According to Alyson Klein at Politics K-12, the US Department of Education told states that it would consider NCLB waiver extension without requiring compliance on the matter of teacher evaluation (this apparently in an email from Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary of saying things Arne Duncan doesn't want to say).
The new plan calls for states' extensions to be judged based only on two out of three of the four big You Have To's-- standards, assessments, turnarounds. Teacher evaluation plans come under a different review sometime further down the road.
I am waiting to hear how this news goes over in Washington State, where the waiver was rescinded because they had no fed-approved teacher evaluation plan in sight. Does this mean the federal government no longer has to fire every teacher and take over every school in WA?
Okay, granted, right now it's an extension. They're going to give some more time for states to come up with something they like (and that is politically palatable in the state's legislature). But it still shows a recognition of some new political realities.
What does it mean? It means the US DOE blinked. It means that Washington State probably just struck a huge blow for teachers across the country. It means that Duncan has once again revealed that the "laws" imposed on states under the pretense of federal get-out-of-actual-laws-free waivers are in fact arbitrary and based on nothing except the calculus of political power. And it means that we've seen the first crack in the foundation of the whole waiver program.
Pardon me while I do a little happy dance!
Friday, May 9, 2014
Marc Tucker's Federalism
Marc Tucker is the author of the infamous "Dear Hillary" letter which has earned him a reputation in conservative circles as an architect of soviet-style centrally-controlled school systems. He's president and founder of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a group that helped create the New Standards Project in 1992 (the great grandaddy of current Reformy Status Quo). NCEE also has one of the creepiest pictures of Arne Duncan ever on its website.
NCEE's basic theory is that there are super-duper awesome education systems out there in the world, and the key to improving US education is to unlock the secret of powerhouses like Shanghai and Estonia. And what they seem to conclude is that it takes a heaping helping of federal involvement.
Recently Tucker took to his blogging platform to discuss the federal role in state education.
He opens with a bit of history. No Child Left Behind, he notes, was an "abrupt departure from more than two centuries of practice" that "had its origins in Congressional frustration." Congress had been throwing money at poor kids for decades and getting not so much as a whimper for its buck.
NCLB was an announcement that henceforth the Congress expected value for its money; it was going to hold the faculty of the public schools that received federal education funds accountable for doing whatever it took to improve the achievement of disadvantaged children.
The Big New Idea in NCLB was that states would face accountability that made the feds back-seat drivers on decisions about spending education money, and it introduced the big federal stick-- if you can't prove that you raised test scores for all your subgroups, we are going to fire your ass.
Having set the context, Tucker identifies the core issue-- the need to balance the federal government's interest in "making sure that the money it gives to schools produces results" with the states' interest in holding onto their constitutional right to determine their own educational policies.
Tucker has an idea about how to find that balance. Short answer: dump a ton of bricks on the federal side of the scale.
Okay-- I'm paraphrasing. Here's what Tucker actually argues.
Saying that the feds have a right/responsibility/interest in seeing how their money is spent is, in terms of arguing federalism, chump change. Tucker builds the foundation of his argument out of three big chunks of concrete:
1) The US has an interest in creating an education system that makes us economically internationally competitive
2) We only qualify as competitive if our ed system measures in the top 10%
3) That means the PISA test, because it's awesome
Having ante'd up, Tucker now goes all in:
...we can no longer say that the failure of any state to educate its students well is a problem only for that state. It is a problem for the United States, for all the states. The states have grown far too interdependent and personal mobility is far too great to pretend that what one state does about education does not matter to the people of the United States. If a state or region fails to educate its people well, there will be great costs to other states, in lost productivity and competitiveness and increased transfer payment costs. We are in that sense among others, one country. But there are many ways to successfully run a state education system. The idea of the states constituting a laboratory of democracy was a good one.
Got that? Letting states function independently was a fun experiment, but it's time to grow up and move past that whole thing.
Tucker's argument is breathtaking. I would challenge you to name any economic or social sector, private or public, that could not be subordinated to the federal government using Tucker's argument. Under Tucker's argument, states could be allowed some autonomy, such as picking their own state flag, state bird, state fungus. Everything else must be regulated and controlled by the federal government.
Against that staggeringly massive background of federal power, Tucker's specific proposal for education seems like small potatoes, but it's worth looking at.
Congress should set a cut score for states on the PISA (and it ought to be the top 10%, but Tucker allows the Congress might settle for less if they wanted to be stupid). States will take the PISA. As long as they make the cut score, they can have (some) control of their educational systems. If they fall below the cut score, the feds get to make all the rules for them.
So we "balance" state and federal interests. States can either serve federal interests voluntarily, or they can be forced to serve federal interests. When my son was a teenager, I used a similar system-- "You can do it my way, or you can do it my way." Didn't work all that well for me, either.
I don't know if this is how we turn US education into a winner; I suspect it is how we can turn moderates into libertarians.
NCEE's basic theory is that there are super-duper awesome education systems out there in the world, and the key to improving US education is to unlock the secret of powerhouses like Shanghai and Estonia. And what they seem to conclude is that it takes a heaping helping of federal involvement.
Recently Tucker took to his blogging platform to discuss the federal role in state education.
He opens with a bit of history. No Child Left Behind, he notes, was an "abrupt departure from more than two centuries of practice" that "had its origins in Congressional frustration." Congress had been throwing money at poor kids for decades and getting not so much as a whimper for its buck.
NCLB was an announcement that henceforth the Congress expected value for its money; it was going to hold the faculty of the public schools that received federal education funds accountable for doing whatever it took to improve the achievement of disadvantaged children.
The Big New Idea in NCLB was that states would face accountability that made the feds back-seat drivers on decisions about spending education money, and it introduced the big federal stick-- if you can't prove that you raised test scores for all your subgroups, we are going to fire your ass.
Having set the context, Tucker identifies the core issue-- the need to balance the federal government's interest in "making sure that the money it gives to schools produces results" with the states' interest in holding onto their constitutional right to determine their own educational policies.
Tucker has an idea about how to find that balance. Short answer: dump a ton of bricks on the federal side of the scale.
Okay-- I'm paraphrasing. Here's what Tucker actually argues.
Saying that the feds have a right/responsibility/interest in seeing how their money is spent is, in terms of arguing federalism, chump change. Tucker builds the foundation of his argument out of three big chunks of concrete:
1) The US has an interest in creating an education system that makes us economically internationally competitive
2) We only qualify as competitive if our ed system measures in the top 10%
3) That means the PISA test, because it's awesome
Having ante'd up, Tucker now goes all in:
...we can no longer say that the failure of any state to educate its students well is a problem only for that state. It is a problem for the United States, for all the states. The states have grown far too interdependent and personal mobility is far too great to pretend that what one state does about education does not matter to the people of the United States. If a state or region fails to educate its people well, there will be great costs to other states, in lost productivity and competitiveness and increased transfer payment costs. We are in that sense among others, one country. But there are many ways to successfully run a state education system. The idea of the states constituting a laboratory of democracy was a good one.
Got that? Letting states function independently was a fun experiment, but it's time to grow up and move past that whole thing.
Tucker's argument is breathtaking. I would challenge you to name any economic or social sector, private or public, that could not be subordinated to the federal government using Tucker's argument. Under Tucker's argument, states could be allowed some autonomy, such as picking their own state flag, state bird, state fungus. Everything else must be regulated and controlled by the federal government.
Against that staggeringly massive background of federal power, Tucker's specific proposal for education seems like small potatoes, but it's worth looking at.
Congress should set a cut score for states on the PISA (and it ought to be the top 10%, but Tucker allows the Congress might settle for less if they wanted to be stupid). States will take the PISA. As long as they make the cut score, they can have (some) control of their educational systems. If they fall below the cut score, the feds get to make all the rules for them.
So we "balance" state and federal interests. States can either serve federal interests voluntarily, or they can be forced to serve federal interests. When my son was a teenager, I used a similar system-- "You can do it my way, or you can do it my way." Didn't work all that well for me, either.
I don't know if this is how we turn US education into a winner; I suspect it is how we can turn moderates into libertarians.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
The Three Sides of the Battle for Public Schools
We have discussed the battle over American public education as if there are two sides. This is not correct, and people who don't grasp the truth are in for a rude and unpleasant shock further down the road.
I. Status Quo
I've called these guys everything from Purveyors of Reformy Nonsense to Reformsters. We don't call them reformers any more because 1) they aren't interested in reforming anything and 2) they've pretty much gotten everything they wanted. High stakes, top down, test driven, corporatized education is with us and has been the dominant feature of the American education landscape for a while.
The Reformy Status Quo supporters are not monolithic. Some are in it for the money. Some are in it for the power. Some truly believe that they know the secret to fixing the entire culture.
What they have in common is the lack of any real love for the public school system and the people who work there. Whether they think it's bloated and inefficient and lazy and moribund, or whether they see it as a big pile of gold waiting to be torn apart and cashed in, they are not interested in preserving or protecting it (except maybe as a holding pen for the students that nobody else can see a way to profit from). For them, teachers are a big part of the problem, an unruly, largely incompetent labor pool of workers who don't know their place, or who won't recognize the superior wisdom of the people trying to Fix Things.
This group also includes lots of people who mean well, but don't see where the policies they support are leading. These people are worth paying attention to, because they really do want American public education to thrive and survive.
II. Insurgents
If you're a reader of this blog, you know who these folks are. This is a somewhat raggedy group of individuals who have come together in various ways to fight for American public education.
They are also not monolithic. Some are BATs; some prefer not to be. Some are teachers; some are not. Some believe in the idea of national standards-- just not these-- and some do not. Some are most opposed to testing. Some oppose charters; some work in charters. Some would like better leadership at the US DOE; some would like the whole department to evaporate. They come from all across the political spectrum.
These folks would like to see education back in the hands of educators. They generally reject the tale of how badly schools are failing. They would like to see the promise of public schools for all restored and revitalized.
III. Nuclear Option
This group is not identical to the Tea Partiers, but there is certainly some overlap.They do not like Big Government, and they see Big Government's grubby paw prints all over the CCSS regime. They do not like the way CCSS was forcefed to the states, and they do not like the large-scale standardization that is coming stapled onto the standards.
They are strongly, vehemently opposed to all things Core (or "Obamacore") as they sometimes call it. In this respect they have much in common with group II. Group III has a good chunk of political clout, and they know how to use it. They are passionate, they are careful researchers, and they care a great deal about children.
Will you be surprised if I type "Group III is not monolithic"? Some are absolutely unswerving in their opposition to government and government schools. Some have a concern about government overreach that is not expressed in irrational tin hat ways. Some love American traditions-- including public schools. Some are teachers.
But while Group II sees Reformy Stuff as some sort of foreign fungus that has attached itself to public education, covering up and distorting its true nature, Group III sees Reformy Stuff as public education without its mask on, not a distortion of the nature of American public education, but an unvarnished revelation of it.
Groups II and III may be able to storm the battlements together, and in the early stages of battle they may seem like natural allies. But where II wants to chase out the occupying army and save the fort, III would like to rout the occupying army and then burn the fort down.You can read a great deal about this stance on the far right in this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
There are three sides to this fight, but do not imagine a triangle. Instead, picture a circle, divided into three separate zones, each gradually fading into the next. Many people on all three sides are jumping to conclusions about where to find their allies and their enemies, but this is a complicated issue with a complex set of players, all of whom are united by some values and separated by others. There are natural points of alliance and conflict between any two of these three groups. Each group contains a range of viewpoints, and some peoples' tolerance for a range of viewpoints is not so great.
The sloppiest kind of thinking is the thinking that says, "Well, we both like the same kind of cheese, so surely we agree about professional ice hockey and the International Monetary Fund." People are complicated, and you have to listen, and pay attention. You have to pay extra attention when you are deciding on allies and enemies.
I. Status Quo
I've called these guys everything from Purveyors of Reformy Nonsense to Reformsters. We don't call them reformers any more because 1) they aren't interested in reforming anything and 2) they've pretty much gotten everything they wanted. High stakes, top down, test driven, corporatized education is with us and has been the dominant feature of the American education landscape for a while.
The Reformy Status Quo supporters are not monolithic. Some are in it for the money. Some are in it for the power. Some truly believe that they know the secret to fixing the entire culture.
What they have in common is the lack of any real love for the public school system and the people who work there. Whether they think it's bloated and inefficient and lazy and moribund, or whether they see it as a big pile of gold waiting to be torn apart and cashed in, they are not interested in preserving or protecting it (except maybe as a holding pen for the students that nobody else can see a way to profit from). For them, teachers are a big part of the problem, an unruly, largely incompetent labor pool of workers who don't know their place, or who won't recognize the superior wisdom of the people trying to Fix Things.
This group also includes lots of people who mean well, but don't see where the policies they support are leading. These people are worth paying attention to, because they really do want American public education to thrive and survive.
II. Insurgents
If you're a reader of this blog, you know who these folks are. This is a somewhat raggedy group of individuals who have come together in various ways to fight for American public education.
They are also not monolithic. Some are BATs; some prefer not to be. Some are teachers; some are not. Some believe in the idea of national standards-- just not these-- and some do not. Some are most opposed to testing. Some oppose charters; some work in charters. Some would like better leadership at the US DOE; some would like the whole department to evaporate. They come from all across the political spectrum.
These folks would like to see education back in the hands of educators. They generally reject the tale of how badly schools are failing. They would like to see the promise of public schools for all restored and revitalized.
III. Nuclear Option
This group is not identical to the Tea Partiers, but there is certainly some overlap.They do not like Big Government, and they see Big Government's grubby paw prints all over the CCSS regime. They do not like the way CCSS was forcefed to the states, and they do not like the large-scale standardization that is coming stapled onto the standards.
They are strongly, vehemently opposed to all things Core (or "Obamacore") as they sometimes call it. In this respect they have much in common with group II. Group III has a good chunk of political clout, and they know how to use it. They are passionate, they are careful researchers, and they care a great deal about children.
Will you be surprised if I type "Group III is not monolithic"? Some are absolutely unswerving in their opposition to government and government schools. Some have a concern about government overreach that is not expressed in irrational tin hat ways. Some love American traditions-- including public schools. Some are teachers.
But while Group II sees Reformy Stuff as some sort of foreign fungus that has attached itself to public education, covering up and distorting its true nature, Group III sees Reformy Stuff as public education without its mask on, not a distortion of the nature of American public education, but an unvarnished revelation of it.
Groups II and III may be able to storm the battlements together, and in the early stages of battle they may seem like natural allies. But where II wants to chase out the occupying army and save the fort, III would like to rout the occupying army and then burn the fort down.You can read a great deal about this stance on the far right in this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
There are three sides to this fight, but do not imagine a triangle. Instead, picture a circle, divided into three separate zones, each gradually fading into the next. Many people on all three sides are jumping to conclusions about where to find their allies and their enemies, but this is a complicated issue with a complex set of players, all of whom are united by some values and separated by others. There are natural points of alliance and conflict between any two of these three groups. Each group contains a range of viewpoints, and some peoples' tolerance for a range of viewpoints is not so great.
The sloppiest kind of thinking is the thinking that says, "Well, we both like the same kind of cheese, so surely we agree about professional ice hockey and the International Monetary Fund." People are complicated, and you have to listen, and pay attention. You have to pay extra attention when you are deciding on allies and enemies.
Standards & Curriculum
So is the Common Core a national curriculum or not?
The Common Core is not a national curriculum, because it is not a curriculum at all. It is only a set of standards, and that's completely different from the scope and sequence of curriculum planning.
As angry villagers storm the Common Core Castle with pointy sticks and burny things, CCSS defenders keep repeating the curriculum/standards explanation over and over. And here's the thing-- theoretically, they aren't wrong. But like that terrible match.com date you went on, the standards-curriculum distinction only looks good on paper. Even though the Common Core shouldn't have to lead to a nationalized curriculum, they almost certainly will.
I am not a scholar or expert in this field, so I'm going to approach this from a layman's perspective. Let's look at how this is going to work.
What Are Standards?
In manufacturing, standards generally are physical and functional. We have an agreed-upon standard for electrical plugs-- what shape, size and configuration they will have. We can actually see the effect of standards change with plugs; the standard was changed at one point so that one prong was wider than the other, and if you are trying to jam a new plug into an old outlet, you experience what frustration changes in standards can cause.
But education is not manufacturing, so educational standards are basically the children of educational outcomes (hands up, all you other greyhairs who remember Outcome Based Education). They are generally a list of behaviors that we expect the students to display.
Humans Are Fuzzy
Human standards tend to get fuzzy because they tend to fall into subjective terminology. For instance, your standard for a boyfriend might be "He will give me an appropriate gift on my birthday." This will become problematic if you think roses are appropriate and he thinks new shag carpet in his van is appropriate.
Except When They Aren't
Humans can get very specific. Your boyfriend requirement might include, "He will call me every day between 5 and 7 o'clock and talk to me for at least fifteen minutes."
What Is Curriculum?
There are people who get doctorates in this stuff, but the simple layman's explanation is that curriculum is the big list of what we're going to do, when we're going to do it, and how long we're going to take. That's it. It's a big, fat to-do list.
How Are Standards and Curriculum Related?
Standards are your destination. Curriculum is your road map. Standards say "You will be at the corner of East 9th and Superior in Cleveland on Sunday at noon." Curriculum is the directions you pulled up on mapquest and the travel plans you made with them.
The more specific my standards, the less freedom I have to create curriculum. What if the standards say that I will travel to Cleveland in less than three hours using only large highways, arriving with no food in the care and at least five gallons of gas in the tank? Now all manner of details about the trip, from vehicle to route to travel speed have all been pre-decided for me.
However, fuzzy standards also tend to limit freedom in writing curriculum, particularly when coupled with large penalties. If your girlfriend gets in the car and says, "Take me some place fun," you may not know exactly where she wants you to go, but you might feel secure making your best guess or even discussing it. If a carjacker gets in the car and says, "Take me some place fun or I will shoot you," you are going to feel an enormous amount of pressure to discern and match the carjacker's idea of fun.
So... Common Core State Standards?
Right. The Core features a mixture of the very specific and the very fuzzy. Let's look at some examples.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.a
Introduce precise, knowledgeable claim(s), establish the significance of the claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.
This is not a standard for writing; this is an outline. In classrooms that adhere to the Core, this may well be used as a template. It gets as close to dictating the actual curriculum as possible without listing actual topics to write about.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.b
Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly and thoroughly, supplying the most relevant evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience's knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases.
This is "drive me someplace fun." "Fairly," "thoroughly," "most relevant," "strengths," and "limitations" are all subjectively assessed qualities. And that's before we even get to the psychic activity involved in working to our imaginary audience's biases etc.
In my own classroom, this standard would not make me uncomfortable. As the assessor of their writing, I would be obliged to share with my students what I meant by all of these subjective terms. We might even discuss them. And that would be cool.
But this is the roadtrip with the carjacker. Somewhere out there, in a triangle roughly between David Coleman, Pearson and Arne Duncan, is somebody with a specific idea of what he thinks those terms mean, and my students and I must nail that interpretation correctly. What we think doesn't matter-- only what that Font of Standards Knowledge thinks.
So how does that fuzziness lead to specific curriculum? Because we don't want to make the carjacker upset, so we look for every possible hint we can find about where he wants to go.
Vagueness screams out for explanation, and explanation is best served by specifics. We plead with the carjacker-- what do you mean by "someplace fun"? He answers, "Oh, someplace like Cedar Point." At that point, looking at the gun, we don't try to think of a place "like" Cedar Point, because we don't really know what particular Cedar Point trait is the fun-maker, anyway. No, we just head straight for Cedar Point.
Let's look at another example that is happening even as we speak.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.10
By the end of grade 11, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 11-CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.
The standards are clear that Some Stuff must be read. Appendix B, the famous text exemplars list, gives us some examples. "They are just examples," insist the Core advocates. "It's not an assigned reading list." But everybody is afraid of the carjacker with the gun. So what has happened? The numbers already indicate that school districts are treating Appendix B as an assigned reading list.
What Are We Supposed To Do
District after district is asking this question. The tenor of the top-down standards, imposed from on high, combined with the high stakes tests waiting at the end of the road, creates the strong impression that while there is no explicit Common Core curriculum, there is an implied one hiding somewhere between the lines. States and districts are desperate to be compliant to come up with a curriculum that properly reflects the Core the way it is supposed to.
From Middle Men To Grand Scale
Where the CCSS are broad and vague and subjective, middle men are leaping into the highly profitable breach. Textbooks, pre-built units, and various consulting firms are all leaping up to say, "We can give you the tools to create a CCSS-aligned curriculum. Or we can walk you through it step by step. Or we can just sell you one out of the box."
This isn't a bug; it's a feature. Remember one of the points of CCSS was to create economies of scale, to allow textbook publishers, for instance, to design textbooks that could be sold in all fifty states. The adoption of national standards insures, for the first time in US history, that one national curriculum could work. In fact, one national curriculum created by one vendor would probably be quicker, easier, and cheaper than everyone figuring out their own individual way of meeting the standards.
Sure, it's a level playing field. Any small company or in-house school district committee is free to compete with the hugest educational corporation in the world. Pearson's capture of the PARCC test contract without a single opposing bid can serve as a preview of coming attractions. The highly rigid and tightly structured instructional modules of engageNY really are the most efficient and simple way to align to the Core.
And corporations like Pearson are not just huge-- they have a head start. Because the standards were rammed through quickly and alignments are required yesterday, schools don't really have the time to do long careful curriculum development. But you know who has had several years to get ready? The corporations that were in the room to write the standards.
Other Connections?
Some of the goals of national standards supporters cannot be met by national standards. For instance, the idea that a student should be able to move from Tennessee to Utah without missing a beat-- you don't fix that "problem" with standards. You can only fix it with curriculum.
The Big Load of Cement
Of course, the other connector between standards and curriculum is the Big Test. High stakes tests push everyone closer to the same curriculum, because the curriculum is test prep.
Nobody believes that all the CCSS must be observed. Standards that promote collaboration are sweet, but they will never be on the test and therefor they don't matter. We all learned under NCLB that the testmakers love some standards and don't care so much about others, and it's the ones they love that we'll spend a chunk of the year teaching to.
So, Bottom Line?
Critics who say charge the Common Core is really a national curriculum (and supporters who accidentally say so) are not correct. The standards are not a curriculum. However-
Supporters who say that the Core is just completely divorced from a national curriculum and of course all curriculum control stays local are being disingenuous. CCSS does not mandate a national curriculum, but it ploughs the road, opens the path, greases the skids, and directs traffic toward it. The Core Standards make it hugely likely that we will not only have a national curriculum, but also that it will created by some corporation (best bet-- one whose name starts with "P" and end s with "earson").
That process may happen organically, or at some point the feds (or their designated agents) may step up and say, "The individual states have created a patchwork or policies that are inconsistent and vary too much from state to state. To bring consistent excellence to all states, we need to make the same high quality learning program available in all states." In other words, exactly the same argument used to push the Core can be rolled out again to push a national curriculum. It's entirely possible that we are only at the halfway mark on a very long road trip with a carjacker who is as patient as he is dangerous.
The Common Core is not a national curriculum, because it is not a curriculum at all. It is only a set of standards, and that's completely different from the scope and sequence of curriculum planning.
As angry villagers storm the Common Core Castle with pointy sticks and burny things, CCSS defenders keep repeating the curriculum/standards explanation over and over. And here's the thing-- theoretically, they aren't wrong. But like that terrible match.com date you went on, the standards-curriculum distinction only looks good on paper. Even though the Common Core shouldn't have to lead to a nationalized curriculum, they almost certainly will.
I am not a scholar or expert in this field, so I'm going to approach this from a layman's perspective. Let's look at how this is going to work.
What Are Standards?
In manufacturing, standards generally are physical and functional. We have an agreed-upon standard for electrical plugs-- what shape, size and configuration they will have. We can actually see the effect of standards change with plugs; the standard was changed at one point so that one prong was wider than the other, and if you are trying to jam a new plug into an old outlet, you experience what frustration changes in standards can cause.
But education is not manufacturing, so educational standards are basically the children of educational outcomes (hands up, all you other greyhairs who remember Outcome Based Education). They are generally a list of behaviors that we expect the students to display.
Humans Are Fuzzy
Human standards tend to get fuzzy because they tend to fall into subjective terminology. For instance, your standard for a boyfriend might be "He will give me an appropriate gift on my birthday." This will become problematic if you think roses are appropriate and he thinks new shag carpet in his van is appropriate.
Except When They Aren't
Humans can get very specific. Your boyfriend requirement might include, "He will call me every day between 5 and 7 o'clock and talk to me for at least fifteen minutes."
What Is Curriculum?
There are people who get doctorates in this stuff, but the simple layman's explanation is that curriculum is the big list of what we're going to do, when we're going to do it, and how long we're going to take. That's it. It's a big, fat to-do list.
How Are Standards and Curriculum Related?
Standards are your destination. Curriculum is your road map. Standards say "You will be at the corner of East 9th and Superior in Cleveland on Sunday at noon." Curriculum is the directions you pulled up on mapquest and the travel plans you made with them.
The more specific my standards, the less freedom I have to create curriculum. What if the standards say that I will travel to Cleveland in less than three hours using only large highways, arriving with no food in the care and at least five gallons of gas in the tank? Now all manner of details about the trip, from vehicle to route to travel speed have all been pre-decided for me.
However, fuzzy standards also tend to limit freedom in writing curriculum, particularly when coupled with large penalties. If your girlfriend gets in the car and says, "Take me some place fun," you may not know exactly where she wants you to go, but you might feel secure making your best guess or even discussing it. If a carjacker gets in the car and says, "Take me some place fun or I will shoot you," you are going to feel an enormous amount of pressure to discern and match the carjacker's idea of fun.
So... Common Core State Standards?
Right. The Core features a mixture of the very specific and the very fuzzy. Let's look at some examples.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.a
Introduce precise, knowledgeable claim(s), establish the significance of the claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.
This is not a standard for writing; this is an outline. In classrooms that adhere to the Core, this may well be used as a template. It gets as close to dictating the actual curriculum as possible without listing actual topics to write about.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.b
Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly and thoroughly, supplying the most relevant evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience's knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases.
This is "drive me someplace fun." "Fairly," "thoroughly," "most relevant," "strengths," and "limitations" are all subjectively assessed qualities. And that's before we even get to the psychic activity involved in working to our imaginary audience's biases etc.
In my own classroom, this standard would not make me uncomfortable. As the assessor of their writing, I would be obliged to share with my students what I meant by all of these subjective terms. We might even discuss them. And that would be cool.
But this is the roadtrip with the carjacker. Somewhere out there, in a triangle roughly between David Coleman, Pearson and Arne Duncan, is somebody with a specific idea of what he thinks those terms mean, and my students and I must nail that interpretation correctly. What we think doesn't matter-- only what that Font of Standards Knowledge thinks.
So how does that fuzziness lead to specific curriculum? Because we don't want to make the carjacker upset, so we look for every possible hint we can find about where he wants to go.
Vagueness screams out for explanation, and explanation is best served by specifics. We plead with the carjacker-- what do you mean by "someplace fun"? He answers, "Oh, someplace like Cedar Point." At that point, looking at the gun, we don't try to think of a place "like" Cedar Point, because we don't really know what particular Cedar Point trait is the fun-maker, anyway. No, we just head straight for Cedar Point.
Let's look at another example that is happening even as we speak.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.10
By the end of grade 11, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 11-CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.
The standards are clear that Some Stuff must be read. Appendix B, the famous text exemplars list, gives us some examples. "They are just examples," insist the Core advocates. "It's not an assigned reading list." But everybody is afraid of the carjacker with the gun. So what has happened? The numbers already indicate that school districts are treating Appendix B as an assigned reading list.
What Are We Supposed To Do
District after district is asking this question. The tenor of the top-down standards, imposed from on high, combined with the high stakes tests waiting at the end of the road, creates the strong impression that while there is no explicit Common Core curriculum, there is an implied one hiding somewhere between the lines. States and districts are desperate to be compliant to come up with a curriculum that properly reflects the Core the way it is supposed to.
From Middle Men To Grand Scale
Where the CCSS are broad and vague and subjective, middle men are leaping into the highly profitable breach. Textbooks, pre-built units, and various consulting firms are all leaping up to say, "We can give you the tools to create a CCSS-aligned curriculum. Or we can walk you through it step by step. Or we can just sell you one out of the box."
This isn't a bug; it's a feature. Remember one of the points of CCSS was to create economies of scale, to allow textbook publishers, for instance, to design textbooks that could be sold in all fifty states. The adoption of national standards insures, for the first time in US history, that one national curriculum could work. In fact, one national curriculum created by one vendor would probably be quicker, easier, and cheaper than everyone figuring out their own individual way of meeting the standards.
Sure, it's a level playing field. Any small company or in-house school district committee is free to compete with the hugest educational corporation in the world. Pearson's capture of the PARCC test contract without a single opposing bid can serve as a preview of coming attractions. The highly rigid and tightly structured instructional modules of engageNY really are the most efficient and simple way to align to the Core.
And corporations like Pearson are not just huge-- they have a head start. Because the standards were rammed through quickly and alignments are required yesterday, schools don't really have the time to do long careful curriculum development. But you know who has had several years to get ready? The corporations that were in the room to write the standards.
Other Connections?
Some of the goals of national standards supporters cannot be met by national standards. For instance, the idea that a student should be able to move from Tennessee to Utah without missing a beat-- you don't fix that "problem" with standards. You can only fix it with curriculum.
The Big Load of Cement
Of course, the other connector between standards and curriculum is the Big Test. High stakes tests push everyone closer to the same curriculum, because the curriculum is test prep.
Nobody believes that all the CCSS must be observed. Standards that promote collaboration are sweet, but they will never be on the test and therefor they don't matter. We all learned under NCLB that the testmakers love some standards and don't care so much about others, and it's the ones they love that we'll spend a chunk of the year teaching to.
So, Bottom Line?
Critics who say charge the Common Core is really a national curriculum (and supporters who accidentally say so) are not correct. The standards are not a curriculum. However-
Supporters who say that the Core is just completely divorced from a national curriculum and of course all curriculum control stays local are being disingenuous. CCSS does not mandate a national curriculum, but it ploughs the road, opens the path, greases the skids, and directs traffic toward it. The Core Standards make it hugely likely that we will not only have a national curriculum, but also that it will created by some corporation (best bet-- one whose name starts with "P" and end s with "earson").
That process may happen organically, or at some point the feds (or their designated agents) may step up and say, "The individual states have created a patchwork or policies that are inconsistent and vary too much from state to state. To bring consistent excellence to all states, we need to make the same high quality learning program available in all states." In other words, exactly the same argument used to push the Core can be rolled out again to push a national curriculum. It's entirely possible that we are only at the halfway mark on a very long road trip with a carjacker who is as patient as he is dangerous.
Testing Does Not Improve Instruction
In an ongoing cultural debate, it is always interesting to watch the shift and change of talking points. The battle for public education is no different.
Many talking points are retired voluntarily. Common Core supporters have shifted from "all CCSS opposition comes from the tin hat tea party wing" to "it's those damn teachers and their unholy alliance with the tea party." Just in the last week, charter fans retired that old classic "Charter schools will be more efficient and save the taxpayer money" and replaced it with "Give charters all the monies that you spend on public schools."
Some talking points should be taken out of rotation. Like "Call Me Maybe," they keep rattling on long after everyone is over them. Maybe the CCSS supporters out on the fringes are late getting the memos. Maybe they just don't realize that the talking points have lost their power to move. Whatever the reason, this talking point needs to be retired Right Now.
High stakes test help improve instruction.
Defenders of high stakes standardized tests repeatedly assert that these will be great because they will aid instruction. Teachers will look at test results and incorporate that feedback into our classroom plans and strategies. Let's take a look at one specific school-- my own-- for an example of all the ways that this is wrong.
We will be taking our state's version of The Test next week (we could have done it a week or two earlier, but this is the state's testing window). So test results-- if they were instantaneous--would help me modify my instruction over the last twenty days of school.
Of course, they won't be instantaneous. We'll get them some time next fall, and by then I will be looking at a completely different group of students in my classroom. Heck, in the case of many members of my department, they won't even be teaching the same grade level or class. So entirely different students and entirely different curriculum.
Can I break down the test results to collect more pearls of pedagogical wisdom? Of course not-- The Test is under super-duper high security, and nobody's allowed to see, touch, taste or smell it. So I will just have to take some test-providers word for it when they tell me that my students aren't very good at meeting Standard A.34-Q7B.01.
Imagine if I did my own student assessment like that-- handed tests back to them with just a grade but no explanation of which questions they missed or why. What could I expect them to learn from that?
More importantly-- do I need to have these test results to analyze? Am I such a disaster as a teacher, such a dud as a sentient being, that I am unable to make educational judgments about the people right in front of me? Is my daily exposure to them, my regular assessment of them, my continued work with them-- is all that so completely insufficient that only by shining the bright light of a standardized test can I hope to see into the murky gloom of my class?
I do understand that helping me is not actually the goal, that we are trying to move toward the dream of a day when the student takes a test on the computer and the computer "individualizes" the student's program. This is a dumb idea for a variety of reasons, but the most notable feature of the idea is that it's not what we're doing. It's a waste of time to sit and play with the remote control for a tv that you expect to own some day in the future, but don't have yet.
And it should go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, that if the test is a terrible rotten lousy no good very bad test, then none of the rest of this discussion matters one whit.
Standardized testing does not help teaching. It does not improve instruction. Supporters of the Reformy Status Quo should stop saying it does.
Many talking points are retired voluntarily. Common Core supporters have shifted from "all CCSS opposition comes from the tin hat tea party wing" to "it's those damn teachers and their unholy alliance with the tea party." Just in the last week, charter fans retired that old classic "Charter schools will be more efficient and save the taxpayer money" and replaced it with "Give charters all the monies that you spend on public schools."
Some talking points should be taken out of rotation. Like "Call Me Maybe," they keep rattling on long after everyone is over them. Maybe the CCSS supporters out on the fringes are late getting the memos. Maybe they just don't realize that the talking points have lost their power to move. Whatever the reason, this talking point needs to be retired Right Now.
High stakes test help improve instruction.
Defenders of high stakes standardized tests repeatedly assert that these will be great because they will aid instruction. Teachers will look at test results and incorporate that feedback into our classroom plans and strategies. Let's take a look at one specific school-- my own-- for an example of all the ways that this is wrong.
We will be taking our state's version of The Test next week (we could have done it a week or two earlier, but this is the state's testing window). So test results-- if they were instantaneous--would help me modify my instruction over the last twenty days of school.
Of course, they won't be instantaneous. We'll get them some time next fall, and by then I will be looking at a completely different group of students in my classroom. Heck, in the case of many members of my department, they won't even be teaching the same grade level or class. So entirely different students and entirely different curriculum.
Can I break down the test results to collect more pearls of pedagogical wisdom? Of course not-- The Test is under super-duper high security, and nobody's allowed to see, touch, taste or smell it. So I will just have to take some test-providers word for it when they tell me that my students aren't very good at meeting Standard A.34-Q7B.01.
Imagine if I did my own student assessment like that-- handed tests back to them with just a grade but no explanation of which questions they missed or why. What could I expect them to learn from that?
More importantly-- do I need to have these test results to analyze? Am I such a disaster as a teacher, such a dud as a sentient being, that I am unable to make educational judgments about the people right in front of me? Is my daily exposure to them, my regular assessment of them, my continued work with them-- is all that so completely insufficient that only by shining the bright light of a standardized test can I hope to see into the murky gloom of my class?
I do understand that helping me is not actually the goal, that we are trying to move toward the dream of a day when the student takes a test on the computer and the computer "individualizes" the student's program. This is a dumb idea for a variety of reasons, but the most notable feature of the idea is that it's not what we're doing. It's a waste of time to sit and play with the remote control for a tv that you expect to own some day in the future, but don't have yet.
And it should go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, that if the test is a terrible rotten lousy no good very bad test, then none of the rest of this discussion matters one whit.
Standardized testing does not help teaching. It does not improve instruction. Supporters of the Reformy Status Quo should stop saying it does.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Oh Nos!! NAEP Sadness!
Wednesday unleashed a torrent of bureaucratic sadness as the newest batch of NAEP numbercrunching shambled out into the light of day. NAEP stands for National Assessment of Educational Progress (and not, as I always assumed, No Actual Educational Purpose), and it involves giving math and science tests to students throughout their educational career.
The Big Sadness is because high school seniors have stayed flat. While fourth and eighth grade test results have inched up for the past couple of decades, senior results stay stuck pretty much in the same corner of the testing results sargasso sea. And we are so very dismayed!!
"Our high schools take kids who have made incredible progress in fourth grade and eighth grade," said Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes of Research who previously led the government arm that administered NAEP. "Whatever good we did is gone."
Experts are scrambling to take a shot at explaining this development. Schneider himself has a pair of theories. "Either our high schools are doing a terrible job, or 12th graders don't care about NAEP."
Oh, Mark. Marky Mark Mark. Let's play a little thought experiment. You are a high school senior in the two-thousand-teens. You have been taking standardized tests your entire school career, tests that you understand aren't really related to your education. But now you are a senior. There's prom and maybe college and some parties and that cute boy/girl that you've got only so much time left to ask out. Nothing left stands between you and your graduation. And here comes one more standardized dumb test that you know has absolutely nothing to do with your life, your future, or anything that you care about. The only thing special about it is that, out of 14,283 standardized tests you've faced down, this is one you can finally safely tell to take a flying leap.
What do you think, Mark? Do you think, "Boy, I had better do my level best to generate some really good, valid data for those number-crunching technocrats to look at. I don't want to disappoint them, so no matter how tough I will just bear down and-- wow, Sandy is looking really cute today!"
Caring is the great missing link in standardized test validity. Test oracles (oh, can I please call them testacles for short) are so devoted to their super duper magical mystical testing programs that it just doesn't occur to them that the world is filled with people who can look at big beautiful standardized tests and just not give a rat's ass. Every test result we ever look at starts with the assumption that the student cared enough to really try.
On some level, testacles know students don't. That's why we keep ramping up the stakes all the way to "Pass this test or you don't get to move out of this grade"-- because we know that without some sort of stick, the students would just start playing ACDC and doodling Spongebob pictures.
Course, not everybody gets that. Joy Resmovits quotes Cornelia Orr of the National Assessment Governing Board calling the senior disengagement an urban myth. After all (I swear I am not making this up), they see a motivational video first! Now, I should not scoff motivational videos. In high school we all saw drivers ed movies including Signal 30 and Mechanized Death and these automotive snuff films motivated us to want to walk everywhere for the rest of our lives (we got over it). So maybe the motivational film depicts Jimmy, a young man who fails to take the NAEP test seriously and ends up impaled on a stack of frozen moray eels at the prom.
There are other possible explanations for where all the awesomeness of the earlier results is vanishing to. One is that the whole model of educational scaffolding is just wrong, and that we can't just jump ahead of one developmental step and expect to stay ahead the rest of our educational career. If you're running a marathon, running your first five miles ten minutes faster than you usually do does NOT mean that you will finish the entire race ten minutes faster than usual.
Another is that the lower grades are loaded with all manner of test prep, which makes fourth and eighth graders particularly ready to ride the train to bubbleland. Meanwhile, schools have pretty much stopped the test prep stuff for seniors, whose bubblicious days are behind them.
Peggy Carr, an NAEP administrator, has an interesting theory-- since many students who would have dropped/flunked out in the past are now sticking it out, they are contributing lower scores to the aggregate and bringing down the overall awesomeness. Of course, her theory assumes that the awesome new grad rate numbers are not statistical shenanigans and hoary hocus-pocus; unfortunately, this article by smart person Julian Vasquez Heilig suggests that the new numbers are baloney.
Let me wrap up with one more quote from Mark Schneider.
"Students aren't learning what they should be learning in high school."
Students aren't learning? We don't really know that, do we? We just know they aren't getting the preferred answers on questions that purport to measure whether or not they have learned certain things. What they should be learning? Wow, there is a whole mountain of assumption in that one-- exactly whose idea of what they should be learning are we chasing here?
There is one thing I do know. We've had the test-centric federal-driven top-down standardized status quo in place for over a decade, and reformsters have had the chance to redesign schools as they wish. We have spent over a decade devoting the entire educational system to churning out exemplary standardized test-takers, and apparently we are bad at it. If stagnant NAEP results prove anything at all, they prove that the reformster agenda is a failure.
The Big Sadness is because high school seniors have stayed flat. While fourth and eighth grade test results have inched up for the past couple of decades, senior results stay stuck pretty much in the same corner of the testing results sargasso sea. And we are so very dismayed!!
"Our high schools take kids who have made incredible progress in fourth grade and eighth grade," said Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes of Research who previously led the government arm that administered NAEP. "Whatever good we did is gone."
Experts are scrambling to take a shot at explaining this development. Schneider himself has a pair of theories. "Either our high schools are doing a terrible job, or 12th graders don't care about NAEP."
Oh, Mark. Marky Mark Mark. Let's play a little thought experiment. You are a high school senior in the two-thousand-teens. You have been taking standardized tests your entire school career, tests that you understand aren't really related to your education. But now you are a senior. There's prom and maybe college and some parties and that cute boy/girl that you've got only so much time left to ask out. Nothing left stands between you and your graduation. And here comes one more standardized dumb test that you know has absolutely nothing to do with your life, your future, or anything that you care about. The only thing special about it is that, out of 14,283 standardized tests you've faced down, this is one you can finally safely tell to take a flying leap.
What do you think, Mark? Do you think, "Boy, I had better do my level best to generate some really good, valid data for those number-crunching technocrats to look at. I don't want to disappoint them, so no matter how tough I will just bear down and-- wow, Sandy is looking really cute today!"
Caring is the great missing link in standardized test validity. Test oracles (oh, can I please call them testacles for short) are so devoted to their super duper magical mystical testing programs that it just doesn't occur to them that the world is filled with people who can look at big beautiful standardized tests and just not give a rat's ass. Every test result we ever look at starts with the assumption that the student cared enough to really try.
On some level, testacles know students don't. That's why we keep ramping up the stakes all the way to "Pass this test or you don't get to move out of this grade"-- because we know that without some sort of stick, the students would just start playing ACDC and doodling Spongebob pictures.
Course, not everybody gets that. Joy Resmovits quotes Cornelia Orr of the National Assessment Governing Board calling the senior disengagement an urban myth. After all (I swear I am not making this up), they see a motivational video first! Now, I should not scoff motivational videos. In high school we all saw drivers ed movies including Signal 30 and Mechanized Death and these automotive snuff films motivated us to want to walk everywhere for the rest of our lives (we got over it). So maybe the motivational film depicts Jimmy, a young man who fails to take the NAEP test seriously and ends up impaled on a stack of frozen moray eels at the prom.
There are other possible explanations for where all the awesomeness of the earlier results is vanishing to. One is that the whole model of educational scaffolding is just wrong, and that we can't just jump ahead of one developmental step and expect to stay ahead the rest of our educational career. If you're running a marathon, running your first five miles ten minutes faster than you usually do does NOT mean that you will finish the entire race ten minutes faster than usual.
Another is that the lower grades are loaded with all manner of test prep, which makes fourth and eighth graders particularly ready to ride the train to bubbleland. Meanwhile, schools have pretty much stopped the test prep stuff for seniors, whose bubblicious days are behind them.
Peggy Carr, an NAEP administrator, has an interesting theory-- since many students who would have dropped/flunked out in the past are now sticking it out, they are contributing lower scores to the aggregate and bringing down the overall awesomeness. Of course, her theory assumes that the awesome new grad rate numbers are not statistical shenanigans and hoary hocus-pocus; unfortunately, this article by smart person Julian Vasquez Heilig suggests that the new numbers are baloney.
Let me wrap up with one more quote from Mark Schneider.
"Students aren't learning what they should be learning in high school."
Students aren't learning? We don't really know that, do we? We just know they aren't getting the preferred answers on questions that purport to measure whether or not they have learned certain things. What they should be learning? Wow, there is a whole mountain of assumption in that one-- exactly whose idea of what they should be learning are we chasing here?
There is one thing I do know. We've had the test-centric federal-driven top-down standardized status quo in place for over a decade, and reformsters have had the chance to redesign schools as they wish. We have spent over a decade devoting the entire educational system to churning out exemplary standardized test-takers, and apparently we are bad at it. If stagnant NAEP results prove anything at all, they prove that the reformster agenda is a failure.
Or Else
"Well, my child won't be like that."
Are there any more hilarious words to come out of the mouths of not-quite-yet parents? Many an actual parent has enjoyed the spectacle of non-parents making pronouncements about a child they haven't even met yet, combined with criticism of the parenting skills of people whose children are actually here.
"Well, I would never let my child get away with that. My child will eat exactly what I put in front of him."
"My child will certainly not still be wearing diapers at that age."
"My child will never, ever behave like that."
"With what we now know about cognitive development, I will have my child ready to read and analyze 19th century Russian novels in their original language by age three."
As all actual parents know, this kind of predicting is hilarious because, as it turns out, children are less like programmable toaster-ovens and more like actual independently-functioning live human beings.And for real live human beings, developmental milestones come when they come. You may have your heart set on recording Junior's first steps before his first birthday, but he's going to walk when he's ready to walk.
These developmental milestones are not really negotiable. Your thirteen-month-old child is not sitting there on his butt because he has decided to Fight the Power and Stick It To the Man. You can certainly help his development either by providing the positives of help and support and a loving, safe environment. But in the end, he's going to walk when he's ready and able to walk.
You know what won't help him walk? Threats.
We've seen those parents. They're so invested in being right, so frustrated that this child who is making them look foolish and ineffectual by not delivering on their "Not my kid" pronouncement, so angry that their will is being thwarted by this child. So they go to threats.
You are going to do this, they say, or else.
Or else doesn't work, not really. It never has. History is filled with proof. You will switch to being right-handed instead of left-handed, or else. You will convert to the True Faith, or else. You will stop falling in love with the Wrong People, or else. The most you can hope for is compliance. Or else never gets you real change.
Or else only gets you compliance if it's possible. Grow a foot taller, or else, is a waste of energy.When compliance is not possible, we can expect to foster anger or resentment or a deep sense of personal failure or a complete loss of respect for us, and for our stupid, impossible demands.
So where do you think it gets us to turn to the eight-year-olds of America and say, "You must be able to read as well as we say by the date we pick in the spring. Or else."
What do the state legislators who passed "reading guarantee" laws imagine was going on-- that a great pack of third graders were out there perfectly capable of reading, but just refusing to learn out of laziness and spite, waiting for someone to kick their little tushies and get them in gear? Did they imagine we are awash in a nation of elementary teachers whose attitude is, "I don't really care if my kids learn anything. I'm just in this for the money and the recess."
Why not a height guarantee law? Let's guarantee every parent that their child will be forty-five inches tall or we will keep flunking the kid till he grows properly. Let's flunk any child is over or under weight according to the growth charts. Let's flunk any left-handed kid until he finally switches to the proper hand.
Or else is a terrible way to raise children. Having expectations that are so rigid that you have already mapped out the child's life before you meet the child-- that's no way to parent, and it's certainly no way to run a school system.
Are there any more hilarious words to come out of the mouths of not-quite-yet parents? Many an actual parent has enjoyed the spectacle of non-parents making pronouncements about a child they haven't even met yet, combined with criticism of the parenting skills of people whose children are actually here.
"Well, I would never let my child get away with that. My child will eat exactly what I put in front of him."
"My child will certainly not still be wearing diapers at that age."
"My child will never, ever behave like that."
"With what we now know about cognitive development, I will have my child ready to read and analyze 19th century Russian novels in their original language by age three."
As all actual parents know, this kind of predicting is hilarious because, as it turns out, children are less like programmable toaster-ovens and more like actual independently-functioning live human beings.And for real live human beings, developmental milestones come when they come. You may have your heart set on recording Junior's first steps before his first birthday, but he's going to walk when he's ready to walk.
These developmental milestones are not really negotiable. Your thirteen-month-old child is not sitting there on his butt because he has decided to Fight the Power and Stick It To the Man. You can certainly help his development either by providing the positives of help and support and a loving, safe environment. But in the end, he's going to walk when he's ready and able to walk.
You know what won't help him walk? Threats.
We've seen those parents. They're so invested in being right, so frustrated that this child who is making them look foolish and ineffectual by not delivering on their "Not my kid" pronouncement, so angry that their will is being thwarted by this child. So they go to threats.
You are going to do this, they say, or else.
Or else doesn't work, not really. It never has. History is filled with proof. You will switch to being right-handed instead of left-handed, or else. You will convert to the True Faith, or else. You will stop falling in love with the Wrong People, or else. The most you can hope for is compliance. Or else never gets you real change.
Or else only gets you compliance if it's possible. Grow a foot taller, or else, is a waste of energy.When compliance is not possible, we can expect to foster anger or resentment or a deep sense of personal failure or a complete loss of respect for us, and for our stupid, impossible demands.
So where do you think it gets us to turn to the eight-year-olds of America and say, "You must be able to read as well as we say by the date we pick in the spring. Or else."
What do the state legislators who passed "reading guarantee" laws imagine was going on-- that a great pack of third graders were out there perfectly capable of reading, but just refusing to learn out of laziness and spite, waiting for someone to kick their little tushies and get them in gear? Did they imagine we are awash in a nation of elementary teachers whose attitude is, "I don't really care if my kids learn anything. I'm just in this for the money and the recess."
Why not a height guarantee law? Let's guarantee every parent that their child will be forty-five inches tall or we will keep flunking the kid till he grows properly. Let's flunk any child is over or under weight according to the growth charts. Let's flunk any left-handed kid until he finally switches to the proper hand.
Or else is a terrible way to raise children. Having expectations that are so rigid that you have already mapped out the child's life before you meet the child-- that's no way to parent, and it's certainly no way to run a school system.
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