In a few hours my wife and I will get on a plane and head off for Seattle, where I will learn about PLCs (yay) and stay with my daughter and son-in-law. From there, it's off to LA, where we will stay with my son and future daughter-in-law.
Consequently, things will be quieter than usual here. Were I a blogger of Diane Ravitch's stature and stamina, I would keep up my regular output while strapped to the bottom of a struggling biplane under attack by flying sharks with lasers attached to them. But as it turns out I'm just a guy who doesn't get to see his children on the left coast nearly often enough, traveling with a finicky laptop on which my online-class-taking wife has dibs. My in-laws are minding the store and the dog, but I'll not ask them to blog for me, too. I'll try to check in now and then, but no promises.
I'll be back to normal in about ten days. Just didn't want anybody to worry that I'd been kidnapped by orcs or something. In the meantime, help yourself to the archives and go visit the other many excellent writers scattered about on line.
Monday, July 7, 2014
Sunday, July 6, 2014
There Really Is No Superman
Though personally I always wanted to be part of the Doom Patrol (original flavor, not modern artsy version). But there's no Doom Patrol, either.
There is something very seductive about the superhero ideal, the notion that as soon as X gets on the job, things will finally be okay. Here he (yes, almost always he) comes to save the day.
There are subtler versions of the superhero ideal as well. Maybe we don't expect Our Hero to Save The Day, but we expect to be able to follow him. There's this powerful yearning to be able to sort people into two groups-- People I Can Always Trust and Believe on the one hand and People Who Are Always Wrong on the other. It makes life simple; if Wally McHeroface says "Go left," I can just go ahead an turn left.
I don't believe in the hero, for the same reason I don't believe in the efficacy of centralized national education standards. Because nobody can be right all the time.
First of all, we're human.
I don't mean "Well, we're all human so we all make the occasional mistake." No, I mean "We're all human, so at one time or another we are each going to behave like selfish asshats, like scared monkeys on an fear-fueled adrenaline overdrive that fills our head with so much blind energy that it pushes our brains straight down into our butts."
For as cranky as I am, I'm actually pretty rosey-viewed about humans. I've met just a miniscule number of people that I would call flat out evil or bad. I think lots of people do bad things without actually being terrible human beings.
It's comforting to think that there are lots of terrible evil human beings who are responsible for all the bad things that happen. It's comforting because A) I can take comfort in believing that I'm not one of Those People and B) people can be easily permanently sorted into two groups and then we never have to think about it ever again. Neither A nor B are true, is what I think.
So neither is the corollary true-- that there are people who are just pure good 24/7 and you can always trust them to steer you right without you having to think about it. Also not true, I think.
Collectivism Doesn't Necessarily Help
Believing that you've found a group that you can trust blindly is likewise a fool's errand. Because groups are composed of people, and see above.
The hard part of running a group is figuring out how to manage the outliers. Sometimes the one lone voice in the crowd is the person who has a conscience today. Sometimes he's a raging asshat. One should be listened to; the other should be silenced.
I have some trust for the wisdom of groups because I believe that on any given day, most people know right from wrong, good from bad, dumb from smart. It won't be the exact same people every day, but a firm majority should be on track. But you can mess with the wisdom of groups by trying to control the crowd and shut people up. "We won't talk about that" or "Nobody question Fearless Leader" or "We already know how this vote is supposed to turn out" are all signs that a group is fundamentally flawed.
Which doesn't mean the group is evil and easily dismissed. But you can't safely follow blindly.
Never Stop Thinking and Paying Attention
History is full of these humans. John Wesley founded Methodism, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a man of God with a great understanding of the divine. But if he had married your sister, you probably would have ended up punching him in the nose. But that doesn't mean we shut down the Methodist Church.
We've seen binary thinking before, because all of our heroes did some crappy things. JFK, MLK, Ronald Reagan, Donnie and Marie-- all had their less-than-admirable moments/days/years. It's pointless and impossible to try to categorize them as 100% heroes or unadulterated villains.
Oh, But Then--
Yeah, if you can't just blindly follow your heroes, then you're stuck thinking for yourself. And that's going to be long and hard.
The fundamental approach of the reformsters has been to say, "Look! There's a terrible crisis in education! Follow us, and we will carry you out of this dreadful valley of destruction."
We cannot counter that with, "No, you'll lead us to more destruction. We will follow Our Hero over here and He will quickly lead us out of the valley on the correct path." Because it's the exact same fallacy-- the notion that one heroic person can take the correct bold steps and end all this struggle right now.
Bad News
Let me tell you something neither of us wants to hear. The struggle for US public education, the fight to help children, the push to create more social justice-- it's going to continue for the rest of your life. There are going to be victories and defeats. There are going to be great moments and terrible moments. And then it's going to continue. This is not a sprint. It's a very long marathon. And a crazy marathon at that, one where every runner runs her own path, and nobody else can set the path for you.
Oh, Wait-- That's The Good News!
So, do I have heroes? Sure-- they are people who are pretty serious and wise about most things. But I don't imagine they're perfect. I know other people who are sort of serious and occasionally wise, and some who are hard to take serious and rarely (but not never) wise, and all the other possible permutations. All that means to me is that I have to listen and I have to pay attention. (That includes keeping an eye on myself and seeing if I'm a jerk today or not.)
Which is cool, because life then turns out to be fascinating and varied and way more interesting than a puppet show based on monocolored cut-outs. It's also cool because it allows us to stop focusing on the surprise of discovering that a hero did something stupid or the exertion of defending something Dead Wrong that came from someone On Our Side or the tortured denial of trying to prove that a villain didn't just get something right. It keeps us from organizing our whole lives around simply sorting people out into two groups, and let's us focus on what really matters, whatever that might be.
In the battle for education, we need our sense of outrage, our moral sense, our professional sense. Let's not wait for some sort of hero to emerge, and let's not imagine we can win this by beating a single Evil Mastermind. See, I called this a marathon, but really it's more like trying to move a great, giant sled. We are all stationed at different corners of this massive machine and its harness, and consequently we have lot so different ideas of what the challenge looks like. But if we gather our strength, throw it against the load, and keep pushing, we can move it a little bit every day, and it's in the struggle and the movement and the series of small, important victories that we move forward and that we find our best truest selves. It's in that long hard haul that we win victories for our students and get them one step closer to the lives they deserve.
There is something very seductive about the superhero ideal, the notion that as soon as X gets on the job, things will finally be okay. Here he (yes, almost always he) comes to save the day.
There are subtler versions of the superhero ideal as well. Maybe we don't expect Our Hero to Save The Day, but we expect to be able to follow him. There's this powerful yearning to be able to sort people into two groups-- People I Can Always Trust and Believe on the one hand and People Who Are Always Wrong on the other. It makes life simple; if Wally McHeroface says "Go left," I can just go ahead an turn left.
I don't believe in the hero, for the same reason I don't believe in the efficacy of centralized national education standards. Because nobody can be right all the time.
First of all, we're human.
I don't mean "Well, we're all human so we all make the occasional mistake." No, I mean "We're all human, so at one time or another we are each going to behave like selfish asshats, like scared monkeys on an fear-fueled adrenaline overdrive that fills our head with so much blind energy that it pushes our brains straight down into our butts."
For as cranky as I am, I'm actually pretty rosey-viewed about humans. I've met just a miniscule number of people that I would call flat out evil or bad. I think lots of people do bad things without actually being terrible human beings.
It's comforting to think that there are lots of terrible evil human beings who are responsible for all the bad things that happen. It's comforting because A) I can take comfort in believing that I'm not one of Those People and B) people can be easily permanently sorted into two groups and then we never have to think about it ever again. Neither A nor B are true, is what I think.
So neither is the corollary true-- that there are people who are just pure good 24/7 and you can always trust them to steer you right without you having to think about it. Also not true, I think.
Collectivism Doesn't Necessarily Help
Believing that you've found a group that you can trust blindly is likewise a fool's errand. Because groups are composed of people, and see above.
The hard part of running a group is figuring out how to manage the outliers. Sometimes the one lone voice in the crowd is the person who has a conscience today. Sometimes he's a raging asshat. One should be listened to; the other should be silenced.
I have some trust for the wisdom of groups because I believe that on any given day, most people know right from wrong, good from bad, dumb from smart. It won't be the exact same people every day, but a firm majority should be on track. But you can mess with the wisdom of groups by trying to control the crowd and shut people up. "We won't talk about that" or "Nobody question Fearless Leader" or "We already know how this vote is supposed to turn out" are all signs that a group is fundamentally flawed.
Which doesn't mean the group is evil and easily dismissed. But you can't safely follow blindly.
Never Stop Thinking and Paying Attention
History is full of these humans. John Wesley founded Methodism, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a man of God with a great understanding of the divine. But if he had married your sister, you probably would have ended up punching him in the nose. But that doesn't mean we shut down the Methodist Church.
We've seen binary thinking before, because all of our heroes did some crappy things. JFK, MLK, Ronald Reagan, Donnie and Marie-- all had their less-than-admirable moments/days/years. It's pointless and impossible to try to categorize them as 100% heroes or unadulterated villains.
Oh, But Then--
Yeah, if you can't just blindly follow your heroes, then you're stuck thinking for yourself. And that's going to be long and hard.
The fundamental approach of the reformsters has been to say, "Look! There's a terrible crisis in education! Follow us, and we will carry you out of this dreadful valley of destruction."
We cannot counter that with, "No, you'll lead us to more destruction. We will follow Our Hero over here and He will quickly lead us out of the valley on the correct path." Because it's the exact same fallacy-- the notion that one heroic person can take the correct bold steps and end all this struggle right now.
Bad News
Let me tell you something neither of us wants to hear. The struggle for US public education, the fight to help children, the push to create more social justice-- it's going to continue for the rest of your life. There are going to be victories and defeats. There are going to be great moments and terrible moments. And then it's going to continue. This is not a sprint. It's a very long marathon. And a crazy marathon at that, one where every runner runs her own path, and nobody else can set the path for you.
Oh, Wait-- That's The Good News!
So, do I have heroes? Sure-- they are people who are pretty serious and wise about most things. But I don't imagine they're perfect. I know other people who are sort of serious and occasionally wise, and some who are hard to take serious and rarely (but not never) wise, and all the other possible permutations. All that means to me is that I have to listen and I have to pay attention. (That includes keeping an eye on myself and seeing if I'm a jerk today or not.)
Which is cool, because life then turns out to be fascinating and varied and way more interesting than a puppet show based on monocolored cut-outs. It's also cool because it allows us to stop focusing on the surprise of discovering that a hero did something stupid or the exertion of defending something Dead Wrong that came from someone On Our Side or the tortured denial of trying to prove that a villain didn't just get something right. It keeps us from organizing our whole lives around simply sorting people out into two groups, and let's us focus on what really matters, whatever that might be.
In the battle for education, we need our sense of outrage, our moral sense, our professional sense. Let's not wait for some sort of hero to emerge, and let's not imagine we can win this by beating a single Evil Mastermind. See, I called this a marathon, but really it's more like trying to move a great, giant sled. We are all stationed at different corners of this massive machine and its harness, and consequently we have lot so different ideas of what the challenge looks like. But if we gather our strength, throw it against the load, and keep pushing, we can move it a little bit every day, and it's in the struggle and the movement and the series of small, important victories that we move forward and that we find our best truest selves. It's in that long hard haul that we win victories for our students and get them one step closer to the lives they deserve.
All Minority Schools
Last Tuesday the Atlantic became the gazillionth news outlet to report that this coming fall, the student population of the US will be less than 50% white.
There's remarkably little comment on or discussion of this, even in the Atlantic's article. I can think of several reasons for this to go unremarked.
1) It's not exactly news because it's been coming for quite a while. It would be like throwing a party and hollering, "Look we have tree!" when that sapling that's been growing in your yard for decades finally passes the ten foot tall mark. It didn't exactly sneak up on you.
2) People who prefer to think of themselves (and have others think of them) as Not Racist would like to say it doesn't matter. Kids are kids. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. This doesn't change a thing.
3) This has already been the reality on the ground in many places. On the local level, many schools have been there for decades.
4) Lots of people know the information, but aren't sure what it really means.
I will readily place myself in group 4. I teach in a rural/small town school district. On the map, we look like part of Appalachia, but we don't think of ourselves that way. It is highly unlikely that our white students will be a majority minority any time soon. But let me conjecture about some implications for the nation's public school system with no majority majority.
We Need To Talk About Assimilation
A large chunk of US education has always been about a benign form of assimilation. If you wanted to get ahead in the US, you had to learn to adopt not just the knowledge and skill base of the dominant culture, but the ethics and values instead. Which we've generally defined as white, Christian, middle classish. Education as a door to opportunity meant education as a way to learn to act like a "regular American." To fit in. We need to talk about that.
Actually, in economically strapped areas, we've been having a version of this conversation for a while. Is our job as schools to prepare our students to help strengthen this area, or to prepare them to escape it? Because the skills and culture they need to do well here are not exactly the same as what they need to do well "out there." My first year of teaching was in hugely diverse city, but in parent conferences I had Hispanic parents who demanded that I respect their home culture and others who demanded that I not "hold their child back" by expecting anything different from what I expected from the white kids.
In language studies, we talk about idioms, dialects, and standard usage. Dialects let you speak easily with people who share the dialect, but standard usage is supposed to be a version of the language that works everywhere. We used to just call standard usage "correct." We're getting smarter about the biases embedded in that judgment, but we still wrestle with it, and it's the mini version of the challenge we now face.
It's a two-part problem. What should be the role of learning to operate within the dominant culture in education and society, and how do you even identify the dominant culture in a hugely diverse salad such as ours?
Different Schools Are More Different
Demographically, my local school doesn't look much different than it did fifty years ago. If anything it is less diverse than a century ago when the town was filling with Italian and Slovakian immigrants who settled literally on the other side of the tracks in a neighborhood nicknamed "the Bloody Third" (because you know how Those People are always fighting and settling their problems with knives).
We've operated for decades on the assumption that regular American schools look the same-- a bunch of white kids with a smattering of some minority students. In a sense, desegregation was about making all schools look like that-- a bunch of white kids with a smattering of minority students.
But what the demographics of that chart really mean is that the only thing we can say with certainty about a "regular" American school is that it has students in it. Never in American history have individual schools looked more different from each other.
This presents a huge two-part challenge. On the one hand, local schools need to have the flexibility and freedom to fit their schools to their local culture and population. More than ever, one size really does not fit all. My current high school has little or no need for any programs that deal with English Language Learners-- the only student I had in decades who was not a native English speaker was a student who was raised Amish. My first high school had a large population of Hispanic students who were the first generation to speak English; we needed programs to help them. Today we can multiply those differences by a factor of thousands. Our individual schools are dealing with different cultures, different races, different language issues, different economic issues, different, different, different.
That chart is the total for the US, but individual schools are wildly varied slices of that. It has never been less possible to come up with school programming or design that can be unpacked in every school house in America.
At the same time, flexibility cannot be allowed to mean short-changed. A huge appeal of Common Core in some communities has been the promise that, finally, they will not just get a cheap knock-off imitation of the Real Education that the rich kids are getting uptown. CCSS can't deliver on the promise, and opens the door to even more damaging things, but the promise-- the promise really resonates for a lot of folks.
The more different our schools become, the more those differences have to be reflected in positive ways. It's not enough to say, "We'll take the education we give the rich kids and just take out the parts that don't fit these Other Kids." If education is clothing, each kid needs an outfit that fits and looks good and the she can feel proud of and is of the same fine quality as everybody else's outfit, and that means we can't shop for everyone off the rack.
Diversity and Empathy
The growth of the minority school population means that we need a more diverse teaching force. Students need to be able to see teachers in front of them that they can imagine growing up to be. Given the diversity within a single classroom, this is a tough challenge to meet. Given the higher-than-average attrition rate for minority teachers, it's a challenge that needs an aggressive and pointed attack. The traditional hiring approach used by most schools for most staffing issues (Wait and Hope We Get Lucky) isn't going to work. It's especially sad that the organization to address this issue loudly is Frickin' Teach for America-- and we know they aren't going to solve it.
But there's another piece of this dynamic. Students can better connect with teachers they feel they have something in common with, people who are like them in some way. Unfortunately, that door seems to swing another way. Our school leaders, legislators, important high poobahs-- they often seem to relate best to schools that have students who are like their own kids.
I don't know how we overcome the empathy gap. I am always frustrated with shows like Undercover Boss or news stories about Board Member McClueless expressing outrage after touring Underfunded Shambles Elemntary School and wonder, "How can you not have had a clue? Why did you need to see this with your own eyes to get it?"
If there were ever an argument for teaching more and more literature, it's in this empathy gap. A country like ours cannot survive if the only people we can talk to, listen to, hear, understand, care about, look out for, take care of are the people who are just like us.
The big takeaway from that chart is that we can no longer approach our nation's schools by aiming at some imaginary white middle class kid (probably a boy) and figuring if we aim at him, tweak things a little here and there for other kids, we'll basically hit everybody.
None of these trends, needs or challenges are new-- we should have been working on them all along. The only thing special about crossing the majority minority line is it gives us a hook on which to hang a conversation that has been ongoing, but which many more people ought to be joining.
1) It's not exactly news because it's been coming for quite a while. It would be like throwing a party and hollering, "Look we have tree!" when that sapling that's been growing in your yard for decades finally passes the ten foot tall mark. It didn't exactly sneak up on you.
2) People who prefer to think of themselves (and have others think of them) as Not Racist would like to say it doesn't matter. Kids are kids. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. This doesn't change a thing.
3) This has already been the reality on the ground in many places. On the local level, many schools have been there for decades.
4) Lots of people know the information, but aren't sure what it really means.
I will readily place myself in group 4. I teach in a rural/small town school district. On the map, we look like part of Appalachia, but we don't think of ourselves that way. It is highly unlikely that our white students will be a majority minority any time soon. But let me conjecture about some implications for the nation's public school system with no majority majority.
We Need To Talk About Assimilation
A large chunk of US education has always been about a benign form of assimilation. If you wanted to get ahead in the US, you had to learn to adopt not just the knowledge and skill base of the dominant culture, but the ethics and values instead. Which we've generally defined as white, Christian, middle classish. Education as a door to opportunity meant education as a way to learn to act like a "regular American." To fit in. We need to talk about that.
Actually, in economically strapped areas, we've been having a version of this conversation for a while. Is our job as schools to prepare our students to help strengthen this area, or to prepare them to escape it? Because the skills and culture they need to do well here are not exactly the same as what they need to do well "out there." My first year of teaching was in hugely diverse city, but in parent conferences I had Hispanic parents who demanded that I respect their home culture and others who demanded that I not "hold their child back" by expecting anything different from what I expected from the white kids.
In language studies, we talk about idioms, dialects, and standard usage. Dialects let you speak easily with people who share the dialect, but standard usage is supposed to be a version of the language that works everywhere. We used to just call standard usage "correct." We're getting smarter about the biases embedded in that judgment, but we still wrestle with it, and it's the mini version of the challenge we now face.
It's a two-part problem. What should be the role of learning to operate within the dominant culture in education and society, and how do you even identify the dominant culture in a hugely diverse salad such as ours?
Different Schools Are More Different
Demographically, my local school doesn't look much different than it did fifty years ago. If anything it is less diverse than a century ago when the town was filling with Italian and Slovakian immigrants who settled literally on the other side of the tracks in a neighborhood nicknamed "the Bloody Third" (because you know how Those People are always fighting and settling their problems with knives).
We've operated for decades on the assumption that regular American schools look the same-- a bunch of white kids with a smattering of some minority students. In a sense, desegregation was about making all schools look like that-- a bunch of white kids with a smattering of minority students.
But what the demographics of that chart really mean is that the only thing we can say with certainty about a "regular" American school is that it has students in it. Never in American history have individual schools looked more different from each other.
This presents a huge two-part challenge. On the one hand, local schools need to have the flexibility and freedom to fit their schools to their local culture and population. More than ever, one size really does not fit all. My current high school has little or no need for any programs that deal with English Language Learners-- the only student I had in decades who was not a native English speaker was a student who was raised Amish. My first high school had a large population of Hispanic students who were the first generation to speak English; we needed programs to help them. Today we can multiply those differences by a factor of thousands. Our individual schools are dealing with different cultures, different races, different language issues, different economic issues, different, different, different.
That chart is the total for the US, but individual schools are wildly varied slices of that. It has never been less possible to come up with school programming or design that can be unpacked in every school house in America.
At the same time, flexibility cannot be allowed to mean short-changed. A huge appeal of Common Core in some communities has been the promise that, finally, they will not just get a cheap knock-off imitation of the Real Education that the rich kids are getting uptown. CCSS can't deliver on the promise, and opens the door to even more damaging things, but the promise-- the promise really resonates for a lot of folks.
The more different our schools become, the more those differences have to be reflected in positive ways. It's not enough to say, "We'll take the education we give the rich kids and just take out the parts that don't fit these Other Kids." If education is clothing, each kid needs an outfit that fits and looks good and the she can feel proud of and is of the same fine quality as everybody else's outfit, and that means we can't shop for everyone off the rack.
Diversity and Empathy
The growth of the minority school population means that we need a more diverse teaching force. Students need to be able to see teachers in front of them that they can imagine growing up to be. Given the diversity within a single classroom, this is a tough challenge to meet. Given the higher-than-average attrition rate for minority teachers, it's a challenge that needs an aggressive and pointed attack. The traditional hiring approach used by most schools for most staffing issues (Wait and Hope We Get Lucky) isn't going to work. It's especially sad that the organization to address this issue loudly is Frickin' Teach for America-- and we know they aren't going to solve it.
But there's another piece of this dynamic. Students can better connect with teachers they feel they have something in common with, people who are like them in some way. Unfortunately, that door seems to swing another way. Our school leaders, legislators, important high poobahs-- they often seem to relate best to schools that have students who are like their own kids.
I don't know how we overcome the empathy gap. I am always frustrated with shows like Undercover Boss or news stories about Board Member McClueless expressing outrage after touring Underfunded Shambles Elemntary School and wonder, "How can you not have had a clue? Why did you need to see this with your own eyes to get it?"
If there were ever an argument for teaching more and more literature, it's in this empathy gap. A country like ours cannot survive if the only people we can talk to, listen to, hear, understand, care about, look out for, take care of are the people who are just like us.
The big takeaway from that chart is that we can no longer approach our nation's schools by aiming at some imaginary white middle class kid (probably a boy) and figuring if we aim at him, tweak things a little here and there for other kids, we'll basically hit everybody.
None of these trends, needs or challenges are new-- we should have been working on them all along. The only thing special about crossing the majority minority line is it gives us a hook on which to hang a conversation that has been ongoing, but which many more people ought to be joining.
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Meet the New NEA Presidents
In election results that surprised nobody anywhere, NEA delegates crowned heir apparent Lily Eskelson Garcia the new presidents of NEA.
Liana Heitin reported on the election for EdWeek, and... well... I'm excited? Bemused? Worried about Garcia's susceptibility to cognitive dissonance.
"I believe Secretary Duncan is sincere..."
"And I absolutely believe he is sincerely wrong," she said in a post-election interview. It's a great statement, sweeping and clear. I'll even give her the desire to step away from vituperative personal political attacks. It is not necessary to prove Duncan is a dim-witted mugwump corporate tool ninnymuggins if we just establish that he's wrong.
Getting specific
Garcia showed her ability to get down to specifics by slamming the ever-popular third grade pass-this-reading-test-or-else policy popular in states where education policy is run by people who don't know any eight year olds. She held up Oklahoma as a specific example (though, as Heitin points out, Oklahoma just threw that policy out, but okay-- it's been a busy day).
And Garcia threw out GERM (the global education reform movement) which is one of the few snappy names for the people variously known as deformers, reformsters, and "reformers" (with ironic quotation marks), linking it specifically to Koch Brothers, ALEC, and "prominent industrialists."
This is your first hint that things are not looking up at NEA. Why pick all our examples from the Evil Conservative Republican Menu while ignoring that plenty of nominally Democratic folks like DFER, She Who Will Not Be Named, and, oh, the well-meaning Arne Duncan, are a big fat part of GERM as well?
And then things go deep into the weeds
When asked about the Gates Foundation, whose influence on education policy is a constant source of debate among educators, Garcia said she applauds the work they've done to promote the Common Core State Standards. "I read those standards, and I love them," she said.
Under which rock has Garcia been hiding? I don't have enough space here to cover every single argument and piece of evidence that makes it clear that opposing testing and loving the Common Core requires a tolerance for cognitive dissonance usually not available without powerful drugs. Just a list of all the GERM organizations funded by a combination of swell honorable Gates money and evil GOP money would be enough to sprain the scroll function on a computer.
Being for the Core and against testing is like loving knives and being opposed to cutting. It is like being a fan of genitals but hating sex. It is like loving airplanes and believing they should never leave the ground. It is like wanting to buy a great instrument and declaring that it's best to never play it. It is like bringing a gorilla into your home and imagining that it will never dirty the furniture. It is like setting the timer on a bomb and being shocked that it eventually explodes. It's like thinking your dog is really pretty but being opposed to dog poop.
Oh, President Garcia, we are going to have some chats here, you and you and I.
Half a Great Communicator
On the subject of her leadership style. "People will know where I stand. There will be absolutely no question. I think that will get me in trouble sometimes."
That may be, but if I may. What tends to get NEA leadership is not the part of communicating where they tell everybody else what they think-- it's the part where they listen.
I'll note here that while DVR had a twitter account that he never used, Garcia appears to have no twitter account at all. The NEA has a real problem with , I don't know, the entire 21st century. I once wrote "Today's NEA is not your father's NEA. It's more like your grandfather's NEA." The union's inability to function in any mode other than the pronouncement-by-press-release and occasional NEA-site essay makes a joke out of its other pronouncements.
I welcome, for instance, NEA's stated intention to help teachers get better at doing their job, to help with professional development. But damn-- you guys can't even operate the twitter! I don't know if I trust you to advise me on how to set up an overhead projector. What the heck are you going to tell a twenty-two year old about how to function as a teacher in today's world when NEA leadership still works in slightly-modified pre-WWII techniques?
So here we go
It's a bold new era in which NEA declares that we must fight the back end of the Reform Horse and kill it dead, but the front end of the Reform Horse is beautiful and noble and to be cherished and loved. It is possible that NEA actually needs two separate presidents at this point-- one for talking out of the left side of her mouth, and one for talking out of the right side. In the meantime, apparently, President Garcia will serve as both.
[Update: Garcia does a keep a blog, which you can find here, including a further explanation of how she keeps CCSS and testing separate inside her head. I've added it to the blogroll over to your right.]
Liana Heitin reported on the election for EdWeek, and... well... I'm excited? Bemused? Worried about Garcia's susceptibility to cognitive dissonance.
"I believe Secretary Duncan is sincere..."
"And I absolutely believe he is sincerely wrong," she said in a post-election interview. It's a great statement, sweeping and clear. I'll even give her the desire to step away from vituperative personal political attacks. It is not necessary to prove Duncan is a dim-witted mugwump corporate tool ninnymuggins if we just establish that he's wrong.
Getting specific
Garcia showed her ability to get down to specifics by slamming the ever-popular third grade pass-this-reading-test-or-else policy popular in states where education policy is run by people who don't know any eight year olds. She held up Oklahoma as a specific example (though, as Heitin points out, Oklahoma just threw that policy out, but okay-- it's been a busy day).
And Garcia threw out GERM (the global education reform movement) which is one of the few snappy names for the people variously known as deformers, reformsters, and "reformers" (with ironic quotation marks), linking it specifically to Koch Brothers, ALEC, and "prominent industrialists."
This is your first hint that things are not looking up at NEA. Why pick all our examples from the Evil Conservative Republican Menu while ignoring that plenty of nominally Democratic folks like DFER, She Who Will Not Be Named, and, oh, the well-meaning Arne Duncan, are a big fat part of GERM as well?
And then things go deep into the weeds
When asked about the Gates Foundation, whose influence on education policy is a constant source of debate among educators, Garcia said she applauds the work they've done to promote the Common Core State Standards. "I read those standards, and I love them," she said.
Under which rock has Garcia been hiding? I don't have enough space here to cover every single argument and piece of evidence that makes it clear that opposing testing and loving the Common Core requires a tolerance for cognitive dissonance usually not available without powerful drugs. Just a list of all the GERM organizations funded by a combination of swell honorable Gates money and evil GOP money would be enough to sprain the scroll function on a computer.
Being for the Core and against testing is like loving knives and being opposed to cutting. It is like being a fan of genitals but hating sex. It is like loving airplanes and believing they should never leave the ground. It is like wanting to buy a great instrument and declaring that it's best to never play it. It is like bringing a gorilla into your home and imagining that it will never dirty the furniture. It is like setting the timer on a bomb and being shocked that it eventually explodes. It's like thinking your dog is really pretty but being opposed to dog poop.
Oh, President Garcia, we are going to have some chats here, you and you and I.
Half a Great Communicator
On the subject of her leadership style. "People will know where I stand. There will be absolutely no question. I think that will get me in trouble sometimes."
That may be, but if I may. What tends to get NEA leadership is not the part of communicating where they tell everybody else what they think-- it's the part where they listen.
I'll note here that while DVR had a twitter account that he never used, Garcia appears to have no twitter account at all. The NEA has a real problem with , I don't know, the entire 21st century. I once wrote "Today's NEA is not your father's NEA. It's more like your grandfather's NEA." The union's inability to function in any mode other than the pronouncement-by-press-release and occasional NEA-site essay makes a joke out of its other pronouncements.
I welcome, for instance, NEA's stated intention to help teachers get better at doing their job, to help with professional development. But damn-- you guys can't even operate the twitter! I don't know if I trust you to advise me on how to set up an overhead projector. What the heck are you going to tell a twenty-two year old about how to function as a teacher in today's world when NEA leadership still works in slightly-modified pre-WWII techniques?
So here we go
It's a bold new era in which NEA declares that we must fight the back end of the Reform Horse and kill it dead, but the front end of the Reform Horse is beautiful and noble and to be cherished and loved. It is possible that NEA actually needs two separate presidents at this point-- one for talking out of the left side of her mouth, and one for talking out of the right side. In the meantime, apparently, President Garcia will serve as both.
[Update: Garcia does a keep a blog, which you can find here, including a further explanation of how she keeps CCSS and testing separate inside her head. I've added it to the blogroll over to your right.]
Duncan Slapped by NEA Rank and File
The NEA resolution calling for the departure of Arne Duncan will be picked apart at great length this weekend. I'm pretty sure that Arne is not looking at his paper this morning thinking, "Well, damn. I guess I'd better resign then." Nor do I think his resignation would accomplish much in practical terms. But it sends a message-- several, actually-- and those are interesting on their own.
Leaving Obama Out of It
Interesting that the resolution calls for Duncan to resign rather than the President to fire him. Reminds me of the Declaration of Independence, which conveniently blamed the British government's misbehavior on the King, quite possibly because some folks wanted to leave the door open to deal with the Parliament (aka the people actually creating the offensive policies). It was a nice piece of political angle-playing, but I'm not sure it did much good.
Sending a Message to NEA Leadership
I've been assured by many folks that Dennis Van Roekel is a heck of a guy, and I have no reason to doubt that, but NEA leadership has blown every call every step of the way. In terms of leadership, they've looked a lot like a drum major who turned left when the band marched right, and now they are scrambling to catch up.
If the NEA ever got turned in the right direction, this was how it was going to happen-- a push-back from the states, refusing to behave as they were supposed to.
The Vergara trial and reactions to it have one more importance on top of all the rest-- it's the first time that NEA leadership and Duncan's office have actually disagreed with each other. I am NOT, please note, analogizing the parties involved, but from a tactical standpoint, Vergara may end up being the reformsters' Little Big Horn-- it looks like a decisive victory, but in the long term, it only serves to rile up the opposition.
I really enjoy the mental picture of Duncan on the phone with NEA leadership saying, "Hey, control your damn people," to which NEA leadership responds by shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Sorry, man, but they're pissed and we can't do anything about it."
The Darkly Cynical Read
I like the idea of NEA leadership reacting with a muted "Oh, bloody hell" when the resolution started to look like it had legs. But the cynical read is that this was not a breakdown of NEA's notoriously careful stage managing of its actions. I note this only because the wording of California's resolution dovetails nicely with the new OMGZ!! Bad Tests!! initiative of the NEA. If I wanted to bleed off some of the rank and file reform rage and make sure that it doesn't accidentally hit the Common Core, this is one way I would do it.
On the other hand, the dovetailing may just be a case of California doing a good job of reading the room.
But Let's Be Hopeful
Even if this was stage managed by NEA (and I have no real reason to believe that it is), it still represents a significant shift. NEA has played with similar crankypants motions before and they both died.
It would be nice if this is seem as proof positive to leaders in DC and NEA conference rooms that the union leadership cannot just deliver members in a nice neat package, all lined up behind whatever the bureaucrats and union officers decide in a quiet conference room. It would be nice if this is more proof that bogus polls and facile reassurances will not make the anger over reformy nonsense simply disappear.
So let's hope that this resolution is a message to all sorts of folks, most specifically NEA leaders and a bunch of folks in DC that teachers have had it with this amateur-hour bullshit trash-and-dismantle approach to our profession and the public education that we've devoted our lives to. Let's continue to make it clear to the folks in DC that we have had it with their assault on American public education. Let's continue to make it clear to the Democratic party it's not true that they don't have to stand up for us because we'll vote for them no matter how many times they attack us. And let's continue to make it clear to NEA leadership that we expect them to represent the teachers of America, and not politicians who keep attacking them.
Leaving Obama Out of It
Interesting that the resolution calls for Duncan to resign rather than the President to fire him. Reminds me of the Declaration of Independence, which conveniently blamed the British government's misbehavior on the King, quite possibly because some folks wanted to leave the door open to deal with the Parliament (aka the people actually creating the offensive policies). It was a nice piece of political angle-playing, but I'm not sure it did much good.
Sending a Message to NEA Leadership
I've been assured by many folks that Dennis Van Roekel is a heck of a guy, and I have no reason to doubt that, but NEA leadership has blown every call every step of the way. In terms of leadership, they've looked a lot like a drum major who turned left when the band marched right, and now they are scrambling to catch up.
If the NEA ever got turned in the right direction, this was how it was going to happen-- a push-back from the states, refusing to behave as they were supposed to.
The Vergara trial and reactions to it have one more importance on top of all the rest-- it's the first time that NEA leadership and Duncan's office have actually disagreed with each other. I am NOT, please note, analogizing the parties involved, but from a tactical standpoint, Vergara may end up being the reformsters' Little Big Horn-- it looks like a decisive victory, but in the long term, it only serves to rile up the opposition.
I really enjoy the mental picture of Duncan on the phone with NEA leadership saying, "Hey, control your damn people," to which NEA leadership responds by shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Sorry, man, but they're pissed and we can't do anything about it."
The Darkly Cynical Read
I like the idea of NEA leadership reacting with a muted "Oh, bloody hell" when the resolution started to look like it had legs. But the cynical read is that this was not a breakdown of NEA's notoriously careful stage managing of its actions. I note this only because the wording of California's resolution dovetails nicely with the new OMGZ!! Bad Tests!! initiative of the NEA. If I wanted to bleed off some of the rank and file reform rage and make sure that it doesn't accidentally hit the Common Core, this is one way I would do it.
On the other hand, the dovetailing may just be a case of California doing a good job of reading the room.
But Let's Be Hopeful
Even if this was stage managed by NEA (and I have no real reason to believe that it is), it still represents a significant shift. NEA has played with similar crankypants motions before and they both died.
It would be nice if this is seem as proof positive to leaders in DC and NEA conference rooms that the union leadership cannot just deliver members in a nice neat package, all lined up behind whatever the bureaucrats and union officers decide in a quiet conference room. It would be nice if this is more proof that bogus polls and facile reassurances will not make the anger over reformy nonsense simply disappear.
So let's hope that this resolution is a message to all sorts of folks, most specifically NEA leaders and a bunch of folks in DC that teachers have had it with this amateur-hour bullshit trash-and-dismantle approach to our profession and the public education that we've devoted our lives to. Let's continue to make it clear to the folks in DC that we have had it with their assault on American public education. Let's continue to make it clear to the Democratic party it's not true that they don't have to stand up for us because we'll vote for them no matter how many times they attack us. And let's continue to make it clear to NEA leadership that we expect them to represent the teachers of America, and not politicians who keep attacking them.
Friday, July 4, 2014
Hess: Free Press Charter Stories "Unhelpful"
The Detroit Free Press recently ran a huge, extensively researched and reported story on Michigan's charter schools. They concluded, among other things, that charters hoover up a billion dollars with little transparency, that many charters are simply an ATM for family and friends of operators, that even really bad charters have stayed open for decade, and that charters don't do any better at educating students than public schools. It's a great report, and well worth the read.
Frederick Hess, however, is not feeling the love. In his column of July 3, Hess characterized the Free Press report as a "crude, unhelpful slam" on charters. Do his criticisms have merit? Let's take a look.
He leads his response with a quote:
As Chuck Fellows, president of the FlexTech High School Board of Directors, argued in a Free Press op-ed, "Traditional schools spend $11 billion annually and have a graduation rate ranging from 70% to 79%, according to a 2006 Gates Foundation report. Does that mean that $2 billion to $3 billion is wasted each year?"
I realize that we have limited data available, but we all of us need to stop citing school research from seven, eight, ten, twenty years ago. Ten are years are a hundred regular years in terms of how much the culture and function inside a building work.
But we also have to stop using graduation rate as a point of comparison between charter and public schools. When a charter student doesn't graduate from a charter school, all that means is that he goes back on the public school rolls. The only meaningful statistic for measuring charters is cohort completion. Here's 100 students in your freshman class of 2010-- how many of the 100 were handed diplomas at that school in 2014?
But I will make a deal with Mr. Fellows-- I will give him that $2-3 billion to any charter that agrees to take on and keep every one of the twenty-some percent of future non-grads.
Hess then moves on to a quick item by item rebut.
A] Charters are spending less per student than are traditional district schools.
Here's something that I think all smart charter operators know-- not all students cost the same to educate. The per-student costs we see cited are averages. Some students just require the basic services and education, but some students have special needs, special requirements, and special compliance with various regulations. I can drop the per student costs in any school-- all we have to do is cut special services.
B] Even the paper's reporting concludes that charters are doing similarly while spending less money.
So, separate but more or less equal? Of course, we don't know that charters are doing similarly. What we know is that they are generating similar test scores. We don't know if the charters are providing no phys ed, no arts, no music, no food, and a miserable soul-crushing environment-- we just know their test scores are in the ballpark. To be fair, we also don't know if the charter is providing superlative arts programs, either. But-- and I cannot say this enough-- test scores do not even begin to give the full picture of a school.
C) Charter schools have no guarantee. Some crappy ones aren't closed aggressively enough. Charter authorizers and advocates are working on the problem. Are public schools doing the same?
I'm going to go with "yes," although undoubtedly more effectively in some quarters than others. I'll call this one a tie.
D) Responding to the charge that Michigan has more for-profits running schools than any other state. Hess says basically, "So what?" What difference does the tax status make?
I agree that for-profit vs. non-profit in the charter world is a distinction without a difference. People like to assume that non-profit means "losing money for altruistic purposes" when it just means "we don't have to share the money we're raking in with stockholders." I've outlined my argument at greater length elsewhere, by the basic point is this: when every cent I spend providing education in my school is a cent I don't get to put in my own pocket, the students are my opponents, not my customers, and not my reason for being in business. They are just a means to the end of my own $$, and I find it impossible to believe that such a system favors providing quality education.
E) If charter board members were forced out because they asked for financial reports, that is bad. But I'm not sure you got the whole story. But if you did, I hope you're chasing naughty public school board members, too.
Sure.
F] If the law doesn't prevent "insider dealing" or "self-enrichment," and that's a problem, then legislators can and should change the law. But I found the series peculiar in the way the Free Press tried to beat up on charters for doing things that are currently acceptable under Michigan law.
Really? This is feeling kind of graspy. "Currently acceptable under the law" is setting the bar remarkably low. I will not bother to include every objectionable act ever completed that was acceptable under the law, other than to note that the list would include pretty much every instructional choice made by a teacher in a public school and every tax increase ever imposed by a governing body.
Throughout, Hess seems to be struggling with this rebuttal. Hess's conclusion is especially ironic. He points out a fundamental flaw in how the press covers charter schools:
It's that reporters and editors tend to hold choice programs up to some imaginary standard of high-quality, equitable provisions, rather than to the options that actually exist.
Where did people, in the press and elsewhere, get the idea that choice programs would be super-awesome and high-quality? I'm going to go with "from the proponents of choice programs." I don't have the resources to check every single PR and ad campaign out there, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no charter or voucher school ever approached parents or the public or lawmakers by saying, "If you just give us the chance, we will do a completely adequate job that is not particularly better than what your public schools are doing now." (If someone has seen that campaign, please send it along, and I'll retract.)
At a minimum, you might have expected an awareness that the chance to rethink and reimagine K-12 schooling comes with bumps in the road.
Except what we're seeing is not anything that rethinks or re-imagines schooling, other than to imagine schools that don't have to serve certain sectors of the student population, don't have to deal with challenging students, and don't have to account for what they do with public tax dollars. If this is the kind of "re-imagining" we have to do in order to get schools that provide results indistinguishable from the schools we already have, I fail to see the advantage.
Frederick Hess, however, is not feeling the love. In his column of July 3, Hess characterized the Free Press report as a "crude, unhelpful slam" on charters. Do his criticisms have merit? Let's take a look.
He leads his response with a quote:
As Chuck Fellows, president of the FlexTech High School Board of Directors, argued in a Free Press op-ed, "Traditional schools spend $11 billion annually and have a graduation rate ranging from 70% to 79%, according to a 2006 Gates Foundation report. Does that mean that $2 billion to $3 billion is wasted each year?"
I realize that we have limited data available, but we all of us need to stop citing school research from seven, eight, ten, twenty years ago. Ten are years are a hundred regular years in terms of how much the culture and function inside a building work.
But we also have to stop using graduation rate as a point of comparison between charter and public schools. When a charter student doesn't graduate from a charter school, all that means is that he goes back on the public school rolls. The only meaningful statistic for measuring charters is cohort completion. Here's 100 students in your freshman class of 2010-- how many of the 100 were handed diplomas at that school in 2014?
But I will make a deal with Mr. Fellows-- I will give him that $2-3 billion to any charter that agrees to take on and keep every one of the twenty-some percent of future non-grads.
Hess then moves on to a quick item by item rebut.
A] Charters are spending less per student than are traditional district schools.
Here's something that I think all smart charter operators know-- not all students cost the same to educate. The per-student costs we see cited are averages. Some students just require the basic services and education, but some students have special needs, special requirements, and special compliance with various regulations. I can drop the per student costs in any school-- all we have to do is cut special services.
B] Even the paper's reporting concludes that charters are doing similarly while spending less money.
So, separate but more or less equal? Of course, we don't know that charters are doing similarly. What we know is that they are generating similar test scores. We don't know if the charters are providing no phys ed, no arts, no music, no food, and a miserable soul-crushing environment-- we just know their test scores are in the ballpark. To be fair, we also don't know if the charter is providing superlative arts programs, either. But-- and I cannot say this enough-- test scores do not even begin to give the full picture of a school.
C) Charter schools have no guarantee. Some crappy ones aren't closed aggressively enough. Charter authorizers and advocates are working on the problem. Are public schools doing the same?
I'm going to go with "yes," although undoubtedly more effectively in some quarters than others. I'll call this one a tie.
D) Responding to the charge that Michigan has more for-profits running schools than any other state. Hess says basically, "So what?" What difference does the tax status make?
I agree that for-profit vs. non-profit in the charter world is a distinction without a difference. People like to assume that non-profit means "losing money for altruistic purposes" when it just means "we don't have to share the money we're raking in with stockholders." I've outlined my argument at greater length elsewhere, by the basic point is this: when every cent I spend providing education in my school is a cent I don't get to put in my own pocket, the students are my opponents, not my customers, and not my reason for being in business. They are just a means to the end of my own $$, and I find it impossible to believe that such a system favors providing quality education.
E) If charter board members were forced out because they asked for financial reports, that is bad. But I'm not sure you got the whole story. But if you did, I hope you're chasing naughty public school board members, too.
Sure.
F] If the law doesn't prevent "insider dealing" or "self-enrichment," and that's a problem, then legislators can and should change the law. But I found the series peculiar in the way the Free Press tried to beat up on charters for doing things that are currently acceptable under Michigan law.
Really? This is feeling kind of graspy. "Currently acceptable under the law" is setting the bar remarkably low. I will not bother to include every objectionable act ever completed that was acceptable under the law, other than to note that the list would include pretty much every instructional choice made by a teacher in a public school and every tax increase ever imposed by a governing body.
Throughout, Hess seems to be struggling with this rebuttal. Hess's conclusion is especially ironic. He points out a fundamental flaw in how the press covers charter schools:
It's that reporters and editors tend to hold choice programs up to some imaginary standard of high-quality, equitable provisions, rather than to the options that actually exist.
Where did people, in the press and elsewhere, get the idea that choice programs would be super-awesome and high-quality? I'm going to go with "from the proponents of choice programs." I don't have the resources to check every single PR and ad campaign out there, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no charter or voucher school ever approached parents or the public or lawmakers by saying, "If you just give us the chance, we will do a completely adequate job that is not particularly better than what your public schools are doing now." (If someone has seen that campaign, please send it along, and I'll retract.)
At a minimum, you might have expected an awareness that the chance to rethink and reimagine K-12 schooling comes with bumps in the road.
Except what we're seeing is not anything that rethinks or re-imagines schooling, other than to imagine schools that don't have to serve certain sectors of the student population, don't have to deal with challenging students, and don't have to account for what they do with public tax dollars. If this is the kind of "re-imagining" we have to do in order to get schools that provide results indistinguishable from the schools we already have, I fail to see the advantage.
Van Roekel, Fordham and Defending the Brand
What a difference a year can make.
A year ago, Dennis van Roekel's message to NEA members was, "Well, if not Common Core, then what in its place?" This year, his message was, "Common who? Hey, look at this toxic testing badness!"
With all the tight aim of a finely-crafted focus-group-tested PR campaign, DVR used the NEARA convention as a launching pad for a campaign to push back hard against The Big Test while also, as Fred Klonsky put it, building a firewall around Common Core.
DVR's keynote seems (full disclosure-- I wasn't in Denver and I am depending on the reports of those who were) a work of exceptionally fine tuning, the kind of careful tap dance that you can't perform without knowing every inch of the dance floor.
He led off with a history of the last several decades of school reform, name-checking the usual rage-inducing suspects (even in a speech, it seems, She Who Must Not Be Named is red meat click bait) without getting lost in details. But somehow a study of the evolution of various ill-fated, teacher-blaming, education-crushing reforms did NOT bring DVR to Common Core. Rather, the evil bad boy of school reform is high stakes testing, first bullying its way into the spotlight and now ruining the entire show.
Look! Look over there, at that Bad Testing!! No no no-- not over here at the CCSS! It's the tests! That's what done it!
DVR outlines four points for getting the accountability train back on track:
1) expand early childhood education to improve school readiness,
2) redirect resources away from testing companies and toward improved conditions of learning and teaching,
3) create high standards for all learners and
4) take ownership of and responsibility for a quality teacher workforce.
1 is harmless. 2 is an interesting pipe dream. 4 is perhaps the most interesting, representing an intention of the union to finally get involved in teacher quality. And 3, of course, reaffirms the NEA's devotion to the Common Core. Not that DVR ever mentioned the Core. Focus-testing apparently made it clear that it was not a guaranteed applause line.
No, the purpose of this initiative is two-fold. Attack the tests. Defend the brand.
It helps that the tests deserve attacking. They're a weak target at this point, and they are the backbone, teeth and testicles of the entire CCSS movement. And they are odious, awful, wretched excuses for anything useful. They are every bit as bad as DVR said they are, and that's part of the campaign's strength-- it's based on truth. It just stops telling the truth once we get to the question of why we have these tests in the first place. Because for some reason, the imperative is to protect the CCSS brand.
Gates proposed moratorium on testing is likely the same thing. At all costs protect the brand.
CCSS is a hot air balloon struggling to avoid crashing back to earth, and testing is the overweight guy who may have been our BFF when we took off, but now we need to get rid of anything that is dragging the CCSS balloon down, so over the side with you, buddy.
Likewise, CCSS foes were chortling yesterday to see Robert Pondisco at the Fordham Institute's blog eviscerating a model teaching example from engageNY's Kate Gerson, who demonstrated an example of why Common Core is often associated with students who would rather have their eyebrows plucked bald one hair at a time. Gerson appears to be channeling the worst teaching techniques of the 1960s, and my heart goes out once again to NY teachers who have to deal with this drivel.
But is Pondisco, shooting holes in the Core? Of course not. The Fordham has been relentless in defending the brand-- from everybody and anybody including She Who Must Not Be Named and Arne Duncan himself. The Fordham applies the same technique over and over again-- they spot something egregious or stupid, and instead of making the amateur hour mistake of trying to protect it because it's Core, they get out their knives, carve it up, and declare, "This is NOT Common Core. This is what you get when some idiot does Common Core wrong." They have mastered a not-easily-mastered skill, because defending yourself from your enemies is easy; defending yourself from your friends is way harder.
Look, I welcome NEA attacking tests. As I've written before, the tests are the very worst, most destructive part of the reformy beast. But if we keep supporting the idea of national standards, we are going to keep getting national standardized tests. Railing against the testing while defending the CCSS is like cutting off dandelions and carefully tending their roots.
This circling of the wagons around the Core is good news for those of us in the resistance. For one thing, Core supporters are way over-estimating how easily CCSS can be cut loose and protected from the effects of things like a testing system that was built right into the Core's dna. For another, the fact that they're willing to try is a measure of how much trouble they're in.
And if, a year after defiantly defending it, DVR is ready to go through his last speech without even mentioning the Common Core, there is hope that my national union might be starting to get the beginning of a clue.
A year ago, Dennis van Roekel's message to NEA members was, "Well, if not Common Core, then what in its place?" This year, his message was, "Common who? Hey, look at this toxic testing badness!"
With all the tight aim of a finely-crafted focus-group-tested PR campaign, DVR used the NEARA convention as a launching pad for a campaign to push back hard against The Big Test while also, as Fred Klonsky put it, building a firewall around Common Core.
DVR's keynote seems (full disclosure-- I wasn't in Denver and I am depending on the reports of those who were) a work of exceptionally fine tuning, the kind of careful tap dance that you can't perform without knowing every inch of the dance floor.
He led off with a history of the last several decades of school reform, name-checking the usual rage-inducing suspects (even in a speech, it seems, She Who Must Not Be Named is red meat click bait) without getting lost in details. But somehow a study of the evolution of various ill-fated, teacher-blaming, education-crushing reforms did NOT bring DVR to Common Core. Rather, the evil bad boy of school reform is high stakes testing, first bullying its way into the spotlight and now ruining the entire show.
Look! Look over there, at that Bad Testing!! No no no-- not over here at the CCSS! It's the tests! That's what done it!
DVR outlines four points for getting the accountability train back on track:
1) expand early childhood education to improve school readiness,
2) redirect resources away from testing companies and toward improved conditions of learning and teaching,
3) create high standards for all learners and
4) take ownership of and responsibility for a quality teacher workforce.
1 is harmless. 2 is an interesting pipe dream. 4 is perhaps the most interesting, representing an intention of the union to finally get involved in teacher quality. And 3, of course, reaffirms the NEA's devotion to the Common Core. Not that DVR ever mentioned the Core. Focus-testing apparently made it clear that it was not a guaranteed applause line.
No, the purpose of this initiative is two-fold. Attack the tests. Defend the brand.
It helps that the tests deserve attacking. They're a weak target at this point, and they are the backbone, teeth and testicles of the entire CCSS movement. And they are odious, awful, wretched excuses for anything useful. They are every bit as bad as DVR said they are, and that's part of the campaign's strength-- it's based on truth. It just stops telling the truth once we get to the question of why we have these tests in the first place. Because for some reason, the imperative is to protect the CCSS brand.
Gates proposed moratorium on testing is likely the same thing. At all costs protect the brand.
CCSS is a hot air balloon struggling to avoid crashing back to earth, and testing is the overweight guy who may have been our BFF when we took off, but now we need to get rid of anything that is dragging the CCSS balloon down, so over the side with you, buddy.
Likewise, CCSS foes were chortling yesterday to see Robert Pondisco at the Fordham Institute's blog eviscerating a model teaching example from engageNY's Kate Gerson, who demonstrated an example of why Common Core is often associated with students who would rather have their eyebrows plucked bald one hair at a time. Gerson appears to be channeling the worst teaching techniques of the 1960s, and my heart goes out once again to NY teachers who have to deal with this drivel.
But is Pondisco, shooting holes in the Core? Of course not. The Fordham has been relentless in defending the brand-- from everybody and anybody including She Who Must Not Be Named and Arne Duncan himself. The Fordham applies the same technique over and over again-- they spot something egregious or stupid, and instead of making the amateur hour mistake of trying to protect it because it's Core, they get out their knives, carve it up, and declare, "This is NOT Common Core. This is what you get when some idiot does Common Core wrong." They have mastered a not-easily-mastered skill, because defending yourself from your enemies is easy; defending yourself from your friends is way harder.
Look, I welcome NEA attacking tests. As I've written before, the tests are the very worst, most destructive part of the reformy beast. But if we keep supporting the idea of national standards, we are going to keep getting national standardized tests. Railing against the testing while defending the CCSS is like cutting off dandelions and carefully tending their roots.
This circling of the wagons around the Core is good news for those of us in the resistance. For one thing, Core supporters are way over-estimating how easily CCSS can be cut loose and protected from the effects of things like a testing system that was built right into the Core's dna. For another, the fact that they're willing to try is a measure of how much trouble they're in.
And if, a year after defiantly defending it, DVR is ready to go through his last speech without even mentioning the Common Core, there is hope that my national union might be starting to get the beginning of a clue.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)