Last week Arne Duncan and John King shared a bill at the National Action Network gathering in NYC. King's message was "Blah blah blah standards tests blah." Same old, same old. Duncan, however, field tested a new message that translates basically to, "All youse normals, just shut up."
John King's history as NY High Commissioner of Educationy Stuff is that of an old school politician-- he says dumb things and does dumb things-- and he never fails to disappoint. But while Duncan is consistent in his pursuit of bad policy, he's a new school post-Reagan pol who understands that if you say good things, you can just go ahead and do bad things that don't match. Except, of course, that he also gets bad cases of the dunderheads, and then dumb things just fall out of his mouth. So I didn't pay much attention to what King had to say; I could probably write it for him. But as quotes started to appear from the Random Noise Generator that is Arne's mouth, I perked up.
Part was pure boilerplate. "I challenge you to support your governor as he challenges the status quo and tries to raise standards, raise expectations, and evaluate and support your teachers and principals."
At the risk of setting off the redundant redundancy alarm myself, let me repeat that neither King nor any of the other Purveryors of Reformy Nonsense are fighting the status quo. The PoRN stars have had years upon years to show us all how their complex of standards based test driven high accountability baloney will save us all, and it isn't happening. NY is special because it has had every single element the PoRNs want-- the charters, the TFA, the testing, the teacher evaluations, the centrally produced teacher-proof CCSS curriculum materials (okay, they haven't killed tenure yet)-- and yet none of those programs has produced anything remotely like success. In New York State the reformy nonsense IS THE STATUS QUO.
King is not challenging that status quo. He is challenging all the people who hate the status quo he and Cuomo have bolted into place.
As a side note, I'll point out that apparently Arne's list is a bunch of things that King is going to do singlehandedly. There is no call for everyone to pitch in and help, no "we're all in it together to lift up the public schools that belong to all of us." Nope. Just "support this guy while he does these things." (He also tagged Cuomo as a brave national leader.)
Arne has been trying out a new talking point lately. It's on display in the latest #AskArne video (which, for the love of God,you should not watch, but I summarize it for you here). Here's the version he used in NY.
It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be rocky, there is going to be
mistakes. People need to listen, they need to be
humble in this and be nimble and make changes. But to sort of stop and
go back to the bad old days simply doesn’t make sense to me.
This new rhetoric is familiar to anyone who, at the age of six, slipped on the ice, fell down, got up, and exclaimed, "I meant to do that. Shut up."
A year ago, in settings such as his infamous "How To Present The News About CCSS The Way I Want You To" speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the PoRN position was, "Anything you've heard about problems with CCSS stuff is a lie. This stuff is great, and we must implement it exactly the way it's laid out"
Last winter we had moved on to "Stay the course. Don't lose momentum! It's starting to work!"
Now we're swinging around to, "Well, of course there will be some problems and mistakes. We totally expected that. It's absolutely part of the master plan for implementation to involve the screwed up torpedoing teacher careers and crushing eight-year-old spirits." Okay, it doesn't generally get as specific as that last part, but our new talking point is basically, "Yeah, when I fixed your carburetor, I totally expected the front end of the car would burst into flames. That's how it's supposed to work. Shut up."
"People need to listen. They," Arne advises, "need to be humble...and nimble..."
People? Which people, I wonder. Not King, who we are supposed to cheer for, nor Cuomo who is a brave leader. Nor did Duncan use that oh-so-obscure construction "We." There isn't a bit of Arne's talk to suggest that what he means is "We reform pushers need to stop and check ourselves, our ideas, and our plans. We need to listen to the people who have been affected by our work and really consider how it's playing out on the ground. We need to be humble enough and flexible enough to be able to say that even though we really believed in a program, it needs to be changed in light of the reality that our children are facing." I mean, geeze, Arne-- if I can see all the way from rural PA what you should be saying, why can't you?
When, in the same speech, Arne characterizes parent concerns as
"drama and noise," it becomes even clearer who is actually supposed to
be doing the listening. And it's not Arne. No, when someone says, "I need to be humble and listen," it means "I have to do better." But when someone says, "You need to be humble and listen," it means, "Shut up. Remember your place. Stop all your drama and noise."
The "bad old days" flourish is, as always, insulting. I invite Arne to try it out in, say, Massachusetts where the bad old days featured better standards and better results than the current reformy mess. The only thing I like about the "bad old days" construction is that it's an admission that the "status quo" line is a lie. How can we "return" to the bad old days, if they are what we are fighting against right now?
It seems like a screw-up, but I'm sure it's exactly what he meant to say. I'll shut up now.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Friday, April 11, 2014
Dead Wood & Tenure
Some people want to insist that schools can be run like businesses. We can get into all the reasons they are wrong another day; for today let's go ahead and say that there are things for Education Leaders to learn from businessmen.
W. Edwards Deming used to like to quote from his own mentor, Peter Scholtes, in talking about deadwood in an organization. The observation came out in many phrasings over the years, but the basic point was this:
So you're firing the deadwood in your organization. Was it dead when you hired it? Or did you hire a live tree and then kill it?
Gregg Stocker is a business guy who has worked primarily in the oil and gas biz. He wrote the book Avoiding the Corporate Death Spiral: Identifying and Eliminating the Signs of Decline and contributed to The Lean Certification Handbook. He writes a blog about lean management entitled Lessons in Lean, and I have no idea what thoughts he has about public ed (he's a Demmings-style standardization guy, so we might disagree on several issues, actually). But he did write a blog post expanding on the deadwood problem that I find interesting in the context of current tenure debates.
Who is responsible for the poor performers in an organization? These are the people about whom leaders regularly complain and blame for many of the company’s problems. According to Jack Welch, they are the 10% of the workforce who need to improve or be fired.
Stocker talks about holding leaders responsible for the poor performance of team members.
I have found that, in many organizations, the responsibility to coach and develop talent is much lower on the list of priorities than documenting and replacing the poor performers.
Compare this concept in management to the fake Vergara lawsuit. The Vergara lawsuit tries to hide behind Civil Rights rhetoric and claim that schools lack the managerial power to fire bad teachers. And yet there is no proof anywhere in sight that firing poor performers (even if we can agree on who they are, which is a huge if, but let's move on anyway) improves the organization. The Jack Welch model of firing your way to excellence has been widely discounted and abandoned in the business world; even Microsoft decided that stack ranking was bad for the business.
But as always, public education is where bad management theories go to die, so we are being told from Kansas to California to Pennsylvania that public school systems need to fire their way to excellence.
In her interview with Josh Edelson of Salon regarding the Vergara case, Linda Darling-Hammon hits this pretty clearly, both in terms of firing:
First of all, just to be clear: It is extremely easy to get rid of teachers. You can dismiss a teacher for no reason at all in the first two years of their employment. And so there is no reason for a district ever to tenure a “grossly ineffective” teacher — as the language of the lawsuit goes — because you know if a teacher is grossly ineffective pretty quickly, and it’s negligence on the part of the school district if they continue to employ somebody who falls into that classification when they have no barriers to [firing them]. And districts that are well-run, and have good teacher evaluation systems in place, can get rid of veteran teachers that don’t meet a standard and [don’t] improve after that point.
She's also crystal clear about the importance of teacher development:
But in fact, the ability to keep teachers and develop them into excellent teachers is the more important goal and strategy for getting a high-quality teaching force. Because if what you’re really running is a churn factory, where you’re just bringing people in and, you know, firing them, good people don’t want to work in a place like that. So it’s going to be hard for you to recruit. Second of all, you’re likely not paying enough attention to developing good teachers into great teachers, and reasonable teachers into good teachers.
Run Schools Like a Business fans should note that it is Darling-Hammond who is in tune with sound business theory. Stocker lists five steps that help good leadership keep the forest alive:
1) Make it difficult to fire someone for performance issues.
2) Recognize terminations as a failure of the system.
3) Establish systems and support for team member development.
4) Make it clear that developing team members is a responsibility of leadership.
5) Promote based on leadership abilities.
The first and second steps are the most striking of the lot. In the first one, his full meaning is that it should be easier to fix someone than simply fire them. The second is an invitation to examine your hiring practices-- if you keep hiring dead wood, that's a hiring problem. This is extra true in school districts where the interview process essentially extends over tow or three years of pre-tenure, during which we have ample time to spot the unfixables and send them packing.
Stocker wraps up with this thought:
Besides showing respect for people, placing a high priority on coaching and development will help the organization improve performance by reducing turnover, improving morale, and engaging more people in improvement efforts.
Imagine how different things would be playing out if the Vergara defendants were in court demanding that poor schools (you know-- the ones that none of the Vergara Nine actually attend) were given the support, training, and development programs needed to create highly excellent teaching staffs. Imagine if the argument were that schools were failing students by repeatedly firing teachers instead of keeping them and investing the time, resources and support in turning those teachers into exemplars, or if it were the hiring practices of the school district were on trial.
In other words, if we wanted to talk about bad teachers in public schools, we could consider some strategies that might actually help instead of the one that everybody is fairly certain will not help at all. We would still have a lot to talk about, and some of that conversation would be difficult and contentious. But it would be far more useful than this thin smokescreen being laid down simply to cover one more attempt to create a world where teachers are churned and burned so that schools can be cheap and staffs can be cowed and obedient.
W. Edwards Deming used to like to quote from his own mentor, Peter Scholtes, in talking about deadwood in an organization. The observation came out in many phrasings over the years, but the basic point was this:
So you're firing the deadwood in your organization. Was it dead when you hired it? Or did you hire a live tree and then kill it?
Gregg Stocker is a business guy who has worked primarily in the oil and gas biz. He wrote the book Avoiding the Corporate Death Spiral: Identifying and Eliminating the Signs of Decline and contributed to The Lean Certification Handbook. He writes a blog about lean management entitled Lessons in Lean, and I have no idea what thoughts he has about public ed (he's a Demmings-style standardization guy, so we might disagree on several issues, actually). But he did write a blog post expanding on the deadwood problem that I find interesting in the context of current tenure debates.
Who is responsible for the poor performers in an organization? These are the people about whom leaders regularly complain and blame for many of the company’s problems. According to Jack Welch, they are the 10% of the workforce who need to improve or be fired.
Stocker talks about holding leaders responsible for the poor performance of team members.
I have found that, in many organizations, the responsibility to coach and develop talent is much lower on the list of priorities than documenting and replacing the poor performers.
Compare this concept in management to the fake Vergara lawsuit. The Vergara lawsuit tries to hide behind Civil Rights rhetoric and claim that schools lack the managerial power to fire bad teachers. And yet there is no proof anywhere in sight that firing poor performers (even if we can agree on who they are, which is a huge if, but let's move on anyway) improves the organization. The Jack Welch model of firing your way to excellence has been widely discounted and abandoned in the business world; even Microsoft decided that stack ranking was bad for the business.
But as always, public education is where bad management theories go to die, so we are being told from Kansas to California to Pennsylvania that public school systems need to fire their way to excellence.
In her interview with Josh Edelson of Salon regarding the Vergara case, Linda Darling-Hammon hits this pretty clearly, both in terms of firing:
First of all, just to be clear: It is extremely easy to get rid of teachers. You can dismiss a teacher for no reason at all in the first two years of their employment. And so there is no reason for a district ever to tenure a “grossly ineffective” teacher — as the language of the lawsuit goes — because you know if a teacher is grossly ineffective pretty quickly, and it’s negligence on the part of the school district if they continue to employ somebody who falls into that classification when they have no barriers to [firing them]. And districts that are well-run, and have good teacher evaluation systems in place, can get rid of veteran teachers that don’t meet a standard and [don’t] improve after that point.
She's also crystal clear about the importance of teacher development:
But in fact, the ability to keep teachers and develop them into excellent teachers is the more important goal and strategy for getting a high-quality teaching force. Because if what you’re really running is a churn factory, where you’re just bringing people in and, you know, firing them, good people don’t want to work in a place like that. So it’s going to be hard for you to recruit. Second of all, you’re likely not paying enough attention to developing good teachers into great teachers, and reasonable teachers into good teachers.
Run Schools Like a Business fans should note that it is Darling-Hammond who is in tune with sound business theory. Stocker lists five steps that help good leadership keep the forest alive:
1) Make it difficult to fire someone for performance issues.
2) Recognize terminations as a failure of the system.
3) Establish systems and support for team member development.
4) Make it clear that developing team members is a responsibility of leadership.
5) Promote based on leadership abilities.
The first and second steps are the most striking of the lot. In the first one, his full meaning is that it should be easier to fix someone than simply fire them. The second is an invitation to examine your hiring practices-- if you keep hiring dead wood, that's a hiring problem. This is extra true in school districts where the interview process essentially extends over tow or three years of pre-tenure, during which we have ample time to spot the unfixables and send them packing.
Stocker wraps up with this thought:
Besides showing respect for people, placing a high priority on coaching and development will help the organization improve performance by reducing turnover, improving morale, and engaging more people in improvement efforts.
Imagine how different things would be playing out if the Vergara defendants were in court demanding that poor schools (you know-- the ones that none of the Vergara Nine actually attend) were given the support, training, and development programs needed to create highly excellent teaching staffs. Imagine if the argument were that schools were failing students by repeatedly firing teachers instead of keeping them and investing the time, resources and support in turning those teachers into exemplars, or if it were the hiring practices of the school district were on trial.
In other words, if we wanted to talk about bad teachers in public schools, we could consider some strategies that might actually help instead of the one that everybody is fairly certain will not help at all. We would still have a lot to talk about, and some of that conversation would be difficult and contentious. But it would be far more useful than this thin smokescreen being laid down simply to cover one more attempt to create a world where teachers are churned and burned so that schools can be cheap and staffs can be cowed and obedient.
Anti-Test & Pro-Core
I have explained repeatedly why I don't believe that the CCSS can be cut free from The Standardized Test Program that accompanies them (both here and here). But it really should come as no surprise that a large (and possibly growing) number of people are calling for just that. I think it's because they're a little fuzzy on what CCSS actually is.
We've seen this in the world of ed reform before. In decades past, when a new reformy idea appeared, a large number of people looked at it like a big projection screen. College professors see an opportunity to plug in their favorite educational theory. Consultants see a chance to shift some of the language in their presentations and make some new money riding the coattails of the Big New Thing. Even classsroom teachers get to thinking, "Now I can finally do that unit with widgets and flying squirrels that I've always wanted to do."
And beyond the projection problem, each reformy blitz, by its top-down nature, has come with its own game of telephone. The folks at the top tell their underlings, who tell their middle managers, who tell the state ed department regional functionaries, who tell the principals, who tell department heads, and by the time we arrive at the classroom teacher, "Implement outcomes based education with clear performance standards" has become "Staple hedgehogs to waffles in the granulator."
CCSS has been prime for both of these factors. It is the top-downiest ed program ever, providing superior opportunity for garbling the message. And the messaging was so vague and so filled with puffery that many, many people simply heard, "Core blah blah blah CRITICAL THINKING blah blah blah blah AWESOMENESS blah blah blah QUALITY." But of course, everyone has a separate idea of what "awesome quality" looks like.
I am convinced that the vast majority of CCSS supporters have no idea what the standards actually say. In all fairness, that's also true of many opponents, but still, to really look at the CCSS is to realize they are the bad work of some unwise amateurs, so the bus runs only one way-- from Supporterville to Land of Disenchantment.
These supporters, whether they're rich content fans like Sol Stern, or "now I can teach thinky stuff" like Kathy Powers, or creative innovative teacher fans like Starr Sackstein, or more rigor for those darn kids (now where's my check) folks like the Fordham Institute gang-- what they see when they look at the Common Core is not actually there.
In earlier reforms, this kind of disunity of vision was not a big deal. Everyone went about his business, wrestling for his vision, and classroom teachers just sort of sorted it out. Nobody knew for sure what Outcomes Based Education meant, ever. There was no single controlling document to bind everyone to a single vision.
But the People In Charge saw this, and saw that it was Not Good. They wanted more uniformity, more control of the process, and so The Test. "You will teach to The Test," they said. "Or else."
So now The Test is the controlling document, and for the first time in reformy history, people are faced with an independent corroboration of what the True Face of Reform looks like. And all the people who had their own happy vision of what the imagined Common Core should be are freaking out.
"But-- but-- but that's not what I meant at all!" Like somebody discovering that their match.com date does NOT look like Brad Pitt, they are shocked. All the Sterns and the Powers and Sacksteins and Petrillis are exclaiming, "Well, there must be some mistake! This test is not at all what the Common Core Test is supposed to look like."
Sorry, folks. Yes. Yes, it is.
Granted, they're entitled to some of their shock. The PARCC, SBA, and various state knockoffs are deeply stunted. But you didn't really think we were going to get measures of collaboration or true close reading in there, did you? "Oh," cry the supporters of the imaginary CCSS in their heads, "but this isn't how I thought it would be at all. You are not my gentleman caller! There must be some mistake!"
And so they want to decouple, to delay, to rewrite, to pull pack, to somehow pry the test off the face of the imginary CCSS that they love so much, because this test, this ugly stupid miserable unfair invalid pointless data-mining child-abusing test is sucking the life out of their CCSS dreams!
I am past wanting a reality check for these folks. I cheer them on. I hope they do damage the test, pull it back, take it away. For one thing, it's doing serious damage as an assessment tool. For another, removing the tests hurts the CCSS.
See, I've come to realize I had it wrong. What I said was "You can't decouple the standards from the tests," but what I meant was, "You can't decouple the standards from the test without damaging both of them." So bring it on. Decouple away. Strip those tests and send them back to their cave. The tests, as deluded supporters of CCSS are learning, are the big ugly fangs of the CCSS regime. Pull the tests, and you pull the teeth. Let them attack the tests while believing they won't hurt the CCSS in the process. I welcome their assistance, witting or un.
Without the testing program, the CCSS are just a big bunch of not-really-enforceable suggestions about what to cover. Everyone would go back to pursuing their own personal imaginary version of what they mean, and in disorder there would be weakness, weak national standards yielding to de facto local standards. Without the testing teeth, the CCSS would be, in the words of the great philosopher Yukon Cornelius, a humble bumble.
We've seen this in the world of ed reform before. In decades past, when a new reformy idea appeared, a large number of people looked at it like a big projection screen. College professors see an opportunity to plug in their favorite educational theory. Consultants see a chance to shift some of the language in their presentations and make some new money riding the coattails of the Big New Thing. Even classsroom teachers get to thinking, "Now I can finally do that unit with widgets and flying squirrels that I've always wanted to do."
And beyond the projection problem, each reformy blitz, by its top-down nature, has come with its own game of telephone. The folks at the top tell their underlings, who tell their middle managers, who tell the state ed department regional functionaries, who tell the principals, who tell department heads, and by the time we arrive at the classroom teacher, "Implement outcomes based education with clear performance standards" has become "Staple hedgehogs to waffles in the granulator."
CCSS has been prime for both of these factors. It is the top-downiest ed program ever, providing superior opportunity for garbling the message. And the messaging was so vague and so filled with puffery that many, many people simply heard, "Core blah blah blah CRITICAL THINKING blah blah blah blah AWESOMENESS blah blah blah QUALITY." But of course, everyone has a separate idea of what "awesome quality" looks like.
I am convinced that the vast majority of CCSS supporters have no idea what the standards actually say. In all fairness, that's also true of many opponents, but still, to really look at the CCSS is to realize they are the bad work of some unwise amateurs, so the bus runs only one way-- from Supporterville to Land of Disenchantment.
These supporters, whether they're rich content fans like Sol Stern, or "now I can teach thinky stuff" like Kathy Powers, or creative innovative teacher fans like Starr Sackstein, or more rigor for those darn kids (now where's my check) folks like the Fordham Institute gang-- what they see when they look at the Common Core is not actually there.
In earlier reforms, this kind of disunity of vision was not a big deal. Everyone went about his business, wrestling for his vision, and classroom teachers just sort of sorted it out. Nobody knew for sure what Outcomes Based Education meant, ever. There was no single controlling document to bind everyone to a single vision.
But the People In Charge saw this, and saw that it was Not Good. They wanted more uniformity, more control of the process, and so The Test. "You will teach to The Test," they said. "Or else."
So now The Test is the controlling document, and for the first time in reformy history, people are faced with an independent corroboration of what the True Face of Reform looks like. And all the people who had their own happy vision of what the imagined Common Core should be are freaking out.
"But-- but-- but that's not what I meant at all!" Like somebody discovering that their match.com date does NOT look like Brad Pitt, they are shocked. All the Sterns and the Powers and Sacksteins and Petrillis are exclaiming, "Well, there must be some mistake! This test is not at all what the Common Core Test is supposed to look like."
Sorry, folks. Yes. Yes, it is.
Granted, they're entitled to some of their shock. The PARCC, SBA, and various state knockoffs are deeply stunted. But you didn't really think we were going to get measures of collaboration or true close reading in there, did you? "Oh," cry the supporters of the imaginary CCSS in their heads, "but this isn't how I thought it would be at all. You are not my gentleman caller! There must be some mistake!"
And so they want to decouple, to delay, to rewrite, to pull pack, to somehow pry the test off the face of the imginary CCSS that they love so much, because this test, this ugly stupid miserable unfair invalid pointless data-mining child-abusing test is sucking the life out of their CCSS dreams!
I am past wanting a reality check for these folks. I cheer them on. I hope they do damage the test, pull it back, take it away. For one thing, it's doing serious damage as an assessment tool. For another, removing the tests hurts the CCSS.
See, I've come to realize I had it wrong. What I said was "You can't decouple the standards from the tests," but what I meant was, "You can't decouple the standards from the test without damaging both of them." So bring it on. Decouple away. Strip those tests and send them back to their cave. The tests, as deluded supporters of CCSS are learning, are the big ugly fangs of the CCSS regime. Pull the tests, and you pull the teeth. Let them attack the tests while believing they won't hurt the CCSS in the process. I welcome their assistance, witting or un.
Without the testing program, the CCSS are just a big bunch of not-really-enforceable suggestions about what to cover. Everyone would go back to pursuing their own personal imaginary version of what they mean, and in disorder there would be weakness, weak national standards yielding to de facto local standards. Without the testing teeth, the CCSS would be, in the words of the great philosopher Yukon Cornelius, a humble bumble.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
A Mercedes Schneider Reader
When it comes to fired-up scholarship, passionate digging out of detail, and supplying simple facts for the Resistance, it is hard to beat Mercedes Schneider.
Schneider has one of the most varied backgrounds in the field. She started out as a classroom teacher of German and English, then acquired a PhD in applied statistics and research methods from the University of Northern Colorado and moved to Indiana to teach at Ball State. But there were curves yet to negotiate; Katrina hit her family head on. She decided to go home, and took a job teaching high school English in 2007. The university let her know that professors don't get to recover from that sort of step backwards. Writes Schneider, "But I love to teach. High school, I decided, would be fine with me."
When I started wading into the school reform swamp, I realized that many of the posts that I kept returning to for facts, data, numbers, details, context and sequence-- so many of them were on her blog. Schneider has a book coming out sometime this month, and I have no doubt that it will be valuable and necessary reading for everyone who cares about public education and what is happening to it. But until it arrives, I've collected some of my favorite Schneider pieces. If you are not a regular Schneider reader, you should be, and these are a fine place to start.
Schneider has one of the most varied backgrounds in the field. She started out as a classroom teacher of German and English, then acquired a PhD in applied statistics and research methods from the University of Northern Colorado and moved to Indiana to teach at Ball State. But there were curves yet to negotiate; Katrina hit her family head on. She decided to go home, and took a job teaching high school English in 2007. The university let her know that professors don't get to recover from that sort of step backwards. Writes Schneider, "But I love to teach. High school, I decided, would be fine with me."
When I started wading into the school reform swamp, I realized that many of the posts that I kept returning to for facts, data, numbers, details, context and sequence-- so many of them were on her blog. Schneider has a book coming out sometime this month, and I have no doubt that it will be valuable and necessary reading for everyone who cares about public education and what is happening to it. But until it arrives, I've collected some of my favorite Schneider pieces. If you are not a regular Schneider reader, you should be, and these are a fine place to start.
Cheating as We Worship: The Almighty Standardized Test
A personal but still fact-loaded reflection on the many ways in which the worship of The Test leads everybody involved to cheat in a variety of creative and not-always-obvious ways.Twelve Embarrassing Years of NCLB and RTTT: Time for Arne to Blame USDOE
Schneider examines the long list of people that Arne likes to blame for the alleged problems in education, from moms to teachers to lawmakers to-- well, you name it. And then she lays out exactly how each of those attempts to shift blame is a lie.Success Academy Tax Documents: Moskowitz Can Afford the Rent
Here's an example of what Schneider does so well. While everyone else was trading allegations and rhetoric about what Eva Moskowitz could or couldn't afford and her charters did or didn't need, Schneider went to the paperwork, dug through the publicly available tax records, and published the real numbers.NCTQ Letter Grades and the Reformer Agenda–Part VIII
After this piece had run, NCTQ removed Michelle Rhee from its board of directors, but this remains one of the best dissection of Rhee's dismal career, going back to her own stories about her failed attempt to be a TFA classroom body.The Common Core Memorandum of Understanding: What a Story
Still one of the most jaw-dropping narrative-destroying pieces of investigative journalism anyone has done about the genesis of the Common Core. Schneider unearth's the memorandum of understanding that lays out who will create them and how they will be implemented. This is your go-to link for every time someone tries to tell you that the Core are the result of a state-led initiative.Gates Money and Common Core– Part VI
I'll give you part six so you can work your way backward through the links to the other sections. Schneider has done massive amounts of work tracking the Gates money and discovering where it went. Who did Gates pay off? This series lays it out for you, thanks to what had to be long and tedious research.
More on the Common Core: Achieve, Inc., and Then Some
More on the core and the roots from which it emerged, with particular attention to Achieve as well as some of the principle architects.
Beware of Data Sharing Cheerleaders Offering Webinars
An example of the kind of respect and attention that Schneider draws in the education world. Come for this column, but stay for the comments in which the some of the top scholars and business leaders of the data mining world get into a spirited discussion of the issues at hand. You could pay for a fancy webinar and not see a discussion this exciting and illuminating.
There are plenty of other classics-- some great work on the data track miners and a whole cast of reformy characters whose names you may not know. Schneider employs her tireless research and her scathing wit on each. Read these, explore some more, and get ready to grab a copy of her book the moment it becomes available.
New Teacher Performance Testing
Today's Education Week includes a commentary from national representatives of school principals, school district administrators, and teacher-prep programs; these folks start out arguing for performance based assessment for new teachers, but then give limited endorsement of corporate baloney instead.
Their opening point is well-made; people looking to enter the teaching profession need real support and an evaluation that isn't stupid. That is not what we have now.
I've seen the effects of what we have now. I'm currently working with a student teacher, and she just took her Praxis exam, and I am struck once again by how much it resembles the standardized tests we inflict on students-- purposefully misleading and tricky, often skipping over the actual core knowledge that should be measured, and totally divorced from any authentic real-world task. I can't imagine that the current Praxis exam can predict future teacher success any better than tea leaves or phrenology.
NEA and AFT have both thrown their hats into the three-ring-circus of new teacher assessment, but the leading candidate for New Gateway To the Profession remains edTPA, a totally awesome teacher evaluation product from our good friends at Pearson and the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity.
The idea is to provide a common measure aligned with high standards (and boy, that has never ended badly before). Candidates are supposed to submit portfolios, lesson plans, videos of their teaching, and evidence of differentiation and assessment. Pearson does the administration of the exam and scoring.
So here is one more educational tool based on the assumption that the troops on the ground are dopes. Yes, we have to check with someone at Pearson in order to know whether or not the teacher right up the hall is any good. In place of old-school techniques such as "Watching her work" or "Talking to he," we have to find out what's up performance videos and long-form essays.
The authors represent a broad swatch of the field: JoAnn Bartoletti is the executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, in Reston, Va. Gail Connelly is the executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, in Alexandria, Va. Daniel A. Domenech is the executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, in Alexandria, Va. Sharon P. Robinson is the president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, in Washington. Their endorsement of edTPA and the desperate-catch-up play, Praxis Performance Assessment for Teachers, is tepid:
Our respective organizations welcome such preservice performance assessments as long as they reflect input from the field, meet rigorous standards of validity and reliability, and support research-based instructional practice. We look forward to helping shape and improve these and other performance-based assessments as they evolve.
Both their endorsement and their tepidness. edTPA strikes me as a terrible approach, but not as bad as the one we have now. So, perhaps, baby steps. And the authors nail the crux of the problem pretty well:
As educators, we can’t control what Congress, state education agencies, or school boards ask us to do. But we can control what it means and what it takes to be a new teacher.
Doctors, lawyers, nurses, physical therapists-- they all exercise considerable control over the entry to their profession. Teachers-- not so much. It would be nice to change that.
Good teachers know how to spot other good teachers. They ask the right questions. They worry about the right things. They have an understanding of their students. Content knowledge is nice to have going in, but it's always an easy weaknesses to fix, whereas it's hard to teach someone how to interact with other human life forms. When you have a long conversation with them, you get a sense that they have an appropriate professional focus, not just a desire to "play teacher" or be the smartest kid in the room. They can see or sense the connection between what to teach, how to teach it, how to tell if you taught it. They read students well. And they have to actually care. Difficult to measure on an assessment.
New teachers tend to follow the 10-80-10 rule. 10% will be awesome no matter what. 10% will be unsalvageable no matter what. 80% will become great or mediocre or awful depending on what kind of support and assistance they get through their first several years. Almost nobody arrives in a classroom at age twenty-two fully formed, completely prepared, and totally able to rock the education biz. Guarding the gateway is not nearly as important as fully supporting the people who get in, figuring out what they need, who they are, how they can best grow into a good teacher.
None of this is well-done by people who aren't there. A new teacher assessment tool can provide some small pieces of information, but just like a PARCC or SBA test, an edTPA is just a small slice of a much larger picture.
Yes, there is a lot of work ahead, but, while not everyone agrees on the right assessment or combination of assessments, we see enough momentum to be encouraged. We are joining as one voice to help accelerate this movement and to make sure it holds up. At the same time, we will be vigilant to ensure that this work is done well, that institutions have the time they need to prepare, and that P-12 educators are involved as collaborators along the way.
I agree. Pearson and Stanford cannot really help us, and the less control over this process they have, the better.
Their opening point is well-made; people looking to enter the teaching profession need real support and an evaluation that isn't stupid. That is not what we have now.
I've seen the effects of what we have now. I'm currently working with a student teacher, and she just took her Praxis exam, and I am struck once again by how much it resembles the standardized tests we inflict on students-- purposefully misleading and tricky, often skipping over the actual core knowledge that should be measured, and totally divorced from any authentic real-world task. I can't imagine that the current Praxis exam can predict future teacher success any better than tea leaves or phrenology.
NEA and AFT have both thrown their hats into the three-ring-circus of new teacher assessment, but the leading candidate for New Gateway To the Profession remains edTPA, a totally awesome teacher evaluation product from our good friends at Pearson and the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity.
The idea is to provide a common measure aligned with high standards (and boy, that has never ended badly before). Candidates are supposed to submit portfolios, lesson plans, videos of their teaching, and evidence of differentiation and assessment. Pearson does the administration of the exam and scoring.
So here is one more educational tool based on the assumption that the troops on the ground are dopes. Yes, we have to check with someone at Pearson in order to know whether or not the teacher right up the hall is any good. In place of old-school techniques such as "Watching her work" or "Talking to he," we have to find out what's up performance videos and long-form essays.
The authors represent a broad swatch of the field: JoAnn Bartoletti is the executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, in Reston, Va. Gail Connelly is the executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, in Alexandria, Va. Daniel A. Domenech is the executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, in Alexandria, Va. Sharon P. Robinson is the president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, in Washington. Their endorsement of edTPA and the desperate-catch-up play, Praxis Performance Assessment for Teachers, is tepid:
Our respective organizations welcome such preservice performance assessments as long as they reflect input from the field, meet rigorous standards of validity and reliability, and support research-based instructional practice. We look forward to helping shape and improve these and other performance-based assessments as they evolve.
Both their endorsement and their tepidness. edTPA strikes me as a terrible approach, but not as bad as the one we have now. So, perhaps, baby steps. And the authors nail the crux of the problem pretty well:
As educators, we can’t control what Congress, state education agencies, or school boards ask us to do. But we can control what it means and what it takes to be a new teacher.
Doctors, lawyers, nurses, physical therapists-- they all exercise considerable control over the entry to their profession. Teachers-- not so much. It would be nice to change that.
Good teachers know how to spot other good teachers. They ask the right questions. They worry about the right things. They have an understanding of their students. Content knowledge is nice to have going in, but it's always an easy weaknesses to fix, whereas it's hard to teach someone how to interact with other human life forms. When you have a long conversation with them, you get a sense that they have an appropriate professional focus, not just a desire to "play teacher" or be the smartest kid in the room. They can see or sense the connection between what to teach, how to teach it, how to tell if you taught it. They read students well. And they have to actually care. Difficult to measure on an assessment.
New teachers tend to follow the 10-80-10 rule. 10% will be awesome no matter what. 10% will be unsalvageable no matter what. 80% will become great or mediocre or awful depending on what kind of support and assistance they get through their first several years. Almost nobody arrives in a classroom at age twenty-two fully formed, completely prepared, and totally able to rock the education biz. Guarding the gateway is not nearly as important as fully supporting the people who get in, figuring out what they need, who they are, how they can best grow into a good teacher.
None of this is well-done by people who aren't there. A new teacher assessment tool can provide some small pieces of information, but just like a PARCC or SBA test, an edTPA is just a small slice of a much larger picture.
Yes, there is a lot of work ahead, but, while not everyone agrees on the right assessment or combination of assessments, we see enough momentum to be encouraged. We are joining as one voice to help accelerate this movement and to make sure it holds up. At the same time, we will be vigilant to ensure that this work is done well, that institutions have the time they need to prepare, and that P-12 educators are involved as collaborators along the way.
I agree. Pearson and Stanford cannot really help us, and the less control over this process they have, the better.
Parents and Tenure
As battles over tenure across the country heat up, teachers will keep encountering parents who are in favor of ending job protections for teachers.
We teachers have our favorite pro-tenure arguments, the long list of bad reasons that teachers in non-tenure districts lose their jobs. But those arguments are most compelling to us. They speak to our professional concerns. What can we say to parents that means something to them? I have a suggestion.
Tell the parent to imagine one of the following situations:
You have to drop your child off early on a wintry morning, and the doors are locked. You'll have to leave them there, freezing and alone outdoors, but you can see the child's teacher just inside the door. Could she please let your child in just this once?
Your child is being bullied by one of the children of a powerful local figure, maybe even a school board member. You've thought about calling the principal, but you're afraid it won't help. Could your child's teacher please intervene to protect your child?
Your child has been through a tremendous personal loss-- maybe the death of a family member-- and she's not coping well. You know your child's teacher has suffered grief as well. Could she perhaps spend a few extra moments counseling your child through this personal crisis?
School officials are picking on your child, forcing your child to deal with educational demands that are just too tough and wrong. They've decided that your kid needs to be toughened up, so they are riding him hard. Could your child's teacher step in to take some of the heat off?
Your child's teacher is using materials that only make your child confused, frustrated and depressed about school. You know this material is bad for your child, and you also know that the teacher didn't support choosing it. Could the teacher please find a way to use the material less, or at least lessen its impact?
And then tell the parent to imagine that the only answer they can get for these or similar problems is this:
I'm sorry. I'd like to help your child. But I could lose my job.
Tell me again why getting rid of tenure and due process will make schools better.
We teachers have our favorite pro-tenure arguments, the long list of bad reasons that teachers in non-tenure districts lose their jobs. But those arguments are most compelling to us. They speak to our professional concerns. What can we say to parents that means something to them? I have a suggestion.
Tell the parent to imagine one of the following situations:
You have to drop your child off early on a wintry morning, and the doors are locked. You'll have to leave them there, freezing and alone outdoors, but you can see the child's teacher just inside the door. Could she please let your child in just this once?
Your child is being bullied by one of the children of a powerful local figure, maybe even a school board member. You've thought about calling the principal, but you're afraid it won't help. Could your child's teacher please intervene to protect your child?
Your child has been through a tremendous personal loss-- maybe the death of a family member-- and she's not coping well. You know your child's teacher has suffered grief as well. Could she perhaps spend a few extra moments counseling your child through this personal crisis?
School officials are picking on your child, forcing your child to deal with educational demands that are just too tough and wrong. They've decided that your kid needs to be toughened up, so they are riding him hard. Could your child's teacher step in to take some of the heat off?
Your child's teacher is using materials that only make your child confused, frustrated and depressed about school. You know this material is bad for your child, and you also know that the teacher didn't support choosing it. Could the teacher please find a way to use the material less, or at least lessen its impact?
And then tell the parent to imagine that the only answer they can get for these or similar problems is this:
I'm sorry. I'd like to help your child. But I could lose my job.
Tell me again why getting rid of tenure and due process will make schools better.
#AskArne- Student Data & Test Edition
Yes, dear readers, the Department of Education continues to crank out youtube videos in which Arne Duncan is fake-interviewed about an educational issue. The newest clip presents a Teach to Lead update, a shady tale of data privacy, and some huge whoppers about the testing going on. I have included the link, but it's really only as corroboration; it's in your blood pressure's best interests not to click. (If you're thinking, "Well, how bad could it be, read my summary of a previous #AskArne.)
So let's see how long it takes this video to invoke some sort of incredible fiction and --oops, look. We're at the four-second mark and I'm looking at a screen that tells me that this video from March (youtube release date April 7-- so either a little long in production or somebody sees these before the crucial youtube demographic) is subtitled "Questions from Teachers." I've seen the questions that get tweeted under the #AskArne hashtag, and I would find a video in which Arne responded to those questions pretty special, but I'm pretty sure that's not what we're getting here.
The teachers who hosted our January outing are no longer here, and that might be an improvement, so like every rooster who thinks he makes the sun rise and every activist who thinks his squawking just made The Man change, I'm going to take credit for every change USDOE has made since I first vented my spleen all over them.
Anyway, our new hostess is Emily Davis, a Teaching Ambassadors Fellow at the USDOE. She is sitting at a table in a library talking to Arne. She thanks him for taking the time to sit down for this video shoot that he scheduled to talk about student data privacy, and he is nodding like, "Yes, yes, that's right, good job."
But first-- a commercial. Emily knows it's early to talk about the new Teach to Lead Initiative that he announced at the National Board convening last week, and I'm thinking, why, exactly is it early? After you announce a new program, would you not want to be able to talk about it? After all these years, I've come to believe that the Duncan DOE specializes in rough drafts, but nobody ever fills in the details. So I'll believe that Teach to Lead actually has a plan when I see it. Anyway, we can't talk about that yet, but she's really hoping he'll talk about it and -- flick go her eyes back to left-of-screen. This eye-flick will be repeated throughout the video and I can only conclude that just stage-right of the camera is either A) a toddler playing with a chain saw or B) Emily's script. She doesn't look quite afraid enough for the toddler theory, so I'm going to go with "working from some sort of prompter."
Anyway, Arne will absolutely talk about Lead to Teach the next time he schedules her to do one of these things. "I was thrilled with that," he says. "It was an extraordinary group of teachers... some of the best teachers in the country." And I guess we've conflated the program and the announcement. Maybe the program WAS the announcement, and now it's over. "The energy behind these hybrid roles of teachers, wanting more responsibility, wanting the chance to do more, but not have to leave the classroom and leave what they love most and do best," says Arne, and I am thinking that lots of teachers would be happy to get back the responsibility and autonomy they had before CCSS started chaining them up. "We have to make this real across the country and again, I think teachers are going to help lead us where we need to go," says Arne, and while I'm not sure what "this" is, exactly, I'm pretty sure that the USDOE's proven track record of ignoring, belittling, dismissing and disregarding teachers makes a joke out of this promise. And now he refers to the speech at the National Board as a "launch," so I'm back to wondering why we can't talk about the details because surely we didn't launch a detail-free rough draft?
Emily is excited, and then pivots awkwardly-- flick-- to the real topic-- student data privacy and the FY15 budget. The budget includes a 200 million dollar ConnectEDucators program (Emily just plain has to stare her notes in the face for this one). "What is this program and why is it so important," asks Emily, and I guess she looked away from the prompter before she could read "ask many teachers."
"This to me is absolute common sense," replies Arne. "Every teacher is looking for more technology." [insert gif of Stewart leaning in to say "Do tell!"] Teachers want time and resources and more PD and tech is changing learning and teaching and "what students are learning not just during the school day but at home" and didn't THAT just send a little chill down your spine? Anyway, we need significant resources and so we need the help of Congress to approve the budget (this would be another major theme of this video). With that, we can get to 40,000 educators and a couple hundred school districts. It will "really help empower teachers to take their craft to an entirely different level."
Emily says, "Oh yeah, that's me. I use technology every day. I'm constantly downloading apps." (Yes, I too, like the young people, am always downloading the apps and playing on the twitter as I listen to the rap music.) But you know, one of the challenges she faces is trying to stay current with the pace of innovation and still balance it with-- flick-- protecting student privacy. Two minutes in and still waiting for a teacher question.
Arne replies that tech changes at "warp speed" and is only going to get warp speedier, so it's hard to stay abreast of it. But as we move excitedly forward, we cannot compromise on student privacy. "That has to be first. That has to be foremost. That's absolutely paramount." I was going to say actually educating the students was paramount, but I'll give him this one.
But at the same time, it's important to give teachers data, to think about not teaching-- oh, I give up. This rambly mess of a sentence either was botched by the captioners or Arne needs to borrow Emily's teleprompter. Eventually we come out the other side and arrive at what I think is his point-- we need lots of data in order to individualize instruction. Plus real time feedback for children and parents.
So we have laws on the books and we have set up a technical assistance center (really? where? for what??) but it's all changing so fast that we have to keep thinking, and it strikes me at this point that Arne has been very serious for this "chat" without any of the smirkiness that I noted last time, and I'm going to go ahead and take credit for that, too.
Anyway, because things change quickly, government at all levels will have to keep thinking (do tell) and we will all have to be very public and transparent in these ongoing conversations, and of course we are all thinking that transparency has been one of the hallmarks of ed reforminess over the past decade.
Emily says that one of the conversations she keeps hearing -- fliiiiiiiick-- in the field is that districts are releasing their student data to third parties, possibly for advertising. She wonders what Arne's thought are on that. Don't we all. And here comes your first huge spit take of the day, because here's what Arne has to say:
Well first and foremost, children's data can never be a commodity
I want to see the blooper reel for this. I want to know how many tries it took him to say that with a straight face.
He goes on to say that the info can be used by teachers to improve instruction, but it should not be sold to a third party-- and we are going to hammer versions of that phrase "not be sold to a third party" a few times. And whenever a political figure who specializes in broad generalities (like say, the Teach to Lead programmish thingy) starts using very specific language, my spidey-sense starts tingling. I'm thinking that if, for instance, we've redefined data collectors as part of the school system (hello, new FERPA), and we don't actually sell them the data, then we've totally kept this very specific promise. Just saying.
Remember-- FERPA was rewritten so that parents could not withhold information about their children in the first place. inBloom was run out of every state on a rail specifically because folks like Leonie Haimson repeatedly demonstrated that the system was already set up to feed data directly to inBloom, and that inBloom wasn't going to make promises about anything, including their ability to resist hacking. Saying "we'll never sell it to those guys because we already let them walk off with it for free," is no reassurance. Saying, "We won't let them sell raw, but only as part of a product they create with it" is no assurance of privacy at all.
When your brother-in-law asks for a set of your car keys, and you say, "Will you keep it safe and never use it except with permission?" you are not looking for an answer like, "Welllll, I'll never rent it to anybody." You know what the easiest way to keep student data private safe is-- keep it completely under the control of parents.
Anyway, there is a website about privacy and a Chief Privacy Officer named Kathleen Styles who is working on this all day every single day, so congrats Kathleen Styles on your new title and so sorry that you have to work weekends.
Arne is a parent, you know, and has children, and the last thing they want is their children's data being sold to someone. So no giving data to people to sell. No selling. Selling data bad. I think we get it, Arne. Districts need to get information, stay current, maintain the trust of parents and public.
Another conversation that Emily is hearing in the field is --flick-- we're in the assessment season-- flick-- field tests are out there linked to college and career ready standards (and somewhere Common Core weeps in its beer and cries, "Why? Wasn't I good to you? And now you never call, and when we run into each other you won't even look me in the eye! Why, Arne, why??!!"). Anyway, Emily says, do you think schools have the technological capacity to administer these exams? Because, yeah, of all the issues associated with The Test, tech preparedness is the biggest.
And here comes Arne's giant whopper of the day, a pack of lies so phenomenally huge that-- he can't do it, he can't keep that poker face one more second and here comes the Arne "I Can't Believe The Bullshit Coming Out of My Mouth" Duncan liar's smile (just like the one on the face of all those baby daddies on Maury).
The field test is just a dry run. And this next line is a quote and I swear to God he actually says this:
There are no stakes attached to them.
"They are testing the technology. They are testing the test. Some items are going to make sense, some items won't'"-- because, you know, adult professional test writers can't tell if something they've written makes sense or not until they show it to eight year olds!!-- and there will be technological glitches. Arne thinks it's important that teachers and principals speak out about the challenges and then we'll have a year to fix things. He keeps saying that if people say the tests are going perfectly, they're lying, and I agree that there's a great deal of lying going on about the tests somewhere. But Arne expects them to be rocky. He expects it!! He wants the bumps! He cherishes the bumps! But wait-- he's not done saying ridiculous things yet.
These tests are going to, I think, start to be the end of the fill in the bubble tests.
Certainly. Because clicking on the correct multiple choice answer is totally different from bubbling in the correct multiple choice answer. It's a whole new world, a whole new bubble-free world. Nope-- adding a computer automatically gets you critical thinking skills. It will be a rocky transition, but we are on our way to the promised land.
Emily is refreshed to hear that Arne loves the bumps and that he's willing to work-- flick-- these things out. And she's looking forward to our next conversation and --Hey!! What happened to the questions from teachers??!!
And Arne wraps up with a reminder that Congress should approve the budget so he has the monies to do swell things. And he thanks Emily for giving him the opportunity to help her follow her instructions from his office. And feel free to send your questions to #AskArne so that they can be not included in the next video.
So let's see how long it takes this video to invoke some sort of incredible fiction and --oops, look. We're at the four-second mark and I'm looking at a screen that tells me that this video from March (youtube release date April 7-- so either a little long in production or somebody sees these before the crucial youtube demographic) is subtitled "Questions from Teachers." I've seen the questions that get tweeted under the #AskArne hashtag, and I would find a video in which Arne responded to those questions pretty special, but I'm pretty sure that's not what we're getting here.
The teachers who hosted our January outing are no longer here, and that might be an improvement, so like every rooster who thinks he makes the sun rise and every activist who thinks his squawking just made The Man change, I'm going to take credit for every change USDOE has made since I first vented my spleen all over them.
Anyway, our new hostess is Emily Davis, a Teaching Ambassadors Fellow at the USDOE. She is sitting at a table in a library talking to Arne. She thanks him for taking the time to sit down for this video shoot that he scheduled to talk about student data privacy, and he is nodding like, "Yes, yes, that's right, good job."
But first-- a commercial. Emily knows it's early to talk about the new Teach to Lead Initiative that he announced at the National Board convening last week, and I'm thinking, why, exactly is it early? After you announce a new program, would you not want to be able to talk about it? After all these years, I've come to believe that the Duncan DOE specializes in rough drafts, but nobody ever fills in the details. So I'll believe that Teach to Lead actually has a plan when I see it. Anyway, we can't talk about that yet, but she's really hoping he'll talk about it and -- flick go her eyes back to left-of-screen. This eye-flick will be repeated throughout the video and I can only conclude that just stage-right of the camera is either A) a toddler playing with a chain saw or B) Emily's script. She doesn't look quite afraid enough for the toddler theory, so I'm going to go with "working from some sort of prompter."
Anyway, Arne will absolutely talk about Lead to Teach the next time he schedules her to do one of these things. "I was thrilled with that," he says. "It was an extraordinary group of teachers... some of the best teachers in the country." And I guess we've conflated the program and the announcement. Maybe the program WAS the announcement, and now it's over. "The energy behind these hybrid roles of teachers, wanting more responsibility, wanting the chance to do more, but not have to leave the classroom and leave what they love most and do best," says Arne, and I am thinking that lots of teachers would be happy to get back the responsibility and autonomy they had before CCSS started chaining them up. "We have to make this real across the country and again, I think teachers are going to help lead us where we need to go," says Arne, and while I'm not sure what "this" is, exactly, I'm pretty sure that the USDOE's proven track record of ignoring, belittling, dismissing and disregarding teachers makes a joke out of this promise. And now he refers to the speech at the National Board as a "launch," so I'm back to wondering why we can't talk about the details because surely we didn't launch a detail-free rough draft?
Emily is excited, and then pivots awkwardly-- flick-- to the real topic-- student data privacy and the FY15 budget. The budget includes a 200 million dollar ConnectEDucators program (Emily just plain has to stare her notes in the face for this one). "What is this program and why is it so important," asks Emily, and I guess she looked away from the prompter before she could read "ask many teachers."
"This to me is absolute common sense," replies Arne. "Every teacher is looking for more technology." [insert gif of Stewart leaning in to say "Do tell!"] Teachers want time and resources and more PD and tech is changing learning and teaching and "what students are learning not just during the school day but at home" and didn't THAT just send a little chill down your spine? Anyway, we need significant resources and so we need the help of Congress to approve the budget (this would be another major theme of this video). With that, we can get to 40,000 educators and a couple hundred school districts. It will "really help empower teachers to take their craft to an entirely different level."
Emily says, "Oh yeah, that's me. I use technology every day. I'm constantly downloading apps." (Yes, I too, like the young people, am always downloading the apps and playing on the twitter as I listen to the rap music.) But you know, one of the challenges she faces is trying to stay current with the pace of innovation and still balance it with-- flick-- protecting student privacy. Two minutes in and still waiting for a teacher question.
Arne replies that tech changes at "warp speed" and is only going to get warp speedier, so it's hard to stay abreast of it. But as we move excitedly forward, we cannot compromise on student privacy. "That has to be first. That has to be foremost. That's absolutely paramount." I was going to say actually educating the students was paramount, but I'll give him this one.
But at the same time, it's important to give teachers data, to think about not teaching-- oh, I give up. This rambly mess of a sentence either was botched by the captioners or Arne needs to borrow Emily's teleprompter. Eventually we come out the other side and arrive at what I think is his point-- we need lots of data in order to individualize instruction. Plus real time feedback for children and parents.
So we have laws on the books and we have set up a technical assistance center (really? where? for what??) but it's all changing so fast that we have to keep thinking, and it strikes me at this point that Arne has been very serious for this "chat" without any of the smirkiness that I noted last time, and I'm going to go ahead and take credit for that, too.
Anyway, because things change quickly, government at all levels will have to keep thinking (do tell) and we will all have to be very public and transparent in these ongoing conversations, and of course we are all thinking that transparency has been one of the hallmarks of ed reforminess over the past decade.
Emily says that one of the conversations she keeps hearing -- fliiiiiiiick-- in the field is that districts are releasing their student data to third parties, possibly for advertising. She wonders what Arne's thought are on that. Don't we all. And here comes your first huge spit take of the day, because here's what Arne has to say:
Well first and foremost, children's data can never be a commodity
I want to see the blooper reel for this. I want to know how many tries it took him to say that with a straight face.
He goes on to say that the info can be used by teachers to improve instruction, but it should not be sold to a third party-- and we are going to hammer versions of that phrase "not be sold to a third party" a few times. And whenever a political figure who specializes in broad generalities (like say, the Teach to Lead programmish thingy) starts using very specific language, my spidey-sense starts tingling. I'm thinking that if, for instance, we've redefined data collectors as part of the school system (hello, new FERPA), and we don't actually sell them the data, then we've totally kept this very specific promise. Just saying.
Remember-- FERPA was rewritten so that parents could not withhold information about their children in the first place. inBloom was run out of every state on a rail specifically because folks like Leonie Haimson repeatedly demonstrated that the system was already set up to feed data directly to inBloom, and that inBloom wasn't going to make promises about anything, including their ability to resist hacking. Saying "we'll never sell it to those guys because we already let them walk off with it for free," is no reassurance. Saying, "We won't let them sell raw, but only as part of a product they create with it" is no assurance of privacy at all.
When your brother-in-law asks for a set of your car keys, and you say, "Will you keep it safe and never use it except with permission?" you are not looking for an answer like, "Welllll, I'll never rent it to anybody." You know what the easiest way to keep student data private safe is-- keep it completely under the control of parents.
Anyway, there is a website about privacy and a Chief Privacy Officer named Kathleen Styles who is working on this all day every single day, so congrats Kathleen Styles on your new title and so sorry that you have to work weekends.
Arne is a parent, you know, and has children, and the last thing they want is their children's data being sold to someone. So no giving data to people to sell. No selling. Selling data bad. I think we get it, Arne. Districts need to get information, stay current, maintain the trust of parents and public.
Another conversation that Emily is hearing in the field is --flick-- we're in the assessment season-- flick-- field tests are out there linked to college and career ready standards (and somewhere Common Core weeps in its beer and cries, "Why? Wasn't I good to you? And now you never call, and when we run into each other you won't even look me in the eye! Why, Arne, why??!!"). Anyway, Emily says, do you think schools have the technological capacity to administer these exams? Because, yeah, of all the issues associated with The Test, tech preparedness is the biggest.
And here comes Arne's giant whopper of the day, a pack of lies so phenomenally huge that-- he can't do it, he can't keep that poker face one more second and here comes the Arne "I Can't Believe The Bullshit Coming Out of My Mouth" Duncan liar's smile (just like the one on the face of all those baby daddies on Maury).
The field test is just a dry run. And this next line is a quote and I swear to God he actually says this:
There are no stakes attached to them.
"They are testing the technology. They are testing the test. Some items are going to make sense, some items won't'"-- because, you know, adult professional test writers can't tell if something they've written makes sense or not until they show it to eight year olds!!-- and there will be technological glitches. Arne thinks it's important that teachers and principals speak out about the challenges and then we'll have a year to fix things. He keeps saying that if people say the tests are going perfectly, they're lying, and I agree that there's a great deal of lying going on about the tests somewhere. But Arne expects them to be rocky. He expects it!! He wants the bumps! He cherishes the bumps! But wait-- he's not done saying ridiculous things yet.
These tests are going to, I think, start to be the end of the fill in the bubble tests.
Certainly. Because clicking on the correct multiple choice answer is totally different from bubbling in the correct multiple choice answer. It's a whole new world, a whole new bubble-free world. Nope-- adding a computer automatically gets you critical thinking skills. It will be a rocky transition, but we are on our way to the promised land.
Emily is refreshed to hear that Arne loves the bumps and that he's willing to work-- flick-- these things out. And she's looking forward to our next conversation and --Hey!! What happened to the questions from teachers??!!
And Arne wraps up with a reminder that Congress should approve the budget so he has the monies to do swell things. And he thanks Emily for giving him the opportunity to help her follow her instructions from his office. And feel free to send your questions to #AskArne so that they can be not included in the next video.
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