What Is The Broad Academy?

If you're going to truly appreciate the news from the Broad Academy of Made Up Superintendent Qualifications, you need to know a bit about the Academy. For those who need a refresher, here you go.

Whence Came This Academy, Pray Tell

You see one of the things that any ordinary teachers can learn from the Broad (rhymes with "toad") Academy is that you can do anything if you have enough money if you put your mind to it. Actually, that might be the only thing that an ordinary teacher can learn from the Academy, because ordinary teachers won't be attending the Academy any time soon.

Give Eli Broad credit-- his personal story is not about being born into privilege. Working class parents. Public school. Working his way through college. Been married to the same woman for sixty years. Borrowed money from his in-laws for his first venture-- building little boxes made of ticky tacky. Read this story about how he used business success and big brass balls to make himself a major player in LA.He's a scrapper; Broad calls himself a "sore winner."

The Broad Foundation is one the Big Three (Walton and Gates) in what we call Venture Philanthropy, which is far different from the traditional kind. Carnegie Rockfeller bestowed money on people who they believed were doing Good Work. Venture philanthropists decide how they want to change the country, and they hire people to make it happen. The Broad reach is wide; this article gives a taste of the cornucopia of reformster talent that has occupied the board.

And so in 2002, Broad launched the "Superintendent's Academy" through which he hoped to further the foundation's goal of transforming America's urban school systems.

But Broad does not believe that schools have an education problem; he believes they have a management problem. School leadership does not need an infusion of educational leadership-- they need business guys, leadership guys. And so Broad launched the Superintendent's Academy by ignoring completely the usual requirements for Superintendent certification or program accreditation. The Board Superintendent Academy exists by its own force of will. It's kind of awesome-- there is no external governing or certifying board of any sort declaring that the Broad Superintendent's Academy is a legitimate thing, and yet, it exists and thrives.

I myself plan to soon open the Curmudgucation Academy of Brain Surgery, or maybe a School Of  Fine Art Production. I have everything I need to make these highly successful, with the possible exception of enough power and money to get people to listen to me whether I know what the hell I'm talking about or not.

But Does It Work?

Well, the Academy boasts many top tier graduates.The indispensable blog The Broad Report offers a full listing of the superintendents who have emerged from this pipeline. It includes such educational heavyweights as  Randolph Ward (brought in by Broad Buddy Jerry Brown and trashed Oakland Schools), Jean-Claude Brizard (received near-unanimous no confidence vote from teachers in Rochester schools), John Q. Porter (suspended after seven months Oklahoma City schools for financial misbehavior),  Deborah A. Gist (RI ed commissioner who headed mass firings and hiring of more Broad superintendents), Christopher Cerf (in charge of blowing up NJ schools), and the always-newsworthy John Deasy (resigned in disgrace from Prince Georges but landed in LA schools boss spot with his way paved by Broad Buddy Mayor Villaraigosa). And that's just to name a few.

Like TFA products, Broad Academy grads like to bring in fellow alumni. Their success rate is not super, but then that depends on how you score success.

Broad Wrote the Book on Blowing Up Schools

Not even kidding. The Broad Foundation actually created a manual for how to get schools closed in order to trim budgets while also managing public upheaval. Short version is
        1) Starve school by shutting off resources
        2) Declare that schools is failing (Try to look shocked/surprised)
        3) Close school, shunt students to charterland

In Their Defense

The notion that good managers don't need to know jack about the businesses they're managing isn't unique. It's all over the business world, and probably qualifies as one of the Reasons American Business Is Messed Up.

Actually, that's all I've got. The Broad Foundation's activity is kind of amazing in its brazenness, and other than it being a literal embodiment of the idea of running schools like a business, there's nothing much to say about it. The products of the Academy are routinely disruptive and make all the sorts of mistakes one would expect from amateurs trying to run school systems.

Can We Renew "The Conversation"?

There has been a renewal of calls lately to refresh, renew, restart, and otherwise rehabilitate the conversation about Common Core.

It has taken a variety of forms. In the Washington Times, Mike Petrilli and Neal McClusky put out a call to retire some of the standard talking points, admitting that the Core is after all kind of curriculummy and probably not the product of a commie conspiracy or of teachers, either. Meanwhile, Peter Cunningham, former communications master for Arne Duncan, has launched a new website that is nothing but standard talking points aimed at "starting a new conversation" in which Core boosters will convince parents that the Core is swell.

Can a new conversation be started? That's actually a trick question, because we never had a conversation to begin with.

When the Great White Whale of Common Core first appeared, with all its attendant barnacles, nobody was having a conversation. Nobody who was writing it said, "Let's get lots of teachers and actual educators in here and have a conversation about what national standards should look like." Nobody in DC who was pushing this stuff said, "Let's get a bunch of stakeholders in here and have a conversation about what the federal role in retooling education should be."

There was no conversation. There was a set of changes and mandates, imposed from the top down, directly and indirectly by people with power and money. They did not ask for conversation or debate, nor did they welcome it when it began to crop up. Teachers, parents, and other concerned stakeholders were told to shut up, sit down, and do as their betters told them to. Critics were labeled cranks, deluded moms, and (Arne's favorite word for a while) "silly." Architects like David Coleman were proud of the fact that they'd done this themselves, without "expert" help. And the implication was repeatedly that teachers were a major cause of public school failure; the implication was that they should not be included in any discussions of education.

So, not a conversation. Not a debate. Just people with money and power who not only had all the seats at the table, but owned the table and the room it was sitting in.

Make no mistake. The calls for conversation, for cooler heads, for less rhetoric, for less politics-- we've been hearing more and more of these over the past year because the reformsters are losing. With a full school year under their collective belts, they have nothing to point to as a clear, substantive success. Nothing they can point to that allows them to say, "See? We were right! Y"all need to shut up now, because here's our proof that we were right."

Some of them are still there. There are no signs that Education Post is about a conversation at all, but is simply more rapid response political spin and marketing. For those who are ready to move forward, they're not really looking to change the conversation so much as start it. And that's fundamentally because talking over everybody else isn't working for them any more.

The call for conversation and debate does something that in the retail world they call "assuming the sale." This is when your used car salesman starts talking to you about financing decisions as if you have already decided to buy the car.

The calls for debate and conversation assume that the reformsters deserve to be sitting at the table, helping set the terms under which education in this country will move forward. It assumes that they somehow have a right to decide what American public education should look like.

It is true that every single American deserves to have a voice in that conversation. And it is probably a cold hard truth that reformsters really do have a seat at the main table where these decisions will be made. But here's another "make no mistake"-- they did not get those seats by virtue of educational expertise or teaching experience or pedagogical knowledge. They did not get those seats by suggesting reforms that were embraced and promoted by teachers and education leaders in schools across America. They got those seats by virtue of money and power. That's it, and that's all.

It's one of the ironies of reformsterdom. As much as many love to talk about merit and effectiveness, Common Core did not become de facto law of the land based on merit or effectiveness. We're talking about Common Core and all the rest of the package because rich people and people with political power and connections decided to make it happen.

So calls for a better, kinder education conversation hit me kind of like calls from anti-evolutionists to "teach the controversy." It is not a meeting of equals. It's a meeting of people who have facts and reason on one side, and people who just believe what they want to believe and have the power to demand attention on the other side.

Reformsters have political power and money on their side, plus nowadays the inertial advantage that comes with being the status quo. Advocates for American public education have expertise, experience, knowledge, passion, and a growing body of facts on their side. (There are several other sides in this discussion, but let me stick to these two for the moment.) Moreover, as reformsters are increasingly discovering, money and power lose a lot of their effectiveness when you are steadily losing hearts and minds.

I do want to have a civil conversation, and I don't assume that reformsters are evil/ignorant monsters. My reluctance is not about their imagined awful intentions or their allegedly evil ideas. It's about their qualifications. I have a hard time getting over a gut reaction. It's the same reaction I would have if a random stranger wandered in off the street, walked into my classroom, and started giving me notes on how to properly explain dependent clauses (and his explanation included "show how the fairies build them"). I have trouble getting past that reaction of "Who are you, and why are you interrupting my work."

Reformsters have yet to answer some fundamental questions about themselves and their Common Core based reforms.

Who are you, and why should we be listening to your ideas about education?

What is the basis for your ideas, and why should we take them seriously?

These are fundamental questions that reformsters have yet to answer convincingly. They have yet to show any reasons that they should be included in a conversation about American public education any more than any other regular citizens. Until that happens, they will be people that we're talking to only and because they have money and power, and I'm not sure how we start a useful conversation based on that.

McClusky and Petrilli Reboot CCSS Debate

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.

How about curriculum? Does the Core prescribe that?

Any set standard puts a box around curriculum, and the crafters of the Core explicitly called for a number of “instructional shifts” in the classroom. In addition, what is on Core-aligned tests may, de facto, fill in some curriculum. This, though, is different from saying only one curriculum will do.

They also blame some of the confusion about Common Core curriculum on the work of book publishers. That's probably fair, though it has also been clear all along that many of the supporters of the Core themselves believe that the Core is a curriculum driver (for instance, the now oft-quoted line from PARCC CEO Laura Slover). Core supporters only started trying to show daylight between curriculum and standards once the pushback on curriculum began; they'd been only too happy to conflate the two the rest of the time.   

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.

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.

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." ]

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.

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.