The old narrative attributed Common Core opposition to the Tin Hat Wing of the Tea Party Wing of the GOP. Arne Duncan was fond of claiming that opponents were just a fringe group of (probably racist) looney tunes who could be easily dismissed. Good dependable conservatives, like, say, Jeb Bush, were those who distanced themselves from the crazypants wing of their party. Hey-- if those crazy tin hat folks were claiming that CCSS was federal overreach and bad policy, that must mean the Core are totally okay, right?
Well, that narrative has been failing for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that it's severely truth-impaired.
Clearly there are CCSS critics on the Left, and clearly association with the Tea Party hasn't been enough to scare turncoats like Bobby "Local Control" Jindal into behaving themselves and keeping in line with other solid corporate conservatives.
So what can we do? What's a new narrative that would both explain Core opposition from the Left AND present conservatives with another toxic boogeyman with which they don't want to be associated?
How about teachers' unions!
Enter The Daily Beast and its screeching story about the "unholy alliance between the Tea Party and the teachers' unions." I might have taken that for a one-off, but today over at MSNBC, a network deeply devoted to the corporate masters of the Core, we have this story from Steve Kornacki.
Kornacki is a kinder, gentler reporter than the overwrought Beast, but his point is the same. His chronology of the Core's genesis isn't all that far off, but he winds his way around to an explanation of why the Core's conservative supporters are suddenly flipping their flops. Kornacki acknowledges that the rollout of Common Core testing has freaked out a lot of parents and teachers, but he arrives quickly at the real game changer, the new opposition from the NEA and the AFT.
This will come as a shock to all the union members who have been begging the NEA and AFT to pull their faces out of the Common Core's hindquarters. But on-- Kornacki says politicians now face the difficult task of navigating between the Tea Party on the right and some organized teacher groups on the left.
There's a good seven minutes of discussion between an assortment of folks including Rob Astorino, Lindsay Layton from the WaPo, Jim Douglas, and NJ teacher Wendell Steinhauser. I am going to brush past them really quickly.
Layton: Boring history of standards attempts going back to Eisenhower. All Presidential, all failures. DOE started with specific no-touchy-states mandate.
Kornacki: But when "they" created Core, they thought they had threaded the needle.
Layton: And so it went very quickly with success until now, because it came from the states. (Did the WaPo send an education reporter?)
Kornacki: Why I am hearing so much resistance all of a sudden from Republicans, Astorino?
Astorino: I don't think it's just from Republicans. Astorino sets up the ordinary citizens angle, namechecks his kids, talks about homework, ticks off the inappropriateness of the requirements and the problems of IEP students. He gets what they want, but one size fits all, everybody crossing same finish line at same time, just doesn't happen. Oh, come be Governor of PA, Rob Astorino. Differences between on paper and in real life. Three weeks wasted on test prep. This whole thing is a huge untested experiment. Bill Gate "we'll find out in ten years." Don't like the idea of my child being a lab rat, and by the way this is expensive. He is strong and confident, yet pleasant and not at all mean or grumpy.
And BOOM-- in about three minutes, Astorino delivers a Master Class in how to run on opposition to the Common Core. I'm going to put up a second link to the clip, just so you can watch that.
Douglass: Former VT and NGA head for CCSS is perplexed. And here is a great new narrative bit-- because remember how NCLB was a federal program pushing into states. The Governors created CCSS BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO PUSH BACK!! The Common Core are a blow for states' rights! How about THAT, you conservative opponents. Also, employers wanted it and 30th in world on standardized test scores, wah.
Steinhauser: NJEA guy who likes standards, hates testing. PARCC sucks, and that's why the pushback. Overtesting is bad. Also, talking is hard.
There is apparently more after the break, but I have seen plenty. Our lessons for the day.
1) Tea Party and Teachers' Unions oppose the Core. Don't you hate those guys? Don't you love the Core now?
2) The CCSS were a blow against the federal government.
3) Rob Astorino is a guy to pay attention to.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Brookings Research Reveals Teachers Are the Problem
Brookings will release a new book this week with the charming title Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How To Fix Them.
And yes-- that title tells us where we're going right off the bat-- teachers really are the problem. In fact, teachers aren't just the opposition-- teachers aren't even American. Perhaps we are all bused in from Outer Slobovia?
The blurb promises that the book "offers the first comparison of the education policy views of both teachers and the public as a whole, and reveals a deep, broad divide between the opinions held by citizens and those who teach in the public schools." And here are some of the specific findings.
* The opinion gap is larger between teachers and actual Americans, that it is between any subsets of eal Americans.
* Widest teacher-human gap issues are (brace yourself) merit pay, vouchers, tenure "reform", charter schools, and annual student testing.
* "Public willingness to give local schools high marks, its readiness to support higher spending levels, and its support for teacher unions all decline when the public learns the national ranking of their local schools."
* When given "new information" current performance levels, teacher pay and current expenditure levels, teachers' opinions change less than the opinions of civilians.
I cannot explain the first finding, nor can I think of a reason to care. The second is not shocking. The third and fourth are an extraordinarily easy effect to create. I've written about it before re: a Hunt Institute poll. The whole key is the "new information" that you provide your respondents; just pick "new information" that prompts the response you want.
This also explains why the "new information" doesn't move teachers so much-- because it's hard to change people's opinions with new information if the people know enough to recognize your "new information" as unvarnished baloney.
The book provides the first experimental study of public and teacher opinion. Using a recently developed research strategy, the authors ask differently worded questions about the same topic to randomly chosen segments of representative groups of citizens. This approach allows them to identify the impact on public opinion of new information on issues such as student performance and school expenditures in each respondent's community.
See what we're really looking for here, what we are really researching? This is not a study about understanding the political tectonics of education issues, and it's not a study about how people are forming their opinions. It's not even research about how teachers are big stupid Slobovians who are trying to pull their Slobovian wool over good American eyes. It's reseach about how to change peoples' minds. Here's the conclusion.
Altogether, the results indicate that support for many school reforms would increase if common core state standards were established and implemented in such a way as to inform the public about the quality of their local schools.
So what we've actually got here is a marketing study framing how to achieve more victory in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. The way to beat our enemy, that vast army of Slobovian teachers, is to provide "new information" to the public ("Get your New Information right here! You know it's fresh because I just made it up!") and in particular, to make sure that CCSS is set up to "prove" that their schools are failing.
The blurb also contains "advance praise" from four education titans. I'll paraphrase--
Joel Klein-- Teachers want the status quo (not the actual status quo, but the status quo we wiped away a decade ago) but when the public discovers what big fat failures schools are, they'll let us do whatever we want.
Jeb Bush-- blah blah blah. It's weird, but Jeb's words actually resist being read, like there's some osrt of force field. Educating the next generation (current students are SOL)
That Woman- This mighty fine research underlines how out of touch teachers are with regular humans and how we will have to drag them into alignment.
Bunch of People from Hoover Institute-- "This scholarly book corrects and changes the political debate. The authors reveal that it is teachers themselves—not just their union representatives—who stand opposed to school reforms a majority of the public favors. In many ways this points to a much larger problem with improving our schools."
It's not just the unions-- it's those actual damn teachers. This seems like a no-brainer, since the national teacher union leadership has already rolled over on school reform.
That last quote underlines what seems to be the message here-- we have marketing to do, and we have to do it to wipe away the influence of those damn teachers. Those damn teachers are, in fact, the main obstacle to education in this country. Clearly, teachers went to college and worked to find a full-time job with mediocre pay just so that they could build a beachhead on the shores of Educationland and fight off anyone who tried to settle there. We always knew that teachers were the problem, but now we have Real Sciency Research to prove it.
This isn't really about teachers versus the public-- it's about teachers versus the reformsters for public hearts and minds. So, one part marketing research, one part explicit attack on teachers. The book comes out April 29. You know you'll want to reserve your copy now.
And yes-- that title tells us where we're going right off the bat-- teachers really are the problem. In fact, teachers aren't just the opposition-- teachers aren't even American. Perhaps we are all bused in from Outer Slobovia?
The blurb promises that the book "offers the first comparison of the education policy views of both teachers and the public as a whole, and reveals a deep, broad divide between the opinions held by citizens and those who teach in the public schools." And here are some of the specific findings.
* The opinion gap is larger between teachers and actual Americans, that it is between any subsets of eal Americans.
* Widest teacher-human gap issues are (brace yourself) merit pay, vouchers, tenure "reform", charter schools, and annual student testing.
* "Public willingness to give local schools high marks, its readiness to support higher spending levels, and its support for teacher unions all decline when the public learns the national ranking of their local schools."
* When given "new information" current performance levels, teacher pay and current expenditure levels, teachers' opinions change less than the opinions of civilians.
I cannot explain the first finding, nor can I think of a reason to care. The second is not shocking. The third and fourth are an extraordinarily easy effect to create. I've written about it before re: a Hunt Institute poll. The whole key is the "new information" that you provide your respondents; just pick "new information" that prompts the response you want.
This also explains why the "new information" doesn't move teachers so much-- because it's hard to change people's opinions with new information if the people know enough to recognize your "new information" as unvarnished baloney.
The book provides the first experimental study of public and teacher opinion. Using a recently developed research strategy, the authors ask differently worded questions about the same topic to randomly chosen segments of representative groups of citizens. This approach allows them to identify the impact on public opinion of new information on issues such as student performance and school expenditures in each respondent's community.
See what we're really looking for here, what we are really researching? This is not a study about understanding the political tectonics of education issues, and it's not a study about how people are forming their opinions. It's not even research about how teachers are big stupid Slobovians who are trying to pull their Slobovian wool over good American eyes. It's reseach about how to change peoples' minds. Here's the conclusion.
Altogether, the results indicate that support for many school reforms would increase if common core state standards were established and implemented in such a way as to inform the public about the quality of their local schools.
So what we've actually got here is a marketing study framing how to achieve more victory in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. The way to beat our enemy, that vast army of Slobovian teachers, is to provide "new information" to the public ("Get your New Information right here! You know it's fresh because I just made it up!") and in particular, to make sure that CCSS is set up to "prove" that their schools are failing.
The blurb also contains "advance praise" from four education titans. I'll paraphrase--
Joel Klein-- Teachers want the status quo (not the actual status quo, but the status quo we wiped away a decade ago) but when the public discovers what big fat failures schools are, they'll let us do whatever we want.
Jeb Bush-- blah blah blah. It's weird, but Jeb's words actually resist being read, like there's some osrt of force field. Educating the next generation (current students are SOL)
That Woman- This mighty fine research underlines how out of touch teachers are with regular humans and how we will have to drag them into alignment.
Bunch of People from Hoover Institute-- "This scholarly book corrects and changes the political debate. The authors reveal that it is teachers themselves—not just their union representatives—who stand opposed to school reforms a majority of the public favors. In many ways this points to a much larger problem with improving our schools."
It's not just the unions-- it's those actual damn teachers. This seems like a no-brainer, since the national teacher union leadership has already rolled over on school reform.
That last quote underlines what seems to be the message here-- we have marketing to do, and we have to do it to wipe away the influence of those damn teachers. Those damn teachers are, in fact, the main obstacle to education in this country. Clearly, teachers went to college and worked to find a full-time job with mediocre pay just so that they could build a beachhead on the shores of Educationland and fight off anyone who tried to settle there. We always knew that teachers were the problem, but now we have Real Sciency Research to prove it.
This isn't really about teachers versus the public-- it's about teachers versus the reformsters for public hearts and minds. So, one part marketing research, one part explicit attack on teachers. The book comes out April 29. You know you'll want to reserve your copy now.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
MSNBC Re-affirms Its Uselessness in Education Coverage
Over at MSNBC, you can watch Andrea Mitchell interview Arne Duncan with all the hard-hitting journalistic thoroughness displayed by Arne's Rent-a-Teacher interviews produced by the DOE. It's four and a half minutes of blood-pressurizing fluffernuttery. And I'm going to break it down for you so you don't have to watch it. Once again, you owe me, reader.
Andrea starts out in front of a pretty picture of the White House saying that the Obama administration has announced, or will announced (when are we running this tape, again?) a new program to hold state moneys hostage unless schools of education Fix Things Real Good. And look-- here's Arne Duncan. Let's open with a hard-hitting, probing question-- What is this, and how is it going to work?
"Quite simply, we believe that every child deserves a highly effective teacher. And every teacher deserves to be well-trained, well-prepared before they ever enter the classroom," says Arne, wearing his happy yet intense face. "And that is why we are, as of today, completely shutting down the Teach for America program." Ha! No, just kidding. As always, the irony of a call for effective teachers from people who also believe that anybody off the street can and should be a teacher is lost.
Arne says he travels all over the country, all the time, and talks to starting out teachers. All the new teachers know Arne. "Often the vast majority feel they were not prepared," So..... some number. But that's unacceptable. So we want to challenge states--er, I mean partner with states (because, you know, if I were actually running the whole country like my own federal school district, that would be illegal) to make sure every teacher is ready to hit the classroom.
Which is not really a bad sentiment, except then Arne oversells it as each teacher being completely ready to succeed on the first day in September (sucks for you guys who start in August, I guess), and I guess that's okay except that if Arne knows the secret of making a beginning teacher fully equipped on Year One, Day One, he should bottle that miracle goo right away, because most of us take several years to really get a grip. But "success" is a fuzzy word, so I'll let it go.
Are you putting any money behind this? Curriculum advice? Andrea wants to ask a question that will keep Arne explaining. He says, "We have resources." So, well, there you go. We're already throwing around $100 mill every year on teach grants-- we want to make sure that those are going to places that take teacher prep seriously.
Arne thinks about the medical model. Doctors have residencies, and they study stuff before they ever touch a patient. They have a seriousness of purpose there that we don't have in teacher training, and I have agreed with Arne about this before (the short form of my point is that if we were serious about American education, Arne Duncan wouldn't be in charge of it).
And now Andrea is going to take over for Arne and carry some of his talking points for him, starting with Finland being oh, so, serious about teaching and we're just going to ignore the many ways in which our current Reformy Status Quo goes against the Finnish model. Those students do so much better, which means scoring higher on international tests, because teachers are taken more seriously. And look-- Andrea Mitchell has both explained the purpose of education AND diagnosed the entire problem! Arne didn't even have to show up!
Arne says "We want to do everything we can to elevate the profession," and I'm pretty sure he and I have different meanings for "everything we can." Because I think maybe they could, for instance, talk to teachers and parents and listen to what they have to say rather than dismissing them as a bunch of distracting noise or whiny liars who want to obstruct CCSS because they can't handle the truth about their idiot children. Maybe he meant "we want to do everything we feel like," or maybe he meant "we want to do everything we can, but we aren't going to." Also, he loves the South Koreans, because there is a culture that really mirrors our own.
Our teachers are/could be nation builders too, but we don't train, prepare, respect or compensate them as such. So we're going to do everything we can (there's that phrase again) to elevate the profession, starting with spanking college programs.
Mitchell has heard that there is some controversy about tying teacher evals to test scores. And here's your Arne Dunan t-shirt ready wisdom chunk for the day--
The goal of teaching is not to teach; the goal of teaching is to have students learn.
He is proud of that-- he's got his best Arne smirk on. So we have to measure that and tie accountability and multiple measures. Andrea asks about the metrics, and Arne assures her (with hand gestures) that states would have lots of flexibility, and Andrea cuts to Washington State, where officials explain that when the US DOE says "flexibility" they mean "flex my way or I'll bomb you into the Bush era." Ha. Just kidding. The irony of that term's use will fly quietly away, like a fluffy albatross. Arne also wants to survey teachers. I suggest he get on twitter and do an #askArne because that always works out well, but I'm guessing we'll select who we ask question a little more carefully.
And now comes the special part where Andrea and Arne join in demonstrating that they apparently have NO IDEA WHATSOVER of how teachers are actually trained. They appear to believe that teachers do nothing but take philosophy, history and psychology of education and never actually practice teaching, and Andrea thinks maybe prospective teachers should get out in a classroom as part of their college training and HOLY MOTHER OF GOD how can they not know that Student Teaching is a Thing? I have had a college senior in my classroom for fourteen weeks working on her technique and practice side by side with an actual teacher (that's me) and I'm preeeeeeetty sure that our situation is not unusual! But no, Arne says that this is the crux, that teacher wannabes need actual practical experience with (you'll like this) twenty-eight or thirty diverse students. "Clinical experience is so important," says Arne, and I guess that's true because an seasoned television reporter and the head of the Department of Education just sat there and displayed that they don't know how doctors or teachers enter their professions.
Now moving on at the 3:00 mark, we'll pivot to a Common Core question. It's a controversy. Are you surprised, Arne? Arne deflects like crazy-- People want to play politics with lots of issues. Republican, Democrat, Arne could care less because he's a father with two kids ("as you know, Andrea"-- what? Do they hang out a lot?) and we all want high standards for our children. We don't want to lie to our children (but their parents are another matter), we don't want to dummy down standards, and we want students across the nation to be truly college and career ready when they graduate.
Today when students graduate "far too many of them" have to take remedial courses "because they weren't prepared" and of the thousands of separate elements that could explain that, we're going to go with "standards." That's unacceptable. The remedial stuff, not the bad solutions. That should be a bipartisan issue. So, what controversy?
Mitchell winds up with the issue of college value and college cost. She asks about that in a questiony kind of way, and then answers her own question by saying that, golly bob howdy, if you go to college you end up rich (so I guess we're not going to discuss the research that suggests that it's the other way around), and Arne talks about wanting it to be more affordable, and Mitchell brings in Elizabeth Warren to discuss making college loans as cheap as Big Bankster loans instead of using student loans to create huge profits for the DOE and no, I'm joking again, Mitchell does no such thing. Mitchell and Duncan stumble over each other trying to get this talking point across the finish line in time, but by working together, they manage.
Arne thanks her for the opportunity to present his press release live and in person with her help, and MSNBC has successfully used up another 4:30 without allowing its airwaves to be tainted with any hint of actual journalism.
Andrea starts out in front of a pretty picture of the White House saying that the Obama administration has announced, or will announced (when are we running this tape, again?) a new program to hold state moneys hostage unless schools of education Fix Things Real Good. And look-- here's Arne Duncan. Let's open with a hard-hitting, probing question-- What is this, and how is it going to work?
"Quite simply, we believe that every child deserves a highly effective teacher. And every teacher deserves to be well-trained, well-prepared before they ever enter the classroom," says Arne, wearing his happy yet intense face. "And that is why we are, as of today, completely shutting down the Teach for America program." Ha! No, just kidding. As always, the irony of a call for effective teachers from people who also believe that anybody off the street can and should be a teacher is lost.
Arne says he travels all over the country, all the time, and talks to starting out teachers. All the new teachers know Arne. "Often the vast majority feel they were not prepared," So..... some number. But that's unacceptable. So we want to challenge states--er, I mean partner with states (because, you know, if I were actually running the whole country like my own federal school district, that would be illegal) to make sure every teacher is ready to hit the classroom.
Which is not really a bad sentiment, except then Arne oversells it as each teacher being completely ready to succeed on the first day in September (sucks for you guys who start in August, I guess), and I guess that's okay except that if Arne knows the secret of making a beginning teacher fully equipped on Year One, Day One, he should bottle that miracle goo right away, because most of us take several years to really get a grip. But "success" is a fuzzy word, so I'll let it go.
Are you putting any money behind this? Curriculum advice? Andrea wants to ask a question that will keep Arne explaining. He says, "We have resources." So, well, there you go. We're already throwing around $100 mill every year on teach grants-- we want to make sure that those are going to places that take teacher prep seriously.
Arne thinks about the medical model. Doctors have residencies, and they study stuff before they ever touch a patient. They have a seriousness of purpose there that we don't have in teacher training, and I have agreed with Arne about this before (the short form of my point is that if we were serious about American education, Arne Duncan wouldn't be in charge of it).
And now Andrea is going to take over for Arne and carry some of his talking points for him, starting with Finland being oh, so, serious about teaching and we're just going to ignore the many ways in which our current Reformy Status Quo goes against the Finnish model. Those students do so much better, which means scoring higher on international tests, because teachers are taken more seriously. And look-- Andrea Mitchell has both explained the purpose of education AND diagnosed the entire problem! Arne didn't even have to show up!
Arne says "We want to do everything we can to elevate the profession," and I'm pretty sure he and I have different meanings for "everything we can." Because I think maybe they could, for instance, talk to teachers and parents and listen to what they have to say rather than dismissing them as a bunch of distracting noise or whiny liars who want to obstruct CCSS because they can't handle the truth about their idiot children. Maybe he meant "we want to do everything we feel like," or maybe he meant "we want to do everything we can, but we aren't going to." Also, he loves the South Koreans, because there is a culture that really mirrors our own.
Our teachers are/could be nation builders too, but we don't train, prepare, respect or compensate them as such. So we're going to do everything we can (there's that phrase again) to elevate the profession, starting with spanking college programs.
Mitchell has heard that there is some controversy about tying teacher evals to test scores. And here's your Arne Dunan t-shirt ready wisdom chunk for the day--
The goal of teaching is not to teach; the goal of teaching is to have students learn.
He is proud of that-- he's got his best Arne smirk on. So we have to measure that and tie accountability and multiple measures. Andrea asks about the metrics, and Arne assures her (with hand gestures) that states would have lots of flexibility, and Andrea cuts to Washington State, where officials explain that when the US DOE says "flexibility" they mean "flex my way or I'll bomb you into the Bush era." Ha. Just kidding. The irony of that term's use will fly quietly away, like a fluffy albatross. Arne also wants to survey teachers. I suggest he get on twitter and do an #askArne because that always works out well, but I'm guessing we'll select who we ask question a little more carefully.
And now comes the special part where Andrea and Arne join in demonstrating that they apparently have NO IDEA WHATSOVER of how teachers are actually trained. They appear to believe that teachers do nothing but take philosophy, history and psychology of education and never actually practice teaching, and Andrea thinks maybe prospective teachers should get out in a classroom as part of their college training and HOLY MOTHER OF GOD how can they not know that Student Teaching is a Thing? I have had a college senior in my classroom for fourteen weeks working on her technique and practice side by side with an actual teacher (that's me) and I'm preeeeeeetty sure that our situation is not unusual! But no, Arne says that this is the crux, that teacher wannabes need actual practical experience with (you'll like this) twenty-eight or thirty diverse students. "Clinical experience is so important," says Arne, and I guess that's true because an seasoned television reporter and the head of the Department of Education just sat there and displayed that they don't know how doctors or teachers enter their professions.
Now moving on at the 3:00 mark, we'll pivot to a Common Core question. It's a controversy. Are you surprised, Arne? Arne deflects like crazy-- People want to play politics with lots of issues. Republican, Democrat, Arne could care less because he's a father with two kids ("as you know, Andrea"-- what? Do they hang out a lot?) and we all want high standards for our children. We don't want to lie to our children (but their parents are another matter), we don't want to dummy down standards, and we want students across the nation to be truly college and career ready when they graduate.
Today when students graduate "far too many of them" have to take remedial courses "because they weren't prepared" and of the thousands of separate elements that could explain that, we're going to go with "standards." That's unacceptable. The remedial stuff, not the bad solutions. That should be a bipartisan issue. So, what controversy?
Mitchell winds up with the issue of college value and college cost. She asks about that in a questiony kind of way, and then answers her own question by saying that, golly bob howdy, if you go to college you end up rich (so I guess we're not going to discuss the research that suggests that it's the other way around), and Arne talks about wanting it to be more affordable, and Mitchell brings in Elizabeth Warren to discuss making college loans as cheap as Big Bankster loans instead of using student loans to create huge profits for the DOE and no, I'm joking again, Mitchell does no such thing. Mitchell and Duncan stumble over each other trying to get this talking point across the finish line in time, but by working together, they manage.
Arne thanks her for the opportunity to present his press release live and in person with her help, and MSNBC has successfully used up another 4:30 without allowing its airwaves to be tainted with any hint of actual journalism.
US DOE Revives Truly Terrible Proposal
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.
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.
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.
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