Who Wants To Be South Korea

South Korea is on the reformster short list of Countries We Want To Be Like (right up there with Finland and Estonia). She Who Will Not Be Named frequently cites her own year in South Korea as a formative experience (from which she somehow jumps to the conclusion that every child in America needs the same experience).

And yet, a piece in the Sunday, August 1, New York Times reminds us why South Korea is more of a cautionary tale than a guiding light.

"An Assault Upon Our Children" by Se-Woong Koo reminds us of all the things about South Korea's system that are not to love. Koo's mother moved him to Vancouver for school after his older brother fell ill from the stress of meeting school requirements, but Koo returned to South Korea as a teacher. That different perspective did not make things look any better.

The students were serious about studying but their eyes appeared dead.When I asked a class if they were happy in this environment, one girl hesitantly raised her hand to tell me that she would only be happy if her mother was gone because all her mother knew was how to nag about her academic performance. 

South Korea is a real life reductio ad absurdum, an actual demonstration of "well, if we cared about nothing but test scores, we'd put students in school for thirteen hours a day and keep driving them until they were utterly miserable."

Which is, of course, what they do. 

This is what pursuit of test scores gets you. This is what happens when you believe that a test score is the be-all and end-all and measure-all of education. This is what happens when you believe that success, as measured by the uber-test, is the only thing that matters in a child's life.

Not only are students miserable, but the logical extension of a test-based system is an emphasis on obedience, Koo tells this story:

I remember the time I disagreed with my homeroom teacher in middle school by writing him a letter about one of his rules. The letter led to my being summoned to the teacher’s office, where I was berated for an hour and a half, not about the substance of my words but the fact that I had expressed my view at all. He had a class to teach but he did not bother to leave our meeting because he was so enraged that someone had questioned his authority. I knew then that trying to be rational or outspoken in school was pointless. 

Why we would want a system like this for our children or our country is beyond my comprehension. Yes-- we could finally triumph in the PISA scores, but so what? What would that get us? The US has never triumphed in the PISA scores-- ever-- and yet, the United States of America seems to have done okay for itself.

Everything in life costs something. South Korea shows us what the cost of universal testing supremacy is-- give up all joy, all curiosity, all creativity, all initiative, all fun and happiness, turning the childhood years into a nightmare. 

Here's a secret about great test scores. We know how to get them. We've always known. But most of us are unwilling to advocate for the kind of child abuse necessary for that "achievement. South Korea pays a huge price for their PISA supremacy, and what do they get for it, other than the admiration of a few American bureaucrats and reformsters. Why the heck would anyone want that?

Without Tenure...

Yesterday, twitter blew up with responses to Whoopi Goldberg and the View having one more uninformed discussion of tenure (and, really, we need to talk about why education discussions keep being driven by the work of comedians).

"#WithoutTenure I can be fired for...." was the tweet template of the day, and even though I rode that bus for a bit, it occurs to me this morning that it misses the point.

It's true that in the absence of tenure, teachers can (and are) fired for all manner of ridiculous things. That's unjust and unfair. As some folks never tire of pointing out, that kind of injustice is endemic in many jobs (Why people would think that the response to injustice is to demand more injustice for more people is a whole conversation of its own). That doesn't change a thing. Firing a teacher for standing up for a student or attending the wrong church or being too far up the pay scale-- those would all be injustices. But as bad as that would be, it's not the feature of a tenureless world that would most damage education.

It's not the firing. It's the threat of firing.

Firing ends a teacher's career. The threat of firing allows other people to control every day of that teacher's career.

The threat of firing is the great "Do this or else..." It takes all the powerful people a teacher must deal with and arms each one with a nuclear device.

Give my child the lead in the school play, or else. Stop assigning homework to those kids, or else. Implement these bad practices, or else. Keep quiet about how we are going to spend the taxpayers' money, or else. Forget about the bullying you saw, or else. Don't speak up about administration conduct, or else. Teach these materials even though you know they're wrong, or else. Stop advocating for your students, or else.

Firing simply stops a teacher from doing her job.

The threat of firing coerces her into doing the job poorly.

The lack of tenure, of due process, of any requirement that a school district only fire teachers for some actual legitimate reason-- it interferes with teachers' ability to do the job they were hired to do.  It forces teachers to work under a chilling cloud where their best professional judgment, their desire to advocate for and help students, their ability to speak out and stand up are all smothered by people with the power to say, "Do as I tell you, or else."

Civilians need to understand-- the biggest problem with the destruction of tenure is not that a handful of teachers will lose their jobs, but that entire buildings full of teachers will lose the freedom to do their jobs well.

We spent a lot of time in this country straightening out malpractice law issues, because we recognized that a doctor can't do his job well if his one concern is not getting sued into oblivion for a mistake. We created Good Samaritan laws because we don't want someone who could help in an emergency stand back and let The Worst happen because he doesn't want to get in trouble.

As a country, we understand that certain kinds of jobs can't be done well unless we give the people who do those jobs the protections they need in order to do their jobs without fear of being ruined for using their best professional judgment. Not all jobs have those protections, because not all workers face those issues.

Teachers, who answer to a hundred different bosses, need their own special set of protections. Not to help them keep the job, but to help them do it. The public needs the assurance that teachers will not be protected from the consequences of incompetence (and administrators really need to step up-- behind every teacher who shouldn't have a job are administrators who aren't doing theirs). But the public also needs the assurance that some administrator or school board member or powerful citizen will not interfere with the work the public hired the teacher to do.

Tenure is that assurance. Without tenure, every teacher is the pawn and puppet of whoever happens to be the most powerful person in the building today. Without tenure, anybody can shoulder his way into the classroom and declare, "You're going to do things my way, or else."

Tenure is not a crown and scepter for every teacher, to make them powerful and untouchable. Tenure is a bodyguard who stands at the classroom door and says, "You go ahead and teach, buddy. I'll make sure nobody interrupts just to mess with you." Taxpayers are paying us for our best professional judgment; the least they deserve is a system that allows us to give them what they're paying us for.

Does Reformster Character Matter?

When I posted this morning about the giant confluence of issues and money that is K12, Inc., I received this comment from ready Candy Crider:

I would rather you address the curriculum - is it sound and will it help students learn and love learning? Bashing the people who built it tells me nothing about the program itself.

"Bashing" is a fairly plastic term in bloggy circles. Sometimes "bashing" means "using ad hominem name calling" and sometimes it means "pointing out annoying facts."While this is a sass-heavy blog, I actually try to stay away from "this person is just a big doody head and so we should ignore them." And it's simply more accurate to write "this person said a very stupid thing" than "this person is very stupid." Smart people write and say stupid things all the time.

But the question of character is a tricky one. It is absolutely true that my piece about K12 did not directly address the curriculum or lessons that K12 uses, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that. Ms. Crider says that looking at the people involved tells us nothing about the program itself. I disagree. I think it tells us loads. Let me propose a scenario.

A new medical practice has opened in your town. You know the following things about it:

* It was not started by doctors or people with medical background, but by investment bankers who heard that you can make a big profit in medicine.

* It pays bottom dollar for its staff, scooping up practitioners who couldn't find work with any other medical practice.

* It requires those practitioners to move patients through at unheard-of rates so that the owners can get maximum profits by collecting maximum insurance payments.

* The practice measures its success not in patients served or cured or helped, but in dollars pocketed.

* The practice aggressively markets itself to patients who are in great need of health care, but who lack the sophistication or knowledge to make highly informed choices about their health care.

Now, Ms. Crider. Your child or mom or someone else you care about is sick. Do you look at this new practice, and with all you know say, "Well, we won't really know how good they are until we give it a shot." Intellectually, you may know that could be true-- but would you really play those long odds with the life of someone you love?

No, your understanding of the operators methods and motivations is more than enough to let you make conclusions about the quality of care. The character of the operators matters.

When David Coleman said that growing up means understanding that nobody gives a shit what you think or feel, that told us a great deal about his goals in writing ELA standards and his vision about what writing instruction should look like.

Likewise, reading Mother Crusader's chilling connect-the-dots between Campbell Brown and Paul Singer doesn't necessarily tell us anything of substance about the New York lawsuit to destroy tenure. But it immediately tells us two things.

First, that Brown is being at best disingenuous when she says she's worried about the protestors going after her backers, and second, just how hard these folks are likely to fight. Because Brown's husband hangs with the kind of people who fight nations and topple governments just to make a buck.

And on the plus side, paying attention to character and motivations allows us to the spot those reformsters who really do value learning and education but are simply clueless about how policies truly affect the achievement of those goals.

Character assassination is an easy game to play (because everybody has done Something Awful at some point) and not particularly valuable. But understanding someone's motivations and values tells us an awful lot about what they're likely to do (or not do). Yes, we should keep focused on the real issues and the substance behind them, and yes, sometimes good people do bad things and bad people do good things. But if someone picks your pocket, punches your spouse, kicks your dog, steals beans out of your garden, and then offers to sell you magic beans, you'd be foolish to say, "Well, sure. I won't know if the beans are magic until I plant them."

K12 Defies... Well, Everything

K12 remains the top dog in the junkyard of cyberschooling. It provides an instructive lesson in how a good pile of cash and friends in the right places can keep a business afloat even after people have poked holes in the hull.

There was never anything about the organization that didn't look like a red flag. It was set up by hedge fund manager Ronald Packer and propped up with money from junk bond king Michael Milken (an iconic Wall Street greedhound of the eighties who pioneered the art of getting caught, convicted and sent to prison, and still remaining rich and powerful). William Bennett, a former Secretary of Education and GOP pundit who was for many reformster ideas before it was cool, was a founding figurehead as well. More recently, Nathaniel Davis began rising through the executive ranks on the board (his previous experience-- CEO of XM radio).

K12 has been "embattled" all along. Here's a fairly brutal shot they took from the New York Times way back in December of 2011. Former teachers routinely write tell-alls about their experience, like this more recent guest piece on Anthony Cody's blog. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cybers that were disqualified from sports eligibility.

In February of this year, the Center for Media and Democracy named Ron Packard one of the highest paid public workers in the country (i.e. person paid with tax dollars). This despite "the alarming fact that only 28% of K12 Inc schools met state standards in 2010-2011."

A look at this report on executive compensation gives a picture of how lucrative the cyber charter business can be. Back in 2009, K12 was delivering a total of $5.51 million dollars in executive compensation. By 2012 that had climbed to $10.89 million, and the following year it jumped a whopping 96% to $21.37 million. And every last bit of it is our tax dollars at work. K12, like all charters, does not "make" money-- they just collect it from taxpayers.

Cyber schooling has long been a darling of ALEC, who, as they are wont to do, whipped up some helpful model legislation for states to follow. And legislatures have been mighty friendly to cybers. In PA, school districts must send their computed cost-per-student to the charters, but prior to 2011-2012 the state gave some of that money back to the bricks-and-mortar schools. Now, nothing.

Meanwhile, a cyber school can assign, say, 250 students to one teacher per subject. Each student gets a "free" computer. If we figure about 30K per teacher and about $500 per computer, that's a rough outlay of  $245,000. So, we spend about 1K per student, while taking in anywhere from 8K to 20K per student (students with special needs are golden). That is a mighty pleasant profit margin.

K12 may have suffered remarkably few consequences for their educational achievements, but when you make your business all about the benjamins, you may have to answer for financial issues. Packard stepped down at the beginning of this year, apparently with a giant suitcase full of personal gains that some stockholders felt was a bit ill-gotten, and they decided to get the courts involved. This is part of a cascade of lawsuits covering everything from artificially inflating stock prices to lying about what the company is actually accomplishing.

It remains to be seen what happens next for the biggest star in the cyber-educational firmament. If my browser ads are any indication, they still have plenty of money for advertising, which only makes sense-- in the cyber charter business, your success is not based on how many students you teach, but on how many you enroll. I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that those numbers finally start heading down.

To learn even more about this story, I cannot recommend enough the website TheTruth About K12-- they've followed this story carefully and have a thoughtful and thorough compendium of useful info. Stop on over and educate yourself.

Petrilli Reports on Common Core Wars

On the eve of his ascension to the top spot at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Michael J. Petrilli wrote a post to reflect on the current state of the "Common Core Wars," a term which in itself demonstrates Petrilli's gift for precision in language (see, it's the Common Core that is embattled, not American public education).

He hits a couple of points on his Update from the Front, all worth looking at.

Who's winning?

Petrilli says its the opponents in the air, and the Core on the ground. It's the foes of CCSS who are making the most noise and garnering the most attention, but they haven't actually kicked the Core to the curb anywhere but Okalhoma (though he notes that Louisiana is getting pretty noisy). We could contest either part of his evaluation, but I think a better question is-- what will winning look like?

It's an important question. A good case can be made that the Great European War (1914-1918) dragged on because nobody knew what the hell victory would look like (except, eventually, France and Belgium, whose goal eventually was "Get everybody to get the hell out of our country"). If you don't know what victory looks like, you A) have a hard time moving toward it and B) have no way of recognizing it.

At this point, neither side in the battle for the soul of public education is going to get what they want. The pro-Core dream of 50 happy states united in one big educational marketplace of universal standardization is not going to happen. The pro-public ed dream of the Core being wiped away and the clock being rolled back to fifteen years ago as if none of it ever happened-- that's not happening either. Until we know what destinations we're considering, we won't know who "won" or "lost"-- or if the metaphor of war and winning and losing even makes sense for the issues we're dealing with (spoiler alert: I bet it doesn't).

What Common Core concerns are legitimate?

Give Petrilli credit on this-- he knows when to give a little ground.

I’ve never argued that decisions to adopt (or retain) the Common Core are a slam dunk or that you have to be done dumb or crazy to oppose them. As with any policy issue, there are plenty of pros and cons.

So what are the legit concerns of Common Core foes?

* Federal overreach. Petrilli points out that Glenn Beck's story of the Core's origin is cockeyed, but he puts forth his own version which still assigns the lead role to the CCSSO, who respond heroically to cries from thinky tanks (like Fordham) that education needs an overhaul (oddly, the well-funded-by-Gates TFI neglects to mention his heroic role in Core promotion). Then some governor's foolishly hit up the feds for some incentives, and the federal too-much-involvement was born, and hard righties began the freaking out, which Petrilli sympathizes with, but really, there's no need and they should all just chill. Good luck with that one.

* The standards aren't perfect. "Opponents are right: they aren’t perfect. We said as much back in 2010. But they’re pretty darn good and much better than what most states had before. Yes, they can absolutely be improved."

This position would be a shade different from the Petrilli who said, in response to the OK uproar, "If there is this pressure to just make sure the standards are different from the Common Core … it's going to mean that teachers who have been working for four years to get trained on these new standards, to update their curriculum, that all that work is going to be thrown out the window." 

But let's stipulate that the pre-CCSS position on rewriting has changed considerably from the days that the CCSS Forefathers put a copyright on the standards and declared that states may change nothing and could only add 15%.  The understanding these days seems to be that nobody anywhere has any intention of trying to enforce that copyright.

Petrilli goes on to note that the standards aren't perfect, but they aren't as bad as critics say.

* Confusing, convoluted textbooks. Plug for Singapore Math and acknowledgement that many textbooks are now a mess, because some textbook companies botched the whole business and teachers aren't trained and everybody who meets a grumpy parent just blames it on the Core.

So when Petrilli says these are three "legitimate concerns," what he appears to mean is that the feelings are real-- they just aren't based in fact.

How to respond to legitimate concerns

Petrilli sees the federalism concern as the driver of the big bus of bile, but also the hardest one to fix. Can't take Race to the Top back, nor the $$$ that went with it. Can't seem to get Arne to stop acting like this is all his baby. I don't know-- we seem to have gotten all of the Obama administration to stop uttering the words "Common Core". Of course, it's also true that almost nobody, including Mike Petrilli, says the "State Standards" part any more. These are all words that have lost their luster as applause lines.

Duncan, Petrell says,  could probably help by declaring his intention to step away. Instead, he's ramping up to pick fights with various states for waiver non-compliance. Punishing OK for dropping CCSS will simply prove that the feds really are conducting this railroad.

Other concerns can be addressed by states, by snazzing up their own versions of CCSS Lite and by grabbing onto the very best in CCSS-approved text books.

We’ll also need to help parents and teachers understand that they aren’t powerless in the face of bad textbooks—that their own local communities still have the authority to decide which instructional materials will be used and that they don’t have to settle for schlock.

Petrilli rightly id's a sense of powerlessness as another driver of Core opposition. I'm not sure why he misses another chance to stick it to the feds-- the number one cause of powerless feelings might be the fact that the feds have said they will punish anyone who doesn't fall in line and get test scores on the mystery tests that, supposedly, can best be prepared for by grabbing anything with a CCSS Ready label on it.

Want to make people feel less powerless? Say something along the lines of, "We're going to put a stop to all high stakes testing until people have a chance to get up to speed. We'll be back in, say, five to eight years and you can show us a top-notch, well-designed, valid state-level test. Until then, use your best judgment." Wouldn't be perfect, but it would sure be better.Unfortunately, Petrilli has something else in mind:

My earnest hope is that the politicians—from Arne Duncan to Bobby Jindal and everyone in between—stop misbehaving and give educators the room to focus on the real work at hand: selecting good curricular materials, improving teaching and learning, and getting ready for the much more rigorous tests that will be given nine months from now. All we are saying is give peace a chance.

Right on track until that last part-- much more rigorous tests that will be given nine months from now. The only thing right about this is that his sentence correctly lists "improving teaching and learning" and "getting ready for the tests" as separate items, because it is true that improving education and getting ready for the testing rigorfests are two entirely different activities, and unfortunately, the latter is really getting in the way of the former. If we are going to give peace a chance, announcing our intention to unleash weapons of mass destruction in nine months is not the way to do it. 

Can't vs. Won't

A million years ago, when I was student teaching at Wiley Jr. High in Cleveland Heights, my co-operating teacher told me that there are two rules in teaching:

     1) Some students will not learn.
     2) There is nothing the teacher can do to change Rule #1.

Pedagogical reform reliably returns to the issue of Can. If we've heard it once, we've heard it a million times-- all students can learn (most recently with the addendum "to a high level of achievement"). And I do not disagree.

But our challenge is not Can. Our challenge is Will. And if we are unwilling to see the difference, we do our students a huge disservice even as we treat them with great disrespect.

I could probably learn conversational Chinese. I have a checkered past when it comes to learning foreign languages, but if I dropped everything else that I'm working on, really buckled down, and applied myself, I could learn to at least get by with at least some spoken Chinese, though what I would do with it I have no idea. But I've done a cost-benefits analysis, and I've concluded that while I could learn conversational Chinese, it's not really worth the time and trouble, and so I will not be taking on that project.

Because I am a grown-ass man, nobody gets too excited about my choice. Nobody finds me oppositionally defiant or learning disabled or just plain a problem. I'm just a person who made a personal choice about how to spend my time and effort.

But if I were seventeen years old, making the same decisions about identifying gerund phrases or understanding Hamlet or solving quadratic equations-- well, then We Would Have a Problem.

There's another helping verb that hovers unacknowledged over these discussions, and that verb is "must." As in the assumption that if we have a well-designed program of instruction being delivered by an effective teacher, well, then, the students must learn.

This assumption, embedded in so much reformster pedagogy, denies the students agency. It denies students the basic human ability to choose how to spend their time, attention, and effort. It treats them with the utmost disrespect, saying, in effect, "Well, of course, they will do as they're told. You just have to tell them correctly."

At its worst, this approach "creates" more defective students. After all, if I have a perfect instructional program in the box and it was unpacked and delivered by an instructor who did just what she was supposed to do, and the student still didn't learn, there can only be one explanation-- there's something wrong with the student. At least, that's the only explanation possible if I assume that the student is not a sentient human life form with the ability to make choices based on her own values and priorities.

Now, as a professional teacher, my job is to get students to choose to learn. I'm teaching high school students, so I face a different version of this challenge than my elementary colleagues. But for me, step one is to recognize that I can't make my students do anything, and they don't have to do anything. I can con, cheer, encourage, bribe, cajole, reward, punish, push, tug, trick, and sell them to get there, but at the end of the day, they will choose to learn or they will choose not to. And I tell them all this on day one, and it has been very successful for me, because the message they hear is that I will treat them with respect.

See, I think this is more than a pedagogical issue. I believe it's a moral and ethical issue as well. It is basic respect to treat other human beings as independent, autonomous entities. It is disrespectful-- I will even go so far as to call it evil-- to try to deprive other human beings of their ability to direct their own lives. Yes-- when you give people the freedom to make choices, they will sometimes make bad ones, but if you are not free to make bad choices, you are not free. Yes, there is a corresponding moral imperative to do all in power to help people make better choices, but there is a line, and we cross it at exactly the moment that we try to take other people's choices away.

It's not correct to say that students who are live in poverty or deal with a disability or come from an unstable home environment cannot learn. They can-- but they face obstacles that make the costs-benefits analysis more difficult, that make choosing to learn a less obvious or easy choice. Recognizing that is NOT "blaming the victim" nor is it "making excuses."  If we are going to encourage them to make sound choices, we have to understand what their choices look like so that we can show them choices that make sense, and arm them with the tools they actually need-- so that they will choose to learn. In some situations, we must also fight hard to make more paths available to them.

So we have a huge obligation to help students choose to learn and grow into their best selves. And we have a huge obligation to recognize their freedom, their ability to make use of their free will. Isn't the ability to make good choices one of the core abilities we want to foster in schools? And how does one learn to make good choices, if one never practices making choices?

A system where the individual students don't matter, where they have no choices, where they are simply pushed through a process like toasters on an assembly line, a system, in short, that assumes that students must be compliant and that they have no power to choose-- that is an immoral system. As invested as we may be in the students' outcomes, their lives are not ours to control.

We absolutely need to recognize that all students can learn. We also need to recognize that whether they will learn or not is their choice, not ours. How far we will go to help them choose well is our own choice, our charge, our responsibility.It's our job.

The Permanent Politicizing of Education

It's completely predictable that in the wake of CCSS, other problems will arise. Folks who think that we can chase the Common Core away and afterwards go back to How Things Were Before are kidding themselves-- even if CCSS were to vanish tomorrow, it has already changed the educational landscape in ways we can't fully grasp yet.

One sign is in Lyndsey Layton's Washington Post article about a wave of education legislation in the states. In "Legislatures Taking State Education into Their Own Hands" she highlights one of the problems we'll be facing in the post-CCSS world-- the hyper-politicizing of public education on the state level. I suspect this is the new normal.

We've seen flashes of this before, mostly in flyover country legislatures debating whether or not science classes should include creationism and other anti-science curriculum.

But Common Core implementation took us past the land of Jesus dinosaurs and to a place where politics were mainlined into the veins of public education. CCSS supporters have bemoaned that the debate about the standards was filled with politics instead of discussion of the merits. On the one hand, that wasn't entirely true-- there has been plenty of criticism of CCSS on the merits. But on the other hand-- of course.

CCSS wasn't presented based on its merits, and it wasn't run through educational channels. Part of its very premise has always been that the Education Establishment is a big stinky pile of hidebound incompetence, and it will be up to a daring team of intrepid billionaires and politicians to save education in this country.

Compare the distribution system for the Core to every other reform we've lived through.

The traditional approach is that somebody sells it to the state department of education, and soon, college professors and state ed department employees fan out to do professional development across the state. Teachers listen critically and take back what, in their professional opinion, belongs in their classroom. Rinse and repeat every three to five years.

But CCSS and NCLB dispersed consultants from new educational corporate start-ups, whose argument was not "We've brought some ideas that we think will help you." It was "Politicians have passed some laws that mean you must pay attention to us." How many PD arguments about effectiveness or validity or educational soundness have been cut short by a presenter who shrugs and says, "You know, we could argue about this all day, but the bottom line is that here's what the law says."

NCLB and RttR determined that politics would be the delivery system for delivering educational programs, meaning that folks who want to sell a bridge to Educationville must sell it to politicians, not educators. NCLB was not about winning the hearts and minds of teachers; it was about compelling them to get in line with the force of law. CCSS promoters did not set out to convince educators across the US that CCSS would make schools better; they sold it to federal politicians and high-level bureaucrats.

The trend Layton notes in her piece is entirely predictable. States aren't saying, "Let's get politicians out of education." They're saying, "Let's get federal politicians out of education and replace them with state level politicians." We can fight to get education back into the hands of educators-- and we should-- but I doubt that it's a fight we'll ever fully win. Name one field in which, once they've taken control, politicians have decided to give control of that field back to the experts.

There are many scenarios for the post-CCSS world, but I suspect most of them include a new reality of tighter political control of education. The state-level reins-grabbing is just one version of that in action, and it is already taking many, many forms. It's important that teachers not just say, "Well, the federal standards lost. Now I can go back to my classroom and teach in peace."