Stephanie Simon's Politico piece "Mom's winning the Common Core war" includes a sort of second breath rededication of purpose from Michael Petrilli at the Fordham Institute and Wes Farno at Higher State Standards Partnership, a group that we've met before working hand in hand with Jeb Bush's FEE and the US Chamber of Commerce. Both Fordham and HSSP are big-fans of the Core (or, at least, big fans of being paid to promote the Core).
“We’ve been fighting emotion with talking points, and it doesn’t work,”
said Mike Petrilli, executive vice president of the Fordham Institute, a
leading supporter of the standards. “There’s got to be a way to get
more emotional with our arguments if we want to win this thing. That
means we have a lot more work to do.”
“The Common Core message so far has been a head message. We’ve done a
good job talking about facts and figures. But we need to move 18 inches
south and start talking about a heart message,” said Wes Farno.
Beyond the practical advice we might offer Farno (specifically, measure twice, cut once, and don't accidentally talking to peoples' intestines or genitals), there's a case to be made that these guys have missed the mark both on the diagnosis and the prescription. But don't take my word for it. listen to some actual conservatives.
Neal McCluskey of the CATO institute has been on the No Love For CCSS bus for quite a while, and his "Core Reporters: We've Just Been Too Darned Principled" pulls no punches.
The argument for the Core – to the extent one has even been given – has
mainly been a simple one of “build high standards and success will
come.”...This ignores the major empirical evidence I and many others
have brought against the Core, and national standards generally,
showing that standards – much less the Core itself – have demonstrated
no such power.
He goes on to observe that the Core defense strategy has depended on neither evidence nor data nor facts, but on calling opponents names. And indeed, both in Simon's article and back in David Coleman's Aspen Chat, the new refrain in reformville is "No, we never should have called those guys names. They're actually fine people."
But we don't have to travel to CATO to find conservatives with doubts. On Tuesday, Andy Smarick posted on Fordham's own blog a piece that asks the question "Is education reform anti-conservative?" Smarick frames the question with his own personal journey (throwing caution to the wind and forgetting David Coleman's admonition that nobody gives a shit what he feels or thinks").
Smarick says he has become "restive" about reform (which would make a fine song lyric or t-shirt) and after considering many of the things he's restive about (failure to operationally embrace diversity, too much compromise with hidebound traditionalists), he finds his answer:
After months of frustration, I finally put my finger on the essence of
the problem: there is no conservatism in today’s education reform...
Others might argue contemporary K–12 reform is premised on conservative
principles (expanding choice, utilizing competition, resisting
public-sector unionism), so I should stop bellyaching. But this
free-market orientation is only one strand of conservatism.
He enumerates some conservative values that are lacking in school reform, including a respect for tradition, and an aversion to activist government that leads to respect for evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. And I just want to point that I've been saying this for a while-- I come from a whole family of traditional conservatives, and the current state of ed reform is not something they are in tune with.
Meanwhile, Rick Hess continues to be in front of the conservative discussion of reform. A while back he asked the question, "What should conservatives be for in education?" (and I answered it), and while I don't always agree with Hess's conclusions, he's a conservative who's generally willing to behave like a grownup and exhibit some intellectual honesty.
About a week ago Hess celebrated the anniversary of Race to the Top by examining what a cock-up it turned out to be. He notes two serious flaws in RttT; it's an underachieving list, like making a list of two attractive women at the Miss America pageant, but the two observations are worth noting.
One is rarely mentioned, but significant-- by offering up a plate of money at a moment of financial disaster, the feds gave states a way to put off solving problems. States looking at real financial crises said, "Okay, our solution is to plug the hole with these free federal funds." This turns out to be somewhat like treating a compound leg fracture with strong doses of pain killers; eventually the pain killers wear off and you're in even worse trouble.
The second is more familiar-- a version of the "if only the feds had stayed out." However, instead of the usual imaginary world where states all signed up to Common Core their hearts out, Hess envisions "a collaborative effort of 15 or so enthusiastic states." But by rushing the whole process and forcing, by RttT or by waiver, every state to climb on board, the feds "pushed states to hurriedly adopt new teacher evaluation systems and
specifically to use test results to gauge teachers,
not-ready-for-primetime evaluation systems are now entangled with the
Common Core and new state tests." Common Core and its various attached reformy things could have been a contender, but now Hess fears it's just a cautionary tale.
So what actually happened? The answer, I suspect, is in Smarick's line
But this
free-market orientation is only one strand of conservatism.
As I've told many of my civilian friends, the reformster assault doesn't make much sense when you try to parse it as liberal versus conservatives-- you end up with all sorts of people on the "wrong" side. But when you reframe it as "corporate $$" versus "educational concerns," it suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Both parties, both political bents, are infested with people who are far more concerned about corporate bucks than... well, anything.
I don't believe that the rush to RttT that Hess decries was the result of just political ambition or simple over-reaching wonkery-- I'd bet that behind the scenes were corporate folks like Pearson et al who could just taste all the delicious money to be made if the feds would just open up the entire education market. Folks who could smell that enormous pile of money, who were writing pieces about education as the next big investment opportunity-- they were not going to settle for a measly fifteen states poking along toward Core-centered reform.
It's hard to tell where some people fall on the political spectrum these days, but it's really easy to tell whether big business pays their bills or not. We've watched money infect the process of defending the country and providing a food supply by warping and twisting the political process surrounding those sectors. Today we're simply living through the same infection spreading into education.
There are always going to be some serious conservative-liberal disagreements about how public education should work, but we all ought to be able to agree that money-driven political baloney does NOT improve the situation.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
BATS and Arne
There's not a lot for me to add to Mark Naison's account of the meeting between six BAT representatives and several Department of Education reps, including Arne Duncan. You should be giving that a read, if for no other reason than it represents a moment when the USDOE paid attention to teachers that they themselves hadn't chosen to talk to.
There are just a couple of moments that I want to highlight.
First, Marla Kilfoyle expressed her concerns about the Department's new policy of testing students with disabilities into a magical state of Not Having Disabilities.
Secretary Duncan deflected her remarks by saying that the Department was concerned that too many children of color were being inappropriately diagnosed as being Special Needs children and that once they were put in that category they were permanently marginalized. He then said “We want to make sure that all student are exposed to a rigorous curriculum.”
So... we're afraid that too many children of color are being mislabeled as having special needs, so rather than fix that, we're just going to operate on a new assumption that students labeled special needs don't actually have special needs. This is perhaps not the most direct way to attack that particular problem (we might start by checking to see how big a problem it is).
Then this, in a discussion of VAM and school closings, leading to the subject of teacher evaluation.
They two officials [one communications guy and an intern] had no real answer to what Dr Wiliams was saying and deflected attention from his critique by insisting that we needed to hold teachers accountable by student test scores because there was no other way of making sure teachers took every student seriously and helped all of them reach their full potential.
It's not that we didn't deduce this already, but there's your statement. Teachers are the problem. We don't want to do our jobs and the only way we can be made to do our jobs is with threats, because that's the only thing we will possibly respond to.
It would be interesting to climb in my time-space machine and ask that un-named intern exactly what sorts of threats got him to take his interning position. Or is he perhaps interning away because he believes in the work and thinks he's Doing Something Important that uses his skills and knowledge to their best advantage.
No matter. As long as the assumption in DC is that teachers will only do their jobs properly when cajoled and threatened, fire to their feet and boots to their asses, we are going to get policy designed to punish teachers.
I have no idea what might actually come out of the meeting, but it's certainly heartening to many folks to know that some unedited unfiltered words were spoken in a DOE meeting room. That, and a face to face meeting, is no small thing.
There are just a couple of moments that I want to highlight.
First, Marla Kilfoyle expressed her concerns about the Department's new policy of testing students with disabilities into a magical state of Not Having Disabilities.
Secretary Duncan deflected her remarks by saying that the Department was concerned that too many children of color were being inappropriately diagnosed as being Special Needs children and that once they were put in that category they were permanently marginalized. He then said “We want to make sure that all student are exposed to a rigorous curriculum.”
So... we're afraid that too many children of color are being mislabeled as having special needs, so rather than fix that, we're just going to operate on a new assumption that students labeled special needs don't actually have special needs. This is perhaps not the most direct way to attack that particular problem (we might start by checking to see how big a problem it is).
Then this, in a discussion of VAM and school closings, leading to the subject of teacher evaluation.
They two officials [one communications guy and an intern] had no real answer to what Dr Wiliams was saying and deflected attention from his critique by insisting that we needed to hold teachers accountable by student test scores because there was no other way of making sure teachers took every student seriously and helped all of them reach their full potential.
It's not that we didn't deduce this already, but there's your statement. Teachers are the problem. We don't want to do our jobs and the only way we can be made to do our jobs is with threats, because that's the only thing we will possibly respond to.
It would be interesting to climb in my time-space machine and ask that un-named intern exactly what sorts of threats got him to take his interning position. Or is he perhaps interning away because he believes in the work and thinks he's Doing Something Important that uses his skills and knowledge to their best advantage.
No matter. As long as the assumption in DC is that teachers will only do their jobs properly when cajoled and threatened, fire to their feet and boots to their asses, we are going to get policy designed to punish teachers.
I have no idea what might actually come out of the meeting, but it's certainly heartening to many folks to know that some unedited unfiltered words were spoken in a DOE meeting room. That, and a face to face meeting, is no small thing.
The engageNY CCSS Primer
In which engageNY provides a brief explanation of why the Core is baloney
That one-stop-shopping for fully sliced Core baloney, engageNY, has a simple chart that can be used to see why the Core is, along with all its other flaws, not particularly necessary.
"Pedagogical shifts demanded by the Common Core State Standards" is a handy list of twelve shifts (six math, six ELA) that teachers implementing the Core must make "to be truly aligned with it in terms of curricular materials and classroom instruction." There are only twelve, so let's have a look, shall we?
Balancing Informational and Literary Texts
Just so you know, this is just a short chart, so there will be no support for any of this. David Coleman just thinks that students would benefit from rich texts about non-fiction subjects because, well, he thinks so.
Knowledge of the Disciplines
That's what the heading says. The "explanation" says "students build knowledge about the world (domains/content areas) through TEXT rather than the teacher or activities." So apparently one "pedagogical shift" will be for teachers to stop pedagogying. "Here's a book, kid. Go get smart."
Staircase of Complexity
"Students read the central grade appropriate text around which instruction is centered." Other than the "grade appropriate" part ("Stop whining, Chris. Just because you can only read at third grade level, that's no reason for you not to just read this seventh grade level text. I don't want to hear about your frustration"), is there anything here that we needed a national standards movement to establish. But wait-- there's more--
"Teachers are patient, create more time and space and support in the curriculum for close reading." As an interesting side note, "and support" seems to have been added in an edit. So remember teachers-- be patient and supportive. Stop being impatient and abusive which, apparently, was the previous pedagogical standard in NY? You heard it here first. Also, remember to give each a student area open enough to have to turn the books' pages.
Text Based Answers
"Students engage in rich and rigorous evidence based conversations about text." This remains one of the great Hallmarks of Stupid in the Annals of Core Lunacy. Remember, when discussing The Sun Also Rises, never mention The Great European War. When covering "The Gettysburg Address" you certainly don't want to mention the Battle of Gettysburg.
And when teaching smaller children, definitely never allow them to make connections between what you're reading and their lives. Which is kind of hilarious, because I teach high school but my wife teaches first grade, and I know what happens in first grade as soon as you say, "So, this puppy is brown. Does anybody know anything about brown puppies?" But remember-- it's never too early to explain to students that their own lives, experiences, and knowledge are unimportant and not worth sharing or consulting. Just what's on the page, kids.
Writing from sources
Yes, absolutely. Previously teachers have just told students, "When you write a paper about this subject, just make stuff up." Remember: when making an argument, your ideas have no value. (Unless you are David Coleman)
Academic vocabulary
This represents a bit of a Common Core head fake, because we're all supposed to be taking academic vocabulary OUT of instruction because David Coleman has decreed that it will be taken out of the SAT. But I do think it's fun that jargon is now a pedagogical shift. A good thing once again, as I have been teaching writing students to just "look at that thingy with the stuff in that lump of wordy things."
Now, the other six are math shifts, but I think even I, an English teacher, can spot the problems here.
Focus
Do less, more deeply. I never understand how this is supposed to work in math. Isn't math fundamentally sequential? Will slowing the sequence down not ultimately reduce the amount of actual math involved in a high school education?
Coherence
This one says, I kid you not, "Principals and teachers carefully connect the learning within and across grades so that students can build new understanding onto foundations built in previous years." And I'm thinking that even if your previous math curriculum planning was "Let's buy a math textbook series and use it across all the years of our school" you already had this covered. This is a shift??!! A big, new change that CCSS will usher in? What the hell have you guys in New York been doing??
Fluency
Students are supposed to have speed and accuracy for simple calculations, and teachers are to make time for them to memorize core functions (not Core functions). Now THIS is good, old-fashioned state-level response to a New Education Program. You take what you want to do, and then blame it on the NEP. If there's anything that's been clear about CCSS, it's that memorization is out, and doing simple things in long convoluted ways to show that you Really Understand what's going on is in. Way to be an old school rebel, engageNY.
Deep Understanding
Here we go. Students don't just learn "the trick" to getting the right answer. They understand the math. Because getting the right answer is just a trick. Would that we had more tricky people in the world.
Application
Students are expected to use math and choose the right application even when not prompted to do so. So, after teaching them for years that every problem should engender multiple responses, the more arcane the better, students should conclude that this means there is really just one right approach to pick.
Dual Intensity
Students are practicing and understanding. Both of them. Again-- a shocking, radical shift, but only in the sense that if this represents a shift, what the hell were teachers doing before?
So there you have it, in brief. EngageNY's interpretation of the Core-- one part useless foolishness, one part stuff that isn't actually in the CCSS, and one part pedagogy that any non-brain-dead teacher was already using. Thank goodness the CCSS are here to save us.
That one-stop-shopping for fully sliced Core baloney, engageNY, has a simple chart that can be used to see why the Core is, along with all its other flaws, not particularly necessary.
"Pedagogical shifts demanded by the Common Core State Standards" is a handy list of twelve shifts (six math, six ELA) that teachers implementing the Core must make "to be truly aligned with it in terms of curricular materials and classroom instruction." There are only twelve, so let's have a look, shall we?
Balancing Informational and Literary Texts
Just so you know, this is just a short chart, so there will be no support for any of this. David Coleman just thinks that students would benefit from rich texts about non-fiction subjects because, well, he thinks so.
Knowledge of the Disciplines
That's what the heading says. The "explanation" says "students build knowledge about the world (domains/content areas) through TEXT rather than the teacher or activities." So apparently one "pedagogical shift" will be for teachers to stop pedagogying. "Here's a book, kid. Go get smart."
Staircase of Complexity
"Students read the central grade appropriate text around which instruction is centered." Other than the "grade appropriate" part ("Stop whining, Chris. Just because you can only read at third grade level, that's no reason for you not to just read this seventh grade level text. I don't want to hear about your frustration"), is there anything here that we needed a national standards movement to establish. But wait-- there's more--
"Teachers are patient, create more time and space and support in the curriculum for close reading." As an interesting side note, "and support" seems to have been added in an edit. So remember teachers-- be patient and supportive. Stop being impatient and abusive which, apparently, was the previous pedagogical standard in NY? You heard it here first. Also, remember to give each a student area open enough to have to turn the books' pages.
Text Based Answers
"Students engage in rich and rigorous evidence based conversations about text." This remains one of the great Hallmarks of Stupid in the Annals of Core Lunacy. Remember, when discussing The Sun Also Rises, never mention The Great European War. When covering "The Gettysburg Address" you certainly don't want to mention the Battle of Gettysburg.
And when teaching smaller children, definitely never allow them to make connections between what you're reading and their lives. Which is kind of hilarious, because I teach high school but my wife teaches first grade, and I know what happens in first grade as soon as you say, "So, this puppy is brown. Does anybody know anything about brown puppies?" But remember-- it's never too early to explain to students that their own lives, experiences, and knowledge are unimportant and not worth sharing or consulting. Just what's on the page, kids.
Writing from sources
Yes, absolutely. Previously teachers have just told students, "When you write a paper about this subject, just make stuff up." Remember: when making an argument, your ideas have no value. (Unless you are David Coleman)
Academic vocabulary
This represents a bit of a Common Core head fake, because we're all supposed to be taking academic vocabulary OUT of instruction because David Coleman has decreed that it will be taken out of the SAT. But I do think it's fun that jargon is now a pedagogical shift. A good thing once again, as I have been teaching writing students to just "look at that thingy with the stuff in that lump of wordy things."
Now, the other six are math shifts, but I think even I, an English teacher, can spot the problems here.
Focus
Do less, more deeply. I never understand how this is supposed to work in math. Isn't math fundamentally sequential? Will slowing the sequence down not ultimately reduce the amount of actual math involved in a high school education?
Coherence
This one says, I kid you not, "Principals and teachers carefully connect the learning within and across grades so that students can build new understanding onto foundations built in previous years." And I'm thinking that even if your previous math curriculum planning was "Let's buy a math textbook series and use it across all the years of our school" you already had this covered. This is a shift??!! A big, new change that CCSS will usher in? What the hell have you guys in New York been doing??
Fluency
Students are supposed to have speed and accuracy for simple calculations, and teachers are to make time for them to memorize core functions (not Core functions). Now THIS is good, old-fashioned state-level response to a New Education Program. You take what you want to do, and then blame it on the NEP. If there's anything that's been clear about CCSS, it's that memorization is out, and doing simple things in long convoluted ways to show that you Really Understand what's going on is in. Way to be an old school rebel, engageNY.
Deep Understanding
Here we go. Students don't just learn "the trick" to getting the right answer. They understand the math. Because getting the right answer is just a trick. Would that we had more tricky people in the world.
Application
Students are expected to use math and choose the right application even when not prompted to do so. So, after teaching them for years that every problem should engender multiple responses, the more arcane the better, students should conclude that this means there is really just one right approach to pick.
Dual Intensity
Students are practicing and understanding. Both of them. Again-- a shocking, radical shift, but only in the sense that if this represents a shift, what the hell were teachers doing before?
So there you have it, in brief. EngageNY's interpretation of the Core-- one part useless foolishness, one part stuff that isn't actually in the CCSS, and one part pedagogy that any non-brain-dead teacher was already using. Thank goodness the CCSS are here to save us.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
One True Path
In the midst of celebrating Coleman's awesomeness at Aspen, the architect of Common Core explained that he would keep aligning the world to the core
so that we are clearly showing kids and teachers that there's a path to college that extends from Kindergarten through twelfth grade.
This is one of the fundamental articles of faith for reformsters-- there is One True Path to a good life, to happy, healthy, productive adulthood. This idea-- along with its corollary (all happy, healthy, productive adult lives look pretty much the same)-- is so patently, observably false that I resist writing about it because I feel as if I'm using a slice of the internet to argue that grass is usually green. But as long as these guys keep saying it, we have to keep pointing out that it's wrong.
You've seen this cartoon
so that we are clearly showing kids and teachers that there's a path to college that extends from Kindergarten through twelfth grade.
This is one of the fundamental articles of faith for reformsters-- there is One True Path to a good life, to happy, healthy, productive adulthood. This idea-- along with its corollary (all happy, healthy, productive adult lives look pretty much the same)-- is so patently, observably false that I resist writing about it because I feel as if I'm using a slice of the internet to argue that grass is usually green. But as long as these guys keep saying it, we have to keep pointing out that it's wrong.
You've seen this cartoon
It's a pretty good representation except that even it shows the arrow coming out at the same place in the end, which is not necessarily the case.
Everybody knows a story like this-- I know a guy who went to college for music straight out of high school, only he turned out not to enjoy that so much, so he went to work as a grocery bagger and an ambulance driver. He eventually went back to school again, and now he's running the largest manufacturing business in my region. For good measure, we can also note that he was engaged a few times, none of which worked out, and is now married to a wonderful woman with whom he raised two exceptional children.
Now, you tell me-- exactly how would a program of high stakes testing in his primary grades have "helped" him?
The notion that there is One True Path underpins many of the other dumb notions of reforminess. For instance, if there's just One True Path, then it's easy to just set up checkpoints along that path because everyone on the path will have to move past those checkpoints. This leads to a slavish defense of the checkpoints. "Hey, you!! Kid crawling through the underbrush! You can't blaze your own trail! You've got to come past this checkpoint." Before you know it, we're not really concerned about whether the student is headed for a successful life or not-- we just want to make sure he goes past the One True Path checkpoint.
Reformsters make mouth noises about personalization and individualization, but they don't mean that every student might take a different path. They mean that each individual student might be at a different point on the One True Path, or that some students walk down the One True Path faster than others. This is not really individualization. This is not about finding the right path for the student; it's about making the student adapt to the One True Path (and stick to the One True Schedule for walking down it).
If we believe in the One True Path, we see nothing ridiculous about claiming that we can tell whether you're on it when you're five years old. Hey, there's only one path. You're either on it or you're not, and as soon as you're old enough to take a test, we can find out if you're in place (Okay, fetus-- kick once for "A" and twice for "B"). Of course we can tell you whether your toddler is college bound or not.
How is it that it has become a radical (or reactionary-- take your pick) position to argue that individual human beings are different, that they follow different paths, pursue different goals, achieve different things, find their happiness and success in different ways, and do it all in their own time. How did that become a controversial point of view?
One size does not fit all. All courtships follow a different path and all marriages grow and succeed (or not) in their own way. Children grow and achieve developmental milestones in their own way. People talk in their own ways. Not every person you ever kiss will kiss you the same way. This is all completely normal and in keeping with the design and function of human beings.
In fact, learning to grow and become fully human, fully one's own self, is all about finding your own path, your own transportation, your own destination, and while it's nice to have a plan or a sense of direction, it's wise not to become to attached to the plan. All of human history, both large scale and small, tells us that this is what it means to be human-- there is no One True Path.
Monday, July 28, 2014
David Coleman Is Superman!
Politico dipped into the David Coleman at Aspen Ideas festival file and pulled out a quote in which Coleman admits that “I think then we make a great mistake by caricaturing the opponents of
the standards as crazies or people who don't tell the truth." They call this "a big takeaway." They also catch Coleman admitting that it's no sign of great paranoia to be concerned about how individual student data is handled.
So has Politico discovered Coleman 2.0 (great taste, less filling), or has Politico simply made use of the magic of careful quote-clipping? I listened to the whole thirty minute clip so that you wouldn't have to, and you owe me.
The second portion of the Aspen Ideas talk has been previously covered in this space; it deals with super new marketing things happening with the College Board. What we're looking at today is the first fifteen minutes or so. And I have important news to report--
David Coleman is the Superman everyone has been waiting for.
The press opportunity is hosted by Jane Stoddard Williams, who telegraphs her position by characterizing the College Board's decision to hire Coleman as "brilliant."She also refers to him as maybe the main architect of the Common Core, and Coleman politely fails to correct her even to the extent of pointing out that there were a whole batch of math guys working while he handled the ELA side.
Williams also makes oblique reference to finally being able to get him to explain what's going on with Common Core " to the extent that he can" and that's definitely not a slam on his knowledge-- there's more a tone of talking to someone who's working on a super-classified modern-day Manhattan Project.
Coleman explains his current employment simply. College Board helped develop the Common Core and it was because of his involvement with the Core that they hired him.
So please expect that public leadership role to continue, and that means visibly aligning instruments like the SAT and AP so that we are clearly showing kids and teachers that there's a path to college that extends from Kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Tougher than malaria
Williams tosses out the Gates quote about battling disease being easier than fixing schools. Coleman says that's unsurprising, and then he shares some "terrible facts." Which are mostly that in forty years of reforminess, we've not moved some test needles much at all. We've hit a wall.
Coleman imagines that Gates is bothered that he hasn't moved the needle enough, and Coleman thinks it's very brave and decent to admit that. And for those of you hoping to see Coleman 2.0, I'll point out that neither Coleman nor Williams addresses the question of why, in a democracy, a really rich private citizen should be taking on personal responsibility for a function of federal, state and local government without the benefit of, say, voters asking him to do so.
But trying to take on that wall-- that's what keeps Coleman up nights.
The burdens of poweriness
Williams wants to know how Coleman came to take all this on. She lists his achievements and colleges and that he's a Rhodes Scholar, to which he interjects "yes, I am" and she asks did he just wake up thinking "we need to get all the states to use the same standards." (So, in this narrative, the phone does not ring with someone calling him to ask him to come help with this standards thing that the states are already doing.)
Coleman, instead of answering that, meditates on power.
As people grow in supposed importance and power in the world, he says, they get self-destructive in how they use their time. "People think if they're important they don't have time to write their own speeches or spend extended time alone." Says Coleman, "Any good I have done has come out" of balancing time to allow him to be alone, thinking.
He went into business designing tests, but that wasn't satisfactory because the standards underpinning the tests were crappy. So he spent time alone, thinking. "One idea that I've been cultivating" was the idea of students doing fewer things, but really well.
Anyway, that's how he works. "It's almost embarrassing to admit how much time I need to spend alone... as part of trying to o anything good." And now I am imagining what Coleman's Fortress of Solitude looks like.
So Coleman is not just busy being a Great Man-- he is actually better at it than lots of other great men.
And that co-operation and collaboration thing? That's for ordinary mortals. Coleman just hatches great ideas out of his own head.
Setting the record straight
That's what Williams tries desperately to get Coleman to do. She steers from his process into the semi-question "So that's where the idea of the standards came from?"
Coleman tosses in "listening" as a technique (though he never says to whom) and then, again, tells us first the standard of greatness that he is going to surpass. There's something annoying about "the sanctity of the entrepreneur" he says. "The world was dark and then I came and there was light," is what those sanctimonious types say. But what Coleman understands that they do not is that entrepreneurship is about telling the truth. This is to introduce himself obliquely as David Coleman, Super-Truth-Teller.
Committees, he observes, suck. At the end, you put everybody's stuff in, and you get a big mess. The standards movement was failing because it was death by committee resulting in a huge vague swamp of standards. We are left to close the circle on that implication, that you need a Superman to leap tall committees in a single bound.
Williams tries again, noting that she knows he's reluctant to discuss this because it's fraught and he's humble. She tries citing the Layton WaPo article, asking him directly to set the records straight. And I'll walk you through the larger version of the answer in a second, but the short answer is "No."
Coleman wants us to know several things. The standards movement started a long time ago. We should decide things based on evidence and not Gates' or Coleman's personalities. And it's in the context of this answer that he provides the quotes about Common Core opponents not being all crazies. He sees many of these folks as principled and smart, and he appreciates the anxiety of parents who feel they've lost control of their children's educations. And he acknowledges that it's a wide range of people who are upset.
Coleman says he's resisting on setting the record straight because he could take a stance of "Now I will tell the facts" and no one will care. He knows that "a person in my position is supposed to say look this was a group endeavor." But there are principled smart people who will still be worried. So he's not going to set the record straight.
Because....? I don't know. If a policeman pulls you over, do you say "I'm not going to explain. You'll just write me a ticket anyway." If your child says he can't sleep because of the monster under the bed, do you say, "I'm not going to bother telling you there's no monster because you'll still be anxious." Of course, if you have certain sorts of scruples, when your child asks, "Is Santa real?" you may avoid saying yes because you don't want to say something you believe is false.
Is it that Superman just doesn't owe us an explanation, or is Coleman unwilling to provide anything that could checked against facts or any of the forty-seven hundred versions of the Common Core origin story floating about? I don't know. I do know that Coleman was handed, on a platter, with golden platters on top, an opportunity to explain exactly where the Core came from, and he refused to give it (though, clearly, he knows exactly what the record really says).
Did you notice?
In a twenty-some minute chunk of audio interview about the Common Core, David Coleman did not mention another single human being, with the exception of Bill Gates. He did not once say some version of "Well, getting this huge project done would have been very challenging without the help of [insert names here] " He also did not once say, "For this part of the Core, I really leaned a lot on the work of researchers and writers such as [insert names here]." So much for clearly citing your sources and backing up your conclusions with data and evidence.
If you had just climbed out from under a rock, and this interview were your only exposure to the Core, you would have to assume that the Common Core Don't-call-them-state Standards were singlehandedly written by David Coleman, sprung from his own brain.
Why tug on Superman's cape?
It is not my intention to simply get my ad hominem on up in here. It's a distraction, and we could all do well to remember that good things are sometimes done by bad people and bad things are sometimes by good people. So David Coleman could be a Very Bad Man, and that would not rule out the possibility that the Core are a Swell Thing.
But if you don't take the medicine that you prescribe for others, others are justified in questioning the medicine. And this interview really highlights the degree to which Little Davey Coleman and his Common Core project would get a failing grade in a Common Core classroom.
Likewise, if you keep changing your story, you make it hard to believe whatever the new story is.
And. And this is a huge and. As a private citizen, you don't get to usurp the functions of government just because you went off to your Fortress of Solitude and had a big think. I don't care how rich or powerful you are, you don't get to just walk over to the Pentagon and say, "I'm going to go ahead an re-organize the armed forces." You don't get to walk into your local city hall and declare, "I just decided to change how the various city departments function."
These sorts of interviews are worth paying attention NOT as a way to say, "Oooooo! That David Coleman is so terrible," but because they provide one more window through which to see that the process that brought is the Core is just as flawed and amateur and unsupported and unsubstantiated and anti-democratic as we thought it was.
So yeah, Coleman changed his story a bit-- we opponents are not crazy, just scared. But don't imagine that a shift on that point signals any kind of exposure to kryptonite. Superman has not yet left the building.
So has Politico discovered Coleman 2.0 (great taste, less filling), or has Politico simply made use of the magic of careful quote-clipping? I listened to the whole thirty minute clip so that you wouldn't have to, and you owe me.
The second portion of the Aspen Ideas talk has been previously covered in this space; it deals with super new marketing things happening with the College Board. What we're looking at today is the first fifteen minutes or so. And I have important news to report--
David Coleman is the Superman everyone has been waiting for.
The press opportunity is hosted by Jane Stoddard Williams, who telegraphs her position by characterizing the College Board's decision to hire Coleman as "brilliant."She also refers to him as maybe the main architect of the Common Core, and Coleman politely fails to correct her even to the extent of pointing out that there were a whole batch of math guys working while he handled the ELA side.
Williams also makes oblique reference to finally being able to get him to explain what's going on with Common Core " to the extent that he can" and that's definitely not a slam on his knowledge-- there's more a tone of talking to someone who's working on a super-classified modern-day Manhattan Project.
Coleman explains his current employment simply. College Board helped develop the Common Core and it was because of his involvement with the Core that they hired him.
So please expect that public leadership role to continue, and that means visibly aligning instruments like the SAT and AP so that we are clearly showing kids and teachers that there's a path to college that extends from Kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Tougher than malaria
Williams tosses out the Gates quote about battling disease being easier than fixing schools. Coleman says that's unsurprising, and then he shares some "terrible facts." Which are mostly that in forty years of reforminess, we've not moved some test needles much at all. We've hit a wall.
Coleman imagines that Gates is bothered that he hasn't moved the needle enough, and Coleman thinks it's very brave and decent to admit that. And for those of you hoping to see Coleman 2.0, I'll point out that neither Coleman nor Williams addresses the question of why, in a democracy, a really rich private citizen should be taking on personal responsibility for a function of federal, state and local government without the benefit of, say, voters asking him to do so.
But trying to take on that wall-- that's what keeps Coleman up nights.
The burdens of poweriness
Williams wants to know how Coleman came to take all this on. She lists his achievements and colleges and that he's a Rhodes Scholar, to which he interjects "yes, I am" and she asks did he just wake up thinking "we need to get all the states to use the same standards." (So, in this narrative, the phone does not ring with someone calling him to ask him to come help with this standards thing that the states are already doing.)
Coleman, instead of answering that, meditates on power.
As people grow in supposed importance and power in the world, he says, they get self-destructive in how they use their time. "People think if they're important they don't have time to write their own speeches or spend extended time alone." Says Coleman, "Any good I have done has come out" of balancing time to allow him to be alone, thinking.
He went into business designing tests, but that wasn't satisfactory because the standards underpinning the tests were crappy. So he spent time alone, thinking. "One idea that I've been cultivating" was the idea of students doing fewer things, but really well.
Anyway, that's how he works. "It's almost embarrassing to admit how much time I need to spend alone... as part of trying to o anything good." And now I am imagining what Coleman's Fortress of Solitude looks like.
So Coleman is not just busy being a Great Man-- he is actually better at it than lots of other great men.
And that co-operation and collaboration thing? That's for ordinary mortals. Coleman just hatches great ideas out of his own head.
Setting the record straight
That's what Williams tries desperately to get Coleman to do. She steers from his process into the semi-question "So that's where the idea of the standards came from?"
Coleman tosses in "listening" as a technique (though he never says to whom) and then, again, tells us first the standard of greatness that he is going to surpass. There's something annoying about "the sanctity of the entrepreneur" he says. "The world was dark and then I came and there was light," is what those sanctimonious types say. But what Coleman understands that they do not is that entrepreneurship is about telling the truth. This is to introduce himself obliquely as David Coleman, Super-Truth-Teller.
Committees, he observes, suck. At the end, you put everybody's stuff in, and you get a big mess. The standards movement was failing because it was death by committee resulting in a huge vague swamp of standards. We are left to close the circle on that implication, that you need a Superman to leap tall committees in a single bound.
Williams tries again, noting that she knows he's reluctant to discuss this because it's fraught and he's humble. She tries citing the Layton WaPo article, asking him directly to set the records straight. And I'll walk you through the larger version of the answer in a second, but the short answer is "No."
Coleman wants us to know several things. The standards movement started a long time ago. We should decide things based on evidence and not Gates' or Coleman's personalities. And it's in the context of this answer that he provides the quotes about Common Core opponents not being all crazies. He sees many of these folks as principled and smart, and he appreciates the anxiety of parents who feel they've lost control of their children's educations. And he acknowledges that it's a wide range of people who are upset.
Coleman says he's resisting on setting the record straight because he could take a stance of "Now I will tell the facts" and no one will care. He knows that "a person in my position is supposed to say look this was a group endeavor." But there are principled smart people who will still be worried. So he's not going to set the record straight.
Because....? I don't know. If a policeman pulls you over, do you say "I'm not going to explain. You'll just write me a ticket anyway." If your child says he can't sleep because of the monster under the bed, do you say, "I'm not going to bother telling you there's no monster because you'll still be anxious." Of course, if you have certain sorts of scruples, when your child asks, "Is Santa real?" you may avoid saying yes because you don't want to say something you believe is false.
Is it that Superman just doesn't owe us an explanation, or is Coleman unwilling to provide anything that could checked against facts or any of the forty-seven hundred versions of the Common Core origin story floating about? I don't know. I do know that Coleman was handed, on a platter, with golden platters on top, an opportunity to explain exactly where the Core came from, and he refused to give it (though, clearly, he knows exactly what the record really says).
Did you notice?
In a twenty-some minute chunk of audio interview about the Common Core, David Coleman did not mention another single human being, with the exception of Bill Gates. He did not once say some version of "Well, getting this huge project done would have been very challenging without the help of [insert names here] " He also did not once say, "For this part of the Core, I really leaned a lot on the work of researchers and writers such as [insert names here]." So much for clearly citing your sources and backing up your conclusions with data and evidence.
If you had just climbed out from under a rock, and this interview were your only exposure to the Core, you would have to assume that the Common Core Don't-call-them-state Standards were singlehandedly written by David Coleman, sprung from his own brain.
Why tug on Superman's cape?
It is not my intention to simply get my ad hominem on up in here. It's a distraction, and we could all do well to remember that good things are sometimes done by bad people and bad things are sometimes by good people. So David Coleman could be a Very Bad Man, and that would not rule out the possibility that the Core are a Swell Thing.
But if you don't take the medicine that you prescribe for others, others are justified in questioning the medicine. And this interview really highlights the degree to which Little Davey Coleman and his Common Core project would get a failing grade in a Common Core classroom.
Likewise, if you keep changing your story, you make it hard to believe whatever the new story is.
And. And this is a huge and. As a private citizen, you don't get to usurp the functions of government just because you went off to your Fortress of Solitude and had a big think. I don't care how rich or powerful you are, you don't get to just walk over to the Pentagon and say, "I'm going to go ahead an re-organize the armed forces." You don't get to walk into your local city hall and declare, "I just decided to change how the various city departments function."
These sorts of interviews are worth paying attention NOT as a way to say, "Oooooo! That David Coleman is so terrible," but because they provide one more window through which to see that the process that brought is the Core is just as flawed and amateur and unsupported and unsubstantiated and anti-democratic as we thought it was.
So yeah, Coleman changed his story a bit-- we opponents are not crazy, just scared. But don't imagine that a shift on that point signals any kind of exposure to kryptonite. Superman has not yet left the building.
Seasoned Teachers Not Getting Filthy Rich
In other news, scientists anticipate the sun rising in the East tomorrow morning.
Okay, this might actually be news to some folks. To listen to the merit-based pay crowd, you would think that we are currently throwing bales of teachers based on years of experience. But an issue brief released last week by the Center for American Progress suggests that in many states that's simply not true.
"Mid- and Late-Career Teachers Struggle with Paltry Incomes," authored by Ulrich Boser and Chelsea Straus, opens with the tale of Richie Brown, a former teacher of the year candidate and "the type of teacher every principal should want." Brown left at the end of six years because he couldn't support his family, having gone several years without a raise at all.
Brown, of course, was teaching in North Carolina (motto: "We hate teachers and hope they will go away"), but Boser and Straus show that North Carolina is not so much an outlier as a trendsetter. Here are their findings.
Mid- and Late- career teacher base salaries are painfully low in many states.
Here's where the paper throws in the striking stats that truck drivers, sheet metal workers, and flight attendants make more than 10 or 15 year teaching veterans in some states.
In some states, ten year teachers who are breadwinners often qualify for various aid programs.
Large numbers of teachers work second jobs. The paper keeps using the term "base salary" to distinguish the teachers' teaching income from their total annual income, which may include their work at other glamorous jobs.
The paper provides two charts that help provide context. Here's one that shows salary growth by state between the first year and the tenth.
And since people do so love to compare us based on international data from the OECD, here's a chance to do that
Okay, this might actually be news to some folks. To listen to the merit-based pay crowd, you would think that we are currently throwing bales of teachers based on years of experience. But an issue brief released last week by the Center for American Progress suggests that in many states that's simply not true.
"Mid- and Late-Career Teachers Struggle with Paltry Incomes," authored by Ulrich Boser and Chelsea Straus, opens with the tale of Richie Brown, a former teacher of the year candidate and "the type of teacher every principal should want." Brown left at the end of six years because he couldn't support his family, having gone several years without a raise at all.
Brown, of course, was teaching in North Carolina (motto: "We hate teachers and hope they will go away"), but Boser and Straus show that North Carolina is not so much an outlier as a trendsetter. Here are their findings.
Mid- and Late- career teacher base salaries are painfully low in many states.
Here's where the paper throws in the striking stats that truck drivers, sheet metal workers, and flight attendants make more than 10 or 15 year teaching veterans in some states.
In some states, ten year teachers who are breadwinners often qualify for various aid programs.
Large numbers of teachers work second jobs. The paper keeps using the term "base salary" to distinguish the teachers' teaching income from their total annual income, which may include their work at other glamorous jobs.
The paper provides two charts that help provide context. Here's one that shows salary growth by state between the first year and the tenth.
Though I will gladly note with pride that we beat Estonia on this one.
The authors note that this is probably part and parcel of the general downturn for the entire middle class.
But what we can also note here is that we are not exactly pouring money into the salary raise pool. Which raises a couple of questions.
For one-- what exactly does the merit pay crowd propose to do. If the intention is to base raises on performance, will it really help if the merit-based raises are just as paltry and inadequate as the raises given for longevity? CAP uses its conclusions to make a case for more merit- and assignment-based bonuses, but this remains a pipe dream. Merit and bonus pay will not work. Beyond the issues of evaluating teacher worthiness of such bonuses, there is a more fundamental problem. Businesses pay bonuses out of the extra money they made by having a good year. School districts do not make extra money, and no school board in the country is going to go to its taxpayers and say, "Our teachers did so very well this year that we need an extra couple mill to give them the merit bonuses they deserve." CAP's data are interesting; their proposed solution is bogus.
The other big question is the same old one. Exactly how do you attract people to a profession that does not promise the ability to provide an actual life, like a grown-up family-supporting adult?
That question itself is premature, because it assumes that reformsters want to do that. The lack of career-level salary scales may well be yet another indicator that for some folks, the goal is not to attract people to teaching, but to turn teaching into a temporary job that people do for a year or two before moving on, providing schools with a cheap pensionless labor force. If that's the goal, it would appear many states are right on track.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Why Teachers Should Be Paid Less ??!!
Over at the Federalist, Jason Richwine has produced a spectacularly bad piece of thought leadership entitled "Why We Shouldn't Raise Teacher Pay." (h/t to Curmudgucator Shannon Jenkins). It's just as bad as you think it will be.
So why should we look at it.
Often, the bad arguments circulating the world of thinkiness are tucked away, hidden in the midst of not-entirely-stupid things. They are the tetanus-encrusted rusty needles in a stack of reasonably-healthy hay. Dealing with these arguments often involves teasing the rotten parts out of their surroundings. So it can be helpful to get a clear look at them, unencumbered by anything sensible. Dumb, in its naked unadulterated form. If we can get a good look at the rusty needle, we are better prepared to recognize it in the haystack.
Jason Richwine has kindly presented us with a hay-free rusty needle.
Our starting problem
Richwine notes that Vergara has now made it "possible to pry the least-effective teachers from their sinecures" by removing the "barrier" of tenure and reformsters now face the challenge of replacing them with "new and better" teachers? But how do we attract them?
It’s not so easy. Even without the tenure obstacle, putting the best teachers in the classroom is a more challenging problem than many reformers will admit. One of the most common reformist prescriptions is raising teacher pay to attract stronger applicants. The logic seems simple, even obvious. But raising teacher pay will not work. In fact, it could be counter-productive. The reason lies not just with the well-known difficulty in predicting who will be a good teacher, but also with the entrenched hiring system of public schools.
We're already on the wrong track
Richwine starts in by saying that teachers are already paid too much. He cites an AEI report from 2011, and the report's conclusion, which I will now oversimplify, is that the old "teachers make less than other highly educated college grads" is bogus. We need to compare teachers to other similarly-educated grads-- in other words, teachers. Put another way, teacher income can't be compared to engineer income because the teacher didn't learn how to be an engineer.
However, public school teachers do make more than private school teachers, ergo, public school teachers are overpaid. Public school teachers do make less than other college-educated professions, but that's because they're teachers. It's their own damn fault.
So teachers are already overpaid and underperforming, so giving raises would not help. Unless, you know, it encouraged more top people to get a college education to become teachers in the first place.
School's turn down the brightest applicants
Richwine now presents us with a rusty needle the size of the Eiffel Tower.
He is puzzled-- deeply puzzled-- that when presented with the best and brightest with super-duper GPAs and specialized training from the Very Best Schools, school districts don't hire them. He cites Vanderbilt economist Dale Ballou's study (sadly behind a paywall), and he offers this daunting observation.
An education degree was generally preferred even for applicants preparing for a secondary-school position.
Yes, those damn schools keep hiring people with teaching credentials for teaching jobs.
No one knows for sure why this happens, but perhaps it’s the institutional culture of public schools.
Well, yes. I notice that the institutional culture of hospitals leads to hiring doctors and nurses with actual doctor and nurse training. Lawyers offices are also pre-disposed to hire people based on having attended law school. On top of that, many schools operate in states that actually require teaching credentials to get a teaching job, so go figure.
Richwine's point is pretty clear. Smart people with college degrees are better teachers than people who have trained to become teachers.
And let's look at two other dumb assumptions packed into this complaint:
1) Having the best GPA makes you a teacher.
It's true. If you don't understand a concept, you're probably not going to teach it very well, or at all. But it does not follow that having a superior understanding of the subject means you can teach it well. Is there anybody who doesn't have a story about a teacher or professor who was brilliant in his field, but who couldn't teach worth a damn?
The assumption here is that being knowledgeable is the only piece needed to complete the teacher puzzle. Once you totally understand the subject, teaching it to other people is a nothing, an afterthought, on a par with breathing. You just, you know, do it. If you got good grades in college, that is good enough.
2) Teaching is not an actual skill set.
There are skills sets, bodies of knowledge, and bridges between the two that teachers need to know. If I think teaching is like breathing, then it seems silly to talk about sending someone to school to learn about it. But if teaching requires learning and practice in techniques, then I need somebody who has those skill sets. And I have to believe that those skill sets exist.
But, Richwine asks, even if the entrenched educational biases can't be overcome, might it not make sense to pay more and then attract a larger pool, from which the best could be selected. No, Richwine answers, it would not.
Higher teacher pay equals lower teacher quality
Is there an economist specialization in Undercutting Public Education with Wonky Stats Juggling? Because Richwine is going to cite Ballou and another economist named Michael Podgursky who determine that higher pay lead to lousier teachers. Their reasoning goes something like this:
* Higher pay = less retirement as teachers stick around for $$
* Higher pay = more applicants
* More applicants = less chance of single applicant getting job
* Lower chance of getting job = fewer people going into teaching
And here comes the important conclusion--
* The people who are discouraged from going into teaching will be the smart, capable ones, while the sucky ones will stay. In other words, Richwine is offering up a fancy version of "Those who can't, teach."
Richwine offers a thought-experiment anecdote in which a mediocre lady goes into teaching because, apparently, failed teachers can always get into an administration job. But a smart man could be an engineer instead, so his opportunity cost is greater, because if he doesn't get to be a teacher, he'll have lost the chance to be an engineer. Also, he's smart to assume that since he's smart and capable, he will not be considered by schools. Because schools absolute hate hiring capable teachers.
This scenario is somehow completely different from a situation where the smart man considers teaching but decides that he can't hope to support a family or have a complete career (thanks to the handy way that Vergara removed the "barrier" of tenure and job security), and so he decides to be an engineer instead because that way he can make a freaking living.
You see, any engineer could be a teacher, but as noted above, teachers could never have been engineers.
So what does Richwine think the answer is?
Well, Richwine has consulted the work of still more economists, and his answer is this:
Lower the entry requirements to become a teacher.
That's it. Just let anybody who has a bachelor's degree become a teacher, and then once you've got them in a classroom, take your time to sort them out. And make it really hard to get tenure.
Seriously? Let's look at some of the ways this is dumb.
First, flinging wide the gates to enter the profession would have one immediate effect-- greatly increasing the pool of applicants. But just a couple of paragraphs ago, Richwine assured us that a larger pool of applicants was a Very Bad Thing that would lower quality by scaring away people who had better prospects in other fields. Plus-- remember-- we'd really like to lower the salary for teachers, which will also likely lower the applicants who have aspirations to, say, make a living in North Carolina (spoiler alert-- you can't do it by teaching). So whether you use my argument or Richwine's, this seems like a Bad Move.
Second, in a Richwine school, we're going to use students as employment testing tools. "Hey, kids, based on his BA in Math, we're going to let Mr. Schlubster try teaching you calculus for a year. If it turns out he's not really any good at it, too bad for you. With any luck we'll catch it before he screws up next year's class."
Are there first-year certified teachers who trash an entire year's worth of students? Sure. But Richwine's Just Let Anybody with a Pulse Teach program guarantees far more disasters as untrained pretend teachers experiment on students who were hoping to get an actual education. This is absolutely NOT student centered schooling.
What will have to happen for Richwine's vision to come true?
The creeping emphasis on credentials must be reversed. School administrators must be willing to hire promising applicants who never received the standard education-school training. Objective evaluation systems must be adopted and refined. All parties must become comfortable with a process that will increase teacher turnover.
"Become comfortable" with teacher turnover? So, a situation that tends to destabilize schools and hurt student learning is just a minor discomfort we have to adjust to, like a bad car heater in the winter.
In the meantime, I look forward to widespread adoption of his ideas. Law firms offering less and less money to new grads. Corporation announcing, "We will not offer bonuses this year because, quality." Why is it that absolutely nobody anywhere in any sector of the economy believes that lowering salaries is the best way to get more quality. Could it be that Richwine's idea is...well , dumb?
PS. Who is Jason Richwine?
Richwine is a policy analyst in DC who used to work for the Heritage Foundation. You may remember him from his Harvard PhD dissertation. Richwine is the guy who argued that immigrants are genetically hampered by low IQ's, and that the US should screen to keep them out (but hide it behind a political smokescreen). His is a name worth knowing, if only to avoid it. He has a blog loaded with plenty of reformsters baloney. He is a man who appears to lack skills in hiding his rusty needles.
Bottom line
This is the argument for TFA writ large. We don't need trained teachers. We don't need to pay teachers well. All we need is a steady stream of BA-holders who will pass through schools by teaching for just a few years. They'll be cheaper, they won't unionize, and we won't have to finance pensions for them. They will probably mostly suck, but at least they'll pass through the system quickly without requiring much of it. And since we've lowered the "barrier" of tenure, if any of them accidentally turn out to be a problem, we can just fire them.
So why should we look at it.
Often, the bad arguments circulating the world of thinkiness are tucked away, hidden in the midst of not-entirely-stupid things. They are the tetanus-encrusted rusty needles in a stack of reasonably-healthy hay. Dealing with these arguments often involves teasing the rotten parts out of their surroundings. So it can be helpful to get a clear look at them, unencumbered by anything sensible. Dumb, in its naked unadulterated form. If we can get a good look at the rusty needle, we are better prepared to recognize it in the haystack.
Jason Richwine has kindly presented us with a hay-free rusty needle.
Our starting problem
Richwine notes that Vergara has now made it "possible to pry the least-effective teachers from their sinecures" by removing the "barrier" of tenure and reformsters now face the challenge of replacing them with "new and better" teachers? But how do we attract them?
It’s not so easy. Even without the tenure obstacle, putting the best teachers in the classroom is a more challenging problem than many reformers will admit. One of the most common reformist prescriptions is raising teacher pay to attract stronger applicants. The logic seems simple, even obvious. But raising teacher pay will not work. In fact, it could be counter-productive. The reason lies not just with the well-known difficulty in predicting who will be a good teacher, but also with the entrenched hiring system of public schools.
We're already on the wrong track
Richwine starts in by saying that teachers are already paid too much. He cites an AEI report from 2011, and the report's conclusion, which I will now oversimplify, is that the old "teachers make less than other highly educated college grads" is bogus. We need to compare teachers to other similarly-educated grads-- in other words, teachers. Put another way, teacher income can't be compared to engineer income because the teacher didn't learn how to be an engineer.
However, public school teachers do make more than private school teachers, ergo, public school teachers are overpaid. Public school teachers do make less than other college-educated professions, but that's because they're teachers. It's their own damn fault.
So teachers are already overpaid and underperforming, so giving raises would not help. Unless, you know, it encouraged more top people to get a college education to become teachers in the first place.
School's turn down the brightest applicants
Richwine now presents us with a rusty needle the size of the Eiffel Tower.
He is puzzled-- deeply puzzled-- that when presented with the best and brightest with super-duper GPAs and specialized training from the Very Best Schools, school districts don't hire them. He cites Vanderbilt economist Dale Ballou's study (sadly behind a paywall), and he offers this daunting observation.
An education degree was generally preferred even for applicants preparing for a secondary-school position.
Yes, those damn schools keep hiring people with teaching credentials for teaching jobs.
No one knows for sure why this happens, but perhaps it’s the institutional culture of public schools.
Well, yes. I notice that the institutional culture of hospitals leads to hiring doctors and nurses with actual doctor and nurse training. Lawyers offices are also pre-disposed to hire people based on having attended law school. On top of that, many schools operate in states that actually require teaching credentials to get a teaching job, so go figure.
Richwine's point is pretty clear. Smart people with college degrees are better teachers than people who have trained to become teachers.
And let's look at two other dumb assumptions packed into this complaint:
1) Having the best GPA makes you a teacher.
It's true. If you don't understand a concept, you're probably not going to teach it very well, or at all. But it does not follow that having a superior understanding of the subject means you can teach it well. Is there anybody who doesn't have a story about a teacher or professor who was brilliant in his field, but who couldn't teach worth a damn?
The assumption here is that being knowledgeable is the only piece needed to complete the teacher puzzle. Once you totally understand the subject, teaching it to other people is a nothing, an afterthought, on a par with breathing. You just, you know, do it. If you got good grades in college, that is good enough.
2) Teaching is not an actual skill set.
There are skills sets, bodies of knowledge, and bridges between the two that teachers need to know. If I think teaching is like breathing, then it seems silly to talk about sending someone to school to learn about it. But if teaching requires learning and practice in techniques, then I need somebody who has those skill sets. And I have to believe that those skill sets exist.
But, Richwine asks, even if the entrenched educational biases can't be overcome, might it not make sense to pay more and then attract a larger pool, from which the best could be selected. No, Richwine answers, it would not.
Higher teacher pay equals lower teacher quality
Is there an economist specialization in Undercutting Public Education with Wonky Stats Juggling? Because Richwine is going to cite Ballou and another economist named Michael Podgursky who determine that higher pay lead to lousier teachers. Their reasoning goes something like this:
* Higher pay = less retirement as teachers stick around for $$
* Higher pay = more applicants
* More applicants = less chance of single applicant getting job
* Lower chance of getting job = fewer people going into teaching
And here comes the important conclusion--
* The people who are discouraged from going into teaching will be the smart, capable ones, while the sucky ones will stay. In other words, Richwine is offering up a fancy version of "Those who can't, teach."
Richwine offers a thought-experiment anecdote in which a mediocre lady goes into teaching because, apparently, failed teachers can always get into an administration job. But a smart man could be an engineer instead, so his opportunity cost is greater, because if he doesn't get to be a teacher, he'll have lost the chance to be an engineer. Also, he's smart to assume that since he's smart and capable, he will not be considered by schools. Because schools absolute hate hiring capable teachers.
This scenario is somehow completely different from a situation where the smart man considers teaching but decides that he can't hope to support a family or have a complete career (thanks to the handy way that Vergara removed the "barrier" of tenure and job security), and so he decides to be an engineer instead because that way he can make a freaking living.
You see, any engineer could be a teacher, but as noted above, teachers could never have been engineers.
So what does Richwine think the answer is?
Well, Richwine has consulted the work of still more economists, and his answer is this:
Lower the entry requirements to become a teacher.
That's it. Just let anybody who has a bachelor's degree become a teacher, and then once you've got them in a classroom, take your time to sort them out. And make it really hard to get tenure.
Seriously? Let's look at some of the ways this is dumb.
First, flinging wide the gates to enter the profession would have one immediate effect-- greatly increasing the pool of applicants. But just a couple of paragraphs ago, Richwine assured us that a larger pool of applicants was a Very Bad Thing that would lower quality by scaring away people who had better prospects in other fields. Plus-- remember-- we'd really like to lower the salary for teachers, which will also likely lower the applicants who have aspirations to, say, make a living in North Carolina (spoiler alert-- you can't do it by teaching). So whether you use my argument or Richwine's, this seems like a Bad Move.
Second, in a Richwine school, we're going to use students as employment testing tools. "Hey, kids, based on his BA in Math, we're going to let Mr. Schlubster try teaching you calculus for a year. If it turns out he's not really any good at it, too bad for you. With any luck we'll catch it before he screws up next year's class."
Are there first-year certified teachers who trash an entire year's worth of students? Sure. But Richwine's Just Let Anybody with a Pulse Teach program guarantees far more disasters as untrained pretend teachers experiment on students who were hoping to get an actual education. This is absolutely NOT student centered schooling.
What will have to happen for Richwine's vision to come true?
The creeping emphasis on credentials must be reversed. School administrators must be willing to hire promising applicants who never received the standard education-school training. Objective evaluation systems must be adopted and refined. All parties must become comfortable with a process that will increase teacher turnover.
"Become comfortable" with teacher turnover? So, a situation that tends to destabilize schools and hurt student learning is just a minor discomfort we have to adjust to, like a bad car heater in the winter.
In the meantime, I look forward to widespread adoption of his ideas. Law firms offering less and less money to new grads. Corporation announcing, "We will not offer bonuses this year because, quality." Why is it that absolutely nobody anywhere in any sector of the economy believes that lowering salaries is the best way to get more quality. Could it be that Richwine's idea is...well , dumb?
PS. Who is Jason Richwine?
Richwine is a policy analyst in DC who used to work for the Heritage Foundation. You may remember him from his Harvard PhD dissertation. Richwine is the guy who argued that immigrants are genetically hampered by low IQ's, and that the US should screen to keep them out (but hide it behind a political smokescreen). His is a name worth knowing, if only to avoid it. He has a blog loaded with plenty of reformsters baloney. He is a man who appears to lack skills in hiding his rusty needles.
Bottom line
This is the argument for TFA writ large. We don't need trained teachers. We don't need to pay teachers well. All we need is a steady stream of BA-holders who will pass through schools by teaching for just a few years. They'll be cheaper, they won't unionize, and we won't have to finance pensions for them. They will probably mostly suck, but at least they'll pass through the system quickly without requiring much of it. And since we've lowered the "barrier" of tenure, if any of them accidentally turn out to be a problem, we can just fire them.
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