Strangers in Mathland

If you are none-math person, here's your quick partial explanation of why math under the Common Core is so hinky.

I'm an English teacher, so I've rather stayed away from the math side of the Common Core Standards. But I can't help noticing that if you are of a certain age (say, mine) some of it seems vaguely familiar. Let me give you a hint...

(Note: Tom Lehrer is, as the young folks say, the bomb. If you are not familiar with his work, you should acquaint yourself).

So, why this theoretical swinging back and forth of the mathematical pendulum? Because math is not all one thing!

I know. In my discipline, we're used to all sorts of squabbling. Despite the fact that David Coleman and The Corophiles (which might be a good name for a band) seem to believe that all matters of reading, interpreting, and generally messing with literature have been definitively settled, those of us who actually live in that world know better. For example, the notion that author's intent is important or even legitimate may be assumed to be true and settled by CCSS, but actual literary scholars and students can argue about it till the cows come home (which the cows may have consciously intended to do, but on the other hand they may have returned home as a result of cultural pressures and expectations, or as an unconscious expression of patriarchal gender-normative structures).

But math. I always thought math was just, you know, math. And then I got older and I did reading about things like chaos theory and quantum mechanics and building structures and I learned that math is not just math. That there is an ongoing rift of sorts between practical mathematics and theoretical (or pure) mathematics.

If you go to math middle school, the applied mathers will all be sitting at the same lunch table pointing and laughing at the theoretical guys and making fun of them for being the kind of people who like big equations but can't change (or design) a spare tire. Meanwhile, the pure math lunch table is pointing back and mocking the applied guys because they only use math to...ew... make things. Think Big Bang Theory and the abuse Sheldon heaps on Howard for being merely an engineer.

Periodically the ongoing rivalry between these groups spill over into the teaching of math to small children. "It's important," say the pure math guys, "that children learn the principles, grasp the ideas, appreciate and see the pure structure underlying the world of mathy things. It doesn't matter if they can make change; it matters that they see the beautiful mathematical structures and relationships underlying the universe of mathematics."

"No," reply the applied math guys. "It would be really nice if they could figure out how to put together some pieces of wood into a properly measured chair that you can sit in, or figure out how long a train takes to get to Amsterdam. Wrong answers mess up the world."

Children and their parents seem to lean historically toward practical math and getting the right answers. But periodically the theoretical math folks gain the upper hand and push the notion that it's concepts, not correct answers, that matter. The last time they gained the upper hand, we got the new math. This time, they somehow used the launch of CCSS to get their feet in the door again, and so Core math arrived, the bastard grandchild of New Math, desperately trying to get six year olds to grasp the beauty of numerical relationships in the universe of pure math (never mind the answer). 

Of course, it's a bit of a false division. Here's one of many rants written about how false a dichotomy it is, but of course, rants like this wouldn't be written or necessary if it weren't a dichotomy that many people observe.

Real Math People undoubtedly understand this better than I, but for my fellow strangers in mathland, I thought a non-mathy explanation might be helpful in grasping why we've been to this weird place of math instruction before, and why we're back there now. And why we undoubtedly won't stay there. If you are of a certain age, you remember what happened to New Math in most places-- schools became very tired of explaining why students were being frustrated by weirdly theoretical homework, but couldn't repeat even a sliver of a times table.

Common Corer? I Don't Even Know Her!

With his House appropriations subcommittee testimony Tuesday, Arne Duncan remains the highest profile reformy booster to wipe the Common Core lipstick off his face and stammer, "But, honey, I barely even know the woman!"

It's not the first time for Arne-- it hasn't even been a month since he watched Indiana dump the Core and said, "Yeah, well, fine. They can do that if they want to." But that was less of a test of his resolve because Indiana was dumping the Core in name only; like several other states (looking at you, Bobby Jindal) they appear to be going to route of shearing the wolf and giving it a new woolen suit.

But here was Arne in front of congressmen saying, "Common core??! You thought I said 'Common Core Standards'?! No no no-- I said 'Je t'adore Standards'-- You know, French! Because standards are so cosmopolitan and so I was just saying I love them standards because--well, no- any standards. Any standards at all!" (I am paraphrasing a bit.)

He walked a tightrope between lying and just not being truthful on the subject of tying state money to CCSS compliance, and I can't fault him because extortion, robbery and holding someone hostage are all different activities.

And he pretended not to know what exactly "Race to the Top 2.0: The Muddle to the Middle" is going to look like. And I was delighted to see Rep. Steve Womack ask the several million-dollar question-- How does one race to equality, exactly? But Arne, gosh, he's just not sure exactly what that new program is going to look like, exactly.

I'm hoping that this performance was more than just Arne's usual attempt to maintain plausible deniability about the federalness (and therefor illegality) of CCSS and its attendant reformy pilot fish. I can't help noticing that he also did not look congress in the eye and try to tell it that only Tea Party fringe elements oppose the Core. But it's hard to connect this Arne to the one who last year told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that the Common Core was the best thing since sliced bread and offered them handy tips on how to help him promote it. Nor is this is certainly the same feisty Duncan who told California that they had better do a full rollout of testing or the USDOE would withhold funds from the state.

The whole thing comes as a steady drip drip drip eats away at the CCSS love. Yesterday's defection by LA Times writer Karen Klein, a previous long-time Common Corer who announced in the paper that she would be opting her daughter out of tests-- that didn't help. The noisy and large opt-outs from testing across the country-- that didn't help. Stephen Colbert returning to the CCSS well for satirical fodder-- that didn't help. Jeb Bush and the Chamber's fizzling program to build a groundswell of grass roots support for CCSS-- that's not helping, either.

They can't hold onto their faithful, and they can't convert new ones. How can this be happening? How can it be that CCSS boosters are losing American hearts and minds?

CCSS supporters all along have been from three groups:

1) People who are making money from pushing the CCSS

2) People who are either willfully or naively delusional about the CCSS

3) People who do not yet fully understand what the CCSS regime entails

At this point, Group 3 is hemorrhaging people at a tremendous rate. Like Karen Klein, people lose their support for the tests at the moment they see one, or hear about it from their children. As more and more people see what CCSS really means, more and more people see it for the mess it really is.

And so its supporters start slowly backing away, start pretending "No, no! I barely even spoke to her! We met, like, one time, at Bill Gates' party!"

What happens next? Realigning strategy-- people have big money invested in this and they aren't just going to walk away. Can the acolytes of CCSS limit the damage to the brand name alone? Some groups will be particularly nervy-- the data overlords need all those tags from all that material to line up. If you want to see how much a state has really dropped the standards, look at the new standards and ask how hard it would be to convert the tagging system. Some tone-deaf groups will pay a price-- if NEA isn't careful, they'll end up as one of the few marquee faces for a disgraced brand. And some politicians will suffer (sorry, no President Jebby for you).

They will deploy new weapons, new rhetoric, new advertising approaches. They will try to get more done away from the public eye (which may have the odd effect of turning the entire battle for public education into a underground war between guerilla fighters on both sides). Sadly for them, they will not deploy the one approach that would be unstoppable. They could win the whole thing, win the court of public opinion, win the support of tastemakers and kingmakers alike.

All they would have to do is be right.

If they were right, all of us in the resistance would have to shut up. If any of the reformy initiatives reaped positive real results, the resistance would have to cope with that success. We would be scrambling for arguments instead of scrambling to cover the many many many failures of the Reformy Folks. That's why time is not on their side. Because every single reformy trick has failed. Every single reformy idea has been tested, has been given exactly what they claimed it needed, and it has failed. And it's going to keep failing, and Arne Duncan is going to keep going before Congress to wag his finger and say, "I have never had legislative intercourse with that program!"

I Love My Job (Seriously)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.