Iowa Teacher of Year Offers Dopey Common Core Quote

“If you go to any college basketball game anywhere in the nation, the court is going to be the same width, the same length and the hoop is going to be same height – and that’s all the Iowa Core outlines for us."

2014 Iowa State Teacher of the Year Jane Schmidt in an interview in the Daily Nonpariel (Stewart). (And picked up by me from the US Dept of Ed "Teachers Edition" newsletter.)

Let's just count the ways in which this metaphor fails.

If I go to any college basketball game, I am stuck watching basketball. I cannot watch football or curling or gymnastics or a performance of a Beethoven Symphony or an art exhibit. But basketball isn't the only game in town. Does Schmidt think only basketball should be standardized, or does she think every public sports and performance venue in the nation should be built to the standardized measurements of a basketball court?

If I go to any college basketball game, I will see a group of carefully screened and selected players. I will not see people who are lousy at basketball. That standardized court does not fit all possible players-- the players are screened to find the small, select group of people who can play well on that court.

Schmidt also needs to declare whether we're watching men or women's ball, because the standards actually are not the same. And if we traced the feeder programs for that team, we would not eventually trace our way back to five year olds playing basketball on that college-ball-standardized court. Even if we ignore that one sport does not fit all athletes, surely we can't ignore that one size court does not fit every person of every age to play that sport.

If I go to any college basketball game, I will see a standardized court built to measurements that are the carefully considered judgment of people who knew and worked in the game for years and years, testing and considering the best dimensions based on expert knowledge. I am not looking at dimensions selected by a bunch of rich amateurs who walked in one day and said, "We've decided what size court you guys should play on."

I went back to the original article to see if it provided a better context for this quote. All I found was this:

We all across Iowa are playing on the same court with the same dimensions, but it’s how you put the team out there and how you coach it that is the local control.

It didn't help. Look-- sports metaphors make terrible ways to describe public education. Sports have winners and losers and people who are cut from the team and people whose talents are in other sports entirely, or even (gasp) no sports at all. 

I am sure that you don't get to be Iowa State Teacher of the Year by being bad at your job or a terrible person. Elsewhere in the article, Schmidt notes that she feels the Common Core and Iowa State Standards (which are as different as night and later that same night) are just misunderstood. If she wants them to be better or more favorably understood, she's going to need a better metaphor.

Outsourcing, Teaching, and Not Understanding the Free Market

The destruction of teaching as a US profession continues to move forward.

Takepart yesterday reported on the increasing use of teachers from the Philippines to fill empty spots in the US. The article focuses on this move as a response to teacher shortages in Arizona, but it alludes to teacher shortages around the country.

This is a tricky subject. On the one hand, teacher shortages are a fairly predictable outcome of the continued assault on the profession. By stripping teachers of autonomy, dropping the pay level, reducing teaching to clerical script-reading work, removing all job security, gutting the parts of teaching that traditionally attract people, and denigrating the profession on a regular basis, the Folks In Charge have assured that teaching today is far less attractive as a profession than it has ever been. For example, given the current conditions there, what person in her right mind would pursue teaching as a lifelong career in North Carolina?

On the other hand, teacher "shortages" are being used as an excuse for any number of misbehaviors. The article mentions a group of Filipino teachers recruited to teach in Baton Rouge, and if gulf coast Louisiana, where 7500 teachers were wrongfully fired from the New Orleans school district-- if that part of the country has a teacher shortage, I'll eat my hat.

The importing of Filipino teachers is already revealing itself to be borderline human trafficking. Those Baton Rouge teachers won a $4.5 million suit against the "recruiters" who charged them $7K for their "applications" and demanded a cut of their wages. Turns out these kinds of shenanigans are not that uncommon.

Nor is the article very forthcoming on the wage issue. The income that the Filipinos make is described as ten times what they could make back home, but it doesn't address whether they are paid the same that a home-grown teacher would have made. Are they being hired at US bargain prices? It's hard not to suspect as much.

In US labor issues, management often develops a sudden lack of understanding of how the free market works. So let me refresh their sad memories.

The free market sets prices by a very simple mechanism. If you want to buy gold for a penny a pound, you offer that amount. If nobody will sell you gold at that price, you have to offer more. You have to keep offering more until somebody will sell.

It is no different for labor. If you want to pay a dollar a day to hire someone for a job, and nobody will take the job, you have to offer more, and keep offering more until someone says, "Yes."

If you have a labor "shortage," then unless you are on a desert island with just two other people, you don't really have a labor shortage at all. What you have is a Willing To Meet the Minimum Conditions Under Which People Will Work For You shortage. Even minimum wage employers, who in lean times will advertise that they're hiring for more than minimum wage, get that.

In a very real sense, there is no teacher shortage in this country at all. What there is is an unwillingness to make teaching an appealing profession that people will actively pursue and stay with for a lifetime. Depending on your location,it may be about money, or autonomy, or job security, or basic teaching conditions (if you're in some place like North Carolina, sorry, but it's all of the above). Another question the article doesn't ask is this-- why isn't Arizons headhunting in other states? Even Virginia (not exactly a teachers' paradise) recognized that North Carolina teachers were ripe for poaching. Why would you recruit teachers from the Philipines, unless you were specifically looking to recruit people who would work for less than the professionals here on the mainland?

Of course, if no one will sell you gold for a penny a pound, another alternative is to find somebody who will sell you really shiny metal that's sort of gold colored. And if your business model is actually about selling fake gold at huge profit to suckers who mistake it for the real thing, this arrangement is perfect. Since many of our reformsters don't really want lifetime career teachers anyway (too expensive, too uppity), refusing to meet the conditions for employment is a great way to shut out the "overqualified" labor they don't want.

That this brings human trafficking into the world of education is no surprise. Much of modern school reform is based on a disregard for the humanity of students and teachers, and one huge thrust of reform has been to define teaching down from a skilled profession to unskilled labor. Trying to profit from trafficking in that labor just seems like a logical extension of the ethics already in play. It's appalling and inexcusable, but it's not unexpected.

Schools and Social Capital

Andy Smarick has continued his series of meditations on how modern education reform and classic conservatism have fallen out of alignment. It's a thoughtful series and worth exploring, but I found his latest particularly striking.

In "Ed reform's blind spot: Catholic schools and social capital" Smarick considers once more the question of what conservatives should want to preserve, and he focuses particularly on social capital.

Social capital describes the “benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks.” When people are connected, they (and even those outside the network) gain, thanks to sharing, interdependence, joint learning, collective action, solidarity, and more.

In case you're not a link-follower, I'll note that the first link leads to Bowling Alone, one of the more indispensable examinations of social connections in our world. Kudos for that reference.

Smarick uses the concept of social capital mostly to talk about Catholic schools, and how they exert a positive influence on neighborhoods stricken by poverty. That reminds me of John Hopkins' longitudinal study in Baltimore; the headline on that study was that family and money are destiny, but it also suggests that neighborhood (not entirely disconnected form the other two) is destiny as well.

But it also resonates for me in the context of my own corner of the world. In fact, I think that in small town and rural areas like mine, the social capital aspect of the schools may be the aspect that folks value most.

I live in an area where High School of Origin is still considered important information about grown adults. It's an area where school sports are a Big Deal, a source of identity and community pride. I live in a county where four separate school districts serve a shrinking student population. My own district and the closest neighbor system now serve fewer students together than my own district held by itself just twenty years ago. We now share sports teams, marching bands, and school play programs. But nobody thinks a merger is going to happen any time soon, and I could explain that by saying that the residents, particularly in the smaller district, do not want to sacrifice the generations of social capital they have invested in their schools.

Districts also find, over and over, that a simple appeal to economic reality, however harsh, rarely moves residents and taxpayers to shut down a school. My district, like many others, has had to essentially confront the question: "How much is this social capital worth to you in cold, hard tax dollars?" The answer repeatedly turns out to be, "A great deal."

Smarick is correct to note that many reformsters have completely disregarded social capital invested in local schools, as well as the real world benefits that come from it. Reformsters and privatizers might do well to consider the issue of how little social capital (which takes considerable time to gather) is invested in shiny new charters, particularly those charters which are not tied to any particular neighborhood.

I've noted before that I find it strange for conservatives to chime in with the idea that students should not be "trapped" by their zip codes or neighborhoods. There is a strength and value and wealth of social capital that comes from having a school rooted in a particular place. It should not be lightly discarded. Heritage, history, community, connection-- these sorts of things have value. "Social capital" and the research that measures its effect just put a scientific face on a human value that many people already recognized.

Social capital doesn't just have implications for Cathoilic schools, but for public schools. It has implications for staffing as well-- longevity matters, and builds more capital.

Smarick wraps up with a striking and apt image:

Those who cleared old, messy “swamps” to make room for modern development severely damaged ecosystems. Those who cleared old, eyesore “slums” to make room for shiny, new public housing high-rises severely damaged communities. 

This is education reform as nature conservation, focusing not on what they want to plow under, but on what should be preserved and saved. I think plenty of folks understand that urge to conserve instinctively, and I think social capital represents a huge investment that people have been loathe to sacrifice just for a few untested and allegedly magic beans. Reformsters often come across as the guys with the big bulldozers who want to pave the swamp, get rid of the noisy birds, kill off the annoying animals, and replace the plants with longlasting perfect plastic flowers. Reformsters seem to think of themselves as men of vision, but there is a whole world of value that they seem to be blind to.

SAT: Going Nowhere Fast

The latest news from the College Board folks has been widely published since being released (see here and here). The lede in most cases is that SAT performance is flat, followed by breathless concern that not enough students are taking advantage of opportunities to be college and career ready (which seems to mean, generally, that they aren't consuming enough of the College Board product line).

Three thoughts here:

One. What other corporation in America does such a good job spinning its marketing reports as legitimate news?

Seriously. If Ford has a drop in sales, they don't manage to get writers across America to wax rhapsodic about the state of automotive transportation, or decry the gap that leaves so many people without a vehicle. And they certainly don't get writers to talk about Ford as if it were the only company producing cars.

But somehow every time the College Board makes another bid for more market share, it's treated as a referendum on the State of American Education. I'll give David Coleman this-- he and his people sure know how to sell shit.

Two. Do you mean to tell me that after the years of Common Core high stakes corporate education reformster baloney, SAT scores haven't gone up??!! Are you saying that a product which markets itself as the premiere arbiter of college readiness says that our students are no more college ready than they used to be? You mean to say that Common Core didn't fix everything??!! I'm shocked. Shocked!!

It's particularly notable that coverage has studiously avoided mentioning that David Coleman, College Board Head Honcho, is also David Coleman, Common Core Architect. In fine government-revolving-door style he has positioned himself to profit from his own regulatory work, and yet, nothing has budged. Both the test results and the SAT market share are stuck.

Three. Corporate baloney. Cyndie Schmeiser, College Board chief of assessment, declares the low performance level "a critically low level" that cannot be tolerated. The whole release this time ties together all the College Board products, with reports on the PSAT and AP classes.

Why put it all together? Nick Anderson at the Washington Post suggests that the College Board is trying to transfer some of the sheen of their better-performing products onto the flailing and failing SAT, which is now the nation's number TWO college entrance exam (though you would not know that from any of the "coverage" we're seeing).

This fits the CB overall plan, which has featured ideas like using PSATs to generate AP "recommendations" sent directly to parents to try to create some market pressure. Coleman repeats his mantra that we don't need more tests-- we need more opportunities. And by "opportunities" we mean "opportunities to give the College Board money."

It reminds me that David Coleman's College Board career is an odd second act, his previous work writ small. Pretend to be trying to launch a movement rooted in social justice and educational opportunity when you're really just a corporate marketer, shilling for a product and a profit.

High Stakes Demand Perfection

Over at Parenting the Core, we find yet another tale pf a Pearson screw-up.

It is not a huge screw-up. It's not even an incomprehensible screw-up. It's just one answer for one problem in one math assignment. But Sarah Blaine correctly notes all the reasons it matters.

If this had been The Big Test instead of a small assignment, the parent would never have seen the wrong answer. The teacher would never have had a chance to correct the wrong answer. And nobody would have a chance to fix the results of the wrong answer.

High stakes demand perfection. If a series of questions is going to decide a child's educational future, that series of questions had better be perfectly designed and flawlessly scored. If Pearson wants to exert this kind of control over all the students in the marketplace, they need a policy of Zero Defects for every one of their testing products.

If they cannot achieve perfection, I'm not going to ding them for that because, as far as I know, they are human beings. But if they cannot perfection, then they must have transparency. There must be a means for teachers and parents and students to check their work, to say, "This answer that just shunted my child into a nightmare world of retesting and remediation is incorrect."

If you want to play for high stakes, you have to be playing on a playing field that is not only level, but immaculately groomed and free from all dips and lumps and gopher holes.

The irony here is that while students and teachers and parents are testing for high stakes, Pearson is not working for high stakes at all. They will continue to make mistakes and it won't cost them a thing.

So I get Blaine's annoyance. The mistake on her daughter's work is small, and I wouldn't want to live in a world where a company and its employees are crushed over a small simple error. But the mistake is just one more example of how Pearson handles its business. And I also do not want to live in a world where students and teachers must have their fate resting in the hands of a company that doesn't know how to handle its business.

Charters Want More Money

Charter fans have long argued that charter schools can be more economically efficient and consequently spend less taxpayer dollar for greater effect.

Despite the modern charter habit of burning and churning staff to keep personnel down and shedding any students who would be more costly to educate, charters are still not likely to deliver on their financial promise. But that really doesn't matter, because the promise of tax savings with charter schools was just the bait-- and here comes the switch.

In both New York and DC, charter schools are suing for more money. The New York lawsuit has been filed by a coalition of charter schools using some charter parents for cover. Their claim is that they are systematically underfunded, thereby denying charter students their constitutional right to "sound basic education." The DC lawsuit follows a similar tack.

The feds are positioning themselves to back the charters on these suits, once again using the administration's reasoning that education is a civil rights issue, and therefor the Office for Civil Rights gets to throw its weight around. A 37-page letter from that office dated October 1st lays out the case for suing districts that have not provided sufficient resources to schools. The DC lawsuit appeared this summer, and the New York suit in mid-September-- draw what conclusion from that you like. The OCR letter is painful in its detail; the mockable line is the one that covers adequate lighting as a suitworthy issue. But as Mike Petrilli noted over at Fordham's blog, this letter sends a pretty clear signal about which way the federal wind is blowing-- the feds want to make sure that all schools, including (especially?) charters, are getting a full slice of pie.

So here comes the switch. We pitched charter schools as more economical, more efficient, lower-cost alternatives. Now that we've got them up and running, we want more money. This is simply a continuation of the policy goal, adored and nurtured from corporate boardrooms to federal offices-- the policy goal of shoving public schools aside and replacing them with charter schools. I don't imagine that public schools will ever be completely done away with, because the charters will need some place to send the students that they refuse to educate, but those public schools will be stripped of resources and filled with the students that nobody wants.

It is really one of the oldest business tricks in the book, used by everyone from John D. Rockefeller to Jeff Bezos-- undercut your competition, and once you've bled them dry, boost your price as much as the market will bear. Charters just refine the technique by having federal and state government serve as the vampiric mechanism by which the competition is sucked dry.

Why shouldn't charters be as fully funded as public schools (yes, yes, yes, I know-- charters are public schools on days they want to be)?

1) They sold us on expanding their reach with the pitch that they didn't need to be as fully funded.

2) They aren't doing a public school's job. They aren't serving the same populations, and they long since stopped pretending that they were offering some sort of unique services. I've laid out the conditions under which I support charters-- if they want to meet those standards, I'll support them.

Network for Public Education Makes History Saturday

This coming Saturday, the Network for Public Education will present an event this coming Saturday that represents a new sort of end run around money, power and media. PUBLIC Education Nation (October 11), is an answer to events such as NBC's Education Nation, the biggest, slickest, most nausea-inducing infomercial for reformsters one could ever hope to see.

It's one of the great challenges we face. How do people who don't have the ear of the media, who don't have twelve million dollars to set up an agitprop website, who make their living doing something other than pushing a political agenda-- how do those people get their message heard?

The answer is-- on the internet.

On Saturday, starting at noon, there will be a live event in the auditorium of the Brooklyn New School, featuring four panels:

Testing and the Common Core: New York Principal of the Year Carol Burris will lead a discussion  with educators Takeima Bunche-Smith, Rosa Rivera-McCutchen and Alan Aja.

Support Our Schools, Don’t Close Them: Chicago teacher Xian Barrett will moderate a panel featuring education professor Yohuru Williams, Hiram Rivera of the Philadelphia Student Union, and a representative of the Newark Student Union.

Charter Schools: North Carolina writer and activist Jeff Bryant will host a discussion that will include New Orleans parent activist Karran Harper Royal, New York teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein, and Connecticut writer and activist Wendy Lecker.

Authentic Reform Success Stories: The fourth panel will be led by Network for Public Education executive director Robin Hiller and will include New York teacher and activist Brian Jones, and author of Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools, Greg Anrig.

Diane Ravitch and Jitu Brown, In Conversation: The event will finish off with a conversation between leading community activist Jitu Brown and Diane Ravitch, who will talk about where we are in building a movement for real improvement in our schools.

There are some great names here, and subjects well worth discussing. There is clearly an agenda for solutions, not just complaining about reformster baloney.

Anybody connected to the internet can watch a live stream of the event. And if you would like to help with the costs, you can follow this link to the NPE website and contribute by way of paypal. So make your contribution, mark your calendar, check your internet hookup, and plan to be part of a historic and informative event. It is possible to be heard, to connect, and to get the word out, even if NBC isn't interested in doing it.