Alyson Klein at EdWeek reports that Robert Gordon has been chosen to serve as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development at the US DOE.
Gordon's previous work credits include the Office of Management and Budget, where he seems to have been a man behind the scenes for the various Fiscal Cliff negotiations. More recently he's been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institute, and we know what great fans of public education those guys are.
It doesn't get any better. His pre-government work is with the Center for American Progress, which is a liberal-leaning thinky tank specializing in economics-related argle-blargle, originally headed up by John Podesta. In 2008, Time magazine credited them with being the outside group with major influence over the formation of the Obama administration.
In 2006, Gordon co-authored "Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job,” a paper which floated the idea of finding effective teachers by looking at student test scores, so perhaps this new job is in recognition of how awesomely THAT has worked out. Just over a month ago he wrote this article for the New Republic that explains how Head Start can be fixed (short answer-- more strictly focused performance outcomes). In short, Gordon has almost a decade of soaking in Reformy goodness under his belt.
Klein notes in passing that "ironically," the man Gordon will be replacing is Carmel Martin, who is now an executive vice-president at CAP. This is not so much irony as business-as-usual, or a reflection on the way that education has become like the military-industrial complex or the food industry-- folks pass back and forth through a revolving door that runs between the offices that write policy, the offices that pass policy, and the offices that make money from that policy.
I almost didn't bother to write this, because there's really nothing new to see here. But as this same thing happens over and over again and as the Obama administration tells us plainly, again and again, how much they support the attack on public education and as the DOE is repeatedly staffed by people with no connection to schools whatsoever-- well, it's monotonous, but we need to pay attention. We need to remember that it's not getting better, that other voices are not being heard, that promise are being kept-- but not the ones made to teachers and parents and students.
And-- sorry Democrat friends-- this goes in my file of "One More Damn Reason That The Federal Department of Education Really Ought To Go Away." Federal level bureaucracies will always be populated by federal level plutocrats, not actual educators. US DOE officials will always be from the federal government, and they will never be here to help us.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Sorry, Newsweek, But You're wrong About Louis C. K.
My first thought when I read Alexander Nazaryan's response to Louis C. K.'s Common Core tirade was, "Wow! What an ass!"
This is not an insult. Readers of this blog know that the what-an-ass writing style is one of my favorites, and I have been an ass frequently. I don't have the luxury of being an ass for a national newsmaga-- well, newsthingy. But it's a skill I respect.
Unfortunately, the alternate title for this blog entry is "Newsweek Presents the Same Old Shit With Some Extra Sass on the Side."
Nazaryan leads off with a summary of Louis's work that makes a simple point-- pretending to be mad about shit is this guy's shtick (so his anger on this occasion probably has no authentic roots in actual anger). Nazaryan then gives a quick summary of Louis's twitter tear. From there, we move on to the usual Common Core talking points. With extra sass.
Mockery of both sides of the opposition? Check. The conservative CCSS opponents are fringe nuts, and the lefties are all teachers worried that they will be judged based on real data. He notes that the standards are "especially loathed" by teachers' unions, thereby keeping up with the new narrative that teacher unions (you know, like the AFT and NEA who have endorsed CCSS right along) are the biggest threat (dethroning the previous champs, tin hat tea partiers).And--ha!-- conspiracy theorists who think Pearson is somehow making big bucks off all this. Yes, that's certainly far-fetched.
A few paragraphs later, he will reduce CCSS opponents to union shills and far-left crazies.
Comparing CCSS to the ACA? Check. Nice line here-- both are necessary but "poorly executed, dropped like a lowing cow into the den of starving lions that is the modern political scene." Which means we've also tagged the "CCSS fooferaw is all about politics, not the innate suckery of the Common Core itself."
Nazaryan admires Louis C. K.'s bullshit detector, but finds it dismaying (to....someone?) that he has used his audience to "malign an earnest effort at education reform, one that is far too young to be judged so harshly." I am not sure how much older CCSS must be before we are allowed to malign it. I was not aware that there was a grace periods for programs that show every sign of being destructive failures, but Nazaryan does not get into that scheduling issue.
Referencing "my time in the classroom"? Check. Nazaryan logged five years in Brooklyn, so good for him. Unfortunately, only he and a few colleagues didn't suck. Everything else was a sea of mediocrity. Damn, but it's tough to be better than everyone else; five years were enough to make him tired, cynical, and, I guess, equally mediocre.
Nominal admission that waves of tests can't fix things, without going so far as to continue on to "so maybe we should stop". Check.
Blithe statement of unproven assumptions? Check. "But introducing a set of national standards is a first step toward widespread accountability, toward the clearly worthy goal of having a teacher in Alaska teach more or less the same thing as a teacher in Alabama." Why are national standards clearly worthy? Seriously? There's not a lick of research to suggest that national standards help anybody learn anything.
Baseless International panic button? Check. The Chinese are leaving us in the dust. Soon we will not be the international test-taking champs. And the connection between that and anything is where...?
Call for teacher accountability without an actual plan? Check. We need "for those teachers to have to account for what their charges learned." Because teachers are the only factor in what students learn? And we can call for teacher accountability all day, but since nobody has a clue (well, that's not true-- I have a plan, but nobody listens to me). Teacher accountability = great. No plan = waste of words.
Grumpy complaint about Kids These Days and how they need to have it rougher? Check.
Staging scenes from Of Mice and Men isn’t going to catch us up to China anytime soon. Nor are art projects or iPads. It was dismaying to hear the new New York City schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, recently complain that our students are deprived of “joy” in the classroom. Joy, our twerking young ones know. Trigonometry, not so much.
Now it's my bullshit detector that's going off. Are Louis's daughters problems tough? Nazaryan says that's as it should be. No. Wrong. Challenging is great, and appropriate. Batshit crazy, pointless, senseless, developmentally inappropriate, just plain stupid-- these are not okay. "Tough" is not in and of itself a pedagogical virtue. Having no food is tough. Living in a car is tough. Having your life held hostage to questions with no sensible answer is tough. That does not mean these are what we should aspire to provide our children.
But no-- here's one more Reformster who says, "If this makes your kids sad and their school day joyless, good! That's how life is supposed to be, ya little whiners."
Use of the word "rigor?" Patronizing comments about lower class children? Double check. "It's the kids in the South Bronx or the South Side who would benefit from a little more rigor in the classroom." Really? Really?? So it's them poor brown kids that need to get their asses kicked and shaped up? Why not go all in and call them "shiftless," too?
Clueless irony? Check. "The saddest thing about all this is that C.K.’s children will be fine, as will mine and, probably, yours." This is true-- because those well-to-do children have the privilege and wealth necessary to shield them from the Common Core, because they won't have some well-heeled magazineything editor telling the world that they need to get rigorously shaped up with some pedagogical toughness, and because they will be able to avoid the very shit you're saying they should be gleefully pursuing!
Closing zinger that allows commentator to be an ass back atcha? Check.
For the most part, the complaints against Common Core and the charter-school movement have come from upper-middle-class parents whose objections are largely ideological, not pedagogical. It’s fun to get angry when you’ve got nothing to lose.
Well, yes, as you've so ably demonstrated, it is.
Here's what great about Louis C. K.'s critique. It takes us back to most basic level. Skip the pedagogical jargon and the educrat gobbledeegook and the marketing blitz and the political white wash. Just ask a simple question-- does this stuff look like it makes sense? Does it look like it would work? A reasonably famous layman with a well-tuned bullshit detector says, "no." Cool.
This is not an insult. Readers of this blog know that the what-an-ass writing style is one of my favorites, and I have been an ass frequently. I don't have the luxury of being an ass for a national newsmaga-- well, newsthingy. But it's a skill I respect.
Unfortunately, the alternate title for this blog entry is "Newsweek Presents the Same Old Shit With Some Extra Sass on the Side."
Nazaryan leads off with a summary of Louis's work that makes a simple point-- pretending to be mad about shit is this guy's shtick (so his anger on this occasion probably has no authentic roots in actual anger). Nazaryan then gives a quick summary of Louis's twitter tear. From there, we move on to the usual Common Core talking points. With extra sass.
Mockery of both sides of the opposition? Check. The conservative CCSS opponents are fringe nuts, and the lefties are all teachers worried that they will be judged based on real data. He notes that the standards are "especially loathed" by teachers' unions, thereby keeping up with the new narrative that teacher unions (you know, like the AFT and NEA who have endorsed CCSS right along) are the biggest threat (dethroning the previous champs, tin hat tea partiers).And--ha!-- conspiracy theorists who think Pearson is somehow making big bucks off all this. Yes, that's certainly far-fetched.
A few paragraphs later, he will reduce CCSS opponents to union shills and far-left crazies.
Comparing CCSS to the ACA? Check. Nice line here-- both are necessary but "poorly executed, dropped like a lowing cow into the den of starving lions that is the modern political scene." Which means we've also tagged the "CCSS fooferaw is all about politics, not the innate suckery of the Common Core itself."
Nazaryan admires Louis C. K.'s bullshit detector, but finds it dismaying (to....someone?) that he has used his audience to "malign an earnest effort at education reform, one that is far too young to be judged so harshly." I am not sure how much older CCSS must be before we are allowed to malign it. I was not aware that there was a grace periods for programs that show every sign of being destructive failures, but Nazaryan does not get into that scheduling issue.
Referencing "my time in the classroom"? Check. Nazaryan logged five years in Brooklyn, so good for him. Unfortunately, only he and a few colleagues didn't suck. Everything else was a sea of mediocrity. Damn, but it's tough to be better than everyone else; five years were enough to make him tired, cynical, and, I guess, equally mediocre.
Nominal admission that waves of tests can't fix things, without going so far as to continue on to "so maybe we should stop". Check.
Blithe statement of unproven assumptions? Check. "But introducing a set of national standards is a first step toward widespread accountability, toward the clearly worthy goal of having a teacher in Alaska teach more or less the same thing as a teacher in Alabama." Why are national standards clearly worthy? Seriously? There's not a lick of research to suggest that national standards help anybody learn anything.
Baseless International panic button? Check. The Chinese are leaving us in the dust. Soon we will not be the international test-taking champs. And the connection between that and anything is where...?
Call for teacher accountability without an actual plan? Check. We need "for those teachers to have to account for what their charges learned." Because teachers are the only factor in what students learn? And we can call for teacher accountability all day, but since nobody has a clue (well, that's not true-- I have a plan, but nobody listens to me). Teacher accountability = great. No plan = waste of words.
Grumpy complaint about Kids These Days and how they need to have it rougher? Check.
Staging scenes from Of Mice and Men isn’t going to catch us up to China anytime soon. Nor are art projects or iPads. It was dismaying to hear the new New York City schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, recently complain that our students are deprived of “joy” in the classroom. Joy, our twerking young ones know. Trigonometry, not so much.
Now it's my bullshit detector that's going off. Are Louis's daughters problems tough? Nazaryan says that's as it should be. No. Wrong. Challenging is great, and appropriate. Batshit crazy, pointless, senseless, developmentally inappropriate, just plain stupid-- these are not okay. "Tough" is not in and of itself a pedagogical virtue. Having no food is tough. Living in a car is tough. Having your life held hostage to questions with no sensible answer is tough. That does not mean these are what we should aspire to provide our children.
But no-- here's one more Reformster who says, "If this makes your kids sad and their school day joyless, good! That's how life is supposed to be, ya little whiners."
Use of the word "rigor?" Patronizing comments about lower class children? Double check. "It's the kids in the South Bronx or the South Side who would benefit from a little more rigor in the classroom." Really? Really?? So it's them poor brown kids that need to get their asses kicked and shaped up? Why not go all in and call them "shiftless," too?
Clueless irony? Check. "The saddest thing about all this is that C.K.’s children will be fine, as will mine and, probably, yours." This is true-- because those well-to-do children have the privilege and wealth necessary to shield them from the Common Core, because they won't have some well-heeled magazineything editor telling the world that they need to get rigorously shaped up with some pedagogical toughness, and because they will be able to avoid the very shit you're saying they should be gleefully pursuing!
Closing zinger that allows commentator to be an ass back atcha? Check.
For the most part, the complaints against Common Core and the charter-school movement have come from upper-middle-class parents whose objections are largely ideological, not pedagogical. It’s fun to get angry when you’ve got nothing to lose.
Well, yes, as you've so ably demonstrated, it is.
Here's what great about Louis C. K.'s critique. It takes us back to most basic level. Skip the pedagogical jargon and the educrat gobbledeegook and the marketing blitz and the political white wash. Just ask a simple question-- does this stuff look like it makes sense? Does it look like it would work? A reasonably famous layman with a well-tuned bullshit detector says, "no." Cool.
Teacher Merit Badges
Earlier this week, Metro Nashville Public Schools unveiled a new virtual merit badge system to reward teachers who take on extras. The idea was facing resistance about fifteen seconds after it was introduced.
Kelly Henderson, the districts executive director of instruction, compared the system to Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. Jill Speering of the school board responded, "I'm sorry-- that doesn't impress me. Teachers are adults. They don't need a badge. It's almost a slap in the face."
This tells me one thing-- neither Henderson nor Speering have an XBox in their homes.
In the world of XBox gaming (this may also be true for Playstation, but we are an xbox & wii home), programmers stumbled upon a way to increase a game's replayability (the number of times you can be entertained by thrashing the same imaginary monster). That was to create achievements. Once you have finished a game, you can still go back and unlock achievements by completing the game without any extra power-ups, or blowing up all the left-handed mugwumps, or never driving your virtual car into a tree, or any number of things so silly you'd think I was making them up. And to commemorate each of your achievements, you get a little virtual badge on your Big Wall O'Achievements.
People love this. Love. It. There are corners of the interwebs filled with people just showing off their Big Walls O' Achievements. Some are skill, and some are luck, but people will sit and replay a game they've already beaten a zillion times just to get the badge for capturing all the pink fluffy mini-godzillas (at least, that's what I hear).
So I think the actual problem with the Nashville plan is that it doesn't go far enough. Virtual badges for continuing ed is swell, but let's really apply ourselves. Let's set some real challenges and have some fun. Here's my list of proposed achievements.
* Teaches entire unit without once using copies of publisher-produced materials
* Teaches for an entire week without shushing anyone
* Goes an entire month without doing any room prep on weekends (elementary only)
* Goes an entire month without running out of kleenex in room (bonus if month is March)
* Teaches an entire week without saying "When I was your age..." (over-30)
* Teaches an entire week without saying "When I was in college..." (under-30)
* For a full week, every student brings a writing utensil to class
* For a full week, computer tech does what it's supposed to every single time
* Calls every single parent in one week
* Goes entire week in the lounge without discussing students
* Correctly writes all standards tags on lesson plan without looking them up
* Turns in all office paperwork-eforms on time for an entire week
* Avoids least favorite colleague for a full week
* Goes a full day without being on the receiving end of student over-sharing
* Gets a different student to say, "Wow! I learned something!" every day for a week
* Successfully clears printer jam
* Successfully gets old mimeograph machine to work when printer suffers jam fatality
* Has worksheets and materials all run off and ready to go full month before needed
* Goes three months without a drop or add in classroom
* Get room full of six-year-olds ready for bus in December in less than ten minutes
* Get at least ten sixteen-year-olds to say, "This Shakespeare guy is okay."
* Goes full week without hearing, "Why do we have to learn this stuff, anyway?"
* Teach in nothing but sports metaphors for a full day
* Says, "Good job, [student name]" 150 times in one day
Teachers would compete like crazy to have their webpage on the school district site drowned in an avalanche of merit badge festoonery, and every day in the classroom would be like a big video game. If you've got more ideas for teacher achievements, leave them in the comments, or perhaps we can float the hashtag #teachermeritbadge.
Kelly Henderson, the districts executive director of instruction, compared the system to Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. Jill Speering of the school board responded, "I'm sorry-- that doesn't impress me. Teachers are adults. They don't need a badge. It's almost a slap in the face."
This tells me one thing-- neither Henderson nor Speering have an XBox in their homes.
In the world of XBox gaming (this may also be true for Playstation, but we are an xbox & wii home), programmers stumbled upon a way to increase a game's replayability (the number of times you can be entertained by thrashing the same imaginary monster). That was to create achievements. Once you have finished a game, you can still go back and unlock achievements by completing the game without any extra power-ups, or blowing up all the left-handed mugwumps, or never driving your virtual car into a tree, or any number of things so silly you'd think I was making them up. And to commemorate each of your achievements, you get a little virtual badge on your Big Wall O'Achievements.
People love this. Love. It. There are corners of the interwebs filled with people just showing off their Big Walls O' Achievements. Some are skill, and some are luck, but people will sit and replay a game they've already beaten a zillion times just to get the badge for capturing all the pink fluffy mini-godzillas (at least, that's what I hear).
So I think the actual problem with the Nashville plan is that it doesn't go far enough. Virtual badges for continuing ed is swell, but let's really apply ourselves. Let's set some real challenges and have some fun. Here's my list of proposed achievements.
* Teaches entire unit without once using copies of publisher-produced materials
* Teaches for an entire week without shushing anyone
* Goes an entire month without doing any room prep on weekends (elementary only)
* Goes an entire month without running out of kleenex in room (bonus if month is March)
* Teaches an entire week without saying "When I was your age..." (over-30)
* Teaches an entire week without saying "When I was in college..." (under-30)
* For a full week, every student brings a writing utensil to class
* For a full week, computer tech does what it's supposed to every single time
* Calls every single parent in one week
* Goes entire week in the lounge without discussing students
* Correctly writes all standards tags on lesson plan without looking them up
* Turns in all office paperwork-eforms on time for an entire week
* Avoids least favorite colleague for a full week
* Goes a full day without being on the receiving end of student over-sharing
* Gets a different student to say, "Wow! I learned something!" every day for a week
* Successfully clears printer jam
* Successfully gets old mimeograph machine to work when printer suffers jam fatality
* Has worksheets and materials all run off and ready to go full month before needed
* Goes three months without a drop or add in classroom
* Get room full of six-year-olds ready for bus in December in less than ten minutes
* Get at least ten sixteen-year-olds to say, "This Shakespeare guy is okay."
* Goes full week without hearing, "Why do we have to learn this stuff, anyway?"
* Teach in nothing but sports metaphors for a full day
* Says, "Good job, [student name]" 150 times in one day
Teachers would compete like crazy to have their webpage on the school district site drowned in an avalanche of merit badge festoonery, and every day in the classroom would be like a big video game. If you've got more ideas for teacher achievements, leave them in the comments, or perhaps we can float the hashtag #teachermeritbadge.
Throwing Away
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.
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.
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.
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