Education Is Not Medicine

One of the popular new reformster talking points is to compare standardized testing to diagnostic testing at the doctor's office (you can find examples here and here). This comparison is total baloney, and reformsters need to retire it immediately. They are just making themselves look silly. Let's break it down.

Students are not patients.

Students are not patients who need to be "cured" of the "disease" of not knowing stuff. There is nothing about that comparison that holds up. Disease attacks a healthy body and breaks down tissues and functions that were previously fine. Which part of that sounds like a student not understanding how to multiply doubly digit numbers or misunderstanding how to find verbs?

Doctors choose the tests.

The doctor uses her professional judgment to determine which tests will be administered. The doctor uses her professional judgment looking at the symptoms, the nature of the patient, and the possible issues that might be involved. And then the doctor decides which test to order because

There are many tests.

Doctors do not have a single one size fits all diagnostic test that is given to all patients, regardless of whether they are complaining about a sore chest, a broken leg, or a high fever. The test is chosen to fit the situation (again, using the doctor's professional judgment). For that matter, for every test the doctor chooses to give a patient, the doctor also choose NOT to give a large number of tests to that patient. There is no medical analog for a high stakes one size fits all test to be given to all students.

Doctors can still see.

When I went to the doctor with the flesh of my knee split open, my doctor did not say, "Well, it looks like the flesh of your knee is split open, and I might be looking at the patella right there, but let me run some tests, first." He definitely didn't say, "First, I have to give you this exact same test that we give every single patient who enters the hospital no matter what the issue seems to be." Because, as it turns out, my doctor has A) eyes and B) sense. So he sewed up my knee. Some times the correct diagnostic test is no test at all, because A) eyes and B) sense.

Results are timely.

Depending on the urgency of the situation (as determined by the professional judgment of the doctor), the results will come back in a timely manner. If you get your broken leg x-rayed in May, your doctor expects to see the images before September.

Judgment beats test

When the test results return, the doctor makes a diagnosis and prescription based on his professional judgment. The test provides data; it does not make a prescription. "The test says I have to prescribe paxil for you," said no doctor ever. The doctor's judgment is not subordinate to the test results.

Doctors know when to quit

My doctor does not shorten my treatment so that he has time to give me more tests. If he has to make a choice between more treatment for my problem and more testing, more testing does not automatically win.

No stakes tests.

The diagnostic tests that a doctor orders do not become part of the job evaluation of the doctor. The hospital board does not call a doctor in and say, "100% of the limbs you ordered x-rays for this year were broken. Therefor we find you ineffective and you're fired." Nor do we use the test results to judge the hospital. And we especially don't use the test results to judge people in some other department who never even saw the patient.

So stop comparing high stakes standardized tests to diagnostic medical tests. They are not comparable and the analogy is extraordinarily weak. Find something else better to compare high stakes standardized tests to, like cumquats or people who insist on talking loudly on their cell phones in public places.

Furthermore

CCSS: Runaway Train

One of the oddest things about the Common Core is that here you have this giant movement, this massive shadow regulation of one of the nation's largest sectors, the entire institution of public education, and yet nobody is in charge.

Think about that. You've got this set of rules that shape the lives of millions of Americans, and nobody is actually in charge.

Core boosters might say, "Well, the state's in charge," but of course that's just not true. The states were required to adopt the Core as it was handed to them, with only minor additions and no changes, and the states have no real authority to change anything in the Core. At least, that's the supposition-- since there's nobody in charge, there is no place for states to turn to ask for that authority to change the Core.

Conservative Core foes would say that the feds are in charge of the Core, but that's not quite right. Arne Duncan has anointed himself the enforcer of standards compliance, but that's a negative role. He will tell you if your state is being too non-compliant with the Core. He'll tell you what not to do, once you try to do it, and he may punish you for it. But he won't tell you what to do with the Core exactly because A) that would be illegal-ish and B) he doesn't really know anything about how to institute effective education programs.

States have been slowly inching out of the Common Core haunted house, like burglars who think maybe the guard dogs are gone now but they're not quite sure, and so mostly they have just decided to sit on the porch and pretend that they've really gotten out of the place.

The copyright holders have been absolutely silent on the requirement not to change parts of the Core and even more silent than that on the subject of how to use it and what's okay to do with it.

The creators have long since walked away from it, moving on to more profitable ventures. And the politicians that once championed it now dare not speak its name. It's senior night at the football game and nobody will step forward to say, "That's my kid!!"

And you might argue that Pearson et al are de facto in charge of Common Core because they make the materials and tests that give it actual form in the classroom. But if you called up Pearson and asked permission to change a standard, they would laugh at you, and if you asked for help implementing a standard, they would just try to sell you something.

Put another way-- if the Common Core were to collapse and everyone in the country came to see it as a disaster and a Huge Mistake, exactly whose head would roll? Who would be held responsible?

It's kind of amazing. Name one sweeping, nation-wide, institution transforming program that has ever been instituted in this country with nobody in charge of it. Common Core is a gigantic runaway train-- maybe not traveling very fast or true, but with a completely empty cab up front.No in charge. No one's responsible. Or, to use the language of the ed revolution, nobody is accountable for Common Core.

CAP: Core Is for Ladies [Updated]

The Common Core is great for the ladies.

At least that's what we can learn from a new CAP (Center for American Progress) article that combines two now-classic Core-boosting rhetorical techniques-- wacky leaps of logic, and taking credit for what was already happening.

The piece opens with a paragraph with a shout out to Title IX, then sadly shakes its head and notes that there are still gender-based inequities in education and employment persist, particularly for girls of color and from low-income background. Plus, girls often lack access to high-quality, rigorous STEMmy courses, which would prepare them for college and high-paying careers. Not that the author offers any evidence, or even an assertion, that they lack access to a higher degree than boys.

Next up: charts and data. The data is exclusively high stakes tests based, so here's what we know. More eight grade boys get proficient-ranked test scores on science tests than eight grade girls. The boys barely edge out girls on the math test results on the eight grade test. And as always, black and brown girls score lower on the test than their white counterparts. So that's a picture of how eight graders score on those two tests. What we can actually deduce from that about the entire educational system is a whole other debate. I just want to be clear on what we're actually talking about. 

Fewer females than males take the AP computer science test. Few females take STEM related AP tests. Also, female students and students of color take more college remedial courses (the article lumps women and minorities together a lot). And we get a section (well, two paragraphs) of data with a chart about the pay gap between men and women. This, the article tells us, exists even when controlling for college major, hours worked, and occupation.

So wait-- how is the Common Core fixing all this? Let's go back to the introduction:

The Common Core State Standards represent an important step toward closing achievement gaps and opening the door to higher-paying STEM fields for millions of girls. By establishing uniform and more-rigorous academic standards, the Common Core helps ensure that all students—both girls and boys, regardless of their income levels and backgrounds—are taught to the same high expectations. 

This is followed by the data establishing, sort of, that the gender gap exists. Then we arrive at this conclusion.

More engaging and challenging standards build a strong academic foundation for all students. Girls—and in particular, girls of color—have a lot to gain from more-rigorous learning standards that better prepare them for college and career success. By raising the expectations for student learning, the Common Core State Standards allow girls the opportunity to seize STEM learning opportunities while in grade school; to pursue a diverse set of college majors; and to obtain jobs that command higher salaries. The Common Core State Standards can expand on the progress girls have made since Title IX and can have a long-lasting impact on women in society.

Many of you will recognize a composition technique known as "recycling your introduction in new words as your conclusion."

That's it. That's the whole argument. CCSS will raise everybody's standards, so women (and, I guess, students of color) will just automatically be raised up to the level of white guys. Of course, that effect would theoretically work with literally any educational standards at all-- so why didn't the states (particularly those with super high standards rated by Fordham Institution as better than CCSS) already wipe out their own gender gaps? And how can rigorous education wipe out the pay gap when the pay gap, as CAP just said, is controlled for occupation? Will lady engineers suddenly be paid more because they have a Common Core seal of approval stamped upon them?

This has to be one of the laziest arguments I have ever seen for pretty much anything. I guess it's good that they didn't print a special CCSS edition in pink for girls, but the implication that girls have been doing poorly because, well, it's just that nobody asked them to do better-- it's somehow insulting to everybody. If CAP is going to try to score social justice points, they're going to have to do much better than this.

[Update 10/30] The evening that this post went up, several of us were contacted by CAP chieftain Neera Tanden who asked if anyone wanted to take issue with the data.

The answer was, of course, that the data about gender gaps were fine, but there was no data at all to indicate that CCSS could close the gap. Tanden cited gains in the College and Career Readiness Ratings for girls in Kentucky, one of the first states to adopt the Core. I asked how those gains for girls compared to gains for boys, and she referred me to this site, where Kentucky parks all their reports on student achievement.

This actually raised more questions than it answered, because the high school data clearly shows that girls outpace boys by large margins in most tested areas (boys win on the social studies test) and that the gender gap on the College and Career Ready ratings also runs in favor of the girls. I asked about this, but have yet to hear a response (it's twitter-- I don't read much into the silence). My conclusion, however, is that the CAP article profiled above makes even less sense than it did before.]

Slow Schools

In a recent blog post, Daniel Katz made a plea for a slow schools movement (like the slow foods movement). It's a great piece and well worth your time.

Katz is the director of Secondary Education and Secondary Special Education Teacher Preparation at Seton Hall University, and he begins the post with observations about what he's hearing from his alumni when they return. They are hurried.

This is not a new problem. Teaching has always involved doing an infinite number of tasks in a finite amount of time. People who want to say, "Yeah, just like every other profession" just don't get it. Teachers are up against finite time in a way that no other professions experience. And boy does this resonate.

The most read thing I have ever written in my life is this post about the hard part of teaching, how there is never enough. Over at HuffPost, it has pulled almost 450,000 facebook likes, and they've translated it into Italian, German and French. Nothing I have ever written in my life has come close. What that tells me is that this is a subject that really really resonates.

Teachers have always suffered from having more and more duties, tasks and responsibilities jammed into their days (and into the parts of their days that are supposed to be theirs). And as Katz correctly observes, those "new"duties are removed just about as often as governments repeal "temporary" taxes. But there is a new order of magnitude going on today.

In a policy environment that provides high stakes standardized tests the power to put teachers’ jobs in the balance and with an active movement afoot to remove teachers’ workplace protections, pressures today rival those at any point since the Common School movement began in the 19th century.

And as Katz observes, it's not just a matter of Getting Things Done, but of getting things done right.

However, the need for “slow schools” goes well beyond a simple desire to lift added and poorly thought out burdens from teachers who already had important work to do.  It goes towards fundamental aspects of what learning actually requires.  A productive school is one that hums with energy, but it is not the energy of people rushing anxiously from one obligation to another.  It is the energy of people grappling with challenging ideas and materials, working through from what they do not understand to what they do understand, and proposing and testing new hypotheses about how the world works around them.  That is a specific kind of energy that cannot happen under constant pressure to perform on command.

Thinking, understanding, coming to grips with concepts, and particular the kind of deep conceptual understanding that the Sultans of Common Core insist they want. This is one of the many self-contradictions of life under the Core-- we want you to go an inch wide and a mile deep, but we won't tell you what material you can now cut from the curriculum, mostly because we still expect you to cover everything you always covered-- just deeper and slower. We want you to drive from LA to San Francisco at 20 MPH, with a stop every hour to get out and smell the flowers, but we still expect you to leave after breakfast and get there in time for supper.

Deeper understanding takes time. Time, Katz says, that includes time for being confused and working through that confusion.

A deep and layered understanding of complex ideas cannot be forced to happen simply through intensity, although significance and deep understanding have intensity of their own.  Students necessarily must be frustrated as they grapple with complex and unknown concepts, but they need time in order to work through that confusion, and when forced or hurried to move they not only fail to develop the desired understanding, but also they become needlessly frustrated and disengaged from the task of learning.  Taken together, Bruner, Doyle, and Duckworth denote essential truisms about classrooms and learning:  1) students are capable of better and deeper understanding of more complex ideas than we often think they can; 2) the products, processes, and materials that support the development of that understanding are often highly ambiguous and complex to enact in a classroom; 3) confusion is an important part of the learning process, and learners need time and space to be where they are in their emerging understanding without being forced to move faster than they need.

 Unfortunately, what we've got is a system that demands results Right Now. Actually, not so much demands results as demands an assortment of paperwork and data points that can stand in for results. And so we have multiple tales of teachers are commanded to spend so much time planning to teach, documenting the planning to teach, document the results of the plan, documenting the results of the teaching, and documenting the analyses of the data generated by the plan to teach-- all this to the point that the teacher literally has no time to do her actual job.

Reformsters have become like the person who asks, fifteen minutes into a first date, "Are we going to get married, or not?" The demands for results (or at least data-filled reports that pass as results) have become so urgent that we lack the proper time to get the results in the first place (but then, we don't need actual results-- just data points and reports that pass for them).

Katz is right. We do need to slow down-- not for the harried and hurried teachers, but for the students who need the time to take that slow and sometimes muddled journey to understanding. I think Katz is absolutely correct-- we need a slow schools movement.

MA Committed to Chasing Teachers Away (Updated)

It seems that several states are locked in a contest to determine who can do the most to undermine and gut the teaching profession. From Florida to North Carolina to Tennessee, state governments are doing their best to find creative ways to tell professional educators to go straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect any dollars.

Massachusetts has taken a bold leap forward by extending the misuse of student test scores. The proposed revisions in the licensure process are a masterpiece of bureaucratic gobbledygook, but then, they have to be-- because if the people who wrote these exquisitely stupid rules had written them plainly, it would be obvious just how foolish they are.

There are three proposed versions (A, B & C) of the new system, and they all share one piece of twisted DNA-- they link teacher evaluations to teacher licenses. Not pay level or continued employment in that particular school district-- but licensure. A couple of below-average evaluations, and you will lose your MA license to teach.

There is no profession anywhere in the country that has such astonishing rules. Good lord-- even if your manager at McDonalds decides you're not up to snuff, he doesn't blackball you from ever working in any fast food joint ever again! Yes, every profession has means of defrocking people who commit egregious and unpardonable offenses. But-- and I'm going to repeat this because I'm afraid your This Can't Be Real filter is keeping you from seeing the words that I'm typing-- Massachusetts proposes to take your license to teach away if you have a couple of low evaluations.

It will not surprise you to learn that those evaluations would include all the usual groundless baloney. Student Impact Ratings-- did your real student get better test scores than his imaginary counterpart being taught by an imaginary average teacher in a parallel universe? Did you successfully climb the paperwork mountain generated by a teacher improvement plan (duly filed with the state department that doesn't have time to do the work it has now, so good luck with the new influx of improvement plan filings)? One version of the plan even allows for factoring in student evaluations of teachers; yes, teachers, your entire career can be hanging by a thread that dangles in front of an eight-year-old with scissors.

You can read the proposed plans here -- apparently hosted by an outfit called the Keystone Center, who have  this to say about themselves: "The Keystone Center was established to independently facilitate the resolution of national policy conflicts." Those conflicts seem to most often have to do with oil and gas stuff, as well as Colorado higher education and monarch butterflies. How they ended up helping Massachusetts blow up teaching careers is not clear to me. But it's easy to see how their "project partners" ended up here, because they're teamed up with TNTP, a group that never met a set of teacher job protections that they didn't want throw in a woodchipper and burn with fire.

If TNTP ever has a legitimate mission, it has long since been replaced with one single-minded focus-- to make it easier to fire all teachers everywhere all the time.

Keystone is also the "vendor and facilitator" for some "stakeholder meetings." These meetings do not appear to be designed for freewheeling stakeholder discussion.

During the upcoming stakeholder meetings, we are not asking for people to vote on or express their support or opposition to any one or more of the Policy Options. Rather, we will be asking stakeholders to identify pros and cons of each of the Policy Options as well as specific considerations or challenges and how to address these challenges.

Massachusetts Teachers Association members who attended the first of these meetings report that they are exactly the cheery railroad ride one would expect.

Members who attended the first session reported that the conversations were controlled and participants were not given the option of challenging the faulty premises being promoted by DESE. (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education)

The MTA site also has some direct and strongly worded objections to all three plans, and I would recommend that the rest of us all study these because if TNTP has their nose in this business, they'll be telling all their friends across the country about this fun way to chase people out of teaching.

I would point out to the people pushing this that it's a great way to chase people away from teaching in Massachusetts ever. I would point out that young people interested in starting a teaching career might favor a state where that career can't be snuffed out because of random fake data that's beyond their control. I would point out that this is one more policy that will almost certainly make it even harder than it already is to recruit teachers for high-poverty low-achievement schools. I mean, most states are settling for evaluation systems that punish inner-city teachers with just losing that particular job; it takes big brass ones for Massachusetts to say, "Come teach in a poor struggling under-funded low-resource school. Take a chance on the job that could end your entire teaching career before you're even thirty." Who on God's green earth thinks this is a way to put a great teacher in every classroom?

Well, the answer is nobody. I would say all those things to the people pushing this program if I thought they cared about any of that. But it seems increasingly obvious that creating a massive teacher shortage is not a bug, but a feature. It's not an unintended consequence, but the chosen objective.

The MTA is a feisty group. I hope they keep fighting, and fighting hard, because if they lose this, two bad things will happen.

First, Massachusetts will become one more state where teachers choose to work only if they're forced to by personal circumstances like friends and family or if they have no other options.

Second, other reformsters in other states (near other branch offices of TNTP) will look at Massachusetts as a model to follow, and the cancer will spread.

(Update! Good news. In fact, the best. In the face of a storm of howls and opposition and, the DESE in Massachusetts has said, "Um, never mind."  The memo (which I can't find a linkable copy of this morning) was pretty straightforward-- the high poobah of MA education said, "I've heard from a buttload of people voicing strong opposition and I've concluded that they're right, so we're not doing this." He has also reportedly invited MTA to continue the conversation. So this story has taken a definite turn for the better.

So now we get to learn a better lesson from this adventure-- that a strongly organized union that throws its back into pro-teacher advocacy can Get Things Done. Rather than worrying that this kind of rules change might infect other state departments of education, we can hope that this sort of strength infects other state teacher organizations (and who knows-- maybe the national ones, too.)

PA Solicits Standards Feedback

Pennsylvania's Department of Education wants public feedback on Eligible Content, the specific skills and knowledge that are listed in the Pennsylvania (Totally Not The Common) Core Standards.

Anybody with an internet hookup can go to http://www.paacademicreview.org 
and review the standards, item by item. They can give each individual item a check (for "that's just fine") or an X. With the X, you get four specific complaints that you can lodge:

* The statement should be broken up into several, more specific statements.
* The statement should be in a different grade level
* The statement should be rewritten
* The statement should be rewritten

These choices allow for written explanation, rationale, and/or suggested rewrites.

You'll be asked for an email address and to explain why you have a stake in PA standards (so knock it off, you crazy carpetbaggers), and you'll only be allowed one comment per standard per device. Right now only the third grade math and ELA standards are up, but everything is supposed to be up within the next couple of weeks. The site will be available until January 15, 2015. 

The stated goals of the site are

1) Increase awareness and understanding of PA's eligible content
2) Solicit actionable feedback as part of the department's review process
3) Provide exam sample questions for teachers in the tested grade/subject

The site is almost entirely funded by Team Pennsylvania Foundation, which is an economic development group. So I'm not sure what they're doing here.

The whole thing seems extraordinarily.... reasonable. So I'm not sure what we're up to, unless this is meant to help Corbett get out from under his education albatross before the election (though the lead time is a little slim). Whatever. It's an open invitation for Pennsylvania teachers (and anybody else) to sound off to the state about the standards. It would seem a shame to waste it.

Why Aren't We Talking About Teacher Retention?

To hear some folks talk about tenure, you would think that one of the biggest issues facing education is a glut of teachers, a veritable mountain of wrinkled old classroom geezers blocking the career paths of a million Bright Young Things who are itching to get into the classroom. Oh, if only tenure and FILO didn't allow them to sit there in lumpen uselessness while hot young blood congeals somewhere else, unused potential unrealized.

All the way back to She Who Will Not Be Named and her Time cover appearance, broom in hand, the prevailing image has been of the need to sweep away the tenure-protected deadwood. It's a compelling image-- it's just not closely related to reality.

The Economic Policy Institute thinks we don't even have enough teaching jobs. By their count, we should have 377,000 more job openings, which I'm pretty sure would take care of every enthusiastic twenty-something who's allegedly languishing somewhere.

On top of that, we are losing somewhere in the neighborhood of a half million teachers each year. Everybody likes to quote the two most striking data points-- fifty percent of new teachers leave within five years, and twenty percent of new teachers leave within the first three years. Recently TFA made the argument that their two-year teachers stay in a classroom longer than most traditional teacher school grads. That may or may not be accurate, but it's certainly close enough to give one pause. Meanwhile, I can report first-hand that many college education programs are shriveling up and, if not outright dying, becoming shambling zombie shadows of their former selves.

This report from April highlights some of the trends. The teacher force is very female, and very white. In other words, the teacher population looks less and less like the student population. And there's no good news to report there, either. Black men are entering the profession in huge numbers and leaving it in even huger numbers.

And into this picture we have Silicon Valley moguls telling us that the problem with education is that we can't fire people enough.

You will occasionally hear a stat thrown around along the lines of "Last year in North Pennsyltucky, only twelve teachers were fired out of sixty gabbillion employed in the state." This is supposed to alarm us with the slackitude of schools' firing skills, and serve as proof that zillions of terrible teachers are still in the classroom, lazily tenured and blissfully unfired. This is baloney. I will admit that when I entered teaching, it was a field where a lazy person could hide and while away the time until retirement. But that was thirty-some years ago; today teachers have to slog away just to keep their heads above water. The high attrition rate for beginning teachers tells me that many young men and women are saying, "Damn-- this is hard work that I don't think I can do very well. I'm outta here!" I believe a huge number of not-so-awsome proto-teachers are showing themselves the door before anybody else has to.

Why else are we hemorrhaging teachers? In that study linked above, Richard Ingersoll wrote this:

In short, the data suggest that school staffing problems are rooted in the way schools are organized and the way the teaching occupation is treated and that lasting improvements in the quality and quantity of the teaching workforce will require improvements in the quality of the teaching job.

In other words, making teaching jobs crappier and less secure is not likely to get people to stick around.

New York City schools played with the tenure thing, creating a sort of tenure twilight. Some folks thought a study of the system proved that you could get weaker teachers to go away on their own. I'm pretty sure that it proved you could get any teachers to go away if you told them they had no job security in their present location.

Everything-- everything-- tells us that if our goal really is to put a great teacher in every classroom, reformsters, educational thought leaders, and rich unelected amateurs who somehow get to set education policy are going about it exactly backwards. The attacks on tenure are literally the exact opposite of what is needed.

Of course, if the actual goal is to give schools a labor force that is cheaper and more easily controlled, then we are right on track. If we are trying to manufacture a staffing crisis so that we can say that we must issue emergency teaching credentials to all sentient beings in America, then we are on the right track. If we are trying to chase teachers away from large urban districts so that those districts (and their big beautiful piles of money) can be divied up by charter privateers, we are on the right track.

But if we want to talk about improving the teaching force, about making it better resemble the student population, about putting great teachers in front of all students-- if we want to talk about those things, then we need to stop talking about tenure and start talking about retention. What people actually choose to talk about tells us a great deal about their actual goals.