Benchmark is originally a surveying term. Benchmarks are slots cut into the side of stone (read "permanent") structures into which a bench (basically a little shelf) can be inserted for surveying purposes. We know they're at a certain level because they've been measured in relation to another marker which has been measured in relation to another marker and so on retrogressively until we arrive at a Mean Sea Level marker (everything in surveying is ultimately measured in relation to one of those).
Surveying markers, including benchmarks, are literally set in stone. Anybody with the necessary training can find them always in the same place and measure any other point in relation to them.
This metaphorical sense of unwavering objective measure is what many folks carry with them to their consideration of testing and cut scores. Passing, failing, and excellence, they figure, are all measured against some scholarly Mean Sea Level marker by way of benchmarks that have been carefully measured against MSL and set in stone.
Sorry, no. Instead, cut scores represent an ideal somewhere between a blindfolded dart player with his fingers duct-taped together, and the guy playing against the blindfolded dart player who sets the darts exactly where he wants them.
Writing in the Stamford Advocate, Wendy Lecker notes that the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium members (including Connecticut's own committed foe of public education Commissioner Stefan Pryor) set cut scores for the SBA tests based on stale fairy dust and the wishes of dying puppies.
People tend to assume that cut scores-- the borderline between Good Enough and Abject Failure-- mean something. If a student fails The Test, she must be unready for college or unemployable or illiterate or at the very least several grades behind where she's Supposed To Be (although even that opens up the question "Supposed by whom?")
In fact, SBAC declares that the achievement levels "do not equate directly to expectations for `on-grade' performance" and test scores should only be used with multiple other sources of information about schools and students.
Furthermore, "SBAC admits it cannot validate whether its tests measure college readiness until it has data on how current test takers do in college."
If you are imagining that cut scores for the high-stakes accountability tests are derived through some rigorous study of exactly what students need to know and what level of proficiency they should have achieved by a certain age-- well, first, take a look at what you're assuming. Did you really think we have some sort of master list, some scholastic Mean Sea Level that tells us exactly what a human being of a certain age should know and be able to do as agreed upon by some wise council of experty experts? Because if you do, you might as well imagine that those experts fly to their meetings on pink pegasi, a flock of winger horsies that dance on rainbows and take minutes of the Wise Expert meetings by dictating to secretarial armadillos clothed in shimmering mink stoles.
Anyway, it doesn't matter because there are no signs that any of these people associated with The Test are trying to work with a hypothetical set of academic standards anyway. Instead, what we see over and over (even back in the days of NCLB), is educational amateurs setting cut scores for political purposes. So SBAC sets a cut score so that almost two thirds of the students will fail. John King in New York famously predicted the percentage of test failure before the test was even out the door-- but the actual cut scores were set after the test was taken.
That is not how you measure a test result against a standard. That's how you set a test standard based on the results you want to see. It's how you make your failure predictions come true. According to Carol Burris, King also attempted to find some connection between SAT results and college success prediction, and then somehow graft that onto a cut score for the NY tests, while Kentucky and other CCSS states played similar games with the ACT.
Setting cut scores is not an easy process. Education Sector, a division of the thinky tank American Institutes for Research (they specialize in behavioral sciency thinking, and have a large pedigree in the NCLB era and beyond), issued an "explainer" in July of 2006 about how states set passing scores on standardized tests. It leads off its section on cut scores with this:
On a technical level, states set cut scores along one of two dimensions: The characteristics of the test items or the characteristics of the test takers.It is essential to understand that either way is an inescapably subjective process. Just as academic standards are ultimately the result of professional judgment rather than absolute truth, there is no “right” way to set cut scores, and different methods have various strengths and weaknesses.
The paper goes on to talk about setting cut scores, and some of it is pretty technical, but it returns repeatedly to the notion that at various critical junctures, some human being is going to make a judgment call.
Educational Testing Service (ETS) also has a nifty "Primer on Setting Cut Scores on Tests of Educational Achievement." Again, from all the way back in 2006, this gives a quick compendium of various techniques for setting cut scores-- it lists eight different methods. And it also opens with some insights that would still be useful to consider today.
The first step is for policymakers to specify exactly why cut scores are being set in the first place. The policymakers should describe the benefits that are expected from the use of cut scores. What decisions will be made on the basis of the cut scores? How are those decisions being made now in the absence of cut scores? What reasons are there to believe that cut scores will result in better decisions? What are the expected benefits of the improved decisions?
Yeah, those conversations have not been happening within anyone's earshot. Then there is this:
It is important to list the reasons why cut scores are being set and to obtain consensus among stakeholders that the reasons are appropriate. An extremely useful exercise is to attempt to describe exactly how the cut scores will bring about each of the desired outcomes. It may be the case that some of the expected benefits of cut scores are unlikely to be achieved unless major educational reforms are accomplished. It will become apparent that cut scores, by themselves, have very little power to improve education. Simply measuring a child and classifying the child’s growth as adequate or inadequate will not help the child grow.
Oh, those crazy folks of 2006. Little did they know that in a few years education reform and testing would be fully committed and devoted to the notion that you can make a pig gain weight by weighing it. All this excellent advice about setting cut scores, and none of it appears to be getting use these days.
I'm not going to go too much more into this document from a company that specializes in educational testing, except to note that once again, the paper frequently notes that personal and professional judgment is a factor at several critical junctures. I will note that they include this step--
The next step is for groups of educators familiar with students in the affected grades and familiar with the subject matter to describe what students should know and be able to do to reach the selected performance levels.
They also are clear that selecting the judges who will set cut scores means making sure they are qualified, have experience, and reflect a demographic cross section. They suggest that policymakers consider fundamental questions such as is it better to pass a student who should fail, or fail a student who should pass? And they are also clear that the full process of setting the cut scores should be documented in painstaking detail, including the rationale for methodology and qualifications of the judges.
And they do refer uniformly to the score-setters as judges, because the whole process involves-- say it with me-- judgment.
People dealing with test scores and test results must remember that setting cut scores is not remotely like the process of surveying with benchmarks. Nothing is set in stone, nothing is judged based on its relationship to something set in stone, and everything is set by people using subjective judgment, not objective standards. We always need to be asking what a cut score is based on, and whether it is any better than a Wild Assed Guess. And when cut cores are set to serve a political purpose, we are right to question whether they have any validity at all.
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Monday, December 22, 2014
Reading Not To Write
This is why I love the blogosphere. Ideas get bounced back and forth and become shiny and polished, like stones in a polishing drum.
A week or so ago, several of us picked up and responded to a David Coleman piece about how to teach reading the Common Core way with Nifty Questions. But the cherry on top of the sundae that was that conversation comes today from Daniel Katz. The post is entitled "On the twelfth day of Common Core, David Coleman gave to me..." and it is A) not a hilarious rewrite of the Twelve Days of Christmas and it is B) long but C) you should read it anyway.
Because, after all the many ways we have tried to explain and distill what's wrong and lacking and Less Than about Coleman's approach to reading, Katz brings us to the simplest, clearest explanation yet.
Coleman thinks the reason to read a work of literature is to prepare to write an English 101 paper about it.
There are a million useful ways to interact with literature. And I would not be an English teacher if I did not believe that there are many benefits to be derived from reading great literature even if you're not going to be an English teacher when you grow up and even if you are not going to be an English major and even if you are not going to go to college at all.
I believe the point of reading and wading into and wrestling with and experiencing literature is to become more fully human, to become (excuse the cheesy cliche) a better person. Coleman believes that the reason to read literature is to write a better term paper.
It's as clear a way as any to capture how Coleman's vision of language education is cramped and small and limited and meager. But you should click on over to Katz's blog and check it out. Because his piece, like many other pieces of writing in the world, is well worth reading even if you aren't going to have to write a paper about it.
A week or so ago, several of us picked up and responded to a David Coleman piece about how to teach reading the Common Core way with Nifty Questions. But the cherry on top of the sundae that was that conversation comes today from Daniel Katz. The post is entitled "On the twelfth day of Common Core, David Coleman gave to me..." and it is A) not a hilarious rewrite of the Twelve Days of Christmas and it is B) long but C) you should read it anyway.
Because, after all the many ways we have tried to explain and distill what's wrong and lacking and Less Than about Coleman's approach to reading, Katz brings us to the simplest, clearest explanation yet.
Coleman thinks the reason to read a work of literature is to prepare to write an English 101 paper about it.
There are a million useful ways to interact with literature. And I would not be an English teacher if I did not believe that there are many benefits to be derived from reading great literature even if you're not going to be an English teacher when you grow up and even if you are not going to be an English major and even if you are not going to go to college at all.
I believe the point of reading and wading into and wrestling with and experiencing literature is to become more fully human, to become (excuse the cheesy cliche) a better person. Coleman believes that the reason to read literature is to write a better term paper.
It's as clear a way as any to capture how Coleman's vision of language education is cramped and small and limited and meager. But you should click on over to Katz's blog and check it out. Because his piece, like many other pieces of writing in the world, is well worth reading even if you aren't going to have to write a paper about it.
A Truce for Redrawing the LIne
Mike McShane is guest-blogging at Rick Hess's EdWeek spot, and today he calls for a truce between sides in the education wars, except that he doesn't really, which is okay because what he's saying is worth paying attention to.
McShane starts with the story of the 1914 Christmas truce on the western front of the Great European War. It's an even more apt opening than it first appears, but let me get back to that shortly. McShane is calling for a similar truce between the warring sides of the battle for US public education, and he makes his pitch by suggesting that there are some important things that unite us. McShane says that people are getting stuck with "caricatured views of their ideological opponents," which is fair, although as with any highly divisive issue, there are plenty of people who insist on behaving like caricatures. But if we look past the caricatures, we can find things that unite us. Well, two things, anyway. He lists them as mistakes he thinks folks are making.
Letting Means Obscure Ends
McShane says that in interviewing people from across the spectrum, he found that both sides see themselves as opposing a goal of monolithic, unresponsive school systems. Conservatives want to avoid a giant governmental bureaucratic monolith, while liberals want to avoid a giant corporate monolith. At the same time, neither actually has a desire to create a large, unresponsive, monolithic system.
The difference, McShane suggests, is what the two sides see as an antidote to the monolith-- liberals like democracy, and conservatives like the free market. But both want to break up the monolith and create a system more responsive to the needs of students and the values of a community.
McShane's not wrong, but he's not entirely correct either. The free market and democracy are distorted reflections of each other. The free market is a form of democracy in which a dollar is a vote-- and therefore some people get to have more votes than others. In a democracy, Bill Gates has as many votes as I do. In the free market, Bill Gates has a gazillion more votes than I do. And because people tend to believe strongly in and value their preferred system, we all tend to launch with, "First, we have to get the system working the way it's supposed to so that we can get started on schools." But not everybody is in a position to make that happen. Folks who won at the Free Market Game are uniquely equipped to advocate that same game be played by everyone.
But there is a commonality that both sides can share, and it's the meat of McShane's argument. It's also why his call for a truce isn't really a call for a truce at all.
Not Recognizing a Common Enemy
What McShane really does in his piece is argue for a redrawing of battle lines. It's not so much that we could have a cease-fire-- it's that we need to start fighting the right people.
When Secretary Duncan says that education can be bipartisan, he means that centrist Republicans can coalesce around an essentially center-left technocratic vision of how to operate schools. They want centralized standards, test-based school and teacher accountability, and limited "quality" choices for students.
The real fight, McShane suggests, is not liberals versus conservatives, or democracy versus the free market-- it's collectivism versus individuals. And on this point, I do not disagree with him. The last fifty years or so of American government has been about the development of a new hybrid form of centralism, in which DC collects a bunch of power and then hands it over to corporate interests.
Politicians like centralized power because that gives them more control, more ability to realize their personal visions of a better place. Corporate interests have always been pro-centralization; from Rockefeller through Gates, business leaders have loved an open market until they are winning, at which point they do their best to shut down all diversity and competition. And everybody has at least moments in which they dream of a system that is more efficient, less wasteful, less cantankerous, a nation of happy people united boldly behind one clear, singularly correct vision-- which is the governmental equivalent of a squad of unicorns dancing on silver clouds with hippogryphs. It can't possibly happen, but it's so pretty to imagine.
So instead of lining up the Left against the Right, McShane would like to line up the Forces of Freedom against the Courts of Centralized Collectivism. This is not so much a truce as a redirection of attack.
This Is Not Easy
Parsing the battle along those lines makes lots of sense, but there are problems.
For one, there are sympathizers on both sides. There are pro-public ed folks who don't like Common Core in particular, but who think centralized national standards in general would be just fine. And there are plenty of privatizers whose believe in the free market only to the extent that it lets them take control and get rich.
There are people who reject ed reform but accept many of its premises; for instance, those who say the current high-stakes testing must go, but of course there must be some mechanism by which a central government can monitor school progress. Some folks reject standardization, but agree that education must progress pretty much the same from state to state; you don't get that without some centralized control. And there are people who just sincerely hate the inefficiency and mess that come with democracy and pluralism.
Nor is history on McShane's side. The ed wars didn't erupt through some form of spontaneous combustion. Reformsters came out swinging, hard, by demonizing public school teachers and creating a system designed to create failure rather than help schools succeed. At the same time, people who actually rather hate public education have come out hard against ed reform policies. Democrats have shat upon their traditional allies in public education, but Republicans have not leapt into the breach to make new friends. It has become quite a challenge for teachers to tell friend and foe apart. McShane's desire to redraw the lines involves a field that is already marked by lines drawn with a feather in fields of wet mud.
My Proposal for Lines Drawing
So we can redraw lines many ways. Centralists versus individualists. Corporate versus public. Urban versus rural. Efficiency versus robust flexibility. But I think there's another place to draw a line-- between the people who have money and power, and the people who don't.
The people with power and money have the means to impose their singular vision for education on everyone else. A classroom teacher or a thinky tank thoughtmeister are just two more people with opinions until they can get someone with power and money to listen to them. David Coleman was just a shmoe with a dream until he successfully bent Bill Gates' ear. Arne Duncan was just one more educational amateur who was sure he knew the Secret of Fixing Schools until he acquired the power to make everyone agree with him.
In other words, the world is filled with people who say, "Boy, if I ruled the world, this is what I'd make everybody do." Only the people who also have money and power are a problem. They will mostly want to have a centralized vision, and they place they envision as the center is the place where they're standing. Arne Duncan without a cushy government gig and Bill Gates without a personal fortune would just be two more guys on twitter scrambling for retweets and followers with the rest of us.
Where you find the threat of a centralized vision, you'll find somebody with money and/or power selling it, pushing it, enforcing it. And one technique of those with money and power for keeping the little people from storming the castle is to get the little people busy fighting each other.
The Great European War
Back in the day, I did plenty of reading and studying of what we now call WWI. One of the striking universal features of the war is that soldiers felt a stronger kinship with other soldiers than they did with the generals and politicians in cushy offices far from the front. Regardless of their nationality, these soldiers often expressed the idea that their biggest enemies were not the other soldiers in the other trenches, but the politicians, generals, and wealthy industrialists who had sent all the soldiers there to fight and die.
The rare truces that broke out at the front can be seen as moments in which the soldiers recognized their kinship, and also recognized that the real enemy was far away, comfortably ignorant of what was really going on at the front. The powerful were far away, making the decisions that would govern the war.
But of course all they did, for that day, was sing some carols and play some soccer. And by 1917, reports of such random truces were rare. They knew that while their real enemies were far away, they were also powerful and untouchable.
I look forward to the next installment of McShane's guest turn. I'm not sure what can be accomplished by a truce-- I think some truly unbridgeable differences in fundamental values stand in the way of significant alliances across these many lines that separate us. But I do believe that we can all benefit from the exercise of figuring out with whom we really agree and disagree, which in turn helps us clarify what we really want, all of which is infinitely preferable to knee-jerk reactions to the people we think we're supposed to align with (or not). And we can always listen. Don't stop paying attention to other things going on, but listen. It never hurts to listen.
McShane starts with the story of the 1914 Christmas truce on the western front of the Great European War. It's an even more apt opening than it first appears, but let me get back to that shortly. McShane is calling for a similar truce between the warring sides of the battle for US public education, and he makes his pitch by suggesting that there are some important things that unite us. McShane says that people are getting stuck with "caricatured views of their ideological opponents," which is fair, although as with any highly divisive issue, there are plenty of people who insist on behaving like caricatures. But if we look past the caricatures, we can find things that unite us. Well, two things, anyway. He lists them as mistakes he thinks folks are making.
Letting Means Obscure Ends
McShane says that in interviewing people from across the spectrum, he found that both sides see themselves as opposing a goal of monolithic, unresponsive school systems. Conservatives want to avoid a giant governmental bureaucratic monolith, while liberals want to avoid a giant corporate monolith. At the same time, neither actually has a desire to create a large, unresponsive, monolithic system.
The difference, McShane suggests, is what the two sides see as an antidote to the monolith-- liberals like democracy, and conservatives like the free market. But both want to break up the monolith and create a system more responsive to the needs of students and the values of a community.
McShane's not wrong, but he's not entirely correct either. The free market and democracy are distorted reflections of each other. The free market is a form of democracy in which a dollar is a vote-- and therefore some people get to have more votes than others. In a democracy, Bill Gates has as many votes as I do. In the free market, Bill Gates has a gazillion more votes than I do. And because people tend to believe strongly in and value their preferred system, we all tend to launch with, "First, we have to get the system working the way it's supposed to so that we can get started on schools." But not everybody is in a position to make that happen. Folks who won at the Free Market Game are uniquely equipped to advocate that same game be played by everyone.
But there is a commonality that both sides can share, and it's the meat of McShane's argument. It's also why his call for a truce isn't really a call for a truce at all.
Not Recognizing a Common Enemy
What McShane really does in his piece is argue for a redrawing of battle lines. It's not so much that we could have a cease-fire-- it's that we need to start fighting the right people.
When Secretary Duncan says that education can be bipartisan, he means that centrist Republicans can coalesce around an essentially center-left technocratic vision of how to operate schools. They want centralized standards, test-based school and teacher accountability, and limited "quality" choices for students.
The real fight, McShane suggests, is not liberals versus conservatives, or democracy versus the free market-- it's collectivism versus individuals. And on this point, I do not disagree with him. The last fifty years or so of American government has been about the development of a new hybrid form of centralism, in which DC collects a bunch of power and then hands it over to corporate interests.
Politicians like centralized power because that gives them more control, more ability to realize their personal visions of a better place. Corporate interests have always been pro-centralization; from Rockefeller through Gates, business leaders have loved an open market until they are winning, at which point they do their best to shut down all diversity and competition. And everybody has at least moments in which they dream of a system that is more efficient, less wasteful, less cantankerous, a nation of happy people united boldly behind one clear, singularly correct vision-- which is the governmental equivalent of a squad of unicorns dancing on silver clouds with hippogryphs. It can't possibly happen, but it's so pretty to imagine.
So instead of lining up the Left against the Right, McShane would like to line up the Forces of Freedom against the Courts of Centralized Collectivism. This is not so much a truce as a redirection of attack.
This Is Not Easy
Parsing the battle along those lines makes lots of sense, but there are problems.
For one, there are sympathizers on both sides. There are pro-public ed folks who don't like Common Core in particular, but who think centralized national standards in general would be just fine. And there are plenty of privatizers whose believe in the free market only to the extent that it lets them take control and get rich.
There are people who reject ed reform but accept many of its premises; for instance, those who say the current high-stakes testing must go, but of course there must be some mechanism by which a central government can monitor school progress. Some folks reject standardization, but agree that education must progress pretty much the same from state to state; you don't get that without some centralized control. And there are people who just sincerely hate the inefficiency and mess that come with democracy and pluralism.
Nor is history on McShane's side. The ed wars didn't erupt through some form of spontaneous combustion. Reformsters came out swinging, hard, by demonizing public school teachers and creating a system designed to create failure rather than help schools succeed. At the same time, people who actually rather hate public education have come out hard against ed reform policies. Democrats have shat upon their traditional allies in public education, but Republicans have not leapt into the breach to make new friends. It has become quite a challenge for teachers to tell friend and foe apart. McShane's desire to redraw the lines involves a field that is already marked by lines drawn with a feather in fields of wet mud.
My Proposal for Lines Drawing
So we can redraw lines many ways. Centralists versus individualists. Corporate versus public. Urban versus rural. Efficiency versus robust flexibility. But I think there's another place to draw a line-- between the people who have money and power, and the people who don't.
The people with power and money have the means to impose their singular vision for education on everyone else. A classroom teacher or a thinky tank thoughtmeister are just two more people with opinions until they can get someone with power and money to listen to them. David Coleman was just a shmoe with a dream until he successfully bent Bill Gates' ear. Arne Duncan was just one more educational amateur who was sure he knew the Secret of Fixing Schools until he acquired the power to make everyone agree with him.
In other words, the world is filled with people who say, "Boy, if I ruled the world, this is what I'd make everybody do." Only the people who also have money and power are a problem. They will mostly want to have a centralized vision, and they place they envision as the center is the place where they're standing. Arne Duncan without a cushy government gig and Bill Gates without a personal fortune would just be two more guys on twitter scrambling for retweets and followers with the rest of us.
Where you find the threat of a centralized vision, you'll find somebody with money and/or power selling it, pushing it, enforcing it. And one technique of those with money and power for keeping the little people from storming the castle is to get the little people busy fighting each other.
The Great European War
Back in the day, I did plenty of reading and studying of what we now call WWI. One of the striking universal features of the war is that soldiers felt a stronger kinship with other soldiers than they did with the generals and politicians in cushy offices far from the front. Regardless of their nationality, these soldiers often expressed the idea that their biggest enemies were not the other soldiers in the other trenches, but the politicians, generals, and wealthy industrialists who had sent all the soldiers there to fight and die.
The rare truces that broke out at the front can be seen as moments in which the soldiers recognized their kinship, and also recognized that the real enemy was far away, comfortably ignorant of what was really going on at the front. The powerful were far away, making the decisions that would govern the war.
But of course all they did, for that day, was sing some carols and play some soccer. And by 1917, reports of such random truces were rare. They knew that while their real enemies were far away, they were also powerful and untouchable.
I look forward to the next installment of McShane's guest turn. I'm not sure what can be accomplished by a truce-- I think some truly unbridgeable differences in fundamental values stand in the way of significant alliances across these many lines that separate us. But I do believe that we can all benefit from the exercise of figuring out with whom we really agree and disagree, which in turn helps us clarify what we really want, all of which is infinitely preferable to knee-jerk reactions to the people we think we're supposed to align with (or not). And we can always listen. Don't stop paying attention to other things going on, but listen. It never hurts to listen.
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Talking Distraction
Dad Gone Wild has been on a streak of extra-sharp postings lately (though it belongs on your blogroll all the time), but I wanted to highlight a particular insight hiding in the midst of his recent post about the new education tsar in Tennessee.
Tennessee is one of many states that has seen the departure of some reformster leadership. Kevin Huffman has moved on, and the governor has named Dr. Candace McQueen to fill the spot. Some observers are happy about that because they see her as more qualified than Huffman, though that is a might low bar to clear since Huffman is a lawyer with a couple of years of Teach for America under his belt-- perfect qualifications for leading a state's education program. So McQueen, who has headed a teacher prep program and supposedly taught in a classroom or two, looks like an improvement. She's being hailed as a choice with appeal to both left and right, and met with calls to be bold and mend fences.
But Dad sees some red flags, particularly in the timing. McQueen will start out just before the legislative session, which promises to feature some bills ranging from reform-unfriendly to reform-rollbacky. Of course, since she's just started at that point, as is supposed to be a Common Core expert, Dad wonders if there won't be a call to just hang on, wait, talk about things, let her work. And he offers what I consider a great insight into one reformster tactic
I’m not trying to come off as a conspiracy nut, but that is standard operating procedure for the reform crowd. They love to play upon your reasonableness and get you talking. See reasonable people believe that while you are talking, both sides are suspending activities. Thats the trap. the reform crowd talks and builds at the same time. You don’t have to look any further then East Nashville to find evidence of that. While neighborhood groups were engaged in dialog about a KIPP take over and what it would look like, KIPP was meeting with the school district, hiring a principal and recruiting in the neighborhood. So guess what, they are now ready to implement their plan despite the fact that the community still hasn’t accepted it and the band plays on.
Good call. One of the features of the political landscape for the past couple of decades is the recognition that you don't really need people to agree with you to get things done. Just keep thm talking and meanwhile, do what you want to do.
It's an insight worth remembering. Not that I think there should never be conversation. I'm a big fan of engaging with anybody who wants to talk about the issues. But listening to what reformsters have to say should never take the place of paying attention to what they are actually doing. It's like those thieves that work in teams-- one at the front door occupying you with a tale of woe while the other slips in the back and steals your stuff. Don't let it turn you into the kind of person who never opens your front door to anybody. But keep your back door locked and stay alert.
Tennessee is one of many states that has seen the departure of some reformster leadership. Kevin Huffman has moved on, and the governor has named Dr. Candace McQueen to fill the spot. Some observers are happy about that because they see her as more qualified than Huffman, though that is a might low bar to clear since Huffman is a lawyer with a couple of years of Teach for America under his belt-- perfect qualifications for leading a state's education program. So McQueen, who has headed a teacher prep program and supposedly taught in a classroom or two, looks like an improvement. She's being hailed as a choice with appeal to both left and right, and met with calls to be bold and mend fences.
But Dad sees some red flags, particularly in the timing. McQueen will start out just before the legislative session, which promises to feature some bills ranging from reform-unfriendly to reform-rollbacky. Of course, since she's just started at that point, as is supposed to be a Common Core expert, Dad wonders if there won't be a call to just hang on, wait, talk about things, let her work. And he offers what I consider a great insight into one reformster tactic
I’m not trying to come off as a conspiracy nut, but that is standard operating procedure for the reform crowd. They love to play upon your reasonableness and get you talking. See reasonable people believe that while you are talking, both sides are suspending activities. Thats the trap. the reform crowd talks and builds at the same time. You don’t have to look any further then East Nashville to find evidence of that. While neighborhood groups were engaged in dialog about a KIPP take over and what it would look like, KIPP was meeting with the school district, hiring a principal and recruiting in the neighborhood. So guess what, they are now ready to implement their plan despite the fact that the community still hasn’t accepted it and the band plays on.
Good call. One of the features of the political landscape for the past couple of decades is the recognition that you don't really need people to agree with you to get things done. Just keep thm talking and meanwhile, do what you want to do.
It's an insight worth remembering. Not that I think there should never be conversation. I'm a big fan of engaging with anybody who wants to talk about the issues. But listening to what reformsters have to say should never take the place of paying attention to what they are actually doing. It's like those thieves that work in teams-- one at the front door occupying you with a tale of woe while the other slips in the back and steals your stuff. Don't let it turn you into the kind of person who never opens your front door to anybody. But keep your back door locked and stay alert.
Education Opportunity Network Newsmaker of the Year
From my library of Posts You Should Really Read (I do actually have such a library, and you can always find it here) come this end of the year post at Education Opportunity Network. I don't have a great deal to add to it, but part of hanging out in the blogosphere is trying to amplify other voices, because some things just ought to be widely read.
The post is a great reminder of some of the folks who came and went in the ed biz this year. Hard to believe that twelve months ago people were still paying attention to She Who Must Not Be Named, or that Campbell Brown turned from journalist to water-girl for corporate interests so very quickly.
But EON has reserved the Newsmaker of the Year award for charters, and they provide a well-collated linkfest-laden narrative that stretches all the way back to the 2013 article in Forbes of all places that laid out how charters were a gravy train running straight to Fat City and includes other great pieces of journalism like the Detroit Free Press series on charters that Rick Hess called "unhelpful" but which I call an awesome piece of actual journalism.
Since then, it has been a constant string of charter misbehavior, theft, scandal, and malfeasance. EON has collected most of the high points, from using charters to funnel money to religious schools to the embezzlement to the regular sudden disappearance of charters to the many techniques used to use non-profit organizations to magically turn public tax dollars into private profits (sometimes for corporations, sometimes for individuals). In Pennsylvania alone:
Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors included an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.
So if you are looking for one stop shopping for news of charter misbehavior and a recognition of how the charter business has had a great year of twisting and torturing public education, this is your post to bookmark and save.
The post is a great reminder of some of the folks who came and went in the ed biz this year. Hard to believe that twelve months ago people were still paying attention to She Who Must Not Be Named, or that Campbell Brown turned from journalist to water-girl for corporate interests so very quickly.
But EON has reserved the Newsmaker of the Year award for charters, and they provide a well-collated linkfest-laden narrative that stretches all the way back to the 2013 article in Forbes of all places that laid out how charters were a gravy train running straight to Fat City and includes other great pieces of journalism like the Detroit Free Press series on charters that Rick Hess called "unhelpful" but which I call an awesome piece of actual journalism.
Since then, it has been a constant string of charter misbehavior, theft, scandal, and malfeasance. EON has collected most of the high points, from using charters to funnel money to religious schools to the embezzlement to the regular sudden disappearance of charters to the many techniques used to use non-profit organizations to magically turn public tax dollars into private profits (sometimes for corporations, sometimes for individuals). In Pennsylvania alone:
Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors included an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.
So if you are looking for one stop shopping for news of charter misbehavior and a recognition of how the charter business has had a great year of twisting and torturing public education, this is your post to bookmark and save.
Defending The Test
Feeling feisty after a successful election run, Republicans are reportedly gunning for various limbs of the reformster octopus, and reformsters are circling the wagons for strategic defense of those sucker-covered limbs.
People are finally remembering that it's the ESEA, due to be transformed from No Child Left Behind into something new since 2007, which gives current reformster wave of waivers its power. Fix the ESEA properly and you cut the legs out from under the current non-laws governing K-12 education in this country. At Ed Week, Klein and Camera report that some GOP aides are already drafting a version of an ESEA rewrite that removes the federal testing mandate. I'm a fan of the idea; months ago, I picked high stakes testing as the reformy thing I'd most like to see die.
Massive high stakes testing is at the center of the reformster program, but it's also one of the most visible and widely hated features of reformsterism. Duncan and other bureaucrats have been issuing word salads aimed at changing the optics since last summer, but nothing of substance has been done to lessen the impact of high stakes testing. Duncan saying, "Schools shouldn't focus on testing so much" without changing any of the policies related to testing is like a mugger saying, "Don't be so pre-occupied with my gun" while he continues to take your wallet.
Our current system is positively Kafkaesque, or possibly Dilbertesque. Schools have literally stopped doing our jobs full time so that we can devote more time to generating reports on how well we're doing our job. Even if the Big Test were an accurate measure of how well we're doing our job (which they are most certainly not), the current set-up is unequivocally absolutely stupid. It is like having welders spend half as many hours welding so that they can write up reports on output of the welding unit in the factory. It's like having your boyfriend go on half as many dates so that he can stay home and write notes about how much he misses you. It's like feeding your baby half as many meals because you need to keep him on the scale to check if he's gaining enough weight.
Actually-- it's worse than all of those. It is supervisory bureaucrats believing that their part of the process-- checking on how the work is going-- is more important than actually doing the work.
Objections to cutting testing all fall into that category. They are all variations on, "But if testing is cut, how will my office know what is going on in classrooms." Well, dipstick, we are trying to tell you what is going on in classrooms-- teachers regularly stop doing actual teaching so that they can prepare for and take your damn tests.
People propose local tests. Reformsters complain that local people just don't know how to make sexy, rigorous tests as well as corporate sponsors like Pearson. People propose staggering the tests, taking only one a year, or one every couple of years. Reformsters claim that this would make it easier to game the system, as if the testing system is not one giant game right now.
In his defense of testing, Andy Smarick offers this list of benefits of annual testing:
Smarick shares with Andrew Saultz and others the belief that testing is also necessary in order to target failing schools. I call baloney on this. Smarick has been a critic of lousy urban schooling for a while; I don't believe for a second that he needed standardized test scores to conclude that some poor urban schools were doing a lousy job. If my hand is resting on a red-hot electric range, and the flesh is sizzling and smoke is curling up from my hand, I'm not standing there saying, "Hey, could someone bring me a thermometer so I could check this temp? I might have a problem here."
The one argument I can concede is that terrible test scores might allow activists to light a fire under the butts of non-responsive politicians (who would not notice a burning hand unless it was holding a thick stack of $100 bills). But we've had time for that to work, and it isn't happening. Lousy scores in poor urban schools are not being used to funnel resources, make infrastructure improvements or otherwise improve poor urban schools-- results are just being used to turn poor urban schools into investment and money-making opportunities for charter operators and investors, and after a few years those outfits have no successes to point to that aren't the result of creaming or creative number-crunching. So this pro-test argument is also invalid.
Mike Petrilli has also stepped up to defend testing. Responding to the reported rewrite initiatives he asks,
Do Republicans really want to scrap the transparency that comes from measuring student (and school and district) progress from year to year and go back to the Stone Age of judging schools based on a snapshot in time? Or worse, based on inputs, promises, and claims? Are they seriously proposing to eliminate the data that are powering great studies and new findings every day on topics from vouchers to charters to teacher effectiveness and more?
The biggest problem with Petrilli's defense is that the current battery of bad standardized tests are not accomplishing any of those things. They are not providing transparency; they are just providing more frequent bad data than the "stone age" technique. The current Big Tests get their own authority and power from nothing more than "inputs, promises and claims." For-profit corporations are really good at creating that kind of marketing copy, but that doesn't make it so. And if data from the Big Tests are powering great studies and new findings, I'd like to see just one of them, because I read up pretty extensively, and I haven't seen a thing that would match that description.
Petrilli does, however, have one interesting idea-- "kill the federal mandate around teacher evaluation and much of the over-testing will go away."
I've always said that Petrilli is no dummy (I"m sure he feels better knowing I've said it). Tying teacher (and therefore school, and, soon, the college from which the teachers graduated) evaluation to both The Test and to the teachers' career prospects guarantees that schools will be highly motivated to center much of everything around that test. This is an aspect of the testing biz that Arne either doesn't understand or is purposefully ignoring. I tend toward the latter; if we go back to the Race to the Top program, we see that teacher evaluation linked to test results is the top policy goal.
If the test result mandate didn't come from the feds, each state would come up with its own version. It might not be any better than the current situation, but we'd have fifty interesting fights instead of one big smothering federal blanket. And each state would still have to come up with some sort of answer to the question of how to evaluate a fifth grade art teacher with third grade math test results.
Of course, there's a trade-off with reducing pressure to do all testing, all the time. The less pressure associated with The Big Test, the more students will not even pretend to take the tests a little bit seriously, and the less valid the results will be (and as invalid as the results are now, there's plenty of room left for that to go further south).
Tests are going stay under the gun because they are at once both the most visible and most senseless part of reformsterism. They are an even easier target for Republicans that the Common Core itself because unlike CCSS, everybody knows exactly what they are and whether or not they've been rolled back, and their supporters can't point at a single concrete benefit to offset the anxiety, counter-intuitive results, and massive waste of school time. And tests have reached into millions of American homes to personally insult families ("You may think your child is bright and worthy, but I'm an official gummint test here to tell you that your kid is a big loser").
But tests will be vigorously defended because-- Good God!! Look at that mountain of money!! The business plan of Pearson et al is about way more testing, not less. Test data is important to create charter marketing and support voucher programs. And because technocrats need data to drive their vision of reform, so they can never admit that the emperor not only has no clothes, but also is not actually an emperor but rather a large hairless rat that has learned to walk on its hind legs.
In short, The Big Test may turn out to be the front line, the divider between people who are worried about actual live human children and people who are worried about programs and policies and -- Good God!! That mountain of money is sooooo huge!!! You can bet that as we speak, lobbyists and their ilk are being dispatched toot suite to do some 'splaining to those GOP politicians who are after the bread and butter. Keep your eyes peeled as we enter the new year to see how this plays out.
People are finally remembering that it's the ESEA, due to be transformed from No Child Left Behind into something new since 2007, which gives current reformster wave of waivers its power. Fix the ESEA properly and you cut the legs out from under the current non-laws governing K-12 education in this country. At Ed Week, Klein and Camera report that some GOP aides are already drafting a version of an ESEA rewrite that removes the federal testing mandate. I'm a fan of the idea; months ago, I picked high stakes testing as the reformy thing I'd most like to see die.
Massive high stakes testing is at the center of the reformster program, but it's also one of the most visible and widely hated features of reformsterism. Duncan and other bureaucrats have been issuing word salads aimed at changing the optics since last summer, but nothing of substance has been done to lessen the impact of high stakes testing. Duncan saying, "Schools shouldn't focus on testing so much" without changing any of the policies related to testing is like a mugger saying, "Don't be so pre-occupied with my gun" while he continues to take your wallet.
Our current system is positively Kafkaesque, or possibly Dilbertesque. Schools have literally stopped doing our jobs full time so that we can devote more time to generating reports on how well we're doing our job. Even if the Big Test were an accurate measure of how well we're doing our job (which they are most certainly not), the current set-up is unequivocally absolutely stupid. It is like having welders spend half as many hours welding so that they can write up reports on output of the welding unit in the factory. It's like having your boyfriend go on half as many dates so that he can stay home and write notes about how much he misses you. It's like feeding your baby half as many meals because you need to keep him on the scale to check if he's gaining enough weight.
Actually-- it's worse than all of those. It is supervisory bureaucrats believing that their part of the process-- checking on how the work is going-- is more important than actually doing the work.
Objections to cutting testing all fall into that category. They are all variations on, "But if testing is cut, how will my office know what is going on in classrooms." Well, dipstick, we are trying to tell you what is going on in classrooms-- teachers regularly stop doing actual teaching so that they can prepare for and take your damn tests.
People propose local tests. Reformsters complain that local people just don't know how to make sexy, rigorous tests as well as corporate sponsors like Pearson. People propose staggering the tests, taking only one a year, or one every couple of years. Reformsters claim that this would make it easier to game the system, as if the testing system is not one giant game right now.
In his defense of testing, Andy Smarick offers this list of benefits of annual testing:
- It makes clear that every student matters.
- It makes clear that the standards associated with every tested grade and subject matter.
- It forces us to continuously track all students, preventing our claiming surprise when scores are below expectations.
- It gives us the information needed to tailor interventions to the grades, subjects, and students in need.
- It gives families the information needed to make the case for necessary changes.
- It enables us to calculate student achievement growth, so schools and educators get credit for progress.
- It forces us to acknowledge that achievement gaps exist, persist, and grow over time.
- It prevents schools and districts from “hiding” less effective educators and programs in untested grades.
Smarick shares with Andrew Saultz and others the belief that testing is also necessary in order to target failing schools. I call baloney on this. Smarick has been a critic of lousy urban schooling for a while; I don't believe for a second that he needed standardized test scores to conclude that some poor urban schools were doing a lousy job. If my hand is resting on a red-hot electric range, and the flesh is sizzling and smoke is curling up from my hand, I'm not standing there saying, "Hey, could someone bring me a thermometer so I could check this temp? I might have a problem here."
The one argument I can concede is that terrible test scores might allow activists to light a fire under the butts of non-responsive politicians (who would not notice a burning hand unless it was holding a thick stack of $100 bills). But we've had time for that to work, and it isn't happening. Lousy scores in poor urban schools are not being used to funnel resources, make infrastructure improvements or otherwise improve poor urban schools-- results are just being used to turn poor urban schools into investment and money-making opportunities for charter operators and investors, and after a few years those outfits have no successes to point to that aren't the result of creaming or creative number-crunching. So this pro-test argument is also invalid.
Mike Petrilli has also stepped up to defend testing. Responding to the reported rewrite initiatives he asks,
Do Republicans really want to scrap the transparency that comes from measuring student (and school and district) progress from year to year and go back to the Stone Age of judging schools based on a snapshot in time? Or worse, based on inputs, promises, and claims? Are they seriously proposing to eliminate the data that are powering great studies and new findings every day on topics from vouchers to charters to teacher effectiveness and more?
The biggest problem with Petrilli's defense is that the current battery of bad standardized tests are not accomplishing any of those things. They are not providing transparency; they are just providing more frequent bad data than the "stone age" technique. The current Big Tests get their own authority and power from nothing more than "inputs, promises and claims." For-profit corporations are really good at creating that kind of marketing copy, but that doesn't make it so. And if data from the Big Tests are powering great studies and new findings, I'd like to see just one of them, because I read up pretty extensively, and I haven't seen a thing that would match that description.
Petrilli does, however, have one interesting idea-- "kill the federal mandate around teacher evaluation and much of the over-testing will go away."
I've always said that Petrilli is no dummy (I"m sure he feels better knowing I've said it). Tying teacher (and therefore school, and, soon, the college from which the teachers graduated) evaluation to both The Test and to the teachers' career prospects guarantees that schools will be highly motivated to center much of everything around that test. This is an aspect of the testing biz that Arne either doesn't understand or is purposefully ignoring. I tend toward the latter; if we go back to the Race to the Top program, we see that teacher evaluation linked to test results is the top policy goal.
If the test result mandate didn't come from the feds, each state would come up with its own version. It might not be any better than the current situation, but we'd have fifty interesting fights instead of one big smothering federal blanket. And each state would still have to come up with some sort of answer to the question of how to evaluate a fifth grade art teacher with third grade math test results.
Of course, there's a trade-off with reducing pressure to do all testing, all the time. The less pressure associated with The Big Test, the more students will not even pretend to take the tests a little bit seriously, and the less valid the results will be (and as invalid as the results are now, there's plenty of room left for that to go further south).
Tests are going stay under the gun because they are at once both the most visible and most senseless part of reformsterism. They are an even easier target for Republicans that the Common Core itself because unlike CCSS, everybody knows exactly what they are and whether or not they've been rolled back, and their supporters can't point at a single concrete benefit to offset the anxiety, counter-intuitive results, and massive waste of school time. And tests have reached into millions of American homes to personally insult families ("You may think your child is bright and worthy, but I'm an official gummint test here to tell you that your kid is a big loser").
But tests will be vigorously defended because-- Good God!! Look at that mountain of money!! The business plan of Pearson et al is about way more testing, not less. Test data is important to create charter marketing and support voucher programs. And because technocrats need data to drive their vision of reform, so they can never admit that the emperor not only has no clothes, but also is not actually an emperor but rather a large hairless rat that has learned to walk on its hind legs.
In short, The Big Test may turn out to be the front line, the divider between people who are worried about actual live human children and people who are worried about programs and policies and -- Good God!! That mountain of money is sooooo huge!!! You can bet that as we speak, lobbyists and their ilk are being dispatched toot suite to do some 'splaining to those GOP politicians who are after the bread and butter. Keep your eyes peeled as we enter the new year to see how this plays out.
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Cuomo to Teachers: Drop Dead
If you have not yet seen the letter from Cuomo aid Jim Malatras to ed leaders Tisch and King, you can find a copy right here. If you want to see just how direct and ugly an attack by a governor on his own state's public education system can be, you should read it. If you are a teacher in New York, you should read it twice.
I'll hit the highlights, not because the letter's particularly hard to parse, but because some things are just so ugly, they need to be held up to the light as much and as often as possible.
It opens with the observation that New York's low success percentages for proficiency on the Big Test are simply "unacceptable" and therefore Cuomo will make sure that the cut scores are set at more acceptable levels as determined by educators and not politicians. Ha! Just kidding. He's going to pretend that those proficiency numbers represent something other than political gamesmanship by the governor's office.
Speaking of proficiency, the next paragraph opens with this sentence:
Governor Cuomo believes in public education it can open up unlimited opportunity to our students.
I believe Malatras he is not a careful proofreader. I sympathize. I am the king of speedy mistakes, as my readers can attest. But I'm not on the state payroll, writing documents of record.
Malatras goes on to say that "virtually everyone" thinks the system must be reformed and improved, and I wonder if he's counting the people who believe that reformation and improvement start with getting Cuomo's grabby hands off public education's neck. But no-- three guesses where efforts to fix schools must be focused:
Part of the package will be to strengthen one of our most important professions teaching. While some seek to demonize teachers, Governor Cuomo believes the exact opposite wanting to reward excellence in teaching and by recruiting the best and brightest into the profession.
(Yes, the letter is riddled with mistakes. No further comment). Those damn teachers. those stupid incompetent teachers that Cuomo loves so very much.
Malatras goes on to note that the governor doesn't have a lot of control over education, and that this represents a wise and rational distribution of power in running a state. Ha! No, kidding again. Cuomo doesn't have that kind of power, so he's going to use the budget process to just take it. He's asking Tisch and King for their input on Cuomo's ideas as matter of policy (leave the politicking to the legislature). Here are Cuomo's Twelve Awesome Thoughts, with a bit of translation. You're welcome.
1) The teacher evaluation system sucks because it's not failing enough teachers. How can we jigger it so that more teachers are failed by it?
2) It's too hard to fire bad teachers. Hard work is hard. How can we make it less hard to get rid of the teachers that we'll be failing more of once we straighten out the evalouation process?
3) How can we make becoming a teacher harder? Because if we make it really hard to become a teacher, then teachers will be better. Can we give them all a competency test? Recruiting best and brightest would be cool.
4) Cuomo would still like to get merit pay up and running, because the fact that it has never worked anywhere doesn't change his love for how it would reduce payroll costs. Because recruiting teachers (point 3) goes better when you tell them they might get well paid if you feel like paying them more.
5) Could we make the pre-tenure period longer, and could we make their certification temporary so that they have to get re-approved every couple of years. We need to make them stop thinking of teaching as a lifetime career, because that's how you recruit the best and the brightest.
6) What can we do about schools that suck? Particularly Buffalo, because we would really like to accelerate the hand-over of Buffalo schools to charter operators, who make much better campaign contributions than low-paid teachers.
7) Charters? Charters charters charters. Can we just increase the cap in NYC? A whole lot?
8) Education special interests have resisted using courses delivered by computer. Could we just go ahead and do that anyway? Because one college instructor with a computer = 143 high school teachers we could fire.
9) What about mayoral control? It looked like a great idea in NYC until they elected some bozo who didn't get the deal with charters until Cuomo had the legislature rough him up a bit. Mayoral control is better than a damn elected board, but mayors are also elected and those damn voters are a pain in my ass.
10) Should we combine some of the 700 school districts in New York? (This might be the only thing on the list that isn't either evil or stupid. I would make fun of 700 different school districts in New York, but I'm in PA and we aren't any better).
11) The damn regents are appointed by the legislature. Do you think we should fix that, because having to work with people not under his direct control is a real problem for the governor.
12) We're about to replace Dr. King. Is there a way to have a transparent process to replace him with someone I pick?
Oddly enough, the Cuomo office has no interest in looking at rampant testing, craptastic canned curriculum, or widely unpopular standards. I would have said that it was hard to blame these not-beloved-by-teachers programs on teachers, but since Rudy Giuliani found a way to blame the death of Eric Garner on teachers, I'm going to accuse Cuomo of slacking on this department.
Several weeks ago Governor Cuomo said that improving education is thwarted by the monopoly of the education bureaucracy. The education bureaucracy's mission is to sustain the bureaucracy and the status quo and therefore it is often the enemy of change. The result is the current system perpetuates the bureaucracy but, fails our students in many ways.Tackling these questions with bold policy and leadership could truly transform public education and finally have it focus on the student as opposed to the bureaucracy.
Because having power centered in places that aren't the governor's office is just, you know, bad.
In a charming coda, Malatras notes that King might now give even better advice now that he is unshackled from the political demands of his office, because you know that John King-- he was always so constrained by his deep concern about public opinion, and his willingness to listen to the public just tied him up. Now as a federal bureaucrat hired outside any sort of approval system, he'll be free to disregard public opinion entirely. Because A) that's a good thing and B) it's not at all how he conducted himself in his New York job.
Man, I just hope all those New York teacher union officials who carried Cuomo's water throughout the primary season are really enjoying this unfettered direct attack against the profession and the public schools. Tisch and King are supposed to get back to Cuomo with their advice on how best to kick New York's teachers in the teeth by December 31, so to all my NY teacher neighbors, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Enjoy the holidays, because 2015 will bring open season on public school teachers in the Empire State.
I'll hit the highlights, not because the letter's particularly hard to parse, but because some things are just so ugly, they need to be held up to the light as much and as often as possible.
It opens with the observation that New York's low success percentages for proficiency on the Big Test are simply "unacceptable" and therefore Cuomo will make sure that the cut scores are set at more acceptable levels as determined by educators and not politicians. Ha! Just kidding. He's going to pretend that those proficiency numbers represent something other than political gamesmanship by the governor's office.
Speaking of proficiency, the next paragraph opens with this sentence:
Governor Cuomo believes in public education it can open up unlimited opportunity to our students.
I believe Malatras he is not a careful proofreader. I sympathize. I am the king of speedy mistakes, as my readers can attest. But I'm not on the state payroll, writing documents of record.
Malatras goes on to say that "virtually everyone" thinks the system must be reformed and improved, and I wonder if he's counting the people who believe that reformation and improvement start with getting Cuomo's grabby hands off public education's neck. But no-- three guesses where efforts to fix schools must be focused:
Part of the package will be to strengthen one of our most important professions teaching. While some seek to demonize teachers, Governor Cuomo believes the exact opposite wanting to reward excellence in teaching and by recruiting the best and brightest into the profession.
(Yes, the letter is riddled with mistakes. No further comment). Those damn teachers. those stupid incompetent teachers that Cuomo loves so very much.
Malatras goes on to note that the governor doesn't have a lot of control over education, and that this represents a wise and rational distribution of power in running a state. Ha! No, kidding again. Cuomo doesn't have that kind of power, so he's going to use the budget process to just take it. He's asking Tisch and King for their input on Cuomo's ideas as matter of policy (leave the politicking to the legislature). Here are Cuomo's Twelve Awesome Thoughts, with a bit of translation. You're welcome.
1) The teacher evaluation system sucks because it's not failing enough teachers. How can we jigger it so that more teachers are failed by it?
2) It's too hard to fire bad teachers. Hard work is hard. How can we make it less hard to get rid of the teachers that we'll be failing more of once we straighten out the evalouation process?
3) How can we make becoming a teacher harder? Because if we make it really hard to become a teacher, then teachers will be better. Can we give them all a competency test? Recruiting best and brightest would be cool.
4) Cuomo would still like to get merit pay up and running, because the fact that it has never worked anywhere doesn't change his love for how it would reduce payroll costs. Because recruiting teachers (point 3) goes better when you tell them they might get well paid if you feel like paying them more.
5) Could we make the pre-tenure period longer, and could we make their certification temporary so that they have to get re-approved every couple of years. We need to make them stop thinking of teaching as a lifetime career, because that's how you recruit the best and the brightest.
6) What can we do about schools that suck? Particularly Buffalo, because we would really like to accelerate the hand-over of Buffalo schools to charter operators, who make much better campaign contributions than low-paid teachers.
7) Charters? Charters charters charters. Can we just increase the cap in NYC? A whole lot?
8) Education special interests have resisted using courses delivered by computer. Could we just go ahead and do that anyway? Because one college instructor with a computer = 143 high school teachers we could fire.
9) What about mayoral control? It looked like a great idea in NYC until they elected some bozo who didn't get the deal with charters until Cuomo had the legislature rough him up a bit. Mayoral control is better than a damn elected board, but mayors are also elected and those damn voters are a pain in my ass.
10) Should we combine some of the 700 school districts in New York? (This might be the only thing on the list that isn't either evil or stupid. I would make fun of 700 different school districts in New York, but I'm in PA and we aren't any better).
11) The damn regents are appointed by the legislature. Do you think we should fix that, because having to work with people not under his direct control is a real problem for the governor.
12) We're about to replace Dr. King. Is there a way to have a transparent process to replace him with someone I pick?
Oddly enough, the Cuomo office has no interest in looking at rampant testing, craptastic canned curriculum, or widely unpopular standards. I would have said that it was hard to blame these not-beloved-by-teachers programs on teachers, but since Rudy Giuliani found a way to blame the death of Eric Garner on teachers, I'm going to accuse Cuomo of slacking on this department.
Several weeks ago Governor Cuomo said that improving education is thwarted by the monopoly of the education bureaucracy. The education bureaucracy's mission is to sustain the bureaucracy and the status quo and therefore it is often the enemy of change. The result is the current system perpetuates the bureaucracy but, fails our students in many ways.Tackling these questions with bold policy and leadership could truly transform public education and finally have it focus on the student as opposed to the bureaucracy.
Because having power centered in places that aren't the governor's office is just, you know, bad.
In a charming coda, Malatras notes that King might now give even better advice now that he is unshackled from the political demands of his office, because you know that John King-- he was always so constrained by his deep concern about public opinion, and his willingness to listen to the public just tied him up. Now as a federal bureaucrat hired outside any sort of approval system, he'll be free to disregard public opinion entirely. Because A) that's a good thing and B) it's not at all how he conducted himself in his New York job.
Man, I just hope all those New York teacher union officials who carried Cuomo's water throughout the primary season are really enjoying this unfettered direct attack against the profession and the public schools. Tisch and King are supposed to get back to Cuomo with their advice on how best to kick New York's teachers in the teeth by December 31, so to all my NY teacher neighbors, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Enjoy the holidays, because 2015 will bring open season on public school teachers in the Empire State.
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