Testing for Social Justice

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

The CCSSO-CGCS announcement heralding High Stakes Tests 2.0 (More Better Less Testing) included plenty of Not New Things. Cerberus, the three-headed reformsters spokesperson, delivered a backhanded acknowledgment that the glut of testing that is clogging our nation's schools has a serious PR problem. At the same time, they held tightly to the notion that high-stakes standardized tests are actually a fine and dandy foundation for every major decision made in the education world. So really, just a variation on that classic top 40 reformster hit, "It's Just the Implementation."

So the chiefs announced that testing needed some tweakage, but was still super-duper essential to education. Arne Duncan chimed in to say "Me, too!" and also "Wouldn't you all like to share responsibility for the policies that I waivered into sort-of-law?" Nothing new to see here.

Except for this.

In the midst of this golden oldie, there was a new note struck. It was a subtle note, a quiet note, a note that didn't even make it into some of the initial coverage. I found this in the Cleveland Plain Dealer's coverage:

"For far too long, too many kids were left out of the opportunity to have access to a high quality education," Minnich said. "These assessments shine a light on that situation."

John White, state superintendent of Louisiana, took that argument further, calling state testing "an absolutely essential element of assuring the civil rights of children in America."

White said broad testing is the only way to know which students are learning and which are not. Testing, he said, is the only way to know the truth of the "serious injustice" to low-income, minority or handicapped children that do not received a good education.

We can find this talking point shaded a few different ways. Here's Minnesota 2014 Teacher of the Year Tom Rademacher on the MinnCAN test cheerleading site: "However, the populations that most need more from our schools are often invisible or dismissible in the rooms of decision makers. Without the data we get, it would be too easy to keep ignoring the voices that demand better than the status quo. With better tests and better testing, we can continue to identify where we are struggling and where we are being successful."

And here's reformy cheerleader Chris Stewart, on the reformster rapid response PR site Education Post: "As a black parent, and a black community member who observes history and demands liberation, I need objective data about how my government and my people are doing to address the old struggle for racial justice and social parity. We have learned by experience what double standards can do to create social strife. We know that we have gaps in employment, wealth, law and health. We should be clear about the cause of those gaps. They are born out of the gaps in educational attainment. And, how do we know these gaps exist? We know because we have data that comes from audits, assessments and, yes, testing."

So we have a new addition to the list of Reasons We Must Have High Stakes Standardized Tests: because otherwise, we would never know that there are pockets of poverty and low achievement in this country's schools.


Ouroboros Rears His Head

If this argument seems a little wonky, that's because we've now come full circle.

When we were sold the Common Core Standards, part of the argument was that we needed to have high standards for the places of low achievement. We would fight the soft racism of low expectations. We knew where these places were, and by raising the bar for students trapped in zip codes filled with poverty and crumbling schools, we would create a world where every single person went to college and made big bucks.

The point is-- we knew where these places were. At what point did we become in danger of losing them? "Hey, these particular schools are terrible," was how we started down this reformy road. How can it be that we have to travel further down the road to find that spot again?

But there are bigger reasons that recasting high stakes standardized tests as instrunments of social justice is bogus.

Are We Still Not Asking Parents?

It's funny that we're so concerned about finding these schools that are failing these children, these pockets where it's such a struggle, because I will bet you dollars to dingleberries that in every afflicted school district, there has been a long-running river of parental information. I will bet you there have been parents calling, writing, complaining, begging, pleading for school leaders to Do Something about their childrens' school. And yet, somehow, their voices don't register (unless those voices fit the reformsters agenda). From Philly to Newark to Detroit, you can still find parents expressing loud and clear what they want and need from their schools.

And yet reformsters sit hunched over computers and spreadsheets saying, "Sorry, I won't know what your district needs until I read the test data."

If social justice is your aim, here is step one—go and listen to the people who are crying for it. Do not act as if you don't need to talk to them, as if you just need to look at the test results.

And after we find these pockets of need ... ?

We must have these tests so that the "invisible" students can be found. Let's pause a moment to register that our stated objective is to find the students who are failing the test and trumpet their failure to the world. Congratulations, small children—we will make your school famous for sucking.
So we've found them, and exposed them. Now we will ... what?

I'd like to believe that the answer is, "Get them the resources and funding and support that they need." But we already know where the underfunded under-resourced schools are, and we have been mighty slow to send those resources. I suspect the actual answer is, "We will dispatch some charter entrepreneurs to their neighborhood."

Are you pitching standardized tests as a form of needs assessment, or is it market research? If the test is a fire alarm, is it wired to a fire station or a contractor's office?

Let's Reverse Engineer

What would happen if we started with the problem we want to solve, instead of the solution we want to rationalize? Imagine we put a group of people—committed, interested, involved, invested people—in a room, and we said to them, "We are afraid that because of some factors of social injustice, there are children out there who are not getting the education they need and deserve. We need a plan to address that concern."

Do we imagine that the first, best plan that anyone would suggest would be—"Let's give every child in the country a high stakes standardized test!"

I mean, was it some sort of oversight that not one of the civil rights leaders of the sixties said, "What our children need are high stake standardized tests!"

We will put the resources of a nation at your disposal to root out and address social injustice. Will your best idea be a high stakes standardized test?

Let's Measure What We Need to Measure

Chris Stewart says we can't solve the achievement gap by erasing the evidence. But the achievement gap is a concept that is just shorthand for an education and opportunity gap, which we pretend to measure with high stakes standardized tests. The standardized tests don't measure the quality of a student's education or the quality of a school. Standardized tests just measure the student's ability to take a standardized test. And we already know that correlates pretty directly with poverty level.
So while in thery "achievement gap" may be intended to encompass a whole host of social ills, the actual achievement gap is simply the test score gap between students of different backgrounds. (It is in itself a nifty rhetorical construct. An "opportunity" gap would imply the cause was those who didn't provide an opportunity, but an "achievement" gap throws the blame back on those who have failed to achieve.)

Look. Let's notice that rich, successful people wear nicer shoes than poor, unsuccessful people. So we'll call it the Shoe Gap. We'll then try to wipe out the Shoe Gap with a National Shoe Intervention Program, and soon we'll put a pair of nice shoes on every person's feet. Do we have any reason to believe that everyone will then be rich and successful? (Hint: No)

We have poverty gaps, opportunity gaps, justice gaps, support gaps—many real gaps. The achievement gap is just a gap in the ability to score well on standardized tests.

Who Opposes Social Justice?

This rhetorical buttressing of high stakes testing is supposed to make people like me easily dismissable. Someone should be able to swoop into the comments and ask why, exactly, I'm opposed to social justice. Just so we're absoutely clear, I am not.

Too many people in our country are denied resources, quality education, decent jobs, non-crumbling schools and neighborhoods, and the right to live their lives without harrassment and brutality (just to list a few social injustices). This is wrong. We should end it.

But it is positively, bizarrely Kafkaesque to declare we can fix social injustice by giving all children standardized tests so that we can begin the process of raising those test scores. This is worse than deck chair shuffling, more callous than fiddling during the fire time.

Rademacher's quote hints at one possible non-baloney use of the test results—to create political pressure on the politicians and bureaucrats who have failed to act. But I doubt that the damage inflicted by a punishment-based testing regimen on young students is worth the possible political leverage.

If you do not know, right now, where at least a few centers of social injustice are in this country, you're an idiot. If you need standardized test results to find those places, I do not trust you to do anything useful once you find them.

CCSS & Charters: The Love Story Ends

The Ed Reform movement has always been a marriage of different groups whose interests and goals sometimes aligned, and sometimes did not. The Systems Guys, the Data Overlords, the Common Core Corporate Hustlers, the Charter Privateers, the Social Engineers-- they agree on some things (we need to replace variable costly teachers with low-cost uniform widgets), but there are cracks in the alliance, and one seems to be turning into a fissure.

The Common Core Hustlers are being dumped by the Charter Privateers. It's not an obvious break-up-- the privateers haven't texted the Core backers to say, "Hey, we need to talk." It's the slow, soft drop. The unreturned phone calls. The unwillingness to even say the name. Not even making eye contact when they show up at the same party. It's awkward. It's painful.

It wasn't always like this. Charters and the Core were a match made in heaven. To spur financing and enrollment, the Charter forces needed a way to "prove" that public schools suck, and that meant finding a yardstick with which public schools could be measured and found failing. That meant some sort of standardized test, and that meant something to test them on. So, Common Core. The Core and the Tests (from which it could not, must not, be separated) would be the smoking gun, the proof that public schools were failing and that only privatizing schools would save Our Nation's Youth.

The corporate folks liked it because it was another opportunity for market growth. The fake liberals liked it because it could be packaged as a way to bring equity to the poor. The fake conservatives liked it because it could be packaged as a way to use market forces to get those slacker poor folks into line.The Core and Charter really got each other. They wanted all the same things.

But soon, the love affair between charters and the Core started to show strain. The Core would show up late at night, smelling like Big Government. And while everybody's friends liked the Core when it first started coming around, as they got to know it, they started whispering behind its back that it was kind of an asshole. Pretty soon, old friends like Bobby Jindal were calling the Core out in public. And when election season came, they weren't invited to the same parties together any more. Jeb Bush had been the Core's oldest and best friend, and even he had a huge party where Charters were held up for praise and applause and the Core wasn't even mentioned.

There was no longer any denying it. When Charter walked into the cafeteria, instead of sitting down with the Core and telling friends, "You should come sit with the Core. It's cool" instead Charter would sit on the other side of the room and say, "You don't want to sit at that table with that thing."

Once the Core had been a marketing point. Public schools were bad news because they couldn't do Common Core well enough. Now public schools are bad news because they are trying to do Common Core well enough. We used to market charters as a way to run toward the Core; now we market them as a way to run away from it.

None of the reformsters who now disown Common Core are dropping any other part of the reformster agenda, especially not privatization.

And so in Connecticut, we have Dannel Malloy who started running away from the Core way back in April, follows up re-election by jumping right back on the charter train. Next stop-- Fully Privatized School Systemville. Andrew Cuomo's stated position on the public school system and the teachers who work there can now be summarized as "Burn them. Burn them all with fire." But he's expressed a desire to toss Common Core on there as well. From Memphis to Cleveland to Minneapolis, it's full speed ahead on privatizing school systems, but Common Core has vanished from the vocabulary, becoming the Chuck Cunningham of the reform movement.

In any divorce, it's a challenge to see who gets custody of which friends. This has proven awkward for fake liberals, who thought they had latched onto a pan-partisan initiative and now find themselves alone at Common Core parties. This is partly their own fault for trying to take credit for CCSS; now the fake conservatives have let them have it.It is only going to get worse. Ted Cruz is an opportunistic putz, but not since Joe McCarthy told the Wheeling Republican Women's Club that he had there in his pocket a paper with a list of prominent state department commies has a politician displayed such a keen sense of the direction of the wind. His intent to "repeal" Common Core is a joke, but it is also writing on the wall. The Core is no longer a bipartisan drive for high standards, but one of those Big Gummint programs.

Meanwhile, in the more rational corner of the GOP, newly minted Senator Lamar Alexander is ready to tackle the long-overdue reauthorization of ESEA (No Child Left Behind). That would be the simplest, most direct pin with which to pop the Race to the Top bubble, and while states can go ahead with charter privatization whether there's RttT or not, it's the Obama administrations waiver-based extortion that has propped up CCSS all along. In the meantime, when even Arne Duncan has shown the sense to let go at least the name of Common Core, national teachers unions still grapple that radioactive mess to heart with hoops of steel.

For people in the Resistance, working to preserve and protect the promise of public education in this country, what this divorce means is that if you like battle metaphors, this battle will henceforth be fought on multiple fronts. Cry out "Common Core is destroying public education" and you may find a charter privateer standing next to you hollering, "Yeah, it sure is!!" The Core and Charters may nod politely to each other when they pass on the street, but the love is gone.

Who Puts the "Merit" in "Meritocracy"?

We love to think of the US-- every last red, white and blue nook and cranny of it-- as a meritocracy. Want to get ahead in life? Just be excellent. Show merit. Or just, you know, possess merit. Or develop merit. Or be filled with merit? Soaked in merit? Steeped in merit? You can start to see our problem already-- we don't seem to know much about the nature of merit. Are you just born with it? Do you develop it, and if so, how? Is it a quality that one simply possesses? I mean, we say that an idea "has" merit, not that it grows it or acquires it. Is that also true for humans? Or, rather than a static quality, is merit only conveyed through action or expression, the same way that you can't just have loudness without actually creating noises that carry the quality of loudness with them? Does it come in increments-- can I be 100% meritty or 75%? Does it have volume, as in I have five gallons of merit but that guy only has a few meritalicios ounces? And is it static-- does a person with merit have merit 24/7, or can I get all through Monday filled with merit (and am I filled with merit like a lungful of air or do I carry merit like a backpack) and then wake up Tuesday morning suddenly meritless again (what about that-- what is the word for someone who doesn't have this highly reward-worthy quality) only to greet Wednesday only about half-meriticious?

Merit reminds me a little bit of ether. Not knock-you-out-while-someone-cuts-a-cannonball-out-of-your-gut ether. The other kind. Back when we figured that light was simply made of waves, somebody pointed out that water waves traveled through water, so what did light waves travel through? Couldn't be air, cause light traveled through space and other vacuums. "Um..." said physicists. "Must be something. We'll, uh, call it...er...ether." And they went looking for it, but could find it. So we could say that the idea of ether didn't have merit. Did the people who studied it for science have merit? Carry merit? Ooze merit?

So merit enters the hall of ideas everybody believes but nobody can explain other than something vaguely like Do Stuff Good (or maybe Do Good Stuff).

And yet we are certain that it is the basis of pour whole society, and absolutely must be instilled in our educational system for students and teachers alike. Because we live in a meritocracy.

If we operate by meritocracy, we must come up with a way to measure this critical quality that we can't explain. Cool. How hard could that be? I'm going to go with "practically impossible."

Because the one thing all the different views I've discussed so far share one thing in common-- the idea that merit is some sort of absolute purely objective quality. Except that's probably not true, either. Because another way to describe a meritocracy is to say it's a system that rewards the best.

No, not even in the commerce driven free market private sector. Do the rewards go to the highest quality product or the most canny marketing or the most profitable production methods? No, don't tell me those approaches all have merit! Or, if you must, tell me which approach has the most merit in some sort of verifiable manner. And not only should we discuss classics like VHS versus Betamax, but we could discuss products like Coca-Cola with no obvious merit at all.

But let's move on to education. Is the immutable, measurable, timeless, impervious-to-subjective-judgment quality of merit visible among teachers or students?

Think about every teacher you've heard described by some former students as "best"

* He was great because he was so demanding and strict that he forced us to do our best
* She was so incredibly smart that we learned just from being in the room with her
* I don't remember what I actually learned from her, but she made me feel like I was a great person, and that made all the difference in my life
* I wasn't any good in that subject, but he made me feel like that was okay
* She got me excited about that whole field
* He was really interested in me as a person, and that helped me learn, I guess
* She didn't worry about who I was at all and just helped me focus on learning things

I guarantee you that every teacher you will ever meet can list examples of all of the following student types

* Student who really liked me
* Student who really hated me
* Student who swears he learned a ton from me
* Student who swears he didn't learn a thing from me

Plus unusual variations. I used to teach downstream from a teacher whose students would swear they never did anything or learned anything in her class last year, and every time I would start a new unit I would check to see who knew something about the content, and they all did, and I would ask how and they would look surprised and answer, "Well, last year, I guess!"

And that's before we even get to the varied administrative definitions of teacher merit. Should students be seated, motionless and attentive, or active, energetic, and engaged? Is a teacher's merit related to the timeliness with which administrative tasks are completed? Is a teacher's merit related to willingness to serve on committees and other "extras."

Ask parents, future employers, community members, students, school leaders, and teachers themselves what qualities are needed for a good teacher, and the list would be huge. Huge! Kind, considerate, good communicator, knowledgeable, professionally up to date, good with tech, nice to students, reasonably professional dress, master of many (try to pick a number!) pedagogical techniques and on and on and on. And every single teacher would present a different constellation of those qualities, and if I asked you, "Which quality has the most merit?" you would say, "Well, they all have merit." But that's not good enough. We have to rank all the teachers, so we have to know which qualities have the most merit.

Students, too. Let's ask everybody-- oh, heck, let's just ask the parents. What qualities do you most want to see in your child? Good at math, good reader, likes to write, likes to run fast, happy, strong spirit, good problem solver, healthy friendships, excited about developing own special talents, passionate about something, knows some history, likes science, confident, strong-- I'll just stop because this list is even longer. Now quick-- which qualities have the most merit. In our meritocracy, we are going to give the greatest rewards to the students who display which quality? No, they can't all have equal merit-- this is a meritocracy, so we have to be able to pick the best!

I'm not going to try to sort out these answers now, because I only want to make one point.

Ranking, rating, and rewarding the merits of human beings in a meritocracy is really really really really really really REALLY complicated.

So somebody please explain to me how the hell we decided that the solution to this complex problem is that merit can be measured with a standardized math and reading test?

How did we decide that the best measure of student's merit is her score on a bubble test? I mean, damn-- was that even ON the list?

How did we decide that the only teacher quality we want to measure is his ability to get students to score well on the standardized test?

Who decided that the "merit" in "meritocracy" is a standardized test score? And does anybody have a clue what the justification, the basis for that definition of "merit" might be? Or did it because measuring merit is really hard, but scoring bubble tests is really easy? Because I think your definition of "merit" is without merit. This was the judgment, the subjective judgment, of some individuals. And don't try to slide off with your baloney about how you're totally calling for "multiple measures" because those are similarly one-size-fits-all meritless-- and in most cases they are a thin screen of smoke trying to hide that, yes, in fact, our major measure of merit is supposed to be a standardized test score.

Here's what I think about merit. I think most of us reach a personal definition of merit that reflects our experiences and our strengths and our weaknesses. I think our concept of merit, just like our concept of good and bad, comes from our values. And any time somebody comes along to tell to try to tell us what we should or should not value, what we should consider good or bad, that person is a problem. I am aware that I am, with a high level of irony, advocating here for my own values, my own idea of merit. But here's the difference-- I am not trying to use the force of law or pseudo-law to impose my values on you. You can read my argument, decide I'm full of it, or decide that my points have merit. I am not telling you that you must accept my values or I will find a way to punish you.

I am not arguing that meritocracy is bad. I am arguing that deciding what is good and bad, truly human and truly rotten-- that's a process that is ongoing and involves discussion and and a system that allows for the probability, or even certainty, that we will arrive at different answers. A meritocracy that insist we have but one measure, and that everybody should be made to use that one standard and measure-- that's not a meritocracy. It's something darker, something uglier, something that is offensive both to human and (if you so believe) divine sensibilities.

Meritocracy is about excellence, and human excellence comes in a gazzillion forms. If we have everybody make a list of the fifteen most excellent people in history. Those lists will not be identical, and no two examples of excellence from those lists will look the same. Because the road to excellence is an individual path, a personal path. You cannot standardize it. You cannot standardize a meritocracy, not even if you pretend to find a standardized measure of merit.

The "merit" in "meritocracy" is not an objective quality. It will always be something chosen by a particular human, and trying to make it the standard of merit for all humans always involves imposing one person's values on everybody else. That's wrong. That's immoral. And it's a very bad way to run a nation's educational system.

Product People and Bean Counters

I watched a short but powerful video this week. It comes from an interview that Steve Jobs sat for toward the end of his "vacation" from running Apple. The important clip is brief and well worth watching. Go ahead-- I'll be waiting for you on the other side

The basic complaint here is the classic argument against bean counters. The bonus insight for me is the idea of exactly how the bean counters end up in charge.

I've watched this process up close with a manufacturing firm right here in my small town. By the 1970's they had come to dominate their industry, and they did it by having the product guys run the company. Sales agents and even customers would sometimes make request for, say, a bifucated widget that could dispense cookies and ice cream, and the engineering department, backed up by the boss who came from the engineering department, would tell the customer "No. You can't have that. You don't even want that. Let us look at your problem and give you the best product design for the job."

They came to dominate their industry because customers who stayed inevitably said, "Yeah, they were right, and we'll never go to anyone else." Customers who walked away to do business with Brand X, who promised them the magic widgets, inevitably came back, saying, "Yeah, that didn't work. They were right about denying our request, and we'll never go to anyone else again."

As Jobs suggests, when you focus on your product and are passionate about your customer's needs, you succeed.

But the company topped out in market dominance, and it went from private ownership to public. Now they were worrying about the shareholders, not the customers, and anyway, there was no way that improving the product was going to get them more market share. And so the sales and finance guys rose to the front offices. When a customer ordered a magic cookie widget, the sales-and-finance bosses told the engineers, "You'll damn well make it." Bosses who had no knowledge of the machinery or the industry tried to demand the impossible, kind of like a yard work company boss telling his snow plow operators that they weren't bringing in enough plowing jobs in June and July.

The process that Jobs is describing has happened over and over and over and over and over in American business-- companies run by bean counters who care about neither the product nor the customer.

You recognize where we're going. The bean counters have, in the last decade, set their sights on the two huge service sectors of the US-- health care and education.

They were late getting to education because it was not immediately evident where money could be made. When the bean counters go to work on a company, they can lower the costs of the product, bump up the marketing, squeeze labor costs, and find ways to monkey with stock values as a way of generating more dollars.

But the education system was so entrenched. Revenue and labor costs were largely frozen, there was no stock to manipulate, and no marketing to be done because geographic boundaries ruled out somehow grabbing more customers.

Reformsters have now figured out how to fix all of those problems. Crush labor costs. Dissolve the geographic boundaries that keep customer locked in so that marketing can be used. Hand operation of schools over to private corporations that can proceed to juggle the books however they wish. We're working on the revenue stream, but that requires legislators to rewrite some rules and kick in funding, so that's last on the list.

The end result, we can already see, is just as Jobs predicts. Product guys-- the teachers and career educators who are concerned with creating the product-- a good education-- are pushed out, because doing a better job of educating students does not help the bean counters. Their passion for the product and for the students who are a big part of their customer base is inconvenient. The bean counters have no feeling for a quality product and no concern for the needs of the customers, but having redefined "success" as "handling the pile of beans really well," they stay in charge.

I wish Jobs had outlined a way for product people to take a company back from the bean counters, because that's the next thing American education will need to do.

Strong Words from Minneapolis

I don't have much to add to this post from Greta Callahan other than a virtual standing ovation. But so many people read my response to the Minneapolis newspaper assault on teachers (aided and abetted by their own superintendent) that I felt I should pass this along.

Greta Callahan teaches five-year-olds at Minneapolis's poorest school. Her response is strong, unapologetic, clear and free from whining.

Let’s start with what it means to be a “good teacher.” As the article says: “The district uses three different tools to evaluate teachers: classroom observations, a student survey and student achievement data.” Let’s put that into the perspective of a Bethune kindergarten teacher.

• Classroom observations: We have four per year. The teacher receives points based on standardized criteria; the feedback is generally helpful. But these observations also involve the observer walking up to students and asking what they are doing. Even my 5-year-olds, who may have just started school, get asked this question. The student is supposed to regurgitate the “I can” statement that correlates to “Focused Instruction.” The usual response, though, is something along the lines of “math” or “Jaden took my crayon!”

If you were in my room, observing an observation, you would laugh. I promise.

• Student surveys: I administer a student survey once a year. My 5-year-olds have to circle their responses (even though they can’t read) to questions about their teacher and school. Have you been around a 5-year-old? They are adorable, spacey, loud and unfocused — and under no circumstances does this student survey make sense for them or to them.

• Student achievement data: Two to three times a year, our students are pulled out of our classrooms and tested by a stranger from the district. When she asks our kids to go into a separate room with her and gives them a test, most of them shut down. It’s intimidating to them. Some are asked to take this test in the middle of breakfast; others are tested right after recess. The inconsistency of when our children are tested creates a test that isn’t being measured consistently or accurately, in my opinion.

And in response to superintendent Bernadeia Johnson's comment that the district would have to take another look at staffing and retention:

Really? None of this is rocket science. The retention rate of teachers at my school and others like it will not go up unless we have more incentive to stay — and more assistance to attempt to give our students an even chance.

If you're wondering if Callahan is as awesome as she seems here, the answer is apparently yes. Tom Rademacher, the 2014 Minnesota Teacher of the Year, profiled her on his blog.

So, why does she stay?  Because of those same kids who come in not knowing their letters. At some point in the year, she gets to watch them read.  There are struggles and frustrations, to be sure, but the successes of the teachers and students at her school are the result of good work for the kids who need it most.  The key, she says, is to love your students, and make sure they understand you love them.  Once she has that bond, she says,  “I can teach them, and when I get them to love school, I have them forever.”

Callahan's response is worthy of a standing ovation, and I hope that her fellow teachers take heart from it.

Do we want a pat on the back? No. Do we want your sympathy? No. Do we want our community to be aware of the challenges in our schools? Yes, we desperately do.

Please do not oversimplify a complex problem by blaming the teachers who are in the trenches every day.

Every line of this powerhouse essay is quoteworthy. I hope that it is clipped and placed on a bulletin board in teachers' lounges across the city.

Gardens, Grit, and Responsibility

So my wife and I are watching an old episode of Restaurant Impossible on Netflix. It's the one where the host takes on a special mission for the First Lady herself-- fixing up a neighborhood center in one of DC's poor neighborhoods (what is sometimes called a "food desert"-- a neighborhood where there is no real source of decent groceries and fresh food).

It's a heartwarming feel-good episode, and it includes a big plug for Michelle Obama's gardening program. The children at the center created and started working in their own neighborhood garden, which along with the Let's Move initiative, and as the show continued to plug how great it was to grow food and get a connection to where food comes from and to harvest your own food and eat it makes you better connected and this is how we beat back childhood obesity and my wife is becoming increasingly agitated on the couch next to me.

Until finally she says something along the lines of, "Yes. Right. Because it makes sense to put the burden of fixing all this on these people who barely have the resources to get through their regular lives every day. Yes, it makes way more sense to put the burden on them than on the multi-billion dollar corporations that control the food supply and the politicians who help them do it."

It's not that the Let's Move and Eat Good Things From Your Garden and Make Better Eating Choices movements are wrong. I am not one of those people who is going to twist myself into a brain pretzel by trying to find a way to mock the idea that kids should eat less crap; there is nothing remotely objectionable about that idea itself.  But to the cynical eye, it can certainly look like these are convenient distractors that let much more powerful players off the hook. It's like visiting somebody who lives next door to a giant, stinking, unregulated pig feces processing plant and telling them they should really use deodorant and buy some of those christmas tree air freshener things. It's not that those aren't good ideas. It's not that they won't help. But there's a much bigger problem, and we're carefully not talking about it.

The neighborhood is labeled a food desert because there's only a corner store, and that store offers not-very-healthy cheap processed food. That is not some quirky accident, and it's not a twist of the free market. The federal government has made it a good business plan to raise corn and turn it into processed crap. Fast food is cheap because our government, directly and indirectly, subsidizes it, and the government subsidies of bad food might just be related to the revolving door between the offices of the major food conglomerates and the halls of Congress. (Read Fast Food Nation or watch Food Inc)

If we wanted healthy vegetables to be more readily available and cheaper than crappy fattening overprocessed crap, we could do that. But that would come with political (as in "lose a lot of money used to get re-elected") consequences. So it's easier to tell poor kids to grow a garden and exercise more. On the one hand we have a poor kid in DC; on the other hand we have CEO of Monsanto. Which one do you think is in a position to influence the eating patterns of the poor in America?

Let's keep punching a kid in the face, and when he falls down, tell him to get up, plant his feet, and take a strong stance. The advice is not wrong-- it's a good thing to do. But maybe WE COULD STOP PUNCHING HIM IN THE FACE!

We are currently confronting an enormous problem with poverty in this country, a problem that is complicated because it lives at the confluence of many large, powerful forces in our country. Some of those factors can be influenced by the people who are most directly affected; some of those factors are influenced by people who are far removed from the effects of poverty; and some of those factors are influenced by who-the-hell-knows-what. But instead of having the big difficult conversation, we've got a whole bunch of powerful people saying, "Well, let's tell kids to show some grit and get a good education."

It is not not NOT that individual human beings do not have responsibility for their own choices and their own actions. But their power is limited by the choices that are available and the power that they have. Those of us who have more available choices and more power should be likewise considering our responsibilities and choices. That includes me, it includes the CEO's of mega-corporations, and it includes the President of the US along with the bozos in Congress. Perhaps all of us powerful grownups should show some grit and stop sluffing responsibilities off on children.

Gilt by Association

Much of what's passed off as ed reform these days involves a tricky logic chain with some wobbly connections and oddball sleight of hand. Let me try, as is my way, to create an analogy. Here's how we get from creating more effective education for all Americans down to stupid multiple choice questions on a bad bubble test.

Let's start with our vision. It will be a golden city. Seriously-- a city all shining gold.

Well, actually, an all-gold city would be unsustainable, so what we'll shoot for is a city with gold leaf surfaces worked over a framework of high-grade super-strong lightweight aluminum.

Now, there are hundreds of details and features and infrastructures that will be needed to build that city, but let's focus (just for a moment, you understand) on the girder frameworks that will be built for medium-sized buildings.

Now, those frameworks will have several dozen structural elements to hold them together properly, and none of us really know how to attach that much gold leaf to that much external surface, but let's focus on the techniques we're going to use to tie the girders together.

Those connections will include bolts and rivets and welds, but let's just focus on the rivets. To create the rivets we're going to need-- well, there are several steps to the process of creating rivets and several different ways we could make them, but we'll focus on the supply of steel cable that will be cut to size for individual rivet bodies.

That steel comes from many different suppliers, but we're going to look at the suppliers in the northeast. Those supplier operations are influenced by dozens of different factors, but the quality of the steel is the one we'll focus on.

The supply chain for the steel is long and involved, but let's focus on finding the right patch of ground to mine for iron ore. Let's determine what the qualities of dirt are that are mostly likely to lead us to the iron ore.

And that is how we end up staring intently at soil, judging it and testing it to determine whether it will lead directly to a shining city of gold.

We have traveled this road backwards, cheerfully ignoring and discarding thousands of crossroads and turns because we were traveling backwards. We never made a competely senseless jump, or a connection that wasn't really there. We just kept pruning away a forest of "distractors."

But now that we have to go the other way, the progression that made so much sense leaves us lost and confused. When someone hands us a bucket of earth and says, "I want a shining city of gold by next Wednesday" we just don't-- I mean, man, it seemed so clear when we were headed this way and the guy was explaining his vision and we could just see the city in our mind and it was so clear that this dirt was a critical first step to creating that city, but now that we're turned around the other way, we're just lost. How do I make a city of gold out of this bucket of gold?

In this same way, we've been walked backwards from a vision of every child in America getting a top-notch education that leads to a good job. And as we've walked backwards we've ignored, walked past, tossed out (because they were inconvenient), glossed over (because we didn't know) a thousand thousand branches and alleys and factors and features, until we find ourselves sitting in front of a set of bubble test questions and talking about them as if they have a real, strong link to the vision we started with. We have gone from a great complete education to standards that only address two content areas while strolling past every single factor that could affect student learning that isn't a teacher, wandered past all the possible ways to assess learning, and landed on standardized bubble test.

If I handed you the bucket of dirt and said, "Okay, so what can you use this to make," your first answer will probably not be "A shining city of gold."

Likewise, if I showed you this question:

What does the phrase "talking to itself" mean about the water?
         A) It is noisy
         B) It may be dangerous
         C) It is moving swiftly
         D) It would be fun for swimming

Yes, there is a reading that goes with this actual sample test question. But if I showed you this question, told you we were going to ask third graders to answer it, and then asked, "What do you think that will tell us?" do you suppose that your answer would be, "Why it will tell me whether this child is on the way to successfully attending college and ultimately starting a well-paying career."

Standardized tests are so tenuously connected to the stated reformster goal of well-educated college-and-career-ready students that it just makes my head hurt to talk to people who really think their bucket of dirt takes them directly to the city of gold.

But really-- we're not crazy. The standardized tests really don't point us in the direction of anything except the tests themselves. It's just a bucket of dirt. Don't let anybody convince you otherwise.