If you want to see a story confirming that there are, in fact, limits to what one can accomplish with money, power and connections, look no further that Education Post. It's a giant, dusty monument to some of the differences that truly separate the reformsters from the defenders of traditional public education.
Education Post debuted on September 1st to considerable fanfare, including a nice infomercial on the launch in Washington Post. The head honcho was (and still is) Peter Cunningham. Cunningham is an old Chicago hand who traveled to DC with Arne Duncan to become the voice of Duncan's office (some others characterized him as its brains). The site was bankrolled ($12 million) by money from Bloomsburg, Broad and Walton philanthropies. It proposed to make the education debates more civil and pleasant and reasoned and based on facts-not-anecdotes, and all of that noble purpose lasted about as long as it took to post the first handful of articles that established that Education Post would be shilling hard for the Obama administration's reformster agenda. Fittingly enough, their logo features a bulhorn, not ordinarily a weapon of choice for civil, reasoned conversation.
EdWeek covered the launch and tossed up this detail about the site's function:
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
The Washington Post profile included this:
Cunningham said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
So what we're really talking about is a campaign politics style PR attack office determined to blitzkreig its way into control of the narrative. And they followed through swiftly. The very day I ran my first piece about the site, I had two contributors? employees? operatives? whatever you want to call thems all up in my twitter with some spicy "So when did you stop beating your wife?" challenges. Cunningham called out Jose Luis Vilson within the first week on the site.
Three weeks later the site tried to take on Carol Burris, decided to dial it back, and still mounted a weak non-conversational assault. And after that, things just got quiet.
In the first few days, the site had drawn many dissenting posts in the comments section. Those were swiftly erased. In response to the complaints, EdPost tweeted "Hoping for a better conversation. Stay tuned." But that conversation never happened-- not even a chorus of happy sock puppets to sing the praises of the stable of writers. Education Post became one more demonstration that the opposite of love is indifference.
It certainly wasn't that people on either side of the education debates hate to converse. Mike Petrilli, Andy Smarick, and Rick Hess are just three examples of hard-driving reformsters who are perfectly capable of having intelligent conversations with public school advocates.
But Education Post was not really interested in a conversation. Instead, they revealed themselves fairly quickly to be a twelve million dollar troll. They had said they wanted to amplify the voices of reformy success stories, but they also devoted time to playing gotcha with voices on the side of public education. They added a feature where they marked up pro-public-ed documents with red pen, like a petulant schoolmarm, and that didn't seem like a conversation starter, either. But clearly they had hoped that they could be at the center of education policy firestorms, and they had a box of matches and a tank of gasoline already to go but... well, nobody wanted to play. Time and again they set out the bait, grabbed ahold of their club, and waited under their bridge but.... crickets.
This is not the first time reformsters have tried to harness the interwebs and some of that social medias the kids are all tweetering about, and it's not the first time that reformsters have failed miserably doing so (see Jeb Bush/FEE's now defunct "Learn More Go Further" campaign for another example). But this might be the most expensive.
I thought I'd check to see how big the fail was, and plugged some sites into the admittedly-imperfect site Alexa.com, which ranks all the websites in the world by traffic. Here's what I got (we'll stick with US ranks and ignore the international). This is the rank in America as roughly estimated by Alexa:
EducationPost-- 223,516
Diane Ravitch's blog-- 20,380
So, Ravitch, with a staff of one and a budget of maybe a hundred bucks, cleaned their clocks. Is it their politics? Let's see what the very-reformy thinky tank Fordham Foundation site clocks in at:
EdExcellence-- 67,360
So, no, it's possible to draw some attention from their side of the tracks. Maybe other sites rank higher because they've been around longer? How about Living in Dialogue, a pro-public ed website launched at just about the same time, for considerably less that $12 million.
Living in Dialogue-- 138,616
How do they compare to a simple high school English teacher who (even though I've been online longer) just blogs in his spare time with a budget of $0.00?
Curmudgucation-- 119,612
I've checked other independent public ed bloggers, and the results are similar. We can also check metrics like sites linking in to the site-- EducationPost has 81, which is not an impressive number.
Bottom line-- in money spent per number people getting the message, EducationPost is at the bottom of the heap. It's proof once again that while the reformsters can keep outspending everybody else, that doesn't mean they're actually convincing anybody else. The reformster movement is lifted up by a giant bag of hot air, and that air is heated by constantly burning a giant pile of money. When the money runs out, or is withdrawn, the balloon will deflate and the reformster initiative will float back to earth with the rest of us.
It can seem like the reformsters are winning-- they have the pretty sites, the shiny PR, the well-paid PR rapid response operatives. What they don't have are the people who are pouring their blood and sweat and heart and soul into a cause that is bigger than profit and power.
Meanwhile, EducationPost continues to troll hard, most recently going after activist mom/blogger Sarah Blaine (because you have to stop those moms from messing wit the narrative) and Diane Ravitch herself by pointing out that she used to say different things than she does now, trying to discredit today's education activity by bringing up what she said way back in the day, as if Ravitch hadn't already written a book herself explaining what beliefs changed and why. These trolling runs have not made EducationPost a center of conversation. No firestorm. Not even a smokescreen. Just a short quiet correction from Mercedes Schneider. It is possible that EducationPost could be more efficient by simply posting, "Notice Me, Dammit" as a headline.
But it's a 2015 world, and people mostly understand that you don't feed the trolls (which is why you'll find no links in this story, or any of my newer stuff, to the EducationPost website). More than that, defenders of US public education are coming to understand that not every reformster requires or deserves a response. Paul Thomas once called for Phase Three in the resistance, and perhaps this is it-- a phase in which we realize that we are no longer backed into a corner and no longer have to respond to every cockamamie attack on public education, even as some reformsters try to get us to start up the same old fight. Maybe EducationPost is not about trying to go forward to better conversations, but to actually sucker us into the same old dynamic and thereby preserve the narrative that reformsters are the ones with all the power, while we have to fight and scrape to get our point across. They aren't Goliath. They're just a big troll on life support.
If that's the case, than the irrelevance of EducationPost (because, really, does it matter whether they close up shop or not?) is one more true sign that Things Have Changed, that money can't win everything, and that we all need to have real conversations about the future of American public education, not simply a battle of rapid-response PR blitzes and stale talking points.
The premise of EducationPost was that the conversation about public education was their conversation to be held at their table under their terms. But now they are sitting at the table alone, while more important conversations are held elsewhere. Good news for the rest of us, but if I were Bloomberg, Broad and Walton, I'd want my $12 million back.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Reading As Relationship
Russ Walsh is an expert in reading instruction, a blogger, and (as near as I can tell) a gentleman. A recent post of his is, for my money, one of his most important ones because it collects some research and clear thinking to remind us of one of the great truths of both reading instruction in particular and education itself in general.
The post sets out to take a more nuanced look at text complexity, leaning particularly on the work of Lauren Anderson and Jamy Stillman, (Over)Simplifying Complexity: Interrogating the Press for a more Complex Text.
Both Russ's post and the original article are well worth reading in their entirety; I'm going to oversimplify them here because that's how I roll.
First, Anderson and Stillman re-support what teachers and other humans with common sense already know-- that giving a student a text above her frustration level does not actually help anything, at all. But there's more than that. Writes Walsh
They were increasingly aware that they needed to revise their definition of text complexity to include the context of the reading situation, the background knowledge and skills of the students and the reading instruction goals.
In other words, the level of challenge in any text is not something that exists as a discrete quality, separate from all others. Text difficulty (or complexity or level or whatever other name tag you want to put on these various measures) is not an objective immutable quality. How challenging a text is depends on context, on whose hands are holding it, on what purpose has been attached to it.
Instruction-- the directions and pedagogy that a teacher attaches to the text-- can change the level of challenge. If I hand first graders a copy of War and Peace and tell them to tell me how many pages or how many chapters are in the book, there is only a little bit of challenge there. If I hand seniors a copy of Green Eggs and Ham, and assign a paper using the book as basis for an analysis of social pressures on the individual as experienced in a post-agrarian society resisting the imperialism of other oppressive cultures, it is now a highly challenging text.
I have been a voracious reader for most of my life (miraculous, considering my parents failed to give me the benefit of high quality pre-pre-K when I was three). Early on, I fell in love with dinosaurs and devoured everything by Roy Chapman Andrews. When I had run out of kid books about dinosaurs, I moved on to grown-up books that were, technically, way above my reading level. But at that point I knew an awful lot about dinosaurs, so between the background knowledge I already had and my high degree of interest and motivation, I managed. On the other hand, the first book I was ever unable to finish was the classic Black Beauty, a stirring tale of some horse who does something or other and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Horses-- I neither knew nor cared about anything horsey. I returned to that book as late as 8th or 9th grade but still found that I was easily distracted from it by, well, watching grass grow would do it. It was like Black Beauty was surrounded by a special impenetrable anti-reading forcefield that would push my eyes off in any direction. Still one of the biggest textual challenges I have ever faced, and I've read Moby Dick.
We can play this anecdotal game all day. Whenever I teach seniors, I always teach them Macbeth, no matter what level students they are. But how I teach, what I teach about it, what I expect them to get out of it, what I assess them for-- that varies widely depending on the students.
Bottom line-- I cannot assess the challenge level of any reading material as a specific, objective quality in and of itself. I can do broad strokes (I feel comfortable saying that Macbeth is more challenging than Green Eggs and Ham), but the real classroom challenge of a work comes down to the relationship between the specific work, the specific students, and the pedagogical approach and techniques of the teacher.
The notion of reading difficulty as some static objective isolated quality is a common mental mistake of the reformsters, and it completely misses the importance of relationships. Current education policy is so off track that it qualifies as both necessary and radical to say that relationships matter.
Yet policy is built on ignoring relationships. Teachers are evaluated in a manner that suggests that a teacher's quality and effectiveness are somehow static, absolute, objective, isolated qualities that exist outside of any context, background or purpose. It's like insisting that if a man is a Good Husband, he will be a Good Husband for any woman selected at random from any place, age or location in the world.
Context matters. Background matters. Purpose matters. And relationships matter most of all. Relationships between students and text, students and teachers, students and each other. The fact that we don't have a handy lexile score or quality index or piece of inanely-generated "data" to measure relationships does not mean they aren't important. That's true for reading and for everything else in education as well.
The post sets out to take a more nuanced look at text complexity, leaning particularly on the work of Lauren Anderson and Jamy Stillman, (Over)Simplifying Complexity: Interrogating the Press for a more Complex Text.
Both Russ's post and the original article are well worth reading in their entirety; I'm going to oversimplify them here because that's how I roll.
First, Anderson and Stillman re-support what teachers and other humans with common sense already know-- that giving a student a text above her frustration level does not actually help anything, at all. But there's more than that. Writes Walsh
They were increasingly aware that they needed to revise their definition of text complexity to include the context of the reading situation, the background knowledge and skills of the students and the reading instruction goals.
In other words, the level of challenge in any text is not something that exists as a discrete quality, separate from all others. Text difficulty (or complexity or level or whatever other name tag you want to put on these various measures) is not an objective immutable quality. How challenging a text is depends on context, on whose hands are holding it, on what purpose has been attached to it.
Instruction-- the directions and pedagogy that a teacher attaches to the text-- can change the level of challenge. If I hand first graders a copy of War and Peace and tell them to tell me how many pages or how many chapters are in the book, there is only a little bit of challenge there. If I hand seniors a copy of Green Eggs and Ham, and assign a paper using the book as basis for an analysis of social pressures on the individual as experienced in a post-agrarian society resisting the imperialism of other oppressive cultures, it is now a highly challenging text.
I have been a voracious reader for most of my life (miraculous, considering my parents failed to give me the benefit of high quality pre-pre-K when I was three). Early on, I fell in love with dinosaurs and devoured everything by Roy Chapman Andrews. When I had run out of kid books about dinosaurs, I moved on to grown-up books that were, technically, way above my reading level. But at that point I knew an awful lot about dinosaurs, so between the background knowledge I already had and my high degree of interest and motivation, I managed. On the other hand, the first book I was ever unable to finish was the classic Black Beauty, a stirring tale of some horse who does something or other and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Horses-- I neither knew nor cared about anything horsey. I returned to that book as late as 8th or 9th grade but still found that I was easily distracted from it by, well, watching grass grow would do it. It was like Black Beauty was surrounded by a special impenetrable anti-reading forcefield that would push my eyes off in any direction. Still one of the biggest textual challenges I have ever faced, and I've read Moby Dick.
We can play this anecdotal game all day. Whenever I teach seniors, I always teach them Macbeth, no matter what level students they are. But how I teach, what I teach about it, what I expect them to get out of it, what I assess them for-- that varies widely depending on the students.
Bottom line-- I cannot assess the challenge level of any reading material as a specific, objective quality in and of itself. I can do broad strokes (I feel comfortable saying that Macbeth is more challenging than Green Eggs and Ham), but the real classroom challenge of a work comes down to the relationship between the specific work, the specific students, and the pedagogical approach and techniques of the teacher.
The notion of reading difficulty as some static objective isolated quality is a common mental mistake of the reformsters, and it completely misses the importance of relationships. Current education policy is so off track that it qualifies as both necessary and radical to say that relationships matter.
Yet policy is built on ignoring relationships. Teachers are evaluated in a manner that suggests that a teacher's quality and effectiveness are somehow static, absolute, objective, isolated qualities that exist outside of any context, background or purpose. It's like insisting that if a man is a Good Husband, he will be a Good Husband for any woman selected at random from any place, age or location in the world.
Context matters. Background matters. Purpose matters. And relationships matter most of all. Relationships between students and text, students and teachers, students and each other. The fact that we don't have a handy lexile score or quality index or piece of inanely-generated "data" to measure relationships does not mean they aren't important. That's true for reading and for everything else in education as well.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Sen. Alexander's Choice
A reminder that if you've been thinking that Lamar Alexander is going to emerge as a public school champion, well, not so much.
Alexander spoke at Brookings (never a good sign, because what Brookings doesn't understand about education would fill a Death Star) at the release of their Education Choice and Competition Index. Arianna Prothero provides a handy short version of his remarks over at EdWeek, and the even shorter version of those remarks is "School choice is awesome and magical."
Alexander would like to "put money in the kid's backpack," because of course education is not a public trust for all citizens of the country, but a private service for families that just happens to be funded by public tax dollars.
Alexander also lays out four Things The Feds Should Do To Help School Choice.
But I want to go back to the first two for a second, because I think they have a backhanded kind of promise.
Note the phrase "of their choice."
As we've been noting for some time, school choice usually turns out to actually mean school's choice. Only Mike Petrilli at the Fordham is honest enough to 'fess up to this, but most charters reserve the right to determine who is deserving.
Imagine what might happen if the feds threw their weight behind that "of their choice" language. Imagine what might happen if charters could not turn away students who wanted to attend, no matter what. Imagine what would happen if a low-income student or a student with disabilities could not be turned down, if they could say, "I choose this charter school" and the charter school could not say no or chase them away or counsel them out or push them toward the door. Imagine if that were part of federal charter law.
I don't expect that charter operators would let such a thing happen without a fight, but it would be an awfully hard point to argue in public. Such a rule would be disastrous for modern charters, whose whole model of success rests on their ability to take and keep only the students they pick and choose.
I am no fan of school choice. But in most places we don't even have that; we have a charter system that allows the schools to do the choosing and the students just have to take what they are given, and as much as a school choice system would stink, a school's choice system is even worse.
Let's see if Alexander wants to take a real whack at that problem.
Alexander spoke at Brookings (never a good sign, because what Brookings doesn't understand about education would fill a Death Star) at the release of their Education Choice and Competition Index. Arianna Prothero provides a handy short version of his remarks over at EdWeek, and the even shorter version of those remarks is "School choice is awesome and magical."
Alexander would like to "put money in the kid's backpack," because of course education is not a public trust for all citizens of the country, but a private service for families that just happens to be funded by public tax dollars.
Alexander also lays out four Things The Feds Should Do To Help School Choice.
- Allow states to use federal dollars to create scholarships to follow low-income students to any school of their choice;
- Allow students with disabilities to spend the federal dollars allocated to them on schools of their choice;
- Expand the District of Columbia's school voucher program, called the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which is funded by Congress;
- Encourage the expansion of high-quality charter schools in the states through federal grant programs.
But I want to go back to the first two for a second, because I think they have a backhanded kind of promise.
Note the phrase "of their choice."
As we've been noting for some time, school choice usually turns out to actually mean school's choice. Only Mike Petrilli at the Fordham is honest enough to 'fess up to this, but most charters reserve the right to determine who is deserving.
Imagine what might happen if the feds threw their weight behind that "of their choice" language. Imagine what might happen if charters could not turn away students who wanted to attend, no matter what. Imagine what would happen if a low-income student or a student with disabilities could not be turned down, if they could say, "I choose this charter school" and the charter school could not say no or chase them away or counsel them out or push them toward the door. Imagine if that were part of federal charter law.
I don't expect that charter operators would let such a thing happen without a fight, but it would be an awfully hard point to argue in public. Such a rule would be disastrous for modern charters, whose whole model of success rests on their ability to take and keep only the students they pick and choose.
I am no fan of school choice. But in most places we don't even have that; we have a charter system that allows the schools to do the choosing and the students just have to take what they are given, and as much as a school choice system would stink, a school's choice system is even worse.
Let's see if Alexander wants to take a real whack at that problem.
What Role Should the Feds Have?
In the edubloggoverse, we've moved quickly from a consideration of a
possible ESEA rewrite to the real issue that will lurk behind all the
upcoming deliberations, negotiations, and arguments with your
brother-in-law at family gatherings—just how much involvement
should the federal government have in the world of public education?
This argument has percolated below the surface for quite a while now, but the ESEA and the U.S. Department of Education itself have turned the heat up by their very existence. Time to stake your position between one of two poles.
The Federal Government Should Maintain a Strong Presence in Regulating Public Education
This is the position advocated by Arne Duncan in his impassioned plea Monday to choose a new direction by staying the course (the Secretary of Education's speech may have been a little muddled). It is also the position preferred by the ACLU, the NAACP, the Business Roundtable, and a whole lot of people who hope to make a bundle in the charter school biz.
Pros:
Accountability. Standardization. A uniformity of schooling. A demand for transparency that will make it harder for states to hide their educational misbehavior. And taxpayers get to know how their money is spent. Well, the money that was borrowed in their name, anyway. National-scale resources can be brought to bear on the problems of education.
Cons:
The concentration of power and control all in one place. There are huge problems with this. With diffuse and dispersed power, you have increased probability that somebody, somewhere is coming up with the right answer. Centralized power assumes that there is One Right Answer for everyone, and that the central office always knows what that answer is. This is unlikely in the best of circumstances. If you put the central office far away from actual schooling and deep in the heart of Politicsland, you make it likely that your Secretary of Education will know way more about power and politics than about education.
Centralized power also creates a one-stop shop for powermongering. If the centralized power controls access to a large, lucrative market, it invites people who want access to that market to do their best to insert themselves into the lawmaking process. How many well-paid lobbyists did Pearson et al keep in DC before there was a Department of Education?
Centralizing power also makes a statement about what you think the "center" actually is. Centralized control by the federal government builds in the assumption that DC is, in fact, the center, and that all those local school districts are just out there on the periphery somewhere, away from the Really Important Stuff. It also re-enforces the idea that people from The Center of Really Important Stuff are best suited to travel out to the distant outposts to bring people living there the school-leading wisdom that only DC has. This is patronizing, paternalistic poop. It first creates an un-meetable necessity that those from The Center must always be right, and quickly leads to an assumption (on their part) that since they are from The Center they must be correct.
The Congressional hearings kicking off today are an example of everything bad about a centralized approach. The hearing room is far, far away from any actual school or classroom, and the entire setting and approach favors people who know how to work the politics and optics of the situation. The hearings will generate lots of sound bites and debate fodder (already those of us in the edubloggoverse are sifting through the quotes and tweets to see what we can fall upon with kisses and/or knives), and Senators will say Very Dumb Things because they don't know for sure what they're talking about, but everyone's paying attention, so they'd better say something.
Control of Education Should Rest With State and Local Authorities
This is the position favored by fans of traditional public education.
Pros:
Local control is the best guarantee that schools meet the needs and goals of the communities they serve. Direct democracy is certainly more in keeping with our nation's traditions. It acknowledges people in those communities are important, that the school and community are not outposts of the Center of All Things Important off in DC, and that those people know best how to manage the ins and outs and resources and needs and culture of their community. They are best positioned to decide what "success" should mean in their local schools.
If a local school district makes a bad policy choice, they're only making it for community (not the entire country) and therefore bad policy decisions can be recognized and contained before they make a hash of every school in the country.
Cons:
A crazy-quilt patchwork pattern of different educational programs across the country, making it impossible to accurately compare and rank different school districts and different educational programs. I'll confess—that prospect doesn't bother me in the slightest, but I understand how reasonable people can think it would be a problem.
True local control would not help us fix the problems of equity. Without federal involvement, it's far more likely that poor schools would suffer from a lack of resources, while wealthy schools flourished.
The Sticking Point Is Money
No matter how much local control fans want local control, they still need and want federal money, and federal money does not come string-free. "Have the taxpayers back a truck of money up to our door, drop it off, and never look back," is not a reasonable expectation.
Meanwhile, folks who want the federal government to drive the national education policy bus have to bump up against their own unwanted consequence—if you want to drive the bus, you have to buy the gas.
In the ideal world of Federal Control fans, the feds hand down the rules on how education ought to work, but they never have to spend a penny of taxpayer money to make it happen. In the ideal world of Local Control fans, the feds dispense as much money as it takes to make things right, but they never say a word about what to do with it.
Neither of these ideal worlds will ever happen. There are big debates in education about how to separate standards from testing, but the big inseparable pair are the conjoined twins, money and control. Every debate about federal versus local control must ultimately come back to those twins.
Originally published at View from the Cheap Seats
This argument has percolated below the surface for quite a while now, but the ESEA and the U.S. Department of Education itself have turned the heat up by their very existence. Time to stake your position between one of two poles.
The Federal Government Should Maintain a Strong Presence in Regulating Public Education
This is the position advocated by Arne Duncan in his impassioned plea Monday to choose a new direction by staying the course (the Secretary of Education's speech may have been a little muddled). It is also the position preferred by the ACLU, the NAACP, the Business Roundtable, and a whole lot of people who hope to make a bundle in the charter school biz.
Pros:
Accountability. Standardization. A uniformity of schooling. A demand for transparency that will make it harder for states to hide their educational misbehavior. And taxpayers get to know how their money is spent. Well, the money that was borrowed in their name, anyway. National-scale resources can be brought to bear on the problems of education.
Cons:
The concentration of power and control all in one place. There are huge problems with this. With diffuse and dispersed power, you have increased probability that somebody, somewhere is coming up with the right answer. Centralized power assumes that there is One Right Answer for everyone, and that the central office always knows what that answer is. This is unlikely in the best of circumstances. If you put the central office far away from actual schooling and deep in the heart of Politicsland, you make it likely that your Secretary of Education will know way more about power and politics than about education.
Centralized power also creates a one-stop shop for powermongering. If the centralized power controls access to a large, lucrative market, it invites people who want access to that market to do their best to insert themselves into the lawmaking process. How many well-paid lobbyists did Pearson et al keep in DC before there was a Department of Education?
Centralizing power also makes a statement about what you think the "center" actually is. Centralized control by the federal government builds in the assumption that DC is, in fact, the center, and that all those local school districts are just out there on the periphery somewhere, away from the Really Important Stuff. It also re-enforces the idea that people from The Center of Really Important Stuff are best suited to travel out to the distant outposts to bring people living there the school-leading wisdom that only DC has. This is patronizing, paternalistic poop. It first creates an un-meetable necessity that those from The Center must always be right, and quickly leads to an assumption (on their part) that since they are from The Center they must be correct.
The Congressional hearings kicking off today are an example of everything bad about a centralized approach. The hearing room is far, far away from any actual school or classroom, and the entire setting and approach favors people who know how to work the politics and optics of the situation. The hearings will generate lots of sound bites and debate fodder (already those of us in the edubloggoverse are sifting through the quotes and tweets to see what we can fall upon with kisses and/or knives), and Senators will say Very Dumb Things because they don't know for sure what they're talking about, but everyone's paying attention, so they'd better say something.
Control of Education Should Rest With State and Local Authorities
This is the position favored by fans of traditional public education.
Pros:
Local control is the best guarantee that schools meet the needs and goals of the communities they serve. Direct democracy is certainly more in keeping with our nation's traditions. It acknowledges people in those communities are important, that the school and community are not outposts of the Center of All Things Important off in DC, and that those people know best how to manage the ins and outs and resources and needs and culture of their community. They are best positioned to decide what "success" should mean in their local schools.
If a local school district makes a bad policy choice, they're only making it for community (not the entire country) and therefore bad policy decisions can be recognized and contained before they make a hash of every school in the country.
Cons:
A crazy-quilt patchwork pattern of different educational programs across the country, making it impossible to accurately compare and rank different school districts and different educational programs. I'll confess—that prospect doesn't bother me in the slightest, but I understand how reasonable people can think it would be a problem.
True local control would not help us fix the problems of equity. Without federal involvement, it's far more likely that poor schools would suffer from a lack of resources, while wealthy schools flourished.
The Sticking Point Is Money
No matter how much local control fans want local control, they still need and want federal money, and federal money does not come string-free. "Have the taxpayers back a truck of money up to our door, drop it off, and never look back," is not a reasonable expectation.
Meanwhile, folks who want the federal government to drive the national education policy bus have to bump up against their own unwanted consequence—if you want to drive the bus, you have to buy the gas.
In the ideal world of Federal Control fans, the feds hand down the rules on how education ought to work, but they never have to spend a penny of taxpayer money to make it happen. In the ideal world of Local Control fans, the feds dispense as much money as it takes to make things right, but they never say a word about what to do with it.
Neither of these ideal worlds will ever happen. There are big debates in education about how to separate standards from testing, but the big inseparable pair are the conjoined twins, money and control. Every debate about federal versus local control must ultimately come back to those twins.
Originally published at View from the Cheap Seats
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Age Before Booty
Wondering if FEE has been up to anything since Jebmaster Bush took off his FEE leader hat so that he could put on his Help Me Further a Presidential Dynasty Hat? Well, today they released the grand-daddy of fake research report position advocacy papers.
If you thought that there were some connections in the pursuit of school choice that were a bridge too far, Dr. Matthew Lardner, Senior Adviser at FEE and Senior Fellow at the Friedman Institute for Educational Choice is here to sing a few choruses of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."
The new report-like paper product is called "Turn and Face the Strain: Age Demographic Change and the Near Future of American Education" and it is a symphony in baloney, an epic exercise in polishing the living daylights out of a weak argument that could only have been the product of a writers' room meeting that started with, "Who can come up with the most outlandishly ridiculous argument for more school choice?"
It's the little things
Okay, we've got large fish to fry here, but there are so many moments of delicious dopiness.
For firsties, the title is a misquote. The actual line from David Bowie's "Changes" is "Turn and face the strange," but Lardner can be excused because even Bowie's background singers originally messed it up. I just wanted to set the record straight. Also, the real line from the song makes an awesome title for this reporty paper-thing.
Also, there is this cool graphic to go with the report.
My esteemed colleague Edushyster (we while away some twitter time poring over this thing) pointed out that A) the affected parties are all white folks and B) some Amish appear to be involved. I think I'm offended that the artist decided to use baldness as a signifier for aged.
There's also a policy brief (kind of like the book jacket for the report paper thing) which warns that Hurricane Gray is going to make landfall, so I guess we need to board up the windows before we are hit by an onslaught of geeezers. I am wondering what the storm surge is in this metaphor; I'm also wondering if it's a good metaphor for a group headquartered in Florida.
But hey-- here's another metaphor. How many people are going to be in the cart, and how many are going to be pushing it. As someone who is going to be in the cart soon, I have other questions. Will it be a nice cart? Will there be comfortable seats? Will I sit facing forward or backwards, because I might get cartsick? Who gets to steer the cart? So many questions.
Perhaps that's why FEE declares "We need policymakers to be more daring." What does that mean? Does this mean that Senators should be BASE jumping off the top of the Congressional dome? Should they drive around DC without seat belts? Should they spit into the wind and pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger?
Well, as it turns out, they should be daring and support choice, and by that FEE means a woman's choice to control her own reproductive options. Ha! Just kidding. Of course the only choice that matters is school choice, which, as it turns out, is the magic solution to everything.
So how did we get from a geriatric avalanche to school choice? Let's back up a step and look at the full report and see if we can piece this together.
Watch out for old people and babies.
"Boomers retire and send their grandkids to school" reads the headline, and that's pretty much the upshot of Part I of this argument.
Lardner introduces us to something called Age Dependency Ratios. This is the ratio of able-bodied working age folks to the combined number of slacker old people and wussy children who insist on living on some version of the dole. Lots of folks appear to compute this just using the oldsters, although most also seem to base the computation using 64 as retirement age, and I'm pretty sure that the real retirement age for my cohort is more like 82-- more if our pensions and social security are scarfed up before we get our hands on them.
Projects call for that ratio to tilt toward the slackluster old-young group, with fewer people pushing a cart full of more retirees and school children. That will probably be expensive.
Now, the reporty paper thing spends a lot of time (over twenty-five pages) establishing this, and we could spend some time picking at the numbers and how panicky they should make us (I've lost the link, but one on-line source I read showed that the projected sky-is-falling ratio for the US is lower than the ratio in Japan right now today-- update: found it).
But I'm not going to argue the point. I'll stipulate that baby boomers are getting old and retirey and that will make us collectively what I believe the economists call Pretty Damn Expensive.
And this relates to school choice how, exactly...?
The connection seems to rest on a couple of pieces of reformster baloney.
Part I is that the current generation entering their thirties are mostly dopes who did poorly on their standardized reading tests, and if they didn't get good reading test scores, then we know, somehow, that they won't be able to pull their weight in society and make sure that my cart is comfy with maybe bucket seats. At least they don't try to back this "connection" up with the fully-debunked "research" by Chetty et al.
They do note that the Age Dependency Ratio depends on the assumption that work age people are working, but this does not lead them to the question of where the jobs went for those folks to work at. Like all problems, this one has nothing whatsoever to do with a fractured economy and rampant poverty. Nor does it suggest that the 1% might want to get off their mountain of money and th9ink about how to put America back to work. Nope. That has nothing to do with it.
Also, throwing money at education hasn't helped anything. Again, don't ask them for a research back-up to this idea. Everyone, you know, just knows. But education the way we do it costs too much and makes the cart too big and heavy.
Now, they will try to back up this next action plan portion with some research because we get to school choice by referring to a study called "The Productivity of Public Charter Schools" by Albert Chang et al. This study "found" that charter schools are much more productive (assuming, as usual, that the only thing anybody wants a school to do is get students to pass a standardized math and reading test).
I have not had a chance to read this study, but Gene V. Glass of Arizona State University did take the time to review the report. We don't have to get into the fine points-- I think a couple of sentences from Glass's review will give you the drift of his gist:
Not reported is the fact that the demographic differences between the two sectors are highly correlated with the estimates of different effects; the sector with the higher percentage of poor pupils scores lower on the NAEP test. This failure alone renders the report and its recommendations indefensible.
So, it's bunk.
But it's part of the foundation of FEE's argument. Education is costly, so we should use more efficient providers aka charters. Or we could have schools powered by cold fusion generators carried on the backs of hippogryphs.
Digital learning. Outcome-based funding (aka merit pay on teacher and district scale). Charter schools. Education savings accounts (aka vouchers 2.0).
Test question. The above four are:
A) programs advocated by FEE
B) approaches that have been repeatedly tried without any hint of success
C) good ways to turn public tax dollars into booty for private interests
D) all of the above
Did you pick D? Congrats-- you are proficient! And since you have been scored proficient, we can confidently say that one less old person will die in poverty.
And just for kicks
The report also throws in a quote from Friedman right next to a photo of him looking all thoughty and heroic, like he is considering the best way to go kung fu on some accountant's ass. Are you convinced yet?
Bottom Line
I have seen choice fans stretch to make their case, but this is going to Siberia to get a bagel. On the back of a unicorn. Edushyster challenged me to sum up the whole program in one tweet, and this was the best I could do:
This is a monument of incoherence, the grand-mac-daddy of non-sequitorial arguments. We will have more old people, therefor we need more school choice. Because reasons.
So, twenty-some pages establishing a problem before setting up a bogus and unsubstantiated connection to their proposed solution. It's slick and pretty and well produced and one more graphic artist staved off starvation for another day, but in the end, this is 100% grade-A nonsense. Good to know FEE is able to carry on without Candidate Bush.
If you thought that there were some connections in the pursuit of school choice that were a bridge too far, Dr. Matthew Lardner, Senior Adviser at FEE and Senior Fellow at the Friedman Institute for Educational Choice is here to sing a few choruses of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."
The new report-like paper product is called "Turn and Face the Strain: Age Demographic Change and the Near Future of American Education" and it is a symphony in baloney, an epic exercise in polishing the living daylights out of a weak argument that could only have been the product of a writers' room meeting that started with, "Who can come up with the most outlandishly ridiculous argument for more school choice?"
It's the little things
Okay, we've got large fish to fry here, but there are so many moments of delicious dopiness.
For firsties, the title is a misquote. The actual line from David Bowie's "Changes" is "Turn and face the strange," but Lardner can be excused because even Bowie's background singers originally messed it up. I just wanted to set the record straight. Also, the real line from the song makes an awesome title for this reporty paper-thing.
Also, there is this cool graphic to go with the report.
There's also a policy brief (kind of like the book jacket for the report paper thing) which warns that Hurricane Gray is going to make landfall, so I guess we need to board up the windows before we are hit by an onslaught of geeezers. I am wondering what the storm surge is in this metaphor; I'm also wondering if it's a good metaphor for a group headquartered in Florida.
But hey-- here's another metaphor. How many people are going to be in the cart, and how many are going to be pushing it. As someone who is going to be in the cart soon, I have other questions. Will it be a nice cart? Will there be comfortable seats? Will I sit facing forward or backwards, because I might get cartsick? Who gets to steer the cart? So many questions.
Perhaps that's why FEE declares "We need policymakers to be more daring." What does that mean? Does this mean that Senators should be BASE jumping off the top of the Congressional dome? Should they drive around DC without seat belts? Should they spit into the wind and pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger?
Well, as it turns out, they should be daring and support choice, and by that FEE means a woman's choice to control her own reproductive options. Ha! Just kidding. Of course the only choice that matters is school choice, which, as it turns out, is the magic solution to everything.
So how did we get from a geriatric avalanche to school choice? Let's back up a step and look at the full report and see if we can piece this together.
Watch out for old people and babies.
"Boomers retire and send their grandkids to school" reads the headline, and that's pretty much the upshot of Part I of this argument.
Lardner introduces us to something called Age Dependency Ratios. This is the ratio of able-bodied working age folks to the combined number of slacker old people and wussy children who insist on living on some version of the dole. Lots of folks appear to compute this just using the oldsters, although most also seem to base the computation using 64 as retirement age, and I'm pretty sure that the real retirement age for my cohort is more like 82-- more if our pensions and social security are scarfed up before we get our hands on them.
Projects call for that ratio to tilt toward the slackluster old-young group, with fewer people pushing a cart full of more retirees and school children. That will probably be expensive.
Now, the reporty paper thing spends a lot of time (over twenty-five pages) establishing this, and we could spend some time picking at the numbers and how panicky they should make us (I've lost the link, but one on-line source I read showed that the projected sky-is-falling ratio for the US is lower than the ratio in Japan right now today-- update: found it).
But I'm not going to argue the point. I'll stipulate that baby boomers are getting old and retirey and that will make us collectively what I believe the economists call Pretty Damn Expensive.
And this relates to school choice how, exactly...?
The connection seems to rest on a couple of pieces of reformster baloney.
Part I is that the current generation entering their thirties are mostly dopes who did poorly on their standardized reading tests, and if they didn't get good reading test scores, then we know, somehow, that they won't be able to pull their weight in society and make sure that my cart is comfy with maybe bucket seats. At least they don't try to back this "connection" up with the fully-debunked "research" by Chetty et al.
They do note that the Age Dependency Ratio depends on the assumption that work age people are working, but this does not lead them to the question of where the jobs went for those folks to work at. Like all problems, this one has nothing whatsoever to do with a fractured economy and rampant poverty. Nor does it suggest that the 1% might want to get off their mountain of money and th9ink about how to put America back to work. Nope. That has nothing to do with it.
Also, throwing money at education hasn't helped anything. Again, don't ask them for a research back-up to this idea. Everyone, you know, just knows. But education the way we do it costs too much and makes the cart too big and heavy.
Now, they will try to back up this next action plan portion with some research because we get to school choice by referring to a study called "The Productivity of Public Charter Schools" by Albert Chang et al. This study "found" that charter schools are much more productive (assuming, as usual, that the only thing anybody wants a school to do is get students to pass a standardized math and reading test).
I have not had a chance to read this study, but Gene V. Glass of Arizona State University did take the time to review the report. We don't have to get into the fine points-- I think a couple of sentences from Glass's review will give you the drift of his gist:
Not reported is the fact that the demographic differences between the two sectors are highly correlated with the estimates of different effects; the sector with the higher percentage of poor pupils scores lower on the NAEP test. This failure alone renders the report and its recommendations indefensible.
So, it's bunk.
But it's part of the foundation of FEE's argument. Education is costly, so we should use more efficient providers aka charters. Or we could have schools powered by cold fusion generators carried on the backs of hippogryphs.
Digital learning. Outcome-based funding (aka merit pay on teacher and district scale). Charter schools. Education savings accounts (aka vouchers 2.0).
Test question. The above four are:
A) programs advocated by FEE
B) approaches that have been repeatedly tried without any hint of success
C) good ways to turn public tax dollars into booty for private interests
D) all of the above
Did you pick D? Congrats-- you are proficient! And since you have been scored proficient, we can confidently say that one less old person will die in poverty.
And just for kicks
The report also throws in a quote from Friedman right next to a photo of him looking all thoughty and heroic, like he is considering the best way to go kung fu on some accountant's ass. Are you convinced yet?
Bottom Line
I have seen choice fans stretch to make their case, but this is going to Siberia to get a bagel. On the back of a unicorn. Edushyster challenged me to sum up the whole program in one tweet, and this was the best I could do:
@EduShyster Going 2be many poor, lazy geezers and infants; only solution is more school choice. Also, a bicycle, becuz a vest has no sleeves
— Peter Greene (@palan57) February 4, 2015
This is a monument of incoherence, the grand-mac-daddy of non-sequitorial arguments. We will have more old people, therefor we need more school choice. Because reasons.
So, twenty-some pages establishing a problem before setting up a bogus and unsubstantiated connection to their proposed solution. It's slick and pretty and well produced and one more graphic artist staved off starvation for another day, but in the end, this is 100% grade-A nonsense. Good to know FEE is able to carry on without Candidate Bush.
Maine's SBA Loaded With Glitches
Lewsiton Middle School teacher Brian Banton took training, complete with practice for the Maine assessments that will be take on iPads. According to the Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal, his report on that experience was direct and to the point.
"I was shocked to discover it doesn't work," Banton said. “As our training went on this morning, teachers in the room looked at each other and said, 'We can't do this.'”
He offered specific examples. When a point is entered on the iPad, it can't be removed. So no correcting mistakes. Multiplication symbols do not appear as multiplication symbols. The test should allow students to see both a graph and questions about it at the same time-- but they can't.
Maine schools do have the option of offering the paper version of the test, but for those just discovering that the computer version is a mess, it's too late-- the final date for choosing the paper version was February 4.
Parents (including some who are teachers) are making noise about opting out, and the school committee chair is right with them:
"The state can say 'it's all fixed,' but show me it is fixed,” Handy said. Or, “we opt out altogether.”
Handy said he can be “a stick in the mud and say, 'We're not going to administer it because you have given us a faulty product.' When an entire school district does that, it puts the state on notice. I have no problem doing that.”
However the school superintendent cautioned that the state has made it clear that giving any aid and comfort to the opt out movement would be "playing with fire."
The school district is pursuing options with the state, but it appears to be one more example of Not Ready for Prime Time testing.
"I was shocked to discover it doesn't work," Banton said. “As our training went on this morning, teachers in the room looked at each other and said, 'We can't do this.'”
He offered specific examples. When a point is entered on the iPad, it can't be removed. So no correcting mistakes. Multiplication symbols do not appear as multiplication symbols. The test should allow students to see both a graph and questions about it at the same time-- but they can't.
Maine schools do have the option of offering the paper version of the test, but for those just discovering that the computer version is a mess, it's too late-- the final date for choosing the paper version was February 4.
Parents (including some who are teachers) are making noise about opting out, and the school committee chair is right with them:
"The state can say 'it's all fixed,' but show me it is fixed,” Handy said. Or, “we opt out altogether.”
Handy said he can be “a stick in the mud and say, 'We're not going to administer it because you have given us a faulty product.' When an entire school district does that, it puts the state on notice. I have no problem doing that.”
However the school superintendent cautioned that the state has made it clear that giving any aid and comfort to the opt out movement would be "playing with fire."
The school district is pursuing options with the state, but it appears to be one more example of Not Ready for Prime Time testing.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Answering Petrilli's Questions: What Does CCSS Opposition Mean?
Mike Petrilli at the Fordham Foundation offered a set of nine questions to ask political candidates who trumpet their Common Core opposition. As one might expect, they are not so much a plan for inquiry as a series of moves in a game of Gotcha.
This is one of the things I find vaguely charming about Petrilli-- he seems like that overeager kid on the debate team who enjoys making a verbal jousting match over anything from the death penalty to the correct side on which the loose end of the toilet paper should hang. Political advocacy/thinky tankery seems like his dream job.
Petrilli has occasionally asked for a more civil and better-toned discussion about the Core. I'd offer him this set of questions as an example of why we don't more easily get that-- these are not questions designed for dialogue, but are instead designed to try to force the Core-attacking politician into a corner. They assume that the pol is engaging in dishonest discourse and therefore can be poked at with similar dishonest tools.
But as someone who is, in fact, opposed to Common Core, I wondered if I could come up with answers to these questions. I don't know that any of these will be useful for the politicians in question, but it's a nice thought exercise, at least. Here we go.
1) Do you mean that you oppose the Common Core standards themselves? All of them? Even the ones related to addition and subtraction? Phonics? Studying the nation’s founding documents? Or just some of them? Which ones, in particular, do you oppose? Have you actually read the standards?
Yeah, when Petrilli says nine questions, he's being liberal with his use of the traditional counting methods.
I have, of course, read the standards, and the correct question is not to ask exactly which ones I object to. I would ask, instead, why I am supposed to search through all the standards looking for the unobjectionable ones, like hunting a piece of uncooked spaghetti in a stack of needles. I would not hand a teacher a textbook and say, "Some of the pages of this book are good and usable, so keep the whole thing." I would not serve someone a meal that is part nutritious food, part plastic, and part arsenic. The fact that some standards are unobjectionable does not mean the whole thing shouldn't be thrown out.
2) Or do you mean that you oppose the role that the federal government played in coercing states to adopt the Common Core?
Well, yes. That and the role it continues to play. Petrilli suggests that doesn't make a GOP candidate special among other GOP candidates. So be it. It's better to be right than to be special.
3) Do you mean that you think states should drop out of the Common Core? States like Iowa? Isn’t that a bit presumptive, considering that you’re not from Iowa and the state’s Republican governor wants Common Core to stay?
This is not so much a question as a dare. Go ahead, it says. Go ahead and declare yourself in favor of setting aside the will of the state. The correct answer is, of course, that Iowa has the right to be a damn fool if it wants to, but that doesn't make it any less foolish, and any sensible person would offer the opinion that Iowa ought to stop being foolish.
4) If you do think that states should reject the Common Core, which standards should replace them? Do they need to be entirely different, or just a little bit different? And could you cite a specific example of a standard that needs to be “different?”
Let's back up the assumption truck, and let me hear your support for the idea that national-ish standards are necessary or in any way useful. Which highly successful nations on the globe are successful because of national standards? Which studies show the value of national standards? Because I think the states should get rid of the standards, period. But if the state thinks they need standards, they can best design them from the ground floor up. The Common Core does not need to be (nor should it be) a rough draft, and there is no need to compare future hypothetical standards to it. If your brother gets divorced, and then remarried, you do not go to Thanksgiving dinner and ask for an accounting of how different his new wife is from his previous one.
5) Or do you mean that you oppose the way Common Core has been implemented? If so, everywhere, or just in some states? Or just in some schools? You are running for president; do you think the president of the United States has a role in fixing Common Core implementation?
Can you catch in features such as the repeated "or" how Petrilli wants you not to just ask these questions, but pepper the candidate with them? But the President does have a role in fixing it, because the President had a role in making implementation both A) necessary and B) too fast in the first place. The President's role is simple-- step back and say, "As far as I'm concerned, everybody can adopt whatever standards they want, or not, whenever they want, or not." And then sit down and shut up.
6) Do you mean you oppose any standards in education that cross state lines? Several years ago, the governors came to an agreement about a common way to measure high school graduation rates. Do you oppose that, too?
If states want to imitate each other or get into cooperative agreements, that's their business, not DC's. Do I oppose measuring graduation rates? These are starting to smell of flop sweat and desperation, not political gamesmanship. Who the heck is going to oppose graduation rate measurement? Out loud?
7) Or do you mean that you oppose any standards, even those set at the state level? Since states have the constitutional responsibility to provide a sound education, don’t you think they should be clear about what they expect students to know and be able to do in the basic subjects?
I'm a pretty anti-standardization guy, but this is about as close as this list gets to a legitimate question. My answer is that they should be clear, but not very. The clearer standards are, the more prescriptive and restrictive they are, and the more it become impossible to impose and oversee them without becoming punitive. Plus, the more specifically educational goals are developed through a political process, the crappier they will be. Any system that doesn't trust teachers is doomed to failure (and, ironically, if teachers really were untrustworthy, strict standards would not help, anyway).
8) Or do you mean that you oppose standards that aim to get young people ready for college or a good-paying career? Do you think that’s too high a standard? What standard would you prefer?
Can you tell me, right now, exactly what a five year old needs to learn over the next thirteen years in order to be ready for a career? If you say anything but "no," you're either delusional or a liar. The future is wide open, mysterious, murky, and ever-changing. Government is fundamentally unable to create any set of standards that are nimble and robust enough to meet this requirement.
There are so many problems with career and college readiness as the definition of an educated person (does this mean future stay-at-home parents can drop out now? what is the government doing to make sure there will be enough good-paying careers available?) but the biggest is that defining a human life in terms of a job is a small, meager, cramped, sad measure of human worth. Let's educate students to be happy, fulfilled, contributing members of society, good citizens and great people. And most of all, let's give them a system that lets them define success for themselves, instead of beating them into whatever version of success that the government has defined for them.
9) Tell us again: Why do you oppose the Common Core?
Well, because it sucks. Hey. Ask a short, snarky question, get a short snarky answer.
That's it. Other than some serious and fundamental policy disagreements with the GOP, I think I'm totally ready to run for the nomination.
This is one of the things I find vaguely charming about Petrilli-- he seems like that overeager kid on the debate team who enjoys making a verbal jousting match over anything from the death penalty to the correct side on which the loose end of the toilet paper should hang. Political advocacy/thinky tankery seems like his dream job.
Petrilli has occasionally asked for a more civil and better-toned discussion about the Core. I'd offer him this set of questions as an example of why we don't more easily get that-- these are not questions designed for dialogue, but are instead designed to try to force the Core-attacking politician into a corner. They assume that the pol is engaging in dishonest discourse and therefore can be poked at with similar dishonest tools.
But as someone who is, in fact, opposed to Common Core, I wondered if I could come up with answers to these questions. I don't know that any of these will be useful for the politicians in question, but it's a nice thought exercise, at least. Here we go.
1) Do you mean that you oppose the Common Core standards themselves? All of them? Even the ones related to addition and subtraction? Phonics? Studying the nation’s founding documents? Or just some of them? Which ones, in particular, do you oppose? Have you actually read the standards?
Yeah, when Petrilli says nine questions, he's being liberal with his use of the traditional counting methods.
I have, of course, read the standards, and the correct question is not to ask exactly which ones I object to. I would ask, instead, why I am supposed to search through all the standards looking for the unobjectionable ones, like hunting a piece of uncooked spaghetti in a stack of needles. I would not hand a teacher a textbook and say, "Some of the pages of this book are good and usable, so keep the whole thing." I would not serve someone a meal that is part nutritious food, part plastic, and part arsenic. The fact that some standards are unobjectionable does not mean the whole thing shouldn't be thrown out.
2) Or do you mean that you oppose the role that the federal government played in coercing states to adopt the Common Core?
Well, yes. That and the role it continues to play. Petrilli suggests that doesn't make a GOP candidate special among other GOP candidates. So be it. It's better to be right than to be special.
3) Do you mean that you think states should drop out of the Common Core? States like Iowa? Isn’t that a bit presumptive, considering that you’re not from Iowa and the state’s Republican governor wants Common Core to stay?
This is not so much a question as a dare. Go ahead, it says. Go ahead and declare yourself in favor of setting aside the will of the state. The correct answer is, of course, that Iowa has the right to be a damn fool if it wants to, but that doesn't make it any less foolish, and any sensible person would offer the opinion that Iowa ought to stop being foolish.
4) If you do think that states should reject the Common Core, which standards should replace them? Do they need to be entirely different, or just a little bit different? And could you cite a specific example of a standard that needs to be “different?”
Let's back up the assumption truck, and let me hear your support for the idea that national-ish standards are necessary or in any way useful. Which highly successful nations on the globe are successful because of national standards? Which studies show the value of national standards? Because I think the states should get rid of the standards, period. But if the state thinks they need standards, they can best design them from the ground floor up. The Common Core does not need to be (nor should it be) a rough draft, and there is no need to compare future hypothetical standards to it. If your brother gets divorced, and then remarried, you do not go to Thanksgiving dinner and ask for an accounting of how different his new wife is from his previous one.
5) Or do you mean that you oppose the way Common Core has been implemented? If so, everywhere, or just in some states? Or just in some schools? You are running for president; do you think the president of the United States has a role in fixing Common Core implementation?
Can you catch in features such as the repeated "or" how Petrilli wants you not to just ask these questions, but pepper the candidate with them? But the President does have a role in fixing it, because the President had a role in making implementation both A) necessary and B) too fast in the first place. The President's role is simple-- step back and say, "As far as I'm concerned, everybody can adopt whatever standards they want, or not, whenever they want, or not." And then sit down and shut up.
6) Do you mean you oppose any standards in education that cross state lines? Several years ago, the governors came to an agreement about a common way to measure high school graduation rates. Do you oppose that, too?
If states want to imitate each other or get into cooperative agreements, that's their business, not DC's. Do I oppose measuring graduation rates? These are starting to smell of flop sweat and desperation, not political gamesmanship. Who the heck is going to oppose graduation rate measurement? Out loud?
7) Or do you mean that you oppose any standards, even those set at the state level? Since states have the constitutional responsibility to provide a sound education, don’t you think they should be clear about what they expect students to know and be able to do in the basic subjects?
I'm a pretty anti-standardization guy, but this is about as close as this list gets to a legitimate question. My answer is that they should be clear, but not very. The clearer standards are, the more prescriptive and restrictive they are, and the more it become impossible to impose and oversee them without becoming punitive. Plus, the more specifically educational goals are developed through a political process, the crappier they will be. Any system that doesn't trust teachers is doomed to failure (and, ironically, if teachers really were untrustworthy, strict standards would not help, anyway).
8) Or do you mean that you oppose standards that aim to get young people ready for college or a good-paying career? Do you think that’s too high a standard? What standard would you prefer?
Can you tell me, right now, exactly what a five year old needs to learn over the next thirteen years in order to be ready for a career? If you say anything but "no," you're either delusional or a liar. The future is wide open, mysterious, murky, and ever-changing. Government is fundamentally unable to create any set of standards that are nimble and robust enough to meet this requirement.
There are so many problems with career and college readiness as the definition of an educated person (does this mean future stay-at-home parents can drop out now? what is the government doing to make sure there will be enough good-paying careers available?) but the biggest is that defining a human life in terms of a job is a small, meager, cramped, sad measure of human worth. Let's educate students to be happy, fulfilled, contributing members of society, good citizens and great people. And most of all, let's give them a system that lets them define success for themselves, instead of beating them into whatever version of success that the government has defined for them.
9) Tell us again: Why do you oppose the Common Core?
Well, because it sucks. Hey. Ask a short, snarky question, get a short snarky answer.
That's it. Other than some serious and fundamental policy disagreements with the GOP, I think I'm totally ready to run for the nomination.
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