It's Obama's fault.
The state-led initiative was chugging right along, moving forward without any interference from the feds, when somehow, they decided to leap in. Or as Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday recently put it, things were fine "until the President and secretary of education took credit for the Common Core."This is part of the current conservative CCSS support narrative (you can find put forth by, among others, the boys over at the Fordham). The story goes something like this:
Once upon a time, some noble governors and dedicated corporate guys got together and created the Common Core, and people pretty much thought it was swell. Then the Obama administration tried to get involved with cheerleading and with Racing to the Top and NCLB waivers. This was a Bad Thing because it woke up the Tea Party folks, who began shrieking about federal over-reach. People who wouldn't have cared one way or another suddenly were against it because Obama was for it and whatever he's doing, it must be evil. If the feds had just stayed home and tended to their knitting, we would not be having all this CCSS fracasization.
Isn't it pretty to think so. Here's why there is no alternate timeline based on those halcyon days before the feds got involved, before CCSS was gone with the DC wind.
There Was Never A "Before the Feds Got Involved."
Even if we pretend that the feds weren't involved from day one, even if we pretend that the feds haven't been angling for this for several administrations, even if we pretend that the Obama administration wasn't sponsoring slumber parties and buying the refreshments for CCSS-writing parties, the feds must still take responsibility for the prime motivator for the whole mess.
States were not open to CCSS because of some burning desire to revamp their education systems. They were all sitting on the ticking time bomb that was (actually, is) No Child Left Behind, otherwise known as ESEA, otherwise known as federal law. The feds were always involved. Always.
Corporations Are Not Lazy
For Pearson et al, CCSS represent a marketing opportunity sent from heaven. CCSS opened up the US education market faster and more completely than a velociraptor fileting a sleepy cow. To open a national market, they needed national standards, not the state-by-state patchwork of the past. They were always going to use every tool at their disposal to make this happen across the entire country, and that toolbox includes the federal government.
Pearson et al were no more going to sit and wait while each state made up its mind about the CCSS than General Dynamics would ever say, "Just send that tank model over to the Pentagon, step back, and just let them make up their minds on their own." Money was at stake. There was no way that Pearson et al was not going to "encourage" its "friends" on the federal level to push CCSS hard.
It's Not Like The CCSS Sell Themselves
Who can seriously argue that all the states were going to say, "Yeah, we should totally implement this untested set of standards, sight unseen. Especially since they come with a huge price tag. Yes, let's do it." Particularly states that had perfectly good standards already. "Now that we've paid off this beautiful Lexus, let's junk it and get a Yugo for twice the cost," said no car owner ever,
No, a wave of bribery (Race to the Top) was needed to get the ball rolling. Or do you seriously want to suggest that states would have raced toward the Core for free. And when states wouldn't fall in line for the bribe, we moved on to the extortion-- "I'd hate to see anything happen to your state just because of some crazy No Child Left Behind law; you should really consider getting our special protection waiver plan."
Selling CCSS required a federal-sized stick and a DC calibre stick. States do not generally volunteer for massive unfunded mandates. Only a federal-sized sales job would do, even if it had to be carefully calibrated to avoid looking illegal.
Because, Politics
Education is the cute fluffy bunny of politics, the one that plays in happy fields far away from third rails. Any politician who has an excuse to pick up the bunny for a photo op will do so because, up until recently, there was no down side. Being in favor of good schools and teaching children was a guaranteed win. It's a measure of how big a botch the CCSS complex is that it has actually turned education into a thorny issue.
So say what you like. It's impossible for the administration to have avoided involvement in CCSS. And if by some miracle it had kept its hands off, CCSS would now be an interesting experimental set of standards being tried out in four or five states, maybe. It's true that Obama didn't do CCSS any favors, but it would have died on the vine without him.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Happy Birthday, CCSS
It seems like just yesterday that the Common Core shambled out of its cave, wearing a tissue-paper cape emblazoned with "State Led" and flexing its big rigorous baby muscles.
But it has been four years, give or take a bit (because gauging its birthday is hard, depending on which backroom deal, which protean form, which lunch meeting between Achieve and its buddies, or which Memorandum of Noneofthepublicsbusiness you want to count from). But let's count from a point in time that really matters-- the start of the Race to the Top grants.
Governor Rick "The Teacher Crusher" Scott recently granted what I can only imagine was a walk-and-talk interview to Bill Korach at The Report Card, and he was pretty clear and direct there: as far as he's concerned, CCSS is done in Florida.
Race to the Top was a four year grant. That grant has expired, it’s done. We are no longer under obligation to the Federal Government. So we are pushing back against any Federal intrusion into our public schools.
You see, poor baby CCSS was such an ugly, unlikeable child that its parents had to pay people to be its friend. At any rate, they had to arrange for somebody to pay others to befriend the poor little Core. Private sources, like the Ma and Pa Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Giant Pile O' Money Trust, paid for private sector friends like fancy thinky tanks and shiny astro-turf groups and even some nice teacher union friends. Meanwhile, the US government did its best to buy Baby Core friends in state governments, either through bribery (Race to the Top) or extortion (avoid being out-of-compliance with No Child Left Behind waivers).
"The states are making friends with Baby Core because they like it," said Arne Duncan, trying to paper over the truth-- that CCSS adoption was voluntary in the same way that mortgage payments are voluntary.
And now the money to buy friends for Baby Core is running out.
Baby Core's parents probably hoped that it would be out of its ugly phase by now, that the undesirable duckling would become a much-beloved swan At the very least they were praying that Baby Core would quickly grow up to be bureaucratic kudzu, so firmly rooted that we'd all just try to convince ourselves it's kind of pretty and settle for trimming it instead of rooting it out.
Alas, after four-ish years, Baby Core is still ugly as sin, and has not a single success to its sad name. People touting the Core's awesomeness come in three groups:
1) Politicians who have stapled their fortunes to it
2) People who are making money from it
3) Silly teachers who say ridiculous things like, "Before Common Core, we didn't know how to use books in my classroom."
There is no wave of leaping test scores, no blossoming of awesome charter chains, no new generation of core-engendered geniuses. The Core hasn't accomplished a damned thing; it has simply revealed itself to be a damned thing. The notion that Common Core would revolutionize and revive American education belongs on the shelf right next to "We will be greeted as liberators."
Baby Core has had four years to make friends on its own. It has failed. And now the money to pay for its faux friends is running out. And the private fund sources can't keep buying more friends forever, particularly if continued defections keep chipping away at the beautiful vision of an entire nation lined up share the CCSS love.
Oh, Scott will still keep his state battling North Carolina for "Most Education-Hostile State in the Union," with tenure's death, merit pay, and high stakes testing. But his defection from the Core party is a reminder that the kinds of friends you have to buy are friends that you'll never be able to count on-- but they're the only kinds of friends the Core has.
Happy birthday, CCSS. I wouldn't buy a very big cake.
But it has been four years, give or take a bit (because gauging its birthday is hard, depending on which backroom deal, which protean form, which lunch meeting between Achieve and its buddies, or which Memorandum of Noneofthepublicsbusiness you want to count from). But let's count from a point in time that really matters-- the start of the Race to the Top grants.
Governor Rick "The Teacher Crusher" Scott recently granted what I can only imagine was a walk-and-talk interview to Bill Korach at The Report Card, and he was pretty clear and direct there: as far as he's concerned, CCSS is done in Florida.
Race to the Top was a four year grant. That grant has expired, it’s done. We are no longer under obligation to the Federal Government. So we are pushing back against any Federal intrusion into our public schools.
You see, poor baby CCSS was such an ugly, unlikeable child that its parents had to pay people to be its friend. At any rate, they had to arrange for somebody to pay others to befriend the poor little Core. Private sources, like the Ma and Pa Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Giant Pile O' Money Trust, paid for private sector friends like fancy thinky tanks and shiny astro-turf groups and even some nice teacher union friends. Meanwhile, the US government did its best to buy Baby Core friends in state governments, either through bribery (Race to the Top) or extortion (avoid being out-of-compliance with No Child Left Behind waivers).
"The states are making friends with Baby Core because they like it," said Arne Duncan, trying to paper over the truth-- that CCSS adoption was voluntary in the same way that mortgage payments are voluntary.
And now the money to buy friends for Baby Core is running out.
Baby Core's parents probably hoped that it would be out of its ugly phase by now, that the undesirable duckling would become a much-beloved swan At the very least they were praying that Baby Core would quickly grow up to be bureaucratic kudzu, so firmly rooted that we'd all just try to convince ourselves it's kind of pretty and settle for trimming it instead of rooting it out.
Alas, after four-ish years, Baby Core is still ugly as sin, and has not a single success to its sad name. People touting the Core's awesomeness come in three groups:
1) Politicians who have stapled their fortunes to it
2) People who are making money from it
3) Silly teachers who say ridiculous things like, "Before Common Core, we didn't know how to use books in my classroom."
There is no wave of leaping test scores, no blossoming of awesome charter chains, no new generation of core-engendered geniuses. The Core hasn't accomplished a damned thing; it has simply revealed itself to be a damned thing. The notion that Common Core would revolutionize and revive American education belongs on the shelf right next to "We will be greeted as liberators."
Baby Core has had four years to make friends on its own. It has failed. And now the money to pay for its faux friends is running out. And the private fund sources can't keep buying more friends forever, particularly if continued defections keep chipping away at the beautiful vision of an entire nation lined up share the CCSS love.
Oh, Scott will still keep his state battling North Carolina for "Most Education-Hostile State in the Union," with tenure's death, merit pay, and high stakes testing. But his defection from the Core party is a reminder that the kinds of friends you have to buy are friends that you'll never be able to count on-- but they're the only kinds of friends the Core has.
Happy birthday, CCSS. I wouldn't buy a very big cake.
Flunking Geography
If you want to find the grubby handprints of Rich People on education, look at the issue of geography.
It has become fashionable for Reformsters to decry the influence of geography, to say that students should not be stuck with a school based on zip code, that community schools are quaint and all, but their time has passed. From Denver to Newark, Reformsters are taking deliberate aim at community schools, claiming that students should not be locked into failing local schools, but should be free to fly like little birds across school lines to enter shiny new better schools. By which we usually mean charters.
And why not? Did we not decide sixty years ago that we would bus black children from underfunded, collapsing sub-par schools to the better schools across town?
Well, there are several reasons why not.
Alternative Solutions
Not to belabor the obvious, but if there is serious inequality between facilities and programs at two different schools, instead of chasing students out of the weaker school, we could always, I don't know, strengthen that school so that it is just as good as the other schools.
This admittedly would be different from the policy favored in some districts in which leaders
1) Cut funding and resources for school
2) Watch school collapse from neglect and starvation
3) Express horror and outrage that school is failing
4) Declare that students must be rescued, preferably by sending them to shiny charter school
We start this conversation with the assertion that schools within a particular zip code are bad, but somehow the end of the sentence is never "and that's why we need to focus resources and energy on making those schools better." Granted, there's a long history of throwing money at these sorts of problems ineffectively, but the escape pod solution still seems to skip a step.
After all, if I take my car to have a flat tire fixed and the mechanic keeps failing to fix it, my next thought is not, "Guess I need to buy a new car."
Community Schools Matter
And they matter more in smaller, less wealthy communities. For well-to-do folks, there are many third places from the gym to the club to the mall. But in smaller, less wealthy communities, it's the school.
My children went to a rural elementary school. On Talent Show night, every person in the community was there. Not every parent-- every person. Community meetings were all in one of two places-- the fire hall or the school. There are hundreds of thousands of community schools with similar stories.
When you're rich, you get to think of a school as one more business that you hire to provide a service. But in many communities, the schools are the face of the community, the expression of local peoples' hearts and goals and dreams, right up there with churches.
Transportation Transportation Transportation
A social worker in my mostly-rural area once explained to me that we don't have homelessness-- we have carlessness. There are always places to live in my county-- but how you'll get from there to an employer or grocery store is a whole other issue.
It is the height of Rich Person thinking to assume that anybody can easily get from Point A to Point B whenever they want to, but that's just not so. It's no surprise to me that Cami Anderson's genius plan for Newark was based on moving students around to any school any where-- but had no provisions for how those students would get there.
One of the signs of privilege is that you can go where you want to when you want to. For working class and poor folks, any trip involves many questions-- how long will it take to get there, and will I have that time available to make the trip? Will I have access to some sort of vehicle (and will the vehicle work)? In urban settings, will I be traveling through safe neighborhoods?
The World Isn't All That Flat
What flattens the world is technology. What buys technology is money. If you don't have access to much of that, your world is still primarily the one you can see, the one you can reach on foot. And if you have grown up and lived in a strong community, it's not all that self-evident that you should ditch that community for a larger, wider one.
Let$ Be Hone$t
The people who are talking about freeing students from the tyranny of neighborhood schools are by and large the people making a buck from it, the people who would like to build their lucrative new charters in desirable neighborhoods. Let's shut down this public school in a poor, brown neighborhood and build a shiny new charter in a well-off white neighborhood.
In other words, neighborhood and community should not matter to the students, but it sure as heck matters to the developers of these new schools-- or they'd be building the new charters right where the defunct public school once stood.
And what are we saying when we claim to rescue students from their terrible neighborhood schools other than, "We are writing this neighborhood off. We're no longer even going to pretend to try to improve it."
Whether $$$ have given them a clueless disconnection from the issues of space and community, or whether they're simply using rhetoric about zip codes to mask one more marketing ploy, the anti-zip code Reformsters are flunking geography.
It has become fashionable for Reformsters to decry the influence of geography, to say that students should not be stuck with a school based on zip code, that community schools are quaint and all, but their time has passed. From Denver to Newark, Reformsters are taking deliberate aim at community schools, claiming that students should not be locked into failing local schools, but should be free to fly like little birds across school lines to enter shiny new better schools. By which we usually mean charters.
And why not? Did we not decide sixty years ago that we would bus black children from underfunded, collapsing sub-par schools to the better schools across town?
Well, there are several reasons why not.
Alternative Solutions
Not to belabor the obvious, but if there is serious inequality between facilities and programs at two different schools, instead of chasing students out of the weaker school, we could always, I don't know, strengthen that school so that it is just as good as the other schools.
This admittedly would be different from the policy favored in some districts in which leaders
1) Cut funding and resources for school
2) Watch school collapse from neglect and starvation
3) Express horror and outrage that school is failing
4) Declare that students must be rescued, preferably by sending them to shiny charter school
We start this conversation with the assertion that schools within a particular zip code are bad, but somehow the end of the sentence is never "and that's why we need to focus resources and energy on making those schools better." Granted, there's a long history of throwing money at these sorts of problems ineffectively, but the escape pod solution still seems to skip a step.
After all, if I take my car to have a flat tire fixed and the mechanic keeps failing to fix it, my next thought is not, "Guess I need to buy a new car."
Community Schools Matter
And they matter more in smaller, less wealthy communities. For well-to-do folks, there are many third places from the gym to the club to the mall. But in smaller, less wealthy communities, it's the school.
My children went to a rural elementary school. On Talent Show night, every person in the community was there. Not every parent-- every person. Community meetings were all in one of two places-- the fire hall or the school. There are hundreds of thousands of community schools with similar stories.
When you're rich, you get to think of a school as one more business that you hire to provide a service. But in many communities, the schools are the face of the community, the expression of local peoples' hearts and goals and dreams, right up there with churches.
Transportation Transportation Transportation
A social worker in my mostly-rural area once explained to me that we don't have homelessness-- we have carlessness. There are always places to live in my county-- but how you'll get from there to an employer or grocery store is a whole other issue.
It is the height of Rich Person thinking to assume that anybody can easily get from Point A to Point B whenever they want to, but that's just not so. It's no surprise to me that Cami Anderson's genius plan for Newark was based on moving students around to any school any where-- but had no provisions for how those students would get there.
One of the signs of privilege is that you can go where you want to when you want to. For working class and poor folks, any trip involves many questions-- how long will it take to get there, and will I have that time available to make the trip? Will I have access to some sort of vehicle (and will the vehicle work)? In urban settings, will I be traveling through safe neighborhoods?
The World Isn't All That Flat
What flattens the world is technology. What buys technology is money. If you don't have access to much of that, your world is still primarily the one you can see, the one you can reach on foot. And if you have grown up and lived in a strong community, it's not all that self-evident that you should ditch that community for a larger, wider one.
Let$ Be Hone$t
The people who are talking about freeing students from the tyranny of neighborhood schools are by and large the people making a buck from it, the people who would like to build their lucrative new charters in desirable neighborhoods. Let's shut down this public school in a poor, brown neighborhood and build a shiny new charter in a well-off white neighborhood.
In other words, neighborhood and community should not matter to the students, but it sure as heck matters to the developers of these new schools-- or they'd be building the new charters right where the defunct public school once stood.
And what are we saying when we claim to rescue students from their terrible neighborhood schools other than, "We are writing this neighborhood off. We're no longer even going to pretend to try to improve it."
Whether $$$ have given them a clueless disconnection from the issues of space and community, or whether they're simply using rhetoric about zip codes to mask one more marketing ploy, the anti-zip code Reformsters are flunking geography.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Relationships & Other Missing Links
Even I can be amazed at how far off track we've gotten.
I just came home from our high school choir concert. It was particularly bittersweet because our young choir director has had quite a year. She delivered a child with some complications, including the complication that led to surgery a few weeks ago (for her-- the baby is doing well now). Somewhere in the midst of all that, administration called her in to tell her that she was being involuntarily transferred to the elementary school and no longer run the high and middle school choral programs she's built over the past seven years. So in addition to the usual seniors' last concert feelings, there were a few other emotions in the room tonight.
She held things together with class and professionalism through the concert. They finished with the "senior send-off" song-- a medley of "For Good" and "Defying Gravity" from Wicked. And then the seniors told her to go sit in the auditorium.
The seniors (there were many of them) stepped up and delivered personal messages. Some were funny, some sad, some angry-ish. One girl who is not terribly talkative or outgoing tried to speak, but couldn't stop crying; the fact that she even tried was pretty impressive. And then, after flowers and a scrapbook and the words, they sang her the song that they had written for her. A couple of the seniors had written it, and they had used her surgical "break" to teach the chorus to the rest of the choir. The whole presentation was heartfelt, pitch perfect, somehow managing to strike perfect notes while steering clear of the uglier politics of the situation. It was a send-off that any teacher would be honored and pleased to receive from her students. It is possible that I even cried a little, possibly.
The students talked about choir being a family, about the ways their teacher had touched their lives, changed them personally, helped them grow into better people, stronger people, more capable, knowledgeable and talented people. It was about relationships. It was about how those young people will carry the experiences on into the rest of their lives.
It was, in short, a thousand world's away from talk of testing and standards and competencies and test preparation. I don't think you could have gathered many dry data points in the room, nor do I think there was much to be gained by arranging the choir members into some sort of bell curve.
It was so clearly the sort of thing that can only happen in school, that should happen in school, and yet which the Reformster concept of school doesn't even imagine would happen in school.
They are so far off track. So far. And they continue to insist on dragging the rest of us with them, toward some imaginary land where students compose songs to commemorate the growth experiences they had in front of a computer screen, answering rigorous multiple choice questions. "Oh," they will sing, "the way you implemented that scripted program with its standardized exercises will stay with me for the rest of my life."
So far off track. So far.
I just came home from our high school choir concert. It was particularly bittersweet because our young choir director has had quite a year. She delivered a child with some complications, including the complication that led to surgery a few weeks ago (for her-- the baby is doing well now). Somewhere in the midst of all that, administration called her in to tell her that she was being involuntarily transferred to the elementary school and no longer run the high and middle school choral programs she's built over the past seven years. So in addition to the usual seniors' last concert feelings, there were a few other emotions in the room tonight.
She held things together with class and professionalism through the concert. They finished with the "senior send-off" song-- a medley of "For Good" and "Defying Gravity" from Wicked. And then the seniors told her to go sit in the auditorium.
The seniors (there were many of them) stepped up and delivered personal messages. Some were funny, some sad, some angry-ish. One girl who is not terribly talkative or outgoing tried to speak, but couldn't stop crying; the fact that she even tried was pretty impressive. And then, after flowers and a scrapbook and the words, they sang her the song that they had written for her. A couple of the seniors had written it, and they had used her surgical "break" to teach the chorus to the rest of the choir. The whole presentation was heartfelt, pitch perfect, somehow managing to strike perfect notes while steering clear of the uglier politics of the situation. It was a send-off that any teacher would be honored and pleased to receive from her students. It is possible that I even cried a little, possibly.
The students talked about choir being a family, about the ways their teacher had touched their lives, changed them personally, helped them grow into better people, stronger people, more capable, knowledgeable and talented people. It was about relationships. It was about how those young people will carry the experiences on into the rest of their lives.
It was, in short, a thousand world's away from talk of testing and standards and competencies and test preparation. I don't think you could have gathered many dry data points in the room, nor do I think there was much to be gained by arranging the choir members into some sort of bell curve.
It was so clearly the sort of thing that can only happen in school, that should happen in school, and yet which the Reformster concept of school doesn't even imagine would happen in school.
They are so far off track. So far. And they continue to insist on dragging the rest of us with them, toward some imaginary land where students compose songs to commemorate the growth experiences they had in front of a computer screen, answering rigorous multiple choice questions. "Oh," they will sing, "the way you implemented that scripted program with its standardized exercises will stay with me for the rest of my life."
So far off track. So far.
Common Core Cement
It's easy to get lost in the big picture or the strained minutia of Common Core, so let's for a moment just focus on one simple, clear, fatal flaw in the CCSS. If your civilian friends can't understand anything else about the fuss, help them understand this.
The Common Core State Standards are set in stone.
Not just stone, but stone mounted in cement crazy-glued to bedrock all sealed in amber.
Let's really, really look at this, because it's an aspect of the Core that civilians tend to assume is just not true, because it's so unbelievably dumb.
But the Core are copyrighted, and if you want to use them, you must do so as is, with not a single change. States may add up to 15% on top of what's there, but they may not rewrite the CCSS in any way, shape, form, jot, tittle, or squib. States cannot adjust the standards a little to suit themselves. They cannot adapt them to fit local needs. They can't touch them.
Even more importantly (and incredibly) there is NO process for review and revision.
This is the part that I think people just assume isn't so, because it's just not how anybody does anything.
All business plans and procedures and policies are set up with a mechanism for internal review. If you want to earn your ISO 900000000 Six Sigma Star Corporate Black Belt, the documentation that you submit a process for the review and revision of your policies and procedures. It is taken as an article of faith that any set of plans and policies will contain problems that will come to light after implementation, and there must be a method for course correction. Plus, a robust system must have a means of adjusting to new realities.
Every system includes measures for adjusting and changing and correcting. School district strategic plans have processes in place for review and revision. IEPs for students have multiple methods for evaluating and adjusting process. The Reformsters like the idea that students will take tests and teachers will absorb the data in order to immediately revise and adjust instruction. Heck, the damn Constitution of the United States of America has a provision for proposing and implementing corrections and changes.
The Common Core State Standards might be the only major controlling plan in the world to NOT include ANY means of correcting, appealing, adjusting, or appealing.
If you found what you considered to be a terrible mistake in the CCSS, there is no place you can call, no office you can contact, no form you can fill out, no appeal process you can appeal to, no meeting of the board you can attend to submit your comment, no set of representatives you can contact with your concern. There is nothing. The CCSS cannot be changed.
Even if your civilian friends are right when they say, "Oh, it can't be that bad," please point out to them that no matter how "not bad" the Core is, it can never, ever get any better. Ever.
P.S. Two Reasons That The Above Only Sort of Matters
Number one. At this juncture, should a state violate the precious copyright or "Do Not Touch" order on the standards, I don't believe for a second that the copyright holders will dispatch the Common Core police.
Number two. The standards don't matter. Only one thing matters, and that's the Big Test. At the end of the day, test prep for that will take precedence over everything else, including whatever folderol is in the standards.
The Common Core State Standards are set in stone.
Not just stone, but stone mounted in cement crazy-glued to bedrock all sealed in amber.
Let's really, really look at this, because it's an aspect of the Core that civilians tend to assume is just not true, because it's so unbelievably dumb.
But the Core are copyrighted, and if you want to use them, you must do so as is, with not a single change. States may add up to 15% on top of what's there, but they may not rewrite the CCSS in any way, shape, form, jot, tittle, or squib. States cannot adjust the standards a little to suit themselves. They cannot adapt them to fit local needs. They can't touch them.
Even more importantly (and incredibly) there is NO process for review and revision.
This is the part that I think people just assume isn't so, because it's just not how anybody does anything.
All business plans and procedures and policies are set up with a mechanism for internal review. If you want to earn your ISO 900000000 Six Sigma Star Corporate Black Belt, the documentation that you submit a process for the review and revision of your policies and procedures. It is taken as an article of faith that any set of plans and policies will contain problems that will come to light after implementation, and there must be a method for course correction. Plus, a robust system must have a means of adjusting to new realities.
Every system includes measures for adjusting and changing and correcting. School district strategic plans have processes in place for review and revision. IEPs for students have multiple methods for evaluating and adjusting process. The Reformsters like the idea that students will take tests and teachers will absorb the data in order to immediately revise and adjust instruction. Heck, the damn Constitution of the United States of America has a provision for proposing and implementing corrections and changes.
The Common Core State Standards might be the only major controlling plan in the world to NOT include ANY means of correcting, appealing, adjusting, or appealing.
If you found what you considered to be a terrible mistake in the CCSS, there is no place you can call, no office you can contact, no form you can fill out, no appeal process you can appeal to, no meeting of the board you can attend to submit your comment, no set of representatives you can contact with your concern. There is nothing. The CCSS cannot be changed.
Even if your civilian friends are right when they say, "Oh, it can't be that bad," please point out to them that no matter how "not bad" the Core is, it can never, ever get any better. Ever.
P.S. Two Reasons That The Above Only Sort of Matters
Number one. At this juncture, should a state violate the precious copyright or "Do Not Touch" order on the standards, I don't believe for a second that the copyright holders will dispatch the Common Core police.
Number two. The standards don't matter. Only one thing matters, and that's the Big Test. At the end of the day, test prep for that will take precedence over everything else, including whatever folderol is in the standards.
EWA Holds Common Core Pep Rally
The Education Writer's Association has carried lots of water for the pro-test, pro-corporate, pro-Core, anti-public ed crowd, so there's no real surprise when it was time for a discussion about the state of CCSS, their convention panel of "experts" includes six CCSS shills and one actual voice for public education.
Monday's panel included Dennis van Roekel (NEA president and CCSS fan), Terry Holliday (KY Ed Commissioner), Patrick McGuinn (Drew University), Sandra Alberti (from profiteering group Student Achievement Partners), Frederick Hess (American Enterprise Insitute), Michael Cohen (pres of Achieve) and, all by her loneseome, Carol Burris, outspoken principal and CCSS critic. What has been reported is a medley of old classic talking points and some nifty new ones.
It's Not Federal
Cohen said, "There are a lot of myths out there," and then proceeded to deal with some of the wackiest ones. Do any serious people believe "the standards were entirely a project of President Barack Obama's administration"? I doubt it, just as I doubt serious people believe that the Core will turn children gay or [insert pretty much anything from Glen Beck's book here]. Conspiracy by Gates et al? Beginnings of K-12 curriculum? Those two are more believable by serious people, but he didn't appear to actually refute them-- just lump them in with wacky ones, like a couple of valuable homes bundled in with bad mortgages so they could all fail together.
This is my favorite Cohen quote: "If federal money equaled a federal curriculum, we would have had a federal curriculum since about 1990." Well, yes. If we could have ignored that whole Constitutional law thing which calls any such federal action illegal. So that might have created a bit of an obstacle. I wonder if there is way around all of that...? Hmmm.....
Holliday's contribution to the old standard was that Kentucky was doing just fine on the state level "until the President and secretary of education took credit for the Common Core," at which point all Southern political holy conservative hell broke loose.
It's All Politics
McGuinn characterized the brouhaha as "a lot of smoke but little fire," by which he meant that for all the sturm and drang, only one state has officially withdrawn from the standards (and that only in name; the substance of Indiana's standards looks oddly familiar).
This is one of the New Classic talking points-- the arguments are all about politics, and have nothing to do with professional educators seeing real issues of substance in the standards themselves (nor does it have anything to do with the fact that there is no mechanism at all by which those sorts of substantive issues can be addressed or adapted). Nope-- this is all just about the politics, the right's hatred of Obama, the left's hatred of corporations. Nothing at all to do with teachers saying, "In our professional judgment, these standards have serious problems."
Ghost Stories
NCLB reared its head at the panel discussion many times, most oddly in the remarks of Dennis Van Roekel. Van Roekel, you may have heard, is the president of something called the National Education Association, a group which used to represent rank and file teachers across the country but now exists to maintain the political connections of a handful of lobbyists and former teachers in DC.
Van Roekel is finally ready to follow the crowd in condemning VAM, but is certain that we can't scrap CCSS because we don't want to go back to NCLB, because....? I don't know. DVR has a short term memory problem so his powers of recall stretch back only a decade? But DVR is afraid that dumping the core will leave us stuck in NCLB which, as you know, results only in memorization and bubble tests.
Honestly, I sometimes forget how deeply disappointing my union leader is. Does he think we are not drowning in test prep and bubbling out the wazoo under CCSS? Memo to DVR: If you want a position to take that isn't stupid, try this one--
We demand that Congress get off its large collective butt and finally reauthorize the ESEA in a non-stupid form.
See how easy that was, DVR? I came up with that policy in the time it takes to type it. Stop saying stupid things with my dues money. Thank you.
Self-Serving Baloney
God, I wonder what people who work at places like SAP tell themselves when they get up in the morning. Alberti offered that CCSS is "a professional opportunity to shape education policy in this country, and teachers across the country are taking on this challenge with energy and commitment."
Because if there's one thing that has characterized the CCSS-based status quo, it's the enthusiastic embrace of teacher input and opinion. But Alberti says that teachers need support, and thank goodness there are corporate profiteers ready to sell all the support they can get a buck for. You're doing God's work, SAP-- thanks for your philanthropic, public-spirited desire to cash in on the new status quo.
Carol Burris
God bless Burris, who often wanders into these dens of Reformsters and just patiently hammers away armed with nothing more than her wits, her honesty, her ability to speak clearly, and facts. I would like to write her an epic poem of thanks here, but I'll stick to her Best Quote of the Day:
This is authentic pushback. Teachers are the canaries in the coal mine and the canaries are not doing well.
In other words, it's NOT just politics and teachers aren't just little leftie/rightie tools, but actual professionals who are the first to deal with, see, and experience the real results of these policies that Reformsters like to promote from their comfy offices somewhere high atop not-schools.
Burris's quote underlines the most bizarre feature of the EWA panels. They wanted to find out how Common Core is doing, and to find out they decided to talk to everyone except actual classroom teachers. It's extraordinary. It's as if a medical convention wanted to find out how a new surgical technique with artificial kidneys is working, and they called the salesmen from the company, the accountant from the hospital, and a few hospital board members-- but not a single surgeon or patient.
I'll give them one credit-- they gave Anthony Cody a nice award that he totally earned. But their panel skills are weak.
Monday's panel included Dennis van Roekel (NEA president and CCSS fan), Terry Holliday (KY Ed Commissioner), Patrick McGuinn (Drew University), Sandra Alberti (from profiteering group Student Achievement Partners), Frederick Hess (American Enterprise Insitute), Michael Cohen (pres of Achieve) and, all by her loneseome, Carol Burris, outspoken principal and CCSS critic. What has been reported is a medley of old classic talking points and some nifty new ones.
It's Not Federal
Cohen said, "There are a lot of myths out there," and then proceeded to deal with some of the wackiest ones. Do any serious people believe "the standards were entirely a project of President Barack Obama's administration"? I doubt it, just as I doubt serious people believe that the Core will turn children gay or [insert pretty much anything from Glen Beck's book here]. Conspiracy by Gates et al? Beginnings of K-12 curriculum? Those two are more believable by serious people, but he didn't appear to actually refute them-- just lump them in with wacky ones, like a couple of valuable homes bundled in with bad mortgages so they could all fail together.
This is my favorite Cohen quote: "If federal money equaled a federal curriculum, we would have had a federal curriculum since about 1990." Well, yes. If we could have ignored that whole Constitutional law thing which calls any such federal action illegal. So that might have created a bit of an obstacle. I wonder if there is way around all of that...? Hmmm.....
Holliday's contribution to the old standard was that Kentucky was doing just fine on the state level "until the President and secretary of education took credit for the Common Core," at which point all Southern political holy conservative hell broke loose.
It's All Politics
McGuinn characterized the brouhaha as "a lot of smoke but little fire," by which he meant that for all the sturm and drang, only one state has officially withdrawn from the standards (and that only in name; the substance of Indiana's standards looks oddly familiar).
This is one of the New Classic talking points-- the arguments are all about politics, and have nothing to do with professional educators seeing real issues of substance in the standards themselves (nor does it have anything to do with the fact that there is no mechanism at all by which those sorts of substantive issues can be addressed or adapted). Nope-- this is all just about the politics, the right's hatred of Obama, the left's hatred of corporations. Nothing at all to do with teachers saying, "In our professional judgment, these standards have serious problems."
Ghost Stories
NCLB reared its head at the panel discussion many times, most oddly in the remarks of Dennis Van Roekel. Van Roekel, you may have heard, is the president of something called the National Education Association, a group which used to represent rank and file teachers across the country but now exists to maintain the political connections of a handful of lobbyists and former teachers in DC.
Van Roekel is finally ready to follow the crowd in condemning VAM, but is certain that we can't scrap CCSS because we don't want to go back to NCLB, because....? I don't know. DVR has a short term memory problem so his powers of recall stretch back only a decade? But DVR is afraid that dumping the core will leave us stuck in NCLB which, as you know, results only in memorization and bubble tests.
Honestly, I sometimes forget how deeply disappointing my union leader is. Does he think we are not drowning in test prep and bubbling out the wazoo under CCSS? Memo to DVR: If you want a position to take that isn't stupid, try this one--
We demand that Congress get off its large collective butt and finally reauthorize the ESEA in a non-stupid form.
See how easy that was, DVR? I came up with that policy in the time it takes to type it. Stop saying stupid things with my dues money. Thank you.
Self-Serving Baloney
God, I wonder what people who work at places like SAP tell themselves when they get up in the morning. Alberti offered that CCSS is "a professional opportunity to shape education policy in this country, and teachers across the country are taking on this challenge with energy and commitment."
Because if there's one thing that has characterized the CCSS-based status quo, it's the enthusiastic embrace of teacher input and opinion. But Alberti says that teachers need support, and thank goodness there are corporate profiteers ready to sell all the support they can get a buck for. You're doing God's work, SAP-- thanks for your philanthropic, public-spirited desire to cash in on the new status quo.
Carol Burris
God bless Burris, who often wanders into these dens of Reformsters and just patiently hammers away armed with nothing more than her wits, her honesty, her ability to speak clearly, and facts. I would like to write her an epic poem of thanks here, but I'll stick to her Best Quote of the Day:
This is authentic pushback. Teachers are the canaries in the coal mine and the canaries are not doing well.
In other words, it's NOT just politics and teachers aren't just little leftie/rightie tools, but actual professionals who are the first to deal with, see, and experience the real results of these policies that Reformsters like to promote from their comfy offices somewhere high atop not-schools.
Burris's quote underlines the most bizarre feature of the EWA panels. They wanted to find out how Common Core is doing, and to find out they decided to talk to everyone except actual classroom teachers. It's extraordinary. It's as if a medical convention wanted to find out how a new surgical technique with artificial kidneys is working, and they called the salesmen from the company, the accountant from the hospital, and a few hospital board members-- but not a single surgeon or patient.
I'll give them one credit-- they gave Anthony Cody a nice award that he totally earned. But their panel skills are weak.
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Go Home, Gramps!
In the ongoing battle to get older, more experienced, and (most importantly) more expensive teachers out of schools, the only surprise is that the latest push didn't come sooner.
Education Next, the magazine by and for the discerning corporate conservative educrats at the Fordham Institute, Harvard Kennedy School, and the Hoover Institution, brings us an article about incentive programs for early retirement.
Early Retirement Payoff is the headline. The payoff is in the subhead-- "Incentive programs for veteran teachers may boost student achievement." Oh, may. "May" is such a word, such a miniature poem that promises everything but requires nothing in the way of proof or substance. Shaking my monitor may make my computer run faster. Riding a bicycle may make my hair grow back. Investing in beet farms may lead to riches.
The article offers two chunks of research, but first, authors Maria D. Fitzpatrick and Michael F. Lovenheim would like to provide some background. You may have heard that public budgets have grown tighter (kudos on the correct use of political passive voice-- an effect has been created and we will stay mum about the cause-- those budgets grew tighter in the same mysterious way that my pants have grown tighter). Teachers get old and then they retire, which leads to hiring cheaper teachers. But sometimes teachers get really old. In 2010, one third of teachers were over fifty (wish I had a link for that, but no). Of course, we could also say that experienced teachers are replaced with inexperienced ones. So can we find a link between teacher early retirement and student achievement?
After all, an early-retiring teacher might be burned out. Or he might be bailing because he sees a roomful of loser coming at him and he wants to dodge that bullet. Our intrepid researchers are curious, but fortuitously they found a big bucket full of data. From twenty years ago.
No- no- wait! Don't walk away. I am sure that there are really useful things we can learn by studying what happened in Illinois schools in the early 90s. Seriously. Okay, no, I don't believe it either. But I do believe by looking at whatever meal these folks cooked up from the leftovers that had been in the freezer for twenty years-- whatever that meal is, it will at least tell us what the Fordham, Hoover, Harvard Kennedy folks (hereafter known as FHHKs) are hungry for. So let's dive in, shall we?
The Illinois Early Retirement Incentive
There are plenty of numbers and even a graph, but the bottom line here is pretty simple.
1) When offered financial incentive to retire early, more teachers will retire. Hope we didn't spend too much money workin' that one out. Pro tip: The sun? It's rising in the East tomorrow.
2) The Illinois Teacher Retirement System needed a good accountant in the early 90s. The ERI saved school districts money and cost the state retirement system more, for a net loss. Oops.
The Effect on Student Test Scores
Now it becomes really challenging to figure out how these numbers are being cooked. I'm wishing that I had the Jersey Jazzman or Mercedes Schneider looking at this because it is a convoluted mess.
But let's start with the conclusion (which I am thinking may be how the researchers managed this as well). The conclusion is that getting teachers to retire early not only doesn't hurt test scores, but actually causes them to rise.
Here are some things we either don't know or will not say:
We don't know exactly who retired, how many years of experience they had, and whether or not they retired early. We assume that teachers retired at age 50 or older and that this means they had at least 15 years of experience. We also assume that because retirement spiked during these years, some significant number of the retirees were early retirees (this would be why we bothered to make obvious point #1 above.)
Illinois schools took standardized tests in 3rd, 6th and 8th grade, so we used those data. We never do say exactly what test we're talking about, including what, exactly, the tests were supposed to be measuring.
We don't know (and we admit as much) what other changes might have accompanied the staff turnovers in schools that lost many retirees. Was curriculum changed, class size altered, rooms moved, ice cream ordered in every Wednesday? We don't know.
We also don't know (and the author's don't admit this) what position the teachers retired from. Did we lose people in the tested grades, the grades immediately before or after? We don't know.
We don't know why the effect occurred. Our best guess is that teachers who are burned out and crappy are most likely to grab the opportunity to get out of Dodge (I'm paraphrasing).
What we do seem to know is that twenty years ago, as average years of experience went down, test scores went up. And we frame our conclusion like this:
But the implication of our results is clear: offering expiring incentives for late-career teachers to retire does not harm student achievement on average.
This is not how you frame an argument in favor of an action; this is how you head off anticipated objections to it. This is somebody saying, "We need to entice older teachers to get out sooner. People will claim that losing older teachers is bad for business. Let's assert that it isn't." It is also possible (this is just my suspicion here, but we seem to be open to WAGs here) that you lowball a finding that you can't explain and don't expect anyone to believe.
Their Policy Implications
Early retirement doesn't help the state if retired teachers are more expensive than employed ones. Make sure you fix that before you start getting people to retire. But if you can do that, it's a win all around. FHHK would really like that.
My Policy Implications
In the 90s, PA also had an early retirement bill passed by the state (in a rare example of legislative charm, it was named after its proposer, Sen. Robert Mellow, and so teachers who were retired early under that bill were said to have "Mellowed out"). Lots of teachers at my school retired, a large cohort who had entered in the hard-to-find-teachers 60s. Those guys were a completely different breed of teacher. I can't think of much to learn about my colleagues of today from my colleagues then.
What we have is research based on a very narrow sample of data from twenty years ago in which we have to tease out, deduce, and suppose the very details that we're treating as critical factors here. It is only slightly more rigorous research than the research which declares that public education has been going to hell in a handcart ever since the Supremes took prayer out of school.
Nevertheless, pay attention, because I suspect this isn't the last we've heard of this study. I fully expect the FHHKers to trot it out again.
Education Next, the magazine by and for the discerning corporate conservative educrats at the Fordham Institute, Harvard Kennedy School, and the Hoover Institution, brings us an article about incentive programs for early retirement.
Early Retirement Payoff is the headline. The payoff is in the subhead-- "Incentive programs for veteran teachers may boost student achievement." Oh, may. "May" is such a word, such a miniature poem that promises everything but requires nothing in the way of proof or substance. Shaking my monitor may make my computer run faster. Riding a bicycle may make my hair grow back. Investing in beet farms may lead to riches.
The article offers two chunks of research, but first, authors Maria D. Fitzpatrick and Michael F. Lovenheim would like to provide some background. You may have heard that public budgets have grown tighter (kudos on the correct use of political passive voice-- an effect has been created and we will stay mum about the cause-- those budgets grew tighter in the same mysterious way that my pants have grown tighter). Teachers get old and then they retire, which leads to hiring cheaper teachers. But sometimes teachers get really old. In 2010, one third of teachers were over fifty (wish I had a link for that, but no). Of course, we could also say that experienced teachers are replaced with inexperienced ones. So can we find a link between teacher early retirement and student achievement?
After all, an early-retiring teacher might be burned out. Or he might be bailing because he sees a roomful of loser coming at him and he wants to dodge that bullet. Our intrepid researchers are curious, but fortuitously they found a big bucket full of data. From twenty years ago.
No- no- wait! Don't walk away. I am sure that there are really useful things we can learn by studying what happened in Illinois schools in the early 90s. Seriously. Okay, no, I don't believe it either. But I do believe by looking at whatever meal these folks cooked up from the leftovers that had been in the freezer for twenty years-- whatever that meal is, it will at least tell us what the Fordham, Hoover, Harvard Kennedy folks (hereafter known as FHHKs) are hungry for. So let's dive in, shall we?
The Illinois Early Retirement Incentive
There are plenty of numbers and even a graph, but the bottom line here is pretty simple.
1) When offered financial incentive to retire early, more teachers will retire. Hope we didn't spend too much money workin' that one out. Pro tip: The sun? It's rising in the East tomorrow.
2) The Illinois Teacher Retirement System needed a good accountant in the early 90s. The ERI saved school districts money and cost the state retirement system more, for a net loss. Oops.
The Effect on Student Test Scores
Now it becomes really challenging to figure out how these numbers are being cooked. I'm wishing that I had the Jersey Jazzman or Mercedes Schneider looking at this because it is a convoluted mess.
But let's start with the conclusion (which I am thinking may be how the researchers managed this as well). The conclusion is that getting teachers to retire early not only doesn't hurt test scores, but actually causes them to rise.
Here are some things we either don't know or will not say:
We don't know exactly who retired, how many years of experience they had, and whether or not they retired early. We assume that teachers retired at age 50 or older and that this means they had at least 15 years of experience. We also assume that because retirement spiked during these years, some significant number of the retirees were early retirees (this would be why we bothered to make obvious point #1 above.)
Illinois schools took standardized tests in 3rd, 6th and 8th grade, so we used those data. We never do say exactly what test we're talking about, including what, exactly, the tests were supposed to be measuring.
We don't know (and we admit as much) what other changes might have accompanied the staff turnovers in schools that lost many retirees. Was curriculum changed, class size altered, rooms moved, ice cream ordered in every Wednesday? We don't know.
We also don't know (and the author's don't admit this) what position the teachers retired from. Did we lose people in the tested grades, the grades immediately before or after? We don't know.
We don't know why the effect occurred. Our best guess is that teachers who are burned out and crappy are most likely to grab the opportunity to get out of Dodge (I'm paraphrasing).
What we do seem to know is that twenty years ago, as average years of experience went down, test scores went up. And we frame our conclusion like this:
But the implication of our results is clear: offering expiring incentives for late-career teachers to retire does not harm student achievement on average.
This is not how you frame an argument in favor of an action; this is how you head off anticipated objections to it. This is somebody saying, "We need to entice older teachers to get out sooner. People will claim that losing older teachers is bad for business. Let's assert that it isn't." It is also possible (this is just my suspicion here, but we seem to be open to WAGs here) that you lowball a finding that you can't explain and don't expect anyone to believe.
Their Policy Implications
Early retirement doesn't help the state if retired teachers are more expensive than employed ones. Make sure you fix that before you start getting people to retire. But if you can do that, it's a win all around. FHHK would really like that.
My Policy Implications
In the 90s, PA also had an early retirement bill passed by the state (in a rare example of legislative charm, it was named after its proposer, Sen. Robert Mellow, and so teachers who were retired early under that bill were said to have "Mellowed out"). Lots of teachers at my school retired, a large cohort who had entered in the hard-to-find-teachers 60s. Those guys were a completely different breed of teacher. I can't think of much to learn about my colleagues of today from my colleagues then.
What we have is research based on a very narrow sample of data from twenty years ago in which we have to tease out, deduce, and suppose the very details that we're treating as critical factors here. It is only slightly more rigorous research than the research which declares that public education has been going to hell in a handcart ever since the Supremes took prayer out of school.
Nevertheless, pay attention, because I suspect this isn't the last we've heard of this study. I fully expect the FHHKers to trot it out again.
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