At the end of the week, the AP ran this story about the current job market. In it, they propose that there are five mysteries about the job market that are just waiting to be solved.
* The percentage of adults working or seeking work has dropped from 66% to 62.8% (a thirty-five year low). That's 7.5 million not-workers. Half of those are retired boomers and some more are students. Question #1-- how many would start looking again if the economic suckage continued to suck slightly less?
* 3.8 million people used to be on the unemployment list. Now they aren't. Did they get jobs, or did they give up? Short answer-- nobody really knows. Long researchy answer (YMMV) is about 40% got jobs and 32% gave up.
* 7.3 million people want full-time jobs but have to settle for part-time work. What does that mean? Some economists think it's the new (crappy) normal (and certain bloggers are sadly inclined to agree with them), while others think that wages may go up. You make your own call about which group are on a unicorn hunt.
* Companies are advertising lots of jobs but not filling them. Maybe they're choosier. Maybe they need welders but everyone's off at college. A fun theory is that it's so easy to advertise a job electronically that employers just post everything, whether they're really ready to hire or not. None of the commenters suggest that the right people just aren't out there. Employers just don't seem to feel any urgency to fill the openings they claim they have.
* Job growth has fallen for women, who only got 40% of the jobs since this recovery-like period started in 2009. That's a sharp drop from previous recoveries, and it includes men glomming up a bunch of usually-female jobs like hotelly stuff. One economist explains this by noting that men took most of the job-losing hit in the recession; once those men are hired back, things should even out.
My question is this--
Which part of this mass of mysteries would be solved by having more college graduates? As is often the case with economic stories, a variety of economists were quoted with a variety of theories. And yet not one was quoted as saying, "This trend would be aided by having more college graduates--oh, and high school grads who are totally career ready."
The administration's theory is that a bumped-up education system would totally wipe out unemployment, poverty, and halitosis. It's a great theory-- it just doesn't seem to have any support in reality. Even computer giants are laying off workers (while claiming that they really need more of those cheap foreign visa hires). And long before the ACA, employers were figuring out that is they just kept to a part-time work force, they could save big bucks on benefits and health care. Plus that overseas tendency to work for peanuts which employers find so appealing.
Put it all together and you get a picture of employment and the economy that is complicated, difficult and not easily fixed. The notion that simply overhauling the US education system will fix it is either incredibly naively dopey, or a cynical ploy to look pro-active instead of helpless. Do any of these mysteries look like a problem in search of a Common Core solution? The idea that economic recovery will be spurred by flunking eight-year-olds who do poorly on standardized reading tests or making all sixteen-year-olds study calculus-- well, that's even worse than a unicorn hunt. It's just one more way in which we propose to punish pour children for their parents' and grandparents' economic failings. As solutions go, we'd be as far ahead to sacrifice newts under a full moon.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Friday, October 3, 2014
Living in a Non-Standardized World
My school was closed today. We're closed every year on this day because it is the weekend of our local small town festival. This is our local holiday.
Like many small town festivals, we have hung ours on a thinnish peg. John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, lived here for a while in the distant past, and so our festival is Applefest.
We close down the main drag on Saturday and Sunday. There's a 5K race down the main street of the city and back. There's a car show on Sunday which fills that same street. There are roughly a gazzillion vendors in the park, selling everything from Ecuadorian sweaters to handcrafted clocks to Jesus painted on roof slate. There's a whole street of local service group vendors, right across from the farmers' market. The local theater group schedules a Big Show for this weekend (this year it's Chicago, which I'm directing but must modestly admit that, thanks to my cast and orchestra, it kicks ass). Last night my school sponsored our high school hall of fame induction dinner. Today my wife and I got up early to go to the apple pancake breakfast at the Catholic church.
Applefest was partly invented and has partly grown organically. When I was a tadpole, it was an afternoon of small crafty booths. Now it's a three day festival that shuts down the whole town and brings in tens of thousands of visitors. Maybe hundreds of thousands. There's not any good way to judge.
Why am I talking about this? Because it's an example of how life in a non-standardized world looks.
No amount of "town festival standards and practices" guidelines would have helped a bit, either ijn the creation of the festival nor in its growth and execution. Most especially, it would not have improved the experience of it.
There are thousands of small town festivals like ours (and a few hundred big city festivals trying to capture the same small town feel). They all have many similar features, and yet they are all different. If you teleport me into the middle of any of them, there isn't the slightest chance that I would mistake it for our festival here. They are all specific to place. You cannot just move seamlessly from one to another without it making a difference.
But they are most of all specific to people. Folks come back for Applefest to see people. In an hour of walking, I will touch on a hundred different relationships. This morning I saw dozens of current students. I saw some old friends and classmates of my own. I saw a student from a decade ago who wanted to tell me that she is now a middle-school English teacher and she sometimes channels me in class. I do remember her from back in the day, and her story becomes one more to add to the file of "People do grow up and turn out okay even if that future is not obvious when they're sixteen" stories.
So when people start talking about standardization in schools as if it is self-evident that standardization is a Good Thing, Applefest is the kind of human experience I think about. How can standardization possibly make human experience better? Why would it be any sort of improvement to be able to move from one place to another without it making a difference? Why is it a good idea to make human experiences more the same? And how, in a world where the foundation of all human activity is the relationship and interactions between various specific individual human beings-- how can standardization even happen without trying to render unimportant the very things that make us human?
If there's anything Applefest doesn't need, it certainly doesn't need a state or federal or "expert" authority to come in with some sort of standards for how to do this better. We don't need to standardize the events or the experience or the people. My experience this morning of walking around town with my wife was unique and singular and absolutely unstandardized.
Schools are a a product of the place in which they exist and the people who walk their halls. Some may struggle, and some may face large challenges. Standardization is not the solution to any of those challenges. Standardization is not what makes the world go round. Standardization is not what makes life rich and full and worth living. And if standardization does not enhance the experience of being human in the world, how could it possibly enhance the experience of school.
Like many small town festivals, we have hung ours on a thinnish peg. John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, lived here for a while in the distant past, and so our festival is Applefest.
We close down the main drag on Saturday and Sunday. There's a 5K race down the main street of the city and back. There's a car show on Sunday which fills that same street. There are roughly a gazzillion vendors in the park, selling everything from Ecuadorian sweaters to handcrafted clocks to Jesus painted on roof slate. There's a whole street of local service group vendors, right across from the farmers' market. The local theater group schedules a Big Show for this weekend (this year it's Chicago, which I'm directing but must modestly admit that, thanks to my cast and orchestra, it kicks ass). Last night my school sponsored our high school hall of fame induction dinner. Today my wife and I got up early to go to the apple pancake breakfast at the Catholic church.
Applefest was partly invented and has partly grown organically. When I was a tadpole, it was an afternoon of small crafty booths. Now it's a three day festival that shuts down the whole town and brings in tens of thousands of visitors. Maybe hundreds of thousands. There's not any good way to judge.
Why am I talking about this? Because it's an example of how life in a non-standardized world looks.
No amount of "town festival standards and practices" guidelines would have helped a bit, either ijn the creation of the festival nor in its growth and execution. Most especially, it would not have improved the experience of it.
There are thousands of small town festivals like ours (and a few hundred big city festivals trying to capture the same small town feel). They all have many similar features, and yet they are all different. If you teleport me into the middle of any of them, there isn't the slightest chance that I would mistake it for our festival here. They are all specific to place. You cannot just move seamlessly from one to another without it making a difference.
But they are most of all specific to people. Folks come back for Applefest to see people. In an hour of walking, I will touch on a hundred different relationships. This morning I saw dozens of current students. I saw some old friends and classmates of my own. I saw a student from a decade ago who wanted to tell me that she is now a middle-school English teacher and she sometimes channels me in class. I do remember her from back in the day, and her story becomes one more to add to the file of "People do grow up and turn out okay even if that future is not obvious when they're sixteen" stories.
So when people start talking about standardization in schools as if it is self-evident that standardization is a Good Thing, Applefest is the kind of human experience I think about. How can standardization possibly make human experience better? Why would it be any sort of improvement to be able to move from one place to another without it making a difference? Why is it a good idea to make human experiences more the same? And how, in a world where the foundation of all human activity is the relationship and interactions between various specific individual human beings-- how can standardization even happen without trying to render unimportant the very things that make us human?
If there's anything Applefest doesn't need, it certainly doesn't need a state or federal or "expert" authority to come in with some sort of standards for how to do this better. We don't need to standardize the events or the experience or the people. My experience this morning of walking around town with my wife was unique and singular and absolutely unstandardized.
Schools are a a product of the place in which they exist and the people who walk their halls. Some may struggle, and some may face large challenges. Standardization is not the solution to any of those challenges. Standardization is not what makes the world go round. Standardization is not what makes life rich and full and worth living. And if standardization does not enhance the experience of being human in the world, how could it possibly enhance the experience of school.
Fraud and Mismanagement in PA Charters
In September, a report entitled "Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's Charter Schools" was released by The Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and Action United. The full report runs twenty pages, but the short conclusion about fraud and financial mismanagement in PA charters is this:
There's a lot of it, and nobody is in any real position to catch it.
The charter bill in PA is expensive enough anyway-- over a billion dollars of taxpayer money is directed away from public schools and into charter treasuries, where they will never see the light of day again. (Remember, one of the rules of operating a modern charter is that you are a public school when it comes to grabbing public tax dollars, but not when it comes to accounting for those dollars.)
The report finds two major flaws with the current oversight system. First, general auditing techniques do not uncover fraud (but they are all we're using). Second, the offices responsible for ferreting out fraud have barely enough staff to ferret out a ferret. The Philadelphia School District, which has run out the red carpet for 86 charters, employed a whopping two auditors to keep an eye on them.
They suggest some repairs for these issues, including audits by people who know fraud stuff, more staff, more transparency and accountability for charters, and better safeguards moving forward. The report would like to see better whistleblower protection and a moratorium on new charters until a decent oversight system is in place. They also include a handy fraud chart, a kind of family tree of the different ways in which charter operators can bilk the taxpayer.
In the meantime, the report figures that the Keystone State has been bilked of at least $30 million by charter operators, including some of these outstanding examples;
* The founder of the Pocono Mountain Charter School used $2.5 million in school money to fix up a church property he ran
* The CEO and founder of New Media Technology Charter School in Philly stole over half a million to help out some other side businesses.
* The founder of Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School has been indicted for stealing a whopping $8 million to provide a lavish lifestyle for himself.
It's worth noting that virtually none of the frauds were discovered by the kinds of auditing checks that the report calls for. Instead, it has been whistleblower tips and journalism that has alerted authorities to move-- and several times, those authorities were federal and not state.
I'm also struck by how amateur hour these shenanigans are. I mean-- why steal the money? Eva Moskowitz just pays herself a huge salary; since there's no penalty for a criminal lack of shame, she can openly and easily enjoy the kind of lifestyle that these guys tried to steal.
At any rate, the report recommends that the state beef up the auditors' force and require charters to institute some real internal checks and balances. Since the state legislature could not be counted on to spend the money on water if the capital building were on fire, I'm not going to hold my breath. On the other hand, if Tom Wolf wanted to add a little juice to his claims that Governor Tom Corbett has cut a billion dollars from state education money, Wolf might also like to observe that another billion is shifted from public to charter schools (oh, don't give me that tired line about charter schools being public-- they aren't) and that some unknown portion of that billion is buying charter operators swimming pools and high end party supplies.
The appendix of the report includes some more fun fraud stories and an explanation (with charts) of how fraud auditing is supposed to work. And footnotes. Grab a cup of hot chocolate and curl up on a cool autumn day.
There's a lot of it, and nobody is in any real position to catch it.
The charter bill in PA is expensive enough anyway-- over a billion dollars of taxpayer money is directed away from public schools and into charter treasuries, where they will never see the light of day again. (Remember, one of the rules of operating a modern charter is that you are a public school when it comes to grabbing public tax dollars, but not when it comes to accounting for those dollars.)
The report finds two major flaws with the current oversight system. First, general auditing techniques do not uncover fraud (but they are all we're using). Second, the offices responsible for ferreting out fraud have barely enough staff to ferret out a ferret. The Philadelphia School District, which has run out the red carpet for 86 charters, employed a whopping two auditors to keep an eye on them.
They suggest some repairs for these issues, including audits by people who know fraud stuff, more staff, more transparency and accountability for charters, and better safeguards moving forward. The report would like to see better whistleblower protection and a moratorium on new charters until a decent oversight system is in place. They also include a handy fraud chart, a kind of family tree of the different ways in which charter operators can bilk the taxpayer.
In the meantime, the report figures that the Keystone State has been bilked of at least $30 million by charter operators, including some of these outstanding examples;
* The founder of the Pocono Mountain Charter School used $2.5 million in school money to fix up a church property he ran
* The CEO and founder of New Media Technology Charter School in Philly stole over half a million to help out some other side businesses.
* The founder of Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School has been indicted for stealing a whopping $8 million to provide a lavish lifestyle for himself.
It's worth noting that virtually none of the frauds were discovered by the kinds of auditing checks that the report calls for. Instead, it has been whistleblower tips and journalism that has alerted authorities to move-- and several times, those authorities were federal and not state.
I'm also struck by how amateur hour these shenanigans are. I mean-- why steal the money? Eva Moskowitz just pays herself a huge salary; since there's no penalty for a criminal lack of shame, she can openly and easily enjoy the kind of lifestyle that these guys tried to steal.
At any rate, the report recommends that the state beef up the auditors' force and require charters to institute some real internal checks and balances. Since the state legislature could not be counted on to spend the money on water if the capital building were on fire, I'm not going to hold my breath. On the other hand, if Tom Wolf wanted to add a little juice to his claims that Governor Tom Corbett has cut a billion dollars from state education money, Wolf might also like to observe that another billion is shifted from public to charter schools (oh, don't give me that tired line about charter schools being public-- they aren't) and that some unknown portion of that billion is buying charter operators swimming pools and high end party supplies.
The appendix of the report includes some more fun fraud stories and an explanation (with charts) of how fraud auditing is supposed to work. And footnotes. Grab a cup of hot chocolate and curl up on a cool autumn day.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Hess's History of Common Core's Failure
Rick Hess, one of my favorite writers that I often disagree with, has been scolding CCSS backers pretty severely of late. In the fall issue of National Affairs, he presents a pretty thorough explanation of how Common Core went wrong, and it's well worth a look. Hess has long been a serious reformster (as an AEI guy, he's more the free market reform type), but he's generally a sharp thinker and willing to call shenanigans even people from his own side of the reformy tracks. So his opinion of how the Core came off those rails is worth considering.
Here's his thesis:
The trouble with the Common Core is not that it was the handiwork of anti-American ideologues or anti-teacher dogmatists, but that it was the work of well-meaning, self-impressed technocrats who fudged difficult questions, used federal coercion to compel rapid national adoption, and assumed that things would work out... In reality, the disingenuous manner in which the enterprise has been pursued has ensured tepid buy-in. This, coupled with the entirely foreseeable politicization of the issue, has created a mess for America's students.
Let's take a look at how he lays out his case.
Early Success
Hess covers the early days of CCSS, from "A Nation at Risk" on through Bush I's governors' summit of '89. He even name checks the spectacular 1995 defeat of national history standards in the Senate (99 to 1). Then on through NCLB and its entirely predictable but largely unpredicted pressure to fudge numbers any which way the states could. Then Achieve, Benchmarking for Success, and ultimately the CCSS.
Hess presents some selected standards to say, "See? Just a simple checklist of educational goals." But he also repeats his criticism that CCSS advocates were speaking out their butts when they threw around phrases like "internationally benchmarked," "evidence-based," and "college- and career-ready."
Early seeds of failure were also sown, Hess suggests, by the adoption path involving a stealth blitzkreig endrun around the democratic process, making the adoption of CCSS both "astonishing and unsurprising." By trying to look mild and harmless, the Common Core was able to slip past checkpoints without raising alarms. The public simply wasn't paying attention. But while advocates may have thought they were bypassing objections and disagreement, they had merely postponed it until the day when the public noticed.
Once the public started to pay attention, and the advocates' carefully crafted talking points were exposed to the harsh reality of implementation, support for the Common Core began to unravel.
Broad Impact (And a Dynamite Sentence)
Hess notes that "straight-talking advocates" (like Chester Finn and Mike Petrilli at the core-loving Fordham) have always acknowledged that standards can end up about as dusty and useless as a corporate mission statement. And then he unloads this sentence:
The real power of standards lies in their ability to change what is tested, and thus to change how curricula and textbooks are written, how teachers teach, and how students learn.
That's as clear, brief and direct explanation as anyone has written (including me, and I've tried more than a few times) of why CCSS and high-stakes testing are not made to be decoupled. The Core drives the testing, and the testing drives the curriculum.
Hess then moves on to advocate for standards and testing, particularly as tools for comparing schools, students and educators (I disagree, but I recognize that reasonable people can believe as Hess does). Standards and testing also ease the marketplace for providers of school materials and for edtruepreneurs like charter operators to work across state lines, as if standardized curricullum and testing somehow erases the regional differences between Florida and Alaska.
And then Hess tries to use the manufacturing standards argument, which is beneath him. Instead of railroad gauges or electrical outlets, he goes with pipe fittings. It doesn't matter. Students are human beings, not manufactured goods. And educational standards have nothing in common with manufacturing standards except the same set of letters.
Here Comes the "I" Word Again
Hess sees the seeds of serious suckage sown in (surprise) implementation. Here's how.
First, the Core was "neither necessary nor sufficient" for fixing the problem of test-gaming that had resulted from NCLB. The NAEP tests were already right there, usable for state-gauging purposes, but instead, CCSS came attached to slackadaisical testing guidelines from the feds that allowed gamesmanship to continue polluting the small pond of barely-useful data.
Second, the states that are committed to the Core just aren't that committed. Yep-- when you pay somebody to be your friend, you end up with a pretty lousy friendship. States committed to not liking federal ed money. But the standards themselves...meh. This has led to sloppy implementation. aThe fast pace (which was required to get the standards accepted at all) guarantees that technology, materials, tests, etc will lurch forward in a discombobulated keystone coppian mess.
Third, the CCSS push hurt a bunch of other reformy priorities. For instance, the race to attach the tests to teacher eval reform involved missteps guaranteed to make critical links like, say, teaching staffs hate them ("See this crappy test that you had no chance to prepare for? We're going to set cut scores really high, make the tests really hard, and decide your career based on the results! How do you like them standards now??")It has also wedged some reformster co-alitions. There's a hilarious bit here where Hess calls DFER a left-leaning group, but he does correctly note that turning CCSS into political kryptonite has sent many previously-cooperative GOP politicians running away from the Core like lightning.
Fourth, the whole Core initiative has become a lever for federal over-reaching into state education programs. The feds have pushed their nose into just about everything from charter schools to testing to teacher evaluation. Advocates of the Core have left their own flanks open by failing to do simple tings like creating a means of commenting on and revising the standards. Leaving gaps like that is just an open invite for the Dept of Education to step in.
Common Core in the Classroom
The ambiguity that suffuses the Common Core was not an accident: The enterprise's early success was fueled by the conviction that it was simultaneously a technical, apolitical exercise not requiring public scrutiny and that it was the engine that would transform American schooling. Because the Common Core had no practical import at first and because it received little media scrutiny, advocates were able to peddle both claims successfully.
In other words, the Core started out being whatever you thought it was. But once the rubber met the road and specifics started emerging, the public took off their beer goggles and started muttering "Good God, what have we done!"
First, there's the Ridiculous Lesson problem. This was so predictable. Every education reform in ever has the same problem-- by the time it filters down to the classroom, college profs and consultants and book publishers have stapled on their own ideas about what it should be, and some of those ideas are terrible. Hess has a great line here when considering the wide-open gates of CCSS: "It hardly seems misguided to question whether the champions of rigor are likely to beat back the forces of faddism." Is it an irony overload to note that rigor is itself a fad?
Second, advocates only care about the supposedly sharp line between standards and curriculum when it suits them, and it hasn't suited them many times. If the Core isn't curriculum, it is certainly detailed instructions on how to write one.
Third, the Core is hell on history and social studies (and art and music and everything else not on the test, but Hess holds himself to the history complaint).
Fourth, the Core poses a threat to the study of literature, no matter what its advocates say.
In short, advocates have tried to wave off concerns by even well-researched and well-thought critics, who, Hess says, often have a better intuitive sense of the messy reality of CCSS "than do the self-confident technocrats who blandly promise that everything will be fine."
The Way Forward
Hess believes that the Core could be okay, particularly if it were pursued "on a practical (rather than political) timeline." It could have been tested by willing states. It could have developed a groundswell of enthusiasm and market-conquering momentuym. It could have been a contender. Hess sees the flaws as based more in hubris than ideology, and a big lack of guts. The proponents didn't trust the public or their own PR departments, so they went all federal-powered stealth (Hess is silent on the role of big-pockets backers like Gates).
Hess believes that scaled down Common Core could still fly. Here's how he thinks that would work.
First, states should actually take the lead. Right. Because there might be one or two states left where taking point on Common Core wouldn't be political suicide. Hess says somebody would have to repudiate the feds, renounce their previous probably-illegal behavior, and promise to shoe them away should they try to get involved again. Meanwhile, the Department of Education would have to scrub all standards talk from the NCLB waivers (or, you know, Congress could finally get off its collective fat ass and re-authorize the ESEA).
Second, Hess says that CCSS advocates would have to get serious. They have failed to put mechanisms in place to insure that the standards are "professionally governed" and that tests are actually reliable. Hess language is a bit opaque in this section, but it appears that he would like to de-politicize the whole business, and put it in the hands of a governance board that would oversee the standards, the tests, and the interpretation thereof (set cut scores, etc). Who, I wonder, would be on such a board? It sounds kind of noble and all, but I'm imagining something more like the military-industrial complex or the revolving door between Monsanto and food regulation agencies.
Third, states should make the whole business more transparent. There should be evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence for every cockamamie thing someone wants to do in the name of Common Core education.
Real Reform
Hess pulls out the "Obamacore" sobriquet, saying that it's not without merit. Two attempts to rewrite giant chunks of American life, done quickly, sloppiliy, mysteriously. And federally.
What ultimately matters is not whether states stay signed on to the empty words of the Common Core standards, but whether those standards are used to engineer the deep, sustained change that advocates seek.
Hess acknowledges that his idea is unlikely to happen, that in fact there are plenty of still fully-hubrised-up advocates who think they can stay the course, gut it out, and still stick it to those fershlugginer opponents. And that insight was underlined a few days later as Hess considered the responses to this piece, which he says did include Core advocates calling him a big wimpy sell-out traitor (I'm paraphrasing).
So?
Hess sees promise in the Core that I do not. But I do not disagree with most of his assessment of how things went wrong. I don't see an alternate universe where they could have gone differently-- the corporate backers (who are oddly absent from Hess's history lesson) were not interested in waiting for payday, nor were the politicians who were looking for an easy win back in the days of economic meltdown and no-consequence bankster malfeasance.
Fast was the only way CCSS was going to happen at all; anything slower would have simply allowed opponents to gather the same arguments we're unleashing now, and advocates wouldn't have been able to cry "But we've already invested so much in it." Without speed, stealth, corporate investment, and federal arm twisting, I feel certain that the Core would have been DOA.
Because it wasn't just the implementation. It was the idea of national standards. And that they weren't very great standards, but the work of rich amateurs. And that they came handcuffed to high stakes testing. And that there's no reason to believe that national standards in education accomplish much of anything. And that they represented a huge dollar cost to cash-strapped districts.
And now the bar is higher, because we've had them, and still no advocates can point to signature success that the Core has reaped.
So I think there's a lot more to CCSS failure than Hess has laid out. But what he has laid out is useful and mostly on point. And remember-- if you think he's out there and not tough enough on the Core, there are Core advocates in the world who think he's a big soft squish on the subject.
Here's his thesis:
The trouble with the Common Core is not that it was the handiwork of anti-American ideologues or anti-teacher dogmatists, but that it was the work of well-meaning, self-impressed technocrats who fudged difficult questions, used federal coercion to compel rapid national adoption, and assumed that things would work out... In reality, the disingenuous manner in which the enterprise has been pursued has ensured tepid buy-in. This, coupled with the entirely foreseeable politicization of the issue, has created a mess for America's students.
Let's take a look at how he lays out his case.
Early Success
Hess covers the early days of CCSS, from "A Nation at Risk" on through Bush I's governors' summit of '89. He even name checks the spectacular 1995 defeat of national history standards in the Senate (99 to 1). Then on through NCLB and its entirely predictable but largely unpredicted pressure to fudge numbers any which way the states could. Then Achieve, Benchmarking for Success, and ultimately the CCSS.
Hess presents some selected standards to say, "See? Just a simple checklist of educational goals." But he also repeats his criticism that CCSS advocates were speaking out their butts when they threw around phrases like "internationally benchmarked," "evidence-based," and "college- and career-ready."
Early seeds of failure were also sown, Hess suggests, by the adoption path involving a stealth blitzkreig endrun around the democratic process, making the adoption of CCSS both "astonishing and unsurprising." By trying to look mild and harmless, the Common Core was able to slip past checkpoints without raising alarms. The public simply wasn't paying attention. But while advocates may have thought they were bypassing objections and disagreement, they had merely postponed it until the day when the public noticed.
Once the public started to pay attention, and the advocates' carefully crafted talking points were exposed to the harsh reality of implementation, support for the Common Core began to unravel.
Broad Impact (And a Dynamite Sentence)
Hess notes that "straight-talking advocates" (like Chester Finn and Mike Petrilli at the core-loving Fordham) have always acknowledged that standards can end up about as dusty and useless as a corporate mission statement. And then he unloads this sentence:
The real power of standards lies in their ability to change what is tested, and thus to change how curricula and textbooks are written, how teachers teach, and how students learn.
That's as clear, brief and direct explanation as anyone has written (including me, and I've tried more than a few times) of why CCSS and high-stakes testing are not made to be decoupled. The Core drives the testing, and the testing drives the curriculum.
Hess then moves on to advocate for standards and testing, particularly as tools for comparing schools, students and educators (I disagree, but I recognize that reasonable people can believe as Hess does). Standards and testing also ease the marketplace for providers of school materials and for edtruepreneurs like charter operators to work across state lines, as if standardized curricullum and testing somehow erases the regional differences between Florida and Alaska.
And then Hess tries to use the manufacturing standards argument, which is beneath him. Instead of railroad gauges or electrical outlets, he goes with pipe fittings. It doesn't matter. Students are human beings, not manufactured goods. And educational standards have nothing in common with manufacturing standards except the same set of letters.
Here Comes the "I" Word Again
Hess sees the seeds of serious suckage sown in (surprise) implementation. Here's how.
First, the Core was "neither necessary nor sufficient" for fixing the problem of test-gaming that had resulted from NCLB. The NAEP tests were already right there, usable for state-gauging purposes, but instead, CCSS came attached to slackadaisical testing guidelines from the feds that allowed gamesmanship to continue polluting the small pond of barely-useful data.
Second, the states that are committed to the Core just aren't that committed. Yep-- when you pay somebody to be your friend, you end up with a pretty lousy friendship. States committed to not liking federal ed money. But the standards themselves...meh. This has led to sloppy implementation. aThe fast pace (which was required to get the standards accepted at all) guarantees that technology, materials, tests, etc will lurch forward in a discombobulated keystone coppian mess.
Third, the CCSS push hurt a bunch of other reformy priorities. For instance, the race to attach the tests to teacher eval reform involved missteps guaranteed to make critical links like, say, teaching staffs hate them ("See this crappy test that you had no chance to prepare for? We're going to set cut scores really high, make the tests really hard, and decide your career based on the results! How do you like them standards now??")It has also wedged some reformster co-alitions. There's a hilarious bit here where Hess calls DFER a left-leaning group, but he does correctly note that turning CCSS into political kryptonite has sent many previously-cooperative GOP politicians running away from the Core like lightning.
Fourth, the whole Core initiative has become a lever for federal over-reaching into state education programs. The feds have pushed their nose into just about everything from charter schools to testing to teacher evaluation. Advocates of the Core have left their own flanks open by failing to do simple tings like creating a means of commenting on and revising the standards. Leaving gaps like that is just an open invite for the Dept of Education to step in.
Common Core in the Classroom
The ambiguity that suffuses the Common Core was not an accident: The enterprise's early success was fueled by the conviction that it was simultaneously a technical, apolitical exercise not requiring public scrutiny and that it was the engine that would transform American schooling. Because the Common Core had no practical import at first and because it received little media scrutiny, advocates were able to peddle both claims successfully.
In other words, the Core started out being whatever you thought it was. But once the rubber met the road and specifics started emerging, the public took off their beer goggles and started muttering "Good God, what have we done!"
First, there's the Ridiculous Lesson problem. This was so predictable. Every education reform in ever has the same problem-- by the time it filters down to the classroom, college profs and consultants and book publishers have stapled on their own ideas about what it should be, and some of those ideas are terrible. Hess has a great line here when considering the wide-open gates of CCSS: "It hardly seems misguided to question whether the champions of rigor are likely to beat back the forces of faddism." Is it an irony overload to note that rigor is itself a fad?
Second, advocates only care about the supposedly sharp line between standards and curriculum when it suits them, and it hasn't suited them many times. If the Core isn't curriculum, it is certainly detailed instructions on how to write one.
Third, the Core is hell on history and social studies (and art and music and everything else not on the test, but Hess holds himself to the history complaint).
Fourth, the Core poses a threat to the study of literature, no matter what its advocates say.
In short, advocates have tried to wave off concerns by even well-researched and well-thought critics, who, Hess says, often have a better intuitive sense of the messy reality of CCSS "than do the self-confident technocrats who blandly promise that everything will be fine."
The Way Forward
Hess believes that the Core could be okay, particularly if it were pursued "on a practical (rather than political) timeline." It could have been tested by willing states. It could have developed a groundswell of enthusiasm and market-conquering momentuym. It could have been a contender. Hess sees the flaws as based more in hubris than ideology, and a big lack of guts. The proponents didn't trust the public or their own PR departments, so they went all federal-powered stealth (Hess is silent on the role of big-pockets backers like Gates).
Hess believes that scaled down Common Core could still fly. Here's how he thinks that would work.
First, states should actually take the lead. Right. Because there might be one or two states left where taking point on Common Core wouldn't be political suicide. Hess says somebody would have to repudiate the feds, renounce their previous probably-illegal behavior, and promise to shoe them away should they try to get involved again. Meanwhile, the Department of Education would have to scrub all standards talk from the NCLB waivers (or, you know, Congress could finally get off its collective fat ass and re-authorize the ESEA).
Second, Hess says that CCSS advocates would have to get serious. They have failed to put mechanisms in place to insure that the standards are "professionally governed" and that tests are actually reliable. Hess language is a bit opaque in this section, but it appears that he would like to de-politicize the whole business, and put it in the hands of a governance board that would oversee the standards, the tests, and the interpretation thereof (set cut scores, etc). Who, I wonder, would be on such a board? It sounds kind of noble and all, but I'm imagining something more like the military-industrial complex or the revolving door between Monsanto and food regulation agencies.
Third, states should make the whole business more transparent. There should be evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence for every cockamamie thing someone wants to do in the name of Common Core education.
Real Reform
Hess pulls out the "Obamacore" sobriquet, saying that it's not without merit. Two attempts to rewrite giant chunks of American life, done quickly, sloppiliy, mysteriously. And federally.
What ultimately matters is not whether states stay signed on to the empty words of the Common Core standards, but whether those standards are used to engineer the deep, sustained change that advocates seek.
Hess acknowledges that his idea is unlikely to happen, that in fact there are plenty of still fully-hubrised-up advocates who think they can stay the course, gut it out, and still stick it to those fershlugginer opponents. And that insight was underlined a few days later as Hess considered the responses to this piece, which he says did include Core advocates calling him a big wimpy sell-out traitor (I'm paraphrasing).
So?
Hess sees promise in the Core that I do not. But I do not disagree with most of his assessment of how things went wrong. I don't see an alternate universe where they could have gone differently-- the corporate backers (who are oddly absent from Hess's history lesson) were not interested in waiting for payday, nor were the politicians who were looking for an easy win back in the days of economic meltdown and no-consequence bankster malfeasance.
Fast was the only way CCSS was going to happen at all; anything slower would have simply allowed opponents to gather the same arguments we're unleashing now, and advocates wouldn't have been able to cry "But we've already invested so much in it." Without speed, stealth, corporate investment, and federal arm twisting, I feel certain that the Core would have been DOA.
Because it wasn't just the implementation. It was the idea of national standards. And that they weren't very great standards, but the work of rich amateurs. And that they came handcuffed to high stakes testing. And that there's no reason to believe that national standards in education accomplish much of anything. And that they represented a huge dollar cost to cash-strapped districts.
And now the bar is higher, because we've had them, and still no advocates can point to signature success that the Core has reaped.
So I think there's a lot more to CCSS failure than Hess has laid out. But what he has laid out is useful and mostly on point. And remember-- if you think he's out there and not tough enough on the Core, there are Core advocates in the world who think he's a big soft squish on the subject.
Ask Arne: Teacher Diversity
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.
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.
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"
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