CURMUDGUCATION

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Kindergarten Slackers Threaten Civilization As We Know It

From Mississippi, terrible news! "Mississippi's youngest students pile on the absences, lose learning time" declares the Hechinger Report!

The story opens with a "frustrated" principal dealing with parents who want to pick their five-year-old children up early. What is wrong with these slackers? Do they not understand that by October, their offspring must be writing sentences, know most of the alphabet, and recognize and write the first ten numerals.

There's not really a lot of digging to do in this article. Here are the two salient facts. 1) Kinder attendance in Mississippi is worse than for any other K-8 grade. 2) Kinder attendance is not mandatory in Mississippi. So we can handle the 'splaining part of this story in two quick sentences.

The handwring and pearl clutching part-- that takes more than two sentences.

“I think that a lot of families don’t put that value in kindergarten being the first official year of education,” says state superintendent Carey Wright. Well, yes. Because their children are five years old.

The article notes that the Southern Education Foundation reports that one in fourteen Mississippi K students had to repeat Kindergarten-- in 2008. I'm not sure what to do with this shocking-ish statistic from seven years ago. You know what I would find interesting-- a study that followed those students from seven years ago to see how things had turned out for them.

But meanwhile, our frustrated principal is bemoaning those lost minutes. “If they miss 30 minutes four times, that’s two hours of instruction," she says. Really? At the end of the day, what's going on with that room full of five year olds is valuable, rigorous instruction.

I can remember not too long ago when the discussion about kindergarten was whether or not to have a full day of it. Now we've jumped straight ahead to requiring kindergartners to have a full day of intense instruction so that they can do numbers and letters and sentences and test-taking. And I have just one question--

Why?

Why why why why why why WHY why why?

Where, in this mad dash to crush childhood, to regiment the happiest humans on earth and beat them into compliance, where in all of that did we get the part where someone showed us conclusively and clearly how this would benefit anybody?

“Kindergarten is, for many kids, the entry point into formal education,” Snow said. “It’s their first time in a structured learning environment.”

Okay-- why is that? What evidence and data and study and research went into determining that this entry point should come a year earlier than it has for generations? And I'd like to see that evidence really quickly, since this ramped-up clamped-down version of kindergarten seems to be only a mid-point on our journey to institutionalize pre-K students.

The destruction of kindergarten as a child-centered, play-rich growth opportunity for students has two of the classic earmarks of reformsterism. First, there's no evidence offered-- just a frantic insistence that we must toughen up these kids and get them Learning Stuff Right Now because if we don't, the United States will be taken over by Estonia and our economy will collapse and loving multinational corporations will turn elsewhere for their worker bees and we will all be eating dog food out of a can in our van down by the river!

Second, it reinforces school as an institution-centered place. The schools in this article are not there to serve the students-- the students are there to meet the needs of the school. The school needs them to show up, because it will be inconvenient for the school if the students are behind next year. There is no discussion of benefits for the students; only the problems for the school. This is reformsterism-- where students exist only to make schools look successful.

This is not how public service works. You serve the public in ways they find useful and helpful, and when they start pulling away from your service, that is a sign that you as a public servant are not doing your job. If the fire department starts hosing down houses that are not on fire, they don't get to start bitching about how the houses they visit are flame-deficient.

If five year olds don't want to spend time in your kindergarten, if every day they can't wait to leave, if they would rather be anywhere else every day of the week-- you are doing it wrong. The children and their families are not defective-- you are.

Charters as Money Funnels

Another Gulen charter chain is in the news this week, this time thanks to reporting by James Pilcher in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Gulen charters are not an actual charter chain, but a reference to the large web of charter schools founded by followers of the Turkish-born Muslim Iman Fethullah Gulen. Gulen came to the US in 1999, acquired a visa with the alleged help of the CIA, and settled in the Poconos (it really is lovely there).

The Cincinnati article catalogs all of the usual complaints about the Gulen chains. Staffed with unqualified, non-English speaking Turks, brought over on H-1B visas (because it's just so hard to find a qualified teacher looking for a job in this country). Education somewhere between mediocre and lousy. Lots of secretive behavior. The perimeter primate blog has some well-researched material about the movement.

Pilcher talked to one former teacher who described a system of tribute payment, in which employees are expected to kickback a good sized chunk of their pay (this allegation is denied by the charter with their usual one-size-fits-all-allegations response "these are just the words of a disgruntled former employee").

I talk to folks who are mystified by the whole business. Why would Turkish nationals be interested in American education? The answer is simple, and it highlights exactly what is wrong with the new wave of charter schools.

They aren't interested in American education at all. They're interested in American money.

When al-Qaeda was linked to US heroin trade a decade ago, nobody asked why the terrorist group was interested in American drug users. The answer was obvious-- drug traffic was a gaping hole in the US economy out of which millions of American dollars could be funneled.

The same principle would seem to apply here. Read about the reported behavior at Gulen charters (candy and parties for the days of "count week") and you see behaviors aimed directly at getting maximum money out of the schools.

It's not a school. It's a fund raiser.

Some commentators are concerned that Gulen is digging for ideological converts, and that may well be a side feature of some of these charters. But mostly what they do is hoover up giant piles of American tax dollars. The Gulen chains don't have to be excellent, and they don't have to play the kind of numbers-fudging games that some charters play-- they just have to do well enough to keep the money rolling in.

And that could be the motto of the modern charter movement-- "Just good enough to keep the money rolling in." Folks can get their dander up about Turkish nationals (and Muslims, at that-- gasp) walking in and setting up mediocre schools that skirt laws, push US teachers out of the job market, and send millions of tax dollars out of the country, but the Gulen folks are simply walking right through a door that modern charter proponents opened up. America is the land of opportunity, and current charter laws in many states represent an opportunity to make a pile of money.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Monday, October 13, 2014

Fordham and CCSS and Reading and Writing

Robert Pondiscio opens a recent Core defense over at the Fordham blog with a nice display of verbal fireworks. Maybe that's why I always end up responding to the Fordham boys; they may be dead wrong on many educational issues, but at least they can write. And as it turns out, writing is on the menu of Things We Think Are Swell About the Core in "What's Right About the Core."

Pondiscio believes there are a few (three, actually) big ideas worth "preserving and promoting." Let's see if we're really ready to gives these puppies a warm, loving home.

Reading To Learn

Pondiscio is a member of the Rich Content Club, and he rails against reading that is context-free, focused on decoding, and not connected to the process of using and acquiring broader knowledge. Confused yet? Pondiscio seems to be, because his rant leads us to this sentence:

By contrast, Common Core’s recognition that content matters — the more you know, the more you can read with understanding—is an important recognition of how reading comprehension actually works.

The Rich Content Club is bound and determined to believe that Common Core is on their side, when it is clearly, explicitly, not. David Coleman has repeatedly made it clear-- Common Core reading is Close Reading, and Close Reading is done "between the four corners of the text." It is also supposed to be done only with short texts (kind of like the ones you'd find on a standardized test).

So the Rich Content Club's belief that full, deep texts that allow students to draw on and add to a broad background of knowledge-- well, David Coleman disagrees with them way more than I do. Content rich reading to learn is not a thing to preserve and promote about the Core any more than beautiful flowers in rolling green fields are the best part of winter in Minnesota.

Curriculum Matters

Pondiscio toots the Ed Hirsch horn here, and again I ask-- what on earth does Hirsch's knowledge-rich cultural literacy have to do with Common Core (which only addresses two content areas in the first place)?

Pondiscio is explicitly not a fan of the fuzzy-headed progressive child-centered hippy-dippy baloney, and I am not inclined to argue with him a great deal about that. But many members of the Rich Content Club seem to think that since CCSS promises to be Not That Fuzzy Thing, it must ipso facto be the kind of rigorous, tough-minded content-rich knowledge-pumping engine of cultural literacy that they dream of. It isn't. It just isn't. There isn't a word of the standards that would make me believe for a moment that it is what they hope for, and the the CCSS-linked high stakes tests clearly and explicitly push in another direction entirely.

It's like listening to one of my sixteen-year-old students explain that her cheating, lying boyfriend is really a wonderful guy, but people just don't know him like I do. Yes, we do, honey, and he does love you like you love him.

Show What You Know

Pondiscio is certain that writing is in "appalling shape" in schools. He's upset that fuzzy child-centered stuff is still leaving a mark, somewhere, I guess. That particular wave never rolled in very high or heavy in these parts, but my aunt ran an open school in Connecticut in the sixties, so I've seen it go both ways.

He shares Coleman's disdain for the personal essay. I'd offer one observation for him, as a teacher of writing-- personal essays allow students to write about subjects on which they are experts. A personal essay lets students focus on craft and technique without having to also worry about researching and supporting content. I would never do a whole year of them, but I'd never do a whole year without them, either. They serve a purpose.

He has this complaint. "If kids enjoy writing, the theory goes, they’ll write more." Well, yes. Duh. I don't know what he's offended by-- students enjoying schoolwork? Back in my day, we hated school, uphill, both ways, in the snow. Made real men out of us (even the girls). Seriously, Pondiscio is starting to go full schoolmarm here.

Pondiscio takes a shot at developing "voice" over structure or grammar (although I suspect he means usage, not grammar-- common mistake). It's an odd criticism from a man who opened this particular essay with about three paragraphs worth of raw, unadulterated voiciness. In fact, there isn't a successful writer I can think of who doesn't have a strong, distinctive voice.

He pulls things back a bit and admits there's a place for personal expression, but the pendulum has swung too far back, and it's about time it swung back, young man.

This is all a conversation worth having. I just want to offer one observation-- there is not the slightest need for Common Core in order to have this discussion. On writing, CCSS offers standards that are so weirdly bad that they will never affect anything anyway ("Never mind. We'll just see what the test wants and cover that separately," say thousands of writing teachers). So let's have the writing pedagogy discussion (for English teachers, it is the conversation that never, ever ends). But don't tell me that it has anything to do with Common Core.

That's Three

So Pondiscio has pulled up three highly debatable topics, but what is most debatable about them is whether or not they have anything at all to do with the Common Core. But that's turning out to be yet another reason that CCSS should just go away-- they are becoming an odd distraction in the midst of discussions of more worthwhile topics. They have nothing useful to add to the conversation, and if we're not careful we get sucked into arguing about what they say about instruction instead of, as we should be, arguing about what good instruction looks like.

Pondiscio ends with an imploration not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but I think we're really talking about not throwing the baby with that old bicycle out behind the barn. They don't have anything to do with each other. Though Andy Smarick also ended his piece in praise of testing, published the same day as Pondiscio's column, with the same baby-bathwater image. Kind of makes me wonder if the Fordham Foundation is expecting.

Super Quote Re: Public Vs. Private

Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report way back in February of 2013 a must-read article about privatization under the current administration. Diane Ravitch quoted it earlier today, but I need to set it down, too, because this quote deserves to be handily located in everyone's mental file of Responses To The Same Old Reformster Arguments. So the next time somebody tries to tell you that the new wave of charter school chains are public schools, just tell them this:

On every level, the advocates of educational privatization strive to avoid using the p-word. They deliberately mislabel charter schools, just as unaccountable as every other private business in the land as “public charter schools,” because after all, they use public money. So do Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, but nobody calls these “public aerospace companies,” “public military contractors,” or “public banks.”

You get to call yourself a public institution when you are answerable to the public (say, by having your governing board members stand for election). You get to call yourself a public institution when any taxpayer who's paying for your shop to stay open can have full and transparent access to your financial information.Some charters, particularly the traditional ones, do this, and they deserve the "public" label.

But if your attitude is "Once that money is in our hands, it's our money and we don't have to explain anything to anybody," you are not a public institution. When it comes to "public," charter chains keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means.

Public Service Incentives (Short Form)

I don't usually do this, but I just hammered out a large post. I'm now to attempt a short version. If you find it intriguing, follow the link to the long version.

Some reformsters keep trying to shore up teacher evaluation systems by referring to the private sector where, we are told, folks are rewarded for doing a good job and suffer for doing poorly. Why, they ask, should teaching not come with a performance based incentive system?

I believe that's a false comparison. A really false comparison.

Teachers are not private sector employees. They are public servants, and public service does not play well with performance incentives.

Nobody proposes that we make performance incentives for police officers that reward them for higher numbers of arrests.

Nobody proposes that we create fire fighter performance incentives based on the total dollar amount of property they save in a month.

Nobody proposes that mail delivery persons be rewarded for delivering to a certain number of addresses per hour (if you can't see why not, think about Montana instead of New York City).

Nobody proposes that we give national guardsmen bonuses based on the income of the people whose property they protect.

Nobody proposes these things because public service means serving the whole public, all of them, equally, without prejudice, without ignoring a part of the public because it might hurt your numbers or screw up your monthly performance bonus.

I stretch it out and fill in the gaps in the longer post, but that's the nut of it.

How We Pay Public Servants-- and Why

We have always paid public servants a flat fee, untethered to any sort of "performance measures." That's because we want public service to be completely disconnected from any private interests. (And if you just thought, "Damn, this is a long post," you can get the basic point here and decide if you want to travel down the whole web of alleys with me.)

Fighting Fire with Money

Imagine if, for instance, we paid fire fighters on sliding scale, based on how many of which type fires they put out at a certain speed. This would be disastrous for many reasons.

Fire fighters would refuse to work in cities where there were few fires to fight, because they couldn't make a living. In cities where there were commonly multiple fires, fire fighters would look at each fire call through a lens of "What's in it for me?"

For instance, in a system where fire fighters were paid based on the value of the flame-besieged property, fire fighters might view some small building fires as Not Worth the Trouble. Why bother traveling to the other side of the tracks? It's only a hundred-dollar blaze, anyway. Let's wait till something breaks out up in the million-dollar neighborhood.

In the worst-case scenario, one of our fire fighters depending on performance-based pay to feed his family may be tempted to grab some matches and go fire up some business.

Perverse Incentivization

Occasionally we've seen these kinds of perverse incentives in action, and we don't much like it. The areas of the country where you take extra speed limit care at the end of the month because the local police have a quota to meet. The neighborhood where cops have to roust a certain number of suspects a week to keep their job ratings. Nobody thinks these are examples of excellence in public service.

In fact, we have a history of playing with private police forces and private fire companies. We don't much care for how that works out, because it creates a system that provides excellent service-- but only for the customers who are paying for it.

The idea of public service is to create a class of people who are above self-interest and who do not respond to a single boss. We are outraged when abuse of police power happens precisely because we expect the police to act as if they work for everyone, and to put their dedication to that service above any single interests, including their own.

That's the definition of public service-- service roles that are stripped of any possibility of incentives other than the mandate to serve the public good. That's what we mean by "professional"-- a person who puts all personal self-interest aside and focuses on Getting the Job Done. Trying to motivate a public servant with self-interest inevitably tends to pollute the professional setting with the very self-interest that we're trying to get out of there.

Incentives and Suck-ups

Here's the thing about performance incentives. They always come from actual individual humans. In business that's okay, because the humans are already the bosses.

In public service, we often talk about performance incentives as if they fall from the sky, descending fully-formed from some on-high objective source. They are not. They, too, are developed by actual individual humans. And those humans will invariably encode their own values and priorities into the incentives.

"I like red houses. I think they are more valuable," say our fire company evaluators. "That's why I live in one. And that's why a good fire company always gives priority to saving red houses first."

Performance incentives for public service always-- always-- involve substituting the values of the few for the values of everybody. Fire fighters are supposed to save save everybody's homes. Police are supposed to protect every citizen. The US Postal Service is supposed to deliver to every home. They are there to serve the public, and that means everybody. Public servants are supposed to support the values of all citizens. Any performance based evaluation reward system will prioritize some citizens' values over those of other citizens.

A Public Service Performance Based Incentive System In Action

You know which public servants have a fully-realized performance-based pay system in place?

Congress.

The CEO of International Whoomdinglers says, "That Senator Bogswaller has done an excellent job of looking out for the things we believe are important. He ought to keep his job. Send him a big fat check."

The head of the Society for Preservation of Free-Range Spongemonkeys says, "We appreciate the hard work that Representative Whangdoodle has done looking out for spongemonkeys. He deserves a raise. Send him a big fat check."

You (and the members of the Supreme Court who are paying attention) might call this corruption, but it's just a Performance Based Incentive System, and the high regard with which Congress is held tells you how well a PBIS mixes with public service.

But But But

But a Performance Based Incentive System put in place by the government would not be run like the hodge-podge of private interests you describe incentivizing the US Congress, you say.

And I say, baloney. We already have a Performance Based Incentive System that says you're a better school district if you sell more of the College Board's AP product line. The PBIS testing system being used to incentivize students and teachers and schools-- that system is entirely a product of private corporate interests.

The only difference between an private incentive system, like the one that runs Congress, and a public one, like Race to the Top, is whether the people with money and power have to manipulate a government middle man or can go straight to the source.

Under the Umbrella

I teach mostly juniors, sometimes seniors. There are a few things I tell them every year.

One is to make the most out of senior year, because it is the last time they will be surrounded by people who are paid to put the students' interests first. It's the last time they'll be in an institution that is organized around their concerns, their interests, their needs. After that, they're in the open market. They will always be dealing with people who are trying to sell them something.

The PSAT will collect a ton of information about them so it can turn around and sell that data to colleges. Colleges will try to sell them, particularly if they are highly desirable ~~customers~~ students. Employers will try to get the use of their talents without having to pay much for it, and politicians will piss on them and tell them it's raining so that the pols can keep their jobs.

But here, under the umbrella of the public school, my students have nothing that I need to survive or make a living. I have no reason to do this job except for the reason I took this job in the first place-- to serve the best interests of my students.

It Doesn't Make Any Difference

It makes business-oriented reformy types crazy that the way I do my job doesn't make any difference to my pay. I understand the terror for them there, but that Not Making A Difference is actually the point of how we pay public servants.

It doesn't matter it's a big fire or a small fire, a rich person's house or a poor person's house-- the fire department still does their job. It doesn't matter whether I have a classroom full of bright students or slow students, rich students or poor students, ambitious students or lazy students-- I will still show up and do my job the best I know how. I should never, ever, ever have to look at a class roster or a set of test results or a practice quiz and think, "Dammit, these kids are going to keep me from making my house payment next month."

Why I Won't Suck

Reformsters are sure that human beings must be motivated by threats and rewards, and that the lack of threats and rewards means that I can too easily choose to do a crappy job, because it won't make any difference. They are wrong. Here's why.

1) I knew the gig when I started. I knew I would not get rich, not be powerful, not have a chance to rise to some position of prominence. There was no reason to enter teaching in the first except a desire to do right by the students.

2) Teaching is too hard to do half-assed. Do a consistently lousy job, and the students will eat you alive and dragging yourself out of bed every day will be too damn much. There isn't enough money to keep people flailing badly in a classroom for a lifetime. Just ask all the TFA dropouts who said, "Damn! This is hella hard!" and left the classroom.

And Most Importantly

Threats and rewards do not make people better public servants (nor have I ever seen a lick of research that suggests otherwise, but feel free to review this oft-linked video re: motivation). Threats and rewards interfere with people's ability to get their job done. Threats and rewards motivate people to game the system.

And any time you have a complex system being measured with simple instruments, you have a system that is ripe for gaming. In fact, if your measures are bad enough (looking at you, high stakes tests and VAM), your system can only be successfully operated by gaming it.

So, No Accountability At All?

Heck, no. You need to keep an eye out for the grossly incompetent, though they will often self-identify (I've made a huge mistake) and take the next stage out of Dodge. Beyond that, you just go watch and pay attention. If you're my administration, you're welcome in my classroom at any time for as long as you'd like to stay. No, don't bring that stupid checklist. Just watch and listen and use your professional judgment. If you think I need to fix something, let's you and I talk about it. How will bringing in extra layers of bureaucracy and government make that system work any more smoothly?

Man, This Is Running Long

Agreed. Sometimes these posts get away from me.

Bottom line-- the comparison to private enterprise performance based incentive systems is bogus. Those systems may be appropriate in corporate environments where we want to enforce a bias in favor of certain actors and outcomes-- where some people are in fact more important than others.

But in public service, performance based incentive systems are contra-indicated. They by nature enforce a particular bias and cannot help but tilt the system in favor of some customers over others.

The system we have does, in fact, make sense. We stand our public servants beside a door and we say, "I'm going to pay you to stand here and wait as long as it takes and help whoever comes through that door. It doesn't matter who comes through that door-- nothing is going to affect your pay, so that's a settled and done deal-- just concentrate on watching that door and helping whoever walks through it."

Are You Still Here?

God bless you. This chunk of ideas has only just grabbed ahold of me, and I still have much to sort out, which I will undoubtedly do in future posts. Feel free to chime in in the comments.

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