KnowledgeWorks: Your Large, Friendly Sibling

Today we'll be looking at KnowledgeWorks, yet another of the vast web of reformy foundations funded by the Gates et al. Their aspirations are high, as you can spot from the various self-descriptions peppered about their materials.

KnowledgeWorks is a social enterprise focused on ensuring that every student experiences meaningful personalized learning that allows him or her to thrive in college, career and civic life. By offering a portfolio of innovative education approaches and advancing aligned policies, KnowledgeWorks seeks to activate and develop the capacity of communities and educators to build and sustain vibrant learning ecosystems that allow each student to thrive. Our portfolio includes EDWorks and StriveTogether.

These guys do not think small, like TNTP's simple goal of gutting the teaching profession. And you can experience the full not-smallness of their vision in their October 2014 report, "Improving Student Outcomes Through COLLECTIVE IMPACT." My typographic choices are meant to capture the report's cover, which hides the first four words in smaller typeface while the last two come out with gusto and largeness. Let's also note that the report is co-produced by a KnowledgeWorks subsidiary, StriveTogether (motto "Every child. Cradle to career.")

StriveTogether, a subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks, works with communities nationwide to help them create a civic infrastructure that unites stakeholders around shared goals, measures and results in education, supporting the success of every child, cradle to career. Communities implementing the StriveTogether framework have seen dramatic improvements in kindergarten readiness, standardized test results, and college retention.

Well, that doesn't sound creepy at all. Strive is in Dallas, Boston, Seattle and Cincinnati, but we let's not get too sidetracked here. We'll turn to the report in a second, but first-- Where did these guys come from?

Some Brief History

KnowledgeWorks is not new to the game. They were founded in Ohio in 1998, with an initial mission of "increasing access" to educational opportunities mostly for poor students and poor working class adults. In 2004 they got on the Gates Small School gravy train and helped create some of those smaller high schools that were Gates' previous theory about how to fix education. In that initiative, they used another subsidiary, EDWorks, who "optimized the school improvement models behind this success by providing curriculum and instruction, supportive high school culture, aligned assessments and comprehensive student support."

In 2009, they switched nimbly to the new Gates gravy train-- college and career readiness; at that time, they also glommed up Napa Valley company New Tech Networks (at least one source says KnowdgeWorks founder built it), a group specializing in transforming schools through blah blah argle bargle my lord in heaven, but these guys soak all of their materials in some sort of corporate word soup that drowns a lot of sense.

The organization was founded by Chad P. Wick (age 72) who has been a CEO of various commercial banks in and around Cincinnati, served on some insurance company boards, and had his hand in Ohio politics one way or another. He seems well-connected to both important people and money, and that has dovetailed nicely with a philanthropic (in the modern sense) career. Wick also co-founded MAYWIC Select Investments, an investment group that bases a lot of its work on "deep relationships" and includes in its portfolio Abe's Market, goldieblox, and One Hope. Over the past several years, Wick has transitioned out of running KnowledgeWorks and into running ACT (yes, the test people).

So that's your short, simple intro to KnowledgeWorks. I've also read their creepy, creepy report so that you don't have to.

Collective Impact-- What Is That?

[Insert standard introduction about how US education is a terrible mess blah blah test scores argle bargle hodgepodge of standards.] Is it possible that these guys know of a solution to all that educational skyfall?

A promising approach to education reform has emerged in more than 100 communities across the country where partnerships of cross-sector leaders are using evidence based strategies and existing resources to improve outcomes for students. This approach, called collective impact, replaces competing agendas, siloed funding streams, and duplicative programs with a shared vision for education reform. 

I'd better explain before we go any further that I don't think of myself as an ideologue, and I don't automatically experiencing jerking of the knee regarding any political systems. So when I comment that this sounds kind of like a call for central planning of the collective, I'm not so much saying, "You mean that evil Communism that come straight from Satan." I'm more saying, "Oh, that central government planning model that keeps failing in almost every place it's attempted."

Well, these guys would like the "community partners" to come together in "an accountable way" (which always makes me ask-- accountable to whom) to implement these four super-swell ideas:

1) Shared community vision. Specifically, a vision for each child's life from "early learning" through entering the workforce.The sharing part means, among other things, no calling out partners in public. Let's just keep disagreements in house, shall we. Public disagreement is so confusing for the public. We want to keep everyone on exactly the same page.

2) Evidence based decision making. "Integrate professional expertise and data" to decide how the community is going to use its resources to "improve student outcomes." We should share data, a lot, and disagregated, too. Just hoover up that data and hand it to anybody in the community so that everybody, from the boss of the widget factory to the boss of the slumgullion factory can have better tell educators what they need to be fixing.

3) Collaborative action. Cross-section systems for so that " networks of appropriate cross-sector practitioners use data to continually identify, adopt and scale practices that improve student outcomes." Also, little focused action groups can Come Together to Do Stuff.

4) Investment & Sustainability. "Demonstrate broad community ownership for building civic infrastructure through committed resources to sustain the work of the partners and improve student outcomes."  Infrastructure's meaning is unclear, although the report proudly notes that fifty communities have joined the StriveTogether Cradle to Career network. I'm wondering if infrastructure isn't related to data sharing, but it also seems to include some helpful offers from the widget factory to help shape up your math teachers.

So that gobbledygook gives us a somewhat vague and wispy picture of what we're after. It's the kind of language that usually signals one of two possibilities. Either A) they don't know how to speak plain English and don't really know what they want to do or B) they know exactly what they want to do, and they'd rather the rest of us didn't get a plain picture of it.

But this report is directed at the feds and their role in all of this, so let's just see what that federal role is supposed to be.

Align Federal Grant Stuff with Local Efforts

This appears to mean that the feds should organize all their granty stuff and award money amounts based on how well the local folks are accomplishing the goals that KnowledgeWorks thinks they should be accomplishing. Do you suppose that list of localities would look a lot like the list of KnowledgeWorks clients?

But, seriously, there's too many funding streams and different applications to fill out with too many different measures of what success for that particular grant would look like. Could we just whittle that down to one grant stream with one application and just one way of measuring success.

Also, they'd like to see "shared accountability incentivized" at the local level, so that everyone will stick around past the paperwork part of the grant. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that kind of local accountability would mean that somebody local would basically have to be in charge of all the local stakeholders. I wonder who would be available to be the local accountability oversight management guys.

Bang for the Buck

The foundation has some ideas about how to organize the management of these improvements, and how to cross-reference that with the four Important Things listed above, and even some ideas of the dollar amounts that should be attached. See, if we can just get everybody to approach it this One Correct Way (that we are experts in because we made it up, so, you know, if anyone needs a consult...) everything will just be awesome and you will get banged for your buck.

The Definition of Success

Well, you didn't think they were going to stop at telling the feds how every school system should be organized, measured and funded according to the One Correct Way, did you? KnowdgeWorks will now go on to tell the feds what they should consider the definition of success for schools. They list six measures:

Kindergarten readiness
Early grade reading
Middle grade math
High school graduation
Postsecondary enrollment
Postsecondary employment

You may have heard that kindergarten is the door to all future success and happiness. It's true! If you're in Cincinnati, you know that these guys helped develop a Pre-K readiness test that can predict whether the child will be able to read in Third Grade. The whole community is now working on test prepping four year olds helping children meet that benchmark before entering kindergarten.

Reading in third grade is a big deal. They hear some states are holding students back who don't pass that reading test. Just sayin', that's all. For middle grade math, they've got even less. "Middle grade math has become an important milestone..." And those are the three points at which success is clearly measured by a student's ability to pass a standardized test. Because, data.

High school graduation leads to more money! Did you know that? Did you also know that 84% of all reformsters are unable to distinguish between correlation and causation? Also, lots of poor students don't go on to college, the next important corner in the pipeline. And graduating from college is good, we hear, though nobody really knows how to measure how successfully that's happening.

The report even offers a handy "dashboard" for entering all the data for handy display and sharing by policy makers. Because the best management is done by people sitting in offices looking at screens.

On the Horizon: Thought Police

I once read Moby Dick. It wasn't fun. I've read the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, too. This report is providing a similar experience, but dammit, I'm sticking through to the end. I pledge allegiance to the flag. Ha! Just seeing if you're still there, reader. God bless you, there's even creepier stuff to come.

Anyway. While KnowledgeWorks knows that academic indicators are important, they also know that people watching the cradle to career pipeline would really like a peek at "social and emotional indicators." Good news!! The Strive wing is totally working on ways to measure those competencies, and they've identified the areas that require further research.

These include the creation of measurement tools that assess more than one competency, a clearer understanding of how the various competencies affect each other, and greater clarity and consistency on names, definitions and categorization of competencies. There is also a strong interest and desire in connecting these outcomes to workforce needs, particularly in high-demand careers.

Yes, there's a strong interest in being able to check those childhood test results so that future employers can get their workers to order straight out of the collective creche. After all, what is the point of having a tightly organized educational pipeline if employers can't use it to mold and select the most desirable qualities. I'm sorry-- did you think that education had some purpose other than to provide employers with workers? Silly you.

White Whale, My Ass

Sorry, but that's as far as I go. There's a page or two of stuff from Dallas showing how well they've engineered test results for small future drones. There's also a page of endnotes which I haven't bothered with because, as is generally the case with these "reports," the notes are just to other self-created pieces of unsupported non-research advocacy PR.

The Cradle To Career Pipeline idea has been around for a while. I had no idea that there was a group out there working so hard to make it real. It's creepy. It's Big Brothery. It hands over control of education to all sorts of people who don't know what the hell they're talking about. It treats education as nothing more than a vocational training system. It reduces the educational path to a one-size-fits-all measured-by-testing track. It opens that track to being directed by people who may or may not be able to successfully predict what job will be there in four, eight, ten years from now. It makes the lives of students an open book to all sorts of people whose right to violate student privacy isn't even questioned in such a program.

I had an idea that it could be this bad, but I didn't realize the infection was so advanced and in so many cities. To those of you living with this, my condolences.

The Real Secret of Grit

Grit is a great thing. Of all the various rhetorical footballs that get kicked around in education debates, grit is one that everybody loves. Reformsters love to talk about it, and nobody that I can think of in the Resistance is out there bad-mouthing it. Nobody is saying, "We need wimpier kids with less toughness and resilience. We need kids who will fold under pressure and buckle when things get tough." Well, at least not out loud or on purpose.

We do have confusion and disagreement about where grit comes from and how it works.

Grit is not self-esteem. Self-esteem is about what you think you deserve. Grit is about what you think you can handle.

All of our concerns, all of our worries, all of our fears, anxieties, distress about the future-- they all come down to grit. Every statement we make about a Bad Thing That Could Happen has an unspoken coda. "I might lose my job" or "The house might burn down" or "I might not get into college" or "I might get stranded on an ice floe with a brace of rabid arctic ferrets"-- every one of them is followed by an unspoken "and I wouldn't be able to handle it."

Think about it. All the things you don't worry about, you don't worry about because you know that you can handle them. "The point on my pencil might break," you say without fear because it's followed by, "and then I would sharpen it." But even good things like graduation and marriage can trigger stress, because they trigger the sme question-- "Can I handle what happens next?"

So building grit is about just one thing-- learning that the answer to "Can I handle what comes next?" is "Yes. Yes, I can."

Some grit proponents like to talk about it as a personal quality, by which they seem to mean that you either have grit or you don't. And some grit fans believe that grit emerges magically from the hard dirt of tough times. Just keep punching someone in the face, and if they have what it takes, they'll develop grit.

This is incorrect. Adversity can be part of the mulch from which grit grows, but it's not the whole part. It's not even the most important part (which is why some people who have had soft, cushy lives still manage to be gritty as hell).

The important part of developing grit is becoming convinced that you can handle whatever it is. Developing grit is becoming convinced that, "Yes. Yes, I can." is your answer. And most often our students get that convincing from another human being. And not because that human being keeps punching the student in the face. Every story of grit emerging from adversity includes one common feature-- a person who said, "Stand up. You can do this."

You develop grit in students by standing with them and saying, "You can do this."

Now, that can be tricky business. Different teacher-student combinations require different styles of interaction. In one case, soft, gentle hand-holdy support may be just the thing, but in another case being all soft and gentle may actually communicate, "You are weak and fragile and can't really handle this." Tough love, even when seemingly harsh, can be just the thing because it communicates, "Well, of course you can handle this. I'm so certain of it that I find it ridiculous to suggest otherwise."

You do not help students succeed by making them feel small. You help students succeed by helping them see themselves as bigger than their challenges. How you do that depends on you and the student you're dealing with, but the key is the focus-- helping that student be big. But you don't do it by making them small, by focusing your attention on all the ways they aren't enough. You do not make them gritty by smashing them down.

The concept of grit is too often used as excuse not to help, treating a challenge in life as a test to which grit is the answer, and if you don't have it, well, no cheating and it sucks to be you. But we have a responsibility to help others-- particularly young others-- develop grit. And sometimes we can do it in a moment. Neil Degrasse Tyson talks about the grit and toughness and resilience it took for him to grow up African-American with dreams of becoming a physicist. And he speaks glowingly about how the great scientist Carl Sagan met him, talked to him, and cemented the idea that he could absolutely do it-- that he was just as big and tough as his dreams. Sagan made him feel big enough.

That should be the goal for all of us (and not just teachers)-- to help others be big enough. If we want grit to grow in the garden, we have to tend it-- not just walk away and insist that it somehow grow itself.

Journeys and Destinations

Yesterday was, of course, Halloween Party day in my wife's classroom. My wife teaches first grade, which is one more reason that I suspect she is some sort of earthbound goddess, except that there couldn't possible be enough earthbound gods and goddesses to account for all the elementary teachers out there.

As with most days, her job yesterday seemed to involve lots of Reassurance. Her students made a ghost out of paper plates and crepe paper strips, and where six year olds with scissors go, disappointment follows. And so, reassurance. Your ghost's mouth didn't turn out the way it was supposed to? It'll be okay. The strips somehow ended up different lengths? It'll be okay. You glued your ghost's arms where his hair is supposed to be? It'll be okay. And that's before she even gets to the Big Stuff-- a little guy was dropped at school without his costume for the big Costume Parade. His mom promised she'd drop it off at the school later. And he waited. And she didn't.

We're extra careful with newborns because their skulls aren't fully formed. Eventually those plates will become hardened and tough and fully protective, but for a while their little brains are just hanging out there, unprotected, vulnerable, and easily hurt.

Well, the same things is metaphorically true of young hearts, but the time frame is much longer. Eventually their protective covering will get hard and tough, but for the time being, their hearts are just hanging out there, unprotected, vulnerable, and easily hurt.

Some of her students arrive already equipped with a powerful fear of Being Wrong, and so she has to reassure them (because when six year olds have soooo much to learn, they do make mistakes). Because when you're afraid to make mistakes, you're afraid to try. It's a long journey, and if you have to stop and fret over every single step, the journey is awfully difficult.

So, reassurance. It's okay to make a mistake. It's okay to be wrong. We just keep trying. We haven't figured it out yet. We don't have it yet. We'll get it. It'll be okay. We're still growing.

It seems natural to explain that a wrong answer or a mistake or a scissor cut that doesn't go according to plan-- none of these things are the end of the world or an unbearable disaster. We'll pull ourselves together. We'll try again. We'll learn from this setback. Doesn't that sound like the message we'd want any six year old child to absorb?

It'll be okay. Let's pick ourselves up, dry our tears, try this again until we figure it out and make it work.

But it is, of course, the exact opposite of what is hard-wired into the test-and-punish regimen that reformsters are installing in schools. The gods and goddesses like my wife are picking kids up, setting them on their feet, drying their tears, telling them that they are alright and they can keep moving forward on their journey, but the reformsters are in these children's faces snarling, "Here's a test. You get one try. Get it right or you're a big fat failure." By the time they're eight, some states want to punish those kids with (proven ineffective) consequences for one set of wrong answers on a single standardized reading test.

It's not just educationally unsound. It's mean, hard-hearted unkindness meant to break children down instead of building them up.

It's not that I want to value the journey to the exclusion of the destination. Those of us who teach writing wrestle with this balance-- it's good to work on your process, your technique, your journey; but ultimately you have to produce a piece of writing and be judged on that result. I don't post rough drafts on this blog.

But when we're talking about fostering the growth of little humans, I believe we must value the journey over the destination, because that's life. Life is mostly journey, and what we think of as destinations are little rest stops along the way. Those stops, those achievement, those checkpoints are great and important and lord knows we don't want to drive around aimlessly and never arrive anywhere, but life is mostly the journey. Where we get is important; I'm not so sure that it's more important than how we get there.

So we have a duty to teach young humans about how to journey through life with strength and confidence and skill. We need to teach them how to grapple their way to solutions, how to attack and attack and attack again whatever problem faces them. And you know-- I don't even think that many reformsters disagree with what I'm saying. But you do not measure any of this with a single one-and-done one-right-answer-for-everyone standardized test. A snapshot test is all destination and no journey.

Despite test boosters claim to the contrary, there is nothing in life-- nothing-- that resembles the standardized test model. Your boss does not walk into your office and say, "Okay-- here's a problem I want you to solve. You have ten minutes. Your solution will determine whether I promote you or fire you." Someone does not walk up to you and say, "Hi, stranger. You have ten minutes to decide whether we should remain strangers or get married."  All right-- I take it back-- there are some things like a standardized test. We call them disasters, or tragedies. A dam breaks .A car crashes. A gunman walks into your school. Is that what standardized tests are supposed to prepare students for?

This is just one more way in which standardized tests utterly fail to measure any of the things we say we care about. Attaching high stakes to them only make them worse. When everything is riding on one set of answers to questions that you only get to wrestle with once, there is no absorbing data from the results and attacking again. There is no learning to grow from that moment. There's nothing but a declaration of winners and losers, and nothing that even the most powerful goddess can tell the losers that blunts the standardized stab at their open hearts.

The standardized test and punish system is not just anti-education. It's anti-human. Our children deserve better.

The Feds and College Money

It can be very, very hard to figure out where the federal government stands on the myriad of financial issues surrounding post-secondary education, particularly in the area of for-profit vocational colleges. Sometimes to suss these matters out, you have to look at the history.

History tells us that last summer, the Obama administration made good on its threat to clean up scamsters like the Corinthian College Giant Web O' College Flavored Deception. These are schools that appear to view students as receptacles for carrying college loan money from the government and banks to the sort-of-a-college's bank account. This process tends to leave the students themselves holding the debt-filled bag, often without anything remotely resembling a marketable skill. Anyway, the feds were going to put a stop to those shenanigans, so last summer they tracked down the biggest offenders, looked them in the eyes, and said, "Here's another pile of money to keep you from going out of business." To be fair, they also said the bureaucratic equivalent of, "And I've got my eye on you, mister, so don't try any funny business." Which given the circumstances was slightly better than, "Watch out. There's more where that came from."

This is in keeping with the highly mixed messages that are common currency in the college loan world. Even those of who have traveled there are not quite sure of the terrain. Take, for instance, Sallie Mae-- the public is split between people who A) believe it's a government agency, B) don't know what the hell it is and C) think it's a country song title. But it was increasingly clear that maybe they were hosing veterans (and settled a $60 million lawsuit without fessing to anything), and so the government decided to investigate them, or itself, or something, and early peeks at the results indicate that-- ta-dahhh!! --- there's Nothing Bad happening.

This so clearly contradicted what folks had concluded by using their powers of seeing and hearing that the Education Department is now scrambling to investigate the investigation. So we're still doing the rewrite on that slice of history.

It's a sore point because the US Department of Education has been accused before of making a buttload of profit from student loans. They've never really refuted those claims other than to say parents are still getting a deal (whether half-baked or raw was not discussed) and that accounting is, you know, hard. Arne Duncan stated definitively, "We did not." So, you know, that settles it. And yet, when discussing the cost of the college education that the administration wants everyone to get, we never discuss tricks like, say, loaning money to college students at the same miniscule rates used to loan money to banks. So-- touchy issue. The federal government and loans have a history.

This week came a clear statement that the administration recognizes the problem. An announcement on both the White House and Ed Department blogs declared the problem:

Too often, students at career colleges — including thousands of veterans — are charged excessive costs, but don’t get the education they paid for. Instead, students in many of these programs are provided with poor quality training, often for low-wage jobs or in occupations where there are simply no job opportunities. They frequently find themselves with large amounts of debt and, too often, end up in default. In many cases, students are drawn into these programs with confusing or misleading information. 

The new rules, which are somewhat nebulous in the press release, appear to require proof that your program produces actual graduates who have actual skills and get actual jobs (for which they are paid actual money).


To qualify for federal student aid, the law requires that most for-profit programs and certificate programs at private non-profit and public institutions prepare students for “gainful employment in a recognized occupation.” 

So if they turn out to be a big scam, we might cut off the federal aid to students and let those students-- what? Still get a fake education but do it with money they borrowed on their own. I mean, maybe somewhere in this mysterious language are some actual teeth, but it looks like the feds are going to keep not doing much of anything about these folks. Though as I read it, this is for programs that are supposed to be vocationalish. I don't think the feds will start requiring liberal arts majors to prove they're employable. At least, not yet. So maybe we're coming around on that one.


I certainly hope so, because this week also featured yet another initiative to get every single student into the FAFSA database. The first lady has released a FAFSA Completion Challenge video, announcing a competition for schools to get 100% of their students registered with the biggest college loan clearing house in the ever.

Looking at the federal history on this issue, it's hard not to feel a bit queasy about the Challenge. The White House press release touts the vast amount of loan money available-- but it's loan money, and this general cheering about getting every student to go to college, no matter the student, no matter the cost just seems irresponsible-- particularly coming from a governmental body that may not be so much an impartial booster as a potential profiteer from all this youthful indebtedness.

And if you are inclined to be paranoid about our Data Overlords, the FAFSA database certainly makes a tasty gathering bucket for a giant stew of Big Data on every eighteen-year-old potential customer in the country.

College isn't cheap, loans aren't free, and higher education is not automatically the road to prosperity. Don't get me wrong-- I'm a huge believer in continuing education, and I will be paying off loans for a long long time because I decided that my own kids would get there if it was humanly possible for me to do it.

But as the last couple of years have demonstrated, attending college is not risk free, and it can do some nasty long-lasting financial damage without leaving any real benefits. I can't help feeling that if the feds really felt strongly about this, they'd find a way to cut students the same kind of loan deals that they give their corporate buddies. They would get into the scholarship business, instead of the loan brokering business. I would feel a lot better about the federal boosting of the college path if they were more clearly looking out for the interests of students rather than bankers and profiteers. The last time the feds started convincing people to buy things they couldn't afford, we ended up with a massive financial crisis, a bunch of banksters who still managed to end up filthy rich, and a bunch of regular citizens hung out to dry.

I want every child who wants to to go to college, and I support the idea of my government making that happen more easily. I'd like to believe that's mostly what we're doing. I like the optimistic view. But in this matter, history is not on the side of optimism.

NC Program To Drive Out Teachers Is Working

The News Observer reports that the number of teachers leaving teaching in North Carolina has grown, and analysts suggest that it's only going to get worse.

"What a surprise," said nobody who was paying attention. The Tar Heel State has been doing its level best to let teachers know that their kind aren't welcome around these parts. The North Carolina legislature has tried to erase tenure, tried to give teachers a choice between job security or getting a raise ever (maybe-- because they didn't actually have a way to fund the hypothetical raise). And, of course, every year north Carolina teachers take a real-dollar pay cut-- unless they just started out and get the almost-adequate beginning teacher raise that the GOP pushed through.

On top of that, North Carolina has followed Florida in implementing the kinds of kid-unfriendly programs that can make classrooms extra-miserable, patterned on classics like Florida's "Just Read, Dammit!" program that tells eight year olds they're ignorant failures who must repeat third grade if they don't get a sufficient score on a badly designed standardized reading test.

Few states in the country can hope to match North Carolina in creating an environment that is openly hostile to anyone who hopes to build a lifetime teaching career there. Under current conditions, it's just not possible.

And so, teachers have decided to get the hell out.

North Carolina's political dimbulbs continue to ignore this. Thanks to a lower retirement rate last year, the full turnover rate took a slight dip downward. But the number of teachers leaving teaching in general and leaving teaching in North Carolina in particular continues to grow. And as one analyst points out, these figures are probably low anyway because they only cover through March and don't include everyone who made a decision to bail over the summer.

Wake County, the state's largest system, continues to lead the pack, with teacher attrition numbers that have at least doubled over the last few years. But Dallas Woodhouse, head of political group Carolina Rising that backs GOP Senate candidate Thom Tillis, thinks things are going great.

Teachers leaving the state is an issue, Woodhouse said. but Republicans are dealing with it. The economy has to improve for teacher salaries to improve, “and we’re seeing that now,” he said.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/30/4279054_teacher-turnover-rate-dips-slightly.html?sp=/99/102/110/112/&rh=1#storylink=cpy

Of course, North Carolina loves its charter schools. Reports suggest as many as 170 opening next year, and why not. NC pols fight hard to preserve charters rights to operate with little or no oversight, even on something as simple as revealing what they pay staff. The special blend of rules has worked well for businessmen like Baker Mitchell, a gifted and well-connected charter profiteer.

For a flourishing charter picture, nothing could be better than a teacher shortage, because teacher-job-filler is cheap and agreeable. North Carolina is becoming a great place to be a TFA temp and the charter operator who hires her. For actual professional teachers, it's sadly true that nothing could be finer than to exit Carolina.

PARCC Is Magical

Today David Hespe, the acting education commissioner in New Jersey, sent out a letter to Chief School Administrators, Charter School Lead Persons, School Principals, and Test Coordinators.

The re: is "Student Participation in the Statewide Assessment Program." Specifically, it's "why there ought to be some, and how you handle uppity folks who want to avoid it."

In the two page letter, the first page and a half are taken up with a history lesson and a legal brief. Basically, "some laws have been passed, starting with No Child Left Behind, and we think they mean that students have to take the PARCC." (If you want to see the faux legal argument dismantled, check out Sarah Blaine's piece here.)

But then Hespe, correctly suspecting that this might not be sufficient for dealing with recalcitrant parental units, offers this magical paragraph:

In speaking with parents and students, it is perhaps most important to outline the positive reasons that individual students should participate in the PARCC examinations. Throughout a student’s educational career, the PARCC assessments will provide parents with important information about their child’s progress toward meeting the goal of being college or career ready. The PARCC assessments will, for the first time, provide detailed diagnostic information about each individual student’s performance that educators, parents and students can utilize to enhance foundational knowledge and student achievement. PARCC assessments will include item analysis which will clarify a student’s level of knowledge and understanding of a particular subject or area of a subject. The data derived from the assessment will be utilized by teachers and administrators to pinpoint areas of difficulty and customize instruction accordingly. Such data can be accessed and utilized as a student progresses to successive school levels.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (forgot that's what PARCC stands for, didn't you) is a magical magical test. It can tell with absolute precision, how prepared your student is for college or career because, magic. And who wouldn't want to know more about the powerful juju contained in the PARCC test.

So if Mr. Hespe and any of his friends come to explain how crucial PARCC testing is for your child's future, you might try asking some questions.

* Exactly what is the correspondence between PARCC results and college readiness. Given the precise data, can you tell me what score my eight year old needs to get on the test to be guaranteed at least a 3.75 GPA at college?

* Does it matter which college he attends, or will test results guarantee he is ready for all colleges?

* Can you show me the research and data that led you to conclude that Test Result A = College Result X? How exactly do you know that meeting the state's politically chosen cut score means that my child is prepared to be a college success?

* Since the PARCC tests math and language, will it still tell me if my child is ready to be a history or music major? How about geology or women's studies?

* My daughter plans to be a stay-at-home mom. Can she skip the test? Since that's her chosen career, is there a portion of the PARCC that tests her lady parts and their ability to make babies?

* Which section of the PARCC tests a student's readiness to start a career as a welder? Is it the same part that tests readiness to become a ski instructor, pro football player, or dental assistant?

* I see that the PARCC will be used to "customize instruction." Does that mean you're giving the test tomorrow (because it'a almost November already)? How soon will the teacher get the detailed customizing information-- one week? Ten days? How will the PARCC results help my child's choir director and phys ed teacher customize instruction?

* Is it possible that the PARCC will soon be able to tell me if my eight year old is on track for a happy marriage and nice hair?

* Why do you suppose you keep using the word "utilize" when "using" is a perfectly good plain English substitute?

* To quote the immortal Will Smith in Independence Day, "You really think you can do all that bullshit you just said?"

The PARCC may look like just one more poorly-constructed standardized math and language test, but it is apparently super-duper magical, with the ability to measure every aspect of a child's education and tell whether the child is ready for college and career, regardless of which college, which major, which career, and which child we are talking about. By looking at your eight year old's standardized math and language test, we can tell whether she's on track to be a philosophy major at Harvard or an airline pilot! It's absolutely magical!

Never has a single standardized test claimed so much magical power with so little actual data to back up its assertions. Mr. Hespe would be further ahead to skip his fancy final paragraph and just tell his people to look parents in the eye and say, "Because the state says so." It's not any more educationally convincing than the magical CACR bullshit, but at least it would be honest.

High Stakes Testing 2.0

In the world of reformsters and their Orwellian word salads, statements often mean the opposite of what they appear to say. "We need to be able to hire more great teachers" actually means "We need to be able to fire any teacher we wish." "We want to rescue high-poverty low-achievement schools" turns out to mean "We want to starve high-poverty low-achievement schools of resources."

So it really should be no surprise that "We see that there's a problem with over-reliance on and over-use of high stakes testing" actually means "We intend to triple down on high stakes testing."

From the moment CCSSO and CGCS held their misleading phone conference, it was evident that they were not talking about backing off testing at all. Almost immediately (as if something had been sent out in the Education Reformsters Newsletter), High Stakes Testing 2.0 began to reveal its ugly face. You can see it in the test-cheerleading websites such as Minnesota's. Even Arne Duncan got in on the act of being against the tests before he was for them (as well as trying to shuck responsibility for installing HST at the center of US education in the first place).

This has been a version of all those crime dramas where the guy who has gone undercover punches his buddy in the face before the really dangerous guys can kill the buddy dead. It's a stalling tactic, mean to save the buddy, not actually harm him.

The Cult of Testing paused just long enough to generate some headlines meant to soothe the opposition, but we are already proceeding with High Stakes Testing 2.0, in which high stakes testing remains the hub around which all decisions in education must turn.

Take a look at Education Post, the website that has rapidly proven itself as a war-room agit-prop echo chamber for every talking point of the reformster movement (and so I'll not link to them unless absolutely necessary). They've been running a swell piece by Erika Sanzi who thanks Arne for insulting white suburban moms and praises testing because, well...

My gratitude now extends to his continued call for smart and meaningful testing of students. We cannot possibly provide kids with the education they need and deserve if we don’t have an accurate sense of what they know, what they don’t know, and how we can best help them.

I try not to do personal attacks here. I'll attack ideas and statements, but I remain conscious that these are real people with homes and families and lives and aspirations, I must assume, to do good. But what am I to make of a mother and teacher who says that she won't know how her children or students are doing unless someone shows her standardized test results? How do I not insult her when she has so handily insulted herself?

Sanzi also floats the talking point that standardized tests are just like diagnostic tests at the doctors office. This is a weak comparison-- doctors order tests, one test is not used for all patients no matter what, and diagnostic tests are not used to evaluate the doctor and hospital. If you want my full rant on why this comparison is bogus, you can find it here.

And Sanzi winds up with the other go-to argument for HST, which translates roughly as, "How dare you try to deprive poor, minority students of this chance to advance in the world!?" It is potent salad of baloney that tosses in some powerful ideas-- civil rights! racial equity! wealthy privilege! It makes it clear that you are risking being rhetorically tattooed as a monster if you try to cross them. It does not provide one whit of explanation as to how giving a poor, minority student a high stakes standardized test will open doors to opportunity for that student.

As someone who has taught in both privileged and underprivileged schools, I can’t imagine anything more threatening to students’ civil rights than denying them evidence that proves they are—or are not—learning. How else can we expose and aspire to close the achievement and opportunity gaps if we aren’t willing to acknowledge they exist?

This echoes the language of John White the CCSSO/CGCS phone call suggesting that only through testing will we ever know that students aren't learning. Because the trained professionals that spend 180 days with these students have no clue (or are big fat liars), and so only tests will tell us The Truth. This is one of the foundational pillars of HST-- that our entire army of professional educators simply can't be trusted to give us information about student achievement. If we don't give tests, we will never know.

And test we will.

A recent post on the US DOE blog highlights just how little of an impression the anti-testing pushback has made-- starting with the title "Investing in Evidence: Finding Game-Changing Evaluations."

The full post is a monument to governmental gobbledygook and a blind faith in testing, but just look at that title. There are two huge assumptions embedded there.

1) The game needs to be changed. Schools are such a disaster we must change everything, start a new game, play a new song, throw out bathwater, babies and basinets. Game-changing does not leave any room for the thought that some of the work being done is good-- no, we need a new game.

2) The way to change the game is with tests. Not with training. Not with personnel. Not even with shiny national standards. No, if games are to be changed, it is tests that will change them. It would be hard to come up with a clearer statement of belief that testing is the foundation, the fundamental bedrock of all education.

The proposal itself seems to be (the language is really impenetrable, and you know I have dug my way through some doozies) to collect up the best tests that are most effective for something something as identified by people who volunteer to answer some questions such as "what questions about P-12 education are still unanswered, because if we find the really good tests and connect up the programs that can't afford really good testing, we can sort of spread the testy love around and answer all the questions by using all the tests. Lordy, I may wade into this thing in greater depth some day, but knowing how way leads on to way, probably not.

Specifically, we are asking your help to identify what the most pressing education policy and/or practice questions are and how answering them could provide needed information to educators, parents and local, state, and federal governments to enable significant improvements in education. Our goal is to support the development of findings that have the rigor and power to inform significant improvements in how schools, districts, states, and the federal government provide services to students.

The clear takeaway is this-- this is not a plan for cutting back on tests or limiting tests. It's a plan for spreading tests out and around.

Every indication, from the feds to reformsters to reformster mouthpieces, is that HST 2.0 may be concerned about its optics, but it's not remotely interested in backing off on the noble goal of testing America's children (and teachers) into submission. So we can all stop pretending that testing caps and limits and restraint was ever a thing, because it wasn't, and it isn't. Get those opt out forms back out, because you're going to need them.