It's true-- with few exceptions, we encounter students in groups. Student groups are like chemical reactions, where every element present changes and is changed by the other elements encountered.
This is news to almost nobody. Every teacher can tell a story about that one student whose absence would make a usually-difficult class well-behaved. Or maybe the tale of that class where several top students drove each other to greater achievements. Or the student who was an angel one-on-one, but who just couldn't focus when in class.
I've long had a theory that male intelligence is inversely proportional to the number of males in the room. IOW, the more of us you put together, the dumber we act (eg men's softball leagues or Congress). I first developed that theory watching my son's elementary school class proceed from K through 6; the group was infamous because the twenty-seven students included twenty-four boys and three girls.
Value Added formulas, the formulas that promise we can magically and numerically strip away everything not-the-teacher that affects the students-- how can those formulas parse the difference between last year's group of seven year olds who never quite comfortable with each other and this year's group, which tends to give each other the giggles twice a day? How does a magic formula distinguish between the student who is part of a class that functions like a well-oiled machine and the student who dreads seeing her classmates every day?
We don't talk about this much, but one more problem with the reformster agenda is that it takes each student as an isolated unit, a human being with no context. The picture of "individualized" education often portrayed by folks like Knewton (the mad number crunching scientists at Pearson) is that we feed Pat into the Giant Data Bank and the GDB spits out Chris a student that the magic formulas claim is just like Pat. "Here's how Chris learned this stuff," says the magical computer. "Just teach Pat the same way."
This is an odd approach for many reasons, but one of the oddest reasons is that it assumes that Pat and Chris are discrete isolated student units with no real context or social setting.
In reformsterland, people are disconnected and no relationships exist. Teachers and students interact in a Strictly Business manner-- teachers deliver instruction and students respond to it by becoming capable enough to score well on standardized tests. But at least teachers and students interact in some manner; in reformsterland, students do not interact with other students at all. The relationships they form, the culture that they create in their schools-- none of this actually exists. In reformsterland, students travel in isolated bubbles, unaffected by any of the other bubbles around them.
It's ironic, because in reformsterland every one of those bubbles contains an identical data generation unit (formerly known as human children). One size fits them all, and I suppose it doesn't matter which one of the other bubbles is their "friend" because they're all interchangeable, and relationships don't affect anything anyway.
It's just one more way in which reformsterland does not resemble the real world. Because in the real world, students travel in packs, and the packs are interesting and vibrant and affecting because every person brings something unique to the table. And the possible combinations of all these humans are infinite in number, staggering in complexity, and endless in influence, whether reformsters want to recognize their existence or not.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
EdPost Dials It Back, Still Whiffs
Over the last forty-eight hours, the rapid responders from Education Post ran into a rapid response of their own. They decided to go after Carol Burris, and while various bloggers called them on their response out in the bloggosphere, Burris and many other responders descended upon the comments section, particularly for the post by the extremely feisty Ann Whalen.
By the end of the day, Whalen was back with a new post and a different tone.
Whalen's first response ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods...") pretty much called Burris a liar who couldn't make an honest case for her position. The response response addressed Burris directly and took a less combative tone.
I appreciate your quick follow-up and willingness to engage in a conversation about how we can support success for all of our students. We may have different approaches and strategies, but I do believe at the core (pun intended), we all want what’s best for children and schools.
And then she tried to address some of the issues that had been re-raised.
The set-in-stone nature of the Core came up, so she tried to once again sell the notion that, gosh, the states "are firmly in the driver’s seat." They can be just a flexible with their college-and-career-ready standards as they want, and several states have used that flexibility which is true in the sense that some states have found it politically expedient to rewrite some of the verbage of CCSS and find new names to call it. She acknowledges that some states have paid a price for not adopting standards that they can sufficiently prove to the feds are CACR enough, but golly, that's not the feds fault. She tries hard to sell the notion of the feds being all handsy offy on the Core, and I just don't understand how she imagines that Burris or any other sentient human who has been paying attention would believe that's true for a second.
The she tosses out the old baloney about how many students arrive at college needing remediation.
Students who are told they have mastered basic skills and are ready for post-secondary work should not find out the dirty truth in college.
Oh, that dirty truth. Of course, many students are arriving at college who were never told they were ready (and how are "mastered basic skills" and "ready for post-secondary work" the same thing, anyway?) I might suggest that it's just as likely that many students who are not college material have been told repeatedly that they must attend college or else they'll be big losing losers.
Here's another conclusion to reach from the remediation numbers-- the reforms that have been forced on public schools over the past ten-plus years have hurt public education more than helping it.
Whalen doesn't try to prop up any of the other ideas that Burris knocked over. But just when I was going to give her credit for adroitly shifting tone and direction, she finishes with this
While I didn’t see many comments on ways we can continue to move forward and improve support and implementation, I do look forward to learning more about your soon-to-be-released solution. Please let us know when we might learn more of this effort.
Oh, Ann. You were doing so well, but then you had to finish up with a big helping of Dolores Umbrage-style snottiness.
Let me repeat this idea for you. It's not up to supporters of public education to propose a solution, because reformsters have never A) proven that there's a problem in need of solving or B) proven that any of their proposals will improve anything about education.
If you want to perform surgery on a patient, the burden is on you to show that you have the right surgery in mind and that you know how to do it. If you want to take money out of someone else's bank account, the burden is on you to prove that you should be allowed to do it.
We've been waiting for years for you guys to back up some-- any-- of your bright ideas with compelling support. It still hasn't happened. You don't get to change the conversation by saying, "Well, what's your big idea, then?" The burden of proof is on you. And really-- why do we need to submit a "solution" for your approval, anyway? The fact that you're on a $12 million website does not mean that you need to be paid attention or that we are answerable to you.
By the end of the day, Whalen was back with a new post and a different tone.
Whalen's first response ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods...") pretty much called Burris a liar who couldn't make an honest case for her position. The response response addressed Burris directly and took a less combative tone.
I appreciate your quick follow-up and willingness to engage in a conversation about how we can support success for all of our students. We may have different approaches and strategies, but I do believe at the core (pun intended), we all want what’s best for children and schools.
And then she tried to address some of the issues that had been re-raised.
The set-in-stone nature of the Core came up, so she tried to once again sell the notion that, gosh, the states "are firmly in the driver’s seat." They can be just a flexible with their college-and-career-ready standards as they want, and several states have used that flexibility which is true in the sense that some states have found it politically expedient to rewrite some of the verbage of CCSS and find new names to call it. She acknowledges that some states have paid a price for not adopting standards that they can sufficiently prove to the feds are CACR enough, but golly, that's not the feds fault. She tries hard to sell the notion of the feds being all handsy offy on the Core, and I just don't understand how she imagines that Burris or any other sentient human who has been paying attention would believe that's true for a second.
The she tosses out the old baloney about how many students arrive at college needing remediation.
Students who are told they have mastered basic skills and are ready for post-secondary work should not find out the dirty truth in college.
Oh, that dirty truth. Of course, many students are arriving at college who were never told they were ready (and how are "mastered basic skills" and "ready for post-secondary work" the same thing, anyway?) I might suggest that it's just as likely that many students who are not college material have been told repeatedly that they must attend college or else they'll be big losing losers.
Here's another conclusion to reach from the remediation numbers-- the reforms that have been forced on public schools over the past ten-plus years have hurt public education more than helping it.
Whalen doesn't try to prop up any of the other ideas that Burris knocked over. But just when I was going to give her credit for adroitly shifting tone and direction, she finishes with this
While I didn’t see many comments on ways we can continue to move forward and improve support and implementation, I do look forward to learning more about your soon-to-be-released solution. Please let us know when we might learn more of this effort.
Oh, Ann. You were doing so well, but then you had to finish up with a big helping of Dolores Umbrage-style snottiness.
Let me repeat this idea for you. It's not up to supporters of public education to propose a solution, because reformsters have never A) proven that there's a problem in need of solving or B) proven that any of their proposals will improve anything about education.
If you want to perform surgery on a patient, the burden is on you to show that you have the right surgery in mind and that you know how to do it. If you want to take money out of someone else's bank account, the burden is on you to prove that you should be allowed to do it.
We've been waiting for years for you guys to back up some-- any-- of your bright ideas with compelling support. It still hasn't happened. You don't get to change the conversation by saying, "Well, what's your big idea, then?" The burden of proof is on you. And really-- why do we need to submit a "solution" for your approval, anyway? The fact that you're on a $12 million website does not mean that you need to be paid attention or that we are answerable to you.
Friday, September 19, 2014
EdPost Flexes Rapid Response Muscles
Well, it turns out that Education Post will be good for one thing. Its rapid response function (in which apparently a cadre of hired bloggists are ready to grab their keyboards from their mantles and launch like internet minutemen) will allow the rest of us to see when Pro-Public Education folks have scored a palpable hit.
By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams column (on the heels of her online debate win), because EdPost has rapidly deployed three bloggists to spank Burris by name the very next day. How do these rapid responders do? Even though the irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has already taken a look, I can't resist taking one, too.
Headliner AnnWhalen wins the Well That Didn't Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost's highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris") but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
And then she tries to refute Burris's arguements by lying. (Hey-- I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).
She tries to argue that the copyrighted CCSS can and have been changed. She would have been further ahead to point out the obvious-- though the standards are copyrighted and states did agree not to change them, nobody in the current political climate is going to enforce that. Instead, she tries to pretend that the truth is not true and that no such copyrights or agreements exist.
Whalen also tries to argue that the Core do not dictate curriculum, and then best she can do here is go anecdotal with some hand-picked teachers from some hand-picked states. Trying to get in an anecdote war over CCSS is a bad choice. We could get into the whole standards vs. curriculum argument here, but let's just observe that since Core fans argue it's a great idea to have the CCSS nationally because it will make all schools the same and students will be able to switch districts without missing a step-- come on. This is such an intellectually dishonest argument that we can only conclude that Core supporters are not interested in having a real conversation with anybody.
Whalen punts the "internationally benchmarked" and "based on research" issue to Fordham. They aren't. There's not a whit of research to say they are. But she pretends not to get Burris's actual argument here.
Whalen also pretends not to understand any of the arguments about the achievement gap and high-poverty schools, at one point weirdly arguing that the Mass Insight report shows the top students are the toppiest, which is not something I'd bring up when trying show the achievement gap is closing.
And she really earns her Big Fat Liar stripes by pushing the same old tired bullshit about how the standards are not national standards and states totally volunteered to adopt the standards that they totally created and seriously, you know Whalen is fresh from government work because I don't think anybody except a career bureaucrat could type this unvarnished horse pucky with a straight face.
Whalen labels Burris's most inexcusable argument that she didn't propose a solution. Holy crap! Okay, I am going to break into your house at night and start stealing your furniture. You wake up and catch me and tell me to stop and I turn to you and say, "Okay, then. Why don't you offer a better solution?" That's how stupid this argument from Whalen is.
So, EdPost's headliner fails.
Erin Dukeshire takes on the curriculum argument. Her argument is....curious. Burris pointed out in her column that specifying specific skills in the standards did make them awfully lot like a curriculum, but Dukeshire seems to want to say that since the CCSS are really specific, it gives her more freedom and makes them less like a curriculum. She also throws in a bit of "before the Core I was lost" baloney, but basically her argument is that since she can have order a Model A in any color, as long as it's black, she's really free.
I actually find that it’s easier to design a variety of successful learning experiences when the standards name both content and skills. During the past few years, I’ve developed several lessons around a Common Core standard that requires students to integrate text with visuals. Because the Common Core lists important literacy standards for students to develop in the science classroom, I don’t spend precious planning periods guessing at how to incorporate reading into my lessons in a meaningful way.
I think I see her problem. Where she is wasting time guessing about how to incorporate reading into her lessons in a meaningful way, I'm over here using my professional judgment and experience and knowledge of my students to figure that out in a non-guessy way.
Maricela Montoy-Wilson will also stand up for the Core. Like Dukeshire, she is an America Achieves Fellow, and she's been teaching the Core for three years, so she knows what's up. She has a great command of reformster baloney-speak, as witnessed by this fluffernuttery:
The standards do not tell me how to teach, contrary to your point, but rather they serve as a guidepost for me, as the educator, to determine the best instructional strategies to attain the standards. The standards guide me in selecting instructional methods that facilitate true understanding of the fewer, deeper standards. They help me focus on clear-cut needs, which help me identify instructional practices through collaboration, strong coaching, and feedback.
So the standards do not tell her what to do-- they just guide and help, help, help her.
Ultimately, the Common Core standards help us prepare students to enter colleges and the ever-changing workplace. We know that our nation is not up to par in mathematical reasoning, and our classrooms are not adequately responding to the fast-evolving needs of the innovative and technological workplace. Therefore, a shift from doing to understanding was imperative in creating innovators. The Common Core standards offer such a shift.
Well, except we don't actually know any of those things. We don't know that we're not up to par-- we don't even know what par is, or what the consequences of being up to it actually are. Nor do we know about the adequancy of responses (adequate for what purpose) nor do we have any authority to declare an imperative need for innovators. And no, we have absolutely no basis for believing that the Core prepares students for college or the workplace. So, very pretty, and all without foundation.
Montoy-Wilson decides to take on the four flim-flams one at a time.
The standards are a guide, she repeats. Since the standards don't tell her how to teach composing and decomposing numbers (Burris's example), they are just a guide. But she's wrong, because teaching composing and decomposing numbers is what the standards present as how teachers are supposed to teach basic math functions. Montoy-Wilson herself repeats the magic phrase "foundational to deeper understanding"-- which means that the point of learning this technique is because it's a how to understand the functions. So, the point still goes to Burris.
The achievement gap. All these arguments make my brain glaze over because they all depend on smoke and mirrors and pretty words because there is not a single fact to back up what Core fans are trying to say. What specifics Montoy-Wilson mentions are, predictably, things like project based learning that any competent teacher can do and did do for years without any Common Core.
Montoy-Wilson is another Core booster who is seeing magical tests somewhere that none of the rest of us see, tests with performance tasks and other fine features that replace the rote memorization that standardized tests were never about anyway. They're standardized tests. They will create a new test prep industry. They don't measure anything but test-taking skills and, indirectly, socio-economic class.
We are at a crossroads in education policy. We can heed calls to make things “easy” and fail to get at the heart of what our students deserve — or we can buckle down together, accept that there are challenges, that the going is tough, but ultimately the promise of these standards are worth it.
Pretty sure that they aren't. Also pretty sure that there's nothing in these three blogs to convince me otherwise. Lots of things are hard. Shoving a post into your eyeball is hard. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. And promising your children a trip to Disneyland is a great promise, but if you're really driving them to a bombed-out playground, your promise doesn't really matter.
As a rapid-response exercise, EdPost is, at last, fast. But hey-- I often provide next day service and I do my writing at times like 5:30 AM and on my lunch break. Surely $12 million will get you the same level of service that my readers get for $0.00.
Beyond the speed, EdPost continues to reveal its true colors. Completely aligned with the US DOE party line. Just as dismissive and condescending and nasty as anybody in the education debates has ever been, which is not a crime-- it's noteworthy only because EdPost launched with the promise that they would change the conversation.
This is not a new conversation. It's the same old bullshit. Talking points repeated ad infinitum, even if they've been previously debunked and abandoned by thinking people on both sides. Personal attacks and dismissive language. Anecdotes and fancy language to make points (which, again, is not a terrible crime, but EdPost launched claiming it would be all facts and calm rationality).
I mean, damn-- if you're going to go after Carol Burris with accusations of being a liar and a cheat and not understanding how education works, you had better be better armed with something other than high dudgeon and government briefings. EdPost has show us what they're about, but they've also shown how good they are at it, and boy, if that were my $12 million, I'd want some of it back.
[Update. I've refrained from linking to Ed Post for the same reason that I stopped naming She Who Will Not Be Named, but you really need to watch Carol Burris take Whalen to school in the comments section, so here's a link.]
By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams column (on the heels of her online debate win), because EdPost has rapidly deployed three bloggists to spank Burris by name the very next day. How do these rapid responders do? Even though the irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has already taken a look, I can't resist taking one, too.
Headliner AnnWhalen wins the Well That Didn't Take Long Prize. She tosses out EdPost's highflying promises about raising the conversational tone in education discussions and goes straight to calling Burris a liar. Well, she uses a nifty construction to do it ("When you can’t make an honest case against something, there is always rhetoric, exaggeration or falsehoods, but it’s disheartening when it comes from an award-winning principal and educator like Carol Burris") but for those of us who can read English, yeah, Whalen just called Burris a liar.
And then she tries to refute Burris's arguements by lying. (Hey-- I never made any hollow promises about elevating the conversation).
She tries to argue that the copyrighted CCSS can and have been changed. She would have been further ahead to point out the obvious-- though the standards are copyrighted and states did agree not to change them, nobody in the current political climate is going to enforce that. Instead, she tries to pretend that the truth is not true and that no such copyrights or agreements exist.
Whalen also tries to argue that the Core do not dictate curriculum, and then best she can do here is go anecdotal with some hand-picked teachers from some hand-picked states. Trying to get in an anecdote war over CCSS is a bad choice. We could get into the whole standards vs. curriculum argument here, but let's just observe that since Core fans argue it's a great idea to have the CCSS nationally because it will make all schools the same and students will be able to switch districts without missing a step-- come on. This is such an intellectually dishonest argument that we can only conclude that Core supporters are not interested in having a real conversation with anybody.
Whalen punts the "internationally benchmarked" and "based on research" issue to Fordham. They aren't. There's not a whit of research to say they are. But she pretends not to get Burris's actual argument here.
Whalen also pretends not to understand any of the arguments about the achievement gap and high-poverty schools, at one point weirdly arguing that the Mass Insight report shows the top students are the toppiest, which is not something I'd bring up when trying show the achievement gap is closing.
And she really earns her Big Fat Liar stripes by pushing the same old tired bullshit about how the standards are not national standards and states totally volunteered to adopt the standards that they totally created and seriously, you know Whalen is fresh from government work because I don't think anybody except a career bureaucrat could type this unvarnished horse pucky with a straight face.
Whalen labels Burris's most inexcusable argument that she didn't propose a solution. Holy crap! Okay, I am going to break into your house at night and start stealing your furniture. You wake up and catch me and tell me to stop and I turn to you and say, "Okay, then. Why don't you offer a better solution?" That's how stupid this argument from Whalen is.
So, EdPost's headliner fails.
Erin Dukeshire takes on the curriculum argument. Her argument is....curious. Burris pointed out in her column that specifying specific skills in the standards did make them awfully lot like a curriculum, but Dukeshire seems to want to say that since the CCSS are really specific, it gives her more freedom and makes them less like a curriculum. She also throws in a bit of "before the Core I was lost" baloney, but basically her argument is that since she can have order a Model A in any color, as long as it's black, she's really free.
I actually find that it’s easier to design a variety of successful learning experiences when the standards name both content and skills. During the past few years, I’ve developed several lessons around a Common Core standard that requires students to integrate text with visuals. Because the Common Core lists important literacy standards for students to develop in the science classroom, I don’t spend precious planning periods guessing at how to incorporate reading into my lessons in a meaningful way.
I think I see her problem. Where she is wasting time guessing about how to incorporate reading into her lessons in a meaningful way, I'm over here using my professional judgment and experience and knowledge of my students to figure that out in a non-guessy way.
Maricela Montoy-Wilson will also stand up for the Core. Like Dukeshire, she is an America Achieves Fellow, and she's been teaching the Core for three years, so she knows what's up. She has a great command of reformster baloney-speak, as witnessed by this fluffernuttery:
The standards do not tell me how to teach, contrary to your point, but rather they serve as a guidepost for me, as the educator, to determine the best instructional strategies to attain the standards. The standards guide me in selecting instructional methods that facilitate true understanding of the fewer, deeper standards. They help me focus on clear-cut needs, which help me identify instructional practices through collaboration, strong coaching, and feedback.
So the standards do not tell her what to do-- they just guide and help, help, help her.
Ultimately, the Common Core standards help us prepare students to enter colleges and the ever-changing workplace. We know that our nation is not up to par in mathematical reasoning, and our classrooms are not adequately responding to the fast-evolving needs of the innovative and technological workplace. Therefore, a shift from doing to understanding was imperative in creating innovators. The Common Core standards offer such a shift.
Well, except we don't actually know any of those things. We don't know that we're not up to par-- we don't even know what par is, or what the consequences of being up to it actually are. Nor do we know about the adequancy of responses (adequate for what purpose) nor do we have any authority to declare an imperative need for innovators. And no, we have absolutely no basis for believing that the Core prepares students for college or the workplace. So, very pretty, and all without foundation.
Montoy-Wilson decides to take on the four flim-flams one at a time.
The standards are a guide, she repeats. Since the standards don't tell her how to teach composing and decomposing numbers (Burris's example), they are just a guide. But she's wrong, because teaching composing and decomposing numbers is what the standards present as how teachers are supposed to teach basic math functions. Montoy-Wilson herself repeats the magic phrase "foundational to deeper understanding"-- which means that the point of learning this technique is because it's a how to understand the functions. So, the point still goes to Burris.
The achievement gap. All these arguments make my brain glaze over because they all depend on smoke and mirrors and pretty words because there is not a single fact to back up what Core fans are trying to say. What specifics Montoy-Wilson mentions are, predictably, things like project based learning that any competent teacher can do and did do for years without any Common Core.
Montoy-Wilson is another Core booster who is seeing magical tests somewhere that none of the rest of us see, tests with performance tasks and other fine features that replace the rote memorization that standardized tests were never about anyway. They're standardized tests. They will create a new test prep industry. They don't measure anything but test-taking skills and, indirectly, socio-economic class.
We are at a crossroads in education policy. We can heed calls to make things “easy” and fail to get at the heart of what our students deserve — or we can buckle down together, accept that there are challenges, that the going is tough, but ultimately the promise of these standards are worth it.
Pretty sure that they aren't. Also pretty sure that there's nothing in these three blogs to convince me otherwise. Lots of things are hard. Shoving a post into your eyeball is hard. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. And promising your children a trip to Disneyland is a great promise, but if you're really driving them to a bombed-out playground, your promise doesn't really matter.
As a rapid-response exercise, EdPost is, at last, fast. But hey-- I often provide next day service and I do my writing at times like 5:30 AM and on my lunch break. Surely $12 million will get you the same level of service that my readers get for $0.00.
Beyond the speed, EdPost continues to reveal its true colors. Completely aligned with the US DOE party line. Just as dismissive and condescending and nasty as anybody in the education debates has ever been, which is not a crime-- it's noteworthy only because EdPost launched with the promise that they would change the conversation.
This is not a new conversation. It's the same old bullshit. Talking points repeated ad infinitum, even if they've been previously debunked and abandoned by thinking people on both sides. Personal attacks and dismissive language. Anecdotes and fancy language to make points (which, again, is not a terrible crime, but EdPost launched claiming it would be all facts and calm rationality).
I mean, damn-- if you're going to go after Carol Burris with accusations of being a liar and a cheat and not understanding how education works, you had better be better armed with something other than high dudgeon and government briefings. EdPost has show us what they're about, but they've also shown how good they are at it, and boy, if that were my $12 million, I'd want some of it back.
[Update. I've refrained from linking to Ed Post for the same reason that I stopped naming She Who Will Not Be Named, but you really need to watch Carol Burris take Whalen to school in the comments section, so here's a link.]
An Open Letter to My Alma Mater Re: TFA
Dear Allegheny College:
I was reading your latest alumni email with its nice batch of "Hey, you're great" quotes. It was nice in the usual boostery way, but when I saw an endorsement from Teach for America, it brought me up short. I'm sad to see Allegheny link itself to TFA. Let me explain.
I came to Allegheny in 1975. I enrolled because the school was not too far from home in NW PA, it was a comfortable size, it was a liberal arts school, and most importantly, it offered a stand-out non-traditional education program.
Let me deliver a rough reminder of how that program worked, because I doubt that many folks there remember it. My major was actually English-- Allegheny believed that Step 1 in becoming a classroom teacher was being an "expert" in your subject area. When it was time for student teaching, I had taken only a few ed courses, but like my cohort, I lived in the college's block of rooms in downtown Cleveland, where the college maintained a field office. As we student taught, we took methods courses at that field office in the evenings (down a floor and up the hall), including a course that we took from the professor who supervised our field work. He saw us in the classroom for about one to three hours about once a week, while we student taught in urban districts that challenged our small town selves to the max.
About two days after I had my diploma, I was in classes for my MA in Education, balanced with looking for a teaching job within forty miles of that field office. I needed to be there because the same professor who saw me through student teaching would supervise me through my first year. The state of Ohio issued a provisional teaching certificate, and while my school district considered me a teacher, the college considered me an intern. I took courses at that same field office, and was observed, less often, by the same man who had watched me student teach and who was familiar with my style, my strengths and weaknesses, my ongoing issues.
Few teacher prep programs provided such an intense level of subject matter study combined with serious mentoring, support and methods instruction that is directly responsive to the real situations the teacher is facing. Allegheny did not provide a traditional teacher background; it provided something far more.
So how the heck did you end up in bed with Teach for America?
I suspect that you may have been attracted by the social justice sales pitch. Teach for America has cycled through several versions of what its mission is supposed to be, but they have all been centered on some vision of social justice. And yet none of those visions have been rooted in reality.
Fix the teacher shortage? There isn't one, actually, and in places like Chicago, New Jersey and Cleveland, actual teachers are being shown the door to make room for TFA recruits. In New Orleans the district actually lost a lawsuit for summarily firing 7,500 teachers, many of whom were replaced with TFA bodies.
Improve high-poverty schools? One of the problems of high-poverty schools is a lack of stability. How exactly does it help to bring in people who have no intention of sticking around for more than a few years?
Teacher diversity recruitment? Studies of the teacher pool show that we do not have a diversity recruitment problem. Minority teachers are actually entering the field at higher rates than white teachers. The problem is that they are also leaving the field at a faster rate than white teachers. And remember those thousands of unjustly fired NOLA teachers? Three quarters of those were black.
There are additional problems with the TFA model. Most notable is the frontal assault on professionalism. Allegheny has been a pre-professional college for decades. Most of my fellow freshmen were pre-med, and the ones who weren't pre-med were pre-law. I can't imagine Allegheny ever supporting a program predicated on the notion that with five weeks of training, any undergrad would be good to go for providing legal or medical services out in the world. Allegheny's teacher program only allowed undergrads to become teachers with the understanding that they would be heavily supported, carefully supervised, and required to complete graduate-level studies of education within five years.
But TFA is founded on the notion that teaching isn't really so hard-- any smart person can basically walk into a classroom and do just fine. This is turn has dovetailed with the agenda of those who want to turn teaching jobs into high-turnover, short-term, easily replaced and therefor low-paying positions. Additionally, TFA buys into and sells the notion that the only measure of educational achievement is standardized test scores, as if raising those scores is the only important work that a teacher does.
Why would Allegheny support a program that claims that any reasonably bright college grad with no educational training beyond a five week summer session is ready to fly solo in a classroom?
Admittedly, fair Allegheny, you and I have had words yonder on the hill, most especially back when you gutted the education program that produced me. There were some nice-sounding words about ending one of the most forward-thinking and sound teacher training programs in the country, but the bottom line appeared to be the bottom line-- it was an expensive program to run (the word on Cynic Street was also that teacher alumni don't contribute the kind of big bucks that doctor alumni and lawyer alumni do).
TFA may well have started out with the best of intentions, but today they have become the shock troops in the push to dismantle public education and de-professionalize teaching. I am very sad to see Allegheny on TFA's list of top supporters, and even sadder to see Allegheny bragging about that connection. Read some of the TFA critics, such as former TFAer Gary Rubinstein, or look at why Pittsburgh schools terminated their TFA contract. It's an unfortunate choice, a bad choice, and I urge you to do your homework and drop your connection to the TFA program.
Sadly, I have no large piles of money to threaten to not give you, but I would gladly talk to campus leadership about this issue further if anyone wishes to do so. My alma mater, you can do better than this.
Sincerely,
Peter Greene, '79
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Another Call for a New Conversation
Patrick Riccards, of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Eduflack blog, has made a fairly reasonable addition to the burgeoning sub-genre of "We reformsters need to get a new conversation started, because we are losing the old one" posts. But this one is interesting.
"Seeking Collaboration Between Reformers, Educators" is his contribution to the field. The opening line of his EdWeek piece sounds familiar:
But if we are truly serious about improving public education for all children, if we honestly want to close those achievement gaps and ensure every child is on a path to success, we need to change how the debate is framed.
The piece-about-the-piece on Eduflack is more direct:
For too long, we have heard of the battles between the education reform community and educators. From the way these debates have been framed, one would think the two sides couldn’t agree that the sky was blue or that water was wet.
Part of what makes Riccards piece interesting is that it appears addressed primarily to the reformy camp, and it lacks the usual tone of "You resistance people should stop being so strident and political with us." He admits that the post-Vergara discussion led to even more folks acting as if teachers were the sworn enemies of education and the root of all failures. He counters that folks on both sides agree on more than they disagree, including a desire to see students succeed and make sure that schools have necessary resources.
Riccards sees three areas that "demand a new look." Classroom teaching, charter schools, and instructional practice.
When it comes to teachers--
We must also realize that real change and improvement come only with the involvement and support of teachers. We fool ourselves when we ignore that teaching is an incredibly difficult job, and getting more so by the day. We should lift up our most successful educators, support those in need, and seek ways to better engage and involve teachers in the process. Without them, even the most meaningful changes will be denied passage at the schoolhouse door.
This really shouldn't be news, but it's still nice to hear somebody say it for a change.
On charters, Riccards points out that even if we doubled charter capacity today, charters would still be an educational approach unavailable to 90% of US students, and a solution that leaves 90% of the student population behind does not qualify as a "Holy Grail of school improvement." He would like to focus on transplanting the most promising practices of charters into traditional public schools.
That's not really a great idea, since the most promising practice of the most successful-on-paper charter schools is to weed out all students who would make them look not-successful, a technique not available to traditional public schools.
Riccards has some other concrete suggestions and wonders what would happen if "instead of fighting, supporters of charters and the like worked together with teachers' unions and individual educators to:"
Open lines of communication. Here's a remarkably sensible idea. Instead of sandbagging teachers and their unions, Riccards suggests that telegraphing what you're going to do and why can lessen the outrage responses. He references his own actions as head of ConnCAN, where he admits that he didn't make nice, but he did reach out to union leaders to let them know "what was coming" when he would release delightful tidbits like the teacher-contract database.
Look for areas to partner. He doesn't really elaborate; it's a simple idea.
Recognize that the union and the teacher are two distinct audiences. Don't write off teachers because of what the union or one individual teacher might say. I would add that reformsters should probably not assume that just because the union has signed off on something, the members will happily go along.
Establish a practitioner advisory board. Riccards suggests that reformsters listen to teachers. And not just in a general fuzzy way, but by developing actual formal structures and bodies to which teachers can be attached. "Have them be part of the reform process, and not just someone reform happens to."
There's positive and negative here. The positive is the willingness to invite teachers to the table and the commitment to listen to them. And I don't want to minimize the degree to which that represents a positive shift in reformster rhetoric.
However. The willingness to invite teachers to the party also underscores the fact this is not the teachers' party. If I gather some teacher friends and start a movement to tell the local doctors, nurses, and hospital personnel how to run their business, I'm not sure how much they'll be mollified if I eventually add, "Oh, and we'll be happy to listen to your thoughts as well." When tourists pass through your town and stop a moment to decide how it should be run, offering to let local folks have say is kind of beside the point. If the guy who is sleeping with your wife calls to tell you that it's okay if you want to stop by at the birthday party he's throwing for her, your first thought is probably not, "Oh, how magnanimous of you."
See, here's the real sticking point about calls for working together, cooperating, changing the conversation, starting a new conversation. Those of us who decided to devote our lives to teaching and education have been having a conversation about how to grow and change and do better and do our jobs and make our schools better-- we've been having that conversation our entire adult lives.
Reformsters did not come along and say, "Hey, we have some thoughts. Can we join your conversation?" No, they started their own conversation, and declared that it was the only conversation, that our conversation was stupid and bad and a big failing failure; and then they gathered money and political power that let them hook their conversation up to giant mega-watt speakers that helped them drown out all other conversations. And now that they've hit a rough patch, they've started saying, "Okay-- you can come be part of our conversation now." But they are still not saying anything remotely like, "You know, as actual practitioners of teaching, as trained professionals who have devoted their lives to public education, you guys are the people having the conversation that counts. Can we come join it?"
No, even the reformster peace offerings are predicated on the notion that their conversation is the real one, and they are the deciders about the course of any conversation about public education.
I don't know. Maybe that's just a political, power and money reality and as a teacher I just need to suck it up and accept that the conversation of my peers and me has been rendered second best, a conversation that only matters to those of us having it. Maybe I have to accept that a bunch of rich, powerful, well-connected amateurs have bought not just a seat at the table, but the table and the room it's sitting in.
But damn-- some days that's a hard pill to swallow, and all the noblesse oblige in the world doesn't make it go down any easier.
Here's how Riccards finishes up
Yes, some may see it as heresy for someone who calls himself a reformer to take issue with the what-about-the-kids, charters-first, all-but-the-classroom approach to school improvement. But as a father, a former school board chairman, and someone committed to improving opportunities for all children, it seems worth taking issue with this view.
The time has come to turn away from the divisive, us-vs.-them approaches of past policy fights. Instead, we must work together with educators to improve our public schools. We must focus on options and opportunities that can have real impact on all our children, not just a select few. And we must do so in a way that improves teaching and learning for all.
It's as close as anything I've seen from reformsters to a viable way to move forward. Maybe we're getting closer.
"Seeking Collaboration Between Reformers, Educators" is his contribution to the field. The opening line of his EdWeek piece sounds familiar:
But if we are truly serious about improving public education for all children, if we honestly want to close those achievement gaps and ensure every child is on a path to success, we need to change how the debate is framed.
The piece-about-the-piece on Eduflack is more direct:
For too long, we have heard of the battles between the education reform community and educators. From the way these debates have been framed, one would think the two sides couldn’t agree that the sky was blue or that water was wet.
Part of what makes Riccards piece interesting is that it appears addressed primarily to the reformy camp, and it lacks the usual tone of "You resistance people should stop being so strident and political with us." He admits that the post-Vergara discussion led to even more folks acting as if teachers were the sworn enemies of education and the root of all failures. He counters that folks on both sides agree on more than they disagree, including a desire to see students succeed and make sure that schools have necessary resources.
Riccards sees three areas that "demand a new look." Classroom teaching, charter schools, and instructional practice.
When it comes to teachers--
We must also realize that real change and improvement come only with the involvement and support of teachers. We fool ourselves when we ignore that teaching is an incredibly difficult job, and getting more so by the day. We should lift up our most successful educators, support those in need, and seek ways to better engage and involve teachers in the process. Without them, even the most meaningful changes will be denied passage at the schoolhouse door.
This really shouldn't be news, but it's still nice to hear somebody say it for a change.
On charters, Riccards points out that even if we doubled charter capacity today, charters would still be an educational approach unavailable to 90% of US students, and a solution that leaves 90% of the student population behind does not qualify as a "Holy Grail of school improvement." He would like to focus on transplanting the most promising practices of charters into traditional public schools.
That's not really a great idea, since the most promising practice of the most successful-on-paper charter schools is to weed out all students who would make them look not-successful, a technique not available to traditional public schools.
Riccards has some other concrete suggestions and wonders what would happen if "instead of fighting, supporters of charters and the like worked together with teachers' unions and individual educators to:"
Open lines of communication. Here's a remarkably sensible idea. Instead of sandbagging teachers and their unions, Riccards suggests that telegraphing what you're going to do and why can lessen the outrage responses. He references his own actions as head of ConnCAN, where he admits that he didn't make nice, but he did reach out to union leaders to let them know "what was coming" when he would release delightful tidbits like the teacher-contract database.
Look for areas to partner. He doesn't really elaborate; it's a simple idea.
Recognize that the union and the teacher are two distinct audiences. Don't write off teachers because of what the union or one individual teacher might say. I would add that reformsters should probably not assume that just because the union has signed off on something, the members will happily go along.
Establish a practitioner advisory board. Riccards suggests that reformsters listen to teachers. And not just in a general fuzzy way, but by developing actual formal structures and bodies to which teachers can be attached. "Have them be part of the reform process, and not just someone reform happens to."
There's positive and negative here. The positive is the willingness to invite teachers to the table and the commitment to listen to them. And I don't want to minimize the degree to which that represents a positive shift in reformster rhetoric.
However. The willingness to invite teachers to the party also underscores the fact this is not the teachers' party. If I gather some teacher friends and start a movement to tell the local doctors, nurses, and hospital personnel how to run their business, I'm not sure how much they'll be mollified if I eventually add, "Oh, and we'll be happy to listen to your thoughts as well." When tourists pass through your town and stop a moment to decide how it should be run, offering to let local folks have say is kind of beside the point. If the guy who is sleeping with your wife calls to tell you that it's okay if you want to stop by at the birthday party he's throwing for her, your first thought is probably not, "Oh, how magnanimous of you."
See, here's the real sticking point about calls for working together, cooperating, changing the conversation, starting a new conversation. Those of us who decided to devote our lives to teaching and education have been having a conversation about how to grow and change and do better and do our jobs and make our schools better-- we've been having that conversation our entire adult lives.
Reformsters did not come along and say, "Hey, we have some thoughts. Can we join your conversation?" No, they started their own conversation, and declared that it was the only conversation, that our conversation was stupid and bad and a big failing failure; and then they gathered money and political power that let them hook their conversation up to giant mega-watt speakers that helped them drown out all other conversations. And now that they've hit a rough patch, they've started saying, "Okay-- you can come be part of our conversation now." But they are still not saying anything remotely like, "You know, as actual practitioners of teaching, as trained professionals who have devoted their lives to public education, you guys are the people having the conversation that counts. Can we come join it?"
No, even the reformster peace offerings are predicated on the notion that their conversation is the real one, and they are the deciders about the course of any conversation about public education.
I don't know. Maybe that's just a political, power and money reality and as a teacher I just need to suck it up and accept that the conversation of my peers and me has been rendered second best, a conversation that only matters to those of us having it. Maybe I have to accept that a bunch of rich, powerful, well-connected amateurs have bought not just a seat at the table, but the table and the room it's sitting in.
But damn-- some days that's a hard pill to swallow, and all the noblesse oblige in the world doesn't make it go down any easier.
Here's how Riccards finishes up
Yes, some may see it as heresy for someone who calls himself a reformer to take issue with the what-about-the-kids, charters-first, all-but-the-classroom approach to school improvement. But as a father, a former school board chairman, and someone committed to improving opportunities for all children, it seems worth taking issue with this view.
The time has come to turn away from the divisive, us-vs.-them approaches of past policy fights. Instead, we must work together with educators to improve our public schools. We must focus on options and opportunities that can have real impact on all our children, not just a select few. And we must do so in a way that improves teaching and learning for all.
It's as close as anything I've seen from reformsters to a viable way to move forward. Maybe we're getting closer.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Is Standardization a Virtue?
One of my largest points of disagreement with the champions of reformy stuff is on the value of standardization.
For instance, lots of folks (including some who don't like the Common Core) will observe as an article of faith that it would be better to have national standards than have different standards from state to state. To them, it seems as obvious as air that this is true. To me, it seems as obvious as dirt that it is not.
I am not in favor of some anarchic Land of Do As You Please, but I also see nothing inherently good about a standardized educational system. I've made my case against standardization itself many times before. But I'm going to argue that beyond any inherent value or lack thereof, standardization cannot help but become toxic in any system where it is viewed as the biggest value.
Many reformsters live by the rule, "Anything worth doing is worth doing at scale." Arne Duncan often discusses measuring the value of an educational program by whether it can be scaled up or not. "If we can't make it work for everybody," he seems to suggest, "then it's not a real success."
But if your guiding value is It Must Be Excellent, you will have to make some compromises on how easily it can be standardized for an entire country, deliver scalability, and be mass-reproduced. However, if your primary value is It Must Be Mass-Reproducable and Standardizable, then you will make compromises on excellence.
If you go to a painter and say, "Make me a painting that painters all across the country can reproduce within certain narrow tolerances," you will not get the Sistine Chapel or Starry Night. If you go to a great jazz musician and say, "Play me something, but make it one that any musician in the country could re-play on any instrument" you will not get "Anthropology" or "Two Tickets to Georgia." If you go to a great chef and say, "Make me something delicious, but make it something that can be made pretty much the same in any kitchen in the country," you do not get Gordon Ramsey's Greatest Hits.
And if you put publishers, thought leaders, politicians, and bureaucrats in a room and say, "Create a revolutionary system of education, but it has to be one that's the same for everybody and can be implemented in every classroom in America with little variation," you do not get excellence. Even if you really want excellence, if your primary value is standardization, you cannot get excellence.
Excellence is specific. It is specific to time, place and people, and it is often different, and usually at the end of a new path, and only people who have the freedom and nimbleness to adjust for ever-changing situations can hope to pursue it. And if the excellence involves providing a service for other humans, the variability increases exponentially.
Standardization does not drive the bus to The Valley of Awesome. If standardization is your primary value, your prized virtue, your guiding star, your metric for achievement, you will never achieve excellence. You can't throw out all standards, or simply flail randomly, but building an national educational system based on national standardization is a fool's game. It is not what we need, and not what our students deserve.
For instance, lots of folks (including some who don't like the Common Core) will observe as an article of faith that it would be better to have national standards than have different standards from state to state. To them, it seems as obvious as air that this is true. To me, it seems as obvious as dirt that it is not.
I am not in favor of some anarchic Land of Do As You Please, but I also see nothing inherently good about a standardized educational system. I've made my case against standardization itself many times before. But I'm going to argue that beyond any inherent value or lack thereof, standardization cannot help but become toxic in any system where it is viewed as the biggest value.
Many reformsters live by the rule, "Anything worth doing is worth doing at scale." Arne Duncan often discusses measuring the value of an educational program by whether it can be scaled up or not. "If we can't make it work for everybody," he seems to suggest, "then it's not a real success."
But if your guiding value is It Must Be Excellent, you will have to make some compromises on how easily it can be standardized for an entire country, deliver scalability, and be mass-reproduced. However, if your primary value is It Must Be Mass-Reproducable and Standardizable, then you will make compromises on excellence.
If you go to a painter and say, "Make me a painting that painters all across the country can reproduce within certain narrow tolerances," you will not get the Sistine Chapel or Starry Night. If you go to a great jazz musician and say, "Play me something, but make it one that any musician in the country could re-play on any instrument" you will not get "Anthropology" or "Two Tickets to Georgia." If you go to a great chef and say, "Make me something delicious, but make it something that can be made pretty much the same in any kitchen in the country," you do not get Gordon Ramsey's Greatest Hits.
And if you put publishers, thought leaders, politicians, and bureaucrats in a room and say, "Create a revolutionary system of education, but it has to be one that's the same for everybody and can be implemented in every classroom in America with little variation," you do not get excellence. Even if you really want excellence, if your primary value is standardization, you cannot get excellence.
Excellence is specific. It is specific to time, place and people, and it is often different, and usually at the end of a new path, and only people who have the freedom and nimbleness to adjust for ever-changing situations can hope to pursue it. And if the excellence involves providing a service for other humans, the variability increases exponentially.
Standardization does not drive the bus to The Valley of Awesome. If standardization is your primary value, your prized virtue, your guiding star, your metric for achievement, you will never achieve excellence. You can't throw out all standards, or simply flail randomly, but building an national educational system based on national standardization is a fool's game. It is not what we need, and not what our students deserve.
Research + Politics = Bad News
At the Fordham's flypaper blog, Andy Smarick has some sobering news. Yes, Smarick is from the reformster camp, but what he reports this week is concerning to anybody who cares about education in this country.
Smarick is reporting about the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the government agency responsible for gathering and sorting the vast ocean of data related to American schools. Smarick, like most folks, has considered NCES a reliable source for accurate information about what's actually happening on the ground. But a series of events has given him pause.
In 2013, Smarick thought that a batch of data regarding large urban districts did not add up, and he further noted that "an advocacy organization that represents and serves large urban districts" was a big part of the data rollout. He wrote a piece chastising the feds.
But what happened next truly opened my eyes to the extent of the potential problem. The then-head of NCES quickly responded to my piece. He noted that his organization was only responsible for producing the data, which they do “free of ‘spin’ or partisan/political influence.” The National Assessments Government Board (which is in charge of NAEP), he wrote, is in charge of the public release pursuant to federal law.
He continued: “NAGB has interpreted this language as giving them authority over all aspects of the release event (in-person or webinar), including its title, format, and, perhaps most importantly, the policy guests whom they invite to present their interpretations of the findings.
Then another former NCES commissioner spoke up with similar issues.
It's a legitimate concern. There has been plenty of concern over the past decade or two about the degree to which political concerns are allowed to influence government-funded science and the degree to which scientists are muzzled or "handled."
But if the data about schools is being tweaked, shaded, trimmed and otherwise altered, that's not good for anybody, no matter what side of the larger argument they're on. It's hard enough to handle all the differing biases, perspectives and agendas-- the last thing we need is to discover that our facts are even facts.
Smarick is reporting about the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the government agency responsible for gathering and sorting the vast ocean of data related to American schools. Smarick, like most folks, has considered NCES a reliable source for accurate information about what's actually happening on the ground. But a series of events has given him pause.
In 2013, Smarick thought that a batch of data regarding large urban districts did not add up, and he further noted that "an advocacy organization that represents and serves large urban districts" was a big part of the data rollout. He wrote a piece chastising the feds.
But what happened next truly opened my eyes to the extent of the potential problem. The then-head of NCES quickly responded to my piece. He noted that his organization was only responsible for producing the data, which they do “free of ‘spin’ or partisan/political influence.” The National Assessments Government Board (which is in charge of NAEP), he wrote, is in charge of the public release pursuant to federal law.
He continued: “NAGB has interpreted this language as giving them authority over all aspects of the release event (in-person or webinar), including its title, format, and, perhaps most importantly, the policy guests whom they invite to present their interpretations of the findings.
Then another former NCES commissioner spoke up with similar issues.
It's a legitimate concern. There has been plenty of concern over the past decade or two about the degree to which political concerns are allowed to influence government-funded science and the degree to which scientists are muzzled or "handled."
But if the data about schools is being tweaked, shaded, trimmed and otherwise altered, that's not good for anybody, no matter what side of the larger argument they're on. It's hard enough to handle all the differing biases, perspectives and agendas-- the last thing we need is to discover that our facts are even facts.
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