Common Core Now Loves Inertia

It is by far the weakest argument presented in favor of the Common Core (well, the weakest argument that is not, like "written by teachers" or "internationally benchmarked," based on fabrications and falsehoods). It is the argument that we must stick with Common Core because dropping the standards would be too costly and disruptive.

This argument has been around since CCSS support started to erode. One of the first signs that Louisianna Governor Bobby Jindal and his state superintendent of education John White were growing apart was White's spirited proclamation that dumping the Core testing would throw teachers into a "state of chaos."



Within the last month, two more states have given voice to plaintive cries of "stay the course!" The Hechinger Report presented "Tennessee Common Core Backtrack Leaves Teachers Stranded" which includes several concerns about the Volunteer State's backtracking (a de-Core-ifying augmented by the departure of reformster Kevin Huffman from the state education commissioner position). Tennessee's back-transition leaves teachers straddling both old and new standards. Said one teacher, "I make sure my students are exposed to both standards, but it's only fair that they're assessed genuinely and authentically to the way they're instructed." Not to mention the additional mess the discombobulated assessment creates in a state that is still all in on VAM, using test based bad data and magic formula voodoo to evaluate teachers.

Meanwhile, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant is making noises about reclaiming Mississippi's educational autonomy and dumping the evil federally over-reaching Core. Some teachers are quoted as being not happy.

"I don't think we've been teaching the standards long enough to tell if it's going to fail," said Robin Herring, a fifth-grade teacher at Eastside Elementary in Clinton. "It really scares me that if we stop in the middle of what we're doing that we're just going to move backwards."

It's not that I don't think these folks have a point. But all of this seems... familiar, somehow. Look at the following quote:

"The education of ... children should not be 'politicized' in this way. This is not about what is best for students or best practices in education or even based on proven research, but rather more political rhetoric based on taking advantage of the latest buzz phrase or issue of the day and today it just happens to be 'Common Core.'"

Quick quiz. Were those words spoken by someone opposing the Common Core a few years ago, or someone defending the Common Core today?

Answer: someone defending Common Core today. But you weren't sure, were you?

Yes, it makes a mess when you change an entire system quickly and with little foresight and planning. Yes, it's unfair to give Big Important Tests on material that's not actually being taught. Yes, it's bizarre to implement programs when we don't even know if they work. Those objections to quickly booting out Common Core are valid today, just as they were when they were raised regarding the implementation of the Core in the first place.

When we were implementing the Core, we were all about blowing up the status quo. We were fighting inertia. We were building planes in mid-air and anybody who complained was just a tool of the establishment. We werer throwing out standards that had been rated higher than the Core because we needed to move forward, and do it quickly (even if we had no earthly way of knowing whether forward was really forward). People who complained about moving too quickly, testing too unfairly, throwing out programs and materials without reasons-- these were just people who Didn't Get It. Back in those days, disruption was necessary. Disruption was good.

Now, suddenly, disruption is bad. Inertia is to be revered and respected. We have no proof-- none-- that Common Core is working, but we shouldn't disturb it or throw it off course.

This has been a repeated pattern for reformsters. They used political gamesmanship, emotional leveraging, and rhetorical smoke and mirrors to install the Common Core, and now that those tools are coming back to bite them in the butt, they want to change the rules of the game. "You're making this too political," cry the people who used insider political power plays to get their agenda in place. "You are being too disruptive," complain the people who treated disruption as a virtue when it served their purposes.

It's too bad we're not having more of a conversation about Common Core's (lack of) virtues, but that was a choice reformsters made five years ago. Those who live by the creative disruption must die by it as well.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

The Biggest Ed Win of 2014

As the battle for the heart, soul, and future of US public education has heated up this year, there have been wins for the Resistance this year. Because it's the time of year in which we all Make Lists and Declare Winners, I'm going to go ahead and sort through public education victories this year and declare the greatest.

Political

It's now quaint to remember a time when education was the easy choice for pols who wanted a win. Coming out for better schools was like announcing your support of cute puppies and apple pie, a political stance with only an up side and no possible downside.

No longer. No longer can politicians just say, "Let's make schools better" and not have to explain what they mean and not suffer consequences for those specifics. Sure, the new opposition to Common Core from guys like Bobby Jindal is strictly political, but then, the support was strictly political in the first place. The good news is that politicians must now do some sort of homework instead of just making platitudinous mouth noises about education.

And while the fall elections left reformster politicians largely untouched, the brutal shellacking of incumbent PA governor Tom Corbett is a clear signal that voters will put up with only so much gutting of public education.

Corporate

I hope Leonie Haimson is having a great New Year's celebration tonight, because this year she was the most visible face of a movement that took down inBloom, the data collecting giant. It would be a mistake to thing our Data Overlords have given up their dreams of hoovering up every speck of data on every sentient being on the planet (it is still fundamental to Pearson's world domination business plan). But their flagship corporate initiative got its ass handed to it in 2014.

Conversational

This was the year for reformsters to talk about the Conversation. Changing the Conversation. Renewing the Conversation. Improving the Conversation. Reformsters talk about the Conversation uniformly ignored one uncomfortable truth-- the Conversation they were talking about changing was the same one they had refused to have. Common Core was rolled out quickly and in a manner deliberately designed to keep national standards, test, and (let's be honest) curriculum from being derailed by any conversation about how (or even if) these things should be done.

So 2014 was the year that reformsters, mostly, acknowledged that simply rolling over the entire country was no longer working as a strategy. Some, like Peter Cunningham at Education Post, still worked on the theory that the public just needed to be rolled over more artfully, but even that was a backhanded acknowledgement that people who disagree with the reform agenda exist and have voices and can't just be ignored. That means there's a possibility that in 2015 we might actually begin the national conversation we should have had in 2009.

The Biggest Public Education Win of 2014

None of these victories, or the many other victories for public ed this year, were the biggest win. Because the biggest win was also the quietest one. Let me tell you what it was, in case you missed it.

In the midst of a staggering assault on public education, with their integrity, judgment, reputation, and ability under attack by everyone from corporate stooges to the US Secretary of Education, and, in many areas, with their job security under direct assault by people who don't know what the hell they're talking about, while powerful forces worked to dismantle the very institutions and ideals that they have devoted their lives to-- in the middle of all that, millions of teachers went to work and did their jobs.

In environments ranging from openly hostile to merely unsupportive, teachers went into their classrooms and did their best to meet the needs of their students. Teachers helped millions of young human become smarter, wiser, more capable, more confident, and better educated. Millions of teachers went to school, met students where they were, and helped those students move forward, helped them grasp what it meant to be fully human, to be the most that they could be. Teachers helped millions of students learn to read and write and figure and draw and make music and play games and know history and understand science and a list of things so varied and rich that I have no room here for them all.

When so many groups were slandering us and our own political leaders were giving us a giant middle finger, we squared our shoulders and said, "Well, dammit, I've got a job to do, and if even if I've got to go in there and do it with my bare hands in a hailstorm, I'm going to do it." And we did.

Yes, some of us finally ran out of fight this year. There's no shame in that; despite what our detractors say, this is not a job that just anybody can do for a lifetime, particularly not under today's conditions. The people who had to leave the classroom are just our measure of how hard it is to stay these days.

And yet, this year, millions of us stayed and fought and taught and did our best this year. While powerful forces lined up to make us fail, or at least make us look as if we were failing, we went into our classrooms armed with professional skills and knowledge and experience and judgment and hours of outside preparation and work, and we didn't fail. We stood up for our students, stood up for the education, their future, their value as human beings. We didn't fail.

So, if you want the biggest public education win of 2014, there it is. Millions of teachers, caught in a storm not of their own making, under fire, under pressure, under the thumb of people with far more money and power still stood up and did their job. The powers that be tried to make us fail, and we got the job done anyway. Celebrate that.

PA's Education Spending Gap

The AP has put research and specific numbers to something that those of us in the Pennsylvania ed biz had already figured out-- the gap between rich schools and poor schools has opened up tremendously over the four years of Tom Corbett as governor.

Pennsylvania has had school funding issues for a while. We are tops in the nation when it comes to local contributions; the state contributes a hair over 36% of the funding for secondary and elementary spending, which puts us well below the national average of 45.5%. We rank 45th out of 50 in state education financial support in K-12. Our state universities are likewise outstanding-- Pitt and Penn State boast the two most expensive in-state tuition costs in the country.

Local school districts carry a big part of the burden for funding their schools, which means, of course, that how much money a district can spend on its students is hugely affected by how much money the local district can gather through real estate taxes because, yeah, that's still how we do it here. A 2008 bill tried to make the funding formula compensate more equitably for local tax base weakness, but Corbett scrapped that and went back to an earlier formula, giving poor districts a double (at least) whammy.

Oh-- and no quick course corrections for PA schools. Act 1, passed in 2006, said that a district must ask for state permission and hold a referendum if they want to increase taxes beyond a very low ceiling. So even districts that have the means to make up the state shortfall are hogtied when it comes to raising tax revenues.

There's more. Remember how some people got suckered back ten years ago into thinking that real estate would be a constant source of vastly growing investment income? On that list of suckers you'll find the state of Pennsylvania, which bet the education pension fund on that giant scam. PA teacher pensions are defined benefit pensions, meaning that we get a pre-determined payout and it's up to the state to make sure the money's there to pay it. When the bottom fell out, the state and local school districts found themselves on the hook for massive pension payments to make up the non-growth of the investments. PA's legislature dealt with this potential crisis by saying, "Yeah, let's just wait and see if things get better on their own." They didn't. Now the state and local districts are trying to deal with the biggest balloon payment ever.

Wealthy districts have been able to pick up the slack from all these budgetary pressures. Poor districts have not. Critics are now saying that to bring poor districts up to parity with rich ones would cost at least a billion dollars.

In the meantime, the AP report shows that rich districts now spend as much as $4K more per student than the poorest districts. That's an increase of about $2,300 more per student. A study from the Center for American Progress last summer crowned Pennsylvania and Illinois the king and queen of school spending inequality.

Tom Corbett didn't create this mess single-handedly. Previous governor Ed Rendell, who was no friend of public education or the teachers who work there, created an extra booby-trap by spending stimulus money to prop up the regular education budget. The GOP-controlled legislature gets credit for making a hash of the pension fund. But if Tom Corbett is not the guy who set the house on fire, he is the guy who told the fire department to go home because they weren't needed.

Corbett has been steadfast in hewing to the classic line that throwing money at schools doesn't make any difference. If that's true, then there should be no problem in taking all that "extra" money away from the wealthy districts and redistributing it to poor districts. After all, the extra $4K per student isn't making a difference, right?

Asked this month about the growing disparity, Corbett didn't point to his administration's policies. Rather, he said, it is a subject of great concern that lawmakers must figure out. He also said a system of 500 school districts that make independent budgeting decisions will complicate the effort to decide how much should be spent to educate a child or achieve parity between the rich and poor.

Corbett has absolutely refused to see his policies as exacerbating the problem. He does have a point about the 500 school districts. In the 1960s the state had even more, and they were almost-forcibly combined,, but each tiny district could join with any district it touched. Consequently, some counties have one unified district. My own county has four district (plus bits of a few others). Students in my building are picked up in the morning and driven through another district and then back into our district (which is shaped kind of like a big backwards E). It is, frankly, an inefficient mess. Several governors have tried to address it, but communities are not going to give up their identities easily.

When confronted with the issue of moving money into poor districts, Corbett told the AP, "So who do I take it away from?"

Corbett's administration has been marked by a real reluctance to take money away from anybody. Pennsylvania should be cashing in on the big marcellus shale boom, but Harrisburg has been determined to charge as little in fees and taxes as they can. Corbett was also determined to make PA attractive to businesses by taking away as little of their money as possible. But critics say that his determination to reverse Pennsylvania's reputation as a business-unfriendly state has left the state treasury with a huge revenue gap. 

I am always cautious about using the cost-per-pupil figure, but even if we aren't certain what the figures mean exactly, the change in them sends a clear message. In Pennsylvania, the poor districts are falling behind with less revenue, less money for staff, for buildings, for resources, for basic maintenance. York is one example of what happens next-- after gutting their budget, the state can then declare that they are no longer fit to govern their own schools. This starvation diet is a perfect setting for privatization.

It's politically pleasing to lambaste Tom Corbett over this, and he certainly made things worse, but Pennsylvania has a problem bigger than partisan politics. In a few days, a new governor takes over. I have no idea if Tom Wolf is going to make things better or not-- Pennsylvania has not had an education governor in my lifetime. But I do know that things are as bad right now as they've ever been, and if you're in a poor school district, they're worse than that.

PBS's Common Core Lifeboat

On Christmas Day, PBS Newshour ran a piece about Common Core that was, if nothing else, organized around a fun central image. "Special correspondent" John Tulenko harkens back to the film classic Lifeboat (which he incorrectly places in the 50s), about survivors stuck in the titular conveyance.

The dilemma of that old film, who stays on board, who gets thrown over, that’s a great way to think about the Common Core these days.

It was launched in 2008, a lifeboat full of big ideas to save public schools. But, out on open seas, it’s had to toss aside key parts of the plan just to stay afloat. And the water is getting rougher.

2008? Now I know Tulenko's in trouble, because even wikipdia and the Core's own website mark launch year as 2009. He goes on to cite an unknown survey that says 60% of Americans don't love the Core, and then cuts to a Louis C. K. core-joke clip, because television. Good news, though-- he's landed three experts to help "navigate these troubled waters." Because Tulenko may be loose on facts, but he is tight on metaphor-maintenance.

Our experts? Neal McClusky from CATO, Chris Minnich of CCSSO, and Catherine Gewertz of Education Week. Each gets an opening sound bite (because television). McClusky goes with, "People sure hate the Core, and they hate the brand name most of all." Minnich floated a cool new talking point saying, roughly, "The fact that everyone hates the Core and we're still in the game just shows how vast is the mountain of money that our backers are willing to throw at this." Ha, no, just kidding. But he does claim that "We're not dead yet" is proof that the Core is still vital and viable. Minnich observes that opponents come in many stripes, and many of them hate the Core origin story than the contents.

Tulenko starts ticking off the parts of the Core that had to be tossed overboard. First to go? The hope that states would adopt CCSS voluntarily. When states were "slow to adopt" standards that, in 2009, still hadn't been finished yet, Obama jumped in with Race to the Top.

McClusky: In 2011, 2012, the backlash began as soon as schools started to see the actual standards and started asking what the heck are these, and who decided they were a good idea. "And so we moved to a system of national standards without ever having had a meaningful national debate about doing that."

Tulenko notes that the boat was rocked further by teachers who weren't given the tools or support to implement the new standards, and many of those teachers jumped ship (Tulenko's commitment to his metaphor is a beautiful thing).

Minnich says it's actually going great, and that the places where it's not going great are just places that flubbed the implementation, but with a little tweakage they'll be right along. I am wondering if Minnich set milk and cookies out for Santa on Christmas eve. His childlike boosterism is sort of inspiring, despite its total disconnection from reality.

But then, Tulenko says, everyone hates the testing. And to someone's credit, nobody in this conversation wastes our time trying to argue that the testing and the Common Core are like unrelated complete strangers who didn't even make eye contact on the dock and it's just random fate that they now share the same berth on this trans-educational cruise ship. With teachers about to have their careers put on the line over unproven tests used to measure not-yet-implemented standards, educators squawked loudly.

Now here's the thing about an extended metaphor; if you're not careful, it leads you to say wacky things just for the metaphor's sake. Like this:

Sharp criticism from teachers forced U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, arguably the ship’s captain, to alter course.

Oh, John. The "arguably" signals that even you know that's probably wrong. And in truth, I don't think you could find anybody on any side of this issue who thinks that Arne Duncan is actually a leader of anything. There are days I almost feel sorry for the guy because he's certainly not the captain of this ship. Deck hand? Carved mermaid on the prow? Keel? But not the captain.

Tulenko makes the point that testing has many people and states backing away, despite Arne's 11th-hour sort-of-reprieve. McClusky gets to point out that testing is also expensive as hell between technology and infrastructure.

Tulenko references the name "Next Generation Content Standards and Objectives," which appears to be the rebranding being used in West Virginia. Tulenko takes a moment to underline the use of rebranding to "right the ship," and Gerwetz allows as how that's a popular approach.

Minnich gets the last sound bite, sounding kind of small at this point: "This blip was to be expected because, as you raise the expectations on any system, there will be — there will be pain points. But I think we have weathered the storm." Minnich must have been stuck in the lifeboat after the USS Reality went down.

Ultimately the story doesn't tell us much, but it's important to pay attention to what is being repeated in the almost-mainstream, and here is PBS, an organization that has shown no inclination to take any kind of critical look at the Core, depicting the standards as a ship barely afloat and struggling to stay on course, and providing air time to more than just the usual slate of cheerleaders. It's not a real journalistic look at the Core yet (c'mon John-- take time to google at least), but at least they are drifting in the right direction.

Jason Zimba: The Other Guy

NPR just ran a piece courtesy of the Hechinger report profiling Jason Zimba. If David Coleman is widely known as the Architect of Common Core, Zimba is That Other Guy who worked on Common Core, handling the math side of things. He never quite achieved the profile of David Coleman, but he's been right there every step of the way.

Zimba has always seemed to me (and I should note that all of my impressions of reformsters are based on twelfth-hand information from reading and youtubing and who knows, if I were actually to sit in a room with David Coleman, I might find him pleasant and personable and not at all possessed of a huge helping of hubris) to be somewhat more human than Coleman, but I've paid less attention to him because math is not my area of expertise. It's hard to sort these guys out; some, like Coleman, seem to have sought out the work propelled by sheer ego, while others seem to have just blundered into the reform biz without really understanding what they were doing.

The profile by Sarah Garland really wants us to see Zimba as a human being. It opens with a scene to remind us that he has children, and that the older one attends a public school, where Common Core is used. "I would be sleeping in if I weren't frustrated," says Zimba, speaking of his Saturday morning extra math lessons for his daughter to make up for what's lacking in the public school. He is apparently also frustrated by how Common Core is playing out in schools across the country.

Common Core was supposed to fuel a revolution. It was supposed to drive improvements in curricula and materials. It would push for excellence and provide the yardstick to measure progress toward that mountain of math awesometude. That was all its creators wanted, and while they knew it would be tough, they were surprised by the pushback.

"The creation of the standards is enshrouded in mystery for people," Zimba says. "I wish people understood what a massive process it was, and how many people were involved. It was a lot of work."

Well, yes. It was shrouded in mystery on purpose. In fact, it was shrouded in mysteries that were wrapped in lies about the involvement of classroom teachers and international benchmarks. But Garland says that the math standards were essentially written by three guys, and not for the first time, I'm reading an account that echoes those SF movies where scientists don't realize that their purely scientific experiment is actually going to be used as a weapon for evil.

"It was a design project, not a political project," says Phil Daro, a former high school algebra teacher who was on the three-man writing team with Zimba and William McCallum, head of the math department at the University of Arizona. "It was not our job to do the politics while we were writing."

I've written about McCallum before, a sad scientist who simply didn't and doesn't grasp the context of CCSS, the way it plays out in the real world, and the motivation of the people powering it. We just built the bomb for good. We never intended it to be used against humans, so humans should not be upset when they get blown up.


Zimba's humble early trajectory wouldn't suggest that he was headed for this kind of government work, but when at Oxford, he "befriended" David Coleman, and in 1999 the two hooked up again to tinker with the idea of an education consulting firm. They started Grow Network, a company that produced reports to help districts and states make sense of the new NCLB test results. "Zimba had a genius for creating reports that were mathematically precise but also humanely phrased, Coleman says." That's striking all by itself; I can't tell you how much of Coleman I've read, and how very rarely he acknowledges the value of any other person's work. Grow was bought out by McGraw-Hill and Coleman and Zimba headed in semi-separate directions. Zimba ended up teaching at Bennington (in Vermont-- there's a great monument there worth visiting) where Coleman's mother was president.

Together they wrote a paper in 2007 addressing the issue of many (maybe too many) standards for math across the states. It was the right paper at the right time. Shortly thereafter, in this squeaky-clean NPR version of history, when the CCSSO and NGA decided to tackle standards, "Coleman and Zimba were picked to help lead the effort." Can't help feeling we've skipped an awful lot of insider history right there. But Student Achievement Partners were formed and given a mountain of money to get to work.

"We were looking for a skill set that was fairly unique," says Chris Minnich, executive director of CCSSO. "We needed individuals that would know the mathematics — Jason and the other writers obviously know the mathematics — but would also be able to work with the states, and a bunch of teachers who would be involved."

That's a fun quote. Particularly the "bunch of teachers" part. Does it suggest that Coleman was on board primarily for his shmoozing abilities?


At this point, Garland's grasp of history gets even slipperier. We do get the inspiring story of Zimba and McCallum working long hours, slaving over the standards in the garage (just like Bill Gates starting Microsoft). She notes again that he was human, with a life and a family and a day job, spiced up with a story of some colleague telling him to stop texting about standards stuff while his second daughter was being born.

During the course of the next year, they consulted with state officials, mathematicians and teachers, including a union group. Draft after draft was passed back and forth over email.

"Consulting." Great word. Then the final standards were released in 2010. Garland notes that "by the following year" forty states adopted them; she does not note that many adopted them before they were written, though she does note that adoption happened "thanks in part to financial incentives dangled by the Obama administration" which is kind of like saying I paid my mortgage payments thanks in part to a Keeping My House incentive dangled by my bank.


Garland's timeline for the resistance to CCSS is even more...um... debatable. She marks the pushback to 2013 and the wave of CCSS test results. She says resistance didn't enter the mainstream until this year, when a father's posting about CCSS homework went viral and Glen Beck picked it up, followed by ridicule from Louis C. K. and Stephen Colbert. Which is about the most truncated history of Common Core opposition I've ever read.

Now CCSS allies are trying to salvage the cause by calling for testing delays. But the writers are just puzzled by all the fuss.

"When I see some of those problems posted on Facebook, I think I would have been mad, too," McCallum says. Daro tells a story about his grandson, who brought home a math worksheet labeled "Common Core," with a copyright date of 1999.
They argue there's actually very little fuzziness to the math in the Common Core. Students have to memorize their times tables by third grade and be able to do the kind of meat-and-potatoes problems Zimba asks of his daughter during their Saturday tutoring sessions, requirements he believes the so-called Common Core curriculum at her school essentially ignored.

In other words, they wrote it right, but everybody is reading it incorrectly.We built the bomb for Good. We do not understand why people are being blown up with it.

Even as Zimba and his colleagues defend the standards against cries of federal overreach, they are helpless when it comes to making sure textbook publishers, test makers, superintendents, principals and teachers interpret the standards in ways that will actually improve American public education, not make it worse.

All of this has pushed Zimba to a new conclusion, a new crusade, a new battle.

These days, Zimba and his colleagues acknowledge better standards aren't enough.
"I used to think if you got the assessments right, it would virtually be enough," he says. "In the No Child Left Behind world, everything follows from the test."
Now, he says, "I think it's curriculum."

Yes, the problem is that we didn't build a powerful enough bomb. If we built a bigger bomb, then it would be used the correct way. 

It is hard not to see these guys as hopelessly naive about How Things Work, about the implications of the work they were doing. I sympathize in part-- when he claims that publishers are mucking up the works by using CCSS to market any old crap lying around the warehouse, I don't disagree, but at the same time, dude, what did you think they were going to do with the bomb once you had finished building it?? You may have thought you were building an instrument of peace and wisdom and growth, but you should have paid better attention to the people who were signing your checks and collecting your work, because this is exactly what they wanted it for.

All three are trying to fix it. McCallum has some little start-up you've never heard of to make math apps. Daro is writing a complete math curriculum for Pearson, presumably because, you know, the politics and business are not his problem. Zimba's trying to work on it, too. None of them seem to see their own hand in the mess that is now choking public education. Granted, I see all of these characters through the smudgy lens of various journalists, but I keep feeling as if Coleman knows exactly what he's doing, but The Other Guys don't really get it. They don't see the battlefield because they are only focused on the bomb.

Zimba does not pick up the lesson that he now realizes that he was wrong back when he thought the standards would fix everything, so maybe he's wrong again now that he thinks national curriculum is the answer. And he doesn't seem to have any sense of the moral or ethical implications of trying to rewrite the education system for everybody part time in his garage-- did nobody at any point say, "Gee, for a project this massive, maybe there's a better way and other people who should be involved." While he seems to lack the strutting ballsiness of Coleman, he still must have the hubris required to think, "Yeah, I could write the math guidelines for every student in the country."

Hotel Impossible, Systems, and Schools

We're a cable-less home, so when we land on a favorite series, we tend to binge watch. When the Travel Channel and the Food Network dropped packages of shows on Netflix, we found several "intervention" shows that we enjoyed, but none so much as Hotel Impossible.

The premise is unsurprising-- a hotel that's in trouble gets a visit from an expert who tries to diagnose and treat major ailments in a couple of days. We like the host (Anthony Melchiorri) who is blunt, but seems really passionate about hotels and displays some real managerial skills on the show. He's forceful, yet respectful, and he has a fun working relationship with the lead designer on the show, Blanche (we are never happy when it's a non-Blanche episode), as opposed to some of the prima donnas who host similar shows on similar networks.

It's reality television, which means its connection to reality is perhaps contrived at times. But it still offers some interesting lessons in How To Be a Turnaround Expert that might be applicable in other situations such as, say, turning around a school.

Respect the people who do the work. Melchiorri is always respectful of the people he's dealing with. He's respectful of the cleaning and other staff in the hotel. He listens to the people who are invested in the place, and he respects what their goals and vision are. He does not try to tell them what they are supposed to want.

Support support support. It is always clear that he is there to help. Not to berate, not to belittle, not to beat them into submission to his vision of what the hotel should be. He helps them find solutions. And as brash and New Yorky as he is, he can be incredibly patient past the point where my wife and I are hollering unkind suggestions to some folks on the show. He is particularly good at maneuvering them so that they can feel like they just had a win, even when less kind managers might have said, "My God, you suck at this. Go do something else."

Systems. Melchiorri strikes a familiar chord with me because he is a huge believer in systems. A repeated theme of the show is that successful hotels run on systems. But his use of and approach to systems is markedly different from the that of the systems guys who have been besieging public education for the past few years.

In almost every episode, Melchiorri proposes or installs a system. But it is not a one-size-fits-all system. He does not demand that the hotel change its culture and vision so that it can better use his system. And that would seem to be simple common sense-- he visits everything from 125-room beach resort hotels to a 12-room inn in Vermont, every place from Puerto Rico to Alaska. So he talks to the owners and workers, watches how the place runs, listens to what the owners want to achieve, and he develops a system that suits that particular hotel.

Imagine-- you "fix" a place based on the particular needs, goals, strengths and weaknesses of that particular place, rather than trying to beat it into the same shape as every other similar place in the country. There are certainly standards that he consistently follows (cleanliness is a biggie), but there is not just One Correct Way to run every hotel in the world.

The show is undoubtedly not everyone's cup of tea, but I can think of a few reformsters who could learn a thing or two from it.

Teachers Declare EVAAS Useless Baloney

From Audrey Amrein-Beardsley at Vamboozled comes a report on a piece of research about SAS EVAAS, the granddaddy of VAM systems, beloved in several states including my own home state. Amrein-Beardsley has a guest post by Clarin Collins, author of the study and former doctoral student under Amrein-Beardsley (if you don't follow this blog, you should). I was interested enough to go read the actual paper, because in Pennsylvania we just lovvvvve PVAAS to pieces.

If you don't live in VAAS state, well, you're missing out on some of the fun. We have a nifty website where we are supposed to find out oodles of data about how we're doing, how our students are doing, and what is supposed to be happening next in our classroom. Periodically some of us are sent off for professional development to show us which nifty charts are there and how we can crunch numbers in order to achieve teacherly awesomeness. SAS (the owner-operators of this business) also include a database of terrible lesson materials, because that helps them sell the site. I have literally never met a single human being who used a lesson from the SAS site.

At any rate, when you hear reformsters talking about how data can be used to rate teacher effectiveness and help teachers design and tweak instruction, this site is what they think they are talking about. Funny thing, though-- prior to Collins's research, nobody went out to talk to teachers in the wild and ask if they were getting any real use out of VAAS, and so VAAS's reputation among educrats and reformsters has rested entirely on its well-polished marketing and not what it actually does in the field. So let's see what Collins found out, shall we?

The Subjects

Collins used an un-named district in the Southwest that is heavily invested in VAAS, has a strong union presences, and 11K teachers. By using a researchy randomizer and digging down to teachers who are actually directly evaluated by VAAS, the research ended up with 882 responders. The responders were mostly female, with a wide range of ages and ethnicities (the oldest was 78!) Collins speaks fluent researchese and if you want to evaluate the solid basis of the research, everything you need is there in the paper. We're just going to skip ahead to the civilian comprehensible parts.

Reliability

Collins first set out to see if, from the teacher perspective, VAAS results seemed reliable. The answer was... not so much. Teachers reported fluctuating from year to year. One teacher drew the gifted student short straw and so showed up on VAAS as a terrible teacher but "the School Improvement Officer observed my teaching and reported that my teaching did not reflect the downward spiral in the scores." The repeated story through the various responses was that a teacher's effectiveness was most directly related to the students in the classroom, except when scores fluctuated year-to-year for no apparent reason.

Validity

For a smaller percentage of teachers, the usual horror stories applied. About 10% reported that they'd been evaluated for scores for subjects in which they were not the teacher of record. Almost 20% reported being VAASed for students for whom they were not the teacher of record, including those like the student who arrived late in the year and left soon thereafter for alternative school. "I'm still considered the teacher of record even though he spent 5-6 months out of my classroom."

Over half of the teachers indicated that their VAASified scores did not match their principal evaluation. Most commonly the principal rated higher, but some teachers did report that VAAS gave them some help with bucking a principal with a personal beef against the teacher. At the same time, a large chunk of the teachers reported that they were getting an award of some sort for teacherly swellness at the same time VAAS was calling them stinky.

Formative Use

We are told repeatedly that VAAS info is formatively useful-- that peeking in there should help inform our remediation and help us fine-tune our instruction. In fact, that is what several of our regional college teacher prep programs teach aspiring teachers.

Well, baloney. 59% of the responders flat-out said they don't use VAAS for that, at all. One teacher noted that by the time the data is up, it's for students you don't teach any more, and to find data for the students you do have requires a long student-by-student search (feel free to work on that in your copious free time).

Of the teachers who said they do use VAAS to inform instruction, further questioning indicated that what they meant was "but not really."

The most common response was from teachers who responded that they knew they were “supposed to” look at their SAS EVAAS® reports, so they would look at the reports to get an overview on how the students performed; however, these same teachers called the reports “vague” and “unclear” and they were “not quite sure how to interpret” and use the data to inform instruction.

Even teachers who made actual use of the reports (commonly to do ability grouping) couldn't really explain how they did that. This puts them on a par, apparently, with many principals who reportedly shared VAAS scores with teachers "in a manner that was 'vague,' 'not in depth,' and 'not discussed thoroughly.' "

Does it deliver on its promises

SAS EVAAS makes plenty of promises about how it will revolutionize and awesometize your school district. Collins did a quick and simple check to see if teachers on the ground were seeing the marketing promises actually materialize. Here's the list of promises:

EVAAS helps create professional goals
EVAAS helps improve instruction
EVAAS will provide incentives for good practices
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for very low achieving students
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for students
EVAAS helps increase student learning
EVAAS helps you become a more effective teacher
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to my school
EVAAS reports are simple to use
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to me as a teacher
Overall, the EVAAS is beneficial to the district
EVAAS ensures growth opportunities for very high achieving students
EVAAS will identify excellence in teaching or leadership
EVAAS will validly identify and help to remove ineffective teachers
EVAAS will enhance the school environment
EVAAS will enhance working conditions

Collins just asked teachers whether they agreed or disagreed. The list here puts the items in ascending amount of disagreement, so the very first "professional goals" item is the one teachers disagreed with least-- and still more than 50% of the respondents disagreed. From there it was just downhill-- at the bottom of the list are items with which almost 80% of teachers disagreed.

Unintended consequences

Did teachers report any effects of VAAS that were not advertised? Yes, they did.

There was a disincentive to teach certain students. ELL students in a transition year and gifted students with their ceiling effect were both unloved. Given the choice, some teachers reported they would choose not to teach those students.

Teacher mobility-- moving from one grade level to another-- was also a casualty of the VAAS model, particularly in those schools that use looping (staying with one group of students for two or more years).

Gaming the system and teaching to the test. Angling for the best students (or having the worst packed into your classroom by an unfriendly principal) seem common. And, of course, as we all already know, the best way to get good test results is to drop all that other teaching and just teach to the test.

Numerous teachers reflected on their own questionable practices. As one English teacher
said, “When I figured out how to teach to the test, the scores went up.” A fifth grade teacher added,
“Anything based on a test can be ‘tricked.’ EVAAS leaves room for me to teach to the test and
appear successful.”

Distrust, competition and low morale also rose in these schools, where VAAS is linked to a "merit" system. Why share a good teaching technique if it's only going to hurt your own ranking? It is bad news for you if the teachers who are the feeders for your classroom do well-- their failure is the foundation of your own success. All of this is predictably bad for morale, and Collins's research supports that.

The incentive program is not an incentive. For something to be an incentive, you need to know what you have to do to get the incentive. All we know is that as a teacher you have to improve your scores more than the other teachers. You can make improvements each year, but if other teachers improve the same amount, you have made no gains according to the system. It is a constantly moving target. You don't know what you need to do to get the "prize" until after the "contest" is over.

Conclusion

SAS EVAAS® and other VAMs, by themselves, are sophisticated statistical models that purportedly provide diagnostic information about student academic growth, and represent teachers’ value-add. In other words, SAS EVAAS® and VAMs are tools. It is what teachers, schools, districts, and states do with this information that matters most. However, for the teachers in this study, even for those participating in training sessions on how to use the data, the SAS EVAAS® data alone were unclear and virtually unusable. For SSD, not only are teachers not using the “product” that costs the district half a million dollars per year, but teachers are aware that SAS EVAAS® inputs can be manipulated based on the student makeup of their classroom, and some teachers even confess to teaching to the test and cheating in attempt to increase their SAS EVAAS® scores.

Collins hasn't found anything that reasonable teachers haven't talked about and predicted for these models, but now we all have a real research paper we can link to for people who have to have those sorts of things for proof. The view from ground zero is clear-- the system is unreliable, invalid, unable to produce the results it promises, and all too capable of producing toxic effects.

It's true that this paper deals a great deal in sheer accumulation of anecdote. I'm struck by just how brutal all the findings are for VAM, because with this type of survey instrument I'm certain that the teacher tendency to be a good little soldier and give the answers you're supposed to give (look back at the formative question) and so a certain percentage of teachers are inclined to just say, "Why, yes! The emperor's new clothes are beautiful and grand," and then go back to the lounge and make comments about the emperor's shocking nakedness.

A teacher of my acquaintance took an on-line course that included some portion about the awesome usefulness of SAS-PVAAS; the teacher was reluctant to openly say how useless the site was for that teacher. When the awful statement was finally out there, many other teachers finally broke down and said, yeah, me too. Nobody tried to defend it. Too many times teachers stand by quietly while the house burns down because they don't want to be impolite or rock the boat.

So when I see research like this that brings forth a whole bunch of boat-rockers, my immediate suspicion is that this is only the tip of the iceberg. I've just hit the highlights here; I recommend you go read the whole thing and get the full picture. But once again, the challenge is to get people in power to actually listen to teachers. Maybe that will happen if it comes in the form of actual research.