both sides of their story.
I mean, the line about touching the future because I teach is great, and I don't disagree, but I am also up to my elbows in the present and it's awesome. I get to work with real live living growing changing rising and advancing human beings. Not like doctors and nurses who see them when they're sick, or lawyers or social workers who see them when they're in trouble-- I get to see them when they are becoming themselves. I get to see them learn what it means to be fully human, to be who they are, to be in the world.
I am driven to understand just like I am driven to write and make music and ride a bike, and I am driven to connect other people to what I understand and to see what I can see through them. Like the guy shoveling coal into the furnace that drives the engine in the belly of a great ocean liner, I get to work next to the burning heart of humanity.
We talk about all the things that matter and all the things that don't, and we talk about how to talk about them, and we talk about how to bridge the gap between human beings, to share understanding, to pass on some of that heat from the burning heart. Every one of my students is a giant waiting to stand up tall, struggling to channel strength into those legs.
We read and write and do every piddly thing any English class ever did. We look into the literature and the paragraphs and the prepositional phrases and we try find some way to use it, some way to move forward, some way to grow and rise and embrace ourselves and the world.
It is not always pretty and it is not always neat and not always according to plan, and lord knows some days I am not very good at it for any number of reasons, up to and including that I'm an imperfect rough draft of a teacher. I may never retire because I don't think I can quit until I actually get really good at this.
The worst is to get distracted by the stupid stuff, and we are all awash in a sea of stupid distractions these days, and that's mostly what I write about. But I need to let myself know (and you, too, dear reader if you have hung on through all these paragraphs) that there is a reason I do this and it is bigger than all the stuff that I bitch and moan about. There's is more to this, to me, than the bitching and moaning. There is the energy in knowing and passing it on, there's the joy of grinding through the tight places to the places where the sky is fresh and clear, and there is absolute heart-shaking awesomeness of watching young humans grow and grasp and build and rise and become fully human and fully themselves.
Make no mistake. I love my job. I freakin' love my job.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Why "Reformy"?
Part of a series of posts for folks who are just beginning to find there way through the current debates on education. My blog dedicated to that audience is Reclaiming Pubic Education 101.
As one wades out into the sea of education blogging, one repeatedly encounters the term "reformy" or "reformy stuff." There's a short explanation, but it underlines one of the central issues of the education world these days.
The champions of Common Core, high stakes testing, charters, TFA, and the other tools of powerful amateurs dedicated to dismantling US public education have tried to claim for themselves the mantle of "Reformers," of people who are standing up to combat the status quo.
"Reformer" is a powerful word. It speaks of someone who sees and unjust system and fights to fix it, to make it more fair, more just. A reformer stands up, against whatever odds, for positive change.
Our current crop of corporate raiders, government stooges, privateers, data overlords, and public ed destroyers do not match the definition of the word. They are not standing up for justice. They are not trying to Fight the Power for freedom and a better world. They are trying to twist and destroy the public education for profit and power.
More than that, they are not fighting against the status quo. Every one of these "reforms" has been in place for years, even decades. Charters have been given every condition they claimed they needed for success. High stakes federally-pushed tests have been used to drive instruction for over a decade, as have state-mandated uniform standards. TFA is over twenty years old. These folks aren't fighting the status quo-- they ARE the status quo.
And so, folks fighting to restore the promise of public education generally refuse to allow these folks the name "reformers," nor can we call the failed policies that have now had ample opportunity to prove themselves "reform."
Some folks tried, "deformers," but while it's catchy, it doesn't really captured the degree to which htey have successfully destroyed and uprooted elements of pubic education. Many bloggers have tried many constructions with limited success (I myself have coined "Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools," but while MoRONS has a certain sophomoric semi-wit to it, it's not really practical for writing).
So the term that has emerged most often is "reformy." Like Colbert's "truthiness," it captures the degree to which the thing is trying to imitate a real quality with a cheap, fake imitation of that quality. Likewise "reformy stuff" shows an understanding of the great CCSS-based complex of educational malpractice without showing it any respect.
As one wades out into the sea of education blogging, one repeatedly encounters the term "reformy" or "reformy stuff." There's a short explanation, but it underlines one of the central issues of the education world these days.
The champions of Common Core, high stakes testing, charters, TFA, and the other tools of powerful amateurs dedicated to dismantling US public education have tried to claim for themselves the mantle of "Reformers," of people who are standing up to combat the status quo.
"Reformer" is a powerful word. It speaks of someone who sees and unjust system and fights to fix it, to make it more fair, more just. A reformer stands up, against whatever odds, for positive change.
Our current crop of corporate raiders, government stooges, privateers, data overlords, and public ed destroyers do not match the definition of the word. They are not standing up for justice. They are not trying to Fight the Power for freedom and a better world. They are trying to twist and destroy the public education for profit and power.
More than that, they are not fighting against the status quo. Every one of these "reforms" has been in place for years, even decades. Charters have been given every condition they claimed they needed for success. High stakes federally-pushed tests have been used to drive instruction for over a decade, as have state-mandated uniform standards. TFA is over twenty years old. These folks aren't fighting the status quo-- they ARE the status quo.
And so, folks fighting to restore the promise of public education generally refuse to allow these folks the name "reformers," nor can we call the failed policies that have now had ample opportunity to prove themselves "reform."
Some folks tried, "deformers," but while it's catchy, it doesn't really captured the degree to which htey have successfully destroyed and uprooted elements of pubic education. Many bloggers have tried many constructions with limited success (I myself have coined "Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools," but while MoRONS has a certain sophomoric semi-wit to it, it's not really practical for writing).
So the term that has emerged most often is "reformy." Like Colbert's "truthiness," it captures the degree to which the thing is trying to imitate a real quality with a cheap, fake imitation of that quality. Likewise "reformy stuff" shows an understanding of the great CCSS-based complex of educational malpractice without showing it any respect.
Monday, April 7, 2014
Just How Federal Are the Core Standards?
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.
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.
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.
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