It seems like some kind of joke to call a movement "un-American," but I think the Reformy Status Quo has earned that adjective.
Here's the thing about us as a country, as a culture. We fight. We struggle. We have sometimes extremely violent, deadly battles among the many smaller tribes that make up this country. But as a nation we are built to accommodate all these differences, and so even as we are wracked by all manner of racism and prejudice and everything that can be ugly about how different groups of people co-exist, and even as we thrash and battle to find solutions to these sometimes-huge rifts in our culture, there is one solution that we, as a country, as a culture, never embrace.
We don't throw people away.
That's not who we are. Sure, there are folks, particularly those with money and power, who use their position to try to get rid of Those People or build a wall to keep Those People out. But it's a measure of our culture that people who try to do such things must always spin it or conceal it or hide it behind some other pretense.
Because that's not who we are. We don't throw people away.
But the entire RSQ movement is based on throwing people away. It's the fundamental principle behind all of it. All of it!
We will find the students who don't measure up, and we will throw them away.
If our charter goals is 100% graduation, we will find the students who don't measure up, and we will get rid of them, before they are seniors.
We will start early and weed out all the third graders who can't read well enough yet.
We will accept "no excuses," and if a student won't do things our way, we will throw him away.
We insist that we want great educational opportunities for all students. And in a sense, we do. But if they do not show the proper respect for and use of the opportunities we so generously give them (and we will define "proper," thank you), then those thankless students must be thrown away. Prove you deserve our largesse. If you prove you don't deserve it, you must be thrown away.
If we find a school that doesn't measure up to our yardstick, we will close it. We will throw it away. We will throw the people who work there away. We may even throw the students away.
How do we fix schools? By finding the teachers who don't do as we say, and throwing them away.
Are the school boards and the voters who elect them not performing as we wish? Let's just throw them away.
The dream of RSQ is a beautiful shiny school building, filled with gleaming students and smiling teachers, and out back, where no one can see, is a mountain of all the human and institutional refuse that has been thrown away.
Time after time, the RSQ dream is defined not by what we achieve, but by what-- or whom-- we get rid of. It's not about lifting up or including or improving-- it's all about the weeding out. The throwing away.
Reformsters often reference our international standing, our need to compete. But we did not become a great nation by throwing people away. The Reformy Status Quo isn't just educational malpractice. It's un-American.
EDIT: Charles Sahm just made an important point on twitter, and I'm going to add a response to it here.
I don't believe that reformsters are advocating throwing people away out of evil or ill intent (for the most part). I think many of them are blind to what they are really advocating. So "no excuses" seems like a great way to maintain high standards, and closing bad schools seems like a great way to trim the losers, and firing our way to excellence seems like a workable theory to some people. Hey-- it certainly seemed like a great idea to some folks in private industry.
But I don't think any of these approaches are viable paths to better education, and what I've tried to articulate here is one of the ways in which I think they are dead wrong. They all posit live human beings as The Problem, and they all posit the solution of making those live humans go away. And that simply is not a reasonable or appropriate option in public education.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Getting Stupical In NY
It seems that some state legislatures are competing to pass the worst education laws. Whether it's Kansas deciding to strengthen education by destroying teaching as a career or Florida beating up on disabled children and grieving mothers, there seems to be a race going on, and if it is to the top of something, that's a mountain I don't ever want to see.
New York has most recently made its bid for the front of the pack with its anti-test-prep law. Like the rest of these laws, it's a legislative action that requires me to invent a whole new word.
You have to be really cynical to be that stupid, and you have to be really stupid to be that cynical, so our new word is-- stupical. (I considered cynipud, but that just sounded like a walking breakfast pastry).
New York has an advantage in the stupical contest because they have Andy Cuomo, whose Thinky Leaders Retreat for High Rollers is pretty stupical all by itself. But New York's new stupical move was to put an actual limit on the amount of time that schools may spend on test prep (2%). This is monumentally stupical for two reasons.
Reason #1.
Here in PA, we have rules that limit the number of weeks during which high school sports teams may hold practice. So, prior to those weeks, coaches hold "open gyms." An open gym is a totally optional gathering at which the athletes practice the skills involved in their sport. But it's totally optional. You don't have to attend if you don't want to, and you will be completely free to ride the bench and be cut from the team, but that's just a coincidence.
When the stakes are high, people lie. I'm pretty sure we've already documented plenty of instances of schools feeling pressure to cheat their way to acceptable results on their high stakes tests. Cheating was pretty severe and indefensible (though some people received fines and some people got to walk off into $50K speaking gigs). This won't even require actual cheating-- just creative renaming.
Reason #2
And it won't even require that, because these stupical people don't know what test prep really is. They keep saying that it's memorization and drill. It's not.
Test prep is squeezing out real short stories and novels and articles out of the course in order to make room for more "selections"-- one page or less.
Test prep is passing over the 147 different forms of legitimate assessment so that we can do one more assessment in multiple choice form.
Test prep is practicing how to spot the trick answers in those multiple choice questions.
Test prep is teaching students how to stifle their authentic voice and actual thoughts and feelings so that they can write a response that fits the formula and satisfies some faceless test-writer's template.
Test prep is tossing out teacher-made materials to make room for the materials from whichever company sold the district its "CCSS-ready" materials.
Test prep is teaching six-year-olds to do seatwork, sitting in place, for 30, 40, 50 minutes at a time so that by the time they're eight, they can handle the gritty rigors of a full-length test.
Test prep is ignoring the interests, strengths and weakness of the students, and driving right past that Teachable Moment because all of them involve material that is Not On The Test.
And in some parts of New York, test prep includes following your module script from the website instead of using any of your professional judgment and skills.
But of course the NY test prep limit law doesn't recognize any of that as test prep, because the legislators are stupical, monumentally stupical, stunningly stupical. It deserves a stupical statue, but I haven't designed one yet. Make your submissions in the comments section. I promise to steal your idea and lie about it, because stupical is as stupical does.
New York has most recently made its bid for the front of the pack with its anti-test-prep law. Like the rest of these laws, it's a legislative action that requires me to invent a whole new word.
You have to be really cynical to be that stupid, and you have to be really stupid to be that cynical, so our new word is-- stupical. (I considered cynipud, but that just sounded like a walking breakfast pastry).
New York has an advantage in the stupical contest because they have Andy Cuomo, whose Thinky Leaders Retreat for High Rollers is pretty stupical all by itself. But New York's new stupical move was to put an actual limit on the amount of time that schools may spend on test prep (2%). This is monumentally stupical for two reasons.
Reason #1.
Here in PA, we have rules that limit the number of weeks during which high school sports teams may hold practice. So, prior to those weeks, coaches hold "open gyms." An open gym is a totally optional gathering at which the athletes practice the skills involved in their sport. But it's totally optional. You don't have to attend if you don't want to, and you will be completely free to ride the bench and be cut from the team, but that's just a coincidence.
When the stakes are high, people lie. I'm pretty sure we've already documented plenty of instances of schools feeling pressure to cheat their way to acceptable results on their high stakes tests. Cheating was pretty severe and indefensible (though some people received fines and some people got to walk off into $50K speaking gigs). This won't even require actual cheating-- just creative renaming.
Reason #2
And it won't even require that, because these stupical people don't know what test prep really is. They keep saying that it's memorization and drill. It's not.
Test prep is squeezing out real short stories and novels and articles out of the course in order to make room for more "selections"-- one page or less.
Test prep is passing over the 147 different forms of legitimate assessment so that we can do one more assessment in multiple choice form.
Test prep is practicing how to spot the trick answers in those multiple choice questions.
Test prep is teaching students how to stifle their authentic voice and actual thoughts and feelings so that they can write a response that fits the formula and satisfies some faceless test-writer's template.
Test prep is tossing out teacher-made materials to make room for the materials from whichever company sold the district its "CCSS-ready" materials.
Test prep is teaching six-year-olds to do seatwork, sitting in place, for 30, 40, 50 minutes at a time so that by the time they're eight, they can handle the gritty rigors of a full-length test.
Test prep is ignoring the interests, strengths and weakness of the students, and driving right past that Teachable Moment because all of them involve material that is Not On The Test.
And in some parts of New York, test prep includes following your module script from the website instead of using any of your professional judgment and skills.
But of course the NY test prep limit law doesn't recognize any of that as test prep, because the legislators are stupical, monumentally stupical, stunningly stupical. It deserves a stupical statue, but I haven't designed one yet. Make your submissions in the comments section. I promise to steal your idea and lie about it, because stupical is as stupical does.
Computer Writer Vs. Computer Grader
Les Perelman is a hero of mine. The former director of undergraduate writing at MIT has been one of the smartest, sanest voices in the seemingly-endless debate about the use of computers to assess student writing. And now he has a new tool.
Babel (the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator) was created by Perelman with a team of students from MIT and Harvard, and it's pretty awesome as laid out in a recent article by Steve Kolowich for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Given the keyword "privacy," Babel generated a full essay from scratch. More accurately, it generated "a string of bloated sentences" that were grammatically and structurally correct. Here's a sample:
Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent. Humankind will always subjugate privateness.
Run through MY Assess! (one of the many online writing instruction products out there), Babel's privacy essay scored a 5.4 out of 6, including strong marks for "focus and meaning" and "language use and style."
Perelman has demonstrated repeatedly over the past decade that "writing" means something completely different to designers of essay-grading software and, well, human beings. When Mark Shermis and Ben Hammer produced a study in 2012 claiming that there was no real difference over 22,000 essays between human grading and computer grading, Perelman dismembered the study with both academic rigor and human-style brio. The whole take-down is worth reading, but here's one pull quote that underlines how Shermis and Hammer fail to even define what they mean by "writing."
One major problem with the study is the lack of any explicit construct of writing. Without such a construct, it is, of course, impossible to judge the validity of any measurement. Writing is foremost a rhetorical act, the transfer of information, feelings, and opinions from one mind to another mind. The exact nature of the writing construct is much too complex to outline here; suffice it to say that it differs fundamentally from the Shermis and Hammer study in that the construct of writing cannot be judged like the answer to a math problem or GPS directions. The essence of writing, like all human communication, is not that it is true or false, correct or incorrect, but that it is an action, that it does something in the world.
Computer-graded writing is the ultimate exercise in deciding that the things that matter are the things that can be measured. And while measuring the quality of human communication might not be impossible, it comes pretty damn close.
There are things that computers (nor minimum-wage human temps with rubrics in hand) cannot measure. Does it make sense? Is the information contained in it correct? Does it show some personality? Is it any good? So computer programs measure what can be measured. Are these sentences? Are there a lot of them? Do they have different lengths? Do they include big words? Do they mimic the language of the prompt?
And as Perelman and Babel show, if it's so simple a computer can score it, it's also simple enough for a computer to do it. Babel's "writing" is what you get when you reduce writing to a simple mechanical act. Babel's "writing" is what you get when you remove everything that makes "writing" writing. It's not just that the emperor has no clothes; it's that he's not even an emperor at all.
In the comments section of the Chronicles article, you can find people still willing to stick up for the computer grader with what have become familiar refrains.
"So what if the system can be gamed. A student who could do that kind of fakery would be showing mastery of writing skills." Well, no. That student might be showing mastery of some sort of skill, but it wouldn't be writing. And no mastery of anything is really required-- at my high school, we achieved near-100% proficiency on the state writing test by teaching our students to
1) Fill up the page
2) Write neatly
3) Indent clearly
4) Repeat the prompt
5) Use big words, even if you don't know what they mean ("plethora" was a fave of ours)
Software can be useful. I teach my students to do some fairly mechanical analyses of their work (find all the forms of "be," check to see what the first four words of each sentence are structurally, count the simple sentences), but these are only a useful tool, not the most useful tool or even the only tool. I'm not anti-software, but there are limits. Most writing problems are really thinking problems (but that's another column).
Babel demonstrates, once again, that computer grading of essays completely divorces the process from actual writing. HALO may be very exciting, but getting the high score with my squad does not mean I'm ready to be a Marine Lieutenant.
Babel (the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator) was created by Perelman with a team of students from MIT and Harvard, and it's pretty awesome as laid out in a recent article by Steve Kolowich for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Given the keyword "privacy," Babel generated a full essay from scratch. More accurately, it generated "a string of bloated sentences" that were grammatically and structurally correct. Here's a sample:
Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent. Humankind will always subjugate privateness.
Run through MY Assess! (one of the many online writing instruction products out there), Babel's privacy essay scored a 5.4 out of 6, including strong marks for "focus and meaning" and "language use and style."
Perelman has demonstrated repeatedly over the past decade that "writing" means something completely different to designers of essay-grading software and, well, human beings. When Mark Shermis and Ben Hammer produced a study in 2012 claiming that there was no real difference over 22,000 essays between human grading and computer grading, Perelman dismembered the study with both academic rigor and human-style brio. The whole take-down is worth reading, but here's one pull quote that underlines how Shermis and Hammer fail to even define what they mean by "writing."
One major problem with the study is the lack of any explicit construct of writing. Without such a construct, it is, of course, impossible to judge the validity of any measurement. Writing is foremost a rhetorical act, the transfer of information, feelings, and opinions from one mind to another mind. The exact nature of the writing construct is much too complex to outline here; suffice it to say that it differs fundamentally from the Shermis and Hammer study in that the construct of writing cannot be judged like the answer to a math problem or GPS directions. The essence of writing, like all human communication, is not that it is true or false, correct or incorrect, but that it is an action, that it does something in the world.
Computer-graded writing is the ultimate exercise in deciding that the things that matter are the things that can be measured. And while measuring the quality of human communication might not be impossible, it comes pretty damn close.
There are things that computers (nor minimum-wage human temps with rubrics in hand) cannot measure. Does it make sense? Is the information contained in it correct? Does it show some personality? Is it any good? So computer programs measure what can be measured. Are these sentences? Are there a lot of them? Do they have different lengths? Do they include big words? Do they mimic the language of the prompt?
And as Perelman and Babel show, if it's so simple a computer can score it, it's also simple enough for a computer to do it. Babel's "writing" is what you get when you reduce writing to a simple mechanical act. Babel's "writing" is what you get when you remove everything that makes "writing" writing. It's not just that the emperor has no clothes; it's that he's not even an emperor at all.
In the comments section of the Chronicles article, you can find people still willing to stick up for the computer grader with what have become familiar refrains.
"So what if the system can be gamed. A student who could do that kind of fakery would be showing mastery of writing skills." Well, no. That student might be showing mastery of some sort of skill, but it wouldn't be writing. And no mastery of anything is really required-- at my high school, we achieved near-100% proficiency on the state writing test by teaching our students to
1) Fill up the page
2) Write neatly
3) Indent clearly
4) Repeat the prompt
5) Use big words, even if you don't know what they mean ("plethora" was a fave of ours)
Software can be useful. I teach my students to do some fairly mechanical analyses of their work (find all the forms of "be," check to see what the first four words of each sentence are structurally, count the simple sentences), but these are only a useful tool, not the most useful tool or even the only tool. I'm not anti-software, but there are limits. Most writing problems are really thinking problems (but that's another column).
Babel demonstrates, once again, that computer grading of essays completely divorces the process from actual writing. HALO may be very exciting, but getting the high score with my squad does not mean I'm ready to be a Marine Lieutenant.
Is There No Common Ground? Well.....
I sympathize with Peter DeWitt, the former K-5 principal who has morphed into a pundit/trainer. In his blog at EdWeek he can often be found trying to chart a course between the Scylla of the CCSS-based Reformsters and the Charybdis of rabid opposition to any changey things in school while sailing under the Pigpen's Black Cloud of corporate deceitfulness with the Pebble of rhetorical purity tests in his shoe.
I get the desire to believe that surely we're all adults here and we ought to be able to work things out like intelligent human beings. Much of his writing has been about finding middle ground, bridges between the two sides, and he most recently addressed the idea directly in a blog entitled Education: Is There No Common Ground.
I understand the value of that question. A decade ago when we were on strike, one of my oft-repeated sound bites was "This is not a contest for one side to win, but a problem for all of us to solve together." DeWitt says he named his blog "Finding Common Ground" because he "was hoping to meet in the middle on some tough issues." I want to believe that's possible, because in general I believe that where people are pursuing what appear to be different goals, they are often pursuing the same values, but in different ways.
But after wading through the swamp of current education debates, I've reluctantly come to believe that some of our biggest issues are the result of fundamentally different values-- and that creates an unbridgeable gap.
We value the students, the young human beings who are trying to grow into their best selves. Reformsters value students only as cogs in the machine, a part of a system that is built to generate outputs and throughputs. When given a choice between what's good for the system and what's good for the students, reformsters pick the system. They say that they want the system to work well in order to insure students success, but they do not see a value for student success beyond using it to prove that the system is functioning well.
We value testing that helps us make more informed choices about how best to identify and meet the needs of individual students. Reformsters value testing that generates the numbers that prove how well the system is working.
We value standards that give us a guide for the direction student education should take. Reformsters value standards that keep the system trim and in line. We think good standards allow for human variety within teachers and students. Reformsters think good standards correct (i.e. wipe out) individual variations within the system.
We value the toughness and ingenuity to use limited resources to make a difference. Reformasters value the opportunity to make a buck.
We think teachers are the front line soldiers in education who have devoted their lives to the job. Reformsters think teachers are the main obstacle to education in this country.
We think people who are in trouble need help. Reformsters they need to be kicked in the butt and cast aside.
We believe that American public education is a system worth saving. Reformsters believe it is a system worth stripping for parts and destroying.
We believe in a process that allows all voices to be heard, that allows for discussion and revision and redirecting, open to all stakeholders. Reformsters believe that if you don't have money or powerful friends, you don't count and your voice is, at most, an annoyance.
That is perhaps the most frustrating part of these bridging discussions. While men of good faith like Peter DeWitt are really trying to keep the possibility of finding common ground open, reformsters like Duncan and Pearson and the Gates et al have no interest in even opening the door to such a conversation. They don't need to talk to the little people, and they so no reason they should have to.
You know who fought tirelessly to maintain peace between the British government and their American colonies? Benjamin Franklin. Franklin desperately and repeatedly worked to do his very best to find common ground with Great Britain, believing fervently that there was more to unite us than separate us. It was one of the great disappointments of his life when he stood (by some accounts) in Parliament, listened to the British, and realized finally that there was no common ground, there would be no bridge, that the British government did not have peace or bridge-building or anything remotely resembling the best interests of the colonies in mind.
I've had my Ben Franklin moment, and I suspect, at some point, Peter DeWitt is going to have his. I admire him for his optimism. I just can't share it any more. I still want to understand, and I still believe that there may be some people tucked in among the reformsters who are good faith and good intent, but I am no longer in the market to buy a bridge.
I get the desire to believe that surely we're all adults here and we ought to be able to work things out like intelligent human beings. Much of his writing has been about finding middle ground, bridges between the two sides, and he most recently addressed the idea directly in a blog entitled Education: Is There No Common Ground.
I understand the value of that question. A decade ago when we were on strike, one of my oft-repeated sound bites was "This is not a contest for one side to win, but a problem for all of us to solve together." DeWitt says he named his blog "Finding Common Ground" because he "was hoping to meet in the middle on some tough issues." I want to believe that's possible, because in general I believe that where people are pursuing what appear to be different goals, they are often pursuing the same values, but in different ways.
But after wading through the swamp of current education debates, I've reluctantly come to believe that some of our biggest issues are the result of fundamentally different values-- and that creates an unbridgeable gap.
We value the students, the young human beings who are trying to grow into their best selves. Reformsters value students only as cogs in the machine, a part of a system that is built to generate outputs and throughputs. When given a choice between what's good for the system and what's good for the students, reformsters pick the system. They say that they want the system to work well in order to insure students success, but they do not see a value for student success beyond using it to prove that the system is functioning well.
We value testing that helps us make more informed choices about how best to identify and meet the needs of individual students. Reformsters value testing that generates the numbers that prove how well the system is working.
We value standards that give us a guide for the direction student education should take. Reformsters value standards that keep the system trim and in line. We think good standards allow for human variety within teachers and students. Reformsters think good standards correct (i.e. wipe out) individual variations within the system.
We value the toughness and ingenuity to use limited resources to make a difference. Reformasters value the opportunity to make a buck.
We think teachers are the front line soldiers in education who have devoted their lives to the job. Reformsters think teachers are the main obstacle to education in this country.
We think people who are in trouble need help. Reformsters they need to be kicked in the butt and cast aside.
We believe that American public education is a system worth saving. Reformsters believe it is a system worth stripping for parts and destroying.
We believe in a process that allows all voices to be heard, that allows for discussion and revision and redirecting, open to all stakeholders. Reformsters believe that if you don't have money or powerful friends, you don't count and your voice is, at most, an annoyance.
That is perhaps the most frustrating part of these bridging discussions. While men of good faith like Peter DeWitt are really trying to keep the possibility of finding common ground open, reformsters like Duncan and Pearson and the Gates et al have no interest in even opening the door to such a conversation. They don't need to talk to the little people, and they so no reason they should have to.
You know who fought tirelessly to maintain peace between the British government and their American colonies? Benjamin Franklin. Franklin desperately and repeatedly worked to do his very best to find common ground with Great Britain, believing fervently that there was more to unite us than separate us. It was one of the great disappointments of his life when he stood (by some accounts) in Parliament, listened to the British, and realized finally that there was no common ground, there would be no bridge, that the British government did not have peace or bridge-building or anything remotely resembling the best interests of the colonies in mind.
I've had my Ben Franklin moment, and I suspect, at some point, Peter DeWitt is going to have his. I admire him for his optimism. I just can't share it any more. I still want to understand, and I still believe that there may be some people tucked in among the reformsters who are good faith and good intent, but I am no longer in the market to buy a bridge.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Malloy: I Didn't Bring That Ugly Girl to the Prom
Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy has joined the parade of politicians working to backpedal like a boss away from the Common Core.
On the CTMonitor site, Jacqueline Rabe Thomas recaps Malloy's Monday interview on NPR.
Malloy does his best to create fear and trepidation for anybody considering an opt-out for testing, and his best includes raising the specter of the feds cracking down. "If too many students opt out," he says in what I imagine to be his spooky voice, "the federal government will take our money and find us in violation of No Child Left Behind. I hear that Washington State is going to lose $40 million for losing their waiver, and we don't want to do that!"
This is, at best, a fuzzy version of the truth, but it is actually an interesting invitation to a cost/benefits analysis. Will it cost Connecticut more to continue complying with the Duncan Waiver Edict than it would cost them to stay in compliance? Because "Spend fifty dollars or else I will fine you ten" is not all that compelling an argument.
But Malloy seems to know he's on shaky ground because instead of doubling down on his federal oogie-boogerie, he throws DWE under the bus.
I didn't adopt Common Core. My predecessor did. Like handling the deficit, I was also handed the problem of seeing this implemented.
Well, that certainly speaks to Malloy's great confidence in the value of the CCSS. "The Common Core: As Appealing As Massive Budget Deficits" would make an awesome slogan for the standards, though I'm guessing we won't be seeing it a lot, and Malloy will probably not get his invitation to the next CCSS Boosters Ball.
Thomas wraps the piece up with appropriate journalistic dryness:
While former Gov. M. Jodi Rell entered the state into an agreement with other states to implement Common Core, the Malloy administration signed an agreement in 2012 with the federal government to implement the new standards and tests in order to receive a federal waiver to the No Child Left Behind law.
While we're rejecting slogans, we can probably throw out "Dannel Malloy: Because Courage and Truth-telling Are Overrated" as a campaign slogan.
On the CTMonitor site, Jacqueline Rabe Thomas recaps Malloy's Monday interview on NPR.
Malloy does his best to create fear and trepidation for anybody considering an opt-out for testing, and his best includes raising the specter of the feds cracking down. "If too many students opt out," he says in what I imagine to be his spooky voice, "the federal government will take our money and find us in violation of No Child Left Behind. I hear that Washington State is going to lose $40 million for losing their waiver, and we don't want to do that!"
This is, at best, a fuzzy version of the truth, but it is actually an interesting invitation to a cost/benefits analysis. Will it cost Connecticut more to continue complying with the Duncan Waiver Edict than it would cost them to stay in compliance? Because "Spend fifty dollars or else I will fine you ten" is not all that compelling an argument.
But Malloy seems to know he's on shaky ground because instead of doubling down on his federal oogie-boogerie, he throws DWE under the bus.
I didn't adopt Common Core. My predecessor did. Like handling the deficit, I was also handed the problem of seeing this implemented.
Well, that certainly speaks to Malloy's great confidence in the value of the CCSS. "The Common Core: As Appealing As Massive Budget Deficits" would make an awesome slogan for the standards, though I'm guessing we won't be seeing it a lot, and Malloy will probably not get his invitation to the next CCSS Boosters Ball.
Thomas wraps the piece up with appropriate journalistic dryness:
While former Gov. M. Jodi Rell entered the state into an agreement with other states to implement Common Core, the Malloy administration signed an agreement in 2012 with the federal government to implement the new standards and tests in order to receive a federal waiver to the No Child Left Behind law.
While we're rejecting slogans, we can probably throw out "Dannel Malloy: Because Courage and Truth-telling Are Overrated" as a campaign slogan.
The New Enemies List
The Tea Party threat is over. Well, over-ish.
I've been writing about this in the context of other topics, but I believe it deserves its own attention. Over the past ten days, I've noticed a shift in the narrative about the Enemies of the Core. Back in the day, the Core's enemies were those crazy fringe Tea Partiers. No longer.
On April 21, The Daily Beast attributed attacks on the Core to "an unholy alliance between the Tea Party and the teachers' unions." That article got some play across the internet.
By last weekend, the calmer voice of MSNBC reporter/commentator Steve Kornacki was also discussing Core opposition under the headline of "Unions and Tea Party Find Common Ground."
Yesterday, Michael Petrilli at the Core-loving Thomas B. Fordham Institute was discussing opposition and dividing it into two basic groups-- Libertarians and conservatives on the right, and the NEA on the left. No Tea Party in sight, but the union wanted to use this chance to back away from policy "it has never liked in the first place." Not only do unions oppose CCSS now, but despite but what you may remember seeing and hearing, they never did. Hooray for rewrites of history.
And of course today, Brookings releases a new "study" showing that both unions and teachers are the biggest problem with education reform.
I popped on over to the NEA websites to see any signs of this new opposition, but no-- at NEAToday the most current CCSS article is still President Dennis Van Roekel's weak and almost-immediately-backpedaled-from denunciation of the implementation of the core. That was back in mid-February. At nea.org, a link to a CCSS-shilling article about how change can be swell is still on the front page. So if the NEA is opposing CCSS, it's doing so very very quietly.
Why make the extra effort to hold up the unions as CCSS opponents? Are we trying to bring conservatives to heel on CCSS by trotting out the standard boogie-men of unions? Are we just putting more weight into the Reformster narrative of teachers as the biggest obstacles to education (just as doctors and nurses are the biggest threat to health).
I'm going to read the timing as desperation. It wasn't that long ago that Reformsters were busily trying to convince teachers that all teachers really lerve the Core. Apparently we've stopped trying to sell that story and we're heading back to teachers as education-hating obstacles to truth, beauty and the American way. I can live with it.
I've been writing about this in the context of other topics, but I believe it deserves its own attention. Over the past ten days, I've noticed a shift in the narrative about the Enemies of the Core. Back in the day, the Core's enemies were those crazy fringe Tea Partiers. No longer.
On April 21, The Daily Beast attributed attacks on the Core to "an unholy alliance between the Tea Party and the teachers' unions." That article got some play across the internet.
By last weekend, the calmer voice of MSNBC reporter/commentator Steve Kornacki was also discussing Core opposition under the headline of "Unions and Tea Party Find Common Ground."
Yesterday, Michael Petrilli at the Core-loving Thomas B. Fordham Institute was discussing opposition and dividing it into two basic groups-- Libertarians and conservatives on the right, and the NEA on the left. No Tea Party in sight, but the union wanted to use this chance to back away from policy "it has never liked in the first place." Not only do unions oppose CCSS now, but despite but what you may remember seeing and hearing, they never did. Hooray for rewrites of history.
And of course today, Brookings releases a new "study" showing that both unions and teachers are the biggest problem with education reform.
I popped on over to the NEA websites to see any signs of this new opposition, but no-- at NEAToday the most current CCSS article is still President Dennis Van Roekel's weak and almost-immediately-backpedaled-from denunciation of the implementation of the core. That was back in mid-February. At nea.org, a link to a CCSS-shilling article about how change can be swell is still on the front page. So if the NEA is opposing CCSS, it's doing so very very quietly.
Why make the extra effort to hold up the unions as CCSS opponents? Are we trying to bring conservatives to heel on CCSS by trotting out the standard boogie-men of unions? Are we just putting more weight into the Reformster narrative of teachers as the biggest obstacles to education (just as doctors and nurses are the biggest threat to health).
I'm going to read the timing as desperation. It wasn't that long ago that Reformsters were busily trying to convince teachers that all teachers really lerve the Core. Apparently we've stopped trying to sell that story and we're heading back to teachers as education-hating obstacles to truth, beauty and the American way. I can live with it.
Petrilli Warns of the Day After
Fordham has deployed the Damage Control team of Michael Petrilli to put up an article at the Governing website. Petrilli and his sidekick Michael Brickman (who, sadly, did not even get his picture on this article for which he's billed as co-writer) have a warning for Common Core foes:
Like a dog that finally catches the bus he'd been chasing forever, what happens when opponents of the Common Core State Standards finally succeed in getting a state's policymakers to "repeal" the education initiative? Early signs from Indiana and elsewhere suggest that the opponents' stated goals are likely to get run over.
The Thomas B. Fordham Insitute is a thinky tank that famously was paid both to promote and evaluate the Core, and they've been carrying water for it ever since. In particular, Fordham has been trying to thread the needle of whipping up conservative support for the Core. This article hints about the newest angle of spin they'll be attempting.
Petrilli acknowledges that opposition to CCSS is not "monolithic," and he proceeds to break it down. On the right we have Libertarians who want states to reject everything, and conservatives who want higher standards. Both want to get the feds out of the ed biz; Petrilli and Brickman think those folks are swell. On the left, "the National Education Association sees an opportunity to push back against a policy it never liked in the first place." Lefties object to the Core because of teacher evaluations and the standards being "too hard." Petrilli and Brickman think these guys are full of it.
Indiana and Oklahoma are hitting the rewind button hard, but no state is giving up the whole package because they don't want to give up the money attached, and because they don't trust the schools to do right by students if there aren't measures and sanctions.
But Indiana critics are also unhappy because the new standards look a lot like the Core (only, Petrilli claims, wimpier and suckier). But they should not be surprised, because "if the goal is to align the Hoosier K-12 system with the expectations of colleges and employers, standards drafters will inexorably come to many of the same conclusions."
See? If you want to get your students ready for college and career, you will unavoidably reach the exact same conclusions as the crafters of the Core, because they were just that good and just that correct, and one size really does fit all.
Indiana's new standards (like other "new" standards) don't AT ALL resemble CCSS because state leaders were trying to get rid of the political albatross of the Common Core brand without pissing off Arne Duncan and his Big Buckets of Money. The new standards' resemblance to the Core is not the result of political tap-dancing-- it's the result of the inevitable, inescapable Rightness of the Core. Relax. One way or another, you will all be assimilated.
What about states that want to keep the Core and ditch the Tests? Petrilli warns that new tests will be really, really expensive (not like the PARCC and SBA with their annual massive per-student costs added on top of a complete rebuild of computer infrastructure-- those things were a damn bargain).
What about the criticism that we aren't allowed to change or alter the Core. Of all the people who have pointed this True Thing out, Petrilli picks Phyllis Schafly (!!!) to carry that quote. He says, sure, states can make changes, like how some states added cursive writing, and I guess Petrelli conveniently forgot the 15% rule on additions. Though honestly-- he probably has a point here. If you do mess with the Core exactly who is going to come after you, and with what?
"Is there a better way forward?" Short Petrilli answer-- no. Leaders should grasp the business case for the Core (not the educational one, Mike?) "Half measures designed to mollify the critics will not cut it. The best that policymakers can do is to give voice to their concerns and then get out of the way." And so we return to one of the recurring themes of the Reformsters-- Democracy sucks, and people who aren't as wise as their betters should just be ignored.
It's worth noting that the CCSS support has shifted. From "Don't even go near that door" we've shifted to "Don't even put your hand on the doorknob" to "Okay, well, you may have turned the handle, but you better not pull the door the rest -- no no-- don't open it any more!!" You'll be sorry. Big costs and much inconvenience, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!I look forward to his next column, "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home."
[Edited: Apparently I don't know how to spell Mike Petrilli's name before I've had my morning bagel]
Like a dog that finally catches the bus he'd been chasing forever, what happens when opponents of the Common Core State Standards finally succeed in getting a state's policymakers to "repeal" the education initiative? Early signs from Indiana and elsewhere suggest that the opponents' stated goals are likely to get run over.
The Thomas B. Fordham Insitute is a thinky tank that famously was paid both to promote and evaluate the Core, and they've been carrying water for it ever since. In particular, Fordham has been trying to thread the needle of whipping up conservative support for the Core. This article hints about the newest angle of spin they'll be attempting.
Petrilli acknowledges that opposition to CCSS is not "monolithic," and he proceeds to break it down. On the right we have Libertarians who want states to reject everything, and conservatives who want higher standards. Both want to get the feds out of the ed biz; Petrilli and Brickman think those folks are swell. On the left, "the National Education Association sees an opportunity to push back against a policy it never liked in the first place." Lefties object to the Core because of teacher evaluations and the standards being "too hard." Petrilli and Brickman think these guys are full of it.
Indiana and Oklahoma are hitting the rewind button hard, but no state is giving up the whole package because they don't want to give up the money attached, and because they don't trust the schools to do right by students if there aren't measures and sanctions.
But Indiana critics are also unhappy because the new standards look a lot like the Core (only, Petrilli claims, wimpier and suckier). But they should not be surprised, because "if the goal is to align the Hoosier K-12 system with the expectations of colleges and employers, standards drafters will inexorably come to many of the same conclusions."
See? If you want to get your students ready for college and career, you will unavoidably reach the exact same conclusions as the crafters of the Core, because they were just that good and just that correct, and one size really does fit all.
Indiana's new standards (like other "new" standards) don't AT ALL resemble CCSS because state leaders were trying to get rid of the political albatross of the Common Core brand without pissing off Arne Duncan and his Big Buckets of Money. The new standards' resemblance to the Core is not the result of political tap-dancing-- it's the result of the inevitable, inescapable Rightness of the Core. Relax. One way or another, you will all be assimilated.
What about states that want to keep the Core and ditch the Tests? Petrilli warns that new tests will be really, really expensive (not like the PARCC and SBA with their annual massive per-student costs added on top of a complete rebuild of computer infrastructure-- those things were a damn bargain).
What about the criticism that we aren't allowed to change or alter the Core. Of all the people who have pointed this True Thing out, Petrilli picks Phyllis Schafly (!!!) to carry that quote. He says, sure, states can make changes, like how some states added cursive writing, and I guess Petrelli conveniently forgot the 15% rule on additions. Though honestly-- he probably has a point here. If you do mess with the Core exactly who is going to come after you, and with what?
"Is there a better way forward?" Short Petrilli answer-- no. Leaders should grasp the business case for the Core (not the educational one, Mike?) "Half measures designed to mollify the critics will not cut it. The best that policymakers can do is to give voice to their concerns and then get out of the way." And so we return to one of the recurring themes of the Reformsters-- Democracy sucks, and people who aren't as wise as their betters should just be ignored.
It's worth noting that the CCSS support has shifted. From "Don't even go near that door" we've shifted to "Don't even put your hand on the doorknob" to "Okay, well, you may have turned the handle, but you better not pull the door the rest -- no no-- don't open it any more!!" You'll be sorry. Big costs and much inconvenience, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!I look forward to his next column, "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home."
[Edited: Apparently I don't know how to spell Mike Petrilli's name before I've had my morning bagel]
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