Charters have huge direct and indirect influence in Pennsylvania. Some of that is shown in a great Daniel Simmons-Ritchie piece at PennLive looking at how the big boys of charterdom play high stakes hardball in Pennsylvania.
PennLive's analysis shows about $10 million going out to PA politicians over the last nine years. It is a measure of how accustomed we have become to the throwing around of money in the education biz that the amount doesn't seem all that huge.
State Rep Bernie O'Neill of Bucks County told PennLive that in addition to their ability to throw money at their problems, charters are also shameless about deploying children as lobbyists. Eva Moskowitz is only one of the more famous of these practitioners, closing her schools so that he students can be bused to the state capital to lobby for her interests.
O'Neill notes that it's an easy sell. Just tell small children and their parents that some mean guys in the capitol want to close their school, and they'll be making posters and phone calls and trips.
Pennsylvania charters have perfected the profitability dodge. PA schools must be non-profit, but that means nothing-- Gotrocks Ed, Inc simply sets up Nonprofit School Biz as a company to file the application and be the charter operator of record, but then NSB simply turns around and hires Gotrocks to run the school, an operation on which Gotrocks makes a handy bundle.
Some of that bundle is used to grease the wheels of government. Vahan Gureghian is the CEO of a charter school company. He's also the second-highest individual contributor to Tom Corbett's campaign; after Corbett won, Gureghian was appointed to two transition team committees, including education.
The charter lobby influence is not always as obvious as its support of vouchers or Educational Improvement Tax Credits (voucher lite). One of Gureghian's charter schools was among those caught in the investigation of schools suspected of cheating on the Big Test, but unlike other schools, Gureghian's company was allowed to investigate itself. Shockingly, they were not found guilty of anything.
O'Neill's commission made a recommendation to scale special education student funding by need. Students with mild special needs but who still get full funding transfers are the great cash cows of the charter business in Pennsylvania. Charters have fought the recommendation.
"They're saying, 'If we lose this money our doors are going to close.' "
O'Neill said. "Well then, there's something wrong with your business
model if you're relying on keeping your doors open on the backs of
special-education students."
It will come as no surprise that O'Neill has been the target of charter lobby attempts to unseat him.
Charter lobbying can be subtle, and the effects of charter reformster rhetoric on public education will be put to a new test in Pennsylvania soon.
Governor Tom Wolf's budget proposal will reportedly address Pennsylvania's public education funding problems. Currently the state covers just over a third of local school costs, meaning that poor districts experience huge effects of their own poverty (this is how York schools end up so poor that the state can propose taking them over). Wolf would like to see the state shoulder 50% of the cost.
That's a great thought-- but it means that the roughly $9 billion provided by the state will need to get closer to $13 billion, and that money will have to come from somewhere.
Pennsylvania is a state with considerable post-parent population-- folks whose kids have long since left school. But the rhetoric of charter proponents has drilled into the public that a school is a service provided to an individual student and her parents. Charters have tried hard to normalize the concept that tax dollars do not go to support community schools, but instead go to little Chris and Pat to go buy themselves an education somewhere.
Charter and voucher systems are all about disenfranchising taxpayers. Now we'll see how those taxpayers react to a larger bill for services that some have been conned into thinking has nothing to do with them. "Why should I pay more taxes? I don't have any kids in school."
If charter and voucher boosters have been successful in selling their message of child-centered funding in place of taxpayers supporting schools as a public service for the whole community, we can expect Wolf's ambitious idea to be an even tougher sell than it would have been.
This will mark one more way in which charter profiteers have made public education a little bit worse in Pennsylvania.
Monday, March 2, 2015
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Live by the sword...
So CPAC happened this week, at which various GOP future candidates try to see if they can win a little conservative love. And that means that Common Core had to be trotted out for ceremonial abuse, like a disgraced former party officer in Communist China.
There was a CPAC panel that addressed the Core, and Patrick Brennan at National Review said it was "...not good." The American Conservative also covered the panel, which included such educational experts as Phyllis Schafly.
The panel featured that kind of Common Core opposition that creates a bit of a conundrum for those of us who support traditional public education. Because some of the people who oppose Common Core are (and I'm sorry to say this, because some of you are readers of this blog) peddling baloney. This is how challenging the Common Core debate has become-- here we are standing in front of our house telling our neighbor, "Do not take that sack of poisonous snakes into your home with your family," and we find ourselves joined on the sidewalk by another neighbor who joins in, hollering, "Yeah, don't take those snakes in there! They will make all the electrical circuits spit blood and cause your paint to peel."
So CPAC included people who somehow blamed CCSS for the teaching of sex education and evolution, as well as the usual concerns about informational reading being code for liberal propaganda. This was intermixed with legitimate points, such as the observation that there's not a lick of evidence to support the notion that broadly-accepted standards fix much of anything.
But mostly what CPAC featured re: Common Core was the Whiplash Brigade, a group of aspiring Presidential wanna-bes who lined up to take pot-shots at the policy initiative that had been, just a few years ago, their educational BFF. Haley Sweetland Edwards at Time noted the phenomenon that featured all the candidate hopefuls downplaying, distancing and demolishing their previous CCSS support. Well, all but one. Jeb Bush continues to signal that he is prepared to fight and die on Mount Common Core. Bush, however, reportedly depends on busloads of high-priced friends to back him, so that battle is not going well.
So who will hold Jindal and Christie and Walker and Huckabee accountable for their flip-floppage?
None other than newly-minted reformstress Campbell Brown, who took to the pages of the Washington Post to throw the "P" word at the assembled hopefuls-- pandering.
Pandering is a great word. Its definition, of course, is "offering support for a policy with which I disagree." Politicians who support policies I agree with are showing wisdom and vision, or at a minimum, smart realpolitik sense.
Brown lays out the history of Jindal and Christie re: Common Core and boils their defection down to this sentence:
All this, of course, is not about education. Or facts.
Her outrage that these politicians are making political choices for political reasons mirrors an argument often used by reformsters in arguments about the Core-- why are you bringing up these political points? why make this issue about politics instead of discussing the educational merits?
How dare these politicians abandon CCSS because desertion id politically expedient?
Well, those who live by political expediency die by political expediency.
Jindal, Christie, Walker, and a host of other politicians did not ever support the Core because they had looked at it and determined that it was a sound educational package. They did not have a team of blue ribbon teachers examine the standards in order to render a solid educational judgment by which politicians might be guided. Heck, in many cases, the governors threw state support behind the standards before they were even written!
Nor were the CCSS birthed in education in the first place. They were created by corporate interests at the behest of politicians (or maybe vice versa). From the earliest sparks, they were created with an eye on the political angle, not by asking how can we create great educational standards, but how can we get some standards adopted by the entire country.
State leaders were convinced that it would be politically expedient to adopt the standards, that like most political education playmaking, there would be plenty of upside and no downside (remember those days not so long ago when saying you were for better schools did not start a cranky debate?). The leaders would adopt the standards, the standards would be driven down through the educational system, and leaders would get to call themselves part of a great transformative movement that made US education awesome.
Guys like Jindal and Christie were never looking at the educational effects or the best interests of students. They were doing political calculus, and the CCSS forefathers were cheering them on.
It's very hard to change the rules of these games in mid-contest. Core proponents wanted the standards to become victorious in a game played by the rules of politics and power, and that's what they got. Sad for them that they didn't anticipate how those rules could work against them one day, but they can't cry "foul" because no foul. By the rules of the game they set out to play, dropping the core because it's politically expedient to do so is right there in the rulebook.
There was a CPAC panel that addressed the Core, and Patrick Brennan at National Review said it was "...not good." The American Conservative also covered the panel, which included such educational experts as Phyllis Schafly.
The panel featured that kind of Common Core opposition that creates a bit of a conundrum for those of us who support traditional public education. Because some of the people who oppose Common Core are (and I'm sorry to say this, because some of you are readers of this blog) peddling baloney. This is how challenging the Common Core debate has become-- here we are standing in front of our house telling our neighbor, "Do not take that sack of poisonous snakes into your home with your family," and we find ourselves joined on the sidewalk by another neighbor who joins in, hollering, "Yeah, don't take those snakes in there! They will make all the electrical circuits spit blood and cause your paint to peel."
So CPAC included people who somehow blamed CCSS for the teaching of sex education and evolution, as well as the usual concerns about informational reading being code for liberal propaganda. This was intermixed with legitimate points, such as the observation that there's not a lick of evidence to support the notion that broadly-accepted standards fix much of anything.
But mostly what CPAC featured re: Common Core was the Whiplash Brigade, a group of aspiring Presidential wanna-bes who lined up to take pot-shots at the policy initiative that had been, just a few years ago, their educational BFF. Haley Sweetland Edwards at Time noted the phenomenon that featured all the candidate hopefuls downplaying, distancing and demolishing their previous CCSS support. Well, all but one. Jeb Bush continues to signal that he is prepared to fight and die on Mount Common Core. Bush, however, reportedly depends on busloads of high-priced friends to back him, so that battle is not going well.
So who will hold Jindal and Christie and Walker and Huckabee accountable for their flip-floppage?
None other than newly-minted reformstress Campbell Brown, who took to the pages of the Washington Post to throw the "P" word at the assembled hopefuls-- pandering.
Pandering is a great word. Its definition, of course, is "offering support for a policy with which I disagree." Politicians who support policies I agree with are showing wisdom and vision, or at a minimum, smart realpolitik sense.
Brown lays out the history of Jindal and Christie re: Common Core and boils their defection down to this sentence:
All this, of course, is not about education. Or facts.
Her outrage that these politicians are making political choices for political reasons mirrors an argument often used by reformsters in arguments about the Core-- why are you bringing up these political points? why make this issue about politics instead of discussing the educational merits?
How dare these politicians abandon CCSS because desertion id politically expedient?
Well, those who live by political expediency die by political expediency.
Jindal, Christie, Walker, and a host of other politicians did not ever support the Core because they had looked at it and determined that it was a sound educational package. They did not have a team of blue ribbon teachers examine the standards in order to render a solid educational judgment by which politicians might be guided. Heck, in many cases, the governors threw state support behind the standards before they were even written!
Nor were the CCSS birthed in education in the first place. They were created by corporate interests at the behest of politicians (or maybe vice versa). From the earliest sparks, they were created with an eye on the political angle, not by asking how can we create great educational standards, but how can we get some standards adopted by the entire country.
State leaders were convinced that it would be politically expedient to adopt the standards, that like most political education playmaking, there would be plenty of upside and no downside (remember those days not so long ago when saying you were for better schools did not start a cranky debate?). The leaders would adopt the standards, the standards would be driven down through the educational system, and leaders would get to call themselves part of a great transformative movement that made US education awesome.
Guys like Jindal and Christie were never looking at the educational effects or the best interests of students. They were doing political calculus, and the CCSS forefathers were cheering them on.
It's very hard to change the rules of these games in mid-contest. Core proponents wanted the standards to become victorious in a game played by the rules of politics and power, and that's what they got. Sad for them that they didn't anticipate how those rules could work against them one day, but they can't cry "foul" because no foul. By the rules of the game they set out to play, dropping the core because it's politically expedient to do so is right there in the rulebook.
The Trouble with Belief
Belief is a big part of the reformster narrative put forth by the administration and its various proxies. The problem with low-achieving minority students and students with special needs, goes the narrative, is that both individual teachers and the institution of school itself do not believe that these students can learn or grow or achieve, and therefor they are denied a full-on education.
At the heart of this narrative is something that is absolutely, undeniably true-- so undeniably true that I don't know a single competent teacher who denies it.
To teach students, you must believe that they can learn. The degree to which you believe in their power and potential has a huge effect on what those students will actually achieve.
I think we would be hard-pressed to find anybody who disagrees with that. But once we get past that point, we start to encounter a great deal of argument and disagreement.
Some of the disagreement is manufactured, the result of a new attempt to use belief to bolster the stance of reformsters, particularly those in the charter camp. The stance goes something like this: "This charter school has achieved great and wonderful success. If you question our statements about that success, it can only be because you don't believe that our students could possibly be that successful." This is another variation on the Condoleezza Rice "charter opponents are racists" argument; it's not about establishing a dialogue, but about shutting people up.
In fact, we know the secrets of charter success, and one of them is the exact opposite of believing all students can learn. It's the secret most clearly articulated by Mike Petrilli of the Fordham, and that story goes something like this: in every low-achieving under-served school you will find a mix of students who could really achieve and students who are part of the problem, so we should use charters to rescue the students who can actually accomplish something.
Where charters succeed (or do at least as well as their public counterparts) it is because they believe only in certain students who meet certain qualifications and behave in certain ways and produce certain results. There are very few charters out there using a sales pitch of, "We believe that all students can succeed and we will accept any and all students and keep them till the bitter end, no matter what, because we will find a way to help them succeed."
Most charters are an expression of the same old belief system that has always marred the face of US public education-- there are some students who we believe in and some we don't. Charters just have the opportunity to gather only the students they believe in. That does not necessarily make charters evil or venal or dastardly, but it does mean that they have nothing to teach public schools, which must take all comers all year, about success and believing in students.
So when I say I'm not impressed by your story of charter success, I'm not saying that I don't believe that your students couldn't succeed or even didn't succeed. I am saying that 1) I have no reason to believe they wouldn't have been just as successful in a public school and 2) that there's very little that you've done in your charter school that is any help to me in a public school, where I will take any student at any time. And if I seem angry, I'm angry on behalf of all the other students that you abandoned in public schools where they must now make do with fewer resources because money and resources were stripped for the select few chosen for charterdom.
Belief is also a problem when it's used as an excuse to ignore the nuts and bolts of education. When belief becomes the linchpin of an argument that says, "You don't need money or a roof that doesn't leak or current textbooks for every single student or enrichment programs or a functional gym or the best administrators we have in the system or the best resources that money can buy-- you just need teachers who believe in those kids."
Do students in poor, minority schools deserve and need teachers who believe in them, in their promise, in their ability, in their potential? Absolutely. Is that the only thing they need? Absolutely not. Find me a rich white school in the 'burbs where the parents say, "Yeah, let's not spend any money on resources or upkeep for the school. Our kids have teachers who believe in them, so they don't need to have anything else at all."
For politicians and policymakers to say, "Yes, we believe in these young people, and that's why we're not going to fully fund their school," is a shameless crock. I'm in Pennsylvania, where the state government leads the nation in making school districts depend on local taxpayers for the bulk of school funding. This has had the predictable effect of making schools in poor areas poor. Belief is important and fundamental and essential, but the students of our poor districts also need resources, tools, a means of attracting and retaining top teaching talent. If politicians want to show how much they believe in the potential of young people, they need to put their money where their mouths are.
Belief is essential. Faith is great. But faith without works is a hollow, empty exercise.
That's because belief has limits. There's a point at which believing in a student goes past the point of being supportive and turns into being abusive. Good teachers try to find that balance every day. If I don't ask enough of a student, I have failed that student. But if I demand more than the student can give, I have also failed that student. There are hundreds of reasons not to believe in students, and they are all wrong and inexcusable. But it is also inexcusable to expect students to leap great barriers without help, support or guidance, just because we expect them to. Believing in the student means the whole student, including her challenges. We cannot overcome what we refuse to acknowledge, but we also can't overcome what we see as insurmountable. This is a hugely difficult balance, and it's here, more than anywhere else in the ongoing debate, we seem to find people refusing to acknowledge the difficulty and importance of this balance. Not all SPED students are placed because of institutional bias and lies, and not all of them are placed because they should be.
This, I think, is one of the reasons that we need more teachers who are rooted in the community where they teach. To actually teach a student, it's not just enough to believe in that student's ability and potential-- you have to be able to understand their world, their life, their background, their culture well enough to see past all of that to where their potential lies and what odds and ends it's hiding behind. This is why the theory of "Let's just move the effective teachers around" strikes me as a waste. I'm pretty effective where I am, but where I am is where I grew up-- I know the territory, I know the background, I know the culture. Transplant me to inner-city Philly, and I would be far less effective. I wouldn't believe in the students any less, but my ignorance of the neighborhood, the families, the culture would all be real deficiencies in me as a teacher and would stand in the way of my ability find connections between student potential and the world they want to enter. I would do my damnedest to learn what I needed to learn, to listen and watch and try to understand and overcome my ignorance, but I doubt that I could ever raise my game to the level of a teacher who has lived there for decades
There are other challenges with belief in the modern reformster era. We need, for instance, measures of student achievement broad enough to encompass all the many ways in which students can achieve. Saying "student achievement" when we mean "student scores on a narrow standardized math and reading test" is disingenuous, and grossly unfair to the students whose awesomeness lies in places other than standardized test taking.
And yes, teachers get testy and defensive when they are confronted with what amounts to the accusation, "Your students failed because you didn't believe in them," as if there isn't any other possible explanation. Blaming the player (We lost the game because you didn't want it enough) is sometimes the truth, but sometimes it's the first and last resort of the bad coach.
And the area where we will probably never find large-scale consensus is in the question of how student potential is affected by student circumstances. Do the most challenging circumstances actually change a child's potential, or do they just lock that potential away behind harder-to-breach barriers? How do we navigate the area between what the child can achieve and what the child will achieve?
I do agree with the core assertion-- teachers must believe that all students can achieve. It is hugely hard to do for every single student, but it's necessary. I know teachers who fail at it occasionally and teachers whose daily failure to believe in their students is the surest sign that they should get out of the teaching biz. But using "belief" as a rhetorical bludgeon or an excuse to sit on your hands does not help us move education forward.
At the heart of this narrative is something that is absolutely, undeniably true-- so undeniably true that I don't know a single competent teacher who denies it.
To teach students, you must believe that they can learn. The degree to which you believe in their power and potential has a huge effect on what those students will actually achieve.
I think we would be hard-pressed to find anybody who disagrees with that. But once we get past that point, we start to encounter a great deal of argument and disagreement.
Some of the disagreement is manufactured, the result of a new attempt to use belief to bolster the stance of reformsters, particularly those in the charter camp. The stance goes something like this: "This charter school has achieved great and wonderful success. If you question our statements about that success, it can only be because you don't believe that our students could possibly be that successful." This is another variation on the Condoleezza Rice "charter opponents are racists" argument; it's not about establishing a dialogue, but about shutting people up.
In fact, we know the secrets of charter success, and one of them is the exact opposite of believing all students can learn. It's the secret most clearly articulated by Mike Petrilli of the Fordham, and that story goes something like this: in every low-achieving under-served school you will find a mix of students who could really achieve and students who are part of the problem, so we should use charters to rescue the students who can actually accomplish something.
Where charters succeed (or do at least as well as their public counterparts) it is because they believe only in certain students who meet certain qualifications and behave in certain ways and produce certain results. There are very few charters out there using a sales pitch of, "We believe that all students can succeed and we will accept any and all students and keep them till the bitter end, no matter what, because we will find a way to help them succeed."
Most charters are an expression of the same old belief system that has always marred the face of US public education-- there are some students who we believe in and some we don't. Charters just have the opportunity to gather only the students they believe in. That does not necessarily make charters evil or venal or dastardly, but it does mean that they have nothing to teach public schools, which must take all comers all year, about success and believing in students.
So when I say I'm not impressed by your story of charter success, I'm not saying that I don't believe that your students couldn't succeed or even didn't succeed. I am saying that 1) I have no reason to believe they wouldn't have been just as successful in a public school and 2) that there's very little that you've done in your charter school that is any help to me in a public school, where I will take any student at any time. And if I seem angry, I'm angry on behalf of all the other students that you abandoned in public schools where they must now make do with fewer resources because money and resources were stripped for the select few chosen for charterdom.
Belief is also a problem when it's used as an excuse to ignore the nuts and bolts of education. When belief becomes the linchpin of an argument that says, "You don't need money or a roof that doesn't leak or current textbooks for every single student or enrichment programs or a functional gym or the best administrators we have in the system or the best resources that money can buy-- you just need teachers who believe in those kids."
Do students in poor, minority schools deserve and need teachers who believe in them, in their promise, in their ability, in their potential? Absolutely. Is that the only thing they need? Absolutely not. Find me a rich white school in the 'burbs where the parents say, "Yeah, let's not spend any money on resources or upkeep for the school. Our kids have teachers who believe in them, so they don't need to have anything else at all."
For politicians and policymakers to say, "Yes, we believe in these young people, and that's why we're not going to fully fund their school," is a shameless crock. I'm in Pennsylvania, where the state government leads the nation in making school districts depend on local taxpayers for the bulk of school funding. This has had the predictable effect of making schools in poor areas poor. Belief is important and fundamental and essential, but the students of our poor districts also need resources, tools, a means of attracting and retaining top teaching talent. If politicians want to show how much they believe in the potential of young people, they need to put their money where their mouths are.
Belief is essential. Faith is great. But faith without works is a hollow, empty exercise.
That's because belief has limits. There's a point at which believing in a student goes past the point of being supportive and turns into being abusive. Good teachers try to find that balance every day. If I don't ask enough of a student, I have failed that student. But if I demand more than the student can give, I have also failed that student. There are hundreds of reasons not to believe in students, and they are all wrong and inexcusable. But it is also inexcusable to expect students to leap great barriers without help, support or guidance, just because we expect them to. Believing in the student means the whole student, including her challenges. We cannot overcome what we refuse to acknowledge, but we also can't overcome what we see as insurmountable. This is a hugely difficult balance, and it's here, more than anywhere else in the ongoing debate, we seem to find people refusing to acknowledge the difficulty and importance of this balance. Not all SPED students are placed because of institutional bias and lies, and not all of them are placed because they should be.
This, I think, is one of the reasons that we need more teachers who are rooted in the community where they teach. To actually teach a student, it's not just enough to believe in that student's ability and potential-- you have to be able to understand their world, their life, their background, their culture well enough to see past all of that to where their potential lies and what odds and ends it's hiding behind. This is why the theory of "Let's just move the effective teachers around" strikes me as a waste. I'm pretty effective where I am, but where I am is where I grew up-- I know the territory, I know the background, I know the culture. Transplant me to inner-city Philly, and I would be far less effective. I wouldn't believe in the students any less, but my ignorance of the neighborhood, the families, the culture would all be real deficiencies in me as a teacher and would stand in the way of my ability find connections between student potential and the world they want to enter. I would do my damnedest to learn what I needed to learn, to listen and watch and try to understand and overcome my ignorance, but I doubt that I could ever raise my game to the level of a teacher who has lived there for decades
There are other challenges with belief in the modern reformster era. We need, for instance, measures of student achievement broad enough to encompass all the many ways in which students can achieve. Saying "student achievement" when we mean "student scores on a narrow standardized math and reading test" is disingenuous, and grossly unfair to the students whose awesomeness lies in places other than standardized test taking.
And yes, teachers get testy and defensive when they are confronted with what amounts to the accusation, "Your students failed because you didn't believe in them," as if there isn't any other possible explanation. Blaming the player (We lost the game because you didn't want it enough) is sometimes the truth, but sometimes it's the first and last resort of the bad coach.
And the area where we will probably never find large-scale consensus is in the question of how student potential is affected by student circumstances. Do the most challenging circumstances actually change a child's potential, or do they just lock that potential away behind harder-to-breach barriers? How do we navigate the area between what the child can achieve and what the child will achieve?
I do agree with the core assertion-- teachers must believe that all students can achieve. It is hugely hard to do for every single student, but it's necessary. I know teachers who fail at it occasionally and teachers whose daily failure to believe in their students is the surest sign that they should get out of the teaching biz. But using "belief" as a rhetorical bludgeon or an excuse to sit on your hands does not help us move education forward.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Coleman's CCSS Writing Style
Back in the summer of 2011, the Hunt Institute (they work at "the intersection of policy and politics," so right at the corner of Corporate Lobbying Way and Educational Profiteering Avenue, just across from where Lobbyist Alley empties into the sewers) produced a series of promotional videos for the Common Core.
I find it instructive to look at these older materials about the Core because reformsters were speaking so much more plainly back then, and said so many things that they would later try to pretend they'd never uttered at all.
So today's featured video is "Writing To Inform and Make Arguments." I should explain right up front that this is not one in a series of videos showing the many different types of writing required by the Common Core; this one video covers all the writing you'll ever need to be Common Core Compliant. I'll just go ahead and put the video here before I talk about it-- just so you know that I'm not making any of this up.
Yes, this video features our old buddy David Coleman and his sidekick Susan Pimentel. Let's go.
Pimentel is up first. You know she's the kind of expert you want writing language standards because she's a lawyer who has done tons of consulting work at schools, plus all sorts of edu-ronin work for the Waltons.
Pimentel lets us know there are three types of writing expected by the Core-- "to argue, to inform and explain, and to tell a story."
"Narrative writing is given early prominence, as it should, in elementary school" because narrative writing is, apparently , for small children. But eventually it "gives way" to the other types, the "analytical types" of writing so that by high school, analytical writing should take up 80% of their assigned writing. Not a shock coming from the folks who believe in 75% "informative" texts. I suppose poetry is completely off the table.
In mid-sentence, we fade over to Coleman, wearing what I've come to think of as his thoughtful, serious face. He does his best to avoid any of those unctuous self-satisfied expressions he uses in interviews, tilts his head to one side, and uses the soft, soothing tone of voice one uses with slow children and volatile crazy persons.
At any rate, he's here to earnestly tell us that this analytical writing "is much more closely connected to the demands of college and career." I have nothing against analytical writing, but I have to say that among my many students who have gone on to successful welding careers I have rarely heard of a regular demand for analytical papers.
The two important things in college and career, says Coleman, is to be able to argue using evidence and to be able to inform and take complex information and make it clear. Okay, that might be three things. Coleman's construction is such that it renders his informing a little unclear. See, for the first time, there will be a sequence from K through 12 to get students used to providing evidence for things they write to support and argument or to support clear informative writing. And "of course narrative has a marvelous role in narrative as well." Really.
Coleman tells us that the Core focuses on "short, focused research projects," which is yet another of those "the Core says X" formulations that has no actual basis in what's actually written in the Core. I actually agree with Coleman that several short projects can be preferable to the old One Big Project a Year approach, but he delivers this with an eyebrow parched expression that seems to say, "How you could possibly think about giving back my ring and killing our puppy?" Then Coleman goes a step further to say that such short, focused research is essential to college and career readiness.
Now comes the real fun.
"Good writing comes from good reading," says Coleman (and a graphic). Gathering evidence from the reading becomes the basis for excellent writing, says Coleman. This is not really a surprise-- Coleman seems to believe that students should read texts with the goal of being able to write college papers about them, so it only makes sense that the purpose of writing would be to show what details you can transfer out of a text. Now, he does want you to know that narrative writing is still in there, and that it helps with the core concepts of creativity and precision (wait-- was creativity in the standards somewhere? because that would be news).
Coleman drives to the finish by saying that when you talk to authors, whether authors of literature, polemics or clear informative pieces, "that precision and command of evidence is at the heart of their work and craft." And it's also at the heart of college and career readiness. Boy, is he earnest. It's hard to believe that this is the same guy who smirked when he said that when you grow up, you learn that nobody gives a shit what you think or feel.
And Pimentel's back, to say that the Core asks students to learn many ways to present data and information (which I guess is meant to underline how the Core embraces the whole world of human expression from A to B). She tries to say something about how student writing in different classes might be different, but that point comes out as a sort of muddled mess. Almost as if she doesn't really know exactly what she's talking about.
We can get the easy criticism out of the way first. In this piece about the importance of using details and evidence to support writing, the presenters include zero detail and evidence to support their assertions about writing, including their bold assertion that the techniques they require are the essential element of all college and career success. But this not news; Coleman's MO has always been to present his ideas without evidence or support. One of the most remarkable features about his work as a public education policy scholar is that he never cites the work of another authority-- Coleman's ideas presumably spring full-blown from his own fertile mind without the need for any other scholars, writers, thought leaders, or researchers.
What the video has to say about writing is not wrong. It's just not the whole picture.
It's certainly not wrong to find a link between good writing and good reading. But it shows an astonishingly narrow focus to suggest that the entire purpose of writing is to convey evidence that you have gathered from a piece of reading. In Coleman's universe, you read so that you can write a good paper for class, and you write a paper so that you can show how well you read. It's like suggesting that the purpose of an automobile is to go get groceries; that's certainly a good and worthwhile purpose, but is that really the only reason you're ever going to get the Buick out of the garage?
We write to express something that we have to say, that we want to say. I often tell my students that their writing problems are based in asking the wrong question-- instead of asking "What do I want to say about this" they ask "what can I write to fulfill this assignment." Do I expect them to include support and evidence that helps them say what they have to say? Sure. But support and evidence are just one of many hows, and for Coleman they seem to be the only how, or even the what. Coleman continually reminds me of students I've had who didn't really want to say anything-- they just wanted the teacher to praise them for being Really Smart.
Recently, Maria Popova at the indispensable Brain Pickings wrote a piece about William Faulkner and the question of why write. She includes a list of links to many authors' answer to the question, but she offers a hefty quote from Faulkner himself. It's long, but I'm including it anyway.
The answer to "Why read" or "Why write" is not "To get a really good grade in class." It is not even "to succeed in college and in my career," because that just transfers the "why" down the line. I believe the answer is to better grasp what it means to be human and alive and here on this planet. I believe the answer is that we try to better understand ourselves and the people around us so that we can better serve and aid and support each other, and come one step closer to being the best version of ourselves we can become in the short time we have here on the planet. At the very least, we are here to take joy in what makes us human whenever we can, and to help others embrace the opportunity to experience that joy.
Coleman and Pimentel offer a Common Core vision that is small and cramped and stunted. They have found an elephant's toe nail clipping and think it represents the entire animal.
I find it instructive to look at these older materials about the Core because reformsters were speaking so much more plainly back then, and said so many things that they would later try to pretend they'd never uttered at all.
So today's featured video is "Writing To Inform and Make Arguments." I should explain right up front that this is not one in a series of videos showing the many different types of writing required by the Common Core; this one video covers all the writing you'll ever need to be Common Core Compliant. I'll just go ahead and put the video here before I talk about it-- just so you know that I'm not making any of this up.
Yes, this video features our old buddy David Coleman and his sidekick Susan Pimentel. Let's go.
Pimentel is up first. You know she's the kind of expert you want writing language standards because she's a lawyer who has done tons of consulting work at schools, plus all sorts of edu-ronin work for the Waltons.
Pimentel lets us know there are three types of writing expected by the Core-- "to argue, to inform and explain, and to tell a story."
"Narrative writing is given early prominence, as it should, in elementary school" because narrative writing is, apparently , for small children. But eventually it "gives way" to the other types, the "analytical types" of writing so that by high school, analytical writing should take up 80% of their assigned writing. Not a shock coming from the folks who believe in 75% "informative" texts. I suppose poetry is completely off the table.
In mid-sentence, we fade over to Coleman, wearing what I've come to think of as his thoughtful, serious face. He does his best to avoid any of those unctuous self-satisfied expressions he uses in interviews, tilts his head to one side, and uses the soft, soothing tone of voice one uses with slow children and volatile crazy persons.
At any rate, he's here to earnestly tell us that this analytical writing "is much more closely connected to the demands of college and career." I have nothing against analytical writing, but I have to say that among my many students who have gone on to successful welding careers I have rarely heard of a regular demand for analytical papers.
The two important things in college and career, says Coleman, is to be able to argue using evidence and to be able to inform and take complex information and make it clear. Okay, that might be three things. Coleman's construction is such that it renders his informing a little unclear. See, for the first time, there will be a sequence from K through 12 to get students used to providing evidence for things they write to support and argument or to support clear informative writing. And "of course narrative has a marvelous role in narrative as well." Really.
Coleman tells us that the Core focuses on "short, focused research projects," which is yet another of those "the Core says X" formulations that has no actual basis in what's actually written in the Core. I actually agree with Coleman that several short projects can be preferable to the old One Big Project a Year approach, but he delivers this with an eyebrow parched expression that seems to say, "How you could possibly think about giving back my ring and killing our puppy?" Then Coleman goes a step further to say that such short, focused research is essential to college and career readiness.
Now comes the real fun.
"Good writing comes from good reading," says Coleman (and a graphic). Gathering evidence from the reading becomes the basis for excellent writing, says Coleman. This is not really a surprise-- Coleman seems to believe that students should read texts with the goal of being able to write college papers about them, so it only makes sense that the purpose of writing would be to show what details you can transfer out of a text. Now, he does want you to know that narrative writing is still in there, and that it helps with the core concepts of creativity and precision (wait-- was creativity in the standards somewhere? because that would be news).
Coleman drives to the finish by saying that when you talk to authors, whether authors of literature, polemics or clear informative pieces, "that precision and command of evidence is at the heart of their work and craft." And it's also at the heart of college and career readiness. Boy, is he earnest. It's hard to believe that this is the same guy who smirked when he said that when you grow up, you learn that nobody gives a shit what you think or feel.
And Pimentel's back, to say that the Core asks students to learn many ways to present data and information (which I guess is meant to underline how the Core embraces the whole world of human expression from A to B). She tries to say something about how student writing in different classes might be different, but that point comes out as a sort of muddled mess. Almost as if she doesn't really know exactly what she's talking about.
We can get the easy criticism out of the way first. In this piece about the importance of using details and evidence to support writing, the presenters include zero detail and evidence to support their assertions about writing, including their bold assertion that the techniques they require are the essential element of all college and career success. But this not news; Coleman's MO has always been to present his ideas without evidence or support. One of the most remarkable features about his work as a public education policy scholar is that he never cites the work of another authority-- Coleman's ideas presumably spring full-blown from his own fertile mind without the need for any other scholars, writers, thought leaders, or researchers.
What the video has to say about writing is not wrong. It's just not the whole picture.
It's certainly not wrong to find a link between good writing and good reading. But it shows an astonishingly narrow focus to suggest that the entire purpose of writing is to convey evidence that you have gathered from a piece of reading. In Coleman's universe, you read so that you can write a good paper for class, and you write a paper so that you can show how well you read. It's like suggesting that the purpose of an automobile is to go get groceries; that's certainly a good and worthwhile purpose, but is that really the only reason you're ever going to get the Buick out of the garage?
We write to express something that we have to say, that we want to say. I often tell my students that their writing problems are based in asking the wrong question-- instead of asking "What do I want to say about this" they ask "what can I write to fulfill this assignment." Do I expect them to include support and evidence that helps them say what they have to say? Sure. But support and evidence are just one of many hows, and for Coleman they seem to be the only how, or even the what. Coleman continually reminds me of students I've had who didn't really want to say anything-- they just wanted the teacher to praise them for being Really Smart.
Recently, Maria Popova at the indispensable Brain Pickings wrote a piece about William Faulkner and the question of why write. She includes a list of links to many authors' answer to the question, but she offers a hefty quote from Faulkner himself. It's long, but I'm including it anyway.
You’re alive in the world. You see man. You have an insatiable curiosity about him, but more than that you have an admiration for him. He is frail and fragile, a web of flesh and bone and mostly water. He’s flung willy nilly into a ramshackle universe stuck together with electricity. The problems he faces are always a little bigger than he is, and yet, amazingly enough, he copes with them — not individually but as a race.
He endures.
He’s outlasted dinosaurs. He’s outlasted atom bombs. He’ll outlast communism. Simply because there’s some part in him that keeps him from ever knowing that he’s whipped, I suppose; that as frail as he is, he lives up to his codes of behavior. He shows compassion when there’s no reason why he should. He’s braver than he should be. He’s more honest.
The writer is so interested — he sees this as so amazing and you might say so beautiful… It’s so moving to him that he wants to put it down on paper or in music or on canvas, that he simply wants to isolate one of these instances in which man — frail, foolish man — has acted miles above his head in some amusing or dramatic or tragic way… some gallant way.
That, I suppose, is the incentive to write, apart from it being fun. I sort of believe that is the reason that people are artists. It’s the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there’s always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do. You’re never bored. You never reach satiation.Some people are going to say, well, yeah, right, that's a motivation if you are going to be an author of great literature. I disagree.
The answer to "Why read" or "Why write" is not "To get a really good grade in class." It is not even "to succeed in college and in my career," because that just transfers the "why" down the line. I believe the answer is to better grasp what it means to be human and alive and here on this planet. I believe the answer is that we try to better understand ourselves and the people around us so that we can better serve and aid and support each other, and come one step closer to being the best version of ourselves we can become in the short time we have here on the planet. At the very least, we are here to take joy in what makes us human whenever we can, and to help others embrace the opportunity to experience that joy.
Coleman and Pimentel offer a Common Core vision that is small and cramped and stunted. They have found an elephant's toe nail clipping and think it represents the entire animal.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Politics and ESEA
As we come down to the first of many wires on the next of many rewrites of ESEA, Politico provides a nail-biting tale of House Republicans looking to make sure they have the votes, while Andy Smarick has provided a handy chart of the range of political stances, ideas, and versions of a new ESEA.
The pieces are instructive. Smarick in particular shows how the various proposals, from Lamar Alexander's to NGA to FEE to-- hmmm, I don't see anything from Secretary Duncan on here. Almost as if he's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Anyway, it's an easy to size up look at the various political positions on the ESEA rewrite. As such it is somewhat informative and entirely depressing.
Likewise, the Politico piece which approaches the rewriting of ESEA as if it's a political office deserving the same horse-race style coverage of a battle for the job of Mayor of Chicago. Also depressing?
Why depressing? Because both pieces are a reminder that the one thing that is not being discussed with any degree of fervor or intensity or even at all is the educational basis for any of these choices. Many of the policy discussions (say, the desire for an eternal onslaught of standardized testing) could be informed by actual research and facts and stuff, but they won't be. ESEA could be rewritten in an atmosphere in which lawmakers and policy writers sit quietly and listen to what actual teachers and educators and researchers (real researchers, not thinky tank un-peer non-reviewed opinion pieces) have to say.
That's not going to happen, and I'm enough of a big boy to understand that that's not how the world works when it comes to any policy. I understand we've crafted a system where expertise and knowledge are often dwarfed by money and power, and that it's hard to have any kind of political system that tries to organize representative government will tilt in that direction. I'm a grown-up. I get it. I'm not going to sit and moan about how we should be living in some non-political utopia where lions and lambs lie down together and the birds and the bees sing kumbayyah. We live in the real world, and this is part of that.
But, by God, the next time some reformster wants to complain that the opponents of Common Core and standardized testing and charter schools keep politicizing things instead of discussing educational policies on their educational merits, I'm going to refer him back to these two pieces. It's time to watch, once again, how the sausage is made, and it's not made out of educational pieces-parts in an educational sausage factory. It's political sausage made at a political sausagefest.
This is a reminder to teachers who want to stay home and say, "Well, I don't want to get my hands dirty with political stuff" that they are opting out of making the decisions that they have to live with. And it's a reminder that "Why must you make this so political?" is another way to say, "I'd like you to go back to being uninvolved and ineffective, please."
The pieces are instructive. Smarick in particular shows how the various proposals, from Lamar Alexander's to NGA to FEE to-- hmmm, I don't see anything from Secretary Duncan on here. Almost as if he's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Anyway, it's an easy to size up look at the various political positions on the ESEA rewrite. As such it is somewhat informative and entirely depressing.
Likewise, the Politico piece which approaches the rewriting of ESEA as if it's a political office deserving the same horse-race style coverage of a battle for the job of Mayor of Chicago. Also depressing?
Why depressing? Because both pieces are a reminder that the one thing that is not being discussed with any degree of fervor or intensity or even at all is the educational basis for any of these choices. Many of the policy discussions (say, the desire for an eternal onslaught of standardized testing) could be informed by actual research and facts and stuff, but they won't be. ESEA could be rewritten in an atmosphere in which lawmakers and policy writers sit quietly and listen to what actual teachers and educators and researchers (real researchers, not thinky tank un-peer non-reviewed opinion pieces) have to say.
That's not going to happen, and I'm enough of a big boy to understand that that's not how the world works when it comes to any policy. I understand we've crafted a system where expertise and knowledge are often dwarfed by money and power, and that it's hard to have any kind of political system that tries to organize representative government will tilt in that direction. I'm a grown-up. I get it. I'm not going to sit and moan about how we should be living in some non-political utopia where lions and lambs lie down together and the birds and the bees sing kumbayyah. We live in the real world, and this is part of that.
But, by God, the next time some reformster wants to complain that the opponents of Common Core and standardized testing and charter schools keep politicizing things instead of discussing educational policies on their educational merits, I'm going to refer him back to these two pieces. It's time to watch, once again, how the sausage is made, and it's not made out of educational pieces-parts in an educational sausage factory. It's political sausage made at a political sausagefest.
This is a reminder to teachers who want to stay home and say, "Well, I don't want to get my hands dirty with political stuff" that they are opting out of making the decisions that they have to live with. And it's a reminder that "Why must you make this so political?" is another way to say, "I'd like you to go back to being uninvolved and ineffective, please."
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Teaching: Too Hard for Teachers
What exactly is a teacher's job? I have generally felt that I know the answer, but in these reformy times I have moments when I wonder.
I had one such moment today, reading this piece from The Hechinger Report entitled "Common Core's Unintended Consequence." The subheading of this piece by Jonathan Sapers tells us what that dreadful, unintended, potentially tragic consequence might be-- "More teachers write their own curricula." Clearly an unexpected tragic side effect of Common Core is that some teachers have forgotten what their proper place is.
OMG! How did such a terrible thing happen!!
According to many teachers, experts and advocates of the Common Core, traditional curriculum sources haven’t been meeting the demands of the new set of math and English standards that have been rolled out in more than 40 states in the past few years. More and more teachers are scrapping off-the-shelf lessons and searching for replacements on the Internet or writing new curriculum materials themselves.
Yes, it's true. Because of a failure of the education materials publishing industry, teachers out there are being forced to find their own teaching materials. Some are even-- choke-- designing teaching materials all by themselves! Oh, the humanity!!
The Center on Education Policy (CEP), a nonpartisan research group, reports that in roughly two-thirds of districts in Common Core states, teachers have developed or are developing their own curricular materials in math (66 percent) and English Language Arts (65 percent). In more than 80 percent of districts, the CEP found that at least one source for curriculum materials was local — from teachers, the district itself or other districts in the state.
Local materials!?! Good heavens! How can teachers hope to create teaching materials?! Don't they understand that they are only teachers?? Do they imagine that just because they went to college and got a degree and completed student teaching and have spent some amount of time in a classroom with students-- I mean, do they think all that qualifies them to create instructional materials?!
Whose fault is this?
Authorities (by which, of course, I mean people other than teachers, who are clearly not authorities on any of this important educational stuff) seem to feel that a large part of the blame lies with publishing companies that have been creating books that do not perfectly align with the Common Core Standards, leaving poor dazed and confused educators to fill in the gaps. At least, they say it's an alignment problem. I know many elementary teachers who seem to think that their Common Core teaching materials involve techniques and a pace that does not actually result in "learning" among actual live "students."
These teachers, whose frustration has driven them to the crazy-ass step of trying to come up with their own materials have been aided and abetted by teacher sharing sites-- places like Teachers Pay Teachers and Sharemylesson.com. But those sites are Very Highly Questionable, because the materials there have been developed by mere teachers, and what the hell do they know?
Potential disasters in the making
Sapers notes that there is research soon to be published that "seems to confirm teachers’ predicament." I can only assume that by "predicament" he means teachers finding themselves trapped in the terrible, terrible position of creating teaching materials for their classrooms. Oh, the woe.
The research will be coming from William Schmidt at the Center for the Study of Curriculum at Michigan State University. Schmidt is concerned:
“It’s a rather elaborate and extensive endeavor to write instructional materials for a whole year, and I think that no one should expect that teachers have the time nor the professional background to do that.”
Yes, this is what it has come to. Teachers designing teaching materials. Teachers delivering lessons. Teachers coming up with their own assignments and assessments and then-- gasp-- actually grading those assignments and assessments.And doing it all with nothing more than the training, education and experience that comes with being a teacher. It is enough to make one weep.
Sapers reports that some brave administrators have tried to aid in this process. For instance, there's principal Shelley Ritz from the Belle Chasse Primary School in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish. Her teachers were totes thrilled about the Common Core.
“Who doesn’t want their child to read grade-level appropriate texts? Answer questions taking evidence from the text? That’s awesome. But how to help that evolve into a curriculum? We’re not curriculum writers. There are companies that are paid millions and millions of dollars to do the research.”
It was frustrating, she said. “There was limited understanding of how to create curriculum, lesson plans and assessments from scratch. And who knew if the final products were correct?”
Who indeed? Clearly classroom teachers lack the professional knowledge and ability to know whether the materials they are using in their classroom with their students are effective or not.
Some good news from our sponsors
Incidentally, Schmidt and the Center have a new product that will allow teachers to get their textbooks lined up properly and direct them to the proper materials for filling any gaps. Because they want to help the poor lost teachers trapped in classroom armed with nothing but their inadequate teaching wits and their tiny unprofessional brains. So, thanks for that Center.
Plus, the folks at Student Achievement Partners, founded by some of the Common Core creators who developed those standards with a deep understanding of education unencumbered by any actual direct knowledge of the teaching profession-- those guys have also developed a tool to help teachers find teaching materials.
Seriously, this has to stop
Before you know it, doctors will be doing diagnosis and prescription on their own without deferring to the superior medical knowledge of drug salesmen.
Teaching is a noble profession, devoted to delivering and implementing the teaching programs created for them by the wise education thought leaders of publishing and government bureaucratacy (and, actually, there are so few of these superior individuals that they have to balance working for both corporations and government). As teacher, our place is simply to deliver the content that Far Smarter People have designed. I mean, Common Core Standards are just more than we could hope to grasp, and we need to back away from our misguided impulses to create our own materials before we hurt ourselves.
I for one will be going to school tomorrow to burn my files of teacher-created materials, dump all my teacher-created worksheets and unit plans into a landfill somewhere, and just sit patiently, my hands folded, waiting for instructions from my betters. I'll use no materials that haven't been passed down by the Proper Authorities, and I will never add anything to them without direct instructions from Certified Educational Thought Leaders.
After all, what the hell do I know about teaching? I'm just a teacher.
I had one such moment today, reading this piece from The Hechinger Report entitled "Common Core's Unintended Consequence." The subheading of this piece by Jonathan Sapers tells us what that dreadful, unintended, potentially tragic consequence might be-- "More teachers write their own curricula." Clearly an unexpected tragic side effect of Common Core is that some teachers have forgotten what their proper place is.
OMG! How did such a terrible thing happen!!
According to many teachers, experts and advocates of the Common Core, traditional curriculum sources haven’t been meeting the demands of the new set of math and English standards that have been rolled out in more than 40 states in the past few years. More and more teachers are scrapping off-the-shelf lessons and searching for replacements on the Internet or writing new curriculum materials themselves.
Yes, it's true. Because of a failure of the education materials publishing industry, teachers out there are being forced to find their own teaching materials. Some are even-- choke-- designing teaching materials all by themselves! Oh, the humanity!!
The Center on Education Policy (CEP), a nonpartisan research group, reports that in roughly two-thirds of districts in Common Core states, teachers have developed or are developing their own curricular materials in math (66 percent) and English Language Arts (65 percent). In more than 80 percent of districts, the CEP found that at least one source for curriculum materials was local — from teachers, the district itself or other districts in the state.
Local materials!?! Good heavens! How can teachers hope to create teaching materials?! Don't they understand that they are only teachers?? Do they imagine that just because they went to college and got a degree and completed student teaching and have spent some amount of time in a classroom with students-- I mean, do they think all that qualifies them to create instructional materials?!
Whose fault is this?
Authorities (by which, of course, I mean people other than teachers, who are clearly not authorities on any of this important educational stuff) seem to feel that a large part of the blame lies with publishing companies that have been creating books that do not perfectly align with the Common Core Standards, leaving poor dazed and confused educators to fill in the gaps. At least, they say it's an alignment problem. I know many elementary teachers who seem to think that their Common Core teaching materials involve techniques and a pace that does not actually result in "learning" among actual live "students."
These teachers, whose frustration has driven them to the crazy-ass step of trying to come up with their own materials have been aided and abetted by teacher sharing sites-- places like Teachers Pay Teachers and Sharemylesson.com. But those sites are Very Highly Questionable, because the materials there have been developed by mere teachers, and what the hell do they know?
Potential disasters in the making
Sapers notes that there is research soon to be published that "seems to confirm teachers’ predicament." I can only assume that by "predicament" he means teachers finding themselves trapped in the terrible, terrible position of creating teaching materials for their classrooms. Oh, the woe.
The research will be coming from William Schmidt at the Center for the Study of Curriculum at Michigan State University. Schmidt is concerned:
“It’s a rather elaborate and extensive endeavor to write instructional materials for a whole year, and I think that no one should expect that teachers have the time nor the professional background to do that.”
Yes, this is what it has come to. Teachers designing teaching materials. Teachers delivering lessons. Teachers coming up with their own assignments and assessments and then-- gasp-- actually grading those assignments and assessments.And doing it all with nothing more than the training, education and experience that comes with being a teacher. It is enough to make one weep.
Sapers reports that some brave administrators have tried to aid in this process. For instance, there's principal Shelley Ritz from the Belle Chasse Primary School in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish. Her teachers were totes thrilled about the Common Core.
“Who doesn’t want their child to read grade-level appropriate texts? Answer questions taking evidence from the text? That’s awesome. But how to help that evolve into a curriculum? We’re not curriculum writers. There are companies that are paid millions and millions of dollars to do the research.”
It was frustrating, she said. “There was limited understanding of how to create curriculum, lesson plans and assessments from scratch. And who knew if the final products were correct?”
Who indeed? Clearly classroom teachers lack the professional knowledge and ability to know whether the materials they are using in their classroom with their students are effective or not.
Some good news from our sponsors
Incidentally, Schmidt and the Center have a new product that will allow teachers to get their textbooks lined up properly and direct them to the proper materials for filling any gaps. Because they want to help the poor lost teachers trapped in classroom armed with nothing but their inadequate teaching wits and their tiny unprofessional brains. So, thanks for that Center.
Plus, the folks at Student Achievement Partners, founded by some of the Common Core creators who developed those standards with a deep understanding of education unencumbered by any actual direct knowledge of the teaching profession-- those guys have also developed a tool to help teachers find teaching materials.
Seriously, this has to stop
Before you know it, doctors will be doing diagnosis and prescription on their own without deferring to the superior medical knowledge of drug salesmen.
Teaching is a noble profession, devoted to delivering and implementing the teaching programs created for them by the wise education thought leaders of publishing and government bureaucratacy (and, actually, there are so few of these superior individuals that they have to balance working for both corporations and government). As teacher, our place is simply to deliver the content that Far Smarter People have designed. I mean, Common Core Standards are just more than we could hope to grasp, and we need to back away from our misguided impulses to create our own materials before we hurt ourselves.
I for one will be going to school tomorrow to burn my files of teacher-created materials, dump all my teacher-created worksheets and unit plans into a landfill somewhere, and just sit patiently, my hands folded, waiting for instructions from my betters. I'll use no materials that haven't been passed down by the Proper Authorities, and I will never add anything to them without direct instructions from Certified Educational Thought Leaders.
After all, what the hell do I know about teaching? I'm just a teacher.
Schools Offer Teacher Test Bonuses
In a move of incredible cheapness and stunted vision, the school leaders of Tipp City, Ohio, have decided to institute performance based pay. It's a good look at just how ridiculous such a system would be.
Tipp City is a bit north of Dayton and has a population of just under 10K. It used to be named Tippecanoe, and was later Tippecanoe City, but there's another Tippecanoe in Ohio and so Tipp City had its name changed. This was apparently a big deal. Fun fact: Kim Deal of the Pixies is from Tipp City.
The school district actually conducted its own phone survey, and respondents overwhelmingly rated the district's education excellent, and its use of tax dollars good.
But the phone survey also touched on another issue facing Tipp Schools--
Tipp City lost many teachers last year to higher paying jobs and nearly 40% of teachers reported they were looking or planned to look for jobs elsewhere. Do you think this is a very important, somewhat important, or not very important concern?
61.1% of respondents (who were overwhelmingly old and without children in the system, because apparently this phone survey was run during the daytime) rated that a Very Important Concern. It came in behind older schools' lack of modern facilities, and the too-small, run-down sports stadium as an important issue for the district. However, because this is Ohio, a state in which schools must go hat in hand to the voters for everything, the survey also checked on support for raising taxes to pay for holding onto teachers. From this we learn that there's a certain percentage of folks who want teachers to stay-- they just don't want to pay for it personally.
So why are Tipp City schools having a personnel problem? They spend less per pupil than eighteen of the surrounding twenty districts. Their personnel problem might be that the teachers have been frozen on their salary step for four years, and for two of those years they have had no cost-of-living increase, which means two years of real-money pay cuts. Working for Tipps is worse than working for tips.
In fact, things have gotten so bad that Tipp teachers are in the midst of forming a union. Seriously. This is playing well locally:
“I am incensed over the fact that we stand on the precipice of having a union in this town,” resident Pete Schinaman said. Schinaman is the co-chair of the levy campaign. He asked the board what could have been done to prevent the teachers association from forming.
Which brings us back to the merit pay.
This is not merit pay as in "additional pay above your step." This is merit pay as in "we're scrapping the entire pay scale and replacing it with this." The proposal is that teachers rated "accomplished" get a 1% raise. (Yes, that's 1 %, with a 1.) "Skilled" teachers get a .75% raise, and "developing" teachers get a .5%. Some quick math tells us that for someone currently stranded on a $50K pay step, the resulting raise will range from $500 down to $250.
So, still losing real dollars every year. I can't imagine why these teachers felt the need to unionize.
I am not sure on which planet this classifies as "trying to retain talented and capable teachers." I'm pretty sure that it sends a clear message and the message is, "If you're waiting for us to finally reinstate a decent pay program, you can stop waiting and start freshening up that resume."
Meanwhile, while other Ohio superintendents are standing up to the state over high-stakes testing, Tipp City's super has sent out a letter reminding parents that while they can opt out, they really shouldn't because it will have bad consequences for the schools, the community and maybe their child, and if they want to opt out, they'll have to do it in person or by phone. Did I mention that administrators can earn up to 3% raises?
So, good luck to you, Tipp City Exempted Village Schools! You have identified a problem and a need, and you have responded to it with a resounding thud, an idea so small and unhelpful that it seems more like mockery than a real attempt to help your teachers thrive and survive, like leaving a one cent tip for the wait-person instead of stiffing them entirely. I hope you enjoy your new union, but if you're worried about that, don't fret, because teachers will probably be too busy packing to bother joining in the first place.
Tipp City is a bit north of Dayton and has a population of just under 10K. It used to be named Tippecanoe, and was later Tippecanoe City, but there's another Tippecanoe in Ohio and so Tipp City had its name changed. This was apparently a big deal. Fun fact: Kim Deal of the Pixies is from Tipp City.
The school district actually conducted its own phone survey, and respondents overwhelmingly rated the district's education excellent, and its use of tax dollars good.
But the phone survey also touched on another issue facing Tipp Schools--
Tipp City lost many teachers last year to higher paying jobs and nearly 40% of teachers reported they were looking or planned to look for jobs elsewhere. Do you think this is a very important, somewhat important, or not very important concern?
61.1% of respondents (who were overwhelmingly old and without children in the system, because apparently this phone survey was run during the daytime) rated that a Very Important Concern. It came in behind older schools' lack of modern facilities, and the too-small, run-down sports stadium as an important issue for the district. However, because this is Ohio, a state in which schools must go hat in hand to the voters for everything, the survey also checked on support for raising taxes to pay for holding onto teachers. From this we learn that there's a certain percentage of folks who want teachers to stay-- they just don't want to pay for it personally.
So why are Tipp City schools having a personnel problem? They spend less per pupil than eighteen of the surrounding twenty districts. Their personnel problem might be that the teachers have been frozen on their salary step for four years, and for two of those years they have had no cost-of-living increase, which means two years of real-money pay cuts. Working for Tipps is worse than working for tips.
In fact, things have gotten so bad that Tipp teachers are in the midst of forming a union. Seriously. This is playing well locally:
“I am incensed over the fact that we stand on the precipice of having a union in this town,” resident Pete Schinaman said. Schinaman is the co-chair of the levy campaign. He asked the board what could have been done to prevent the teachers association from forming.
Which brings us back to the merit pay.
This is not merit pay as in "additional pay above your step." This is merit pay as in "we're scrapping the entire pay scale and replacing it with this." The proposal is that teachers rated "accomplished" get a 1% raise. (Yes, that's 1 %, with a 1.) "Skilled" teachers get a .75% raise, and "developing" teachers get a .5%. Some quick math tells us that for someone currently stranded on a $50K pay step, the resulting raise will range from $500 down to $250.
So, still losing real dollars every year. I can't imagine why these teachers felt the need to unionize.
I am not sure on which planet this classifies as "trying to retain talented and capable teachers." I'm pretty sure that it sends a clear message and the message is, "If you're waiting for us to finally reinstate a decent pay program, you can stop waiting and start freshening up that resume."
Meanwhile, while other Ohio superintendents are standing up to the state over high-stakes testing, Tipp City's super has sent out a letter reminding parents that while they can opt out, they really shouldn't because it will have bad consequences for the schools, the community and maybe their child, and if they want to opt out, they'll have to do it in person or by phone. Did I mention that administrators can earn up to 3% raises?
So, good luck to you, Tipp City Exempted Village Schools! You have identified a problem and a need, and you have responded to it with a resounding thud, an idea so small and unhelpful that it seems more like mockery than a real attempt to help your teachers thrive and survive, like leaving a one cent tip for the wait-person instead of stiffing them entirely. I hope you enjoy your new union, but if you're worried about that, don't fret, because teachers will probably be too busy packing to bother joining in the first place.
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