Pearson's Renaissance (1): History and Revolution

Pearson has released another essay/position paper/world conquest outline. This one comes from Peter Hill and Pearson Commandant Michael Barber, and it's entitled "Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment." We've looked at a Pearson position paper before, and it was kind of scary, so for that reason alone, this is not for the faint of heart. The fact that this paper is eighty-some pages long is also reason to balk. But because I love you guys, I am going to wade through this so that you don't have to. Although you probably should, because it's always good to get to know your new overlords.

I'm not kidding about the 88 pages.I'm going to break this up into several posts, mostly because I know some of you read on phones and tablets and I don't want to bust your thumbs. If you would like to get just some highlights, try this post. But over here we'll power through this a bit at a time, starting with the first segment of the paper, which presents Pearson's version of History So Far, what is driving the revolution in education, and what the revolution demands.

The Preliminaries

The cover features a multi-ethnic group of teenagers sitting at school desks working on digital tablets, just so you have an inkling of where we're headed.

Inside we get the intro to Pearson and our two authors. You may be less familiar with Peter Hill unless you are Australian, in which case you may have noticed him monkeying around with your educational system making sure you suffer through the same reformy GORP as the rest of us. Michael Barber, Educationist, gets his own wikipedia page. The least you need to know about him is that he runs Pearson, and that he was a big wheel at McKinsey. He is an A-list reformster.

There are some acknowledgements, and a forward from Lee Sing Kong. He's a trained horticulturist who somehow ended up as a bigwig at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. His intro: Blah blah blah thanks you guys for writing this awesomely important paper.

I. Setting the Scene

Schooling is made out of three parts: 1) curriculum, 2) learning and teaching, 3) assessment. They work together, but we're focusing on the third because it's the "lagging" one and also there's a consensus (somewhere) that it's on the verge of a rebirth. That's what we're going to talk about. We'll cover the reasons and nature of the change, tell governments, schools and leaders what they're supposed to do, and "provide a framework for action to enable change." Because Pearson does not dream small.

We're going to try not to be all technical, and we are going to focus on fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds. And we will particularly focus on assessment used for "certification, selection, accountability, and improving learning and teaching." And to do all that, we're going to have to set the stage.

The Educational Revolution

They take a pile of words to say that in modern times, education has changed less than anything, and that what changes have occurred haven't really changed any fundamentals of schools. So the question-- is the current upheaval in education indicating real revolution? "We have concluded...that this time things are different." Which is, of course, what they always say.

But the authors argue that this real revolution is being pushed by globalization and digital technologies and being pulled by the realization that "the current paradigm is no longer working as well as it should." Both of these factors are of course just natural and spontaneous and not at all trends that Pearson and other corporations have spent a gazillion dollars trying to foster and grow.

Globalization: the Key Driver of Revolutionary Change

Globalization is driven by technology, which is changing the world into the "Knowledge Society." And as God is my witness, they call this "the new world order," because they are not Americans.

In the past, it was possible "to talk with some certainty about the kind of education needed to prepare young people for life and work." The writers are not clear about how far in the past they think this magical time was, but okay. But nowadays, all the jobs are going away. Airport counters, bank tellers, supermarket checkers-- "anything that can be automated is being automated" is what they say next, though they don't follow it with "and if we have our way, that will include teachers." Then they suggest that Europe doesn't have enough STEM grads to fill job needs. So I guess it is possible to talk with some certainty about the kind of education needed to prepare young people for life and work?

They present two educational choices: 1) traditional core of schooling and 2) non-memorizing cross-disciplinary doing-not-knowing learning. Having created this artificial divide, they then declare that they don't think it's actually a conflict.

So what do they want? They want more. More of everything. More cross-curricular skills. More twenty-first century skills. More critical thinky stuff. And more intra-personal skills. Pearson wants your whole brain.

They like the Australian scheme of seven general capabilities:

1) literacy
2) numeracy
3) information and communication technology capability
4) critical and creative thinking
5) personal and social capability
6) ethical understanding
7) intercultural understanding

Which, I have to say, is way better than the Common Core that we are saddled with. Apparently the international benchmarking that our leaders claim to have done did not include any Aussies.

The writers also note that we're talking about changing the concept of what it means to be an educated person. And then they let their old fart flags fly by suggesting that Kids These Days have a more complicated and difficult world to make sense of than anyone else ever on their road to becoming useful citizens. And they segue again into the notion that education should be designed to develop students with character, students with grit and resilience, students who are The Right Kind of People. Not for the last time, we'll note that Pearson is perfectly comfortable laying out exactly what kind of people should be designed to live in the world. If Pearson ever thinks about Big Brother at all, it must be to think about how he thought too small and achieved too little.

And as we pivot toward the next section, we'll note that globalization not only has implications for how people should know and think and feel, but also for how they should be taught (spoiler alert: with technology).

The Performance Ceiling: The Other Driver

Hill and Barber trot out the observation that student achievement has been flat for decades. I'm always curious about this observation. Do critics think that IQ's should be steadily raised, like stock market averages?  At any rate, here come NAEP and PISA results again, leading to the conclusion that the systems currently in place have gotten all they can get out of juvenile brains. I don't see any research cited here to indicate that there are untapped reserves of educatedness in those juvenile brains; we're just going to take those unplumbed depths on faith, assuming that human intelligence and educational achievement have no innate ceiling and that human beings can expect to get infinitely smarter forever, until we're all big-headed geniuses from an Outer Limits episode.

Let's follow that us with some research used to prop up the idea that teachers are responsible for the topping out. The ceiling is made neither of glass nor brick, but of inert teacher bodies, human speedbumps on the road to infinite smartitude. And here comes one of the recurring themes of the paper-- How Teaching Must Be Changed.

Teaching must be transformed from a "largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionized, bureaucratically controlled semi-profession into a true profession with a distinctive knowledge base, framework for teaching, well-defined common terms for describing and analyzing teaching at a level of specificity and strict control." We'll be returning to this point many times, so let me just shorten it to "teachers must be converted from humans to robots." We'll learn more about this in Part 2.

The authors would also like to scrap the whole age-grade progression in favor of a system that organizes students by ability instead. This is an idea that makes a great deal of sense to anyone who has not worked with fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds. But what they want is a new paradigm that puts individual students at the center of a personalized learning system.

Because nothing would be better at developing the kind of character and personality that Pearson envisions than looking at students in no context other than the context of their academic skills.

Key Elements of the Education Revolution

Our thesis, then, is that the 'push' factor of globalization and the 'pull' factor of the performance ceiling are together giving rise to an education revolution in which certain long-held beliefs and ways of doing things are being repudiated and replaced by a new set of beliefs and practices.

There are six Old Ways that they believe are being tossed on the trash can of educational history. Here's how Pearson believes the world has changed.

First, they believe the old way was that students were treated as empty vessels with fixed capacity for learning. That has been replaced by "practices that build on prior learning" and a belief that given sufficient expectations, motivation, time and support, all students can meet high standards. I'm not sure which planet used teaching not built on prior learning, but you will recognize the high expectations part in the "one size fits all" approach of Arne Duncan and his assertion that the only thing holding back students with learning disabilities is their teachers' low expectations.

Second, they believe that curricula that emphasize rote memorization is being replaced by "deep learning of big ideas and organizing principles." Honestly, where is this school reformsters keep talking about where rote memorization is still a big thing? Because I don't think I'm in some super-progressive corner of the universe, and nobody has based their instruction on rote memorization here since 1952.

Third, shifting from the school as the focus of educational policy to focusing on the individual student. I'm sure that this has nothing to do with wanting to do more direct marketing of educational products.

Fourth, we're going to replace the old time-bound school day and year with omni-education. Students will learn in all sorts of places all the time.

Fifth, we're moving from the teacher in a classroom to online instruction with more differentiation, with learning partnerships that leave the teacher as an "activator" of the various learning partnerships, connections, cybersymbioses, etc.  Kind of like Julie on the Love Boat.

Sixth, teachers must be converted from humans to robots.

The revolution has already begun (Pearson should know-- they're paying for it), but education is sluggish. Barber backs this up (for neither the first nor the last time) by quoting himself. In the next chapter, we're going to look at how Pearson thinks teaching and assessment should really work.

Pearson's Rennaisance (2): Assessment Driving Instruction

We are reading through the four chapters of Pearson's "Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment," Peter Hill and Michael Barber's 88-page ode to reform. In the previous chapter, we looked at how the stage had been set for revolution. Next up-- a look at exactly how assessment (and teaching) is currently coming up short.

 

2. Assessment: A Field in Need of Reform

Assessments! Man, they're a mess. Particularly because of using tests for purposes other than those for which they were designed and unanticipated side effects. Here we will look at how the world's pre-eminent test salesmen see the various purposes of testing.

Assessment for selection and certification

Like the Regents tests of NY or the SATs. Interesting history of this sort of testing. Graduation exams are controversial all over the world.

Assessment for accountability

Also much fun for everyone. A brief history, including NCLB. They believe these come from a "consensus that outcomes matter; that they should be measured and that schools and systems should be held accountable for them." Neo-liberals like them because they provide data on which to base school choice which will of course lead to great schools. "Parents believe that they are entitled to know how their child is progressing" and boy, is this one tiresome. Has anybody ever heard of a parent stomping into a school or classroom and saying, "I'm tired of living in the dark. I demand you give my child a standardized test right now, dammit!"

The authors discuss both of these testing purposes as if they sprang up like kudzu. They modestly refrain from including any sentence like "Also, we have spent a gabillion dollars lobbying and advocating and convincing  powerful people that they need more testing to make their schools better." This is like reading an objective history of smoking written by The Tobacco Institute declaring, "Man, I don't know why everyone was smoking. I guess they just wanted to be sophisticated and cool."

For these two types of assessment, we face Four Big Challenges of Testing, which are

1) Accommodating the full range of student outcomes

Can they come up with a test that will accurately measure the full range of ability. Hint: remember the standardized test that your top kids finished in fifteen minutes and your low-function students spent five hours on? It was failing in this domain.

2) Providing meaningful information on learning outcomes 

Not being able to test the full range in turn leads to reports of results that aren't exactly helpful or useful. There are many paragraphs here, but they boil down to "no matter how you statistically massage clunky data, you don't get golden eggs." Particularly when you try to draw conclusions from the data that the data was not intended to measure.

3) Assessing the full range of valued outcomes

Fancy words but mostly this about the fact that you can't measure much higher order skill and thought with a multiple choice question. Turns out there are all sorts of things that can't be cheaply and easily assessed by a standardized bubble test. Who knew?

4) Maintaining the integrity of assessments

People try to game the system. I'm shocked. Shocked!

Assessment for improving learning and teaching

Here's what we're selling next. Formative assessment is awesome. Awesome! ay attention to this next part, because although Pearson doesn't label it as such, it's Pearson's picture of

What instruction is supposed to look like

To teach the Pearson way, the teacher must--

-- have a really clear picture of what the student is supposed to learn. This should take the form of "validated maps of the sequence in which students typically learn a given curriculum outcome." These are sometimes called "learning progressions" or "critical learning paths." It's the railroad track that every student must travel down.

-- have a process to collect, store and analyze oodles of student data

-- monitor students daily with structured observation and assessment tools that are connected to objectives

-- use all that data to plan what comes next

Furthermore, Pearson wants you to know

The way you teach now sucks

Teachers mostly don't have the resources to do all of the above. "But without such a systematic, data-driven approach to instruction, teaching remains an imprecise and somewhat idiosyncratic process that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers."

In other words, we need to teacher-proof classrooms. Teachers are human and variable and not reliable cogs in the educational machine. If we could get them all bound to assessments, that would tie them into a system that would be smooth and elegant. And profitable.

Assessment is the new Missing Link for transforming education into a teacher-proof, school-proof, techno-driven, highly profitable process. In the next chapter, we'll look at how assessment is supposed to be transformed.

Pearson's Renaissance (3): Transforming Assessment

We are working our way through Pearson's Big Paper about Assessment. In Part I, we considered their ideas about the coming revolution in education. In Part 2, we considered what's wrong with assessment these days and hinted at what it should look like. Now in Part 3, we'll look at what Pearson thinks assessment should look like.

3. Transforming Assessment

The writers think that new assessment is going to change everything, from raising the achievement ceiling to making every student a smarter thinker and a better human being. In particular, they have huge faith in the transformative power of online testing. Here's why.

Assessing the full range of abilities

Traditional tests are too hard for some students and too easy for others, but computer adaptive testing (CAT) will be the baby bear porridge of testing-- just right for everybody. Pearson is confident that every state will be adopting this, and notes that Smarter Balanced is "making use of" CAT and a bank of 21K questions.

One problem for CAT is the requirement that test items be released to the public after the test is given. This would compromise its integrity in some undefined way. It would also make creating a new test every year subject to "unsupportable development costs."

Authors Hill and Barber provide a nice chart of how CAT is supposed to work-- essentially students take testlet A and the real-time results direct them to either testlet B or C, and so on. At the end of the line we might arrive at open-ended response questions "that can be scored by trained professionals." Of course, they could also be scored by minimum-wage barely-trained workers as well. They note that "considerable research" has been directed at solving the problem of getting an accurate estimate of student ability from testlet A, and they are confident that once current limitations are overcome, "there is every likelihood" that a fully-adaptive testy thingy will happen. Back in the previous chapter they bemoaned that "teaching remains an imprecise and somewhat idiosyncratic process that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers." Is it okay if we base teaching on the personal intuition and competence of corporate chieftains?

Providing meaningful information on learning outcomes

Online testing will be fraught with meaning. Results will come back instantaneously, and the ability to give different versions of the test to different students will make data bloom in lovely ways. Hong Kong loves it. There's a lot of flowery language in this section, but it boils down to saying that online tests will give more information faster better zowie!

Assessing the full range of valued outcomes

Standardized tests are limited in what they can actually measure, because multiple choice questions don't go very deep. Pearson is certain that performance tasks can be adapted to a rubric approach that can allow assessment of playing and instrument, reading aloud with fluency, repairing an engine, and working well with a group.

By substituting the judgment of test and rubric writers for the judgment of teachers in the classroom, we can better measure all sorts of stuff.

The writers also devote some space to claiming once again that there are automated essay-scoring systems that are not actually crap. They admit the software has limitations, but so do humans, so neener neener. And then there's this:

A more fundamental solution lies in using digital technologies to support the adoption of a new generation of assessment tasks specifically designed to access deep learning and other outcomes not amenable to assessment via traditional tests and examinations.

In other words, instead of asking how we can best assess particular skills or knowledge, let's ask what sort of cool assessments we can make with a computer. Let's base assessment not on what we want to assess, but what we can assess most easily.

Pearson also wants you to know that they have some cool tests for assessing character traits, so that we can start recording data on what kind of person your child is. As always, I'll ask exactly who needs that data that does not already have it? In other words, are parents really sitting at home wondering about the character of their children and dreaming of a test that would tell them, or is this just an excuse to put another domain of data in a human drone child's cradle to career file?

Integrity of the test

This is the pivot point. Cheating is inevitable as long as we have a small number of tests on which high stakes are riding. High stakes equal high motivation to cheat. But--

intriguingly, the ultimate solution may lie in the potential of a new generation of assessments designed primarily to monitor and inform ongoing learning and teaching

ALL ASSESSING- ALL THE TIME

How do we tie curriculum and teaching together? How do we fix the achievement ceiling an finally make students smarter?  How do we make learning really "professional" and not just something filled with human frailty? How do we collect and crunch more data than God? How do we create an ungameable system?

All assessing, all the time.

This is assessment with a new purpose-- not to give a grade, but to determine whether Pat and Chris are ready to move on to the next stage of the curriculum. I once posited that Common Core standards were not so much standards as they are data tags for marking, storing, cataloging and crunching everything students do. Here's what Pearson says:

Through the use of rubrics, which will define performance in terms of a hierarchically ordered set of levels representing increasing quality of responses to specific tasks, and a common set of curriculum identifiers, it will be possible to not only provide immediate feedback to guide learning and teaching but also to build a digital record of achievement that can be interrogated for patterns and used to  generate individualised and pictorial achievement maps or profiles.

My emphasis. The online software will correct the work, sort the work, store the work, spit out the resources, evaluate the student's progress. The data collection will be mountainous, epic, massive in scope, providing a completely picture of who the student is and what the student knows.

For teachers, the transformation will be huge. "Learning systems of the future will free up teacher time currently spent on preparation, marking and record-keeping and allow a greater focus on the professional roles of diagnosis, personalized instruction, scaffolding deep learning, motivation, guidance and care." Scan back to the top of that sentence-- teachers will no longer prepare lessons or material.

Meanwhile, the system will be providing personalized instruction. As always with this kind of system talk, what we appear to mean is personalized pacing. All students are meant to climb up the exact same ladder-- it's up to the software to decide which rung they're ready to step on.

Pearson's Brave New World

This is education in Pearson's Brave New World. They list a few challenges in the transition, but I have a different set of problems that I anticipate.

Exactly where is the instructional content coming from in this system? The system is cheerfully spitting out the resources and assessments needed according to the educational plan. Who, exactly, is writing any of those things? Pearson wants to teacher-proof education by removing the influence of individual teachers from the classroom, but which human beings are producing the materials that go into the software? And why should I, as a professional educator, trust the nameless faceless functionaries on the other end of the internet hookup to know better than I what the program design should be?

Like all systematic approaches dependent on technology, this system depends on huge assumption-- that the students will take it seriously and attempt anything more than superficial compliance with the software.

Look-- my students do (mostly) the things I ask (kind of) because they respect me. They don't automatically respect me for being a teacher-- I spend most of September earning their respect and trust, and because I've earned it, they now take on the tasks I set out for them. Exactly how does the Pearson system propose to earn that trust from students? What makes them think that their system will fare any better than the old teaching machines or Rocketship academies or programs like Study Island (which do an excellent job of training students to click buttons quickly)?

Until Pearson has a good answer for either of those issues (neither of which they actually address), this is all baloney.

Next, and finally, we'll look at what Pearson wants to see policy makers, schools, system leaders, and other Important People do in order to keep the revolution on track.

Pearson's Renaissance (4): Marching Orders

This is the last in the series of wonk-heavy posts about Pearson's "Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment." In previous posts we've looked at Pearson's versions of the upcoming revolution, the problems of assessment, and the future after the revolution occurs. Now we'll take a look at the final chapter-- what they want various leaders to do in order to bring the revolution about.

4. A Framework for Action

For ease of understanding, Pearson provides the marching orders for leaders in a nice, numbered list.

1. Think long-term

"The assessment renaissance, we firmly believe, is coming. But it is hard to predict when it will arrive." The technical problems of making all this work, and people are unaccountably more attached to the status quo than a hypothetical future version of education.

So we have to think long term. The arrival of the assessment renaissance, like the Second Coming of Christ, will appear on a day unlooked for. Everyone best be ready.

2. Build partnerships

Not only do teachers and government need to team up, but education corporations, tech corporations, venture capital corporations, and university researchers need to get their hands in the till. The writers suggest incentivizing cooperation to speed it up. They particularly like the example of a competition to propose solutions (competitions are great because you can get lots of people to work for you, but you only have to pay the winners).

3. Create the infrastructure

The current tech infrastructure sucks. If only you could get somebody like, say, the government to underwrite the infrastructure improvement so that the road to profit was open and clear.

4. Develop teacher capacity

Teachers' ability to shift with the new changes is slow for some reason. It's almost as if they've repeatedly been told "Do this great new thing" and then had the rug yanked out from under them, making them hesitant to jump on the newest bandwagon. The writers suggest something like a five-year plan  for developing teacher familiarity with technology and "sophisticated assessment."

5. Allow variation in implementation

No, don't get excited. They are "not recommending simply leaving te system, school or teacher alone and seeing what happens." Just as "personalizing" instruction really just means  differentiating the speed at which everyone does the same thing, so does "variation" here just mean that schools don't necessarily need to move in lock step. As they implement exactly the same system.

6. Adopt a delivery approach

You need to sell a shared vision, because this will take a while and politicians will come and go. If you let things become too politicized, it will mess implementation up. Or, in other words, if you allow people in positions of power who have not been assimilated, you'll run into trouble. Make sure that doesn't happen.

7. Communicate consistently

People keep getting the Wrong Idea about this stuff. Some people are confused and some people willfully mislead. Pearson does not allow for the category of people who understand perfectly and object vehemently. But their choice of "consistently" is telling. They don't recommend that their people be "transparent" or even "honest." Just consistent. Get your story straight, and stick to it.

8. Apply the change knowledge

Oh, a list within a list. Barber quotes himself again, this time to indicate what he believes is necessary to make this change happen successfully. Pay attention to this list, because it tells you just how serious he is about this stuff

-- Moral purpose
-- Positive experiences
-- Shared vision and ownership
-- Learning in context is key
-- Encourage and learn from pioneers
-- System support
-- Balance pressure and support
-- Leadership is the key to system transformation
-- Better value for money

Yes, moral purpose. If you've never read Barber before, know this-- he speaks repeatedly about changing the world's education system not as a business opportunity, but as a moral imperative. He is, in fact, carrying the white man's burden, fixing all the schools in the world because he Knows how they are supposed to work.

6 Lessons from Pearson's Assessment Renaissance

I have plowed through Pearson's massive "Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment" because these are the people that the reformsters listen to. The paper itself is an 88-page monster; if you would like me to walk you through it, you can start with this post.

But for this post, let me just try to distill some of the big takeaways from Peter Hill and Michael Barber's essay. Here are some important things to know about what Pearson's brave new future education world would look like.

Welcome to the matrix: students will be plugged in

Pearson does not aspire to simply administer a high stakes test or two a couple of times a year. Think of every sort of assessment you do, from unit tests to small check quizzes to daily exercises for understanding. Pearson wants all of that. All. Of. That. Every single bit of assessment will generate data which will go straight into the Big Data Bank so that a complete picture of the individual student can be created and stored. I once noted that the Common Core standards make more sense if viewed as data tags. I wrote that last March, but it still looks correct to me.

The point of having everything done via internet-linked device is not just to deliver instruction and assessment to the student-- it's to be able to collect every bit of data that the student generates.

Through the use of rubrics, which will define performance in terms of a hierarchically ordered set of levels representing increasing quality of responses to specific tasks, and a common set of curriculum identifiers, it will be possible to not only provide immediate feedback to guide learning and teaching but also to build a digital record of achievement that can be interrogated for patterns and used to  generate individualised and pictorial achievement maps or profiles

And Pearson is completely comfortable with assessment and instruction centered on character traits, developing grit and tenacity and prudence and the ability to work well with others. So their system will hoover all that info up as well. By the time your child is eighteen, there will be a complete profile, covering every aspect of her intellectual and personal development. I wonder if Pearson would be able to make any money selling that database to potential employers or to government agencies. Hmmm...

Teachers will not be teachers

Pearson doesn't much like the teaching profession as it currently stands. They believe that teaching must be transformed from a "largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionized, bureaucratically controlled semi-profession into a true profession with a distinctive knowledge base, framework for teaching, well-defined common terms for describing and analyzing teaching at a level of specificity and strict control."

"Learning systems of the future will free up teacher time currently spent on preparation, marking and record-keeping and allow a greater focus on the professional roles of diagnosis, personalized instruction, scaffolding deep learning, motivation, guidance and care." The system will do all the planning and implementing, and the system will put all the necessary technology at hand. "But without such a systematic, data-driven approach to instruction, teaching remains an imprecise and somewhat idiosyncratic process that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers."

All educational decisions will be made by the software and the system. Teachers will just be needed as a sort of stewardess. We will teacher-proof the classroom, so that any nasty individuality cannot mess up the system.

Personalized learning won't be

Pearson's concept of personalized learning is really about personalized pacing. The framework for learning starts with "validated maps of the sequence in which students typically learn a given curriculum outcome." So-- like railroad tracks. Personalized does not mean wandering all over a variety of possible learning paths. It means adjusting to move slower or faster while pausing for review when there's a need to fill in holes.

Pearson does not offer an answer to the age-old question, "How do all students move at their own paces but still cross the finish line in time?"  They do suggest that we give up the old age-grade progression, and they believe that high expectations fix everything, but they do not directly explain if that's enough to keep some students from being stuck in school until they're twenty-nine years old.

Character may be important, but humanity, not so much

One of the odd disconnects in Pearson's vision is that they value (enough to plan measuring) social skills and character, but they do not pause to consider how their system might affect or be affected by the development of these qualities.

What does it do to the development of a child to be in groups that change regularly because of differing educational pace. What will happen when an eight year old must leave her best friend behind because she is being moved up? What will happen to the very bright twelve-year-old grouped with a bunch of fairly slow seventeen-year-olds?

Pearson lists a wide variety of possible obstacles to this system's emergence, but they assume that students will simply fall in line and take the system seriously, feeling some sort of accountability to the device screen that delivers their instruction and assessment. Teachers no longer automatically receive the trust and respect of our students--we have to earn it. Pearson assumes that because they think they're important, students will, too. That's a bad assumption.

Software will be magical

Pearson knows that trying to test any higher levels of cognition with bubble test questions is doomed to failure. Their solution is magical software. Software can ask questions that will delve deep, and software can read and assess the answers to open-ended essay questions. Software can suss out a student's intelligence so well that it can then create more test items that will be perfect for that student. Software can unerringly crunch all the data to create a perfect profile of the student. Software can do all of these things better than live human beings (even though software is written by live human beings).

And if you believe all that, I would like to sell you some software that controls the Brooklyn Bridge.


Important people are listening to these guys

You cannot read a page of this essay without encountering familiar references. New tests that move beyond the old bubble tests. High expectations can bring all students up to excellence. Enhanced data collection will lead to better learning. The job of teaching needs to be changed. We've heard it all from various bureaucrats, reformster leaders, and US Secretaries of Education.

Important people pay attention to Pearson, even though most of their ideas are rather dumb and self-serving. We all need to be paying attention to Pearson as well, because back behind the Gatesian money and the policies of Arne Duncan we find these guys, generating and articulating the ideas that become foundational to the reformsters.

It would be easy to dismiss Pearson as simple money-grubbing corporatists, to lump them together with the goofy amateurism of a Duncan or a Coleman. But they are rich, they are polished, they are powerful, and they are, I believe, driven. I have never read work by Michael Barber in which he does not note that changing the global face of education is a moral imperative, a job that he must do because he knows what must be done to improve mankind. For me, that takes this all to a new level of scary.

ConnectED to Reality?

The White House fact sheet about the Presidential Plan for Connecting All Schools to the Digital Age is a lovely document. But then, I like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, too, and I will gladly recommend Mervyn Peake's glorious Gormenghast books as well. As with all works of literature, the challenge is in teasing out the connections to reality, and all three of these works present some challenges. But time is short, so let's focus on the ConnectED plan.

First, the challenge:

Driven by new digital technologies, the future of learning is increasingly interactive, individualized, and full of real-world experiences and information. Unfortunately, the average school has about the same connectivity as the average American home, but serves 200 times as many users, and fewer than 20 percent of educators say their school’s internet connection meets their teaching needs. And our teachers do not get enough training and support to integrate technology in their classroom and lessons, despite the fundamental and increasing importance of those skills. 

So many questions here, such as what is meant by saying schools have "the same connectivity." Same bandwidth? Same access to the same internet? I'm not sure. But I'm really wondering about that first sentence-- if being "interactive, individualized, and full of real-world experiences and information" are the future of education, what was in the past? And what about any of those qualities leads us directly to a need for internet technology in schools? Are those features beyond our reach without broadband wifi?

And now, the solution:

Today, President Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to take the steps necessary to build high-speed digital connections to America’s schools and libraries, ensuring that 99 percent of American students can benefit from these advances in teaching and learning. He is further directing the federal government to make better use of existing funds to get this technology into classrooms, and into the hands of teachers trained on its advantages. And he is calling on businesses, states, districts, schools and communities to support this vision.

The sheet focuses on three areas of super-duperosity. And it is nothing if not bold.

First, we're going to get connectivity to 99% of America's students using next-gen broadband and hot wifi in their schools and libraries. As a teacher in a fairly rural school district, I think this would be an awesome thing indeed, but it clearly involves enough detail-based underbrush to hide a million devils.

I should probably take a moment to note that I am completely un-Ludditish in my technoattitudes, and have been one of the most aggressively pro-computer tech guys in my district for a the last two decades. But I don't think tech is magical. I don't over-estimate its capabilities, and I don't under-estimate its challenges.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that people who don't get out of the city much really don't get the tech challenges of rural life. This first goal would inspire me a great deal more if I believed that the feds really knew what they were proposing to do. They do name-check "leveling the playing fields for rural students," but blah blah funds and argle bargle transformative.

Second, the initiative proposes to train teachers so that we can "use technology to help improve student outcomes." Because what good is the internet if it doesn't bring test scores up. The Department of Ed will use existing funding and strategically invest and blah blah blah they want this to happen but they aren't really going to fund it. Thanks, guys.

Third, build on private-sector innovation. Ah, here's the pay-off. The feds are going to transform schools into massive markets for hardware and software. They would like us all to use

feature-rich educational devices that are increasingly price-competitive with basic textbooks and high-quality educational software (including applications) providing content aligned with college-and career-ready standards being adopted and implemented by States across America.

We'll be able to get this stuff from "leading companies" because "a robust market in educational software can unlock the full educational potential of these investments and create American jobs and export opportunities in a global educational marketplace of over $1 trillion." So, again, not so much about educational quality as about opening up markets for corporate sales.

The implication here is that "feature-rich" devices can be used to replace textbooks, and that's a pretty thought. And those devices might well be cheaper than textbooks-- if I were assuming that we had to replace textbooks every two-to-four years. For purposes of price comparison, I will also need to assume that I don't have to pay any license fees for the digital content I'm accessing with my feature-rich device. I'm pretty sure that once we factor in replacement costs and frequency for the devices and add on the license costs for the content, this is not going to be an economic win for schools.

And that's before I even begin to look at whether it's actually a good idea or not educationally. You can look at the early research suggesting that e-reading is not so great as book reading, or you can come talk to my students. We've been a one-to-one school (we give every single student a netbook) for about five years, and they still mostly hate having to read anything on their feature-rich device.

But of course we're not really looking at the educational advantages of this system. Like Kodak confronting digital photography, the book publishers response to their digital competition was both slow and dumb (at one point you could only buy a digital textbook if you would also buy the corresponding number of paper ones). Common Core and the digitizing of American education is supposed to save their bacon, and part of that porcine preservation includes opening some huge markets.

Beware! Falling sky!

Finally, no reformy appeal would be complete without the terrifying news that we are in danger of being internationally outstripped.

Many of our leading competitors are moving forward with aggressive investments in digital learning and technology education. In South Korea, all schools are connected to the internet with high-speed connections, all teachers are trained in digital learning, and printed textbooks will be phased out by 2016. 

Because if there's any culture and country that embodies everything America wants to be, it's South Korea.

Here's a pro tip for racing-- there's no point in chasing somebody if they aren't running in the right direction. There's no reason to get excited about lagging "behind" South Korea is they are in fact running toward the edge of a cliff.

What's the goal?

I am a huge fan of modern tech. I use it without hesitation every time it offers some advantage in pursuing a worthwhile educational goal. I even tolerate the massive level of unreliability that comes with it (in five years I'm pretty sure I've never had a class in which every single student's tech worked as it was supposed to at once).

But if our goal is to be the next South Korea so that we can better fill corporate coffers and, oh yeah, maybe educate some students along the way, then I'm not excited. I am also not excited if what we're really salivating over here is the opportunity to plug students in so that we can collect an ocean of data from each and every one.

Let's use, for instance, the massive bulk buying power of states to get an enormously cheap rate from all of these folks, and let's not just figure that since it's tax dollars at work, we can pay top dollar for all of this technoeduparaphenalia. If we must have a government initiative in this arena, let's have government approach businesses as a representative of public interests, instead of acting as a corporate representative in the business of milking the public interest for all it can.

Duncan in Denial

There are many portions of Arne Duncan's educational policies that are... what's the word? Counter-intuitive? Not aligned with reality as experienced by most sentient beings? Baloney? There are days when I imagine that the energy Duncan expends just holding cognitive dissonance at bay must be enough to power a small country (like, say, Estonia).

But nowhere are Duncan's powers of denial more obvious than in his deep and abiding love for Value Added Measures. Arne loves him some VAM sauce, and it is a love that simply refuses to die. "You just don't know her the way I do," he cries, as the rest of us just shake our heads.

At this point, VAM is no spring chicken, and perhaps when it was fresh and young some affection for it could be justified. After all, lots of folks, including non-reformy folks, like the idea of recognizing and rewarding teachers for being excellent. But how would we identify these pillars of excellence? That was the puzzler for ages until VAM jumped up to say, "We can do it! With Science!!" We'll give some tests and then use super-sciency math to filter out every influence that's Not a Teacher and we'll know exactly how much learnin' that teacher poured into that kid.

The plan is simple and elegant. All it requires is two simple tools:

1) A standardized test that reliably and validly measures how much students know
2) A super-sciency math algorithm that will reliably and validly strip out all influences except that of the teacher.

Unfortunately, we don't have either.

We know we don't have either. We are particularly clear on the degree to which we do not have the second. Scan the list of reformster programs, and while you can find plenty of principled disagreement on most points, there is no part of the reformster education platform that has been so thoroughly, widely debunked as VAM-for-teacher-evaluation. The National Association of Secondary School Principals has taken a stand, and if you read their resolution, you'll find not just a philosophical argument, but a list of striking debunkers. The American Statistical Association has made its own statement in opposition. A peer-reviewed study paid for by the Gates Foundation itself, the grand-daddy of all reformster backers, declared in no uncertain terms that VAM tells us nothing about teacher quality. The blog Vamboozled (by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley) provides unplumbable depths of VAM-busting research and essays.

At this point, even the Flat Earth Society would be reluctant to endorse VAM as a measure of teacher effectiveness.

NO portion of his policy has been so thoroughly disproven, and yet no portion of his policy has earned more of Duncan's loyalty. He stopped saying "Common Core" out loud. He at least pretends to be cooling off on testing. Even he has to admit that some charters have issues. And data collection has become the love that dare not speak its name. But VAM still owns a place close to Arne's heart.

Witness the most recent doubling down on VAM, in which Duncan not only pledges his allegiance to the flagging monster, but announces his intention to extend its reach, taking the already invalid VAM ratings of individual teachers and taking a giant leap backwards to use them to evaluate the college that trained that teacher. Is there anybody else who can present this idea with a straight face? Read Anthony Cody here as he takes this proposal down, then note that you have over a month to register your disagreement wit the feds, and do it.

Why would someone who professes such love for data and critical thinking stay so attached to a policy that is supported by neither? Why does Duncan insist on such a mountain of denial?

Well, I can't pretend to see into his brain. But I can see that if Duncan were to admit that his beloved VAM is a useless tool, a snub-nosed screwdriver with a briar-encrusted handle, then all his other favorite programs would collapse as well.

Everywhere we turn in reformsterland, we keep coming back to teacher effectiveness. Every one of the policies and programs either begins or ends with measuring teacher effectiveness. Why do we give the Big Test? To measure teacher effectiveness. How do we rank and evaluate our schools? By looking at teacher effectiveness. How do we find the teachers that we are going to move around so that every classroom has a great teacher? With teacher effectiveness ratings. How do we institute merit pay and a career ladder? By looking at teacher effectiveness. How do we evaluate every single program instituted in any school? By checking to see how it affects teacher effectivesness. How do we prove that centralized planning (such as Common Core) is working? By looking at teacher effectiveness. How do we prove that corporate involvement at every stage is a Good Thing? By looking at teacher effectiveness.And by "teacher effectiveness," we always mean VAM (because we don't know any other way, at all).

If our measure of teacher effectiveness, our magic VAM sauce, is a sham and a delusion and a big bowl of nothing, then a critical piece of the entire reformy puzzle is missing. We have no proof that we need reform, and we have no method of proving that reform is working (we already have means of measuring reform's effects, but we don't like those because the answers are not the ones we want).

Duncan has to hold onto his belief in VAM because without it, the whole ugly sweater of reform starts to unravel even faster than it already is.

VAM is the compass by which reform steers. To admit that it is random and useless would be to admit that our political leaders have been piloting the ship of education blindly, cluelessly, haplessly, that they are steering us onto the rocks and that they have no idea how to get us anywhere else. Either that, or they would have to admit that they've known all along exactly where they were taking us, and the VAM compass has just been a big fat lie to keep the passengers quiet and calm. Either way, admitting VAM is a fraud would be inviting (further) mutiny, and Duncan can't do that any time soon.