At TechCrunch, David Liu suggests the answer is "Yes."
That's kind of wacky, because Liu is the COO at Knewton, a data crunching wing of Pearson and previously notorious for imagining that data overlords could tell you what to have for breakfast on testing days. But Liu is a global data cruncher, and he wants to bring some of that globalism to the discussion.
Liu starts out with a perfunctory nod to one year's worth of PISA scores to suggest that it seems the US is falling behind (pro tip-- when charting "trends," more than one data point is useful). He recently spent some time in Korea and Japan, and that got him to thinking. He notes that those nations have super-duper PISA scores, and so he concludes, "Maybe we should only give PISA tests to our best students."
Ha ha. No, just kidding. He's going a whole other direction here.
It’s obvious that Korea and Japan both value education enormously. But
so does the United States. We regard education as a basic human right.
Do we? Do we really? Is that why we have billionaire industrialists saying they can't stand to watch underfunded schools another second, so they're going to pay more taxes to help properly fund them? Or is that why we have hedge fund managers and their friends getting into the school biz in order t9o make a bundle of loot, and facilitating their marketing by booting out students who are too difficult or costly to teach? But hey-- let's move on.
So why is there a great test result discrepancy?
Some say it’s cultural. In America, we prize exceptionalism; in Korea
and Japan, the focus is on raising the mean. Others point to
socioeconomic inequality; schools can’t fix poverty. American K-12
education is controlled at the local level, making it difficult to
implement programs widely. We’re paralyzed by politicized debates over
standards, testing, and budgets.
We've heard that last one from technocrats before-- democracy is messy and slow and that's by and large because we let everybody have a voice when clearly some people just don't deserve to have a voice. In which case Korea would look pretty good to them (particularly the Northern one, although South Korea is a rather crappy place for teachers as well). Liu skips over the possibility that the testing instrument is a lousy, or that not everybody tests the same population. Instead, he lands on this:
But I think there’s something more important at play here: the way we
treat teachers. In Korea and Japan, teachers are revered and paid
accordingly. Top students aspire to the profession.
And then this...
In Korea and Japan, teachers are paid in accordance with their stature in society.A 2012 study
found a correlation between higher teacher pay and improved student
outcomes. Korea and Japan were at the top of the spectrum for both.
The study in question deserves its own dissection, but we can sail right past that to the larger question-- how can a guy who is the flipping COO of a major data corporation NOT know the difference between correlation and causation. I invite him to check out this awesome website, where we learn, among other things, that there is a correlation between people who die falling into swimming pools and the number of movies Nicolas Cage appeared in.
I mean, I am just a teacher, but it seems fairly clear to me that if a culture really values education, they spend a lot of money on it, including teacher salary money.
But do not give up on Liu yet, because he actually has some more useful observations in his article.
He gets points for the oft-noted but worth-repeating observation that teachers in the US, Japan and Korea work about the same number of hours, but that Japanese and Korean teachers spend far fewer of those hours in a classroom, whereas in the US, our default assumption is a teacher who's not in front of a classroom is slacking off, and we should get teachers in front of students as close to 100% of the time as we can get.
Liu argues for career paths for teachers, particularly creating roles for master teachers to mentor and lead. This was always a good idea, back before reformsters grabbed onto it as a way to cut staffing costs. Liu may or may not be imagining the reformster version of master teaching, but he definitely missed the memo on Burn and Churn. Several of his arguments come down to "good for retention."
The first step is providing teachers with the support they need:
competitive compensation, growth opportunities, well-equipped schools,
and enough time. Today, almost half of American teachersleave
the classroom within their first five years of teaching. No industry
can endure that kind of turnover and not suffer from it.
He doesn't really need to argue for software engineer style rock star status. All he's really saying is, "Treat teachers like valuable high-skills, hard-to-replace employees." Who ever expected that there would come a time when that simple piece of business common sense would be a radical idea?
Monday, October 6, 2014
Depth of Knowledge? You'll Need Hip Boots.
Have you met Webb's Depth of Knowledge in all its reformy goodness. I just spent a couple of blood pressure-elevating hours with it. Here's the scoop.
In Pennsylvania, our state department of education has Intermediate Units which are basically regional offices for the department. The IU's do some useful work, but they are also the mechanism by which the state pumps the Kool-Aid of the Week out into local districts.
Today my district hosted a pair of IU ladies today (IU reps are typically people who tried classroom teaching on for size and decided to move on to other things). As a courtesy, I'll refer to them as Bert and Ernie, because one was shorter are chirpier and the other has a taller frame and a lower voice. I've actually sat through DOK training before, but this was a bit clearer and direct (but not in a good way).
Why bother with DOK?
Bert and Ernie cleared this up right away. Here's what was written on one of the first slides in the presentation:
It's not fair to students if the first time they see a Depth of Knowledge 2 or 3 question is on a state test (PSSA or Keystone).
In other words, DOK is test prep.
Ernie showed us a pie chart breaking down the share of DOK 2 and 3 questions. She asked how we thought the state will assess DOK 4 questions? Someone went with the obvious "on the test" answer, and Ernie said no, that since DOK 4 questions take time, the Test "unfortunately" could not do that.
There was never any other reason. Bert and Ernie did not even attempt to pretend to make a case that attending to DOK would help students in life, aid their understand, or even improve their learning. This is test prep.
Where did it come from?
Webb (it's a person, not a piece of jargon) developed his DOK stuff in some sort of conjunction with CCSSO. Ernie read out what the initials stand for and then said without a trace of irony, as God is my witness, "They sound like real important people, so we should trust them." She did not mention their connection to the Common Core which, given the huge amount of CCSS love that was going to be thrown around, seems like an odd oversight. The presenters did show us a graphic reminding us that standards, curriculum, and assessments are tied together like the great circle of life. So there's that.
How does it work?
This turned out to be the Great White Whale of the morning. We watched two videos from the Teacher Channel that showed well-managed dog and pony shows in classrooms. Bert noted that she really liked how the students didn't react to or for the camera. You know how you get that? By having them spend lots of time in front of the cameras, say, rehearsing their stuff over and over.
The first grade class was pretty impressive, but it also only had ten children in it. One of my colleagues asked if the techniques can be used in classes with more than ten students (aka, classes in the real world) and that opened up an interesting side note. The duo noted that the key here is routine and expectations, and that you need to spend the first few weeks of school hammering in your classroom routines so that you could manage more work. One teacher in the crowd noted that this would be easier if all teachers had the same expectations (apparently we were all afraid to use the word "rules") and Ernie allowed as how having set expectations and routines from K through the upper grades would make all of this work much better. "Wouldn't it be lovely?" she said.
Because when you've got a system that doesn't work very well with real, live children, the solution is to regiment the children and put them in lockstep. If the system and the childron don't mesh well-- change the children.
Increasing rigor!
You might have thought this section would come with a definition of that illusive magical quality, but no. We still can't really explain what it is, but we know that we can increase rigor by ramping up content or task or both.
We had some examples, but that brought up another unsolved mystery of the day. "Explain where you live" (DOK 1) ramped its way up to "Explain why your city is better than these other cities" (DOK 3). One of my colleagues observed that this was not only a change in rigor, but a complete change of the task and content at hand. Bert hemmed and hawed and did that little I Will Talk To You Later But For Right Now Let's Agree To Ignore Your Point dance, and no answer ever appeared.
So if you are designing a lesson, "List the names of the planets" might be a DOK 1 question, but a good DOK 3 question for that same lesson might be "Compare and contrast Shakespeare's treatment of female characters in three of his tragedies."
Audience participation
Bert and Ernie lost most of the crowd pretty early on, and by the time we arrived at the audience participation portion (two hours later), the audience seemed to have largely checked out. This would have been an interesting time for them to demonstrate how to handle a class when your plan is bombing and your class is disengaged and checked out, but they went with Pretending Everything Is Going Swell.
The audience participation section highlighted just how squishy Depth of Knowledge is. Bert and Ernie consigned all vocabulary-related activities to Level 1, because "you know the definition or you don't." That's fairly representative of how test creators seem to think, but it is such a stunted version of language use, the mind reels. Yes, words have definitions. But there's a reason that centuries of poetry and song lyric that all basically mean, "I would like to have the sex with you," have impressed women far more than simply saying "I would like to have the sex with you."
There's a lot of this in DOK, a lot of just blithely saying, "Well, this is what was going on in the person's brain when they did this, so this is the level we'll assign this task."
DOK's big weakness
DOK is not total crap. There are some ideas in there that can lead to some useful thinking about thinking. And if you set it side by side with the venerable Bloom's, it can get your brain working in the same way that Bloom's used to.
But like all test prep activities, DOK does not set out to teach students any useful habits of mind. It is not intended to educate; it is intended to train students to respond to certain sorts of tasks in a particular manner. This is not about education and learning; this is about training and compliance. It's a useful window into the minds of the people who are writing test items for the Big Test, if you're concerned about your students' test scores. If you're interested in education, this may not be the best use of your morning.
In Pennsylvania, our state department of education has Intermediate Units which are basically regional offices for the department. The IU's do some useful work, but they are also the mechanism by which the state pumps the Kool-Aid of the Week out into local districts.
Today my district hosted a pair of IU ladies today (IU reps are typically people who tried classroom teaching on for size and decided to move on to other things). As a courtesy, I'll refer to them as Bert and Ernie, because one was shorter are chirpier and the other has a taller frame and a lower voice. I've actually sat through DOK training before, but this was a bit clearer and direct (but not in a good way).
Why bother with DOK?
Bert and Ernie cleared this up right away. Here's what was written on one of the first slides in the presentation:
It's not fair to students if the first time they see a Depth of Knowledge 2 or 3 question is on a state test (PSSA or Keystone).
In other words, DOK is test prep.
Ernie showed us a pie chart breaking down the share of DOK 2 and 3 questions. She asked how we thought the state will assess DOK 4 questions? Someone went with the obvious "on the test" answer, and Ernie said no, that since DOK 4 questions take time, the Test "unfortunately" could not do that.
There was never any other reason. Bert and Ernie did not even attempt to pretend to make a case that attending to DOK would help students in life, aid their understand, or even improve their learning. This is test prep.
Where did it come from?
Webb (it's a person, not a piece of jargon) developed his DOK stuff in some sort of conjunction with CCSSO. Ernie read out what the initials stand for and then said without a trace of irony, as God is my witness, "They sound like real important people, so we should trust them." She did not mention their connection to the Common Core which, given the huge amount of CCSS love that was going to be thrown around, seems like an odd oversight. The presenters did show us a graphic reminding us that standards, curriculum, and assessments are tied together like the great circle of life. So there's that.
How does it work?
This turned out to be the Great White Whale of the morning. We watched two videos from the Teacher Channel that showed well-managed dog and pony shows in classrooms. Bert noted that she really liked how the students didn't react to or for the camera. You know how you get that? By having them spend lots of time in front of the cameras, say, rehearsing their stuff over and over.
The first grade class was pretty impressive, but it also only had ten children in it. One of my colleagues asked if the techniques can be used in classes with more than ten students (aka, classes in the real world) and that opened up an interesting side note. The duo noted that the key here is routine and expectations, and that you need to spend the first few weeks of school hammering in your classroom routines so that you could manage more work. One teacher in the crowd noted that this would be easier if all teachers had the same expectations (apparently we were all afraid to use the word "rules") and Ernie allowed as how having set expectations and routines from K through the upper grades would make all of this work much better. "Wouldn't it be lovely?" she said.
Because when you've got a system that doesn't work very well with real, live children, the solution is to regiment the children and put them in lockstep. If the system and the childron don't mesh well-- change the children.
Increasing rigor!
You might have thought this section would come with a definition of that illusive magical quality, but no. We still can't really explain what it is, but we know that we can increase rigor by ramping up content or task or both.
We had some examples, but that brought up another unsolved mystery of the day. "Explain where you live" (DOK 1) ramped its way up to "Explain why your city is better than these other cities" (DOK 3). One of my colleagues observed that this was not only a change in rigor, but a complete change of the task and content at hand. Bert hemmed and hawed and did that little I Will Talk To You Later But For Right Now Let's Agree To Ignore Your Point dance, and no answer ever appeared.
So if you are designing a lesson, "List the names of the planets" might be a DOK 1 question, but a good DOK 3 question for that same lesson might be "Compare and contrast Shakespeare's treatment of female characters in three of his tragedies."
Audience participation
Bert and Ernie lost most of the crowd pretty early on, and by the time we arrived at the audience participation portion (two hours later), the audience seemed to have largely checked out. This would have been an interesting time for them to demonstrate how to handle a class when your plan is bombing and your class is disengaged and checked out, but they went with Pretending Everything Is Going Swell.
The audience participation section highlighted just how squishy Depth of Knowledge is. Bert and Ernie consigned all vocabulary-related activities to Level 1, because "you know the definition or you don't." That's fairly representative of how test creators seem to think, but it is such a stunted version of language use, the mind reels. Yes, words have definitions. But there's a reason that centuries of poetry and song lyric that all basically mean, "I would like to have the sex with you," have impressed women far more than simply saying "I would like to have the sex with you."
There's a lot of this in DOK, a lot of just blithely saying, "Well, this is what was going on in the person's brain when they did this, so this is the level we'll assign this task."
DOK's big weakness
DOK is not total crap. There are some ideas in there that can lead to some useful thinking about thinking. And if you set it side by side with the venerable Bloom's, it can get your brain working in the same way that Bloom's used to.
But like all test prep activities, DOK does not set out to teach students any useful habits of mind. It is not intended to educate; it is intended to train students to respond to certain sorts of tasks in a particular manner. This is not about education and learning; this is about training and compliance. It's a useful window into the minds of the people who are writing test items for the Big Test, if you're concerned about your students' test scores. If you're interested in education, this may not be the best use of your morning.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
California's Superintendent's Race Defies Sense
I haven't been paying as much attention to the California State Superintendent race as I should, because I can only tolerate watching so many scary movies at a time, but today this video landed in my inbox:
Yes, it's more celebrity endorsements for an anti-public school candidate.
Tuck is running on his record as a school turnaround expert, a guy who worked as president of Green Dot Public Schools, one more charter scam job. Diane Ravitch ran an insider account of their insanely bad teacher retention issues last year. He's a Broad Fake Graduate School alumni, an investment banker, and he's backed by the same giant pile of money that has worked to tilt school board elections in LA. But he is pretty, and he clearly has some connected Hollywood friends.
Tuck is popular with the Let's Kick Teachers' Asses crowd, which is why this election matters. Current Superintendent Tom Torlakson pissed off a lot of powerful people by deciding to challenge the Vergara ruling, and if elected Tuck will put an end to that toot suite.
I confess to being a little fascinated by the Tuck candidacy, because what is the end game here? I mean, unless he's an idiot, he has to know that the same smoke and mirrors that create the illusion of success for charter schools cannot be scaled to the state level, and his bold claims that he can raise California's educational standings will fail hugely. "Throw out difficult students who make school look less successful" only works if there are other schools to send them to. Maybe he has figured out how to scale charter success with, say, a plan to push all low-performing California students into Nevada. But I'm doubtful. He has to know that he cannot deliver any of the results he is promising.
So if he's not an idiot, what's the plan here? Just get in there and strip as much money as possible out of the system and walk away? Destroy the teaching profession and public education and just hope nobody notices or cares? The usual reformster profile is to find yourself a job where you aren't accountable to much of anybody and where the reporting of results is entirely under your control. But Tuck wants to be responsible to the state voters for an entire state system whose results will be pretty hard to hide.
Granted, She Who Will Not Be Named has created a template for becoming a nationally respected school superintendent and celebrity spokesmodel for reformsters without ever actually successfully accomplishing anything, ever.
I confess to an uncharitable and irresponsible thought, which boils down to "I don't live in California." So let him win. Let him gut the public school system and replace his teacher force with burn and churn TFA-style temps. Maybe then Californians, celebrity and otherwise, would see just how bogus and screwed up and anti-education these sorts of policies are.
Then I remember. California's newspapers can be relied upon to back Whatever The Big Pile of Money wants. The LA Times has bent itself into a tortured pretzel of intellectual dishonesty trying to find ways to say that LA Supertintendent John Deasy is just totally awesometastic. Seemingly every paper in the state has climbed on board the Tuck money train. So perhaps the end game is to piss all over the people of California and use a massive PR machine to tell them it's raining.
In the meantime, I have to deal with my sadness over Adam Scott's endorsement of this twit. I don't know why it's upsetting to find out that actors whose imaginary characters one really likes are also live human beings, perfectly capable of holding bad opinions. I'll get over it. That much makes more sense than the rest of Tuck's campaign.
Yes, it's more celebrity endorsements for an anti-public school candidate.
Tuck is running on his record as a school turnaround expert, a guy who worked as president of Green Dot Public Schools, one more charter scam job. Diane Ravitch ran an insider account of their insanely bad teacher retention issues last year. He's a Broad Fake Graduate School alumni, an investment banker, and he's backed by the same giant pile of money that has worked to tilt school board elections in LA. But he is pretty, and he clearly has some connected Hollywood friends.
Tuck is popular with the Let's Kick Teachers' Asses crowd, which is why this election matters. Current Superintendent Tom Torlakson pissed off a lot of powerful people by deciding to challenge the Vergara ruling, and if elected Tuck will put an end to that toot suite.
I confess to being a little fascinated by the Tuck candidacy, because what is the end game here? I mean, unless he's an idiot, he has to know that the same smoke and mirrors that create the illusion of success for charter schools cannot be scaled to the state level, and his bold claims that he can raise California's educational standings will fail hugely. "Throw out difficult students who make school look less successful" only works if there are other schools to send them to. Maybe he has figured out how to scale charter success with, say, a plan to push all low-performing California students into Nevada. But I'm doubtful. He has to know that he cannot deliver any of the results he is promising.
So if he's not an idiot, what's the plan here? Just get in there and strip as much money as possible out of the system and walk away? Destroy the teaching profession and public education and just hope nobody notices or cares? The usual reformster profile is to find yourself a job where you aren't accountable to much of anybody and where the reporting of results is entirely under your control. But Tuck wants to be responsible to the state voters for an entire state system whose results will be pretty hard to hide.
Granted, She Who Will Not Be Named has created a template for becoming a nationally respected school superintendent and celebrity spokesmodel for reformsters without ever actually successfully accomplishing anything, ever.
I confess to an uncharitable and irresponsible thought, which boils down to "I don't live in California." So let him win. Let him gut the public school system and replace his teacher force with burn and churn TFA-style temps. Maybe then Californians, celebrity and otherwise, would see just how bogus and screwed up and anti-education these sorts of policies are.
Then I remember. California's newspapers can be relied upon to back Whatever The Big Pile of Money wants. The LA Times has bent itself into a tortured pretzel of intellectual dishonesty trying to find ways to say that LA Supertintendent John Deasy is just totally awesometastic. Seemingly every paper in the state has climbed on board the Tuck money train. So perhaps the end game is to piss all over the people of California and use a massive PR machine to tell them it's raining.
In the meantime, I have to deal with my sadness over Adam Scott's endorsement of this twit. I don't know why it's upsetting to find out that actors whose imaginary characters one really likes are also live human beings, perfectly capable of holding bad opinions. I'll get over it. That much makes more sense than the rest of Tuck's campaign.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
College Ready for Economic Mysteries
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.
* 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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)