Ask Arne: Testing and Accountability

You know I'm a huge fan of the Ask Arne video series, because who doesn't enjoy seeing their tax dollars used to produce little pieces of high tech advertising for failing policies? You can read about previous Ask Arne videos here, here, here, and here.

Today's entry was put up on December 9, but seems linked to the baloneyfest that started with CCSSO and CGCS announcing they were really looking at testing, with "looking at" meaning "trying to fix how it's playing in Peoria" and not "considering substantive changes." Then Arne said, "Me, too" in a Washington Post op-ed that dodged the issue of federal responsibility for testing issues. All of that happened back in October, but it appears to be in the recent past for the making of this video.

This video represents a real change in style for the Ask Arne franchise, which usually depends on a "conversation" between the Secretary of Education and ordinary civilians (hand picked by the Dept. of Education). Today's host is my personal favorite-- Emily Davis, on loan from her job teaching middle school Spanish in St. Augustine, FL-- but beyond her intro (filmed in what is below-standard lighting for this series), her function is to ask basically just one question.

Her intro sets us up. "Lately we've heard a lot of questions from educators, principals and teachers, as well as parents and students around the current climate of testing in schools." It's a nicely shaded choice of verbage, suggesting a more generalized curiosity ("So, how's that testing business shaping up?") rather than actual complaints ("What the hell is up with all this testing!?"). But she assures us that we're going to sit down with Arne to "discuss some of these challenges" (reminding me that the substitution of "challenges" for "problems" is on of the great modern rhetorical inventions).

And so, her question:

Arne, everyone is talking about testing. I recently came back from the Bus Tour [yes, the closed caption capitalizes it] and talked to principals and teachers in the Southeast. The President is talking about testing. The Chief State Officers and the Council of Great City Schools are talking about testing. You, yourself put out an op ed about testing, so I am just wondering what your thoughts are on the current testing environment.

Arne is not looking as chipper as he usually does for these little chats. His usual goofy grin is not in evidence; he looks a little stern and irritated, and as I type that I realize that had I known that blogging would lead me to a place where I would be even slightly expert in Arne Duncan's facial expressions, I might have chosen another path. Look what you have done to both of us, Arne.

Anyway, Arne opens with the philosophical observation that you can have an extreme too muchiness of anything. "Too much of anything is too much" is an actual string of words that comes out of his mouth. But the very next string of words notes that there are "some who would like to walk away from any assessments and go the other extreme" and my experience would suggest that "some" is a pretty small group since pretty much every teacher I've ever met uses some sort of assessment on a very regular basis. But sometimes Arne gets "assessment" and "standardized test" confused, so maybe that's it. At any rate, Arne does not support abandoning tests, and he wants you to know that he says that as "a parent with two young children." Because Arne has no idea how his kids are doing until he sees those standardized test scores.

 "We want to know how much our children are learning each year," says Arne, and I'm going to do some close reading here because "how much" implies that learning is a single homogenous quality like water or distance, acquired in uniform units and measured with beakers or yardsticks that can be used to measure any learning that has been poured into any child. He does not express an interest in knowing what students have learned or how they have learned or how they grew or what sort of people they are becoming. Physics or musical instruments, writing or cooking-- it's all the same. He just wants to find out whether the students had six or twelve or eighteen liters of learning poured into them. Yes, it's picking at a small thing, but the small things are revealing, and it's what I do here.

Arne then lays out exactly what testing problems he's concerned about. Redundant testing and duplicative testing-- those are bad. It also doesn't make sense to spend too much time on test prep or teaching to the test, says Arne, and I would suggest to Arne that those things make perfect sense in a world where the federal government has mandated that schools and teachers be evaluated based on those test results. This remains a point of sublime obtuseness for Arne. He mandated that teachers, schools, districts, and states would be rewarded or punished based on test results-- what could he have possibly imagined would happen? Does he seriously mean to say, "Your career depends upon these test results, but whatever you do, don't act as if your career depends upon these test results."

Emily observes that a principal in Nashville says that we're testing so much that we don't know what the good data is any more (pro tip-- nothing that comes from the standardized tests is good data). And she slides into some form of, "So you also wanted to make a point about the year's grace period." Arne is making such a face; with a frozen frame it looks like a bad moment in marriage counseling in which Arne is reacting to Emily's admission of some guilty with a face that says, "Well, that's what I would expect from an ignorant slut like you." It's a very odd moment.

Arne says that states and districts committed to taking a hard look in the mirror and "figuring out if they had a coherent theory of action" and if they are getting actionable data-- "is it useful, timely, relevant" and if they can say yes to that, they are probably on a good path. Teachers and principals should be weighing on this conversation, which means I guess that they're not really involved in it to begin with, but just sort of consulting. Anyway, they should weigh in because the testing stuff is supposed to help instruction and student learning. If it is taking away from those things, then "it is part of the problem." Arne does not say what to do if you determine that all the things that are detracting from learning are the result of federal mandates, which is of course the real question that non-koolaid-drinking schools are wrestling with-- how do we do the things the government says we must, which we know are educational malpractice and a waste of time, and still educate? How do we keep the government off our backs while doing our jobs.

Emily says that out in the field nobody knows what the hell the flexibility year is about, and would Arne clear that up. Now Arne looks less angry and more sleepy.

Arne says that many folks are moving to the next generation of tests-- less filling of bubbles, more critical thinking and writing etc and as always, I'm going to call bullshit. Tests that actually measure those things do not exist. But policy appears to be that we'll just keep calling a watermelon a pig in the hopes that when you bite into a slice you'll taste pork. Arne says many places are also "thinking differently about teacher and principal support and evaluation" but the rest of his sentence is not "for example, the state of Washington, where we took their waiver away for thinking TOO differently."

The year, he says, is to play with this stuff without having scores count for teacher and principal evaluations. "There is no right or wrong answer here," says Arne. This is a great sentence because it captures both his wrongness (there are, in fact, lots of wrong answers, some of which have full federal support) and his disconnect between the words coming out of his mouth and the policies coming out of his office (he will certainly punish states that choose answers he thinks are wrong, e.g. Washington).

Some states are ahead, some are way ahead, there are no value judgments, blah blah blah. He is on a quest for a true accountability system.

Arne reiterates that student growth and gains should be a part of teacher evaluation-- so bad tests providing useless data run through discredited VAM models remain his fave. But don't put too much emphasis on testing or test prep. But include other things-- don't have just a test score and cut score. Let's get all holistic up in there.

"We now have states holding themselves accountable for graduation rates, reducing dropout rates, making and ensuring their high school graduates are truly college and carer ready."  Well, no. We have the feds holding states accountable for those things, and we have the feds strongly encouraging states about what the measures of those things should be. And we have Arne claiming not to see the obvious outcome of the federal mandates about what will be the goal and how success will be measured. Lower remedial class rates in college and more college completion would be great signs of success (though of course there's no right and wrong or value judgments and states can totally have any color Model T they like as long as it's black).

Emily reads her closing thank you's off her notes and Arne gives her a look that says, "Don't think I'm not going to send my boys to lean on that mailman you've been making eyes at."

Holding the Baby

I've spent the last week in Seattle (motto: A Beautiful Place To Suffer Your Seasonal Affective Disorder) visiting my recently-birthed grandson and his parents. My grandson is a young man of generally calm demeanor and simple pursuits, but he does his best sleeping while being held, so I spent a great deal of my time holding the baby.

That provided a great deal of time for reflection. It also provided a huge amount of time for netflix binge-watching; it may in fact be the purpose for which netflix was actually created (I recommend all of Hotel Impossible, though the Blanche episodes are superior, and Blacklist is a great use of James Spader, and I feel a lot differently about some aspects of Gilmore Girls than I did the first time, though once Luke's improbable daughter turns up and Rory steals a boat and Lorelei runs of with Chris it goes straight to hell, furthermore, the last season of Parks and Rec really doesn't need a follow-up and I worry that they'll from one of those shows that ended perfectly to one of those shows that didn't know when to shut up, and it also occurs to me at this moment that I may still be a bit jet lagged still).

Anyway, reflection.

I hold a baby and I look for signs of personality. I watch every little expression, waiting for the special ones like the goofy smile. My grandson has a great I-am-figuring-out-the-problems-of-the-world face. I think about the things he's going to do and see and say when he's a bit more able to do such things, and I stop roughly every ten seconds to be amazed that this is a tiny human being, and I marvel at all the simple things he is learning about how to be human in the world, learning bit by bit and piece by piece in front of me.

I wonder about the unusual balance of power. On the one hand, he's completely unable to do anything for himself, doesn't even have the tools to express himself clearly. On the other hand, we adults who are dealing with him must deal entirely in terms of what he wants or needs, and not what we think he should want or need. Maybe he shouldn't need to be walked at 3 AM in order to sleep, but he does, and that's just how it is. I wonder at how this balance will be worked out between his own agency, his own needs, and how far the world will bend to meet him .

You know what I don't wonder? I don't wonder if he is, at three weeks, on the proper College and Career Ready track. I don't wonder if there's some standardized test he could take to find out if he's hitting his CACR marks.

"Well, don't be silly," you say (in vain). "Who would do that?"

I'm not sure I want an answer to that, but we know that my federal government education guys want to think about it for a four year old. They are proudly announcing their new pre-school grant program awards.

“Expanding access to high-quality preschool is critically important to ensure the success of our children in school and beyond,” said Secretary Duncan. “The states that have received new Preschool Development Grants will serve as models for expanding preschool to all 4-year-olds from low- and moderate-income families. These states are demonstrating a strong commitment to building and enhancing early learning systems, closing equity gaps and expanding opportunity so that more children in America can fulfill their greatest potential.”

It's not that I'm anti-preschool. But I have zero confidence that the feds will back preschool done right. In fact, I'm surprised to see them calling it "preschool" at all, since we usually refer to it as Pre-K to underline the fact that our real purpose if to provide prep school for kindergarten. But I expect that "high-quality" means 1) academic work and 2) if the feds are measuring quality in order to judge its highness, that will mean standardized testing of some point.

Who does that? Who holds their precious vulnerable tiny child, infant, toddler in their arms and thinks, "What this bundle of joy needs is some rigorous instruction. What I need are some standardized test results to make sure his future college success is insured."

The answer, I'll betcha, is nobody. Nobody holds their own baby and thinks that. Nobody who is working arduously on the womb-to-workplace pipeline believes they are building it for their own children. The whole structure the reformsters are building is for Other Peoples' Children.

Well, everybody should hold the baby. Our school system is large and sprawling and deep and wide in its aspirations and client base, but when making decisions about the shape and direction of education, we should be thinking about the individual tiny humans that must pass through and what they need, not what we think should be best for thousands of babies that we have never personally held. We should be thinking about how this baby will become fully human and find his way through the world, not how to mold a mass of other peoples' undifferentiated children into a set of proper cogs for the machine. 

Hold him. Watch him snuggle up against you. Watch him try to make sense of what his eyes can see and ears can hear. Watch him express his version of sadness and need and joy and delight. Notice how little fundamental need he has for the ministrations of rigorous instruction and standardized testing. Yes, I know he's going to grow up and change, but this is where it starts, and you must not forget it. Hold the baby.

Free Market & Strippers

One of America's super-duper examples of how the free market can unlock innovation and advance education is back in the news. With strippers.

Fast Train College has been out of the news since the feds raided it in 2012. Fast Train had unlocked the innovation of the free market with such great innovations primarily related to Applying for Free Federal money, with such competitive approaches as Faking High School Diplomas. They also embraced another principle of the Free Market (American Style) in which one makes sure that a legislator or two has your back. In their case it was apparently Alice Hastings, who has been a staunch supporter of For Profit schools, including working to defend them back in the early teens against Obama's initiative to shut down predatory for-profit schools (bet she's feeling silly now that the administration has demonstrated that "shut down predatory for profit colleges" actually means "protect profits of predatory for-profit operators")

Fast Train is now the subject of a federal suit (it must have taken two years just to shovel through the mountains of misbehavior). Amongst the many lies that Fast Train College used to grab some of that sweet, sweet federal cash (like lying about whether or not students actually attended classes), we find the money detail-- they hired strippers and exotic dancers as admissions officers.

The college unlocked the forces of free market innovation by sending strippers out for high school visitations, recruiting young men whose interest in the beauty of round, firm education drove them to sign up as federal education money procurement tools for the edupreneurial wizards looking to make a quick buck by pursuing educational excellence.

Had this not involved crushing set and failed educational dreams for thousands of students, this would be a fairly hilarious story (confession-- I picked the story up from Seattle morning drive time DJ's). As it is, it's one more reminder that when you turn free market forces in education, you do not drive excellence in education. Market forces do not foster excellent products; market forces foster excellent marketing.-- and if your target demographic is 18-year-old males, strippers make a certain kind of marketing sense.

P.S. Fast Train College was based in Florida. Surprise.

The Poverty Disconnect

America is supposed to be the land of opportunity—the one place in the world where a young child can grow up poor and end up anywhere he wants to be. ...We are called to care for the poor, to build them up, to provide and guide and generously give. Here is our chance. It’s time to take it.

This is from the final paragraph of an article in Christianity Today. It is part of a moving argument-- well, sort of moving. Because it highlights one of the great disconnects in the debate over public education.

The reformster argument is full of disconnects. One is the assessment disconnect-- the argument that says 1) we need to measure education, 2) standardized tests measure something, therefor 3) standardized tests will measure education.

The Christianity Today article is one of the more evocative (and less self-serving) presentations of the Poverty Disconnect.

Liz Riggs is a freelance writer in Nashville who has taught in a low-income middle school. Her piece for CT follows, albeit smoothly, all the pieces of the poverty argument, and it's worth reading just so you get the hang of spotting this piece of rhetorical tapdancery. Here are the steps.

1) Education is in terrible trouble. Riggs goes the test-score route on this point, repeating the idea that the US has fallen from some height of testy supremacy. This has been picked apart many times, but Riggs wants us to know that we are losing world supremacy in test-taking (though our list of disconnects includes the lack of any connection between standardized test scores and a nation's success).

2) The poor are hurt the worst. Or, as Riggs puts it, "As America’s education system loses its clout and disproportionately fails to prepare poor students, it is clear we need to change how things are done."  This also feels true, because as the poor are increasingly left behind in this country, schools serving them have suffered as well. But in the backwards world of reformsterland, the fact that high-poverty schools are getting less and less government support is proof that they should get more support. It's withholding food from your weakest child and then claiming that somebody, somehow must fix this malnutrition problem, as if you hadn't caused it yourself.

3) Common Core will fix it.  Yeah, there's no actual argument here. Just assertions. We have just made the leap.

Progress for some does not have to come at the cost of others; in fact, more rigor means the potential for higher levels of learning for all kids—not just some. It means kids of means and kids from poverty are more equipped for college and beyond; a rising tide lifts all boats.

This is the giant disconnect. Common Core will improve the life of students in poverty because rigor? Because unicorns and fairy dust? Because we say so? If you believe you have a problem, like, say, halitosis, and somebody comes up to you and says, "I can fix that. Just give me a hundred dollars and let me punch you in the face!" You are going to ask for some sort assurance that this will help. There are questions you might ask-- Are you a halitosis expert? Has this technique been tried? How did it work? Are there other techniques, and do they work? Does anybody else use this face-punching successfully? But when we use the poverty disconnect, we don't answer any of those questions. Instead, we just become more insistent about the severity of poverty, as if the worse poverty is, the more that proves that Common Core fixes it. But showing a problem is bad only adds to the urgency and the believability of the problem-- it does not constitute proof that your "solution" actually works.

The sensible response to the "Poverty is bad and also hurts education-- we need CCSS to fix it" must always be "What reason is there to believe that CCSS will work? Where is your evidence?" No reformster has successfully answered those two questions yet.

4) Flourishes. As always, there are little flourishes and touches to be added. These are simply a sideshow. Riggs goes with a hint of privilege guilt, far short of a full-blown "If you don't want poor, black kids to have Common Core, you're a racist." There's also the old Old Folks Just Don't Understand the new ways with the rigor and the deep thinkines, and have you heard-- with Common Core, you get critical thinking, which scares many people because it's so rare. Riggs disposes of the CCSS origin objections by linking to the Common Core website and saying it doesn't really matter anyway.

The Common Core poverty disconnect is simple. Even if we accept that US education is in trouble, and even if we accept that education is the key to fixing poverty is education (and I'm not ready to accept either of those assertions), there is a huge leap from those premises to the notion that Common Core will somehow fix them.

How does Common Core fix poverty? How? What piece of evidence, or even coherent theory, tells us that any such linkage exists?

Go back to the quote at the top of this post. All true, all compelling-- but what on earth would lead us to the conclusion that the most useful possible response would be the Common Core? We are called to care for the poor, but what in Heaven's name would lead one to conclude that the proper response to that call is to implement the Common Core. I've done a lot of Bible reading, and while there are plenty of Biblical imperatives to care for the poor, I don't recall any that involved rigor or the imposition of national school standards.

What David Coleman Doesn't Know About Literature

Thanks to Nicholas Tampio at Aljazeera America, I discovered a special piece of work from David Coleman, architect of the Common Core and Master of the College Board, a man who has singlehandedly tried to redefine what it means to be an educated human being.

In a fairly massive essay entitled "Cultivating Wonder " (published with an austere cover featuring a giant question mark, so maybe it's "Cultivating Wonder?"), Coleman lays out in great detail what's wrong with his ideas about how, exactly, literature should be taught. Okay, yes, that wasn't his intention, exactly, but then sometimes authors reveal things beyond their actual intentions. The essay may not have changed my mind about how to teach literature, but it gave me a clearer picture of what's going on in Coleman's hubris-engorged melon.

So much depends on a good question. A question invites students into a text or turns them away. A question provokes surprise or tedium. Some questions open up a text, and if followed never let you see it the same way again.

That's the cold open, followed by a restatement of the aged old baloney-- that efforts to improve reading in this country have hit a wall as proven by flat reading scores. Nothing in that premise is correct, including the idea that 8th grade reading scores tell us how well reading is going in this country. But Coleman wants us to understand that we need him and his insights not just as educators, but as a nation. Two paragraphs in, and Coleman has established a familiar tone-- he is not here to share some ideas and techniques teacher to teacher, but is here to give his superior insights to the nation full of lesser beings who are hopelessly lost and failing. Some reformsters may pay lip service to the accumulated wisdom of the vast army of professional educators; Coleman never does.

Coleman says that the Core "challenges students to read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter" (though he doesn't illuminate this with specific examples of either-- one of the things that remains striking about Coleman is that he never acknowledges or expresses respect for the expertise of anyone who's not a dead author). You may think I'm being picky, but I'm just trying to read like a detective.

At any rate, Coleman is going to show us how it's done by using five awesome questions connected to five reading standards to open up five texts. I am not going to walk you through all five, but we'll take a close look at a couple just to see what this genius is up to.

Hamlet

Coleman decodes to aim high right off the bat, and his first question is this:

In what tone of voice does Bernardo ask "Who's there?" and how do you know?

As anyone who has taught Hamlet knows, this is not a bad question. Shakespeare sets a mood of dread and anxiety in the first few pages of the play by giving us two castle guards who are on edge. Coleman wants us to know that he has taught Hamlet to Yale students and inner city New Haven high schoolers, and he wants us to know that students don't always catch the importance of that exchange. Thank goodness he was there to help.

After breaking down the whole scene in what qualifies as a legitimate reading, Coleman calls it "extraordinary" that Shakespeare doesn't just have Bernardo come out and say, "I'm scared." But if we were allowed to look beyond the four corners of the page, we'd know it's not extraordinary at all. Shakespeare is a huge fan of Opening Exposition Via Minor Character. In Romeo and Juliet we learn of the violent feud from a set of passing servants. In Julius Caesar, we learn about the current political unease of Rome from two unimportant citizens.  And the notion of showing rather than telling is fundamental to drama.

Coleman's lesson misses much. He notes that Shakespeare doesn't give much in the way of stage directions, but, trapped between the four corners, he doesn't move into a discussion of why-- that the playwright was there to give the directions himself-- or what that might mean to us in terms of what has and has not been handed down (in fact, he also does not address that we don't really have an absolutely authoritative version of the text we are so closely examining).

Coleman's lesson also ignores the nature of drama. "Rarely when we read a script does it explicitly state how one might say the word or direct the action. But by examining exactly what the script says and then making inferences from this evidence, the playwright's art comes to light." (Watch those dangling modifiers there, Mr. Coleman). Well, duh. Every acting and directing student ever has learned that. I explain it to my students like this: A novel is done, complete. The text is finished. But a play is not finished until it is performed. Hamlet is much-beloved precisely because it is not only rich in what's there, but it is rich in possible choices for the actors who perform it (just how crazy, or not, is Hamlet, and how does that madness or not-madness progress; and what can we figure out about Gertrude; how do we settle on a version of Ophelia who is not too weak and not too strong).

Coleman does not claim that his question is the be-all and end-all, but he still comes across like a man who has discovered how to use a can opener and now believes he has found the secret to being a five-star chef.

An Athlete of God

Coleman next works his way into Martha Graham's essay "An Athlete of God." I'm not going to wade too far into this except to note just a couple of Colemanisms.

Most notably, he has selected a work in which Graham has laid out what she thinks and feels about practice and dance, so I guess sometimes when you grow up, people do give a shit about what you think and feel after all.

The other is the inability to distinguish between his own experience and the possibility of any other. At one point he says, "The mystery of what Graham means can be illuminated only by further reading." He walks us through his own progression of understanding as he reads, but he does so as if his own response to the work unfolds in the only way that anyone's response can. This is a repeated problem of Colemanism-- in David Coleman's world, the only way smart people think is the way David Coleman thinks, not just in conclusions, but in process. There is only one path to the truth, and David Coleman is on it.

Huck Finn

What is the role of Tom Sawyer in the first chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

If Coleman had wanted to illustrate the limits of Colemanism, he could not have picked a better work with which to do so. 

First, the sheer volume of critical writing about the novel is huge. If ever there were a moment for Coleman to drop a "as critic Smarty McThinksalot says..." quote in here, this would be it. At the very least, he might acknowledge there are continuing debates about many of the conclusions that he presents as settled and decided.

Coleman does, for instance, tackle the end of Huck Finn, one of the most contentious literary puzzles in American letters. Hemingway said that Huck Finn is the source of all American literature, but he also said, "If you read it you must stop where... Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating." Many critics have written extensively about whether or not the ending fits or works or is genius or suckage. If we could step outside of the four corners, we would probably observe that Twain himself stopped after chapter 18 and walked away from the book for about two years.

But Coleman simply observes that "one of the most striking developments of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the final diminished stature of Tom Sawyer. Tom enters awkwardly near the end of the novel and offers very little-- he is merely childish. The smallness of Tom at the end of the book shows how much Huck has grown." He observes this as if this is not a point on which critics from big-time PhD's down to students in my class disagree with vehemently. And his view is a hard one to sell, since the ending sees Huck give Tom complete control of Jim's escape, losing his own hard-won agency and self-direction. 

Huck Finn is a work that can provide an opportunity for rich debate in a class, but in Mr. Coleman's class there is no need for debate, because there's only one correct answer.

Gettysburg Address

Props to Coleman for his willingness to return to the scene of the most famous critical crime perpetrated in the name of Common Core, but whatever else we can say about Coleman, there's never been any question about his gigantic brass balls.

This is not any real improvement over earlier CCSS advice about the address. Coleman wants us to ask about the use of "dedicate" in the text. This is (though he doesn't say so) Coleman's response to the question of how one can teach the Gettysburg Address without teaching what it's about. In Colemanism, it's about the use of a vocabulary word. It's about playing compositional tricks with the word "dedicate." The Address is a writing exercise and Lincoln is a very clever boy-- he is presenting "a master class in vocabulary."

Coleman takes a moment to reject questions like "What is Lincoln's purpose in the speech?" It is "generic" and does not "arise from a specific encounter with the text." It's "more complicated, less reading" and "more open to cliché and canned response."

This is Coleman exhibiting (yet again) his lack of teaching background. Because, let's talk about canned response. If I have Mr. Coleman for class, and for every literature question there is only one answer that shows I have thought properly about the work, and that answer is always the same, and I want to Do Well in that class, I will spit that answer quickly straight out of the can. Coleman claims that general questions "just don't work. Generic questions that may seem deep often put teachers and students into automatic pilot rather than the alert attentiveness that real reading requires." Not like, you know, the REALLY deep questions that Coleman wants to ask. I don't suppose Colemanism allows for the possibility that how the question is asked, how the follow-ups are asked, the context of where the students are in interest and understanding-- that any of those factors might matter.

Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night and One Art

Coleman wants to compare and contrast the poets' use of a repeated line with and without variations. Once again we are more concerned with structure than content, though Coleman again allows himself the luxury of packaging his own responses as critical absolutes. Finals stanzas behind with "breathtaking direct address" and "both of these lines take your head off." I'm going to breeze past this one because Coleman would now like to tell us

Seven Things Worth Bearing in Mind

When it comes to this question stuff.

1) Beginning matter and are often worthy of sustained attention As with many Coleman insights, I want to say, "No, duh. Do you think you're offering something bold and new here?"

2) Great questions follow the author's lead. Coleman writes, and I am not making this up, "Good questions begin in humility." What he means is that what's within the four corners of the text is more important than the best gesture of our brains.

3) The text is the star. Again, stay within those four corners.

4) Great questions have a simplicity that allows students to get started by observing and gathering evidence and gradually to earn larger insights and ideas. In other words, there is only one true path to understanding.

5) Great questions provoke a sense of mystery and provided a payoff in insight that makes the word of reading carefully worth it. This one deserves some extra attention, because it reveals a level of Colemanism not always noted. Not only does Coleman assume there is only one pathway to truth, but he assumes there is only one motivation for traveling it. There's only one way to feel as if reading a work carefully was worth the trouble, only one reason that people dive into complex texts and come out the other side being glad they did. Only some works are really worth reading, says Coleman, and there's only one reason to engage them.

6) Great questions draw on advantages of students reading together by sharing what they have noticed and seen. Unless of course, there's only one correct answer that proves they've been noticing and seeing properly, in which case the only group discussion will be centered on the question "What do you think he wants us to say is the answer?"

7) Some great questions do not follow these principals and may even break them. Well, there's something I can actually agree with.

Is The Whole Thing Crap

Ironically, Coleman's question ideas are not in and of themselves terrible, and many of us use them in limited and appropriate ways. But this is definitely one of those "if your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail" situations.

Coleman repeatedly fails to distinguish between his own experience of the text and Universal Truth. This leads him both to believe apparently that if he just figured something out about Bernardo, he must be the first person ever to see it, that his own reaction to a line is the universal one, that his path into the text is the only one, and that things that do not matter to him should not matter to anybody. Of all the reformsters, he is the one least likely to ever acknowledge contributions of any other living human being. For someone who famously said that nobody gives a shit about your thoughts and feelings, Coleman is enormously fascinated by and has great faith in his own thoughts and feelings.

The frequent rap on Coleman's reading approach is that it is test prep, a technique designed to prepare students to take standardized tests. But the more Coleman I read, the more I suspect it's the other way around-- that Coleman thinks a standardized test is really a great model of life, where there's always just one correct answer, one correct path, one correct reading, and life is about showing that you have it (or telling other people to have it).

Sadly, it often seems that what David Coleman doesn't know about literature is what David Coleman doesn't know about being human in the world. Life is not a bubble test. There is a richness and variety in human experience that Coleman simply does not recognize nor allow for. His  view of knowledge, learning, understanding, and experience is cramped and tiny. It's unfortunate that circumstances have allowed him such unfettered power over the very idea of what an educated person should be. It's like making a person who sees only black and white the High Minister of National Art.

The Magic Filing Cabinet

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.

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.