President Obama has brushed the mothballs off one of the worst, dumbest proposals in Arne Duncan's USDOE toolbox (and that is not an easy bar to clear). As reported by Reuters, Duncan is poised to revive the plan for test-based evaluation of college teacher prep programs.
There are already many dumb plans in place, from the content specific Praxis tests (because if you can pass a computerized bubble test about your content area, clearly you can teach it) to recent suggestions that we can test prospective teachers for grit.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters
poor teacher preparation programs produce teachers "who are
under-prepared, who are ineffective and who are frustrated."
When it comes to identifying a problem, the feds have actually done pretty well. There are some truly execrable teacher training programs out there. I know that because, like most teachers, I have dealt with some of their products as either student teachers or colleagues, and it is hard not to conclude that the application for some teacher programs consists of a simple question:
Will you give us this large sum of money if we let you take teacher classes from us?
One can easily identify at least one source of the problem. There are simple too few 18-to-22-year-olds to go around these days. Being picky is an expensive set of principles for a college to embrace. So I think most teachers have to admit that what Arne has to say about some teacher prep programs isn't any harsher than some of the things we've said in our own teacher lounges about certain programs. (We might also point out that Arne has offered, all on his own, an excellent reason to shut down TFA, but let's move on.)
So in the face of a real issue-- subpar teacher prep at a few colleges and universities-- what does Arne have to offer? Nothing less than one of the dumbest ideas ever in the history of bad, dumb, dumbly bad ideas ever. Duncan wants to track student back through their teachers all the way back to the teachers' college of origin. Yes, an eight-year-old's low reading score will be used to help shut down Wassamatta U's art education program. Because, data.
It's hard to really convey how terrible this idea is. It's cliche at this point to observe vis-a-vis Testing that you do not make a pig grow fatter by weighing it. But even that metaphor is inadequate, as putting a pig on a scale will actually tell you how much it weighs.
No, Duncan's college program data scoring program would work more like this: Shave a strip of hair of the back of the pig, then weigh that hair and, using a special proprietary formula, calculate the weight of the pig. then use the pig's weight to determine how healthy the pig is. Then use the pig's health index to calculate the health index for the whole barn full of pigs. Then use that data to calculate a rating for the quality of the barn. Then use the barn's rating to work out the quality of the lumber used to build the barn. Then use the lumber unit ranking to score the mill from which the lumber came, which in turn can be used to rank the equipment used to cut down the trees that were turned into lumber. And from there we can arrive at a quality rating for the gloves worn by the guy who operated the equipment used to cut down the trees that were turned into lumber that was built into the barn where we raised the pig that grew the hair that we shaved off his back. Easy peasy, and all done with numbers and formulas, so you know that it's just loaded with science and data and stuff.
The US DOE proposes to start with tests that measure, at best, a small sliver of student learning which will be used to evaluate teachers, who only affect a small sliver of that learning, and then use that rating to rank the college of origin (which only affected a small sliver of that teacher's professional skills).
The US DOE proposes to take a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of slice of pie, and given just how bad the CCSS tests are, it proposes to have all the sliver slicing done by a blind one-armed guy using a chainsaw.
This proposal rests on two favorite administration assumptions:
1) Standardized tests, particularly those produced by large corporations, are flawless measures of a child's education.
2) Everyone who works in public education is too stupid to figure out anything at all without corporate-backed feds to tell them.
Do I know a better way to fix teacher education? You know I do (who would become a blogger if he didn't have an answer for everything). But I'm going to save that for another day, because I don't want anything to distract us from the sheer awesome mountainous screamingly foolish heap of dumb that is this new proposal. It is the Grand Canyon of dumb, and it deserves to be viewed quietly, with awe and respect, before we start telling our state legislators that there's one more dumb idea from DC that we need them to ignore.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Friday, April 25, 2014
What Test Prep Is Not
I've noticed a meme in writing promoting CCSS tests lately in which fans promote the New Improved Test's ability to dig deep into the furthest thinky places of the human brain. "It's the end of the old bubble test," these enthusiastic testinators declaim. "No more of that test prep." Here. Here. And here.
And then, as sort of a rhetorical bank shot, they slip in what "test prep" means to them, and it's generally defined as it is here, in this fairly direct example included in New York's recently-released FAQ guide to Corporate Baloney Talking Points About Testing:
Do Common Core tests require excessive or rote standardized test preparation?
No. NYSED discourages rote standardized test preparation, which takes time away from learning. The best preparation for testing is good teaching.
Got that? "Test prep" here and elsewhere is defined as rote memorization. And it's swell that we're going to stamp it out-- except that "test prep" hasn't meant rote memorization since your great-grandfather invented dirt!
We've been doing hard core test prep ever since No Child Left Behind was a pup, and it has NOT consisted of rote learning or memorization. It has consisted of learning how to perform the specific cockamamie tasks favored by the designers of the various state-level assessments.
We have covered "How To Spot the Fake Answers Put There To Fool You." We've discussed "Questions About Context Clues Mean You Must Ignore What You Think You Know." We've discussed how open-ended questions require counting skills (the answer to any question that includes "Give three reasons that..." just requires a full three reasons of anything at all, but give three). For lower-function students, we covered such basics as "Read All Four Answers Before You Pick One."
We have pushed aside old literary forms like "short stories" and "novels" in favor of "reading selections"-- one-page-sized chunks of boring contextless pablum which nobody reads in real life, but everybody reads on standardized tests. We have taught them to always use big words like "plethora" on their essay answers, and to always fill up the whole essay page, no matter what repetitive gibberish is requires. We have taught them to always rewrite the prompt as their topic sentence. In PA, we have taught them what sort of crazy possible meaning the test-writers might have assigned to the words "tone" and "mood."
Like the Test Prep Titans of the SAT world (who will not be going out of business any time soon, no matter what David Coleman says), we have not had our students rotely memorize a thing. We have simply tried to prepare them to travel from the Land of Education to the planet Crazy Baloney, where everything operates according to different laws of sense and physics.
Still, it is technically correct that the new CCSS Tests will not require memorization, just as we will also not demand that students ride to school on their pennyfarthings and take the test with self-sharpened quills. Once again, Reformistas have rushed in to solve a problem that we don't have.
But test prep? We'll certainly doing that, like a boss, all day, hard, because our jobs and our students' futures depend on this newest trip to Crazy Baloney. Memorization won't help them a bit. Unfortunately, neither will a good education, critical thinking, and great reading and writing skills. The New CCSS Tests test exactly what the Old NCLB Tests tested-- the students' ability to take a high stakes poorly designed unvalidated craptastic standardized test. And as long as that's what we're testing, we will be test prepping until we can't pedal our pennyfarthings another inch.
And then, as sort of a rhetorical bank shot, they slip in what "test prep" means to them, and it's generally defined as it is here, in this fairly direct example included in New York's recently-released FAQ guide to Corporate Baloney Talking Points About Testing:
Do Common Core tests require excessive or rote standardized test preparation?
No. NYSED discourages rote standardized test preparation, which takes time away from learning. The best preparation for testing is good teaching.
Got that? "Test prep" here and elsewhere is defined as rote memorization. And it's swell that we're going to stamp it out-- except that "test prep" hasn't meant rote memorization since your great-grandfather invented dirt!
We've been doing hard core test prep ever since No Child Left Behind was a pup, and it has NOT consisted of rote learning or memorization. It has consisted of learning how to perform the specific cockamamie tasks favored by the designers of the various state-level assessments.
We have covered "How To Spot the Fake Answers Put There To Fool You." We've discussed "Questions About Context Clues Mean You Must Ignore What You Think You Know." We've discussed how open-ended questions require counting skills (the answer to any question that includes "Give three reasons that..." just requires a full three reasons of anything at all, but give three). For lower-function students, we covered such basics as "Read All Four Answers Before You Pick One."
We have pushed aside old literary forms like "short stories" and "novels" in favor of "reading selections"-- one-page-sized chunks of boring contextless pablum which nobody reads in real life, but everybody reads on standardized tests. We have taught them to always use big words like "plethora" on their essay answers, and to always fill up the whole essay page, no matter what repetitive gibberish is requires. We have taught them to always rewrite the prompt as their topic sentence. In PA, we have taught them what sort of crazy possible meaning the test-writers might have assigned to the words "tone" and "mood."
Like the Test Prep Titans of the SAT world (who will not be going out of business any time soon, no matter what David Coleman says), we have not had our students rotely memorize a thing. We have simply tried to prepare them to travel from the Land of Education to the planet Crazy Baloney, where everything operates according to different laws of sense and physics.
Still, it is technically correct that the new CCSS Tests will not require memorization, just as we will also not demand that students ride to school on their pennyfarthings and take the test with self-sharpened quills. Once again, Reformistas have rushed in to solve a problem that we don't have.
But test prep? We'll certainly doing that, like a boss, all day, hard, because our jobs and our students' futures depend on this newest trip to Crazy Baloney. Memorization won't help them a bit. Unfortunately, neither will a good education, critical thinking, and great reading and writing skills. The New CCSS Tests test exactly what the Old NCLB Tests tested-- the students' ability to take a high stakes poorly designed unvalidated craptastic standardized test. And as long as that's what we're testing, we will be test prepping until we can't pedal our pennyfarthings another inch.
When Washington Waiver Is Washed Away, Will We Waive Weeping?
Arne Duncan, King of All Schools, has banished Washington State to an earlier age. Stripped of their flexibility (our current word the law-cancelling edict that cabinet secretaries can apparently issue), the state must now tumble back into the unloving embrace of No Child Left Behind.
In the short term, this is terrible news for the state. Under NCLB, this is the year that we should all have reached 100% proficiency-- every single, solitary student, no exceptions, should be scoring above average on the state evaluation. If they don't, then Terrible Things are supposed to happen.
But in the long term, this may very well be great news for all of us.
As of September, every single school in Washington will be failing. Every single school in Washington will be under a mandated turnaround. In the most extreme application of the law, every school could be stripped of staff, administration, and funding, and then handed over to some turnaround company to fix them. And that would be good.
Look at it this way. Duncan just engineered what some activists have been dreaming of-- a complete walkout of teachers across an entire state.
Teachers know this one-- it's the nightmare we all had when we started, the nightmare where all the students in your room get up and walk out and dare you to try to give every single one of them a detention. And you wake up feeling a lump in your gut because you know you never could. How do you punish EVERYBODY!??
Actually forcing an implementation of the nuclear options in NCLB will hold it up to public ridicule ("Wait-- our local school is in trouble because the three kids who got arrested for blowing up mailboxes didn't pass the test?") and create a bureaucratic nightmare (How many DOE officials does it take to take over the daily operations of every school in the state?). The result would be logistically unmanageable and politically unsellable.
What are the possible outcomes?
Duncan could negotiate a blunting of the impact by somehow reducing the penalties for statewide failure. At worst, this could create inconvenience in the state that makes the law and the DOE look stupid. At best, it could cause other waiver states to declare, "Hey, that doesn't look nearly as painful as trying to implement all this idiocy that King Arne decreed! Hey Arne! We'll have some of what they're having!"
Congress could get off its collective ass. There is plenty of reason to hate Duncan's unilateral installing of the waiver system, but it's also true that it wouldn't have happened if Congress hadn't spent almost an entire decade playing Hot Potato with ESEA reauthorization. You can complain about the executive branch usurping legislative power, but if the legislative branch didn't leave the keys to the car just lying on the coffee table all the time, maybe junior would not feel tempted to go joy-riding.
I don't care if they're hypocritical about it, or badly disingenuous, as long as they say, "Yeah, that law is broken. Let's fix it." And then do so. That would lead to all sorts of interesting federal arguments about education, and I would never utter "It couldn't possibly be worse," (because it always can be), but it would give us a fighting chance to make things better.
Washington's school system could be messed up so badly that a huge tidal wave of backlash washes away all the reformy nonsense that we've been choking on, and the reformista's status quo would finally fade into the past. I don't wish that kind of disaster on anybody's schools, but as anybody who has learned enabling bad behavior knows, sometimes in order to get better, you have to let things break.
In the short term, this is terrible news for the state. Under NCLB, this is the year that we should all have reached 100% proficiency-- every single, solitary student, no exceptions, should be scoring above average on the state evaluation. If they don't, then Terrible Things are supposed to happen.
But in the long term, this may very well be great news for all of us.
As of September, every single school in Washington will be failing. Every single school in Washington will be under a mandated turnaround. In the most extreme application of the law, every school could be stripped of staff, administration, and funding, and then handed over to some turnaround company to fix them. And that would be good.
Look at it this way. Duncan just engineered what some activists have been dreaming of-- a complete walkout of teachers across an entire state.
Teachers know this one-- it's the nightmare we all had when we started, the nightmare where all the students in your room get up and walk out and dare you to try to give every single one of them a detention. And you wake up feeling a lump in your gut because you know you never could. How do you punish EVERYBODY!??
Actually forcing an implementation of the nuclear options in NCLB will hold it up to public ridicule ("Wait-- our local school is in trouble because the three kids who got arrested for blowing up mailboxes didn't pass the test?") and create a bureaucratic nightmare (How many DOE officials does it take to take over the daily operations of every school in the state?). The result would be logistically unmanageable and politically unsellable.
What are the possible outcomes?
Duncan could negotiate a blunting of the impact by somehow reducing the penalties for statewide failure. At worst, this could create inconvenience in the state that makes the law and the DOE look stupid. At best, it could cause other waiver states to declare, "Hey, that doesn't look nearly as painful as trying to implement all this idiocy that King Arne decreed! Hey Arne! We'll have some of what they're having!"
Congress could get off its collective ass. There is plenty of reason to hate Duncan's unilateral installing of the waiver system, but it's also true that it wouldn't have happened if Congress hadn't spent almost an entire decade playing Hot Potato with ESEA reauthorization. You can complain about the executive branch usurping legislative power, but if the legislative branch didn't leave the keys to the car just lying on the coffee table all the time, maybe junior would not feel tempted to go joy-riding.
I don't care if they're hypocritical about it, or badly disingenuous, as long as they say, "Yeah, that law is broken. Let's fix it." And then do so. That would lead to all sorts of interesting federal arguments about education, and I would never utter "It couldn't possibly be worse," (because it always can be), but it would give us a fighting chance to make things better.
Washington's school system could be messed up so badly that a huge tidal wave of backlash washes away all the reformy nonsense that we've been choking on, and the reformista's status quo would finally fade into the past. I don't wish that kind of disaster on anybody's schools, but as anybody who has learned enabling bad behavior knows, sometimes in order to get better, you have to let things break.
Cami, Surgery & Big Stupid Democracy
Like a cat struggling with a fascinatingly ugly hairball, the internet yesterday coughed up an extraordinary video of Cami Anderson. I do not know where she is or why (the wall behind her says "Arizona State University/GSV"), and I do not usually cover New Jersey education because so many capable, local hands already have that covered.
But for the rest of us, the video answers the question, "Is she really that messed up?" And it's also yet another window into the troubled minds of the Masters of Reforming Our Nations' Schools who are defining the current dysfunctional status quo. It's down at the end of the page, but let me break down the best parts.
Cami speaks in the video about "our responsibility as educators" in reference to people actually being attached to their old schools, and she offers an illuminating metaphor.
Her sister is a trauma surgeon, a general surgeon, who cuts people open, and Cami thinks all the time about how, when her sister is in the operating room, with someone's life literally in her hands, she does not ask a bunch of people in the second row to vote on whether or not to close or keep going. She does not have someone in the third row telling her that she has to use a rusty scalpel. She does not have the five loudest people who are anti-everything, shouting and banging on the door about the color of her hair or skin or where she went to school or not. She is empowered to make decisions that are in the best interests of saving that patient, in saving his life so that he is able to live a life as full as possible. We have that responsibility.
Cami, Cami, Cami. Here are the two biggest ways your metaphor is not quite what you had in mind.
First, your sister the surgeon is a trained professional. She has years of training, years of practice, years of learning her craft so that she has a level of expertise that earns her the right to that empowerment. She did not get that empowerment just because she is somehow an inately superior human being.
I guarantee you that she did not get her surgery licensure after five weeks of training, and she didn't get the job in the hospital because of political strings. Well, actually, I don't know that-- but I'm betting it's true. You, on the other hand, have no training, no experience, and no qualification. So in the metaphor, you are not a highly trained surgeon, but a woman whose political connections somehow got you the right to stand in an OR holding a scalpel that you know nothing about using.
Second, your sister the surgeon could not operate until she had the consent of the patient and his family. Even trauma surgeons do not just walk up to someone on the street, announce, "You need surgery," knock them unconscious, and proceed to operate. Doctors must get the consent of the patients (kind of like civil authority flows from the consent of the governed).
Before she could set foot in that operating room, she had to convince people that she had a plan, that the plan was good, and that they should agree to it.
There's more video. Cami toughs out the personal stuff because she came from a big rough family; also, her brothers might come to Jersey to show people what's up. And if a small student can come to school when it sucks, Cami can come to work and hear Mean Things.
But the main thread that we keep finding running through MoRONS speech, from this video to Reed Hastings rant about elected school boards to Arne Duncan's commandeering of the law-making process is this:
Democracy is stupid.
Look, say the Reformistas. We are just better than you are. We are wiser, smarter, and just plain righter than the rest of you. So you should stop getting in our way. All of you lesser humans should stop insisting that you're entitled to some sort of voice-- you aren't. Shut up, sit down, and let the superior humans take care of these difficult matters.
It's extraordinary. Cami feels personally attacked, and yet she does not perceive how her very framing of the situation attacks everyone else for being stupid or complainy or just not special enough to see her awesomeness. I just hope for her sake that Christie's office never decides that she is one more hysterical female who needs to be cut loose.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Duncan Breaks Up With WA
In a move that just underlines how deeply bizarre the relationship has become between Arne Duncan, King of All Schools, and the previously-sovereign states, Arne today pulled the rug out from under Washington state, sending them tumbling toward a bureaucratic limbo that...well, at the very least, will be interesting.
The Dear John letter is trim and bureaucratic. I'll offer a translation into Plain English.
Graph 1: I got your formal request for yet another extension. In good standardized test style, I will recycle your prompt into my topic sentence. Thank you for playing. Thank you for sucking up by telling me how great our work was in helping your kids.
Graph 2: "As you know," your waiver was based on your willingness to follow our instructions. You have failed to do so, so now your "flexibility" (which is our favored code word for waiver) is at an end. I'll throw in the word "regret" because I hear frowny emoticons are inappropriate for official letters.
Graph 3: One of the promises you made (just like all the other boys and girls in class) was to evaluate your teachers and principals based on the Common Core tests (no, of course he didn't use those words-- he used the whole CCR standards etc etc-- I'm translating). It was going to be sweet, with "robust, timely, and meaningful feedback" (which is what I'm pretty sure nobody anywhere using the fed-required system is getting). And he said this: "Including student learning growth as a significant factor among the multiple measures used to determine performance levels is important as an objective measure to differentiate among teachers and principals who have made significantly different contributions to student learning growth and closing achievement gaps." And wow-- that's completely unsubstantiated, but there's federal stuff on the stationary so it must be trues!
Graph 4: I'm going to recap the timeline now. Not sure why-- we all know what happened and when-- but I guess I need it for the record. Anyway, you double-pinky swore on this date and then promised again on another date and now you're obviously not going to get it done in time. Also "I recognize that requiring the use of statewide assessments to measure student learning growth requires a legislative change, and that Governor Inslee and your office worked diligently to obtain that change. I thank you for your leadership and courage in those efforts." So, I recognize you got hammered politically. I'm not mad at you-- just your stupid doody-head legislators who don't seem to understand that I am their boss. Thanks for trying. Heckuva job, Dorny.
Graph 5: Thanks for trying, but you failed, so it sucks to be you. This will cost you money. But hey-- if you ever get some political heft behind you again, feel free to re-apply for flexibility.
Graph 6: In a masterpiece of bureaucratic understatement, Duncan opens this graph with- I appreciate that transitioning back to NCLB is not desirable, and will not be simple. Attached is a list of all the laws you are now breaking as of next fall. Asst Secretary Deborah Delisle has the thankless task of taking your phone calls begging for help with damage control, because whenever you call, I'm going to be "out of the office."
Graph 7: "Thank you again for your leadership and your efforts to keep the commitments Washington made in its ESEA flexibility request. Thank you, as well, for your continued focus on enhancing education for all of Washington’s children." See ya. Wouldn't wanna be ya!
So, to quickly recap. Washington got to ignore its violation of federal NCLB laws if they agreed to install Duncan's own untried, untested, unproven, unsubstantiated but very specific prescriptions about how to use CCSS tests to evaluate teachers and principals. Which, when you take a step back and look at it, is really ballsy! And now, having once arbitrarily extended his deadline, Duncan has arbitrarily decided not to, and so--snap--just like that, the law that Congress passed is now in effect again! It's like magic! I don't know if this is how laws are made, but I suspect it's a good way to make libertarians.
This can only get better, because it reminds me of a story about some laws and how they work. I will tell you that story in the next paragraph, if you want to skip it.
Years ago, I was president of a striking union in PA. At the time, the law said the school year must be finished by a specific date, and therefor the strike could not go past a certain date. Both we and the administration were unsure of exactly which date that might be, so we called Harrsiburg to find out. And what we found out was that although this law was on the books, nobody knew how it would be enforced, or who would be responsible for enforcing it. We literally could not find a single person in Harrisburg who would take responsibility for what the law meant or what would happen to the teachers and district if we somehow broke it. And that, boys and girls, is how laws work some times.
I have to say this again, because we already know it, but this little event puts it back out in plain sight. Duncan doesn't just believe that CCSS test-based measures of teachers and principals are a good idea. He doesn't just deny every stone on the mountain made out of evidence that he's wrong. He has given CCSS test-based measurement the full weight of federal law.
So what will happen to Washington, and who will do it? Or will the legislators freak out and panic, installing Arne's junk science system at the 11th hour to win back his Kingly affection? You can bet a few other states will be watching (as Rick Hess notes in his fine commentary today, Washington's probably not the only state not living up to the letter of their waiver)-- how much do they need to fear a hissy fit from the King of All Schools?
The Dear John letter is trim and bureaucratic. I'll offer a translation into Plain English.
Graph 1: I got your formal request for yet another extension. In good standardized test style, I will recycle your prompt into my topic sentence. Thank you for playing. Thank you for sucking up by telling me how great our work was in helping your kids.
Graph 2: "As you know," your waiver was based on your willingness to follow our instructions. You have failed to do so, so now your "flexibility" (which is our favored code word for waiver) is at an end. I'll throw in the word "regret" because I hear frowny emoticons are inappropriate for official letters.
Graph 3: One of the promises you made (just like all the other boys and girls in class) was to evaluate your teachers and principals based on the Common Core tests (no, of course he didn't use those words-- he used the whole CCR standards etc etc-- I'm translating). It was going to be sweet, with "robust, timely, and meaningful feedback" (which is what I'm pretty sure nobody anywhere using the fed-required system is getting). And he said this: "Including student learning growth as a significant factor among the multiple measures used to determine performance levels is important as an objective measure to differentiate among teachers and principals who have made significantly different contributions to student learning growth and closing achievement gaps." And wow-- that's completely unsubstantiated, but there's federal stuff on the stationary so it must be trues!
Graph 4: I'm going to recap the timeline now. Not sure why-- we all know what happened and when-- but I guess I need it for the record. Anyway, you double-pinky swore on this date and then promised again on another date and now you're obviously not going to get it done in time. Also "I recognize that requiring the use of statewide assessments to measure student learning growth requires a legislative change, and that Governor Inslee and your office worked diligently to obtain that change. I thank you for your leadership and courage in those efforts." So, I recognize you got hammered politically. I'm not mad at you-- just your stupid doody-head legislators who don't seem to understand that I am their boss. Thanks for trying. Heckuva job, Dorny.
Graph 5: Thanks for trying, but you failed, so it sucks to be you. This will cost you money. But hey-- if you ever get some political heft behind you again, feel free to re-apply for flexibility.
Graph 6: In a masterpiece of bureaucratic understatement, Duncan opens this graph with- I appreciate that transitioning back to NCLB is not desirable, and will not be simple. Attached is a list of all the laws you are now breaking as of next fall. Asst Secretary Deborah Delisle has the thankless task of taking your phone calls begging for help with damage control, because whenever you call, I'm going to be "out of the office."
Graph 7: "Thank you again for your leadership and your efforts to keep the commitments Washington made in its ESEA flexibility request. Thank you, as well, for your continued focus on enhancing education for all of Washington’s children." See ya. Wouldn't wanna be ya!
So, to quickly recap. Washington got to ignore its violation of federal NCLB laws if they agreed to install Duncan's own untried, untested, unproven, unsubstantiated but very specific prescriptions about how to use CCSS tests to evaluate teachers and principals. Which, when you take a step back and look at it, is really ballsy! And now, having once arbitrarily extended his deadline, Duncan has arbitrarily decided not to, and so--snap--just like that, the law that Congress passed is now in effect again! It's like magic! I don't know if this is how laws are made, but I suspect it's a good way to make libertarians.
This can only get better, because it reminds me of a story about some laws and how they work. I will tell you that story in the next paragraph, if you want to skip it.
Years ago, I was president of a striking union in PA. At the time, the law said the school year must be finished by a specific date, and therefor the strike could not go past a certain date. Both we and the administration were unsure of exactly which date that might be, so we called Harrsiburg to find out. And what we found out was that although this law was on the books, nobody knew how it would be enforced, or who would be responsible for enforcing it. We literally could not find a single person in Harrisburg who would take responsibility for what the law meant or what would happen to the teachers and district if we somehow broke it. And that, boys and girls, is how laws work some times.
I have to say this again, because we already know it, but this little event puts it back out in plain sight. Duncan doesn't just believe that CCSS test-based measures of teachers and principals are a good idea. He doesn't just deny every stone on the mountain made out of evidence that he's wrong. He has given CCSS test-based measurement the full weight of federal law.
So what will happen to Washington, and who will do it? Or will the legislators freak out and panic, installing Arne's junk science system at the 11th hour to win back his Kingly affection? You can bet a few other states will be watching (as Rick Hess notes in his fine commentary today, Washington's probably not the only state not living up to the letter of their waiver)-- how much do they need to fear a hissy fit from the King of All Schools?
In Pursuit of Failure
Let's say I'm devoted to finding the Loch Ness Monster, and I am determined to find scientific proof. So I order up a host of sciency devices to search the loch, and I set out to test them. My test-- any device that finds the monster is certified accurate, and any device that does not is rejected and faulty.
I will measure the device's scientific accuracy by measuring it against my pre-existing belief. This is a type of science called Not Actually Science, and it is an integral part of much Reformy Teacher Evaluation.
James Shuls, Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute (a maket-based solution group out of Missouri and not, sadly, a school for strippers), appeared this week in Jay P. Greene's blog (no relation afaik) reminding us of TNTP's "report" on the Lake Woebegone effect (so we've got the intersection here of three Reformy flavors).
Shuls follows a familiar path. We know that there are a bunch of sucky teachers out there. We just do. Everybody has a sucky teacher story, and Shuls also says that there is objective data to prove it, though he doesn't say what that data is, but we know it's accurate and scientific data because it confirms what we already know in our gut. So, science.
We know these teachers exist. Therefor any evaluation system that does not find heaps of bad teachers cluttering up the landscape must be a bad system. This line of reasoning was echoed this week by She Who Must Not Be Named on twitter, where a conversation with Jack Schneider spilled over. Feel free to skip the following rant.
(Because, for some reason, EdWeek has launched a new feature called Beyond the Rhetoric which features dialogue between Schneider and the Kim Kardashian of Education Reformy Stuff, and while I actually welcome the concept of the column, I am sad to see That Woman getting yet another platform from which to make word noises. Could they not have found a legitimate voice for the Reformy Status Quo? I mean, I wish the woman no ill will. I know there are people who would like to see her flesh gnawed off by angry weasels, but I'm basically a kind-hearted person. But I am baffled at how this woman can be repeatedly treated like a legitimate voice in the ed world when the only successful thing she has done is start a highly lucrative astroturf business. Sigh.)
Anyway, She tosses in the factoid that 1/2 of studied school districts didn't dismiss any teachers during the pre-tenure period. This, again, is offered as proof that the system is broken because it didn't find the Loch Ness Monster.
Now let me clear-- I think bad teachers are undoubtedly more plentiful than Loch Ness Monsters (and smaller). I've even offered my own revised eval system. I agree that the traditional teacher eval system could have used some work (the new systems, by contrast, are generally more useless than evaluation by tea leaves).
What I don't understand is this emphasis on Badness and Failure. This is the same focus that got us Jack Welch and stack ranking, widely considered "the worst thing about working at Microsoft" until Microsoft management decided they agreed and, like everyone else in the private sector, stopped doing it. This type of evaluation starts, even before a manager has met his team, with the assumption of a bell-ish curve-- at MS, out of every ten employees, the assumption was that two were great, seven were okay, and one was fire-ably sub-par.
Imagine doing that with a classroom of students. Imagine saying, "Whoever gets the lowest score on this gets an F, even if the score is a 98%."
Oh, wait. We do that, as in John White announcing before the New York test is even given, that 70% of students will fail it. And then-- voila-- they did!
It's a little scary that the Reformy Status Quo model is built around an absolute gut-based certainty that The Trouble With Education is that schools are full of terrible teachers who are lying to their gritless idiot pupils, and what we really need to do is shake up public schools by rooting out all these slackers and dopes, just drag them out into the light and publicly shame them for their inadequacy.
It's a lot scary that some of us seem to already know, based on our scientific guts, just how much failure we should be finding, and we're just going to keep tweaking systems until they show us the level of failure we expect to find.
For Shuls and free-market types, that means giving eval systems real teeth.
If school leaders actually had the authority and proper incentives to make positive pay or firing decisions based on teacher performance, we might start seeing some teacher evaluation systems that reflect reality.
Note again the assumption that we already know the "real" failure level-- we just need to get the evaluation system to reflect that. Shuls thinks the problem might be wimpy admins and weak consequences. If we threatened teachers with real damage, then we'd get somewhere.
For Education's Sarah Palin, the problem is people. VAM and other methods of including Test scores appeal to them because the test score won't be distracted by things like the teacher's personality or style or, you know, humanny stuff. The Test, these folks are sure, will reveal the students and teachers that are stinking up the joint, and it will be there in cold, hard numbers that can't be changed or softened or escaped. And they are numbers, so you know they're True.
The pursuit of the Loch Ness Failure Monster is a win-win for Purveyors of Reformy Nonsense. If a school appears to be staffed with good, capable teachers, that's proof that they are actually failing because if they had a real eval system, it would reveal all the failing teachers. And if the eval system does reveal failing teachers, well, hey, look at all the failing teachers. Not only is failure an option; it's a requirement.
I will measure the device's scientific accuracy by measuring it against my pre-existing belief. This is a type of science called Not Actually Science, and it is an integral part of much Reformy Teacher Evaluation.
James Shuls, Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute (a maket-based solution group out of Missouri and not, sadly, a school for strippers), appeared this week in Jay P. Greene's blog (no relation afaik) reminding us of TNTP's "report" on the Lake Woebegone effect (so we've got the intersection here of three Reformy flavors).
Shuls follows a familiar path. We know that there are a bunch of sucky teachers out there. We just do. Everybody has a sucky teacher story, and Shuls also says that there is objective data to prove it, though he doesn't say what that data is, but we know it's accurate and scientific data because it confirms what we already know in our gut. So, science.
We know these teachers exist. Therefor any evaluation system that does not find heaps of bad teachers cluttering up the landscape must be a bad system. This line of reasoning was echoed this week by She Who Must Not Be Named on twitter, where a conversation with Jack Schneider spilled over. Feel free to skip the following rant.
(Because, for some reason, EdWeek has launched a new feature called Beyond the Rhetoric which features dialogue between Schneider and the Kim Kardashian of Education Reformy Stuff, and while I actually welcome the concept of the column, I am sad to see That Woman getting yet another platform from which to make word noises. Could they not have found a legitimate voice for the Reformy Status Quo? I mean, I wish the woman no ill will. I know there are people who would like to see her flesh gnawed off by angry weasels, but I'm basically a kind-hearted person. But I am baffled at how this woman can be repeatedly treated like a legitimate voice in the ed world when the only successful thing she has done is start a highly lucrative astroturf business. Sigh.)
Anyway, She tosses in the factoid that 1/2 of studied school districts didn't dismiss any teachers during the pre-tenure period. This, again, is offered as proof that the system is broken because it didn't find the Loch Ness Monster.
Now let me clear-- I think bad teachers are undoubtedly more plentiful than Loch Ness Monsters (and smaller). I've even offered my own revised eval system. I agree that the traditional teacher eval system could have used some work (the new systems, by contrast, are generally more useless than evaluation by tea leaves).
What I don't understand is this emphasis on Badness and Failure. This is the same focus that got us Jack Welch and stack ranking, widely considered "the worst thing about working at Microsoft" until Microsoft management decided they agreed and, like everyone else in the private sector, stopped doing it. This type of evaluation starts, even before a manager has met his team, with the assumption of a bell-ish curve-- at MS, out of every ten employees, the assumption was that two were great, seven were okay, and one was fire-ably sub-par.
Imagine doing that with a classroom of students. Imagine saying, "Whoever gets the lowest score on this gets an F, even if the score is a 98%."
Oh, wait. We do that, as in John White announcing before the New York test is even given, that 70% of students will fail it. And then-- voila-- they did!
It's a little scary that the Reformy Status Quo model is built around an absolute gut-based certainty that The Trouble With Education is that schools are full of terrible teachers who are lying to their gritless idiot pupils, and what we really need to do is shake up public schools by rooting out all these slackers and dopes, just drag them out into the light and publicly shame them for their inadequacy.
It's a lot scary that some of us seem to already know, based on our scientific guts, just how much failure we should be finding, and we're just going to keep tweaking systems until they show us the level of failure we expect to find.
For Shuls and free-market types, that means giving eval systems real teeth.
If school leaders actually had the authority and proper incentives to make positive pay or firing decisions based on teacher performance, we might start seeing some teacher evaluation systems that reflect reality.
Note again the assumption that we already know the "real" failure level-- we just need to get the evaluation system to reflect that. Shuls thinks the problem might be wimpy admins and weak consequences. If we threatened teachers with real damage, then we'd get somewhere.
For Education's Sarah Palin, the problem is people. VAM and other methods of including Test scores appeal to them because the test score won't be distracted by things like the teacher's personality or style or, you know, humanny stuff. The Test, these folks are sure, will reveal the students and teachers that are stinking up the joint, and it will be there in cold, hard numbers that can't be changed or softened or escaped. And they are numbers, so you know they're True.
The pursuit of the Loch Ness Failure Monster is a win-win for Purveyors of Reformy Nonsense. If a school appears to be staffed with good, capable teachers, that's proof that they are actually failing because if they had a real eval system, it would reveal all the failing teachers. And if the eval system does reveal failing teachers, well, hey, look at all the failing teachers. Not only is failure an option; it's a requirement.
The Opposite of Grit
My sister and her family recently returned from a visit to Thomas Edison's laboratory (because when engineery types head to greater NYC, that's their idea of a cool stop), and they took many pictures. The place is amazing-- all this space cleaned and arranged and perfectly fitted out for investigating and experimenting and engineering much of the modern world.
It was not, I thought, the kind of place where you needed lots of grit to work.
As much as we value the quality of grit, of perseverance, of resilience, have you noticed that what we mostly do on the road to success is eliminate the need for it?
Bill Gates did not say to his folks, "Hey, I'm working on something here that I think may be important, so to help me, I would like you to cut me off without a cent, throw me out of the house, and force me to get a job at Piggly Wiggly that will barely support a one-room run-down apartment let alone enough food to keep me conscious. Because to get this done, I really need to stimulate my grit glands."
I have never read about a CEO saying, "I want the smallest, most cramped office in the building. And no administrative assistants-- I'll answer my own phone. And no paid lunches-- I'll pack and sandwich. And do the same for all our executives! And cut all our salaries to 6% of current levels. We'll never achieve greatness if we don't have to have grit!!"
From sports stars to medical personnel to high-priced lawyers, we work hard to create a smooth supportive work environment, to get rid of any obstacles in their path to success. Nor do many privileged parents give their children an allowance of $1.00 a week and make them live in the tool shed so that they'll develop grit.
If we really believe that grit is the loam that grows excellence, we have a funny way of showing it. The more important the job, the more carefully we insulate it from the need for grit. Instead, a true marker of success and status in our culture is the degree to which one does not need grit.
So what does it say about members of the Cult of Grit that they want our students to live as if they're failures?
A clip circulated recently of Neil deGrasse Tyson responding to a question about why women seemed genetically unsuited to be scientists. He talked about his own path to science and the tremendous institutional and cultural obstacles he faced ("Wouldn't you rather play basketball?"). He talked about the toughness and devotion it took him to become so successful (he didn't use the word "grit" but he might as well have), and about looking behind him to see young black men following the path into science-- and seeing none.
How many gifted black and female scientists do we NOT have today because of the extra giant heaping helping of grit they would need to follow that path?
It's not that I don't think grit is valuable. I do. Resilience and perseverance are useful for everything from dealing with career setbacks to handling a child who always wants to cry and eat at 2 AM.
But here's the thing. Life provides plenty of need for grit all on its own. It's not necessary to provide more on purpose. And the need for grit doesn't help get things done, doesn't help people succeed. It may call on their strength, but it doesn't create it. We know that. We understand it.
When we want someone to succeed, we do as much as we can to remove the need for grit.
Do we not want our students to succeed?
It's true you don't build muscle by lifting a 3 ounce weight, but you don't build anything trying to bench press a truck, either. We really don't have to worry about making things too easy for a six-year-old. Life is never all that easy for a child-- you're physically tiny and generally powerless over your own world. And people who idealize the teen years as idyllic and happy and easy are dopes; I've been around teenagers for four decades and you couldn't print enough money in a year to pay me to be sixteen again. Trust me-- if we want students to need grit, the universe has that covered already.
But if we want them to succeed, we can stop the nonsense about fostering grit and deliberately making life more difficult for our children. Challenge, yes. Grit, no. Instead, let's try support and kindness and building them up. Let's take care of our children, and let the grit take care of itself.
It was not, I thought, the kind of place where you needed lots of grit to work.
As much as we value the quality of grit, of perseverance, of resilience, have you noticed that what we mostly do on the road to success is eliminate the need for it?
Bill Gates did not say to his folks, "Hey, I'm working on something here that I think may be important, so to help me, I would like you to cut me off without a cent, throw me out of the house, and force me to get a job at Piggly Wiggly that will barely support a one-room run-down apartment let alone enough food to keep me conscious. Because to get this done, I really need to stimulate my grit glands."
I have never read about a CEO saying, "I want the smallest, most cramped office in the building. And no administrative assistants-- I'll answer my own phone. And no paid lunches-- I'll pack and sandwich. And do the same for all our executives! And cut all our salaries to 6% of current levels. We'll never achieve greatness if we don't have to have grit!!"
From sports stars to medical personnel to high-priced lawyers, we work hard to create a smooth supportive work environment, to get rid of any obstacles in their path to success. Nor do many privileged parents give their children an allowance of $1.00 a week and make them live in the tool shed so that they'll develop grit.
If we really believe that grit is the loam that grows excellence, we have a funny way of showing it. The more important the job, the more carefully we insulate it from the need for grit. Instead, a true marker of success and status in our culture is the degree to which one does not need grit.
So what does it say about members of the Cult of Grit that they want our students to live as if they're failures?
A clip circulated recently of Neil deGrasse Tyson responding to a question about why women seemed genetically unsuited to be scientists. He talked about his own path to science and the tremendous institutional and cultural obstacles he faced ("Wouldn't you rather play basketball?"). He talked about the toughness and devotion it took him to become so successful (he didn't use the word "grit" but he might as well have), and about looking behind him to see young black men following the path into science-- and seeing none.
How many gifted black and female scientists do we NOT have today because of the extra giant heaping helping of grit they would need to follow that path?
It's not that I don't think grit is valuable. I do. Resilience and perseverance are useful for everything from dealing with career setbacks to handling a child who always wants to cry and eat at 2 AM.
But here's the thing. Life provides plenty of need for grit all on its own. It's not necessary to provide more on purpose. And the need for grit doesn't help get things done, doesn't help people succeed. It may call on their strength, but it doesn't create it. We know that. We understand it.
When we want someone to succeed, we do as much as we can to remove the need for grit.
Do we not want our students to succeed?
It's true you don't build muscle by lifting a 3 ounce weight, but you don't build anything trying to bench press a truck, either. We really don't have to worry about making things too easy for a six-year-old. Life is never all that easy for a child-- you're physically tiny and generally powerless over your own world. And people who idealize the teen years as idyllic and happy and easy are dopes; I've been around teenagers for four decades and you couldn't print enough money in a year to pay me to be sixteen again. Trust me-- if we want students to need grit, the universe has that covered already.
But if we want them to succeed, we can stop the nonsense about fostering grit and deliberately making life more difficult for our children. Challenge, yes. Grit, no. Instead, let's try support and kindness and building them up. Let's take care of our children, and let the grit take care of itself.
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