(Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats)
Proponents of choice systems, whether they're talking about charters
or vouchers, depend on certain financial fictions to make their case.
Like beach-bound vampires wearing SPF 110 sunscreen, these robust and
rigorous fictions just won't die. Let's examine some of these dancing
unicorns of the choice world.
System Savings
In the 1960s, Pennsylvania strongly encouraged its
many small township-based school districts to consolidate. It did so
because of an obvious piece of common sense-- it is cheaper and more
efficient to educate 100 students in one school building to spread them
out over four separate buildings.
Choice systems sometimes hide the additional costs by transfering
them to parents or corporate sponsors or fund-raising projects. Charters
can also bridge the financial gap by slashing teacher pay and
maintaining high turnover so that there's little to no cost for benefits
and pensions; that's just transfering the additional costs of a choice
system to the teachers who work in it. But the bottom line is that
opening a whole bunch of schools to serve a population that previously
fit into one is cost-ineffective and usually more expensive. There may
be clever methods used to hide the additional costs, but it is still
there.
Cost Per Pupil
Let's say you read a statement that a car is stolen every forty-four seconds
in this country. That's a lot of cars to steal, and a tough crime wave
to put a dent in. But hey-- that means that about 163 cars are stolen
between 2:00 and 4:00 AM every day. Streets are pretty quiet then-- it
would be easy to spot nefarious doings. So let's create a federal grant
to stem the tide of auto theft in those early morning hours. It will
save almost 60,000 stolen cars a year!
Except, of course, that it really won't, because every statement
about how [Bad Thing A] happens every [unit of time] is a fiction, a way
to present data that is easily understood. But there is no ring of car
thieves out there carefully and precisely stealing a car every
forty-four seconds.
Likewise, Cost Per Pupil is a fiction. It makes a neat number for
comparison of different districts, but a $10K per pupil expense does not
mean that East Podwallow Schools are actually spending precisely $10K
on each student.
Choice fans like to treat the per pupil cost as if it's a stipend, a
chunk of money set aside for each specific student. The money, they
insist, does not belong to the taxpayer or the school district, but
should follow the student around like an imprinted gosling. But the per
pupil cost is not an education allowance from the government that can be
put into any educational vending machine.
Public schools are brutalized by this fiction time after time. If
Chris leaves my school, taking "his" $10K with him, my school's expenses
do not decrease. We do not hire fewer teachers, run fewer buses, heat
the building to a lower temperature, or turn Chris's textbooks in for a
refund from the publisher.
This remains true if ten of Chris's friends (and another $100K) leave
the school. Or twenty- unless by some bizarre coincidence all twenty
leave from the same classroom. And by the same token, when ten more
students move into the district, the budget does not increase by $100K.
These statistical fictions have a place, particularly in comparison.
If one city has a car stolen "every day" and another has them stolen
"every twelve hours," it helps me decide when to park. And if Blorgville
Schools spend $10K per pupil and East Woggle Schools spend $18K, that
tells me something about how the districts are different. But it does
not tell me that each student in East Woggle has a literal $18K paying
for her education.
Disenfranchisement
That Cost Per Pupil amount is not an allowance paid to students by
the state, and to treat it as such is to disenfranchise every taxpayer
who contributed to it. Parents and students are not entitled to clutch
that not-actually-a-stipend and claim, "This is mine. My school choice
is only about me, and not about anybody else."
It is about other people. It's about the students left behind in the
public school that is now some number of dollars poorer. And it is about
the taxpayers who now have no say in how the money they invested in
public schools will be spent. Every taxpayer is a stakeholder, because
every citizen hopes to live in a country filled with educated people.
"Schools take money from taxpayers without giving them a say,"
protest the choice fans. That is simply untrue. School board members are
elected, and taxpayers have a say (aka "vote"). That's true everywhere
except in places like Newark and Philadelphia, where the public has been
shut out of the democratic process, and you can see in those places
just how bad this sort of disenfranchisement gets.
Apply the same argument to the army, and we would have soldiers
trained and equipped by the taxpayers going back home and saying, "I am
only going to protect my own house."
Zero Sum
A choice advocate once told me that I should stop
talking about this issue as if it were a zero sum game. But it is a zero
sum game. The tax dollars involved are finite. Money taken for one
school must come from another school. And if we try to run two homes on a
strict one-home budget, we are playing a zero-sum game that guarantees
disappointment for some players.
There are many fine reasons to consider at least some aspects of a
choice system. But we can't have those conversations until and unless we
drop the financial fantasies and are honest about the true cost. Feel
free to start in the comments section here.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Secrets
Secrets are rarely a good thing. Sure, there can be secret treasure maps and secrets of hidden temples, but mostly, secrets are bad news.
I'm not talking about simply postponing information for a bit, like hiding a surprise birthday party until it's time. And I'm not talking about confidentiality, which is all about not telling people a story that is not your to tell. I'm not even talking about privacy, which is just the business of maintaining appropriate boundaries.
I'm talking about a pattern of consistently withholding information, usually in an attempt to manipulate somebody else's behavior.
If you are just starting to date someone and that person won't share a home phone number or work history or family details or bits of information such as, say, a full name-- these are not signs that Things Are Going Well. People who keep secrets are up to something. Institutions that keep secrets are definitely up to something, and it's not something good.
So what are we to make of so much reformy stuff that is so very secretive.
High stakes tests, on which so much of the reformy architecture rests, are given the kind of secrecy blanket usually reserved for things like plans to overthrow third world dictators. Teachers are sworn to twelve kinds of secrecy, promising that they will never divulge what they see in the bowels of the testing dungeons of America. The tests are given the kind of trade secret protection that we usually see with, say, the Colonels special blend of herbs and spices.
Some trainers have told us that the tests must be kept secure to preserve their validity, which strikes me about like buying a chastity belt to preserve Charlie Sheen's virginity.
Then there are the secrets of teacher evaluation systems, the Special Super-Secret Sauce that goes into VAM and turns student scores on standardized tests into measures of the educational effect of teachers-- and ONLY the effects of the teacher and not the effects of poverty, home life, emotional state, phases of the moon, or student attitudes about stupid standardized tests. VAM sauce has been criticized mercilessly (in much the same way that gravity will mercilessly criticize your decision to step off a high roof), and if the VAMsters wanted to build support for their technique, all they need to do is pull up a stool and a power point slide show and say, "We will now show you exactly how the VAM sauce works so that you need never have doubts again."
And yet, years into the VAMification of teaching, that conversation has not occured. VAM sauce remains secret in the same way that fracking wonder-chemical mixes remain secret.
All these secrets. We can't know exactly who is backing Campbell Brown-- it's secret. In fact, we can't know who's bankrolling many reformster enterprises, nor who's profiting from them. We are not meant to know where from the great deep to the great deep the money flows.
So many secrets, and the great wall of secrets suggests only one thing-- that reformsters are Up To Something. They like to call for transparency (particularly when publishing teacher ratings)-- well, let's have some. Because if all your methods and tests and proofs that your methods and tests work-- if all those things must be secret, it only gives further credence to the theory that it's all baloney, and we must not be allowed to look behind the curtain or check out the emperor's new tailor or we would give the game away for the scam it is.
I'm not talking about simply postponing information for a bit, like hiding a surprise birthday party until it's time. And I'm not talking about confidentiality, which is all about not telling people a story that is not your to tell. I'm not even talking about privacy, which is just the business of maintaining appropriate boundaries.
I'm talking about a pattern of consistently withholding information, usually in an attempt to manipulate somebody else's behavior.
If you are just starting to date someone and that person won't share a home phone number or work history or family details or bits of information such as, say, a full name-- these are not signs that Things Are Going Well. People who keep secrets are up to something. Institutions that keep secrets are definitely up to something, and it's not something good.
So what are we to make of so much reformy stuff that is so very secretive.
High stakes tests, on which so much of the reformy architecture rests, are given the kind of secrecy blanket usually reserved for things like plans to overthrow third world dictators. Teachers are sworn to twelve kinds of secrecy, promising that they will never divulge what they see in the bowels of the testing dungeons of America. The tests are given the kind of trade secret protection that we usually see with, say, the Colonels special blend of herbs and spices.
Some trainers have told us that the tests must be kept secure to preserve their validity, which strikes me about like buying a chastity belt to preserve Charlie Sheen's virginity.
Then there are the secrets of teacher evaluation systems, the Special Super-Secret Sauce that goes into VAM and turns student scores on standardized tests into measures of the educational effect of teachers-- and ONLY the effects of the teacher and not the effects of poverty, home life, emotional state, phases of the moon, or student attitudes about stupid standardized tests. VAM sauce has been criticized mercilessly (in much the same way that gravity will mercilessly criticize your decision to step off a high roof), and if the VAMsters wanted to build support for their technique, all they need to do is pull up a stool and a power point slide show and say, "We will now show you exactly how the VAM sauce works so that you need never have doubts again."
And yet, years into the VAMification of teaching, that conversation has not occured. VAM sauce remains secret in the same way that fracking wonder-chemical mixes remain secret.
All these secrets. We can't know exactly who is backing Campbell Brown-- it's secret. In fact, we can't know who's bankrolling many reformster enterprises, nor who's profiting from them. We are not meant to know where from the great deep to the great deep the money flows.
So many secrets, and the great wall of secrets suggests only one thing-- that reformsters are Up To Something. They like to call for transparency (particularly when publishing teacher ratings)-- well, let's have some. Because if all your methods and tests and proofs that your methods and tests work-- if all those things must be secret, it only gives further credence to the theory that it's all baloney, and we must not be allowed to look behind the curtain or check out the emperor's new tailor or we would give the game away for the scam it is.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Reforming Accountability: Does CRPE Have Something New To Say?
News comes this morning of yet another initiative, this one aimed squarely at school accountability. Or as Michael Petrilli put it on twitter, "Not just a change in tone."
It's the Center on Reinventing Public Education (and why couldn't they be reinventing Excellent public education, because then they would be CREPE instead of CRPE). And they are going to deserve a look on their own. CRPE'sfounders include Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation. [Correction: Petrilli is part of this particular conversation, and Fordham is connected to CRPE, but Petrilli is not actually offically "at" CRPE]. Next is Robin Lake, "internationally recognized for her research and analysis of U.S.
public school system reforms, including charter schools and charter
management organizations; innovation and scale; portfolio school
districts; school turnaround efforts; and performance-based
accountability systems." And Paul Hill, whose "current work focuses on re-missioning states and school districts to
promote school performance; school choice and innovation; and finance
and productivity."
Yes, the reformster is strong in this one.
This morning the three founders offer "A New Start on Accountability." It's an outline of where they propose the accountability bus needs to travel.
They lay out their premises pretty simply.
First: "Every child should be in a school where he or she can learn effectively." "Effectively" is a vague enough word to make this acceptable to anyone.
Second: "Actions taken in pursuit of the goal are controversial because they are difficult and complicated. There is a lot of work of many kinds to be done: improving teacher training, experimenting with more effective methods, and continuously improving learning opportunities for children." Like many teachers, I've been doing two of these and complaining about one for decades, so I can't disagree.
Third: The connecting link between all improvement efforts is accountability. Meh. I've addressed this at length in responding to the Brookings bathroom scale analogy. Short answer-- you don't need a bathroom scale to lose weight. You don't even need a bathroom scale to know you're losing weight. I'm more inclined to believe the "taxpayers deserve to know what they're getting for their money" argument for accountability. The Trio say that in America, it's never enough to say "just trust us." Fair enough. But let's file that discussion for another day so we can get on to the bullet points.
There is a little bit of mystery here.
Earlier this year, a bipartisan and multi-disciplinary group of analysts and educators met to work on our unsolved accountability problem. Everyone in the group believed accountability was necessary, but all agreed that we had not been going about it right. Under the leadership of the three of us, the group formulated a set of principles to guide our search for the best way to redesign school accountability systems that can help states deliver on the promise of Common Core.
So, somebody met somewhere at some time about some stuff. And again, for the sake of moving forward, go ahead and insert here the argument that the "promise of the Common Core" is at best a promise made to corporate interests that they'll get to cash in big, and at worst just a big pile of crap.
Let's instead look at CRPE's list of Things We Need To Do To Make Accountability Swell:
All parents need to know immediately when, based on current achievement levels, their children are not likely to graduate high school, or be ready for college or a rewarding, career-ladder job.
This one is just silly. Most schools issue these things called grades that are pretty good predictors of going-to-graduateness. And despite the various reformster initiatives to the contrary, nobody knows how to predict the college-or-career readiness piece.
Student test scores are indispensable as timely indicators of student and school progress. But they should be considered along with other valid indicators, e.g., course completion and normal progress toward graduation
No, they're not. Test scores are indispensable as indicators of student ability to take standardized tests. And of course, as noted a gazillion times, they are excellent ways to tell the socio-economic class of the students. So "considered along with" is a weasel phrase. In student achievement salad, test scores should not be the lettuce. At best, maybe bacon bits.
Every family should have the choice among public schools that are demonstrably capable of educating children well.
Given that the mystery committee is being run by charter folks, this is not a shocker. But since the topic du jour is accountability, I'd really like to hear how charters fit the picture. They're run by people who are not accountable to anyone, including taxpayers, and modern charters have frequently gone to court to insist that they not have to account for money or spending or much of anything. So how, exactly, do charters help with accountability.
States and school districts must support creation of new options for kids who are not learning.
I suspect "new options" means really different things to different people, but in principle I think this is just fine. Traditional public school, particularly under the current status quo of reformster twistiness, does not serve everyone equally well.
School leaders must have enough freedom to lead their schools and take responsibility for the results they get.
This is such unobjectionable language because school principal hands are soooo tied. But I can't shake feeling that this means that you want school leaders to be able to run schools like corporations-- specifically corporations where there are no unions and labor is cheap and easily replaceable.
States should hold schools, not individual teachers, accountable for student progress.
Hey look! Something that is, in fact, different. Not new, actually-- threatening to punish just schools is what we tried under NCLB, and it didn't work. Not to mention that we don't know how to do it, just as we don't know how to hold individual teachers accountable. This is no more useful than saying "Santa should lend us his naughty and nice list for accountability purposes."
The article also provides a list of Things To Worry About While Pursuing Accountability.
But this list of problem areas? That's a good piece of work, because it does in fact recognize a host of obstacles that generally go ignored and unrecognized. These are "problems" in the sense that gravity is a problem for people who want to jump naked off high buildings, flap their arms, and not get hurt. I don't know that CRPE, given its clear focus on charters, finance, and high stakes standardized testing, has goals and objectives any different from a few dozen other reformy iterations. But the recognition of obstacles shows some grasp of reality, and that's always a nice sign.
Here's their finish:
These problems are solvable, but they require serious work, not sniping among rival camps. It is time to start working through the problems of accountability, with discipline, open-mindedness, and flexibility.
We—all the co-signers of the September 24 statement—are eager to work with others, including critics of tests and accountability. Issues of measurement, system design, and implementation must be addressed, carefully and through disciplined trials.
I'll accept that from a step up from, "Shut up and do as you're told. We totally know exactly what we're doing." I'm not seeing much in CRPE's ideas that represent a new direction on the issue; it's basically reframing and repackaging. But the recognition of real-world obstacles is more than a simple shift of tone. (And there's still the Whose Party Is This problem). But keep talking CRPE. I'm still listening.
It's the Center on Reinventing Public Education (and why couldn't they be reinventing Excellent public education, because then they would be CREPE instead of CRPE). And they are going to deserve a look on their own. CRPE's
Yes, the reformster is strong in this one.
This morning the three founders offer "A New Start on Accountability." It's an outline of where they propose the accountability bus needs to travel.
They lay out their premises pretty simply.
First: "Every child should be in a school where he or she can learn effectively." "Effectively" is a vague enough word to make this acceptable to anyone.
Second: "Actions taken in pursuit of the goal are controversial because they are difficult and complicated. There is a lot of work of many kinds to be done: improving teacher training, experimenting with more effective methods, and continuously improving learning opportunities for children." Like many teachers, I've been doing two of these and complaining about one for decades, so I can't disagree.
Third: The connecting link between all improvement efforts is accountability. Meh. I've addressed this at length in responding to the Brookings bathroom scale analogy. Short answer-- you don't need a bathroom scale to lose weight. You don't even need a bathroom scale to know you're losing weight. I'm more inclined to believe the "taxpayers deserve to know what they're getting for their money" argument for accountability. The Trio say that in America, it's never enough to say "just trust us." Fair enough. But let's file that discussion for another day so we can get on to the bullet points.
There is a little bit of mystery here.
Earlier this year, a bipartisan and multi-disciplinary group of analysts and educators met to work on our unsolved accountability problem. Everyone in the group believed accountability was necessary, but all agreed that we had not been going about it right. Under the leadership of the three of us, the group formulated a set of principles to guide our search for the best way to redesign school accountability systems that can help states deliver on the promise of Common Core.
So, somebody met somewhere at some time about some stuff. And again, for the sake of moving forward, go ahead and insert here the argument that the "promise of the Common Core" is at best a promise made to corporate interests that they'll get to cash in big, and at worst just a big pile of crap.
Let's instead look at CRPE's list of Things We Need To Do To Make Accountability Swell:
All parents need to know immediately when, based on current achievement levels, their children are not likely to graduate high school, or be ready for college or a rewarding, career-ladder job.
This one is just silly. Most schools issue these things called grades that are pretty good predictors of going-to-graduateness. And despite the various reformster initiatives to the contrary, nobody knows how to predict the college-or-career readiness piece.
Student test scores are indispensable as timely indicators of student and school progress. But they should be considered along with other valid indicators, e.g., course completion and normal progress toward graduation
No, they're not. Test scores are indispensable as indicators of student ability to take standardized tests. And of course, as noted a gazillion times, they are excellent ways to tell the socio-economic class of the students. So "considered along with" is a weasel phrase. In student achievement salad, test scores should not be the lettuce. At best, maybe bacon bits.
Every family should have the choice among public schools that are demonstrably capable of educating children well.
Given that the mystery committee is being run by charter folks, this is not a shocker. But since the topic du jour is accountability, I'd really like to hear how charters fit the picture. They're run by people who are not accountable to anyone, including taxpayers, and modern charters have frequently gone to court to insist that they not have to account for money or spending or much of anything. So how, exactly, do charters help with accountability.
States and school districts must support creation of new options for kids who are not learning.
I suspect "new options" means really different things to different people, but in principle I think this is just fine. Traditional public school, particularly under the current status quo of reformster twistiness, does not serve everyone equally well.
School leaders must have enough freedom to lead their schools and take responsibility for the results they get.
This is such unobjectionable language because school principal hands are soooo tied. But I can't shake feeling that this means that you want school leaders to be able to run schools like corporations-- specifically corporations where there are no unions and labor is cheap and easily replaceable.
States should hold schools, not individual teachers, accountable for student progress.
Hey look! Something that is, in fact, different. Not new, actually-- threatening to punish just schools is what we tried under NCLB, and it didn't work. Not to mention that we don't know how to do it, just as we don't know how to hold individual teachers accountable. This is no more useful than saying "Santa should lend us his naughty and nice list for accountability purposes."
The article also provides a list of Things To Worry About While Pursuing Accountability.
- How to avoid specifying outcomes so exhaustively that schools are unable to innovate and solve problems.
- How to drive continuous improvement in all schools, not just the lowest-performing.
- How to coordinate and limit federal, state, and district demands for data.
- How to prevent cheating on tests and other outcome measures.
- How to motivate students to do their best in school and on assessments.
- How to give children at risk new options without causing a constant churn in their educational experience.
- How to adjust measurement and accountability to innovations in instruction and technology.
But this list of problem areas? That's a good piece of work, because it does in fact recognize a host of obstacles that generally go ignored and unrecognized. These are "problems" in the sense that gravity is a problem for people who want to jump naked off high buildings, flap their arms, and not get hurt. I don't know that CRPE, given its clear focus on charters, finance, and high stakes standardized testing, has goals and objectives any different from a few dozen other reformy iterations. But the recognition of obstacles shows some grasp of reality, and that's always a nice sign.
Here's their finish:
These problems are solvable, but they require serious work, not sniping among rival camps. It is time to start working through the problems of accountability, with discipline, open-mindedness, and flexibility.
We—all the co-signers of the September 24 statement—are eager to work with others, including critics of tests and accountability. Issues of measurement, system design, and implementation must be addressed, carefully and through disciplined trials.
I'll accept that from a step up from, "Shut up and do as you're told. We totally know exactly what we're doing." I'm not seeing much in CRPE's ideas that represent a new direction on the issue; it's basically reframing and repackaging. But the recognition of real-world obstacles is more than a simple shift of tone. (And there's still the Whose Party Is This problem). But keep talking CRPE. I'm still listening.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Can We Be Less Nice, Please and Thank You?
I recently stumbled across a blog by mommy/teacher Katie Knight. It's an interesting read in that we appear to come from completely opposite ends of the bloggy spectrum. "Teacher to the Core" is awash in pink and is so precious that it nearly sent me into sugar shock, and Mrs. Knight is the sort of woman who has tiny dogs that she calls her children. Not saying that's a terrible thing, but it's surely not me.
That said, Knight is no dummy, and her blog includes the kind of filter-free blogging that makes for an authentic read. And the blog has 2300 followers (plus 6K plus on facebook), so there can be no doubt that if we're going to get in a validation-by-audience contest, she is going to kick my ass.
Well, if she did that sort of thing.
Knight is nice. Way nice. The post that I linked to above caught my attention because it underlines one of the ways that we as teachers really don't help ourselves.
The blog is a long story, complete with a printer emergency followed by trips to Staples, followed by getting the wrong cartridge, followed-- well, the point of the story is that by the time she arrives at her Common Core math module training session, she's feeling a bit edgy.
The trainer proceeds to present some ideas that Knight doesn't so much agree with, pedagogy-wise, and then proceeds to do that thing where she tries to draw out the teacher-learners into providing answers after which the presenter can either reward the teacher--leader or (more likely) point out how wrong the responder was as a set-up for Revealing Wisdom. Knight had pretty much had it (but in a pink, nice way).
I hate this Common Core engagement/struggle until you want to die kind questioning. Explore, figure it out, give me your big idea, but it better be the right one or you *might* look like an idiot. All of this happening at a training is really annoying.
I think the kids don’t like it either. At least not in the large doses it seems to be heaped on them these days. “Let the kids figure it out” “Let them EXPLORE, let them struggle.” For how long?
Knight observes that some of what she calls Common Core teaching techniques lack compassion for the learner. And she wants us to understand that, and how zen-less she's feeling, before she explains how she "freaked out" on the presenter.
So I tell her empathically . “Please stop. I don’t like this kind of Common Core questioning. I don’t like the “you know the answer and I am exploring to find it”. I don’t like that kind of questioning when I am in the thick of Module Mania. And now you are waving your arms at me. This is tricky and trainers treating the trainees like kids is not my favorite. Instructional styles in the Common Core can’t forget compassion for the learner. I am the learner here. I don’t know what you want me to say”
And that would be totally okay, you'd think. But a few paragraphs later, we have this...
Of course, I waved her back over 15 minutes later and asked her to forgive me for having been so heated. She did. I asked her not be afraid of me and that I was really a super nice person.
The unending pink didn't rattle me, nor did the endless cuteness nor even the apparently imperfect understanding of what the Core is and is not. But this-- this bugs me.
Why did you apologize, Katie Knight?
Why would you worry about whether or not this trainer thought were you a super-nice person?
And most especially, why would you worry more about having the trainer thinking you were not super-nice than you would worry about standing up for your students? You are clearly motivated by a gigantic heart full of compassion and caring for your students. So why set that aside for fear that a drive-by trainer who is busy teaching people things that you believe are wrong-- why is that person's opinion about your niceness more important than letting them know that a trained, professional educator believes they are making some serious pedagogical mistakes.
Yes, I know the trainer didn't write the module or the policy. In your shoes, I still want that trainer to go back to the main office and say, "You know, we're getting a lot of pushback on this point" or even "I've heard a lot of good arguments for re-thinking this."
This is one of the worst things we do. We sit and listen to someone shovel fertilizer, and we smile and nod and afterwards, in the lounge, we discuss how foolish it all was, but meanwhile the presenter is in his car driving back to the main office thinking, "This stuff must be great because those teachers are just eating it up."
I'm not saying be a jerk. I'm not saying be unspeakably rude. But if we as teachers don't stand up to say, "What you're pushing is wrong for our students,"-- who else is going to?
We worry too much about playing nice, being good team players, doing as we're told by the People In Charge. We worry too much about being nice.
That said, Knight is no dummy, and her blog includes the kind of filter-free blogging that makes for an authentic read. And the blog has 2300 followers (plus 6K plus on facebook), so there can be no doubt that if we're going to get in a validation-by-audience contest, she is going to kick my ass.
Well, if she did that sort of thing.
Knight is nice. Way nice. The post that I linked to above caught my attention because it underlines one of the ways that we as teachers really don't help ourselves.
The blog is a long story, complete with a printer emergency followed by trips to Staples, followed by getting the wrong cartridge, followed-- well, the point of the story is that by the time she arrives at her Common Core math module training session, she's feeling a bit edgy.
The trainer proceeds to present some ideas that Knight doesn't so much agree with, pedagogy-wise, and then proceeds to do that thing where she tries to draw out the teacher-learners into providing answers after which the presenter can either reward the teacher--leader or (more likely) point out how wrong the responder was as a set-up for Revealing Wisdom. Knight had pretty much had it (but in a pink, nice way).
I hate this Common Core engagement/struggle until you want to die kind questioning. Explore, figure it out, give me your big idea, but it better be the right one or you *might* look like an idiot. All of this happening at a training is really annoying.
I think the kids don’t like it either. At least not in the large doses it seems to be heaped on them these days. “Let the kids figure it out” “Let them EXPLORE, let them struggle.” For how long?
Knight observes that some of what she calls Common Core teaching techniques lack compassion for the learner. And she wants us to understand that, and how zen-less she's feeling, before she explains how she "freaked out" on the presenter.
So I tell her empathically . “Please stop. I don’t like this kind of Common Core questioning. I don’t like the “you know the answer and I am exploring to find it”. I don’t like that kind of questioning when I am in the thick of Module Mania. And now you are waving your arms at me. This is tricky and trainers treating the trainees like kids is not my favorite. Instructional styles in the Common Core can’t forget compassion for the learner. I am the learner here. I don’t know what you want me to say”
And that would be totally okay, you'd think. But a few paragraphs later, we have this...
Of course, I waved her back over 15 minutes later and asked her to forgive me for having been so heated. She did. I asked her not be afraid of me and that I was really a super nice person.
The unending pink didn't rattle me, nor did the endless cuteness nor even the apparently imperfect understanding of what the Core is and is not. But this-- this bugs me.
Why did you apologize, Katie Knight?
Why would you worry about whether or not this trainer thought were you a super-nice person?
And most especially, why would you worry more about having the trainer thinking you were not super-nice than you would worry about standing up for your students? You are clearly motivated by a gigantic heart full of compassion and caring for your students. So why set that aside for fear that a drive-by trainer who is busy teaching people things that you believe are wrong-- why is that person's opinion about your niceness more important than letting them know that a trained, professional educator believes they are making some serious pedagogical mistakes.
Yes, I know the trainer didn't write the module or the policy. In your shoes, I still want that trainer to go back to the main office and say, "You know, we're getting a lot of pushback on this point" or even "I've heard a lot of good arguments for re-thinking this."
This is one of the worst things we do. We sit and listen to someone shovel fertilizer, and we smile and nod and afterwards, in the lounge, we discuss how foolish it all was, but meanwhile the presenter is in his car driving back to the main office thinking, "This stuff must be great because those teachers are just eating it up."
I'm not saying be a jerk. I'm not saying be unspeakably rude. But if we as teachers don't stand up to say, "What you're pushing is wrong for our students,"-- who else is going to?
We worry too much about playing nice, being good team players, doing as we're told by the People In Charge. We worry too much about being nice.
Monday, September 22, 2014
CCSS: Set in Stone?
One of the ongoing side arguments in the education debates is the question of just how set in concrete the Common Core standards are.
The pro-Core talking point has become some variation of, "Pshaw! States can totally do as they wish. The Core are just like, you know, mild suggestions, and states can just rewrite them or modify them or whatever." This is a considerable shift from the days when CCSS was sold as a way to get every single state on exactly the same page.
Exhibit A in the rebuttal has been the fact that the CCSS are copyrighted, and that the original language of state adoption included a bit about adding no more than 15% to the standards.
The argument that CCSS are set in concrete (an argument that I've made myself) is both unimportant and important. Because the reformsters who are arguing that the whole copyright business doesn't matter actually have a bit of a point
.
Why the copyright issue doesn't matter
What difference does a copyright make if the people holding it have no intention of protecting it? The answer is "None."
If copyright infringement were going to be prosecuted, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would be losing big time over its Pennsylvania Core Standards, which are a pretty transparent cut-and-paste version of CCSS. Likewise, several states have violated both the CCSS copyright and the 15% rule, and so far there is not the slightest indication that anybody has any intention of enforcing either.
Furthermore, the standards don't matter, and they have never mattered, and they never will matter. Schools learned many things from the years of NCLB (including "Never Be Excited When the Feds Offer To Help Schools"), and one important lesson was that you should just ignore all the blather about what the standards do or do not purport to value-- the only thing that matters is the test.
Nobody important (i.e. "with the power to withhold money from the district") is going to measure how well you follow the standards. They are going to look at one thing, and on thing only-- your test scores. So despite reformster protestations to the contrary (and is anybody more pro-test than reformsters), schools will arrange themselves not to teach to the standards, but to teach to the tests. Yes, some folks will insist that if we teach the standards real good and hard, the test scores will just fall into place. But we've seen that movie already
There are items in the standards that will never, ever be truly tested on the Big High-Stakes Standardized Tests, and so schools will dump those just as quickly as they dump art, music and recess. The degree to which the dumpage happens will depend on A) the severity of the punishments being used by the state to "motivate" schools and B) the spine and integrity of the school district administrators.
Put two piles in front of school administrators. In one pile, put copies of the CCSS. In the other, put copious sample questions from their state's High Stakes Do-Or-Die Standardized Test. Which one do you think the administrators will pick up and use to design instruction?
At the end of the day, we're talking about a copyright that nobody enforces or observed exerted over material by which nobody is really being guided.
Why the copyright issue does matter
So if the copyright on the CCSS doesn't really matter, why talk about it at all. Why is it even important?
It's important because it speaks to the intent of the Core architects. Intent has become a whole subspecies of reformster debate, because those dismantling public education have proven to be somewhat slippery and malleable (kind of like silly putty lathered in lard) when it comes to their arguments.
But between the copyright and the 15% rule and the methods used to foist standards adoption on the states, it's clear that the Core was never meant to be adaptable, changeable or interpreted fifty different ways. Note also that there was never (and still is not) a mechanism in place to revise or revisit the Core. There's no number to call with suggestions, ideas, or requests for clarification (I suggest 1-800-WTF-CORE). There's no formal announced review process by which the creators will get together every four years to course correct. In fact, the creators have all moved on to other well-paying jobs, like David Coleman, who in the finest beltway tradition has moved into the private sector where he can profit from the rules he created while doing gummint work.
So when pro-Core folks claim that the standards are intended to be adapted and interpreted by each individual state, they are selling pure grade-A baloney. It is true that the Pro-Core Crowd has shifted from "We must all walk around with identical team mascots" to "Dress it up any way you have to in order to save its life."
The Core could have been designed for adptability. Most obviously, they could have been open source rather than copyrighted and owned. They could have been crowd sourced on the web. They could have been written with broad open ideas rather than specific mandated techniques.
But they weren't designed to be adaptable; they were designed to be a one-ring-to-rule-them-all standard for every state. When you build something to be a brick wall, trying to repurpose it as a stylish poncho after the fact just doesn't end well.
The pro-Core talking point has become some variation of, "Pshaw! States can totally do as they wish. The Core are just like, you know, mild suggestions, and states can just rewrite them or modify them or whatever." This is a considerable shift from the days when CCSS was sold as a way to get every single state on exactly the same page.
Exhibit A in the rebuttal has been the fact that the CCSS are copyrighted, and that the original language of state adoption included a bit about adding no more than 15% to the standards.
The argument that CCSS are set in concrete (an argument that I've made myself) is both unimportant and important. Because the reformsters who are arguing that the whole copyright business doesn't matter actually have a bit of a point
.
Why the copyright issue doesn't matter
What difference does a copyright make if the people holding it have no intention of protecting it? The answer is "None."
If copyright infringement were going to be prosecuted, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would be losing big time over its Pennsylvania Core Standards, which are a pretty transparent cut-and-paste version of CCSS. Likewise, several states have violated both the CCSS copyright and the 15% rule, and so far there is not the slightest indication that anybody has any intention of enforcing either.
Furthermore, the standards don't matter, and they have never mattered, and they never will matter. Schools learned many things from the years of NCLB (including "Never Be Excited When the Feds Offer To Help Schools"), and one important lesson was that you should just ignore all the blather about what the standards do or do not purport to value-- the only thing that matters is the test.
Nobody important (i.e. "with the power to withhold money from the district") is going to measure how well you follow the standards. They are going to look at one thing, and on thing only-- your test scores. So despite reformster protestations to the contrary (and is anybody more pro-test than reformsters), schools will arrange themselves not to teach to the standards, but to teach to the tests. Yes, some folks will insist that if we teach the standards real good and hard, the test scores will just fall into place. But we've seen that movie already
There are items in the standards that will never, ever be truly tested on the Big High-Stakes Standardized Tests, and so schools will dump those just as quickly as they dump art, music and recess. The degree to which the dumpage happens will depend on A) the severity of the punishments being used by the state to "motivate" schools and B) the spine and integrity of the school district administrators.
Put two piles in front of school administrators. In one pile, put copies of the CCSS. In the other, put copious sample questions from their state's High Stakes Do-Or-Die Standardized Test. Which one do you think the administrators will pick up and use to design instruction?
At the end of the day, we're talking about a copyright that nobody enforces or observed exerted over material by which nobody is really being guided.
Why the copyright issue does matter
So if the copyright on the CCSS doesn't really matter, why talk about it at all. Why is it even important?
It's important because it speaks to the intent of the Core architects. Intent has become a whole subspecies of reformster debate, because those dismantling public education have proven to be somewhat slippery and malleable (kind of like silly putty lathered in lard) when it comes to their arguments.
But between the copyright and the 15% rule and the methods used to foist standards adoption on the states, it's clear that the Core was never meant to be adaptable, changeable or interpreted fifty different ways. Note also that there was never (and still is not) a mechanism in place to revise or revisit the Core. There's no number to call with suggestions, ideas, or requests for clarification (I suggest 1-800-WTF-CORE). There's no formal announced review process by which the creators will get together every four years to course correct. In fact, the creators have all moved on to other well-paying jobs, like David Coleman, who in the finest beltway tradition has moved into the private sector where he can profit from the rules he created while doing gummint work.
So when pro-Core folks claim that the standards are intended to be adapted and interpreted by each individual state, they are selling pure grade-A baloney. It is true that the Pro-Core Crowd has shifted from "We must all walk around with identical team mascots" to "Dress it up any way you have to in order to save its life."
The Core could have been designed for adptability. Most obviously, they could have been open source rather than copyrighted and owned. They could have been crowd sourced on the web. They could have been written with broad open ideas rather than specific mandated techniques.
But they weren't designed to be adaptable; they were designed to be a one-ring-to-rule-them-all standard for every state. When you build something to be a brick wall, trying to repurpose it as a stylish poncho after the fact just doesn't end well.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
How Much College Remediation Is Really Needed?
When reformsters want to beat the College Ready drum, they get out the sticks of college remediation statistics. Tons, mountains, endless chains of entering freshmen must be remediated, they declare. Clearly, high schools are turning out defective products. Something Must Be Done. Otherwise we will continue to fall behind Estonia and be conquered by Finland or Vikings, or something.
I've talked about this before, and I've offered some explanations.
1) The admissions process has stopped screening for Students Who Can Be Successful Here and moved on to screening for Students Willing To Come Here And Who Have Access To Money.
2) Let's make students take extra courses that we can charge for but which don't count toward a diploma. After the original post, I heard from college folks who swore no such thing happens ever, and college students who said, "That totally happened to me," so I'm concluding this is a localized issue and not a universal one.
3) Marketing. We've been trying to convince all students that they must all go to college or they will end up alone, unloved and living in a one room apartment over a hardware store and eating cat food they've warmed up on a hot plate.
Bonus reason) As we spend more and more time getting students ready to take standardized tests, we spend less and less actually preparing them for college.
Well, thanks to blog reader Ajay Srikanth, I've been reading up on the work of Judith Scott-Clayton. Scott-Clayton and colleagues Peter M. Crosta and Clive R. Belfield published some research back in 2012 on this very subject, and Scott-Clayton (Columbia University) penned this little piece for the New York Times.
She was spinning off an article about how early medical screening might not be all it's cracked up to be. And she applies the same thoughts to college placement exams and the remediation they often lead to.
While remediation rates based on placement exams has increased dramatically, Scott-Clayton notes that the major increase is among students with strong high school grades.
For students with high school grade-point averages between 3.5 and 4.0, remediation rates have more than doubled (see chart below). This is not a result of high school grade inflation – the percentage of students with G.P.A.’s in this range has not changed – but is consistent with increasingly ubiquitous placement testing.
Department of Education, National Center for
Education Statistics, Beginning Postsecondary Students database;
computation by N.C.E.S. QuickStats.
Scott-Clayton considers two important questions raised by all this.
First, is there even any benefit to the remediation, because "remediation has been referred to as the Bermuda Triangle of postsecondary education, because the majority of those who enter never make it out. "
The second point is so obvious I feel foolish for not having originally considered it.
Maybe the placement tests just suck.
Scott-Clayton, whose research covers this very subject, says "the tests commonly used to screen for college readiness are only weakly related to college outcomes" and cites two studies mentioned in another NYT piece that say so. Students who go on to have trouble in college pass the test, and students who would have done just fine fail it. This is a murky area of coulda-woulda-shoulda, but Scott-Clayton estimates that one in four remediated math students could have pulled B-or-better grades without remediation, and one in three English students would have done the same in freshman comp.
Scott-Clayton further figures that remediation rates could be dropped by 8 to 12 percent just by exempting strong high school students from placement tests, with no drop in the college's pass-fail rate. At the very least, this would be a cheaper solution that re-tooling the entire US public secondary school system.
Scott-Clayton posits that this system remains in place, like medical screening, because you can regret failing to catch a Bad Thing before it happened, but little regret is involved in pursuing a solution that may not have been necessary. I mean, as long as we've had a dog, our home has not been attacked by Vikings. Maybe we don't need a big floppy chocolate lab to keep the Vikings away, but do we want to take that chance? I think not.
So once again we find that Common Core supporters are trying to sell the Core as a solution that won't work for a problem we don't have. Well, actually, it might work. Since the real problem is that too many incoming freshmen are failing poorly designed standardized placement exams, giving them more high school training taking badly designed standardized tests might indeed fix the problem. Of course, so would throwing the exams out the window and just focusing on actual education. We could prepare them to take college courses instead of preparing them for college placement exams. But we wouldn't want to get too crazy. Vikings, you know.
I've talked about this before, and I've offered some explanations.
1) The admissions process has stopped screening for Students Who Can Be Successful Here and moved on to screening for Students Willing To Come Here And Who Have Access To Money.
2) Let's make students take extra courses that we can charge for but which don't count toward a diploma. After the original post, I heard from college folks who swore no such thing happens ever, and college students who said, "That totally happened to me," so I'm concluding this is a localized issue and not a universal one.
3) Marketing. We've been trying to convince all students that they must all go to college or they will end up alone, unloved and living in a one room apartment over a hardware store and eating cat food they've warmed up on a hot plate.
Bonus reason) As we spend more and more time getting students ready to take standardized tests, we spend less and less actually preparing them for college.
Well, thanks to blog reader Ajay Srikanth, I've been reading up on the work of Judith Scott-Clayton. Scott-Clayton and colleagues Peter M. Crosta and Clive R. Belfield published some research back in 2012 on this very subject, and Scott-Clayton (Columbia University) penned this little piece for the New York Times.
She was spinning off an article about how early medical screening might not be all it's cracked up to be. And she applies the same thoughts to college placement exams and the remediation they often lead to.
While remediation rates based on placement exams has increased dramatically, Scott-Clayton notes that the major increase is among students with strong high school grades.
For students with high school grade-point averages between 3.5 and 4.0, remediation rates have more than doubled (see chart below). This is not a result of high school grade inflation – the percentage of students with G.P.A.’s in this range has not changed – but is consistent with increasingly ubiquitous placement testing.
Scott-Clayton considers two important questions raised by all this.
First, is there even any benefit to the remediation, because "remediation has been referred to as the Bermuda Triangle of postsecondary education, because the majority of those who enter never make it out. "
The second point is so obvious I feel foolish for not having originally considered it.
Maybe the placement tests just suck.
Scott-Clayton, whose research covers this very subject, says "the tests commonly used to screen for college readiness are only weakly related to college outcomes" and cites two studies mentioned in another NYT piece that say so. Students who go on to have trouble in college pass the test, and students who would have done just fine fail it. This is a murky area of coulda-woulda-shoulda, but Scott-Clayton estimates that one in four remediated math students could have pulled B-or-better grades without remediation, and one in three English students would have done the same in freshman comp.
Scott-Clayton further figures that remediation rates could be dropped by 8 to 12 percent just by exempting strong high school students from placement tests, with no drop in the college's pass-fail rate. At the very least, this would be a cheaper solution that re-tooling the entire US public secondary school system.
Scott-Clayton posits that this system remains in place, like medical screening, because you can regret failing to catch a Bad Thing before it happened, but little regret is involved in pursuing a solution that may not have been necessary. I mean, as long as we've had a dog, our home has not been attacked by Vikings. Maybe we don't need a big floppy chocolate lab to keep the Vikings away, but do we want to take that chance? I think not.
So once again we find that Common Core supporters are trying to sell the Core as a solution that won't work for a problem we don't have. Well, actually, it might work. Since the real problem is that too many incoming freshmen are failing poorly designed standardized placement exams, giving them more high school training taking badly designed standardized tests might indeed fix the problem. Of course, so would throwing the exams out the window and just focusing on actual education. We could prepare them to take college courses instead of preparing them for college placement exams. But we wouldn't want to get too crazy. Vikings, you know.
Running a Business with No Employees
This week New York magazine profiled a new type of business, and while it has nothing to do with teaching, it's a business model that those of us who work in the ed biz should pay attention to.
Modern business leaders in America face what seems to them to be a dreadful problem-- employees who want to be paid. Earlier this week, I was involved in a bloggy exchange with Neerav Kingsland, and both he and commentors on his blog were clear that what they see as a problem in the education business-- labor costs are too fixed and too high. They really, desperately, want to be able to repurpose all that money that is going to employees, the better to make their business "nimble" and "robust."
The New York article highlights the up-and-coming way to do that. Do not hire employees. Hire independent contractors.
This is not a brand new idea. Virtually all of the writing work that I've done over the last two decades has been as an independent contractor (well, except things like this blog, for which I'm paid in satisfaction, eyestrain, and a cleared-out head) . I don't get a W-2; instead, I get a Form 1099. That means I also don't get benefits, retirement, and, as a bonus, I get to pay some self-employment taxes to Uncle Sam. It's a sensible approach for a writer. I don't go in to work, my bosses don't really boss me, and I set my work hours. It's very flexible, which makes it easy to fit it in with the work I do that actually supports me.
But what if we extended that idea to other businesses? Uber doesn't "hire" anybody to drive you around; they just maintain a middleman kind of system. The article starts with an example from Homejoy-- hire a house cleaner for just $19 (and try not to shocked when he turns out to be homeless).
There's some economic sense in it. How do you get a business started when there's not really enough money in the potential market to make the business profitable or even do-able? Lower the labor costs hugely by using contract labor that is paid by job, not by hourly rates, and costs you $0.00 for benefits and pension costs.
For some workers this makes for a great way to earn some extra money on the side. For other workers, this makes for a way to get screwed (which reminds me that, yes, the world's oldest profession has tended to use the contract employee model as well).
But I think it also marks a continued shift in our fundamental model of a business's responsibilities to the community. Lots of Americans continue to believe that if you are able-bodied and willing to work, you should be able to support yourself. We are being exceedingly slow to catch on to just how many people in this country are now working poor-- employed and working hard, and yet not being paid enough to live.
Understand, I am not an opponent of profit. Making money is a great and worthwhile objective for a business. But in the "Not MY Problem" economy, many businesses no longer feel any need to provide jobs at which people can make a living. "Roll up your sleeves and we will make sure that you get an honest day's wage for an honest day's work," was once a thing that employers would say with pride. But it's being replaced with "We'll use you when it's handy for us and pay you as little as possible."
I am sure that some 1099 Biz operators are doing their best to serve both employees and business interests. But it's also clear from the article that some businesses are just using the model as a way to slash payroll costs dramatically. Shame on them.
Why mention any of this in an education blog? Because this contract employee model is one that many edbiz operators are excited to use themselves. It is easy to see how a charter school company could really boost that bottom line by simply using contract employees-- teachers who are only hired for a year at a time (or even less) but as contract employees do not get benefits or retirement. (As Paul Thomas smartly observed, "TFA, anyone?") If you didn't think such a thing was possible or viable, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. But first, I suggest you read the New York article.
[Update: While this may be a new sort of thing in the US, the world already has plenty of experience with independent contractors in teaching. Check out Alyssa Hadley Dunn's expose of Teachers Without Borders and take a look at this post on Teacher Solidarity, a blog that keeps an eye on the international teaching scene from the UK. ]
Modern business leaders in America face what seems to them to be a dreadful problem-- employees who want to be paid. Earlier this week, I was involved in a bloggy exchange with Neerav Kingsland, and both he and commentors on his blog were clear that what they see as a problem in the education business-- labor costs are too fixed and too high. They really, desperately, want to be able to repurpose all that money that is going to employees, the better to make their business "nimble" and "robust."
The New York article highlights the up-and-coming way to do that. Do not hire employees. Hire independent contractors.
This is not a brand new idea. Virtually all of the writing work that I've done over the last two decades has been as an independent contractor (well, except things like this blog, for which I'm paid in satisfaction, eyestrain, and a cleared-out head) . I don't get a W-2; instead, I get a Form 1099. That means I also don't get benefits, retirement, and, as a bonus, I get to pay some self-employment taxes to Uncle Sam. It's a sensible approach for a writer. I don't go in to work, my bosses don't really boss me, and I set my work hours. It's very flexible, which makes it easy to fit it in with the work I do that actually supports me.
But what if we extended that idea to other businesses? Uber doesn't "hire" anybody to drive you around; they just maintain a middleman kind of system. The article starts with an example from Homejoy-- hire a house cleaner for just $19 (and try not to shocked when he turns out to be homeless).
There's some economic sense in it. How do you get a business started when there's not really enough money in the potential market to make the business profitable or even do-able? Lower the labor costs hugely by using contract labor that is paid by job, not by hourly rates, and costs you $0.00 for benefits and pension costs.
For some workers this makes for a great way to earn some extra money on the side. For other workers, this makes for a way to get screwed (which reminds me that, yes, the world's oldest profession has tended to use the contract employee model as well).
But I think it also marks a continued shift in our fundamental model of a business's responsibilities to the community. Lots of Americans continue to believe that if you are able-bodied and willing to work, you should be able to support yourself. We are being exceedingly slow to catch on to just how many people in this country are now working poor-- employed and working hard, and yet not being paid enough to live.
Understand, I am not an opponent of profit. Making money is a great and worthwhile objective for a business. But in the "Not MY Problem" economy, many businesses no longer feel any need to provide jobs at which people can make a living. "Roll up your sleeves and we will make sure that you get an honest day's wage for an honest day's work," was once a thing that employers would say with pride. But it's being replaced with "We'll use you when it's handy for us and pay you as little as possible."
I am sure that some 1099 Biz operators are doing their best to serve both employees and business interests. But it's also clear from the article that some businesses are just using the model as a way to slash payroll costs dramatically. Shame on them.
Why mention any of this in an education blog? Because this contract employee model is one that many edbiz operators are excited to use themselves. It is easy to see how a charter school company could really boost that bottom line by simply using contract employees-- teachers who are only hired for a year at a time (or even less) but as contract employees do not get benefits or retirement. (As Paul Thomas smartly observed, "TFA, anyone?") If you didn't think such a thing was possible or viable, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. But first, I suggest you read the New York article.
[Update: While this may be a new sort of thing in the US, the world already has plenty of experience with independent contractors in teaching. Check out Alyssa Hadley Dunn's expose of Teachers Without Borders and take a look at this post on Teacher Solidarity, a blog that keeps an eye on the international teaching scene from the UK. ]
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