Twelve million dollars buys you a big splash. Many of us have launched blogs; very few of us have had heavy press coverage of the launch.
When Anthony Cody, a nationally known education writer and activist left the nest at Education Week to launch Living in Dialogue, a website that features work from many of the top writers in education policy today, the Washington Post did not dispatch Lindsey Layton to cover the new addition to the education conversation. But when Education Post, a site with a similar format (multiple writers cover education issues) and a similar stated mission (further the education conversation), launched last week, it got the royal treatment in other media outlets.
It's telling that Education Post's logo is a bullhorn. Its intention of providing a new education conversation vanishes immediately in its press coverage. In the Washington Post coverage, Bloomberg guy Howard Wolfson said
There hasn’t really been an organization dedicated to sharing the
successes of education reform around the country. You
have local success, but it isn’t amplified elsewhere.
Bruce Reed, from the Broad Foundation, is even clearer.
One of the goals of Education Post is to publicize what works in public education.
Reed also offers this characterization of the problem voices in the debate
Most of the people in the organizations we work with are too busy
starting schools or teaching kids to spend much time to take part in a
policy debate about what they do. They're showing up at 7 in the morning
to run a school and grading papers late into the night. They're not
blogging vicious comments at the bottom of every education news story
that gets written. [emphasis mine]
Just for the record, I get to school at 7 AM and grade papers late into the night and a few other things besides. I still make time to burn bandwidth because education is important to me. Just sayin'.
Education Post is not just about its own website. In Mark Walsh's EdWeek piece on the launch, we find this tidbit
Cunningha, said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
In the Washington Post piece, it comes out like this
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down
false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country
where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
So, not conversation. Now, if reformsters want to put together a site devoted to getting out their message, that fine. When I go to Anthony Cody's site, I expect that I'll find a certain point of view represented, and my policy here at this blog is that I stick to saying things that I believe are true.
But Education Post goes a step beyond a simple bloggy point of view. It's looking a lot more like a well-financed, well-populated political PR rapid response team. And it has already shown its rapid response skills. When I wrote my initial take on the site, I had two twitter accounts associated with the group challenging me by the end of the afternoon, talking points at the ready. The second round of blogs include, along with pieces in praise of standardized testing and the new teacher evaluation models, a piece entitled "I'm All Ears, Jose." It's a response to Jose Luis Vilson, one of the A-list ed bloggers to take an early look at EP, and it reads a little like Peter Cunningham's version of "Was there something you wanted to tell the whole class?"
Again, there's nothing wrong with having a point of view, and nothing wrong with being assertive about it. But these guys are not exploring or conversing; they're selling something, and they are defining "toxic" conversation as words that interfere with their sales pitch. This is not an attempt to have a conversation, but an attempt to shape and control one.
Controlling the narrative is all the rage in these issues. Mercedes Schneider and Paul Thomas have both written recent pieces that show this subtle and powerful technique in action. I say, "So there we were, winning the game with superior skills, when some people got upset, apparently about some foul in the third quarter. We are totally open to discussing that third quarter foul situation," and if you want to engage in the argument about the foul, that's fine with me because we've now sold the notion that my team was winning and that we have superior skill.
EdPost's narrative is that we were all just sitting around, talking pleasantly about how to accomplish great things with these really successful ed reforms, and suddenly the conversation turned ugly and unpleasantly toxic. Now we just need people to calm down so that we can talk about all the great successes of ed reform.
This is disingenuous on two levels. First, it's what people who believe in marketing way too much do. When their Big Poop Sandwich is selling poorly, they work with the assumption that's there's a problem with their messaging and not a problem with trying sell a sandwich filled with poop. Second, they already know when the conversation turned ugly. It was back a few years ago when reformsters refused to listen to any dissenting voices and proceeded to dismiss all critics as cranks and fringe elements and hysterically deluded suburban white moms. Back then a combative tone was okay because they thought they would win that conversation. Now they would like a new choice, please.
There is another secondary story here-- the tale of the former Obama administration figures who have become field operatives for hard-edged reformster promotion. From this PR initiative to the East Coast Vergara lawsuit of Campbell Brown, we're seeing former Obama/Duncan folks resurface as reformster warriors. At the very least, a reminder that it's a mistake to assume that a Democrat is on the side of public education.
Look, I'm all for civil conversation. I count a large number of reformster types with whom I have had plenty of civil exchanges. But those exchanges include honesty and listening and an intention to understand what the other person is saying. Education Post and its extremely well-funded megaphone appear to come up a bit short.
Put another way-- if your neighbor drives a tank into his driveway and parks it next to a few cases of ammo, and then he tells you, "Look! I got a great new sailboat! Pretty soon we'll all be heading out onto the lake together," you'd be right to have a few doubts. Education Post may want to promote itself as a sailboat, but it sure looks like a tank to me.
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Saturday, September 6, 2014
The Other Conservative Reform Argument
If you've been scratching your head and wondering why several prominent conservative ed writers and thinky tankists have been turning on the Common Core lately, we have an reminder of where a new argument could be headed.
Over at SFGate, we find Vicki E. Alger, a thinky tankist from the Independent Institute (libertarian) in Oakland, presenting this article-- "American Education Needs Competition, Not Common Core."
The title pretty well says it all. The article is loaded with baloney. Did you know that the CCSS standards writers compromised on real toughness in the standards in order to get buy in from teachers' unions? Of course you didn't, for much the same reason that you weren't aware that the flames on the sun are maintained by dancing fairies.
There's more in a general Glen Becky way-- federal overreach, data gathering, feds many broken education promises. But here's the pin on which the argument pivots.
Ultimately, Common Core rests on the faulty premise that a single, centralized entity knows what's best for all 55 million students nationwide. Raising the education bar starts with putting the real experts in charge: students' parents.
For much of the new wave of reformy goodness, choice, privatization and the Core have traveled hand in hand. The premise was that CCSS would be a yardstick by which all schools could be measured, and by using it (by way of super-awesome tests) we would find out that public schools were sucky and needed to be escaped by sending students (and their money) to charter/choice/private schools.
In this newer argument, the Core is no longer a yardstick of excellence, but a straightjacket of government naughtiness. The Core used to be a tool for helping students escape terrible government schools; now it's a symbol of why government schools are terrible. This is not a new argument; it's just one that we haven't always clearly associated with the conservative fans of reforminess.
Bottom line: Reformsters who are fans of privatization and free-market voucherish solutions for the dismantling and monetization of public education-- these folks do not really need the Common Core to push their agenda, and can easily move from fighting for it to fighting against it without having to drop any other piece of their program. Alger has been beating this drum for a while; who knows when her band might suddenly get bigger.
Over at SFGate, we find Vicki E. Alger, a thinky tankist from the Independent Institute (libertarian) in Oakland, presenting this article-- "American Education Needs Competition, Not Common Core."
The title pretty well says it all. The article is loaded with baloney. Did you know that the CCSS standards writers compromised on real toughness in the standards in order to get buy in from teachers' unions? Of course you didn't, for much the same reason that you weren't aware that the flames on the sun are maintained by dancing fairies.
There's more in a general Glen Becky way-- federal overreach, data gathering, feds many broken education promises. But here's the pin on which the argument pivots.
Ultimately, Common Core rests on the faulty premise that a single, centralized entity knows what's best for all 55 million students nationwide. Raising the education bar starts with putting the real experts in charge: students' parents.
For much of the new wave of reformy goodness, choice, privatization and the Core have traveled hand in hand. The premise was that CCSS would be a yardstick by which all schools could be measured, and by using it (by way of super-awesome tests) we would find out that public schools were sucky and needed to be escaped by sending students (and their money) to charter/choice/private schools.
In this newer argument, the Core is no longer a yardstick of excellence, but a straightjacket of government naughtiness. The Core used to be a tool for helping students escape terrible government schools; now it's a symbol of why government schools are terrible. This is not a new argument; it's just one that we haven't always clearly associated with the conservative fans of reforminess.
Bottom line: Reformsters who are fans of privatization and free-market voucherish solutions for the dismantling and monetization of public education-- these folks do not really need the Common Core to push their agenda, and can easily move from fighting for it to fighting against it without having to drop any other piece of their program. Alger has been beating this drum for a while; who knows when her band might suddenly get bigger.
Out Standing In Our Field
It's something that every teacher can do for all teachers. Get out into the community
I've heard the speech from fellow teachers-- "When I walk out of here at the end of the day, I don't want to see any students again until I walk back into school tomorrow." I have known teachers who deliberately bought homes well outside the district limits so that their home life would never, ever intersect with their school life.
We can't do that any more. We cannot hold ourselves separate from the communities where we serve.
I teach in a small town, so I know plenty of teachers who stay active and connected. they sing in church choirs. The coach little league. They paint houses in the summer. They work with the Humane Society. One teacher in my building was the town mayor for years. Me? I play in a town band, write for the local newspaper, and stay involved in local community theater (right now I'm directing a production of Chicago-- stop by if you're in the neighborhood in three or four weeks).
I shop at local businesses where my students and their parents and my former students all work. My students see me in the grocery store. Buying food!! In jeans!!!
Yes, there are down sides. When I was president of the striking local years ago, people knew right where to find me. And when my first marriage blew up and I became a divorced single male in a small town, there were plenty of entertaining stories told about me.
But teachers who are out in the community, who are visible and active, are teachers whose students can recognize them as actual human beings. When we are visibly connected to the communities we serve, we are real stakeholders and participants and not just drive-by do-gooders who vanish at 3:45 to some other place that is apparently a better place. And when educational issues arise in our world (as they do these days roughly every twelve minutes), members of our community do not think about Those Darn Teachers, but the actual live human beings they know who also happen to be teachers.
We teachers are pretty noisy these days about our dislike of top-down pronouncements. But when we rarely descend from Mount School except to deliver pronouncements on how Pat is doing in class or what the parent should be doing to help Chris, are we not rather top-downy ourselves?
Connecting to our communities helps us do our jobs better. We better understand our students, and they better understand us. We serve as examples of how adults are active in many aspects of their lives. We better represent the profession; this was always a good idea, but in times like these in which the profession is under constant attack, it's essential. People are most likely to stick up for human beings they know, not faceless functionaries who are only slightly more human than a clerk at the DMV. And connecting to communities helps us avoid incredibly tone-deaf acts of insensitivity like wearing police-supporting t-shirts at a moment and in a place where the police are not trusted.
There are certainly some practical barriers. For highly mobile teachers, moving for every job change would be silly. And married teachers have to balance two sets of needs. Not everybody can live right in the district where she teaches. But every teacher can spend time in that district after school hours for any purpose, even something as simple as shopping.
In times like these, teachers cannot simply hide in their caves. We have to be out in the field, visible, active, using our talents, connecting with our students and their families. We need to be loud and proud, local and vocal.
I've heard the speech from fellow teachers-- "When I walk out of here at the end of the day, I don't want to see any students again until I walk back into school tomorrow." I have known teachers who deliberately bought homes well outside the district limits so that their home life would never, ever intersect with their school life.
We can't do that any more. We cannot hold ourselves separate from the communities where we serve.
I teach in a small town, so I know plenty of teachers who stay active and connected. they sing in church choirs. The coach little league. They paint houses in the summer. They work with the Humane Society. One teacher in my building was the town mayor for years. Me? I play in a town band, write for the local newspaper, and stay involved in local community theater (right now I'm directing a production of Chicago-- stop by if you're in the neighborhood in three or four weeks).
I shop at local businesses where my students and their parents and my former students all work. My students see me in the grocery store. Buying food!! In jeans!!!
Yes, there are down sides. When I was president of the striking local years ago, people knew right where to find me. And when my first marriage blew up and I became a divorced single male in a small town, there were plenty of entertaining stories told about me.
But teachers who are out in the community, who are visible and active, are teachers whose students can recognize them as actual human beings. When we are visibly connected to the communities we serve, we are real stakeholders and participants and not just drive-by do-gooders who vanish at 3:45 to some other place that is apparently a better place. And when educational issues arise in our world (as they do these days roughly every twelve minutes), members of our community do not think about Those Darn Teachers, but the actual live human beings they know who also happen to be teachers.
We teachers are pretty noisy these days about our dislike of top-down pronouncements. But when we rarely descend from Mount School except to deliver pronouncements on how Pat is doing in class or what the parent should be doing to help Chris, are we not rather top-downy ourselves?
Connecting to our communities helps us do our jobs better. We better understand our students, and they better understand us. We serve as examples of how adults are active in many aspects of their lives. We better represent the profession; this was always a good idea, but in times like these in which the profession is under constant attack, it's essential. People are most likely to stick up for human beings they know, not faceless functionaries who are only slightly more human than a clerk at the DMV. And connecting to communities helps us avoid incredibly tone-deaf acts of insensitivity like wearing police-supporting t-shirts at a moment and in a place where the police are not trusted.
There are certainly some practical barriers. For highly mobile teachers, moving for every job change would be silly. And married teachers have to balance two sets of needs. Not everybody can live right in the district where she teaches. But every teacher can spend time in that district after school hours for any purpose, even something as simple as shopping.
In times like these, teachers cannot simply hide in their caves. We have to be out in the field, visible, active, using our talents, connecting with our students and their families. We need to be loud and proud, local and vocal.
Efficiency Report Is Only Mostly That Bad
The edublogonewsphere buzzed a bit this week about a report from GEMS Education Solutions regarding educational efficiency and the fact that it finds the US somewhat lacking. It is, however, a large report, and some reporters made the mistake of skipping through to just the shiny, sexy parts. I'm not sure that the report has anything useful to tell us, but I don't think it's quite as outrageous as some folks have painted it.
GEMS Education Solutions is the consulting wing of GEMS Education. This is the gigantic multi-national education corporation that American privateers dream of becoming when they grow up. Started by a pair of teachers in 1959, the company now has offices in London, New York, Singapore and Delhi, with headquarters in Dubai. Would anyone like to guess what office space costs in Dubai look like. You can get the quick company tour in this video:
Despite the incredibly creep title frame that youtube has selected, this is a slick and impressive video-- one that presents the international ed biz as a big, corporate business. Should the US education market ever be really, truly opened to outfits beyond hamfisted amateurs with crony connections, this is the company that will eat many private school operators' lunch. Star Trek got one thing wrong-- when the BORG come, they will be pretty.
Like any good multinational corporation, they do their homework, and they look at how governments are functioning. The study and consult side of the business (in addition to this and the school-running side, there is also a philanthropic side) is called GEMS Solutions, and those are the folks who cranked out that efficiency report.
If you want to see the highlights, go here. Hell, go there anyway. I read a lot of these reports, and nobody has created a prettier, slicker on-line presentation format than this group. Every thinky tank putting their "research" projects in lame pdf format should take a look at this. Then, when you want to go look at the full report (also in a slick package), go to this link.
I'm not going to get into great detail, because at the end of the day, the report is kind of a waste of time. The concept is not entirely ridiculous, but the foundation is rotten.
The concept? Let's look at sixty-some factors that could affect a nation's educational program and see which ones make a difference. Turns out, they say, that only class size and teacher pay matter. So then they do a basic efficiency study-- whose results come at the best price for their situation? Who is getting the most bang for the buck? At one point they compare it to studying the fuel efficiency of a vehicle, and that's not unfair.
Unfortunately, all of this is built on a bad foundation. Their measure for the bang, the How Well Is The Nation Doing in Education piece, is PISA scores. Even if we accept that PISA scores are a good measure of anything (and that's a debate for another day), do we want to say that good PISA scores are the point and purpose of a nation's education system?
The reports authors acknowledge that might not be the case:
...some [countries] are in the fortunate position to be able to focus on outcomes, because resources are plentiful. Customers buying luxury sports cars are not likely to be concerned with fuel efficiency; they can choose to prioritise other highly desirable features and are prepared to pay higher fuel costs for the privilege. It is very possible that some educational systems are similarly paying a premium for additional outcomes beyond PISA scores. Although providing an excellent method of comparing educational attainment across borders, they cannot measure every output of the system. In such cases, inefficiency may not be considered a problem, but these additional outcomes must be known and desired.
The report suggests that the US would be more efficient if it paid teachers less and had larger class sizes, but what does that even mean in this context?
Efficiency is not excellence, and the report doesn't pretend otherwise. The optimum teacher pay level is not where you get the best PISA scores. It's just that beyond that part, you have to spend larger amounts of money to get smaller results. The authors also use the automotive metaphor to note that even if you have a highly fuel-efficient car, taking a long trip still requires a whole lot of gas.Co-author Adam Still acknowledged as much talking to Joy Resmovits at HuffPost
"We're not saying that the U.S. should cut salaries or should increase class sizes in order to improve quality -- it doesn't make common sense," he said.
Is it even humanly possible to figure out the things GEMS pretends to have figured out? I'm unconvinced. What does average national teacher salary even mean in this context? Would not those figures as well as the class size figures be rather wonky because of various types of outliers? And although the report corrects straight money units into purchasing power measures, that still leaves us with a national average that puts San Francisco dollars and Pittsburgh dollars and Paducah dollars all in the same bucket.
The teacher salary portion of the report says that "too low" salary means "not enough to attract the best people." How does anybody possibly compute such a thing, particularly when not taking any of the cultural or social factors into account? The more one looks at the report, the more one sees a big bunch of mostly-made-up numbers.
Many teachers have bristled at the use of "efficiency" and other biz-world jargon. It doesn't bother me so much-- if we're honest, we have to admit that we make efficiency decisions daily, though our currency is usually time. What's the most bang I can get for my five minutes left at the end of class? But we're making efficiency judgments based on actual usable data, and not sets of information so large and sweeping as to be nearly meaningless sitting on a foundation too tiny and rotten to be useful. GEMS hasn't offended me or shifted my dudgeon-mobile into high gear; they've just wasted a lot of money on this thing, and since they've clearly got plenty of money to waste, I guess that producing a report like this is okay. It just doesn't seem very efficient.
GEMS Education Solutions is the consulting wing of GEMS Education. This is the gigantic multi-national education corporation that American privateers dream of becoming when they grow up. Started by a pair of teachers in 1959, the company now has offices in London, New York, Singapore and Delhi, with headquarters in Dubai. Would anyone like to guess what office space costs in Dubai look like. You can get the quick company tour in this video:
Like any good multinational corporation, they do their homework, and they look at how governments are functioning. The study and consult side of the business (in addition to this and the school-running side, there is also a philanthropic side) is called GEMS Solutions, and those are the folks who cranked out that efficiency report.
If you want to see the highlights, go here. Hell, go there anyway. I read a lot of these reports, and nobody has created a prettier, slicker on-line presentation format than this group. Every thinky tank putting their "research" projects in lame pdf format should take a look at this. Then, when you want to go look at the full report (also in a slick package), go to this link.
I'm not going to get into great detail, because at the end of the day, the report is kind of a waste of time. The concept is not entirely ridiculous, but the foundation is rotten.
The concept? Let's look at sixty-some factors that could affect a nation's educational program and see which ones make a difference. Turns out, they say, that only class size and teacher pay matter. So then they do a basic efficiency study-- whose results come at the best price for their situation? Who is getting the most bang for the buck? At one point they compare it to studying the fuel efficiency of a vehicle, and that's not unfair.
Unfortunately, all of this is built on a bad foundation. Their measure for the bang, the How Well Is The Nation Doing in Education piece, is PISA scores. Even if we accept that PISA scores are a good measure of anything (and that's a debate for another day), do we want to say that good PISA scores are the point and purpose of a nation's education system?
The reports authors acknowledge that might not be the case:
...some [countries] are in the fortunate position to be able to focus on outcomes, because resources are plentiful. Customers buying luxury sports cars are not likely to be concerned with fuel efficiency; they can choose to prioritise other highly desirable features and are prepared to pay higher fuel costs for the privilege. It is very possible that some educational systems are similarly paying a premium for additional outcomes beyond PISA scores. Although providing an excellent method of comparing educational attainment across borders, they cannot measure every output of the system. In such cases, inefficiency may not be considered a problem, but these additional outcomes must be known and desired.
The report suggests that the US would be more efficient if it paid teachers less and had larger class sizes, but what does that even mean in this context?
Efficiency is not excellence, and the report doesn't pretend otherwise. The optimum teacher pay level is not where you get the best PISA scores. It's just that beyond that part, you have to spend larger amounts of money to get smaller results. The authors also use the automotive metaphor to note that even if you have a highly fuel-efficient car, taking a long trip still requires a whole lot of gas.Co-author Adam Still acknowledged as much talking to Joy Resmovits at HuffPost
"We're not saying that the U.S. should cut salaries or should increase class sizes in order to improve quality -- it doesn't make common sense," he said.
Is it even humanly possible to figure out the things GEMS pretends to have figured out? I'm unconvinced. What does average national teacher salary even mean in this context? Would not those figures as well as the class size figures be rather wonky because of various types of outliers? And although the report corrects straight money units into purchasing power measures, that still leaves us with a national average that puts San Francisco dollars and Pittsburgh dollars and Paducah dollars all in the same bucket.
The teacher salary portion of the report says that "too low" salary means "not enough to attract the best people." How does anybody possibly compute such a thing, particularly when not taking any of the cultural or social factors into account? The more one looks at the report, the more one sees a big bunch of mostly-made-up numbers.
Many teachers have bristled at the use of "efficiency" and other biz-world jargon. It doesn't bother me so much-- if we're honest, we have to admit that we make efficiency decisions daily, though our currency is usually time. What's the most bang I can get for my five minutes left at the end of class? But we're making efficiency judgments based on actual usable data, and not sets of information so large and sweeping as to be nearly meaningless sitting on a foundation too tiny and rotten to be useful. GEMS hasn't offended me or shifted my dudgeon-mobile into high gear; they've just wasted a lot of money on this thing, and since they've clearly got plenty of money to waste, I guess that producing a report like this is okay. It just doesn't seem very efficient.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Rick Hess Joins the Resistance
This week Rick Hess took to the National Review Online to punch Common Core in the nose.
Hess has always been a well-connected reform advocate. He's the education guy at American Enterprise Institute, and an executive editor at Education Next, an outfit run by Paul Peterson and sponsored by the Thomas Fordham Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School. He's a conservative writer whose work is often sharp and to the point; I've called him one of my favorite writers that I disagree with. But I certainly agreed with him this time.
His critique hits the Core for five "big half-truths."
Internationally benchmarked? "What the Common Core authors did is more 'cutting-and-pasting' than 'benchmarking.'"
Evidence-based? "In fact, what advocates mean is that the standards take into account surveys asking professors and hiring managers what they thought high-school graduates should know, as well as examinations of which courses college-bound students usually take."
College- and career-ready? "The result adds up to something less than the recipe for excellence that the marketing suggests. "
Rigor? "More often than not, the case for the Common Core’s superiority rests on the subjective judgment of four evaluators hired by the avidly pro–Common Core Thomas B. Fordham Institute."
Leading nations have national standards? "Advocates have made a major point of noting that high-performing nations all have national standards. What they’re much less likely to mention is that the world’s lowest-performing nations also all have national standards."
And for a final swing. " As much as Common Core boosters celebrate 'evidence,' they ought to be able to provide something more than, 'We’re smart, and here’s what we think.'"
The small swipe at the Fordham (Hess later on twitter called it a characterization, not a criticism) is striking because Hess and Petrilli always seem (from out here in the cheap seats) like BFF's.
I agree mostly with his critique, though I think the problems with college- and career-ready are a little different than his diagnosis that they are too limp. And my criticism of rigor is that it's a dumb, vague, magical-thinking concept.
But still, it's interesting to see Hess rip into the Core with such gusto, even as he prepares to be teamed with Carol Burris to represent the Anti- side in an upcoming CCSS debate. Between this and the semi-conciliatory tone of the Petrilli-McClusky CCSS op-ed, one wonders if there's something in the air in conservative thinky tank land.
What does it all mean? Hess has never shown a tendency to go easy on people just because they're on "his side." His reformy focus has generally been on the privatizing side of the debate; one can argue that Common Core is becoming more of a liability to corporate interests than a tool for pushing privatizing.
Whatever the case, Hess left the Dark Side (and, presumably, its cookies) to join us on the Light Side for a day or two (what do we have? waffles, maybe?) Who knows? Maybe he'll stay a while.
UPDATE: Mike Petrilli responded to Hess with five questions. Greg Forster (over at Jay P Greene's blog) answers those five questions and hammers the Core even more. Read it here.
Hess has always been a well-connected reform advocate. He's the education guy at American Enterprise Institute, and an executive editor at Education Next, an outfit run by Paul Peterson and sponsored by the Thomas Fordham Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School. He's a conservative writer whose work is often sharp and to the point; I've called him one of my favorite writers that I disagree with. But I certainly agreed with him this time.
His critique hits the Core for five "big half-truths."
Internationally benchmarked? "What the Common Core authors did is more 'cutting-and-pasting' than 'benchmarking.'"
Evidence-based? "In fact, what advocates mean is that the standards take into account surveys asking professors and hiring managers what they thought high-school graduates should know, as well as examinations of which courses college-bound students usually take."
College- and career-ready? "The result adds up to something less than the recipe for excellence that the marketing suggests. "
Rigor? "More often than not, the case for the Common Core’s superiority rests on the subjective judgment of four evaluators hired by the avidly pro–Common Core Thomas B. Fordham Institute."
Leading nations have national standards? "Advocates have made a major point of noting that high-performing nations all have national standards. What they’re much less likely to mention is that the world’s lowest-performing nations also all have national standards."
And for a final swing. " As much as Common Core boosters celebrate 'evidence,' they ought to be able to provide something more than, 'We’re smart, and here’s what we think.'"
The small swipe at the Fordham (Hess later on twitter called it a characterization, not a criticism) is striking because Hess and Petrilli always seem (from out here in the cheap seats) like BFF's.
I agree mostly with his critique, though I think the problems with college- and career-ready are a little different than his diagnosis that they are too limp. And my criticism of rigor is that it's a dumb, vague, magical-thinking concept.
But still, it's interesting to see Hess rip into the Core with such gusto, even as he prepares to be teamed with Carol Burris to represent the Anti- side in an upcoming CCSS debate. Between this and the semi-conciliatory tone of the Petrilli-McClusky CCSS op-ed, one wonders if there's something in the air in conservative thinky tank land.
What does it all mean? Hess has never shown a tendency to go easy on people just because they're on "his side." His reformy focus has generally been on the privatizing side of the debate; one can argue that Common Core is becoming more of a liability to corporate interests than a tool for pushing privatizing.
Whatever the case, Hess left the Dark Side (and, presumably, its cookies) to join us on the Light Side for a day or two (what do we have? waffles, maybe?) Who knows? Maybe he'll stay a while.
UPDATE: Mike Petrilli responded to Hess with five questions. Greg Forster (over at Jay P Greene's blog) answers those five questions and hammers the Core even more. Read it here.
Prof. Pearson Goes To College
On Thursday, Gabriel Kahn at Slate reported news that is not actually news to anybody who pays attention to education these days, but it's still worth noting.
Pearson has made it possible for colleges and universities to do away with those pesky professors entirely by providing a Course in a Box. Students who sign up for an Intro to Psychology course at Any University, USA, may very well find themselves taking exactly the same online course from Pearson PLC.
The online courses (the article also profiles one in math) provide an online textbook, and whenever you get stuck on a math problem, just click a link and up pops a video of somebody showing you how to do it.
The advantage to the university is obvious-- they don't have to fork over even the pennies involved in hiring a part-time adjunct.
The threats are also obvious. First, how do students decide between University A and University B if the course offerings are in so many cases absolutely identical? Anxious publishers are saying that the university has many ways to customize the experience so that it has something to offer beyond the identical course content.
Second, just how much longer will Pearson and the other whales in this business need the university at all. Right now, the university is needed for its accreditation-- attaching their name to the the product turns it into a legitimate certified college course. It seems like a strong line to hold now.
But a quick look at the world of pre-college ed shows that wall falling. We are now in a world where five weeks of summer TFA training is enough to make any college grad a "certified" teacher. For over a decade the Broad Academy has been turning out "Fellows" who are qualified to be superintendents because the uncertified, unaccountable Broad program says they are. Depending on where you are and who you know, you too can open a charter school and offer legitimate high school diplomas, no matter what educational qualifications you may or may not have. And that includes chains of charters that are built around the model of plunking a student in front of a computer screen all day for "instruction."
In such a world, it doesn't seem like such a stretch to imagine Pearson Online University existing separate from any ivy-covered bricks and mortar.
The publishers have an edge right now because they got there first. The Slate article quotes a couple of profs who have the same observation: "I was trying to put an online component together and realized that Pearson had already done it better than I could with my limited time and resources." Jefferson Flanders, head honcho at MindEdge Inc, another course producer, says “Ironically, I would fear less the course-in-a-box future than I do the cooking-it-at-home."
“I don’t think there are any heroes or villains here,” says Flanders. “There is just an extremely muddled understanding of what the boundaries are, and real questions for faculty about what their role might be.”
That really is one of the questions in front of most of us these days-- what is the future role of faculty in education, if any? Is an inexpensive uniformly okay-enough product worth making actual human instructors essentially obsolete (or existing only in captivity at companies like Pearson)? The only good news I have for college faculty is that they are not alone in facing this issue.
Pearson has made it possible for colleges and universities to do away with those pesky professors entirely by providing a Course in a Box. Students who sign up for an Intro to Psychology course at Any University, USA, may very well find themselves taking exactly the same online course from Pearson PLC.
The online courses (the article also profiles one in math) provide an online textbook, and whenever you get stuck on a math problem, just click a link and up pops a video of somebody showing you how to do it.
The advantage to the university is obvious-- they don't have to fork over even the pennies involved in hiring a part-time adjunct.
The threats are also obvious. First, how do students decide between University A and University B if the course offerings are in so many cases absolutely identical? Anxious publishers are saying that the university has many ways to customize the experience so that it has something to offer beyond the identical course content.
Second, just how much longer will Pearson and the other whales in this business need the university at all. Right now, the university is needed for its accreditation-- attaching their name to the the product turns it into a legitimate certified college course. It seems like a strong line to hold now.
But a quick look at the world of pre-college ed shows that wall falling. We are now in a world where five weeks of summer TFA training is enough to make any college grad a "certified" teacher. For over a decade the Broad Academy has been turning out "Fellows" who are qualified to be superintendents because the uncertified, unaccountable Broad program says they are. Depending on where you are and who you know, you too can open a charter school and offer legitimate high school diplomas, no matter what educational qualifications you may or may not have. And that includes chains of charters that are built around the model of plunking a student in front of a computer screen all day for "instruction."
In such a world, it doesn't seem like such a stretch to imagine Pearson Online University existing separate from any ivy-covered bricks and mortar.
The publishers have an edge right now because they got there first. The Slate article quotes a couple of profs who have the same observation: "I was trying to put an online component together and realized that Pearson had already done it better than I could with my limited time and resources." Jefferson Flanders, head honcho at MindEdge Inc, another course producer, says “Ironically, I would fear less the course-in-a-box future than I do the cooking-it-at-home."
“I don’t think there are any heroes or villains here,” says Flanders. “There is just an extremely muddled understanding of what the boundaries are, and real questions for faculty about what their role might be.”
That really is one of the questions in front of most of us these days-- what is the future role of faculty in education, if any? Is an inexpensive uniformly okay-enough product worth making actual human instructors essentially obsolete (or existing only in captivity at companies like Pearson)? The only good news I have for college faculty is that they are not alone in facing this issue.
Thursday, September 4, 2014
The Broad Academy Makes a Change
Last week the folks at the Broad Academy (motto: "You're a superintendent because we say you are") dropped some news on the education world. If you need a refresher (or just a fresher) on what the Broad Academy is, just click over to this tutorial. In the meantime, just remember that a dream is a wish your heart makes, and if your heart is wishing you were a school superintendent, you don't need a fancy education or an accredited program or education qualifications-- you just need a giant pile of money and powerful friends a lot of dedication, grit and hard work.
The nation's most prominent preparation program for urban school superintendents has been revamped, extending its scope, nearly doubly in length and placing greater emphasis on leadership development and helping leaders grow high-performing organizations.
"Most prominent" is a delightful set of weasel words, but I suppose it makes better copy than "the most high-profile unaccredited professional program anywhere." It's also worth noting that without the words "school superintendent," this sounds pretty much as if it could be the description of any management training program anywhere.
But the Broadsters want you to know that they've been listening to the 150 fellows who emerged from their program. No word on whether they weighted this feedback according to whether the particular alum had previously resigned in disgrace, been fired, or faced allegations of various misbehaviors.
Managing director Christina Heitz tells the story
Over time, we consistently heard from our Fellows that the focus on best practices in leadership and management helped them make progress. But they wanted to do more. They wanted to develop breakthrough strategies that propel faster, greater improvements which are both systemwide and sustainable; to nurture the kinds of relationships and partnerships that help them do this work with people and communities; and to closely collaborate with colleagues across the nation, sharing resources and learning from each other's successes as well as their mistakes.
You would think that one of those 150 Fellows might have expressed an interest in learning something about education, schools, teachers, or students. But the Broad does not recognize education problems-- only management problems.
The new model includes some exciting changes!
* The program will now run 18 months instead of 10, adding "more than 100 hours of personalized learning on topics such as public engagement, student assignment patterns and funding equity." It would have been sweet if they were given personalized learning about personalized learning, but I am dying to know what form their personalization actually takes. For that matter, given that the first new cohort only has eleven members, I'm wondering what their IMpersonalized learning looks like. I'm also curious about "student assignment patterns." Is that like a Masters Degree in No Homework on Fridays?
* Broad is branching out from big city schools to high-performing public charter school systems, state and federal departments of education, and statewide turnaround districts. So basically, professional bureaucrats and disaster capitalists. Are they grooming the next Arne Duncan (who was on the Broad Board and hired several alumni to work at the DOE)? Good to know we'll keep providing the government with professional managers with no education background.
* No more requirement that you take a new job after graduating. Which is a sideways way of saying that they now take Fellows who are already in positions of power and just want to sharpen their power-claws.
* Sadly, there is no expanded curriculum about how to blow up schools so you can shut them down (a subject on which Broad literally wrote the book).
* I would also expect a class on How To Avoid Allegations of Misconduct, or at least How To Ride Out of Town By Transit Other Than a Rail. I suppose the modern business leader thought visionary doesn't really plan on staying in one place long anyway.
At any rate, now that the Academy now wants to create Master of the Universe (Education Division) rather than mere superintendents, they've switched from the former Broad Superintendents Academy to the Broad Academy. Meaning that their total lack of accreditation matters less than it used to.
The new class
The eleven shiny new world beaters each get a paragraph worthy of a Miss America introduction. Is there anybody special here?
Antwan Wilson was previously an assistant superintendent in Denver, but now "he is applying that laser-like focus on supporting student success in both the classroom and in life to his new role as superintendent of Oakland Unified School District. Broad has provided Oakland with leadership before; let's hope this one goes better.
Dacia Toll is co-CEO of Achievement First Charters, whose Hartford branch has posted impressively high numbers in the Suspension of Six Year Olds category. But hey-- you're never too young to start the process of being squeezed out of a charter school.
Marc Sternberg is getting ready to become director of K-12 for the Walton Family Foundation. Ka-ching.
John Schnur is founder and head of New Leaders, a group which has its own heartwarming story. Five buddies (including a TFA grad, a McKinsey management consultant, a charter school advocate, a former NYC teacher and Schnur, former ed policy analyst for Bill Clinton) at Harvard grad school got their business plan into the finals of Harvard Business School's annual competition. Funding followed, and they were soon cranking out urban principals in 11 cities (many, like New Orleans and Prince George's, already reformster faves and home to Broad alumni-- it's just a small world in reformsterland).
In addition, there are several folks in the charter school biz already, including the Grand Daddy of the Too-Wet Dream of Charterdom, New Orleans-- yes, NOLA RSD super Patrick Dobard is getting himself all Broaded up!
And let us not forget Andrea Castaneda, the chief of fiscal integrity and statewide efficiencies at the RI Dept of Ed. She "knows there is not a second or cent to spare when it comes to school improvement" [Correction. Earlier versions included an allegation that Castaneda was involved in shady investment ideas. That's one of her friends-- the state treasurer. But it's not Castaneda. My apologies form the error]
Change you can believe in
There are signs of a shift here, and what they say is that is that Broad is shifting from training superintendents who can run schools like a business to training business chiefs who can make money in actual education-related businesses. It's a subtle shift, it's true, but it takes Broad one step further away from actually caring about schools. The bottom line has not changed-- the Broad Foundation is still tops in its desire to dismantle public education, privatize the best part, and sell off the pieces.
But Dobard has inspiring things to say. He calls the academy "one of the most fulfilling experiences" of his entire professional career. "What makes it different is that it is full of a lot of 'we's.' This work can't be about just 'I' or 'me.' It's about working with others, reaching out to others and how, together, we can transform communities and the lives of underprivileged youth."
I suppose it's too much to hope that the "we" would include teachers, parents and community members. I know it's too much to hope that any of this ties directly back to actual teaching and learning and school stuff.
In the meantime, just remember, if everyone in the audience will clap really loud, Tinker Bell will come back to life as a qualified school superintendent or charter school operator or edubiz CEO. Wishing will make it so.
The nation's most prominent preparation program for urban school superintendents has been revamped, extending its scope, nearly doubly in length and placing greater emphasis on leadership development and helping leaders grow high-performing organizations.
"Most prominent" is a delightful set of weasel words, but I suppose it makes better copy than "the most high-profile unaccredited professional program anywhere." It's also worth noting that without the words "school superintendent," this sounds pretty much as if it could be the description of any management training program anywhere.
But the Broadsters want you to know that they've been listening to the 150 fellows who emerged from their program. No word on whether they weighted this feedback according to whether the particular alum had previously resigned in disgrace, been fired, or faced allegations of various misbehaviors.
Managing director Christina Heitz tells the story
Over time, we consistently heard from our Fellows that the focus on best practices in leadership and management helped them make progress. But they wanted to do more. They wanted to develop breakthrough strategies that propel faster, greater improvements which are both systemwide and sustainable; to nurture the kinds of relationships and partnerships that help them do this work with people and communities; and to closely collaborate with colleagues across the nation, sharing resources and learning from each other's successes as well as their mistakes.
You would think that one of those 150 Fellows might have expressed an interest in learning something about education, schools, teachers, or students. But the Broad does not recognize education problems-- only management problems.
The new model includes some exciting changes!
* The program will now run 18 months instead of 10, adding "more than 100 hours of personalized learning on topics such as public engagement, student assignment patterns and funding equity." It would have been sweet if they were given personalized learning about personalized learning, but I am dying to know what form their personalization actually takes. For that matter, given that the first new cohort only has eleven members, I'm wondering what their IMpersonalized learning looks like. I'm also curious about "student assignment patterns." Is that like a Masters Degree in No Homework on Fridays?
* Broad is branching out from big city schools to high-performing public charter school systems, state and federal departments of education, and statewide turnaround districts. So basically, professional bureaucrats and disaster capitalists. Are they grooming the next Arne Duncan (who was on the Broad Board and hired several alumni to work at the DOE)? Good to know we'll keep providing the government with professional managers with no education background.
* No more requirement that you take a new job after graduating. Which is a sideways way of saying that they now take Fellows who are already in positions of power and just want to sharpen their power-claws.
* Sadly, there is no expanded curriculum about how to blow up schools so you can shut them down (a subject on which Broad literally wrote the book).
* I would also expect a class on How To Avoid Allegations of Misconduct, or at least How To Ride Out of Town By Transit Other Than a Rail. I suppose the modern business leader thought visionary doesn't really plan on staying in one place long anyway.
At any rate, now that the Academy now wants to create Master of the Universe (Education Division) rather than mere superintendents, they've switched from the former Broad Superintendents Academy to the Broad Academy. Meaning that their total lack of accreditation matters less than it used to.
The new class
The eleven shiny new world beaters each get a paragraph worthy of a Miss America introduction. Is there anybody special here?
Antwan Wilson was previously an assistant superintendent in Denver, but now "he is applying that laser-like focus on supporting student success in both the classroom and in life to his new role as superintendent of Oakland Unified School District. Broad has provided Oakland with leadership before; let's hope this one goes better.
Dacia Toll is co-CEO of Achievement First Charters, whose Hartford branch has posted impressively high numbers in the Suspension of Six Year Olds category. But hey-- you're never too young to start the process of being squeezed out of a charter school.
Marc Sternberg is getting ready to become director of K-12 for the Walton Family Foundation. Ka-ching.
John Schnur is founder and head of New Leaders, a group which has its own heartwarming story. Five buddies (including a TFA grad, a McKinsey management consultant, a charter school advocate, a former NYC teacher and Schnur, former ed policy analyst for Bill Clinton) at Harvard grad school got their business plan into the finals of Harvard Business School's annual competition. Funding followed, and they were soon cranking out urban principals in 11 cities (many, like New Orleans and Prince George's, already reformster faves and home to Broad alumni-- it's just a small world in reformsterland).
In addition, there are several folks in the charter school biz already, including the Grand Daddy of the Too-Wet Dream of Charterdom, New Orleans-- yes, NOLA RSD super Patrick Dobard is getting himself all Broaded up!
And let us not forget Andrea Castaneda, the chief of fiscal integrity and statewide efficiencies at the RI Dept of Ed. She "knows there is not a second or cent to spare when it comes to school improvement" [Correction. Earlier versions included an allegation that Castaneda was involved in shady investment ideas. That's one of her friends-- the state treasurer. But it's not Castaneda. My apologies form the error]
Change you can believe in
There are signs of a shift here, and what they say is that is that Broad is shifting from training superintendents who can run schools like a business to training business chiefs who can make money in actual education-related businesses. It's a subtle shift, it's true, but it takes Broad one step further away from actually caring about schools. The bottom line has not changed-- the Broad Foundation is still tops in its desire to dismantle public education, privatize the best part, and sell off the pieces.
But Dobard has inspiring things to say. He calls the academy "one of the most fulfilling experiences" of his entire professional career. "What makes it different is that it is full of a lot of 'we's.' This work can't be about just 'I' or 'me.' It's about working with others, reaching out to others and how, together, we can transform communities and the lives of underprivileged youth."
I suppose it's too much to hope that the "we" would include teachers, parents and community members. I know it's too much to hope that any of this ties directly back to actual teaching and learning and school stuff.
In the meantime, just remember, if everyone in the audience will clap really loud, Tinker Bell will come back to life as a qualified school superintendent or charter school operator or edubiz CEO. Wishing will make it so.
The
nation’s most prominent preparation program for urban school
superintendents has been revamped, expanding its scope, nearly doubling
in length and placing greater emphasis on leadership development and
helping leaders grow high-performing organizations. - See more at:
http://www.broadcenter.org//newsroom/full/new-programming-new-name-among-changes-for-the-broad-academy#sthash.PvwwRts0.dpuf
The
nation’s most prominent preparation program for urban school
superintendents has been revamped, expanding its scope, nearly doubling
in length and placing greater emphasis on leadership development and
helping leaders grow high-performing organizations. - See more at:
http://www.broadcenter.org//newsroom/full/new-programming-new-name-among-changes-for-the-broad-academy#sthash.PvwwRts0.dpuf
The
nation’s most prominent preparation program for urban school
superintendents has been revamped, expanding its scope, nearly doubling
in length and placing greater emphasis on leadership development and
helping leaders grow high-performing organizations. - See more at:
http://www.broadcenter.org//newsroom/full/new-programming-new-name-among-changes-for-the-broad-academy#sthash.PvwwRts0.dpuf
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