Dear Randi

Dear Randi-

I just got the email from you that I've reprinted below. I thought I would go ahead and reply. I want to like you. I admire the way you put yourself out there on social media-- I've watched you engage in some fairly heated exchanges on twitter, and as someone whose union leadership has a history of rarely engaging with the rank and file, I find your openness refreshing. But I can't help noticing that in your stirring message to the troops telling the story of the many election fights fought across the nation, you left out one major state.

I'm an NEA member, and a teacher in Pennsylvania, so what the AFT does in NY isn't really my problem-- except that I'm a teacher in a country where an awful lot of people in power are trying to dismantle public education and the profession that I've devoted my life to. So everything that happens in the education biz is kind of my business in the same way that a fire on the back porch of the house is my problem even if I'm sitting in the front living room.

So I've been watching New York, and it has not been fun.

I'm not a NY AFT member. I don't know all the ins and outs of the politics of the union, nor do I know all the history of all the players. And I have been a local union president (through a strike, no less), and I understand that sometimes you have to temper idealistic aspirations with political reality.

But I'm tired of union leaders who won't stand up for teachers. I'm tired of union leaders who don't unequivocally say, "That is wrong. What you are saying about teachers is wrong. What you are doing to teachers is wrong, and we will not support a person who says such things."

I've read the attacks on you accusing you of all sorts of Machiavellian political angling, of putting personal ambition over teacher concerns. I have no reason to believe those things. I have no reason not to believe them. I think they might even be beside the point.

But I do know that when someone gets wrapped in shading and angling and nuancing and carefully crafting messages, it's easy to think that your message is coming across with all its complicated shades intact. That is usually not true.

So I'm not writing to accuse you of anything. But I want you to understand what the last year has looked like to someone out here in the cheap seats, to someone who cares about the stakes of the cause, but who has no dog in the specific fights of New York State or the AFT. Regardless of what you intended for people to see, this is what I saw. take that for what it's worth.

I saw AFT push the Working Families Party to make an utterly senseless endorsement of Cuomo, justified by the notion that they were making a deal with a career politician who historically never makes or keeps bargains. And that was support not just for Cuomo, but turning their back on Teachout, a woman whose understanding of what the hell is wrong is clear and profound and yet prcatical.

I saw you mount a last minute campaign to salvage the primary hopes of Cuomo's running mate, a man who was in trouble because your own members didn't want to vote for him.

And as things became uglier and uglier, climaxing in Cuomo making one of the most clear and direct declarations of war on teachers and public schools of any American politician-- I mean, seriously, we know many of those guys were thinking it, but Cuomo just flat out said it as directly as Khrushchev declaring "We will bury you"-- you didn't call him on it. You did not muster one sliver of the outrage and indignation you directed at Time magazine, a fading magazine that may have insulted teachers, but does not have the power to turn insults into policy. Cuomo, who has announced his intention to exert that power to break public education and teachers, got a pass, an excuse made for him (though he never asked to be excused for his words).

I don't know if there was a carefully crafted message that AF brass put together. Out here in the cheap seats, it looks like rank and file teachers do not have leaders who will stand up for them when it matters. Again, I am not trying to make an accusation-- I am telling you what I see.

Maybe from my vantage point I just don't see enough, and I'm missing all sorts of things that would make me feel better about all of this. But when you send out a Rally the Troops letter that pointedly ignores the New York governor's race entirely, it makes me think I was probably right with my first impression.

I confess to being mystified by some aspects of New York politics. I don't know why people try to get along with Cuomo, when that clearly doesn't really do anybody any good.

Out here in the communities of PA, we do indeed unite behind many of these issues. But, honestly, at this point it's not really clear to me what side AFT leadership is on. It makes me nervous. Cuomo is just across the border, getting ready to rip the guts out of public education and the teaching profession, and for some reason, the AFT can't bring itself to say, "Boo." I know there's a bigger fight coming. I just don't know if we count on you when it gets here. If you think there are reasons that I should feel reassured, I'm telling you that you are not currently communicating those reasons to me or my colleagues.

Thanks for listening, 
Peter

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Peter,

First and foremost, thank you.

Whether you knocked on doors, made calls, talked to your friends and neighbors, or simply cast a ballot for working families, thank you.

Over the last few months, we’ve crisscrossed the country—from Miami to Anchorage—working side by side with you, our members and community allies, to elect leaders who share our values.
Tuesday night was tough. All day Wednesday, people asked us whether all the work was worth it. We’ve said the same thing to all of them.

Whether you win or lose, it’s never a mistake to go all-in for working families.

Tuesday, Randi spent the day in Pennsylvania, knocking on doors and making calls for Tom Wolf. And the evening began with the great news that we had won.

Sadly, it got a lot tougher after that. In Wisconsin, Mary Cathryn came back from a day of canvassing for Mary Burke only to watch as Scott Walker won re-election. After a day of door-knocking in Baltimore, Lorretta looked on in disbelief as Larry Hogan won in Maryland.

There’s no denying that this election will be a setback. Ironically, Wall Street—whose reckless actions helped caused the economic malaise that motivated voters to vote against Democrats—has already expressed its joy over the Republican takeover of the Senate.


Which gets to our point. There’s something important that people aren’t talking about as much: Where the election was clearly about everyday concerns—education, minimum wage, paid sick leave—working families prevailed.


From the governor’s race in Pennsylvania to minimum wage ballot measures in places like Nebraska and Arkansas, we see that communities are with us on the issues. We beat back restrictions on women’s healthcare, and defeated ballot measures that attacked due process, pensions and collective bargaining. When we campaign on real issues and offer big ideas, people agree with us. That’s an important lesson. But where the choices were less clear, voters took out their frustration with our seemingly broken system by voting against Democrats. It’s a reminder that we must make it clear what we stand for, and stand up proudly to tell people what we believe.
And here’s another thing: Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve seen the power that people feel from participating.

Yes, we lost many of the races we fought in. But we fought. We stood up—together—and said, “Our communities deserve better." And every time one of us stands up, it gives another person the courage to do the same.

We will not stop fighting now. In fact, we’ll redouble our efforts. From the statehouse to Capitol Hill, we need you with us now.

Power never yields without a fight, and to change the balance of power, we must stand together. That’s what unions are about—working together to make things better for working families. Today, we promise this union will stand strong with our members, our families and our communities.

From state capitols to Capitol Hill, we need your voice. We are calling on all governors—Democrats and Republicans—to fully fund public education, to lift up workers and protect our basic rights. We’re calling on Capitol Hill to break the endless logjam and move us forward.
To make that happen, we need you—your voice, your courage, your commitment—to help show our leaders that we demand better.

There’s a very simple promise enshrined in America. If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to get ahead, and each generation will do better than the one before. We must continue our work to reclaim that promise.
In unity,

Randi Weingarten, AFT President

Lorretta Johnson, AFT Secretary-Treasurer

Mary Cathryn Ricker, AFT Executive Vice-President

TN Core Apologist

Casie Jones is concerned, maybe even upset. Over at Bluff City Education, she would like to explain why Tennessee cannot, should not, abandon the Common Core now.

I'm a student of the Teachers Says We Must Support The Core narrative in its many not-very-varied forms, and Jones follows most of the standard bullet points., starting with her title: "Sabotaging Common Core Sabotages Teachers, Students." "Sabotaging" is a great word choice, because it assumes that the Core is a Great Thing that is Actually Working.

Tennessee schools were sucking hard enough to hoover the chrome off a trailer hitch. Furthermore, they were coping with No Child Left Behind Adequate Yearly Progress demands with the nationally-favored technique of "gaming the numbers," also known as "cheating."

So thank goodness the Core came along to fix all of that. Which of course takes us to the classic Teacher Core Booster line-- previously I couldn't do my job, but once I adopted the Core, my classroom came alive, my students prospered and grew wings, and well, here you go. You may say it's mean for me to pick on Jones for previously being incompetent, that it is a personal and unwarranted attack. But the implication of these personal reformation stories is, "Hey, you don't know how to do your job, either, so you need the Core." Which is also a personal and unwarranted attack on every other teacher in the country.

What I find bizarre about these Giant Core Revelation stories is that they are unnecessary for a sales job. I'm always looking for ways to grow and develop, and I'll look at anything that might help. But don't tell me, "You suck. You need to change everything" and don't tell me, "You should really use this new technique called Reading Books."

There are two interesting moments in Jones's testimonial. One is her protest against the people waging the "war against Common Core."

After testifying several times before Tennessee legislators, I realized that those who are making these decisions for “our students” are not people who have taught in a classroom.  They are not people who spend time in schools and they have never worked with the standards themselves.  They are politicians, business leaders, and social representatives who have been easily swayed by the outcry against the standard... 

Where, I wonder, does she think the Core and the impetus for enshrining it in the nation's schools came from? Has she met David "I'm an educational amateur and proud of it" Coleman? Or the US Chamber of Commerce? Or Arne Duncan?  Hell, she is in Tennessee, where the entire ed department is run by a TFA grad who has spent less time in a classroom than a devoted PTA room mother!! The people who made the decision that "our students" need the Core in the first place were politicians, business leaders, and a coalition of rich and powerful amateurs. I understand her frustration that political considerations are now starting to force the Core out-- but it was political considerations that forced the Core in in the first place! Live by the sword, and all that.

The other moment comes in her Tale of How Common Core Saved Tennessee.

Modifications to the math and English/language arts standards made their way into the classroom, followed by the talk of a new rigorous assessment that would finally push us to the next level.

Correct. At its heart, the Common Core is test driven. Jones is seriously arguing that standardized testing should be used to drive Tennessee's curriculum, that the way to get to a high quality education is by giving harder standardized tests. Which is just one more reason why people like me, people who are teachers and do work in a classroom are arguing against Common Core and the assorted crappy reform ideas stapled to it.

You don't write strong, powerful, useful curricula with tests. You don't drive-- or measure-- excellence with a bubble sheet (and if you're clicking answers on a screen, it's still a bubble test).  A new rigorous test will not take you to the next level of anything except the next level of standardized testing.

After a stirring final graf exhorting other teachers to speak up of their Core love and listing some specific Core benefits that are all Things Good Teachers Already Know To Do, Jones winds up with this sentence-

We owe it to our students to demonstrate commitment to a plan that took guts to implement and will bring glory if we do not give up!

Well, it didn't take guts implement it. It took money and political connections and some back room power brokering, and there is no glory to be found in pursuing this unproven, failing slab of education malpractice.

Churning Those $125K Teachers

The Atlantic asks the question, "What Happens To Test Scores When Teachers Are Paid $125,000 a Year?"

They're taking a look at the Equity Project Chart School in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and what they found are two things-- neither of which are surprising.

The basic concept of the school, one we've heard batted about many times, is get rid of administrative positions and create a high base salary for teachers. We don't talk much about the threat to administrators in charter models, but when you think about it, what does a modern charter operation need a real principal for? Policies and procedures are set by the main office, and educational programs come in a can. Mostly we just need someone in the front office to shuffle papers. Meanwhile, let's make all the teachers do their own disciplinary work and other administrative chores. If we're giving them the former Assistant Principal's salary, they can go ahead and do his job, too. Double the salary is perhaps less impressive when it comes with double the work.

The progress of the school was studied by Mathematica, a research-for-hire favorite of the Gates Foundation, so you know the results will be as totally dependable as research on tobacco health effects sponsored by the Tobacco Institute. They measured the impact in years of learning (a thing that can't actually be done-- imagine trying to measure student heighgt in "years of growing") and discovered that after a couple of years, Equity was doing AWESOME-- particularly when it comes to math. 46% of their eighth graders passed the city math test, which is better than most schools. I'm sure that the Equity student population is totally reflective of the city-wide student population. I'm also sure that they don't just spend most of their time doing test prep.

"Hey," you say. "Results are results. And how about those massive teacher salaries?"

Glad you asked. You might wonder how a school could afford to pump so much money into a base salary. And beyond that, there are supposed to be bonuses after two years of successful work! How will we keep from going broke?

Did I mention there's also no tenure? Does that suggest a solution to you?

That's right. You avoid having to pay those two year bonuses by just firing everybody before they can get them.

Mind you, by reformsters own test-passing standards, Equity is somewhat successful, which means we're going to give teachers the credit for that, right? But no-- somehow Equity achieved great results with what was apparently a crappy staff. Over four years, 20 out of 43 teachers did not return for a second year.

Some quit before they could be fired, but sixteen of those were not rehired after their first year. I bet they feature these numbers prominently in their pitch to recruit new teachers.

There's your charter model-- more churn than a fast food restaurant, less job security than a grocery store bagger.

Note: For another, somewhat more grown up, look at the Equity Project, check out this post at the Shanker Blog.

So, About That Election

Apparently there's a law requiring all bloggers and commentators to write election wrap-up pieces within twenty-four hours, and the clock is ticking on me here.

So what does the election mean to the Reformsters and the Resistance?

Decoupling Could Happen

Not of Common Core and High Stakes Testing, silly. That's never going to happen.

Nobody ran on support of Common Core, and lots of people ran against it. Ted Cruz felt emboldened enough by results to call for a repeal of Common Core, a gesture has no real meaning other than as a signal that the windsock that is Cruz has a sense of which way the CCSS wind is blowing.

But you know what nobody ran against successfully (almost-- but we'll get there in a moment)? Charter schools. Several privatization fans noted immediately that election results were good news for charter school vultures and privateers (they might not have phrased it quite like that).

Point is, we're seeing repeatedly that you can be pro-charter and pro-reform and simultaneously anti-Core and anti-reform. This has been coming for a while. Initially, privateers needed the Core and its attendant testing to "prove" that public schools were failing and needed to be "rescued" by charters. But even as Common Core has turned into political poison, privateers have learned that starving public schools of resources (Philly) or simply changing to charters because, hey, you have the power and you want to do it (Chicago, Cleveland, New York City) are effective all by themselves.

Not only can conservative-labeled politicians safely jettison the Core while keeping their support for everything else, they pretty much need to. It will be more true than ever that you can't assume that someone's opposition to the Core goes hand in hand with support for public schools. I think we're actually going to see a period of shuffling, because Dem-GOP-charter fan-Core supporter-etc-etc don't necessarily help us tell the sides apart. Stay tuned for Bush 2016.

The Democratic Party Still Has Its Head Way Up Its Butt

Over at Slate, John Dickerson argues that the Republicans won by running against Obama. While that undoubtedly helped drive plenty of GOP voting, he doesn't note that it probably drove Democrat voting (and non-voting) as well. This administration has been relentlessly anti-public education and anti-teacher, and if they were figuring that the Big Teacher Unions would deliver the votes of millions of shat-upon teachers anyway, they had simply failed to note that the union leaders have firmly aligned themselves with the power elite, and not the members they allegedly represent.

It was positively painful to watch Randi Weingarten help torpedo Zephyr Teachout's candidacy. When Time magazine put up an ugly cover, she could muster some fight and zip, including a piece of sidewalk kabuki. But when Andrew Cuomo directed as direct and unambiguous threat against teachers and public education-- certainly as clear and vicious as anything that ever came from a GOP politician-- the crickets chirped. Okay, she wrote a strongly worded letter. While crickets chirped.

The Democratic party is currently clueless and spineless. I could respect them a little if they were blatant, unapologetic sell-outs, instead of trying to pretend that they have some feelings for the 99%. I could respect them a lot if they actually stood up for the people whose votes they take for granted. I'm angry that they have reduced the national unions to puppet extensions of the party, robbing the leadership of any right to command respect in or outside the profession. The Democratic Party has tried selling off seats at the table, but it turns out that it's the kids table. Now the party just runs on a platform of, "You know you're never going to cast your ballot for that other guy, so shut up and give us your vote, already."

The Democrats deserved to lose last night (even the ones who won by polishing their 1% credentials). I do hope they'll figure out why.

The Cavalry Is Not Coming

My favorite thing about the end of an election is that I can stop listening to people who think that once we elect Chris Pootwaddle to office, Everything Will Be Great. It's not that political solutions don't matter. It's not that politicians can't make things better-- or worse. But this idea that the Right Person in office will help is self-defeating and foolish.

At the very best, when Pootwaddle gets into office, the newly-elected office-holder will not be able to accomplish anything without a ton of ground support. At the worst, Pootwaddle won't be able to get anything done. Well, actually, the worst is when Pootwaddle turns out to be just as bad as the last one.

Which brings me to Pennsylvania.

Commonwealth Lessons

There are several things to note about my state.

One is that Corbett largely lost by having screwed with education too much. And not in abstract ways-- what killed him was that everybody in PA knows a school that's been downsized, a college that cut programs and got more expensive. And they have heard, from a chorus of people who wouldn't shut up about it, how all the blame for that lay at Corbett's door. Kudos to the many actual grassroots organizations that appeared in the Keystone State.

That's an extraordinary accomplishment, particularly when you consider that when Corbett repeatedly argued that he did not cut $1 billion from education, he was kind of telling the truth. Democrat Ed Rendell did that, covering it by using stimulus money exactly they way he wasn't supposed to-- to fill the regular operating budget gap. Corbett inherited the gap, and decided not to plug it, and to screw with the funding program to the detriment of poor districts, and to let cyber charters drain public schools dry. Corbett was terrible at PR, and he could never overcome the umpty gabillion Pennsylvanians who saw the real effects of his slash and privatize ways.

Corbett's fall (the first involuntary one-term governor in PA history) was a direct result of his reformy education ways. He is a cautionary tale for every reformster politician out there. (Starting with, I hope, Tom Wolf, who before he got electoral religion and smelled Corbett's blood, liked the charter school movement just fine. So, we'll see.)

Other Stuff

I suspect that most of the real election stories are local, and that's where a lot of the good coverage is. Believing that we can sort out the effect of education policy in all that is kind of-- well, it's like believing that you can take a student's test scores and correct for all other influences so that you can create a reliable Value Added Measure of the teacher's influence. So, baloney.

I think it was not a great night for the Core, an opportunity for soul-searching and navel-gazing among Democrats and union leaders, and really really bad news in some states for fans of public education and actual trained and qualified teaching staffs.

I have no cheery spin to put on that. In some places in this country, it sucks to be a teacher these days. But the good news from PA is that there are limits to what the public will put up with, particularly if they become well-educated about the source of their dismay. The reformsters may have had a good election this year, but they didn't win a free pass.

Brookings: "Poor Kids Suck"

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When it comes to slick-looking research of questionable results in fields outside their area of expertise, you can always count on the folks at Brookings. They have a new report out entitled The Character Factor: Measures and Impact of Drive and Prudence, and it has some important things to tell us about the kinds of odd thoughts occupying reformster minds these days.

The whole report is thirty-five pages long, but don't worry-- I've read it so that you don't have to. Fasten your seatbelts, boys and girls (particularly those of you who can be scientifically proven to be character-deficient)-- this will be a long and bumpy ride.

Character Is Important

Yes, some of this report is clearly based on work previously published in The Journal Of Blindingly Obvious Conclusions. And we announce that in the first sentence:

A growing body of empirical research demonstrates that people who possess certain character strengths do better in life in terms of work, earnings, education and so on, even when taking into account their academic abilities. Smarts matter, but so does character. 

In all fairness, the next sentence begins with "This is hardly a revelation." That sentence goes on to quietly define what "character" means-- "work hard, defer gratification, and get along with others." But we push right past that to get to Three Reasons This Field of Study Is Now a Thing.

1) There's concrete evidence to back it up, a la Duckworth et. al.
2) That evidence suggests that character is as important as smartness for life success
3) Given that importance, policymakers ought to be paying more attention to "cultivation and distribution of these skills."

Now, at first I thought point 3 meant that policymakers need to develop better character themselves, and I was ready to get on board-- but no. Instead, Brookings wants character building to be something that policymakers inflict on other people (and they have a whole other article about it). I am less excited about that.

Also, "non-cognitive skills" is nobody's idea of what to call this stuff.

Narrowing Our Focus, Muddying the Water

Let's further define our terms, and distinguish between moral character (qualities needed to be ethical) and performance character (qualities needed to " realize one's potential for excellence").  Some scholars apparently argue that the distinction is not clear cut and/or unhelpful. It appears to me that performance character could be defined as "the kind of character one could have and still be a sociopath," which, in terms of anything called "character," seems problematic.

For this report, Brookings is going to go with performance character. Specifically, they're going to stick with Duckworth's work, defining performance character as a composite of the tendency to stick with long term goals and self control. They reference her revered grit scale and other products of Grittological Studies .

At any rate, for the purpose of this report, we are going to pretend that sticktoitivity and self-control are the key to understanding character. Or, alternately, we could say that we are going to study these two small qualities and do our damndest to pretend that they have broader implications. And to complete this process of obfuscatorial magnification, we're going to give these two qualities new names-- "drive" and "prudence."

We'll define "drive" as the ability to apply oneself to a task and stick to it. We'll define "prudence" as the ability to defer gratification and look to the future. And we will establish the importance of our definitions by, I kid you not, putting them in table form.

Bizarre Side Trip #1

Brookings uses a footnote to cover why they call these things "character strengths" instead of traits. It is totally NOT because that attaches a positive value judgment to them, but because it shows they are deeper than skills and more malleable than traits. Not quite simply born with them, but deeper than simple learned behavior. Remember that for later.

The footnote also has this rather sad observation: "It is hard to learn kindness, but somewhat easier to learn self-control." No particular research base is offered for that extraordinary observation, but it is sheer poetry in terms of efficiently describing the sad inner lives of some folks. Dickens could not have better described the broken soul of Ebenezer Scrooge. But here, as throughout pretty much the whole report, we're going to take the personal experience of one select sampling and assume it to be true for all human beings.

How Much Does Drive Matter?

Here Brookings will throw a bunch of research projects at the wall to see what sticks. They include, for instance, the classic grittological studies that showed that people who tend to complete long projects will tend to complete long projects (because every Department of Grittology needs a Professor of Tautological Studies). "Drive appears to be related to college completion," they observe, and back it up by saying it does better at predicting college completion that SAT or ACT scores, which is a mighty low bar to clear. We're a little fuzzy on how we determined drive ratings for the individuals in these studies; if they have anything to do with high school GPA, then of course they're good predictors. It's like saying that knowing how far your eyeballs are above the ground is a good predictor of your height.

They do have some interesting data from the ASVAB test, which includes some sections that test a student's resistance to mind-numbingly dull tasks (really). And they cite themselves in another paper to prove that non-cognitive skills (sorry-- they backslid, not I) correlate to economic mobility. If I personally had a higher drive rating, I would go read that paper too and report back, but alas, I am not that drivey.

And What About Prudence?

Can I just say how much I love that we're talking about prudence, because it's such a lovely word, steeped in the aroma of maiden aunts and pilgrims. Prudence. Just breathe it in for a moment.

K. For this, we're going to trot out the old four year olds vs. marshmallows research. There has been some great research in the last forty years to parse out what this hoary old study might actually mean and might actually miss. I like this one in particular from Rochester, because it finds a huge difference factor in the environment. Some researchers behaved like unreliable nits, while others proved true to their words, and the result was a gigantic difference in the children's wait time. This is huge because it tells us something extremely important--

It's much easier to defer gratification till later if you can believe that you'll actually get it later. If you believe that deferring gratification means giving it up entirely-- you are less likely to defer. Brookings does not include the new research in their report.

Brookings concludes this section with

Drive and prudence contribute to higher earnings, more education, better health outcomes
and less criminal behavior.And as long as we're just making stuff up:

We can also easily imagine that they are important for marriage, parenting, and community involvement.

Plus, we can imagine that they give you better hair, firmer muscle tone, and fresher smelling breath. Plus, you probably won't get cancer. But as unsupported as these suppositions are, they are still a critical part of the foundation for what comes next.

Yes, Rich People Really Are Better

Brookings now bravely turns to the question of how class is related to these character strengths. And I can't accuse them of burying the lede:

If character strengths significantly impact life outcomes, disparities in their development may matter for social mobility and equality. As well as gaps in income, wealth, educational quality, housing, and family stability, are there also gaps in the development of these important character strengths?

This is followed by some charts that suggest that poor kids do worse on "school-readiness measures of learning-related behavior." Another chart shows a correlation between income and the strengts of persistence and self-control through the school years.

About Those Numbers

Brookings moves straight from the charts to a whole section addressing the fact that there aren't any "widely accepted tests for character strengths." So here's some of the measures and data that they massaged, including some cool stuff from KIPP, "a highly successful national network of charter schools" which-- surprise-- currently employs one of the authors of this paper. Anyway, KIPP has those cool character report cards, so you know they must have a handle on this whole character thing. Well, performance character. Moral character is outside our scope here.

Anyway, they used surveys, behaviors and tests. They also figured out how to crunch large data sets with a nifty punnett square that crosses direct-indirect with broad-narrow, to get four sorts of character markers. Indirect and broad, which is something like "risky sexual behavior" is a one start marker, while direct and narrow, like the grit scale, is the tops.

Using that rating system, they ploughed through acres of US Data Sets, rating each one based on how well it would indicate character strengths (or the lack thereof), and created a few pages worth of charts. I am impressed by the amont of drive and prudence it must have taken to do all this. Bottom line-- most of these from the Fragile Families Survey to National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Adults, don't provide the kind of awesome data that standardized subject tests provide for cognitive skills (choke). So they would like more direct acquisition of data please. We need more standardized character tests in schools.

So, Let's Just Go There

So after sorting through all those data sets, they selected some faves. Their first choice was perhaps unfortunate-- from the Behavior Problems Index, they plucked the hyperactive scale. Now, they would like us to know that this does not certainly does not "necessarily indicate that a child is medically hyperactive (that is, has a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). In this sense, the terminology here is unhelpful."

Well, yes. Suggesting that a behavior problem (particularly one tied to a medical problem) is a sign of a character deficit would be unhelpful. Is there any way we could make this even more unhelpful?

Sure there is. Let's link scoring low on the hyperactive scale and therefor demonstrating a lack of character-- let's link that to socio-economic class! Yes, this character deficit ties most closely to being born into the bottom quintile-- also teen mom, especially if she's a high school dropout. (The good news, I suppose, is that the researchers see no link in their meta-analyses to race as a factor.)


They also worked backwards, starting with good outcomes and looking to see how the data feeding into those incomes looked. The same picture emerged-- good things (including not getting pregnant and finishing school) were less likely to happen to the poor kids.

Micro-Macro

The study notes that the BPI hyperactivity rating connected to five specifics

• Has difficulty concentrating/paying attention
• Is easily confused, seems in a fog
• Is impulsive or acts without thinking
• Has trouble getting mind off certain thoughts
• Is restless, overly active, cannot sit still

These five very specific traits connected to the BPI hyperactivity score (a small slice of the larger BPI) which we used as a marker of the two qualities that we picked as representative of the one kind of character that we're studying as the stand-in for the full range of non-cognitive skills. So basically we're doing that thing where we look at an elephants eyelash and use it to make pronouncements about the status of all endangered animal species on the African continent.


Oops

Brookings, who don't always seem to get all of the reformster memos, go a page too far now by suggesting (with charts!) that their prudence and drive measures (which would be a half-decent band name) are as good a predictor of success as cognitive/academic measures. Which means that we can totally scrap the PARCC and the SBA tests and just check to see if the kid is able to sit still and wait fifteen minutes for a marshmallow. I will now predict that this is NOT the headline that will be used if leading reformster publications decide to run this story.

What Does It All Mean?

Brookings is not going to put their other foot in it, so it is not clear whether they want to say that lack of character strengths causes poverty or if poverty causes a character strength deficit. They are clear once again at the conclusion that character is a necessary element of success.

Character matters. Children who learn and can exhibit character strengths attain more years of education, earn more, and likely outperform other individuals in other areas of life. Of course, many other factors matter a great deal, too – most obviously cognitive skills, but also a host of cultural, social and education attributes.

Also, capabilities don't automatically equal motivation to act. And there's other stuff that could be important, too. Including, I kid you not, self-esteem. But we need more data for research. Also, we can build character, so we need more programs to do that, too.

Did I Miss Something?

Well, somebody did. Best case scenario-- we've re-demonstrated that people who come from a high socio-economic background tend to be successful in school, and those who don't, don't. Stapel on some tautologies as a side show and call it an insight.

Or maybe this is a report that buttresses old farts everywhere by suggesting that if your kid can't learn to sit still, he probably lacks character and is likely to fail at life.

And remember up above when we decided to call these "character strengths." That meant these behaviors are deeper than simple learned behaviors, but not quite genetically hardwired. So we're stopping just short of saying that poor kids are born with a lack of character.

But at worst-- at worst-- this is codified cultural colonialism. This is defining "success" as "making it in our dominant culture, which we will define as normal for all humans." And then declaring that if you want to make it as (our version of) a normal human, you must learn to adopt our values. This is going to Africa and saying, "Well, of course these people will never amount to anything-- they don't wear trousers."

Whether character strengths can be developed through explicit public policy is quite another, and here the answer appears to be: we don’t know. Policymakers often fall into the trap of what philosopher Jon Elster describes as ‘willing what cannot be willed.’ But as we learn more about the importance of character strengths, and disparities in their development, the need to move forward – if only through more research and evaluations of existing character-development programs – becomes more urgent, not least in terms of boosting social mobility. For greater mobility, we need not only to increase opportunities, but also to insure that people are able to seize them.

The authors miss a third, important need-- the need to increase opportunities which can be grasped by the people who we'd like to see grasp them. You don't really increase cutting opportunities for left handed children by setting out a larger supply of right-handed scissors. Nor do you help them out by trying to beat them into being right-handed. The best solution is to meet them where they are-- buy some left-handed scissors.

There are so many things wrong with this report-- sooooooo many things-- and I'm about stumped for wrapping it all up in a neat conclusion. It is such a thin tissue of supposition, weak arguments, cultural biases, part-for-the-whole fallacies and poorly reasoned conclusions that I get rather lost in it myself. I can only hope that as of this post, I'm the only person who's really paid this much attention to it.

Speak Friction

What do you do when it's election day and you know you're on the losing side before you even enter the ballot box (or tube or data input station)?

I'm a big believer in speaking your truth, even if it's the smallest speak in the room. I think we minimize that action at times because we don't see how it can turn the whole ship around-- and very often it's true that it just won't make an enormous difference.

But I like Thoreau's image--

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Thoreau may overstate his case a bit (I know-- shocking from Thoreau) but I like the idea of friction. Friction doesn't necessarily stop the machine, but it always affects the way the machine runs. And sometimes that's good enough.

Smart money says that by midnight tonight, Andrew Cuomo will still be governor. But just as with the primary election, there is a huge difference between a Cuomo who's swept into office and one who just barely squeaks through the door as crowds holler at him (a huge difference in particular for Cuomo 2016's Presidential dreams). 

It's the same way you may not be able to flat-out stop your school district from doing Something Stupid, but you can keep it from being an easy, unanimous Stupid. You can't always prevent people from achieving a bad goal. Sometimes the best you can do is make people work for it, and that affects the energy they have to implement it, which in turn sets the stage for failure, which may one day lead to a bunch of people coming to you to say, "Hey, tell me again about why this was a dumb idea."

Sometimes you're friction. Sometimes you're playing a long game.

And sometimes you just want to sleep at night. You want to be able to say, "I did what I could. I said what I had to say. I didn't sit silent in the face of Something Wrong." And sometimes that's as good as it gets.

Yes, voting in elections in this country sucks these days, with a full buffet of bought-and-paid-for tools. But as long as it all runs smoothly, they can tell themselves, "Hey, this is going great! No problems at all." So be a friction. Speak your piece. Get out there, hold your nose, and vote.

Can TFA Be Reinvented

I am a fan of blogger and education professor Jack Schneider. He occupies what I think of as the Very Reasonable Wing of the Resistance with other writers like Peter DeWitt and John Thompson. In the great ongoing debate about the fate of US public education, it's a Good Thing to have some smart folks who are always looking for ways to open lines of communication and dialogue.

In his latest post, Schneider wonders aloud (well, in print-- well, in words rendered on computer screens) if TFA could be reinvented as something less awful.

So to all the TFA critics out there, here's my pitch: TFA isn't going away. Not in our lifetime. Why not, then, pressure them to do something like this—a reinvention that would convert their power and influence more productive?

That's the conclusion. His ideas are multi-layered.

Plan A is for TFA to retool their rhetoric to match the things they say internally to each other, which Schneider believes are far more realistic and reasonable than the blustering TFA public persona.

But Schneider doesn't think he can get Plan A, so he has another plan ready for consideration.

To put it as simply as possible: I'd like to see TFA set a goal of recruiting all of its teachers from the alumni rolls of the elementary and high schools where it places teachers.

He argues that this would A) really cement their commitment to recruiting teachers of color and B) would make them confront what it took to get students from high-poverty schools ready to enter and succeed in college.

It is a really interesting idea, but I think it's a non-starter. I think the problem is that Schneider mis-reads the purpose of TFA. At this point, I don't think TFA's missoin is providing teachers for high needs schools. I don't think that's their vision. I don't think that's their brand.

Like many people, I'll give TFA credit for starting out with the best of intentions. But as I argue here, their stated purpose shifts don't resemble the mission creep of a service organization, but the product marketing shifts of a corporation.

And TFA's product is not education for high-poverty students. TFA now deal in money, power, training and networking. They can't forsake the ivy leaguers who use their service, because those folks are their customers. Check out this Business Insider article about how TFA is a great way to angle for a job at Google (where, insiders say, only products of select universities need apply). Look at the massive network of well-placed Masters of the Universe TFA has produced.

At this point, high needs schools are being used as training facilities for TFA's true customers-- the resume boosters who are just passing through. TFA's customers are also the charter operators who depend on TFA for front line shock troops (but troops with a limited life span, because short-term employees are far better for ROI). And to best serve these customers, TFA must maintain its connections and profile, which means power and prestige are part of its business plan, and not something it can easily turn its back on.

I have no doubt that the TFA ranks include some people with a sincere interest in teaching and social judgment. TFA needs these people top maintain an appearance of legitimacy, a way for donors and backers to feel good about the fresh-scrubbed young folks who Really Want To Make a Difference. But as Schneider notes, TFA already knows the things they ought to be doing to better support those fresh-faced recruits and better insure their success. TFA knows what it needs to do for those folks-- and so far, it simply isn't doing them. Because as long as TFA can generate the numbers that make the enterprise look good, they've done enough. Because creating pockets of educational success in high needs schools isn't really their primary mission.

If it were, Schneider's idea would make sense. But his ideas will not help TFA improve its profile, maintain its political clout, or generate more contributions. And his ideas especially won't serve TFA's customer base of resume builders, charter operators, and power players who want to look good doing good.

TFA has already reinvented itself several times, and each time the reinvention was about maintaining TFA's standing as a Major Player in the Ed Reform Biz as well as an extension of the high status school networking network. It will continue to reinvent itself to meet those goals. I would love to believe that at some point it might decide to turn back to its roots and the people in power would really, sincerely redirect their resources and attention to achieving the goals of helping to improve education in the poor corners of the country. But their original attempts to do so were misguided, and they've only wandered further away from that place.

Jack Schneider thinks they could still do good work. It's pretty to think so, but I don't see it happening any time soon.