There's been a pig-pile on Arne today over his ill-considered announcement of the DOE's new get-tough-on-states policy regarding students with disabilities (I know, because I was one of the first pigs on the pile).
However. The answer that Arne came up with is stupid, but the question it addresses-- are all students with disabilities getting the educational service they deserve-- is not a stupid question at all. This is a serious issue, and there are some of the serious points that
need to be seriously considered if we're going to have a serious
conversation about it.
* "Students with disabilities" is a huge, huge, HUGE category. It includes the students in my classroom who are labeled learning disabled but whose label I would never have guessed because their disability never interferes with their classroom performance. It also includes students with profound levels of difficulty who will never, ever in their lives function "at grade level." And it includes every shade of grey in between. To make any statement of policy about students with disabilities that lumps them altogether is like writing a policy that dictates how we should handle "people with dark hair."
* Parents of students with disabilities often have to fight long, hard, and constantly to get their children the services and support that they should be getting. Many districts and schools have a history of writing off disabled students. That's not okay.
* The balancing act between when parents want, what schools recommend, and what can be realistically delivered is tricky, delicate and not always easily settled. You can't automatically choose one side every time. Anybody who wades into this mess has to know that.
* Standardized testing is often the worst possible way to measure the educational attainments of students with special needs. Watching special needs students deal with these tests drives home the oft-repeated (at least by me) truth that a standardized test only really measures the student's ability to take a standardized test.
* "Well, those LD students
are just dumb and you'll never teach them anything anyway," is not a
valid position. How they can learn, what they can learn, and how we can determine what they've learned are all tricky, highly individual issues. Almost everybody can learn something, but we all have limits, and some limitations are greater than others.
* The most severely disabled students are like buckets with limited capacity. Do we want to fill the bucket with Skills For Taking Standardized Tests or Skills For Having A Happy Life? Because those things aren't the same.
So what Arne should have said was something like this:
Our nation, our states, and our schools have an obligation to every young citizen in search of an education. But for some of our most challenged young citizens, that definition of an education may look very different from the standard one.
I will renew the department's commitment to ensuring that in all states, students with special needs do not have those needs neglected. It is not enough to just do the required paperwork without regard for what is actually happening with the student, and it is not acceptable to simply jam each student into a pre-set standardized slot.
Yes, there are students whose unique challenges mean they require unique educational plans, and those plans must be made with respect and sensitivity to each student's unique limitations and gifts. But each plan must be made by a team of people who know and care about that student, not simply pulled out of a bureaucratic template created in some far-off office.
We must hold each special student up to the highest possible expectations, but we must temper those expectations with sensitivity and wisdom. It does no good to push people past their breaking point. There should never be another Ethan Rediske. And we must recognize that we may not be able to measure their achievements with conventional standardized tools. We depend on our educational professionals on the ground to help parents see what their children have accomplished.
The promise of American public education was not made to so-called "normal" students alone, but to every student, no matter what the individual constellation of strengths and weaknesses may be. This administration is committed to seeing that the promise of public education is fulfilled for every American student, not by bending that student to fit our vision, but by expanding our vision so that is large enough, and flexible enough, to meet the needs of each student.
And that, more or less, is what Arne should have said.
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Quite Possibly the Stupidest Thing To Come Out of the US DOE
In announcing a new emphasis and "major shift," the US Department of Education will now demand that states show educational progress for students with disabilities.
Arne Duncan announced that, shockingly, students with disabilities do poorly in school. They perform below level in both English and math. No, there aren't any qualifiers attached to that. Arne is bothered that students with very low IQs, students with low function, students who have processing problems, students who have any number of impairments-- these students are performing below grade level.
"We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel," Duncan said. (per NPR coverage)
And I'm pretty sure we don't know any such thing. I'm pretty sure that the special needs students in schools across the country are special needs precisely because they have trouble meeting the usual expectations.
But who knows. Maybe Arne is on to something. Maybe blind students can't see because nobody expects them to. Maybe the student a colleague had in class years ago, who was literally rolled into the room and propped up in a corner so that he could be "exposed" to band-- maybe that child's problems were just low expectations. Maybe IEPs are actually assigned randomly, for no reason at all.
And that's not even the stupidest thing. We're not there yet.
Kevin Huffman, education boss of Tennessee, also chimed in on the conference call, to explain why disabled students do poorly, and how to fix it.
He said most lag behind because they're not expected to succeed if they're given more demanding schoolwork and because they're seldom tested
That's it. We should just demand that disabled students should do harder work and take more tests.
When Florida was harassing Andrea Rediske to have her dying, mentally disabled child to take tests, they were actually doing him a favor, and not participating in state-sponsered abuse.
Don't tell me reading is hard because of your dyslexia, kid. Just do it. And take this test.
We don't need IEPs-- we need expectations and demands. We don't need student support and special education programs-- we need more testing. We don't need consideration for the individual child's needs-- we just need to demand that the child get up to speed, learn things, and most of all TAKE THE DAMN TESTS. Because then, and only then, will we be able to make all student disabilities simply disappear.
This is just so stunningly, awesomely dumb, it's hard to take in. Do they imagine that disabled students are just all faking, or that the specialists who diagnose these various problems are just making shit up for giggles? Either way, Duncan and Huffman have set an entirely new high bar for ignorance, insensitivity, and just plain flat out stupidity.
Arne Duncan announced that, shockingly, students with disabilities do poorly in school. They perform below level in both English and math. No, there aren't any qualifiers attached to that. Arne is bothered that students with very low IQs, students with low function, students who have processing problems, students who have any number of impairments-- these students are performing below grade level.
"We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel," Duncan said. (per NPR coverage)
And I'm pretty sure we don't know any such thing. I'm pretty sure that the special needs students in schools across the country are special needs precisely because they have trouble meeting the usual expectations.
But who knows. Maybe Arne is on to something. Maybe blind students can't see because nobody expects them to. Maybe the student a colleague had in class years ago, who was literally rolled into the room and propped up in a corner so that he could be "exposed" to band-- maybe that child's problems were just low expectations. Maybe IEPs are actually assigned randomly, for no reason at all.
And that's not even the stupidest thing. We're not there yet.
Kevin Huffman, education boss of Tennessee, also chimed in on the conference call, to explain why disabled students do poorly, and how to fix it.
He said most lag behind because they're not expected to succeed if they're given more demanding schoolwork and because they're seldom tested
That's it. We should just demand that disabled students should do harder work and take more tests.
When Florida was harassing Andrea Rediske to have her dying, mentally disabled child to take tests, they were actually doing him a favor, and not participating in state-sponsered abuse.
Don't tell me reading is hard because of your dyslexia, kid. Just do it. And take this test.
We don't need IEPs-- we need expectations and demands. We don't need student support and special education programs-- we need more testing. We don't need consideration for the individual child's needs-- we just need to demand that the child get up to speed, learn things, and most of all TAKE THE DAMN TESTS. Because then, and only then, will we be able to make all student disabilities simply disappear.
This is just so stunningly, awesomely dumb, it's hard to take in. Do they imagine that disabled students are just all faking, or that the specialists who diagnose these various problems are just making shit up for giggles? Either way, Duncan and Huffman have set an entirely new high bar for ignorance, insensitivity, and just plain flat out stupidity.
GOP and Dems Once Again United by Disdain for Teachers
Well, we knew it was coming. We just didn't know it would be quite so bald-faced.
As reported by Politico, the coming push to trash teacher job protections will bring together players from both the Obama and Bush administration (just in case you still doubted that Obama-on-education was at all different from Bush-on-education).
Campbell Brown, former journalist and current-- well, I hesitate to call her a teacher-hater, but it's hard to find any evidence to the contrary, will be launching a lawsuit in New York state to strip teachers of tenure and FILO protections (and then move on to other states from there). This is not a surprise-- given the Vergara decision, it was foregone conclusion that many folks would smell an opening for smashing unions and stripping teacher job protections across the country. But there are several aspects of this soon-to-be-case that are more special than we might have expected.
* Brown is not even pretending to mount any kind of political theater. Vergara at least made a small show of hiding the millionaire plaintiffs behind a curtain while using nine live teens as props. Brown is announcing her intent before even having a casting call for plaintiffs. And her Partnership for Educational Justice makes spectacularly little effort to pretend to be anything other than what it is-- an astroturf group founded to pilot legal attacks on tenure and seniority.
* Robert Gibbs (former communications aid to Senator Obama and press secretary for President Obama), Ben LaBolt (campaign spokesman for candidate Obama), and Jon Jones (2008 digital strategist for candidate Obama) have been hired to do the PR campaign for the lawsuit. And we're not really pretending that anything different is happening. Because that's where we now live-- in a country where you want to make sure your lawsuit is backed up by a public relations blitz.
* Jay Lefkowitz, an attorney who was a deputy assistant for domestic policy under President George W. Bush, will be doing the legal work pro bono. So there it is-- beyond terrorist threats, the one thing that can unite GOP and Dems in this country is a desire to slap up those damn teachers.
* Brown is quoted by Politico explaining why the PR matters-- because the conversation is more important than the lawsuit. In other words, it would not be enough to have the courts strip teachers of job protections; teachers must get their asses kicked in the court of public opinion as well. The PR portion of Vergara was heavy on how teachers are lazy slackers who don't want to do their jobs, while the union cared only for itself and not for students. Is that the conversation we need to have more of.
* Brown compares the battle against tenure to the battle for gay marriage. Because, Proposition 8. Because.... I got nothing. It's an amazing parallel.
Beyond this, we have the same old same old. Brown is connected to many of the reformster crowd, including her husband, and she has often spoken out against the difficulty in removing sexual predators from teaching positions, but her proposed solutions have always been considerably broader. Not "here's how we could solve this specific problem" but "here's how we could get rid of the union and tenure." So, we have cockroaches in the kitchen, so let's burn down the house.
The future plaintiffs continue to parrot the line "we must insure that every child has a strong teacher in the classroom." What nobody has even pretended to explain is how making it easier to fire teachers guarantees a great teacher in every classroom (particularly at a time when teachers arealready getting out of Dodge at an unprecedented rate).
It's all kind of sad and ridiculous and angry-making and appalling all at once.
There is a conversation to be had about teacher job protection. I talked about it here. But we already know from Vergara that Brown's lawsuit is not going to further that conversation. As Rick Hess noted, one of the problems standing in the way of that conversation is a lack of trust, and a flood of PR like we saw in California is not about to make teachers feel any more trusting.
Seeing folks from both political parties united behind a media figure and financed by shadowy figures who won't be revealed, all trying to remove job protections by arguing in the court of public opinion that teachers shouldn't have those protections because teachers are lazy and awful and simply don't deserve them-- that is not going to make teachers feel that it's safe to show any vulnerability at all. And no-- it's no help to soften the pitch with a "Well, the great teachers don't suck, but we reserve the right to tell you whether you are great or not. Because you probably suck."
This is more full on attack, with nothing new for teachers to learn except that the folks who want to slap us down and put us in our place come from all over the political spectrum. And perhaps a few more teachers will figure out that it's foolish to assume that Democrats are our friends.
As reported by Politico, the coming push to trash teacher job protections will bring together players from both the Obama and Bush administration (just in case you still doubted that Obama-on-education was at all different from Bush-on-education).
Campbell Brown, former journalist and current-- well, I hesitate to call her a teacher-hater, but it's hard to find any evidence to the contrary, will be launching a lawsuit in New York state to strip teachers of tenure and FILO protections (and then move on to other states from there). This is not a surprise-- given the Vergara decision, it was foregone conclusion that many folks would smell an opening for smashing unions and stripping teacher job protections across the country. But there are several aspects of this soon-to-be-case that are more special than we might have expected.
* Brown is not even pretending to mount any kind of political theater. Vergara at least made a small show of hiding the millionaire plaintiffs behind a curtain while using nine live teens as props. Brown is announcing her intent before even having a casting call for plaintiffs. And her Partnership for Educational Justice makes spectacularly little effort to pretend to be anything other than what it is-- an astroturf group founded to pilot legal attacks on tenure and seniority.
* Robert Gibbs (former communications aid to Senator Obama and press secretary for President Obama), Ben LaBolt (campaign spokesman for candidate Obama), and Jon Jones (2008 digital strategist for candidate Obama) have been hired to do the PR campaign for the lawsuit. And we're not really pretending that anything different is happening. Because that's where we now live-- in a country where you want to make sure your lawsuit is backed up by a public relations blitz.
* Jay Lefkowitz, an attorney who was a deputy assistant for domestic policy under President George W. Bush, will be doing the legal work pro bono. So there it is-- beyond terrorist threats, the one thing that can unite GOP and Dems in this country is a desire to slap up those damn teachers.
* Brown is quoted by Politico explaining why the PR matters-- because the conversation is more important than the lawsuit. In other words, it would not be enough to have the courts strip teachers of job protections; teachers must get their asses kicked in the court of public opinion as well. The PR portion of Vergara was heavy on how teachers are lazy slackers who don't want to do their jobs, while the union cared only for itself and not for students. Is that the conversation we need to have more of.
* Brown compares the battle against tenure to the battle for gay marriage. Because, Proposition 8. Because.... I got nothing. It's an amazing parallel.
Beyond this, we have the same old same old. Brown is connected to many of the reformster crowd, including her husband, and she has often spoken out against the difficulty in removing sexual predators from teaching positions, but her proposed solutions have always been considerably broader. Not "here's how we could solve this specific problem" but "here's how we could get rid of the union and tenure." So, we have cockroaches in the kitchen, so let's burn down the house.
The future plaintiffs continue to parrot the line "we must insure that every child has a strong teacher in the classroom." What nobody has even pretended to explain is how making it easier to fire teachers guarantees a great teacher in every classroom (particularly at a time when teachers arealready getting out of Dodge at an unprecedented rate).
It's all kind of sad and ridiculous and angry-making and appalling all at once.
There is a conversation to be had about teacher job protection. I talked about it here. But we already know from Vergara that Brown's lawsuit is not going to further that conversation. As Rick Hess noted, one of the problems standing in the way of that conversation is a lack of trust, and a flood of PR like we saw in California is not about to make teachers feel any more trusting.
Seeing folks from both political parties united behind a media figure and financed by shadowy figures who won't be revealed, all trying to remove job protections by arguing in the court of public opinion that teachers shouldn't have those protections because teachers are lazy and awful and simply don't deserve them-- that is not going to make teachers feel that it's safe to show any vulnerability at all. And no-- it's no help to soften the pitch with a "Well, the great teachers don't suck, but we reserve the right to tell you whether you are great or not. Because you probably suck."
This is more full on attack, with nothing new for teachers to learn except that the folks who want to slap us down and put us in our place come from all over the political spectrum. And perhaps a few more teachers will figure out that it's foolish to assume that Democrats are our friends.
Arne Blows Some Smoke at the PTA
Monday the US DOE put up the full prepared text of Secretary Arne Duncan's speech to the National Convention of the PTA. As always, Duncan presents a compelling pastiche of baloney, things that aren't technically "true," and fine rhetoric that bears no relation to the actual behavior of the administration. Let me take you through the highlights. It won't be pretty, but it's useful to see what smoke is coming out of the Washington fog machine at the moment, and this stirring speech is a great view of Arne's overall vision.
Warming Up
Arne opens up his speech as pretty much anybody would (Glad to be here! Your organization is great! Let's hear it for your leaders!) and then moves on to tales of his children's schooling. Their experience was not the typical 25-30 desks in a row. His son got to work ahead in math because, technology. His daughter got to attend a constitutional convention and Civil War day.
But it’s those kinds of opportunities that I think are so special. And why are those experiences so important? Because I think all of us – all of us as parents – want our children to be inspired, to be challenged, to be active participants in their own learning.
This is not the last time that Arne will say something that is true, but also completely disconnected from the kind of schooling promoted by his department's policies. I'm pretty sure we can make it a drinking game; every time Arne says something that would make a great basis for educational policy, but US DOE actually does the opposite--drink! Do I need to point out that Arne's kids attend a school that remains untouched by the policies that are being inflicted on the rest of us?
Pivot to Big Idea
But that's the warm-up. Time to move on to the real pitch.
"Every child – every student -- deserves an education that will prepare her for the future. And more and more, success in the real world won’t be just about what you know, but what you can do with what you know." Folks will need not just knowledge, but the ability to connect it, to use critical thinking, to work in diverse groups, understand technology as a tool and not an end in itself. Yeah, I know we just started, but go ahead and drink.
Young people will change careers many times. Oh lordy-- he's quoting Tom Friedman-- the best careers are the ones they'll create for themselves. You can take an extra drink just to forget.
"Fluency with critical thinking, readiness for life-long learning – that's what will matter." Is critical thinking some kind of foreign language. Will we use that in job interviews? "I am able to do advanced coding, and I am fluent in Spanish, German and critical thinking."
The real challenge will be "making this happen at scale." We don't need an education plan; we need a business plan. At scale? It will take a whole separate blog to look at how stupid those two words are.
Changity Change Change
If you only remember one thing, Arne wants it to be this-- public education has to change (private schools are free to carry on as is). And he says there is "growing agreement" about what has to happen. It's a nice rhetorical touch, suggesting as it does that there's a movement building and the train is leaving the station and if you want to be part of Big Things, you'd better get your ticket.
Arne says we need to prepare students for success in "college, careers and life." And he's going to lay out the change.
First, it's not about pleasant platitudes (drink). But he'd like to ask two questions. Who thinks they're better off than their parents? Who thinks their kids will have a better life than their own? Lots of people are worried about the future for their children, and they should be.
Booga Booga
Arne will now list a bunch of scary thing.
Parents see German, Korean, and Chinese kids"racing" past ours educationally, and suspect they will be better positioned in the global economy. Arne does not note that this could be because the feds and other reformsters keep repeating this over and over. Nope-- somehow, just somehow, parents have a sense that the sky is falling.
More young people are poor and living with their parents. Few middle class kids and fewer poor kids get college degrees. And college has become as expensive as a triple-decker caviar and diamond sandwich, while family income has not budged from peanut butter levels.
Arne is not surprised because "the education system we have today was designed for a time when higher education was simply a privilege reserved for the elite." And wait! What? I could have sworn that our system used to be geared so that Regular People of all stripes could get some sort of college, and it is only in recent years that college has become a privilege of the wealthy.
Now we'll trot out the usual "quality education can't be because of wealth or zip code" talking point. Also, we're going to have a minority-majority in schools shortly. Not that Arne is saying that the challenge is educating all those poor brown kids, because man, that would be appalling. No-- everybody's education must be better!
The Vision for Schools
Arne will now explain what these new schools are supposed to look like.
First, they must be supportive, safe and joyful. That's we must give eight year olds huge reading tests and flunk them based on the results. Ha ha. just kidding Take a drink.
No, this is actually to introduce a digression on guns. Too many still show up in schools shooting children, which we do with far greater regularity than any other country on earth. Arne supports -- well, actually all he explicitly supports is keeping "our children safe and free from fear."
On to the academics.
All children must be prepared for college. I'm not hyperbolizing, here. He says "all of them." He does acknowledge that college has value beyond job preparation, but his argument is based on two mis-statements of data.
He trots out the old college-income correlation. People who go to college make more money. That's a real correlation. Now, does it mean that people who come from wealthier background are more likely to become wealthy adults, and part of what comes with that wealthy lifestyle is four years of college, or does it mean that everybody at age 18 is on a level playing field and college is what decides who gets ahead? Does college redistribute wealth, or is it just one more marker of it?
Arne underlines his innumeracy by pointing out that the dollar difference is way more now than it was in 1965. Which is... obvious? Unless Arne is suggesting that cars, houses and salaried employees are also far more valuable now than they were in 1965.
Every student in America must be prepared to compete with – and actually to lead – the rest of the world.
Yeah, Arne said that.
As always, Arne's understanding of outsourcing seems incomplete. We keep talking as if India and China took jobs away by being "smarter" and "better educated", when most of the evidence would suggest they took jobs away by being "good enough" and "willing to work for really tiny wages." If Arne's argument were valid, we would also be trying to bring the garment industry back to the US by sending everyone to sewing school.
We didn't lose out to these countries because our education ceiling doesn't go high enough; we lost out because our poverty basement doesn't go low enough.
Another List
Yeah, I thought we had started a list of important school qualities, but somehow we're starting a list again. But here come seven factors of great schools of the future.
First, inspiring, effective, well-supported teachers; second, high standards; third, engaged parents and families; fourth, motivated students; fifth, courageous, committed, accountable leaders; sixth, a safe, secure classroom environment; and finally, access to modern technology.
Okay, I'll wait a second while you polish off an entire bottle.
Arne starts with his usual boilerplate about how we really should be supporting and valuing great teachers in this country. That leads us to these two paragraphs.
Doctors, top managers and pro athletes all have access to excellent coaching, informed by solid data. They receive top-notch training and ongoing development to hone their skills.
Together, let’s work to make all those elements the norm in teaching – better training, better resources, better support, and smarter accountability, tied to better information about student progress.
Quick! What made it into the second paragraph that wasn't in the first one? Two things, actually-- the idea that teachers must be held accountable, and they need help figuring out if they're succeeding. Because, you know, if the scoreboard wasn't there, athletes wouldn't know how they were doing. If doctors didn't get bean-counter stats, they wouldn't know whether they were helping patients or not. And nobody in any professional field can do good work without having bureaucrats looking over their shoulder and threatening them.
"Part of great teaching is personalizing instruction, meeting the needs of 30 or more individual student..."Oh, Arne. I see what you did there. Thirty or more kids? Yes, I bet that's exactly what classes are like at that awesome school your kids attend. Thirty-some kids in a classroom is totally ideal.
More List!
Arne talks through the rest of his seven items.
Teachers need techy tools-- and students need to have their data kept secure and private. This is either a non-sequitor, or Arne thinks that teacher technology should be about collecting student data. So if you were dreaming of universal Smartboards and document cameras, you're out of luck.
We should be focusing on mastery of skills, not time in seats (drink!) Students progress needs to hinge on actual demonstrated learning, and parents also need that kind of clear, specific report of student progress (because they have no clue otherwise?) with the kind of great information "than what comes from today’s simplistic bubble tests."
Hey! Here's an idea. We could have each student work with an education professional. That professional could use a whole array of formal and informal assessments to determine the student's progress, skills, and knowledge. Then the education professionals could send home periodic reports to the parents, make the reports available on line to parents, and also be available for occasional conferences with the parents about their child's progress. How does that sound, Arne? Would that work as an alternative to simplistic untested unvalidated bizarrely bad bubble tests (like, say, the PARCC)? Let's all take a big drink.
But don't drain your glass yet. Here's another thing that Arne actually said: "And where schools are spending too much time prepping for tests, they should cut back there as well." Drrrrrink! Because test prep wouldn't be related, would it, to a series of punitive and high stakes threats attached to test results, all favored, supported and promoted by the US DOE. "Too many mugging victims are handing over their money to threatening men with guns. Where that is happening, people should cut back on giving money to muggers."
Great teaching, that’s what leads to real learning and strong results in assessments – not time spent on test prep.
Arne said that too. Never mind taking another drink. Just hit yourself in the head with a brick, in honor of the miracle that Arne can actually say such baloney with a straight face.
Support and evaluation for teachers should take into account student growth and gain – as one part of a mix of measures including things like observations, surveys or portfolios of student work.
Drink. Arne somehow forgets that we don't have any sort of accurate way to measure student growth and gain. All we have are various forms of VAM, which we know does NOT actually measure much of anything except the gullibility of bureaucrats.
Better information means more thoughtful, targeted, and effective support—and nobody gains when school systems treat all teachers as indistinguishable.
That quote comes straight from the StudentsFirst/TNTP playbook. I guess treating teachers as indistinguishable does not include requiring them all to teach to the same standards. Drink.
Time for Some [Common Core] Smoke Blowing
I put Common Core in brackets because throughout this whole next section of his speech, which is totally about Common Core, Arne will never actually say the name once. He will just refer to them as "higher standards." And he will say a bunch of things about them that are not technically true.
-- these standards are beloved by teachers, who finally are freed up to teach critical thinking, a skill previously banned from all classrooms
-- these standards were totally created by a coalition of " state leaders, parents, principals, policymakers, and education experts from across the country."
-- the standards were chosen by the states (which is technically true, in the same way that you will probably choose to give your money to the mugger who points a gun at you).
Also, this:
Third, higher standards of learning give parents more information about how well their neighborhood schools are performing.
No. No, they don't. A standard doesn't tell you anything more than a ruler that is in a desk drawer. You have to know how to use the ruler, when to use the ruler, how to read the ruler, and how to report what you think you've found out.
The standards do not tell parents shit. A reporting system based on the standards might-- if the system was based on something that collected valid, accurate data. And THAT data would only be useful is the standards were any good to begin with. If you have a mislabeled ruler that you hold cattywonkus to the edge you're measuring, you get information that is meaningless.
Argument by Anecdote
Having established that the strength of the new school system is that everything is reported through clear, reliable, scaled data, Arne will now prove that the system is working by offering data-- ha! Of course not. He will now tell some stories and include no data in his proof at all. Drink twice.
College Affordability
College has become really expensive. Arne and the President would like to fix that, so as of now, the US DOE will stop making gazillions of dollars of profits on student loans and cut rates accordingly. No, sorry, that's not it at all. Umm... they will be throwing their support behind Elizabeth Warren's proposal to slash costs for student loans. No, also not it. They are going to cap loan payment amounts for college grads at 10% of their monthly income.
Remember that lesson in consumer math about paying off your credit card? You know-- the one where they explained that if you only made the minimum payment on your credit card, you would end up paying 12,722% of the original loan? The loan repayment cap does keep some students from going under and declaring bankruptcy at age 23. It also means that the students' costs will be even greater over time. The US DOE is actually making college loans more expensive as a way of guaranteeing that the loaning agencies will not get defaulted on.
So, no. This did NOT make college more affordable. It made it more expensive. It just made it more likely that the folks who make college loans will get their money back, with enough interest to send their own children to private school, twice. Take a drink. With extra interest.
Arne acknowledges that many factors contributed to high college costs, including state budget cuts. He also notes, and I am truly quoting here, "Universities jacked their tuition up."
More Flag Waving
Arne notes that the feds must strive to be great partners and acknowledges "what matters most will never, never be ideas that come from Washington." Which is true in the sense that most of these ideas are just passing through DC on a journey from the private board room to the public trough. So, maybe half a drink.
Arne is coming around the home stretch. He has more touching anecdotes-- well, images, actually. He has exactly one data point-- the graduation rate. Dropout rates are down by some measure. Arne says college enrollment is at "record levels" and given the current demographic dip and the way that my own local colleges are scrambling desperately to fill seats and save programs, I'm suspecting there's plenty of smoke puffed into that claim. And NAEP scores for younger students (you know-- the ones who have spent the least amount of time under this regime) are up-ish. Not that we know why. Nor do we know why high school scores are NOT up. Nor can we really, truly explain why the NAEP scores particularly matter. But I digress.
This is important work. If it seems speedy, that's because it is, because we just have to change everything right away. And PTA folks, we need your help. Support good teachers (aka the ones doing as they're told). Support changes in schools. And, I don't know. I just hear a dull buzzing in my brain. It's a Grand Canyon of baloney. And I never should have turned it into a drinking game.
Warming Up
Arne opens up his speech as pretty much anybody would (Glad to be here! Your organization is great! Let's hear it for your leaders!) and then moves on to tales of his children's schooling. Their experience was not the typical 25-30 desks in a row. His son got to work ahead in math because, technology. His daughter got to attend a constitutional convention and Civil War day.
But it’s those kinds of opportunities that I think are so special. And why are those experiences so important? Because I think all of us – all of us as parents – want our children to be inspired, to be challenged, to be active participants in their own learning.
This is not the last time that Arne will say something that is true, but also completely disconnected from the kind of schooling promoted by his department's policies. I'm pretty sure we can make it a drinking game; every time Arne says something that would make a great basis for educational policy, but US DOE actually does the opposite--drink! Do I need to point out that Arne's kids attend a school that remains untouched by the policies that are being inflicted on the rest of us?
Pivot to Big Idea
But that's the warm-up. Time to move on to the real pitch.
"Every child – every student -- deserves an education that will prepare her for the future. And more and more, success in the real world won’t be just about what you know, but what you can do with what you know." Folks will need not just knowledge, but the ability to connect it, to use critical thinking, to work in diverse groups, understand technology as a tool and not an end in itself. Yeah, I know we just started, but go ahead and drink.
Young people will change careers many times. Oh lordy-- he's quoting Tom Friedman-- the best careers are the ones they'll create for themselves. You can take an extra drink just to forget.
"Fluency with critical thinking, readiness for life-long learning – that's what will matter." Is critical thinking some kind of foreign language. Will we use that in job interviews? "I am able to do advanced coding, and I am fluent in Spanish, German and critical thinking."
The real challenge will be "making this happen at scale." We don't need an education plan; we need a business plan. At scale? It will take a whole separate blog to look at how stupid those two words are.
Changity Change Change
If you only remember one thing, Arne wants it to be this-- public education has to change (private schools are free to carry on as is). And he says there is "growing agreement" about what has to happen. It's a nice rhetorical touch, suggesting as it does that there's a movement building and the train is leaving the station and if you want to be part of Big Things, you'd better get your ticket.
Arne says we need to prepare students for success in "college, careers and life." And he's going to lay out the change.
First, it's not about pleasant platitudes (drink). But he'd like to ask two questions. Who thinks they're better off than their parents? Who thinks their kids will have a better life than their own? Lots of people are worried about the future for their children, and they should be.
Booga Booga
Arne will now list a bunch of scary thing.
Parents see German, Korean, and Chinese kids"racing" past ours educationally, and suspect they will be better positioned in the global economy. Arne does not note that this could be because the feds and other reformsters keep repeating this over and over. Nope-- somehow, just somehow, parents have a sense that the sky is falling.
More young people are poor and living with their parents. Few middle class kids and fewer poor kids get college degrees. And college has become as expensive as a triple-decker caviar and diamond sandwich, while family income has not budged from peanut butter levels.
Arne is not surprised because "the education system we have today was designed for a time when higher education was simply a privilege reserved for the elite." And wait! What? I could have sworn that our system used to be geared so that Regular People of all stripes could get some sort of college, and it is only in recent years that college has become a privilege of the wealthy.
Now we'll trot out the usual "quality education can't be because of wealth or zip code" talking point. Also, we're going to have a minority-majority in schools shortly. Not that Arne is saying that the challenge is educating all those poor brown kids, because man, that would be appalling. No-- everybody's education must be better!
The Vision for Schools
Arne will now explain what these new schools are supposed to look like.
First, they must be supportive, safe and joyful. That's we must give eight year olds huge reading tests and flunk them based on the results. Ha ha. just kidding Take a drink.
No, this is actually to introduce a digression on guns. Too many still show up in schools shooting children, which we do with far greater regularity than any other country on earth. Arne supports -- well, actually all he explicitly supports is keeping "our children safe and free from fear."
On to the academics.
All children must be prepared for college. I'm not hyperbolizing, here. He says "all of them." He does acknowledge that college has value beyond job preparation, but his argument is based on two mis-statements of data.
He trots out the old college-income correlation. People who go to college make more money. That's a real correlation. Now, does it mean that people who come from wealthier background are more likely to become wealthy adults, and part of what comes with that wealthy lifestyle is four years of college, or does it mean that everybody at age 18 is on a level playing field and college is what decides who gets ahead? Does college redistribute wealth, or is it just one more marker of it?
Arne underlines his innumeracy by pointing out that the dollar difference is way more now than it was in 1965. Which is... obvious? Unless Arne is suggesting that cars, houses and salaried employees are also far more valuable now than they were in 1965.
Every student in America must be prepared to compete with – and actually to lead – the rest of the world.
Yeah, Arne said that.
As always, Arne's understanding of outsourcing seems incomplete. We keep talking as if India and China took jobs away by being "smarter" and "better educated", when most of the evidence would suggest they took jobs away by being "good enough" and "willing to work for really tiny wages." If Arne's argument were valid, we would also be trying to bring the garment industry back to the US by sending everyone to sewing school.
We didn't lose out to these countries because our education ceiling doesn't go high enough; we lost out because our poverty basement doesn't go low enough.
Another List
Yeah, I thought we had started a list of important school qualities, but somehow we're starting a list again. But here come seven factors of great schools of the future.
First, inspiring, effective, well-supported teachers; second, high standards; third, engaged parents and families; fourth, motivated students; fifth, courageous, committed, accountable leaders; sixth, a safe, secure classroom environment; and finally, access to modern technology.
Okay, I'll wait a second while you polish off an entire bottle.
Arne starts with his usual boilerplate about how we really should be supporting and valuing great teachers in this country. That leads us to these two paragraphs.
Doctors, top managers and pro athletes all have access to excellent coaching, informed by solid data. They receive top-notch training and ongoing development to hone their skills.
Together, let’s work to make all those elements the norm in teaching – better training, better resources, better support, and smarter accountability, tied to better information about student progress.
Quick! What made it into the second paragraph that wasn't in the first one? Two things, actually-- the idea that teachers must be held accountable, and they need help figuring out if they're succeeding. Because, you know, if the scoreboard wasn't there, athletes wouldn't know how they were doing. If doctors didn't get bean-counter stats, they wouldn't know whether they were helping patients or not. And nobody in any professional field can do good work without having bureaucrats looking over their shoulder and threatening them.
"Part of great teaching is personalizing instruction, meeting the needs of 30 or more individual student..."Oh, Arne. I see what you did there. Thirty or more kids? Yes, I bet that's exactly what classes are like at that awesome school your kids attend. Thirty-some kids in a classroom is totally ideal.
More List!
Arne talks through the rest of his seven items.
Teachers need techy tools-- and students need to have their data kept secure and private. This is either a non-sequitor, or Arne thinks that teacher technology should be about collecting student data. So if you were dreaming of universal Smartboards and document cameras, you're out of luck.
We should be focusing on mastery of skills, not time in seats (drink!) Students progress needs to hinge on actual demonstrated learning, and parents also need that kind of clear, specific report of student progress (because they have no clue otherwise?) with the kind of great information "than what comes from today’s simplistic bubble tests."
Hey! Here's an idea. We could have each student work with an education professional. That professional could use a whole array of formal and informal assessments to determine the student's progress, skills, and knowledge. Then the education professionals could send home periodic reports to the parents, make the reports available on line to parents, and also be available for occasional conferences with the parents about their child's progress. How does that sound, Arne? Would that work as an alternative to simplistic untested unvalidated bizarrely bad bubble tests (like, say, the PARCC)? Let's all take a big drink.
But don't drain your glass yet. Here's another thing that Arne actually said: "And where schools are spending too much time prepping for tests, they should cut back there as well." Drrrrrink! Because test prep wouldn't be related, would it, to a series of punitive and high stakes threats attached to test results, all favored, supported and promoted by the US DOE. "Too many mugging victims are handing over their money to threatening men with guns. Where that is happening, people should cut back on giving money to muggers."
Great teaching, that’s what leads to real learning and strong results in assessments – not time spent on test prep.
Arne said that too. Never mind taking another drink. Just hit yourself in the head with a brick, in honor of the miracle that Arne can actually say such baloney with a straight face.
Support and evaluation for teachers should take into account student growth and gain – as one part of a mix of measures including things like observations, surveys or portfolios of student work.
Drink. Arne somehow forgets that we don't have any sort of accurate way to measure student growth and gain. All we have are various forms of VAM, which we know does NOT actually measure much of anything except the gullibility of bureaucrats.
Better information means more thoughtful, targeted, and effective support—and nobody gains when school systems treat all teachers as indistinguishable.
That quote comes straight from the StudentsFirst/TNTP playbook. I guess treating teachers as indistinguishable does not include requiring them all to teach to the same standards. Drink.
Time for Some [Common Core] Smoke Blowing
I put Common Core in brackets because throughout this whole next section of his speech, which is totally about Common Core, Arne will never actually say the name once. He will just refer to them as "higher standards." And he will say a bunch of things about them that are not technically true.
-- these standards are beloved by teachers, who finally are freed up to teach critical thinking, a skill previously banned from all classrooms
-- these standards were totally created by a coalition of " state leaders, parents, principals, policymakers, and education experts from across the country."
-- the standards were chosen by the states (which is technically true, in the same way that you will probably choose to give your money to the mugger who points a gun at you).
Also, this:
Third, higher standards of learning give parents more information about how well their neighborhood schools are performing.
No. No, they don't. A standard doesn't tell you anything more than a ruler that is in a desk drawer. You have to know how to use the ruler, when to use the ruler, how to read the ruler, and how to report what you think you've found out.
The standards do not tell parents shit. A reporting system based on the standards might-- if the system was based on something that collected valid, accurate data. And THAT data would only be useful is the standards were any good to begin with. If you have a mislabeled ruler that you hold cattywonkus to the edge you're measuring, you get information that is meaningless.
Argument by Anecdote
Having established that the strength of the new school system is that everything is reported through clear, reliable, scaled data, Arne will now prove that the system is working by offering data-- ha! Of course not. He will now tell some stories and include no data in his proof at all. Drink twice.
College Affordability
College has become really expensive. Arne and the President would like to fix that, so as of now, the US DOE will stop making gazillions of dollars of profits on student loans and cut rates accordingly. No, sorry, that's not it at all. Umm... they will be throwing their support behind Elizabeth Warren's proposal to slash costs for student loans. No, also not it. They are going to cap loan payment amounts for college grads at 10% of their monthly income.
Remember that lesson in consumer math about paying off your credit card? You know-- the one where they explained that if you only made the minimum payment on your credit card, you would end up paying 12,722% of the original loan? The loan repayment cap does keep some students from going under and declaring bankruptcy at age 23. It also means that the students' costs will be even greater over time. The US DOE is actually making college loans more expensive as a way of guaranteeing that the loaning agencies will not get defaulted on.
So, no. This did NOT make college more affordable. It made it more expensive. It just made it more likely that the folks who make college loans will get their money back, with enough interest to send their own children to private school, twice. Take a drink. With extra interest.
Arne acknowledges that many factors contributed to high college costs, including state budget cuts. He also notes, and I am truly quoting here, "Universities jacked their tuition up."
More Flag Waving
Arne notes that the feds must strive to be great partners and acknowledges "what matters most will never, never be ideas that come from Washington." Which is true in the sense that most of these ideas are just passing through DC on a journey from the private board room to the public trough. So, maybe half a drink.
Arne is coming around the home stretch. He has more touching anecdotes-- well, images, actually. He has exactly one data point-- the graduation rate. Dropout rates are down by some measure. Arne says college enrollment is at "record levels" and given the current demographic dip and the way that my own local colleges are scrambling desperately to fill seats and save programs, I'm suspecting there's plenty of smoke puffed into that claim. And NAEP scores for younger students (you know-- the ones who have spent the least amount of time under this regime) are up-ish. Not that we know why. Nor do we know why high school scores are NOT up. Nor can we really, truly explain why the NAEP scores particularly matter. But I digress.
This is important work. If it seems speedy, that's because it is, because we just have to change everything right away. And PTA folks, we need your help. Support good teachers (aka the ones doing as they're told). Support changes in schools. And, I don't know. I just hear a dull buzzing in my brain. It's a Grand Canyon of baloney. And I never should have turned it into a drinking game.
Monday, June 23, 2014
Feds Bail Out For-Profit College Chain
Yup. According to a Monday, June 23 press release from the USDOE, the DOE has signed an agreement with Corinthian Colleges, Inc, to keep the large for-profit college chain open long enough to finish the year, or so.
Corinthian has a somewhat checkered past. Okay, checkered might be generous. They have grown prodigiously since being founded in 1995, acquiring around twenty other post-secondary institutions from Duff's Business School to the American Motorcycle Institute. They operate the Everest College chain, plus a few others. They've been called "the nation's worst private college chain" and have been sued more times than anybody seems to be able to count. The State of California in particular seems to be intent on driving them out of business, charging them with the usual predatory practices of marketing to poverty-level folks with promises of careers that never appear. This would also be the chain who got caught (by Huffington Post, of all people) hiring their own grads to keep their grad-employment numbers up.
They are, in short, exactly the kind of for-profit college that the feds said they were going to shut down.
Not that this has scared away investors. Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Royce, New York Mellon, and Morgan-Chase have all bought a piece of this action.
Today, this announcement:
The U.S. Department of Education is working with Corinthian Colleges Inc. on a plan to avoid an immediate closure of the career training program chain and prevent suddenly disrupting the education of 72,000 students and the jobs of 12,000 employees.
So if nothing else, we now know what "too big to fail" looks like in the for-profit college world.
What's the deal? Corinthian will work at selling and teach-out its programs; a DOE picked monitor will oversee the sales and operation. Corinthian is allowed to enroll new students, but must give refunds to anyone who doesn't qualify for federal aid. In return, the feds will release $16 million in student aid for the students currently enrolled (Corinthian is required to document student enrollment, which seems cool, because these guys don't have a history of acting like crooks or anything.)
“Students and their interests have been at the heart of every decision the Department has made regarding Corinthian,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell. “We will continue to closely monitor the teach-out or sale of Corinthian’s campuses to ensure that students are able to finish their education without interruption and that employees experience minimal disruption to their lives. The Department is committed to ensuring all students receive a quality education that leads to a well-paying job and a strong future.”
Yes, that Ted Mitchell. The Pearson and privatization guy who know works at the Department of Education.
The Department will put Corinthian under "heightened financial monitoring," and another part of the deal is that Corinthian must stop stonewalling the department regarding records related to the employment lying that HuffPost reported on back in January.
So, on the one hand, 72,000 students who were getting ripped off by these shysters get to receive the rest of... well, whatever it is they were getting. On the other hand, the administration is kind of doing exactly the opposite of what they pledged a few months ago when they said they would shut down programs that were found to be doing, well, pretty much everything that Corinthian has been caught and accused of doing.
Maybe it's a learning curve. Nobody really knows how to use federal powers to shut down a for-profit college, and as we've now noticed, there's an awful lot of collateral damage when a school crashes. Bringing them to ground may turn out to be a long, slow process. But really-- is the best thing to do to let these students, who are likely spending money for sitters, for transportation, for lost work hours, for the sheer challenge of going to classes while living life near the poverty line-- is the best thing for these folks to prolong the bilkery?
At least they're not announcing a plan to keep Corinthian in business forever. But do we say to victims of snake oil salesmen, "Look, this stuff is just a waste of money, but go ahead and keep taking it until we can work something out."
I want to believe that the best interests of the students are being cared for here, but I can't help noticing that the press release doesn't mention Corinthian's general misbehavior or the financuial shenanigans that got it into this mess, or the umpteen court cases brought against it over the last decade, or any reaffirmation of the administration's commitment to protecting Americans from Fraud Colleges.
So maybe we're helping out the 72,000 students. Or maybe we're more concerned about bailing other folks out. I guess time will tell. But this is definitely a story to watch.
Corinthian has a somewhat checkered past. Okay, checkered might be generous. They have grown prodigiously since being founded in 1995, acquiring around twenty other post-secondary institutions from Duff's Business School to the American Motorcycle Institute. They operate the Everest College chain, plus a few others. They've been called "the nation's worst private college chain" and have been sued more times than anybody seems to be able to count. The State of California in particular seems to be intent on driving them out of business, charging them with the usual predatory practices of marketing to poverty-level folks with promises of careers that never appear. This would also be the chain who got caught (by Huffington Post, of all people) hiring their own grads to keep their grad-employment numbers up.
They are, in short, exactly the kind of for-profit college that the feds said they were going to shut down.
Not that this has scared away investors. Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Royce, New York Mellon, and Morgan-Chase have all bought a piece of this action.
Today, this announcement:
The U.S. Department of Education is working with Corinthian Colleges Inc. on a plan to avoid an immediate closure of the career training program chain and prevent suddenly disrupting the education of 72,000 students and the jobs of 12,000 employees.
So if nothing else, we now know what "too big to fail" looks like in the for-profit college world.
What's the deal? Corinthian will work at selling and teach-out its programs; a DOE picked monitor will oversee the sales and operation. Corinthian is allowed to enroll new students, but must give refunds to anyone who doesn't qualify for federal aid. In return, the feds will release $16 million in student aid for the students currently enrolled (Corinthian is required to document student enrollment, which seems cool, because these guys don't have a history of acting like crooks or anything.)
“Students and their interests have been at the heart of every decision the Department has made regarding Corinthian,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell. “We will continue to closely monitor the teach-out or sale of Corinthian’s campuses to ensure that students are able to finish their education without interruption and that employees experience minimal disruption to their lives. The Department is committed to ensuring all students receive a quality education that leads to a well-paying job and a strong future.”
Yes, that Ted Mitchell. The Pearson and privatization guy who know works at the Department of Education.
The Department will put Corinthian under "heightened financial monitoring," and another part of the deal is that Corinthian must stop stonewalling the department regarding records related to the employment lying that HuffPost reported on back in January.
So, on the one hand, 72,000 students who were getting ripped off by these shysters get to receive the rest of... well, whatever it is they were getting. On the other hand, the administration is kind of doing exactly the opposite of what they pledged a few months ago when they said they would shut down programs that were found to be doing, well, pretty much everything that Corinthian has been caught and accused of doing.
Maybe it's a learning curve. Nobody really knows how to use federal powers to shut down a for-profit college, and as we've now noticed, there's an awful lot of collateral damage when a school crashes. Bringing them to ground may turn out to be a long, slow process. But really-- is the best thing to do to let these students, who are likely spending money for sitters, for transportation, for lost work hours, for the sheer challenge of going to classes while living life near the poverty line-- is the best thing for these folks to prolong the bilkery?
At least they're not announcing a plan to keep Corinthian in business forever. But do we say to victims of snake oil salesmen, "Look, this stuff is just a waste of money, but go ahead and keep taking it until we can work something out."
I want to believe that the best interests of the students are being cared for here, but I can't help noticing that the press release doesn't mention Corinthian's general misbehavior or the financuial shenanigans that got it into this mess, or the umpteen court cases brought against it over the last decade, or any reaffirmation of the administration's commitment to protecting Americans from Fraud Colleges.
So maybe we're helping out the 72,000 students. Or maybe we're more concerned about bailing other folks out. I guess time will tell. But this is definitely a story to watch.
Learning Made Visible
"Thank you for putting into words what I felt, but couldn't say."
I've been writing for a long time, though it took the current education situation to make me really prolific (311 posts so far in 2014). But if I had a nickle for every time I've heard the above sentiment, I'd be writing on really fancy, expensive equipment. If I have any writing gifts, one of them seems to be finding a way to articulate an idea or feeling that helps crystallize or clarify it for some readers. They read what I've written and say, "Yes, that's it. That's what I mean." They get a clear picture of the idea. But let me ask a question about that.
Before they read my words, before they were able to borrow my words and use them, did they have any grasp of that idea at all?
I know the teacher shorthand, the saying, "If you can't explain it, then you don't really understand it." But "explain it" is a pretty barn-side-sized target to hit. If I sing a love song that someone else has written to my wife, does that mean I don't really love her? If I forward a blog post instead of writing one myself, does that mean I don't really understand the content of it?
I ask because the Common Core, like all standards-based and outcome-based educational approaches, is founded on, as one pro-Core blogger put it, "the basis of establishing definable, observable, and measurable outcomes." It is one of the reformsters favorite ideas-- if you can't measure it, it doesn't matter.
Think of it as the corollary of that famous quote from CCSS architect David Coleman-- "Nobody gives a shit what you think or feel." In other words, people only give a shit about what you do.
When we fully shift to an outcomes-based view of education, however, we create a whole raft of problems for ourselves.
Now the goal is not to understand calculus or Great Expectations; the goal is to act as if you understand calculus or Great Expectations.
This is always A goal, and a teacher's challenge is always to design tasks that can be best completed by someone who actually understands the material. Standardized materials generally suck for this. The task designer needs a good knowledge of exactly was and wasn't covered in class, and when it's time to assess, a knowledge of the student who performed the task.
Let's say, for instance, that the task is to provide a speech about Pip's development. A student stands up and gives a halting, awkward speech. Is it halting and awkward because the student doesn't know what he's talking about, or does that actually represent the best speech he's ever managed to get through? Only someone who knows him will be able to tell.
Now, someone is going to pop up now and say, "No, no. Making allowances for your knowledge of the individual is wrong. There has to be an absolute scale against which all speeches are judged. If a student delivers an F speech because he's awkward and a bad speaker, it's still an F speech." And that is true in a system in which we're focused only on the performance task, if we aren't trying to assess how well he understands Pip, but just how well he can act like he understands Pip.
We add more to the challenge when we define "understanding" as "understanding as I do." This is not just an educational problem-- it's a real world problem. Look no further than our own educational debates and consider how many people are convinced that their opponents must be either stupid or deliberate liars, because anyone who really understood the situation would understand it the same way I do. Under CCSS, this has turned into the bizarro world of New Again Math, where we are requiring students to act like they understand math in a particular way, or it doesn't count.
These problems of performance tasks are always with us, but if we accept an outcomes-based view of education, performance tasks are transformed from a tool for measuring our success (student understanding) but the entire purpose of school.
If our goal is to train students to complete standardized performance tasks, our work is simple. Throw an assignment on their desk, collect it, and teach them to act like they understand.
But if our goal is for them to understand, our job is much harder. If we are, in fact, going to give a shit what they think, they we are going to have to find a way to unpack that understanding and rally search their performance of tasks for signs that they get it. We are, in fact, going to have to model critical thinking as we give their work a true close reading. Because not everybody can get their understanding unpacked and displayed by writing a blog or giving a speech or interpretive dance.
Put another way-- if you can't measure it, that might not mean it doesn't matter. It might just mean your measuring is faulty.
I've been writing for a long time, though it took the current education situation to make me really prolific (311 posts so far in 2014). But if I had a nickle for every time I've heard the above sentiment, I'd be writing on really fancy, expensive equipment. If I have any writing gifts, one of them seems to be finding a way to articulate an idea or feeling that helps crystallize or clarify it for some readers. They read what I've written and say, "Yes, that's it. That's what I mean." They get a clear picture of the idea. But let me ask a question about that.
Before they read my words, before they were able to borrow my words and use them, did they have any grasp of that idea at all?
I know the teacher shorthand, the saying, "If you can't explain it, then you don't really understand it." But "explain it" is a pretty barn-side-sized target to hit. If I sing a love song that someone else has written to my wife, does that mean I don't really love her? If I forward a blog post instead of writing one myself, does that mean I don't really understand the content of it?
I ask because the Common Core, like all standards-based and outcome-based educational approaches, is founded on, as one pro-Core blogger put it, "the basis of establishing definable, observable, and measurable outcomes." It is one of the reformsters favorite ideas-- if you can't measure it, it doesn't matter.
Think of it as the corollary of that famous quote from CCSS architect David Coleman-- "Nobody gives a shit what you think or feel." In other words, people only give a shit about what you do.
When we fully shift to an outcomes-based view of education, however, we create a whole raft of problems for ourselves.
Now the goal is not to understand calculus or Great Expectations; the goal is to act as if you understand calculus or Great Expectations.
This is always A goal, and a teacher's challenge is always to design tasks that can be best completed by someone who actually understands the material. Standardized materials generally suck for this. The task designer needs a good knowledge of exactly was and wasn't covered in class, and when it's time to assess, a knowledge of the student who performed the task.
Let's say, for instance, that the task is to provide a speech about Pip's development. A student stands up and gives a halting, awkward speech. Is it halting and awkward because the student doesn't know what he's talking about, or does that actually represent the best speech he's ever managed to get through? Only someone who knows him will be able to tell.
Now, someone is going to pop up now and say, "No, no. Making allowances for your knowledge of the individual is wrong. There has to be an absolute scale against which all speeches are judged. If a student delivers an F speech because he's awkward and a bad speaker, it's still an F speech." And that is true in a system in which we're focused only on the performance task, if we aren't trying to assess how well he understands Pip, but just how well he can act like he understands Pip.
We add more to the challenge when we define "understanding" as "understanding as I do." This is not just an educational problem-- it's a real world problem. Look no further than our own educational debates and consider how many people are convinced that their opponents must be either stupid or deliberate liars, because anyone who really understood the situation would understand it the same way I do. Under CCSS, this has turned into the bizarro world of New Again Math, where we are requiring students to act like they understand math in a particular way, or it doesn't count.
These problems of performance tasks are always with us, but if we accept an outcomes-based view of education, performance tasks are transformed from a tool for measuring our success (student understanding) but the entire purpose of school.
If our goal is to train students to complete standardized performance tasks, our work is simple. Throw an assignment on their desk, collect it, and teach them to act like they understand.
But if our goal is for them to understand, our job is much harder. If we are, in fact, going to give a shit what they think, they we are going to have to find a way to unpack that understanding and rally search their performance of tasks for signs that they get it. We are, in fact, going to have to model critical thinking as we give their work a true close reading. Because not everybody can get their understanding unpacked and displayed by writing a blog or giving a speech or interpretive dance.
Put another way-- if you can't measure it, that might not mean it doesn't matter. It might just mean your measuring is faulty.
Behaving As Expected
"You just didn't react the way you were supposed to."
This is another thread that runs through support of the CCSS complex. There's nothing wrong with the policy or program; people just didn't react the way they were supposed to.
For instance, Anne Hyslop over at Real Clear Education, called concern over test-and-punish a "state of mind, not state of reality." Policy is not responsible for the death of support-and-improve, she says. Her argument is two-fold.
First, there are some accountability policies out there, but they don't really kick in for a couple of years, so what's the big deal. Also, when your spouse has filed for divorce, but the divorce isn't actually final yet, your whole family should be able to have a perfectly fine Thanksgiving dinner together.
Here's a fairly predictable set of school system behaviors (at least, fairly predictable for anyone who works in a school system). If you tell schools that everybody on their staff will have to clear a five-foot hurdle in three years, they will start making staff jump this afternoon.
Which brings us to Hyslop's second point. "What is incompatible with the support-and-improve mindset is the choices of some elected officials, school administrators, and educators." The policy is great. It's fine. It's just that all the human beings who are involved in implementing it are doing it wrong.
This refusal to behave as expected is frequently frustrating to reformsters, particularly systems fans. They set up this really cool system and, in their heads, people are going to respond to the system in a particular way. And then those damn actual real live human beings insist on NOT doing what they are supposed to.
I believe there are reformsters who really, truly think that the new generation of standardized tests will end test prep, and the students and teachers will respond to these new tests by plunging into rich curriculum materials and getting their critical thinking on. But by allowing high stakes (from third grade promotion to keeping a school open) to be attached to the tests, they have absolutely guaranteed that schools will give renewed focus and devotion to test prep.
The irony here is that teachers understand this problem all too well. There's not a teacher alive who doesn't remember planning a lesson on the assumption that students would react in a particular way and realizing (sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with horror) that they aren't going to react that way at all ("When I did my marshmallow gun unit, I was sure they'd be fascinated by shooting at my wacky targets and not each other's heads"). And what do all good teachers learn from that experience?
When you fail to anticipate how live human beings are going to react to your program, that is a failure of you and your program, not of those human beings.
Why do policy makers and big thinkers keep making this sort of mistake? Too little interaction with live human beings. Too little personal field testing of their ideas. Way way wayyyyyy too insulated in situations where other humans behave as expected because they are the boss (is there anything sadder than the former business exec-turned-guest teacher who thinks that since all his employees hang on his every word, so will a room full of fifteen year olds?)
But make this mistake they do. This is not how people were supposed to react to the standards. This is not how states are supposed to implement the testing. This is not how teachers are supposed to react to the evaluation systems. Reformsters can take heart in that this is not just an education policy problem ("US troops will be greeted as liberators").
But if your defense of your program is that people aren't reacting to it correctly, your program is indefensible. That great teacher of physics, Julius Sumner Miller, used to always say, "We must not say the experiment has failed. Rather, we have failed to meet the requirements of nature." If your policy and programs are great in every way-- except when being implemented by actual human beings-- your policy and programs have failed to meet the requirements of nature. They are no good, and they belong on the ash heap of history with communism and free love.
When people fail to behave as expected, the problem is not with their behavior. It's with your expectations.
This is another thread that runs through support of the CCSS complex. There's nothing wrong with the policy or program; people just didn't react the way they were supposed to.
For instance, Anne Hyslop over at Real Clear Education, called concern over test-and-punish a "state of mind, not state of reality." Policy is not responsible for the death of support-and-improve, she says. Her argument is two-fold.
First, there are some accountability policies out there, but they don't really kick in for a couple of years, so what's the big deal. Also, when your spouse has filed for divorce, but the divorce isn't actually final yet, your whole family should be able to have a perfectly fine Thanksgiving dinner together.
Here's a fairly predictable set of school system behaviors (at least, fairly predictable for anyone who works in a school system). If you tell schools that everybody on their staff will have to clear a five-foot hurdle in three years, they will start making staff jump this afternoon.
Which brings us to Hyslop's second point. "What is incompatible with the support-and-improve mindset is the choices of some elected officials, school administrators, and educators." The policy is great. It's fine. It's just that all the human beings who are involved in implementing it are doing it wrong.
This refusal to behave as expected is frequently frustrating to reformsters, particularly systems fans. They set up this really cool system and, in their heads, people are going to respond to the system in a particular way. And then those damn actual real live human beings insist on NOT doing what they are supposed to.
I believe there are reformsters who really, truly think that the new generation of standardized tests will end test prep, and the students and teachers will respond to these new tests by plunging into rich curriculum materials and getting their critical thinking on. But by allowing high stakes (from third grade promotion to keeping a school open) to be attached to the tests, they have absolutely guaranteed that schools will give renewed focus and devotion to test prep.
The irony here is that teachers understand this problem all too well. There's not a teacher alive who doesn't remember planning a lesson on the assumption that students would react in a particular way and realizing (sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with horror) that they aren't going to react that way at all ("When I did my marshmallow gun unit, I was sure they'd be fascinated by shooting at my wacky targets and not each other's heads"). And what do all good teachers learn from that experience?
When you fail to anticipate how live human beings are going to react to your program, that is a failure of you and your program, not of those human beings.
Why do policy makers and big thinkers keep making this sort of mistake? Too little interaction with live human beings. Too little personal field testing of their ideas. Way way wayyyyyy too insulated in situations where other humans behave as expected because they are the boss (is there anything sadder than the former business exec-turned-guest teacher who thinks that since all his employees hang on his every word, so will a room full of fifteen year olds?)
But make this mistake they do. This is not how people were supposed to react to the standards. This is not how states are supposed to implement the testing. This is not how teachers are supposed to react to the evaluation systems. Reformsters can take heart in that this is not just an education policy problem ("US troops will be greeted as liberators").
But if your defense of your program is that people aren't reacting to it correctly, your program is indefensible. That great teacher of physics, Julius Sumner Miller, used to always say, "We must not say the experiment has failed. Rather, we have failed to meet the requirements of nature." If your policy and programs are great in every way-- except when being implemented by actual human beings-- your policy and programs have failed to meet the requirements of nature. They are no good, and they belong on the ash heap of history with communism and free love.
When people fail to behave as expected, the problem is not with their behavior. It's with your expectations.
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