Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Duncan on Harris v. Quinn

"Collective bargaining is a fundamental right that helped build America’s middle class. I’ve seen firsthand as Education Secretary that collaborating with unions and their state and local affiliates helps improve outcomes for students. The President and I remain committed to defending collective bargaining rights."

That's not an excerpt. That's the whole thing.

Here's the complete Duncan statement on Vergara.

“For students in California and every other state, equal opportunities for learning must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher. The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students. Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems. Together, we must work to increase public confidence in public education. This decision presents an opportunity for a progressive state with a tradition of innovation to build a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve. My hope is that today’s decision moves from the courtroom toward a collaborative process in California that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift. Every state, every school district needs to have that kind of conversation. At the federal level, we are committed to encouraging and supporting that dialogue in partnership with states. At the same time, we all need to continue to address other inequities in education–including school funding, access to quality early childhood programs and school discipline.”

When you slice baloney thinner, it's easier to see through it.


I ignored Duncan's release on Vergara initially because it seemed so transparently not about Vergara, like a spirited tap dance around a mine. Duncan hits everything except the target, finishing on a quick fade to left field. I would think that he either didn't understand the significance of Vergara, or just didn't want to, but his response to Haris v. Quinn shows he can in fact parse these things.

So Arne, perhaps you could go back and take another look at Vergara and ask what it says about collective bargaining and other employment protections as well as teachers' chance to be represented by a union. Or perhaps you'd like to expand your comment on Harris v. Quinn to explain what you think it means to support and defend collective bargaining rights.

I would hate to think that Harris v. Quinn only woke up the administration because it directly affects unions' ability to serve as a fundraising arm of the Democratic party.

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Charter Party of the Year: The Tweet Report

I believe that charter schools were once a viable option, a way to diversify and expand the possibilities available within a public school system. That possibility has all-but-vanished, crushed under the transformation of charter schools from an educational offering into an investment opportunity (thank you, obscure tax law). Modern charter operators care about education no more than millionaires with Swiss bank accounts care about Switzerland.

Nothing quite underlines that transformation like the annual National Charter Schools Convention. It's happening in Vegas, but unlikely to stay in Vegas. It's not over yet, but it has already generated some fabulous news. In one shocking surprise, the Broad folks awarded a butt-load of money to KIPP schools for being totally awesome.

Unlike some actual journalisty types, I was unable to break away for the soiree, but I still have twitter. Let's see what #NCSC2014 looks like.

And of course, there are the celebrities. Last year's charter edupreneur was Pitbull (who presumably was not exhorting his own students to get "face down, booty up" nor conjecturing "slicker than an oil spill, she says she won't but I say she will.") This year, Steven M. Quezada was looking to shelter some of the money he made on Breaking Bad, and appeared as the kickoff speaker.





It's a nice sentiment, but it appears that many speakers spoke on the subject of "How much public schools suck way more than charters," or how to most effectively market your charter as better than crappy public schools.





Yeah, that should be interesting.




Plenty of elected officials and their representatives were on hand (also, former elected officials like Eric Cantor).




Again, many of the presenters seem not to have gotten the "charters are public schools" memo, unless it was suppose to mean "charter schools have just as much right to public tax dollars as public schools." In which case, they totally got the memo.




Glad to hear that NOLA schools are doing great, because I was pretty sure the news was that, having gotten everything they ever wanted, the full-on-charter RSD wasn't doing significantly better than the old public school system had. After NOLA has a full year as an all-charter district, there should be a fun conversation at NCSC2015.




This is a ballsy slice of data for charters to throw around. I'm guessing that the next slide was not "Here's how many charter 9th graders actually graduate from that charter school." It's easy to claim superiority on the drop-out issue when you are free to throw away or force out any students you don't want on campus. 



Really? Really!? I am not a fan of school choice at all, but even I have never tried to link it to hookers and the mob and  stripping suckers of their money on sucker bets.




Boy, were the corporate folks out in force. Here's just a partial list compiled by a fellow educator: Broad Foundation, Pearson Foundation , Getting Smart, 50 Can, School Choice Now, PublicCharters.org, CredoAtStanford, ChartersNChoice, Sal Kahn, Schoolzilla, Black Alliance for Educational Options, NoodleEducation, Capital Impact, Hispanic Creo, The Reinvestment Fund, Accelerate Institute, Orrick Public Finance, CharterBoardPartners, and of course, the Fordham. Now, yes, it's basically a trade show, but still- can we pretend a little it's not all about the $$?




Thomas Newkirk has clued me in to the term "mystification," and I plan to exercise it. It refers to the business of making something seem so technical and special that it is beyond a teacher's capability, and will require some sort of expert, training, or technology to manage it. English teachers, take a look at this and tell me if you need a consultant to come in and explain it to you.




The Browns are both on hand. Ken was one of several presenter who covered the PR needs of the charter movement. 




Judging by the tweets, Frank Luntz fired plenty of people up. This particular quote seems like a straight line-- "there are no losers in charter schools because as soon as we spot them, we ship them straight back to public schools where they belong" comes to mind.

There was a lot of this language, an alternation of "here's a great product" with "we are doing God's work." There was acknowledgement of the need for diversity side by side with repeated offers to win mini-ipads by stopping by and texting mystory to a number. Data gathering indeed.

I keep hoping that at some point the profiteers will move on from charter schools and let charters regain their souls. There was a time they showed real promise. But this-- this is like finding one of your old friends, one that you always thought was destined for great things, hunched over a one-armed bandit, eyes blurred, voice slurred, and the last of his savings being pumped into the machine because he's sure he's about to strike it rich while the family he's responsible too waits at home, broke and hungry.

Vegas, indeed. I look forward to more reports from #NCSC2014



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Brown Presents NY Lawsuit Talking Points

In the June 24 NY Daily News, Campbell Brown presented the basic talking points for the newly-manufactured NY road show version of the Vergara trial. Here we go.

A Stirring Anecdote

Her story centers on the Williams family

One of their children... felt so strongly about the lack of instruction she was getting at her Rochester school that she wrote an essay about her experience. Instead of getting help, Jada was confronted about it, and her mom received harassing calls from teachers. Subjected to unfair treatment, Jada eventually had to transfer school.

This "ordeal," says Brown, began with a student's "request for sound teaching."

It's a good story because it underlines exactly what is problematic about this sort of narrative as a model of teacher evaluation. This could in fact be the story of a student who made a reasonable request, wrote an essay about it, and was unfairly hounded by multiple teachers. While I'd like to say that I can't imagine that ever happening, it's certainly not impossible (though the harassing phone calls from plural teachers is hard to imagine).

But this could also be the story of a student who decide she knew better than a trained professional how the teacher should do his job, got called on it, and had the whole thing blow up when the school tried to deal with her insubordination and disrespect.

Either version of the story could be the truth. If we put in student hands the nuclear option of ending a teacher's career, we are certainly, as Brown says she wants to, changing the balance of power. But I'm not sure how we get to excellence in teaching by way of a student smiling and saying, "Mrs. DeGumbuddy, my lawyer and I think you really want to reconsider my grade on this essay."

The Three Basic Underminers

Brown's lawsuit (there really is no need to pretend that this is the students' lawsuit) asserts that three policies of the State of New York undermine the presence of quality teachers in the classroom.

Seniority-- "last in, first out" is bad. It's also a sign of how carefully this is all crafted, because for years I never heard the policy called anything by FILO (first in, last out). But since we need to focus on the young teachers unjustly terminated by this policy, LIFO suits us better.

Tenure-- NY makes teachers wait three years and eighteen observations for tenure. This is the most obvious difference between the New York case and Vergara (California was awarding tenure after less time). This is a hard argument to make-- if an administrator can't tell whether or not she's got a keeper after three years and eighteen observations, that administrator needs to go get a job selling real estate or groceries, because, damn!

On the plus side, I look forward to Brown's accompanying argument that all New York schools should be barred from ever again hiring Teach for America two-year contract temps. If it takes more than three years to determine if a teacher is any good, then clearly TFA is a waste of everybody's time. Do let me know when Brown brings that up.

Dismissals-- Too long, too hard. I'm not in New York, so I don't know the real numbers here. This was the weakest part of the state's case in Vergara-- while you can't rush through these proceedings, there's no excuse for dragging them out for months and years. It's not good for either party.

Brown Is Stumped

Brown's clincher is a sign that either she's playing dumb for rhetorical purposes, or she really doesn't understand schools at all.

...last year, nearly 92% of the state’s teachers outside New York City were deemed effective or highly effective. If this is the case, how can 69% of students fail to show they are proficient in math or English Language Arts testing?

The strictly factual answer of course would be the studies indicating that teachers account for 14% tops of student learning. I don't know if I buy that exact number personally, but it's out there. Certainly it can't be hard for Brown to imagine that some students are capable of sitting in a classroom with an awesome teacher and still not learn from her, either because of distraction, personal issues, or simple defiance.

But the other reason that 69% of NYS students came up short on math and ELA proficiency? Because they were supposed to. Because the NY cut scores (the line between passing and failing) were not set by using some scientific study of what a "sufficient" display of skill would be, but by determining distribution ahead of time. By saying, let's draw the pass-fail line so that 30% are above it, and the rest are below it. You can read a pretty thorough run-down of these tests by Carol Burris and John Murphy here.

And nice touch on calling the fail rate 69% instead of the 70% more commonly reported. 69% sound much more inexact and therefor more "real" than 70%, which in its very tidiness reveals its made-up origins.

I feel bad once again for the prop plaintiffs who are shown in the photo looking out at the crowd, shoulders hunched, like they are seeing a huge raging river that they have to cross. But the Vergara prop plaintiffs were well taken care of, and I'm sure these will be as well. But there is a special corner of hell reserved for adults who use children as tools to further their own agenda.

In the meantime, teachers here in the East can now look forward to a PR blitz tearing down teachers in support of a lawsuit designed to dismantle teaching as a profession. We can only hope the ultimate result will be better than the California version of this traveling circus.
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Monday, June 30, 2014

A Little Help, Please!

Next week, I'm off to Seattle for a 2.5 day session on PLCs. Our school district is trying to pilot PLCs, and my principal has asked me to attend. He's working his posterior off to get our school on track, so I would probably walk across coals if he asked, but the fact that my daughter and son-in-law just moved to Seattle is definitely a bonus.

Anyway, we have a variety of breakout sessions to attend, so I thought I would see if anyone had any recommendations regarding any of these folks. You can leave something in the comments, find me on facebook or twitter-- whatever works. Here's the list of presenters

Tim Brown
Austin Buffum
Luis Cruz
Rebecca & Richard DuFour
William M. Ferriter
Janel Keating
Shanon V. Kramer
Mike Mattos
Anthony Muhammad
Sara Schuhl

Note: It won't be useful to tell me to avoid the whole thing. I'm going. I'll be there. Any idea of how I can best use my time?

Thanks!
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Thomas Newkirk's Superlative Look at CCSS

Thomas Newkirk's Holding Onto Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones was already a book worth reading. In 2009, it was a very thoughtful response to some of the twisting of instruction that was happening in English classrooms. Not a practical strategies book, but a book for thinking about the philosophical foundations of what we do.

Turns out that in 2013 Newkirk added a Postscript to the book entitled "Speaking Back to the Common Core," and it's a great addition to the family of essays laying out clearly why the Common Core onslaught is bad news for education. He makes nine solid points.

1. Conflict of interest

It is a fundamental principle of governance that those who establish the guidelines do not benefit financially from those guidelines. We don’t, for example, let representatives of pharmaceutical
companies set health guidelines, for fairly obvious reasons. 

As far as health legislation goes, Newkirk is perhaps optimistic, but his point is still valid. The Core was built and written by the same people who expected to benefit financially for it.


2. Misdiagnosis of the problem

A central premise of the CCSS is that students are not reading difficult enough texts and that we need to ramp up the complexity of the texts they encounter. I would argue that the more serious problem is that students cease to read voluntarily, generally around middle school—and fail to develop the stamina for difficult texts 

In other words, the CCSS prescription is exactly backwards.


3. Developmental Inappropriateness

By working backwards from the ending goals, creators of CCSS ended up with unrealistic expectations for young students.

4. A sterile view of reading

As a reading guy, Newkirk likes the emphasis on "thoughtful reading." But the directive to "stay within the four corners of the text"-- not so much. "This seems to me an inhuman, even impossible, and certainly unwise prescription." He demonstrates with an example.

 5. Underplaying role of narrative

Newkirk offers a great argument that narrative is not some sort of separate animal unto itself, but the root of much work in many disciplines."Biology, for example, is all about process, about action, about events occurring in time, in sequence. Photosynthesis is a story; our immune system is a story; digestion is a story—even “corn sex” is a story..." Again, with examples.

 6. A reform that gives extraordinary power to standardized texts

The central question is this: Are standardized tests compatible with the more complex goals of twenty-first-century literacy? Or are they a regressive and reductive technology (ironically, many of the countries we are chasing in international comparisons do not share our belief in these tests)?

And my absolute favorite parable for the testing wave ever--

    It all comes down to the parable of the drunk and his keys, an old joke that goes like this: A drunk is fumbling along under a streetlight when a policeman comes up and asks him what he doing. The drunk explains he is looking for his keys. “Do you think you lost them there?” the policeman asks.
    “No. But the light is better here."

7. A bonanza for commercialism

We are already seeing at work a process I call “mystification”—taking a practice that was once viewed as within the normal competence of a teacher and making it seem so technical and advanced that a new commercial product (or form of consultation) is necessary.


8. Standards directing instruction

Newkirk recognizes that the creators were skirting a line when they chose to create (totally legal) state standards and not (completely illegal) national curriculum. But he says the line between the two was already breached by Coleman and Pimental themselves when they did things like describe how many text-dependent questions should appear in basal readers.

9. Drowning out other conversations

Newkirk is talking about opportunity cost. A great question that he heard asked of a curriculum director-- "Are you taking any initiatives that are not related to the Common Core?" Newkirk wonders what conversations we won't be having.

I have only tried to whet your appetite-- you should definitely click on over and check out the full text. It's a readable, smart, well-supported look at the Core. I would recommend it in particular as a piece to refer to your civilian friends, or people who are just arriving at "So, is there something wrong with Common Core?"


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The Mystery of Excellence

Diane Ravitch's recent columns about Ms. McLaughlin, one of the undeservingly employed terrible teachers of the Vergara trial, underlines one of the central problems of the whole teacher evaluation portion of the reformster dream.

Ms. McLaughlin won awards for teaching excellence not once, but twice in her career. And yet one of the plaintiffs found her to be grossly ineffective. Now, it's possible that there are factors at play here-- the plaintiff was reportedly recruited for the lawsuit by her only "effective" teacher, a teacher who was RIFed and whose job was then taken by Ms. McLaughlin. So, wheels within wheels.

But could it be possible that a teacher so many students found wonderful was a total dog for another teacher? Of course. Because as much as we think we get excellence in this country, excellence is still a mystery.

I don't imagine I'm God's gift to teaching, but I do okay. My feedback from students, both blind and personal, has been good over the years. But there have been years of my career when I was definitely less good, and there have been students who have been sure that I sucked hugely.

I had a colleague years ago whose students were sure they never did a damn thing in her class, that she was confused and disorganized and didn't know what she was doing. Yet those students came to me next, and invariably time after time I would ask a question about X, and they would answer it, and I would ask, "How did you know that?" and they would realize that Ms. McClueless had actually taught them a great deal.

And it's not just teaching. Every successful writer has devoted fans and an assortment of rabid haters. Every boss of a successful company has supporters and employees who would like to see him roasted slowly over a gas grill. And of course there has never been a political leader who was universally hailed as excellent.

How can someone be both excellent and terrible simultaneously? Mostly it comes down to different measures. If we measure strictly on writing skill, Stephenie Meyer is not awesome, but if we measure based on ability to generate revenue, Stephenie Meyer is a genius.

When measuring excellence, we use a wide variety of metrics. Some are irrelevant; my grandmother used to stop listening to any singer who was divorced, because a divorced person couldn't possibly sing well. Some not only accept bias, but embrace it-- if you are not on The Right Side, then everything you have to say must be horribly wrong. And some are just a matter of personal values. I may just want to hire somebody who gets the job done even if he's not very pleasant, while you may be as concerned about getting along with the person as getting the job done.

The problem with identifying teacher excellence has always been that we have a million ideas about what a teacher is supposed to do. Should Pat's kindergarten teacher make sure that Pat is happy and getting along well with others and maintaining a joyful attitude about life no matter how little Pat learns, or should Pat's teacher be making sure that Pat can master sight words even if it makes Pat miserable to do it? And if we're splitting the difference, where do we split it? And that's before we get to all the other expectations-- should my students learn traditional grammar (and how much) or should we spend more time on writing and what part of the canon (if any) should we read? Should my classroom be a free and open place where everything is filled with the spirit of free and open inquiry, or should it be like a tight, well-disciplined machine? And what's the proper balance of being teacher-directed and student directed?

We could play that game all day. You get the idea. We have a gazillion ideas of what an excellent teacher looks like.

Plenty of attempts have been made to use science-ish techniques to break down the traits of teacher excellence. People still disagree. Or rather, people still default to their own idea of what teacher excellence looks like.

The reformsters thought they had a solution. We'll just define an excellent teacher as one whose students get good scores on the Big Test. And now we're going to use Vergara-style lawsuits and new teacher-eval laws to cement that definition. You can have whatever definition of teacher excellence you like. The courts and the legislatures have the last word.

We could talk about why that definition of teacher excellence is small and narrow and not particularly good. But that's been covered. Let's talk about how it's reformsters shooting themselves in the feet again.

Remember how the whole Big Test thing worked:

Reformsters: We will give students a test to show exactly what they learned in the course of the year.
Parents:Well, that sounds like a good idea.
[Students actually take the test]
Parents: Damnl! I didn't realize that was how that was going to work. You want to do it some more?! Oh, hell no.

Reformsters can install new systems of determining teacher excellence, covered with a smoke screen about how this will "protect great teachers" and "guarantee a great teacher in every classroom." But when the random "ineffectives" start appearing and the public is seeing beloved Ms. Awesomesauce being canned because some system that nobody can really explain claims that she's no good, there will be noise. Particularly in smaller districts (we don't all teach in New York City, Chicago and LA) where teachers are well-known in their communities.

Reformsters keep making the same mistake. It's not enough to have a great sales pitch and convincing story about how well your super-duper plan is going to work. At some point, you have to deliver. From the promise of the Awesome Big Test (which was never going to work) to the promise of charter schools (which, operated for something other than profit, could have), reformsters have made promises they failed to keep.

The promise of evaluation-based staffing will be more of the same. When people see how badly it actually work, reformsters will feel the same kind of pushback that has them scurrying for cover on testing (umm... moratorium! yea, that's it!). The truly unfortunate part is that some large number of teaching careers will be derailed and uncountable could-have-been teachers chased away from the profession by the time that pushback happens. Reformsters are shooting themselves in the feet, but a lot of other people are going to get caught in the crossfire.


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Sunday, June 29, 2014

The Uses of Small Data

Brian Kibby, the president of the Higher Education Group at McGraw-Hill, took to Huffington Post last week to praise Small Data.

"Big data" might be the most hollow, misused term in education. For all of the chest-pounding about how big data has come to education, how are colleges and instructors actually using it --now, in 2014? 

Kibby notes that we've long heard that Big Data will change everything. But in fact "true big data does not exist in education today." Instead of cheering or fearing how Big Data will save us or bring on doomsday, Kibby suggests that we look at how it might actually be useful right now. Big Data could be awesome, and Kibby is a fan in theory, but in practice there are justifiable concerns about privacy as well as a lack of technology that can actually collect, crunch and process the data back to an instructor in any useful way.

Kibby would rather talk about what we can actually do today, and what we can do today are targetted analytics: "things like assignment scores, time spent on the material, progress in an adaptive learning environment."

What we're talking about is short term use, small picture stuff. "These tools aren't paying attention to whether the student had Frosted Flakes or Cheerios for breakfast the morning before a test, but they're looking at what matters most." (I'm guessing Kibby's familiar with the Knewton video) Instead, small data can monitor things like exactly how well the student did on the homework, or how long he worked on it.

What is the upside for McGraw-Hill in the moderately-courageous, slightly-new world?

Odd coincidence-- I just saw the Undercover Boss episode about the chancellor of the University of California at Riverside. He watched a class of 250 do lecture question response with a clicker which allowed the instructor to immediately gauge how well the class was getting it. It's cool stuff. I've seen it in action. I would use it.

What conclusion did the chancellor draw? This is really cool tech that would work well to scale up into other large classes. With this kind of tech, everybody could teach classes of five hundred.

I've always maintained that classroom teachers already do massive amounts of data collection, far more rich and varied than what reformsters have been pushing at us via testing etc. What a teacher collects by looking at, talking to, interacting with, giving small quizes, informal assessments-- we collect a ton of data every day that allows us to develop rich and valuable student assessments that help us make instructional choices and adapt teaching to the individual needs.

But there are limits to that. Beyond a certain number of students, I just can't collect all the data. I can't watch 100 faces to see reactions. I can't informally verbally assess 100 students.

With small data systems in place? Hmmm. Cyber schooling has turned out to be a bust for all but a small sector of the student population. But what about a hybrid, somewhere in between the two extremes. A few hundred students still in a classroom with a live, actual instructor, but interacting through computer tech that allows him to collect and save response data from all those students.

I'm not sure how well it would work. But if it worked well at all, McGraw-Hill could sell a lot of materials, and Anywhere University could cut 50% of that pesky adjunct staff.







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