Chris Potter has a great piece of journalism in this morning's Pittsburgh Post Gazette covering the amped-up anti-teacher advocacy in the burgh. Mostly what I have to say is, "Go read it." But there are just a couple of moments in the article that I want to highlight.
Pittsburgh schools had previously won accolades and some Gates money by committing to a model for data-based teacher improvement created by the district and the teachers together. That's a story of its own for another day.
But one of the players in the Pittsburgh ed scene is A+ Schools, whose major project was an annual report laying out all the data for the city's schools. But in the last few years, they've decided "not just to report on conditions, but to reshape them." And they've retooled their strategic plan to say they will advocate for certain positions on school reform. They've pulled a couple of pages from the standard reformy handbook, with a big serving of Teacher Thunderdome (let's stack-rank teachers and when layoffs come, use stack rankings to make the call) with a side order of achievement gap rhetoric.
The article looks at the A+ "shift" toward advocacy, and it considers the possibility of a Gates factor in the shift-- about the time A+ was becoming more reformy, Gates was handing them a cool million. This may be a chicken-egg problem, but pursuing it pulls an interesting quote from a Gates spokesperson:
Mr. Brown, of the Gates Foundation, agreed that once evaluations are created, “a lot of folks will have questions” if they aren’t used in personnel decisions. “Our perspective was, ‘You said you’d use this information to [ensure kids had] access to the best educators.’"
So, the whole point of teacher evaluation is to rank teachers and the whole point of ranking teachers is to fire the ones at the bottom of the stack.
Mr. Brown added that Gates makes grants to “thought partners” like A+ Schools to ensure education remains in the public eye.
Also, Jessie Ramey of Yinzercation makes it into the article with this on-point quote:
“When you are talking about evaluating teachers,” Ms. Ramey added,
“you’re really inflicting more testing on students,” which disrupts
learning, and whose results are “highly dependent on poverty.”
The one aspect of this approach that Potter misses is the Thunderdome ideal-- a system that stack ranks teachers and makes employment decisions based on those rankings pits teachers against each other in a battle to the professional death. It makes student and class assignments critical to a teacher's future, and it turns offering a helping hand to a colleague a matter of professional self-destruction. This is why Microsoft ultimately abandoned stack ranking-- it creates an ugly anti-collegial culture. It's no way to run a school.
Potter also looks at the state capital, where unions are spending big money, but where we also find A+ huddled up with StudentsFirst and PennCAN (just in case you had any doubts about A+'s "neutrality").
The article is well worth your attention. Read and share!
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Six Recommendations for Responsibility
Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue should be on your bookmark list. In addition to Cody's own valuable voice, the blog provides a great assortment of voices from the education world.
Last month he included a piece with a rather twisty pedigree. Last year NEA entered into a project with VIVA Idea Exchange (I'm supposed to put a little TM with that, which gives you your first hint about these folks). VIVA is linked to New Voice Strategies, a PR opinion-pushing firm that Dennis Van Roekel (blessedly-former NEA president) used and which hired Paul Toner once Massachusetts teachers had booted him out of his union president job. Reportedly, 900 teacher comments were solicited, then boiled down to the final product.
A result of that project was presented at Living in Dialogue, prompting considerable discussion both at LID and at Diane Ravitch's blog. There's considerable debate about how hard VIVA pushed for certain inclusions in the final product and how "pure" the process remained. I thought I'd just go ahead and see if I thought the results were any good. Here are the six recommendations regarding accountability:
1) Shift away from blame, toward shared responsibility.
This requires moving away from models that hold any ONE stakeholder as solely responsible for a student’s learning, and moving to a model acknowledging that teachers, families, students, and policymakers share responsibility for how well students learn.
Interesting list of stakeholders, as it includes politicians but misses taxpayers, voters, and members of the community. I'm not just nitpicking-- I consider that a glaring omission. But beyond that, I would certainly support any model that didn't involve intoning that teachers are the single biggest factor in student learning, so let's spank them real hard. I would welcome moving away from the ridiculous reasoning that if 50% of a state's students are not proficient, the only possible explanation is that 50% of the state's teachers are bad teachers.
So, basic idea is good. Specific iteration needs work.
2) Educate the whole child
Good lord, yes. Reformsters have insisted that the parts of the child that they believe they can measure are the only parts that matter. Educating the whole child has not always been one of public education's Best Things, but we have never moved further away as a matter of deliberate policy than we have right now. If teachers are going to do their whole job, accountability freaks will have to accept that not all parts of a teacher's job performance can be measured easily, or even a all.
3) Top down funding without top down control.
This is unicorn farming. The federal government simply doesn't play this game; all federal money comes with strings attached. And the writers have sandwiched a whole lot of stuff in this particular bullet point that smells of horn polish.
Educators in every state need to develop education standards, benchmarks, and assessments in all content area due to an increasingly mobile and transient student population – without dictating a specific curriculum.
First, no. No, they don't. I know reasonable people believe in the inevitable necessity of national standards of one sort or another. I do not. And while I would be extraordinarily hard to budge on this point, I have never seen a single solitary piece of evidence that national standards have any educational value at all. None. Not a bit. So don't keep saying that to me like it's self-evident, because it's not, nor has anyone provided any evidence yet.
Second, you cannot fix your (imaginary) transient student problem with anything except a national curriculum.
They also have a wish list of three unlikely items and one good one. The three unlikely ones include a constitutional amendment requiring states "to direct necessary funds toward public education." Who's going to decide what "necessary" means? Their wish list also calls for a combination of lawmaking and lawsuiting to establish education as a civil right and supplement limited state money with limitless federal money. So, the feds won't exert top down control, except when they do.
The fourth item is full testing transparency-- what the tests cost in money and time and scoring and everything else. That would be peachy.
4) Teacher autonomy and professionalism
Recognize educators as professionals who care about the growth of students, the climate of schools, and the state of education in today’s world, and allow them the autonomy afforded to such professionals. Given the impact of teachers on student achievement, it is imperative that teachers be treated as trained professionals who know their students, their students needs, and how best to deliver instruction in the most appropriate way. Allowing teachers to determine best practices will result in removing scripted, one-size-fits-all lessons that often emerge from upper-level decision-making, ignoring the human element. Classroom teachers know how to assess, monitor, and adjust, and if allowed to use their professional judgment with their own students, schools will witness student growth.
Well, yes. That sounds about right, other than "given the impact of teachers on student impact" is just reinforcing the accountability myth that bad test scores can be best explained by bad teachers.
The second paragraph, unfortunately, is way too mealy-mouthed. Teachers should be valued. Their voices and opinions should be considered. Teachers should be free to offer comments and criticism without fear of retaliation (you know--we could offer them some sort of job protection that we could call "tenure").
Sorry to unload on this particular article, but I am tired of teachers and reformsters putting forth as their best ideal a world where teachers are "considered" and "listened to." I'd love those things. But as long as we're staking out unicorn farms, I'd like a world where the state licensing board for teachers and teacher education programs is composed entirely of working teachers. I'd like a world where no major decision about a school building can be made without the approval vote of the teaching staff. I would like a world where nobody is allowed to hold a major education oversight position, like charter school operator or state ed commissioner or secretary of education, without at least ten years of teaching experience in a public school. That's my unicorn farm, and it includes a hell of a lot more than teachers just being listened to politely by all the non-teachers who have the actual power over the world of education.
And don't tell me they were just being realistic when they were writing this. They drop-kicked realism easily enough one item ago when the feds were going to hand out free money with no strings and the states were going to approve a Constitutional amendment. If the writers' biggest dream was to be listened to, they need to dream bigger.
5) Emerge from evaluation to support
Now here are some big dreams. Scrap every stitch of the current system, they say, and replace it with teachers providing an end-of-year report. No evaluations linked to merit pay, licensure, punitive crap, nothing, nada.
I can hear the public (some of whom I've been hanging out with over vacation)-- "So bad teachers will just write their own job performance review?" And I have to agree with them.
Look, if we want everyone to extend trust and respect to teachers based on our professionalism and ability, then we need to extend that same courtesy to our principals. Their proposed self-evaluation certainly has a place in a larger picture, but it wont stand by itself. More than simple honesty, it requires a self-awareness that even some really great teachers lack. I cannot imagine a functioning evaluation system that does not include principal obeservation.
I agree that the goal of such a system needs to be support, not punishment. That's good for the profession, good for the teacher, and good for the school system.
However, test scores have no place in teacher evaluation. You can send the principal to my classroom every day; I won't mind a bit and you'll probably learn a lot about how I do my job. But looking at my students' test scores won't tell you a damn thing about how well I teach.
6) One size does not fit all.
Students arrive with their own unique strengths, aptitudes, interests, and life experiences. Education begins with recognizing who our students are as persons and facilitating the development of their gifts.
Yeah, that's about right. And this, too:
Education must extend beyond a narrow academic focus to include a broad range of human developmental goals and values. In order to educate the whole child, we need to support student growth through individualized guidance programs, electives that nurture aptitudes and extra-curricular activities that develop social skills. This can only happen in a safe and democratic environment. Schools and school districts must communicate to students that they are accepted, valued, and needed just as they are, regardless of their academic achievements.
It's a good finish for this proposed list that-- well, it came from somewhere, somehow. It's kind of sort of about responsibility and accountability, though beyond the teachers-grade-themselves idea, it's not exactly loaded with actionable material. It's an interesting exercise in I-don't-know-what, because I can't imagine any reformster being convinced by it, and I'm not sure (beyond a few choice pull quotes) what PR usefulness VIVA will glean. Apparently there's another group working on turning it into another sort of document, so we can look forward to that.
Last month he included a piece with a rather twisty pedigree. Last year NEA entered into a project with VIVA Idea Exchange (I'm supposed to put a little TM with that, which gives you your first hint about these folks). VIVA is linked to New Voice Strategies, a PR opinion-pushing firm that Dennis Van Roekel (blessedly-former NEA president) used and which hired Paul Toner once Massachusetts teachers had booted him out of his union president job. Reportedly, 900 teacher comments were solicited, then boiled down to the final product.
A result of that project was presented at Living in Dialogue, prompting considerable discussion both at LID and at Diane Ravitch's blog. There's considerable debate about how hard VIVA pushed for certain inclusions in the final product and how "pure" the process remained. I thought I'd just go ahead and see if I thought the results were any good. Here are the six recommendations regarding accountability:
1) Shift away from blame, toward shared responsibility.
This requires moving away from models that hold any ONE stakeholder as solely responsible for a student’s learning, and moving to a model acknowledging that teachers, families, students, and policymakers share responsibility for how well students learn.
Interesting list of stakeholders, as it includes politicians but misses taxpayers, voters, and members of the community. I'm not just nitpicking-- I consider that a glaring omission. But beyond that, I would certainly support any model that didn't involve intoning that teachers are the single biggest factor in student learning, so let's spank them real hard. I would welcome moving away from the ridiculous reasoning that if 50% of a state's students are not proficient, the only possible explanation is that 50% of the state's teachers are bad teachers.
So, basic idea is good. Specific iteration needs work.
2) Educate the whole child
Good lord, yes. Reformsters have insisted that the parts of the child that they believe they can measure are the only parts that matter. Educating the whole child has not always been one of public education's Best Things, but we have never moved further away as a matter of deliberate policy than we have right now. If teachers are going to do their whole job, accountability freaks will have to accept that not all parts of a teacher's job performance can be measured easily, or even a all.
3) Top down funding without top down control.
This is unicorn farming. The federal government simply doesn't play this game; all federal money comes with strings attached. And the writers have sandwiched a whole lot of stuff in this particular bullet point that smells of horn polish.
Educators in every state need to develop education standards, benchmarks, and assessments in all content area due to an increasingly mobile and transient student population – without dictating a specific curriculum.
First, no. No, they don't. I know reasonable people believe in the inevitable necessity of national standards of one sort or another. I do not. And while I would be extraordinarily hard to budge on this point, I have never seen a single solitary piece of evidence that national standards have any educational value at all. None. Not a bit. So don't keep saying that to me like it's self-evident, because it's not, nor has anyone provided any evidence yet.
Second, you cannot fix your (imaginary) transient student problem with anything except a national curriculum.
They also have a wish list of three unlikely items and one good one. The three unlikely ones include a constitutional amendment requiring states "to direct necessary funds toward public education." Who's going to decide what "necessary" means? Their wish list also calls for a combination of lawmaking and lawsuiting to establish education as a civil right and supplement limited state money with limitless federal money. So, the feds won't exert top down control, except when they do.
The fourth item is full testing transparency-- what the tests cost in money and time and scoring and everything else. That would be peachy.
4) Teacher autonomy and professionalism
Recognize educators as professionals who care about the growth of students, the climate of schools, and the state of education in today’s world, and allow them the autonomy afforded to such professionals. Given the impact of teachers on student achievement, it is imperative that teachers be treated as trained professionals who know their students, their students needs, and how best to deliver instruction in the most appropriate way. Allowing teachers to determine best practices will result in removing scripted, one-size-fits-all lessons that often emerge from upper-level decision-making, ignoring the human element. Classroom teachers know how to assess, monitor, and adjust, and if allowed to use their professional judgment with their own students, schools will witness student growth.
Well, yes. That sounds about right, other than "given the impact of teachers on student impact" is just reinforcing the accountability myth that bad test scores can be best explained by bad teachers.
The second paragraph, unfortunately, is way too mealy-mouthed. Teachers should be valued. Their voices and opinions should be considered. Teachers should be free to offer comments and criticism without fear of retaliation (you know--we could offer them some sort of job protection that we could call "tenure").
Sorry to unload on this particular article, but I am tired of teachers and reformsters putting forth as their best ideal a world where teachers are "considered" and "listened to." I'd love those things. But as long as we're staking out unicorn farms, I'd like a world where the state licensing board for teachers and teacher education programs is composed entirely of working teachers. I'd like a world where no major decision about a school building can be made without the approval vote of the teaching staff. I would like a world where nobody is allowed to hold a major education oversight position, like charter school operator or state ed commissioner or secretary of education, without at least ten years of teaching experience in a public school. That's my unicorn farm, and it includes a hell of a lot more than teachers just being listened to politely by all the non-teachers who have the actual power over the world of education.
And don't tell me they were just being realistic when they were writing this. They drop-kicked realism easily enough one item ago when the feds were going to hand out free money with no strings and the states were going to approve a Constitutional amendment. If the writers' biggest dream was to be listened to, they need to dream bigger.
5) Emerge from evaluation to support
Now here are some big dreams. Scrap every stitch of the current system, they say, and replace it with teachers providing an end-of-year report. No evaluations linked to merit pay, licensure, punitive crap, nothing, nada.
I can hear the public (some of whom I've been hanging out with over vacation)-- "So bad teachers will just write their own job performance review?" And I have to agree with them.
Look, if we want everyone to extend trust and respect to teachers based on our professionalism and ability, then we need to extend that same courtesy to our principals. Their proposed self-evaluation certainly has a place in a larger picture, but it wont stand by itself. More than simple honesty, it requires a self-awareness that even some really great teachers lack. I cannot imagine a functioning evaluation system that does not include principal obeservation.
I agree that the goal of such a system needs to be support, not punishment. That's good for the profession, good for the teacher, and good for the school system.
However, test scores have no place in teacher evaluation. You can send the principal to my classroom every day; I won't mind a bit and you'll probably learn a lot about how I do my job. But looking at my students' test scores won't tell you a damn thing about how well I teach.
6) One size does not fit all.
Students arrive with their own unique strengths, aptitudes, interests, and life experiences. Education begins with recognizing who our students are as persons and facilitating the development of their gifts.
Yeah, that's about right. And this, too:
Education must extend beyond a narrow academic focus to include a broad range of human developmental goals and values. In order to educate the whole child, we need to support student growth through individualized guidance programs, electives that nurture aptitudes and extra-curricular activities that develop social skills. This can only happen in a safe and democratic environment. Schools and school districts must communicate to students that they are accepted, valued, and needed just as they are, regardless of their academic achievements.
It's a good finish for this proposed list that-- well, it came from somewhere, somehow. It's kind of sort of about responsibility and accountability, though beyond the teachers-grade-themselves idea, it's not exactly loaded with actionable material. It's an interesting exercise in I-don't-know-what, because I can't imagine any reformster being convinced by it, and I'm not sure (beyond a few choice pull quotes) what PR usefulness VIVA will glean. Apparently there's another group working on turning it into another sort of document, so we can look forward to that.
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.
Friday, January 2, 2015
Indiana: Building a Better Leech
Twice today, this has turned up in my twitter feed:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
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."
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."
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