Another CCSS Writer Awakens

Psychology Today ran a great interview in January, talking to Dr. Louisa Moats, a psychologist, teacher, and researcher who was a contributing writer for the Common Core Standards, that is now making the rounds. The interview is worth reading in its entirety, but let me entice you with some highlights. And let me start by noting that David Coleman recruited Dr. Moats to work on the project, so this is someone that Coleman thought was knowledgeable enough to be a CCSS consultant.

Dr. Moats worked primarily on the K-5 ELA standards. Dr. Moats went into the project with a fair amount of optimism and good intentions.

I saw the confusing inconsistencies among states’ standards, the lowering of standards overall, and the poor results for our high school kids in international comparisons. I also believed that the solid consensus in reading intervention research could be reflected in standards and that we could use the CCSS to promote better instruction for kids at risk.

There were two shocks in store for the doctor.


One was the onslaught of monied interests into the field of testing production. "I never imagined when we were drafting standards in 2010 that major financial support would be funneled immediately into the development of standards-related tests. How naïve I was."

The other was the application of the standards. Moats seems to have thought that she was writing "aspirational" goals for the top students. "Realistically, at least half, if not the majority, of students are not going to meet those standards as written." For those students who can not meet these standards, many other paths to education and career are needed. Imagine-- multiple paths and not just one size fits all.

If I could take all the money going to the testing companies and reinvest it, I’d focus on the teaching profession – recruitment, pay, work conditions, rigorous and on-going training. 

Dr. Moats also advocate for a strong foundation of fundamentals for the lower levels, with the more complex texts saved for the upper grades. This dovetails with what seems to be her greatest criticism-- that CCSS has tossed aside much of what we were and are learning about how students learn to read in favor of approaches that are not actually research based at all. From reading instruction to writing instruction, we are not making use of the research that is out there. Dr. Moats asserts that we should be training teachers in that research and the application of it rather than running teachers through "poorly designed workshops on teaching comprehension of difficult text or getting kids to compose arguments and essays."

Dr. Moats also confirms what hundreds of teachers have sensed are issues with the standards here:

The standards obscure the critical causal relationships among components, chiefly the foundational skills and the higher level skills of comprehension that depend on fluent, accurate reading.  Foundations should be first!  The categories of the standards obscure the interdependence of decoding, spelling, and knowledge of language.

And here:

The standards treat the foundational language, reading, and writing skills as if they should take minimal time to teach and as if they are relatively easy to teach and to learn. They are not. 

What is implied in the interview is that the standards that emerged are the work of amateurs who did not understand or did not use the available research about reading and writing. What is repeatedly sold as research-based is, in fact, research-deprived. And what substance is there is further hampered by the fact that teachers lack the training to implement it-- are, in fact, getting training that makes matters worse. To be clear, I don't know that I'd be doing a happy dance if Dr. Moats got to rewrite the standards as she wishes, but as the CCSS battle rages on, her voice is important to hear.

So yet another CCSS co-creator emerges to say

A) That was not what I signed up for

B) The end product is seriously defective

CT's Choice of Evils

Connecticut teacher-voters are facing the Choice Between Evils for the gubernatorial race, and the AFT isn't making things any easier.

ICYMI, Connecticut voters face a choice between current Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy and GOP challenger Tom Foley. This problematic because Malloy is co-president with NY Governor Andrew Cuomo of the So What If I'm a Democrat; Public Schools and Their Stupid Teachers Can Smooch My Tuchus Club. Put another way, if being a Democratic supporter of public education were a crime, it would be impossible to convict Malloy.

As it turns out, Connecticut voters actually have a third choice. Jonathan Pelto, whose blog Wait! What? has long served as an encyclopedic chronicle of Malloy's misbehavior, has mounted a third party challenge. And union leaders would rather you didn't hear about it.

At the AFL-CIO gathering, it qualified as news that Randi Weingarten actually mentioned Pelto's name. Barred from speaking and blown off by CT teacher union leaders, Pelto has not exactly been welcomed as a voice in the political conversation. Said the head of Connecticut's AFL-CIO, "Third party candidates don't win. They spoil."

The spoiler label always strikes me as an admission that the political system is seriously messed up. After all, we're not arguing that a spoiler's platform is too ridiculous to be taken seriously. The spoiler label is a tacit admission that the candidate will be taken seriously, that in fact the spoiler candidate is speaking to real concerns that the "real" candidate is not.

Put another way, labeling someone a spoiler is an admission that your "real" candidate cannot win on his own merit. And if that's your problem, maybe you'd better address it. If Malloy can only win the election by sweeping up the "Well, he's better than voting for my dog" vote, then here's a hot flash for you-- he sucks.

The proper response to a credible threat from a third party "spoiler" candidate is to say, "Damn-- this guys speaks to some concerns that a lot of people apparently share. Maybe we should address those concerns." The proper response is not, "Somebody shut that sumbitch up!"

I get the concerns here. Dems are claiming that Foley would Wisconsinize Connecticut and crush labor laws left and right. But, again, if your candidate can only beat him if you basically force a bunch of people to vote against him, you have problems, serious problems, huge problems that cannot be papered over with a highly manufactured election win.

The AFL-CIO did not even wring any concessions from Malloy in exchange for their fealty. At least Working Families in NY got a promise from Cuomo to act as if he's sort of a Democrat, a pledge that he honored for almost a full 24 hours after commandeering their endorsement.

Sooner or later this kind of political charade needs to end. Believe it or not, I am not actually a hard-core die-hard union guy, but doggone it-- if unions want to address their ever-dwindling membership and support, perhaps it might help to present themselves as something other than an extension of the political establishment, with no apparent function except to dole out endorsements and photo ops in exchange for, well, a sort of promise from politicians to consider punching union workers in the face instead of in the throat (and the chance for union leaders to be Really Important People).

Look, I'm not in Connecticut. I don't know the territory. Maybe votes for Pelto will make Foley governor and bring on the apocalypse. But I've read more than enough to know that when it comes to education, Malloy sucks, sucks like an industrial shop-vac powered by a hundred black holes. Pro-VAM, pro-CCSS, pro-charters, anti-teacher, anti-tenure, pro-testing-- is there anything about public education that he's not dead wrong about?

I just dream of the day when a candidate waves his Democratic Party badge at teachers, followed by a song and dance entitled "Watch Out For the Scary Republican Over There- Booga Booga" and teachers reply, "No, sorry. That's not enough."

So, good luck to Jonathan Pelto. May he be a huge pain in the ass throughout this campaign.

Inauthentic Reading Assessment

Does it seem as if test writers come up with the most obscure, boring, reading-resistant passages possible for standardized test? It's not just you. It's a deliberate choice, and not necessarily an ill-intended one, but the result is a completely unreal inauthentic reading experience that real humans don't have anywhere except on standardized tests.

One goal in test design is to steer the ship of assessment past the shoals of "prior knowledge." After all, if I'm Pittsburgh and my test includes a reading passage about the Steelers with questions about Troy Polamalu's career stats, I won't know if the students answered correctly because they read the passage or because they already know the stats.

So I am looking for a passage that my test-takers are unlikely to have prior knowledge about. In fact, since I'm trying to create a standardized test on the national scale, my third grade testing goal is to find selections for which no eight year old anywhere in America would have prior knowledge.

That's how eight year olds end up taking tests on selections explaining the village politics of ancient Turkey.

But let's look at just how inauthentic that is.

In school, we always present new material by connecting it to old material. We do this because A) we are trained educators and B) we are not idiots. The most fundamental way of absorbing new material is to connect it to what we already know. As teachers, we use that to our advantage, and we model it for our students. They aren't just learning to read-- they're learning how to learn. Part of the whole business of becoming an educated person is acquiring enough background that no matter what New Stuff we encounter, we have the foundation of knowledge to connect the New Stuff to Stuff We Already Know.

We also model attack skills, the skills needed to make sense of things that do not, initially, make sense. Ask somebody. And in the 21st century-- get out your device and look it up.

In real life, we read things we are interested in, which means we already have some prior knowledge about the content before we even start. And our real-world presentation of reading materials always involves some reader prep, from the blurbs on the back cover of a book to the pull-quotes and sub-headlines in non-fiction articles.

 I just looked at a wired article about photochrons with a blurb calling them the instagrams of the 1800s, which is not exactly accurate, but it immediately communicates where we're going for everyone who doesn't already know about photochrons (aka "pretty much everyone"). That connecting idea would be a complete no-no in standardized test land, yet in the real world, it's exactly what a good editor does.

Where in real life do we ever pick up something that has no connection to anything we already know, and then read it without the ability to do simple look-it-up research to make sense of the hard parts?

Nowhere. The type of reading we demand students do on reading tests is a type of reading that isn't done anywhere except on reading tests. Well, and of course now, also, in all the classrooms that are trying to get students ready for these inauthentic reading tests. The perversion of close reading that insists on teaching students short excerpts with no scaffolding or preparation has nothing to do with teaching readers and everything to do with test prep.

It has been said many many times, but it's important enough that somebody should be saying it, again, every week. Reading instruction is a casualty of testing, twisted into test prep that does not teach our students how real readers read in the real world. It is not aimed at preparing lifetime readers, but at preparing test takers.

NCTQ Coverage- How's It Look So Far?

The release of this year's NCTQ teacher prep school ratings is another opportunity for news organizations to practice press release journalism. The good news is that as of noon-time on June 17, most outfits aren't even bothering to do that.

Foxnews.com is headlining a list of twelve terrible teachers who are being protected by tenure. A search on USAToday.com for "nctq" produces only a press release from February of 2013. On cnn.com, a similar search turns up nothing at all. Even MSNBC, whose love for reformy things is deep and abiding, is more excited about the Starbucks college (sort of) plan.

That's understandable. The NCTQ report is proprietary USNews stuff, and rival organizations aren't going to do someone else's PR work for them. That reality, it should be noted, underscores the degree to which the report is not news.

Even a google of the report turns up mostly various folks debunking the whole ridiculous mess. (There's some good debunkery here and here.) So it's possible that this story may get the kind of attention it actually deserves, which is to say none except those deflating the self-inflated bubble of importance.

However, if we want to see the template for how some news outlets will inevitably be elevated to a level of importance and legitimacy that it does not deserve, we can stroll over to see what Joy Resmovits is covering it at HuffPost.

We're going to skip over the inflammatory headline-- in the world of journalism, writers generally do not write their own headlines, so it's no fair holding journalists responsible for the clickbait banners that fly above their work.

We hit our first bit of trouble in graf two: "The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington group that advocates tougher teacher evaluations..."

Resmovits gets a point for the verb "advocates," because NCTQ is nothing more than that. But to say that they advocate for tougher teacher evaluations is to echo their own press releases. I might as easily say that NCTQ advocates for their own ideas about what teacher evaluations should look like, or advocates for evaluations that reflect their own narrow interests. By characterizing them as "tough" Resmovits gives them a badge of legitimacy and positive focus that they do not deserve, and which incorporates a judgment about their agenda that is not really reportage.

Resmovits then summarizes their big findings, unchallenged, and lets NCTQ honcho Kate Walsh have the floor for some lengthy quotage-- again, unchallenged.

Then we throw in a graph. With "raw scores," because, you know, data. Resmovits does not address the question of where the raw scores come from. Not entirely surprising, because any positive reporting of NCTQ ratings has to pussy-foot around the question of where the numbers come from. Number of times that Common Core and Phonics are mentioned in the course catelog? Quality of department stationary? Evaluator's mood on the afternoon they were throwing numbers around? We don't know.

Resmovits does report that there is Broad and Arnold money behind the report, but again characterizes the report as aiming "to improve teacher training, modeling itself after broad reforms to medical schools a century ago." And boy, there's a sentence that just begs further explanation. I'm going to guess it doesn't mean "more teachers should train with cadavers" but beyond that, who knows. Whatever it is, we're once again going to characterize it as "improving" education rather than any number of other verbs such as "alter" or "twist" or even "take over."

Resmovits says HuffPo tried getting quotes from the bottom three schools; I could have told her that was unlikely, given that these schools are just today finding out that they (apparently) suck and have had no real chance to figure out why they got the ax. That might have been something worth noting, though one school did indicate that they had declined to cooperate with NCTQ. That's doing better than some, since NCTQ doesn't always bother to even speak to the school. A teacher school up the road from me was taken aback last year when they found themselves rated failing for a program that they don't even have. "Had anyone talked to us," the university president told me, shrugging.

But Resmovits lets Walsh bat clean-up as well, and Walsh assures us that even if it seems like everyone in public is ignoring their bogus bulk of bulbous baloney (I'm paraphrasing), behind closed doors, policymakers are getting ready to use this important information in the upcoming federal takeover of teacher prep programs.

The AACTE, teacher prep school lobby group, offers a politely worded raspberry about the report and its origins. That's in the very last paragraph.

Resmovits frustrates me. She clearly has the skill and brains to do better reportage, but invariably she fails to challenge the reformster narrative, or even offer enough details to let it be seen in all its awesome glory.

For instance, there's my favorite fun fact from the report. The top teacher prep school for secondary teachers is an on-line school. Wouldn't that be a fun lead. Wouldn't America's parents just be delighted a few years down the road to find out that their kid's teacher was certified at a cyber school.

At any rate, that's how things look just a few hours after the release of the report. Arne Duncan has kept quiet so far, as have many major media outlets. Let's see what happens as the week goes on.

TNTP & The Unreal Lessons of Vergara

TNTP is the less famous faux-reform sibling of StudentsFirst, but like that other batch of corporate reformsters, they can be counted on to articulate their agenda in a more-transparent-than-they-probably-meant-to-be manner. Last week they brought their reformy skills to "The Real Lessons of Vergara," in which Tim Daly and Dan Weisberg reveal some of the huge holes in the reformster agenda.

Their thesis is not all that unreasonable.

Despite all the prophecies of doom during the trial, teachers need not fear this verdict. Everyone agrees that California’s children deserve an education that prepares them for success in college and life, and the state’s constitution guarantees it. Likewise, there is broad consensus that teachers should have reasonable and professional job protections. This case has always been about finding the right balance between the two.

That's what the case has always been about? Because if that's what the case was about, it was remarkably well-hidden by the plaintiffs, who seemed to be pretty intent on just plain wiping out tenure and FILO (as is StudentsFirst). But maybe we can read that piece of revisionist history as a signal that reformsters are willing to back off a bit.

But there are curious versions of alternate reality that run throughout the TNTP piece.

Throughout the trial, the plaintiffs exposed how California’s laws make it nearly impossible for schools to hire and keep outstanding teachers or dismiss teachers who simply aren’t up to the job.

I understand the argument about not being able to fire bad teachers-- but what exactly about California's laws made it hard to hire good teachers in the first place? Or are we suggesting that because young teachers have less job security, they are less likely to apply in California? In which case, the solution is even less job security? I feel as if I'm missing some crucial point here.

Daly and Weisberg suggest there are four key changes needed to properly balance the need for job protection with the need to provide the best teachers. Each one is problematic.

Give Teachers a Longer Tryout

Because the problem with FILO is that we have to fire too many of our best teachers, who are the young ones. So, we need more job protection for young teachers, except that we shouldn't give them any kind of tenure for at least four years. So, we need to not fire young teachers, but we need to make it easier to fire young teachers. Got it?

Keep Due Process, But Eliminate "Uber" Due Process

Oh, the devil is in the details, isn't it, boys. Daly and Weisberg accept that teachers should have protections for, say, outside political activities. The teacher evaluation should be given the benefit of the doubt, but teachers should be able to appeal if they think the process wasn't followed correctly, but teachers should not be able to appeal because they believe the finding of the evaluation is wrong, and the process should be allowed to go on for a while, but not too much of a while.

I actually agree that the process should not be hugely time and money-consuming, but I can only hope that trying to write this one paragraph gave these guys a sense of just how hard it is to write the rulebook that will keep the whole process under control. You can go ahead and say "The hearing process should only take one day" and isn't it pretty to think so, but how exactly do you force that to happen and keep things fair to all parties? Actual justice is messy.

Lower the Stakes of Dismissal

Daly and Weisberg say that a dismissal should not be a career-ender because "a teacher who’s a bad fit for one school might be a great fit for another school" and --gaaahhh-- do you see what you just said there, boys? Because one freaking premise of Vergara was that "bad teacher" and "good teacher" are absolute, solid state conditions and that the school in which a teachers is working is in no way related to the quality of that teacher's work.

The Vergara plaintiffs (and the StudentsFirst anti-tenure agitprop) aren't saying, "The state is failing to match teachers up with the assignments in which they will shine." The message is that there are a bunch of Good Teachers out there and a bunch of Bad Teachers, and the Good Teachers will be great wherever we put them and the Bad Teachers will be bad wherever they work, so we need to fire the Bad Teachers and put the Good Teachers in the classrooms that need them (where they will continue to be Good Teachers). You just blithely threw out the whole thing. Sloppy work, boys.

Let Schools Protect Their Best Teachers During Layoffs

Daly and Weisberg split a new set of hairs here, indicating that a great new teacher might be fired so that the district can keep a teacher who just has just a year or two more seniority. So, not the usual picture of the freshfaced twenty-five year old being thrown into the street by some washed-up fifty-something old fart.

Unfortunately, this new version brings into sharp relief just how corrosive this approach would be to the atmosphere of a school.

Principal: Hey, Chris. This is Pat, the new hire. Pat's almost your age, so I thought you could help Pat get acclimated. Also, Pat's pretty bright, so we think Pat might take your job at the next round of layoffs. Make Pat feel welcome.
Chris: Sure thing. So, Pat, here are some tips. The office really likes it when you show movies all the time. And don't turn your grades in till the last minute; they love that. Just remember-- don't ever ask me for any help or materials, and if you ever get in any trouble, I'll be in my room contemplating my mortgage payment and ignoring you.

Because you can pretend all day that these battles over teacher effectiveness will be washed-up old guy versus fresh-faced newby, but we have studies out the wazoo to confirm what we already know-- when it comes to teacher quality, it's years of experience that make the most difference. So in an effectiveness showdown, it will be young teachers versus young teachers. Unless, of course, management decides to weigh some other factor, like, say, how much the teacher costs the district. Oh, but this is all about getting great quality, not about making schools run cheaply by churning and burning teaching staff. Right?

TNTP always seems a bit more mellow than StudentsFirst, and this piece follows that pattern. There are some softer edges on the anti-tenure argument here, but the center of the argument is still shot full of holes, contradictions, and weaknesses. And that's only if I give them the very huge benefit of a very small doubt that this isn't really all about cutting personnel costs in school by turning into non-career status temp work. I'm not sure any of us know for certain what the lessons of Vergara will turn out to be, but I don't think TNTP is in the ballpark.

Yes, Virginia, There Are Bad Teachers

"So I guess you just deny that there are any bad teachers at all."

This is a popular retort to various forms of "Your system for evaluating teachers is a lousy system." It is a dumb retort. It is dumb in the same way the following exchanges are dumb.

Chris: I am going to cure your mother's cancer by poking her in the eye with a pointy stick.
Pat: I do not want you to poke my mother in the eye with a sharp stick.
Chris: Why do you not want your mother to get healthy?

Scotty: I'm pretty sure that one of the tires is flat. Can you get out and check?
Tony: How about I just whale all over the car with this pickax?
Scotty: Please don't do that!
Tony: So apparently you don't believe in wheels.

Ranger Smith: Help! There is a bear mauling my leg!
Ranger Duncan: How about I just close my eyes and shoot blindly in your general direction?
Ranger Smith: Aaaa!! No!!!!!
Ranger Duncan: I guess you don't believe in bears.

Let me be perfectly clear. I believe that bad teachers exist. I believe that most teachers believe that bad teachers exist.

How could we not? Apart from the bad teacher's actual students, nobody suffers for their sins more than their colleagues. We are the ones who have to pick up the slack for what wasn't taught last year. We are the ones have to take the reputational hit for Mr. Putzwhistle's bad behavior. We are the ones who have to answer the age-old question, "Why are we doing all this work when my buddy in Ms. Farkleton's has been watching movies for a month?"

You know what I don't believe in? The reformster plans for finding the offending educators. Every plan is more random and stupid than the one before. VAM?! Really??!! You are still peddling that when every reputable authority has told you it's baloney. The 10% rule (or 15%) that just starts with the assumption that there are X number of bad teachers? Private industry dumped that as a self-destructive mistake years ago.

I think reformsters have about as much chance of locating bad teachers as a one-armed blind man looking for a gnat's fart in Carlsbad Caverns. I think there are faux tin hat physicists who are closer to building a cold fusion generator and a perpetual motion machine than reformsters are to building a reliable and accurate system for identifying bad teachers.

Do I think there's a valuable conversation to be had about less effective teachers and how to best deal with them in a school system? Oh, boy, do I. But we aren't ready for that conversation, because you aren't ready to admit that you don't have a clue how to tell a great teacher having a bad day from a good teacher with a tough class from a bad teacher who probably should be a shoe salesman from a great teacher who just got randomly swept up by whatever mangled metric you loosed upon the teaching world.

You keep saying you want to raise the bar when mostly you're just swinging the bar wildly around with closed eyes and every time you randomly clobber something you cry out, "There-- it's another bad teacher!" As long as you are swinging bad metrics around like so many long-dead cats on a ten-foot pole, no teacher is going to be comfortable getting anywhere near you and your super-secret method for weeding out the riff from the raff.

It really is not that we don't believe in bad teachers, or that we think they should be enshrined and preserved. What we don't believe in is you, and your cockamamie untested unvalidated unproven evaluation systems. Until you fix that (or--gasp-- ask us teachers to help you fix it), you might as well go dowsing for bad teachers with a rod made out of woven skunk hair.

Why Conservatives Should Not Love the Vergara Decision

Over at the National Review, Rick Hess catches what conservatives should have noticed before they started applauding the Vergara decision.

While I am clearly someone who isn't a fan of that decision, I was surprised that some conservatives were not also at the very least nervous about it, given that it involved

         1) Serious judicial activism in the service of
         2) Extending government control over anything it feels like
         3) Based on made up non-facts

The rationale behind the Vergara decision could become the rationale behind any number of decisions that conservatives might not be so happy about. If we are going to say that the courts have the power to rewrite the rules of schools in any area for any sort of reasons that are not even supported with actual facts, I see no limits to what the courts could do.

Some of what I imagine is pretty fanciful and unlikely (the state of California owes every of-age poor student a car to drive to school), but some is not. If we are going to talk about civil rights being violated by lesser facilities at a particular school, it seems absolutely no stretch at all for the court to step in and say that David Welch and his hedge fund friends are going to start forking over school tax money until every school in every neighborhood is just as well-funded as the schools in California's richest neighborhoods.

Hess has his own list of nightmares.

If plaintiffs pick the right judge and present the right experts, can they get judges to require that preschool teachers serving poor or minority children have a teaching credential from a school of education? Can judges order schools to adopt the Common Core if they think that will help ensure that all students are held to an equal standard? Can judges order legislators to double teacher pay if that’s what they think it will take to ensure that poor and minority students have good teachers?

He's right. And the list can get a lot longer, because if we're allowed to use made up numbers and fake facts to make our case, the sky's the limit.


Conservatives and liberals both have a long, troubled tradition of choosing victory over principles, and it hasn't helped anyone in the long run. I'm not a fan of sticking to principles even in the face of common sense and reality, but some days it seems that our whole political spectrum is a muddy mess, united by the principle of "Hey, whatever, as long as we get what we want."

Almost everybody should be unhappy with the Vergara decision for one reason or another. Some of us just aren't ready to admit it yet.