Dancing into the Apocalypse

I'm writing this now so that I can read it to myself when the first day of school rolls around. Sometimes you have to be your own motivational speaker at the start of the new year.

Why the World of Public Education Has Never Been Worse, and Why I'm Excited To Be a Teacher Anyway

How Bad Is It?

It is almost breathtaking to step back and try to take in the wide array of forces lined up against the great traditions of American public education.

State legislatures and courts are re-writing the rules of employment to end the idea of lifetime teachers, and an entire organization has been set up to replace them with an endlessly cycle of barely-trained temps.

Data miners are rewriting the entire structure and purpose of schools to focus on gathering data from students rather than actually educating them, treating them as simply future marketing targets.

A far-reaching network of rich and powerful men is working to take the public education system as we know it and simply make it go away, to be replaced by a system that is focused on generating profit rather than educating children.

Teachers have been vilified and attacked. Our professional skills have been questioned, our dedication has been questioned, and we have been accused of dereliction and failure so often that now even our friends take it as a given that "American schools are failing."


One of the richest, most powerful men on the planet has focused his fortune and his clout on recreating the education system to suit his own personal ideas about how it should work and what it should do. He's been joined in this by other wealthy, powerful men who see the democratic process as an obstruction to be swept away.

We have been strong-armed into adopting new standards and the programs that come with them. These are one-size-fits-all standards that nobody really understands, that nobody can justify, and that are now the shoddy shaky foundation of the new status quo.

And in many regions, our "educational leaders" are also part of the reformster movement. The very people on the state and local level who are charged with preserving and supporting public education are, themselves, fighting against it.

All education is now slave to standardized testing. We live in a bizarro world where we pretend that test results tell us everything from whether a seven year old is college material to whether teachers (and the colleges at which they studied) are any good. The future of teachers, schools, and students themselves, ride on these tests that, when all is said and done, measure nothing except the students' ability to take these tests.

The President of the United States of America agrees with most of the forces lined up against public education. At his best, he has simply stood by while public education has come under attack; at his worst, he and his administration have actively implemented policies to break down our public education traditions.

It is true, as some folks like to say, that public education has been tossed about by the winds of one edu-fad or another. Anyone who has worked for more than ten years can rattle off a list of Next Big Things that have come and gone while teachers closed their doors and kept working.

But this is different. This is worse. This wind comes with more political power, more widespread support, and more power to do real damage than anything before. If these people achieve all their goals, what's left will be a system that looks nothing like the American public education system, and teaching as a career will be done.

So Why Am I Not Bailing Out?

First of all, none of what I'm saying here is meant as criticism of people who have left the profession. You can't do what you can't do, and when you reach your limit, you have to make the choice you have to make. Not all of us have the same kind of strength, and we do not all face the same level of challenge. I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say why I still think it's worth the fight.

There has never been a tougher time for public education, and that means there has never been a time when teachers have been needed more.

Education is can't run on autopilot any more. I don't mean it shouldn't (though that has always been true), but that anything resembling an autopilot or inertia or just a gravitation in the right direction has been busted, shattered. Public education will take its direction from the people who fight to get their hands on the steering wheel. Teachers need to be in that fight.

Someone has to look out for the students. Someone has to put the students' interests first, and despite the number of people who want to make that claim, only teachers are actually doing it. The number of ridiculous,  time-wasting, pointless, damaging, destructive policies that are actually making it down to the students themselves is greater than ever before. Somebody has to be there to help them deal with it, help them stand up to it, and most of all, help them get actual educations in spite of it.

I don't want to over-dramatize our role as teachers, but this is what professionals do. Police, lawyers, doctors, fire fighters-- they all go toward people in trouble. They run toward people who need help. That's what teachers do-- and teachers go toward the people who are too young and powerless to stand up for themselves. And for professionals, the greater the trouble, the greater the need.

The fact that public education is under attack just means that our students, our communities, need us more than ever.

Is There Hope?

Yes. Yes, there is.

The new high stakes test-driven corporate status quo runs on money, and money is not infinite. Particularly when resistance picks up and the ROI isn't looking so great. The big bold reformster programs all have one thing in common-- they have not produced any sort of success. Well, two things-- they also all required a big boost of money and "advocacy groups" to even happen in the first place.

The reformsters are not going to win, but neither are we going to simply set the clock back to twenty years ago. Our education system, our schools are going to be different, changed. And we will deal with that, too.

The reformsters are tourists, folks just passing through for a trip that will last no longer than their interest. They'll cash in their chips and move on to the next game. But we'll still be here, still meeting the challenges that students bring us. They've committed to education for as long as it holds their attention and rewards them; we've committed for as long as we can still do the work. They think they can sprint ahead to easy victory; we understand that this is a marathon.

I don't care if this is a passing storm or the apocalypse. I choose not to meet it huddled and hoping that I'll somehow be spared. And while we keep defaulting to battle metaphors, I'd rather not get into the habit of viewing every other human as an enemy that I have to combat with force of arms. I learned years ago that you don't wait for everything to be okay to do your dance and sing your song; you keep dancing and singing, and that's how everything gets closer to okay.

We can do this. We will do this. And our students will be better for it.

Whole Brain Teaching

I had put this out of my whole brain until Diane Ravitch posted a clip this morning from Nashville Prep. Here's the clip:

This looks to be an application of Whole Brain Teaching, sometimes called Power Teaching, a technique that seems to be the brain child of Chris Biffle. Biffle is no slacker; he's published an assortment of books with legit publishers, and his Whole Brain empire boasts a pretty well-developed website. And for the leader of a teaching movement that has been in action since 1999, Biffle keeps a remarkably low profile. It appears that he was a professor at Crafton Hills College, a community college in Yucaipa, CA, and it was there that he teamed up with an elementary and secondary teacher to create Whole Brain Teaching, which has grown pretty much on its own.

So there's not much that seems shady about WBT. Some sources suggest that Biffle has mis-stated his resume, but if the man's goal was to become rich and famous, he doesn't appear to be doing a very good job of achieving it.

The stated goal of WBT was to put some organized fun in the classroom. And I could try describing how Power Teaching is supposed to work, but it will be more effective to dip into the extensive youtube library of power teaching examples

As you can see, Biffle himself is kind of an avuncular and unthreatening, so the overall effect is kind of like a Hitler Youth meeting run by Fred Rogers. Some of the groupiness aspects are recognizable to anyone who was ever in band, choir, or the armed forces. And I have to tell you-- given the youtube and on-line testimonials, and WBT's persistence over fifteen years, there are people out there who love this. I can see the appeal if you are in a school mired in endless chaos, or if you've always struggled with classroom management, or if you're Dolores Umbridge.

All that aside, it is creepy as hell. Set your individuality aside, become part of the group, do as you're told, sit up, lie down, roll over , speak (but only as directed). Just imagine what this would look like with someone more stern, more authoritarian, more Hitlerish, in front of the classroom. If you can handle it, you can find sample lessons all the way down to Kindergartners.

But in a funny twist, per Ravitch's post this morning, it turns out that Biffle was a man ahead of his time, because what Nashville Prep and others have discovered is that WBT is great for test prep. It turns out that subsuming your individuality, spitting out dictated exact answers on demand, and generally being a good little all-fit-one-size widget is excellent training for taking standardized tests.

So if you find this little mini-re-enactment of the Cultural Revolution unappealing, the bad news is that this is exactly what high stake standardized testing call for.

John Thompson's Response to My Response to John Thompson's Post

I recently (oh, good lord, it was this morning-- am I still sitting here at the computer) wrote a piece in response to historian John Thompson's guest post on Living in Dialogue. That piece is here.  John attempted to post a very thoughtful response in the comments section, but apparently it was so thoughtful that it broke the internet. He asked for my help in posting it, and I asked if I could instead post it as a guest post here on the main stage.  So here it is-- John Thompson's response to my morning post.

 

Curmudgucation’s  response to my post, like Wag the Dog’s and Paul Thomas’s response to the Gates call for a moratorium and the comments on both posts, are indicative of a fundamental difference between the two sides in this education civil war. Corporate reformers refuse to submit their hypotheses to peer review by professionals or the give and take of democracy. We, the coalition of educators and families who do not even have a name, respect the clash of ideas.

Obviously, I knew my post would annoy friends. Honestly, the first drafts were more supportive of the moratorium, and less confrontational to Gates. I knew I had to listen and temper my call for offering an olive branch after thinking through the arguments it would provoke.

For instance, it makes an excellent point about Pearson and the profits that motivate them. Originally, I ducked that reason entirely, and I did so for a reason which many will reject. Especially in my first drafts, I tried to be as diplomatic as possible, hoping that Gates and other reformers would listen. Even in my final draft, I soft pedaled that issue, which of course is one of the dangers of trying to stress communication over confrontation.

Yes, I believe that Gates probably is taking the attitude of “Let's get our PR and politics lined up and relaunch more effectively in a year or two." Naively or not, my first drafts focused on explaining to reformers why that’s a bad idea. They won a lot of political victories for the first decade of two of reform, but they’ve wracked up one implementation failure after another. I don’t expect them to give up the political fight, but neither do I expect that they will find a bigger and better political gun to pull out. (We in schools and in the rest of society may lose to the worst of Big Data; we can’t deny the possibility of defeat or dwell on it.)

The last third of my posts stressed the political benefits that I see in working for a moratorium, as long as we are in stark contrast with reformers and don’t obscure our intentions. We’re in the fight against testing and other reward and punish schemes for the long run.

Yeah, the commenter, Eric Baldwin, is right, and I think it is great that Hanna Skandera, Kevin Huffman, and other Chiefs for Change have blown their gaskets and I bet the billionaires don’t like being called ridiculous by reformers an more than they do by teachers.

I agree with the great post below,   Data is the Fools Gold of Common Core

http://vigornotrigor.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/data-is-fools-gold-of-the-common-core/

Paul Thomas didn’t mention me, but I often ask myself what his response will be to some of my posts.  He responded to Gate’s call with a brilliant passage from Hemingway. Yes, the “Road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.”

http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/gates-moratorium-another-scam-beware-the-roadbuilders-pt-2/

His post prompted an equally good metaphor by Anthony Cody. Common Core is like a road through the Amazon forest. Stop the road and you can save the forest. (That explains why I said that I can’t see myself supporting a new set of NATIONAL standards, after Common Core is defeated.)  

I’d say that that metaphor is supportive of both sides on the point that separates Curmudguation and me. In the overall fight against the road, don’t we accept as many temporary delays as we can get while trying to kill it? Students who would be damaged next year by Common Core testing are like a village that is first in the road’s path. Saving that village is a first step. Saving the village of teachers who would have been punished in the next two years is a second step.

Whether we’re environmentalists fighting a road or educators fighting corporate reform, we must discuss and debate the best ways to win short term and long term political victories. By the time I finished the post, I knew I had toughened it up to the point where Gates people would dismiss it, but where it would still rile up allies. I went ahead with it because we need to converse about these issues.   

I see Anthony has also responded.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2014/06/is_a_high_stakes_moratorium_wo.html

I need to now think through his post. On first reading, I would stress that we agree that the first priority is the “impact our students. Does it relieve them of a test-centered education? Does it alter the path we are on towards an education system monitored by tests, increasingly delivered by technological devices, all aligned to a master set of standards? Or does it simply slow the pace slightly, in order to placate and silence critics?”

Yes, as Anthony says, Common Core “will yield terrible results for our students, especially those facing the greatest challenges in life and in school.”

We and the increasing number of families who are rejecting tests must continue to fight those who “will continue to label these students, and the schools they attend, as failures.”

Talking about Tenure and Trust

Rick Hess (one of my favorite bloggers that I frequently disagree with) recently reflected on his conversation with Randi Weingarten about tenure.

He had several smart observations, but I think one of the most useful ones was an acknowledgement throughout that the reform battles in general and the tenure conversation in particular are hampered by distrust on both sides. In a companion post to this one, I look at the question of where such huge distrust was built. In this post, I want to answer a different question:

What would a conversation about tenure look like if we all trusted each other?

Tenure would be a great place to start, because of all the educational issues before us, it's the one on which we already have agreement on most of the major issues.

Teachers know full well that bad teachers exist, probably better than anyone; after all, your kid was in Mr. McNumbnutt's class for a year, but I've been working next door to him for ten. While there are teachers who are going through a patch, need some guidance or are struggling with a difficult assignment, some teachers, having had their chance to shape up, need to get out.

Likewise, many reformsters have acknowledged that teachers need to be protected from capricious firing, that they should have the job security necessary to actually do their job in without fear of retribution for following their best professional judgment.

If we can agree on those two points, everything else in the tenure conversation is detail.

So what would we need to sort out? What topics would have to be settled to create a workable system that protected the interests of teachers, students, and school systems?

A Real Evaluation System

We don't have one. The old system of administrator fly-bys followed by a mostly-subjective eval by the administrator was only as good as the administrator (and sometimes not even that good). The new systems based on some version of VAM are terrible and serve the interests of literally nobody. Administration would get better data out of reading tea leaves. A thorough Danielson-style observation like Pennsylvania's is better, but it is also onerous for principals, who are left with little or no time to perform any of their other duties.

This is a huge challenge, but it's essential. The most fundamental problem with every system ever is that we don't have any reliable way to sort the teachers. Teachers do not fear accountability because we are afraid of having to do our jobs; we fear accountability systems because we're afraid we'll get tagged as ineffective for no good reason.

 Likewise, a school leader nightmare (as they've presented it during tenure debates) is having to fire all their good teachers and make do with the bad ones that are left. We should all be trying to figure out how to fix that. And teachers are going to have to talk about taking a role in the process. (Note: I have a proposal for a system. Just waiting for my call.)

A Remediation System

A school does not want to start from scratch, particularly after they've already invested time and money in a new staff member, and particularly when starting from scratch doesn't necessarily guarantee a trade up.

It's fair to make the question, "How badly do you want to be a teacher?" part of the eval process. It's fair to the teacher and efficient for the district to try to shape up a marginal teacher.

Safeguards for Teachers

We need a system that provides some sort of safeguards for the teachers, some assurances that they if they are terminated, it will be for reasons related to their job performance and not for matters of internal politics or crossing the wrong parent or failing to pucker up for the right tuchus or for being old and getting too large a paycheck. This is a benefit for the school district as well, because it makes recruiting and retention easier and thereby improves the stability of the schools.

Safeguards for the Districts

Districts need to know that firing a clearly-unfit teacher will not turn into an unending legal nightmare. This is where trust would be a huge benefit. Unions fight termination to the bitter end, even when they know the person on the block should be drummed out of teaching, because they don't want the district to use it against them later. They do not want to be trying to defend Ms. McSwellteach from an unjust termination and hear, "Well, you let it go with that last guy."

Districts and unions need to find a point at which they can agree that it's time cut Mr. van Swine loose, and not drag the process out into infinity.

Training and Support for Administrators

One of the reasons the current tenure system is under fire is because it's not used properly. Administrators consider taking action against teachers, but decide it would be hard, or get hives thinking about starting job interviews again, or just hate filling out forms. So they mutter, "Well, I would do something, but, you know, tenure" and hide behind that excuse.

We can put the best new system in the world in place, but it won't survive a bad administrator. Whether he's lazy or clueless or unable to get along with uppity women who don't know their place, an administrator who doesn't know what he's doing will twist any system completely out of shape. Some sort of support and training for the administrators is a minimum requirement.

If we could agree to trust each other to be working to protect the interests of school systems and teachers (and thereby taking care of the interests of students), talking through these five points could begin, and we might end up with a new version of tenure/due process/what have you that would actually work.

Of course, first there's the trust thing.

What Happened To the Trust?

Rick Hess (one of my favorite bloggers that I frequently disagree with) recently reflected on his conversation with Randi Weingarten about tenure.

He had several smart observations, but I think one of the most useful ones was an acknowledgement throughout that the reform battles in general and the tenure conversation in particular are hampered by distrust on both sides. In a companion post to this one, I consider how we could move forward if we had the trust in place. In this post, I want to answer a different question:

Where did the trust go?

I'm asking not as an exercise in assigning blame. Knowing who got us here is not particularly useful knowledge in and of itself. But understanding how we got here is useful in figuring out if we can get out of here, and if so, how. So, what are some of the factors that led to a discussion deadlock on tenure (among other issues).

Bundling

Both sides of this ongoing battle are made of a wide variety of people who possess a wide variety of viewpoints, styles, and agendas. There is a tremendous tendency to bundle all the people on The Other Side into one large homogenous group. That is exacerbated by the tendency of people not to be critical of their allies.


When I was the president of a striking teachers' union, the school board president and I got together for breakfast regularly. One of the reasons we did it was, basically, to reassure each other that our wackiest constituents did not speak for everybody.

"You can't really pick your friends," one of us said.

"Yes," replied the other. "Or get them to shut up, either."

That leads to seeing ALL of your opponents believing ALL of the things that you hear SOME of them saying. If you're not careful, you will write people off who you actually share common ground with. Bundling makes everything seem worse and amplifies the effect of each of the following.

Anti-Teacher Rhetoric

There has been mile upon mile of anti-teacher rhetoric from reformsters across the spectrum. We have heard over and over again that A) schools are a disastrous failure and B) it's the fault of teachers. Some of the post-Vergara rhetoric has simmered down, but during the trial, plenty of people made it loud and clear what the trial was about-- getting rid of all those terrible teachers. When you keep telling us that one of your goals is to get rid of us, we suspect that getting rid of job protections is, well, about getting rid of us.

Anti-Non-Teacher Rhetoric

Yes, there are lots of people who think they know how to do our job and who are pretty much wrong about everything. But "you've never been a teacher" should not be a reason to ignore you. It can explain why what you just said was stupid, but to do that, I'll have to listen to you first. Refusing to you just because you were never a teacher does not build bridges.

We-Think-You're-Stupid Baloney

Reformsters far too often try to hide behind transparently fake rhetoric. So "we need to pay teachers more" ends up meaning that we're going to pay teachers less. "We're going to give you more freedom to teach" ends up meaning "follow the script and do exactly as you're told." Charters are either private or public depending on whether you want to scarf up public money or keep secret what you've done with it. Words have meaning. When you indicate you don't think that's true, it's very hard to trust you.

A Freakishly Extreme Resistance To All Change

I am sure that, some days, reformsters feel that if they walked up to a teacher who was smacking himself in the head with a hammer and said, "Maybe you shouldn't smack yourself in the head with that hammer," the teacher would reply, "You aren't the boss of me!" and smack himself harder. Many of us hate change badly enough to shut down even an attempt to talk about it. Yes, we have our reasons (if you are of a Certain Age, this all seems like Great New Thing #4,215,449), but imagine that a student runs up to you with a drawing he just finished. "Look! Look! I made you a flower!" he cries, and you just turn away saying, "Hell, kid, I've seen flowers before."

A Refusal To Discuss Bad Teachers So Entrenched That Reasonable People Might Conclude We Refuse To Acknowledge Their Existence

This has bugged me my whole career. It's in our interest to help weed out the bad ones, but we have made it a matter of policy not to even entertain the suggestion. While I believe it's wrong to think teachers don't believe in bad teachers, and counter-intuitive to think so, we have refused to address the issue for so long that critics could be forgiven for concluding that we had joined the Flat Earth Society.

It works for both teachers and reformsters-- when you seem to say things that reasonable people can plainly see are just not so, you should expect people to distrust you. They may distrust your judgment or your honesty, but distrust they will.

Privatizers

Reformsters have to face up to the self-evident truth that some of their number want to do away with public education. Profit-generating private and charter schools, staffed with unqualified temps, all used to replace public schools and public school teachers send a clear message, and the only thing missing is a reformster Kruschev banging his shoe and declaring "We will bury you."

When people show by word and deed that they are out to destroy the work and the institution that you have dedicated your life to, by any means handy, you tend not to trust them. Certainly when someone who wants to take your job away announces that they'd like to make that process a little easier, you are not filled with a warm fuzzy trusty feeling.

Hess, for instance, puzzles over why teachers aren't more excited about charters. I suspect that it's because here on the ground, a new charter almost always means fewer resources for the public schools. Cyber-charters are bledding PE public schools dry. And in nearby Cleveland, charters staffed with TFA temps are being launched to replace public schools and public school teachers. It's not nearly as perplexing as Hess thinks. 


Look, I don't know if the trust thing is fixable. And this is just talking about the tenure issue. It is entirely possible that, on the larger picture, the gulf between the two sides is unbridgeable, that it is a very deep distance created by two entirely different value systems. I'm not convinced that reformsters want public education to accomplish what teachers want it to accomplish (and I'm quite convinced that some reformsters don't want it at all). I don't think they're all (or even mostly) evil and nefarious. I think some are. I think some are well-meaning and clueless. I think some are so well-insulated by money and power that they really don't know how much about anything (including not knowing how much they don't know). And I think some just have different goals for the public education system. I trust some of them, and others I don't trust a bit, and some others, I suppose, fall somewhere in between.

And at the end of the day, I'm nobody. Just one classroom teacher among millions. But if I were someone important, I would certainly agree to meet for breakfast to talk. It never hurts to talk about stuff. But it is going to take a whole mountain of talk to fix these issues of trust.

UPenn Offers Degree in Soulless Profiteering

The University of Pennsylvania has decided that the only thing the world needs more than educational profiteers looking to make a buck in the ed biz is educational profiteers with a Masters degree.

At EdTech Times, Michelle Harven reports, "Education and entrepreneurship is the modern match, and the evidence of a new thriving industry is pilling up." I think she meant "piling," though when I read about this sort of thing, I absolutely want to take a pill. Either the red one of the blue one will do.

Yes, UPenn will become "the first graduate school of education to offer a master’s degree in Education Entrepreneurship (M.S.Ed)." This looks like a bit of weasel-wording. Rice and Harvard both have programs of a similar nature, but which do not result in exactly this degree. John Hopkins may be working on something similar, and there may be some online programs as well. So UPenn may just be the first to the marketplace with this exact wording and degree that allows them to make an attention-getting marketing claim (and hey-- isn't that what good entrepreneurs do?)

And just in case you're wondering whether this program will be more heavily weighted toward education or entrepreneuring, here comes Barbara Kurshan, the Executive Director of Academic Innovation. And, yes, that title is your first clue.

She says "the education and entrepreneurial combination makes sense since the growth of edtech has ignited a whole new audience that want to create schools and build educational businesses."

Kurshan said many of these people need a foundation in education in order to gain insight into the industry. “We believe entrepreneurs need to understand education and need to understand the academic side of this research to be able to implement, design, create new products, and start a business,” said Kurshan.

Yes,indeedy, knowing a little something about schools and educationy stuff might help you get that little extra edge in making a buck in the ed biz. You can find even more soul-crushing business-speak on UPenn's website for the program:

This interdisciplinary Ivy League program provides students with the unique skills and experience necessary to conceptualize, develop, and manage effective 21st-century innovations in education. Designed at the intersection of education, business, and entrepreneurship, the program combines Penn’s rigorous academic study with practical coursework – giving you the tools necessary to chart entrepreneurial solutions in education, including creating new schools or other education ventures in the for-profit or non-profit sectors.

But don't worry. The program covers three domains: Foundations of Education, Business Essentials, and Entrepreneurial Management of Knowledge. See? Education does come up. Here's what future edu-businesspersons will learn about education:

In this domain, students study current education systems and policies, as well as the history of how these systems and policies evolved. Students also learn about the history, theory and application of various pedagogies and modes of school organization, as well as how they affect and are affected by government policy and public pressures. Students also study the changing landscape of delivery systems in urban public education.

This is actually less exciting that the Entrepreneurial Management of Knowledge domain. In this domain, we'll learn "about how entrepreneurs can influence the creation, advancement and successful exploitation of knowledge." A grasp of all three domains will prep budding corporate tools to create "new social impact ventures."

It's a two-year program aimed at people who are currently working, with non-traditional scheduling, 10 CUs, plus  a capstone project and practicum. But "graduates of the program leave not only with a more robust entrepreneurial mindset, but also with concrete skills that will prepare you to undertake new ventures in your chosen area of interest including creating new schools or other education ventures." So you know it's totally worth the time and effort. I mean, who doesn't want a more robust entrepreneurial mindset?

And this isn't just a chance to make American education a little bit worse, but promises potential for exporting our lousiest educational ideas overseas as well. Back to Harven's reporting here:

Many of the applicants Kurshan sees are international students who are interested in creating schools in their own country. These students want to learn school design and creation in order to run a charter or international school. Kurshan mentions one applicant who would like to use this degree in order to create a program like Teach for America in Indonesia.

One other interesting detail. I looked through the UPenn's site, and nowhere did I find a word about educating students or about how these Social Impact Projects would interface with the actual carbon-based life form units who would potentially be impacted by the project. Apparently when you are learning how to make big bucks by starting a school, the last thing you need to worry about is how, what or why you are actually going to teach those children.

Is It Time for a Truce

As guest blogger over at Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue, John Thompson asks the question, "Is it time for a truce."

He's responding specifically to the Gates Foundation call for a two-year testing moratorium. Now that they've put down that particular club, do we point down our pointy sticks and try to have a chat?

It is odd to watch the moratorium idea play out. Since it's a recommendation from Gates, the Arsenal of Reformy Stuff, I don't anticipate any reformsters standing up to say, "Don't listen to them!" if for no other reason than it's hard to transition from that to "Could we have our big fat check now, sir?"

But that doesn't mean reformsters can't fumble the idea. The Cuomo "compromise" in New York says essentially that we'll hold off on beating teachers over the heads with the testing, but we will go full speed ahead on beating up students with them. There's no way to make philosophically consistent sense out of that decision. Either the tests are a good idea, a good idea that's not ready for prime time yet, or a bad idea; in none of those cases does the Cuomo testing pause make sense. And it makes least sense if you're foundational motivation is "Let's do what's best for the kids."

The moratorium smells like a practical decision, the latest version of the Bad Tests Are Ruining Public Support for Our Beautiful Beautiful Common Core Standards argument that we've been hearing for a while, and the tension around it underlines one of the fault lines that have been present among the reformsters since day one-- there are reformsters who want to do national standards and testing "right," but they have allied themselves with corporate powers who got into this to have a shot at that sweet sweet pile of education tax money, and they have more inclination to wait than my dog has to sit and stare longingly at his bowl of food.

It's one of the interesting questions the moratorium raises. If Gates says, "Let's wait on testing," will Pearson say, "Sure, we can put off that revenue stream for a few years."

But Thompson correctly identifies the danger of the moratorium.

Gates blames others for not getting test-based accountability right. Presumably, a two-year moratorium would give top-down reformers the opportunity to hold management accountable for improperly holding students and teachers accountable. Apparently, the Foundation would use the moratorium to tinker with precisely the amount of coercion - not too harsh but not too easy - that should be imposed on the systems that make teachers and principals toe the line. 

In other words, the moratorium is not about "Hey, this whole high stakes testy thing might be a mistake that messes up our noble goal of high standards." It's more likely about, "Hey, we messed up the implementation of these high stakes tests. Let's get our PR and politics lined up and relaunch more effectively in a year or two."

The reformsters have put down their club, but that's probably because they've gone to pick up a gun.

Thompson is also correct in suggesting that we can use the interregnum to make our case against high stakes testing to the general public, the politicians, the people who have only been paying half attention. We have a chance to lay out our ideas, make our point. A moratorium gives the reformsters a chance to repurpose the energy and resources they are now using to defend the testing; likewise, it gives the resistance the chance to repurpose the energy and resources we are using to oppose the testing. As Thompson said on twitter, better for "jaw-jaw than war-war."

So, no, I don't think the moratorium presents a chance for a truce. I think it is at best a lull, and more likely represents a shift of the battle to other fronts.

[EDIT- John Thompson sent along a very thoughtful response to this piece which I have put up as a guest post here.]