Teacher Union Alternatives?

One of the hallmarks of reformsterism continues to be a concerted effort to crush teacher unions. The bottom line is pretty simple-- privatizers and profiteers want to be able to hire and fire at will, and they want to be able to pay teachers whatever they feel like paying them. You make profit by controlling revenue and expense, and since education revenues are fairly static and beyond the easy control of reformster ed CEOs, the CEOs need to be able to control costs, and the number one cost in a school is personnel. Reformsters also want to be able to work their teachers with no constraints; nobody should be telling them that teachers won't be working twelve hour days, seven days a week.

So reformsters really want unions to go away.

In the New Orleans Advocate, we find Alexandria Neason pushing one form of anti-union baloney. Her article reports on a "trend" of NOLA teachers seeking out non-union alternatives, looking for other groups that "amplify teachers voices." And, holy smokes, what a list. America Achieves, Teach Plus, Educators 4 Excellence, Leading Educators -- a dozen Super Bowls couldn't use this much astroturf. I am not sure why Neason did not list the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a great alternative to the teachers' unions.

But it's an alternative that doesn't provide much of anything that a union does

The new organizations like America Achieves differ in their specific goals and structure, but they all seek to amplify teachers’ voice in policy debates, and they rarely, if ever, concern themselves with protecting one of unions’ main reasons for being: teacher tenure.

"Seek to amplify teachers' voices in policy debates." Seriously? I would love to see a specific example of that, but one is not forthcoming, so I'm going to assume that these groups are doing what astroturf groups have always done-- pursue their reformster-driven agendas while searching for teachers they can use as PR cover.

But what about the union function of bargaining contracts or providing resources and support for teachers under fire?

America Achieves, where Eckhardt is now the head of the teacher fellowship program, focuses less on advocating for specific positions and more on helping teachers learn how to advocate for themselves.

So, sure. When it's time to get a new salary set or it's time to defend your career against a biased or incompetent administrator, just march into district offices and take care of that yourself. America Achieves also rounds up teachers to provide fun audiences for things like NBC's Education Nation Reformster Infomercials, and they provided the teacher props for the Arne Duncan Meets With Live Teachers photo op of 2010. They also help teachers write op-eds and other great reformster PR. And when it comes to putting teachers in these settings, Eckhardt gets in a zinger:


But the group didn’t tell the teachers what to say — something Eckhardt said would never have happened with a union.

And, well, damn, he's not entirely wrong. In the name of unity, teachers unions can be absolutely terrible about allowing a diverse group of voices to speak. NY has its infamous loyalty oath. And nobody rises to positions of national leadership without proving to people in power that you're the Right Kind of Person.

I've been a local union leader in a tough contract year followed by a tough strike year. I know just how invaluable the resources and experts from the state level can be. I also know it would be foolish to assume that local, state and national union interests are always 100% aligned.

But Eckhardt's statement is disingenuous. Of course his group didn't tell teachers what to say-- they just made sure to select teachers who would only be inclined to say The Right Thing in the first place. I think some people imagine that politics works by giving somebody a pile of money and saying, "Okay, now you should pretend to be opposed to mugwump regulation." But it's much simpler to find someone who is actually opposed to mugwump regulation and use your money to give him a platform. Astroturf groups don't need to indoctrinate people-- just recruit the right people to start with.

Jim Testerman of NEA argues that NEA is a member-driven group where members set the policy. I wish that were more true of the national unions, but it's not. Consider last summer when both AFT and NEA members forced anti-Duncan resolutions on their leaders, who have since made sure that those resolutions had absolutely no affect on what NEA and AFT have actually done. Rank and file members have little hope of using their national or state unions as methods of amplifying their voices.

Of course, that's only part of the point. If you are a teacher who wants your voice to be heard in national policy debates, get a blog. If you are a teacher who wants a decent contract, protection on the job and some heavy guns to back you when trouble comes your way, join a union. It's as simple as that. Saying these groups are a substitute for a union is like saying a bicycle is a substitute for steak.

The astroturf threat is just the more modern approach to eroding unions. Indiana has just unveiled a pretty standard approach. Governor Mike Pence just unveiled "Freedom To Teach," and if that sounds kind of like "Right To Work," that's because they're the same idea.

Freedom To Teach will earmark a bunch of money for any school that wants to chuck out its old teacher pay method and replace it with a system that will pay all the teachers in the school way more. Ha! Just kidding, although Pence tries to sell the program with that page straight from the reformster handbook:

“Everyone knows that good teachers make a difference, we have to get even more good teachers in front of more classrooms,” Pence says. “You get more good teachers by paying good teachers more.”

The key to making this kind of merit pay work is that you only pay "good teachers" well. And since you are deciding what qualifies someone as a good teacher, you never have to find yourself employing more good teachers than you can afford. The rest will leave quickly, but so what? Your program allows you to recruit saying, "Come here! We pay a top salary of $125K!" Just make sure you don't include the ad copy that says, "You'll probably never see that money, and you'll start at poverty wages, but come be our fresh meat anyway."

Indiana House Democratic leader Scott Pelath explains his take on the program:

“‘Freedom to teach’ — those are just words,” Pelath said. “Those are words that were dreamed up in some think tank with pollsters sitting by their sides. That’s not about freedom to teach, it’s about deconstructing and deregulating schools to the point where they don’t matter anymore, and that’s what the goal is.”

And to pursue that goal, reformsters need to break the unions.

Look, I'm not a knee-jerk union booster. On the state and national level, unions are their own second-worst enemies. They supported Common Core when it should have been obvious that it was the tip of a reformy spear aimed straight at teachers' heads. They make terrible deals for "a seat at the table" and try to justify them with, "It could have been worse." They try to oppose testing and stick by CCSS, which is like saying, "Okay, I accept that the earth is part of a solar system revolving around the sun, but I still believe it's a flat disc on a turtle's back." Unions have been failing miserably to draw new, young members, and they are entirely too quick to squelch dissent in the ranks.

But there is no way to stand up and be represented in the room with the people with the power in school districts without some sort of union.

The most effective way for management to get rid of a union has always been clear-- treat your employees well and build trust that you will watch out for their interests as carefully as you watch out for your own. Even if you have a union, the relationship does not have to be adversarial. I've known managers in industry who had excellent relationships with their unions because they were honest, transparent and fair, and in those businesses, the union became an effective way to help run the company better.

But if you have decided, as many reformsters have, that the interests of your employees, your teachers, is in direct opposition to your own interests, if you have decided that every win for them is a loss for you, then you are going to find yourself facing a hostile union or something like it. You have created a rocky path for yourself, and all the astroturf in the world will not smooth it out (not even if you fertilize it with bullshit). You cannot create better schools by crushing the teachers that work in them. It's a cliche, but it's the truth-- our working conditions are student learning conditions.

Indiana: Building a Better Leech

Twice today, this has turned up in my twitter feed:

You could receive $5,000 for nominating a talented ed leader to The Mind Trust. Learn more. https://t.co/XWWPuGNjak
— The Mind Trust (@TheMindTrust) December 30, 2014

Indeed, this links to website that offers a $5K bounty for "excellent candidates for school leaders."  I don't know. Maybe this is better than when "Dr." Ted J. Morris recruited charter school board members on LinkedIn or when the NYC Teaching Collective went looking for any warm body to pretend-teach by putting an ad on Craigslist. But given the Mind Trust's history, probably not.

If you haven't been paying attention to Indiana, buckle up campers (I mean, specifically, buckle up your nose). I'm going to try to render a quick and dirty picture of the history here. If you'd like the Full Monty, I recommend Hoosier School Heist from Doug Martin, a fully-researched picture of the whole mess.

Indiana education is an unholy mess, a gold mine that reformsters have helped themselves to at length. Jeb Bush used it as an expansion ground for his reformy ideas and Charter Schools USA (currently being considered to take over the entire York PA school system) was one of the early beneficiaries.

But the Mind Trust represents some of the finest home-grown gravy train engineering. The Mind Trust (and by the way, who came up with that name, because it sounds like a cross between "brain trust" and "mind f@#!" and neither is good idea) was founded in 2006 by former Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson (Dem) and his charter school director, David Harris.  Peterson was mayor in 2001, when Indiana passed legislation giving the mayor of Indianapolis power to singlehandedly authorize charter schools. So, basically, the best and most legally-authorized patronage system ever.

In Summer of 2007, the charter-loving Hoover Institute had this to say about the new organization:

In January, David Harris left the mayor’s office to work on another side of the charter school problem: ‘stimulating supply,’ as he puts it. If Indianapolis is going to continue being a leader in school innovation, it must, Harris reasons, become the place to develop new ideas. So he has built a nonprofit—IPS superintendent White, among others, sits on the board—to fund highly paid fellowships for education entrepreneurs. It is called [The] Mind Trust, and along with trying to find the next Michael Feinberg (a co-founder of KIPP) or the next Wendy Kopp (founder of Teach For America), Harris will be trying to draw the cream of education reform organizations to establish a presence in Indianapolis.

And nothing says "cream of education reform" like twitter job solicitations. But in 2007 that was far in Mind Trust's future. Closer in the future was voters denying Peterson a third term in office.

This did not slow down the Mind Trust. They simply gathered money and friends. Peterson was hired by Eli Lilly and Company, and they proceeded to become huge boosters of Mind Trust's work. In turn, Mind Trust used that money to turn Indianapolis into a blooming oasis for reformsters. How about $3.4 million for TFA? Done, and the parade of reformy groups continued. In 2012 Mind Trust presented another meeting of the minds to hear prominent voucher booster Howard Fuller speak, sponsored by reformsters like Stand for Children and Education Reform Now.

This came in the wake of their magnum opus, "Creating Opportunity Schools, dumped on the public in December, 2011. The report is roughly 155 pages long. You know I love you, but this is one time I am not going to read the original so that you don't have to. The Mind Trust did produce this nifty 1:33 video.



Incidentally, before you watch this, prepare to have your heart broken-- the narrator is Mind Trust board member Jane Pauley.

The basic pitch is a now-familiar one: "Many students are not learning things at all! Don't you wish they could all have a pony? We totally promise to do that."

NUVO (Indiana's alternative voice) attempted to delve a little deeper into Mind Trust and the report in the summer of 2013. I am going to crib from their work.

The report first asserts that Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) are tragically and completely broken. Soooo... let's cut $188 million worth of central office functions and use it to fund "opportunity schools" which will operate in their own rules-free universe, where school leaders can work like CEO's and hire, fire, pay, and if that sounds like the reformster template for charterization, that's because we ought to channel a bunch of that $188 million toward charters, too.

NUVO writers found that much of the language of the report looked a lot like the language used by Public Impact, the North Carolina education policy and management consulting firm that Mind Trust hired. Bottom line, as one panelist in NUVO article observed, the whole proposal "was a way of establishing a beachhead for people to come in and make a lot of money."

Harris told NUVO that "evidence suggests" that schools under mayoral control perform better; he also suggested that one mayor who must be re-elected based on a variety of issues is more accountable than a large assortment of individuals in each of the school communities who are elected based strictly on their educational performance. Okay, I may have reworded his argument a hair, but his way didn't capture how stupid a justification he offered for dis-enfranchising whole neighborhoods of voters.

Harris, who is apparently either a con artist or a dope, also observed "when you go to schools that have excellent test scores, they're not teaching to the test." Oh, and also this:  "When people say we're trying to privatize education, I really don't understand that. They are all public schools. We're just saying other people can be involved than just the people in the central office."

In 2014, Indiana's legislature legislated itself a new brand of school, named Innovation Network Schools, and my quick read is that Mind Trust's Opportunity Schools idea is now law. More specifically, it is open season on education dollars in Indianapolis. The law appears to open schools up to privatization without having to use the word "charter" even as charter operators are just as free to jump on the pile of cash as anybody else.

In the promo video on the Mind Trust page, Peterson says that these schools combine the best of public charter schools and traditional schools, and then he explains-- the resources and buildings of the public system with the autonomy over staffing, curriculum and budget of a charter school. So, charter schools with a twist-- instead of trying to hide the way the charter leech sucks the blood from public schools, this puts the leeching out front and sells it as a plus.

The Mind Trust seems to be the Godfather of charter/privatized schooling in Indianapolis; under "What We Do" their website has two subheadings-- "launching great schools," and "creating a landscape for success" (which includes the "charter school incubator"). They arranged some start-up grants for charters, and last summer picked some fellows to run some turnaround schools for them (including a former senior intelligence analyst who'd like to start an entrepreneur school). But apparently, somehow, they haven't turned up enough super-duper charterish operators yet. Hence, today's tweet.

What do you get as a new charter operator innovation school fellow? Two years to design and launch your own school. Plus access to national experts (I'd love to see that list), staff support, travel, a generous salary, and more! Plus, Peterson brags, Indianapolis is loaded with TFA and TNTP folks who make a "rich ecosystem of education organizations" and the graphic shows Teach Plus, KIPP, College Summit, Diploma Plus and many more in the ecosystem because this is just an orgy of profiteering.

Lord, I know this is running long, but seriously-- why solicitations on twitter? I suppose it's possible their just looking for a beard-- the support network and staffing help etc are all the people who will really run the school while Mr. McStarsearch draws his generous salary and sips latte in the office. Maybe Mind Trust is offering a new sort of service to the other ecosystem members-- we will set up a school for you to suck the blood from, and if anything goes south, we will also provide a fall guy to be the nominal boss of the whole mess. Maybe Mind Trust is so clueless that they believe that not only can anyone be a teacher with five weeks of training, but anyone can be a charter school CEO with a pile of money.

Look, there are people out there who know Indiana's tortured ed reform history far better than I, and they deserve to have the rest of us pay better attention, because Indiana's messes (aka Jeb Bush and Tony Bennett et al) tend to spread. But after scanning all this history and looking at this newest wrinkle, there's one thing I'm certain of-- whatever the goal is here, it's not about actually educating the children of Indianapolis.

Suspension of Democracy Proceeds in York

York, PA is currently the front line of a new battle over public education.

A PA judge has ruled that the state can go ahead with its plan to put the district in receivership, appointing the same David Meckley who has served as the district's recover officer. Meckley, a 63-year-old businessman, has the advantage of being a York native, but the disadvantage of having no educational background.

The stakes are higher because everyone already knows what Meckley's plan is-- to hand the entire district over to the Charter Schools USA for-profit chain. This is not the first time in the US that such a move has been tried; you just don't hear much from reformsters about Muskegon Heights, Michigan, because that experiment ended prematurely, in failure.

The next move came before the ink was dry on the court's ruling. The district's school board and two unions filed an appeal. And reactions started to roll in.

The York Dispatch ran an editorial that, among other things, called the CSUSA plan "half-baked" and attacked the 2012 PA law that law underneath the judge's ruling. Opinions began to roll in from elsewhere.

People have been watching governor-elect Tom Wolf carefully. Sure, he's a Democrat. So is Andrew Cuomo. He is also a York resident with ties to Meckley and the private school community. Colleen Kennedy has been the reporter on the ground since before Day One, and her work on this subject is exhaustive. Bottom line-- there's no certainty about which way Wolf will jump on this one.

The comment issued from his office does not necessarily clarify the matter. Though this reporter summarizes Wolf as "opposed" to the takeover, let's look at what spokesperson Jeff Sheridan actually said:

Gov.-elect Wolf knows that schools across Pennsylvania have been starved for resources over the last four years and our children are being put at a disadvantage. As a result, district like York have been forced to the brink of financial collapse. Gov.-elect Wolf will make education his top priority by working to restore funding cuts and providing adequate resources so school districts can deliver on the promise of a high-quality public education for all Pennsylvanians.

In short, it's not his fault that this is happening. He plans to take steps to make sure it doesn't happen any more. But it does not say, directly or indirectly, that the York takeover should be stopped, should not happen, will be fought by the governor's office.


If he wants to really step up, he has the chance. "The state" has filed motions to get the appeal thrown out, starting with the school board's appeal. "The state" has a two-pronged approach to their objection. Prong one, the nit-picky prong, is the technicality that the board took the action of filing the appeal without a proper public meeting and vote.

Prong two, the "insult to injury" prong, says that at the moment the judge's ruling was issued, David Meckley became the Lord and Master of the York School District and nobody employed by the district could say "boo" about the lawsuit without his permission. Shut the door quick! Some actual voters or taxpayers might get a chance to say something!

And there's why everybody should be pissed off, upset, opposed to, and calling their congressperson about York. Because the state's underlying rationale here is, "The voters and taxpayers of York have, in the state's opinion, lost their right to have any sort of say about York schools. In Harrisburg, we have decided that democracy should be suspended in York because we don't like the way the voters handled it. Democracy is nice and all, but it's a luxury that only Some People are entitled to, and in Harrisburg, we've decided that the people of York are Not The Right People."

In York, we see laid out with stark clarity, the process that has been under way in many school systems, and this is the aspect of reformsterdom that people who don't even give a rat's rear about schools and education should still be paying attention to, because the root of the process, from York to Philly to Detroit to Chicago to New York is to replace democracy with corporate ownership. The process is about taking the vote away from citizens and giving it to corporate operators. This is literally taxation without representation.

Pennsylvania is not technically a state. We're a commonwealth, but these days that title seems a bit misplaced.

One Million-versary

Sometime last night this blog passed the 1,000,000 mark for views. I'm not going to get all meta here (one of my least favorite things is blogging about my blogging), but I do want to say thank you.

Thanks to Diane Ravitch for putting me in front of such a large audience. She has a huge platform, and her willingness to share that so many other voices is one of the great driving engines of the Resistance. We've never met or even talked on the phone, but she's had a huge influence on the success of this blog and, like many others, I am personally grateful for her support.

Likewise, the BATs gave a large audience a look at my words. Anthony Cody was one of the first A-list bloggers to pick up one of my pieces, and he also threw my hat in the ring when Education Week needed someone to fill at least a tiny piece of the gap he left when he took Living in Dialogue independent. EdWeek and Huffington Post have both put my words in front of new audiences, and I am thankful for their boosting as well.

I take inspiration from a long list of bloggers (you can see most of them in the right-hand column), and I have a group of loyal readers who keep me supplied with horrifying new leads and who do me the favor of alerting me to my latest eruption of typos, misspellings, and omitted words. I am grateful for them as well. My twitter account (@palan57), where I try to amplify the voices of many, is now up over 2000 followers, and my tumblr (curmudgucation news at curmudgucation.tumblr.com) was just supposed to be a place where I could store articles I didn't want to lose, but it now has its own batch of followers.

There is a massive buzz and hum and discussion going on in and around the world of public education, and I am privileged to be a small part of it. If I can provide something useful for the people who read here, then I've paid part of my debt to the planet and the profession today. Thanks to everybody who has read, and double thanks to everybody who has read and passed around what I've written.

USED Calls Parents and Teachers Dopes, Again

At Politico, Caitlin Emma took a pretty thorough look at the state of high stakes testing in this country, with a particular eye toward the Republicans who are making noises about rolling the testing juggernaut back a step or two (place your bets now on what kind of warm, friendly holiday greeting those guys have gotten from Pearson and friends in the last week).

Emma notes that the testing pushback has created some unusual allies from the left and right, and she notes that AFT and NEA have both come down on testing (she does not note the significance of this being pretty much the only aspect of reformsterism that the two unions have actually spoken up against). Emma also notes some of the staggering numbers of school hours spent on testing that are getting out to the public.

While they won’t back down on annual tests, Duncan and Obama recently responded to pressure to do something. They’re supporting a new effort to reduce testing led by state education chiefs and large urban-district leaders. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools will soon release findings that show where tests can be eliminated or improved. And they’ll announce a task force to develop recommendations for states and districts looking to cut back.

Yeah, we talked about that back when it first happened, and I feel safe predicting that the substantive part of that new effort-- the generating of optic-improving PR-- is already done, and we can expect to see nothing else of significance coming out of it.

Emma also gives a decent summary of the opt-out responses that have sprung up. Really, the whole article is worth your attention-- I just want to highlight one particular aspect.

”We’re responsible for student learning every single day and every single year,” an Education Department official said. “I want us to never back away from the fact that it’s our responsibility … Parents have a right to know how their students are progressing. Students have a right to know how they measure up.”

We've heard this from the feds before. It's one more translation of a driving idea for this administration that we could express more directly thus:

Parents are dopes and schools are filled with teachers and leaders who are some mix of liars and incompetents. Only with national high stakes testing will anybody know how students are doing.

The feds envision a world where a family gathers at home, befuddled. "So," asks Mom. "Are you learning how to read?" Junior shrugs and replies, "I don't know. I think so. Maybe. Maybe not." But Dad reassures them. "Don't worry. In a few months we'll get the test results from the state and then we'll know how you're doing."

Meanwhile, teachers huddle in staff rooms. "Do you have any idea whether your kids are learning anything or not," asks Mr. McNumbgnutts. His colleagues shrug. "Guess we'll just have to wait to get the test results back."

This, say the feds, is why testing must happen annually.

“If you’re waiting every three years to measure student learning, then what happens when a student has been falling behind?” the [unnamed Education Department] official said. “Do you wait until that third year to figure out what their interventions ought to be?”

The folks at the department of Education want testing because everybody else are dopes. Teachers, parents, students themselves-- nobody has a clue how students are doing in school without the wise intervention of Our Friends at Pearson (who are more than ready to step in -- they would like to tell us what the child should eat for breakfast and what kind of human being she is). 

"Do you wait until that third year to figure out what their intervention ought to be?" No, Sherlock. Most of us don't wait until the end of the week. In fact, a recent study of actual live human teachers tells us just how much use they get out of this nifty test data-- pretty much none. These quotes tell us, once again, just what stunningly low regard the guys in DC hold the (mostly female) teachers in classrooms.

This, perhaps more than anything the feds have done since the President arrived in DC, has been the biggest federal contribution to the destructive wave of reformsterism that has hit public education-- they have thrown full federal weight behind the idea that public education is an unmitigated failure and that nobody who's actually involved in it has a clue about anything at all.

Remember-- the feds didn't just agree to be facilitators for the reform plans of CCSSO, Achieve, Coleman, Pearson, et al. They also didn't say anything at all along the lines of, "You know, there are millions of trained, experienced, education professionals in the field. Maybe we should call a couple." It's understandable from the corporate reformsters-- teachers would only gum up their works, and they have no obligation to represent anybody but their own stockholders. But our political leaders simply cast a quick vote of no confidence in public education and let the bulldozers have at it. And they are still at it, buttressing each reformy idea with an argument that boils down to, "We have to do something because teachers and parents are dopes."

I sure hope we can remember this all the way into 2016. And in the interim, maybe Democrats should come up with a better campaign platform than the cartoonish, "We're going to tell you how it should go because you don't have a clue."

2014: What Did My Readers Care About?

Had I known what this blog was going to turn into, I probably would have done it on wordpress, which has many more nifty tools. This last week, I have watched with envy as worpressers get their own little number-crunching nicely-graphicked end-o'-year wrap-up. Meanwhile, even doing simple tagging is a chore on blogspot.

But my wife has been under the weather, so we've stayed close to home and I've had time to break a few things down here at the blogstand. What could I see in the tea leaves of my sites stats?

I always start with the assumption that readers in the bloggoverse respond mostly to subject. When I see a post take off and draw large readership, I don't think "Wow, I must have written the hell out of that one" so much as I think, "Damn, that must have touched a nerve." So by looking at what posts were popular, I get a sense of what nerves are out there, waiting to be touched.

By far, nothing I have ever written in my life has touched as many nerves as this piece:

The Hard Part dealt with the issue of teachers never having enough-- enough time, enough resources, enough you to do everything you know you should do. It ran on this blog a year ago, and then I later used it on my HuffPost space, where it blew up. At this point it has 560,000 likes on facebook, and has been translated into French, Spanish and German. It is not my greatest moment of writing (at one point, I announce a metaphor and then launch a simile--d'oh) but boy does it ever speak to something that many, many teachers feel-- a sense of just not being enough, of having too much to do and too little to do it with. If there was ever a moment in which blogging made me feel as if I were not the only person to feel a particular way, this was it.

As much as we've all learned to pay attention on the national level, people still respond very strongly to their own local concerns. Three of my four top posts for the year are regional: a piece about the publishing of Minneapolis teacher ratings, a piece from last spring about North Carolina's spirited drive to kick its teachers repeatedly in the face, and one of several posts following the stripping of special subjects in Ohio. Massachusetts's flirtation with teacher certificate screwery made the top 10.

Posts also take off when they address some of the favorite reformsters. People never seem to get tired of seeing what Arne Duncan's latest move of gooberdom, and I swore off directly referencing She Who Will Not Be Named because She always served as the most base-but-effective clickbait. Besides, she simply never deserved to be famous, so I stopped being part of that process.

Once you get away from the reformster A-list, however, interest drops. I will not hurt the feelings of some reformsters by listing the people in whom there's just not much interest, and I will continue responding to their work just because I like to.

People also like mockery, apparently, which is a need I'm prepared to fill. The top ten posts for the year include my directory of anti-teacher trolls and my own take on the ubiquitous "Why I Heart Common Core" letters. Which tells me that as serious as the situation is, folks are still willing to laugh at it. In seven hundred and some posts of varying degrees of seriousness, I have never gotten a "How dare you make light of these serious issues" note. I have, however, received several notes from reformsters-friendly folks saying essentially, "I disagree with most of the substance of what you wrote, but that was still pretty funny." So I guess as contentious as the debates about the future of US public education have become, we are not all so grim as the folks in some of the other big debates in this country.

My sampling here is obviously self-selecting, and not representative of the general population, but it still is interesting to get a hint of what sorts of things people are concerned about. And now I have also fulfilled my contractual obligation to do some sort of end-of-the-year post. Happy New Year to us all!

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