Nobody can accuse the Daily Beast of being unclear about its position. "The Incredibly Stupid War on the Common Core" says the headline, followed by the subheading, "An unholy alliance between the Tea Party and the teachers' unions threatens to derail the most promising education reform in decades." So right off the bat, we know where Charles Upton Sahm is headed (though it should be noted that writers rarely get to write their own headlines).
The lead graph compares CCSS to Rocky being pummeled in the early rounds, then quotes Diane Ravitch, the Heritage Foundation, and Glenn Beck. Sahm then goes on to catelog the CCSS setbacks, from Bobby Jindal's backpedaling to Andy Cuomo's blasting of the implementation and creation of a review panel and Indiana (and others) pulling out of the standards. It's an odd list, counting as it does several moves that were about the cosmetics of political theater and not actual changes in position. Does Sahm think the Cuomo review panel was a Real Thing. Surely he didn't miss their findings ("It's all good!"). And it doesn't take much research to note that in many states, nothing has changed about Common Core except the name on the label.
This is a new type of spin. From bluster and confidence ("momentary, meaningless setbacks or no consequence") we've moved to playing the underdog ("boy, we are really on the ropes now"). What's the play here? Are we trying to get CCSS opponents to put up their gloves and go home for a victory celebration? Or are we trying to win the sympathy of the crowd so that they'll shower their support on poor beleagured Rocky "Common Core" Balboa?
Sahm also mentions the AFT and NEA, once enthusiastic supporters, are now distancing themselves, notes the NYSUT bailed, but he parenthetically chalks this up to concerns over the "new, more difficult tests."
This is worth noting because these days The Test never leaves the house without "more difficult" by its side. The implication is always that these new tests are more difficult, more challenging and that's why they bother people. "More difficult" is a useful weasel phrase because everybody assumes that it's a legitimate "more difficult." It's more difficult to go into the boxing ring against an opponent who's bigger and stronger than you are. Of course, it's also more difficult to go into the boxing ring with ferrets crazy-glued to your eyebrows and a dozen angry hamsters in your shorts, but people don't think along those lines because we wouldn't actually describe the ferret-and-hamster option as "more difficult" but would instead call it "crazy unreasonable stupid." By constantly describing the new tests as more difficult, writers keep directing peoples' attention away from the ferrets and hamsters.
Sahm says that "unfortunately" the debate about the Core is more about politics than education. Well, duh. The Core has been more about politics than education from day one. Why would today be any different. If the Core were about education, the conversation about it would have included educators. But it was created by politicians and businessmen for politicians and businessmen. Honest to Stallone, Charles-- teachers have been trying to make the debate about education for several years now, but nobody in power seems to want to do that.
And we go straight from unfortunately politics to Peggy Noonan handicapping Jeb Bush because he has stapled his Presidential hopes to CCSS.
"So what's all this hysteria about?" asks Sahm, and, wow, buddy, I see what you did there. "Hysteria" from the Latin "crazy-ass women with their silly vaginas and not-too-strong thinky parts be getting all worked up over some stupid thing that smart penissy men know better than to emote over."
Sahm does a quick recap of the Standard Issue History of CCSS, starting with "A Nation at Risk" and moving through the governors getting "curriculum experts" and as always I'm amazed at these folks who are unfamiliar with how the internet works. So click here to watch David Coleman explain that the Core was written by a "collection of unqualified people." So, not curriculum experts. (Also-- why do we need curriculum experts to create something that isn't a curriculum?)
This is also the CCSS story that notes retrospectively that President Obama's support in 2009 was a Bad Thing that created a political liability with people on the Right. This part of the narrative is intriguing; I am wondering how, in a non-federalized CCSS alternate universe, the CCSS ever is adopted. First, in that universe, what mysterious force makes the corporate backers/writers of the Core sit back and say, "Yeah, we probably shouldn't use every tool at our disposal to get every state to adopt these. If just a few adopt them, that will be good enough for us." Second, in that universe, why do states adopt the CCSS? I mean-- who would be selling it? Who would be going state to state saying, "Yes, it will make your schools awesome and only cost you a gazillion dollars to implement, and it's totally voluntary!"
CCSS supporters can complain about the damage done to their cause by federal push for CCSS adoption, but without that federal bribery (RTTT) and extortion (NCLB waivers), CCSS would be sitting in a dusty binder somewhere. This is why it's a political debate, Charles-- because it was politically created and politically pushed into states. CCSS has depended on political power for every breath it has taken in its short, wasteful life.
Sahm goes on to tell us what the standards are supposed to do in math and English (he does not bother to say how we know that the standards will accomplish these things, but it's a short article). He points out that they are not a national curriculum, just an outline of what students should learn. So, totally different things. And he grabs the low-hanging fruit of debunking the complaint about non-fiction vs. fiction.
Overall, some claim that the standards are too weak; some argue that
they are too rigorous, especially in the early grades. But the Common
Core is intended as a floor, not a ceiling. They represent a benchmark
for what an average, well-educated student on track for college should
know. Even critics agree that, in most cases, the Common Core is an
improvement over the weak and haphazard state standards they are
replacing. Some states are now tweaking the standards and dumping the
“Common Core” label. This is fine. The important thing is that for the
first time in decades states are taking a serious look at content and
curriculum.
What a paragraph!! People can't even agree on whether the standards are too hard or too easy-- those dopes! The CCSS is a floor for what every average student on track for college should learn, and watch Sahm just sail straight past the assumption that every single student in this country should be prepared for college, or that where you have an average student, you must also have a below-average student. Because every student here in Lake Woebegone should be getting ready for college. Some critics agree that the CCSS is better than old standards, and I guess Sahm wore out his googler finding those quotes for the lead paragraph, so here we'll just have to take his word for it. He admits that some states are monkeying around with the CCSS (why no mention of the copyright, Charles?), and says it's great that we're at least talking about content and curriculum, which is odd because I hear that even some supporters of the Common Core agree that it's not actually a curriculum.
He deploys the current talking point about how implementation is rocky and that's totally expectable and no reason to get all wigged out, and that whether the CCSS work or not will totally be up to the states' implementations.
For the finish, lets' quote David Brooks' lamebrained NYT piece and insist that people who don't love the Core are misinformed and opposing a perfectly sensible program because of hysterical-- oh, that word again. Let's throw in an appeal to the sensible center, and return to our Rocky image of the Core being battered and bruised but still game.
You know what everybody always forgets about the first Rocky movie? At the end of the big climactic boxing match, Rocky loses.
Monday, April 21, 2014
Why Are Teachers So Quiet?
Some recent comments on this blog took teachers to task. A parent activist noted her own work against the current reformy regime and then added "and teachers as a profession and individually refused/refuse to step up
and do their share of push back - paychecks were/are more important than
the principles at stake and our children's wellbeing."
Recently, Susan Ohanian, a respected voice in education who was ringing the public ed fire alarm years before most folks even smelled smoke, expressed frustration that a White House petition calling for the removal of high stakes testing from current ed policies was sitting and languishing. All these vocal teachers raging about the state of education, and the petition barely creaked its way to 5000 signatures (yes, I signed).
The Bad Ass Teachers are excited about having 44,000 members. It's unclear how many of those are actually teachers; it's also unclear how many of those actually take part in BAT actions. There's no question that the group makes a noise and is vastly preferable to the silence within the teaching world just a year ago, but one has to wonder, given the state of education these days, why there are only 44,000 BATs.
Why are teachers so quiet? I can think of a couple of explanations.
Some are worried about their paychecks. Teachers have mortgage payments and children who like to eat food and wear clothes and all the other sorts of responsibilities that folks have in the real world, and in many corners of the country, they can lose all that on an administrator's whim. Not everybody has the stamina to risk raising their family in a car on a matter of principle.
The fear of losing a job isn't just about the paycheck. Keeping your job also means keeping your relationship with your students, staying to do as much for them as you are able. In some areas, sure, you could stand on the front steps of the school and refuse to administer the PARCC-- but the only result will be that you'll be replaced by somebody who will administer the test. It's not just that taking a big stand is scary-- in some settings it's also ineffective. This is a difficult calculation to make; I wouldn't want to have to make it, and I'm glad that I don't have to. Which brings us to another factor.
For all the reading and writing I do about the public ed issues of the day, I personally don't have it bad at all. I work in a decent district for good bosses. If I were not paying much attention to what's going on in the rest of education world, I might conclude, based on my own immediate experience, that things were bad, but not all that bad. Many teachers have reached that conclusion.
Teachers are generally Good Boys and Girls. This one drives me crazy, but I remember my own slow change from well-behaved good boy to cranky PITA. Teachers believe in rules. Teachers believe that when the Person In Charge says "Jump," you should jump (and not say "how high" because that's just being sassy). If our administrators or union chiefs tell us to follow these instructions, we follow just as obediently as we would expect our students to follow us. Teachers do not want to Get In Trouble.
Teachers are disproportionately conflict-averse. Everyone who's ever worked with a union knows this-- for every one teacher who will holler and fight and rant in a strategy meeting, there are ten who will quietly see you after the meeting to say that they understand why everyone is so upset, but couldn't we just be nicer about the whole business? These teachers are certain that any time somebody gets too angry, somebody is going to Get In Trouble.
Teachers don't know where to make the noise. One of the things that has changed under the new status quo is that the old lines of trust are gone. Maybe you can trust your administration; maybe you can't. The Democratic party always supported teachers; now in some parts of the country, they are teachers' biggest foes. The national unions have sold us out; can you trust your state group? And within that group, are there individuals that you trust and others that you cannot?
Teachers can no longer automatically assume that someone in a particular position or wearing a particular label automatically deserves trust. I have limited sympathy with this problem, but I remind myself that people grow up at their own speed in their own time. But we are living in a 1984 world where the person that you thought would be your big savior turns out to be your biggest enemy, and if you are going to be a grown-up, you are going to have to see people as what they are-- and what they aren't. Simply joining a group isn't an answer, and simply trusting someone who seems to have An Answer isn't the way, either.
Most likely you are going to have to sift through stuff, bits and pieces at a time. It's always a mistake to accept or reject someone's point of view 100%-- you have to look and examine and think and decide for yourself. Some people (and some are teachers) just hate to decide for themselves, but there is no other way to live in difficult and interesting times. Some teachers remain reluctant to do so.
Anthony Cody put out the call for reluctant warriors earlier this month (and I added my own thoughts), but I don't expect millions of teachers to get noisy overnight. Those of us who have already become noisy in our own ways can help the process by spreading the word and explaining the situation repeatedly and clearly, and particularly by building relationships of trust with folks we have contact with. It is not easy to make teachers noisy, but I am pretty sure that this is a marathon, not a sprint, so we need to just keep plugging away.
Recently, Susan Ohanian, a respected voice in education who was ringing the public ed fire alarm years before most folks even smelled smoke, expressed frustration that a White House petition calling for the removal of high stakes testing from current ed policies was sitting and languishing. All these vocal teachers raging about the state of education, and the petition barely creaked its way to 5000 signatures (yes, I signed).
The Bad Ass Teachers are excited about having 44,000 members. It's unclear how many of those are actually teachers; it's also unclear how many of those actually take part in BAT actions. There's no question that the group makes a noise and is vastly preferable to the silence within the teaching world just a year ago, but one has to wonder, given the state of education these days, why there are only 44,000 BATs.
Why are teachers so quiet? I can think of a couple of explanations.
Some are worried about their paychecks. Teachers have mortgage payments and children who like to eat food and wear clothes and all the other sorts of responsibilities that folks have in the real world, and in many corners of the country, they can lose all that on an administrator's whim. Not everybody has the stamina to risk raising their family in a car on a matter of principle.
The fear of losing a job isn't just about the paycheck. Keeping your job also means keeping your relationship with your students, staying to do as much for them as you are able. In some areas, sure, you could stand on the front steps of the school and refuse to administer the PARCC-- but the only result will be that you'll be replaced by somebody who will administer the test. It's not just that taking a big stand is scary-- in some settings it's also ineffective. This is a difficult calculation to make; I wouldn't want to have to make it, and I'm glad that I don't have to. Which brings us to another factor.
For all the reading and writing I do about the public ed issues of the day, I personally don't have it bad at all. I work in a decent district for good bosses. If I were not paying much attention to what's going on in the rest of education world, I might conclude, based on my own immediate experience, that things were bad, but not all that bad. Many teachers have reached that conclusion.
Teachers are generally Good Boys and Girls. This one drives me crazy, but I remember my own slow change from well-behaved good boy to cranky PITA. Teachers believe in rules. Teachers believe that when the Person In Charge says "Jump," you should jump (and not say "how high" because that's just being sassy). If our administrators or union chiefs tell us to follow these instructions, we follow just as obediently as we would expect our students to follow us. Teachers do not want to Get In Trouble.
Teachers are disproportionately conflict-averse. Everyone who's ever worked with a union knows this-- for every one teacher who will holler and fight and rant in a strategy meeting, there are ten who will quietly see you after the meeting to say that they understand why everyone is so upset, but couldn't we just be nicer about the whole business? These teachers are certain that any time somebody gets too angry, somebody is going to Get In Trouble.
Teachers don't know where to make the noise. One of the things that has changed under the new status quo is that the old lines of trust are gone. Maybe you can trust your administration; maybe you can't. The Democratic party always supported teachers; now in some parts of the country, they are teachers' biggest foes. The national unions have sold us out; can you trust your state group? And within that group, are there individuals that you trust and others that you cannot?
Teachers can no longer automatically assume that someone in a particular position or wearing a particular label automatically deserves trust. I have limited sympathy with this problem, but I remind myself that people grow up at their own speed in their own time. But we are living in a 1984 world where the person that you thought would be your big savior turns out to be your biggest enemy, and if you are going to be a grown-up, you are going to have to see people as what they are-- and what they aren't. Simply joining a group isn't an answer, and simply trusting someone who seems to have An Answer isn't the way, either.
Most likely you are going to have to sift through stuff, bits and pieces at a time. It's always a mistake to accept or reject someone's point of view 100%-- you have to look and examine and think and decide for yourself. Some people (and some are teachers) just hate to decide for themselves, but there is no other way to live in difficult and interesting times. Some teachers remain reluctant to do so.
Anthony Cody put out the call for reluctant warriors earlier this month (and I added my own thoughts), but I don't expect millions of teachers to get noisy overnight. Those of us who have already become noisy in our own ways can help the process by spreading the word and explaining the situation repeatedly and clearly, and particularly by building relationships of trust with folks we have contact with. It is not easy to make teachers noisy, but I am pretty sure that this is a marathon, not a sprint, so we need to just keep plugging away.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
How To Do Real Teacher Evaluation
The fans of Reformy Stuff are not wrong about everything. For example, they are correct that the general state of teacher evaluation in this country was pretty useless. Their mistake was replacing Inertly Useless with Actively Destructive. The old system was a simple two step process (1- check for teacher pulse; 2- award perfect score [edit--or, in some Bad Places To Work, award lousy score just because you want to]) while the new step is a little more involved (1- apply random groundless unproven mathematical gobbledeegook to big bunch of bad data; 2- award randomly assigned bad score).
Years ago, frustrated with the old mostly-useless model and before the current looney tunes empire took hold, a friend and I had started to rough out an evaluation system. Let me sketch out the basics for you.
What Should a Good Teacher Eval System Do?
1) Provide clear expectations to the teacher. One of the wacky things about teaching is that everybody is sure that everybody knows what a teacher's exact job description is, and yet it invariably turns out that nobody agrees. In many districts, teachers enter their classrooms with no job description and no really clear idea of what is expected of them.
2) Provide useful feedback and remediation. That includes setting the stage for meaningful remediation if it's called for. Only a small percentage of new teachers will be awesome right out of the box or clearly hopeless. Most are waiting to be guided toward either excellence or despair, and most districts depend on a system that I like to call "Blind Luck." I swear there are teachers out there whose careers could have gone a completely different direction if they had just eaten lunch with a different set of veteran teachers in their first few years.
3) Provide the district with clear information on whether they need to retain, retrain or refrain from hiring permanently.
Assumptions in Building the Eval System
1) Precise, observable data is the enemy of real, useful information. In the hands of hard data overlords, traits like "maintains good communication with parents" ends up being some numerical observable, such as "calls at least two parents every five days." Hard data fans like really precise measures, and so their data may be precise, but their conclusion is always wrong. Mr. McSwellteach may personally visit 150 parents a month or sing in a church choir with half of his total parental units. He may rely more on e-mail because that's what his students' parents prefer. He may have an absolutely uncanny sense of when to contact the parents and when to leave them alone. He may, in short, be a pretty awesome parent communicators, but since the metric focuses on one specific, concrete, observable, measurable piece of data out of a thousand possible factors, it completely misses the real information here.
2) People may not be able to explain a good teacher, but they generally know one when they see her.
3) The best way to correct for individual bias in a survey is to collect information from many, many individuals. And anyway...
4) You're trying to evaluate subjective qualities. This is like trying to evaluate husbands. Your husband from hell may be her perfect dreamboat. There are certainly some rough patterns of qualities that will emerge, clustered around a statistical strange attractor of some sort, but you will not be able to draw a box around a configuration and say, "Everything inside the line is good, and everything outside is bad." If that violates your world view or makes you uncomfortable, just suck it up and put on your Big Person Pants.
The Short Method for Real Teacher Evaluation
Hire a really good principal and let him do his job.
The Method Proposed for the Other 98% of Schools
The first step actually occurs before your district even gets started. This is where our consulting firm start-up was going to have to do some real work. Basically, you need a giant list, a huge constellation of teacher qualities arranged around some master categories such as Knowledge, Community Interaction, Classroom Management-- mostly the basic main qualities that we're familiar with. For each of the master qualities, a truckload of specifics, from "dresses up for work" to "enthusiastic with kids." Not that mostly these will not be specific enough for some of you-- it will be more "communicate well with parents" and not at all "makes two parent phone calls every four days." This massive menu of teacher qualities is where we start and launch into the following steps.
1) Pull together a large committee. It will include teachers, students, administrators, community members, parents, business folks-- as much of a broad representation of the stakeholders as you can gather up. And then using one of any of the many fine models for this kind of group work out there, your group is going to take the master list of traits and customize it.
2) Customizing will cover two factors-- what to include, and how to weight it. It's here where your folks will decide, for instance, that in your community dressing up to teach doesn't matter at all, and that being kind to students is twice as important as being funny. You'll work this out on two levels-- which micro-traits will contribute what percent of the score for the categories (eg "strict disciplinarian" will make up 4% of the "Classroom management" category). And you will work out the relative weight of the master categories. You'll do this on the school level-- Content Knowledge may be 50% of your expectation for secondary teachers but only 30% for elementary, whereas Parent Relationship might run the other way. And hey-- if you want "Prepares students thoroughly for standardized tests" to be a huge factor, you can go ahead and do that.
3) Congratulations. The process was long and hard and involved lots and lots and LOTS of discussion, some of it probably heated, but once you're done you have created a fairly detailed job description, a picture of what your stakeholders expect from a teacher in the district. Imagine, teachers, if on your first day someone had handed you a multi-page detailed and weighted list of the qualities and behaviors they expected you to display instead of a room key and hearty "Good luck!"
4) Hey look! That big involved job description is also the evaluation form. All we have to do is give you a score for each line item, and we have already figured out how much weight that carries in your final evaluation.
5) Who fills out your eval form? Well, some of you won't like this, but our answer was "Everybody." Other teachers, current students, former students (we thought it important to keep alumni in the loop for decades after graduation), admins, parents, anybody we can think of.
The eval forms can be filled with simple number scores, but we allow for narrative to be added if they wish. Will there be outliers-- cranky parent, jerk student, someone who just has an axe to grind? Sure-- but if our sample is large, small outliers won't screw anybody up, and the same software that's going to crunch (and possibly collect) all this data can also be taught to toss out small left-field samples. We could probably even teach the program to block folks who are consistently mischief-makers.
We had never quite figured out weighting as it applied to this portion. I'm pretty sure the principal should carry more weight than Billy-Bob Schnoodleman in 5th grade art class, but we hadn't quite worked out that kink when we stopped working on this. Put it in the to-do pile.
6) Hey look! The evaluation results tell you exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are! And part of this process will involve establishing a in-school remediation work group-- folks who can be mentor and help other teachers with particular weaknesses that match up with their particular strengths. There's a piece for deciding when someone is, well, hopeless, but our focus is on strengthening people. But we'll stop there before I start in on my plan for creating teaching schools that work like teaching hospitals for doctors.
Why This Is Better Than What State and Federal Authorities Want To Do
1) The goal is to help people improve rather than firing our way to excellence. FOWTE creates an ugly atmosphere in a building, and it doesn't really help because the replacement hire is only going to require you to start from scratch again. I know some reformy types think we can churn and turn TFA-style forever, but those people are idiots. With emphasis on building strength, we not only get better teachers, but we automatically build the atmosphere of collegiality, support, and quality work that makes a school a better place.
2) The data comes from many many observations over much time, and not one forty-five minute squat and squint by just one guy. No evaluation system in the world can protect a teacher from an incompetent vindictive principal if he's the only guy who has a say.
3) The data does not come from a bad standardized test that measures little of value and is useless as a teacher measurement tool.
4) The system is transparent. Unlike VAM, which cannot be successfully explained and is apparently created by magic gnomes in a castle under the South Pole, this system is created and weighted in plain sight. Everybody knows what's going on.
5) The system reflects local values. What's the story we keep hearing with the current crop of test-based VAMified evals-- that Mrs. McWunderteach has gotten a terrible rating even though everybody knows that she's an awesome teacher. We should be tapping the source of that "everybody knows," not the Data Overlord system. Does this mean that Teacher Excellence will look different from district to district? Well, yes. Of course it will-- because IT DOES!!
National Standards
I am aware that this system does not really give us a model for teacher evaluation and excellence that scales to the national level. That's one of the reasons I like it. It's actually a bit of a compromise, because if every single district used it, they would still be able to talk to each other, but they would still be free to do what seemed best in their own district ("Oh, is that how you scaled and weighted Content Knowledge for elementary? Here's what our sheet ended up looking like").
Yes, an Excellent Teacher in Buford, Montana might be a different set of measures and paperwork than an Excellent Teacher in Nicetown, Tennessee-- but each of those districts would have what they believed to be examples of excellent teachers. What would be better than that?
At any rate, we had this system well past halfway done when the New Evaluations started to emerge. But it still represents my idea of how a useful, authentic teacher evaluation would work, and is definitely my answer to, "Well, if you don't want to use this awesome teacher evaluation system of VAm and test scores and Danielson rubrics, then what DO you want to do?" This. I want to do this.
Years ago, frustrated with the old mostly-useless model and before the current looney tunes empire took hold, a friend and I had started to rough out an evaluation system. Let me sketch out the basics for you.
What Should a Good Teacher Eval System Do?
1) Provide clear expectations to the teacher. One of the wacky things about teaching is that everybody is sure that everybody knows what a teacher's exact job description is, and yet it invariably turns out that nobody agrees. In many districts, teachers enter their classrooms with no job description and no really clear idea of what is expected of them.
2) Provide useful feedback and remediation. That includes setting the stage for meaningful remediation if it's called for. Only a small percentage of new teachers will be awesome right out of the box or clearly hopeless. Most are waiting to be guided toward either excellence or despair, and most districts depend on a system that I like to call "Blind Luck." I swear there are teachers out there whose careers could have gone a completely different direction if they had just eaten lunch with a different set of veteran teachers in their first few years.
3) Provide the district with clear information on whether they need to retain, retrain or refrain from hiring permanently.
Assumptions in Building the Eval System
1) Precise, observable data is the enemy of real, useful information. In the hands of hard data overlords, traits like "maintains good communication with parents" ends up being some numerical observable, such as "calls at least two parents every five days." Hard data fans like really precise measures, and so their data may be precise, but their conclusion is always wrong. Mr. McSwellteach may personally visit 150 parents a month or sing in a church choir with half of his total parental units. He may rely more on e-mail because that's what his students' parents prefer. He may have an absolutely uncanny sense of when to contact the parents and when to leave them alone. He may, in short, be a pretty awesome parent communicators, but since the metric focuses on one specific, concrete, observable, measurable piece of data out of a thousand possible factors, it completely misses the real information here.
2) People may not be able to explain a good teacher, but they generally know one when they see her.
3) The best way to correct for individual bias in a survey is to collect information from many, many individuals. And anyway...
4) You're trying to evaluate subjective qualities. This is like trying to evaluate husbands. Your husband from hell may be her perfect dreamboat. There are certainly some rough patterns of qualities that will emerge, clustered around a statistical strange attractor of some sort, but you will not be able to draw a box around a configuration and say, "Everything inside the line is good, and everything outside is bad." If that violates your world view or makes you uncomfortable, just suck it up and put on your Big Person Pants.
The Short Method for Real Teacher Evaluation
Hire a really good principal and let him do his job.
The Method Proposed for the Other 98% of Schools
The first step actually occurs before your district even gets started. This is where our consulting firm start-up was going to have to do some real work. Basically, you need a giant list, a huge constellation of teacher qualities arranged around some master categories such as Knowledge, Community Interaction, Classroom Management-- mostly the basic main qualities that we're familiar with. For each of the master qualities, a truckload of specifics, from "dresses up for work" to "enthusiastic with kids." Not that mostly these will not be specific enough for some of you-- it will be more "communicate well with parents" and not at all "makes two parent phone calls every four days." This massive menu of teacher qualities is where we start and launch into the following steps.
1) Pull together a large committee. It will include teachers, students, administrators, community members, parents, business folks-- as much of a broad representation of the stakeholders as you can gather up. And then using one of any of the many fine models for this kind of group work out there, your group is going to take the master list of traits and customize it.
2) Customizing will cover two factors-- what to include, and how to weight it. It's here where your folks will decide, for instance, that in your community dressing up to teach doesn't matter at all, and that being kind to students is twice as important as being funny. You'll work this out on two levels-- which micro-traits will contribute what percent of the score for the categories (eg "strict disciplinarian" will make up 4% of the "Classroom management" category). And you will work out the relative weight of the master categories. You'll do this on the school level-- Content Knowledge may be 50% of your expectation for secondary teachers but only 30% for elementary, whereas Parent Relationship might run the other way. And hey-- if you want "Prepares students thoroughly for standardized tests" to be a huge factor, you can go ahead and do that.
3) Congratulations. The process was long and hard and involved lots and lots and LOTS of discussion, some of it probably heated, but once you're done you have created a fairly detailed job description, a picture of what your stakeholders expect from a teacher in the district. Imagine, teachers, if on your first day someone had handed you a multi-page detailed and weighted list of the qualities and behaviors they expected you to display instead of a room key and hearty "Good luck!"
4) Hey look! That big involved job description is also the evaluation form. All we have to do is give you a score for each line item, and we have already figured out how much weight that carries in your final evaluation.
5) Who fills out your eval form? Well, some of you won't like this, but our answer was "Everybody." Other teachers, current students, former students (we thought it important to keep alumni in the loop for decades after graduation), admins, parents, anybody we can think of.
The eval forms can be filled with simple number scores, but we allow for narrative to be added if they wish. Will there be outliers-- cranky parent, jerk student, someone who just has an axe to grind? Sure-- but if our sample is large, small outliers won't screw anybody up, and the same software that's going to crunch (and possibly collect) all this data can also be taught to toss out small left-field samples. We could probably even teach the program to block folks who are consistently mischief-makers.
We had never quite figured out weighting as it applied to this portion. I'm pretty sure the principal should carry more weight than Billy-Bob Schnoodleman in 5th grade art class, but we hadn't quite worked out that kink when we stopped working on this. Put it in the to-do pile.
6) Hey look! The evaluation results tell you exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are! And part of this process will involve establishing a in-school remediation work group-- folks who can be mentor and help other teachers with particular weaknesses that match up with their particular strengths. There's a piece for deciding when someone is, well, hopeless, but our focus is on strengthening people. But we'll stop there before I start in on my plan for creating teaching schools that work like teaching hospitals for doctors.
Why This Is Better Than What State and Federal Authorities Want To Do
1) The goal is to help people improve rather than firing our way to excellence. FOWTE creates an ugly atmosphere in a building, and it doesn't really help because the replacement hire is only going to require you to start from scratch again. I know some reformy types think we can churn and turn TFA-style forever, but those people are idiots. With emphasis on building strength, we not only get better teachers, but we automatically build the atmosphere of collegiality, support, and quality work that makes a school a better place.
2) The data comes from many many observations over much time, and not one forty-five minute squat and squint by just one guy. No evaluation system in the world can protect a teacher from an incompetent vindictive principal if he's the only guy who has a say.
3) The data does not come from a bad standardized test that measures little of value and is useless as a teacher measurement tool.
4) The system is transparent. Unlike VAM, which cannot be successfully explained and is apparently created by magic gnomes in a castle under the South Pole, this system is created and weighted in plain sight. Everybody knows what's going on.
5) The system reflects local values. What's the story we keep hearing with the current crop of test-based VAMified evals-- that Mrs. McWunderteach has gotten a terrible rating even though everybody knows that she's an awesome teacher. We should be tapping the source of that "everybody knows," not the Data Overlord system. Does this mean that Teacher Excellence will look different from district to district? Well, yes. Of course it will-- because IT DOES!!
National Standards
I am aware that this system does not really give us a model for teacher evaluation and excellence that scales to the national level. That's one of the reasons I like it. It's actually a bit of a compromise, because if every single district used it, they would still be able to talk to each other, but they would still be free to do what seemed best in their own district ("Oh, is that how you scaled and weighted Content Knowledge for elementary? Here's what our sheet ended up looking like").
Yes, an Excellent Teacher in Buford, Montana might be a different set of measures and paperwork than an Excellent Teacher in Nicetown, Tennessee-- but each of those districts would have what they believed to be examples of excellent teachers. What would be better than that?
At any rate, we had this system well past halfway done when the New Evaluations started to emerge. But it still represents my idea of how a useful, authentic teacher evaluation would work, and is definitely my answer to, "Well, if you don't want to use this awesome teacher evaluation system of VAm and test scores and Danielson rubrics, then what DO you want to do?" This. I want to do this.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Duncan Lays It All Out (2010 edition)
If you want a complete explanation of the CCSS Reformy Master Plan, as well as one more piece of evidence that the CCSS regime is in fact a federal program, you can't do much better than Arne Duncan's speech on November 4, 2010, to UNESCO, "The Vision of Education Reform in the United States."
I recommend you read the whole thing, but if you're in a hurry, or you just enjoy commentary, let me run it down for you.
Introductiony Stuff
UNESCO has been around for many years, and it's a swell group, promoting peace since 1945, when the world was a bit messy. "The promise of universal education was then a lonely beacon--a light to guide the way to peace and the rebuilding of nations across the globe."
Today the world is no longer recovering from WWII, but education is still a Very Swell Thing. "And in a knowledge economy, education is the new currency by which nations maintain economic competitiveness and global prosperity."
He has two major messages today about education.
And They Are
"First, the Obama administration has an ambitious and unified theory of action that propels our agenda." It can't be fixed quickly. It will take "a clear, coherent, and coordinated vision of reform."
Second, the President and Duncan reject any notion that ed reform is international zero sum. If some people excell, it's good for everyone. We will grow the economic pie rather than carve it up.
This Is Super Important
We have an unprecedented opportunity to make US education great, which is #1 in national economic boosting. We have "an economic and moral imperative" to fix the gap. 25% of US students don't finish in four years-- and here I interrupt to question the big focus on the four year thing. It's a dumb choice, because it means a kid who fails an entire year and has to repeat, and for whom that experience is a shock and a wake-up call so that he gets his act together and finishes as a strong student-- that kid is considered the same as a kid who just plain drops out. that's dumb.
Duncan also name checks the retired military report that 75% of US grads are unfit for military service because they are dropouts, criminals, or not physically fit. Also, he read that Thomas Friedman says the world is flat, so knowledge etc competition is globally tough.
"In the knowledge economy, opportunities to land a good job are vanishing fast for young workers who drop out of school or fail to get college experience." And I'm thinking that sentence should have stopped after "workers," but here we have inserted the belief that corporations would stop outsourcing call center jobs to India if only they could find more Americans with Masters degrees willing to work part time for minimum wage and no benefits.
The President says that the country that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow, and then offers historical examples of when this has happened in the past--oh no, whoops, I made that last part up. We're just going to go with what, in the CCSS biz, we call "thoughts and feelings with no textual support." Also, all our scientists and PhD's and engineers are immigrants, so that's why we're going to close up the VISA loopholes being used by employers to hire cheap immigrants and why we're also going to start providing real support for the hard sciences in this country instead of making science go begging from corporations. No, sorry, I made up all that last part again.
Duncan observes that we also must collaborate across boundaries. In this new world we can't fix poverty of terrorism by ourselves, but must cooperate with other nations. These international partnerships will require students to do more critical thinking, learn new languages, understand other cultures, and embrace their sense of obligation to the world community. Conservative conspiracy theorists will want to highlight this portion of this speech (delivered to a group of international cooperators).
Here Are Some Goals
The Pres wants us to lead the world in college grads by 2020. Because more college grads = world domination. But don't forget-- "not zero sum." Our world collegiate domination will bring benefits to everybody.
Also, we should get girls into college.
Better educated world = better economics world. Because when you have lots of educated people, lots of high-quality well-paying jobs appear to greet them. Just ask all the degreed 25-year-olds still living in their parents' basements and working at Burger King.
Also, better educated world = safer world. Because ignorance causes violence. That's why, when we led the world in college grads, we never got into wars with anyone. Okay, I made that up. I can't help it. Duncan keeps saying things without offering any evidence or support-- not even anecdotal. I know it's four years late, but I'm still trying to finish this speech for him.
Education is the great equalizer, but when economies improve, the college educated will reap more of the benefits.
Then This Quote Happens
As the author Ben Wildavsky writes in his new book, The Great Brain Race, in the global economy “more and more people will have the chance . . . to advance based on what they know rather than who they are.”
And I could spend a whole day discussing how odd I find it to imagine that our knowledge base is somehow separate from who we are as people. But since we're starting with the presumption that education is a transformative commodity and not a human quality, I guess this makes sense. So I'll move on.
And Now For the Creepy Stuff
There have been misconceptions in the cover of President Obama's plans. For instance, his support as a progressive for private charter schools, and his insistence that teachers be evaluated based on student test scores.
Duncan says that the misconception is not that these aren't his actual plans, nor does Duncan try to point out that these ideas have their origins anywhere but the Oval Office. No, the misconception is, apparently, in seeing these as The Plan when in fact they are just the tip of the iceberg. "In fact, these elements are only a modest part of our overall agenda. The President’s aims are far more ambitious."
Test based teacher evaluation = great teacher in every classroom. Growing "school choice" = more innovation.
The North Star guiding the alignment of our cradle-to-career education agenda is President Obama’s goal that America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
That goal can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers.
So, cradle to career it is. We will expand pre-K. And we will try to increase access to college. He does not actually add "and make a huge profit off the loans."
The Four Assurances
The K-12 theory of action is based on the four assurances, which will look familiar. They are
1) Academic standards will show that students really are college and career ready, because states have been lying to them. Fortunately, we all know the exact secret of measuring someone's C&C readiness, so, easy peasy.
2) Big data. Because that will totally give teachers the feedback they need to do their jobs (because we are all clueless, I guess. Or liars. But if we're liars, what difference will the feedback make? We'll just lie about it.) No mention of what else big data might be useful for.
3) Improve preparation and evaluation of teachers. Because "when it comes to teaching, love, and commitment and talent matter tremendously." And love and commitment really show up on those standardized tests. Also, poor students have bad access to good education, and that makes Arne sad.
4) Gets several graphs that boil down to: Some schools really suck. Fewer than 2,000 schools produce more than half the dropouts, which amount to almost 75% of brown and black dropouts. Can I have a fact check on aisle three? No more tinkering, says Arne. We are going to throw real money "to drive real change with unprecedented urgency."
The Federal Role and How We Made It Almost Illegal
As we made our plans, we had to factor in that the federal role in education is "unusual," by which we mean "constitutionally non-existent." In the 1960s it grew to encompass handing out money for "inputs."
The Obama administration has sought to fundamentally shift the federal role, so that the Department is doing much more to support reform and innovation in states, districts, and local communities.
And now after a big bunch of laying out the President's program developed by the President and following the President's goals for the President's vision of the education as supported by the President's initiative, Arne spends some time saying, "But, we, like totally were being pushed along by state and local officials in a way that is not at all a violation of law regarding federal involvement in American education."
So we offered grants and stuff, and states signed up for them (Arne doesn't mention the NCLB gun pointed at every state's head). Basically, the feds figured out how to apply principles of venture philanthropy to gummint work. Don't just give money to people who say they'll do something good-- lay out exactly what you want done and then wait for someone to create just that. It's not if you build it they will come-- it's if you pay for it, they will come and build it themselves.
At the end of the day, I believe it is that courage, and not our resources, that will transform educational opportunity in our country. But we have a lot more resources than courage, so that's what we're going with. Now you may think this is the part where we get the story of how the governors just leapt up and said, "Hey, we want to write standards!" But actually, we get this:
In March of 2009, President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state school chiefs to “develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.”
And golly bob howdy, those standards have gone over like gangbusters. We just awarded a bunch of grant money, and we also awarded grant money to the consortia that won our contest to develop assessments. These are great assessments. magical assessments. How magical?
When these new assessments are in use in the 2015-15 school year, millions of U.S. schoolchildren, parents, and teachers will know, for the first time, if students truly are on-track for colleges and careers.
Reform has to be about results.
The Wind Up
Duncan quotes five questions from Sir Michael Barber, whom he does not identify as That Guy from Pearson, and points out they are better than the questions that the USDOE usually asks about their money: Are program rules being followed? Are monies being spent as promised? So understand that THIS USDOE will not be all about compliance with their rules (this was in 2010, so Duncan may not have known that he would eventually threaten several states with losing their money if they did not comply with his conditions for giving it to them.)
Duncan's DOE is going to be listening to the states, and in all fairness he has only had four years to get started on this and a lot on his plate, so maybe that's coming soon. We also have a lot to learn from other countries (like Finland, South Korea, and Singapore, because if we are too dense to recognize the role of local culture and socio-economics when it comes to American urban school districts, why would we recognize it on an international level. They all speak English, right?)
Annnnd we have lots to teach other countries. So watch out Other Countries-- we may happily export our swell and profitable ideas to you!
The year, again, was 2010. It's a pretty complete picture of the reformy agenda's public face as well as a fairly straightforward admission that education reform does require a big fat federal power grab, and that this whole business is the administration's baby and nobody else's.
I recommend you read the whole thing, but if you're in a hurry, or you just enjoy commentary, let me run it down for you.
Introductiony Stuff
UNESCO has been around for many years, and it's a swell group, promoting peace since 1945, when the world was a bit messy. "The promise of universal education was then a lonely beacon--a light to guide the way to peace and the rebuilding of nations across the globe."
Today the world is no longer recovering from WWII, but education is still a Very Swell Thing. "And in a knowledge economy, education is the new currency by which nations maintain economic competitiveness and global prosperity."
He has two major messages today about education.
And They Are
"First, the Obama administration has an ambitious and unified theory of action that propels our agenda." It can't be fixed quickly. It will take "a clear, coherent, and coordinated vision of reform."
Second, the President and Duncan reject any notion that ed reform is international zero sum. If some people excell, it's good for everyone. We will grow the economic pie rather than carve it up.
This Is Super Important
We have an unprecedented opportunity to make US education great, which is #1 in national economic boosting. We have "an economic and moral imperative" to fix the gap. 25% of US students don't finish in four years-- and here I interrupt to question the big focus on the four year thing. It's a dumb choice, because it means a kid who fails an entire year and has to repeat, and for whom that experience is a shock and a wake-up call so that he gets his act together and finishes as a strong student-- that kid is considered the same as a kid who just plain drops out. that's dumb.
Duncan also name checks the retired military report that 75% of US grads are unfit for military service because they are dropouts, criminals, or not physically fit. Also, he read that Thomas Friedman says the world is flat, so knowledge etc competition is globally tough.
"In the knowledge economy, opportunities to land a good job are vanishing fast for young workers who drop out of school or fail to get college experience." And I'm thinking that sentence should have stopped after "workers," but here we have inserted the belief that corporations would stop outsourcing call center jobs to India if only they could find more Americans with Masters degrees willing to work part time for minimum wage and no benefits.
The President says that the country that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow, and then offers historical examples of when this has happened in the past--oh no, whoops, I made that last part up. We're just going to go with what, in the CCSS biz, we call "thoughts and feelings with no textual support." Also, all our scientists and PhD's and engineers are immigrants, so that's why we're going to close up the VISA loopholes being used by employers to hire cheap immigrants and why we're also going to start providing real support for the hard sciences in this country instead of making science go begging from corporations. No, sorry, I made up all that last part again.
Duncan observes that we also must collaborate across boundaries. In this new world we can't fix poverty of terrorism by ourselves, but must cooperate with other nations. These international partnerships will require students to do more critical thinking, learn new languages, understand other cultures, and embrace their sense of obligation to the world community. Conservative conspiracy theorists will want to highlight this portion of this speech (delivered to a group of international cooperators).
Here Are Some Goals
The Pres wants us to lead the world in college grads by 2020. Because more college grads = world domination. But don't forget-- "not zero sum." Our world collegiate domination will bring benefits to everybody.
Also, we should get girls into college.
Better educated world = better economics world. Because when you have lots of educated people, lots of high-quality well-paying jobs appear to greet them. Just ask all the degreed 25-year-olds still living in their parents' basements and working at Burger King.
Also, better educated world = safer world. Because ignorance causes violence. That's why, when we led the world in college grads, we never got into wars with anyone. Okay, I made that up. I can't help it. Duncan keeps saying things without offering any evidence or support-- not even anecdotal. I know it's four years late, but I'm still trying to finish this speech for him.
Education is the great equalizer, but when economies improve, the college educated will reap more of the benefits.
Then This Quote Happens
As the author Ben Wildavsky writes in his new book, The Great Brain Race, in the global economy “more and more people will have the chance . . . to advance based on what they know rather than who they are.”
And I could spend a whole day discussing how odd I find it to imagine that our knowledge base is somehow separate from who we are as people. But since we're starting with the presumption that education is a transformative commodity and not a human quality, I guess this makes sense. So I'll move on.
And Now For the Creepy Stuff
There have been misconceptions in the cover of President Obama's plans. For instance, his support as a progressive for private charter schools, and his insistence that teachers be evaluated based on student test scores.
Duncan says that the misconception is not that these aren't his actual plans, nor does Duncan try to point out that these ideas have their origins anywhere but the Oval Office. No, the misconception is, apparently, in seeing these as The Plan when in fact they are just the tip of the iceberg. "In fact, these elements are only a modest part of our overall agenda. The President’s aims are far more ambitious."
Test based teacher evaluation = great teacher in every classroom. Growing "school choice" = more innovation.
The North Star guiding the alignment of our cradle-to-career education agenda is President Obama’s goal that America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
That goal can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers.
So, cradle to career it is. We will expand pre-K. And we will try to increase access to college. He does not actually add "and make a huge profit off the loans."
The Four Assurances
The K-12 theory of action is based on the four assurances, which will look familiar. They are
1) Academic standards will show that students really are college and career ready, because states have been lying to them. Fortunately, we all know the exact secret of measuring someone's C&C readiness, so, easy peasy.
2) Big data. Because that will totally give teachers the feedback they need to do their jobs (because we are all clueless, I guess. Or liars. But if we're liars, what difference will the feedback make? We'll just lie about it.) No mention of what else big data might be useful for.
3) Improve preparation and evaluation of teachers. Because "when it comes to teaching, love, and commitment and talent matter tremendously." And love and commitment really show up on those standardized tests. Also, poor students have bad access to good education, and that makes Arne sad.
4) Gets several graphs that boil down to: Some schools really suck. Fewer than 2,000 schools produce more than half the dropouts, which amount to almost 75% of brown and black dropouts. Can I have a fact check on aisle three? No more tinkering, says Arne. We are going to throw real money "to drive real change with unprecedented urgency."
The Federal Role and How We Made It Almost Illegal
As we made our plans, we had to factor in that the federal role in education is "unusual," by which we mean "constitutionally non-existent." In the 1960s it grew to encompass handing out money for "inputs."
The Obama administration has sought to fundamentally shift the federal role, so that the Department is doing much more to support reform and innovation in states, districts, and local communities.
And now after a big bunch of laying out the President's program developed by the President and following the President's goals for the President's vision of the education as supported by the President's initiative, Arne spends some time saying, "But, we, like totally were being pushed along by state and local officials in a way that is not at all a violation of law regarding federal involvement in American education."
So we offered grants and stuff, and states signed up for them (Arne doesn't mention the NCLB gun pointed at every state's head). Basically, the feds figured out how to apply principles of venture philanthropy to gummint work. Don't just give money to people who say they'll do something good-- lay out exactly what you want done and then wait for someone to create just that. It's not if you build it they will come-- it's if you pay for it, they will come and build it themselves.
At the end of the day, I believe it is that courage, and not our resources, that will transform educational opportunity in our country. But we have a lot more resources than courage, so that's what we're going with. Now you may think this is the part where we get the story of how the governors just leapt up and said, "Hey, we want to write standards!" But actually, we get this:
In March of 2009, President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state school chiefs to “develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.”
And golly bob howdy, those standards have gone over like gangbusters. We just awarded a bunch of grant money, and we also awarded grant money to the consortia that won our contest to develop assessments. These are great assessments. magical assessments. How magical?
When these new assessments are in use in the 2015-15 school year, millions of U.S. schoolchildren, parents, and teachers will know, for the first time, if students truly are on-track for colleges and careers.
Reform has to be about results.
The Wind Up
Duncan quotes five questions from Sir Michael Barber, whom he does not identify as That Guy from Pearson, and points out they are better than the questions that the USDOE usually asks about their money: Are program rules being followed? Are monies being spent as promised? So understand that THIS USDOE will not be all about compliance with their rules (this was in 2010, so Duncan may not have known that he would eventually threaten several states with losing their money if they did not comply with his conditions for giving it to them.)
Duncan's DOE is going to be listening to the states, and in all fairness he has only had four years to get started on this and a lot on his plate, so maybe that's coming soon. We also have a lot to learn from other countries (like Finland, South Korea, and Singapore, because if we are too dense to recognize the role of local culture and socio-economics when it comes to American urban school districts, why would we recognize it on an international level. They all speak English, right?)
Annnnd we have lots to teach other countries. So watch out Other Countries-- we may happily export our swell and profitable ideas to you!
The year, again, was 2010. It's a pretty complete picture of the reformy agenda's public face as well as a fairly straightforward admission that education reform does require a big fat federal power grab, and that this whole business is the administration's baby and nobody else's.
Broken Trust
Regardless of how the battle for the soul of public education shakes out in the end (or at least in the future-- I don't know that we'll ever see an end), there are things that we have already lost for at least a generation, collateral damage, the china in a shop over-run by a herd of clashing cattle.
Perhaps the biggest casualty is the trust of parents.
It's not just that the last twelve years have produced a steady stream of edu-crap from schools. It's not just that some schools have started to treat students like one more school supply, like bricks or floor wax. It's not just the bombardment of terrible tests, or state and federally mandated educational malpractice.
Teachers have compounded all of that by becoming collaborators or unthinking attack dogs.
The collaborators have tried to convince parents that everything is all right, that the Testy Stuff will be Just Fine and parental units can just relax and Trust Us because, golly bob howdy, this Common Core stuff will be absolutely great. Just as the current leadership of NEA has fixed it so that rank and file members can never easily trust the union any time soon, some current classroom teachers have broken trust with parents. We're supposed to give assurance that we will keep children safe at school, and in some places that's a hard-- if not impossible-- assurance to give. But lying to them is not good.
The unthinking attack dogs have egged the dissenting public on. We have encouraged them to challenge every test, post every aggravating homework assignment on line accompanied by withering take-downs. Many UADs have stood by silently while parents attacked school work that really wasn't a symptom of CCSS at all (looking at you, number line math problem) or that was actually perfectly sound (I see you, argumentative essay about hypothetically rewriting the Bill of Rights).
We've been happy to hand people stones to throw at the CCSS-infused school, and in some cases it's as if we've forgotten that at some point, we will have to go back into the building and work there ourselves.
The opt-out movement has been effective in some areas. It has been necessary and powerful and I have every hope that it will spread and cripple the whole testing arm of the corporate ed establishment. But it also marks a line that we've all crossed, and we can't go back.
We have encouraged parents to examine closely what schools do, and if they don't like it, to look those schools in the face and say, "Not with my child, you don't." And we've been super-comfy with that when Mrs. McActivemom questioned the PARCC test. But I wonder how many teachers will be caught by surprise when Mrs. Activemom wants to have that same conversation about teacher generated assignments and teacher-created tests. We have encouraged parents to never accept something as sound educational practice just because it comes from a school, and many parents have taken that lesson to heart.
It's ironic. The Reformy Crowd has always claimed that they want greater school and education accountability to the public, and some of the most effective resistance to them has come through making them accountable to the public. And most ironic of all, as they have been beaten back, they are actually getting what they said they wanted, and it's not going to go away.
In this one arena, the Reformy Folks have won. As we go forward, we are going to be held more accountable by the public than ever before.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm going to go with "all of the above."
It's certainly not a bad thing for teachers to be able to make a case for what we teach. We should be accountable to the public and to our students, and any teacher who ever stands in front of a class and says, "We're doing this Because I Said So" is asking for trouble, and deserves all the trouble he gets. If you don't have a good reason for doing what you're doing in your classroom, you should not be there (note: "because the scripted materials say so" and "because it's on the test" are not good reasons).
On the other hand, dealing with a parent whose biases and blind spots are gaping was never fun in the best of times. We all have our version of this. In some areas, you deal with the parent who doesn't see the need for all this way-too-hard fancy book-learning. In other areas, you deal with the parent who is sure his advanced degree in particle physics makes him far more qualified to understand dependent clause construction than you are. And Lord help you if, in some regions, you happen to teach literature with any of those Naughty Words in it.
So accountability comes with its challenges, but at the end of the day, I do believe that we owe a full and clear explanation to our taxpayers for what we do with their money. I also believe they owe us trust for our professional expertise and judgment, but that side of the scale is taking a real hit these days.
I think the change on balance is good, but I'm not sure everyone in the teaching profession has fully realized what's happening. I think many teachers are dreaming of the day when they can go back to their room, close the door, and just quietly do their job again. And while some communities may well go right back to sleep when this storm has passed, I think many of us need to recognize that the last decade has ripped the doors off our classroom and buried them at sea, and it's going to be a long time before teaching is a quiet, private pursuit again.
When you break trust in a relationship, it takes a long time to earn it back. We have got a lot of trust re-earning to do with the parents of American school children.
Perhaps the biggest casualty is the trust of parents.
It's not just that the last twelve years have produced a steady stream of edu-crap from schools. It's not just that some schools have started to treat students like one more school supply, like bricks or floor wax. It's not just the bombardment of terrible tests, or state and federally mandated educational malpractice.
Teachers have compounded all of that by becoming collaborators or unthinking attack dogs.
The collaborators have tried to convince parents that everything is all right, that the Testy Stuff will be Just Fine and parental units can just relax and Trust Us because, golly bob howdy, this Common Core stuff will be absolutely great. Just as the current leadership of NEA has fixed it so that rank and file members can never easily trust the union any time soon, some current classroom teachers have broken trust with parents. We're supposed to give assurance that we will keep children safe at school, and in some places that's a hard-- if not impossible-- assurance to give. But lying to them is not good.
The unthinking attack dogs have egged the dissenting public on. We have encouraged them to challenge every test, post every aggravating homework assignment on line accompanied by withering take-downs. Many UADs have stood by silently while parents attacked school work that really wasn't a symptom of CCSS at all (looking at you, number line math problem) or that was actually perfectly sound (I see you, argumentative essay about hypothetically rewriting the Bill of Rights).
We've been happy to hand people stones to throw at the CCSS-infused school, and in some cases it's as if we've forgotten that at some point, we will have to go back into the building and work there ourselves.
The opt-out movement has been effective in some areas. It has been necessary and powerful and I have every hope that it will spread and cripple the whole testing arm of the corporate ed establishment. But it also marks a line that we've all crossed, and we can't go back.
We have encouraged parents to examine closely what schools do, and if they don't like it, to look those schools in the face and say, "Not with my child, you don't." And we've been super-comfy with that when Mrs. McActivemom questioned the PARCC test. But I wonder how many teachers will be caught by surprise when Mrs. Activemom wants to have that same conversation about teacher generated assignments and teacher-created tests. We have encouraged parents to never accept something as sound educational practice just because it comes from a school, and many parents have taken that lesson to heart.
It's ironic. The Reformy Crowd has always claimed that they want greater school and education accountability to the public, and some of the most effective resistance to them has come through making them accountable to the public. And most ironic of all, as they have been beaten back, they are actually getting what they said they wanted, and it's not going to go away.
In this one arena, the Reformy Folks have won. As we go forward, we are going to be held more accountable by the public than ever before.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm going to go with "all of the above."
It's certainly not a bad thing for teachers to be able to make a case for what we teach. We should be accountable to the public and to our students, and any teacher who ever stands in front of a class and says, "We're doing this Because I Said So" is asking for trouble, and deserves all the trouble he gets. If you don't have a good reason for doing what you're doing in your classroom, you should not be there (note: "because the scripted materials say so" and "because it's on the test" are not good reasons).
On the other hand, dealing with a parent whose biases and blind spots are gaping was never fun in the best of times. We all have our version of this. In some areas, you deal with the parent who doesn't see the need for all this way-too-hard fancy book-learning. In other areas, you deal with the parent who is sure his advanced degree in particle physics makes him far more qualified to understand dependent clause construction than you are. And Lord help you if, in some regions, you happen to teach literature with any of those Naughty Words in it.
So accountability comes with its challenges, but at the end of the day, I do believe that we owe a full and clear explanation to our taxpayers for what we do with their money. I also believe they owe us trust for our professional expertise and judgment, but that side of the scale is taking a real hit these days.
I think the change on balance is good, but I'm not sure everyone in the teaching profession has fully realized what's happening. I think many teachers are dreaming of the day when they can go back to their room, close the door, and just quietly do their job again. And while some communities may well go right back to sleep when this storm has passed, I think many of us need to recognize that the last decade has ripped the doors off our classroom and buried them at sea, and it's going to be a long time before teaching is a quiet, private pursuit again.
When you break trust in a relationship, it takes a long time to earn it back. We have got a lot of trust re-earning to do with the parents of American school children.
Friday, April 18, 2014
What Would Winning Look Like?
The comment keeps coming (most recently from Rick Hess) that Common Core regime opponents can't just say "no" to the Core, that they must stand for something-- not just against something.
I don't entirely agree. If a mugger approaches you and says, "I'm going to beat you up and take all your money," I will probably say, "I prefer not to be mugged." At that point, I don't think it's a legitimate criticism of my position to say that I can't just be against being beaten and robbed-- I need to be for something.
But I'm going to go ahead, as a kind of thought experiment, and describe a world where all of this shook out the way I think it ought to. Here's life in my world after the CCSS regime finally was swept away:
The Common Core State Standards are replaced with Common Core Recommended National Standards. These standards provide some broad educational goals covering all areas of a child's education (not just math and English). The CCRNS (oh wait-- can I put "American" in front so that they're ACCRNS? Too much??) would be created by a national coalition of teachers and college educators; the creating group would not include a single representative of private education corporations. The federal government might provide some logistical help (setting up the conferences, providing infrastructure, etc) but there would not be a single federal representative at the table.
Adoption of the CCRNS on the state level would be entirely voluntary and not tied to a single federal dollar. State standards boards, also composed entirely of teachers, would rewrite the national standards for use in their states as they saw fit. Keep a little, keep a lot. Add a little, add a lot. Adopt it whole hog, reject the entire thing. They would not have to justify these choices to anybody except the citizens of their states.
A CCRNS Board would stay in place after the initial rollout. It would be smaller than the group that wrote the standards, and meet less frequently. It would maintain an office and web presence and field questions of the "What was the intent/meaning of standard Q.16-7?" and also collect comments of the "Here's our rewrite of standard X.47-b/13, and why we think it works better." These would be useful at the bi-annual convention where the CCRNS were re-examined and re-written. Teacher members will rotate on and off this board; it's conceivable that a few may need leaves of absence to serve on the national standards board for a year at a time.
State Standards Boards will also maintain a skeleton crew for similar purposes, but it will also be up to the State Board to license instructional materials. No publisher gets to slap a CCRNS-ready sticker on their materials until the appropriate state standards board has checked it out. This does mean they will have to repeat the process for all fifty states. Tough shit.
All curriculum decisions will be made by local school districts. All of them. State DOE will not provide "model" curricular material nor "sample" course outlines nor a list of mandated units. They will not "recommend" textbooks. Let me say it again. All curriculum decisions will be made by local school districts.
There will be no high stakes standardized tests. None. Not one. None. States may decide they want to require each district to administer an exit exam for graduation, but the state will not provide it (well, the state never provides it-- more accurate to say the state will not pay somebody like Pearson buckets of money to provide it for them). Any such exams will be developed by the local district. The local district may decide to purchase a standardized test that's out there on the market; that will be a locally made decision.
How would we know that CCRNS was working? Because teachers, parents, employers, community members-- who are not actually fools and dopes-- would see the results. CCRNS would thrive if all the stakeholders said, "That's great. More, please," and fail if all the stakeholders said, "That doesn't seem to help a bit." Of course, since it would be constructed with a review and revision process built in, it could actually respond to criticism and changing conditions on the ground.
Because of all of the above, education will look different from state to state and district to district. In my perfect world, people will recognize that this is a good thing.
Obviously there are many points for argument here, and since I'm not a billionaire I can't just force everyone to come to grips with my vision for education whether they want to or not. But in this piece I'm just laying out my vision. I'll start making my case for it in Part II.
I don't entirely agree. If a mugger approaches you and says, "I'm going to beat you up and take all your money," I will probably say, "I prefer not to be mugged." At that point, I don't think it's a legitimate criticism of my position to say that I can't just be against being beaten and robbed-- I need to be for something.
But I'm going to go ahead, as a kind of thought experiment, and describe a world where all of this shook out the way I think it ought to. Here's life in my world after the CCSS regime finally was swept away:
The Common Core State Standards are replaced with Common Core Recommended National Standards. These standards provide some broad educational goals covering all areas of a child's education (not just math and English). The CCRNS (oh wait-- can I put "American" in front so that they're ACCRNS? Too much??) would be created by a national coalition of teachers and college educators; the creating group would not include a single representative of private education corporations. The federal government might provide some logistical help (setting up the conferences, providing infrastructure, etc) but there would not be a single federal representative at the table.
Adoption of the CCRNS on the state level would be entirely voluntary and not tied to a single federal dollar. State standards boards, also composed entirely of teachers, would rewrite the national standards for use in their states as they saw fit. Keep a little, keep a lot. Add a little, add a lot. Adopt it whole hog, reject the entire thing. They would not have to justify these choices to anybody except the citizens of their states.
A CCRNS Board would stay in place after the initial rollout. It would be smaller than the group that wrote the standards, and meet less frequently. It would maintain an office and web presence and field questions of the "What was the intent/meaning of standard Q.16-7?" and also collect comments of the "Here's our rewrite of standard X.47-b/13, and why we think it works better." These would be useful at the bi-annual convention where the CCRNS were re-examined and re-written. Teacher members will rotate on and off this board; it's conceivable that a few may need leaves of absence to serve on the national standards board for a year at a time.
State Standards Boards will also maintain a skeleton crew for similar purposes, but it will also be up to the State Board to license instructional materials. No publisher gets to slap a CCRNS-ready sticker on their materials until the appropriate state standards board has checked it out. This does mean they will have to repeat the process for all fifty states. Tough shit.
All curriculum decisions will be made by local school districts. All of them. State DOE will not provide "model" curricular material nor "sample" course outlines nor a list of mandated units. They will not "recommend" textbooks. Let me say it again. All curriculum decisions will be made by local school districts.
There will be no high stakes standardized tests. None. Not one. None. States may decide they want to require each district to administer an exit exam for graduation, but the state will not provide it (well, the state never provides it-- more accurate to say the state will not pay somebody like Pearson buckets of money to provide it for them). Any such exams will be developed by the local district. The local district may decide to purchase a standardized test that's out there on the market; that will be a locally made decision.
How would we know that CCRNS was working? Because teachers, parents, employers, community members-- who are not actually fools and dopes-- would see the results. CCRNS would thrive if all the stakeholders said, "That's great. More, please," and fail if all the stakeholders said, "That doesn't seem to help a bit." Of course, since it would be constructed with a review and revision process built in, it could actually respond to criticism and changing conditions on the ground.
Because of all of the above, education will look different from state to state and district to district. In my perfect world, people will recognize that this is a good thing.
Obviously there are many points for argument here, and since I'm not a billionaire I can't just force everyone to come to grips with my vision for education whether they want to or not. But in this piece I'm just laying out my vision. I'll start making my case for it in Part II.
What if there were 50 standards?
(Part II of a series; Part I is here)
Sol Stern has been trying to cyber-argue with Diane Ravitch and Mercedes Schneider lately (you can read his latest thrash here and watch Schneider shrug it off here). His latest flight into the higher altitudes of Mt. Dudgeon builds to a roar and finishes with this closer:
If Diane Ravitch and other anti-Common Core campaigners on both the left and right succeed in their destructive mission, we will go right back to “50 states, 50 standards, 50 tests.” Ravitch and her allies can then celebrate their political victory—but the children in America’s schools will be the losers.
I know that I'm supposed to recognize that going back to fifty states, fifty standards, fifty tests is clearly and unarguably a Terrible Thing, but here I where I differ with the Fans of Standardization. Because I have yet to hear a single, solitary convincing argument for why having one standard and one test for fifty states is a Swell Thing.
I'm actually going to skip over the "one test" part of this, because my contention is that the correct number of high stakes standardized tests to give students is "zero," so we'll just set that part of the argument aside for another day. Let's just focus on my other assertion.
One set of standards for the nation is not a good thing. It's not even a human thing.
Yes, there are useful standards, such as standards for railroad gauge and electrical plugs. These sorts of standards are helpful because they make manufactured objects more useful. Everybody understands that schools are not for making useful manufactured objects, right? I don't need to go over that again, do I?
National education standards for live humans should fail. The notion that every state should produce exactly the same education at exactly the same rate is just so bizarre that I find it painfully difficult to argue against because I have a hard time understanding how anybody could think it's a good thing.
Within our country, we expect places to be different. That's normal. People are cool and flinty in the Northeast and warm and gooshy in the South. People are all packed together in the city and all spread out in the country. December means one thing in Los Angeles and another thing in Syracuse. The human experience is very different depending on where you live.
Corporate forces have actively worked against that human variation for about 100 years, with a huge turbo-boost of standardization activity in the post-WWII period. To really make money, we need to get people to eat the same food, wear the same clothes, shop at the same stores, buy the exact same stuff from Wyoming to Delaware. Plopped down in the middle of any mall in America, you would be hard-pressed to guess where in the world you were standing.
This sort of standardization demands that everything unique and richly interesting about local human experience be erased, all pointy spots and rough edges be ground down. So tear down the Santa Monica Pier and put up a McDonald's. Knock down the 16th Street Mall in Denver and put up a Wal-Mart. Make the beaches in Hawaii available for developers to purchase directly. Condemn Clark's Trading Post and let an outlet mall have a shot at really opening up the Kancamagus Highway. You, dear reader. don't even know what all of these places are, because each is a unique local experience, and that's a good thing, because all together they add up to the rich, varied, human beings on Earth experience.
Why would we want to create a world where nobody ever needed to travel because there was nothing to see anywhere else that you couldn't see at home? Why would we want our ideal world to be one where nobody agonized over where to live because it didn't make any difference? What does "home" even mean when all places are pretty much the same?
"Calm down," I hear somebody saying. "We don't want to turn the world into a bland boring land of commercialized mediocrity. We just want to standardize education."
But local school districts are an expression of local personality. Sports teams are named after local features. School buildings are part o local history. Teachers are still, in many places, public figures of the same sort as city councilmen or police officers.
Schools' priorities, strengths, weaknesses, triumphs, disasters are an all expressions of and part of the local culture, which is in turn an expression of the live human beings who live in that community. You cannot turn schools into a chain. Yes, it's swell that you can walk into any Starbucks anywhere and get exactly what you would get at any other Starbucks, but that is not a worthwhile aspiration for a school. I do not see any value in a future in which, when you ask a student what makes his school special, he answers proudly, "Why nothing! Nothing at all! Isn't that awesome!"
What we want for every human being is that each person should know herself as a unique, valuable, and special, with something important and valuable to offer, a unique constellation of qualities and history, a product of individual hard-wiring and history. I don't mean we need to raise self-indulgent sociopaths, but no healthy society ever developed by saying to its young people, "We want you to grow up to be exactly like everyone else." And our schools have to express that value, and they cannot express that value if they are organized the principle of standardized mass-production.
Now, the other big argument for standardization is, "What if the local values are ignorance and dumbosity? What if-- given the freedom to school as they wish-- they choose poorly?' I hear you-- and that's where I'm going in Part III.
Sol Stern has been trying to cyber-argue with Diane Ravitch and Mercedes Schneider lately (you can read his latest thrash here and watch Schneider shrug it off here). His latest flight into the higher altitudes of Mt. Dudgeon builds to a roar and finishes with this closer:
If Diane Ravitch and other anti-Common Core campaigners on both the left and right succeed in their destructive mission, we will go right back to “50 states, 50 standards, 50 tests.” Ravitch and her allies can then celebrate their political victory—but the children in America’s schools will be the losers.
I know that I'm supposed to recognize that going back to fifty states, fifty standards, fifty tests is clearly and unarguably a Terrible Thing, but here I where I differ with the Fans of Standardization. Because I have yet to hear a single, solitary convincing argument for why having one standard and one test for fifty states is a Swell Thing.
I'm actually going to skip over the "one test" part of this, because my contention is that the correct number of high stakes standardized tests to give students is "zero," so we'll just set that part of the argument aside for another day. Let's just focus on my other assertion.
One set of standards for the nation is not a good thing. It's not even a human thing.
Yes, there are useful standards, such as standards for railroad gauge and electrical plugs. These sorts of standards are helpful because they make manufactured objects more useful. Everybody understands that schools are not for making useful manufactured objects, right? I don't need to go over that again, do I?
National education standards for live humans should fail. The notion that every state should produce exactly the same education at exactly the same rate is just so bizarre that I find it painfully difficult to argue against because I have a hard time understanding how anybody could think it's a good thing.
Within our country, we expect places to be different. That's normal. People are cool and flinty in the Northeast and warm and gooshy in the South. People are all packed together in the city and all spread out in the country. December means one thing in Los Angeles and another thing in Syracuse. The human experience is very different depending on where you live.
Corporate forces have actively worked against that human variation for about 100 years, with a huge turbo-boost of standardization activity in the post-WWII period. To really make money, we need to get people to eat the same food, wear the same clothes, shop at the same stores, buy the exact same stuff from Wyoming to Delaware. Plopped down in the middle of any mall in America, you would be hard-pressed to guess where in the world you were standing.
This sort of standardization demands that everything unique and richly interesting about local human experience be erased, all pointy spots and rough edges be ground down. So tear down the Santa Monica Pier and put up a McDonald's. Knock down the 16th Street Mall in Denver and put up a Wal-Mart. Make the beaches in Hawaii available for developers to purchase directly. Condemn Clark's Trading Post and let an outlet mall have a shot at really opening up the Kancamagus Highway. You, dear reader. don't even know what all of these places are, because each is a unique local experience, and that's a good thing, because all together they add up to the rich, varied, human beings on Earth experience.
Why would we want to create a world where nobody ever needed to travel because there was nothing to see anywhere else that you couldn't see at home? Why would we want our ideal world to be one where nobody agonized over where to live because it didn't make any difference? What does "home" even mean when all places are pretty much the same?
"Calm down," I hear somebody saying. "We don't want to turn the world into a bland boring land of commercialized mediocrity. We just want to standardize education."
But local school districts are an expression of local personality. Sports teams are named after local features. School buildings are part o local history. Teachers are still, in many places, public figures of the same sort as city councilmen or police officers.
Schools' priorities, strengths, weaknesses, triumphs, disasters are an all expressions of and part of the local culture, which is in turn an expression of the live human beings who live in that community. You cannot turn schools into a chain. Yes, it's swell that you can walk into any Starbucks anywhere and get exactly what you would get at any other Starbucks, but that is not a worthwhile aspiration for a school. I do not see any value in a future in which, when you ask a student what makes his school special, he answers proudly, "Why nothing! Nothing at all! Isn't that awesome!"
What we want for every human being is that each person should know herself as a unique, valuable, and special, with something important and valuable to offer, a unique constellation of qualities and history, a product of individual hard-wiring and history. I don't mean we need to raise self-indulgent sociopaths, but no healthy society ever developed by saying to its young people, "We want you to grow up to be exactly like everyone else." And our schools have to express that value, and they cannot express that value if they are organized the principle of standardized mass-production.
Now, the other big argument for standardization is, "What if the local values are ignorance and dumbosity? What if-- given the freedom to school as they wish-- they choose poorly?' I hear you-- and that's where I'm going in Part III.
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