Test Prep Texts

Reformsters like to claim that the new generation of standards and tests have moved us beyond test prep. "No more rote memorization," they'll say. "Now we'll be testing critical thinky skills and depth of knowledge."

They are wrong on several counts. First, there are no standardized tests for critical thinking. Nor do I believe there ever will be. Let's consider the challenges to create a single such test question. We'd need to

1) design a deeply thinky, open-ended question that will play the same for every child from Florida to Alaska that generates

2) a million potentially divergent answers in a million different directions but which

3) can still be consistently mass-scored by a computer or army of low-skills test scorers. Plus

4) all this must be accomplished at a low cost so that whatever company doing it doesn't go broke.

Nothing that the testing industry has done in the history of ever would suggest that they have the slightest clue how to do this successfully. So what we get is a bunch of workarounds, cut corners, and plastic imitations of critical thought, such as questions where students must bubble in the correct piece of evidence one must be guided by, or more commonly, the one correct conclusion a good critical thinker must reach. Pro tip: if you expect every one of millions of human beings to answer your question with the same answer, it's not an open-ended question, and you aren't measuring critical thinking skills.

No, what we've got now is new tests that require more test prep rather than less. Here's why.

In prehistoric slate-and-charcoal tests, we would give the student a question such as "4 + 2 = ?" Because we had learned the conventions of that simple set-up, the student knew exactly what was being asked, and exactly how to answer it. The only test prep required was making sure that the student knew what you get when you add two and four.

The modern test problem is exemplified by a student I was once supervising in a test prep academic remediation class. He was working on a popular on-line test prep teaching program, and he had stopped, stared at the screen, typed, entered, stared some more, typed again-- rinse repeat, finally with lots of staring. I stepped up behind him; he was frustrated. "Do you need a hand with this problem?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I know what the answer is. I just don't know exactly how they want me to say it."

Meredith Broussard captured the issue masterfully in her Atlantic article last summer, "Why Poor Schools Can't Win at Standardized Testing." She concluded that the very best way to get students ready for the Big Test is to get them textbooks written by the same big three corporations that are producing the tests.

The most important test prep is getting students used to A) how the test will ask the questions and B) how the test wants students to answer the question. More complex (excuse me-- "rigorous") items just mean multiple ways to ask the question (and multiple ways to interpret the question that you ask) and multiple ways to answer the question.

So teachers are spending lots of time teaching students "When they ask X, what they're looking for is Y" as well as "When the want Y, they want you to say it like this." We practice reading short, context-free crappy excerpts, and then we learn what sorts of things the questions are rally looking for. We are doing more test prep carefully focused aligned instruction than ever.

If you're fortunate enough to be studying out of a Pearson text, you'll be test prepped educationally prepared for the Pearson test. If your students are studying out of some Brand X textbook, they won't be learning the Right Way to ask the question nor the Right Way to answer it. And what Broussard also revealed is that many large urban school districts (she was looking at Philly, but there's no reason to believe they are hugely unique in this respect) do not have the money to put the proper test prep books in front of their students.

It's just one more way that poor school systems get the shaft. Or if you're more conspiratorially minded, it's one more ways that large urban systems are set up for failure as a prelude to letting charter and private schools get their hands on all that sweet, sweet cash.

And even in less poor districts, test prep texts are a challenge. Remember-- if your books are more than about four years old, they probably aren't giving good test prep properly aligned with the tested standards. You need to replace them all, even if you're on a seven or ten year book replacement cycle.

Test prep is not only alive and well. It is more necessary, and more profitable, than ever.

Lend a Blogging Helping Hand

I read many education blogs. Many education blogs. There are so many people doing this work, and my blog list over on the right-hand side of this blog gets longer and longer. I'm writing today to enlist your assistance for one of my faves.

Most of the help you can give bloggers is cost-free. Don't just like; share, repost, retweet. If you like the word, spread the word. These just take a few extra seconds, and they are hugely appreciated.

Few of these blogs generate income for their writers, but most of us still have our day jobs, so it's not a big deal. Some folks will occasionally try to draw the false equivalency between the sides of the debate about the fate of public education, but the fact is, on one side you have outfits like Education Post that get $12 million in start-up money from reformsters and on the other side you have guys like me, who blog before the sun gets up or after the papers are graded at night or over our duty-free lunch.

But those of us who sacrifice a little sleep or more leisurely chewing sacrifice is small potatoes to someone like Jennifer Berkshire, who doesn't blog in addition to her job, but instead of getting a real revenue-enhancing job.

Berkshire is the brains behind Edushyster, a blog that is wickedly funny in a way that I deeply enjoy. But beyond being wickedly funny, Berkshire also does the work of a real journalist. She goes places, and talks to people, and consequently sees and hears things that nobody else does. She's been doing on this for two years, depending on the kindness of strangers and the forbearance of the man to whom she is, apparently, technically married. Now she proposes to try a little something else, but that requires her to get a little more than a couch to sleep on in some strange city.

She is proposing to take a look at some fairly big issues in education and gentrification as they play out in Chicago, and she's doing it through a sort of crowd-sourced independent journalist platform called Beacon. And the crowd-sourcing part is where we can help.

Follow this link. Look at the pitch. And chip in. Help support a valuable voice in the debate over public education.

TFA vs. Harvard Students

Valerie Strauss reports an exchange between the TFA mother ship and members of the Harvard chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops. Strauss presents the letters from this back-and-forth in their entirety, and you should click on over there and read them. It's worth noting that both sides are extraordinarily polite and civil. But I want to highlight just a couple of details from the TFA missives.

In reply to the USAS charge that TFA no longer follows its original mission of relieving a teacher shortage:

To your question about shortages, our program exists to meet local demand for teachers and long-term education leaders. In many of our partner districts, this demand stems from a severe shortage of available candidates for low-income schools generally. In others, the shortages are specific to certain subject areas or grade levels. In some, we serve as an additional source of teaching talent for principals to choose from.[Emphasis mine]

So, note that the program has as its stated purpose creating long-term education leaders. The teaching thing is just a training program for future edubosses, edupreneurs, and edubureaucrats.

The TFA writer also notes that TFA only applies for open positions, which is probably wise because back when I was job-hunting, I found that applying for occupied positions wasn't very helpful. The writer does not make any particular distinction about how those positions became open (say, through mass firings instituted so that the position could be filled with TFA members). And then we revisit the point made above:

We believe that students are best served when principals have access to the most robust possible talent pipeline – whether through our program, other alternative certification routes, or the schools of education that continue to prepare the vast majority of our nation’s teachers. We aim to be one small part of a well-trained, supported and celebrated national teaching force.

So-- it's not that there's a teacher shortage, or even (per the newest iteration of TFA) a teacher of color shortage. It's that principals need more choices, because what's coming through the traditional pipeline just isn't good enough. It's as straightforward a TFA statement as I've ever seen saying, "We fully intend to beat out new teacher school graduates for these jobs. You don't need us because there are too few teachers. You need us because there are two few teachers who are as awesome as we are."

After a USAS response, the next TFA letter comes from co-chief Matt Kramer. Kramer offers this interesting statistic:

Compared to first year teachers in general, they [TFA bodies] are more likely to teach a second year.

Not clear how he figures this one. While the USAS letters come with footnotes for their allegations. Kramer just says stuff. He also addresses the TFA Just Passing Through criticism by saying that the problems of education are larger than a classroom teacher can fix so he deplores the idea of judging any teacher based on student test results. Ha! Just kidding. He says that since these problems are too big for classroom teachers, many TFAers do education the favor of becoming "principals, community activists, district administrators, policy makers, elected officials and parent advocates." Thanks, guys!

The whole thing is an eye-opening exchange, particularly in the ways USAS find to say gently, firmly and politely, "You are full of it. Here are the facts. Stop lying." But totally civilly and respectfully. I could probably learn a lesson or two from them.

Jeb's National Education Summit

It's almost November and that means it's time to start making our plans to attend Bush III's National Education Summit, brought to you by your friends at Jeb Bush for President 2016 Foundation for Excellence in Education. It's a giant reformsterpalooza. (For some great stories from previous summits, read here and here.)

This year's theme is Unlocking Student Achievement: Choice * Accountability and it provides a great template for how we can peddle all of the regular reformster wares even as we completely scrub them of any reference to the Common Core. Bush III has been scrubbing all of the royal presidential educational advocacy materials lately, having noticed that being a Common Core Adorer is not winning him big love from the conservative wing of the GOP. Note this fundraising letter that completely avoids any mention of Bush III's previous policy BFF.

The national conference may be Common Core Free, but it is still stacked tall with reformy baloney. Here are the sessions you can expect to enjoy if you attend, and to save you time, I'll go ahead and predict the takeaways for each right now.

After Bush III's opening keynote (still working on a title, I guess), will be followed by these strategy sessions:

Measurement 2.0: Elevating students by testing what you teach

"States are adopting more rigorous academic standards" is about as close as we get to acknowledging that the Core exist (though if we're talking in present tense "dumping and distancing themselves from" might make a better sentence middle here).

But add to your stack of 1001 Statements That Prove CCSS and Tests Cannot Be Decoupled this sentence:

A standard without accurate measurement and strong accountability quickly becomes optional.

You can't kill the tests without killing the standards, and don't think for a moment that reformsters don't understand that. At any rate, this session focuses on the search for a super-duper test that is impervious to test prep and rote learning, and which measures critical thinking and depth of understanding. We will hear from four states about their search for this mythical test. Since the four states are Kentucky, Idaho, Mississippi and Florida (Pam Stewart will be there, perhaps to explain why tests should be administered to dying children), so I think we can cut to the chase, which is that nobody yet has the slightest clue how to create this mythically awesome tests.

Autonomy vs. Accountability: The right mix for school choice programs

We're talking about private school choice programs here. Michael McShane will be leading the panel, which includes leaders from FEE, Step Up for Students, and Alliance for School Choice.  Let's go ahead and predict that the right mix is "Let them do whatever the hell they want."

Communicating Reform Part 1: Crafting e-messages people will read and watch

Given the short life and sad demise of the "Learn More. Go Further" PR campaign that Bush and Friends launched. complete with sad sponsored teacher twitter accounts, I'm not sure FEE is the group to give advice about this. But somebody must because " we are confronted by an organized and well-funded opposition dedicated to maintaining the status quo." All I can say is-- somebody had better cough up my share of this well-fundedness, because I am clearly not getting a cut of the money that is buying other public education advocates their summer homes and fancy dijon mustard on their fancy ham sandwiches. I am literally sitting here at my desk in pajamas with a toasted bagel perched atop my desk mess, and shortly the dog is going to demand to go poop in the back yard and I will have to take him myself. I wonder if Jeb Bush has to take his own dog to poop in the back yard. I wonder how all of these reformsters dogs will cope when their owners are all in DC for two days.

In short, "organized and well-funded," my ass.

But @TeacherFaye is going to be here on the panel, so I'm pretty sure the takeaway will be, "Yes, go on and use the twitter on the interwebs, and the young persons will see your message and become convinced by the twitness."

Education Begins with K-3 Literacy: If kids can’t read, they can’t graduate

"because we won't let them" should probably be the rest of the title. FEE has beaten this drum since the first national convention in 2010, and the short form is simple-- flunk all third graders who can't pass your state's standardized reading test. The panel includes Mississippi State Senator Tollson and  Ohio Superintendent Richard Ross; if you are expecting to hear the slightest lick of research por evidence that this test and punish retention plan is a sound and helpful idea, you should just go wait in line with the people waiting to see Sasquatch riding a unicorn across the Bridge to Atlantis.

Takeaway: we should flunk third graders who flunk the state test because eight year olds need to be whipped into shape. Uphill, both ways.

Innovation in the Certification Process: Rethinking teacher licensure

"Rethinking" is a great word. I am rethinking taking my dog out to poop because my wife is now up and if I rethink it long enough, I might get out of doing it. While I do not mean to compare teacher licensure to dog poop, I think the rethinking process is similar. The panel also seems to be interested in rethinking tenure and FILO. It includes John King, so you know this will totally not be about how to rethink your way to an easily managed, low paid, non-licensed teaching workforce.

Making Schools Better Instead of Just More Expensive: How to make your education dollars count

"Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is still widespread belief that school success is tied to school funding," begins this description. "So this panel will discuss how they cut the budgets of high achieving schools in rich neighborhoods down to level of low-achieving schools in poor neighborhoods because it shouldn't make any difference." Ha! Just kidding. This panel is led by Chester Finn. This panel will discuss how to "direct funds where they will do the most good" or, as I read it, how to rewrite funding rules so that generating good test scores gets you funding, because directing funding away from struggling schools so that they can be declared failures and closed is bad education, but damn fine business.

The Next Chapter in Educational Choice: Education Savings Accounts

aka "Maybe If We Try Legislating Vouchers This Way, We Can Finally Get Them Past the Courts."


Not Your Daddy’s Woodshop: Career and technical education in the 21st century

Possibly not stupid-- somebody has noticed that we have a problem filling high skills blue collar jobs. Since we haven't yet figured out how to make jobs like, say, welding as low-skills as making fries, we'll have to come up with a way to train these peoples. "This is definitely not your daddy's woodshop," they say, stopping just short of "And of course your mommy would never take wood shop because, no penis." The head of the US Chamber, heavy promoters of Common "Everyone Has To Go To College" Core will head this panel, so I hope he's taking his cognitive dissonance pills.

Accountability Works Workshop: A-F school grading

Another Bush III fave with no actual facts to back it up. Presumably we'll skip the unit on How To Tweak the System So You Don't Embarrass Your Charter School Friends.

Day II Starts with:

The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time: Access to a Quality Education

This general session is moderated by famous civil rights activist and educational expert Campbell Brown. Since she's only the moderator, presumably she will not deliver her speech on "How to squash uppity black ladies who try to horn in on your civil rights lawsuit action."

For actual panelists we get Andrew Malone of Harlem Success Academy, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Patrick Dobard or the New Orleans Recovery School District. The blurb suggests that this will be a demonstration of how to appropriate the language of civil rights to promote your business interests as you cash in in the education sector.

Communicating Reform Part 2: Delivering effective messages

Marketing strategy. This is about "how to effectively reach your target audiences with tailored messages." So I'm expecting an update of the classic Charter Messaging Bible.And it should be a good one-- one of the panelists is Felix Schein, president of RALLY, the PR firm that created the successful astroturf group Students Matter for David Welch. Expect some practical branding and messaging advice here.

Bridging the Access Gap: How to bring the best courses to every student, in every state

I last encountered this idea in Michael McShane's walk-and-talk video-- why voucherize entire schools when you can really unbundle and voucherize by individual classes. Charter operators, you should attend this session so that you can understand that when some reformsters look into the future of education, they don't see you.

Building Trust in the Classroom: Protecting student data privacy and security

The big question is why this is not entitled "Doing the Right Thing: Protecting student data and privacy." But in reformsterland, data security is a PR problem, not an actual problem. This session promises to address all the data security issues except the main ones. We're going to talk about securing your on-line gradebook, but apparently not for the wholesale collection, sharing and selling of the data gathered from high stakes testing.


And there you have it

The confab runs from early morning, Thursday, November 20, through Friday afternoon, thereby guaranteeing that the doors will not be darkened by anybody who actually works in a public school classroom. Registration for the event is $499, though you can apply for a scholarship. The conference will be held at the Washington Marriot Wardman Park, so, fancy.

But the organizers want you to know: "Attendees leave the National Summit armed with the knowledge and networks to advance bold education reform in their states." They call it an "uncommon conference" which is kind of hilarious because they have scrubbed every reference to certain common thing, so it is literally un-commoned. At any rate, it "serves as a catalyst for energizing and accelerating the reform movement across the nation. Be there or be left behind."

I would love to be there to watch and learn and write down things I could blog about in a well-funded and organized way later, but I actually lack the funding and I am using my personal days this year to visit my soon-to-be-newborn grandson. Also, somebody has to be here to take the dog out to poop. Priorities, you know.

Charter Wolves in Public School Clothing: Buffalo Edition

The Alliance for Quality Education and Citizen Action of New York have released a report that shows in impressive detail how one school board member is raking in money in the charter biz.

Carl Paladino runs Ellicott Development, a large property develop company in the Buffalo area. Ellicott does a big chunk of business with charter operators in Buffalo, having worked with "the private operators of at least five Buffalo charter schools. His preferred money-making technique appears to be either flipping properties back to the operators, or "leaseback" deals.

The report also suggests that Paladino makes money indirectly from properties near new charters, which are now more valuable because the neighborhood has been improved. In one particularly sweet deal, Paladino bought up twenty-two properties on Buffalo's East Side, turned two of them into charter schools, and then started developing the other nearby nineteen as apartments.

Paladino ran for school board on the assertion that he would recuse himself from charter school votes. But the report notes that he has instead acted as "the most vocal proponent" of charters.

It reminds me a bit of the old westerns where the wily politician grabs himself a chunk of land and then colludes with the railroad company to run the new tracks through his property.


Paladino's interest in charter schools is not in dispute-- not even by him. On the question of making money from working with charters, the Buffalo City News quotes him:  "If I didn't, I'd be a friggin' idiot."

The News sat down with Paladino after the report was released and gave him an opportunity to respond. His argument appears to boil down to:

* Charters are only a small fraction of Ellicott's business.
* His investments in charters are crazy risky and yield a paltry 10% ROI, but he's a charter believer.
* Ellicott is a private company and he's not opening his books.
* He'll recuse himself from votes in which he has direct financial interest, but that's it.

The News also found at least charter founder who found Paladino to be an angel. These testimonies include schools in which Paladino is the sole investor; I am thinking they know how to treat that feeding hand.

The report gets into the specifics of how some of these arrangements work. The leaseback is particularly tasty. For those of you who don't play games with money for a living, here's how it works:

* Chris buys a building.
* Pat leases the building from Chris for a buck ($1.00)
* Chris leases the building (which he actually already owns) from Pat for a buttload of money.

Why would anybody even do that? Why pay a buttload of money to lease a building you already own? At least two possibilities come to mind.

1) In some regions, you may get tax breaks on lease payments that aren't available if you outright own the place. If you make the lease "include" features like custodial services and utilities, you can get breaks for basic overhead.

2) It gives a plausible cover for any large sum of money that Chris wants to give Pat without having to explain it. It can also be a way to hire and pay someone to fix your building up-- you could say that one is leasing back the improvements on the property. Of course, it all gets much more interesting if Chris and Pat are business partners-- or the same guy. Like, say, a not-for-profit school operator who still wants to pocket profit-like money.

I don't know what's going on in Paladino's case. He has scarfed up something like $685 K in tax breaks from sales and mortgage tax. Whatever he is, he is not a friggin' idiot.

Paladino may not be a generally shady operator at all-- at least no shadier than the average developer. Much of this likely falls within SOP for developers, and what Buffalo is simply witnessing the predictable shenanigans that come when you turn education from a public trust into a private enterprise. Paladino spent much of the article clarifying and supporting his business practices, but there was not a word about the quality of the charter schools that he has profited from.

The real shame here is that Paladino is on the school board, that he has basically been given a voice in how to run his business's main competitor and the oversight for his charter business. The conflict of interest here is huge, and anybody who says that charter interests and public school interests aren't directly opposed is smoking something. This is like giving a major leadership role at Coke to somebody with a major financial interest in Pepsi. It is like putting a wolf in charge of shepherding.

Should We Embrace Charter Districts

First in USA Today, and a few days later, a bit more expansively in the Hechinger Report, Richard Whitmire argues for the embrace of charter growth, particularly since charters are starting to look like school districts.

We'll look at the Hechinger Report version, because it allows Whitmire to lay out his complete argument. It's an impressive compendium of almost every pro-charter argument ever made, and it manages to get very little correct.

More than twenty years ago when charter schools first got launched in Minnesota no one envisioned that one day we would see charter management networks growing to resemble medium-size school districts.

Probably not true. I think plenty of people called this one. More importantly, I think plenty of people interested in the charter business were absolutely banking on it.


Whitmire goes on to applaud the greenlighting of fourteen more Success Academy branches in NY. He cheers that the rapid expansion of the chain doesn't seem to have hurt the quality, and that even students in freshly opened branches have gotten swell test results.

"Regardless of your personal opinion of charter schools versus traditional schools," says Whitmire, "that’s remarkable."

Well, no. It isn't remarkable at all. If Success Academies, say, retained all of a starting class to the point of graduation instead of losing more than half, that would be remarkable. And if that wholly retained batch of eighth graders qualified for one of NYC's top high schools, instead of having to just move into another Success Academy berth, that would be remarkable. But it's not what happened. Raising standardized test scores is not the same thing as providing a quality education-- particularly if you drop the educating to focus on weeks and weeks of preparatory drilling. There is nothing remarkable about creaming a select student population and training them to get better test scores to the detriment of everything else.

Of course, there are larger chains than Success. Others reach greater states of hugification, but Whitmire is thankful that "only the best charter networks were allowed to grow to this size." It begs the question who, exactly, is "allowing" the growth, but okay. All of these large chains are, he claims, able to catch these students up with a year-and-a-half of learning for every year in the classroom. Measuring student learning in years? Not an ounce of support that that is actually a real thing.

Whitmire knows the secrets that allow charter chains to scale up. For instance, there's this:

...their ability to attract some of the nation’s brightest college graduates as teachers. Many of those teachers move on to other careers, but they stay long enough to make a difference.

So, TFA temps make charters better (I am curious-- how long exactly is "long enough to make a difference"?)  Sure, they may have little or training, and contribute nothing to the stability of the school. But at least they're cheap, easily replaced, and don't draw a pension. Whitmire has that stability thing covered-- charters are also great because they establish a common classroom culture. In other words, if you have a strong policies and procedures manual, you can plug any warm body into a classroom without making a difference.

Whitmire will trot out the old canard that charter schools are public schools. I've explained what four requirements must be met to earn the name "public" and I don't think the charter chains are meeting any of them (including Success Academy, which went to court to keep their finances secret).

He notes that charters have waiting lists out the whazoo, and cites Success as an example. Interesting choice, given Success's well-documented high-priced recruitment/marketing campaigns.

Whitmire does admit that charter networks don't take as many special education students. He also allows as how charters drain resources from public districts, forcing them to downsize "to meet diminished demand," which is incorrect. Public schools downsize to meet diminished funding, which would be easy if there were, in fact, a diminished demand. But when one kid leaves a classroom a charter, the students left behind still demand a fully resourced classroom.

When a charter kids leaves public school, she takes 100% of her funding with her, but she does not take 100% of the costs that she incurred for the district.

Whitmire proceeds to sign a song of many charter successes. Except they aren't successes. Tennessee's ASD is a mess. He claims that charter vs. public competition in DC benefits students on both sides. And he spends a whole paragraph touting the miracle of New Orleans, which appears to be only a miracle of PR. Like many hotbeds of charterfication, New Orleans' success has been in getting tax dollars directed to corporate pockets. Educating children? Not so much.

And why is it that no charter advocates want to talk about one place that is really working on implementing the New Orleans model? Where are the songs of praise dedicated to One Newark? Could it be that in New Jersey, charteristas have been freed to Do As They Please, and what they've created is a horrible, horrible mess. (If you want a link, read the collected works of Jersey Jazzman-- this is a mess so large that one blog post can't hold it.)

On the home stretch, Whitmire admits that some charters aren't pulling their weight, and he thinks that the authorizers should be all over their chartery butts.

But the growth of high performing single charters, as well as these larger CMOs such as IDEA, KIPP and Uncommon Schools, should be welcomed, not stonewalled or smeared with conspiracy theories about “privatizing” education.

"Conspiracy theory" is a polite and classy way to dismiss somebody as being crazy wrong. But when the state legislature of New York passes special laws requiring New York City schools to hand over real estate to the private company that runs Success Academy so that they can rake in the money (but not account for it, even as they pay their boss a cool half million) -- well, I'm not sure what that is, if not "privatization." I mean, it might come up short of "privatization" because it is being paid for with "public tax dollars," but other than that "splitting of hairs" I'm not sure what Whitmire is "talking about."

And as a last shot "These charters are successfully educating thousands of students destined to fail in traditional neighborhood schools." I'm impressed that we can tell the destinies of these students in alternate universes. I would like to peek over there and see how many of the students left behind in thanks-to-charters underfunded schools would have been destined to succeed more easily. Nor do I understand why charters, with their special destiny-o-vision, send so many students back to public schools.

But that's the whole compendium. Whitmire has sandwiched in just about every piece of marketing copy ever used for charters, while simultaneously answering none of the legitimate criticisms of the modern charter movement. He also manages to avoid the very question he raises-- why exactly is a larger charter chain better than a single charter? More layers of bureaucracy? A central office far away from your child's actual school? He never did tell us why size matters here.

It's a herculean effort, and a good piece to bookmark if you want access to All the Pro-charter Arguments. But for me, I'm going to hold off on the whole embracing thing, thanks.
It's an impressive compendium

Time's Tenure Story

Time's cover story by Haley Sweetland Edwards is the tale of David Welch's crusade to provide school CEO's with more power to control their workforce. I'm sure there will be much reflection on this article in the days ahead, but here's my quick read over lunch reaction.

It comes close to being a balanced reporting of the story. Public education advocates will find that it goes to easy on Welch. Reformsters will find that it is a bit too transparent and doesn't fully capture Welch's awesome heroism.

You'll want to read the whole thing for yourself, but here are some highlights that jumped out at me.

On Vergara: It was the first time, in California or anywhere else, that a court had linked the quality of a teacher, as measured by student test scores, to a pupil’s right to an education. 

Yes. It was the court that created that linkage. The plaintiffs did not, the research does not, and reality does not. But the court did.

It is a reflection of our politics that no one elected these men to take on the knotty problem of fixing our public schools, but here they are anyway, fighting for what they firmly believe is in the public interest. 

Edwards strikes this note several times, and I give Time credit for at least including the observation. But the Real Big Story here is not the tenure wars. The real big story here is that a bunch of unelected amateurs with large piles of money have decided that they should go ahead and take over previously-democratic portions of the public sector. Perhaps the editors at Time lack the balls to pick that angle, or perhaps they simply judged that the angle would not generate the kind of clicks and sales that a tenure wars angle would.

I don't really fault Edwards. The elements of the story, the reporting, are all here. But for whatever reason, we've decided not to treat the derailing of democracy by some Very Rich Guys as the main story here.

[Update: When I wrote this earlier today, I was just looking at the cybercopy of the article. I've since seen the cover, on which Time editors have put "Rotten Apples" in big bold letters. To see the cover, one would expect a massive hatchet job on teachers inside, so I guess that answers the question about how Time editors are inclined to slant Edwards's article. That just leaves the question of whether Time editors are philosophically inclined to give teachers a big punch in the face, or they just think that punching teachers in the face is mostly likely to draw a large paying crowd. Either way, I'm not impressed. If you are also unimpressed, please use this link to an AFT action to let Time know how unimpressed you are or email feedback@time.com.]

Edwards does try to draw a line between technocrat gazillionairs of today and the robber barons of yesterday, but doesn't really stick the landing on the distinction between them. The Carnegies and Rockefellers worked mostly to create new institutions such as library systems and colleges; but today's "philanthropists" are busy engineering hostile takeovers of the public institutions that were already in place.

Welch remembers asking a big-city California superintendent to tell him the one thing he needed to improve the public-school system. The answer blew Welch away. The educator didn’t ask for more money or more iPads. “He said, ‘Give me control over my workforce,'” Welch said. “It just made so much sense. I thought, Why isn’t anyone doing something about that? Why isn’t anyone fixing this?”

In this version of the story, that is the extent of Welch's research. His next move was to start getting legal advice because "if children are being harmed by these laws, then something, somewhere, is being done that’s illegal."

Edwards does not cloak any of Welch's moves in gauzy idealistic terms. Welch hires a PR firm to start Students Matter, an astro-turf group tasked with 1) ginning up support and money and 2) finding "a team of lawyers who were willing to reverse engineer a lawsuit on the basis of an untested legal theory on behalf of plaintiffs who didn’t yet exist."

The retelling of the Vergara story includes this line:

 Happily for Welch’s lawyers, their innovative argument happened to coincide with a flood of new academic research on teacher quality that could serve as evidence in court. 

One does not have to be a raving conspiracy theorist to note that the happy coincidence was the result of "research" funded by Welch's fellow technocrats and reformsters, much of it begun at about the same time that Welch started shopping for lawyers.

One major dropped ball for Edwards-- she does not discuss the major holes in the Veraga plaintiff arguments (including WAG statistics).

Edwards quotes, of all people, Mike Petrilli and Michael McShane on the problems of Vergara and government intervention. It's up to McShane to point out that measuring "grossly ineffective" is problematic. Edwards cherry-on-tops with the note that the teacher described as "ineffective and undeserving of tenure" was also a Pasadena Teacher of the year.

Edwards goes on to note that there's an irony that Vergara hinges on the ability to identify poor teachers just as we're all figuring out that we don't have that ability. She notes the current "outright mutiny" over high stakes testing and provides a quick guide to the studies showing that VAM is garbage science.

The close is a bit chilling:

 David Welch says he’s undeterred. While he’s received an informal crash course in the unforgiving politics of education reform in this country in the past year, the back-and-forth doesn’t interest him. “I look at this as my responsibility to help and improve the society I live in,” he says. “And I’m willing to fight that battle as long as I have to fight that battle.”

Welch would do well to remember that the society he lives in is a democratic one, where it's not up to a rich and powerful amateur to just commandeer a public service because he has some ideas-- ideas that or no better-informed or professionally supported than the ideas of any average non-billionaire shmoe. Nobody elected Welch to do any of this. And nobody thinks that the best way for America to work is for us to have a democratic system that can be shoved aside by any rich guy on a crusade.


Edwards article is a plus in that it pulls back the curtain (at least part way) on much of what has actually happened in the Vergara assault on tenure without gauzing it up or calling it pretty names. She misses, however, the full implications of the "control over the workforce" quote. The assault on tenure makes much more sense in the context of continued attempts to de-professionalize teaching and turn it into a low-paying, short-term, easily replaceable line of work. She missed that entirely.

Edwards could certainly have turned a more critical eye on the Vergara plaintiff's case, and she stops short of calling out some of the larger issues. On top of the rich-guy-buys-democratic-institution problem, Edwards also glosses over much as "political" issue; the tenure wars are "political" only to the extent that they represent the use of political power to smash another part of public education.

Should this be a country where anybody, regardless of his lack of professional background, can set education policy for the entire nation just because he wants to and just because he's rich? That would be a really good question to start some reporting. Edwards almost raised it-- but not quite.

In other words, Edwards has presented a reasonably fair and accurate part of the picture-- but it's only part of the picture.