One of the premise of reformster policy is the Myth of the Magic Cabinet.
Apparently most teachers in most schools have one-- a big secret filing cabinet, wrapped in camouflage and stuffed with fabulous lessons. These are magical lessons, amazing lessons, lessons that can turn the dullest student into a blinding beacon of wisdom and understanding. Exposure to these lessons would turn every student into college material, or at the very least, math whizzes and reading geniuses. These lessons would even erase all effects of learning and developmental disabilities. It is even rumored that they can make the dead rise and cure cancer.
And yet, the teachers who possess these magic filing cabinet refuse to use them.
Authorities are not certain why. Some suspect that the teachers are holding out for more cash. "I will open my magic filing cabinet," they say, "when I can make serious money from it. After all, I became a teacher in order to make serious money."
Other teachers reportedly say, "I just don't feel threatened enough. If my job were riding on it, I might open the magic filing cabinet, but I just can't really get interested in teaching unless I'm seriously threatened." (One wonders what sort of fearsome threats forced those individuals to go to teacher school in the first place.)
Of course, authorities don't believe all teachers have magic cabinets. They're pretty sure that some are just stupid, unable to teach or dress themselves or come in out the rain. Those teachers just need precise instructions to follow (which is frankly easier than cajoling them to open the magic filing cabinet).
But mostly reformsters recognize that teachers could teach all students well if they wanted to but that, like the members of some educational Illuminati, they have gone into the teaching profession to hide the secrets of education. That's why we must offer them the incentives of merit pay and the threats of accountability systems with no job protections. Because if we keep pushing them, maybe teachers will finally open their magic filing cabinets.
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Human Cogs
I'm sitting in the terminal at the Pittsburgh Airport, which this morning isn't terribly crowded. I'm a fretful, infrequent traveler, so when none of the disasters I allow time for actually happen, I end up with terminal time on my hands.
Flying always reminds me of how dehumanizing systems can be. An airport is a place filled with customers who are at times actually treated like barely tolerable nuisances. There is a system at work here, and the expectation is that humans will line up and be proper cogs.
People deal with that in many ways. Those required to enforce the system can put a human face on it, or show their annoyance with the cogs that won't behave or simply aren't familiar with their coggy roles. Not knowing what you're supposed to do is one of the great unpardonable.
Pittsburgh has, in my experience, one of the nicer groups of TSA agents. But then, I'm a reasonably uninteresting looking middle aged white guy. Most of the people I encounter in an airport, from airline workers to food sellers, treat me reasonably well. Plus, as a teacher, I'm pretty good at adapting to the rhythm of a place built on rules. I can see that brown and black guys, particularly middle-easterny looking brown guys, don't always get the same kind treatment, and it's fascinating to me that systems supposedly built on treating people like identical cogs can very easily incorporate systemic nuances and tricks for treating cogs very differently.
I can also see the effects on the cogs. While some people can adapt a friendly open approach, or strike up a connection with a travel buddy, mostly traveling seems to foster the same warmth and community as a busy Manhattan sidewalk. People are tense anyway, particularly those who don't travel often, and air travel fosters an atmosphere of scarcity. I've taken to traveling with a checked bag and only my personal backpack to carry on, because not having to compete for overhead bin space reduces my boarding stress by 1000%. There's not enough space, enough time, enough kindness, enough slack to go around, and contrary to some free-market fans, the competition does not bring out the best in people.
I have had many pleasant travel experiences, and I read that great piece about coming together at an airport terminal (I would link to it, but I'm on a tablet right now and it's just not going to happen), and I completely believe it. There are certain moments when. People insist on asserting their humanity in the face of the machine, and you can't assert your humanity without recognizing the humanity of the people around you.
I have no complaints, sitting here. This kind of travel reminds me how many of my "problems" are first world problems. I'm fortunate that I have a demeanor, background, and skin color that make these sorts of adventures pretty free and easy.
But airport terminals always remind me what a fine line separates an institutional system that supports and serves people from one that grinds them down and beats them up. It is such a little thing--a kind word, a recognition of shared humanity, a piece of public art, a valuing of the needs of humans over the "needs" of the system.
I think about all of this in particular because I'm headed to Seattle to meet my first grandson who is only about seventeen days old and not very interested in the deeper philosophical underpinnings of human systems, but will one day have to deal with whatever we have built for his generation.
Flying always reminds me of how dehumanizing systems can be. An airport is a place filled with customers who are at times actually treated like barely tolerable nuisances. There is a system at work here, and the expectation is that humans will line up and be proper cogs.
People deal with that in many ways. Those required to enforce the system can put a human face on it, or show their annoyance with the cogs that won't behave or simply aren't familiar with their coggy roles. Not knowing what you're supposed to do is one of the great unpardonable.
Pittsburgh has, in my experience, one of the nicer groups of TSA agents. But then, I'm a reasonably uninteresting looking middle aged white guy. Most of the people I encounter in an airport, from airline workers to food sellers, treat me reasonably well. Plus, as a teacher, I'm pretty good at adapting to the rhythm of a place built on rules. I can see that brown and black guys, particularly middle-easterny looking brown guys, don't always get the same kind treatment, and it's fascinating to me that systems supposedly built on treating people like identical cogs can very easily incorporate systemic nuances and tricks for treating cogs very differently.
I can also see the effects on the cogs. While some people can adapt a friendly open approach, or strike up a connection with a travel buddy, mostly traveling seems to foster the same warmth and community as a busy Manhattan sidewalk. People are tense anyway, particularly those who don't travel often, and air travel fosters an atmosphere of scarcity. I've taken to traveling with a checked bag and only my personal backpack to carry on, because not having to compete for overhead bin space reduces my boarding stress by 1000%. There's not enough space, enough time, enough kindness, enough slack to go around, and contrary to some free-market fans, the competition does not bring out the best in people.
I have had many pleasant travel experiences, and I read that great piece about coming together at an airport terminal (I would link to it, but I'm on a tablet right now and it's just not going to happen), and I completely believe it. There are certain moments when. People insist on asserting their humanity in the face of the machine, and you can't assert your humanity without recognizing the humanity of the people around you.
I have no complaints, sitting here. This kind of travel reminds me how many of my "problems" are first world problems. I'm fortunate that I have a demeanor, background, and skin color that make these sorts of adventures pretty free and easy.
But airport terminals always remind me what a fine line separates an institutional system that supports and serves people from one that grinds them down and beats them up. It is such a little thing--a kind word, a recognition of shared humanity, a piece of public art, a valuing of the needs of humans over the "needs" of the system.
I think about all of this in particular because I'm headed to Seattle to meet my first grandson who is only about seventeen days old and not very interested in the deeper philosophical underpinnings of human systems, but will one day have to deal with whatever we have built for his generation.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Common Core Testing Ignores Common Core
Some commentators applauded me for giving it to Common Core writing the other day. But in all fairness to the Core, the standardized testing that is being used to beat students, teachers and schools into submission, often completely fails to test the Common Core at all. One of the gigantic Jabba the Hutt sized fantasies pushed by reformsters is the one where they say, "See these standards over here? This Standardized Test will totally whether we're meeting those standards or not."
There are two failure points between the anchor standards and the tests themselves.
Anchor standards? Those are the broader, more global final destination of the standards, the Stuff of which College and Career Ready Dreams are made. They lead us to the grade-specific standards within the Core, and let's just say that often something is terribly, terribly lost in the translation. But that's a whole other post for a whole other day.
The second failure point is the one at which the grade-specific standard is somehow "measured" by a bubble test-- excuse me! we're totally past bubble testing-- a point and click question. Reformsters blithely assume/insist/pretend that nothing is lost, and that the standardized tests accurately measure if students are in line with the anchor standards or not.
But let's perform a little thought experiment. Let's look at the twelve anchor standards for writing, and let's imagine how we would assess those standards, and see if we imagine anything that looks at all like the mass-produced standardized tests currently serving as the pointy stick in the eye of education.
Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
First we'll need a substantive topic or text, so, a text of some length and complexity. Any analysis and claim-making will require either some prior knowledge about the topic, or the opportunity to acquire that knowledge. So from beginning of the topic/text intro to the end of handing in the essay, I'd expect to spend at least a week. "Valid," "relevant" and "sufficient" are all subjective judgments and therefor would have to be made by somebody very familiar with the topic/text. After all-- how do you know an observation about existential angst in Moby Dick is valid or not unless you're familir with both existential angst and Moby Dick?
Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
Again, how can you evaluate this skill without having the student do this very thing. The "accurately" as well as the "effective" again require expertise on the reader's part in order to assess.
Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences.
Big wig lingo for "tell a good story." "Effective," "well-chosen," and "well-structured" are all subjective calls. Would you rather read Hemmingway, Dickens, Studs Terkel, or Carl Sagan?
Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
A difficult artificial task, as we are either writing for an imaginary audience, in which case we'd better hope we imagine it the same way the test-makers do, or we are writing for our real audience, either a minimum-wage test-scorer in a assessment sweat shop, or, God help us, a computer. What if the development or organization that's most appropriate is many, many pages?
Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.
A great nod to the process writing approach, which I actually believe in. To properly assess this will again take a least a week. Editing and revising thirty seconds after writing is really just a more involved first draft technique.
Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.
I'm stumped. I don't even know how I would imaginarily assess this. You could, I suppose, use the popular on-line course technique of requiring the student to start X discussion threads and respond in Y others, because that always leads to scintillating authentic conversation. Again, there's a time frame here that I find daunting for standardized assessment.
Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
Once again, how could you possibly reduce this to a mass-produced, mass-taken, mass-scored assessment? I suppose you could tell every single student to get out her netbook and research ferrets right now, but I'm afraid the infrastructure demands alone would make this a no-win.
Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.
Also, lead a large angel square dance on the head of a pin. This will be an assessment that takes several days and is held in a library? It surely won't be assessed by listing several resource excerpts and requiring students to select the "correct" information from each of the mini-sources. It's an admirable standard, but it is completely unassessable in a standardized test.
Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
At this point, I believe the full assessment will take roughly three months.
Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.
No, never mind. It will take all year.
It's the same problem, over and over and over again-- the standards have to assessed by someone whose professional judgment is equal to the task of dealing with highly subjective measures, while the activities involved are time-consuming and very open-ended. If I look at the writing strand of the CCSS, and I look at any of the High Stakes Standardized Tests out there, I can confidently state that those tests measure exactly NONE of these standards. Those tests have nothing at all to do with these standards. These standards might as well say "Student will spin straw into gold and use the gold to knit flipper mittens for the Loch Ness Monster," because the high stakes standardized tests are testing other things entirely.
Yes, I could lead a spirited argument about the standards themselves, but that's another post. Today, I want to underline one simple idea-- when reformsters say that test results tell us how students are doing on these standards, they are big lying liars who lie large lies.
There are two failure points between the anchor standards and the tests themselves.
Anchor standards? Those are the broader, more global final destination of the standards, the Stuff of which College and Career Ready Dreams are made. They lead us to the grade-specific standards within the Core, and let's just say that often something is terribly, terribly lost in the translation. But that's a whole other post for a whole other day.
The second failure point is the one at which the grade-specific standard is somehow "measured" by a bubble test-- excuse me! we're totally past bubble testing-- a point and click question. Reformsters blithely assume/insist/pretend that nothing is lost, and that the standardized tests accurately measure if students are in line with the anchor standards or not.
But let's perform a little thought experiment. Let's look at the twelve anchor standards for writing, and let's imagine how we would assess those standards, and see if we imagine anything that looks at all like the mass-produced standardized tests currently serving as the pointy stick in the eye of education.
Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
First we'll need a substantive topic or text, so, a text of some length and complexity. Any analysis and claim-making will require either some prior knowledge about the topic, or the opportunity to acquire that knowledge. So from beginning of the topic/text intro to the end of handing in the essay, I'd expect to spend at least a week. "Valid," "relevant" and "sufficient" are all subjective judgments and therefor would have to be made by somebody very familiar with the topic/text. After all-- how do you know an observation about existential angst in Moby Dick is valid or not unless you're familir with both existential angst and Moby Dick?
Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
Again, how can you evaluate this skill without having the student do this very thing. The "accurately" as well as the "effective" again require expertise on the reader's part in order to assess.
Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences.
Big wig lingo for "tell a good story." "Effective," "well-chosen," and "well-structured" are all subjective calls. Would you rather read Hemmingway, Dickens, Studs Terkel, or Carl Sagan?
Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
A difficult artificial task, as we are either writing for an imaginary audience, in which case we'd better hope we imagine it the same way the test-makers do, or we are writing for our real audience, either a minimum-wage test-scorer in a assessment sweat shop, or, God help us, a computer. What if the development or organization that's most appropriate is many, many pages?
Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.
A great nod to the process writing approach, which I actually believe in. To properly assess this will again take a least a week. Editing and revising thirty seconds after writing is really just a more involved first draft technique.
Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.
I'm stumped. I don't even know how I would imaginarily assess this. You could, I suppose, use the popular on-line course technique of requiring the student to start X discussion threads and respond in Y others, because that always leads to scintillating authentic conversation. Again, there's a time frame here that I find daunting for standardized assessment.
Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
Once again, how could you possibly reduce this to a mass-produced, mass-taken, mass-scored assessment? I suppose you could tell every single student to get out her netbook and research ferrets right now, but I'm afraid the infrastructure demands alone would make this a no-win.
Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.
Also, lead a large angel square dance on the head of a pin. This will be an assessment that takes several days and is held in a library? It surely won't be assessed by listing several resource excerpts and requiring students to select the "correct" information from each of the mini-sources. It's an admirable standard, but it is completely unassessable in a standardized test.
Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
At this point, I believe the full assessment will take roughly three months.
Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.
No, never mind. It will take all year.
It's the same problem, over and over and over again-- the standards have to assessed by someone whose professional judgment is equal to the task of dealing with highly subjective measures, while the activities involved are time-consuming and very open-ended. If I look at the writing strand of the CCSS, and I look at any of the High Stakes Standardized Tests out there, I can confidently state that those tests measure exactly NONE of these standards. Those tests have nothing at all to do with these standards. These standards might as well say "Student will spin straw into gold and use the gold to knit flipper mittens for the Loch Ness Monster," because the high stakes standardized tests are testing other things entirely.
Yes, I could lead a spirited argument about the standards themselves, but that's another post. Today, I want to underline one simple idea-- when reformsters say that test results tell us how students are doing on these standards, they are big lying liars who lie large lies.
Monday, December 1, 2014
Forbes Fab Five by Five (Part II)
In our last installment, Forbes called a summit of Many Very Rich People to lay out what it would cost to fulfill the Must Have list for remaking American education. Now, we're going to sit around with some alleged representatives of education stakeholders. And we should note that it's happening in the department of Forbes.
Paul Tudor Jones (founder of the Robin Hood Foundation) will be directing traffic as Andy Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Kay Henderson (DC school chancellor) jaw about this. I should note that I'll be walking you through the Short and Marginally Sweeter transcript; apparently there is a longer version, but I just can't bring myself to go there.
You can read the account of what Forbes decided US education Really Needed at this post. The basic list of five critical elements of an educational overhaul are:
1) Teacher efficacy-- recruit best and brightest
2) Universal Pre-K-- because childhood is too long
3) School leadership-- give principals greater power over staff
4) Blended learning-- broadband and computers for everybody
5) Common Core/ College Readiness-- insert all classic baloney arguments here
So, let's begin.
Jones: "We have literally, the pillars of education in the US" here today. Our first question is a request to comment on the five...well, I guess we're going to call them Big Ideas. Which is biggest?
Weingarten goes first. Sigh. She thinks the five big ideas are really big and must all get done together. She sticks up for the Common Core some more, as if the whole foundational assumption of Common Core is that Weingarten's constituents can't do their jobs. I've made the same complaint about my own NEA many times-- would it be too much to ask that the head of a teachers' union stick up for teachers. Today, apparently, it is.
Henderson thinks that control of teaching staff and Common Core are the secret of DC's imaginary leap forward.
Arne thinks all five are swell, and all must be done at the same time and at scale. There are days when I think Arne is just a life-sized See 'N Say-- pull a string and some combination of his usual word salad comes out. Name checks his favorite Places Where Things Are Going Great (DC, Indiana, Tennessee). Thinks what's needed are leaders who will buck their own party orthodoxy-- so, Republicans who will cheerfully welcome federal control and Democrats who will screw teachers and public schools. Which brings us to
Cuomo agrees that we need all five. He decries the dual system of good schools for some and bad schools for others, as if he hasn't been working hard to spread that two-tier system. Andy says the big problem is that we're moving too slow and we're okay with that. Guess that's one more hint about what NY teachers can look forward to, and soon.
Jones asks which of the five can be controlled, and which can't. Weingarten makes noises about co-operating on local level, and Henderson allows that she has great power but she Gets Things Done when she works with her union partners, gets money from her government partners, and gets even more money from philanthropists.
Duncan goes with great teachers, great principals, high standards. Then someone pulls his string and something comes out from some alternate universe:
We found obviously that federal mandates don’t work well. Where we’ve had the most success is around incentives. And lots of carrots. Not mandate, not have sticks, but put money out there where we can to reward excellence–and that’s a hard sell on both sides in Congress. They’d much prefer straight formula funding. So we’re always fighting to have just a little bit of money to put out there as carrots.
Wait! What? I'm pretty sure the entire foundation of the waiver-based RttT system is sticks. Sticks to thump on states, evaluatory sticks to thump teachers, mandated testing, mandated school closings, do what we tell you or we'll let the wratch of NCLB rain down on your head-- maybe Arne just doesn't know what the difference is between a carrot and a stick. I mean, they're both shaped about the same. Maybe he's just completely confused.
Cuomo observes that he didn't get anything done by being nice, so he made everybody's money contingent on how well they follow his orders and he hasn't had any problems since. Money buys compliance! He has it all figured out, except maybe the part where purchasing compliance gets you nice paperwork and reports and people who are undercutting you every single chance they get. It gets you a mandate that never arrives because you were only able to buy just enough support to win, but not enough to win in a Presidential timbre manner.
Jones wants to know how philanthropists. Randi says "we're starting to learn what works" and this whole sad performance is one more example of how it's useless to get a seat at the table if you're not going to say anything useful once you get there. Honestly-- if you erased the names and titles, you would never read this article and guess that one of the participants was the head of the second-biggest teacher's union in the US.
Henderson gives Arne some strokes for being the only government guy who will fund innovation, and I think we can all agree that using a bureaucratic waiver maneuver to create new laws without the benefit of Congress is pretty innovative. The guillotine was also hot new stuff in its day.
Arne will now deliver more History from an Alternative Universe:
Having a common way of measuring success is just so basic and fundamental to all of your businesses–that’s a radical concept in education. We need to get to that point of having a high bar and having clear ways of measuring how everybody is stacking up against that bar. Under No Child Left Behind, about 20 states dummied-down their standards, they reduced their standards. Why? To make politicians of both parties look good. It was terrible for children. Not one person challenged those politicians. Until [philanthropic leaders] and the broader citizenry hold politicians accountable, we’ll continue to be mired in mediocrity.
It's true. In thirty-plus years of teaching, I have never measured success in any manner. Just throw darts at a board and call it a day. But states did not dummy down under NCLB to make politicians look good. They did it to save their states' school from punishment under the heavy brainless hand of top-down federal mandates. They did it to avoid an unavoidable punishment that was inevitable because the feds set standards that nobody believed could be met, but they set them anyway. The dummying down was a completely predictable result of the perverse incentives built into a unsustainable punishment-based test-driven system created by educational amateurs in Washington DC. Dammit, Arne, if you want to learn a lesson from NCLB, learn that one, and learn it in some manner other than repeating the same damn mistakes.
As I said, there's a longer version of this somewhere. But as much as I love you all, that is a hit I'm not ready to take for the team.
Paul Tudor Jones (founder of the Robin Hood Foundation) will be directing traffic as Andy Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Kay Henderson (DC school chancellor) jaw about this. I should note that I'll be walking you through the Short and Marginally Sweeter transcript; apparently there is a longer version, but I just can't bring myself to go there.
You can read the account of what Forbes decided US education Really Needed at this post. The basic list of five critical elements of an educational overhaul are:
1) Teacher efficacy-- recruit best and brightest
2) Universal Pre-K-- because childhood is too long
3) School leadership-- give principals greater power over staff
4) Blended learning-- broadband and computers for everybody
5) Common Core/ College Readiness-- insert all classic baloney arguments here
So, let's begin.
Jones: "We have literally, the pillars of education in the US" here today. Our first question is a request to comment on the five...well, I guess we're going to call them Big Ideas. Which is biggest?
Weingarten goes first. Sigh. She thinks the five big ideas are really big and must all get done together. She sticks up for the Common Core some more, as if the whole foundational assumption of Common Core is that Weingarten's constituents can't do their jobs. I've made the same complaint about my own NEA many times-- would it be too much to ask that the head of a teachers' union stick up for teachers. Today, apparently, it is.
Henderson thinks that control of teaching staff and Common Core are the secret of DC's imaginary leap forward.
Arne thinks all five are swell, and all must be done at the same time and at scale. There are days when I think Arne is just a life-sized See 'N Say-- pull a string and some combination of his usual word salad comes out. Name checks his favorite Places Where Things Are Going Great (DC, Indiana, Tennessee). Thinks what's needed are leaders who will buck their own party orthodoxy-- so, Republicans who will cheerfully welcome federal control and Democrats who will screw teachers and public schools. Which brings us to
Cuomo agrees that we need all five. He decries the dual system of good schools for some and bad schools for others, as if he hasn't been working hard to spread that two-tier system. Andy says the big problem is that we're moving too slow and we're okay with that. Guess that's one more hint about what NY teachers can look forward to, and soon.
Jones asks which of the five can be controlled, and which can't. Weingarten makes noises about co-operating on local level, and Henderson allows that she has great power but she Gets Things Done when she works with her union partners, gets money from her government partners, and gets even more money from philanthropists.
Duncan goes with great teachers, great principals, high standards. Then someone pulls his string and something comes out from some alternate universe:
We found obviously that federal mandates don’t work well. Where we’ve had the most success is around incentives. And lots of carrots. Not mandate, not have sticks, but put money out there where we can to reward excellence–and that’s a hard sell on both sides in Congress. They’d much prefer straight formula funding. So we’re always fighting to have just a little bit of money to put out there as carrots.
Wait! What? I'm pretty sure the entire foundation of the waiver-based RttT system is sticks. Sticks to thump on states, evaluatory sticks to thump teachers, mandated testing, mandated school closings, do what we tell you or we'll let the wratch of NCLB rain down on your head-- maybe Arne just doesn't know what the difference is between a carrot and a stick. I mean, they're both shaped about the same. Maybe he's just completely confused.
Cuomo observes that he didn't get anything done by being nice, so he made everybody's money contingent on how well they follow his orders and he hasn't had any problems since. Money buys compliance! He has it all figured out, except maybe the part where purchasing compliance gets you nice paperwork and reports and people who are undercutting you every single chance they get. It gets you a mandate that never arrives because you were only able to buy just enough support to win, but not enough to win in a Presidential timbre manner.
Jones wants to know how philanthropists. Randi says "we're starting to learn what works" and this whole sad performance is one more example of how it's useless to get a seat at the table if you're not going to say anything useful once you get there. Honestly-- if you erased the names and titles, you would never read this article and guess that one of the participants was the head of the second-biggest teacher's union in the US.
Henderson gives Arne some strokes for being the only government guy who will fund innovation, and I think we can all agree that using a bureaucratic waiver maneuver to create new laws without the benefit of Congress is pretty innovative. The guillotine was also hot new stuff in its day.
Arne will now deliver more History from an Alternative Universe:
Having a common way of measuring success is just so basic and fundamental to all of your businesses–that’s a radical concept in education. We need to get to that point of having a high bar and having clear ways of measuring how everybody is stacking up against that bar. Under No Child Left Behind, about 20 states dummied-down their standards, they reduced their standards. Why? To make politicians of both parties look good. It was terrible for children. Not one person challenged those politicians. Until [philanthropic leaders] and the broader citizenry hold politicians accountable, we’ll continue to be mired in mediocrity.
It's true. In thirty-plus years of teaching, I have never measured success in any manner. Just throw darts at a board and call it a day. But states did not dummy down under NCLB to make politicians look good. They did it to save their states' school from punishment under the heavy brainless hand of top-down federal mandates. They did it to avoid an unavoidable punishment that was inevitable because the feds set standards that nobody believed could be met, but they set them anyway. The dummying down was a completely predictable result of the perverse incentives built into a unsustainable punishment-based test-driven system created by educational amateurs in Washington DC. Dammit, Arne, if you want to learn a lesson from NCLB, learn that one, and learn it in some manner other than repeating the same damn mistakes.
As I said, there's a longer version of this somewhere. But as much as I love you all, that is a hit I'm not ready to take for the team.
Forbes Fab Five By Five (Part I)
The philanthropic fiduciary phenoms at Forbes brought together some eduwhizes to play Pimp My Ride with the US education system. They started with the basic questions-- How much money would it take for a complete refurbishing of the US education system, what would the priorities for such a rebuild be, and how much benefit would accrue from such a redo?
They followed this unicorn-fueled analysis with a roundtable of Educational Leaders; they put that discussion in a separate article, and I'm going to do the same. Part I will look just at their master plan, because it's kind of interesting when the Masters of the Universe stop with the soft lights and champagne and Johnny Mathis records and just say straight out what they want to do.
So, first-- let's set our standards really, really low:
We set out to determine the costs and benefits of taking U.S. schoolkids from their middling global rankings to top five in the world, as measured by math scores and rates for high school graduation, college entry and four-year college completion.
That's it. Math scores, grad rates, and college success. Imagine what our education system would look like if those-- and nothing else-- became the goal of US schools. (Spoiler alert-- it wouldn't look much like an actual education system.)
But while our standards may be low, the stakes are really, really high:
The resulting numbers were big. Really big. The investment required to implement all five would run somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.2 trillion, spread over 20 years. Or $310 billion a year in today’s dollars. And the payoff, as calculated by factoring in all those additional, better-skilled high school and college graduates on our national GDP? Almost $225 trillion, spread over an 80-year time horizon, which incorporates an entire generation’s professional achievement.
Where did those numbers come from? But in case you wonder, the cost analysis was overseen by David Steiner, the dean of Hunter College’s School of Education and New York State’s former education commissioner, and Ashley Berner, who works there, too, I guess? They consulted experts in the field (top experts! spared no expense!) For the benefits side of the projection, they used "a formula based on complex modeling by Stanford’s Eric Hanushek that correlates the effect each policy would have on math scores to long-term economic performance and structural economic changes." Then all the numbers were written in unicorn blood on the wings of a gryphon who flew to Narnia and had the figures processed by an army of Jabberwockies. Let's just say that Forbes "projects" that it would cost A Lot of Money, but pay off in Even More Money.
The article also notes that the researchers made many assumptions and skipped over others (e.g. they assumed only recruiting great teachers and not firing crappy ones). So, unicorn blood taken only from unicorns who are left-handed and speak esperanto.
This giant educational pimpage requires, in Forbes' opinion, five major initiatives. Do these, and the US will have oodles of students graduating from our math academies to go finish college. Here we go! And each one comes with a few words from-- well, sponsors? interested rich guys?
Teacher Efficacy
We need to attract the best and the brightest to teaching. We will do it by throwing money at them. That's the plan, backed up by a McKinsey study that estimates (wait-- can you do that? Because I'm thinking scientists could have a lot more fun doing studies if they could just estimate their findings instead of having to find facts and stuff) that a 50% salary increase would result in teachers coming from the top third of college grads (which would be good, because everybody knows that doing well in college and being able to teach in a classroom are exactly the same skill sets).
Each of these categories also comes with numbers about cost and returns and I'm not going to report them because, unicorn's blood. Suffice it to say that each would supposedly cost an incredible amount of money but would return a ridiculously incredible amount of money. Seriously-- is this how rich guys convince other rich guys to invest money, because I'm suddenly feeling even less confident about the underpinnings of our economy.
Our commenter is Larry Robbins, a hedge fund billionaire who wants his kids to have good teachers and thinks the "blunt instrument" of paying everyone more would be swell. Though he also proposes the really interesting idea of exempting top teachers from income tax. Says Robbins, "That would cost less than our subsidies to agriculture, excluding food stamps. It would cost one-third of that which we are spending on wars. Should there not be a war for teachers?"
Universal Pre-K
Get pre-K for every kid in the country. But we need to do more than just add pre-K to schools. For some reason, we'd also need to mess with teacher observation, and of course connecting to the curricular requirements of kindergarten. Because play is for babies. No, seriously. Only infants should be allowed to play.
Comments from J. B. Pritzker, who inherited his billions and who runs Pritzker Children's Initiative and Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development (because philanthropy needs good branding). His comments can be summarized as, "I do not understand the difference between correlation and causation. If a four year old learns more words, he'll stop being poor." Did I mention that Pritzker inherited his money?
School Leadership
Empower principals. Attract higher-level talent by raising salaries 26% (seriously, that's the number, because, you know, 25% wouldn't be enough and 27% would be overkill). "Reform" state laws so that principals have the powers of business leaders and can hire and fire and cook books and sacrifice long-term success for short-term flash. Create principal-training academies, presumably where they can be taught cool business management stuff and not have their heads filled with education nonsense. And not that Forbes loves them some business sense or anything, but they predict a ROI of 5,551x the original investment.
There does not seem to be any question of how giving a principal Icahn-like power might affect that whole recruitment thing. Our guest commenter is John Fisher, who inherited his money and used it to buy the Oakland A's. His educational involvement is a mess of charter baloney. Fun fact about Fisher: the money he inherited was money his father made running the Gap. KIPP founders approached him and said, "It's all about replicating leaders like us," and that sounded about right to the guy who made his millions creating a chain devoted to fashion excellence and quality, so now the Fisher Foundation is a big KIPP financial partner. All of this is so interesting that I completely forgot to pay any attention to anything Fisher has to say about education.
Blended Learning
This is "arming students with computers and delivering rote lessons in part through digital media, personalized and optimized to individual needs and pace, allowing teachers more value-added." Which is great because I end every day thinking, damn, if only I had had more value-added today. I wish it came in a can, like V-8.
This will require broadband everywhere, as well as coaching schools and teachers on how toimplement lesson plan B when the technology fails once again integrate technology in lessons, because computers are magical.
Fred Wilson is a venture capital guy who thinks that blended learning will kill one size fits all learning and give us personalized teaching for each and every kid. And he thinks the FCC E-rate program will totally pay for all this. I hope he does a bit more due diligence when he's managing his venture capital fund.
Common Core/College Readiness
Wonder how CCSS is still hanging in there? One likely answer is that rich guys just love it. "While Common Core has critics on both extremes of the political spectrum, those in the sensible center rightly view high national standards, coupled with tools to achieve success, as a no-brainer." This is unintentionally hilarious to me because I do indeed believe that Common Core makes the most sense if you do in fact have no brain. The Forbes Factoid Squad projects that it will cost $185.4 billion to make CCSS fully happen, but will yield returns of $27.9 trillion. Do you suppose that rich guys smoke really, really good drugs. Laced with unicorn blood?
Michael Bloomberg's daughter Emma (another inheritance billionaire) offers this observation:
Essentially, Common Core is bringing our education system in line with the way the world works today standards intended to help address America’s lagging international tech scores, our inability to produce college and career-ready graduates and the growing inequality in educational opportunity, not just among socioeconomic classes but among states.
It's awesome in its almost complete lack of facts, since CCSS doesn't address most of these things, isn't aligned to anything else in the world, and won't fix some of these problems because they don't exist. But if you get in trouble supporting the Core, don't worry, because Ms. Bloomberg makes a promise:
We ask our elected officials to stick their necks out for our kids, and then we don’t support them when our opponents try to tear them down. They need to know if they do what’s right we’ll be there to make sure they don’t lose their jobs.
And with the kind of money these guys have available, that's no empty promise.
So those are the five pillars of magical refurbishing on the nation's education system. And to discuss how awesome all this is, Forbes has asked Paul Tudor Jones (Robin Hood Foundation) to sit down with Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten, Andy Cuomo, and DC public schools chancellor Kay Henderson. You know this is going to be awesome (even more awesome if you read it while high on unicorn blood).
They followed this unicorn-fueled analysis with a roundtable of Educational Leaders; they put that discussion in a separate article, and I'm going to do the same. Part I will look just at their master plan, because it's kind of interesting when the Masters of the Universe stop with the soft lights and champagne and Johnny Mathis records and just say straight out what they want to do.
So, first-- let's set our standards really, really low:
We set out to determine the costs and benefits of taking U.S. schoolkids from their middling global rankings to top five in the world, as measured by math scores and rates for high school graduation, college entry and four-year college completion.
That's it. Math scores, grad rates, and college success. Imagine what our education system would look like if those-- and nothing else-- became the goal of US schools. (Spoiler alert-- it wouldn't look much like an actual education system.)
But while our standards may be low, the stakes are really, really high:
The resulting numbers were big. Really big. The investment required to implement all five would run somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.2 trillion, spread over 20 years. Or $310 billion a year in today’s dollars. And the payoff, as calculated by factoring in all those additional, better-skilled high school and college graduates on our national GDP? Almost $225 trillion, spread over an 80-year time horizon, which incorporates an entire generation’s professional achievement.
Where did those numbers come from? But in case you wonder, the cost analysis was overseen by David Steiner, the dean of Hunter College’s School of Education and New York State’s former education commissioner, and Ashley Berner, who works there, too, I guess? They consulted experts in the field (top experts! spared no expense!) For the benefits side of the projection, they used "a formula based on complex modeling by Stanford’s Eric Hanushek that correlates the effect each policy would have on math scores to long-term economic performance and structural economic changes." Then all the numbers were written in unicorn blood on the wings of a gryphon who flew to Narnia and had the figures processed by an army of Jabberwockies. Let's just say that Forbes "projects" that it would cost A Lot of Money, but pay off in Even More Money.
The article also notes that the researchers made many assumptions and skipped over others (e.g. they assumed only recruiting great teachers and not firing crappy ones). So, unicorn blood taken only from unicorns who are left-handed and speak esperanto.
This giant educational pimpage requires, in Forbes' opinion, five major initiatives. Do these, and the US will have oodles of students graduating from our math academies to go finish college. Here we go! And each one comes with a few words from-- well, sponsors? interested rich guys?
Teacher Efficacy
We need to attract the best and the brightest to teaching. We will do it by throwing money at them. That's the plan, backed up by a McKinsey study that estimates (wait-- can you do that? Because I'm thinking scientists could have a lot more fun doing studies if they could just estimate their findings instead of having to find facts and stuff) that a 50% salary increase would result in teachers coming from the top third of college grads (which would be good, because everybody knows that doing well in college and being able to teach in a classroom are exactly the same skill sets).
Each of these categories also comes with numbers about cost and returns and I'm not going to report them because, unicorn's blood. Suffice it to say that each would supposedly cost an incredible amount of money but would return a ridiculously incredible amount of money. Seriously-- is this how rich guys convince other rich guys to invest money, because I'm suddenly feeling even less confident about the underpinnings of our economy.
Our commenter is Larry Robbins, a hedge fund billionaire who wants his kids to have good teachers and thinks the "blunt instrument" of paying everyone more would be swell. Though he also proposes the really interesting idea of exempting top teachers from income tax. Says Robbins, "That would cost less than our subsidies to agriculture, excluding food stamps. It would cost one-third of that which we are spending on wars. Should there not be a war for teachers?"
Universal Pre-K
Get pre-K for every kid in the country. But we need to do more than just add pre-K to schools. For some reason, we'd also need to mess with teacher observation, and of course connecting to the curricular requirements of kindergarten. Because play is for babies. No, seriously. Only infants should be allowed to play.
Comments from J. B. Pritzker, who inherited his billions and who runs Pritzker Children's Initiative and Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development (because philanthropy needs good branding). His comments can be summarized as, "I do not understand the difference between correlation and causation. If a four year old learns more words, he'll stop being poor." Did I mention that Pritzker inherited his money?
School Leadership
Empower principals. Attract higher-level talent by raising salaries 26% (seriously, that's the number, because, you know, 25% wouldn't be enough and 27% would be overkill). "Reform" state laws so that principals have the powers of business leaders and can hire and fire and cook books and sacrifice long-term success for short-term flash. Create principal-training academies, presumably where they can be taught cool business management stuff and not have their heads filled with education nonsense. And not that Forbes loves them some business sense or anything, but they predict a ROI of 5,551x the original investment.
There does not seem to be any question of how giving a principal Icahn-like power might affect that whole recruitment thing. Our guest commenter is John Fisher, who inherited his money and used it to buy the Oakland A's. His educational involvement is a mess of charter baloney. Fun fact about Fisher: the money he inherited was money his father made running the Gap. KIPP founders approached him and said, "It's all about replicating leaders like us," and that sounded about right to the guy who made his millions creating a chain devoted to fashion excellence and quality, so now the Fisher Foundation is a big KIPP financial partner. All of this is so interesting that I completely forgot to pay any attention to anything Fisher has to say about education.
Blended Learning
This is "arming students with computers and delivering rote lessons in part through digital media, personalized and optimized to individual needs and pace, allowing teachers more value-added." Which is great because I end every day thinking, damn, if only I had had more value-added today. I wish it came in a can, like V-8.
This will require broadband everywhere, as well as coaching schools and teachers on how to
Fred Wilson is a venture capital guy who thinks that blended learning will kill one size fits all learning and give us personalized teaching for each and every kid. And he thinks the FCC E-rate program will totally pay for all this. I hope he does a bit more due diligence when he's managing his venture capital fund.
Common Core/College Readiness
Wonder how CCSS is still hanging in there? One likely answer is that rich guys just love it. "While Common Core has critics on both extremes of the political spectrum, those in the sensible center rightly view high national standards, coupled with tools to achieve success, as a no-brainer." This is unintentionally hilarious to me because I do indeed believe that Common Core makes the most sense if you do in fact have no brain. The Forbes Factoid Squad projects that it will cost $185.4 billion to make CCSS fully happen, but will yield returns of $27.9 trillion. Do you suppose that rich guys smoke really, really good drugs. Laced with unicorn blood?
Michael Bloomberg's daughter Emma (another inheritance billionaire) offers this observation:
Essentially, Common Core is bringing our education system in line with the way the world works today standards intended to help address America’s lagging international tech scores, our inability to produce college and career-ready graduates and the growing inequality in educational opportunity, not just among socioeconomic classes but among states.
It's awesome in its almost complete lack of facts, since CCSS doesn't address most of these things, isn't aligned to anything else in the world, and won't fix some of these problems because they don't exist. But if you get in trouble supporting the Core, don't worry, because Ms. Bloomberg makes a promise:
We ask our elected officials to stick their necks out for our kids, and then we don’t support them when our opponents try to tear them down. They need to know if they do what’s right we’ll be there to make sure they don’t lose their jobs.
And with the kind of money these guys have available, that's no empty promise.
So those are the five pillars of magical refurbishing on the nation's education system. And to discuss how awesome all this is, Forbes has asked Paul Tudor Jones (Robin Hood Foundation) to sit down with Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten, Andy Cuomo, and DC public schools chancellor Kay Henderson. You know this is going to be awesome (even more awesome if you read it while high on unicorn blood).
Meaning and Standardized Writing
One of the most unsuccessful initiatives of the Great Education Makeover is the attempt to reduce writing to a skill set that can be assessed by a standardized test.
Making language is like making music-- there is definitely a technical component, but at the end of the day, technical mastery is not enough. I can play all the notes on the page and still be boring, lifeless, and unlikely to engage any audience. I can write something that fits the technical definition of an essay, and it can still be a terrible piece of writing.
All writing is problem solving, and like any problem solving activity, the most important step is defining the problem that you intend to solve.
The vast majority of student writing failures are not actually composition failures, but thinking failures. I often tell my students that they are having trouble with an assignment because they are starting with the wrong question. They are asking "what can I write to satisfy this assignment" or "how can I fill up this piece of paper" or "what can I use to fill in five paragraph-sized blanks," and these are all the wrong question to start with.
The correct problem that writing should solve is "How can I communicate what I want to communicate in a meaningful way?"
I choose "meaningful" because it's a fuzzy word. We may find meaning in being moved emotionally or challenged intellectually. Whatever meaning may be, our goal is to create an experience for another human (and because writing is also time travel, that other human might even be our future self).
There are certainly technical aspects to this operation. In fact, much of the history of literature is the history of writers inventing new techniques and forms to better communicate meaningfully. But technical skills by themselves are not only meaningless, but have no purpose if not used for some meaningful pursuit. That's why you don't pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch great musicians run scales and warm-up exercises.
The standardized testing approach to writing, both in "writing" assessments and in the open-ended response format now creeping into other tests, gets virtually nothing right at all. Nothing. The goal is itself a meager one-- let's just measure student technical skill-- and even that is not measured particularly well. Test writing is the opposite of good writing. The problem the student is trying to solve is not "How do I create a meaningful expression" but "How do I provide what the test scorer wants to see" or "What words can I use to fill up this space."
Students are supposed to react to the prompt or stimulus (yes, I've seen that word used, as if students are lab rats) with the appropriate response, and their response should not be side tracked by any attempt on their part to make the response meaningful. It is literally meant to be meaningless, as if stripping meaning from writing somehow leaves us with pure, measurable technique. This is like somehow sucking the bones from a human being on the theory that without the skeleton in place, we can get a better pure measurement of muscle tone.
Every teacher of writing has been saying the same thing for years-- standardized writing tests encourage and reward bad writing. "So what?" comes my least favorite response. "If they're really good writers, they ought to be able to fake the testing stuff, right?" Wrong on two counts.
First, while great writers may be able to "fake it," less great writers may not, and all writers run the risk of becoming hornswoggled into believing that Bad Writing is really the ideal. "Faking it" assumes some understanding that we're imitating something bogus. I'm concerned about students who don't recognized the bogus nature of test writing.
Second-- even if they can fake it, that's not a good thing. This is like saying that people who are really good at kissing their spouses would probably be equally good at kissing any random stranger. And, well-- do we really want anybody to be good at that? If the best kiss is one filled with meaning and significance, then why would we want to send the message that good kissing is just a matter of the right pucker and moisture and what it actually means is not even on the table. Who cares whose lips you're smooshing up against as long as your technique is good? Who cares about context or purpose or intent or any of the rest of it? Just pucker up and smoosh facial areas.
Sure, there are technical minimums that have to be reached. "Don't smoosh your lips against your partner's eyeball" is probably good technical kissing advice. "Don't write sentences composed entirely of prepositions" is also good advice. But as the ever-awesome Les Perelman has repeatedly demonstrated, standardized tests have a huge tolerance for meaningless gibberish that is technically proficient.
I remained convinced that it is absolutely impossible to create a useful cheap standardized test for writing. The repeated attempts to do so are a destructive expression of a nearly nihilistic impulse, the thinking of people who believe a picture of a bear rug is as good as a bear.
Making language is like making music-- there is definitely a technical component, but at the end of the day, technical mastery is not enough. I can play all the notes on the page and still be boring, lifeless, and unlikely to engage any audience. I can write something that fits the technical definition of an essay, and it can still be a terrible piece of writing.
All writing is problem solving, and like any problem solving activity, the most important step is defining the problem that you intend to solve.
The vast majority of student writing failures are not actually composition failures, but thinking failures. I often tell my students that they are having trouble with an assignment because they are starting with the wrong question. They are asking "what can I write to satisfy this assignment" or "how can I fill up this piece of paper" or "what can I use to fill in five paragraph-sized blanks," and these are all the wrong question to start with.
The correct problem that writing should solve is "How can I communicate what I want to communicate in a meaningful way?"
I choose "meaningful" because it's a fuzzy word. We may find meaning in being moved emotionally or challenged intellectually. Whatever meaning may be, our goal is to create an experience for another human (and because writing is also time travel, that other human might even be our future self).
There are certainly technical aspects to this operation. In fact, much of the history of literature is the history of writers inventing new techniques and forms to better communicate meaningfully. But technical skills by themselves are not only meaningless, but have no purpose if not used for some meaningful pursuit. That's why you don't pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch great musicians run scales and warm-up exercises.
The standardized testing approach to writing, both in "writing" assessments and in the open-ended response format now creeping into other tests, gets virtually nothing right at all. Nothing. The goal is itself a meager one-- let's just measure student technical skill-- and even that is not measured particularly well. Test writing is the opposite of good writing. The problem the student is trying to solve is not "How do I create a meaningful expression" but "How do I provide what the test scorer wants to see" or "What words can I use to fill up this space."
Students are supposed to react to the prompt or stimulus (yes, I've seen that word used, as if students are lab rats) with the appropriate response, and their response should not be side tracked by any attempt on their part to make the response meaningful. It is literally meant to be meaningless, as if stripping meaning from writing somehow leaves us with pure, measurable technique. This is like somehow sucking the bones from a human being on the theory that without the skeleton in place, we can get a better pure measurement of muscle tone.
Every teacher of writing has been saying the same thing for years-- standardized writing tests encourage and reward bad writing. "So what?" comes my least favorite response. "If they're really good writers, they ought to be able to fake the testing stuff, right?" Wrong on two counts.
First, while great writers may be able to "fake it," less great writers may not, and all writers run the risk of becoming hornswoggled into believing that Bad Writing is really the ideal. "Faking it" assumes some understanding that we're imitating something bogus. I'm concerned about students who don't recognized the bogus nature of test writing.
Second-- even if they can fake it, that's not a good thing. This is like saying that people who are really good at kissing their spouses would probably be equally good at kissing any random stranger. And, well-- do we really want anybody to be good at that? If the best kiss is one filled with meaning and significance, then why would we want to send the message that good kissing is just a matter of the right pucker and moisture and what it actually means is not even on the table. Who cares whose lips you're smooshing up against as long as your technique is good? Who cares about context or purpose or intent or any of the rest of it? Just pucker up and smoosh facial areas.
Sure, there are technical minimums that have to be reached. "Don't smoosh your lips against your partner's eyeball" is probably good technical kissing advice. "Don't write sentences composed entirely of prepositions" is also good advice. But as the ever-awesome Les Perelman has repeatedly demonstrated, standardized tests have a huge tolerance for meaningless gibberish that is technically proficient.
I remained convinced that it is absolutely impossible to create a useful cheap standardized test for writing. The repeated attempts to do so are a destructive expression of a nearly nihilistic impulse, the thinking of people who believe a picture of a bear rug is as good as a bear.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Mystifying the Personality
One concept I've borrowed from Thomas Newkirk's excellent "Speaking Back to the Common Core" is the idea of mystification.
We are already seeing at work a process I call “mystification”—taking a practice that was once viewed as within the normal competence of a teacher and making it seem so technical and advanced that a new commercial product (or form of consultation) is necessary.
He called that one in 2013, and we've seen it ramp up steadily since. We've seen it used for consulting (you need to hire somebody to come in and show your teachers how to "unpack" the standards) and for testing (parents and teachers have no clue how the student is doing until they see standardized test results). We even see it as a textbook marketing strategy (you'd better have somebody from the publisher come train your teachers in how to use the new textbook series because, you know, textbooks are hard, and they're only teachers).
But all of that was mystification of the curriculum and content. Reformsters are inching across a bold new boundary when it comes to mystification. They are mystifying the personality of children.
The Rise of Non-Cognitive Skills
We've been playing with NCS for a while, most notably with the new science of Grittology. Our basic premise is that there are non-content skills or abilities or traits that determine a child's future success just as well or better than the child's ability to perform like a well-trained monkey on a standardized test. Sometimes we fall back on old words like "character," but most of the discussion has been in the vein of the Brookings report that asserts that A) character is important and B) poor people don't have it so C) that's why they're poor.
But these discussions of NCS have generally been about blame. Students fail because they lack character and grit, so it's pretty much their own fault (well, theirs and their teachers') and society has no obligation to provide support or resources or any of those things that require money.
The things is, though, there's plenty of real research that NCS are actually important (plus anecdotal evidence from every single human being who ever worked with other human beings). The folks who are building that cradle-to-career pipeline are aware that NCS are are part of the grease that will keep the pipeline running smoothly, so we have got to talk about these non-cognitives as something other than an excuse not to help poor people.
New America Steps Up
So here comes one notable attempt to fill that gap. Working for the folks at New America, Melissa Tooley and Laura Bornfreund have authored "Skills for Success: Supporting and Assessing Key Habits, Mindsets, and Skills in PreK-12." What is New America?
New America is dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age. We carry out our mission as a nonprofit civic enterprise: an intellectual venture capital fund, think tank, technology laboratory, public forum, and media platform. Our hallmarks are big ideas, impartial analysis, pragmatic policy solutions, technological innovation, next generation politics, and creative engagement with broad audiences.
Their education policy wing is funded by, among others, the Joyce Foundation, the Gates, Lumina Foundation,the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The latter footed the bill for this particular report.
Skills for Success: Why Care (or Assess)?
The authors start out by lumping all the non-cognitives, from grit through emotional intelligence, under the Skills For Success (SFS) brand (they have a nice pair of charts here, one of which was adapted from CA's waiver application). The authors make the case that prudence and grit (they don't use the words, but that's what they're talking about) are necessary for college success, and now that everybody is supposed to go to college, well...
They note that SFS are often imparted in pre-K, but not so much in K-12, noting that some people would argue this makes sense because these can only be instilled early in life. No, say the authors-- people are malleable and we could totes develop these into young adulthood (the authors have done yeoman's work in avoiding the verb "teach" when it comes to SFS).
The Big Leap appears to be the hallmark of Tooley and Bornfreund. Right after saying that there are "some promising approaches available" for supporting SFS growth, they declare, "one thing is clear: school and classroom climate can either help promote or deter the development of SFS." So, from promising to proven in just a few sentences.
But the Biggest Leap is embedded so heavily that the authors don't address it directly. They go straight from "SFS should be supported by schools" to "SFS should be assessed by schools." There's a lot of this sort of thing in the paper:
To be effective, any SFS approach must be clearly aligned with local needs and goals and be implemented with fidelity. A system of assessments can help achieve these goals. Needs assessments can help inform decisions about strategies to reach SFS goals, while implementation assessments can provide feedback on the quality of strategy implementation and the level of progress associated with those strategies. Well-run schools are already using these types of assessments in other areas to ensure that they are helping move all students toward their full potential.
They allow that SFS assessment is an imperfect science at the moment and "it may not currently possible to assess certain skills at all." But that's no reason not to assess.
What do they propose doing with the assessment? Nothing that directly impacts the student-- for instance, no pass-fail a grade decisions based on the students' standardized Are You a Jerk or a Nice Person Test (Pearson pat. pending). However, "since schools and teachers can positively or negatively influence the development of students’ SFS, teacher observations and school environment ratings should—over time—be incorporated into educator and school accountability systems, Pre-K–12th grade."
The paper comes with recommendations. For the feds, they recommend 1) more money spent on experiments in fostering and assessing SFS, 2) promoting a more holistic approach to school evals, 3) encouraging shift in teacher focus, and 4) promote more holistic student evaluations that include formative information for teachers, parents, and students.
What Are We Really Talking About Here?
Let's go back to the chart and look at some of the specifics they include.
We have empathy, integrity, and compassion. Self-awareness, self-regulation, and responsible decision making. If you want to be sure to freak out your conservative friends, use this one: "Sense of belonging in one's community which contributes to one's willingness to adopt established norms."
We are really talking about character, personality. We are asking, "Is your kid a good kid?"
The Mystification of Personality
There are really two issues here. The first is an old one-- we'd like schools to teach children to be decent human beings. This is not new, nor are the controversies that go with it. The authors acknowledge that there's liable to be some pushback, that the same people who feel Common Core is some sort of indoctrination program are probably not going to be delighted to hear that the school is trying to teach their child "proper values." But this is an issue as old as the hills and generations of "values" education.
The second issue is the new one. Because what we're saying here is that parents and teachers need to see test results in order to know whether or not a child is kind or not. This report suggests that parents and teachers are sitting, twiddling their thumbs, thinking, "Well, I think Chris is a pleasant, kind, decent kid, but I guess I won't know till I get the Pearson SFS Test results back." It imagines a teachers lounge conversation that includes, "You know, I thought that Jenkins kid was all right, but I just got his test scores back and apparently he's kind of a dick."
It's true that adult evaluations of children are not always spot on. Mrs. Cleaver thought Eddie Haskell was a nice boy. Of course, if you don't think Eddie Haskell could totally game whatever SFS test was thrown at him, I have a unicorn farm I'd like to sell you.
This is one of those reformster ideas that is so stunningly dumb that it's hard to grasp. But let's say it again-- these folks are proposing that parents and teachers do not know what kind of people their children are unless some expertly produced standardized test tells them! Teachers will stumble through the first several weeks of class, and when someone asks them what kind of class they have, they'll just shrug and say, "I have no idea. I'm waiting to get their scores back." Parents will look at their three year old and say, "Boy, I can't wait to send this kid to school so he can take that test and we'll know what kind of person we're raising."
This is beyond mystifying the content and academics of school. This is mystifying the personality of children. This is saying that teachers and parents lack the qualifications to make judgments about the personality of a child, and that they must call in the experts to answer the question, "What kind of person is this?"
What's Really Going On?
The only thing that rescues this idea from total dumbosity is that, in the end, it's just a cover story.
Well, two things. The first thing is that they can't do it. Because if there were great SFS assessment tools, people would be using them. Somebody would be getting rich using it in an on-line matchmaking service. Employers would be using them to scan every potential employee.
And that's our big hint. Remember-- we agreed way up front that these skills really do matter for employment success.
The reformsters do not want to give these students a standardized Are You A Good Person test in order to share the data with parents or teachers. The main market for that information would be the employers waiting at the other end of the cradle to career pipeline. That pipeline will be working smoothly when "applying" for a job just means letting an HR department click on a link to your permanent on-line file that includes your math and English scores since you were three, side by side with the scores that indicate whether you're too nice, not nice at all, or just nice enough.
To get the cradle to career pipeline up and running and fully useful to corporate human resource departments, it needs to include a complete picture of each future drone, and that means all your SFS scores as well. My slightly paranoid, somewhat cranky and non-compliant side (at least, I think I have that side-- it's hard to know what kind of person I am without a professional standardized test analysis) thinks that THAT is the purpose of all this noise, and the reason we're going to hear how schools must foster and test-- but mostly test-- these very important skills.
We are already seeing at work a process I call “mystification”—taking a practice that was once viewed as within the normal competence of a teacher and making it seem so technical and advanced that a new commercial product (or form of consultation) is necessary.
He called that one in 2013, and we've seen it ramp up steadily since. We've seen it used for consulting (you need to hire somebody to come in and show your teachers how to "unpack" the standards) and for testing (parents and teachers have no clue how the student is doing until they see standardized test results). We even see it as a textbook marketing strategy (you'd better have somebody from the publisher come train your teachers in how to use the new textbook series because, you know, textbooks are hard, and they're only teachers).
But all of that was mystification of the curriculum and content. Reformsters are inching across a bold new boundary when it comes to mystification. They are mystifying the personality of children.
The Rise of Non-Cognitive Skills
We've been playing with NCS for a while, most notably with the new science of Grittology. Our basic premise is that there are non-content skills or abilities or traits that determine a child's future success just as well or better than the child's ability to perform like a well-trained monkey on a standardized test. Sometimes we fall back on old words like "character," but most of the discussion has been in the vein of the Brookings report that asserts that A) character is important and B) poor people don't have it so C) that's why they're poor.
But these discussions of NCS have generally been about blame. Students fail because they lack character and grit, so it's pretty much their own fault (well, theirs and their teachers') and society has no obligation to provide support or resources or any of those things that require money.
The things is, though, there's plenty of real research that NCS are actually important (plus anecdotal evidence from every single human being who ever worked with other human beings). The folks who are building that cradle-to-career pipeline are aware that NCS are are part of the grease that will keep the pipeline running smoothly, so we have got to talk about these non-cognitives as something other than an excuse not to help poor people.
New America Steps Up
So here comes one notable attempt to fill that gap. Working for the folks at New America, Melissa Tooley and Laura Bornfreund have authored "Skills for Success: Supporting and Assessing Key Habits, Mindsets, and Skills in PreK-12." What is New America?
New America is dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age. We carry out our mission as a nonprofit civic enterprise: an intellectual venture capital fund, think tank, technology laboratory, public forum, and media platform. Our hallmarks are big ideas, impartial analysis, pragmatic policy solutions, technological innovation, next generation politics, and creative engagement with broad audiences.
Their education policy wing is funded by, among others, the Joyce Foundation, the Gates, Lumina Foundation,the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The latter footed the bill for this particular report.
Skills for Success: Why Care (or Assess)?
The authors start out by lumping all the non-cognitives, from grit through emotional intelligence, under the Skills For Success (SFS) brand (they have a nice pair of charts here, one of which was adapted from CA's waiver application). The authors make the case that prudence and grit (they don't use the words, but that's what they're talking about) are necessary for college success, and now that everybody is supposed to go to college, well...
They note that SFS are often imparted in pre-K, but not so much in K-12, noting that some people would argue this makes sense because these can only be instilled early in life. No, say the authors-- people are malleable and we could totes develop these into young adulthood (the authors have done yeoman's work in avoiding the verb "teach" when it comes to SFS).
The Big Leap appears to be the hallmark of Tooley and Bornfreund. Right after saying that there are "some promising approaches available" for supporting SFS growth, they declare, "one thing is clear: school and classroom climate can either help promote or deter the development of SFS." So, from promising to proven in just a few sentences.
But the Biggest Leap is embedded so heavily that the authors don't address it directly. They go straight from "SFS should be supported by schools" to "SFS should be assessed by schools." There's a lot of this sort of thing in the paper:
To be effective, any SFS approach must be clearly aligned with local needs and goals and be implemented with fidelity. A system of assessments can help achieve these goals. Needs assessments can help inform decisions about strategies to reach SFS goals, while implementation assessments can provide feedback on the quality of strategy implementation and the level of progress associated with those strategies. Well-run schools are already using these types of assessments in other areas to ensure that they are helping move all students toward their full potential.
They allow that SFS assessment is an imperfect science at the moment and "it may not currently possible to assess certain skills at all." But that's no reason not to assess.
What do they propose doing with the assessment? Nothing that directly impacts the student-- for instance, no pass-fail a grade decisions based on the students' standardized Are You a Jerk or a Nice Person Test (Pearson pat. pending). However, "since schools and teachers can positively or negatively influence the development of students’ SFS, teacher observations and school environment ratings should—over time—be incorporated into educator and school accountability systems, Pre-K–12th grade."
The paper comes with recommendations. For the feds, they recommend 1) more money spent on experiments in fostering and assessing SFS, 2) promoting a more holistic approach to school evals, 3) encouraging shift in teacher focus, and 4) promote more holistic student evaluations that include formative information for teachers, parents, and students.
What Are We Really Talking About Here?
Let's go back to the chart and look at some of the specifics they include.
We are really talking about character, personality. We are asking, "Is your kid a good kid?"
The Mystification of Personality
There are really two issues here. The first is an old one-- we'd like schools to teach children to be decent human beings. This is not new, nor are the controversies that go with it. The authors acknowledge that there's liable to be some pushback, that the same people who feel Common Core is some sort of indoctrination program are probably not going to be delighted to hear that the school is trying to teach their child "proper values." But this is an issue as old as the hills and generations of "values" education.
The second issue is the new one. Because what we're saying here is that parents and teachers need to see test results in order to know whether or not a child is kind or not. This report suggests that parents and teachers are sitting, twiddling their thumbs, thinking, "Well, I think Chris is a pleasant, kind, decent kid, but I guess I won't know till I get the Pearson SFS Test results back." It imagines a teachers lounge conversation that includes, "You know, I thought that Jenkins kid was all right, but I just got his test scores back and apparently he's kind of a dick."
It's true that adult evaluations of children are not always spot on. Mrs. Cleaver thought Eddie Haskell was a nice boy. Of course, if you don't think Eddie Haskell could totally game whatever SFS test was thrown at him, I have a unicorn farm I'd like to sell you.
This is one of those reformster ideas that is so stunningly dumb that it's hard to grasp. But let's say it again-- these folks are proposing that parents and teachers do not know what kind of people their children are unless some expertly produced standardized test tells them! Teachers will stumble through the first several weeks of class, and when someone asks them what kind of class they have, they'll just shrug and say, "I have no idea. I'm waiting to get their scores back." Parents will look at their three year old and say, "Boy, I can't wait to send this kid to school so he can take that test and we'll know what kind of person we're raising."
This is beyond mystifying the content and academics of school. This is mystifying the personality of children. This is saying that teachers and parents lack the qualifications to make judgments about the personality of a child, and that they must call in the experts to answer the question, "What kind of person is this?"
What's Really Going On?
The only thing that rescues this idea from total dumbosity is that, in the end, it's just a cover story.
Well, two things. The first thing is that they can't do it. Because if there were great SFS assessment tools, people would be using them. Somebody would be getting rich using it in an on-line matchmaking service. Employers would be using them to scan every potential employee.
And that's our big hint. Remember-- we agreed way up front that these skills really do matter for employment success.
The reformsters do not want to give these students a standardized Are You A Good Person test in order to share the data with parents or teachers. The main market for that information would be the employers waiting at the other end of the cradle to career pipeline. That pipeline will be working smoothly when "applying" for a job just means letting an HR department click on a link to your permanent on-line file that includes your math and English scores since you were three, side by side with the scores that indicate whether you're too nice, not nice at all, or just nice enough.
To get the cradle to career pipeline up and running and fully useful to corporate human resource departments, it needs to include a complete picture of each future drone, and that means all your SFS scores as well. My slightly paranoid, somewhat cranky and non-compliant side (at least, I think I have that side-- it's hard to know what kind of person I am without a professional standardized test analysis) thinks that THAT is the purpose of all this noise, and the reason we're going to hear how schools must foster and test-- but mostly test-- these very important skills.
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