In the past, I've used up plenty of letters blasting Arne Duncan's blather in his serious of Ask Arne videos, so it's only fair that I provide coverage of one that is not completely dopey. The department has learned their lesson and disabled youtube comments on their Arne video, but I can still take a whack at it here.
For the topic of Teacher Diversity, Arne sits down for a pretend interview with Joiselle Cunningham, a 2013 teaching fellow, and David Johns, Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. Johns loses points for using "impactful" in a sentence, but he gets points back for the nifty phrase "to conspire for their success."
Most of the discussion is fairly straightforward and blather-free. Arne makes note of the fact that our diversity numbers are hugely out of whack-- the US teacher workforce is composed primarily of white women. Arne connects this to his time running Chicago schools, where entire buildings contained not a single man of color, and also notes that a large number of African-American homes are single mom homes. Johns also shares a story from his own teaching background, telling of being basically one of three men called upon to settle issues, by which I get the impression he means "break up fights." He was called on for older and larger students, and Arne for some reason finds this funny-- like, out loud guffaw funny.
The general gist here is that having a diverse teacher force in a building is a good thing. I would mock this for being as obvious as air, except that I've seen the discussion by aggrieved white teachers indicating their feelings are hurt by this and that any good teacher can teach any kid regardless of color, and while I don't disagree with that to an extent, I also don't see how anyone can deny that a child gets a special benefit from seeing adults in a school who look like him or her. So yeah-- the teacher force needs more men in general and more men of color in particular, particularly now that, as if often noted, our school system is a minority-majority system.
There's some nice jabber about a recruitment website, but the conversation, unfortunately, does not address the real problem, which is retention. African-American men are entering the profession at a high rate, a rate that would go far to solving our diversity deficit if they weren't also leaving the profession at a high rate.
We have lots of folks making noises about the need for diversity, and TFA has sustained rotator cuff injuries patting themselves on the back for their diversity recruitment. But the problem of retention is difficult to address for many reason, not the least of which is that a great deal of reformster energy is being devoted to chasing people out of teaching. The diversity issue forces us to confront the issue of retention, and reformster fluffernuttery notwithstanding, you do not retain people in teaching by reducing autonomy, cutting or freezing wages, making it easier to fire folks for any reason at all, or basing pay on test-based random data VAM models.
If reformsters like Duncan really want to address the diversity issue, then they need to take a good hard look in the face of retention issues and the question of why so many men of color are getting out of teaching so soon after they enter it. And that's not something this video even pretends to do. It's great that Duncan can identify an actual real issue, but if he's not willing to take a serious look at the problem, it's just hot air. Saying "we recognize this problem" is good politics, but that's all it is. We've seen Duncan's ability to make pleasing mouth noises before. It's not enough.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Navarette Doesn't Quite Get Common Core
Ruben Navarrette, Jr., contributed some CNN commentary about the Core this week. He asks if it's "a good idea gone bad." And he takes a look at the battle over the standards.
This war won't be won or lost in boardrooms, classrooms or conference rooms but in the worlds of politics and public relations. You might have a powerful idea to reform the education system. But if you don't spend the time, money and effort fashioning an effective communication strategy to sell it, you're toast. You can't bring a policy paper to a Twitter fight.
It's interesting to get a perspective from someone who follows politics and policy, but not education. It's also remarkable to read commentary that doesn't repackage the same language and talking points. I get so used to reading essentially the same thing over and over in different sources that it really does surprise me to encounter something different.
Navarrette correctly identifies opposition on both the right and the left, and he diagnoses the Core's problems as being tied to the worst marketing jobs ever. Here he summarizes his insights in one multiple choice question:
This war won't be won or lost in boardrooms, classrooms or conference rooms but in the worlds of politics and public relations. You might have a powerful idea to reform the education system. But if you don't spend the time, money and effort fashioning an effective communication strategy to sell it, you're toast. You can't bring a policy paper to a Twitter fight.
It's interesting to get a perspective from someone who follows politics and policy, but not education. It's also remarkable to read commentary that doesn't repackage the same language and talking points. I get so used to reading essentially the same thing over and over in different sources that it really does surprise me to encounter something different.
Navarrette correctly identifies opposition on both the right and the left, and he diagnoses the Core's problems as being tied to the worst marketing jobs ever. Here he summarizes his insights in one multiple choice question:
Common Core is ...
a. A good and harmless idea that has been unfairly maligned by a small band of critics on the left and the right.
b. A reasonable concept that has been poorly executed and terribly communicated by the elites who devised it.
c. A nonsensical method of teaching that reeks of a big government and corporate takeover of the public schools.
d. A gigantic "fail" that is taking on water faster than the Titanic after the ship hit the iceberg.
e. All of the above.
His answer is, of course, E.
It's interesting that Navarrette completely missed the carefully crafted language designed to make a fine distinction. He buys the need for some sort of standardized schooling in America, but he calls Common Core (repeatedly) a curriculum. When people don't pay close attention to your carefully designed plan to take a duck and rename it a mongoose, they end up just calling it what it obviously is. To many civilians, Common Core is obviously a curriculum.
However, he also misses that some of detail that many of the states who "withdrew" from the Core only withdrew from the name. Their "mongooses" are still ducks.
He connects this educational revolution to New Math and Whole Language as innovations that people were upset by. But he really places the blame on the architects.
Common Core supporters can't concoct a new national curriculum and then
fail to effectively communicate what they did, why they did it and what
effect it's going to have on kids. Politics is a reality. Learn to
navigate it, or stay out of the arena. And elitism and condescension are
better repellents than bug spray.
He thinks that opponents should shelve the Look Out For Number One approach, and here he shows another area of ignorance-- it's not selfishness that's driving opposition, but an investment in having a public education system in this country that has not been trashed, dismantled, and sold for parts. Navarrette hasn't looked very deeply into this issue; what we have to learn from him is what people who are only kind of paying attention are seeing, and if he's an indicator, what they are not seeing is the degree to which Common Core implementation is being driven by people who would like to turn US public education into a fast food model. They are also apparently not seeing the degree to which CCSS just aren't very good, or the degree to which CCSS drive punitive and destructive testing regimes.
Navarrette has bought the notion that the Core is basically okay-- it's just been marketed badly. But it's hard to market something well when it's just kind of craptastic.
He concludes
I hope that the people behind the new curriculum have learned some
humility and are ready to show us why we should listen to them. And I
hope more states stick with the Common Core and give it another chance.
Another chance? They've had many many chances all across the country. In many venues they've had everything they asked for. By now they should be telling us all about the various districts where the Core is making things educationally awesome, and parents and teachers, having lived with the Core for a year or two, should be saying, "Yeah, now that I've been through it, I can see it's great after all." But the opposite is happening. The more people are exposed to the Core, the less they like it. Even in Tennessee, where the Core has been given the red carpet treatment, teachers are learning to loathe it.
Common Core doesn't have a marketing problem any more than New Coke had a marketing problem. I encourage Navarrette to dig a little deeper and learn why the Core's problems run a little deeper than simple snotty marketing.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Getting Out Of Poverty
I googled "education" and "getting out of poverty." Over 1 million hits.
I googled "education" and "ending poverty." About 160K hits.
Many reformsters, from Arne Duncan to She Who Will Not Be Named, have tried to tout education as a way to end poverty, or even THE way to end poverty. I remain unconvinced. The end of poverty requires one of two things to happen:
1) All jobs will pay above-poverty-line wages. That means either an official or effective raising of the minimum wage.
2) All poverty-level jobs will disappear, to be replaced with enough high-paying jobs to keep all the displaced burger flippers and retail checkers employed.
Okay, actually there could be a 3)-- the government gives every poor person enough money to not be poor.
I am not an economist (although there are a lot of economists playing education expert, so I'm comfortable turning that table), but I am pretty sure both 1 and 2 are impossible (and 3 is harder than that). I see no reason to believe that having all students graduate from high school meeting the government's standard of College and Career Ready (aka got good scores on some standardized tests) will make the impossible more possible.
But mostly we're really talking about getting out of poverty, which is way different from ending it.
Imagine two buildings are on fire, dozens of people trapped inside. The fire company that shows up at one building says, "We have got to put out that fire." The other fire company says, "Let's try to save a couple of those people." That's the difference between "end poverty" and "get out of poverty."
When we say our goal is getting people out of poverty, we are committing ourselves to letting the building burn. And since poverty is grounded in jobs that need to be done and the people who have to take them, we are deciding to consign more victims to poverty. It's saying, "I don't care what happens to the ship or the people still trapped on it-- I've got my lifeboat seat." Or more concisely, "I've got mine, Jack."
Some folks try to soothe the harshness of this attitude (particularly followers of that Jesus fella, who had some things to say about people in poverty, and none of them were "I've got mine, Jack") by maintaining that the people who suffer from poverty deserve it. They're slackers, or miscreants, or just bad people. It's okay if poverty happens, as long as it happens to the right people.
Poverty must continue. People must suffer for their failings by being trapped in poverty. All we need do is provide an avenue for the deserving few to escape (or at least something we can claim is an avenue of escape). Once we've done that, we've done all we need do. If the educational path is there, anyone trapped in poverty has only himself to blame.
That's the system of belief that seems to drive some reformster thought. It's a system of thought that isn't merely divorced from reality, but is divorced from morality as well.
For two excellent reads on the subject:
Daniel S. Katz "The Moral Perversity of Today's Education Reform"
Jersey Jazzman "The Fundamental Flaw in the Reformy Argument"
I googled "education" and "ending poverty." About 160K hits.
Many reformsters, from Arne Duncan to She Who Will Not Be Named, have tried to tout education as a way to end poverty, or even THE way to end poverty. I remain unconvinced. The end of poverty requires one of two things to happen:
1) All jobs will pay above-poverty-line wages. That means either an official or effective raising of the minimum wage.
2) All poverty-level jobs will disappear, to be replaced with enough high-paying jobs to keep all the displaced burger flippers and retail checkers employed.
Okay, actually there could be a 3)-- the government gives every poor person enough money to not be poor.
I am not an economist (although there are a lot of economists playing education expert, so I'm comfortable turning that table), but I am pretty sure both 1 and 2 are impossible (and 3 is harder than that). I see no reason to believe that having all students graduate from high school meeting the government's standard of College and Career Ready (aka got good scores on some standardized tests) will make the impossible more possible.
But mostly we're really talking about getting out of poverty, which is way different from ending it.
Imagine two buildings are on fire, dozens of people trapped inside. The fire company that shows up at one building says, "We have got to put out that fire." The other fire company says, "Let's try to save a couple of those people." That's the difference between "end poverty" and "get out of poverty."
When we say our goal is getting people out of poverty, we are committing ourselves to letting the building burn. And since poverty is grounded in jobs that need to be done and the people who have to take them, we are deciding to consign more victims to poverty. It's saying, "I don't care what happens to the ship or the people still trapped on it-- I've got my lifeboat seat." Or more concisely, "I've got mine, Jack."
Some folks try to soothe the harshness of this attitude (particularly followers of that Jesus fella, who had some things to say about people in poverty, and none of them were "I've got mine, Jack") by maintaining that the people who suffer from poverty deserve it. They're slackers, or miscreants, or just bad people. It's okay if poverty happens, as long as it happens to the right people.
Poverty must continue. People must suffer for their failings by being trapped in poverty. All we need do is provide an avenue for the deserving few to escape (or at least something we can claim is an avenue of escape). Once we've done that, we've done all we need do. If the educational path is there, anyone trapped in poverty has only himself to blame.
That's the system of belief that seems to drive some reformster thought. It's a system of thought that isn't merely divorced from reality, but is divorced from morality as well.
For two excellent reads on the subject:
Daniel S. Katz "The Moral Perversity of Today's Education Reform"
Jersey Jazzman "The Fundamental Flaw in the Reformy Argument"
The Seven Big Lies of Reformsterdom
Some of the classic Not-Entirely-Truisms of the Reformster Movement have been quietly retired. For instance, one rarely hears the claim that teachers had major input in creating the Common Core any more because there's hardly a soul left who can say it with a straight face.
But there are still some huge bogus beliefs ,falsehoods in the foundation of reformster policies that make everything built upon them a waste of time and energy.
Educational Standards Make Countries Economically Stronger
At the root of reform is the idea that America's economic competitiveness rests on educational standards. If we have higher educational standards, the argument goes, our economy will become strong and robust and internationally competitive. Not only does this idea ignore every other economic factor known to intelligent human beings and economists, it comes wrapped with a bow and without an iota of proof, either historical or theoretical.
The Common Core Standards Are Higher, Stronger, Better Educational Standards
They aren't. The hard core Core corps at Fordham Institute determined that some states already had better standards than CCSS. Experts in the math and language fields have picked apart the standards in a dozen different ways and revealed them to be what they are-- the work of amateurs. And can we please talk about the fact, rarely addressed, that the standards only address math and language. These standards are supposed to be elevating the entire education system, and yet they only address two subject areas.
We Have Proxies That Are As Good As Reality
Reformsters propose that standardized test results are perfectly good stand-ins for educational quality. We are supposed to be able to talk about teacher VAM or VAAS or [your prefix here] VAAS scores as if they are actual numerical measures of how good a teacher is at her job. There's no proof that standardized test measure anything other than a student's ability to take standardized tests (well, that and their socio-economic class), and there's plenty of proof that VAM scores are only slightly more reliable than dice that have been numbered with pencil and thrown by chimpanzees.
Better Educational Outcomes Will End Poverty
The promise of reformsters (including prominent gummint reformsters) is that once every young American is emerging from high school College and Career Ready, every adult American will be employed at an above-minimum-wage job that is personally and economically rewarding. Education reform has been presented as a means to end poverty. This is a bizarre assertion. When the day of 100% CACR graduates arrives, will US employers declare, "Well, now that these guys are so well-educated, we will start paying them more." Did well-paying US jobs move overseas because Indian and Chinese workers are so better educated, or because they are willing to work for American peanuts? Will being a burger flipper become a lucrative position, or will it disappear as a job entirely because the burgers are flipping themselves? Exactly how will having better-educated citizens make more jobs appear? If you want to see the falseness of this promise debunked with charts and numbers, read this and this.
People Are Only Motivated by Threats and Punishment
Every piece of reformster implementation hinges on threats and punishment. If third graders won't learn to read, we will punish them with failure. If teachers do not perform well, we will cut their wages and/or fire them. It's not just that the threats are part of the new reformy status quo-- it's the underlying assumption that they are necessary. It appears in the side battles as well-- tenure foes are just certain that teachers couldn't possibly be doing good work if their job isn't on the line every day. It's a sad, cramped, meager view of human nature that wants to found a society based on the worst possible view of what it means to be human.
Education Is Just Job Training
Speaking of tiny, sad views of what it means to be human. Over and over again, reformsters suggest that the only real purpose of an education is to prepare one for work. You get an education so that you can become useful to your future possible employers. That's it. That's all. Everything that is beautiful and loving and glorious about human life, everything that resonates in our connections to each other and the world around us-- none of that matters in education. The measure of whether a subject should be taught is simply, "Will this help the student get a job?" Learning about everything that is rich and joyful and rewarding in the human experience, everything about learning to grow and understand and embrace who you are as a human being and how you make your way in the world-- that's all stuff you can do in your free time, I guess, if you really want to.
Education Is Scalable
The premise here is that the best education solutions can be applied to all students everywhere in the country. Let's stop for a second and think about how this concept has been successfully applied ever. We have the examples of... well, fast food, where we've provided the identical product for all customers. But we did that by producing a mediocre product, and even then, customers are self-selected, so we haven't really provided mediocre food for every single possible consumer (which is what a national education system would have to do). Or we can look at the example of Krispy Kreme donuts, a product that was highly successful on a regional basis, but when scaled to a larger market lost the qualities that made it successful.
But education is not a product, you say. That's true. So can we say that there are scalable standards for any other sorts of human relationships. Would you like to propose that we have a scalable national system for how to be a spouse, or a parent? Unlikely, since we can't even agree on the very broadest standards that we have in place now. No, education is personal and individual. No good education system is scalable on a national level.
These are seven huge lies of the reformster movement. There are other fairly hefty lies as well (free markets will make schools better, inexperienced teachers are the best), but these seven are lies huge enough and foundational enough that the reformster status quo cannot exist without them. Pull any one of these rotted jenga blocks of lies, and the whole tower or garbage comes crashing down. See any of these lies for what they are, see the truth they fight to obscure, and one can't help but look at the reformster program and recognize that it's just plain wrong.
But there are still some huge bogus beliefs ,falsehoods in the foundation of reformster policies that make everything built upon them a waste of time and energy.
Educational Standards Make Countries Economically Stronger
At the root of reform is the idea that America's economic competitiveness rests on educational standards. If we have higher educational standards, the argument goes, our economy will become strong and robust and internationally competitive. Not only does this idea ignore every other economic factor known to intelligent human beings and economists, it comes wrapped with a bow and without an iota of proof, either historical or theoretical.
The Common Core Standards Are Higher, Stronger, Better Educational Standards
They aren't. The hard core Core corps at Fordham Institute determined that some states already had better standards than CCSS. Experts in the math and language fields have picked apart the standards in a dozen different ways and revealed them to be what they are-- the work of amateurs. And can we please talk about the fact, rarely addressed, that the standards only address math and language. These standards are supposed to be elevating the entire education system, and yet they only address two subject areas.
We Have Proxies That Are As Good As Reality
Reformsters propose that standardized test results are perfectly good stand-ins for educational quality. We are supposed to be able to talk about teacher VAM or VAAS or [your prefix here] VAAS scores as if they are actual numerical measures of how good a teacher is at her job. There's no proof that standardized test measure anything other than a student's ability to take standardized tests (well, that and their socio-economic class), and there's plenty of proof that VAM scores are only slightly more reliable than dice that have been numbered with pencil and thrown by chimpanzees.
Better Educational Outcomes Will End Poverty
The promise of reformsters (including prominent gummint reformsters) is that once every young American is emerging from high school College and Career Ready, every adult American will be employed at an above-minimum-wage job that is personally and economically rewarding. Education reform has been presented as a means to end poverty. This is a bizarre assertion. When the day of 100% CACR graduates arrives, will US employers declare, "Well, now that these guys are so well-educated, we will start paying them more." Did well-paying US jobs move overseas because Indian and Chinese workers are so better educated, or because they are willing to work for American peanuts? Will being a burger flipper become a lucrative position, or will it disappear as a job entirely because the burgers are flipping themselves? Exactly how will having better-educated citizens make more jobs appear? If you want to see the falseness of this promise debunked with charts and numbers, read this and this.
People Are Only Motivated by Threats and Punishment
Every piece of reformster implementation hinges on threats and punishment. If third graders won't learn to read, we will punish them with failure. If teachers do not perform well, we will cut their wages and/or fire them. It's not just that the threats are part of the new reformy status quo-- it's the underlying assumption that they are necessary. It appears in the side battles as well-- tenure foes are just certain that teachers couldn't possibly be doing good work if their job isn't on the line every day. It's a sad, cramped, meager view of human nature that wants to found a society based on the worst possible view of what it means to be human.
Education Is Just Job Training
Speaking of tiny, sad views of what it means to be human. Over and over again, reformsters suggest that the only real purpose of an education is to prepare one for work. You get an education so that you can become useful to your future possible employers. That's it. That's all. Everything that is beautiful and loving and glorious about human life, everything that resonates in our connections to each other and the world around us-- none of that matters in education. The measure of whether a subject should be taught is simply, "Will this help the student get a job?" Learning about everything that is rich and joyful and rewarding in the human experience, everything about learning to grow and understand and embrace who you are as a human being and how you make your way in the world-- that's all stuff you can do in your free time, I guess, if you really want to.
Education Is Scalable
The premise here is that the best education solutions can be applied to all students everywhere in the country. Let's stop for a second and think about how this concept has been successfully applied ever. We have the examples of... well, fast food, where we've provided the identical product for all customers. But we did that by producing a mediocre product, and even then, customers are self-selected, so we haven't really provided mediocre food for every single possible consumer (which is what a national education system would have to do). Or we can look at the example of Krispy Kreme donuts, a product that was highly successful on a regional basis, but when scaled to a larger market lost the qualities that made it successful.
But education is not a product, you say. That's true. So can we say that there are scalable standards for any other sorts of human relationships. Would you like to propose that we have a scalable national system for how to be a spouse, or a parent? Unlikely, since we can't even agree on the very broadest standards that we have in place now. No, education is personal and individual. No good education system is scalable on a national level.
These are seven huge lies of the reformster movement. There are other fairly hefty lies as well (free markets will make schools better, inexperienced teachers are the best), but these seven are lies huge enough and foundational enough that the reformster status quo cannot exist without them. Pull any one of these rotted jenga blocks of lies, and the whole tower or garbage comes crashing down. See any of these lies for what they are, see the truth they fight to obscure, and one can't help but look at the reformster program and recognize that it's just plain wrong.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
What Lily Misses about the Common Core
My esteemed colleague at Edushyster scored an interview with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia, and as always, it's pretty encouraging to see an NEA boss express herself in plain English that clearly opposes reformster ideas-- except for the Common Core. I'm going to reprint a full paragraph because I think it articulates more clearly than anything I've seen where LEG's mistake lies.
But listen, I have this exact conversation with my best friend all the time. She hate, hate, hates the Common Core and she always says: *You know exactly what’s going to happen, Lily. You know the Common Core is just going to be turned into one more high-stakes punishment. It will be all about cut scores, you get fired, this kid doesn’t graduate.* I can’t disagree with her on that. She’s basically describing what happened in New York. Before teachers were even trained to know what was in the Common Core at their grade level, before they had time to do anything in a thoughtful way, it was clearly so much more important to have the cut scores and the punishments in place. But here’s what I tell my friend. Let’s say you could develop the perfect standards. They’re so perfect that everyone is throwing up confetti because that’s how perfect they are. And you find the perfect curriculum and you have text books that are aligned to these perfect standards. And you only have to give one test a year instead of a thousand of them. In other words, it’s perfect! But some politician says, *you get punished, you get a prize.* It’s not the standards. It’s not the curriculum. It is the high-stakes punishment that is hooked to them. That’s why people are so upset about the standards, because of the high-stakes punishment that’s now attached to them and that has corrupted what it means to teach. We have to get rid of that.
What happened in New York (and with various variations, around the country) is what the Common Core was designed to do. The Core was designed as a means of imposing standardization on US public schools, and as any manufacturing person can tell you, you cannot have that kind of standardization without measuring the output.
The Standards and the Tests are inextricable, because conceptually, the Test came first. The cut scores and punishments were put in place first because they were always the point. What the Founding Fathers of Coresylvania said was, "We are going to put a mechanism in place for checking to see that every state is on point. Of course, we'll tell them what the instrument is checking for, but the checking-- that's the important part."
The Test is not there to measure the outcome of the Standards. The Standards are there to facilitate preparation for the test. They are not designed to answer the question "What would a great education look like." They are designed to answer the question, "What will be on the test? What must your students do to prove to the People In Charge that you are doing a good job?" For the people who created, promote, and profit from the Core, it is inconceivable that it could be separated from testing.
Let's look at that hypothetical perfect standard.
The perfection would be rooted in a completely different purpose and intent. The perfect standards would exist in order to help provide guidance and support to teachers, filtered through their own professional judgment. The Standards would exist as a means to assist teachers, not as an avenue through which they must prove they are meeting someone else's conception of their job.
The number of tests I would give per year with the perfect standards would be zero, because no standardized test will be capable of giving a true measure of how well my students met those standards.
Proving you're doing a good job and actually doing a good job are two separate activities. The Common Core are designed around proving we're doing a good job, and for that reason (among others, but let me be brief-ish) they cannot be simply separated from testing.
Put another way, the Common Core Standards and LEG's hypothetical perfect standards are two completely different kind of standards.
The Core standards are manufacturing standards, a list of tolerances that widget construction must adhere to. Manufacturing standards mean nothing unless you use them to test your widgets, either passing them on or throwing them out, depending on how well they meet the standards. These are standards that People in Power use to judge, accept, and reject others.
Perfect human standards are internal guidance systems. As in, "I trust my daughter's choice in boyfriends because I know she has high standards" or "Our hospital personnel are committed to a high standard of care." These are standards that people use as their own personal compass.
Manufacturing standards may be used to make course corrections in the process, but the individual widgets are in a strictly binary win-or-lose situation. The human standards allow for course corrections constantly, with the goal of making use of multiple, continuous opportunities to do well.
Manufacturing standards are followed by people who are concerned about avoiding punishment. Perfect human standards are followed by people who are concerned about being the best they can be, being able to see a friendly face in the mirror and to sleep soundly at night. Manufacturing standards have no moral imperative other than "Save yourself." Human standards have some sort of moral code at their foundation.
Removing the threat of punishment from manufacturing standards does not turn them into human standards. Because they have no moral basis, without the threat of punishment they simply evaporate, or join the big shelf full of dusty binders. Manufacturing standards are the standards that you follow only when somebody is watching. Human standards are the ones you follow all the time, even when you're alone.
Imagining that you can remove the Tests from the Core and end up with useful standards is like imagining that you can chain-saw off the roof of your car and have a convertible. It's like imagining that you can create a housebroken pony by chopping the back end off of a horse. It's like imagining that your spouse would be a great spouse if that spouse were an entirely different person.
Lily, it is the standards, because the standards have no existence independent of the Test. The standards are not the kind of standards you imagine as being perfect (or nearly so), and removing the testing will not turn them into those standards. Removing the testing will turn them into an irrelevant mass of documentation created by amateurs and ignored by real teachers, so for that reason, I still support removing the tests as a tactic-- but for that exact reason the Core supporters will fight decoupling tooth and nail.
But listen, I have this exact conversation with my best friend all the time. She hate, hate, hates the Common Core and she always says: *You know exactly what’s going to happen, Lily. You know the Common Core is just going to be turned into one more high-stakes punishment. It will be all about cut scores, you get fired, this kid doesn’t graduate.* I can’t disagree with her on that. She’s basically describing what happened in New York. Before teachers were even trained to know what was in the Common Core at their grade level, before they had time to do anything in a thoughtful way, it was clearly so much more important to have the cut scores and the punishments in place. But here’s what I tell my friend. Let’s say you could develop the perfect standards. They’re so perfect that everyone is throwing up confetti because that’s how perfect they are. And you find the perfect curriculum and you have text books that are aligned to these perfect standards. And you only have to give one test a year instead of a thousand of them. In other words, it’s perfect! But some politician says, *you get punished, you get a prize.* It’s not the standards. It’s not the curriculum. It is the high-stakes punishment that is hooked to them. That’s why people are so upset about the standards, because of the high-stakes punishment that’s now attached to them and that has corrupted what it means to teach. We have to get rid of that.
What happened in New York (and with various variations, around the country) is what the Common Core was designed to do. The Core was designed as a means of imposing standardization on US public schools, and as any manufacturing person can tell you, you cannot have that kind of standardization without measuring the output.
The Standards and the Tests are inextricable, because conceptually, the Test came first. The cut scores and punishments were put in place first because they were always the point. What the Founding Fathers of Coresylvania said was, "We are going to put a mechanism in place for checking to see that every state is on point. Of course, we'll tell them what the instrument is checking for, but the checking-- that's the important part."
The Test is not there to measure the outcome of the Standards. The Standards are there to facilitate preparation for the test. They are not designed to answer the question "What would a great education look like." They are designed to answer the question, "What will be on the test? What must your students do to prove to the People In Charge that you are doing a good job?" For the people who created, promote, and profit from the Core, it is inconceivable that it could be separated from testing.
Let's look at that hypothetical perfect standard.
The perfection would be rooted in a completely different purpose and intent. The perfect standards would exist in order to help provide guidance and support to teachers, filtered through their own professional judgment. The Standards would exist as a means to assist teachers, not as an avenue through which they must prove they are meeting someone else's conception of their job.
The number of tests I would give per year with the perfect standards would be zero, because no standardized test will be capable of giving a true measure of how well my students met those standards.
Proving you're doing a good job and actually doing a good job are two separate activities. The Common Core are designed around proving we're doing a good job, and for that reason (among others, but let me be brief-ish) they cannot be simply separated from testing.
Put another way, the Common Core Standards and LEG's hypothetical perfect standards are two completely different kind of standards.
The Core standards are manufacturing standards, a list of tolerances that widget construction must adhere to. Manufacturing standards mean nothing unless you use them to test your widgets, either passing them on or throwing them out, depending on how well they meet the standards. These are standards that People in Power use to judge, accept, and reject others.
Perfect human standards are internal guidance systems. As in, "I trust my daughter's choice in boyfriends because I know she has high standards" or "Our hospital personnel are committed to a high standard of care." These are standards that people use as their own personal compass.
Manufacturing standards may be used to make course corrections in the process, but the individual widgets are in a strictly binary win-or-lose situation. The human standards allow for course corrections constantly, with the goal of making use of multiple, continuous opportunities to do well.
Manufacturing standards are followed by people who are concerned about avoiding punishment. Perfect human standards are followed by people who are concerned about being the best they can be, being able to see a friendly face in the mirror and to sleep soundly at night. Manufacturing standards have no moral imperative other than "Save yourself." Human standards have some sort of moral code at their foundation.
Removing the threat of punishment from manufacturing standards does not turn them into human standards. Because they have no moral basis, without the threat of punishment they simply evaporate, or join the big shelf full of dusty binders. Manufacturing standards are the standards that you follow only when somebody is watching. Human standards are the ones you follow all the time, even when you're alone.
Imagining that you can remove the Tests from the Core and end up with useful standards is like imagining that you can chain-saw off the roof of your car and have a convertible. It's like imagining that you can create a housebroken pony by chopping the back end off of a horse. It's like imagining that your spouse would be a great spouse if that spouse were an entirely different person.
Lily, it is the standards, because the standards have no existence independent of the Test. The standards are not the kind of standards you imagine as being perfect (or nearly so), and removing the testing will not turn them into those standards. Removing the testing will turn them into an irrelevant mass of documentation created by amateurs and ignored by real teachers, so for that reason, I still support removing the tests as a tactic-- but for that exact reason the Core supporters will fight decoupling tooth and nail.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Gates at Politico. Wrong. So Wrong.
Bill Gates popped up once again, spicing up a Politico interview with some of his standard educational wrongness.
First, he proposes that Common Core is simply a technocratic solution for education. He then compares the standards to the standardized railroad gauge or standardized plugs for appliances. Let me take a deep breath and see if I can put in words (beyond the obvious "children are not toasters") why this analogy is simply wrong.
Railroad gauges and plug configurations are, within certain engineering requirements, fairly arbitrary choices. Had railroad gauges been set a few inches wider or a few inches, it would not matter. The purpose of setting a standard is not to impose a choice that's a better choice for the rails, but to impose a choice that makes all the rails work as parts of a larger whole. Within certain extremes, there's no bad choice for gauge width; the actual width of the gauge matters less than the uniformity.
Decisions about educational standards are not arbitrary. Some educational choices are better than others, and those choices matter in and of themselves. The choice of standards matters far more than the uniformity. Human children are not in school for the primary purpose of being fitted to become part of a larger whole. Imposing a bad standards choice simply to have uniformity is a disastrous choice, but that is what the Common Core has done-- sacrificed good standards in order to have uniformity, which is not even a desirable goal for human children in the first place.
(There's an irony here-- the computer biz has been messing with the standards for powering equipment for years. Manufacturers have been forced to rig up a variety of adaptations because they are stuck with a world of outlets locked into old standards, but we also have power-by-USB cords, allowing tech equipment to circumvent the old standards.)
Gates has some intellectual blind spots, and they shine through in this interview.
First, it appears from out here in the cheap seats that he's simply been a boss far too long.
The idea that what you should know at various grades … should be well structured and you should really insist on kids knowing something so you can build on that.
Because that's how education happens? You just "insist" that kids know something at a particular stage of their development. This is the language of someone who's used to simply being a boss, and not having to deal with people who hold onto their own preferences or demand that their individuality be recognized.
Gates also describes the previous fifty standards as a "cacophony," which is an interesting word choice. A cacophony is a big bunch of noise, disorderly. It's what you call the Rolling Stones if you'd rather listen to Bach. With this word, Gates is not suggesting that the previous standards were ineffective or bad or destructive-- he's just saying they were messy and bothersome. This is Cult of Order talk. This is demanding that all the pencils on every desk are lined up just so, not because there's any proof that it's more effective, but because the mess just makes his fingers itch and his head hurt.
And charters. He loves charters. Which-- more irony-- is an odd thing to be in favor of when your other goal is to make all schools essentially the same, anyway.
First, he proposes that Common Core is simply a technocratic solution for education. He then compares the standards to the standardized railroad gauge or standardized plugs for appliances. Let me take a deep breath and see if I can put in words (beyond the obvious "children are not toasters") why this analogy is simply wrong.
Railroad gauges and plug configurations are, within certain engineering requirements, fairly arbitrary choices. Had railroad gauges been set a few inches wider or a few inches, it would not matter. The purpose of setting a standard is not to impose a choice that's a better choice for the rails, but to impose a choice that makes all the rails work as parts of a larger whole. Within certain extremes, there's no bad choice for gauge width; the actual width of the gauge matters less than the uniformity.
Decisions about educational standards are not arbitrary. Some educational choices are better than others, and those choices matter in and of themselves. The choice of standards matters far more than the uniformity. Human children are not in school for the primary purpose of being fitted to become part of a larger whole. Imposing a bad standards choice simply to have uniformity is a disastrous choice, but that is what the Common Core has done-- sacrificed good standards in order to have uniformity, which is not even a desirable goal for human children in the first place.
(There's an irony here-- the computer biz has been messing with the standards for powering equipment for years. Manufacturers have been forced to rig up a variety of adaptations because they are stuck with a world of outlets locked into old standards, but we also have power-by-USB cords, allowing tech equipment to circumvent the old standards.)
Gates has some intellectual blind spots, and they shine through in this interview.
First, it appears from out here in the cheap seats that he's simply been a boss far too long.
The idea that what you should know at various grades … should be well structured and you should really insist on kids knowing something so you can build on that.
Because that's how education happens? You just "insist" that kids know something at a particular stage of their development. This is the language of someone who's used to simply being a boss, and not having to deal with people who hold onto their own preferences or demand that their individuality be recognized.
Gates also describes the previous fifty standards as a "cacophony," which is an interesting word choice. A cacophony is a big bunch of noise, disorderly. It's what you call the Rolling Stones if you'd rather listen to Bach. With this word, Gates is not suggesting that the previous standards were ineffective or bad or destructive-- he's just saying they were messy and bothersome. This is Cult of Order talk. This is demanding that all the pencils on every desk are lined up just so, not because there's any proof that it's more effective, but because the mess just makes his fingers itch and his head hurt.
And charters. He loves charters. Which-- more irony-- is an odd thing to be in favor of when your other goal is to make all schools essentially the same, anyway.
The Market Hates Losers
Fans of market forces for education simply don't understand how market forces actually work.
What they like to say is that free market competition breeds excellence. It does not, and it never has.
Free market competition breeds excellent marketing. McDonald's did not become successful by creating the most excellent food. Coke and Pepsi are not that outstandingly superior to RC or any store brand. Betamax was actually technically superior to VHS, but VHS had a better marketing plan.
The market loves winners. It loves winners even if they aren't winning-- Amazon has yet to turn an actual profit, ever, but investors think that Bezos is a winner, so they keep shoveling money on top of him. And when we enter the area of crony capitalism, which likes to pretend it's the free market, picking winners becomes even less related to success. Charter schools were once a great idea with some real promise, but the whole business has become so toxically polluted with crony capitalism that it has no hope of producing educational excellence in its present form.
But then, the market has only one measure for winning, and that is the production of money. The heart of a business plan is not "Can I build a really excellent mousetrap?" The heart of a business plan is "Can I sell this mousetrap and make money doing it?"
There is nothing about that question that is compatible with pursuing excellence in public education.
The most incompatible part of market-driven education is not its love of money-making winner, but its attitude about losers. Because the market hates losers. The market has no plan for dealing with losers. It simply wants all losers to go away.
Here's the problem. I teach plenty of students whom the market would consider losers. They take too long to learn. They have developmental obstacles to learning. They have disciplinary issues. They may be learning disabled. They have families of origin who create obstacles rather than providing support. What this means to a market-driven education system is that these loser students are too costly, offer too little profit margin, and, in their failures, hurt the numbers that are so critical to marketing the school.
In PA, we already know how the market-driven sector feels about these students. It loves to recruit them by promising a free computer and a happy land of success where nobody ever hounds you about attendance and all homework can be completed by whoever is sitting by the computer. But sooner or later, those students are sloughed off and sent back to public schools. And by "sooner or later," I mean some time after the cyber-charter has collected the money for that student.
The market sheds its losers, its failures (well, unless they can convince some patron or crony that they are just winners who are suffering a minor setback). Schools cannot.
For the free market, failure is not only an option, but a necessity. Losers must fail, be defeated, go away. For a public school system, that is not an option. Only with due process and extraordinary circumstances should a student be refused a public education. And certainly no traditional respectable public school system can simply declare that it has too many loser kids, so it's going to shut down.
The free market approach to schools must inevitably turn them upside down. In a free market system, the school does not exist to serve the student, but the student exists to serve the interests of the school by bringing in money and by generating the kinds of numbers that make good marketing (so that the school can bring in more money). And that means that students who do not serve the interests of the free-market school must be dumped, tossed out, discarded.
To label students losers, to abandon them, to toss them aside, and to do all that to the students who are in most need of an education-- that is the very antithesis of American public education. The free market approach to schools will no more unleash innovation and excellence than did 500 channels on cable TV. What it will do is chew up and spit out large numbers of students for being business liabilities.
Free market forces will not save US education; they will destroy it. To suggest that entrepreneurs should have the chance to profit at the cost of young lives is not simply bad policy-- it's immoral. It's wrong.
What they like to say is that free market competition breeds excellence. It does not, and it never has.
Free market competition breeds excellent marketing. McDonald's did not become successful by creating the most excellent food. Coke and Pepsi are not that outstandingly superior to RC or any store brand. Betamax was actually technically superior to VHS, but VHS had a better marketing plan.
The market loves winners. It loves winners even if they aren't winning-- Amazon has yet to turn an actual profit, ever, but investors think that Bezos is a winner, so they keep shoveling money on top of him. And when we enter the area of crony capitalism, which likes to pretend it's the free market, picking winners becomes even less related to success. Charter schools were once a great idea with some real promise, but the whole business has become so toxically polluted with crony capitalism that it has no hope of producing educational excellence in its present form.
But then, the market has only one measure for winning, and that is the production of money. The heart of a business plan is not "Can I build a really excellent mousetrap?" The heart of a business plan is "Can I sell this mousetrap and make money doing it?"
There is nothing about that question that is compatible with pursuing excellence in public education.
The most incompatible part of market-driven education is not its love of money-making winner, but its attitude about losers. Because the market hates losers. The market has no plan for dealing with losers. It simply wants all losers to go away.
Here's the problem. I teach plenty of students whom the market would consider losers. They take too long to learn. They have developmental obstacles to learning. They have disciplinary issues. They may be learning disabled. They have families of origin who create obstacles rather than providing support. What this means to a market-driven education system is that these loser students are too costly, offer too little profit margin, and, in their failures, hurt the numbers that are so critical to marketing the school.
In PA, we already know how the market-driven sector feels about these students. It loves to recruit them by promising a free computer and a happy land of success where nobody ever hounds you about attendance and all homework can be completed by whoever is sitting by the computer. But sooner or later, those students are sloughed off and sent back to public schools. And by "sooner or later," I mean some time after the cyber-charter has collected the money for that student.
The market sheds its losers, its failures (well, unless they can convince some patron or crony that they are just winners who are suffering a minor setback). Schools cannot.
For the free market, failure is not only an option, but a necessity. Losers must fail, be defeated, go away. For a public school system, that is not an option. Only with due process and extraordinary circumstances should a student be refused a public education. And certainly no traditional respectable public school system can simply declare that it has too many loser kids, so it's going to shut down.
The free market approach to schools must inevitably turn them upside down. In a free market system, the school does not exist to serve the student, but the student exists to serve the interests of the school by bringing in money and by generating the kinds of numbers that make good marketing (so that the school can bring in more money). And that means that students who do not serve the interests of the free-market school must be dumped, tossed out, discarded.
To label students losers, to abandon them, to toss them aside, and to do all that to the students who are in most need of an education-- that is the very antithesis of American public education. The free market approach to schools will no more unleash innovation and excellence than did 500 channels on cable TV. What it will do is chew up and spit out large numbers of students for being business liabilities.
Free market forces will not save US education; they will destroy it. To suggest that entrepreneurs should have the chance to profit at the cost of young lives is not simply bad policy-- it's immoral. It's wrong.
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