In Monday's Washington Times, Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute and Neal McClusky form Cato made an attempt to reboot the debate about the Common Core by writing a list of basic points on which folks from all sides ought to be able to agree. It's a worthy effort from two men who share a conservative sensibility but not an identical point of view about the Core, and it deserves a serious look. So, although I represent the Guys With Beards and Blogs Foundation, I'm going to go ahead and do that.
Have they identified legitimate baseline points on which all of us can agree? Let's see.
First, there is no evidence that most Core opponents or advocates are ill-intentioned.
Agreed. Sort of. I think some Core advocates have intentions to dismantle US public education, but I'll stipulate that they don't intend to do so out of some desire to commit institutional vandalism. Their intentions may well be good, but there objectives are destructive in a way that I am unlikely to embrace.
But in pretty much all debates, I think it's useless to insist that all reasonable and intelligent people must reach the same conclusions I do. Declaring that anybody who disagrees with me must be either deluded, ignorant or evil is not useful and almost always untrue.
Next, the Core was not created by Washington,
but groups that saw crummy state standards and tests and agreed on the
need to improve their quality. In particular, these organizations wanted
to ensure that “proficient” meant the same thing in Mississippi as
Massachusetts, and sought to reduce the huge proportion of people
arriving at college or workplaces without the skills to succeed.
Responding to this, the National Governors Association and Council of
Chief State School Officers started discussing whether common, higher
standards could be forged in the basic subjects of reading and math.
With support from the Gates Foundation, they launched the effort that
eventually became the Core. All this occurred, importantly, before
Barack Obama was elected president.
McClusky and Petrilli lay out a history of the Core that comes much closer to the truth than the old "written by a bunch of teachers" or "hatched in the bowels of DC by commie conspirators" narratives. The generic noun "groups" is a bit disingenuous, but okay. They go on to describe the feds role in promoting the Core, in particular offering a explanation of how state adoption was not exactly forced and not exactly free.
Core adoption was technically voluntary: States could refuse to seek
Race to the Top money or waivers, and a few did. The allure of hundreds
of millions of dollars and No Child Left Behind relief, though, were
certainly powerful. Some Core advocates wanted federal incentives. The
National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School
Officers called for them in their 2008 report “Benchmarking for
Success,” and some supporters reportedly worked with the administration
in formulating Race to the Top.
They finish up with a list of questions to consider for going forward.
Is there good reason to think common, rigorous state standards will
improve outcomes? Does the Common Core fit that bill? What roles should Washington,
states, districts and parents have in deciding what standards guide
classroom instruction? We have different answers to these questions, but
agree on at least one thing: We must stop fighting over basic facts,
and respectfully tackle these crucial questions.
I think there's a major factor in the debate or conversation or word salad wrangling about education that they've overlooked, and I'll post about that next. But in the meantime, this represents a shift in the position for some of the conservative fans of the Core. For that matter, it indicates a willingness to talk, which is an all new position from the days that reformsters took the position that teachers should sit down, shut up, and do as their told while the Core and its attached reformy ideas were rammed through as quickly as possible.
Certainly there are better uses for energy on all sides than in defending tired and indefensible talking points. And Petrilli and McClusky are correct in that ultimately the fate of CCSS ought to be decide based on its actual merits (as well as the merits of any national standards). Whether we can have that debate, let alone have it guide decisions, is a more difficult question.
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Grit Not Solution To Everything
In EdWeek, Sarah Sparks reports that a new study suggests that grit might not actually be the dirt from which all flowers of success may grow. It's a study to file in your Captain Obvious folder, and yet such is the world we live in these days, such studies need to be both performed and noted, because Captain Obvious cannot always vanquish his arch-enemy, Commander Oblivious.
When I was in high school, there was a guy in band who worked harder than anyone. Every study hall, extra lunch time, before and after school, he was in a practice room practicing his instrument over and over and over and over and over again. I think it's safe to say that his Grit Quotient was huge. And yet, he never got any better. His technique was adequate, and he played like he had a brick ear. His horn never sang; it barely spoke. Mostly it just spit out notes in a row. To this day, my schoolmates from that era refer to a syndrome named after him, for people who work and work and work but just don't get anything out of it.
Magdalena G. Grohman at the University of Texas at Dallas could have been studying him.
Her analyses (which, I should note, was apparently performed on subjects of convenience-- college undergrads) suggests that grit, consistency, and perseverance did not predict success in creative endeavors. Instead, creativity seems to relate most closely to openness to new experiences.
At Yale, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle at the Center for Emotional Intelligence, working on a separate study that looked at reports of high school students through peer reports and teacher surveys, discovered much the same thing. Grit had nothing to do with creativity, but creativity correlated strongly with openness and passion for the project.
Pringle has suggested an interesting future line of study-- what about the person who has creative ideas that s/he never gets around to actually producing. Does grit come into play there?
Founding Mother of Grittology, Angela Duckworth, noted that she found all this interesting, but since she never studied any links between creativity and grit, she has no thoughts about how Grohman's and Pringle's work connects to her own.
So grit has limits. Of course, if you're of the opinion that creativity is not required in the worker bees of tomorrow, you might not care.
When I was in high school, there was a guy in band who worked harder than anyone. Every study hall, extra lunch time, before and after school, he was in a practice room practicing his instrument over and over and over and over and over again. I think it's safe to say that his Grit Quotient was huge. And yet, he never got any better. His technique was adequate, and he played like he had a brick ear. His horn never sang; it barely spoke. Mostly it just spit out notes in a row. To this day, my schoolmates from that era refer to a syndrome named after him, for people who work and work and work but just don't get anything out of it.
Magdalena G. Grohman at the University of Texas at Dallas could have been studying him.
Her analyses (which, I should note, was apparently performed on subjects of convenience-- college undergrads) suggests that grit, consistency, and perseverance did not predict success in creative endeavors. Instead, creativity seems to relate most closely to openness to new experiences.
At Yale, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle at the Center for Emotional Intelligence, working on a separate study that looked at reports of high school students through peer reports and teacher surveys, discovered much the same thing. Grit had nothing to do with creativity, but creativity correlated strongly with openness and passion for the project.
Pringle has suggested an interesting future line of study-- what about the person who has creative ideas that s/he never gets around to actually producing. Does grit come into play there?
Founding Mother of Grittology, Angela Duckworth, noted that she found all this interesting, but since she never studied any links between creativity and grit, she has no thoughts about how Grohman's and Pringle's work connects to her own.
So grit has limits. Of course, if you're of the opinion that creativity is not required in the worker bees of tomorrow, you might not care.
A (Not So) New Education Conversation
A new website debuted September 1st, devoted to bringing a "new conversation" to the world of education. Education Post is here to create this new conversation by relaunching some old familiar reformster talking points. Just four articles in on Day One, and you know that we've seen this movie before. Let me walk you through it so that you don't have to bother.
INTRODUCTION
Peter Cunningham wants us to know that parents want a better conversation. They're tired of politics and name calling and excuses. Hey, maybe he's including the politics used to push the reformster agenda, the name calling that reformsters use to marginalize critics, and the excuses made for the CCSS, testing and charters!
With the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, we are launching a new organization called Education Post to provide a strong voice for those who believe the current education system needs to get better.
Yeah, probably not. Since those three groups have been pushing the reformster agenda like crazy, I guess we probably aren't going to acknowledge that at this point, the current education system is, in fact, the one the reformsters wanted, with CCSS, high-stakes standardized testing, and charters blooming like a million dandelions.
Cuningham proudly notes that they have Democrats, Republicans and teachers on board here, to give voice to people who have been shouted out in the ed conversation (because if there's anyone who's had trouble being heard, it's Bloomberg, Broad and Walton), and he has three particular points he wants to get across.
* Students need to be challenged with high standards and critical thinking
* We need great schools with great teachers, which we'll get with accountability systems
* Parents should get to make the right choices for their kids
So, Common Core, test-based ratings for teachers, and charters. Are these really ideas that have had trouble being heard in the education world?
One line in the intro does help identify the target audience:
At its core, our mission is to help parents answer the one question they are asking: “Is my child getting the education he or she needs to have the quality of life we hoped for?”
VILLARAIGOSA'S STORY
The former LA mayor talks about his own history as a troubled youth and as a mayor for whom improving schools was a top priority. He believes we need to change the status quo (and I agree, though I suspect we disagree on what the status quo actually is). "We need to stop the name-calling and polarized debates, and start collaboration and civil discussion." Also, "We [Education Post] believe we can change the tenor of the discourse, shifting away from political divisions and towards results for students and families."
And that sounds swell, except that some of the divisiveness is built into the debate. I want to preserve and renew public education in the US; many of the reformsters want to dismantle it and sell the parts. I think a certain amount of divisiveness is built in.
And as I have noted before-- the polarization, the name-calling, the politics are all part of the discussion because reformsters put them there. With their power, money, and hubris, reformsters set the terms for this debate, and now that they're losing on those terms, they would like to change the rules, please. It's not that I disagree, exactly-- I thought the rules were unfair and off point when reformsters set them. But they built them into the discussion, and I'm not sure how we can get them out. I'm quite sure the solution is not for reformsters to pretend that they had nothing to do with those elements of the discussion in the first place.
But there's still two articles to go. Let's see how they do.
THE CASE FOR CHARTERS
Chris Stewart wants to talk about charters, but he doesn't want to talk about anything except how they affect his own family.
Except that he's going to repeat some standard pro-charter talking points about how charters get on top performing schools lists and there are huge waiting lists to get in. Also, traditional public schools work for some families, even though the schools suck.
He tells his own story, about how he was heartbroken at the possibility that his son would be "less competitive" because of a dreadful public school. Then he discovered a charter school, and it wasn't even expensive, because it was "free."
So this lead article on a website devoted to discussing school issues with "more hard facts and fewer unsupported opinions" gives us one man's personal experience with charters and no facts about charters as a whole. It re-presents the PR points about high charter achievement without looking at the facts about retention and how well charter population represents the general population. Nor does it address the questions of how a "free" charter education comes at the cost of resources to those large, unruly public schools, nor the fact that the "free" charter is paid for by money from taxpayers who have no say in the charter system, no opportunity to elect the charter board.
But in terms of addressing parents, the article is on point. It addresses the admittedly difficult moral dilemma many parents face-- would you put your own child in a lifeboat if it meant that the boat holding everybody else's children would sink that much faster? Stewart's answer-- "I've got mine, Jack."
COMMON CORE PLUG
Our final launch article is "The Common Sense Behind Common Core," and Tracy Dell'Angela is here to plug it as a mom.
She's here to tell you that everything negative you've ever heard about the Core is a lie. Misbranding headlines. Biased polls (she references the PDK poll). Sham allegations from opponents. With her newsroom background, she knows that journalists often take lazy shortcuts, though she seems to connect this only to CCSS oppo pieces, and not the sixty gazillion (my rough estimate) puff pieces promoting the Core. And she quotes Randi Weingarten to show that of course the Core is fine with teachers.
She acknowledges only two issues-- rushed implementation and teacher evals tied to testing-- "But we can have meaningful dialogue about these issues without poisoning the promise of shared high standards."
As a mom, I don’t rightly care what we brand this movement, but I know we should not stand still — and we cannot retreat. I don’t want to go back to that time when “meeting standards” was an empty promise that offered no peace of mind that my daughters were really, truly learning.
Yes, indeed. No education of any value ever happened anywhere until the Core came along. This is an unvarnished Common Core plug.
I CALL BALONEY
If this were simply more reformster puff piecing, I would just walk away. But this is extra obnoxious because it tries to shoehorn its way into a need sector of the ed debates.
We can certainly use more conversations that try to deal with educational issues without rancor and political foolishness. But to use that need to send up this pretend conversation is cynical and worse than counter-productive.
The message here is not "We need to have some Real Talk." The message here is "We're trying to sell our goods and these people keep interrupting with their arguments and ideas." When you're really trying to have a conversation and someone keeps calling your names, you have a right to be upset. When you are trying to sell snake oil and hecklers keep pointing out that it's just snake oil, you're on shakier ground. When you are trying to burn down someone's house and they yell, "Hey, stop burning down my house," you don't get to complain about how you've been ill treated.
This is not a sincere attempt to start a conversation. It doesn't recognize or acknowledge any point of view but its own; in fact, both Stewart and Dell'Angela respond to certain opposition viewpoints with "I don't care." Not exactly a conversation starter, that. And despite the introductory call for facts over fireworks, the site depends on personal anecdotes and a disregard for all data that don't fit the sales pitch.
None of that is new. We've seen plenty of this over the past couple of years. What is unfortunate about the site is that by trying to adopt the mantle of non-political fact-based examination, they've made that pitch a bit less believable for the next group that wants to use it. If Education Post called itself what it is-- a site devoted to furthering the reformster agenda-- it would be merely noise. By masquerading as a site for fair and balanced conversation, it damages one more space where actual conversation might one day have taken place.
[Update: Today the site was further demonstrating its interest in conversation by deleting the many negative comments it had drawn on Monday night. When called on it on twitter, the response was "Hoping for a better conversation. Stay tuned." ]
INTRODUCTION
Peter Cunningham wants us to know that parents want a better conversation. They're tired of politics and name calling and excuses. Hey, maybe he's including the politics used to push the reformster agenda, the name calling that reformsters use to marginalize critics, and the excuses made for the CCSS, testing and charters!
With the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, we are launching a new organization called Education Post to provide a strong voice for those who believe the current education system needs to get better.
Yeah, probably not. Since those three groups have been pushing the reformster agenda like crazy, I guess we probably aren't going to acknowledge that at this point, the current education system is, in fact, the one the reformsters wanted, with CCSS, high-stakes standardized testing, and charters blooming like a million dandelions.
Cuningham proudly notes that they have Democrats, Republicans and teachers on board here, to give voice to people who have been shouted out in the ed conversation (because if there's anyone who's had trouble being heard, it's Bloomberg, Broad and Walton), and he has three particular points he wants to get across.
* Students need to be challenged with high standards and critical thinking
* We need great schools with great teachers, which we'll get with accountability systems
* Parents should get to make the right choices for their kids
So, Common Core, test-based ratings for teachers, and charters. Are these really ideas that have had trouble being heard in the education world?
One line in the intro does help identify the target audience:
At its core, our mission is to help parents answer the one question they are asking: “Is my child getting the education he or she needs to have the quality of life we hoped for?”
VILLARAIGOSA'S STORY
The former LA mayor talks about his own history as a troubled youth and as a mayor for whom improving schools was a top priority. He believes we need to change the status quo (and I agree, though I suspect we disagree on what the status quo actually is). "We need to stop the name-calling and polarized debates, and start collaboration and civil discussion." Also, "We [Education Post] believe we can change the tenor of the discourse, shifting away from political divisions and towards results for students and families."
And that sounds swell, except that some of the divisiveness is built into the debate. I want to preserve and renew public education in the US; many of the reformsters want to dismantle it and sell the parts. I think a certain amount of divisiveness is built in.
And as I have noted before-- the polarization, the name-calling, the politics are all part of the discussion because reformsters put them there. With their power, money, and hubris, reformsters set the terms for this debate, and now that they're losing on those terms, they would like to change the rules, please. It's not that I disagree, exactly-- I thought the rules were unfair and off point when reformsters set them. But they built them into the discussion, and I'm not sure how we can get them out. I'm quite sure the solution is not for reformsters to pretend that they had nothing to do with those elements of the discussion in the first place.
But there's still two articles to go. Let's see how they do.
THE CASE FOR CHARTERS
Chris Stewart wants to talk about charters, but he doesn't want to talk about anything except how they affect his own family.
Except that he's going to repeat some standard pro-charter talking points about how charters get on top performing schools lists and there are huge waiting lists to get in. Also, traditional public schools work for some families, even though the schools suck.
He tells his own story, about how he was heartbroken at the possibility that his son would be "less competitive" because of a dreadful public school. Then he discovered a charter school, and it wasn't even expensive, because it was "free."
So this lead article on a website devoted to discussing school issues with "more hard facts and fewer unsupported opinions" gives us one man's personal experience with charters and no facts about charters as a whole. It re-presents the PR points about high charter achievement without looking at the facts about retention and how well charter population represents the general population. Nor does it address the questions of how a "free" charter education comes at the cost of resources to those large, unruly public schools, nor the fact that the "free" charter is paid for by money from taxpayers who have no say in the charter system, no opportunity to elect the charter board.
But in terms of addressing parents, the article is on point. It addresses the admittedly difficult moral dilemma many parents face-- would you put your own child in a lifeboat if it meant that the boat holding everybody else's children would sink that much faster? Stewart's answer-- "I've got mine, Jack."
COMMON CORE PLUG
Our final launch article is "The Common Sense Behind Common Core," and Tracy Dell'Angela is here to plug it as a mom.
She's here to tell you that everything negative you've ever heard about the Core is a lie. Misbranding headlines. Biased polls (she references the PDK poll). Sham allegations from opponents. With her newsroom background, she knows that journalists often take lazy shortcuts, though she seems to connect this only to CCSS oppo pieces, and not the sixty gazillion (my rough estimate) puff pieces promoting the Core. And she quotes Randi Weingarten to show that of course the Core is fine with teachers.
She acknowledges only two issues-- rushed implementation and teacher evals tied to testing-- "But we can have meaningful dialogue about these issues without poisoning the promise of shared high standards."
As a mom, I don’t rightly care what we brand this movement, but I know we should not stand still — and we cannot retreat. I don’t want to go back to that time when “meeting standards” was an empty promise that offered no peace of mind that my daughters were really, truly learning.
Yes, indeed. No education of any value ever happened anywhere until the Core came along. This is an unvarnished Common Core plug.
I CALL BALONEY
If this were simply more reformster puff piecing, I would just walk away. But this is extra obnoxious because it tries to shoehorn its way into a need sector of the ed debates.
We can certainly use more conversations that try to deal with educational issues without rancor and political foolishness. But to use that need to send up this pretend conversation is cynical and worse than counter-productive.
The message here is not "We need to have some Real Talk." The message here is "We're trying to sell our goods and these people keep interrupting with their arguments and ideas." When you're really trying to have a conversation and someone keeps calling your names, you have a right to be upset. When you are trying to sell snake oil and hecklers keep pointing out that it's just snake oil, you're on shakier ground. When you are trying to burn down someone's house and they yell, "Hey, stop burning down my house," you don't get to complain about how you've been ill treated.
This is not a sincere attempt to start a conversation. It doesn't recognize or acknowledge any point of view but its own; in fact, both Stewart and Dell'Angela respond to certain opposition viewpoints with "I don't care." Not exactly a conversation starter, that. And despite the introductory call for facts over fireworks, the site depends on personal anecdotes and a disregard for all data that don't fit the sales pitch.
None of that is new. We've seen plenty of this over the past couple of years. What is unfortunate about the site is that by trying to adopt the mantle of non-political fact-based examination, they've made that pitch a bit less believable for the next group that wants to use it. If Education Post called itself what it is-- a site devoted to furthering the reformster agenda-- it would be merely noise. By masquerading as a site for fair and balanced conversation, it damages one more space where actual conversation might one day have taken place.
[Update: Today the site was further demonstrating its interest in conversation by deleting the many negative comments it had drawn on Monday night. When called on it on twitter, the response was "Hoping for a better conversation. Stay tuned." ]
Monday, September 1, 2014
The Only Road to Happiness
I'll warn you up front-- this is more about politics and culture than actual education, because apparently I'm having one of those days. But if you stick with me, I think we've got insights here about how a certain sort of reformster mind works.
This all starts with a GOP poll report leaked to Politico. The poll reveals that a whole lot of women, particularly single, educated ones, see the GOP as a party of old, white, right-wing, stuck-in-the-past, out-of-touch men. The report that came with it suggests some strategies to deal with that. Those strategies are pretty aptly summed up by Amanda Hess at Slate as "carefully explaining that women are wrong."
But Hess's article led me to this piece by editor R. R. Reno at First Things, a journal focusing on economic freedom and "a morally serious culture." And that article is valuable because it presents such an unabashed, unvarnished representation of a particular point of view.
Reno gets off to an interesting start, conflating women's feelings about the GOP with their feelings about "the conservative message.' That in itself deserves some attention because I think a pretty good case can be made that a broad swath of the GOP is miles out of touch with conservative values. But we'll save that for another day.
Responders like Hess have focused on the centerpiece of Reno's piece, a fully imaginary single woman who has been constructing with an impressive level of specificity. Reno creates her, and then explains why her lack of appreciation for conservative values has made her sad. The story of the sad straw woman, while impressive in its fictive inventiveness, is not nearly as interesting to me as a particular set of assumptions that run through the article.
They want a sense of belonging and a modest degree of confidence that their life-path will bring happiness. Both tend to be weakened as traditional institutions exercise less authority.
Put somewhat more concretely, the single, 35-year-old woman feels “judged” when I oppose gay marriage, because she intuitively senses that being pro-traditional marriage involves asserting male-female marriage as the norm—and therefore that her life isn’t on the right path. She resents this implication.
As a result, people suffer from anomic disorders. (That means various kinds of personal unhappiness related to the lack of clear norms for how to live.)
The assumption here is that if people would just follow the path that traditional institutions and cultural values lay out, the people would be happy. They are not following that path because a more permissive society has seduced them into following various other paths, and now they both feel judged for taking alternate paths and are unhappy because they are not on the only road to happiness.
I have a smidge of sympathy for Reno. I agree that when people live as if they can make any choices they like and then get pissed off that those choices have consequences-- well, those people are asking for a life full of cranky. And I think it's a big group, including people who want to be an hour late to work every day and still keep their job as well as GOP candidates who want to be dicks to women but still get the women's vote.
But Reno is missing a huge part of the picture. People are abandoning traditional pathways because for many people, those pathways have ceased to work. Get a job + work hard at it is supposed to = become a self-supporting member of society. But low minimum wage + part time status + no benefits = member of the working poor. Economically, we have lots of people who did exactly what they were Supposed To Do, and now their college diploma gathers dust while they try to figure out how to make this month's rent with what they make bagging groceries. And our new world-class level of poverty means an entire generation is growing up in situations where following the traditional path does not get you jack. I suspect this has a great deal to do with the erosion of traditional values in our culture.
Of course, the difficulty today is in finding a source of “effective authority” that has currency in the public square.
Well, yeah. You know how an effective authority could gain currency? By saying things that seem to be related to the people actually live in. Telling poor people "It's your own fault for being lazy and dumb and morally suspect" or women "It's your own fault for not staying home and raising babies" does not earn currency.
But beyond even that is the underlying assumption that there is One, True Road to happiness, and that people who travel it end up happy, and everybody else does not. This is not true now, and there is no evidence that it has ever been true, ever, in the history of human beings. Yes, traditionalists like to point at some point in the past (frequently coinciding with their childhood) and say, "There was a time when everyone was on the same page and life was better." This says more about the failure of their memory than the success of the culture. There was never such a time.
People who believe there is One Right Way to live your life are a menace to society, primarily because what they really believe is that there is One Right Way to live your life and they know what it is. They believe that Happiness is located at one special place, and they have a map. And though I started with the GOP, that political party by no means has a monopoly on this viewpoint.
I don't believe I can name one thing that is required to make every single human being happy. A really great kiss is right up there, but there are probably people who are happy without one, or unhappy with one. I would say that is because human beings are different. Reno would say that's it because some people are right, and some people are wrong. For those of who believe that Happiness is a million little separate flowers in a very large field, the One Right Way theory just seems bizarrely wrong.
But that's their premise, and if you're still here, it's the same premise behind Common Core and high stakes standardized testing and national teacher evaluation systems. There's just One Right Way to do things, and the People in Charge know what it is, and so they have labored to create a system that puts everybody on one path to the same destination instead of a system that fosters a gazillion individual searches for a gazillion individual people.
One size does not fit all. Not everybody in the world needs to travel the same path in the same time. I can't believe I live in a time in which that idea has to be argued, let alone even stated.
This all starts with a GOP poll report leaked to Politico. The poll reveals that a whole lot of women, particularly single, educated ones, see the GOP as a party of old, white, right-wing, stuck-in-the-past, out-of-touch men. The report that came with it suggests some strategies to deal with that. Those strategies are pretty aptly summed up by Amanda Hess at Slate as "carefully explaining that women are wrong."
But Hess's article led me to this piece by editor R. R. Reno at First Things, a journal focusing on economic freedom and "a morally serious culture." And that article is valuable because it presents such an unabashed, unvarnished representation of a particular point of view.
Reno gets off to an interesting start, conflating women's feelings about the GOP with their feelings about "the conservative message.' That in itself deserves some attention because I think a pretty good case can be made that a broad swath of the GOP is miles out of touch with conservative values. But we'll save that for another day.
Responders like Hess have focused on the centerpiece of Reno's piece, a fully imaginary single woman who has been constructing with an impressive level of specificity. Reno creates her, and then explains why her lack of appreciation for conservative values has made her sad. The story of the sad straw woman, while impressive in its fictive inventiveness, is not nearly as interesting to me as a particular set of assumptions that run through the article.
They want a sense of belonging and a modest degree of confidence that their life-path will bring happiness. Both tend to be weakened as traditional institutions exercise less authority.
Put somewhat more concretely, the single, 35-year-old woman feels “judged” when I oppose gay marriage, because she intuitively senses that being pro-traditional marriage involves asserting male-female marriage as the norm—and therefore that her life isn’t on the right path. She resents this implication.
As a result, people suffer from anomic disorders. (That means various kinds of personal unhappiness related to the lack of clear norms for how to live.)
The assumption here is that if people would just follow the path that traditional institutions and cultural values lay out, the people would be happy. They are not following that path because a more permissive society has seduced them into following various other paths, and now they both feel judged for taking alternate paths and are unhappy because they are not on the only road to happiness.
I have a smidge of sympathy for Reno. I agree that when people live as if they can make any choices they like and then get pissed off that those choices have consequences-- well, those people are asking for a life full of cranky. And I think it's a big group, including people who want to be an hour late to work every day and still keep their job as well as GOP candidates who want to be dicks to women but still get the women's vote.
But Reno is missing a huge part of the picture. People are abandoning traditional pathways because for many people, those pathways have ceased to work. Get a job + work hard at it is supposed to = become a self-supporting member of society. But low minimum wage + part time status + no benefits = member of the working poor. Economically, we have lots of people who did exactly what they were Supposed To Do, and now their college diploma gathers dust while they try to figure out how to make this month's rent with what they make bagging groceries. And our new world-class level of poverty means an entire generation is growing up in situations where following the traditional path does not get you jack. I suspect this has a great deal to do with the erosion of traditional values in our culture.
Of course, the difficulty today is in finding a source of “effective authority” that has currency in the public square.
Well, yeah. You know how an effective authority could gain currency? By saying things that seem to be related to the people actually live in. Telling poor people "It's your own fault for being lazy and dumb and morally suspect" or women "It's your own fault for not staying home and raising babies" does not earn currency.
But beyond even that is the underlying assumption that there is One, True Road to happiness, and that people who travel it end up happy, and everybody else does not. This is not true now, and there is no evidence that it has ever been true, ever, in the history of human beings. Yes, traditionalists like to point at some point in the past (frequently coinciding with their childhood) and say, "There was a time when everyone was on the same page and life was better." This says more about the failure of their memory than the success of the culture. There was never such a time.
People who believe there is One Right Way to live your life are a menace to society, primarily because what they really believe is that there is One Right Way to live your life and they know what it is. They believe that Happiness is located at one special place, and they have a map. And though I started with the GOP, that political party by no means has a monopoly on this viewpoint.
I don't believe I can name one thing that is required to make every single human being happy. A really great kiss is right up there, but there are probably people who are happy without one, or unhappy with one. I would say that is because human beings are different. Reno would say that's it because some people are right, and some people are wrong. For those of who believe that Happiness is a million little separate flowers in a very large field, the One Right Way theory just seems bizarrely wrong.
But that's their premise, and if you're still here, it's the same premise behind Common Core and high stakes standardized testing and national teacher evaluation systems. There's just One Right Way to do things, and the People in Charge know what it is, and so they have labored to create a system that puts everybody on one path to the same destination instead of a system that fosters a gazillion individual searches for a gazillion individual people.
One size does not fit all. Not everybody in the world needs to travel the same path in the same time. I can't believe I live in a time in which that idea has to be argued, let alone even stated.
How To Spot Lies
It is easy to get caught up in the wrong conversation. If someone locks you in a room without food and tells you, "I'm doing this to make you a better person," it's easy to get caught up in a whole argument about how this will actually hurt you and why would going without food make you a better person, anyway?
But let's not have that conversation. Instead, let's reverse engineer the premise. You've said that the objective is to make me a better person? Let's start from there and ask this question:
If we were going to try to make me a better person, what would we do?
It's this same process that so often leads me to conclude that many reformsters are simply lying (or, at best, confused). They present a misguided, distracting or destructive policy and then at the end, tag it with a noble or worthy rationalization, like stapling a lion's tail onto the butt of an ugly donkey. What happens if we just look at the tail and ask, "What animal would this have come from?" Let's look at some reformster classics.
...so that students aren't the victims of their zip codes.
This is used to justify charter programs, particularly large clusterfinagles like Newark.
But if we wanted to make sure that no child went to a lousy school just because she grew up in a poor community, we would make sure that no schools were terrible, regardless of the neighborhood. We would demand that state and local governments found ways to fully fund each and every school. We would make sure that no zip code anywhere was victimizing any children. That way there would be nothing that anybody needed to escape.
...so that we know how well our children are progressing in their education.
If we wanted to have a really effective measure of student learning, we would have a long and difficult task to undertake.
First. we'd have to come up with an effective measure of all learning, which would be hugely challenging on a large scale. We would have to be relentless in making sure that we were designing instruments that measured what we wanted to know, and not basing them on what we can most easily measure. I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but I expect that 1) there wouldn't be a multiple choice question anywhere in it and 2) it wouldn't be economical to do it on a national scale.
Then we would have to decide how to use the data that we gathered. We'd need long conversations about where to put the various dividing lines (cut scores. etc) and how to package the data in a way that was meaningful and useful to teachers and parents.
And we would have to decide whether our goal was to provide teachers with information to inform their teaching, students and parents to make their own choices and decisions, or suitable for government functionaries to make state and national policy decisions. Instruments that did one of these would be hard; instruments that did all three might be impossible. The easiest approach is the one we're currently using--instruments that do none of these things.
...so that all students are taught by a great teacher.
If we want to do this (and why wouldn't we), there are several problems that have to be tackled.
First, we would have to identify the best teachers. This would require multiple instruments and some broad judgment. We would have to test, pilot, check, test again. And if experts in the field of these sorts of measurements said, "Hey, this thing you've come up with is crap," we would not ignore them.
We would have to recognize that all teachers start somewhere, so we would want to have considerable training and support through the first several years in the classroom. We would also recognize that most teachers hit tough patches now and then, and at those times they need support, not condemnation and threats.
And we would want to come up with ways to attract and retain the best people. And, because we know that stability in school is important, we would want to hold onto good teachers for their entire careers.
To that end, we would offer job security, solid career pay, autonomy, resources, and support to do their job. We would foster school atmospheres that treated teachers like managers, not flunkies. We would treat them like valued professionals, experts in their field, whose knowledge and insights would be a valued element of how the school functioned.
You can play this game with pretty much any reformster proposal (it works in the rest of life as well). If they say, "By doing this, we can get to X" just ask yourself, "If I wanted to get to X, what would be the best way?" Of course you're answer isn't the only one. This approach can be used badly (beware anyone who says sentences that start with "If you really loved me..."). But if you find your ideas about getting to X are wildly different from what you're being sold, something is up.
But let's not have that conversation. Instead, let's reverse engineer the premise. You've said that the objective is to make me a better person? Let's start from there and ask this question:
If we were going to try to make me a better person, what would we do?
It's this same process that so often leads me to conclude that many reformsters are simply lying (or, at best, confused). They present a misguided, distracting or destructive policy and then at the end, tag it with a noble or worthy rationalization, like stapling a lion's tail onto the butt of an ugly donkey. What happens if we just look at the tail and ask, "What animal would this have come from?" Let's look at some reformster classics.
...so that students aren't the victims of their zip codes.
This is used to justify charter programs, particularly large clusterfinagles like Newark.
But if we wanted to make sure that no child went to a lousy school just because she grew up in a poor community, we would make sure that no schools were terrible, regardless of the neighborhood. We would demand that state and local governments found ways to fully fund each and every school. We would make sure that no zip code anywhere was victimizing any children. That way there would be nothing that anybody needed to escape.
...so that we know how well our children are progressing in their education.
If we wanted to have a really effective measure of student learning, we would have a long and difficult task to undertake.
First. we'd have to come up with an effective measure of all learning, which would be hugely challenging on a large scale. We would have to be relentless in making sure that we were designing instruments that measured what we wanted to know, and not basing them on what we can most easily measure. I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but I expect that 1) there wouldn't be a multiple choice question anywhere in it and 2) it wouldn't be economical to do it on a national scale.
Then we would have to decide how to use the data that we gathered. We'd need long conversations about where to put the various dividing lines (cut scores. etc) and how to package the data in a way that was meaningful and useful to teachers and parents.
And we would have to decide whether our goal was to provide teachers with information to inform their teaching, students and parents to make their own choices and decisions, or suitable for government functionaries to make state and national policy decisions. Instruments that did one of these would be hard; instruments that did all three might be impossible. The easiest approach is the one we're currently using--instruments that do none of these things.
...so that all students are taught by a great teacher.
If we want to do this (and why wouldn't we), there are several problems that have to be tackled.
First, we would have to identify the best teachers. This would require multiple instruments and some broad judgment. We would have to test, pilot, check, test again. And if experts in the field of these sorts of measurements said, "Hey, this thing you've come up with is crap," we would not ignore them.
We would have to recognize that all teachers start somewhere, so we would want to have considerable training and support through the first several years in the classroom. We would also recognize that most teachers hit tough patches now and then, and at those times they need support, not condemnation and threats.
And we would want to come up with ways to attract and retain the best people. And, because we know that stability in school is important, we would want to hold onto good teachers for their entire careers.
To that end, we would offer job security, solid career pay, autonomy, resources, and support to do their job. We would foster school atmospheres that treated teachers like managers, not flunkies. We would treat them like valued professionals, experts in their field, whose knowledge and insights would be a valued element of how the school functioned.
You can play this game with pretty much any reformster proposal (it works in the rest of life as well). If they say, "By doing this, we can get to X" just ask yourself, "If I wanted to get to X, what would be the best way?" Of course you're answer isn't the only one. This approach can be used badly (beware anyone who says sentences that start with "If you really loved me..."). But if you find your ideas about getting to X are wildly different from what you're being sold, something is up.
A Great Labor Day Story
If you live in New England, or were paying attention to supermarket labor news this summer, you already know this story.
Almost a hundred years ago, Greek immigrant Arthur Demoulas founded what would become the grocery chain Market Basket. For the last few decades, the company has been run by two grandsons-- Arthur T. Demoulas and Arthur S. Demoulas.
The chain had grown to 71 stores with 25,000 employees. But there was a constant struggle between the cousins. Arthur S. pushed hard to get more golden eggs out of the Market Basket goose, but Arthur T., who did the actual managing of the operation, provided holiday bonuses, hefty retirement packages, and a career ladder that reached all the way down to baggers. He was personable and pleasant and well-known to his customers and his workers.
In June, Arthur S. gathered enough board votes to put a stop to all that touchy-feely crap, and Arthur T. was canned. When eight executives in the company tried to protest the ouster, they were canned, too. And as any qualified website headline writer would say, nobody could predict what would happen next.
What happened next was that the workers and customers of Market Basket shut the place down.
The workers walked out. The customers started boycotting. The suppliers stopped supplying. If you walked into a Market basket in July or August, you felt like you'd wandered into an abandoned building or perhaps time-traveled back to the saddest supermarket in Soviet Russia.
And the workers didn't just walk out. They held pep rallies. They walked with signs of their former fired CEO and demanded his return. Arthur S. threatened to fire them all, replace them with scabs, and the workers felt the pressure. Many of them are part-timers who depend on that check, and even those who didn't walk saw their hours cut dramatically as the stores ground to a halt. And yet a scan of news coverage finds no real signs of backlash-- even the workers who didn't walk did not call for the job action to fold.
By the end of August, it was over. Arthur S. and his cohort sold out to Arthur T. who was restored to leadership of the chain. It's a story so special that the link you just read past connects to coverage in the LA Times.
What are the lessons of the Market Basket story?
For folks in the big offices, the lesson is simple-- treat your people well, run your company fairly, and operate moral, ethical and just plain decent human being management, and there is no limit to how hard your workers will work and fight for you.
For workers, the story is a reminder that people do have power and that, pulling together in the name of a decent cause, they can create enormous pressure for management to do the right thing.
Happy Labor Day!
Squeezing Labor For $$$
If your goal is to get rich in business, labor is a problem you must solve.
I mean, there's that big stream of money. You can see it, right there, fat and full and flowing right toward you and then BAM-- it suddenly gets diverted because you have to pay workers their wages.
Early in human history, rulers established the ideal base level for wages-- $0.00/lifetime. But most countries (even the US-- though not first as we like to believe) eventually recognized slavery as a Bad Thing, and so the scramble was on to see what creative ways could be discovered to drive wages as low as possible.
Unions emerged as a way to exert counter-pressure, and while it will be repeated many times today (Labor Day), it can never be stated too many times-- everything that American workers take for granted from minimum wage to a defined work week to safe work conditions was fought for by unions and not given freely and voluntarily by management. And that most definitely includes the workers' share of that big stream of money.
In education, the financial pressures were traditionally different. There were certainly plenty of pressures to keep costs down, and I get that. As a taxpayer, I'm not inclined to write the school district a blank check, either. Those fights could get plenty ugly. I remember when Cleveland City Schools would shut down in October or November because they were out of money and the taxpayers had voted down the levy. And once upon a time, I was a local union president during contract negotiations and a subsequent strike. Believe me-- I know exactly how angry taxpayers when they think their taxes are going to go up.
But these we're seeing something new. Folks in the financial sector have noticed that the river of money running through education is huge. Huge! And they want a piece of it.
That can only mean one thing. Because that river flows mostly toward personnel. In fact, in runs toward personnel in a way that business people can find absolutely shocking. I remember a local board member who operated a concrete business and who was absolutely stunned by the percentage of the school budget that went to personnel costs. In his whole tenure, he never stopped talking about it, and always in tones that suggested he saw it as proof that the district was completely screwed up from a business standpoint.
But schools are a service sector, and personnel have to be a huge portion of the budget. Yes, there's money to be made in infrastructure and supplies, but that's easy-- you just insert your own business in that particular pipeline.You can't easily bring more money in by, say, raising prices. No, if you want to squeeze real money out of schools, you'll have to squeeze the personnel.
So when you hear reformsters talking about restructuring teacher pay, they're really talking about one thing-- "how do we divert some of that river of money from teachers to us?"
Proposals that follow the same template as TNTP's bogus plan talk about increasing pay for teachers, but they are really about the overall costs of a teaching staff. The basic principle here is pretty simple-- schools can afford to pay beginning teachers a bit more if they can convince them not to stick around. There will be some savings in not having to pay them a top career-level master teacher salary, but the big savings will come from not having to provide them with a pension, ever.
Merit systems are even easier to stack in favor of the school operators; the technique is already well-known in the private sector. You budget a set amount of money for merit bonuses, and that's it. It doesn't matter how many merit bonuses you award-- they are all going to be a slice of that pre-determined pie.
The tier system that some propose is a matter of PR and recruitment. You get one or two Master Teachers per building making a hefty salary. Those allow you to say, "Look at the huge salary our Master Teachers make!" (It also helps with the average salary numbers for your building.) You budget for the number of high-paid Master Teachers you can afford, and never exceed it. For extra savings, promote teachers to the Master slot after six or seven years, wash them out before a decade, and still avoid pension costs.
None of these plans are about making teacher compensation better for teachers. No reformsters are out there proposing to attract teachers with offers of better lifetime career earnings, nor are reformsters talking about how to keep the best teachers around for thirty-five or forty years. The idea is simply to reduce labor costs as much as possible, so that the river of sweet, sweet money can roll on, unimpeded.
I mean, there's that big stream of money. You can see it, right there, fat and full and flowing right toward you and then BAM-- it suddenly gets diverted because you have to pay workers their wages.
Early in human history, rulers established the ideal base level for wages-- $0.00/lifetime. But most countries (even the US-- though not first as we like to believe) eventually recognized slavery as a Bad Thing, and so the scramble was on to see what creative ways could be discovered to drive wages as low as possible.
Unions emerged as a way to exert counter-pressure, and while it will be repeated many times today (Labor Day), it can never be stated too many times-- everything that American workers take for granted from minimum wage to a defined work week to safe work conditions was fought for by unions and not given freely and voluntarily by management. And that most definitely includes the workers' share of that big stream of money.
In education, the financial pressures were traditionally different. There were certainly plenty of pressures to keep costs down, and I get that. As a taxpayer, I'm not inclined to write the school district a blank check, either. Those fights could get plenty ugly. I remember when Cleveland City Schools would shut down in October or November because they were out of money and the taxpayers had voted down the levy. And once upon a time, I was a local union president during contract negotiations and a subsequent strike. Believe me-- I know exactly how angry taxpayers when they think their taxes are going to go up.
But these we're seeing something new. Folks in the financial sector have noticed that the river of money running through education is huge. Huge! And they want a piece of it.
That can only mean one thing. Because that river flows mostly toward personnel. In fact, in runs toward personnel in a way that business people can find absolutely shocking. I remember a local board member who operated a concrete business and who was absolutely stunned by the percentage of the school budget that went to personnel costs. In his whole tenure, he never stopped talking about it, and always in tones that suggested he saw it as proof that the district was completely screwed up from a business standpoint.
But schools are a service sector, and personnel have to be a huge portion of the budget. Yes, there's money to be made in infrastructure and supplies, but that's easy-- you just insert your own business in that particular pipeline.You can't easily bring more money in by, say, raising prices. No, if you want to squeeze real money out of schools, you'll have to squeeze the personnel.
So when you hear reformsters talking about restructuring teacher pay, they're really talking about one thing-- "how do we divert some of that river of money from teachers to us?"
Proposals that follow the same template as TNTP's bogus plan talk about increasing pay for teachers, but they are really about the overall costs of a teaching staff. The basic principle here is pretty simple-- schools can afford to pay beginning teachers a bit more if they can convince them not to stick around. There will be some savings in not having to pay them a top career-level master teacher salary, but the big savings will come from not having to provide them with a pension, ever.
Merit systems are even easier to stack in favor of the school operators; the technique is already well-known in the private sector. You budget a set amount of money for merit bonuses, and that's it. It doesn't matter how many merit bonuses you award-- they are all going to be a slice of that pre-determined pie.
The tier system that some propose is a matter of PR and recruitment. You get one or two Master Teachers per building making a hefty salary. Those allow you to say, "Look at the huge salary our Master Teachers make!" (It also helps with the average salary numbers for your building.) You budget for the number of high-paid Master Teachers you can afford, and never exceed it. For extra savings, promote teachers to the Master slot after six or seven years, wash them out before a decade, and still avoid pension costs.
None of these plans are about making teacher compensation better for teachers. No reformsters are out there proposing to attract teachers with offers of better lifetime career earnings, nor are reformsters talking about how to keep the best teachers around for thirty-five or forty years. The idea is simply to reduce labor costs as much as possible, so that the river of sweet, sweet money can roll on, unimpeded.
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