I received the following message from one of my readers. I'm telling her story here with her permission:
I am writing to you because I don't know where else to turn. I am a
veteran elementary teacher of 25 years. I am emotionally spent. Yes,
it is the second month of a new school year, and I am completely burned
out. To be fair, it hasn't all happened in the last month and a half.
It all started about 5 years ago, and things have been rolling downhill
since then. You see, because I am an elementary teacher, my life today
is completely out of balance. My colleagues and I easily work 60 hours a
week, and when we are not at work, are usually worrying about
work--about how we are going to get everything done that needs to be
done and and how we are going to get our students to the end goal that
our administration expects of us, er, I mean, them.
Many
of us arrive at school each day at or before 7 am, and and often do
not make it home in time for supper with our families. Our lunch break
is spent inhaling yogurt as we work with children, score papers, record
grades or make copies. We come home exhausted to our own children who
need our help with homework, piles of laundry that need to be washed or
folded, and to lunches that need to be packed for the next day when this
whole crazy cycle begins again. But by the time we get home, we have
nothing left to give. And when the weekend finally does roll around,
activities have to be scheduled around time we know that we have to
spend doing yet more schoolwork. Elderly parents to visit? No time.
Sick child? Hubby can you take this? This is just no way to live!
When
I was in college, I studied hard and planned for my future in which I
expected to one day be a successful, experienced, respected
professional. Over the years as a teacher, I have continued to push
myself toward greater understanding of child development, academic
achievement and my role in helping children reach their potential. Yet
where I am today could hardly be farther from the vision I once had for
myself. Instead, I find myself in a workplace where I have had
instilled in me the notion that I am not doing enough, don't know enough
and am not making progress fast enough. I often look back on my
college days with regret and even resentment.. I could have done
anything. I could have been anything. Why did I make this stupid
choice to be a teacher?
My
husband tells me that my colleagues and I just need to band together to
talk with our administrators, sharing our struggles with them. Surely,
he says, our collective voices would be enough to make a case that the
administration can't ignore. After all, any good employer cares about
the physical and emotional well-being of its employees, right? And
surely they would be interested in the morale in the building, right?
Well, we have tried. They aren't
If
I found a job in a field outside of education this afternoon that fit
me, I would take it by tonight. I want out. And I want the world to
know it. (Well, kind of. Not my immediate world, perhaps--after all, I
do have to keep my job until I can find something else!) But until
then, I want some relief. And I simply don't know where to find it.
This teacher works in Wisconsin, and feels that following the "walk out the door at 5:00" approach would result in her being out of a job in a few months.
I don't know how people who create this kind of work environment live with themselves. I don't know what story they tell themselves at the end of the day that makes them feel as if they have done heroic, important things.
And I know that some of you will think, "Well, they just need to stand tall, stand together, and fight back hard." I don't know enough of the specifics of her situation to know if that's a real option or not. But I have to wonder what has happened-- how did we get to the place where it's usual to expect that a teacher needs to be a hard-as-nails street fighter.
How many great people are we losing because all they have to offer is that they are gentle and kind, love children, and want to help students learn and understand--- and they know (or they learn) that that is not enough.
Do feel free to offer support to this reader in the comments. I expect she'll see your comments. As will the other readers who are in a similar place.
Monday, October 20, 2014
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Forever Schools
You may well have seen some variation on this poster:
I've seen plenty of them (and we have a forever dog of our own).
This morning I came across this piece on Buzzfeed, of all places, talking about the beginning of the end for charter profiteers in general, and K12 in particular. And it reminded me of one more quality that distinguishes between modern profiteering charter schools and true public schools.
Public schools are forever schools, not until schools.
Public schools do not serve students until the financial returns get too low.
Public schools do not serve students until those students turn out to be too challenging.
Public schools do not serve students until they can't get away with lying about staff qualifications.
Public schools do not serve students until the students reveal learning disabilities.
Public schools do not serve students until the market presents a better investment opportunity.
Public schools do not serve students until the sponsoring corporation dissolves itself and disappears.
Public schools do not serve students until they can't get sweetheart deals from politicians any more.
Public schools do not serve students until they decide to just close up overnight with no notice.
Public schools do not serve students until the people running them feel like doing something else instead.
Public schools do not serve students until those students have to be pushed out for scoring too low on The Test.
A public school is a commitment. It's a community promising, "We will build this place to help our children learn and grow, and we will never, ever, close it for capricious or self-serving reasons. Families may come and go. Businesses may rise and fall. But when you come back here in a generation or two or three, you will find this school still standing."
It is true that forever schools don't really last forever (and our dog is not immortal, either). But the commitment is a forever commitment, a commitment that goes beyond individual staff, leaders, community members. The commitment is the community, past, present and future saying to their children and their children's children, "We will be right here, just as long as children need a safe place to learn and grow."
The modern profiteering charters make no such commitment. "We'll be right here," they say, "just as long as it serves our purposes."
There are cities, increasing in number, where leaders have trampled on the promise of public schools. Shame on those leaders, and shame on our national leaders who have encouraged the destruction of the public school promise. Wouldn't it be interesting if charter school companies had to sign contracts that, say, bound them to keeping a school open for ten, fifteen, twenty years whether they were making money or not. Wouldn't it be interesting if, in places like New Orleans, politicians had said, "You can open a charter school to replace the public school that used to be here, but you can't ever close it until we say you can. You must guarantee to provide educational services to the children of New Orleans as long as there are children in New Orleans." Public schools should be as permanent as any public institution can be. It is a huge ripoff to replace them with temporary schools having no more aspiration to permanence than the pop-up tent store selling Fourth of July fireworks.
In the meantime, the modern profiteering charters are just the educational version of the people who bring home puppies and a year later have taken them to the pound or abandoned them in the country or simply neglected them to death.
All pets should be forever pets. And all schools should be forever schools.
I've seen plenty of them (and we have a forever dog of our own).
This morning I came across this piece on Buzzfeed, of all places, talking about the beginning of the end for charter profiteers in general, and K12 in particular. And it reminded me of one more quality that distinguishes between modern profiteering charter schools and true public schools.
Public schools are forever schools, not until schools.
Public schools do not serve students until the financial returns get too low.
Public schools do not serve students until those students turn out to be too challenging.
Public schools do not serve students until they can't get away with lying about staff qualifications.
Public schools do not serve students until the students reveal learning disabilities.
Public schools do not serve students until the market presents a better investment opportunity.
Public schools do not serve students until the sponsoring corporation dissolves itself and disappears.
Public schools do not serve students until they can't get sweetheart deals from politicians any more.
Public schools do not serve students until they decide to just close up overnight with no notice.
Public schools do not serve students until the people running them feel like doing something else instead.
Public schools do not serve students until those students have to be pushed out for scoring too low on The Test.
A public school is a commitment. It's a community promising, "We will build this place to help our children learn and grow, and we will never, ever, close it for capricious or self-serving reasons. Families may come and go. Businesses may rise and fall. But when you come back here in a generation or two or three, you will find this school still standing."
It is true that forever schools don't really last forever (and our dog is not immortal, either). But the commitment is a forever commitment, a commitment that goes beyond individual staff, leaders, community members. The commitment is the community, past, present and future saying to their children and their children's children, "We will be right here, just as long as children need a safe place to learn and grow."
The modern profiteering charters make no such commitment. "We'll be right here," they say, "just as long as it serves our purposes."
There are cities, increasing in number, where leaders have trampled on the promise of public schools. Shame on those leaders, and shame on our national leaders who have encouraged the destruction of the public school promise. Wouldn't it be interesting if charter school companies had to sign contracts that, say, bound them to keeping a school open for ten, fifteen, twenty years whether they were making money or not. Wouldn't it be interesting if, in places like New Orleans, politicians had said, "You can open a charter school to replace the public school that used to be here, but you can't ever close it until we say you can. You must guarantee to provide educational services to the children of New Orleans as long as there are children in New Orleans." Public schools should be as permanent as any public institution can be. It is a huge ripoff to replace them with temporary schools having no more aspiration to permanence than the pop-up tent store selling Fourth of July fireworks.
In the meantime, the modern profiteering charters are just the educational version of the people who bring home puppies and a year later have taken them to the pound or abandoned them in the country or simply neglected them to death.
All pets should be forever pets. And all schools should be forever schools.
Management By Screen
If you remember the film classic Aliens (a film classic that James Cameron made way before he decided to remake Ferngully for a gazillion dollars), you remember his nightmare vision of soldiering in the not-too-distant future. Lt. Gorman is the "leader" who expects to manage his troops from a mobile office loaded with screens that are in turn loaded with data. It is an effective narrative shorthand for leadership that is detached, impersonal, and ultimately fatally ineffective. And in 1986, it was an convincing portrayal of how things could go wrong.
Well, it's almost thirty years later, and Lt. Gorman is real.
Not so much in the military, perhaps, but Management By Screen is alive and well in the private sector.
My brother has worked in the manufacturing world most of his adult life, and he tells me hair-curling tales of the things going on out there. The hot, new, with-it manager is a data god. He is sure to live at least forty miles away from the location of the plant, because you can't make the necessary hard-nosed brutal decisions you need to make if you're personally familiar with the people and community that will be affected.
And this data god's management style looks kind of like this
Yes, you should be able to manage a facility from your desk. Just make sure you're collecting the necessary data.
The photo is from an investment firm, which helped me connect some dots. We know that lots of economists think they know how to re-organize schools. Is it any wonder that they envision a world in which data is king, and collecting and managing data is the main function of educational leaders? That's the world they know. Talking to live humans is just a distraction. It's all just data. Just manage the data.
Management By Screen has certainly been successful in some settings. Wal-Mart has managed to dominate its sector by superior interconnection of data-- the cash registers and store inventory counters and warehouse inventory and supplier and manufacturers are all linked in one big web of tightly wound, stuff-providing data. When the checker swipes your widget at the cash register, data flows all the way up the line to the widget factory. And it can all be managed by screen in an office somewhere.
That, of course, is the model that some imagine as an educational paradise. If we can somehow turn every student activity into data generation, and the collect all that data, and then use that data to tweak the data-generating activities, like adjusting the speed on a assembly-line unit or the temperature on a baking unit or the response time on supplier response-- well, that wold just be schooling heaven. We would be able to scale up, plug hundreds--thousands!-- ofdata generation units students into the system, and just watch those outputs and throughputs reach optimal state on the screen, eventually connecting all of it to employers and health care providers and everything would eventually be connected in the great chain of life and death and supply and labor, without us having to interact directly with any of them.
And while you may think I have phrased that in such a way as to highlight its awfulness, you should realize that there are people who would read that paragraph and not see a single thing wrong with it.
Do not ask them to explain how any of this would help. For them, it is self-evidently great to have people all plugged into a system that removes human variables and which can be run through the beautiful, elegant screen. Of course this is a terrible way to work with humans, but in some corporate settings, that just doesn't matter. But the goal of schooling is to make a better life for the human beings who pass through the schools. This does not matter to the screen management people. Their goal is not to make life better for the students. Their goal is to make the system better.
They are the bombadiers of education, flipping a switch, watching the sights line up elegantly, and existing in a small quiet space far away from the actual carnage and destruction. Flesh and blood are messy and difficult. But everything looks better on a screen.
Well, it's almost thirty years later, and Lt. Gorman is real.
Not so much in the military, perhaps, but Management By Screen is alive and well in the private sector.
My brother has worked in the manufacturing world most of his adult life, and he tells me hair-curling tales of the things going on out there. The hot, new, with-it manager is a data god. He is sure to live at least forty miles away from the location of the plant, because you can't make the necessary hard-nosed brutal decisions you need to make if you're personally familiar with the people and community that will be affected.
And this data god's management style looks kind of like this
Yes, you should be able to manage a facility from your desk. Just make sure you're collecting the necessary data.
The photo is from an investment firm, which helped me connect some dots. We know that lots of economists think they know how to re-organize schools. Is it any wonder that they envision a world in which data is king, and collecting and managing data is the main function of educational leaders? That's the world they know. Talking to live humans is just a distraction. It's all just data. Just manage the data.
Management By Screen has certainly been successful in some settings. Wal-Mart has managed to dominate its sector by superior interconnection of data-- the cash registers and store inventory counters and warehouse inventory and supplier and manufacturers are all linked in one big web of tightly wound, stuff-providing data. When the checker swipes your widget at the cash register, data flows all the way up the line to the widget factory. And it can all be managed by screen in an office somewhere.
That, of course, is the model that some imagine as an educational paradise. If we can somehow turn every student activity into data generation, and the collect all that data, and then use that data to tweak the data-generating activities, like adjusting the speed on a assembly-line unit or the temperature on a baking unit or the response time on supplier response-- well, that wold just be schooling heaven. We would be able to scale up, plug hundreds--thousands!-- of
And while you may think I have phrased that in such a way as to highlight its awfulness, you should realize that there are people who would read that paragraph and not see a single thing wrong with it.
Do not ask them to explain how any of this would help. For them, it is self-evidently great to have people all plugged into a system that removes human variables and which can be run through the beautiful, elegant screen. Of course this is a terrible way to work with humans, but in some corporate settings, that just doesn't matter. But the goal of schooling is to make a better life for the human beings who pass through the schools. This does not matter to the screen management people. Their goal is not to make life better for the students. Their goal is to make the system better.
They are the bombadiers of education, flipping a switch, watching the sights line up elegantly, and existing in a small quiet space far away from the actual carnage and destruction. Flesh and blood are messy and difficult. But everything looks better on a screen.
Bad News from Minneapolis
Per yesterday's report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Minneapolis public school system is showing bad signs of advanced charteritis.
The city schools have been hit by low enrollment; they planned for 900 more students this year, but the actual number was two. That translates into a huge loss of state money. “For a long time we were the big player in town. That has created a sense of complacency,” said Robert Doty.
Doty is the Chief Operations Officer for the district, and if that sounds more corporate than educational, then you are just starting to get the picture. Here's the rest of that quote: “We haven’t focused on student retention and student recruitment as others in the market have.”
Yes, the Minneapolis public school system is not suffering from low enrollment-- they are suffering from a diminishing "market share." And they need to find ways to "recruit and retain" students.
This is free market schooling in action. It's not a contest of educational excellence-- it's a battle of marketing prowess, and it creates some tough choices for the people charged with running--well, managing, I suppose, Minneapolis's school system. And it highlights all the things fundamentally wrong with such a system.
First, it takes focus off doing a good job of creating education and puts it on doing a good job of selling seats in a building.
You can claim that, well, of course, the best way to market schools is to make them really excellent. But at the last meeting, Doty did not call the board together to talk about education. "At Tuesday night’s meeting, Doty and other staff members gave the board an update on the grim enrollment numbers and proposed the creation of a comprehensive marketing plan."
And this isn't just a philosophical problem-- marketing plans cost money. The outrage and upset over having a band program cut because of budget slashing or shifting resources to more test prep-- that outrage is old hat at this point. But imagine finding out that your child's band program must be cut because the board needs money to buy a series of tv spots and billboards. It's alarming, but as long as charter chains like K12 can divert taxpayer dollars directly into an advertising budget, what other choice does a public school have?
Free market schooling does not demand superior schools. It demands superior marketing.
It's not all lost in Minneapolis. At that same meeting, "some" board members tried to get back to business. Board member Alberto Monserrate suggested that the board need to stop worrying about marketing and get its focus back on educating students.
“We need to stop our obsession with market share,” Monserrate said at the board meeting. “We are not a business. At some point you have to have the right product to market.”
Yes, that's right. The guy whose point was "we need to stop talking about school like it's a business" then went on to talk about schools like they are a business. Sigh.
Not that Doty heard a word Monserrate said.
Doty said he agrees on the need to improve student achievement, but said he’s confident that the district’s new strategic plan will address the issue. The plan will require schools to increase math and reading scores by 5 percent every year for the next five years. For students of color, leaders want those standards to increase by 8 percent each year.
Maybe there's more to this than the paper reported, but I bet not. If you've worked in retail, you will recognize this management approach. Set numbers for the new quarter. Then institute your "plan" by pushing those numbers down the line. Some suit in the Big Boardroom says, "We will increase these numbers by 5%," and a month later, a store manager is telling a part-time, minimum wage sales person, "These are your target numbers for the quarter. Hit them, or else." It's a very popular management technique, because although it's absolutely destined for failure, it pushes blame for that failure down to the least important, most expendable people in the company.
So kudos, Mr. Doty, for bringing yet another time-tested business technique to schools.
[Update: I'm still learning about the Minneapolis situation, including the role of the Kramer family who are, it should be said, kind of amazing. My esteemed colleague edushyster profiled these folks a few years back. Dad used to own the newspaper, and the children (most of whom went the TFA-to-Master of the Universe education route) include a boss of TFA, a couple of charter honchos,and a director of a charter-promoting group in Minneapolis. Plus active roles in many reformster organizations nationally, as well as chipping in tobuy support their very own school board candidate. And these days Dad runs a site that promotes the whole package. Clearly Minneapolis is a great town to be rich and committed to reformsterizing schools even as your charterfy your way to more riches. No wonder the public schools are on the ropes.]
Meanwhile, the Minneapolis public school system is being bled dry. The charters have scooped up about 20,000 students, leaving 34,000 in the public system. The dollar amounts being drained from the public schools are huge, putting the district in "triage" mode. But of course it lacks the charter power to pick and choose its students. So the money is drained, the cream is scooped off, and the public system must increasingly carry the weight of inevitable failure-- all while trying to divert some of its meager resources to marketing plans. And of course marketing becomes increasingly difficult because in this scenario, the public schools will sooner or later be largely failing-- not because they collapsed, but because they were attacked, their resources stripped, and their remaining schools charged with the task of educating all the students that the charters don't want.
I do not know how to reverse this, other than to require that charter schools function like the public schools they pretend to be (though of course that would make them far less profitable and therefor far less interesting to the hedge fund masters of the universe currently pushing them). You would also have to fix the funding system of the state, and it might be a good idea to slap some sort of legislative lid on advertising activities so that tax dollars meant for education are not being wasted on marketing.
But fundamentally you have to get back to the idea that public education is a public trust and that we have an obligation to maintain it for the benefit of all students. As long as we keep treating it like a consumer good to be marketed like breakfast cereal and automobiles, for the profit of corporate investors and for the use of those few customers who can afford the very best-- as long as we keep doing that, Minneapolis is the future for many cities.
The city schools have been hit by low enrollment; they planned for 900 more students this year, but the actual number was two. That translates into a huge loss of state money. “For a long time we were the big player in town. That has created a sense of complacency,” said Robert Doty.
Doty is the Chief Operations Officer for the district, and if that sounds more corporate than educational, then you are just starting to get the picture. Here's the rest of that quote: “We haven’t focused on student retention and student recruitment as others in the market have.”
Yes, the Minneapolis public school system is not suffering from low enrollment-- they are suffering from a diminishing "market share." And they need to find ways to "recruit and retain" students.
This is free market schooling in action. It's not a contest of educational excellence-- it's a battle of marketing prowess, and it creates some tough choices for the people charged with running--well, managing, I suppose, Minneapolis's school system. And it highlights all the things fundamentally wrong with such a system.
First, it takes focus off doing a good job of creating education and puts it on doing a good job of selling seats in a building.
You can claim that, well, of course, the best way to market schools is to make them really excellent. But at the last meeting, Doty did not call the board together to talk about education. "At Tuesday night’s meeting, Doty and other staff members gave the board an update on the grim enrollment numbers and proposed the creation of a comprehensive marketing plan."
And this isn't just a philosophical problem-- marketing plans cost money. The outrage and upset over having a band program cut because of budget slashing or shifting resources to more test prep-- that outrage is old hat at this point. But imagine finding out that your child's band program must be cut because the board needs money to buy a series of tv spots and billboards. It's alarming, but as long as charter chains like K12 can divert taxpayer dollars directly into an advertising budget, what other choice does a public school have?
Free market schooling does not demand superior schools. It demands superior marketing.
It's not all lost in Minneapolis. At that same meeting, "some" board members tried to get back to business. Board member Alberto Monserrate suggested that the board need to stop worrying about marketing and get its focus back on educating students.
“We need to stop our obsession with market share,” Monserrate said at the board meeting. “We are not a business. At some point you have to have the right product to market.”
Yes, that's right. The guy whose point was "we need to stop talking about school like it's a business" then went on to talk about schools like they are a business. Sigh.
Not that Doty heard a word Monserrate said.
Doty said he agrees on the need to improve student achievement, but said he’s confident that the district’s new strategic plan will address the issue. The plan will require schools to increase math and reading scores by 5 percent every year for the next five years. For students of color, leaders want those standards to increase by 8 percent each year.
Maybe there's more to this than the paper reported, but I bet not. If you've worked in retail, you will recognize this management approach. Set numbers for the new quarter. Then institute your "plan" by pushing those numbers down the line. Some suit in the Big Boardroom says, "We will increase these numbers by 5%," and a month later, a store manager is telling a part-time, minimum wage sales person, "These are your target numbers for the quarter. Hit them, or else." It's a very popular management technique, because although it's absolutely destined for failure, it pushes blame for that failure down to the least important, most expendable people in the company.
So kudos, Mr. Doty, for bringing yet another time-tested business technique to schools.
[Update: I'm still learning about the Minneapolis situation, including the role of the Kramer family who are, it should be said, kind of amazing. My esteemed colleague edushyster profiled these folks a few years back. Dad used to own the newspaper, and the children (most of whom went the TFA-to-Master of the Universe education route) include a boss of TFA, a couple of charter honchos,and a director of a charter-promoting group in Minneapolis. Plus active roles in many reformster organizations nationally, as well as chipping in to
Meanwhile, the Minneapolis public school system is being bled dry. The charters have scooped up about 20,000 students, leaving 34,000 in the public system. The dollar amounts being drained from the public schools are huge, putting the district in "triage" mode. But of course it lacks the charter power to pick and choose its students. So the money is drained, the cream is scooped off, and the public system must increasingly carry the weight of inevitable failure-- all while trying to divert some of its meager resources to marketing plans. And of course marketing becomes increasingly difficult because in this scenario, the public schools will sooner or later be largely failing-- not because they collapsed, but because they were attacked, their resources stripped, and their remaining schools charged with the task of educating all the students that the charters don't want.
I do not know how to reverse this, other than to require that charter schools function like the public schools they pretend to be (though of course that would make them far less profitable and therefor far less interesting to the hedge fund masters of the universe currently pushing them). You would also have to fix the funding system of the state, and it might be a good idea to slap some sort of legislative lid on advertising activities so that tax dollars meant for education are not being wasted on marketing.
But fundamentally you have to get back to the idea that public education is a public trust and that we have an obligation to maintain it for the benefit of all students. As long as we keep treating it like a consumer good to be marketed like breakfast cereal and automobiles, for the profit of corporate investors and for the use of those few customers who can afford the very best-- as long as we keep doing that, Minneapolis is the future for many cities.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Can Any Teacher Make a Case for CCSS?
More teacher-fans of the Common Core have been uncovered. This time they're in Bismark, North Dakota. For instance, here's Amanda Peterson, an English teacher at Bismark High.
“They have allowed us to bring in more nonfiction selections that help us better understand, better critically analyze the literature we are reading,” she said.
The focus is no longer on recalling the plot of a story, she said, explaining that it no longer matters that students can recall the color of a car in a particular chapter of a book.
“Being able to make connections between the text and between real life and the news and the world around them and seeing how those patterns have continued over time is something I find incredibly important and valuable,” she said.
So what do you think? Was Ms. Peterson forbidden to bring in non-fiction before the state told her district they had to allow her? Who exactly had forced her to ask these car color questions in the past? Had the school district kept students and teachers walled off from the outside world so that she was unable to connect reading to patterns? Who exactly had forbidden her to use these approaches that she finds "incredibly important and valuable"?
Or was it not a matter of permission. Was Ms. Peterson free to do all these things, but simply unaware that such pedagogical approaches existed? Did she ask questions about the color of a car because she simply couldn't think of anything else to ask?
And here comes middle school English teacher Meagan Sharp.
She said seventh-grade students in her class used to read only one novel. They now participate in book clubs, where they read four novels per year.
Sigh. Same question for Ms. Sharp. Was she restricting her students to one novel because she was forbidden to teach more, or because she didn't realize that such a thing was humanly possible.
This narrative is repeated again and again and again. A teacher breathlessly announces that her classroom has been revolutionized and revived by Common Core, because the Core made it possible for her to use techniques that have been in use for forever by reasonably competent educators. Sometimes it's even an approach that isn't actually in the Common Core (I'm still waiting for someone to show me which ELA standard calls for critical thinking).
I keep trying to explain. When you say things like this:
“The connections that they make between the characters is deeper than I have ever seen since I started teaching,” she said.
you may think you're saying "This Common Core special sauce is amazing" but what I hear is "I have never had any idea about how to do my job."
It is possible that the message here is "I just teach out of the book that the school gives me, and now the book I teach out of has cool new stuff." Again, this does not tell us nearly as much about the Common Core as it tells us about your professional skills. And if we're talking about what is embedded in the script that you read lessons from-- well, I am accepting of wide varieties of techniques, but anybody who is happy "teaching" from a script does not belong in a classroom.
Here is one of the things I find striking about the Common Core is that here we are, well into the rollout, and here I am, reading mile after mile of verbage written about it, and I have yet to read a single credible endorsement of the ELA standards by a classroom teacher. Instead we get endorsements of techniques already well-known to capable teachers; these techniques may or may not actually be in the Core, but the Core still gets credit for them. On the rare occasions that a Core enthusiast talks about a technique not already in regular use, it's because the technique was long ago discredited and abandoned.
So, to you teachers who insist that Common Core revolutionized and revitalized your classroom, I will be impressed if you can successfully answer any of the following questions--
1) What's a thing that you would have to stop doing in your classroom tomorrow if the Common Core were repealed?
2) What's a thing that Common Core made possible that had never been possible in a classroom before?
I will not hold my breath. I don't think it's possible to make a case that the Core can do a thing to help an actual classroom teacher in the daily performance of her duty. Argue the need for national standards to get everybody on the same page if you must, but don't pretend that Common Core invented the wheel.
“They have allowed us to bring in more nonfiction selections that help us better understand, better critically analyze the literature we are reading,” she said.
The focus is no longer on recalling the plot of a story, she said, explaining that it no longer matters that students can recall the color of a car in a particular chapter of a book.
“Being able to make connections between the text and between real life and the news and the world around them and seeing how those patterns have continued over time is something I find incredibly important and valuable,” she said.
So what do you think? Was Ms. Peterson forbidden to bring in non-fiction before the state told her district they had to allow her? Who exactly had forced her to ask these car color questions in the past? Had the school district kept students and teachers walled off from the outside world so that she was unable to connect reading to patterns? Who exactly had forbidden her to use these approaches that she finds "incredibly important and valuable"?
Or was it not a matter of permission. Was Ms. Peterson free to do all these things, but simply unaware that such pedagogical approaches existed? Did she ask questions about the color of a car because she simply couldn't think of anything else to ask?
And here comes middle school English teacher Meagan Sharp.
She said seventh-grade students in her class used to read only one novel. They now participate in book clubs, where they read four novels per year.
Sigh. Same question for Ms. Sharp. Was she restricting her students to one novel because she was forbidden to teach more, or because she didn't realize that such a thing was humanly possible.
This narrative is repeated again and again and again. A teacher breathlessly announces that her classroom has been revolutionized and revived by Common Core, because the Core made it possible for her to use techniques that have been in use for forever by reasonably competent educators. Sometimes it's even an approach that isn't actually in the Common Core (I'm still waiting for someone to show me which ELA standard calls for critical thinking).
I keep trying to explain. When you say things like this:
“The connections that they make between the characters is deeper than I have ever seen since I started teaching,” she said.
you may think you're saying "This Common Core special sauce is amazing" but what I hear is "I have never had any idea about how to do my job."
It is possible that the message here is "I just teach out of the book that the school gives me, and now the book I teach out of has cool new stuff." Again, this does not tell us nearly as much about the Common Core as it tells us about your professional skills. And if we're talking about what is embedded in the script that you read lessons from-- well, I am accepting of wide varieties of techniques, but anybody who is happy "teaching" from a script does not belong in a classroom.
Here is one of the things I find striking about the Common Core is that here we are, well into the rollout, and here I am, reading mile after mile of verbage written about it, and I have yet to read a single credible endorsement of the ELA standards by a classroom teacher. Instead we get endorsements of techniques already well-known to capable teachers; these techniques may or may not actually be in the Core, but the Core still gets credit for them. On the rare occasions that a Core enthusiast talks about a technique not already in regular use, it's because the technique was long ago discredited and abandoned.
So, to you teachers who insist that Common Core revolutionized and revitalized your classroom, I will be impressed if you can successfully answer any of the following questions--
1) What's a thing that you would have to stop doing in your classroom tomorrow if the Common Core were repealed?
2) What's a thing that Common Core made possible that had never been possible in a classroom before?
I will not hold my breath. I don't think it's possible to make a case that the Core can do a thing to help an actual classroom teacher in the daily performance of her duty. Argue the need for national standards to get everybody on the same page if you must, but don't pretend that Common Core invented the wheel.
Arne Blows Standardized Smoke
As soon as CCSSO and CGCS announced their non-plan to provide PR coverage for the high stakes test-and-punish status quo, Arne Duncan was there to throw his tooter on the bandwagon. On top of an official word salad on the subject, Arne popped up yesterday in the Washington Post.
There was a time when Duncan could be counted on to at least say the right thing before he went ahead and did the wrong thing. And I cannot fault his opening for the WaPo piece.
As a parent, I want to know how my children are progressing in school each year. The more I know, the more I can help them build upon their strengths and interests and work on their weaknesses. The more I know, the better I can reinforce at home each night the hard work of their teachers during the school day.
He's absolutely correct here. It's just that his words have nothing to do with the policies pursued by his Department of Education.
Duncan welcomes the stated intention "to examine their assessment systems, ensure that assessments are high-quality and cut back testing that doesn’t meet that bar or is redundant."Duncan does not welcome an examination of the way in which standardized testing is driving actual education out of classrooms across America.
He makes his case for standardized testing here:
Parents have a right to know how much their children are learning; teachers, schools and districts need to know how students are progressing; and policymakers must know where students are excelling, improving and struggling.
As a case for standardized testing, this is wrong on all three points.
1) Parents do have a right to know how much their children are learning. And standardized tests are by far the least effective instruments for informing them. They are minute snapshots, providing little or no description of how students are growing and changing. Standardized tests measure one thing-- how well students do on standardized tests.
2) Teachers, schools and districts need to know how students are doing. And if a teacher needs a standardized test to tell her how her students are doing, that teacher is a dope, and needs to get out of teaching immediately. I measure my students dozens of times every single week, collecting wide and varied "data" that informs my view of how each student is doing. A standardized test will tell me one thing-- how that student does with a standardized test. If the school or district does not know whether they can trust my word or not about how the student is doing, the school and district are a dope. Standardized tests offer no useful information for this picture.
3) Explain, please, exactly why policymakers need to know how my third period class is doing on paragraph construction? Why do the bureaucrats in state and federal capitols need to know where students are "excelling, improving and struggling"? Is Congress planning to pass the "Clearer Lesson Plans About the Rise of American Critical Realism Act"? Are you suggesting that there are aides in the DOE standing by to help me write curriculum? Because I cannot for the life of me figure out why the policymakers (nice term, that, since it includes both the legislators who pass policy and the unelected suits who write it for them) need to have standardized results on every single kid in this country.
Duncan follows this up with a reference to another of his pet theories-- that students with learning disabilities just needed to be tested harder in order to fix their difficulties.
Duncan goes on to admit that "in some places" testing is eating up calendars and stressing students.
Policymakers at every level bear responsibility here — and that includes me and my department. We will support state and district leaders in taking on this issue and provide technical assistance to those who seek it.
In one sense, Duncan is correct. Policymakers at the state and local level bear responsibility for not telling the federal government to take its testing mandates and shove them where the NCLB-based money threats don't shine. Duncan's Department of Education bears responsibility for everything else.
This is the worst kind of weasel wording. This is the kid who sets fire to the neighbors house and then says to the kids who just tried to talk him out of it, "So, we're all in this together, right?"
It was the Duncan/Obama Education Department that twisted every state's arm up behind its ear and said, "If you want your Get Out Of NCLB Free Card, you will make testing the cornerstone of your education system." Duncan does not get to pretend that this testing mania, this out of control testing monster, somehow just fell from the sky. "Gosh," Duncan says and shrugs. "I guess there was just something in the water that year that made everybody just suddenly go crazypants on the testing thing. Guess we'll all have to try harder, boys."
No. No no no no. Testing mania is the direct mandated result of NCLB and its ugly stepsister RttT. It didn't just happen. The federal government required it. And if Duncan really though this was an actual problem and not just a PR problem, he is the one guy who could wave his magic waiver wand and say, "My bad. Your waiver no longer requires you to test everything that moves and use the test results as the basis for all educational system judgments."
I mean-- the states did not just suddenly all say, "You know, wouldn't it be fun to make test results part of teacher evaluations." That was a federal freaking mandate. It was a part of the NCLB based extortion, written into the offer that states could not refuse. NCLB enfederalized high stakes testing, and Race to the Top tripled down on it, and no policymakers outside the beltway ever had a say.
So no, Arne-- you do not get to pretend that "policymakers at every level" are responsible for the test-based gutting of education. Policymakers at your level-- specifically the policymakers who work in your office-- are responsible. All by themselves. No others.
Then it's back to the usual baloney. We've been falling behind educationally for "a generation" (because, kids these days). Dropout rates are down; college enrollment is up (because, you know, college is magic). Educators are taking steps to improve US education, because they are now "empowered to be creative and to teach critical thinking skills" (because creativity and critical thinking were only invented four years ago, and had never before been used in classrooms).
Also-- this whole testing problem is also going to be solved because we totally spent a bunch of free federal money on grants to develop super duper awesometastic tests that will be sooooo much better than current bubble tests (which are apparently not so great, though that has not led to anyone in DC saying, "yeah, you probably shouldn't use those any more"). These tests will be hella amazing and OMGZ-- they will measure writing and critical thinking exactly the same way for every single student in the country. Because if there's one thing we know about critical thinking and good writing, it's that they can always be measured exactly the same way for exactly the same results across the entire population of a country.
At this point I don't know if Duncan is a extraordinary liar or staggeringly clueless. But the WaPo piece ends with this line:
The writer is U.S. secretary of education.
So the piece at least begins and ends with something true. It's only everything in between that is wrong.
There was a time when Duncan could be counted on to at least say the right thing before he went ahead and did the wrong thing. And I cannot fault his opening for the WaPo piece.
As a parent, I want to know how my children are progressing in school each year. The more I know, the more I can help them build upon their strengths and interests and work on their weaknesses. The more I know, the better I can reinforce at home each night the hard work of their teachers during the school day.
He's absolutely correct here. It's just that his words have nothing to do with the policies pursued by his Department of Education.
Duncan welcomes the stated intention "to examine their assessment systems, ensure that assessments are high-quality and cut back testing that doesn’t meet that bar or is redundant."Duncan does not welcome an examination of the way in which standardized testing is driving actual education out of classrooms across America.
He makes his case for standardized testing here:
Parents have a right to know how much their children are learning; teachers, schools and districts need to know how students are progressing; and policymakers must know where students are excelling, improving and struggling.
As a case for standardized testing, this is wrong on all three points.
1) Parents do have a right to know how much their children are learning. And standardized tests are by far the least effective instruments for informing them. They are minute snapshots, providing little or no description of how students are growing and changing. Standardized tests measure one thing-- how well students do on standardized tests.
2) Teachers, schools and districts need to know how students are doing. And if a teacher needs a standardized test to tell her how her students are doing, that teacher is a dope, and needs to get out of teaching immediately. I measure my students dozens of times every single week, collecting wide and varied "data" that informs my view of how each student is doing. A standardized test will tell me one thing-- how that student does with a standardized test. If the school or district does not know whether they can trust my word or not about how the student is doing, the school and district are a dope. Standardized tests offer no useful information for this picture.
3) Explain, please, exactly why policymakers need to know how my third period class is doing on paragraph construction? Why do the bureaucrats in state and federal capitols need to know where students are "excelling, improving and struggling"? Is Congress planning to pass the "Clearer Lesson Plans About the Rise of American Critical Realism Act"? Are you suggesting that there are aides in the DOE standing by to help me write curriculum? Because I cannot for the life of me figure out why the policymakers (nice term, that, since it includes both the legislators who pass policy and the unelected suits who write it for them) need to have standardized results on every single kid in this country.
Duncan follows this up with a reference to another of his pet theories-- that students with learning disabilities just needed to be tested harder in order to fix their difficulties.
Duncan goes on to admit that "in some places" testing is eating up calendars and stressing students.
Policymakers at every level bear responsibility here — and that includes me and my department. We will support state and district leaders in taking on this issue and provide technical assistance to those who seek it.
In one sense, Duncan is correct. Policymakers at the state and local level bear responsibility for not telling the federal government to take its testing mandates and shove them where the NCLB-based money threats don't shine. Duncan's Department of Education bears responsibility for everything else.
This is the worst kind of weasel wording. This is the kid who sets fire to the neighbors house and then says to the kids who just tried to talk him out of it, "So, we're all in this together, right?"
It was the Duncan/Obama Education Department that twisted every state's arm up behind its ear and said, "If you want your Get Out Of NCLB Free Card, you will make testing the cornerstone of your education system." Duncan does not get to pretend that this testing mania, this out of control testing monster, somehow just fell from the sky. "Gosh," Duncan says and shrugs. "I guess there was just something in the water that year that made everybody just suddenly go crazypants on the testing thing. Guess we'll all have to try harder, boys."
No. No no no no. Testing mania is the direct mandated result of NCLB and its ugly stepsister RttT. It didn't just happen. The federal government required it. And if Duncan really though this was an actual problem and not just a PR problem, he is the one guy who could wave his magic waiver wand and say, "My bad. Your waiver no longer requires you to test everything that moves and use the test results as the basis for all educational system judgments."
I mean-- the states did not just suddenly all say, "You know, wouldn't it be fun to make test results part of teacher evaluations." That was a federal freaking mandate. It was a part of the NCLB based extortion, written into the offer that states could not refuse. NCLB enfederalized high stakes testing, and Race to the Top tripled down on it, and no policymakers outside the beltway ever had a say.
So no, Arne-- you do not get to pretend that "policymakers at every level" are responsible for the test-based gutting of education. Policymakers at your level-- specifically the policymakers who work in your office-- are responsible. All by themselves. No others.
Then it's back to the usual baloney. We've been falling behind educationally for "a generation" (because, kids these days). Dropout rates are down; college enrollment is up (because, you know, college is magic). Educators are taking steps to improve US education, because they are now "empowered to be creative and to teach critical thinking skills" (because creativity and critical thinking were only invented four years ago, and had never before been used in classrooms).
Also-- this whole testing problem is also going to be solved because we totally spent a bunch of free federal money on grants to develop super duper awesometastic tests that will be sooooo much better than current bubble tests (which are apparently not so great, though that has not led to anyone in DC saying, "yeah, you probably shouldn't use those any more"). These tests will be hella amazing and OMGZ-- they will measure writing and critical thinking exactly the same way for every single student in the country. Because if there's one thing we know about critical thinking and good writing, it's that they can always be measured exactly the same way for exactly the same results across the entire population of a country.
At this point I don't know if Duncan is a extraordinary liar or staggeringly clueless. But the WaPo piece ends with this line:
The writer is U.S. secretary of education.
So the piece at least begins and ends with something true. It's only everything in between that is wrong.
Friday, October 17, 2014
CCSSO & CGCS Offer No Useful Change on Testing
The big news on the street is that the CCSSO and CGCS (state ed leaders and big city school folks respectively) have announced an intention to rein in the testing juggernaut.
I'm not impressed. To begin with, they put front and center NY State's John King, Louisiana's John White, and DC Public's Kaya Henderson-- three big fresh faces of the anti-public school reformster movement (two TFA temps and a charter profiteer). That's a big fat signal that this not about changing course, but about protecting the current high-stakes test-driven status quo.
And in fact these folks were not there to say, "We realize something is wrong and we're committed to fixing it." They were there to say, "We recognize that we're taking some PR heat on this, so we're going to see if we can't tweak the optics enough to get everyone to shut up while we stay the course." They're going to "look at" testing. Maybe "audit" the number.
Andy Smarick broke the non-event down into Ten Big Takeaways. He tries to sell this as a "smart 'third-way' approach," but it certainly looks like the same old spam to me. Smarick tries to sell the new ... well, "plan" seems like an overstatement. Maybe "expression of a general new inclination"? At any rate, he tries to paint this as a compromise, but it's not.
The whole trick of this new position is that it carefully avoids the most important question. And so we're having a conversation about having less testing without discussing the quality of testing and its role in driving education. We're going to combine tests and streamline tests, but we're not going to discuss the value of the tests or the uses of their results. It's as if we discovered that students were getting arsenic on their school lunch every day and the compromise response was, "Well, let's just look at putting a little less on there." It's like living in a crime-ridden neighborhood and being told, "Good news! The muggers have gotten together and decided that they will coordinate more carefully so that you only get robbed once a day."
John White earns the Dumbest Statement award for the phone conference. He suggests that most of the daily testing is from the everyday work in schools, and characterized local testing as "nonessential." According to the Washington Post, he said, "We believe we can work together with our districts to make sure the testing we have in our states at the state and local level is the minimum necessary to inform our decisionmaking."
So the kind of daily assessments that teachers do in order to know, right now, how well students are grasping the material-- that's what White thinks is nonessential??!! Meanwhile, we need to keep our commitment to standardized testing programs that are no instructional help to classroom teachers at all.
No, the announcement is nothing more than a sort-of-commitment to make testing more efficient, which is about as comforting as knowing that the guy who's planning to punch you in the face is getting a nice manicure.
I am not surprised that reformsters are circling the wagons and figuring out how to protect the testing industrial complex. But I am bum-foggled that people are reporting this under headlines that talk about vows and changes.
The fundamental problem remains-- a systematically toxic dependency on tests that do not measure what they purport to measure in order to use data that is not true to prove things that the data cannot prove, while at the same time reducing public education to a test prep process that steals time and resources from the real process of actual education in order to feed a process bent on reducing students to trained circus animals and teachers to clerical workers.
This is not a step forward. In fact, to the extent that it convinces people we're taking steps forward, it's a step backwards.
I'm not impressed. To begin with, they put front and center NY State's John King, Louisiana's John White, and DC Public's Kaya Henderson-- three big fresh faces of the anti-public school reformster movement (two TFA temps and a charter profiteer). That's a big fat signal that this not about changing course, but about protecting the current high-stakes test-driven status quo.
And in fact these folks were not there to say, "We realize something is wrong and we're committed to fixing it." They were there to say, "We recognize that we're taking some PR heat on this, so we're going to see if we can't tweak the optics enough to get everyone to shut up while we stay the course." They're going to "look at" testing. Maybe "audit" the number.
Andy Smarick broke the non-event down into Ten Big Takeaways. He tries to sell this as a "smart 'third-way' approach," but it certainly looks like the same old spam to me. Smarick tries to sell the new ... well, "plan" seems like an overstatement. Maybe "expression of a general new inclination"? At any rate, he tries to paint this as a compromise, but it's not.
The whole trick of this new position is that it carefully avoids the most important question. And so we're having a conversation about having less testing without discussing the quality of testing and its role in driving education. We're going to combine tests and streamline tests, but we're not going to discuss the value of the tests or the uses of their results. It's as if we discovered that students were getting arsenic on their school lunch every day and the compromise response was, "Well, let's just look at putting a little less on there." It's like living in a crime-ridden neighborhood and being told, "Good news! The muggers have gotten together and decided that they will coordinate more carefully so that you only get robbed once a day."
John White earns the Dumbest Statement award for the phone conference. He suggests that most of the daily testing is from the everyday work in schools, and characterized local testing as "nonessential." According to the Washington Post, he said, "We believe we can work together with our districts to make sure the testing we have in our states at the state and local level is the minimum necessary to inform our decisionmaking."
So the kind of daily assessments that teachers do in order to know, right now, how well students are grasping the material-- that's what White thinks is nonessential??!! Meanwhile, we need to keep our commitment to standardized testing programs that are no instructional help to classroom teachers at all.
No, the announcement is nothing more than a sort-of-commitment to make testing more efficient, which is about as comforting as knowing that the guy who's planning to punch you in the face is getting a nice manicure.
I am not surprised that reformsters are circling the wagons and figuring out how to protect the testing industrial complex. But I am bum-foggled that people are reporting this under headlines that talk about vows and changes.
The fundamental problem remains-- a systematically toxic dependency on tests that do not measure what they purport to measure in order to use data that is not true to prove things that the data cannot prove, while at the same time reducing public education to a test prep process that steals time and resources from the real process of actual education in order to feed a process bent on reducing students to trained circus animals and teachers to clerical workers.
This is not a step forward. In fact, to the extent that it convinces people we're taking steps forward, it's a step backwards.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)