If New Orleans public schools were dropped directly into the depths of reformster-built torture by the assault of Hurricane Katrina, Philadelphia schools have experienced a decades long descent, sliding slowly down the on ramp of the highway to public school hell. And as instructive as the mess in New Orleans can be, we should be paying close attention to Philadelphia. Unlike NOLA's meteorological catastrophe, Philly's mess is man-made. If they come for the public schools in your city, it's likely to look a lot more like the assault on Philly's school system.
I live in Western PA, and if you know Pennsylvania politics, you know that nobody dislikes Philadelphia more than everybody else in every other place in Pennsylvania. But I take no joy in following their struggle. Teachers are on the beachhead of one more reformster assault against schools, caught between a history of financial humbuggery, city level mismanagery, and a first term governor desperate to prop up his hopes for a second term.
Setting the Stage
Pennsylvania funds schools by collecting local property taxes, throwing them in a big pot, and sending them back out according to various arcane formula. It is a system that pretty much nobody likes, but fixing it has been-- well, here's the thing. PA has the fourth highest senior citizen population. That means we're right up front in the battle to decide whether we should tax people who make money or people who own stuff. So we all agree we need to fix taxes, particular Grampa McFixedincome doesn't want to pay for schools because he owns a house.
It's also a contentious issue because Philly is a giant money pit, and people all across the state end up paying taxes so Philly can have mass transit and functioning infrastructure and schools that work.
By the 1990's, Philly was severely underfunded and not exactly setting the educational world on fire. Then-superintendent David Hornbeck decided to play chicken with the state legislature. "Give me enough money to open the schools, or I won't," he said.
"Fine," said the legislature. "You can have the money, but we're taking over your district." And so Pennsylvania became a pioneer in how to take the "public" out of public schools.
Not-so-public Education and Starving the Beast
As the millennium opened, Philadelphia schools were no longer run by an elected board, but by a group appointed by the state (3/5) and the city (2/5). This is the School Reform Commission (SRC), and they have not exactly accomplished great things in Philly.
One of the things they could not do was grow money on trees. Pennsylvania has been starving its schools for a while now, and although it's fashionable to blame it all on Tom Corbett, his predecessor Democrat Ed Rendell was no friend of public education, and his predecessor Tom Ridge was reportedly ready to hand Philly schools over to Edison way back before such privateering wasn't even fashionable yet. State funding of schools has dropped steadily down to a current low of 36%.
At the same time, local districts have had a cap slapped on raising local taxes. The state has effectively stripped funding from districts and made it impossible for them to replace those funds from local sources. As in, "Junior, I'm cutting your lunch money allowance in half, but you may only ask your grandmother for fifteen cents."
So Pennsylvania has been systematically starving its schools. It used stimulus funds to hide the starving, and Corbett is currently trying to sell the idea that pension spending counts as education spending to further obscure the picture (Pennsylvania pension funds were hammered by the financial collapse and Harrisburg dealt with it through advanced down-road can kicking).
The Charter Claws Come Out
Nobody got starved worse than Philly schools. Each year has brought another massive deficit, along with the unsurprising revelation that teachers working in underfunded, understaffed, decrepit surroundings with the children of poverty and deprivation-- those teachers do not get top "achievement" results. You could argue that Philly teachers have been struggling against huge odds, and that like salmon trying to spawn up mountains through onrushing alpine avalanches, every inch of progress they've made is nothing short of epically heroic.
You could argue that, but of course nobody in power in PA has been trying to. Instead, reformsters have unleashed the usual cries of, "OMGZ!! We must haz rescue students from these failing schools!! Bring in the charters! They shall save us!"
And so charters have been chip chip chipping away at Philly schools. Thanks to Pennsylvania's logic-defying funding formula for charters, charter schools can quickly become a massive drain on a school district's finances. It's being felt all across the state, but again, with its huge ongoing financial issues, Philly gets to feel it the worst.
As is typical with these charter gold rushes, there has been a steady parade of malfeasance and misbehavior. It has gotten bad enough that even the SRC has pushed back against charters, but even victory is messy. They won a battle to make one charter follow its enrollment cap rules, and now this week students at Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School will hold a lottery to determine which couple of hundred students will be looking for a school next week.
What Fresh Hell Is This
Over a year ago, Aaron Kase at Salon described Philly schools as "a public school system from hell." Kase was writing in August of 2013, the same month that the Philly teacher contract expired. As you might imagine, negotiations have not run smoothly.
The SRC has been asking for various rule suspensions because of their massive poorness. In August of 2013, they decided to go ahead and suspend seniority rules, hiring back laid-off teachers based on cost rather than seniority. This went hand-in-hand with the continuing series of cockamamie deals made with Harrisburg in an attempt to cobble together enough money to open the schools each fall, plus gigantic cuts in staff and schools.
But while the SRC and Harrisburg were practicing political posturing over the question of how to keep Philly schools open and functioning, the teachers of Philly were actually doing it. Buying supplies. Taking on extra duties. And working without contracts, even as the SRC didn't even pretend to be trying to negotiate. The teachers were seen as the heroes, the ones holding schools together, while the politicians were passing "doomsday budgets" and making convoluted deals to get a cigarette tax to help finance yet more shortfalls. The PA Supreme Court ordered the SRC to get to the negotiating table and the SRC... just didn't.
Meanwhile, Tom Corbett is on track to become the first one-term PA governor in half of forever, hugely down in the polls (anywhere between 17% and 33% depending on whose poll you ask) and he needed something, anything. Philadelphia City Papers had said in the summer of 2013 that Corbett's possible Hail Mary was to take on the Philly teachers' union.
Can It Get Uglier
Three weeks before the election, the SRC announced that they would no longer honor the old contract under which the teachers had been working since it expired. They might honor some pieces, but nobody was getting a raise, and they were taking the teachers' health care. And when I say "announced," I mean snuck in and out of an un-publicized meeting at an odd hour with no public input.
Harrisburg tried to get involved, but accomplished nothing, thanks to Harrisburg. Are you surprised to learn that the SRC can only be dissolved by action of.... the SRC.
Students walked out of schools to strike on behalf of their teachers. The school district celebrated parent appreciation night with a screening of "Won't Back Down" and got a student protest instead. Gratifying, perhaps, but tiny compared to what's lined up against the teachers.
The superintendent went on NPR to say that teachers needed to be willing to sacrifice. A right-wing thinky tank, the Commonwealth Foundation, has a website set up to smear the Philadelphia Federation for Teachers, and hired people to attend today's teacher protest and counter-protest (though they dispute that verb, it sure seems about right).
Follow This Story
Tonight, that protest blocked the street in front of the district offices, as prelude to this evening's SRC meeting. That meeting, which allows some public comment, is likely to run a bit late. Probably a bit heated as well.
The game plan in Philly seems pretty straightforward-- starve the district until it fails, then send in the charters to scarf up the pieces. The big challenge is that Philly schools really are, by all accounts, in bad shape. That's the result of a systematic assault, not some inherent failure. But the end result is a district on the ropes, and bringing it back to health will not be as simple as taking the reformster boot off its neck.
Nor do I think the election will resolve this. Tom Wolfe may not be Tom Corbett, but I'm not so sure he's bent on rescuing public schools either. Wolf has since distanced himself from the point of view, but the man who led the drive to charterize York schools is an old Wolf friend.
So this isn't going to be quick or easy or pretty. But Philly teachers are up against the same wall that teachers are being backed up to all across this country, and they need and deserve the support of all of the rest of us. Their fight really is our fight. We need to watch and help and learn. These are men and women who are trying to do hard, important work in the middle of a storm that just keeps hammering away at their work, their livelihoods, and their professional futures. Everything I see tonight on line says that they are hanging tough and standing tall. But if you have a thought or prayer or dollar or word of support that you can send toward Philadelphia, now is the time to send it.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
The Public Charter School Test
If you glance through the blog, you might conclude I hate charter schools. But like many critics of the current charter wave, I don't object to the idea of charters at all. Once upon a time, charters were actually a pretty good addition to the public education landscape.
The potential is still there. But to unlock it, charteristas will have to make true the mantra they keep repeating, that charter schools are public schools.
Charter schools, the modern version as represented by K12 and Success Academies, are not public schools at all. If they really want to earn the "public" label, they need to meet these four requirements.
Transparent Finances
As a taxpayer, I can walk into my local school district office and ask to see everything there is to see about the district finances. As a taxpayer, I'm entitled to a full accounting of how my money has been spent. To be a true public entity, you can't just take public funds-- you must give a public accounting of them as well.
That also means oversight. The modern charter is all too often tied up in all too shady financial dealings. Baker Mitchell of North Carolina is only the most recent example of a charter operator who uses a non-profit charter to funnel money to his own private firms. It is Modern Charter 101 -- set up charter school, hire yourself, your family, your friends to do everything from managing the school to washing the floors. And rent the building and equipment from yourself. K12 routinely uses public tax dollars to mount advertising campaigns.
A true public school is always strapped for cash, and taxpayers are always keenly aware of where that money comes from. When negotiating contracts, spending money on big ticket items, even deciding to outsource janitorial services, our school board members are subject to plenty of input, feedback and general kibbitzing from the people who will pay for all those things.
Meanwhile, modern charters have famously gone to court to keep state auditors from getting a look at their books. That is not how a public institution behaves. If you're a public school, your finances must be completely transparent.
Accountability to the Voters
Boy, do I ever get charter operators frustration on this count. My ultimate bosses are a group of educational amateurs who have to win election to stay in charge of me. It's a screwy way to run a business-- what other enterprise requires professional experts to work at the beck and call of people whose only qualification is that they managed to garner a bunch of votes? Oh, wait. I remember an example-- the entire local, state and federal government of the entire country. Because we're a democracy.
Reed Hastings famously articulated the modern charter operator position-- elected school boards are a nuisance. They're unstable and change their composition and therefor their collective mind. What schools need is a single CEO, a kinderfuhrer who can swiftly and boldly make decisions without having to explain himself to people, particularly voting people who can remove him from power if they don't like his answers.
This is not how public institutions are supposed to work in a democratic society. Yes, as some folks periodically rediscover, democracy is terribly messy and inefficient. But the alternative is efficient long-term mediocrity or short term excellence (followed by crashing and burning). Neither is an appropriate goal for a stable society, and neither is appropriate for running a school system meant to serve all citizens, regardless of their income or social status.
If the voters of your school district do not have a say in how the school is run, you are not a public school. It does not count if your tsar or board of tsars is appointed by a state-level elected official. If there is no way for local voters to change the school's management through local means, it is not a public school.
And yes-- that means that there are places like Philadelphia and Newark where the schools are no longer public schools in anything but name. Leaving the name alone-- that's how you steal an entire public school system from the public it is supposed to serve.
Play by the Rules
The charter movement, even the traditional one, has been all about getting around bad rules. This has never made a lot of sense to me, this business of government saying, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we need a different kind of school as an alternative." Why not say, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we are now going to rescind some of those rules. Because, dumb."
The "we need charters to escape dumb rules" argument is like filling up your own car with Long John Silver's wrappers and empty coffee cups and one day saying, "Well, damn. This car's a mess. Guess I have to buy a new car." If you've made a mess of things, clean up the mess!
So I'll agree that there are some public school rules that charters shouldn't play by, because nobody should have to play by them. Important note: I can identify these rules because they interfere with a teacher's ability to provide quality service for students.
But there are other rules charters don't want to have to play by. For instance, "hire licensed personnel" seems to be a popular corner to cut (the Gulen folks seem to trip over this one a bunch). Likewise, modern charters like skirting that nasty union rubbish, which helps with holding onto the option to terminate any "teacher" at any time. This is not about providing superior schooling for students; this is about maintaining a more easily controlled workforce that will be cheap and kept in line.
It goes back to that whole damn democracy thing. Modern charter operators want to be able to rule their company like a Bill Gates or a Leona Helmsley. They do not want to have to govern a public service trust like a Congress or a President, held ultimately accountable to a separate court or electorate (though don't worry-- they're working on that system, too).
Public schools are a trust, a service to the communities that house them and the country that holds them. If you want to be a public school, you have to play by the public school rules. You can certainly set up a private school outside those rules, but that's what it is-- a private school, not a public one.
Serve the Full Population
The same modern charter trick has been documented over and over. Behind every charter school miracle is a charter school that gets rid of students who might hurt their numbers.
They say that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. But in America, there's another place like that-- the public school.
A public school accepts every student. A public school does not bar a student for being too expensive to educate. A public school does not push out a student who gets lousy test scores. A public school must accept every single student who shows up on their doorstep, barring only those who reach a criminal level of threat to others (and sometimes not even that).
No school that turns students away, pushes students away, counsels students out, or even has the option of considering these actions because there is some other school that must take the student-- no school that does these things can call itself a public school. No school that has a student population substantially different from the student population of the area it serves can rightly call itself a public school.
I was tweet-challenged on this point the other day with the issue of magnet schools. That's a valid point-- a school designed to focus on the performing arts cannot be expected to have the same percentage of tone-deaf, stage-inept non-performers as the rest of its neighborhood. But magnet schools have a very specific, very explicit mission that clearly defines how their population will differ from the larger group. A performing arts school mission does not say "To foster great student arts, plus keeping out any ELL students, too." The careful focus was in fact one of the things that could, and did, and does, make classic charters great.
But another characteristic of modern charters is that they rarely have such a clearly defined mission. And certainly none have a mission that makes explicit upfront, as magnet schools do, exactly which students they plan to include and exclude. As far as I know, no modern charter has a mission statement that reads, "We will give a mediocre education to all poor kids except the ones who are difficult or have developmental problems or who can't hit our numbers."
You can certainly be selective about which students make it into your school (and get to stay there), but if you do, you are a private school. A public school accepts all students.
Public School and Virtue
I am not saying that you must meet all four of these requirements to qualify as a ethically upright and educationally sound school. I can think of several private schools that flunk all four tests (though all have far more accountability measures in place than many modern charters), and they are perfectly good schools. But they are private schools, not public schools.
I can think of some charter schools that pass all four tests. They are classic versions of charter education, and they deserve to be called public schools.
But to call the Success and Imagine and K12 and Hope-on-a-Shingle and all the rest of the hedge-fund backed, politically connected, ROI ROI ROIing their big financial boat modern charters may be many things.
But they are not public schools. Not. Public. Schools.
The potential is still there. But to unlock it, charteristas will have to make true the mantra they keep repeating, that charter schools are public schools.
Charter schools, the modern version as represented by K12 and Success Academies, are not public schools at all. If they really want to earn the "public" label, they need to meet these four requirements.
Transparent Finances
As a taxpayer, I can walk into my local school district office and ask to see everything there is to see about the district finances. As a taxpayer, I'm entitled to a full accounting of how my money has been spent. To be a true public entity, you can't just take public funds-- you must give a public accounting of them as well.
That also means oversight. The modern charter is all too often tied up in all too shady financial dealings. Baker Mitchell of North Carolina is only the most recent example of a charter operator who uses a non-profit charter to funnel money to his own private firms. It is Modern Charter 101 -- set up charter school, hire yourself, your family, your friends to do everything from managing the school to washing the floors. And rent the building and equipment from yourself. K12 routinely uses public tax dollars to mount advertising campaigns.
A true public school is always strapped for cash, and taxpayers are always keenly aware of where that money comes from. When negotiating contracts, spending money on big ticket items, even deciding to outsource janitorial services, our school board members are subject to plenty of input, feedback and general kibbitzing from the people who will pay for all those things.
Meanwhile, modern charters have famously gone to court to keep state auditors from getting a look at their books. That is not how a public institution behaves. If you're a public school, your finances must be completely transparent.
Accountability to the Voters
Boy, do I ever get charter operators frustration on this count. My ultimate bosses are a group of educational amateurs who have to win election to stay in charge of me. It's a screwy way to run a business-- what other enterprise requires professional experts to work at the beck and call of people whose only qualification is that they managed to garner a bunch of votes? Oh, wait. I remember an example-- the entire local, state and federal government of the entire country. Because we're a democracy.
Reed Hastings famously articulated the modern charter operator position-- elected school boards are a nuisance. They're unstable and change their composition and therefor their collective mind. What schools need is a single CEO, a kinderfuhrer who can swiftly and boldly make decisions without having to explain himself to people, particularly voting people who can remove him from power if they don't like his answers.
This is not how public institutions are supposed to work in a democratic society. Yes, as some folks periodically rediscover, democracy is terribly messy and inefficient. But the alternative is efficient long-term mediocrity or short term excellence (followed by crashing and burning). Neither is an appropriate goal for a stable society, and neither is appropriate for running a school system meant to serve all citizens, regardless of their income or social status.
If the voters of your school district do not have a say in how the school is run, you are not a public school. It does not count if your tsar or board of tsars is appointed by a state-level elected official. If there is no way for local voters to change the school's management through local means, it is not a public school.
And yes-- that means that there are places like Philadelphia and Newark where the schools are no longer public schools in anything but name. Leaving the name alone-- that's how you steal an entire public school system from the public it is supposed to serve.
Play by the Rules
The charter movement, even the traditional one, has been all about getting around bad rules. This has never made a lot of sense to me, this business of government saying, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we need a different kind of school as an alternative." Why not say, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we are now going to rescind some of those rules. Because, dumb."
The "we need charters to escape dumb rules" argument is like filling up your own car with Long John Silver's wrappers and empty coffee cups and one day saying, "Well, damn. This car's a mess. Guess I have to buy a new car." If you've made a mess of things, clean up the mess!
So I'll agree that there are some public school rules that charters shouldn't play by, because nobody should have to play by them. Important note: I can identify these rules because they interfere with a teacher's ability to provide quality service for students.
But there are other rules charters don't want to have to play by. For instance, "hire licensed personnel" seems to be a popular corner to cut (the Gulen folks seem to trip over this one a bunch). Likewise, modern charters like skirting that nasty union rubbish, which helps with holding onto the option to terminate any "teacher" at any time. This is not about providing superior schooling for students; this is about maintaining a more easily controlled workforce that will be cheap and kept in line.
It goes back to that whole damn democracy thing. Modern charter operators want to be able to rule their company like a Bill Gates or a Leona Helmsley. They do not want to have to govern a public service trust like a Congress or a President, held ultimately accountable to a separate court or electorate (though don't worry-- they're working on that system, too).
Public schools are a trust, a service to the communities that house them and the country that holds them. If you want to be a public school, you have to play by the public school rules. You can certainly set up a private school outside those rules, but that's what it is-- a private school, not a public one.
Serve the Full Population
The same modern charter trick has been documented over and over. Behind every charter school miracle is a charter school that gets rid of students who might hurt their numbers.
They say that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. But in America, there's another place like that-- the public school.
A public school accepts every student. A public school does not bar a student for being too expensive to educate. A public school does not push out a student who gets lousy test scores. A public school must accept every single student who shows up on their doorstep, barring only those who reach a criminal level of threat to others (and sometimes not even that).
No school that turns students away, pushes students away, counsels students out, or even has the option of considering these actions because there is some other school that must take the student-- no school that does these things can call itself a public school. No school that has a student population substantially different from the student population of the area it serves can rightly call itself a public school.
I was tweet-challenged on this point the other day with the issue of magnet schools. That's a valid point-- a school designed to focus on the performing arts cannot be expected to have the same percentage of tone-deaf, stage-inept non-performers as the rest of its neighborhood. But magnet schools have a very specific, very explicit mission that clearly defines how their population will differ from the larger group. A performing arts school mission does not say "To foster great student arts, plus keeping out any ELL students, too." The careful focus was in fact one of the things that could, and did, and does, make classic charters great.
But another characteristic of modern charters is that they rarely have such a clearly defined mission. And certainly none have a mission that makes explicit upfront, as magnet schools do, exactly which students they plan to include and exclude. As far as I know, no modern charter has a mission statement that reads, "We will give a mediocre education to all poor kids except the ones who are difficult or have developmental problems or who can't hit our numbers."
You can certainly be selective about which students make it into your school (and get to stay there), but if you do, you are a private school. A public school accepts all students.
Public School and Virtue
I am not saying that you must meet all four of these requirements to qualify as a ethically upright and educationally sound school. I can think of several private schools that flunk all four tests (though all have far more accountability measures in place than many modern charters), and they are perfectly good schools. But they are private schools, not public schools.
I can think of some charter schools that pass all four tests. They are classic versions of charter education, and they deserve to be called public schools.
But to call the Success and Imagine and K12 and Hope-on-a-Shingle and all the rest of the hedge-fund backed, politically connected, ROI ROI ROIing their big financial boat modern charters may be many things.
But they are not public schools. Not. Public. Schools.
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.
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.
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
We're Here To Help
Andy Jacob, the "comms guy for @TNTP," disagreed with my characterization of TNTP's classic, "The Widget Effect." A few days ago, I summed up the message with two sentences:
We don't pay teachers differently based on how good they are. We should do that.
Jacob allowed as how he wasn't sure I'd really read the report, and when I assured him that I had, suggested a correction to the drift of my gist.
This "helpfulness" idea is one that turns up often in reformster teacher evaluation plans. "We're just dredging up all this data about your performance," they say, "so that we can help you become a better teacher." Sometimes they would also like to help school administrations make better staffing choices.
Now we could talk about all the subtle clues that "helping" might not be the goal here, such as the repeated complaints that if 70% of students failed the Big Test then it can't possibly be true that 90% of their teachers don't suck. But that's not where I'm headed today.
No, sometimes, when somebody makes a claim, I find it useful to perform a little thought experiment and imagine what the world would like if what they claimed was true was, in fact, true. What do I imagine a teacher evaluation system set up to help teachers would look like.
Wide slices.
The observation portion would not be a single short snapshot. Since this is an imaginary system to help teachers, I'm going to go ahead and imagine a system that would be a huge pain for administrators. I'll imaginarilly help them some other day.
So, more than one visit. And more than formal observations. Plenty of drop in's, drop by's, drive by's, and maybe even some lurking outside my room. Point is, I don't need help figuring out what needed to be tweaked in a single lesson on the third Tuesday of the second month of school. I'm more interested in finding out if there are systemic issues in my classroom, but those issues will only be obvious over time.
Student products.
Take a look at what kind of product I'm getting out of my students. Look at their written work-- does it look like they're achieving in that area. Look at the tests I've given them-- how are they doing on those. And take a longitudinal look-- are they making gains over the course of the year. Hell, go ahead and talk to them-- see if they think they're learning anything.
Yes, you can throw in some standardized test results if you like, but most of those crappy bubble tests designed in far away places by people who don't know me, my students, my community's expectations for education-- those tests have little of use to tell me. Basis for comparing me with some teacher in Palookahville, North Arksylvania? What good does it do me to know whether he prepared his students for a one-time pointless exercises better than I did? It's a one-time pointless exercise.
Handle the results professionally.
If, in the course of observing me, you saw me post grades with names attached on the board, announcing "Look at how many people are better students than Ashley," you would rightfully chastise me (if you would not, I do not want to work for you).
If this evaluation system is all about helping me, then it should be part of a conversation between you and me and nobody else. I do not help Ashley learn about gerund phrases by telling the whole class how much she sucks. I help Ashley by talking to Ashley. You help me by talking to me. It may be more efficient to hand me off to a designated peer coach, but if I'm going to get better, it will be helpful not to be distracted by fear and humiliation.
Support me.
Help me focus on all the ways I can succeed, not all the ways I'm going to suffer if I fail. When you learn to drive a car, you learn to keep your eyes on the road, to focus on the destination you desire. If you get afraid of the tree, and stare at the tree, you will drive directly for the trees.
So let's figure out a a plan for my success, not for my failure.
Don't raise the stakes.
The stakes are already huge. The stakes are my ability to think of myself as a successful teacher, as a person who is succeeding in the career I have chosen for my adult life. I have spent the last umpteen years working toward doing this for a lifetime, toward waking up in the morning and saying, "I am a teacher, and today I am going to make a difference in some child's life."
If I fail at this job, it will not be like the summer I decided I would never be a good telemarketer. I will be devastated.
So threats to cut my pay, hold up my raise, mark me with a scarlet "ineffective"-- these just add insult to injury. These allow me to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, to say, "Yeah, I got better, but not better enough I guess."
I am already hugely motivated. You can't motivate me more-- you can only hurt me. And if I'm not already hugely motivated, you should probably counsel me out. But in the meantime, trying to mess with my pay and my ratings won't make me any more motivated.
If I'm good, recognize me.
Give me a little plaque. Give me some office space. Thanks me. Let me have a little piece of extra responsibility that I can handle on my own in my own way. Recognize me in the way that grown professional humans recognize each other. A performance bonus is-- well, it's not that I can't use the money, but it's kind of like taking a woman out for a date and at the end saying, "You were great honey, and handing her five twenties." It's not exactly flattering.
Stay with me.
Continue the process. Work with me. Check up on me. Help me move forward. Don't just drop an improvement plan on my desk and disappear like smoke. Work with me as if you actually wanted to keep me around.
These ar all things I would expect to see in a teacher evaluation system designed to help me. Help, not threats and punishment. Emphasis on collecting information that tells you how I'm actually doing at teaching (not how I'm doing at being in a room with students who generate good test scores). And no-- I don't mean "multiple measures," because many of the indicators and pictures that show what kind of teacher I am are not measures at all. Saying "multiple measures" for evaluating teachers is like saying we'll use lots of different rulers and tape measures to measure excitement. A whole variety of the wrong tools = the wrong tools.
And support to help me get to where we both want me to be. Those are the things I would expect to see. Do you see those things in refornster teacher eval plans? No, me neither. Not even with multiple measures.
We don't pay teachers differently based on how good they are. We should do that.
Jacob allowed as how he wasn't sure I'd really read the report, and when I assured him that I had, suggested a correction to the drift of my gist.
@palan57 No, the gist is that most schools give everyone a perfunctory "good" or "great" rating, and that's not helpful for anyone.
— Andy Jacob (@andyjacob) October 13, 2014
This "helpfulness" idea is one that turns up often in reformster teacher evaluation plans. "We're just dredging up all this data about your performance," they say, "so that we can help you become a better teacher." Sometimes they would also like to help school administrations make better staffing choices.
Now we could talk about all the subtle clues that "helping" might not be the goal here, such as the repeated complaints that if 70% of students failed the Big Test then it can't possibly be true that 90% of their teachers don't suck. But that's not where I'm headed today.
No, sometimes, when somebody makes a claim, I find it useful to perform a little thought experiment and imagine what the world would like if what they claimed was true was, in fact, true. What do I imagine a teacher evaluation system set up to help teachers would look like.
Wide slices.
The observation portion would not be a single short snapshot. Since this is an imaginary system to help teachers, I'm going to go ahead and imagine a system that would be a huge pain for administrators. I'll imaginarilly help them some other day.
So, more than one visit. And more than formal observations. Plenty of drop in's, drop by's, drive by's, and maybe even some lurking outside my room. Point is, I don't need help figuring out what needed to be tweaked in a single lesson on the third Tuesday of the second month of school. I'm more interested in finding out if there are systemic issues in my classroom, but those issues will only be obvious over time.
Student products.
Take a look at what kind of product I'm getting out of my students. Look at their written work-- does it look like they're achieving in that area. Look at the tests I've given them-- how are they doing on those. And take a longitudinal look-- are they making gains over the course of the year. Hell, go ahead and talk to them-- see if they think they're learning anything.
Yes, you can throw in some standardized test results if you like, but most of those crappy bubble tests designed in far away places by people who don't know me, my students, my community's expectations for education-- those tests have little of use to tell me. Basis for comparing me with some teacher in Palookahville, North Arksylvania? What good does it do me to know whether he prepared his students for a one-time pointless exercises better than I did? It's a one-time pointless exercise.
Handle the results professionally.
If, in the course of observing me, you saw me post grades with names attached on the board, announcing "Look at how many people are better students than Ashley," you would rightfully chastise me (if you would not, I do not want to work for you).
If this evaluation system is all about helping me, then it should be part of a conversation between you and me and nobody else. I do not help Ashley learn about gerund phrases by telling the whole class how much she sucks. I help Ashley by talking to Ashley. You help me by talking to me. It may be more efficient to hand me off to a designated peer coach, but if I'm going to get better, it will be helpful not to be distracted by fear and humiliation.
Support me.
Help me focus on all the ways I can succeed, not all the ways I'm going to suffer if I fail. When you learn to drive a car, you learn to keep your eyes on the road, to focus on the destination you desire. If you get afraid of the tree, and stare at the tree, you will drive directly for the trees.
So let's figure out a a plan for my success, not for my failure.
Don't raise the stakes.
The stakes are already huge. The stakes are my ability to think of myself as a successful teacher, as a person who is succeeding in the career I have chosen for my adult life. I have spent the last umpteen years working toward doing this for a lifetime, toward waking up in the morning and saying, "I am a teacher, and today I am going to make a difference in some child's life."
If I fail at this job, it will not be like the summer I decided I would never be a good telemarketer. I will be devastated.
So threats to cut my pay, hold up my raise, mark me with a scarlet "ineffective"-- these just add insult to injury. These allow me to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, to say, "Yeah, I got better, but not better enough I guess."
I am already hugely motivated. You can't motivate me more-- you can only hurt me. And if I'm not already hugely motivated, you should probably counsel me out. But in the meantime, trying to mess with my pay and my ratings won't make me any more motivated.
If I'm good, recognize me.
Give me a little plaque. Give me some office space. Thanks me. Let me have a little piece of extra responsibility that I can handle on my own in my own way. Recognize me in the way that grown professional humans recognize each other. A performance bonus is-- well, it's not that I can't use the money, but it's kind of like taking a woman out for a date and at the end saying, "You were great honey, and handing her five twenties." It's not exactly flattering.
Stay with me.
Continue the process. Work with me. Check up on me. Help me move forward. Don't just drop an improvement plan on my desk and disappear like smoke. Work with me as if you actually wanted to keep me around.
These ar all things I would expect to see in a teacher evaluation system designed to help me. Help, not threats and punishment. Emphasis on collecting information that tells you how I'm actually doing at teaching (not how I'm doing at being in a room with students who generate good test scores). And no-- I don't mean "multiple measures," because many of the indicators and pictures that show what kind of teacher I am are not measures at all. Saying "multiple measures" for evaluating teachers is like saying we'll use lots of different rulers and tape measures to measure excitement. A whole variety of the wrong tools = the wrong tools.
And support to help me get to where we both want me to be. Those are the things I would expect to see. Do you see those things in refornster teacher eval plans? No, me neither. Not even with multiple measures.
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.
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.
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.
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