Michael McAdoo is suing the University of North Carolina. The premise of his case is simple-- UNC promised him an education in exchange for his services as an athlete, and they violated that agreement when the shoved him into essentially fake classes with no educational value.
UNC's problems with "paper classes" and what has been called "eighteen years of academic fraud" were already large. This will not help.
But Time's coverage of the case notes that, while this may seem like an easy win, case law is not on McAdoo's side, and they refer to a 1992 case based on a similar premise.
In 1992, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit largely
upheld a lower court decision to dismiss a case involving Kevin Ross, a
former basketball player at Creighton University who sued the school for
negligence and breach of contract for failing to educate him. “We agree
— indeed we emphasize — that courts should not ‘take on the job of
supervising the relationship between colleges and student-athletes or
creating in effect a new relationship between them,’” the judges wrote.
Courts are reluctant to judge the quality of a student’s education,
because “theories of educations are not uniform.” How can you
objectively measure the quality of a student’s academic experience? It
may be a ‘practical impossibility to prove that the alleged malpractice
of the teacher proximately caused the learning deficiency of the
plaintiff student.’”
The emphasis is mine. The case deals with the college level and not third graders. But it would be interesting to see if the court's reluctance to rule on what constitutes a quality education, or a teacher's role in providing it, would hold up in lawsuits over current evaluation systems being used to cripple and end teaching careers.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Did the Ohio Board Just Try To Stonewall Critics?
Today was supposed to be a day for the public to offer testimony about the Ohio State Board of Education's proposed cutting of elementary specials requirements, after the proposal cleared a board committee yesterday. Things did not run so smoothly.
Board President Debe Tehar started off the day by announcing that public testimony would be delayed so that Ohio Ed Department staffers could explain the change first. That presentation was already scheduled for today, but this move bumped it to the top of the schedule.
Board member Debbie Cain asked Tehar to explain why people who had taken a day off of work to testify were being pushed back (which presumably could include being pushed back to a time commonly referred to as "tomorrow"). Now maybe the shift was just an attempt to pre-emptively explain things before people could complain about them, but that's not what Tehar said. What Tehar said was nothing.
Board member Ann Jacobs called point of order (parlimentarianese for "I call shenanigans"), and Tehar replied, "I'm the president. I can commit shenangians as I see fit." (I'm paraphrasing)
At this point four board members (Jacobs, Cain, A. J. Wagner and Stephanie Dodd) walked out of the meeting. Wagner lead the charge, he indicated, because of the schedule change and the ignoring of a board member.
[Update: The Dayton Daily News added these details to that special moment:
When Terhar said it was within her authority to change the agenda, a member of the audience called out that the board should vote on the matter, and that if the schedule changed, many in the audience would have to leave.
Terhar told the audience member that she was welcome to leave at that moment.
At that point, Wagner stood up and said, “I’ll leave.” Board members Cain, Stephanie Dodd and Ann Jacobs joined Wagner in walking out of the meeting.
Board member Mary Rose Oakar again asked Terhar to reconsider, but Terhar instructed members of the Ohio Department of Education to begin the presentation.
So I think the "screw you" message from the board president comes through loud and clear.]
The Columbus Dispatch filed this story at 12:12. Public testimony was supposed to begin at noon. No word yet on who or if that is going.
So it looks like this is not going to run smoothly, and that the board is not exactly in agreement about how to handle it. But trying to squeeze public testimony out the mix by forcing people to sacrifice many work days for the possibility that they may or may not make today's schedule-- that would be a pretty low move.
Board President Debe Tehar started off the day by announcing that public testimony would be delayed so that Ohio Ed Department staffers could explain the change first. That presentation was already scheduled for today, but this move bumped it to the top of the schedule.
Board member Debbie Cain asked Tehar to explain why people who had taken a day off of work to testify were being pushed back (which presumably could include being pushed back to a time commonly referred to as "tomorrow"). Now maybe the shift was just an attempt to pre-emptively explain things before people could complain about them, but that's not what Tehar said. What Tehar said was nothing.
Board member Ann Jacobs called point of order (parlimentarianese for "I call shenanigans"), and Tehar replied, "I'm the president. I can commit shenangians as I see fit." (I'm paraphrasing)
At this point four board members (Jacobs, Cain, A. J. Wagner and Stephanie Dodd) walked out of the meeting. Wagner lead the charge, he indicated, because of the schedule change and the ignoring of a board member.
[Update: The Dayton Daily News added these details to that special moment:
When Terhar said it was within her authority to change the agenda, a member of the audience called out that the board should vote on the matter, and that if the schedule changed, many in the audience would have to leave.
Terhar told the audience member that she was welcome to leave at that moment.
At that point, Wagner stood up and said, “I’ll leave.” Board members Cain, Stephanie Dodd and Ann Jacobs joined Wagner in walking out of the meeting.
Board member Mary Rose Oakar again asked Terhar to reconsider, but Terhar instructed members of the Ohio Department of Education to begin the presentation.
So I think the "screw you" message from the board president comes through loud and clear.]
The Columbus Dispatch filed this story at 12:12. Public testimony was supposed to begin at noon. No word yet on who or if that is going.
So it looks like this is not going to run smoothly, and that the board is not exactly in agreement about how to handle it. But trying to squeeze public testimony out the mix by forcing people to sacrifice many work days for the possibility that they may or may not make today's schedule-- that would be a pretty low move.
USED: Nothing-Burger with Cheese
According to Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, the Obama administration on Monday once again paid lip service to one of its less noted but more dumb ideas. They would like to shuffle teachers around. This is not a new thing-- I wrote about it last December:
Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been manufactured ...er, I mean, tabulated with totally reliable data.
One of the ideas is, basically, to make your certified crappy teachers and your certified excellent teachers trade places. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, starting with the fact that we still don't have any useful way of identifying excellent (or not-so-excellent) teachers. So instead of trying to solve that riddle, states are declaring, as required by the Department of Education's NCLB/RTTT-fueledextortion waiver, that teachers will be evaluated at least in part based on standardized test results. Of course, we also know that poverty and poorly funded schools leaded inexorably to low standardized test results, so voila!-- teachers working in high poverty schools are far more likely to be teaching low-score students, and therefor far more likely to be "discovered" to be less excellent teachers. It's not that our most struggling students don't deserve excellent teachers-- it's that we don't have any real reason to believe that many of those excellent teachers are not already there.
I have explained this before. If you remove the roof from a classroom, whoever is in the classroom will get wet when it rains. If you say, "Hey, this teacher is all wet-- send me another one," it will make no difference. When the new teacher arrives, she will get wet, too.
You cannot improve this situation with threats. If you say, "Hey! The next wet teacher I find in this room is gonna get fired!" you will not get miraculously dry teachers standing in the rain. What you will get are teachers who want to keep their jobs saying, "No, I am NOT going to go teach in the roofless room, thankyouverymuch." And your roofless wet room will be occupied primarily by young teachers who didn't have other options or who believe that they'll be kept dry by their youth and enthusiasm and job offers from hedge funds for after they've finished.
This seems so obvious and yet clearly it isn't-- creating extra performance pressure without addressing the root causes of poor student performance absolutely guarantees to do the OPPOSITE of recruiting teachers to those situations. "Don't you want to come here and risk your teaching career in difficult wet room with no support" is NOT a great recruiting line.
However, the Ed Department occasionally notices that No Child Left Behind (which is still actually the law governing education, as opposed to the pseudo-laws of Race to the Top waivers) requires every state to have an equity plan-- a plan for how we're going to shuffle around those teachers to get the great ones in the wet rooms.
The rest of why this law is stupid is because nobody knows how to do it. When it comes to moving excellent teachers to low-performing classrooms, there are only a few possibilities:
Guilt trip: Your nation needs you. It's the right thing to do. There is no more important work in our country today. On the one hand, this has the advantage of being related to actual truth. On the other hand, it is a challenge for state and federal education officials to convey that they actually believe any of it. Nevertheless, their best bet is probably to convince teachers to take one for the team.
Bribery: Offer them obscene amounts of money to do it. And I mean pro football obscene. This actually makes sense. We pay pro athletes huge amounts of money because they are basically drawing their entire career salary in a few years, because their careers will probably be over by the time they're thirty. Same thing here. If we're going to ask teachers to work in career-ending classrooms, let's pay them their entire career salary for it. But I'll go cheap-- let's say $350,000 a year. The problem, of course, is that reformsters want to pay most teachers less rather than more.
Extortion: Pull teacher credentials at random and tell them they have to teach in low performing schools or else they will lose their teaching certification (Massachusetts got confused and is proposing the reverse-- teach at a low-performing school and then we'll take your certificate.)
Trickery: Tell teachers they've won a trip to Bermuda or Alaska or that nice farm where families send their very old dogs. When they discover they've actually ended up in a low-performance school, it will be too late.
Rendering: Wait outside a teacher's classroom. Tie a bag over her head and throw her in a van. Easy peasy. If anybody asks questions, just explain that she moved to that nice farm where families send their very old dogs.
There may also be a possibility of implementing indentured servitude, but essentially the law and every succeeding administration to work under it is forced to depend on wishful thinking and hopeful thoughts to implement the Great Educator Shift.
Fortunately, nobody is really asking states to actually do anything. There is a deadline for submitting a plan, but no requirement that the plan be actually feasible, nor any requirement that said plan actually be implemented.
Michael Petrilli gets the quote-of-the-day award. "This is a nothing-burger," said the president of the Fordham Institute. Which I think pretty much nails it, except that not only can we not find the beef, but I'm pretty sure there's no bun, though there is plenty of cheese.
Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been
One of the ideas is, basically, to make your certified crappy teachers and your certified excellent teachers trade places. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, starting with the fact that we still don't have any useful way of identifying excellent (or not-so-excellent) teachers. So instead of trying to solve that riddle, states are declaring, as required by the Department of Education's NCLB/RTTT-fueled
I have explained this before. If you remove the roof from a classroom, whoever is in the classroom will get wet when it rains. If you say, "Hey, this teacher is all wet-- send me another one," it will make no difference. When the new teacher arrives, she will get wet, too.
You cannot improve this situation with threats. If you say, "Hey! The next wet teacher I find in this room is gonna get fired!" you will not get miraculously dry teachers standing in the rain. What you will get are teachers who want to keep their jobs saying, "No, I am NOT going to go teach in the roofless room, thankyouverymuch." And your roofless wet room will be occupied primarily by young teachers who didn't have other options or who believe that they'll be kept dry by their youth and enthusiasm and job offers from hedge funds for after they've finished.
This seems so obvious and yet clearly it isn't-- creating extra performance pressure without addressing the root causes of poor student performance absolutely guarantees to do the OPPOSITE of recruiting teachers to those situations. "Don't you want to come here and risk your teaching career in difficult wet room with no support" is NOT a great recruiting line.
However, the Ed Department occasionally notices that No Child Left Behind (which is still actually the law governing education, as opposed to the pseudo-laws of Race to the Top waivers) requires every state to have an equity plan-- a plan for how we're going to shuffle around those teachers to get the great ones in the wet rooms.
The rest of why this law is stupid is because nobody knows how to do it. When it comes to moving excellent teachers to low-performing classrooms, there are only a few possibilities:
Guilt trip: Your nation needs you. It's the right thing to do. There is no more important work in our country today. On the one hand, this has the advantage of being related to actual truth. On the other hand, it is a challenge for state and federal education officials to convey that they actually believe any of it. Nevertheless, their best bet is probably to convince teachers to take one for the team.
Bribery: Offer them obscene amounts of money to do it. And I mean pro football obscene. This actually makes sense. We pay pro athletes huge amounts of money because they are basically drawing their entire career salary in a few years, because their careers will probably be over by the time they're thirty. Same thing here. If we're going to ask teachers to work in career-ending classrooms, let's pay them their entire career salary for it. But I'll go cheap-- let's say $350,000 a year. The problem, of course, is that reformsters want to pay most teachers less rather than more.
Extortion: Pull teacher credentials at random and tell them they have to teach in low performing schools or else they will lose their teaching certification (Massachusetts got confused and is proposing the reverse-- teach at a low-performing school and then we'll take your certificate.)
Trickery: Tell teachers they've won a trip to Bermuda or Alaska or that nice farm where families send their very old dogs. When they discover they've actually ended up in a low-performance school, it will be too late.
Rendering: Wait outside a teacher's classroom. Tie a bag over her head and throw her in a van. Easy peasy. If anybody asks questions, just explain that she moved to that nice farm where families send their very old dogs.
There may also be a possibility of implementing indentured servitude, but essentially the law and every succeeding administration to work under it is forced to depend on wishful thinking and hopeful thoughts to implement the Great Educator Shift.
Fortunately, nobody is really asking states to actually do anything. There is a deadline for submitting a plan, but no requirement that the plan be actually feasible, nor any requirement that said plan actually be implemented.
Michael Petrilli gets the quote-of-the-day award. "This is a nothing-burger," said the president of the Fordham Institute. Which I think pretty much nails it, except that not only can we not find the beef, but I'm pretty sure there's no bun, though there is plenty of cheese.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Clarifying the Ohio Situation (Or Not)
In today's cleveland.com, Tom Gunlock, Ohio State Board or Education vice chairman, tells everyone to simmer down on the Ohio elementary schools specialist flap.
First, the date of the vote, as reported by various sources, including me, is incorrect. That vote will not take place until December.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the essence of the story I reported is correct.
The state board will vote in December, not this week as some have claimed, on whether to eliminate requirements that local districts have a certain number of elementary art, music or physical education teachers, school counselors, library media specialists, school nurses, social workers and "visiting teachers."
Administrative code requires districts to have at least five of these eight positions per 1,000 students in what some call the "5 of 8" rule. The state board is considering wiping out that rule and allowing districts to make staffing decisions on their own.
The other takeaway from this article is that yesterday's commotion was enough to either make the newspaper say, "Gee, we should cover this" or (my vote goes to this one) the Ohio State Board call a newpaper contact to say, "Hey, we need some help getting a response out to this." Either way, the internet rumblings were felt.
First, the date of the vote, as reported by various sources, including me, is incorrect. That vote will not take place until December.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the essence of the story I reported is correct.
The state board will vote in December, not this week as some have claimed, on whether to eliminate requirements that local districts have a certain number of elementary art, music or physical education teachers, school counselors, library media specialists, school nurses, social workers and "visiting teachers."
Administrative code requires districts to have at least five of these eight positions per 1,000 students in what some call the "5 of 8" rule. The state board is considering wiping out that rule and allowing districts to make staffing decisions on their own.
Tom Gunlock, the board's vice chairman, said
this morning that the proposed change isn't to eliminate those
positions, as some are charging, but to let districts make their own
choices.
What I reported, with others, is that the state is considering removing the requirement for those positions. Gunlock confirms that. What we now have is a rationale for it, and the rationale appears to be "local control."
"For years, people have been telling me about all these unfunded
mandates and that we're telling them what to do. They keep telling me
they know more about what their kids need that we do, and I agree with
them."
It seems that arts and phys ed are still on the table, though I agree with other commentators that he school code seems to preserve those disciplines elsewhere (though maybe not with teachers certified in those areas). Wish I was a bit more familiar with Ohio school law.
But per this article, it is true that the state is not actually going to eliminate those positions. It's just going to give the green light to any local district that decides they want to eliminate those positions. Because there are so many parents and districts out there saying, "Dammit, our children don't need a librarian or phys ed or a nurse-- why the hell does the state force us to hire these people??"
But per this article, it is true that the state is not actually going to eliminate those positions. It's just going to give the green light to any local district that decides they want to eliminate those positions. Because there are so many parents and districts out there saying, "Dammit, our children don't need a librarian or phys ed or a nurse-- why the hell does the state force us to hire these people??"
Gunlock says that the noise yesterday was blown out of proportion, and it is true that anybody who said that the state was going to eliminate those positions would have been over-reacting. Did anybody think that the state was going to say "There can be no arts, phys ed, etc positions in elementary schools"? No? Didn't think so.
No, the early buzz was correct. The state board would like to eliminate the requirement for those positions, leaving any local district free to eliminate some or all of them. Let me just quote me:
Who does this? Who jumps up and says, "You know what our students need?
Less! Our students need less! Let's take a stand and do what we can to
make it easier to give them less!" Who the hell does that? Apparently
the Ohio State Board of Education does that. Tell them it's not okay.
The other takeaway from this article is that yesterday's commotion was enough to either make the newspaper say, "Gee, we should cover this" or (my vote goes to this one) the Ohio State Board call a newpaper contact to say, "Hey, we need some help getting a response out to this." Either way, the internet rumblings were felt.
You have a month to make some more noise, Ohio. Don't waste it. And let me repost this:
Every Teacher Should Be Bad at Something
Like most teachers, I've worked at a variety of side jobs, from radio dj to musician to newspaper columnist. But I may have learned the most from my time at a catalog order call center.
This was not one of those cold call phone banks, but a call center where customers called us to place their orders. Our job was to get the ordered placed as quickly and pleasantly as possible, then provide them with a few opportunities for further purchases at the end of the call. Our job was to try to get them to pick up another item or two, and then "while their order was processing" (it was all on computer-- we were already looking right at it) try to sell them either a shop-with-us club membership kind of thing, or a kind of medical supplemental insurance. I worked at the job a full summer and through many months part-time thereafter.
I was not good at this job. I was bad at this job. I was punctual and never missed a shift, which they liked, but I was a terrible salesman.
Now, I'm not a master of any of the trades I've messed with. I'm an okay musician, a passable writer, a fair-to-middlin' radio guy-- the list of things that I can do well enough goes on and on (nor am I by any stretch of the imagination the best teacher in my building). But I had never done a job before at which I was just plain not good.
It wasn't long before I noticed how Being Bad was affecting me.
I came to dread being there, walking through the door, driving the car to work. While there, I wanted to be somewhere else. There can be big down time between calls; rather than just sit and soak in the place, I would throw myself into reading. Any distraction-- a chatty caller, an entertaining co-worker-- was consuming. I would negotiate deals between myself, my bladder and the clock (forty-five more minutes and I will go pee).
Part of my brain just wanted to somehow discount the whole experience, to come up with ways to dismiss what I was doing so that my failure was somehow proof that I was smarter or better or cooler or just generally above this. If I could treat it as a ridiculous joke of a job, the fact that I wasn't any good at it wouldn't matter. If I could find flaws in the people who were long-time successful employees, then I wouldn't have to feel bad about myself. A part of my brain dropped whatever it usually did and devoted itself full time to creating excuses, both macro and micro, and another portion started working full time on odd routines just to give me back some sense of control over y situation. A part of my brain was doing anything it could to avoid reaching an unwelcome conclusion about myself based on my apparent inability to succeed at a seemingly simple task. A part of my brain worked on telling me reasons it just didn't matter that I wasn't good at this-- after all, the real part of my real life was outside the company's four walls. I knew I was a perfectly capable, intelligent human being with a useful array of talents-- but none of them were doing me any good and it was hard to not frame my mismatch for the job as a deficit on my part.
After a while, I became used to failing. When the screen popped up that held my script for selling the club membership, I would flinch and just try to get through to the moment when the customer would reject my offer and we could move on. The more I failed, the more it was impossible to imagine anything but failure, and the more I envisioned failure, the more I wanted to avoid entering that wrestling match with the job that I just knew I would lose.
My employers were great. I was gently coached, pleasantly directed, and given encouragement. It did not help.
There is just a spiritually corrosive quality to having to go back, day after day after day, and throw yourself into something that you aren't very good at. Yes, I'm sure I could have grabbed my bootstraps or sucked up my testicular fortitude or put my head down and driven through--and I knew that, and the fact that I couldn't do any of that just became one more badge of failure in the job.
However, the whole experience did have one useful aspect, because I realized right off the bat who also dealt regularly with feelings like mine.
My students.
This is why I now say that all teachers should not only get a job outside of school, but also have the experience of being bad at something.
My lower functioning students have to get up every day and go to a place where all day long, they are required to do things that they are bad at. They have to carry the feelings that go with that, the steady toxic buildup that goes with constantly wrestling with what they can't do, the endless drip-drip-drip of that inadequacy-based acid on the soul.
It's up to us to remind them that they are good at things. It's up to us to make a commitment to get them to a place of success. It's up to us NOT to hammer home what they already know-- that there are tasks they aren't very good at completing.
I don't know how much longer the company would have tolerated my low bonus sale numbers, but my lack of scheduling availability was enough to end my phone career. That's okay. The extra money was nice, and I have no doubt that being a bad telemarketer made me a better teacher. And I have some great stories (you have not lived until you have helped a little old lady order a personal intimate massage device by phone), but I will save those for another day.
This was not one of those cold call phone banks, but a call center where customers called us to place their orders. Our job was to get the ordered placed as quickly and pleasantly as possible, then provide them with a few opportunities for further purchases at the end of the call. Our job was to try to get them to pick up another item or two, and then "while their order was processing" (it was all on computer-- we were already looking right at it) try to sell them either a shop-with-us club membership kind of thing, or a kind of medical supplemental insurance. I worked at the job a full summer and through many months part-time thereafter.
I was not good at this job. I was bad at this job. I was punctual and never missed a shift, which they liked, but I was a terrible salesman.
Now, I'm not a master of any of the trades I've messed with. I'm an okay musician, a passable writer, a fair-to-middlin' radio guy-- the list of things that I can do well enough goes on and on (nor am I by any stretch of the imagination the best teacher in my building). But I had never done a job before at which I was just plain not good.
It wasn't long before I noticed how Being Bad was affecting me.
I came to dread being there, walking through the door, driving the car to work. While there, I wanted to be somewhere else. There can be big down time between calls; rather than just sit and soak in the place, I would throw myself into reading. Any distraction-- a chatty caller, an entertaining co-worker-- was consuming. I would negotiate deals between myself, my bladder and the clock (forty-five more minutes and I will go pee).
Part of my brain just wanted to somehow discount the whole experience, to come up with ways to dismiss what I was doing so that my failure was somehow proof that I was smarter or better or cooler or just generally above this. If I could treat it as a ridiculous joke of a job, the fact that I wasn't any good at it wouldn't matter. If I could find flaws in the people who were long-time successful employees, then I wouldn't have to feel bad about myself. A part of my brain dropped whatever it usually did and devoted itself full time to creating excuses, both macro and micro, and another portion started working full time on odd routines just to give me back some sense of control over y situation. A part of my brain was doing anything it could to avoid reaching an unwelcome conclusion about myself based on my apparent inability to succeed at a seemingly simple task. A part of my brain worked on telling me reasons it just didn't matter that I wasn't good at this-- after all, the real part of my real life was outside the company's four walls. I knew I was a perfectly capable, intelligent human being with a useful array of talents-- but none of them were doing me any good and it was hard to not frame my mismatch for the job as a deficit on my part.
After a while, I became used to failing. When the screen popped up that held my script for selling the club membership, I would flinch and just try to get through to the moment when the customer would reject my offer and we could move on. The more I failed, the more it was impossible to imagine anything but failure, and the more I envisioned failure, the more I wanted to avoid entering that wrestling match with the job that I just knew I would lose.
My employers were great. I was gently coached, pleasantly directed, and given encouragement. It did not help.
There is just a spiritually corrosive quality to having to go back, day after day after day, and throw yourself into something that you aren't very good at. Yes, I'm sure I could have grabbed my bootstraps or sucked up my testicular fortitude or put my head down and driven through--and I knew that, and the fact that I couldn't do any of that just became one more badge of failure in the job.
However, the whole experience did have one useful aspect, because I realized right off the bat who also dealt regularly with feelings like mine.
My students.
This is why I now say that all teachers should not only get a job outside of school, but also have the experience of being bad at something.
My lower functioning students have to get up every day and go to a place where all day long, they are required to do things that they are bad at. They have to carry the feelings that go with that, the steady toxic buildup that goes with constantly wrestling with what they can't do, the endless drip-drip-drip of that inadequacy-based acid on the soul.
It's up to us to remind them that they are good at things. It's up to us to make a commitment to get them to a place of success. It's up to us NOT to hammer home what they already know-- that there are tasks they aren't very good at completing.
I don't know how much longer the company would have tolerated my low bonus sale numbers, but my lack of scheduling availability was enough to end my phone career. That's okay. The extra money was nice, and I have no doubt that being a bad telemarketer made me a better teacher. And I have some great stories (you have not lived until you have helped a little old lady order a personal intimate massage device by phone), but I will save those for another day.
Sunday, November 9, 2014
[More Update] Ohio Gunning for Specialists
My first teaching job was in Ohio (Lorain High School); I have some fondness for our nearby neighbors. So it has been alarming to watch Ohio transform fairly rapidly into a state that is openly hostile to public education and public school teachers.
This morning comes word that the Ohio State Board of Education will votethis Tuesday [ per this article on cleveland.com ], the vote will come in December] today on some revision to the school code. The most significant revision reportedly under consideration is one that would end state requirements for elementary specialists. [I've written a reaction to the new article over here]
Currently, school code states that for every thousand elementary students, schools must have in place five of the following eight specialists: art, music, counselor, school nurse, librarian/media specialist, visiting teacher, social worker, or phys ed.
The revision would eliminate the section that includes that language. What would be left is this definition of staff:
Educational service personnel are credentialed staff with the knowledge, skills and expertise to support the educational, instructional, health, mental health, and college/career readiness needs of students.
The appeal for districts is obvious. Let's have one music teacher for 10,000 students. Let's have no music teacher at all. Great. Let me mention that this article also came across my screen this morning: "Youngstown kids second poorest in nation" Do we really need to argue that the poorest, most vulnerable students are the ones who most need these sorts of services and enrichment? Is there somebody in Ohio prepared, seriously, to argue that nurses and music and art and phys ed are unnecessary luxuries, and kids should just pack up their grit and do without?
I would love to tell you more about this, like what the justification for the move might actually be (other than giving districts more leeway to slash personnel), but the whole business appears to be occurring with a double helping of speed and stealth. There's a slide presentation about the move available here and that comes with contact information. The issue is burning up twitter under the hashtag #ohio5of8.
So take some time to fire off emails, hit the twitter, do what you can to, at least, make some noise so that folks in Ohio see what's happening, because then maybe they'll make some noise and maybe the Ohio Board will think twice before making this stupid move.
Who does this? Who jumps up and says, "You know what our students need? Less! Our students need less! Let's take a stand and do what we can to make it easier to give them less!" Who the hell does that? Apparently the Ohio State Board of Education does that. Tell them it's not okay.
[Update:
I heard this evening from Greg at Plunderbund, an Ohio-focused site. Greg had a couple of observations to make that are perhaps good news for a portion of this issue, but still troubling for others. His reading of the code is that the arts and phys ed are not in danger, but the same may not be true for the other support services
[Update: Here's a handy guide to names, regions, and emails for board members
This morning comes word that the Ohio State Board of Education will vote
Currently, school code states that for every thousand elementary students, schools must have in place five of the following eight specialists: art, music, counselor, school nurse, librarian/media specialist, visiting teacher, social worker, or phys ed.
The revision would eliminate the section that includes that language. What would be left is this definition of staff:
Educational service personnel are credentialed staff with the knowledge, skills and expertise to support the educational, instructional, health, mental health, and college/career readiness needs of students.
The appeal for districts is obvious. Let's have one music teacher for 10,000 students. Let's have no music teacher at all. Great. Let me mention that this article also came across my screen this morning: "Youngstown kids second poorest in nation" Do we really need to argue that the poorest, most vulnerable students are the ones who most need these sorts of services and enrichment? Is there somebody in Ohio prepared, seriously, to argue that nurses and music and art and phys ed are unnecessary luxuries, and kids should just pack up their grit and do without?
I would love to tell you more about this, like what the justification for the move might actually be (other than giving districts more leeway to slash personnel), but the whole business appears to be occurring with a double helping of speed and stealth. There's a slide presentation about the move available here and that comes with contact information. The issue is burning up twitter under the hashtag #ohio5of8.
So take some time to fire off emails, hit the twitter, do what you can to, at least, make some noise so that folks in Ohio see what's happening, because then maybe they'll make some noise and maybe the Ohio Board will think twice before making this stupid move.
Who does this? Who jumps up and says, "You know what our students need? Less! Our students need less! Let's take a stand and do what we can to make it easier to give them less!" Who the hell does that? Apparently the Ohio State Board of Education does that. Tell them it's not okay.
[Update:
I heard this evening from Greg at Plunderbund, an Ohio-focused site. Greg had a couple of observations to make that are perhaps good news for a portion of this issue, but still troubling for others. His reading of the code is that the arts and phys ed are not in danger, but the same may not be true for the other support services
If you look on page 108 of the Board Book, Volume 5 (ftp://ftp.ode.state.oh.us/ODEMediaWeb/State_Board_Board_Books/November_2014/Board%20Book%20Vol%205%20Nov%202014.pdf),
you'll see that it still requires that all curriculum required by Ohio Revised Code shall still be provided by school districts.
As such, if you then look at ORC 3313.60 (http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/3313.60), you'll see that physical education and the arts are explicitly required.
In addition, earlier in the changes to OAC (page 99 of the Board
Book), it does clearly define all of the "Educational Service
Personnel".
Now, something to look into is the issue of nurses, counselors,
social workers and the possible impact of these changes on those
positions. I haven't had time to research the other requirements for
those roles in our schools. Focusing research on these
jobs might be more important than looking at the arts & phys ed.
which are not going anywhere.
[More update: Per the cleveland.com article, the board's vice-chairman says that the board is not eliminating the positions. They're just saying that local schools don't have to have them.]
[More update: Per the cleveland.com article, the board's vice-chairman says that the board is not eliminating the positions. They're just saying that local schools don't have to have them.]
[Update: Here's a handy guide to names, regions, and emails for board members
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.
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.
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