What if we were serious about treating education like a business?
I recently finished an advance copy of What Great Brands Do by Denise Lee Yohn. It is a book that has absolutely nothing to do with education. Instead, Yohn looks at how brands from Kodak to Nike fail or succeed, and how building a brand leads to a higher level of real success.
Yohn has been around through several decades of corporate work from Frito-Lay through the rescue work of Sony. She is a business uber-expert. So let's see what happens if we measure the Education Reform Brand with the yardsticks delievered in her book. Yohn presents seven brand-building principles, and it takes her a whole book to do it, so I'll be grossly over-simplifying here. So what else is new.
Great Brands Start Inside
This chapter was the one that immediately made me think of education reform. She is loaded with great pull quotes.
It's always easier to change what you say about your company than it is to actually change your company.
Or this quote she passes on from Sam Palmisano at IBM:
When your business is primarily based on knowledge, [then] people-- rather than products-- become your brand.
Yohn tells the story of IBM's reboot to underline the need to build a brand that grows from the inside, that is an outgrowth of the culture of the people who do the work of the company. She shows a process in which the company starts by finding out what their culture is (not insisting on what they think it is, or should be) and then generating a new culture by starting with employees as the foundational building blocks.
In other words, brand building can't be done as a top-down imposition with an eye on the customer experience and making that customer experience reflect the values.
In the case of the Reformy Status Quo, we already know how much the people on the inside have been involved in creating the brand culture-- not at all. But this view also shows how the brand fails. No matter what Reformsters say about their brand, the customer experience of students is high stakes standardized testing and the preparation for it.
We can see this in the tenor of the current push back. For most of the customers of Reformy Status Quo, the Test is the ultimate expression of what the whole brand is about.
Yohn quotes Jim Collins: "The great companies are internally driven, externally aware." Ed Reform has been deaf to the voices of teachers inside the system, and blind to the results for students outside of it.
Great Brands Avoid Selling Products
Yohn opens with the story of Nike's momentous decision to scrap an ad campaign about how Nike started the fitness revolution and instead launched "Just Do It."
We humans are emotional creatures. We make our purchases based on how products make us feel. That's why great brands succeed by seeking intimate emotional connection with customers. Either the product satisfies and emotional need I have ("I want to feel healthy and successful") or it offers me access to a self-identity that I want to experience and express ("I'm an athlete").
Education should be able to lock into this-- we are all about helping students fulfill desires and express self-identity. But RSQ has deliberately rejected all of this.
We know what David Coleman has to say about what you feel and think ("Nobody gives a shit") and the whole RSQ movement has been like. We don't care about feelings, emotions-- we want data, meeting standards, hitting benchmarks. We want kids to show grit, not whine. Once I started thinking about this, I was struck by how completely RSQ has worked to strip all emotional language from discussion of education. How your child feels about going to school and getting an education is immaterial. Be college and career ready as a mechanical meeting of a standard requirement, not because it will allow you to realize hopes and dreams about yourself, to become the person you dream of being.
It's striking, the degree to which RSQ passed up the chance to make the debate all about hopes and dreams and aspirations and emotions. Instead, the message has been charts and data and, when feelings are mentioned, it's only to suggest that students should feel bad (and get rigor). In that context, one of Yohn's sub-headings really jumps out--
Emotions Trump Efficacy
Great brands are built on feelings, an emotional connection between the customer and the company. Not unlike the emotional connection that so many people feel for their local school, the emotional connection that so many Reformsters believe an obstacle rather than the point.
Great Brands Ignore Trends
If you follow trends, you are always behind. RSQ goes one step behinder by following trends that are already fading because they have failed. Vouchers, VAM, stack ranking, standardized testing-- all trends borrowed from the business world and all being dropped just as RSQ is setting them in cement.
Yohn points out the value of being a challenge brand, and to their credit the Reformsters have tried to frame themselves as challengers of the status quo. They just.... aren't. As one of Yohn's subheadings notes,
It's Not the Data; It's What You Do With It
Great Brands Don't Chase Customers
The idea here is that having a strong brand attracts customers. A "lighthouse brand" doesn't chase customers, but rather lets them come.
Oddly enough, old school charter schools (back before the primary metric for a charter was ROI) used this. Be very good at something, wait for students who want that thing to sign up. But "without a strong sense of self, a brand doesn't inspire success." What projects a strong sense of self? If we go back to the top, we're reminded that the projection comes from the customer experience and relationship with the brand employees who are suffused with the brand culture.
Meanwhile, the RSQ chases students with butterfly nets, trying to grab them up with all manner of charter takeovers and faux parent triggers.
Great Brands Sweat the Small Stuff
Attention to detail. Attention to design. Making sure that every choice is an expression of the brand culture. "The mark of a great brand is not being obsessive compulsive; it is being intentional."
This also means that a brand's dysfunctional qualities will be reflected in the details, which is where we are with RSQ. CCSS supporters complain that critics are picking away at tiny details, but it is in the tiny details that they reveal themselves. In fact, in some details (like the lack of any real plan for how RSQ will affect special needs students), they reveal what they think is tiny and unimportant (answer: special needs student population).
Yohn has advice on how to catch this: experience your brand like a customer. If Reformsters want to really experience the brand, they need to get in a classroom, take a PARCC. Yohn also talks about silos, and how disconnected parts of the company lead to a clunky, just-plain-bad customer experience. Such as when standards development is disconnected from testing is disconnected from materials development is disconnected from staff development (if any).
Great Brands Commit and Stay Committed
This is the story, for instance, of how Krispy Kreme gets more interested in expanding and making big bucks than in making especially good donuts. The problem about commitment with RSQ is that Reformsters are committed to things like political power, making money, pushing their agenda, and winning. Lots of things other than education.
Commitment to education would look like, "We are going to find the best practices, no matter how much we have to search, who we have to talk to, how many of our pet theories we have to abandon." Instead, Reformsters make commitments like "Nobody can change the CCSS at all."
What you commit to, no matter what, is what identifies your brand. Reformsters are not comitted to education.
If you made a list of all the things your brand is able to do, you'd probably find that the list is quite long. Now try compiling another list, the list of what your brand was made to do.
Common Core and the testing regime attached to it are defined around what we are able to do. Try to find me a teacher, even a CCSS-supporting teacher, who looks at the Core and says, "This is what I was made to do." Commitment is about identifying core competencies and staying focused on them. RSQ has defined education's core competency as data generation and testing. This is not what we were born to do.
Great Brands Never Have To "Give Back"
"Great brands are themselves becoming a force for positive social change, rather than simply supporting external programs."
Yohn lists four traits to consider when looking at this aspect of a brand:
*Success-- quality products and financially strong
*Fairness-- well-priced, good value, honest and decent relationships with customers
*Responsibility-- respectful of employees
*Trust-- consistently delivers on promises about products and services
So, zero out of four for the Reformsters.
What Have We Learned
Yohn certainly isn't the only business consultant in the world, and I am certainly the last person in the world to argue that education should be measured with the yardstick of the business world.
But at the very least, this look at an actual book about current business theory demonstrates that EVEN BY BUSINESS STANDARDS, the Reformsters are failing. Many other writers and I have spun out light-years of wordage to demonstrate that Reformsters have failed by our standards, by the standards of the education world. But it is well worth noting that they have also failed by their own standards, by the standards of good brand management.
Monday, April 28, 2014
The Gates Wants Higher Ed To Take a Stand
Over at Inside Higher Ed, Dan Greenstein and Vicki Phillips are making yet another pitch for the Core on behalf of the Gates Foundation (Greenstein is director of postsecondary success and Pillips is director of education). I would love to tell you that they have shiny new talking points to offer, but no-- it's the same old fluffernuttery. Here's the breakdown.
They begin with a mystery-- why, they have wondered, don't more young people who start college actually earn degrees. They had reams of data (really? like what, pray tell) but they wanted to hear from college leaders, and let me say that it's refreshing to hear reformsters say that sometimes you just have to ignore the data and actually talk to people.
So they asked college leaders what the barriers to success were, and shockingly, college leaders responded with a resounding, "Hey, it's not our fault. It's those damn high schools." G & P note that the complaint was most prevalent at community colleges, which I take as a big fat hint. I've discussed the college unreadiness phenomenon before, but here's my short theory-- college freshmen are increasingly unready for college because colleges are increasingly accepting students who are clearly not ready for college. This might be related to the increasing college full court marketing press aimed at convincing every student on the planet that OMGZ they must has college or they will fail and be poor.
And about the P word-- the research tells us repeatedly that what is linked to school achievement? What's that, boys and girls? Yes, poverty. And which students are most likely to enroll in community colleges? That's right-- poor ones. So two graphs in, I'm ready to solve this mystery for them. But no-- they are headed in another direction.
So, is this view an attack on high school educators? Not at all. We see this as a reason for K-12 and higher education leaders to work together on behalf of students. It’s exactly why higher education leaders must engage with the Common Core State Standards — the biggest and boldest effort in a generation to ensure every student is prepared to succeed in college and the workforce.
For too long, they opine, we have taught to standards that don't match knowledge and skills needed for post-secondary success. The CCSS were designed to address this by providing rrrrrigorous goals for all students. No matter where they live or what they want to do after school, this one size will fit all. HOW do we know the CCSS match the knowledge and skills needed for post-secondary success? Because we just do, shut up.
The new standards move far beyond memorizing facts and figures. They challenge our students to develop a deeper understanding of subject matter, to think critically, and to apply what they are learning to the real world.
And thank God for that, because in my classroom we have never done anything but memorize stuff and poke rocks with sticks. Yes, a critical part of the CCSS sales pitch remains the implication that all schools and teachers have been mired in stone-age teaching techniques and general stupidity. Tell me again the part about how this is not an attack on high school educators.
Specifically, the full and faithful implementation of the Common Core could all but eliminate the need for colleges to provide academic remediation to students enrolling in college immediately after graduating from high school.
I am out of words. This sentence is like a black hole of dumb that just sucks the air out of my brain.
CCSS is not curriculum, nor does it prescribe content, I hear. But any student going to any college who earned any grades from any courses at any high school will be fully prepared to be a freshman at any college. Even in the fantasyland that reformsters occupy, how does that work. How. Does. That. Work.
G & P follow up with the news that Kentucky adopted the Core and their percentage of grads ready for college and career increased from 38% to 47% in a single year, a statement is only true if you believe that a single bubble test will tell you whether someone is college and career ready or not. I don't. You don't. Bill "We'll have to wait a decade to see if this works" Gates doesn't. And I don't believe that G & P believe it either.
This imaginary college readiness will reduce the college time and save students lots of money, and I am sure that the colleges who are trying to con my former students into taking extra remedial course they don't need will welcome the chance to make less income with wide open arms.
G & P say another swell benefit of the Core will be purposeful connection between high schools and colleges and I say, bring it on, since colleges currently ignore us when we do everything attach a blinking red sign on transcripts that screams "This student is not ready for college!" Of course, we often talk about our students preparing themselves for college, and clearly they bear no responsibility at all.
But now to the action item portion of this piece.
Many colleges are working to align their freshman course to fit the new high school course standards and-- wait! what? Let me see if I follow this.
We rewrote high school standards to better match expectations of college freshman courses. Now we are rewriting freshman course expectations to match the new high school standards. So in fact the Core Standards are actually written on a Moebius strip? The back of the Worm Ouroborus? Or somebody just made them up from air and is now using circular reasoning to make it look like they have some objective basis. One of those three. Got it.
Anyway, G & P want to sound the alarm, because some groups are "working to purposefully undermine them with misinformation that isn't about quality." Critics continue to claim that CCSS are improper federal overreach, that educators weren't involved in creating them, and that they dictate curriculum. And here we arrive at the plea of this article:
The higher education community is in a unique position to reinforce what matters most, affirming the quality of the Common Core State Standards and attesting that the standards are aligned to better prepare students for credit-bearing courses.
They begin with a mystery-- why, they have wondered, don't more young people who start college actually earn degrees. They had reams of data (really? like what, pray tell) but they wanted to hear from college leaders, and let me say that it's refreshing to hear reformsters say that sometimes you just have to ignore the data and actually talk to people.
So they asked college leaders what the barriers to success were, and shockingly, college leaders responded with a resounding, "Hey, it's not our fault. It's those damn high schools." G & P note that the complaint was most prevalent at community colleges, which I take as a big fat hint. I've discussed the college unreadiness phenomenon before, but here's my short theory-- college freshmen are increasingly unready for college because colleges are increasingly accepting students who are clearly not ready for college. This might be related to the increasing college full court marketing press aimed at convincing every student on the planet that OMGZ they must has college or they will fail and be poor.
And about the P word-- the research tells us repeatedly that what is linked to school achievement? What's that, boys and girls? Yes, poverty. And which students are most likely to enroll in community colleges? That's right-- poor ones. So two graphs in, I'm ready to solve this mystery for them. But no-- they are headed in another direction.
So, is this view an attack on high school educators? Not at all. We see this as a reason for K-12 and higher education leaders to work together on behalf of students. It’s exactly why higher education leaders must engage with the Common Core State Standards — the biggest and boldest effort in a generation to ensure every student is prepared to succeed in college and the workforce.
For too long, they opine, we have taught to standards that don't match knowledge and skills needed for post-secondary success. The CCSS were designed to address this by providing rrrrrigorous goals for all students. No matter where they live or what they want to do after school, this one size will fit all. HOW do we know the CCSS match the knowledge and skills needed for post-secondary success? Because we just do, shut up.
The new standards move far beyond memorizing facts and figures. They challenge our students to develop a deeper understanding of subject matter, to think critically, and to apply what they are learning to the real world.
And thank God for that, because in my classroom we have never done anything but memorize stuff and poke rocks with sticks. Yes, a critical part of the CCSS sales pitch remains the implication that all schools and teachers have been mired in stone-age teaching techniques and general stupidity. Tell me again the part about how this is not an attack on high school educators.
Specifically, the full and faithful implementation of the Common Core could all but eliminate the need for colleges to provide academic remediation to students enrolling in college immediately after graduating from high school.
I am out of words. This sentence is like a black hole of dumb that just sucks the air out of my brain.
CCSS is not curriculum, nor does it prescribe content, I hear. But any student going to any college who earned any grades from any courses at any high school will be fully prepared to be a freshman at any college. Even in the fantasyland that reformsters occupy, how does that work. How. Does. That. Work.
G & P follow up with the news that Kentucky adopted the Core and their percentage of grads ready for college and career increased from 38% to 47% in a single year, a statement is only true if you believe that a single bubble test will tell you whether someone is college and career ready or not. I don't. You don't. Bill "We'll have to wait a decade to see if this works" Gates doesn't. And I don't believe that G & P believe it either.
This imaginary college readiness will reduce the college time and save students lots of money, and I am sure that the colleges who are trying to con my former students into taking extra remedial course they don't need will welcome the chance to make less income with wide open arms.
G & P say another swell benefit of the Core will be purposeful connection between high schools and colleges and I say, bring it on, since colleges currently ignore us when we do everything attach a blinking red sign on transcripts that screams "This student is not ready for college!" Of course, we often talk about our students preparing themselves for college, and clearly they bear no responsibility at all.
But now to the action item portion of this piece.
Many colleges are working to align their freshman course to fit the new high school course standards and-- wait! what? Let me see if I follow this.
We rewrote high school standards to better match expectations of college freshman courses. Now we are rewriting freshman course expectations to match the new high school standards. So in fact the Core Standards are actually written on a Moebius strip? The back of the Worm Ouroborus? Or somebody just made them up from air and is now using circular reasoning to make it look like they have some objective basis. One of those three. Got it.
Anyway, G & P want to sound the alarm, because some groups are "working to purposefully undermine them with misinformation that isn't about quality." Critics continue to claim that CCSS are improper federal overreach, that educators weren't involved in creating them, and that they dictate curriculum. And here we arrive at the plea of this article:
The higher education community is in a unique position to reinforce what matters most, affirming the quality of the Common Core State Standards and attesting that the standards are aligned to better prepare students for credit-bearing courses.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Steve Kornacki & The New Narrative
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.
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.
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.
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