AFT: Still Supporting the False Narrative

In its press release about the awarding of two grants for the purpose of fiddling with Common Core while the schoolhouse burns, AFT manages to capture in one paragraph much of what irritates me about the Big Unions' response to the Core.

"These grants are about giving educators some seed money to take their ideas about educational standards and convert them into practice. Many educators support higher standards but are concerned about particular aspects, especially the Common Core standards' poor implementation and their developmental appropriateness, particularly in the early grades," said AFT President Randi Weingarten. "We wanted to give the people closest to children a chance to do something different, as long as we were all focused on how to help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the Common Core standards are supposed to be about." 

1) "seed money to take their ideas about educational standards and convert them into practice"

In other words, do our jobs. Like we do every day. Only now, somehow, in the brave new CCSS world, we need grant money and the permission that goes with it to do it. And this is apparently a new thing? Because I'm pretty sure that educators were busily doing this, and doing it well, before the Core came along and teachers were told they had to drop what they were doing and get aligned to the federal state standards.

2) "Many educators support higher standards but are concerned about particular aspects, especially the Common Core standards' poor implementation..."

I see what you did there. You treated "higher standards" and "Common Core" as if they were synonyms. Of course, we know from no less an authority that the Fordham Institute that in many states the Core are not higher standards at all. Personally, I'd argue that they aren't higher standards than much of anything, nor do we have a lick of research to back up the claim that they are.

3) "their developmental appropriateness"

Well, yes. But let's not just lump that in with rollout problems, or pretend that it doesn't call into question the whole "higher standards" thing. When you ask a fish to fly and it says it can't, the appropriate response is not, "Oh, well I'm sorry that you can't handle something so much better than swimming." (Also, you are completely overlooking the miracle of a talking fish).

The implication here, as in many places, is that developmental inappropriateness is a function of asking children to do things that are too awesome for them. It hints that somehow they're tiny little minds just aren't up to it, that they are still suffering from some sort of deficit. That's not it. What it really means is that you have designed a task that is wrong for that person. The tiny person is not at fault. You are. And that's not because you just raised the standards too high. It's because you made a stupid request.

4) "We wanted to give the people closest to children a chance to do something different"

Different from what? Because we were all trying to do different things before folks came along with the one size fits all Common Core. 

5) "as long as we were all focused on how to help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the Common Core standards are supposed to be about."

Is that what the Core are supposed to be about? Are you seriously suggesting that we need the Core to incorporate critical thinking and problem solving in classrooms? An organization that represents a nation of teachers is implicitly agreeing here with the idea that teachers never really did know how to do their jobs until the Blessed Core came to rescue us.

That's the narrative, the one that I don't much care for. Once upon a time, America's schools were struggling and failing because teachers just didn't know how to teach any more. So some wise men devised a set of higher standards that would teach students how to read and write and think like never before. Now, with standards this ambitious, some bumps and hiccups could be expected, but those were just implementation issues and not in any way indicative of fundamental flaws in the Core.

It continues to irritate me no end that the two major unions accept and promote a narrative predicated on the idea that their own members are lost, clueless, maybe lazy, possibly incompetent, but definitely in need of someone (like maybe rich and powerful amateurs) to come show them the way. I can tolerate that story from the amateurs. But union leaders should know better. Union leaders may need to play some politics- I accept that. But I don't accept union leaders hanging their heads and saying, "Yeah, our guys really don't know what they're doing. They need help."

So the grant idea? Throwing around money is always swell, but the fact that it's attached to that same old narrative reduces the swellness considerably.

NCTQ: It's So Easy

The National Council on Teacher Quality is one of the leaders in the production of education-related nonsense that is somehow taken seriously. The offices of NCTQ may not produce much of anything that provides real substance, but somewhere in that cushy suite there must be the best turd-polishing machine ever built.

NCTQ has published a new "report" that "seeks" to "answer" two questions:

Are teacher candidates graded too easily, misleading them about their readiness to teach? Are teacher preparation programs providing sufficiently rigorous training, or does the approach to training drive higher grades?

And when I say "seeks to answer," what I mean is "tries to cobble together support for the answer they've already settled on." There is no indication anywhere that NCTQ actually wondered what the answers to these questions might be. No, it appears that they set out to prove that teacher candidates are graded too easily as they meander through their rigorless teacher programs.


Who are these guys?

Does the NCTQ moniker seem familiar? That's because these are the guys who evaluated everyone's education program and ran it as a big story in US News (motto "When it comes to sales, lists are better than news"). That evaluation list caused a lot of stir. A lot.

Funny story. I interviewed a college president from a local school who was steamed about that list in part because it slammed them for the low quality of a teacher program that they don't even have. Turns out a lot of people had problems with NCTQ methodology, which involved not actually talking to anybody at the schools, but collecting information less detailed than what you can get from your high school guidance counselor. You can read a cranky critique here and a more scholarly one here. Bottom line-- they get great media penetration with a report that has less substance than my hair.

NCTQ has tried to blunt some of the criticism with moves like adding a Teacher Advisory Group composed of Real Live Teachers. Also, NCTQ uses very pretty graphics in soothing colors.

The new report-- Easy A's (they even italicize the title, like a book title, because it's more hefty and important than a mere "article title")-- is billed as "the latest latest installment of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s Teacher Prep Review, a decade-old initiative examining the quality of the preparation of new teachers in the United States." This is supposed to be part of their "growing body of work designed to ensure that teacher preparation programs live up to the awesome responsibility they assume." For the moment, let's look at the "findings" in this "report."

And the bottom line is...

They studied about 500 schools; these schools are collectively responsible for about half the teacher degrees granted. Two "findings" here.


First, they find the majority of institutions studied (58%) grading standards are lower than for students in other majors on the same campus.

Second, they find a strong link "between high grades and a lack of rigorous coursework, with the primary cause being assignments that fail to develop the critical skills and knowledge every new teacher needs."

Wow!!

I know! My mind boggles at the huge amount of research involved here. This must have required an extensive study of each of the 500 institutions studied. I mean, we're talking about comparing the rigor of assignments in both education and non-education courses, so researchers must have had to dig through tens of thousands of college course assignments in addition to an extensive study of the grading standards of thousands of professors to be able to make these comparisons.

And then to do all the research and number crunching needed to establish a correlation between the rigor of assignments and grades achieved-- this would be a more complicated model than VAM, to tease out all those data,

Also, it's worth noting that NCTQ knows what critical skills and knowledge all new teachers need, which must have been a huge research project all by itself. I do hope they publish that one soon, because if we had such a list, it would certainly revolutionize teacher evaluation and training. In fact, if they've done all this research and know all these answers, why aren't they just traveling from college to college and saying, "Here-- this is what our proven research shows you should be teaching teacher trainees."

Never mind.

Apparently the minds at NCTQ boggled at that research challenge as well. So let's look at what they actually did.

For the first point-- the idea that teacher grads are the recipients of departmental grade inflation-- NCTQ looked at commencement brochures. They checked commencement brochures to see a) who graduated from a teaching program and b) who had an honors grad designation based on GPA.

It is not clear how many years are spanned. There were 500-ish schools studied, and footnotes in an appendix indicate that a total of 436 commencement brochures were discarded for insufficient data. Yet the executive summary says that 44% of all teacher grads in all 509 schools earned honors, while only 30% of all graduating students did. And in 214 schools, there's no real difference, and in 62 schools, teachers had fewer honors grads. How did they get such precise numbers? That is not explained.

There's some more detailed breakdown of methodologies of teasing the data, but that's the data they accumulated from graduation brochures, and the whole argument boils down to "Barely more teachers graduate with honors than do other majors." Oddly enough, this does not lead NCTQ to conclude, "Good news, America! Teachers are actually smarter than the average college grad." I guess it comes down to how you interpret the data. That you collected from graduation brochures.

But what about that lack of rigor?

Having somehow concluded that teacher programs are hotbeds of easy grades, NCTQ turns to the question of who let the rigor out. Once again, their methodology is itself as rigorous as a bowl of noodles left to boil for twelve hours.

Multiple theories as to why students in education majors might appear to excel so often were also examined (e.g., clinical coursework that lends itself to high grades, too many arts and crafts assignments, too much group work, particularly egregious grade inflation, better quality instruction, more female students who tend to get higher grades, opportunities to revise work, and higher caliber students), but none appears to explain these findings as directly as the nature of the assignments.

First of all, interesting list of theories there. Second of all-- "none appears to explain"?? How did you judge that appearance, exactly. Did we just put each theory on a post-it note, stick it to the wall, stand back and hold up our thumbs and squint to see which one looked likely? Because usually the way you reject theories in research is with research.


The Big NCTQ Thumb came to rest on "criterion-referenced" and "criterion-deficient" assignments. We'll come back to that in a moment-- it deserves its own subheading. Just one more note about te methodology here.

NCTQ got their hands on syllabi for 1,161 courses, "not just on teacher education but across an array of majors." Except-- wait. We're looking at 509 schools, so 1,161 works out to a hair over two courses per school, including schools with multiple education programs. Oh, no-- never mind. Here it is in the appendix-- we're only going to do this in depth analysis for seven schools. Plus at thirty-three other schools, we will look at just the education programs. Oh, and on this chart it shows that of the seven in-depth schools, we'll look at only teacher programs in two. So, "wide array" means six other majors at five of the 509 schools.

And yes-- the data comes from course syllabi. At seven schools. Not the course, professors, students-- just the syllabi. So our first assumption will be that these syllabi with their lists of course assignments will tell us everything we need to know about how rigorous the coursework is.

Creating the right hatchet for the job

"Criterion-referenced" is a thing, and it basically means an objective test. "Criterion-deficient," on the other hand, will actually win you a game of googlewhacking because apparently nobody uses the term except NCTQ. "Criterion deficiency" is a real thing, used it seems mostly in the non-teaching world to describe a test that fails to assess an important criterion (e.g. you want a secretary who can word process, but the job evaluation doesn't check for word processing). I bring this up only because now I have a great fancy word for discussing high stakes standardized tests-- they suffer from citerion deficiency.

But back to our story.

NCTQ cross-reference course syllabi with grade records posted publicly by registrars and open records requests (Schools DO that?! Seven years ago I wasn't allowed to know the grades of my own children for whom I was paying bills because of privacy laws!) NCTQ "applauds the commitment to transparency" of those schools willing to complete ignore student privacy concerns.

NCTQ looked at 7,500 assignments and ranked them as either CR or CD (that's my abbreviation--if they can be lazy researchers, I can be a lazy typist). Here are the criteria used to tell the difference:

An assignment is considered criterion-referenced when it is focused on a clearly circumscribed body of knowledge and the assignment is limited so that the instructor can compare students’ work on the same assignment. 

Qualities that indicate an assignment is criterion-referenced include
* a limited scope
* evaluation based on objective criteria;
* students’ work products similar enough to allow comparison.

Qualities that indicate an assignment is criterion-deficient include
* an unlimited or very broad scope
* evaluation based on subjective criteria
* students’ work products that differ too much to be compared. 

NCTQ provides a sample of each. A CR lesson would be one in which the student is to apply a specific tool to critique videotaped (quaint) lessons. This is good because everyone uses the same tool for the same lessons so that the instructor knows exactly what is going on. A CD assignment would be to teach something-- anything-- to the class using information from the chapter. This is bad because everybody teaches something different, uses different specific parts of the chapter, and teaches in different ways. This would be bad because there would be too many differences the instructor would be unable to determine who is best at the teaching of stuff.


How is this distinction a useless one? Let me count the ways.

1) It assumes that the purpose of an assignment is to allow comparison of one student to another. This would be different from, say, using assignment as a way to develop and synthesize learning, or to mark the growth and development of the individual student.

2) It assumes that all good teachers look exactly the same and can be directly compared. It imagines that difference is a Bad Thing that never intrudes in a proper classroom. This is bananas.

3) It assumes that the best assignments are close-ended assignments that have only one possible outcome. Even reformsters steeped in Depth of Knowledge and Rigorology tout the value of open-ended response tasks with a variety of correct answers without demanding that the many correct responses be ranked in order of most correct.


4) It appears to place the highest value on objective testing. If that is true for my teacher training, is it not true for my practice? In other words, is NCTQ suggesting that the best assessments for me to use with my students are true-false and multiple choice tests rather than any sort of project-based assessment. Because, no.

5) It assumes that all students in the future teacher's future classroom will also be one size fits all. When I ask my students to prepare oral presentations, should I require that they all do reports on Abraham Lincoln so that they can be more easily and accurately compared?

6) It discounts the truth that part of being a professional is being ready and able to exercise subjective judgment in an objective manner. In other words, free from personal prejudice, but open to the ways that the individual student's personality, skills, and history play into the work at hand (without excusing crappy work).

7) They are trying to make this distinction based on assignments listed in syllabi.

There's more 

I did look for the appendix evaluating how well five weeks will prepare you for teaching if you come from a super-duper university, but that was one aspect of teacher training ease NCTQ did not address.

There are other appendices, examining ideas such as Why High Grades Are Bad (including, but not limited to, if grades are divorced from learning, would-be employers will find grades less useful). But I'm not going to plow through them because at the end of the day, this is a report in which some people collected some graduation brochures and course syllabi and close read their way to an indictment of all college teacher training programs. 

It is not that these questions are without merit. Particularly nowadays, as teacher programs are increasingly desperate to hold onto enough paying customers to keep the ivy covered lights on, teacher training programs are undoubtedly under increasing pressure to manufacture success for their students, one way or another. Nor is it unheard of for co-operating teachers to look at student teachers and think, "Who the hell let this hapless kid get this far, and who the hell is going to actually give him a teaching certificate?"

The question of how well training programs are preparing teachers for real jobs in the real world ought to be asked and discussed regularly (more colleges and universities might consider the radical notion of consulting actual teachers on the matter). And as more reformster foolishness infects college ed departments, the problem of Useless Training only becomes worse. So this is absolutely a matter that needs to be examined and discussed, but the method should be something more rigorous than collecting some commencement brochures and course syllabi and sitting in an office making ill-supported guesses about what these random slips of paper mean.

And yet I feel in my bones that soon enough I'll be reading main stream media accounts of the important "findings" of this significant "research." Talk about your easy A.

Green Dot Offers View of Alternate Universe

Say hello to Marco Petruzzi, CEO of Green Dot Public Schools. Today he made his first blog entry at Green Dot's Website of Bloggy Goodness.

If you're unfamiliar with the Green Dot charter chain, I can tell you that it's one more fine example of the modern charter movement, depending on student skimming, political connections, and the pushing aside of public schools, as well as demonstrating the ways in which a non-profit can be used to generate profits. Petruzzi himself came to the charter world from a partnership at Bain, and makes sure that he himself is well paid for his great-hearted work for the poor. If you want a long, hard look at Green Dot from an insider, try this piece which notes both their liberal use of TFA staffing and their spectacularly bad teacher retention issues. Read here for a discussion of their "issues" with students with special needs.

So the fact that he bills himself as the CEO of a "public" school lets us know right off the bat that we have entered some sort of alternate universe. I must be sure to let my superintendent know that she is missing out by not calling herself "CEO" and setting her own ginormous salary.

Petruzzi, contemplating his entry into blogland, decides that he will tackle some Big Questions. So let's see how these Big Questions are answered in Petruzzi's alternate universe.

A Very Little History

Before the 1980's, public education and the economy fit hand in glove. Manufacturing and service jobs provided "reasonable, if not lavish" middle class lives (thanks to those unions). Upper class students went to college. Poor students did not. And poor, lower class students often ended up in crappy jobs.

In our universe, these sorts of trends were the result of many socio-economic trends, from a loss of cheap energy to the outsourcing of jobs to save corporate a buck. In Petruzzi's universe, there was only one reason for the spread in inequity-- "We failed to ask why a public school system intended to create equal access to opportunity consistently failed low-income students and minorities." Yuppers-- in Petruuziverse, nobody was screwing with access to opportunity except those damn failing schools.

The Birth of "Ed Reform" (I once went out with his sister, Susie Reform)

Blah blah blah "Nation at Risk."

By 2020, two-thirds of jobs will require a college degree. Yet our education system maintains a college completion rate well below 40%, with clear and dramatic differences between ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. Despite all our advances, the historic concepts of “class” and “race” still predetermine a student’s outcomes.

Again, in this universe this might be a good prelude to a serious discussion about growing income gaps, the unbalanced distribution of wealth, the move from a Maker economy to a Bean Counter and Investment Bankster economy, not to mention of a deep and difficult conversation about how class and race shape the American experience. But no-- there's only one factor to discuss.

So why is it so controversial to readjust our education system to give our students a real shot at succeeding in the rapidly emerging knowledge-economy? And why is it still so controversial to challenge the clear socio-economic inequity of access to those opportunities?

Answer in our universe: it's not, really, unless you insist on pretending that the education system is somehow the cause of the tidal wave of inequity and not one of the many institutions that's caught in the crushing watery wall of onslaught.


A Call for Unity

Can't we all just get along. Petruzzi thinks we should stop saying that union members only care about their jobs and reformsters only want to make a buck. It is not clear whether he is trying to argue that both those things are actually true.

Aren’t we all “reformers” to some degree? Don’t we all want to improve the system for the benefit of students? Can’t the continuing debate about methodology be one of honesty and mutual respect?

These are good questions. Unfortunately, in this universe it certainly appears that the answer to the second question is, "no." When you're using political connections to smash public schools and doing your best to turn teaching inside your own schools into a low-paying low-skills temp job, it's hard to feel the waves of love and respect.

I agree that an atmosphere of mutual respect is a good thing, and there are reformsters I actually respect even as I believe they're wrong about almost anything. But too many reformsters have displayed an attitude of zero respect for teachers from the first moment they showed up on the scene, shouldering aside teachers with accusations that public schools sucked and teachers were the problem. And Green Dot's record of love and respect for public education and the teachers who woirk there is not great. So pardon me for being standoffish until I have reason not to be.

The Challenges of Reform

Oh, boy. In the Petruzziverse, reform "has unleashed a wave of innovations that have jolted the current system and forced it to confront some hard truths." Um, name one. Charters were billed as laboratories of educational innovation, like a scholastic space program. But as yet, we cannot point to a single solitary development, not so much as a jar of educational Tang, that made the rest of the education world sit up and say, "Wow! Slice us off a piece of that." Nothing.

There have also been, apparently, "talented and passionate individuals," and I think it's just as well he didn't name names. Petruzzi admits that some ideas didn't pan out (in his universe "some" and "all" are apparently synonyms). And here's a fun quote: "Some talented individuals have failed to make the announced progress with students." I bet back at Bain, when corporate bosses of companies they were invested in "failed to make the announced progress," that was an occasion for laughter and parties.

Petruzzi objects to having these failures called failures.

Or, even worse, there is an outcry that we are “experimenting” on children’s futures. Nothing infuriates me more. Allowing low-income students of color to languish in a system that fails them generation after generation is NEVER a preferable choice to the uncertainty of a noble attempt to change such students’ life trajectories!

See, when the public school does it, it's okay to call it a failure. And experimenting on poor kids is okay because A) they're poor kids and B) you're thinking noble thoughts while you do it.

The Charter Movement

Now here's a fun new argument. See, in Petruzziverse, he's learned a cool thing- students are not all the same. And I'm trying not to be too dismissive, but seriously, dude-- this is like being back in a freshman dorm room listening to Melanie Potter explain how she suddenly realized that an atom could be like, you know, a little solar system. And did you ever realize that water is, like, wet?

This is the most entertaining brand of ego-- if I just figured something out, I must be the first person to ever figure it out!

The idea is that charters can provide variety better than a big school district. This must be another way that things are backwards over there, because over here, the fact that a large school has ten English teachers means there are ten ways to learn English in that building; unless, of course, you force them all to teach to the same stupid script and follow the same cementified standards, so thanks for helping argue against Ed Reform's Common Core, Mr. Petruzzi.

Petruzzi is once again claiming that charters are engines of transformational innovation, so I will once again ask-- name one. Just one.

Embrace Complexity

In the Petruzziverse, Green Dot has "always embraced the complexity and messiness of ed reform," and I don't want to diss complexity and messiness (I'm very attached to them, as students in my room can tell you) but do you suppose that reform has been so messy and complex is because so many of the people running it don't know what the hell they're doing but just figured that because they could be a partner in a hedge fund they could certainly manage a school after all how hard can it be?

But he is proud that Green Dot has focused on the big problem schools, because I guess they did that out of nobility and not because low performing schools are low hanging fruit for privatizers, like in this universe. He thinks LAUSD and the President totally got it right when they called on charters to focus on the lowest schools and so that's why they took on those schools and this is where I would expect the stories about how they totally turned those places around, but, um, no... nope. No such story here. Probably a first-time blogger rookie mistake. Oh, hell, I'll give him a break here. He could have just lied to us, and he didn't, so that's kind of a win for both universes.

Join Us

This is the work that Green Dot is interested in doing. This is how we’re interested in speaking about the complexities of education and sharing the lessons as we learn from them. This is the point of our blog.

We hope you join us as we explore our successes and our struggles, with honesty and transparency.

I probably won't. Alternate universes are hard on my brain (they make it all ouchy) and this particular alternate universe seems pretty far removed from our own. But it's always fun to have a new neighbor in the edubloggoverse. We'll see what these folks come up with next.

The Courts Speak On Education

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.

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.

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-fueled extortion 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.

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.

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??" 

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: