Testing: What Purposes?

As the Defenders of Big Standardized Tests have rushed to protect and preserve this important revenue stream this monster program, they have proposed a few gazillion reasons that testing must happen, that these big bubbly blunt force objects of education serve many important purposes.

The sheer volume of purported purposes makes it appear that BS Tests are almost magical. And yet, when we start working our way down the list and look at each purpose by itself...

Teacher Evaluation.

The notion that test results can be used to determine how much value a teacher added to an individual student (which is itself a creepy concept) has been debunked, disproven, and rejected by so many knowledgeable people it's hard to believe that anyone could still defend it. At this point, Arne Duncan would look wiser insisting that the earth is a giant flat disc on the back of a turtle. There's a whole argument to be had about what to do with teacher evaluations once we have them, but if we decide that we do want to evaluate teachers for whatever purpose, evaluations based on BS Tests do not even make the Top 100 list.

Inform Instruction: Micro Division

Can I use BS Tests to help me decide how to shape, direct and fine tune my classroom practices this year? Can I use the BS Tests results from the test given in March and sent back to us over the summer to better teach the students who won't be in my class by the time I can see their individual scores? Are you kidding me?

BS Tests are useless as methods of tuning and tweaking instruction of particular students in the same year. And we don't need a tool to do that any way because that's what teachers do every single day. I do dozens of micro-assessments on a daily basis, formal and informal, to determine just where my students stand on whatever I'm teaching. The notion that a BS Test can help with this is just bizarre.

Inform Instruction: Macro Division

Okay, so will year-to-year testing allow a school to say, "We need to tweak our program in this direction." The answer is yes, kind of. Many, many schools do this kind of study, and it boils down to coming together to say, "We've gotten as far as we can by actually teaching the subject matter. But test study shows that students are messing up this particular type of question, so we need to do more test prep--I mean, instructional focus, on answering these kinds of test questions."

But is giving every single student a BS Test every single year the best way to do this? Well, no. If we're just evaluating the program, a sampling would be sufficient. And as Catherine Gerwitz pointed out at EdWeek, this is one of many test functions that could already be handled by NAEP.

Measuring Quality for Accountability

It seems reasonable to ask the question, "How well are our schools doing, really?" It also seems reasonable to ask, "How good is my marriage, really?" or "How well do I kiss, really?" But if you imagine a standardized test is going to tell you, you're ready to buy swampland in Florida.

Here's a great article that addresses the issue back in 1998, before it was so politically freighted. That's more technical answer. The less technical answer is to ask-- when people wonder about how good a school is, or ask about schools, or brag about schools, or complain about schools, how often is that directly related to BS Tests results. When someone says, "I want to send my kids to a great school," does that question have anything to do with how well their kid will be prepped to take a narrow bubble test?

BS Tests don't measure school quality.

Competition Among Schools

"If we don't give the BS Test," opine some advocates, "how will we be able to stack rank all the schools of this country." (I'm paraphrasing for them).

The most obvious question here is, why do we need to? What educational benefit do I get in my 11th grade English classroom out of know how my students compare to students in Iowa? In what parallel universe would we find me saying either, "Well, I wasn't actually going to try to teach you anything, but now that I see how well they're doing in Iowa, I'm going to actually try" or "Well, we were going to do some really cool stuff this week, but I don't want to get too far ahead of the Iowans."

But even if I were to accept the value of intra-school competition, why would I use this tool, and why would I use it every year for every student? Again, the NAEP is already a better tool. The current crop of BS Tests cover a narrow slice of what schools do. Using these to compare schools is like making every single musician in the orchestra audition by playing a selection on oboe.

The Achievement Gap

We used to talk about making the pig fatter by repeatedly measuring it. Now we have the argument that if we repeatedly weight two pigs, they will get closer to weighing the same.

The data are pretty clear-- in our more-than-a-decade of test-based accountability, the achievement gap has not closed. In fact, in some areas, it has gotten wider. It seems not-particularly-radical to point out that doubling down on what has not worked is unlikely to, well, work.

The "achievement gap" is, in fact, a standardized test score gap. Of all the gaps we can find related to social justice and equity in our nation-- the income gap, the mortality gap, the getting-sent-to-prison gap, the housing gap, the health care gap, the being-on-the-receiving-end-of-violence gap-- of all these gaps, we really want to throw all our weight behind how well people score on the BS Tests?

Finding the Failures

Civil rights groups that back testing seem to feel that the BS Test and the reporting requirements of NCLB (regularly hailed as many people's favorite part of the law) made it impossible for schools and school districts to hide their failures. By dis-aggregating test results, we can quickly and easily see which schools are failing and address the issue. But what information have we really collected, and what are we actually doing about it?

We already know that the BS Tests correspond to family income. We haven't found out anything with BS Tests that we couldn't have predicted by looking at family income. And how have we responded? Certainly not by saying, "This school is woefully underfunded, lacking both the resources and the infrastructure to really educate these students." No, we can't do that. Instead we encourage students to show grit, or we offer us "failing" schools as turnaround/investment opportunities for privatizers. Remember-- you don't fix schools by throwing money at them. To fix schools, you have to throw money at charter operators.

Civil Rights

For me, this is the closest we come to a legit reason for BS Tests. Essentially, the civil rights argument is that test results provide a smoking gun that can be used to indict districts so steeped in racism that they routinely deny even the most rudimentary features of decent schooling.

But once again, it doesn't seem to work that way. First, we don't learn anything we didn't already know. Second, districts don't respond by trying to actually fix the problem, but simply by complying with whatever federal regulation demands, and that just turns into more investment opportunities. Name a school district that in the last decade of BS Testing has notably improved its service of minority and poor students because of test results. No, instead, we have districts where the influx of charter operations to fix "failing" schools has brought gentrification and renewed segregation.

BS Testing also replicates the worst side effect of snake oil cures-- it creates the illusion that you're actually working on the problem and keeps you from investing your resources in a search for real solutions.

Expectations

On the other hand, one of the dumbest supports of BS Testing is the idea, beloved by Arne Duncan, that expectations are the magical key to everything. Students with special needs don't perform well in school because nobody expects them to. So we must have BS Tests, and we must give them to everyone the same way. Also, in order to dominate the high jump in the next Olympics, schools will now require all students to clear a high jump bar set at 6' before they may eat lunch. That includes children who are wheelchair bound, because expectations.

Informing parents

Yes, somehow BS Test advocates imagine that parents have no idea how their children are doing in school unless they can see the results of a federally-mandated BS Test. The student's grades, the students daily tests and quizzes and writing assignments and practice papers provide no information. Nor could a parent actually speak to a teacher face to face or through e-mail to ask about their child's progress.

Somehow BS Test advocates imagine a world where teachers are incompetent and parents are clueless. Even if that is true in one corner or another, how, exactly, would a BS Test score help? How would a terrible teacher or a dopey parent use that single set of scores to do... anything? I can imagine there are places where parents want more transparency from their schools, but even so-- how do BS Tests, which measure so little and measure it so poorly, give them that?

Informing government

Without BS Testing, ask advocates, how will the federal government know how schools are doing? I have two questions in response.

1) What makes you think BS Tests will tell you that? Why not just the older, better NAEP test instead?

2) Why do the feds need to know?

Bottom Line

Many of the arguments for BS Testing depend on a non sequitor construction: "Nutrition is a problem in some countries, so I should buy a hat." Advocates start with a legitimate issue, like the problems of poverty in schools, and suggest BS Testing as a solution, even though it offers none.

In fact there's little that BS Tests can help with, because they are limited and poorly-made tools. "I need to nail this home together," say test advocates. "So hand me that banana." Tests simply can't deliver as advertised.

The arguments for testing are also backwards-manufactured. Instead of asking, "Of all the possible solutions in the world, how could we help a teacher steer instruction during the year," testing advocates start with the end ("We are going to give these tests") and then struggle to somehow connect those conclusions to the goal.

If you were going to address the problems of poverty and equity in this country, how would you do it? If you were going to figure out if someone was a good teacher or not, how could we tell that? How would you tell good schools from bad ones, and how would you fix the bad ones?

The first answer that pops into your mind for any of those questions is not, "Give a big computer-based bubble test on reading and math."

Nor can we say just give it a shot, because it might help and what does it really hurt? BS Tests come with tremendous costs, from the huge costs of the tests to the costs of the tech needed to administer them to the costs in a shorter school year and the human costs in stress and misery for the small humans forced to take these. And we have yet to see what the long-term costs are for raising a generation to think that a well-educated person is one who can do a good job of bubbling in answers on a BS Test.

The federal BS Test mandate needs to go away because the BS Testing does not deliver any of the outcomes that it promises and comes at too great costs. 

Time To Speak Up

This week the Big Noise About NCLB kicks off in DC with a hearing on Wednesday, Jan 21 entitled "Fixing No Child Left Behind: Testing and Accountability." Heaven only knows who will be speaking at it-- the featured guest list will be one more set of tea leaves we can look at to see which way this new wind is blowing. But of course, we already know whose voices will not be prominently featured at the hearings.

Teachers.

So why we're all busy doing the actual work of educating America's children, a bunch of folks in DC will talk about how we ought to be doing that job.

However, that doesn't mean we can't put our voices out there.

Sen. Lamar Alexander has issued a press release that gives you all the tools you need. There's a link to the draft version of the legislation and an email address to send your comments to.

FixingNCLB@help.senate.gov

Send an email. Send an email. Send. An. Email.

You do not have to be brilliant or super-articulate. Just speak from the heart. Don't write Moby Dick in email form. Keep it brief (aka "readable") and if you have a lot more to say, send several emails. If you just have a sentence or two and can't figure out how to add to that, just send that. If you've read something that really said it for you, email a link to the piece and write "Read this. I believe it's true."


But whatever you do, don't sit silently hoping that Congress does the right thing. You can bet the farm that DC is swarming with lobbyists and "activists" who are making certain that their point of view is heard up close and personal. We know that the unions that are supposed to represent the teacher point of view are unlikely to do so.

It's on us. It's time to speak up. It's time to speak your truth. Will they hear us and listen to us? Who knows, But I do know this-- there is no possibility that they will hear us if we don't speak.

I am going to spend a little less time blogging this weekend and divert my torrent of words into emails to the committee. I implore you, beg you, to do the same.

Send an email.

Speak up.

This is the biggest opportunity we've had to be heard in the education debates since the federal government first stuck their nose in. We have no excuse not to use it, and shame on us if we don't.

Not So Free To Teach

Like many teachers, I get the occasional thoughtful invitation from my buddy Matt Eason at Free To Teach, an organization that clearly has my interests at heart. Let's start peeling this onion, shall we?

Layer One: A Concerned Teacher-Activist

I’m proud to be a public school educator of 17 years. But I am not proud that teachers don’t have a choice when it comes to whom they give their money. 

You can see where this is going (spoiler: it's those damn unions). Now, for those of you who are exceptionally cynical, I'll point out that Matt Eason appears to be a real teacher who works in a real district. Eason is in Avon Grove schools, located a bit southwest of Philly. A non-union teacher, he seems to have gotten in a bit of a tiff with the district back in 2013 when it turned out they had quietly approved Fair Share and PACE deductions in a new contract (oddly enough, Eason had seventeen years of teaching in 2013, and that's still what he has as of the last email he sent me).

Outside of our schools, no one would just give their money willingly for any political purpose without knowing how it is being used.  This has to be stopped. Teachers deserve more accountability. That’s why I’ve supported legislation called “paycheck protection,” which would end the practice of school districts deducting the union’s political money straight from our paychecks at taxpayer expense.

Fair Share is of course the provision that teachers in a district should shoulder some of the cost of operating the union even if they don't belong. PACE is the political action wing of the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Eason didn't care for any of those things, and to be perfectly honest, I have my own conflicted feelings about Fair Share. On the one hand, teachers benefit from the union whether they belong for it or not, and it seems cheap to ride coattails. On the other hand, this is America and if you don't want to join things, you shouldn't have to. I think Fair Share also hurts all of us in the union because it gives the state and national levels one less reason to actually pay attention to us (they'll get a chunk of our money, anyway). I could totally live with a system in which teachers don't have to belong, but then they also get to negotiate their own personal contracts with the district, and the district has no obligation to pay them as well as anyone else.

Nor am I going to speak up for PACE, which has a great track record of collecting money from teachers to help support the election of politicians who then kick teachers in the face. 

All that said, Eason seems to have some points scrambled. It's not clear to me how the union dues deduction involves "taxpayer expense," and as far as I know, the only way to contribute to PACE is voluntarily.

But perhaps we can learn more by looking at the group Eason represents, Free to Teach.

Layer Two: A Teacher Advocacy Group

Free To Teach has a slick-nifty website decked in a kind of well-designed country chic. Their slogan is "Politicians and union leaders have spoken. It's time they heard from teachers." They even have a teacher's bill of rights. Actually, just five rights. Here they are:

1) "The right to associate professionally as I choose, without being forced to contribute financially to any organization I do not support." This is a mighty fine right, also popular with people who choose to pay just some or none of their taxes.

2) "The right to be rewarded as a professional based on my job performance." Oh, honey. Can I put this next to my right to be given a Lexus because I'm a decent fellow? The implication here, as always, is that school districts are just dying to give super-duper pay to a handful of extraordinary teachers, but the damn union is holding them back. It shows a charming excess of faith in the system and an equally charming believe in the speaker's own awesomeness. Personally, I am quite sure that Sofia Vergara wants to seduce me away from my wife with incredibly hot sex, but a secret conspiracy is keeping her from doing it.

3) "The right to protect my paycheck and not be forced to fund political views I oppose." Once again, a great anti-income tax argument.

4) "The right to have flexibility to meet the learning needs of students regardless of the job action stipulations by the union." I'm not really sure which imaginary situation this is trying to remedy. My principal wanted to assign me to a job I'm not certified to do, but the damn union stopped him? I was dying to donate twenty extra teaching hours a week to the district, but the damn union stopped me?

5) "The right to be employed based on merit, not just years of experience." And again, the suggestion that employers are dying to do the right thing, but those damned unions are stopping them. When Sofia finally gets to me, I plan to tell her all about this.

It all comes from the crazypants world of Right To Work. It's the union that's holding you back! Employers wanted to give you a thirty hour work week and a massive raise, but the unions forced us to have a forty hour week with a minimum wage. So why does this teacher advocacy site sound so much like an anti-labor corporate one? Oh wait-- what's this down at the bottom of the page?

Layer Three: Right Wing Faux Thinky Tank

"A project of Commonwealth Foundation."

The Commonwealth Foundation website is, I kid you not, blocked by my school's firewall as spam. The Foundation bills itself as a think tank, but as someone who has been reading a lot of thinky tank material, I have to say there doesn't seem to be a lot of thinking in this tank. Right now there's a big article claiming the Governor Wolf of PA has a conflict of issue problem because he took campaign contributions from the government worker unions, with whom he will soon be entering contracts. Please remember this complaint, because further down the page it will turn out to be hilarious.

Digging about turns up other articles like- oh look! One about how objectionable it is that dues are withheld from teacher paychecks at government expense. That sounds... familiar.

A post from today mocks objections to more charters in Philly; these guys say the objections are because the charters will be "too popular." Marcellus shale is bringing prosperity to PA. Obama is a big failure. Oh, and an article complaining that a PAC that was active in the defeat of Tom Corbett is funded by shadowy figures who are not accountable, including unions. Remember this complaint, too.

And-- there's no end to this-- they are also busily supporting "Mary's Law," based on the case of an unhappy PSEA member who doesn't like how her dues are used. Their argument, once again, is that somehow public resources are being used to withhold money from teacher. Or maybe their argument is that teacher pay is made out of public resources. Either way, their bottom line is "Public resources should never be used for politics." This leads to a section where they discuss how charters and cyberschools use tax dollars to advertise and lobby for their businesses. Ha ha! Of course not. This heinous crime is only committed by unions.

As I said-- I've read lots of think tanks. An outfit like the Fordham produces ideas and arguments, often backed up with actual facts, and while I generally think they miss the mark, there are clearly signs that somebody is thinking. But these guys-- this is just a political spin group, no more a think tank than Fox News.

Commonwealth Foundation says that it "crafts free-market policies, convinces Pennsylvanians of their benefits, and counters attacks on liberty." Sourcewatch, however, says that the group "is a right-wing pressure group based in Pennsylvania that calls itself a 'think tank.'"

What else does Sourcewatch say about these guys?

Level Four: What?! These guys again?!

Sourcewatch has connected Commonwealth Foundation to something called the State Policy Network, a network of about sixty-four right-wing so-called thinky tanks across the country. These guys have allegedly fostered a little state-sized network of Baby Heritage Groups. They have a history supposedly going back to the Reagan era.

If you want to read more about these guys, you can go to the Center for Media and Democracy's "EXPOSED: The State Policy Network -- The Powerful Right-Wing Network Helping to Hijack State Politics and Government" or this piece from Pullitzer-nominated Jane Mayer from the New Yorker, "Is IKEA the New Model for the Conservative Movement?"

There's a lot of good reportage in those, including Mayer's account of SPN who reportedly said in a meeting of SPN folks

... that SPN "would provide 'the raw materials,' along with the 'services' needed to assemble the products. Rather than acting like passive customers who buy finished products, she wanted each state group to show the enterprise and creativity needed to assemble the parts in their home states. 'Pick what you need,' she said, 'and customize it for what works best for you.'" Not only that, but Sharp "also acknowledged privately to the members that the organization's often anonymous donors frequently shape the agenda. 'The grants are driven by donor intent,' she told the gathered think-tank heads. She added that, often, 'the donors have a very specific idea of what they want to happen.'

Coming up with legislation-to-order should ring a few bells, and yes, indeedy, it turns out via Sourcewatch that SPN is tied directly and closely to ALEC.

It's hard to know exactly who is behind SPN because (remember that one hilarious thing I told you to remember?) much of its money is donated via DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, two funds that exist specifically to let people donate money anonymously so that they can remain shadowy and unaccountable to anyone.

Not that everybody remains shadowy. Sourcewatch lists some specific donors, including the Allegheny Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and (you knew this was coming) the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Yes, here's the other hilarious thing I told you to remember-- the organization that is shocked-- shocked!-- by the notion that someone might contribute to a politician's campaign and then seek influence over policies that affect that donor, is funded by Koch money, money that has never traveled anywhere without the intention of influencing policy.

That's Some Onion

And so, sadly, we must conclude that Matt Eason, who is a real person and probably has some real concerns for real reasons, is ultimately being used as a sock puppet by ALEC and the Kochs and other unknowable folks whose goal remains the same-old same-old ruination and sweeping aside of unions as a political force and as a voice for individual teachers.

So thank you for your concern, but I'm pretty sure that the biggest obstacles to my freedom to teach do not lie amidst my brothers and sisters in the classrooms next to mine. My union is far from perfect, and you need only read through the contents of this blog to find me saying hard things about them. But if I'm huddling in a ramshackle house in a driving storm of wind and rain being bombarded by missiles and cannonballs, my best choice moving forward is not to burn down the house and count on the people firing the weaponry to keep me safe.

Maternity Leave and Federal Priorities

If you want a hint about how federal priorities are set, just take a look at parental leave.

Plow through this report from the United Nation's International Labor Office and you'll learn of the 185 developed countries in the world, the US is one of only two with no federally mandated paid maternity leave. (The other one, I think, is New Guinea) *

Iran, Georgia, Germany, and Mongolia all mandate a better maternity leave arrangement than the US. Estonia and Finland once again kick our red,white and blue posteriors. Within the US, only five states pick up the slack.

But on the federal level, the best we can do is mandate that if you work for a company with more than fifty employees, they must give you time off without pay. Because if there is one time in life when someone is in a good place to give up income, it's when they have a new baby.

I bring up maternity leave because we are, on the federal level, so very deeply concerned about the little people these days. On the federal level we've been pushing for lots of testing and plenty of school oversight because Arne Duncan wants to be able to look a seven-year-old in the eyes and tell him he's on the right path to college.

And we have been plugging the living daylights out of pre-school and how much the little children need that great start in life and high-quality schooling to get them started out well. The feds are working hard on that cradle to career pipeline, so why are they not more interested in doing something about the cradle end of it?

President Obama famously said that no woman should have to choose between being a mother and going to work, and you would think that could lead straight into a discussion of mandated paid maternity leave to make that choice unnecessary. The next sentence should have been, "So let's make sure that young families just bringing home a precious, vulnerable newborn don't have to worry about the support of that infant taking a huge financial chunk out of their lives. Let's give every young mother a financial cushion so that she can have twelve or fourteen weeks to get her family off to a healthy start." That should have been the next sentence. Instead, the next sentence was, "So let’s make this happen: By the end of this decade, let’s enroll 6 million children in high-quality preschool, and let’s make sure that we are making America stronger.”

So why all this emphasis on pre-school as a way of catching up with the world when there is a child-care are in which we clearly lag-- providing a federal mandate that mothers can afford to stay home for the critical launch of their children?

I suppose it could be that we don't take maternity leave seriously as a culture. Time has a fairly awesome piece by Belinda Luscombe -- "Please Stop Acting as if Maternity Leave is a Vacation"-- which addresses this beautifully.

If it helps, think of family leave not as a vacation, but as a job swap. The new parents are swapping the jobs they know for shift work in an excrement-making factory with a co-worker who cannot communicate except by weeping or kicking. Plus, the shift never ends. And the chances of promotion are zero.

Sadly, I don't think it's an attitude problem. I suspect it is simpler and sadder than that.

The launching of nationally mandated and funded pre-K (complete with testing to check for that high-qualitiness) will make a bunch of corporations a ton of money. Paid maternity leave would cost corporations a ton of money. The Pre-K initiative will divert a ton of tax dollars into corporate pockets. Paid maternity leave would divert corporate dollars into the pockets of moms. Guess which way the lobbying wind blows on these issues.

If we really, really cared about getting babies a great start in life, and if we really worried about lagging behind the world in things that matter, we'd be pushing for federally mandated paid maternity leave like crazy. Instead, we use concern about children and our international standing as excuses to direct a lot of money to corporate interests. It's just one more of those little things that leads me to conclude that when the feds talk about Our Children, I shouldn't take them seriously.

*We should totally be talking about paternity leave as well, but the US is not exactly alone in failing to recognize the importance of the father in the early weeks, so I'm going to stick to maternity leave  in this piece.

AFT, WTF?

The Center for American Progress is "a left-leaning think tank long associated with the Obama Administration," according to Stephen Sawchuk at EdWeek. That's fair.

But I might describe CAP a bit differently. I might call them an intellectually dishonest bunch of shills for the reformster movement. I might the call them one more group that ardently churns out anti-public education material under a thin shell of legitimacy, a group that is devoted to hiding the privatizer agenda under a bad costume of progressive causes. And if you want to read some of the other things I've called them, you can look here, here, here, and here.

What I would not call them is "a fit ally for any teacher union, large or small."

And yet, somehow, Wednesday saw the release of a joint statement between CAP and the AFT.

Sawchuk called it "a sort of compromise." Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post called it "a hybrid position." At Living in Dialogue, Mary Porter calls it "terms of final surrender." My own theory is that the high level of stress and pressure created by the anticipated rewrite of ESEA has created cracks in the time-space continuum leading our universe's AFT to be switched with the AFT from some other universe where the AFT neither speaks to nor represents the interests of the teachers who belong to it.

What does this statement of shared principles contain?

Well, first, it assures us that it is not concerned with all of AFT/CAP's ideas for ESEA reauthorization-- just the ones dealing with accountability, the use of tests, and the "need to elevate the teaching profession." So, what do these two groups now apparently agree on?

First, they believe that federal policy should be used "to address funding inequities, to improve teaching and learning, and to support and elevate the teaching profession." Well, that's certainly broad and fuzzy. However, for the life of me, I cannot imagine how the federal government can improve teaching. Seriously-- exactly what specific action could Congress take to improve the profession, other than to get the hell out of the way? And as always, I'm wondering why we get this crap-- does Congress ever decide that they must improve doctoring or lawyering or welding or opera singing?

Next, well--

We propose that in order to inform instruction, to provide parents and communities information about whether students are working at grade level or are struggling, and to allow teachers to diagnose and help their students, the federal requirement for annual statewide testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school should be maintained.


Wow! I mean, just, wow! Not only has AFT decided to reverse itself on opposing testing, but they're ready to go on record agreeing that big standardized tests can do magical things like diagnose student issues. On what planet will PARCC or SBA "inform instruction" ever?

AFT/AP also loves them some accountability based on multiple measures. Well, that seems like a-- wait!! WHAT??!!

While these systems should include assessment results...


So AFT now supports VAM? Randi "VAM is a sham" Weingarten says, "Sure, we'd like a little
sham in our accountability"?!!


AFT now agrees that the fundamental principles of corporate reform-- evaluation through standardized testing results. The quality, validity, use of these tests-- we're not even going to push back on this a little? Well, at least AFT is going to stand up for public education, right?

All accountability systems should be designed to help all students succeed and to identify and target interventions to schools with large achievement gaps or large numbers of low-performing, disadvantaged groups.

So-- the system preferred in many states of targeting schools for turnaround or takeover or both, the whole reformster foundational principle of "Label schools failing and then target them to be the leading edge of market penetration by privatizers"-- AFT is signing off on that, too?

Next: States should fund schools properly. Well, thank goodness AFT still believes that, anyway.

AFT/CAP believes that ESEA should be used to make it harder to get into the teaching profession, because that will make student outcomes better and give us a national economic edge. Because, if anybody should be controlling what it takes to get into teaching, it should be the federal government. Certainly not teachers.

Oh, but they have more details. AFT/CAP wants a $4 Billion investment in Title II, Part A "focused on creating incentives for states and districts to invest in systemic reforms aimed at elevating the teaching profession and supporting educators." That money should be used to bribe the states into doing some of the following Swell Things taken from both the union and reformsters playbook (eg pay teachers more, and make licensure harder).

I confess to being absolutely gobsmackedly stumped about what AFT is thinking. As far as the actual content of the document, Diane Ravitch hits it pretty well:

The mandate for annual testing in grades 3-8 should not remain in federal law. Even though the signatories to this agreement say the scores should not be used for accountability, habits die hard. They will be, even though doing so is inaccurate and invalid. There really is no point to testing every child every year unless you want to know whether they have mastered the art of test-taking. Grade span testing (elementary, junior high school, and high school) should be quite enough. No high-performing nation tests every child every year from 3-8. Unless you happen to be a shareholder in Pearson or McGraw-Hill, it is a massive waste of children’s time and taxpayer’s money.

And I also like Mary Porter's take on the compromise

The PEOPLE don’t want a “compromise” at all. They want to be rid of high-stress mass testing, and rid of the forces that use testing to put a corporate heel on their third grader’s neck, period. They don’t want annual testing for any reason at all. They don’t want their child held accountable to Pearson or McGraw Hill or to Bill Gates or Jeb Bush or Barack Obama every year, or every third year, or AT ALL.

This document is truly puzzling. Why would AFT feel the need to negotiate a compromise position about hypothetical legislation with people who won't be helping to write it? What possible use is there to AFT in compromising away so many fundamental principles for no purpose whatsoever? It's not like they can say, "Well, at least we got X or Y out of this." They got nothing. Nothing. They simply provided the public spectacle of reversing themselves and selling out their members.

We know that the Big Standardized Test accomplishes nothing for actual education. We know it serves no useful purpose in the classroom. We know that it generates numbers that are a favorite tool of reformsters to use in the offensive against public education. We know it robs time from our students and gives them nothing in return but stress and grief. We know that it will create results that will be used against those of us who work in public education.

Why would AFT sign off on this document? Why would they team up with CAP? Should I watch for an AFT/DFER joint conference, or an AFT lovefest at the next national charter school operators convention?

I'm not a member of AFT. I wish I were. Because if I were a member of AFT, I could now quit.

Fixing Tenure

Conversations over the holiday break have reminded me that to the regular civilians, the removal of bad teachers remains a real policy issue. There is no way to argue against that as a policy issue-- "I didn't have a single bad teacher in all my years of school," said no person ever. Arguing against a system for removing incompetence from the classroom is like arguing against the heliocentric model of the solar system; it can be done, but you'll look like a dope.

But we aren't any closer to fixing whatever is supposedly wrong with tenure than we were a few years ago. Why not? Because there are certain obstacles to the brighter bad-teacher-firing future that some dream of.


Administration

In most districts there is a perfectly good mechanism in place to fire bad teachers. But to use it, administrators have to do work and fill out forms and, you know, just all this stuff. So if you're an administrator, it's much easier to shrug and say, "Boy, I wish I could do something about Mr. McSlugteach, but you know that tenure."

A natural reluctance is understandable. In many districts, the administrator who would do the firing would be the same one who did the hiring, and who wants to say, "Yeah, I totally failed in the Hiring Good People part of my job."

Yes, there are large urban districts where the firing process is a convoluted, expensive, time-wasting mess. But that process was negotiated at contract time; school leaders signed off on it. Could a better version be negotiated? I don't know, but I'll bet no teacher facing those kind of charges thinks, "Boy, I hope this process that's going to decide my career is going to be long and drawn out."

We know that administrators can move quickly when they want to. When a teacher has done something that smells like parent lawsuit material, many administrators have no trouble leaping right over that tenure obstacle.

All of which tells us that most administrators have the tools to get rid of incompetent teachers. They just lack either the knowledge or the will. So there's our first obstacle.

Metrics vs Quality

We don't have a valid, reliable tool for measuring teacher quality. There can't be a serious grown-up left in this country who believes that VAM actually works, and that's all we've got. The Holy Grail of evaluation system is one that can't be tilted by a principal's personal judgment, except that would be a system where a good principal's good judgment would also be blocked, and that seems wrong, too. We need to allow local discretion except when we don't.

I have a whole system blocked out and I'm just waiting for a call to start my consulting career. The downside for national scalability fans is that my system would be customized to the local district, making it impossible to stack rank teachers across the country.

And even my system is challenged by the personal quality involved. I can have every graduate of my high school list their three best and worst teachers, and they can probably all do it-- but their lists won't match. Bad teaching is like pornography-- we know it when we see it. But we don't all see it the same way. Identifying how we know bad teaching is a huge challenge, as yet unsurmounted.

Metrics vs Time

But that hurdle is just about identifying who's doing a good or bad job right now. There's another question that also needs to be answered-- with support, will this teacher be better in the future?
Once we've spotted someone who's not doing well, can we make a projection about her prospects? I've known many teachers who started out kind of meh in the classroom, but got steadily better over the course of their careers (include me in that group). I've known several teachers who hit a bad patch in mid-career and slumped for a while before pulling things back together.

If I ask graduates from over two decades to list best and worst teachers, that will provide even more variety in the lists. So how do we decide whether someone is just done, or that some support and improvement will yield better results that trying to start from scratch with a new person.

Hiring replacements

Any system that facilitates removing bad teachers must also reckon with replacing them. In fact, if we were good at hiring in the first place, we'd have less need to fire.

For all the attention and money and lawyering thrown at tenure, precious little attention has been paid to where high-quality replacements are supposed to come from. Instead, we've got the feds preparing to "evaluate" ed programs with the same VAM that serious grown-ups know is not good for evaluating teachers.

But the lack of suitable replacements has to be part of the serious calculus of firing decisions. Beefing up the teacher pool must be part of the tenure discussion.

Holding onto quality

The constant gush, gush, gush of teachers abandoning the profession is also a factor. If I've just had two or three good teachers quit a department in the last year, I'm less inclined to fire the ones I have left (who at least already know the bell schedule and the detention procedures). There are many ways to address this, including many that don't cost all that much money. But if you are going to remove a feature of teaching that has always made it attractive-- job security-- you need to replace it with something.

This is why holding onto a few less-awesome teachers is better than firing some good ones-- you do not attract teachers by saying, "You might lose your job at any time for completely random reasons."
If you can't hold onto your better people, your school will be a scene of constant churn and instability, which will go a long way toward turning your okay teachers into bad teachers.

The virtues of FILO

I know, I know. Just go to the comments and leave your story of some awesome young teacher who lost her job while some grizzled hag got to stay on. First In, Last Out may be much-hated, but it has the following virtues.

1) It is completely predictable. You don't have to wonder whether or not your job is on the line. The school trades a handful of young staffers with job worries for the rest of the staff having job security.

2) It's a ladder. As a nervous young staffer, you know that if things work out, you'll earn that job security soon enough.

3) Youth. Young teachers at the beginning of their careers are best able to bounce back from losing a job. Being fired is least likely to be a career-ender for the newbs.

But in private industry--

Don't care. Schools are not combat troops, hospitals, or private corporations. I'll save the full argument for another day, but the short argument is this-- schools are not private industry, and there's no good reason to expect them to run like private industry.

Whose judgment

At the end of the day, any tenure and firing system is going to depend on somebody's judgment. When we use something like Danielson rubric or even a God-forsaken cup of VAM sauce, we are simply substituting the judgment of the person who created the system for the judgment of the people who actually work with the teacher.

True story. In a nearby district a few years ago, the teachers were called to a meeting, and as they entered the meeting, they pulled numbers out of a hat. Then as the meeting started they were told what the numbers meant-- certain numbers would have a job the next year, other numbers would not, and the last group were maybe's.

That's what an employment system that uses no personal judgment looks like, and it satisfies the needs of absolutely none of the stakeholders. What we need is a system that uses the best available judgment in the best possible way. But it will have to address all the issues above, or we're just back to numbers in a hat.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Is Ed Reform a Clash of Class Cultures

At CRPE, Steven Hodas has an interesting read of the conflict reformsters and traditionalists (tip of the hat to Andy Smarick). I think his "Clash of Cultures: Blue Collar, White Collar and School Reform" gets the wrong read on some aspects of the issues, but there's some valuable insight in there as well.

Hodas is writing specifically from the perspective of New York City's reformy battles, but most of what he says could be considered in the broader sense.

The first part of his notion about culture clash is telegraphed by the title. He sees teachers as a blue collar culture squaring off against the white collar world of reformsters, and these culture clashes fed into an increasingly heated battle that turned to personal and brutal attacks. Hodas outlines what he sees as the fundamental difference in cultures. The traditional school culture was much like a culture of tradesmen:

The techniques of day-to-day practice (on a job site, at a fire, in the classroom) were largely unwritten; passed through stories, lore, and peer-mediated experience. Coming up through the system was both an educative and a normative experience, reinforcing the workplace culture and drawing clear boundaries between insiders and outsiders. The centers of gravity and legitimacy were situated with the front-line workers themselves, and only those managers who had risen through the ranks of successive apprenticeship had legitimized authority. Attempts by non-legitimized authority to impose rules or shape practice were generally ignored or subverted.

I'm not sure how strictly blue-collar this is. Lawyers and doctors have a similar trade-like approach to earning your way into the profession by paying your dues, learning the Way We Do Things, and apprenticing (but for professional folks, of course, apprenticing is called interning). But that's not how things work in the white-collar managerial culture, says Hodas.


Contrast this with the white-collar, managerially focused culture represented by Bloomberg and Klein. This was a much more abstracted, rationalized notion of practice that assumes that structure and incentives—not experience and relationships—are the most powerful determinants of practice. In this framework, seniority and experience are suspect, even potential detriments, because they are bound up with the culture and practices of the old worldview. They reek of personal loyalties and obligations, which are not assets but liabilities to org chart-style managers.

At this point, I think Hodas misses one other huge difference in cultures, though in a way it's not a difference at all. The white collar world of a Bloomberg or Klein really isn't that different all-- it, too, runs on relationships and experience. Follow the threads surrounding the history of reformsters like Klein over the past decade, and you find the management class consistently working with old friends, old connections, people who have proven themselves to be "the right kind of people." The Broad Academy, like many elite universities, counts a great deal on networking and bringing the Right Kind of People in contact with each other.

Broad and TFA are both examples of how the "white-collar" culture rejects the tradition of training and experience and replaces it with the notion that the Right Kind of People can skip all of that. There's no structure and incentives there-- just connections among people who have proven to have the right background by virtue of their relationships and experiences.

Now, I think Hodas is right about the reformster love of systems and incentives-- but not for themselves. Those kinds of structures and systems and incentives are required for the Little People, but not the reformsters themselves-- they don't need any such structure because they already know they are the Right Kind of People. When folks in this elite class need someone to fill a particular top-level job, they do not rely on systems and structures and rationalizations-- they cal a guy they know. They resent both the traditional tradesman-style structures and their own rationalized systems because those are for little people. Someone like, say, an Eva Moskowitz should not be held back by rules because she's already known by her relationships and experience to be the Right Kind of Person with connections to more of the Right Kind of People.

In short, I'm not sure the culture clash as Hodas lays it out is so much about different ideas of structure as it is about different levels of social class.

But he correctly points out that much teacher resistance and bristling has been about a sense that people like Klein and Moskowitz and organizations like TFA represent a challenge to and devaluing of the very culture that teachers came up in professionally themselves.

I think Hodas also misses one other important point here-- the reformster programs, their systems and structures and rationalizations, have been used in the service of bad practices. Reform has given us lots of things that our new leaders swear ought to work-- and yet do not. This is not a phenomenon restricted to public schools. Private industry sees plenty of it, too, where new management comes in and sweeps clean the old structures, traditions and culture of the company.

The critical difference between failure and success in these instances is not about the clash of cultures-- it's about whether the imposed culture actually shows expertise and accomplishment. If the new way of doing things is successful, people shut up fairly quickly and fall in line. Ed reformers have had at least a decade to procure this result, and they have failed. Every one of their reformy ideas has failed. So it's not just the culture-- it's that the culture did not bring anything useful with it.

I am aware that my last point hinges on the definition of the words "fail" and "succeed," and that those definitions are themselves culture-dependent. But let me move on to a point that I think Hodas hits on the head.

Reform critics are correct to have sniffed a corporatist agenda within this strand of school reform, but they have fundamentally misconstrued the motive. It’s less about extracting profits than it is about advancing a cultural hegemony.

Absolutely. I've never believed that Bill Gates was pushing reform because he thinks it will make him more money. I believe that he and many other reformsters look at US public education and see a system that just doesn't work right. I believe they are in the grip of the same basic impulse as an OCD person walking into a room with twenty portraits hanging crookedly on the walls. From their perspective, they see a system that just doesn't work the way a system should, and they want to fix that.


They want to extend their culture into school culture for the same reason that European missionaries wanted Africans to wear pants-- it's just the right thing to do.

The newly debarked white-collar managers saw themselves as missionary and insurgent, their nominal authority threatened and undermined at every turn by aboriginal cultures of practice. Where they found strongholds they dismantled them, most significantly in the community school districts and in the central Division of Teaching and Learning (headed at the time by Carmen Farina, now de Blasio’s Chancellor and settling scores). Wherever possible, the ground was salted and a new language of practice imposed in an attempt to prevent the old order from reestablishing itself.

In other words, for them, success was not primarily about educating students well as much as it was about making the school system work the way it was supposed to, to follow the right rules. If some feel as if reformsters want to put teachers in their place, it's because, yeah, the pretty much do.

...what is saliently "corporate" about these sponsors is not that they are profit seeking, but that they represent thoroughly white-collar notions about work and value expressed in endless wonky tweaking of measurements, incentives, and management structures that feel increasingly disconnected from the lived experience of students, parents, and teachers.

It's a model worth noting, because I think we traditionalist often ascribe motives to reformsters that are both more and less complex than their real ones, and because any kind of discussion across the lines of battle will require us to translate across cultural boundaries. I think the cultures on both side of this divide are far more diverse and varied than Hodas allows for, but then, I'm no stranger to over-simplifying to make a point. However, it's worth noting that on top of the white collar managerial culture that he's talking about, reformsters also include the culture of the super-rich and the mega-powerful, and that's a whole other kettle of balled-up wax fish. Still, the lens of clashing cultures is one more way to view the struggle for the soul of public education in this country, and it offers some insights worth seeing.