One theory of education that reformsters like to put forward is the idea that if we fire the right people, schools will get better.
We hear this refrain every time reformsters go after tenure and FILO (as they are currently doing in Pennsylvania) with the usual anecdotal evidence that [insert school district here] had to lay off [insert number here] fantastic young teachers because of that stupid FILO. First In, Last Out is bad, we are told, because it leads to firing the wrong people.
We should be firing the right people, the worst teachers. And you know, that might have some merit if we could reasonably identify the worst teachers. But that's a big If, a huge If, an If into which you could drop the Grand Canyon, the Rock of Gibraltar and my brother's 1953 Buick (which is, trust me, a huge vehicle) and that If would still have room to swing a herd of cats while running a marathon.
Reformsters are sure they've got a great secret sauce which combines diverse metrics from "How much money will you pay the College Board this year?" to VAM. It is hard to believe that we are seriously still talking about VAM despite the fact that it has been discredited by virtually everybody who understands how it works (or doesn't).
Bottom line: the reformster measures of teacher effectiveness suck. I will see your "young teachers who were laid off" and raise you "experienced great award-winning teachers who were given poor evaluations."
Over at EdWeek, Rick Hess (one of my favorite writers that I often disagree with) has been conducting a long-running and often fascinating conversation with John Thompson, and in the latest installment Thompson made the observation, "It's not hard to identify bad teaching. Hold educators accountable for
what they do or don't do. Fire bad teachers for their behavior and we'll
rid schools of 'ineffective' teachers."
I don't know if that's entirely true. Part of the challenge of teaching is that it involves two people (teacher, student) and so different combinations yield different results. I have been a very good teacher for some students, but I'm pretty sure I've been a terrible teacher for some others.
Nor do any of these evaluation approaches seriously look at the systemic issues; administration and building culture have the power to make an average teacher rise to greatness or sink to suckiness. And one of the problems with the reformy nonsense sweeping the nation and various states is that it creates a rules-bound climate in which teachers can't do a great job. The rising tide of resignations is essentially a whole batch of teachers saying, "In this climate, under these rules, I will be a lousy teacher, so I am firing myself."
Test-driven high stakes accountability, the kind of thing that results in eight-year-olds needing high-pressure test prep to avoid failing third grade-- this doesn't just allow bad teaching. It requires it. It demands it.
Not only that, but the current climate of education, the current status quo of test-driven cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all pseudo-teaching combined with other reformster nonsense is drying up the talent pool. In the midst of a teacher shortage, how will you replace all those supposedly bad teachers that you fired?
The private sector figured out that you can't fire your way to excellence years ago. Reformsters have decided that they will not only embrace management-by-firing, but they will create an educational system where teaching excellence is neither fostered nor recognized (and I don't mean "recognized" as in "given a testimonial" but that they literally do not know it when they see it).
Coaches do not create winning teams by humiliating and cutting the worst players. They foster excellence, they help the best get better and the mediocre get good, and they create an atmosphere where excellence is valued. They certainly do not create an atmosphere where all players must worry about being punished for some random factors beyond their control.
The people we most need to get rid of are not in classrooms-- they're in boardrooms and superintendent offices and state ed department suites and the US DOE. We need to fire the people who are intent on breaking down the American public education system by destroying the profession that makes it work (and I don't mean professional politicians). We do need to fire the right people.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Monday, June 9, 2014
Test + Punish = Real Accountability
Over at the StudentsFirst blog, Jacob Waters opens the door to more disingenuous flimflammery with a post entitled "Some Much-Needed Honesty on Accountability."
The post is one more entry in the "Let's beat up Weingarten and Darling-Hammond for daring to break ranks" sweepstakes that has been running all week. The sweepstakes is a bit bizarre, since all the two hard core Core fans have suggested is that the accountability side of the reformster program is in danger of killing off the CCSS. Maybe it is time for the Dennis Quaid of reform to cut loose the Jay O. Sanders of testing before he drags them all down into the abandoned shopping mall of broken dreams.
This "cut loose the testing before it kills the Core" is not a new idea-- various conservative pundits have been tossing it out for months. But you would think Weingarten and Darling-Hammond had actually wised up enough to abandon the CCSS (no such luck, campers). Instead, they call for a "support-and-improve" model, which is a weak soup indeed, leaving the reformsters' fundamentally flawed approach in place.
Anthony Cody has effectively shown why the Weingarten-Darling-Hammond piece is too little of the wrong fix. But Waters effectively distills what the reformsters object to in their proposal.
And of course we need to do a better job providing classroom support. But this masks their true goal: passing the buck on our educational failings.
We are reminded, once again, that StudentsFirst really doesn't give a tiny rat-sized tuchus about students. What they really want to see is teacher tuchuses kicked, and kicked hard, preferably to the nearest curb.
Note the article of faith in Waters's sentence-- we know that we have educational failings. Even though the accountability measures we need have been barely present in NY (our model state) and in fact this whole argument because California has NOT put the measures in place, we just know, we know with our guts, our heart, our very marrow that schools are filled from bottom to top with loads of failing teachers. There is no question of if. We know they're there, like monsters in the closet.
The piece Waters lauds for its honesty is here in HuffPost, cranked out by Kati Haycock and Russlyn Ali (drum majors from two more of the endless parade of corporate Core-horn-tooting marching bands) in defense poor, picked-on John King. Those two paint King as a dedicated crusader for the educational rights of black, brown and poor students. Meanwhile, in California, whose "educational system has for years been gripped by a kind of 'pobrecito' phenomenon, where hugging kids is too often considered an acceptable substitute for teaching them." Yes, those damn California teachers, with their terrible hugging and niceness and grit-destroying kindness.
As for the W/D-H charge that King's approach is "test and punish," Haycock and Ali deftly dismantle that charge by calling it "preposterous" and then listing-- well, no, actually, all they have for proof is an adjective.
The essential difference between New York and California is that educators in the latter state will never feel consequences themselves. In New York, educators and schools who don't grow their students after years of feedback and support will face consequences. Unless California changes course, their counterparts there will be able to continue doing damage for decades to come.
The reformsters want to see teachers punished for low test scores, and they want to see it now. Nothing else will do. No other method of helping students achieve, nor of measuring that achievement, will do. We must test students, then we must punish their teachers (oh! "test then punish" not "test and punish"!). Only that is "real accountability." Also, knock off that damn hugging.
The post is one more entry in the "Let's beat up Weingarten and Darling-Hammond for daring to break ranks" sweepstakes that has been running all week. The sweepstakes is a bit bizarre, since all the two hard core Core fans have suggested is that the accountability side of the reformster program is in danger of killing off the CCSS. Maybe it is time for the Dennis Quaid of reform to cut loose the Jay O. Sanders of testing before he drags them all down into the abandoned shopping mall of broken dreams.
This "cut loose the testing before it kills the Core" is not a new idea-- various conservative pundits have been tossing it out for months. But you would think Weingarten and Darling-Hammond had actually wised up enough to abandon the CCSS (no such luck, campers). Instead, they call for a "support-and-improve" model, which is a weak soup indeed, leaving the reformsters' fundamentally flawed approach in place.
Anthony Cody has effectively shown why the Weingarten-Darling-Hammond piece is too little of the wrong fix. But Waters effectively distills what the reformsters object to in their proposal.
And of course we need to do a better job providing classroom support. But this masks their true goal: passing the buck on our educational failings.
We are reminded, once again, that StudentsFirst really doesn't give a tiny rat-sized tuchus about students. What they really want to see is teacher tuchuses kicked, and kicked hard, preferably to the nearest curb.
Note the article of faith in Waters's sentence-- we know that we have educational failings. Even though the accountability measures we need have been barely present in NY (our model state) and in fact this whole argument because California has NOT put the measures in place, we just know, we know with our guts, our heart, our very marrow that schools are filled from bottom to top with loads of failing teachers. There is no question of if. We know they're there, like monsters in the closet.
The piece Waters lauds for its honesty is here in HuffPost, cranked out by Kati Haycock and Russlyn Ali (drum majors from two more of the endless parade of corporate Core-horn-tooting marching bands) in defense poor, picked-on John King. Those two paint King as a dedicated crusader for the educational rights of black, brown and poor students. Meanwhile, in California, whose "educational system has for years been gripped by a kind of 'pobrecito' phenomenon, where hugging kids is too often considered an acceptable substitute for teaching them." Yes, those damn California teachers, with their terrible hugging and niceness and grit-destroying kindness.
As for the W/D-H charge that King's approach is "test and punish," Haycock and Ali deftly dismantle that charge by calling it "preposterous" and then listing-- well, no, actually, all they have for proof is an adjective.
The essential difference between New York and California is that educators in the latter state will never feel consequences themselves. In New York, educators and schools who don't grow their students after years of feedback and support will face consequences. Unless California changes course, their counterparts there will be able to continue doing damage for decades to come.
The reformsters want to see teachers punished for low test scores, and they want to see it now. Nothing else will do. No other method of helping students achieve, nor of measuring that achievement, will do. We must test students, then we must punish their teachers (oh! "test then punish" not "test and punish"!). Only that is "real accountability." Also, knock off that damn hugging.
Before We Get Too Excited About Crumbling CCSS
As the Common Core takes hit after hit, it's easy to get excited. We shouldn't. There are dangers to public education waiting in the wings.
When the Lion Sleeps, the Jackals Feed
An antelope may fight off a lion, may even convince the lion that it's not worth the trouble. But the fight with the lion may leave the antelope weakened and easy prey for other predators.
I've written before about the folks who feel that CCSS is simply the "government schools" showing their true oppressive colors. As Common Core is pushed back, these folks are not going to say, "Okay, well now that we've chased CCSS out of here, our work is done and we can go home." They are going to say, "While we have the gummint on the run, it's time to clean these schools up for good."
That may mean upping the choice ante so that they can rescue their children from government schools. It may mean a level of school oversight unlike anything we've ever seen-- after all, if they can successfully challenge that awful PARCC test, why not also challenge Mrs. Guttershmidt's awful test about Shakespearean literature? It may involve replacing public schools entirely with a network of privatization and homeschooling.
Public school supporters who have been fighting the enemy in front of them had better be prepared to swing around to cover their flanks quickly.
Getting Rid of Practices Doesn't Change Premises
North Carolina, a state that has proven itself spectacularly hostile to public school and public school teachers, is making noise about canning the Core. Does anybody really think that what would come next would be good news for public education?
There are plenty of people opposing Common Core who still believe that
-- we need some sort of nationalized standards and/or curriculum
-- we need some sort of test-based acountability
-- that our schools are failing and they need a swift kick in the ass
-- and that it's teachers' collective fault
Getting rid of the Common Core Complex without altering the premises that powered it is like trying to deal with your aged-whitened hair by shaving your head-- it's just going to grow back. Mow the dandelions in your yard, and they'll just grow back. If we don't address the ideas that allowed CCSS to take root, we will just grow more of the same.
$$$$$$$$$
Concurrent with the rise of the Core is the discovery that American public education is a giant cash cow just waiting to be milked. Pearson et al will not be saying, "Oh, so, never mind? That's cool. We'll just pack our stuff and go home."
Part of what has appealed to the biz community about CCSS complex stuff is that A) it reflects a dog-eat-dog, stack and rank, winners and losers, sticks and carrots world view and B) it costs money to implement it. But A) the dog-eat-dog competitive worldview is a lousy idea for educating children, and B) we need to focus our limited resources on things that actually help educate students.
Folks in the edubiz world have found beautiful new Lexus-spawning business model. It's the golden goose, the magic beans, the pot of gold that keeps on giving. They are not going to walk away from that easily or ever.
It's a New World
CCSS supporters were right about one thing-- we can't go back to the way things were. Not because it's a bad idea, but because the landscape has changed. The CCSS will collapse, sooner or later, because even the giant pile of money being fed into them will not compensate for reformsters' ever-growing record of failure. But when they collapse, we will be in a new place, a place that will still be shaped by what the reformsters have done.
It's ironic. Even people who disagree with the reformsters' ideas for solutions have quietly accepted the reformsters' framing of the problem. If we want to really change the conversation about public education, that's where we will need to focus our energy.
When the Lion Sleeps, the Jackals Feed
An antelope may fight off a lion, may even convince the lion that it's not worth the trouble. But the fight with the lion may leave the antelope weakened and easy prey for other predators.
I've written before about the folks who feel that CCSS is simply the "government schools" showing their true oppressive colors. As Common Core is pushed back, these folks are not going to say, "Okay, well now that we've chased CCSS out of here, our work is done and we can go home." They are going to say, "While we have the gummint on the run, it's time to clean these schools up for good."
That may mean upping the choice ante so that they can rescue their children from government schools. It may mean a level of school oversight unlike anything we've ever seen-- after all, if they can successfully challenge that awful PARCC test, why not also challenge Mrs. Guttershmidt's awful test about Shakespearean literature? It may involve replacing public schools entirely with a network of privatization and homeschooling.
Public school supporters who have been fighting the enemy in front of them had better be prepared to swing around to cover their flanks quickly.
Getting Rid of Practices Doesn't Change Premises
North Carolina, a state that has proven itself spectacularly hostile to public school and public school teachers, is making noise about canning the Core. Does anybody really think that what would come next would be good news for public education?
There are plenty of people opposing Common Core who still believe that
-- we need some sort of nationalized standards and/or curriculum
-- we need some sort of test-based acountability
-- that our schools are failing and they need a swift kick in the ass
-- and that it's teachers' collective fault
Getting rid of the Common Core Complex without altering the premises that powered it is like trying to deal with your aged-whitened hair by shaving your head-- it's just going to grow back. Mow the dandelions in your yard, and they'll just grow back. If we don't address the ideas that allowed CCSS to take root, we will just grow more of the same.
$$$$$$$$$
Concurrent with the rise of the Core is the discovery that American public education is a giant cash cow just waiting to be milked. Pearson et al will not be saying, "Oh, so, never mind? That's cool. We'll just pack our stuff and go home."
Part of what has appealed to the biz community about CCSS complex stuff is that A) it reflects a dog-eat-dog, stack and rank, winners and losers, sticks and carrots world view and B) it costs money to implement it. But A) the dog-eat-dog competitive worldview is a lousy idea for educating children, and B) we need to focus our limited resources on things that actually help educate students.
Folks in the edubiz world have found beautiful new Lexus-spawning business model. It's the golden goose, the magic beans, the pot of gold that keeps on giving. They are not going to walk away from that easily or ever.
It's a New World
CCSS supporters were right about one thing-- we can't go back to the way things were. Not because it's a bad idea, but because the landscape has changed. The CCSS will collapse, sooner or later, because even the giant pile of money being fed into them will not compensate for reformsters' ever-growing record of failure. But when they collapse, we will be in a new place, a place that will still be shaped by what the reformsters have done.
It's ironic. Even people who disagree with the reformsters' ideas for solutions have quietly accepted the reformsters' framing of the problem. If we want to really change the conversation about public education, that's where we will need to focus our energy.
Never Mind the SAT
Today's Slate includes an intriguing report of the non-traditional application process for Bard College. Rebecca Shuman presents the new elective small-college alternative:
Bard College, a highly selective liberal-arts school in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is about to enter the second year of a revolutionary college-admissions experiment: four wickedly challenging essays, 2,500 words each, reviewed by Bard faculty (who, I assume, enjoy grading papers). All four essays get a B+ or higher? You’re in, period. No standardized test, no GPA, no CV inflated with disingenuous volunteer work.
How cool is that?!
There are some additional safeguards; incoming freshmen take a pre-matriculation language and thinking workshop. If their work there doesn't seem to measure up to (read "come from the same person as") their admissions essays, their entrance into the freshman class just doesn't happen.
The program is not huge at this point-- only forty-some prospective freshmen took the essay route last year. But it is a great example of what can happen when a college decides to create an authentic measure of the skills they want for their incoming students, instead of simply processing some off-the-shelf data points gathered by third parties whose main interest is their own business and not the interests of either the college or the students.
It is, of course, the opposite of where we're headed. The pull quote from the article is:
It’s preposterous to determine a young person’s entire future based on her choices as a 14-year-old.
If Shuman thinks that is preposterous, she's going to love the brave new world in which we tell seven year olds whether or not they are "on track" for college.
Bard College, a highly selective liberal-arts school in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is about to enter the second year of a revolutionary college-admissions experiment: four wickedly challenging essays, 2,500 words each, reviewed by Bard faculty (who, I assume, enjoy grading papers). All four essays get a B+ or higher? You’re in, period. No standardized test, no GPA, no CV inflated with disingenuous volunteer work.
How cool is that?!
There are some additional safeguards; incoming freshmen take a pre-matriculation language and thinking workshop. If their work there doesn't seem to measure up to (read "come from the same person as") their admissions essays, their entrance into the freshman class just doesn't happen.
The program is not huge at this point-- only forty-some prospective freshmen took the essay route last year. But it is a great example of what can happen when a college decides to create an authentic measure of the skills they want for their incoming students, instead of simply processing some off-the-shelf data points gathered by third parties whose main interest is their own business and not the interests of either the college or the students.
It is, of course, the opposite of where we're headed. The pull quote from the article is:
It’s preposterous to determine a young person’s entire future based on her choices as a 14-year-old.
If Shuman thinks that is preposterous, she's going to love the brave new world in which we tell seven year olds whether or not they are "on track" for college.
Takeaways from Layton's Gates Interview
If you have not yet read Lyndsey Layton's extraordinary piece about How Gates Did It, or watched the video of the interview itself, you must do so. (And when you're done, also take a look at Mercedes Schneider's simple question-- why is the interview being published three months after it actually happened?)
The article is a nice piece of work, and I'm not going to rehash it here. But I am going to underline just a few of the pieces that jumped out at me.
Money and Connections
The article underlines what many of us have said many times-- if the money dried up today, support for Common Core would dry up tomorrow. Every step of the process, every bit of spreading of support has been a function of money.
I actually agree with Gates when he says that he doesn't pay people to agree with him. I don't how that is how it works. If I were rich, I wouldn't say, "Agree with me and I'll give you money." But I would look to give my money to people who agree with me, or at least fake it well enough to convince me.
But the entire story of Common Core's success is a combination of "We got a grant" and "I know a guy." The CCSS world is a tight, incestuous community of likeminded people who call on each other when a job needs to be done. Reformsters used connection in Kentucky to get them on board, and they used connections in the business community to get on board, and money gave it all a slick, glossy, well-backed look, as well as making all the leg work, paper work, and meeting work free!
This article notes, as many have, that the onset of CCSS was quiet, initially unnoticed. That's because CCSS never made its way through the marketplace of ideas. It never had to sweep through the public, nor was it ever run by people in the education community. Money, power and connections allowed it to leapfrog right past all of that.
Federal Program
Raise your hand is you're surprised to read that Race to the Top almost included a Common Core requirement until someone realized that would be illegal. Yeah, me neither.
The notion that this is state-led is one of the most transparently ridiculous fictions of the whole reformster movement. It's nice to see that laid out in print.
Gates Is Human
Maybe I'm projecting. Maybe I'm compensating (disclosure-- a member of my family works for Microsoft). But it seems that Gates shares a completely ordinary perception problem-- once he has bought into a certain view, he does not modify it.
When he says, "There’s a lot of work that’s gone into making these [standards] good," I don't get the sense he's deliberately lying. I get the impression that he's a guy who has convinced himself that it's so. I think he's developed a mental image of how these worked, how they arrived, what they do, and what they will accomplish, and now it's just a matter of exercising will (and money and power) to make it so.
I get that. It's how you turn Windows into the OS that rules most of the computer world. Unfortunately, it is also how you end up spending millions producing the Zune.
So Gates has invested huge amounts of time and money into a process and product that is fundamentally flawed and terminally wrong-- so wrong that its continued survival depends on continued financial support. And on top of being already dead wrong, the process has been co-opted and twisted by profiteers who see their chance-- outfits like Pearson and the Data Overlords and hedge fund charter operators who see helping the great Gates as a way to get a free pass on the gravy train. One way of viewing our current mess is that Common Core is the disease and the rest is a mass of opportunistic infections.
Because there's a problem with a program that survives only because of money. It ends up being pushed and supported by people who believe, not in the program, but in money. It's money that they're faithful to, and money that they follow, and if it comes down to a choice between making some more money and staying faithful to Gates's vision of a better educational world, they'll choose the money every time. It only makes matters worse that the vision is so wrong to begin with.
I don't believe that Gates is some sort of Evil Genius, and I don't think he really cares if he makes more money on all of this. I do think he is a rich and powerful guy who is used to being right and used to getting his way, and he's is uniquely and specially blind to how completely wrong he is on Common Core and all the evil to which it has opened the door. IOW, I don't think it's greed; I think it's hubris.
It's hubris that makes humans stop paying attention. It's hubris that makes humans say, "I don't need any new information. I just need to preserve my vision of what I know is right. Any challenge to that is a challenge to me, and I will fight it just like an attack on my person." Add a ton of money, and people will fall over themselves telling you just how right you are.
Best Quote in the Article
The best quote for me in the article comes from Jay P. Greene.
"Really rich guys can come up with ideas that they think are great, but there is a danger that everyone will tell them they’re great, even if they’re not,” Greene said.
That's the big takeaway. CCSS is not about education, it's not about research, it's not about educational experts, it's not about actual results in school, it's not about looking out for the rights of students--
It's about money and power.
The article is a nice piece of work, and I'm not going to rehash it here. But I am going to underline just a few of the pieces that jumped out at me.
Money and Connections
The article underlines what many of us have said many times-- if the money dried up today, support for Common Core would dry up tomorrow. Every step of the process, every bit of spreading of support has been a function of money.
I actually agree with Gates when he says that he doesn't pay people to agree with him. I don't how that is how it works. If I were rich, I wouldn't say, "Agree with me and I'll give you money." But I would look to give my money to people who agree with me, or at least fake it well enough to convince me.
But the entire story of Common Core's success is a combination of "We got a grant" and "I know a guy." The CCSS world is a tight, incestuous community of likeminded people who call on each other when a job needs to be done. Reformsters used connection in Kentucky to get them on board, and they used connections in the business community to get on board, and money gave it all a slick, glossy, well-backed look, as well as making all the leg work, paper work, and meeting work free!
This article notes, as many have, that the onset of CCSS was quiet, initially unnoticed. That's because CCSS never made its way through the marketplace of ideas. It never had to sweep through the public, nor was it ever run by people in the education community. Money, power and connections allowed it to leapfrog right past all of that.
Federal Program
Raise your hand is you're surprised to read that Race to the Top almost included a Common Core requirement until someone realized that would be illegal. Yeah, me neither.
The notion that this is state-led is one of the most transparently ridiculous fictions of the whole reformster movement. It's nice to see that laid out in print.
Gates Is Human
Maybe I'm projecting. Maybe I'm compensating (disclosure-- a member of my family works for Microsoft). But it seems that Gates shares a completely ordinary perception problem-- once he has bought into a certain view, he does not modify it.
When he says, "There’s a lot of work that’s gone into making these [standards] good," I don't get the sense he's deliberately lying. I get the impression that he's a guy who has convinced himself that it's so. I think he's developed a mental image of how these worked, how they arrived, what they do, and what they will accomplish, and now it's just a matter of exercising will (and money and power) to make it so.
I get that. It's how you turn Windows into the OS that rules most of the computer world. Unfortunately, it is also how you end up spending millions producing the Zune.
So Gates has invested huge amounts of time and money into a process and product that is fundamentally flawed and terminally wrong-- so wrong that its continued survival depends on continued financial support. And on top of being already dead wrong, the process has been co-opted and twisted by profiteers who see their chance-- outfits like Pearson and the Data Overlords and hedge fund charter operators who see helping the great Gates as a way to get a free pass on the gravy train. One way of viewing our current mess is that Common Core is the disease and the rest is a mass of opportunistic infections.
Because there's a problem with a program that survives only because of money. It ends up being pushed and supported by people who believe, not in the program, but in money. It's money that they're faithful to, and money that they follow, and if it comes down to a choice between making some more money and staying faithful to Gates's vision of a better educational world, they'll choose the money every time. It only makes matters worse that the vision is so wrong to begin with.
I don't believe that Gates is some sort of Evil Genius, and I don't think he really cares if he makes more money on all of this. I do think he is a rich and powerful guy who is used to being right and used to getting his way, and he's is uniquely and specially blind to how completely wrong he is on Common Core and all the evil to which it has opened the door. IOW, I don't think it's greed; I think it's hubris.
It's hubris that makes humans stop paying attention. It's hubris that makes humans say, "I don't need any new information. I just need to preserve my vision of what I know is right. Any challenge to that is a challenge to me, and I will fight it just like an attack on my person." Add a ton of money, and people will fall over themselves telling you just how right you are.
Best Quote in the Article
The best quote for me in the article comes from Jay P. Greene.
"Really rich guys can come up with ideas that they think are great, but there is a danger that everyone will tell them they’re great, even if they’re not,” Greene said.
That's the big takeaway. CCSS is not about education, it's not about research, it's not about educational experts, it's not about actual results in school, it's not about looking out for the rights of students--
It's about money and power.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
If Competition Is So Great...
Reformsters love competition. Love it.
Our students should be competitive. Our measure of success is how well our students can compete with workers in Shanghai and India and China (we never discuss that a good way to compete would be to learn how to live on ten bucks a week pay, but never mind that-- competition!).
Our schools should be competitive. We should let everybody who wants to open up a school and then let them all compete and that would lead to awesome super-duper excellence in schools. Public schools are lazy and terrible because they don't have to compete with anybody (because devoting resources to marketing instead of teaching makes educational sense).
Our teachers should be competitive. They should not ever have job security; they should come to work every day watching their back for an attack from the next hot young teacher to enter the building. Fear of losing their jobs will totally keep them on their A-game (and having a collegial atmosphere in schools is totally over-rated).
So if competition is so awesome--
If competition is so awesome, why is the backbone of the Common Core revolution a system for making all states do the same thing?
Why are reformsters not saying, "The states should compete! By having each try to come up with their own standards, we will spark a great competition that will produce the greatest educational standards ever seen!"
Why are reformsters promoting and defending a system that has its basic policy that all states must do the same thing and never, ever fall out of lockstep. Whatever the states do, they must NOT compete.
Maybe competition is not always so awesome after all?
Our students should be competitive. Our measure of success is how well our students can compete with workers in Shanghai and India and China (we never discuss that a good way to compete would be to learn how to live on ten bucks a week pay, but never mind that-- competition!).
Our schools should be competitive. We should let everybody who wants to open up a school and then let them all compete and that would lead to awesome super-duper excellence in schools. Public schools are lazy and terrible because they don't have to compete with anybody (because devoting resources to marketing instead of teaching makes educational sense).
Our teachers should be competitive. They should not ever have job security; they should come to work every day watching their back for an attack from the next hot young teacher to enter the building. Fear of losing their jobs will totally keep them on their A-game (and having a collegial atmosphere in schools is totally over-rated).
So if competition is so awesome--
If competition is so awesome, why is the backbone of the Common Core revolution a system for making all states do the same thing?
Why are reformsters not saying, "The states should compete! By having each try to come up with their own standards, we will spark a great competition that will produce the greatest educational standards ever seen!"
Why are reformsters promoting and defending a system that has its basic policy that all states must do the same thing and never, ever fall out of lockstep. Whatever the states do, they must NOT compete.
Maybe competition is not always so awesome after all?
CCSS: Schooling for Wretched People in a Miserable World
The Council of the Great City Schools (yet another group apparently set up to make money by shilling for the Core) has created a marvelous promotional video for the Core. Done in the style of those high-speed marker-drawing videos that the interwebs love, and narrated by a possible-non-caucasian lady narrator, it does a fabulous job of distilling the world view embedded in the Common Core complex.
I'm not going to break it down second by second. Instead, lets look at some of the assumptions built right into the program
Education Is A Single Staircase
The central image of the video is the stairway. The stairway is a single path, always heading upward. It should be exactly the same for everyone-- in fact, every "problem" that the video brings up is visualized as ways in which two separate sets of steps aren't exactly the same. Differences are bad. We feel so strongly about this that we even lie about how the new CCSS staircase is just like the international staircase, because Same is Good.
It's a Dog Eat Dog World
"Like it or not," says the video grimly, the world is all about measuring and competition. We see athletic winners blocks with big piles of money going to the top spot. The world is all about competition. Here is a cartoon American competing with cartoon grads from Shanghai and look-- the Shanghai grads are getting all the money.
So it's clear that not only is life all about competition, but there is only one way of keeping score-- and that's with money.
But, Plateaus
The video highlights one of the oddly self-negating qualities of the Core Complex. Our students need to compete, but we've also got plateaus on the steps where we will gather all the students and make sure they're all on the same step. So it's like a race-- but a race where at the end of every lap, everyone has to sit and wait until all the runners have caught up.
Measures Are For the Fatherland, Not the Child
The video makes it clear that one of our big problems is that the different staircases, different tests and different measures make it hard for the Supervisory Other to see what's going on. I actually appreciate the honesty in this point of view-- it certainly beats the usual line that students and their teachers are somehow too boneheaded to know how the student is doing.
But here it's clear. They don't need to know. It's the bosses, the overlords, the fatherland, the high potentates of business and government-- these are the people who need a good, solid dependable report on how well the education system is doing and what kind of product it's churning out.
This video is worth watching because it captures just how small and meager and bleak is the world envisioned by the reformsters. Our students are to all toil away on exactly the same path, with exactly the same steps, to exactly the same destination, where the only measure of their success or worth in this upward rat race will be how much money they get. And that education, as flat and uninspiring as it is, is not being provided for the benefit of the students, but to benefit the uberclass that runs the schools and the factories and the government, the same uberclass to whom the students and the schools are accountable.
What a miserable joyless de-humanizing version of education. What a sad model of a pointless life for wretched people in a miserable world.
I'm not going to break it down second by second. Instead, lets look at some of the assumptions built right into the program
Education Is A Single Staircase
The central image of the video is the stairway. The stairway is a single path, always heading upward. It should be exactly the same for everyone-- in fact, every "problem" that the video brings up is visualized as ways in which two separate sets of steps aren't exactly the same. Differences are bad. We feel so strongly about this that we even lie about how the new CCSS staircase is just like the international staircase, because Same is Good.
It's a Dog Eat Dog World
"Like it or not," says the video grimly, the world is all about measuring and competition. We see athletic winners blocks with big piles of money going to the top spot. The world is all about competition. Here is a cartoon American competing with cartoon grads from Shanghai and look-- the Shanghai grads are getting all the money.
So it's clear that not only is life all about competition, but there is only one way of keeping score-- and that's with money.
But, Plateaus
The video highlights one of the oddly self-negating qualities of the Core Complex. Our students need to compete, but we've also got plateaus on the steps where we will gather all the students and make sure they're all on the same step. So it's like a race-- but a race where at the end of every lap, everyone has to sit and wait until all the runners have caught up.
Measures Are For the Fatherland, Not the Child
The video makes it clear that one of our big problems is that the different staircases, different tests and different measures make it hard for the Supervisory Other to see what's going on. I actually appreciate the honesty in this point of view-- it certainly beats the usual line that students and their teachers are somehow too boneheaded to know how the student is doing.
But here it's clear. They don't need to know. It's the bosses, the overlords, the fatherland, the high potentates of business and government-- these are the people who need a good, solid dependable report on how well the education system is doing and what kind of product it's churning out.
This video is worth watching because it captures just how small and meager and bleak is the world envisioned by the reformsters. Our students are to all toil away on exactly the same path, with exactly the same steps, to exactly the same destination, where the only measure of their success or worth in this upward rat race will be how much money they get. And that education, as flat and uninspiring as it is, is not being provided for the benefit of the students, but to benefit the uberclass that runs the schools and the factories and the government, the same uberclass to whom the students and the schools are accountable.
What a miserable joyless de-humanizing version of education. What a sad model of a pointless life for wretched people in a miserable world.
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