Testing vs. Student Teaching

This week the e-mail came out as it does every year. Who's willing to take a student teacher next year? Let the office know.

For the first time in my career, I wondered if that was a good idea. In fact, I wondered if I should send a reminder to my colleagues to think hard before saying yes.

Mind you, I am a big believer in being a co-operating teacher. I have always believed that helping train the next round of teachers is a professional responsibility. It's kind of like jury duty-- you can't complain that it's being done poorly if you say "no" every time it's your turn. Like most teachers who take on a mentee, I've had the full range of student teachers in my room, from a young woman who was better after two months than I had been after two years, to a gentleman who was a great guy but could not teach a puddle how to be wet (for what it's worth, neither is a teacher today).

It's a real journey. I believe hugely that a student teacher is not there to become a mini-me, but to find her own voice in the classroom, to figure out who he is when he's a teacher. I expect my student teachers to eventually take over, design their own stuff, plan their own materials; I stay with them every step of the way, but it has to be their way, not mine. It's a tough process; inevitably there will come a moment when I'm telling him or her, "That's okay. If you don't cry at least once during student teaching, you don't understand the situation." It can be a huge challenge, but the next generation of teachers has to come from somewhere.

But times have changed, and teachers in public schools face a new question-- can you really turn your class over to a trainee for any significant amount of time when so much is riding on Big Standardized Tests?

If I'm teaching under a system like NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposed 50% test score weighting for teacher evaluations, how can I possibly turn over my class and my professional future to a green college kid? What about a system like Pennsylvania's, where every teacher is partially evaluated based on a building rating? In PA, my buddies the shop teacher and the band director depend on me to get a good score out of my students' Big Reading Test, because those scores will affect their professional rating-- how do I turn that responsibility over to an inexperienced newbie?

I could take on a student teacher and keep her on a short, tight leash, never letting her do anything except exactly what I've laid out for her to do. But the world does not need any more Content Delivery Specialists who just unpack the program and mindlessly follow the directions; the world needs more teachers.

I suppose we could also just say to heck with actually training teachers and just take people with any kind of degree and drop them into a classroom where, under the newer accountability systems they would quickly wash out after a year or two and have to be replaced over and over and-- oh, wait. Now I see it. If you wanted to de-professionalize teaching, this would work just fine.

But for the rest of us, it's just one more bad side effect of test-driven accountability.

Newark Students Occupy District Offices

Social media is an amazing thing. I've been following events in Newark from the comfort of Pennsylvania. And it has been rather exraordinary.

Newark students have occupied Superintendent Cami Anderson's office. As reported by Bob Braun, who was there with the students during the first night (you could see him in the background on the video feed), the actual occupation was not too tricky. A board meeting was going on upstairs, and the office on the 8th floor was just open and unguarded.

The Newark students are not strangers to this brand of activism. They have previously occupied a board meeting and helped scare Anderson away from an appearance at AEI in New York.

That was Tuesday night. The district, as reported by Braun, was initially confrontational, then switched gears to expressing concern for the students and promised water and access to bathrooms.

By Wednesday, the district appeared to be playing a harder brand of ball. Police reportedly delivered this letter to parents of students in the office, telling them to get their kid the heck out of there.

Great job #camianderson - u have cops deliver threatening letters to parents of @NewarkStudents #occupynps ? Wow. pic.twitter.com/p1PGGHSvOn
— Montel Williams (@Montel_Williams) February 19, 2015

That didn't happen. Students in the office were told there was pizza for them-- outside in a school bus waiting to take them to school. Much of the day involved tweets, phone calls, and other communications regarding food for the students that district officials insisted was not being held up but which clearly was not getting to the students. (The live streaming from inside the building made this kind of obfuscation hard for the district to pull off.)

Late in the evening, a group of clergy arrived at the building and told security that they were clergy and they were taking the food up to the students. They delivered the food, along with some words of support and encouragement, led some prayers for the students, the building, and the city, and then returned outside to a rally in front of the building where just about every civic leader in Newark was gathered, speaking to the press. The district claims it has been attempting to talk to the students and negotiate, but the students have not said a word that I've seen to indicate they've heard any such overtures. I'm pretty sure the threatening letters and the bus pizza gambit don't count as negotiations.

The students are demanding the resignation or removal of Anderson; at the very least, for her to talk to them. That hasn't happened and #WheresCami is one of the questions of the day. An employee at a restaurant allegedly snapped this photo of Anderson on Wednesday afternoon.

What she's doing instead of talking to the community #occupynps #ournewark pic.twitter.com/WqN08lP0aY
— Newark Student Union (@NewarkStudents) February 19, 2015

The students have been livestreaming both from inside the building and from events held outside, and the story is drawing media attention. It's an amazing level of bravery, commitment and commitment. Many people have been plenty upset about the state of education in Newark, which has not been allowed local control of their own school system in about twenty years. This small group of activist students have provided a real rallying point and it will be interesting to see how events unfold. Stay tuned.  The twitter hashtag to follow is #OccupyNPS.

Super Secret Top Test Security

As we approach testing season here in Pennsylvania, it's time for each of us to take our "training" regarding test security. I present a quick overview here not to make the point that testing is ridiculous, but to underline just how useless the testing is to actual classroom teachers.

The "training" format is an on-line power-point presentation, followed by questions that anyone with a scintilla of common sense could answer without having watched the slide show (True or false: During the test procedure, it is okay to bubble in answers for the students). This is the sort of "training" that is not so much about training as it is about plausible deniability ("We made them all get training on the not-cheating thing, so it's not our fault.")

The "training" gives the impression that the state is really, really concerned that students, in their deep and extreme desire to get good test results, will indulge in all manner of creative cheating. They will pass notes, use super-secret eyelid semaphore signals, and take chemical additives rumored to promote psychic powers. Most especially they will use their smart phones. Phones are greatly to be feared when it comes to test security. These are perhaps problems in other corners of the Commonwealth, but here in this corner, the problem with the Big Standardized Test is that students see it as an irrelevant pointless exercise that is basically pass-fail.

There are ethical issues, apparently, and we've looked at that document before. But the biggest threat to test security is the Test Administrators (sometimes known as teachers).

We are not allowed to engage in "unauthorized viewing." UA is a violation of test security, and can include (but is not limited to)

* looking at test content to determine its meaning or essence
* looking to see if a student marked content
* viewing test content to see how a student answered test questions
* memorizing test questions

And we are serious about this stuff:

Be aware any time you interact with students during the test period there is the potential for a testing irregularity or a perceived testing irregularity. Therefore it is very important that as a Test Administrator you thoughtfully consider where and how you interact with students and choose your words and actions carefully. The key is to maintain the integrity of the test environment and the validity of student results. Your actions should support this goal at all times.

Because the validity of the test is a fragile and delicate thing (so fragile and delicate that apparently nobody has ever actually tested the validity at all). But in the post-slide-show quiz, we get back to the really important point in a true or false question--

It is unacceptable for the Test Administrator to read or view the contents of an exam at any time-- True!

So the next time somebody is claiming that the Big Standardized Test helps teachers and schools by showing them where student weaknesses lie, ask exactly how teachers are supposed to get information from a test that they are forbidden to even look at. It's a new version of the emperor's new clothes-- you can't study them or even look at them, but you must just take the grand vizier's word for what you need to contribute as accessories.

Imagine if we sent report cards home but told parents they were never, ever allowed to even see any of the assignments or tests or books or materials that their child had worked with during the year.

To claim that we can make useful corrections and tweaks to educational programming based on tests that we never ever see is ludicrous. It's just one more reason that the Big Standardized Test is a waste of everyone's time and money.

The Very Best Policy Memo on Testing

Policy memos, like white papers, reports and means for grown-ups to say, "Hey, here's what I think should happen," are often a motley crew with little foundation and a lot of hot air. These kinds of reports are all-too-often just blog posts in a glossy tuxedo.

But the National Education Policy Center can be counted on to do actual research, use actual facts, and express their ideas in clear, cogent prose. And when it comes to the issue of ESEA renewal and testing, they do not disappoint.

"Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Time To Move Beyond Test-Focused Policies" is a mouthful of a title, but in a mere dozen pages (several are endnotes), Kevin G. Welner and William J. Mathis deliver a clear and thorough response to those who insist that annual standardized tests need to be the engine that drives the pubic education system. I am not going to do it justice here in this space, but let me give you the nickel tour of some of the best of the many great pull-quotes in the piece.

Their first paragraph presents a clear foundation:

Today’s 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they’ve known. The federal government entrusted their educations to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014. Thus, we would achieve “equality.” This approach has not worked.

They drop back for a history lesson, beginning with where we started:

NCLB was an ineffective solution to some very real problems.

But policy fails to provide supports for student success and ignores "the many opportunity gaps children face outside of school." Federal funding has been insufficient, has run out, has been kicked in the teeth by the Great Recession. "Adequate school funding remains a key, unaddressed issue."

NEPC then goes on to look at the testing debate itself, making this key point about what is not being included:

Nevertheless, the debate in Washington, D.C., largely ignores the fundamental criticism leveled by parents and others: testing should not be driving reform.

But the problem is not how to do testing correctly. In fact, today's standardized assessments are probably the best they've ever been. The problem is a system that favors a largely automated accounting of a narrow slice of students' capacity and then attaches huge consequences to that limited information.

 The paper goes on the list some of the undesirable side effects of that "singular focus," including (and I'll paraphrase) sucking the fun out of school, turning teaching into clerical gruntwork, giving up on an actual well-rounded education, and tossing out non-academic skills related to becoming a decent human being.

Tests, they caution, can be useful when used properly and for their intended purposes.

The problem is not in the measurements; it is in the fetishizing of those measurements. It is the belief that measurements will magically drive improvements in teaching and learning.

NEPC next turns to the Equity Argument for Test-Based Reform. They note the real reasons, including historic neglect of some groups, for people to find this argument compelling.

...we do not see any reason to believe that a test-focused ESEA in 2015 would yield any greater focus on opportunities to learn than did a test-focused ESEA in 2002.

The writers note that the achievement gaps were well-known and documented via NAEP  results before NCLB was ever hatched. Test-based attempts to close the achievement gap have never worked. And the NAEP provides all the measurement we'll ever need.

The secret? Poverty. The original ESEA language called for an additional 40% of a state's spending for each child living in poverty. This would be one of those parts of the law that nobody has ever come close to following. Meanwhile, poverty is making a mess, inevitably leading to larger opportunity gaps and achievement gaps. "Testing will document this, but it will do nothing to change it."

What about universal accountability?

NCLB and similar policies have done a disservice to the word "accountability." Our nation and our nation's education system need accountability, but it must be fair and it must be universal. Holding teachers accountable but excusing policymakers who fail to provide necessary supports is as harmful and illogical as holding students accountable but excusing poor teaching. Today's demoralized teaching force has been given too much responsibility for outcomes and too little control over these outcomes.

And then they wind to a close, which like the rest of the paper is thoroughly quoteworthy. Let's use this line:

The way forward is not to tinker further with failed test-based accountability mechanisms; it is to learn from the best of our knowledge.

The NEPC has an open letter to Congress with this report attached for any researchers and professors to sign; so far almost 1,500 names are attached. If you are a researcher or college prof, you should sign it. If you are a person who cares about public education, you should read the entire document. If there is an app that allows us to give something a standing ovation on the internet, this paper deserves it.

The Governors Want Their Schools Back

Last week the National Governor's Association (NGA) released their idea of what the new ESEA should look like. The document is only six pages long, but it has some remarkable features, and while the NGA may not ultimately carry a great deal of weight in this discussion, they certainly don't carry any less weight than Arne Duncan and the USED, and we've talked about their ideas. So fair is fair.

NGA, you may recall, is notable for being the copyright holders of the Common Core as well as being one of the groups that supposedly hired David Coleman, Jason Zimba, and some other gifted amateurs to punch up the nation's education system. So the first thing that we'll note is that the phrase "Common Core" does not appear anywhere in their proposal.

So what's the major upshot of this proposal from the folks who helped start the ball rolling on the federal take-over of fifty separate public education systems? The major upshot is this:

Give us back our schools.

Here are the more specific breakdowns of the proposal.

Governance and Educational Alignment

Governors and state legislatures believe that a student's success is determined by much more than time spent in elementary and high school. Students need a supportive, seamless progression from preschool through college to lifelong learning and successful employment.

So there's your fetus-to-fertilizer pipeline. The NGA loves it-- they just don't think it can be managed very well from DC. After all, he's called Big Brother, not Big Uncle or Big Second Cousin Once Removed on Your Mother's Side. Race to the Top was great for modernizing the approach to education, but "it is time to take the next step" by rewriting ESEA so that it "supports students in all phases of life." Yeah, that's not creepy and stalkery at all.

Does it seem like I'm over-reacting by thinking that this proposes to make the schools a cog in the worker supply chain? Well, here's a quote from their press release:

“The Elementary and Secondary Education Act will allow states to align our needs through early education to higher education with the needs of our innovative businesses, developing a stronger workforce development pipeline, expanding opportunity for all of our people and ensuring that students are prepared for success in all phases of life,” said New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, vice chair of the committee.”


Specifically, the NGA recommends that ESEA gives state-level leaders the authority to align, leverage, and finance their way to greater efficiency. Give states the tools to lump pre- and post- secondary education into the mix, as well as workforce development; break down silos, and allow flexibility for "public-private partnership." So, loosen up the rules so we can outsource to whatever vendor suits us.

Accountability and Testing

NGA would like to move away from "label and punish" and get with a more supportive framework-- for each student. For accountability to work, "federal prescriptions must be replaced with a federal, state and local partnership that makes certain every child counts."

So keep the public reporting of progress, and keep disaggregating results. But dump the "rigid structure" of Annual Measurable Objectives and Adequate Yearly Progress and let the states come up with their own systems that ensure ambitious targets, use multiple measures, account for college and career readiness, check districts' annual progress, gets public input from all constituencies, and allows states to cut a deal with individual districts.

Also, the state's assessment system should be one that "prohibits the US Secretary of Education from influencing or dictating the state's development of goals under ESEA." So, memo from NGA to Arne Duncan: Suck it.

The states should also get to create their own intervention process that does not necessarily hold Title I funds hostage, allows the state to partner with a failing district, but requires the state to flat out intervene after things stay too bad too long. The Title I non-hostage clause would be enough all by itself to get the federal monkey off the states' back.

Also, states should be able to pick or substitute their own alternatives to any federally-required assessments, and they should be able to do it without seeking the permission of the Secretary of Education. So, again-- Arne, suck it.

High Quality Education for All Students

Governors and state legislators want students to succeed and believe that all can (at high levels). We still think the transparency and disaggregatiness of NCLB are just fine, thanks.

So NGA advocates ensuring a high-quality education for all by continuing testing and reporting results, which is kind of backwards, like saying we'll make sure you get a good meal by cleaning the plates afterwards. NGA also advocates allowing some fancy footwork with aggregating, and getting rid of "cumbersome" government paperwork.

Also (I don't know why this is hiding here), they want you to know that "states" include US territories and outside regions. So, congratulations Kwajalein-- you get a piece of this, too.

NGA also recommends that students with disabilities not be left out of this, as well as English language learners. As with the rest of the high-quality delivery system, the states want flexibility to sort things out.

School Improvement

States have been researching ways to "lift up" failing schools like crazy and even trying ways to keep those that are circling the drain from failing. The feds should help us fund scaling up these various techniques (I presume that NGA meant to add "in case we ever find one that actually works, other than obvious things like getting money and resources to schools in trouble"). "The current limited federal menu of options for school improvement" keeps us from doing what we think we'd rather.

However, the feds should still send money. We may want to change other parts of this, but that sending money part? We would like to keep doing that. Then we will spend the money on turnaround specialists or state partnerships with the district or a menu of strategies. Also, we'd like to let successful districts export their ideas to unsuccessful ones (presumably NGA imagines strategies other than "build your school in a wealthy neighborhood" coming to light).

Districts might also use that funding to recruit some awesome high-quality school leaders and then gift them with flexible resources (aka folding money).

Schools would have three years to turn things around, unless they "partnered" with the state, in which case the time frame is open to negotiation. The state will figure out which data markers will determine success.

Empowering Teachers and School Leaders

Teachers and school leaders and the state should be co-developers of an evaluation system and professional development. Districts should be able to use federal money to build partnerships with postsecondary partners (because we all teach in districts right next to colleges).

The feds should scrap their definition of a highly qualified teacher and let the states go back to determining that for themselves. The evaluation system will likewise be a state thing that would give "meaningful weight" to "multiple-measures of teacher and principal performance" (I do not know what the hyphen is doing in there) as well as evidence of student learning and "contributing factors" to student growth. The state, working with educators at all levels, would decide what to do with evaluation results.

Also, "the Secretary may not dictate or require any methodology as part of a state's teacher and school leader evaluation system." So, a third time, NGA says suck it, Arne.

NGA says fine on retaining the requirement to distribute teachers equitably across the state (an requirement that nobody has ever even pretended to implement) but they would like the freedom to spend the money for that on, well, pretty much anything. "Efforts" to increase number of great teachers in a school-- heck, I can fob anything of as an "effort" to do anything.

State and Local Flexibility

States and schools must be given increased flexibility to meet the individual needs of students and prepare them to compete in a highly-skilled workforce.

Well, that certainly lowers the bar for what we want from an educated public, doesn't it. Just get 'em ready for a job. If their future employers are happy, that's all we need? The entire US public education system isn't here to serve students or parents or taxpayers-- it's here to serve businesses?

This part of the proposal is about flexibility in how states have to deal with the feds.

For instance, we spend a third of a page talking about federal approval of the state plan request. The Secretary must have a team to review these plans. The Secretary may not add academic requirements. The Secretary get the plan reviewed and back in sixty days or it is automatically approved. And the Secretary cannot disapprove a plan unless he can "provide substantive, research-based evidence that the plan will negatively affect children's education."

And in the event that we're still doing waivers, the Secretary is again given a list of restrictions, finishing with being forbidden to deny a waiver "for conditions outside the scope of the waiver request," nor may he add additional requirements not covered in ESEA. So in other words, under NGA's version of the law, the current waiver requirements that Arne has saddled everyone with would be illegal (or, if you like, more clearly illegal than they already are). 

So, once more, and with gusto, Arne is cordially invited to suck it.

Two Thoughts

Two things occur to me reading this document (well, three, if you count how very much the governors want Arne to get bent).

One is that the governors don't seem to have a great deal of faith in the authority of the state. It seems that if they were really feeling their oats, they would just do some of the things on this list instead of asking if the feds might allow them a small cup of rights. "Please, sir, may I have some more," hardly seems like the stance for a full-scale American governor.

Second, the NGA seems surprised to be here, as if they can't imagine how education ever got in such a heavily-federalized mess. They've tried selling this "Who, us?" narrative before, but it was the governors who laid out what would be the framework of Race to the Top, and they did it back in 2008, before Duncan and Obama had made their unsuccessful attempt to get ESEA rewritten, before Race to the Top was devised as an end run around it. If the governor's don't like the current reformy scenery, well, we've arrived exactly where they wanted to take us. A piece of my heart will go out to any US Congress member who calls the governors on that.

The best final word on the NGA Christmas list comes from Anne Gassel at Missouri Education Watchdog, so I'll let her wrap this up by putting this newest reformy proposal in its proper context:

Outcome Based Education, School To Work, Goals 2000, NCLB are all signs that the federal government is incapable of drafting workable or effective laws regarding education. Reform at this level will not work. Such laws, by the very fact that they  require central control (and accountability), are destined not to work for education and need to be eliminated. Unfortunately our Governors don’t recognize that they already have all the authority they need to do what they want and instead are asking for permission, thereby granting control to the feds. This is not leadership Governors. This is middle management at best.

Why Are Suburban Moms Agitated

Laura McKenna is a former poli-sci professor, pretty entertaining blogger and suburban mother of a child with special needs. She is, by her own admission, not an expert on curriculum, but she also did PhD work on education policy and vouchery stuff. She claims to have done her reading up on the subject, but that expertise is not on display in her article last week for the Atlantic, "Suburbia and Its Common Core Conspiracy Theories."

McKenna gets a lot wrong. A lot. But she's in a mainstream magazine, and so we need to pay attention because this is part of the narrative that's Out There. Let's look at the story as McKenna tells it.

Who doesn't love the Core?

Common Core standards are, "of course, a set of broad, universal academic goals in math and English-language arts for public school children of all ages." They're connected to tests which are scaring everyone and giving rise to all sorts of pushback. So far, so good.

McKenna uses the old template for characterizing CCSS opponents-- they're mostly Tea Party crazies. She dismisses the idea that the Core initiative represents federal overreach, and she collects a list of the most indefensible foolishness with which the Core has been-- it will turn kids gay, Muslim, communist and anti-American. So you know we can ignore those folks. CCSS is also opposed by politicians who are afraid that kids in their district will stack up unfavorably against others. She suggests they have reason to worry.

But there are also suburban moms. She happens to be one, and she thinks Arne Duncan may have been onto something when he made his infamous White Suburban Moms comment. Those moms are angry. And they're angry because they don't know what the heck they're talking about. So McKenna is here to address their many and varied misconceptions caused by all those other crazed and/or self-serving Core opponents mentioned previously.

She ticks off the many foolish misconceptions that these ladies post, email, and agitate about, in the process revealing that maybe she's a little behind on her recent reading on the subject. It is an unfortunate fact of life in the debate for public education that there are some cray-cray people opposed to CCSS for some reality-impaired reasons. It would be useful not to lump them in with every other argument against the Core.

Common Core is ruining childhood and eliminating recess. Well, yes. Teachers "drill irrelevant facts into kids' heads in order to game the testing results." Well, no. Test prep is more insidious than that-- teachers now teach a kind of reading and writing that is only useful for test-taking, and we spend time teaching students how to outwit the gotcha questions that new tests come loaded with.

"And since the new exams will be taken on computers, hackers might even reveal the test results to colleges." Are you kidding, Ms. McKenna? Hackers will not be required-- the dream here is a cradle to career pipeline in which a mountain of data is collected for each child, to be lovingly curated and made available (for a price) to government agencies and employers. This is not conspiracy-style reading-between-the-spaces-between-the-lines. Just google cradle to career pipelines and meet all the agencies and groups that are already working on it. Go read about Pearson's plans for Big Data, or watch a Knewton exec explain how the dream is to be able to tell a child what to eat for breakfast on test day.

Nothing to worry about! Just calm down!

While maybe there's some truth in the concerns, the protests have become "irrational, hysterical" (oh, that word). McKenna is concerned that all these fears have led to real action (which is an artful construction-- can you fill in this blank? "_______ fears have led to real actions." McKenna does an careful job throughout the article of calling the moms foolish and wrong without saying it directly).

But these folks are getting worked up for nothing:

The reality of the Common Core model is much more boring. America’s schools could be better, no doubt. They could be more equal. They could be more effective in preparing kids for the new, global economy and the ever-growing rigors of higher education. But there is no evidence that one set of standards, that a single standardized test, will alter the basic school experience of children. They will probably still have to do book reports on Abraham Lincoln and To Kill a Mockingbird. They almost certainly will still have time to joke around on the playground with their buddies. They will be evaluated by teachers’ exams and rubrics and probably won’t be penalized by the Common Core tests.      

Worrying about this new batch of tests is silly. Students already take lots of standardized tests, and they still spend more time playing Super Mario. So why are suburban moms and dads so concerned about them? I can't speak for New Jersey (where McKenna is located) but I'm pretty sure that in PA part of the concern is that the Big Standardized Test will soon become a graduation requirement. And it's a lousy test. So I'm thinking that could be a factor.

So why are the suburbs uproarified?

But her answer, ultimately, is that it's a matter of parental protectiveness plus parental misinformation, stoked up by "click-bait" articles, and she provides some examples without discussing whether or not those titles ("Parents Opting Kids Out of Common Core Face Threats From Schools," or "Common Core Test Fail Kids In New York Again. Here’s How," or "5 Reasons the Common Core Is Ruining Childhood.") lead to articles that include facts. (And as click-bait these seem pretty tame to me-- not a single "and what happens next will astound you" or a Kardashian in the bunch). 

McKenna makes a comparison to anti-vaxxer panic, but she skips the critical step in that comparison. Yes, the motivations may be similar-- but what about the facts behind them? That would be the way to make this point, and McKenna doesn't.

McKenna next notes the teacher role in all this, and gets it wrong again. She says teachers unions were initially "very supportive," which is technically correct-- leadership of NEA and AFT threw their support behind the Core (and to date have not yet really unthrown it), and they have taken increasing amounts of grief from actual teachers because of it. She also says that teachers helped shape the goals of Common Core, and that piece of cheese is years old at this point. I am not sure where McKenna found a source that still tries to sell that story.

She indicates that teacher support waned as test results were tied to punishments. Teacher evaluations are now tied to test results per federal mandate. School evaluations have been tied to test results per federal mandate for over a decade, and now those evaluations are being used as justification for closing schools. 

How do we calm these mothers down?

Without political and education leaders providing valid, fact-based justifications for the new testing system and a clear, jargon-free explanation of new teaching strategies, suburban parents are easily influenced by others. 

Here's part of the problem. No such valid fact-based justifications exist. All that exists is a nation of schools cutting programs and losing funding and scrambling to keep test scores up over all else, for tests that have not been proven to indicate anything at all. 

McKenna wants to get simple facts out there, like "the Common Core does not prescribe certain textbooks." But that's not so simple. Depending on your state and district, some text or "program" with Common Core approval will be enforced. It's like Henry Ford's "you can have a Model T in any color you like, as long as it's black." And since there are teaching materials out there available from the exact same company that produced the test, what are the odds that well-off districts will feel compelled to buy them. Your spouse is technically free to sleep with anyone else at all, but it might lead to some serious marital problems. Technically "any textbooks you want" is a choice, just like "any bedmate you want." But practically speaking, it is not a choice at all.

McKenna notes that suburban schools generally do fine on these test thing, and that seems like a point she might have pursued, thereby noting that the best predictor of standardized test results is socio-economic class and thereby questioning whether the test is a valid measure or a biased crapshoot, but no, she seems content with "Bad things like test failures don't happen to us in the suburbs, so let's just simmer down and forget about it." When the test results are published (because, they've all been super secret so far??), suburban moms will see that all is as it has always been, and they'll calm down.  

Petrilli offers perspective and monkeys

Mike Petrilli at the Fordham also took a look at this article, and while he gives the "any books you want" point an uncritically supportive pass, he sees something else.

Suburban moms, he says, may contain some of the expressionist parents. These are what we might call the artsy-fartsy types (the illustration is, I kid you not, a pair of hippie monkeys, playing sitar and flute and wearing a headband and tie-dye). Expressionist parents may just be focused on artsy stuff and not academics and test results and so want their children not to be stamped into conformity. 

That's okay, says Petrilli. "One size fits most." And within broad parameters, I'd be inclined to agree with him. But we aren't looking at a system that's set up for most kids. We're looking at a system that is supposed to cover all students, every last one (well, except for the wealthy kids that go to un-core-ified private schools). We're looking at a system that doesn't see students who are "different." It sees students who are "deficient" or "just plain wrong" or, in some cases "not going to graduate" and "on the path to fail at life." Until we fix that feature, talking about One Size Fits Most is not a sufficient defense.

But that's the response to suburban moms. Calm down, honey. You're getting all hysterical over nothing. You'll see. Everything will just be like it's always been, and this won't be any big deal. And if that's really the defense of Common Core, then why are we bothering? You can't have it both ways. Either Common Core (and the testing that is irreversibly welded to it) are going to shake things up and rock the educational world with systemic changes that will unearth and root out all sort of issues-- in which case parents are correct to be concerned about how their children may get caught in the destruction-- or it's just business as usual, keep moving, nothing to see here, in which case it's the most expensive nothing we've ever launched. It can't be both.

McKenna closes her blog discussion of this article with these words

 I’m not an expert on curriculum, so I can’t tell you whether or not this particular system is way better than other programs. I trust the experts on this one. And, as I also said, the experts came from diverse political groups and from all areas of education.

Well, no. They didn't. The "experts" came from the industry leaders who most stood to profit from a systemic overhaul of education, and they have since been joined by more "experts" who hope to profit from privatizing every aspect of public education.

So perhaps suburban moms are responding to a growing sense that their previous bundle of joy is being viewed and treated as a piece of meat, a commodity to be bought and sold and squeezed for the profit of corporations or the survival of the school. Perhaps suburban moms are sensing that schools no longer devote as much time and attention to protecting the children because too much of the school's energy goes into protecting itself. 

McKenna says she's looked at the issue. I suggest she go back and look some more, and not start with the assumption that her fellow moms are just hysterical.

Katrina Is Headed for Atlanta

Over the weekend, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an advertisement for article about New Orleans charterfied school district, because the Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia would like to get rid of his own public school system. He's just not fortunate enough to have a major hurricane tear up his state. But don't worry, Georgians-- you, too, can have your own disaster area.

The article, among other things, shows that charter marketing is improving. For instance, they've learned that they need to talk more about being connected to the community and less about escaping the tyranny of zip codes. This helps them conceal that charter schools are not neighborhood schools, disconnected from any particular community (if you want to read a scholarly look at this in New Orleans, here's Brian Beabout's "Reconciling Student Outcomes and Community Self-Reliance in Modern School Reform Contexts.") Sarrio says that unnamed Louisiana educators recommend making the community part of the decisions, which seems to conflict with this NPR coverage of the district entitled "The End of Neighborhood Schools."

But the basic sales pitch is the same as always. Talking about the Arthur Ashe charter, Jaime Sarrio writes:

Advocates of the model say Ashe and schools like it show what’s possible when elected school boards, unions and poorly run school systems get out of the way and let school leaders decide how to educate students.

How exactly does one square getting rid of locally elected school boards with being connected to your community? "We are happy to work with members of the community just so long as they never get to make any decisions"? It's that damned democracy-- it so cramps a "school leader's" style.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal wants voters to create a state-run district to take over struggling schools.

This sort of thing must give hard-core conservatives a fit. Replace schools with a state-run system?! Who runs the current system? Keebler elves? But of course, Deal means to cut local control out of the loop, so that state-level bureaucrats can apply their higher levels of wisdom, because local school boards are all tied up in elections and regulations and such. Also, it's easier for charter operators to have one stop shopping.

The "freedom from rules" argument is an old one for charters, and after all these years it still makes zero sense. The government has tied public schools' hands with all these terrible rules, so we need new schools, say the legislators who tied schools' hands in the first place. Couldn't we just, I don't know, untie some hands? This is like locking a bunch of people in a room, throwing a molotov cocktail in there with them, then standing outside the door with the keys and saying, "Well, I guess we have to build another set of doors." Use the damn keys (and stop throwing molotov cocktails)!

Sarrio's article includes a short history of NOLA's Recovery School District. I've read a lot about the district; this history seems like the version you would get only by reading the press releases of the charter boosters. Here's state board member and charter cheerleader Leslie Jacobs:

“The philosophy behind the recovery school district is very simple: Take the same kids, the same building, the same amount of money, give it to someone else to operate to prove we can do better,” Jacobs said. They wanted to make “the risk of doing nothing in the face of failure more painful than the risk of trying something that doesn’t work.”

Let's be honest-- we're talking about sub-contracting a government function to a money-making entity. And unless I missed something, this "same building, same kids" stuff is high grade baloney.

Sarrio's article includes the same old charter dog whistles:

“You have to have people who believe all kids can learn regardless of where they come from, and we believe that,” said Erin Hames, education policy advisor for Gov. Nathan Deal.

Right. Because teachers don't believe any such thing. If you want people who really believe in the educational promise of children, you don't want adults who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching-- you want businessmen and bureaucrats.

Sarrio visits a KIPP school and takes a hard-hitting guided tour and discovers that-- surprise-- KIPP school is awesome! Computers! And most importantly, autonomy-- KIPP school leaders can do whatever the hell they want! Because democracy is a drag, and accountability is for lesser operations tied to that foolish democracy model.

The article also talks to "consultant" Paul Pastorek, former LA state superintendent now cashing in as an "expert" in how to charterize a school system. He indicates that such a system isn't a good fit for just any state (only the special ones, I guess). He notes that Georgia has the advantage of a "strong accountability system," which in privatization-speak means "good system for labeling schools failures so that they can be targeted for takeover."

Unnamed Louisiana school leader types also note that Georgia would need to grow itself some more school leaders, which in charter-speak usually seems to mean "people who are prepared to operate like CEOs rather than professional educators." I recommend a system like the one being launched in Ohio, which will give candidates one year of interning resulting in an MBA and a principal's certificate.

Did Sarrio discover anything in New Orleans that would suggest that the charterization was anything less than awesome. Well, she did note that some folks claimed that charters were " unevenly expelling or threatening to expel problem students in an attempt to inflate test scores." But we can relax, because "the district has made changes to address these concerns." Oh, and that lawsuit brought by parents of students with disabilities was totally settled, so that's okay now.

She did get a quote from parent advocate Karen Harper Royal suggesting that there are better ways to improve "as opposed to this game we’re playing with school roulette, closing schools and opening schools." Which is just confusing because I thought charters were totes community schools now.

Sarrio also talked to Erika McConduit-Diggs, president of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, who "said the speed of the changes and the the dismissal of almost 7,000 Orleans Parish teachers, which courts later ruled unlawful, left a scar on the community that hasn’t healed."

The overall tone, however, is to suggest that the RSD is a success. Sarrio and her sources are careful not to call it a miracle, but settle for the impression that it's a modest success that is ever-so-much-better than what it replaced, and surely it will be a great idea for Georgia. I would recommend that before the next time she writes about New Orleans, Sarrio read through the works of Mercedes Schneider, Crazy Crawfish and Geauxteacher, just for starters.

Sarrio has missed a lot. A lot. In fact, if you are only going to read one other account of what's going on in NOLA, I recommend that NPR article mentioned above. In that article you can read about just how cut off these schools are from any community. You can read about the horrific process of trying to get your child into a school (and the hope that you won't be putting your child on a bus at 6 AM for a hour-plus ride). You can read about Douglass Harris and Beth Sondel and their findings that what tiny test improvements shown by RSD are the result of a narrowing of curriculum, a growing skill in teaching to the test. You can read about the hyper-repressive test-prep atmosphere of a KIPP school. You can read about how counseling out students helps grow test scores. You can read about the system's dependence on outside money to support its higher-than-state-average per pupil spending.

And this is NPR, which has not proven to be particularly loyal to the traditional public school model. And yet it seems clear that Leslie Jacobs characterization of the NOLA plan given a close-to-lede spot in Sarrio's article-- Take the same kids, the same building, the same amount of money, give it to someone else to operate to prove we can do better-- is incorrect on all counts. They sorted the kids, closed the buildings, and spent more money to hire charter operators who have not, as yet, shown any great measure of success.

The business interests who want to take a big bite of Georgia peach did a nice job with this coverage, but the voters, taxpayers, parents, children, and community members of Georgia deserve a better, clearer, more accurate look at the public education disaster headed their way.