This will be post #400 on the blog, and I thought I'd use it to direct your attention to some other blogs. This is by no means an exhaustive and comprehensive list-- there are tons of people blogging about education these days, and I keep discovering new (to me) voices. I've put off writing this kind of post because I don't want to short-change someone, but I'm going to go ahead anyway, because better imperfectly than never on this.
@ the Chalk Face
One of several collective blogs, gathering together many of the major writers in the blogosphere, including Mercedes Schneider, Kris Nielsen, Shaun Johnson and Tim Slekar. Comes with a radio show on Blog Talk Radio
Network for Public Education News Briefs
Another anthology blog, with pieces from many members of the Network for Public Education.
Public School Shakedown
A blog from the Progressive that presents a fine roster of many great bloggers, collected with a progressive bent.
Jersey Jazzman
One of many regional bloggers who make it worth your while to read about places that you don't actually live. He's good with sass and sharp language, but the Jazzman is also a very capable cruncher of numbers and stalker of stats. And New Jersey is ground zero for many reformster initiatives, so it's worth your while to pay attention.
Crazy Crawfish's Blog
New Orleans is another petri dish in which strange and important things have been left to grow. This blog covers it with style.
Perdido Street Station
This blog covers all things New York. You'll notice that I have a soft spot for writers who bring a sharp edge and wit to their writing. Bonus points for the obscure-ish SF reference in the title.
Yinzercation
Pittsburgh based, but covering Pennsylvania, this blogger-activist has scored some major victories over the past few years.
Common Core
Out in Utah, three conservative moms got together to stand up against CCSS. These ladies have done their homework, and they are often a great source of facts.
Wait What?
Jonathan Pelto has kept the heat turned up in Connecticut, to the point that he is now running for governor against an incumbent not-very-education-friendly Democratic governor.
School Finance 101
With as many economists and business types are lined up against public education, it's nice to have someone who can count those beans honestly and clearly enough that laypeople can get it working on the side of the angels.
Teacher Under Construction
John Kuhn called Steph Rivera "a force of nature." Follow this young woman who has a powerful record as an activist and an impossible-to-ignore voice as a writer.
Wag the Dog
Freewheeling far-ranging discussion of many of the issues of the day in education.
VAM-boozled
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley brings a clear understanding of the data and fuzzy math behind the murkiest subject of the day-- VAM. She makes it easy to understand what the heck is going on, and why it should stop.
Russ on Reading
Russ Walsh came to blog about reading and reading instruction; he stayed to try to figure out what the heck is happening in our schools today. Often wry and witty, this teaching veteran belongs on your blogroll.
Edushyster
Edushyster brings legitimate journalist chops to her work, but she is also one of the funniest writers in the blogosphere. Real substance in a sweet candy coating.
The Becoming Radical
Reading Paul Thomas just makes me feel smarter. Well-read, deep-thinking, Thomas manages to connect the clear specifics of the education world to the Big Ideas underlying them. And he knows his comics, too, so bonus.
Susan Ohanian
Navigating Ohanian's blog can be daunting, but that's because she's been on line forever. Ohanian was sounding the alarm on the modern school reform movement while many of us were still snoozing. Hers is a voice that deserves attention.
Peg with Pen
She does not post often, but when she does, you want to pay attention.
Cloaking Inequity
Julian Vasquez Heilig is one of the most powerful important voices out there right now. The man appears to need neither sleep nor rest, and he has forced many people to take another look at what's happening to equity and equality in education.
Gatsby in L.A.
An unusual blog in that it's just about finished. Ellie Herman was a screenwriter/producer who dropped out of the biz to get into a classroom. Her adventure started last August, and you can read through her whole year. Smart and sensitive.
Honest Practicum
Erin Osborne working to find her way through the reformy morass, with a real gift for graphics.
Living in Dialogue
Anthony Cody is a founding member of the Network for Public Education and a great voice for the resistance. His EdWeek blog examines many of the important topics of the day.
Mercedes Schneider's Edublog
If you read here often, you already know I'm a fan. Indispensable research hound, this woman has ferreted out more raw information about what's really going on behind the curtain than any other single writer.
The Answer Key
At the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss is one of the best mainstream writers about education out there, and she features plenty of top-notch guest talent.
Diane Ravitch's Blog
If you read me, you undoubtedly read Ravitch, but just in case, know that in the edublogoverse, all roads lead to her. An insanely prolific poster, she provides a daily digest of what's being written, what news is breaking, and what we all need to know.
There are many, many, many, many more. Hunt through the links on the right side of the screen. I encourage you to read, follow links, and pass on what you like. You can help voices be heard by posting, tweeting and sharing the words that are powerful for you.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
John King's Story
Listening to people tell their story often gives us a clue what they are thinking about, how they do the connecting of certain dots. That was my reaction to watching this video from a Manhattan Institute appearance by John King. Sometimes people who are sincere about wanting to fix education in this country (I do not assume all reformsters are cynical profiteering greedhounds) make connections between things that simply don't make sense. But by looking at their stories, sometimes we can see what The Dream is for education.
The whole business is introed by Charles Sahm, a deputy director at the Institute with whom I've had some entirely pleasant email correspondence, and his intro contains one notable nugget-- apparently the Manhattan Institute is planning to release rankings of every school in the country next year. Swell.
Norman Atkins Leads Off
But next up, to introduce John King, is Norman Atkins of the Relay Graduate School of Education and Uncommon Schools. Between his intro and the beginning of John King's speech, we get a full version of the John King Story.
Atkins opens by observing that "teacher training" is now a "politically incorrect" phrase. "So we have to be careful with our language." He's just saying, I guess.
Atkins sets up an analogy by referring to the group that launched Uncommon Schools as a dream team, and John King was Michael Jordan. But he's going to tell a story.
Labor Day, 1999. John King (who would have been about 24) and Evan Ruttle (sp?) were getting ready to open Roxberry Prep, one of the country's most swell charter schools. John had worked for two or three years (my sources say two) at City on the Hill Charter School. So it's been a long day, but late in the day, they noticed that the student name stickers on the lockers were "put up in a really sloppy fashion." King declared that unacceptable, so in the wee hours, they were fixing the stickers on the lockers. And while they were doing that, King was describing the vision for teaching each of the core subjects at Roxberry, based on all the work they had done preparing the school. In Atkins telling, this involved scouring the international standards and national standards "such as they were" and Massachusetts standards. King had figured out the arc of lessons and units and "was narrating this with tremendous energy and detail." And at that moment, Roxberry Prep was born.
So here's one piece of The Dream-- a school that is squeaky-perfect, completely planned and controlled by the people who run it. Also note-- given all the illustrative stories Atkins could pick to show how King injected greatness into Roxberry, he picks a story without any teachers or students in it.
Classroom Is Key
Atkins quotes Sol Stern to Sol Stern, saying "the primal scene of all education reform is in the classsroom." One of the reasons we're in so much trouble in American education, says Atkins, is many of the people in charge of education haven't spent time in the classroom." But we are blessed in New York to have a leader "who knows instruction and what goes on in the classroom better than anybody."
Someday I'll have a chance to send out a reformster questionnaire, and one of the questions I'll ask is "How do you think people best acquire knowledge of how to do classroom instruction?" Because on the one hand reformsters think teachers (particularly experienced ones) have no knowledge worth consulting. On the other hand, John King, who taught in a public classroom a grand total ONE year, and only two more in a charter classroom, somehow knows more about classroom instruction than God.
Atkins says that one of the reasons that King is beloved is that he would plan down to every small detail the instruction for the entire year in his school and our schools. He would do this with high standards, and plan the entire year in detail for the students to achieve that.
Well, one can certainly see how that might lead to an education commissioner who likes the idea of canned online day-by-day lessons on engageNY. But what reason do we have to believe that this is good teaching? Certainly I should not walk into the classroom and pull today's lesson out of my butt, but if know exactly what I'm doing on the 150th day of school before I have even met my students on the first, I am NOT a great teacher. I am a content delivery specialist, and my students are little cogs who are supposed to mold themselves to fit my program. I have already built my square hole; all you pegs had better shape up, no matter what shape you started out as.
Educational Rock Star
Also, according to Atkins, King was out and about in his schools a great deal, popping into every classroom on a daily basis, "managing instruction." He continues to do this as commissioner. He isn't just watching teachers, but his eye is on the students, seeing what they're learning and if they're learning. He's asking would this class be good enough for my kids. He is also a master at giving feedback; his visits are not evaluative with your career on the line, but a way to get better. Imagine having someone "so brilliant" come into your room and give you "incredible" feedback.
This is another part of The Dream. A necessary ingredient for excellent schools is rock star leaders, educational geniuses who can lead all the lesser beings. Reformsters like to talk about teams, but what they invariably describe is a benevolent monarchy. A brilliant creates and directs a vision, and the rest of the plebes fall in line and implement it.
I expect this is why King has spent his whole career gravitating to charters-- because in a charter, the ability to control everything, every detail, every teacher, every student, is so much greater. You can teach exactly the kind of students you want with exactly the teachers you want teaching exactly as you want.
Boosting Common Core
John asks questions, and the core question is "Is this good enough?" Always positive, but never satisfied. And always told the truth. Being the "captain" for education is hard, but we need a truth teller because we are lying to ourselves. 80% think other people's schools are failing, but our own schools are great. "There's something not right about that." By plugging CCSS, King is exposing that what we're doing isn't good enough.
Why is that a good idea? Again, I'm no fan of building educational camels in committee, but what if there aren't enough geniuses to go around? What if the genius isn't right all of the time? What if somebody passes themselves off as a genius but is actually a gigantic tool? And doesn't this tend to result in schools that are organized around the genius and not the students?
Atkins now attaches King to the tradition of Horace Mann. Mann wanted common schools for everyone; King wants Common Core for everyone. Atkins defines Common Core as "highest possible standards for all our children." Atkins name-checks Steiner and Cerf who both suggested that John's intro include a reference to his courage. When other states are ducking away from CCSS, King has the courage to stay the course.
King Tells His Story
The Dream is always of high standards, and we continue to cling to the unexamined (by reformsters) assumption that CCSS represent high standards, not to mention the unexamined assumption that such a thing as a single set of standards that will fit our entire nation of children is even do-able, or could even bring about results. None of those assumptions have been proven correct. Repeatedly pushing them forward is not the same as proving them.
King leads off with his story. And make no mistake-- King's story is a hell of a story. Mother passed away when he was eight, leaving King with a father who was dying of Alazheimers, King credits public school teachers with saving him. And he doesn't do it in a vague, general way-- he routinely names the guy. Mr. Osterweil was challenging and exciting and King says that in his class, they had the Common Core before it was the Common Core. They studied Shakespeare. They would read the New York Times every day and summarize the articles, and King benefited forever after from the academic work and the discipline. They had a classroom that was stable, challenging, and nurturing.
It is a great story, even if usually skips over the part where he was thrown out of Phillips Andover ivy league prep school. And the fact that King equates Common Core with Mr. Osterweil's class shows yet another disconnect in the CCSS love-fest. Because, of course, Mr. Osterweil's class was like that because Mr. Osterweil was free to do what he judged best for his roomful of students.
What I wish King would ask himself is, what would happen to Mr. Osterweil today? How many of those lessons that King cherishes would be put aside for test prep. How much time would he have to spend teaching the required lessons from the state; would Principal King let Mr. Osterweil set his own program, or would King have the lessons all planned out in detail, first day through last, before Mr. Osterweil even came back from summer break? How stable and nurturing would the class be when Mr. Osterweil had to guide his charges through this week's punishing and demoralizing test. I'd bet that King is confident that Mr. Osterweil would be found highly effective on his modern evaluation, but I'm not so confident. If Mr. Osterweil had the wrong assortment of students, or was unable to use his most effective techniques because Principal King's program didn't allow for them, would it turn out that King's favorite life-saving teacher was rated ineffective?
Just how many more Mr. Osterweil's are out there, and what is Commissioner King doing to make sure that they be the best classroom teachers they can be?
The whole business is introed by Charles Sahm, a deputy director at the Institute with whom I've had some entirely pleasant email correspondence, and his intro contains one notable nugget-- apparently the Manhattan Institute is planning to release rankings of every school in the country next year. Swell.
Norman Atkins Leads Off
But next up, to introduce John King, is Norman Atkins of the Relay Graduate School of Education and Uncommon Schools. Between his intro and the beginning of John King's speech, we get a full version of the John King Story.
Atkins opens by observing that "teacher training" is now a "politically incorrect" phrase. "So we have to be careful with our language." He's just saying, I guess.
Atkins sets up an analogy by referring to the group that launched Uncommon Schools as a dream team, and John King was Michael Jordan. But he's going to tell a story.
Labor Day, 1999. John King (who would have been about 24) and Evan Ruttle (sp?) were getting ready to open Roxberry Prep, one of the country's most swell charter schools. John had worked for two or three years (my sources say two) at City on the Hill Charter School. So it's been a long day, but late in the day, they noticed that the student name stickers on the lockers were "put up in a really sloppy fashion." King declared that unacceptable, so in the wee hours, they were fixing the stickers on the lockers. And while they were doing that, King was describing the vision for teaching each of the core subjects at Roxberry, based on all the work they had done preparing the school. In Atkins telling, this involved scouring the international standards and national standards "such as they were" and Massachusetts standards. King had figured out the arc of lessons and units and "was narrating this with tremendous energy and detail." And at that moment, Roxberry Prep was born.
So here's one piece of The Dream-- a school that is squeaky-perfect, completely planned and controlled by the people who run it. Also note-- given all the illustrative stories Atkins could pick to show how King injected greatness into Roxberry, he picks a story without any teachers or students in it.
Classroom Is Key
Atkins quotes Sol Stern to Sol Stern, saying "the primal scene of all education reform is in the classsroom." One of the reasons we're in so much trouble in American education, says Atkins, is many of the people in charge of education haven't spent time in the classroom." But we are blessed in New York to have a leader "who knows instruction and what goes on in the classroom better than anybody."
Someday I'll have a chance to send out a reformster questionnaire, and one of the questions I'll ask is "How do you think people best acquire knowledge of how to do classroom instruction?" Because on the one hand reformsters think teachers (particularly experienced ones) have no knowledge worth consulting. On the other hand, John King, who taught in a public classroom a grand total ONE year, and only two more in a charter classroom, somehow knows more about classroom instruction than God.
Atkins says that one of the reasons that King is beloved is that he would plan down to every small detail the instruction for the entire year in his school and our schools. He would do this with high standards, and plan the entire year in detail for the students to achieve that.
Well, one can certainly see how that might lead to an education commissioner who likes the idea of canned online day-by-day lessons on engageNY. But what reason do we have to believe that this is good teaching? Certainly I should not walk into the classroom and pull today's lesson out of my butt, but if know exactly what I'm doing on the 150th day of school before I have even met my students on the first, I am NOT a great teacher. I am a content delivery specialist, and my students are little cogs who are supposed to mold themselves to fit my program. I have already built my square hole; all you pegs had better shape up, no matter what shape you started out as.
Educational Rock Star
Also, according to Atkins, King was out and about in his schools a great deal, popping into every classroom on a daily basis, "managing instruction." He continues to do this as commissioner. He isn't just watching teachers, but his eye is on the students, seeing what they're learning and if they're learning. He's asking would this class be good enough for my kids. He is also a master at giving feedback; his visits are not evaluative with your career on the line, but a way to get better. Imagine having someone "so brilliant" come into your room and give you "incredible" feedback.
This is another part of The Dream. A necessary ingredient for excellent schools is rock star leaders, educational geniuses who can lead all the lesser beings. Reformsters like to talk about teams, but what they invariably describe is a benevolent monarchy. A brilliant creates and directs a vision, and the rest of the plebes fall in line and implement it.
I expect this is why King has spent his whole career gravitating to charters-- because in a charter, the ability to control everything, every detail, every teacher, every student, is so much greater. You can teach exactly the kind of students you want with exactly the teachers you want teaching exactly as you want.
Boosting Common Core
John asks questions, and the core question is "Is this good enough?" Always positive, but never satisfied. And always told the truth. Being the "captain" for education is hard, but we need a truth teller because we are lying to ourselves. 80% think other people's schools are failing, but our own schools are great. "There's something not right about that." By plugging CCSS, King is exposing that what we're doing isn't good enough.
Why is that a good idea? Again, I'm no fan of building educational camels in committee, but what if there aren't enough geniuses to go around? What if the genius isn't right all of the time? What if somebody passes themselves off as a genius but is actually a gigantic tool? And doesn't this tend to result in schools that are organized around the genius and not the students?
Atkins now attaches King to the tradition of Horace Mann. Mann wanted common schools for everyone; King wants Common Core for everyone. Atkins defines Common Core as "highest possible standards for all our children." Atkins name-checks Steiner and Cerf who both suggested that John's intro include a reference to his courage. When other states are ducking away from CCSS, King has the courage to stay the course.
King Tells His Story
The Dream is always of high standards, and we continue to cling to the unexamined (by reformsters) assumption that CCSS represent high standards, not to mention the unexamined assumption that such a thing as a single set of standards that will fit our entire nation of children is even do-able, or could even bring about results. None of those assumptions have been proven correct. Repeatedly pushing them forward is not the same as proving them.
King leads off with his story. And make no mistake-- King's story is a hell of a story. Mother passed away when he was eight, leaving King with a father who was dying of Alazheimers, King credits public school teachers with saving him. And he doesn't do it in a vague, general way-- he routinely names the guy. Mr. Osterweil was challenging and exciting and King says that in his class, they had the Common Core before it was the Common Core. They studied Shakespeare. They would read the New York Times every day and summarize the articles, and King benefited forever after from the academic work and the discipline. They had a classroom that was stable, challenging, and nurturing.
It is a great story, even if usually skips over the part where he was thrown out of Phillips Andover ivy league prep school. And the fact that King equates Common Core with Mr. Osterweil's class shows yet another disconnect in the CCSS love-fest. Because, of course, Mr. Osterweil's class was like that because Mr. Osterweil was free to do what he judged best for his roomful of students.
What I wish King would ask himself is, what would happen to Mr. Osterweil today? How many of those lessons that King cherishes would be put aside for test prep. How much time would he have to spend teaching the required lessons from the state; would Principal King let Mr. Osterweil set his own program, or would King have the lessons all planned out in detail, first day through last, before Mr. Osterweil even came back from summer break? How stable and nurturing would the class be when Mr. Osterweil had to guide his charges through this week's punishing and demoralizing test. I'd bet that King is confident that Mr. Osterweil would be found highly effective on his modern evaluation, but I'm not so confident. If Mr. Osterweil had the wrong assortment of students, or was unable to use his most effective techniques because Principal King's program didn't allow for them, would it turn out that King's favorite life-saving teacher was rated ineffective?
Just how many more Mr. Osterweil's are out there, and what is Commissioner King doing to make sure that they be the best classroom teachers they can be?
Being White Guys
I'm going to write this companion piece to last night's post about race and gender and then I'm going to set this topic aside (until I don't).
Preamble and Disclaimer
Let me make two points before I start this exercise in gross generalization. These apply to the previous post as well.
1) I cannot possibly speak for everybody in any category and to every person's experience. If you want to point out to me that you know of experiences or persons who don't fit what I'm saying, all I have to say is, "Of course."
2) I am trying to describe how people see, hear or experience certain stuff. I am not trying to evaluate the correctness of those beliefs. In my experience, when you want to talk with someone, it's useful to understand how they see things, period.
Why Are White Guys So Bad At This Conversation
The "privilege" conversation degenerates rapidly every time it comes up in this culture. Why don't we white guys just admit we live in privilege and move the conversation forward?
Because most of us don't feel privileged.
Tell a working class guy who is pulling fifty-sixty hours a week because he wants to grapple with the frustration of not being able to give his children nice things, and who spends those fifty-sixty hours having is every move dictated by the many people who have power over him at work-- tell that guy about his white guy privilege, and he will think you're making a bad joke.
In a school setting, we may feel that we've got the same size classroom, work for the same people, teach the same material.
For some of us, it's not that we want to defend "privilege," or justify it, but that we literally cannot see what the heck you are talking about. And when someone starts talking about "privilege," we hear an accusation, a charge that we somehow cheated by being born white and male, which we feel is unfair because we worked hard to get where we are.
Suck It Up
When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Walk it off. Grab life by the balls. Make it happen. No excuses. The buck stops here.
If life is a mountain to climb, then women and minorities are told that there are certain paths for them to take, areas they are barred from, obstacles they cannot surmount. White guys are shown the mountain and told, "There is no excuse for you not to get to the top. If you don't climb the mountain, it's because you aren't strong enough, focused enough, good enough." For some men, that is exhilarating, and for some it is terrifying.
The flip side of the assumption that women are helpless is the assumption that men, real men, never are. I know more than a couple of strong, capable women who still believe that the procedure for solving problems is
1) Tell a man about it
2) Wait
In schools, this is the staff meeting where the women turn to the man for answers. It's the female teachers who want to get that guy from the union to come fix this problem.
To someone else, it may look as if a white guy lives without an extra set of invisible obstacles, but he may experience that as huge pressure, as a situation where his success or failure all rests on him, and meeting the challenge is a straight-up measure of his worth as a person. And we've raised to think that's how the world works (not how the world works just for white guys). So when other groups start explaining the kinds of cultural obstacles and differences they face, what white guys hear is a list of excuses.
Yes, the no excuses schools, along with much of the reformster movement, are straight out of the white guy world view.
Our Big Blind Spot
White guys overcome obstacles all the time. All the time. Things do not come easily for us, and the success that we experience comes, as near as we can tell, from the exertion of our strength and smarts and willpower and hard work and grit.
And we literally cannot imagine how it would not be possible for any human being to exert their own strength and smarts and willpower and hard work and grit. We do not see that any sort of privilege is involved in being able to use all those tools to create our success. We are kind of like the person who can't understand why clinically depressed people don't just cheer themselves up. Or the teacher who stands in front of a class saying, "Well, just understand it. You're not trying."
Not a Contest
My intent is not to say "Waa! White guys have it tough, too." It's never useful when these conversations devolve into Who Gets Pissed On More contests. But if we're going to have these conversations, we're going to have to stop talking past each other, and that gets easier if we understand where the other person is coming from.
That's particularly true as teachers. As both the teaching pool and the student population diversify, and as American culture itself spreads out into a gazillion subcultures, our ability to reach across those lines becomes critical to our success and the success of our students.
Preamble and Disclaimer
Let me make two points before I start this exercise in gross generalization. These apply to the previous post as well.
1) I cannot possibly speak for everybody in any category and to every person's experience. If you want to point out to me that you know of experiences or persons who don't fit what I'm saying, all I have to say is, "Of course."
2) I am trying to describe how people see, hear or experience certain stuff. I am not trying to evaluate the correctness of those beliefs. In my experience, when you want to talk with someone, it's useful to understand how they see things, period.
Why Are White Guys So Bad At This Conversation
The "privilege" conversation degenerates rapidly every time it comes up in this culture. Why don't we white guys just admit we live in privilege and move the conversation forward?
Because most of us don't feel privileged.
Tell a working class guy who is pulling fifty-sixty hours a week because he wants to grapple with the frustration of not being able to give his children nice things, and who spends those fifty-sixty hours having is every move dictated by the many people who have power over him at work-- tell that guy about his white guy privilege, and he will think you're making a bad joke.
In a school setting, we may feel that we've got the same size classroom, work for the same people, teach the same material.
For some of us, it's not that we want to defend "privilege," or justify it, but that we literally cannot see what the heck you are talking about. And when someone starts talking about "privilege," we hear an accusation, a charge that we somehow cheated by being born white and male, which we feel is unfair because we worked hard to get where we are.
Suck It Up
When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Walk it off. Grab life by the balls. Make it happen. No excuses. The buck stops here.
If life is a mountain to climb, then women and minorities are told that there are certain paths for them to take, areas they are barred from, obstacles they cannot surmount. White guys are shown the mountain and told, "There is no excuse for you not to get to the top. If you don't climb the mountain, it's because you aren't strong enough, focused enough, good enough." For some men, that is exhilarating, and for some it is terrifying.
The flip side of the assumption that women are helpless is the assumption that men, real men, never are. I know more than a couple of strong, capable women who still believe that the procedure for solving problems is
1) Tell a man about it
2) Wait
In schools, this is the staff meeting where the women turn to the man for answers. It's the female teachers who want to get that guy from the union to come fix this problem.
To someone else, it may look as if a white guy lives without an extra set of invisible obstacles, but he may experience that as huge pressure, as a situation where his success or failure all rests on him, and meeting the challenge is a straight-up measure of his worth as a person. And we've raised to think that's how the world works (not how the world works just for white guys). So when other groups start explaining the kinds of cultural obstacles and differences they face, what white guys hear is a list of excuses.
Yes, the no excuses schools, along with much of the reformster movement, are straight out of the white guy world view.
Our Big Blind Spot
White guys overcome obstacles all the time. All the time. Things do not come easily for us, and the success that we experience comes, as near as we can tell, from the exertion of our strength and smarts and willpower and hard work and grit.
And we literally cannot imagine how it would not be possible for any human being to exert their own strength and smarts and willpower and hard work and grit. We do not see that any sort of privilege is involved in being able to use all those tools to create our success. We are kind of like the person who can't understand why clinically depressed people don't just cheer themselves up. Or the teacher who stands in front of a class saying, "Well, just understand it. You're not trying."
Not a Contest
My intent is not to say "Waa! White guys have it tough, too." It's never useful when these conversations devolve into Who Gets Pissed On More contests. But if we're going to have these conversations, we're going to have to stop talking past each other, and that gets easier if we understand where the other person is coming from.
That's particularly true as teachers. As both the teaching pool and the student population diversify, and as American culture itself spreads out into a gazillion subcultures, our ability to reach across those lines becomes critical to our success and the success of our students.
Saturday, June 28, 2014
For White Guys
A few days back, I reported on a study that noted seven trends in the teacher workforce. Two of those trends noted were 1) the teacher workforce is getting more female and 2) the teacher workforce is getting less white. Whether it is synchronicity, or just heightened awareness, I've seen both of those topics flare up in various discussions about the interwebs.
While very aware of these topics, I have avoided addressing them because I am a white guy. And when it comes to issues of gender and race, I've always assumed two things.
1) There are things that I really don't get.
2) I have no idea what all the items under #1 are.
I am also painfully aware of the tendency that white guys have to turn discussions of gender in race into conversations about being a white guy.
But I am going to take some of my own advice and venture outside of my comfort zone. I will try not to presume to speak people of other races or genders about what they should know or do about being female or black or brown. Instead, I'm going to try to speak to my people-- white guys.
Gender
Guys, there are many things we don't get about being a woman. And I don't mean in a ha-ha women are so wacky with their crazy mysterious thinky parts. I mean like the degree to what it must be challenging to have to always associate intimacy and love with making yourself physically vulnerable to someone who is usually larger and stronger than you, and who, in the early stages of a relationship, you don't know if you can trust.
What do we guys do when we find ourselves in a situation where we're around people who can physically dominate us? We make nice. We even have a special pseudo-psychological term for little guys who insist on being aggressive instead of sensibly making nice (Napoleon complex). Women are in that situation pretty much all the time. Being nice isn't just the socially acceptable thing to do-- it's a survival skill.
At the same time, niceness is socially preferred in women. Society tells them constantly to play nice, be nice. If you are going to deal with women, particularly in a work situation, you need to check yourself. If you are going to ding a woman for being too nice and not sticking up for herself, you also cannot ding her for being uppity and pushy.
Keep that double ding in mind, because as I mentioned above, teaching is a mostly-female profession, and in some areas, that means we male teachers are being approached as if we are women-- play nice, don't talk out of turn. On top of that, we are going to find ourselves surrounded by lots of women who are not necessarily ready to step out of that mold and fight beside you. You can't fix that by yelling, "What the hell is the matter with you!" and you can't fix it by saying, "That's okay honey. You sit down and I'll take care of it."
If you're of my generation (high school class of '75), you grew up with some confusing and ultimately incomplete messages. You will also encounter young women who act like what we would have called feminists who insist they aren't feminists (as near as I can tell, the current definition of "feminist" is "woman who demands unreasonable things." women who advocate things like equal pay are just using common sense, and aren't feminists at all). But my experience is that if you treat them like individual human beings-- listen to them, hear what they want, help them see how to get it, offer advice when they want it and shut the hell up when they don't-- that all seems to work.
We guys are supposed to approach conflict like it's no big deal. Just whale the tar out of each other, then get a drink. Everybody's buds. No blood, no foul. But for women conflict is a more threatening thing. The good news is that that is mostly trained into them, not hardwired, and they can learn to leave it behind. Just not the same way we do. Be a coach, but not a mansplainer, and recognize when to step back and get out of the way.
And (and this is huge) if you are in a mostly-female building, recognize that you need to adjust to the culture of the building, and not insist that it get all manned up. In teaching, we are more likely to find ourselves in that position in the years ahead.
I've heard the complaints. How are little boys supposed to grow up when they are surrounded by women in school all day? Won't they get all infected with the womenny stuff? Shouldn't there be more men around so they have male role models?
Well, hold that thought.
Race
My ignorance runs deep here. I'm a really white guy who lives in a small town setting where most of out black population belongs to one of the same five families that have lived here for generations.
Teaching is becoming blacker and browner, but-- and this is huge-- minority teachers are also leaving the profession at a higher rate than white teachers. So there's something wrong there, and I honestly have no idea what. Somebody really needs to figure it out, and soon. Because we need more minority teachers.
We need more minority teachers because we are going to have increasingly more minority students. Why? Remember a few graphs ago when you were worried about little boys not seeing anybody they could identify with at school? Same thing. Same. Thing.
Look, I know we were raised to think of ourselves as colorblind. There's a place for that, but there's also a way in which it can go horribly wrong.
As I try to explain to my students, racism is not just "Black people are all stupid and inferior." Racism is also, "Normal people are just like me. Everybody else is abnormal to whatever degree they are not like me."
"Black folks are just like me," sounds generous, but it's not, because it implies, "Like me. You know, normal. Oh, I know they look or act like they're not normal, but I'm willing to overlook those abnormalities, so they're really just a white guy like me." One of the privileges we enjoy as white guys is that we never have to explain any part of ourselves away. Even a term like "non-white" reinforces that-- we're defining race by whether it's normal whiteness or not. We are "normal" by default.
With that in mind, teaching needs to be a place where being black or brown is normal, and that is doubly, triply true in schools with predominantly minority populations. Yes, we white guys can do great work in those schools, be great teachers, even be great models of what it means to be a man. But we will never be somebody that a black seven year old can look at and imagine growing up to be. That's a valuable quality, and we will never have it.
Individual
I'm a big believer in individual situations. The chances of something working can be one in a million, but if you're the one, it doesn't matter. General rules of thumb, general tendencies, general ways to be and understand-- none of those matter in the face of particular specific situation. But you know what makes it easy for me to think that? I'm a white guy, and the general circumstances of being a white guy rarely ever get in the way of anything for us.
It would be enormously useful for us, when dealing with our female and minority colleagues, if we listen, and listen particularly with an understanding that other people on this planet navigate a series of barriers and obstacles that we pretty much never see. The fact that we don't see doesn't mean they aren't there, and -- hardest for us to accept -- the fact that we don't see them also doesn't mean that we don't have a hand in keeping them in place.
But if we are ever going to see them or understand them, we are going to have to listen and try to understand. And then, I think there's a question we are actually well-placed to help answer-- "If you didn't have to deal with obstacle X, what would you do?" Because if we could help remove the obstacles, people could do for themselves, and living in a world without those obstacles is a subject we're actually well-qualified to talk about-- not why you shouldn't be held back or why you shouldn't care about the obstacle or how we can do for you, but how much you could enjoy that world, if we could help make it.
Look, this is a hugely complicated set of issues, and that's before we throw in delineators such as socio-economics and sexual orientation. But I'm beginning to think that we white guys need to spend less time mansplaining to everyone else, start actually listening, and start talking to each other about what part we can play in making a better world for everyone.
While very aware of these topics, I have avoided addressing them because I am a white guy. And when it comes to issues of gender and race, I've always assumed two things.
1) There are things that I really don't get.
2) I have no idea what all the items under #1 are.
I am also painfully aware of the tendency that white guys have to turn discussions of gender in race into conversations about being a white guy.
But I am going to take some of my own advice and venture outside of my comfort zone. I will try not to presume to speak people of other races or genders about what they should know or do about being female or black or brown. Instead, I'm going to try to speak to my people-- white guys.
Gender
Guys, there are many things we don't get about being a woman. And I don't mean in a ha-ha women are so wacky with their crazy mysterious thinky parts. I mean like the degree to what it must be challenging to have to always associate intimacy and love with making yourself physically vulnerable to someone who is usually larger and stronger than you, and who, in the early stages of a relationship, you don't know if you can trust.
What do we guys do when we find ourselves in a situation where we're around people who can physically dominate us? We make nice. We even have a special pseudo-psychological term for little guys who insist on being aggressive instead of sensibly making nice (Napoleon complex). Women are in that situation pretty much all the time. Being nice isn't just the socially acceptable thing to do-- it's a survival skill.
At the same time, niceness is socially preferred in women. Society tells them constantly to play nice, be nice. If you are going to deal with women, particularly in a work situation, you need to check yourself. If you are going to ding a woman for being too nice and not sticking up for herself, you also cannot ding her for being uppity and pushy.
Keep that double ding in mind, because as I mentioned above, teaching is a mostly-female profession, and in some areas, that means we male teachers are being approached as if we are women-- play nice, don't talk out of turn. On top of that, we are going to find ourselves surrounded by lots of women who are not necessarily ready to step out of that mold and fight beside you. You can't fix that by yelling, "What the hell is the matter with you!" and you can't fix it by saying, "That's okay honey. You sit down and I'll take care of it."
If you're of my generation (high school class of '75), you grew up with some confusing and ultimately incomplete messages. You will also encounter young women who act like what we would have called feminists who insist they aren't feminists (as near as I can tell, the current definition of "feminist" is "woman who demands unreasonable things." women who advocate things like equal pay are just using common sense, and aren't feminists at all). But my experience is that if you treat them like individual human beings-- listen to them, hear what they want, help them see how to get it, offer advice when they want it and shut the hell up when they don't-- that all seems to work.
We guys are supposed to approach conflict like it's no big deal. Just whale the tar out of each other, then get a drink. Everybody's buds. No blood, no foul. But for women conflict is a more threatening thing. The good news is that that is mostly trained into them, not hardwired, and they can learn to leave it behind. Just not the same way we do. Be a coach, but not a mansplainer, and recognize when to step back and get out of the way.
And (and this is huge) if you are in a mostly-female building, recognize that you need to adjust to the culture of the building, and not insist that it get all manned up. In teaching, we are more likely to find ourselves in that position in the years ahead.
I've heard the complaints. How are little boys supposed to grow up when they are surrounded by women in school all day? Won't they get all infected with the womenny stuff? Shouldn't there be more men around so they have male role models?
Well, hold that thought.
Race
My ignorance runs deep here. I'm a really white guy who lives in a small town setting where most of out black population belongs to one of the same five families that have lived here for generations.
Teaching is becoming blacker and browner, but-- and this is huge-- minority teachers are also leaving the profession at a higher rate than white teachers. So there's something wrong there, and I honestly have no idea what. Somebody really needs to figure it out, and soon. Because we need more minority teachers.
We need more minority teachers because we are going to have increasingly more minority students. Why? Remember a few graphs ago when you were worried about little boys not seeing anybody they could identify with at school? Same thing. Same. Thing.
Look, I know we were raised to think of ourselves as colorblind. There's a place for that, but there's also a way in which it can go horribly wrong.
As I try to explain to my students, racism is not just "Black people are all stupid and inferior." Racism is also, "Normal people are just like me. Everybody else is abnormal to whatever degree they are not like me."
"Black folks are just like me," sounds generous, but it's not, because it implies, "Like me. You know, normal. Oh, I know they look or act like they're not normal, but I'm willing to overlook those abnormalities, so they're really just a white guy like me." One of the privileges we enjoy as white guys is that we never have to explain any part of ourselves away. Even a term like "non-white" reinforces that-- we're defining race by whether it's normal whiteness or not. We are "normal" by default.
With that in mind, teaching needs to be a place where being black or brown is normal, and that is doubly, triply true in schools with predominantly minority populations. Yes, we white guys can do great work in those schools, be great teachers, even be great models of what it means to be a man. But we will never be somebody that a black seven year old can look at and imagine growing up to be. That's a valuable quality, and we will never have it.
Individual
I'm a big believer in individual situations. The chances of something working can be one in a million, but if you're the one, it doesn't matter. General rules of thumb, general tendencies, general ways to be and understand-- none of those matter in the face of particular specific situation. But you know what makes it easy for me to think that? I'm a white guy, and the general circumstances of being a white guy rarely ever get in the way of anything for us.
It would be enormously useful for us, when dealing with our female and minority colleagues, if we listen, and listen particularly with an understanding that other people on this planet navigate a series of barriers and obstacles that we pretty much never see. The fact that we don't see doesn't mean they aren't there, and -- hardest for us to accept -- the fact that we don't see them also doesn't mean that we don't have a hand in keeping them in place.
But if we are ever going to see them or understand them, we are going to have to listen and try to understand. And then, I think there's a question we are actually well-placed to help answer-- "If you didn't have to deal with obstacle X, what would you do?" Because if we could help remove the obstacles, people could do for themselves, and living in a world without those obstacles is a subject we're actually well-qualified to talk about-- not why you shouldn't be held back or why you shouldn't care about the obstacle or how we can do for you, but how much you could enjoy that world, if we could help make it.
Look, this is a hugely complicated set of issues, and that's before we throw in delineators such as socio-economics and sexual orientation. But I'm beginning to think that we white guys need to spend less time mansplaining to everyone else, start actually listening, and start talking to each other about what part we can play in making a better world for everyone.
We Need Fewer Nice Teachers
A colleague tells the story of taking an on-line graduate course and being chastised for calling out fellow students for some fairly low-information posts on the topic. Could my colleague please be more polite, reword the posts so they were less "offensive." So he did, and the original posts were erased. The punchline, of course, is that the topic was censorship.
For some reason, it is often a problem in our profession that teachers value niceness over truth.
We sit in a professional development session and listen to a presenter give instructions that we know are questionable at best and just plain dead wrong at worst, but we nod and smile and politely avoid asking any questions or making any comments. After all, we don't want to be rude. We wouldn't like to make anybody uncomfortable. So the presenter leaves thinking he's hit a home run and we go back to our rooms and tell each other how terrible it was (but we don't tell our principal, because that would be rude).
When I was president of a striking union, I had many members who simply didn't want to do anything that might make anybody uncomfortable. Some members were pretty sure that the board and their attorney would be more giving and conciliatory if we were just nicer.
Sometimes this conflict avoidance turns teachers into institutional enablers. A principal creates a new policy that causes some problems, but rather than confront him with the problems, some classroom teachers go out of their way to fix the problem. In the worst version of this scenario, they then sulk because fixing the problem makes them sad, and they think the administration should see their sadness and feel compelled to address it. "Why don't they see the problem and fix it?" they ask. The answer-- because you fixed the problem already. The fact that you are now sad is not his problem. It is no more motivational than telling an alcoholic that you had to lie to cover up for him again.
This is not to say that we should not be team players and do our best for our schools. It is also not to say that we should be contentious shrews who pick a fight over every picayune peccadillo (how long have I waited for an excuse to stick those two words together).
Sometimes conflict happens, and you can only deal with it by dealing with it.
Trust me on this. It's one of the lessons I learned at Divorce School (or "Top Ten Ways I Blew Up My First Marriage") In ALL relationships in life, Rule #1 is You Must Show Up. When you run away or hide to avoid conflict, you break relationship rule #1.
People often blast Laziness as the big enemy of virtue; I think Comfort is far worse. We will go to amazing lengths to avoid being uncomfortable. Like a nice girl being pawed by a grade-A lout, we will allow ourselves to be victims of inexcusable indignities because we don't want to "be mean" or "cause a scene" or "make anyone uncomfortable."
Teachers do this way too much. Way too much. We avoid confronting or speaking out or just standing up and saying "I think that's wrong." We don't tell the truth, or we wrap it in comfortable layers of cotton until it is muffled and all its sharp edges are hidden.
But if you won't tell the truth, you can't be surprised that nobody hears it.
Given the choice between Being Nice and Telling the Truth (and we don't always have to choose between the two), pick Telling the Truth. Pick telling the truth. Show up. You cannot fix what's wrong in your relationship, whether it's with your spouse, your child, your students, your colleagues, your bosses, your profession-- you can't fix ANY of those relationships until you follow Rule #1 and Show Up. And you can't run away from an uncomfortable truth AND show up both at the same time.
Yes, sometimes conflict arrives when you wish it wouldn't. Sometimes we don't get to choose, just like the times that some student in a classroom does something so obvious and unmistakable that you sigh and think, "Well, dammit, now I have to do something." It's like your hungry crying baby or your parent with newly-diagnosed cancer or the spouse who announces they can't take it (whatever it is) one more minute-- you don't choose the fight, but to walk away from the fight is to walk away from the relationship. Sometimes you don't get to choose.
That's why it's generally no kindness to lie to people. And truthfully (and I say this as someone who used to, believe it or not, love Being Nice), Being Nice is basically a selfish impulse. It's not about making life easier for other people; it's about making life nicer, more comfy, for ourselves. Being Nice is not a virtue, particularly when it excuses running away from the truth.
The usual teacher niceness, our compliance, our love of rules, our belief in the hierarchy of schools, has been used against too often. Too many people feel they can kick us knowing that we will not complain, that we will in fact turn on any of our own number who do complain.
We don't have to be mean. We don't have to be unkind ("kind" and "nice" are not the same at all, but this post is already too long). But we do have to speak our truth. We do have to stop sitting silently when people say things in our hearing that are just not so. We have to stop taking attacks and slander on our profession because we don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable.
Believe it or not, I am not really a fighter. And one of my guiding principles is that life produces enough pain and challenge on its own, so it's a sin to make more pain and challenge in the world when you don't have to. Bu I also believe it's wrong to sit silent so that someone else can commit a wrong unnoticed and unchallenged. You can't just talk; you must also listen (also a whole other post). But you have to speak up. You have to value the truth over niceness.
For some reason, it is often a problem in our profession that teachers value niceness over truth.
We sit in a professional development session and listen to a presenter give instructions that we know are questionable at best and just plain dead wrong at worst, but we nod and smile and politely avoid asking any questions or making any comments. After all, we don't want to be rude. We wouldn't like to make anybody uncomfortable. So the presenter leaves thinking he's hit a home run and we go back to our rooms and tell each other how terrible it was (but we don't tell our principal, because that would be rude).
When I was president of a striking union, I had many members who simply didn't want to do anything that might make anybody uncomfortable. Some members were pretty sure that the board and their attorney would be more giving and conciliatory if we were just nicer.
Sometimes this conflict avoidance turns teachers into institutional enablers. A principal creates a new policy that causes some problems, but rather than confront him with the problems, some classroom teachers go out of their way to fix the problem. In the worst version of this scenario, they then sulk because fixing the problem makes them sad, and they think the administration should see their sadness and feel compelled to address it. "Why don't they see the problem and fix it?" they ask. The answer-- because you fixed the problem already. The fact that you are now sad is not his problem. It is no more motivational than telling an alcoholic that you had to lie to cover up for him again.
This is not to say that we should not be team players and do our best for our schools. It is also not to say that we should be contentious shrews who pick a fight over every picayune peccadillo (how long have I waited for an excuse to stick those two words together).
Sometimes conflict happens, and you can only deal with it by dealing with it.
Trust me on this. It's one of the lessons I learned at Divorce School (or "Top Ten Ways I Blew Up My First Marriage") In ALL relationships in life, Rule #1 is You Must Show Up. When you run away or hide to avoid conflict, you break relationship rule #1.
People often blast Laziness as the big enemy of virtue; I think Comfort is far worse. We will go to amazing lengths to avoid being uncomfortable. Like a nice girl being pawed by a grade-A lout, we will allow ourselves to be victims of inexcusable indignities because we don't want to "be mean" or "cause a scene" or "make anyone uncomfortable."
Teachers do this way too much. Way too much. We avoid confronting or speaking out or just standing up and saying "I think that's wrong." We don't tell the truth, or we wrap it in comfortable layers of cotton until it is muffled and all its sharp edges are hidden.
But if you won't tell the truth, you can't be surprised that nobody hears it.
Given the choice between Being Nice and Telling the Truth (and we don't always have to choose between the two), pick Telling the Truth. Pick telling the truth. Show up. You cannot fix what's wrong in your relationship, whether it's with your spouse, your child, your students, your colleagues, your bosses, your profession-- you can't fix ANY of those relationships until you follow Rule #1 and Show Up. And you can't run away from an uncomfortable truth AND show up both at the same time.
Yes, sometimes conflict arrives when you wish it wouldn't. Sometimes we don't get to choose, just like the times that some student in a classroom does something so obvious and unmistakable that you sigh and think, "Well, dammit, now I have to do something." It's like your hungry crying baby or your parent with newly-diagnosed cancer or the spouse who announces they can't take it (whatever it is) one more minute-- you don't choose the fight, but to walk away from the fight is to walk away from the relationship. Sometimes you don't get to choose.
That's why it's generally no kindness to lie to people. And truthfully (and I say this as someone who used to, believe it or not, love Being Nice), Being Nice is basically a selfish impulse. It's not about making life easier for other people; it's about making life nicer, more comfy, for ourselves. Being Nice is not a virtue, particularly when it excuses running away from the truth.
The usual teacher niceness, our compliance, our love of rules, our belief in the hierarchy of schools, has been used against too often. Too many people feel they can kick us knowing that we will not complain, that we will in fact turn on any of our own number who do complain.
We don't have to be mean. We don't have to be unkind ("kind" and "nice" are not the same at all, but this post is already too long). But we do have to speak our truth. We do have to stop sitting silently when people say things in our hearing that are just not so. We have to stop taking attacks and slander on our profession because we don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable.
Believe it or not, I am not really a fighter. And one of my guiding principles is that life produces enough pain and challenge on its own, so it's a sin to make more pain and challenge in the world when you don't have to. Bu I also believe it's wrong to sit silent so that someone else can commit a wrong unnoticed and unchallenged. You can't just talk; you must also listen (also a whole other post). But you have to speak up. You have to value the truth over niceness.
The Attack on Higher Ed Continues in the NYT
In the battle for American education, new fronts (aka new profit and growth opportunities) have been opening up steadily from Pre-K and Pre-Pre-K all the way up to colleges and universities. Today's New York Times includes a peek at what the attack on colleges and universities will look like.
Kevin Carey says not only do American public schools suck, but so do American colleges and universities.
Kevin Carey is the education policy program director for the New America Foundation. NAF bills itself as a non-partisan thinky tank based in DC. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is chair of the NAF board. Their over-a-million-dollar funders include the Gates Foundation and the US State Department. They have their fingers in several pies in their search for bold new ideas that will make America sweller.
However, as presented in the NYT, their new ideas are not so new.
Carey's basis for saying that American public schools suck is that tired old chestnut, PISA scores. And his answer to the question, "How can we know how good our colleges are" is, "Another test from the OECD."
The new OECD project is called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies and it is stunningly dumb. The OECD gave a test to 166,000 grown men and women with college degrees between the ages of 16 and 65. The test itself, with its alleged emphasis on "real world" problems of literacy and math, sounds plenty dumb on its own. But we don't have to look at the test to see how pointless this exercise is. The test-takers were from the thirty-four member nations plus Russia and Cyprus. So that means roughly 4600 test takers per country, and only some of that small sample were college grads. Whatever tiny data slivers that remained were used to judge the quality of every iteration of every college over the past forty-ish years. That also means that the OECD gave a test to a sixty-year old person and assumed that his results were indicative of the college education he received forty-some years ago, and nothing that happened during those forty years.
This is quote possibly one of the dumbest studies I have ever seen touted as fact. But Carey's point is that American's need to stop thinking that our colleges and universities are any good. Actually, I suppose the point (although he stayed away from this, perhaps realizing it shows the ridiculousness of the study) is that American colleges have been sucking for the last forty-some years. It's funny, because if our colleges and universities had been so bad for so long we might have noticed. I guess those wily graduates of Giant Suck University have been covering it up successfully.
But this is going to be the new line of attack. We have this test, and it proves that our colleges and universities are terrible. I wonder if the solution will turn out to involve government regulation and private corporate take-overs. I would try to figure it all out, but gosh, I graduated from an American college in 1979, so I am probably too dumb.
[Edit: I made a huge mistake. When rereading the NYT piece, I realized that the test was not given to 16-65 year old college grads, but apparently all adults. Meaning that the sample of college grads being compared is even smaller. I have edited the text accordingly.]
Kevin Carey says not only do American public schools suck, but so do American colleges and universities.
Kevin Carey is the education policy program director for the New America Foundation. NAF bills itself as a non-partisan thinky tank based in DC. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is chair of the NAF board. Their over-a-million-dollar funders include the Gates Foundation and the US State Department. They have their fingers in several pies in their search for bold new ideas that will make America sweller.
However, as presented in the NYT, their new ideas are not so new.
Carey's basis for saying that American public schools suck is that tired old chestnut, PISA scores. And his answer to the question, "How can we know how good our colleges are" is, "Another test from the OECD."
The new OECD project is called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies and it is stunningly dumb. The OECD gave a test to 166,000 grown men and women with college degrees between the ages of 16 and 65. The test itself, with its alleged emphasis on "real world" problems of literacy and math, sounds plenty dumb on its own. But we don't have to look at the test to see how pointless this exercise is. The test-takers were from the thirty-four member nations plus Russia and Cyprus. So that means roughly 4600 test takers per country, and only some of that small sample were college grads. Whatever tiny data slivers that remained were used to judge the quality of every iteration of every college over the past forty-ish years. That also means that the OECD gave a test to a sixty-year old person and assumed that his results were indicative of the college education he received forty-some years ago, and nothing that happened during those forty years.
This is quote possibly one of the dumbest studies I have ever seen touted as fact. But Carey's point is that American's need to stop thinking that our colleges and universities are any good. Actually, I suppose the point (although he stayed away from this, perhaps realizing it shows the ridiculousness of the study) is that American colleges have been sucking for the last forty-some years. It's funny, because if our colleges and universities had been so bad for so long we might have noticed. I guess those wily graduates of Giant Suck University have been covering it up successfully.
But this is going to be the new line of attack. We have this test, and it proves that our colleges and universities are terrible. I wonder if the solution will turn out to involve government regulation and private corporate take-overs. I would try to figure it all out, but gosh, I graduated from an American college in 1979, so I am probably too dumb.
[Edit: I made a huge mistake. When rereading the NYT piece, I realized that the test was not given to 16-65 year old college grads, but apparently all adults. Meaning that the sample of college grads being compared is even smaller. I have edited the text accordingly.]
Friday, June 27, 2014
CAP Releases New CCSS Baloney Sandwich
For a couple of days I have had CAP's new "report" open on my desktop, trying to slowly drag myself through it. From its odd cover image (uniformed school children, grasping gigantic pencils; one tries to nonchalantly look at the other's paper, while the cheatee looks back with an expression of "Oh, no, you didn't") to its final pages of "endnotes" cataloging references to everything short of wikipedia, this "report" is a fine embodiment of the Thinky Tank As PR Firm school of advocacy.
"Roadmap for a Successful Transition to the Common Core in States and Districts" caught my eye thanks to a CAP tweet touting it as a document that"shows" how CCSS, impemented well, totally works. I think CAP has confused "shows" with "says." The "report" is actually a set of recommendations. Let's look, shall we?
Introduction
At this point, these reformster puff pieces of CCSS praise pretty much write themselves. Roadmap of knowledge and skills needed for 21st century. End of rote memorization and bubble tests; it'll be all sunshine and critical thinking form now on. Evidence based. BUT despite the awesome, CCSS are in jeopardy Righties think feds overreach, but "no federal input" into standards (at least CAP doesn't try to claim they are teacher-written). And there have been some implementation bobbles that we need to work out. Teachers are "apprehensive" about test-based eval (nice word choice-- I hear many front-line soldiers are apprehensive about being shot and killed).
But good news-- we can save the Core. Just follow this handy list of recommendations and everything will be all hunky AND dory! The recommendations are summarized in the intro, but let's skip the foreplay and jump right into bed!
1. States and Districts should administer better, fairer and fewer.
So I see the heading and think, "Hey, something I can agree with," but CAP blows it in the very first sentence:
"Testing is critical to ensuring students receive a high-quality education..." Yes, just like a yardstick is necessary to growing tall and a scale is necessary to getting in shape.
It doesn't get any better. CAP's complaint is that the current tests aren't Common Core-y enough. They should be harder and more confusing. And states should all get in the national testing pool, because what good is a test if it doesn't let you compare your kid to a kid a thousand miles away. And we'll also invoke the children of military families because we need to remake the entire education system to accommodate that minute percentage of students, and yet there is no other subgroup we're worried about like, say, students with special needs or English Language Learners or primary grade students whose first encounter with a computer is to take a standardized tests. All of those students should suck it up and get some grit, but military students who move into new states should have a nation's education system designed around them. Also, if CCSS is not a curriculum, how does it help traveling students?
And with better tests, there should be no drilling or test prep. Because although the tests will show if a student is getting a complete education, it will not test anything related to actual knowledge? As long as there are standardized tests, there will be standardized test prep. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
2. States and Districts should phase in high stakes for teachers and students
I'm pretty sure the authors managed to write this section without including a single True Thing. Take this:
A meaningful system of teacher evaluation that assesses teacher performance across multiple measures, including multiple observations of classroom instruction, student feedback, and measures of achievement gains based on assessments over multiple years, can fairly and reliably identify effective teaching.
And so on. We'll use these VAMMY systems, even though they've been repeatedly debunked and proven inaccurate, invalid, and unreliable, and we will identify the best teachers and then we will, somehow, move them around so that students who previously had ineffective teachers will be given great ones. I've already explained how this is a massive crock.But let me do the short form.
In a 2011 study of 10 school districts across 7 states, the National Center for Education Evaluation found an “overall trend that indicates that low-income students have unequal access, on average, to the district’s highest-performing teachers,” and the distribution of effective teachers is uneven within
and across districts.
No. The study found that low-income students tend to get low scores on tests (not a new finding). The study then assumed that no other reason in the whole entire world could account for that except low-performing teachers, so that must be what kind of teachers the poor kids have.
CAP recognizes that teachers may have concerns about being evaluated by this cockamamie system, and while those concerns are valid, CAP recommends that schools do it anyway-- just not so fast that you spook the natives.
3. States should have statewide accountability systems that single out individual schools
Not how they put it, but my way has fewer words. Use tests to identify problem schools, redirect money and resources accordingly. Show no results because you didn't address the actual problems. Declare schools useless failures, announce that only closing them and bringing in charter operators will fix the schools. Fortunately, charter operators will not be hard to attract since area is receiving additional resources.
Okay, I actually skipped ahead. They only admit to the first couple of steps. I filled in the rest based on what we've already seen in great urban reformist areas.
4. States and schools must ensure that teachers are engaged in the development of—and have access to—comprehensive curricula and instructional materials aligned with the Common Core standards.
Least weaselly thing they've said so far. Giving teachers a fighting chance to adapt to new materials seems like a no-brainer, but a few years ago reformsters were so sure we could build the airplane while we were flying it that this objection was rolled over repeatedly. Nowadays fashionable reformistas are more into building the plane on the ground, so they're "discovering" this idea that teachers have been yelling at them for a while.
CAP points out that schools and states can do this design work on their own, but, hey, there are plenty of consultants out there just itching tocash in on the new standards help schools achieve excellence.
5. States and districts must invest in teacher preparation and ongoing professional development for educators.
Speaking of consultants, there are many that would love to take your money for help you out with teacher training. And don't forget, states-- all college and university teacher training programs should be assimilated as well. It's easier to train them properly if you catch them young.
6. States, districts, and schools should provide additional time for teachers to collaborate and plan together.
This is not stupid. Oddly enough, it's at this point that CAP chooses to bring up the example of what they do in high-performing school systems of other countries. You would think they would have already brought up examples of high-performing nations that organize their schools around a national system of standards-- oh! except there aren't any!
CAP points out that Finland, for example, has its teachers up in front of students several hundred hours per year fewer than we US teachers spend. And then CAP recommends that the solution here is to lengthen the school day. Damn, CAP. This was like shooting fish in a barrel and you still ended up spearing the family cat.
7. States and districts should engage educators, parents, and other stakeholders in the implementation effort
Parents, teachers, community members, businesses, institutions of higher education, and student advocates must be engaged regularly for the Common Core to be implemented successfully.
The fact that we're even talking about this as a recommendation is a sign of how far off track we've been. This is like including "put on pants before you leave the house" in a list of fashion recommendations. Put another way-- if this is news to you, shame on you.
But it does represent a change of direction for reformsters, who started this Journey to the New Status Quo thinking they could just snap their fingers and everyone would fall into line. Live and learn, I guess. Wouldn't it be wacky, though, if someone like David Coleman stepped up and said something like, "Yeah, I was kind of a dick about all of this, and I'd like to apologize for not considering your thoughts and feelings. I'd like to apologize, and I'd like to start over, and I'd like to begin our fresh start by listening to you, teachers, parents community members, etc."
But I digress. What CAP actually advocates is that districts should " partner with supportive nonprofits and other organizations across the state." So, not actual people. Just get hooked up with the right groups.
Schools should prepare parents and families for the revelation that their children suck (probably not looking to Arne for a model here). As for teachers--"States and districts must similarly engage teachers. Not only will it increase teacher readiness to teach to the Common Core, but it also recognizes that teachers are trusted ambassadors with parents and other stakeholders." CAP's point, driven home through the paragraph, is that teacher support is a great marketing tool. They even cite a 50CAN (another fine CCSS advocacy group) study indicating that teachers are most trusted when it comes to evaluating educational changes. No kidding! Who knew?
8. States should help districts get enough computers to take tests.
These tests are supposed to be taken online, because, computers. But thosetest-taking terminals computers aren't going to buy themselves. There's a boatload of money to be handed over, and it will have to some form somewhere.
9. States and districts should use available resources andguidance to improve the Common Core implementation process
That turns out to mean that states and districts should pick up some of these handy papers from various other CCSS-promotion groups. So, like a last "buy our t-shirts in the lobby" announcement.
Conclusion
Insert rewrite of introduction.
Bonus Round
Each recommendation comes with some tales from particular districts. Tales from Hartford's teacher eval system, North Carolina's Move Teachers Around program, Colorado's Involve Teachers in Writing Programs program. Some are just filler-- after the first (fewer tests) section, the anecdotes were of school districts that are definitely looking into probably doing something about that. I didn't find any of them compelling; perhaps you'll feel differently.
Notes!
CAP wants you to see how researchy this paper is. However, almost none of the notes reference actual scholarly studies of any of the standards in action. There are plenty of newspaper articles, many commentaries from other reformsters on the topic of "What I Think You Should Do."In short, there is "proof" in this paper on the same order of the "proof" I include in this blog when I link to myself and to other bloggers.
Finishing Up
Since falling down the reformy rabbit hole, I've become kind of fascinated with this kind of faux scholarly paper product. CAP hasn't done anything more rigorous than what I do here at the blog-- state my opinion in a semi-organized manner, arguing for it based on my own ideas about what's right, what should be right, and how I think the world works. The less-than-serious tone and language I use is my way of acknowledging that this blog is just me, shooting off steam, generally based on nothing except my own powers of observation, logic and language. It would be foolish to use anything I've ever posted as "proof" of anything.
But this type of faux paper dresses it all up in the appearance of scholarship (look! endnotes!!) and slick layout, attached to an organization with a fancy name and slick production values. All of these fake thinky tank PR groups are doing their best to convey some sort of Great Authority when in fact they are just like the rest of us-- bullshitting some words about what they happen to believe is right and true, using some sort of political PR theater to add weight.
It makes me wonder how much undeserved power I could gather if I were an organization instead of a guy, and somebody had given me a huge grant to fancy things up around here. I don't begrudge CAP the right to get on line and express their own sets of beliefs about education, but the only difference between CAP and a Mercedes Schneider or a Jersey Jazzman or a Paul Thomas is that CAP comes wrapped in the finest veneer that money can buy (well, and the number of actual facts used, but let's let that slide for the moment). [Added value addendum: And it's a good pile of money too. From Schneider's research, we learn that CAPS got a nice piece of the Gate$ Foundation pie-- $6.4 million since 2008, with $550,000 specifically for CCSS.]
In other words, stripped of its glossy pdf file, using links instead of endnotes, and attached to its three authors instead of a big PR group, this would just be one more unremarkable blog post, and would probably sink into the same couple-hundred views ephemeracy as most blog posts. Beyond its repackaged same-old-baloney content, this "report" is one more example of how the reformsters depend on money to keep their point of view alive in the marketplace of ideas.
"Roadmap for a Successful Transition to the Common Core in States and Districts" caught my eye thanks to a CAP tweet touting it as a document that"shows" how CCSS, impemented well, totally works. I think CAP has confused "shows" with "says." The "report" is actually a set of recommendations. Let's look, shall we?
Introduction
At this point, these reformster puff pieces of CCSS praise pretty much write themselves. Roadmap of knowledge and skills needed for 21st century. End of rote memorization and bubble tests; it'll be all sunshine and critical thinking form now on. Evidence based. BUT despite the awesome, CCSS are in jeopardy Righties think feds overreach, but "no federal input" into standards (at least CAP doesn't try to claim they are teacher-written). And there have been some implementation bobbles that we need to work out. Teachers are "apprehensive" about test-based eval (nice word choice-- I hear many front-line soldiers are apprehensive about being shot and killed).
But good news-- we can save the Core. Just follow this handy list of recommendations and everything will be all hunky AND dory! The recommendations are summarized in the intro, but let's skip the foreplay and jump right into bed!
1. States and Districts should administer better, fairer and fewer.
So I see the heading and think, "Hey, something I can agree with," but CAP blows it in the very first sentence:
"Testing is critical to ensuring students receive a high-quality education..." Yes, just like a yardstick is necessary to growing tall and a scale is necessary to getting in shape.
It doesn't get any better. CAP's complaint is that the current tests aren't Common Core-y enough. They should be harder and more confusing. And states should all get in the national testing pool, because what good is a test if it doesn't let you compare your kid to a kid a thousand miles away. And we'll also invoke the children of military families because we need to remake the entire education system to accommodate that minute percentage of students, and yet there is no other subgroup we're worried about like, say, students with special needs or English Language Learners or primary grade students whose first encounter with a computer is to take a standardized tests. All of those students should suck it up and get some grit, but military students who move into new states should have a nation's education system designed around them. Also, if CCSS is not a curriculum, how does it help traveling students?
And with better tests, there should be no drilling or test prep. Because although the tests will show if a student is getting a complete education, it will not test anything related to actual knowledge? As long as there are standardized tests, there will be standardized test prep. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
2. States and Districts should phase in high stakes for teachers and students
I'm pretty sure the authors managed to write this section without including a single True Thing. Take this:
A meaningful system of teacher evaluation that assesses teacher performance across multiple measures, including multiple observations of classroom instruction, student feedback, and measures of achievement gains based on assessments over multiple years, can fairly and reliably identify effective teaching.
And so on. We'll use these VAMMY systems, even though they've been repeatedly debunked and proven inaccurate, invalid, and unreliable, and we will identify the best teachers and then we will, somehow, move them around so that students who previously had ineffective teachers will be given great ones. I've already explained how this is a massive crock.But let me do the short form.
In a 2011 study of 10 school districts across 7 states, the National Center for Education Evaluation found an “overall trend that indicates that low-income students have unequal access, on average, to the district’s highest-performing teachers,” and the distribution of effective teachers is uneven within
and across districts.
No. The study found that low-income students tend to get low scores on tests (not a new finding). The study then assumed that no other reason in the whole entire world could account for that except low-performing teachers, so that must be what kind of teachers the poor kids have.
CAP recognizes that teachers may have concerns about being evaluated by this cockamamie system, and while those concerns are valid, CAP recommends that schools do it anyway-- just not so fast that you spook the natives.
3. States should have statewide accountability systems that single out individual schools
Not how they put it, but my way has fewer words. Use tests to identify problem schools, redirect money and resources accordingly. Show no results because you didn't address the actual problems. Declare schools useless failures, announce that only closing them and bringing in charter operators will fix the schools. Fortunately, charter operators will not be hard to attract since area is receiving additional resources.
Okay, I actually skipped ahead. They only admit to the first couple of steps. I filled in the rest based on what we've already seen in great urban reformist areas.
4. States and schools must ensure that teachers are engaged in the development of—and have access to—comprehensive curricula and instructional materials aligned with the Common Core standards.
Least weaselly thing they've said so far. Giving teachers a fighting chance to adapt to new materials seems like a no-brainer, but a few years ago reformsters were so sure we could build the airplane while we were flying it that this objection was rolled over repeatedly. Nowadays fashionable reformistas are more into building the plane on the ground, so they're "discovering" this idea that teachers have been yelling at them for a while.
CAP points out that schools and states can do this design work on their own, but, hey, there are plenty of consultants out there just itching to
5. States and districts must invest in teacher preparation and ongoing professional development for educators.
Speaking of consultants, there are many that would love to
6. States, districts, and schools should provide additional time for teachers to collaborate and plan together.
This is not stupid. Oddly enough, it's at this point that CAP chooses to bring up the example of what they do in high-performing school systems of other countries. You would think they would have already brought up examples of high-performing nations that organize their schools around a national system of standards-- oh! except there aren't any!
CAP points out that Finland, for example, has its teachers up in front of students several hundred hours per year fewer than we US teachers spend. And then CAP recommends that the solution here is to lengthen the school day. Damn, CAP. This was like shooting fish in a barrel and you still ended up spearing the family cat.
7. States and districts should engage educators, parents, and other stakeholders in the implementation effort
Parents, teachers, community members, businesses, institutions of higher education, and student advocates must be engaged regularly for the Common Core to be implemented successfully.
The fact that we're even talking about this as a recommendation is a sign of how far off track we've been. This is like including "put on pants before you leave the house" in a list of fashion recommendations. Put another way-- if this is news to you, shame on you.
But it does represent a change of direction for reformsters, who started this Journey to the New Status Quo thinking they could just snap their fingers and everyone would fall into line. Live and learn, I guess. Wouldn't it be wacky, though, if someone like David Coleman stepped up and said something like, "Yeah, I was kind of a dick about all of this, and I'd like to apologize for not considering your thoughts and feelings. I'd like to apologize, and I'd like to start over, and I'd like to begin our fresh start by listening to you, teachers, parents community members, etc."
But I digress. What CAP actually advocates is that districts should " partner with supportive nonprofits and other organizations across the state." So, not actual people. Just get hooked up with the right groups.
Schools should prepare parents and families for the revelation that their children suck (probably not looking to Arne for a model here). As for teachers--"States and districts must similarly engage teachers. Not only will it increase teacher readiness to teach to the Common Core, but it also recognizes that teachers are trusted ambassadors with parents and other stakeholders." CAP's point, driven home through the paragraph, is that teacher support is a great marketing tool. They even cite a 50CAN (another fine CCSS advocacy group) study indicating that teachers are most trusted when it comes to evaluating educational changes. No kidding! Who knew?
8. States should help districts get enough computers to take tests.
These tests are supposed to be taken online, because, computers. But those
9. States and districts should use available resources andguidance to improve the Common Core implementation process
That turns out to mean that states and districts should pick up some of these handy papers from various other CCSS-promotion groups. So, like a last "buy our t-shirts in the lobby" announcement.
Conclusion
Insert rewrite of introduction.
Bonus Round
Each recommendation comes with some tales from particular districts. Tales from Hartford's teacher eval system, North Carolina's Move Teachers Around program, Colorado's Involve Teachers in Writing Programs program. Some are just filler-- after the first (fewer tests) section, the anecdotes were of school districts that are definitely looking into probably doing something about that. I didn't find any of them compelling; perhaps you'll feel differently.
Notes!
CAP wants you to see how researchy this paper is. However, almost none of the notes reference actual scholarly studies of any of the standards in action. There are plenty of newspaper articles, many commentaries from other reformsters on the topic of "What I Think You Should Do."In short, there is "proof" in this paper on the same order of the "proof" I include in this blog when I link to myself and to other bloggers.
Finishing Up
Since falling down the reformy rabbit hole, I've become kind of fascinated with this kind of faux scholarly paper product. CAP hasn't done anything more rigorous than what I do here at the blog-- state my opinion in a semi-organized manner, arguing for it based on my own ideas about what's right, what should be right, and how I think the world works. The less-than-serious tone and language I use is my way of acknowledging that this blog is just me, shooting off steam, generally based on nothing except my own powers of observation, logic and language. It would be foolish to use anything I've ever posted as "proof" of anything.
But this type of faux paper dresses it all up in the appearance of scholarship (look! endnotes!!) and slick layout, attached to an organization with a fancy name and slick production values. All of these fake thinky tank PR groups are doing their best to convey some sort of Great Authority when in fact they are just like the rest of us-- bullshitting some words about what they happen to believe is right and true, using some sort of political PR theater to add weight.
It makes me wonder how much undeserved power I could gather if I were an organization instead of a guy, and somebody had given me a huge grant to fancy things up around here. I don't begrudge CAP the right to get on line and express their own sets of beliefs about education, but the only difference between CAP and a Mercedes Schneider or a Jersey Jazzman or a Paul Thomas is that CAP comes wrapped in the finest veneer that money can buy (well, and the number of actual facts used, but let's let that slide for the moment). [Added value addendum: And it's a good pile of money too. From Schneider's research, we learn that CAPS got a nice piece of the Gate$ Foundation pie-- $6.4 million since 2008, with $550,000 specifically for CCSS.]
In other words, stripped of its glossy pdf file, using links instead of endnotes, and attached to its three authors instead of a big PR group, this would just be one more unremarkable blog post, and would probably sink into the same couple-hundred views ephemeracy as most blog posts. Beyond its repackaged same-old-baloney content, this "report" is one more example of how the reformsters depend on money to keep their point of view alive in the marketplace of ideas.
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