Jeb Bush took to the Washington Post last Friday to try to clarify his education policy ideas. We can probably look forward to many repeats of this process, because Candidate Bush has a powerful need to keep clarifying his education policies until he can find some version of them that isn't hated by voters both inside and outside his party.
His WaPo piece intends to clarify the line on federalism. People in his party hate Common Core, and they hate it at least in part because they see it as federal intrusion on state functions, so it would be useful for Bush III if he could find a way to convince voters that he likes a big, strong wall between the lovely garden of state powers and the big scary snake of federal intrusion.
He's going to need some more clarifying, because this version of the wall is fuzzy and porous.
He starts out with a simple chicken-wire wall foundation, trying to blame the intrusiony part of Common Core Etc on the Obama administration. For those who have followed the Core closely, this will not be particularly convincing, as what the Obama administration gave the Core Creators was pretty much what they asked for. There was never pure, pristine version of the Core somewhere back before Obama got his hands on it. The administration did not pervert CCSS; they fulfilled its every dream.
But Bush III is clear-- "the federal government's role in elementary and secondary education should be limited." That seems like a nice, clear, solid, snake-resistant wall. But then he clarifies what he means.
It should work to create transparency so that parents can see how their
local schools measure up; it should support policies that have a proven
record; and it should make sure states can’t ignore students who need
extra help. That’s it.
Oops. This is not so much a snake-resistant wall as a special snake door leading to snake tunnel that leads directly to the garden.
We could take a shortcut by simply pointing out that all of these policy ideas are exactly what got the fat federal fingers all over education in the last few years, but let's pretend we're starting from scratch. Why do these three supposedly clear policy divides make a better open door than a closed window?
Transparency. This formulation is stupid. It presumes that schools are ordinarily giant opaque black boxes, mysterious and secret fortresses whose walls no parents' gaze can pierce. Parents sit at home for 180 days, scratching their heads and wondering how their children are doing, too foolish and helpless to gather any information.
But if by "measure up" Bush means "measure their school in comparison to some other school many states away," then there is no way to accomplish that without federal intrusion. There's no way to create such a cross country report card without having the federal government declare what should be taught, when it should be taught, and how the teaching of that material should be measured.
You can't have a national report card without a national curriculum and national testing. Federal intrusion doesn't get much intrudier than that.
Support policies that have a proven record. Proven to do what? Proven to whose satisfaction? As long as the feds are setting the rules for what counts as success, they are (again) setting the curriculum and evaluation agenda for the country.
Make sure states can't ignore students who need extra help. This one assumes ill intent by the states, and that certainly doesn't bode well for the feds stepping back. If we're pre-emptively accusing the states of ignoring some students, then the only way this works is if the feds decide which students need extra help. That means determining which students aren't where they should be, and that can only be done if the feds decide where those students should be, which means, once again, that in order to do this supposedly simple federal task, the feds have to set a curriculum, a scope and sequence, and impose a federal level assessment, and that assessment will mean a federal-level school record for each student. How can the feds say, "Yo, state-- you are not doing right by Chris" unless the feds know exactly how Chris is doing?
What Bush has laid out is a fuzzy out-of-focus picture of a wall that is barely pretending to cover up a giant, neon THIS WAY sign with blinking arrow for every federal snake in the area. There is no way for Bush's Three Little Tasks to be truly accomplished without the federal government taking a central and controlling role in education.
He's going to need to clarify his education policy some more, because this isn't going to soothe anybody.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Legal Assault on Public Ed in Boston
“Boston’s public charter schools are helping students succeed. But to
get into one of the city’s public charter schools, kids literally have
to win the lottery. Kids should not have to be lucky to get an adequate
education,” said Paul Ware, a partner at Goodwin Procter and former
chairman of the firm’s litigation department. “It’s time for action to
ensure that all students in Boston have stronger educational
opportunities.”
That quote might lead one to expect that the next words out of Ware's mouth might be, "So we will going to court to insure that every public school in the Boston has the resources and support necessary for success." But it turns out that March is Opposites Month in Boston, and so what actually happens next is that three big time law firms are going to court to strip more resources from Boston Public Schools.
Paul F. Ware Jr., Michael B. Keating, and William F. Lee, partners at top Boston law firms, are planning to file a lawsuit on behalf of children who want to attend charter schools but allegedly didn't win Boston's charter school lottery. Charter students reportedly make up 4% of total students in Massachusetts; presumably the other 96% will just have to go round up lawyers of their own.
Boston has hit its limit of 34 charter schools. Last summer the legislature declined to add to that. This dance over charter caps is an annual ritual in the pilgrim state, where resistance to charters can become spirited (a quick google turned up two previous charter-related lawsuits, filed in order to keep charters out of communities). Feelings in MA have been rather split among voters when it comes to charters, with no strong groundswell of charter support on which to hang a political hat.
So now, lawyers will be trying the civil rights argument, claiming that those students who are not getting to escape public schools are having their civil rights violated. Civil rights violations affecting the students still in public schools, such as having their schools inadequately funded, or having more of their funding sucked away by charters-- these are apparently not the kind of civil rights violations that concern these lawyers.
Mark Kenen of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association thinks the suit is swell and that it fits their thirty-year argument that charters should be allowed to flourish.
This argument rests on the assertion that charters have been successful. That's a tough argument to back up. Attempts to provide data and support lead to pieces like this one at Edushyster in which some fairly simple number crunching leads to the conclusion that Boston charters are producing about three male graduates per charter per year.
The worry this time is that the lawsuit will be filed against state secretary of education James A. Peyser who, like his boss Governor Charlie Baker, feels the charter love to his very core. I suppose it's theoretically possible that this is all sock puppet theater, leading quickly to the moment where Peyser and Baker declare themselves forced by the courts to do exactly what they couldn't get permission for from the legislature. In other words, public ed proponents are worried that the defense against this lawsuit might not be very spirited, or even life-like.
It's a troubling argument to repeatedly encounter-- the notion that the state has a moral obligation to allow the rescue of some students in a manner that simultaneously strips other, apparently less-worthy students, of the resources and support needed for their schools. This is lawsuit to demand that the state rob Peter in order to help Paul turn a charter profit.
There are moral and civil rights issues at play here, but they are aligned precisely opposite of where the charter supporters wish to display them. If rich lawyers want to get up in arms about the civil rights of students, my recommendation is that they stand up for all students, even the ones who aren't trying to get into charter schools.
That quote might lead one to expect that the next words out of Ware's mouth might be, "So we will going to court to insure that every public school in the Boston has the resources and support necessary for success." But it turns out that March is Opposites Month in Boston, and so what actually happens next is that three big time law firms are going to court to strip more resources from Boston Public Schools.
Paul F. Ware Jr., Michael B. Keating, and William F. Lee, partners at top Boston law firms, are planning to file a lawsuit on behalf of children who want to attend charter schools but allegedly didn't win Boston's charter school lottery. Charter students reportedly make up 4% of total students in Massachusetts; presumably the other 96% will just have to go round up lawyers of their own.
Boston has hit its limit of 34 charter schools. Last summer the legislature declined to add to that. This dance over charter caps is an annual ritual in the pilgrim state, where resistance to charters can become spirited (a quick google turned up two previous charter-related lawsuits, filed in order to keep charters out of communities). Feelings in MA have been rather split among voters when it comes to charters, with no strong groundswell of charter support on which to hang a political hat.
So now, lawyers will be trying the civil rights argument, claiming that those students who are not getting to escape public schools are having their civil rights violated. Civil rights violations affecting the students still in public schools, such as having their schools inadequately funded, or having more of their funding sucked away by charters-- these are apparently not the kind of civil rights violations that concern these lawyers.
Mark Kenen of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association thinks the suit is swell and that it fits their thirty-year argument that charters should be allowed to flourish.
This argument rests on the assertion that charters have been successful. That's a tough argument to back up. Attempts to provide data and support lead to pieces like this one at Edushyster in which some fairly simple number crunching leads to the conclusion that Boston charters are producing about three male graduates per charter per year.
The worry this time is that the lawsuit will be filed against state secretary of education James A. Peyser who, like his boss Governor Charlie Baker, feels the charter love to his very core. I suppose it's theoretically possible that this is all sock puppet theater, leading quickly to the moment where Peyser and Baker declare themselves forced by the courts to do exactly what they couldn't get permission for from the legislature. In other words, public ed proponents are worried that the defense against this lawsuit might not be very spirited, or even life-like.
It's a troubling argument to repeatedly encounter-- the notion that the state has a moral obligation to allow the rescue of some students in a manner that simultaneously strips other, apparently less-worthy students, of the resources and support needed for their schools. This is lawsuit to demand that the state rob Peter in order to help Paul turn a charter profit.
There are moral and civil rights issues at play here, but they are aligned precisely opposite of where the charter supporters wish to display them. If rich lawyers want to get up in arms about the civil rights of students, my recommendation is that they stand up for all students, even the ones who aren't trying to get into charter schools.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Mike Petrilli Goes To War
Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute spoke today in front of the New York Council of School Superintendents, a speaking engagement that was enough to stir up general commotion before he ever even opened his mouth. I'm not a NYS superintendent, but the text of the speech is on line, so let's see what he had to say.
Petrilli starts by re-casting his topic. The speech was billed as "How To End the Education Wars," but he modifies that to how to survive them. And he then launches his three ideas:
Be the voice of the sane and sensible center
Petrilli uses the new fave talking point for reformsters in which he characterizes the pro-public-education folks (and name checks Diane Ravitch) as those who have given up, think that education is hopeless in the face of poverty, believe that schools cannot do any better. This is the new improved straw man version of dismissing reform critics because they "use poverty as an excuse." It's a snappy rhetorical point, but it's a lie, a deliberate misreading of what folks in the pro-public-ed camp are saying.
It's a particularly galling point coming from the man who has explained on more than one platform that the proper role of charters is to rescue those students who are deserving, snatching them from the midst of the undeserving mob. It's galling from charter fans in general, as their whole point is that public schools are hopeless and we should not waste another cent trying to help them do better.
But it's also insulting to the millions of teachers who are in the classroom day after day, doing the best they can with the resources they have. Hey, teachers-- if you're not succeeding with all of your students, it has nothing to do with obstacles and challenges in your path. You just don't believe enough.
The Petrilli pivots to criticize reformers, mostly for creating unrealistic definitions of success and failure. All students will not be ready to go to college, and not all schools labeled failing are, in fact, failing.
He suggests that superintendents advocate for growth measures in evaluating schools. He calls on them to call out schools that are failing, because it will increase their credibility. He does not take any time explaining what standards the individual student growth should be measured against, nor why.
He also throws in a plug for vocational education, and on this I'm in complete agreement with him.
But in this section Petrilli has mapped out a "sensible center" that I do not recognize. On the one side, an extreme straw-man version of reform opponents, and on the other, a tiny concession that assumes the fundamentals of reform are sound. Petrilli's sensible middle has nothing to say about the destructiveness of test-driven accountability, the warping of the system that comes from making schools accountable to the federal government, or the lack of full funding and support. On the one hand he dismisses anyone who wants to talk about the effects of poverty on education, but on the other, he acknowledges the unfairness of comparing schools where students arrive already behind on their first day. Petrilli's sensible middle is a bit of a muddle.
Ask for the ball-- then run with it.
This is also a hot new reformster talking point (also on view in Rick Hess's cage-busting teacher) in which people who are getting ground down by the system are responsible for boot-strapping themselves into a better place.
Petrilli gives it to both sides with superintendents and teacher evaluations. He chides the superintendents-- we reformers never would have had to come after you on this if you hadn't been doing such a crappy job (and we skip, again, the question of why the ed system is responsible for coming up with a system that reformsters approve of. I don't like the way some think tanks are run-- should they have to come up with a new system that makes me happy?) On the one hand, he feels their pain because of course it's "damn near impossible" to fire a teacher, and again, Petrilli is too smart to actually believe that's true. Unless he and I have radically different definitions of "damn near impossible."
At the same time, Petrilli characterizes Andrew Cuomo's teacher evaluation proposal as "insane," noting that the trend is to use test scores less, not more. But he tells them they can do a better job with evaluating and canning probationary pre-tenure teachers. Not sure I disagree with this, but he cites Joel Klein's work with this system in New York City, but the last I read, New York's Teacher Tenure Twilight didn't yield any useful results.
Petrilli also scolds the superintendents for doing a lousy job on leader development and recruitment, simply waiting for teachers to self-select for administration roles.
So actually, the balls that Petrilli thinks superintendents could grab are relatively small and not terribly significant ones. But of course, they're among the few balls that are still left to superintendents in New York.
On charters: don't fight 'em, join 'em
Petrilli acknowledges that his charter love might be why eyebrows have been raised to ceiling height for his appearance at the supers' gathering, but he says New York is charter territory because Albany leads the nation in production of education red tape. The awesome thing about charters is that they get to run without all that tapiness, and the superintendents should agitate for the same tapeless freedom. And if they can't get it, they should get in on the charter fun.
This third point is brief, perhaps because there are no details to add to this. How does one elaborate on these points. Ask Albany for freedom that they won't grant you in a zillion years? Join the charter game by finding millionaires to back you? Stop being so resentful that politicians, with the backing and encouragement of outfits like the Fordham Foundation, have been steadily stacking the deck against public schools and in favor of charteristas? Yes, it's probably just as well that Petrilli didn't dwell too long on this point.
Petrilli starts by re-casting his topic. The speech was billed as "How To End the Education Wars," but he modifies that to how to survive them. And he then launches his three ideas:
Be the voice of the sane and sensible center
Petrilli uses the new fave talking point for reformsters in which he characterizes the pro-public-education folks (and name checks Diane Ravitch) as those who have given up, think that education is hopeless in the face of poverty, believe that schools cannot do any better. This is the new improved straw man version of dismissing reform critics because they "use poverty as an excuse." It's a snappy rhetorical point, but it's a lie, a deliberate misreading of what folks in the pro-public-ed camp are saying.
It's a particularly galling point coming from the man who has explained on more than one platform that the proper role of charters is to rescue those students who are deserving, snatching them from the midst of the undeserving mob. It's galling from charter fans in general, as their whole point is that public schools are hopeless and we should not waste another cent trying to help them do better.
But it's also insulting to the millions of teachers who are in the classroom day after day, doing the best they can with the resources they have. Hey, teachers-- if you're not succeeding with all of your students, it has nothing to do with obstacles and challenges in your path. You just don't believe enough.
The Petrilli pivots to criticize reformers, mostly for creating unrealistic definitions of success and failure. All students will not be ready to go to college, and not all schools labeled failing are, in fact, failing.
He suggests that superintendents advocate for growth measures in evaluating schools. He calls on them to call out schools that are failing, because it will increase their credibility. He does not take any time explaining what standards the individual student growth should be measured against, nor why.
He also throws in a plug for vocational education, and on this I'm in complete agreement with him.
But in this section Petrilli has mapped out a "sensible center" that I do not recognize. On the one side, an extreme straw-man version of reform opponents, and on the other, a tiny concession that assumes the fundamentals of reform are sound. Petrilli's sensible middle has nothing to say about the destructiveness of test-driven accountability, the warping of the system that comes from making schools accountable to the federal government, or the lack of full funding and support. On the one hand he dismisses anyone who wants to talk about the effects of poverty on education, but on the other, he acknowledges the unfairness of comparing schools where students arrive already behind on their first day. Petrilli's sensible middle is a bit of a muddle.
Ask for the ball-- then run with it.
This is also a hot new reformster talking point (also on view in Rick Hess's cage-busting teacher) in which people who are getting ground down by the system are responsible for boot-strapping themselves into a better place.
Petrilli gives it to both sides with superintendents and teacher evaluations. He chides the superintendents-- we reformers never would have had to come after you on this if you hadn't been doing such a crappy job (and we skip, again, the question of why the ed system is responsible for coming up with a system that reformsters approve of. I don't like the way some think tanks are run-- should they have to come up with a new system that makes me happy?) On the one hand, he feels their pain because of course it's "damn near impossible" to fire a teacher, and again, Petrilli is too smart to actually believe that's true. Unless he and I have radically different definitions of "damn near impossible."
At the same time, Petrilli characterizes Andrew Cuomo's teacher evaluation proposal as "insane," noting that the trend is to use test scores less, not more. But he tells them they can do a better job with evaluating and canning probationary pre-tenure teachers. Not sure I disagree with this, but he cites Joel Klein's work with this system in New York City, but the last I read, New York's Teacher Tenure Twilight didn't yield any useful results.
Petrilli also scolds the superintendents for doing a lousy job on leader development and recruitment, simply waiting for teachers to self-select for administration roles.
So actually, the balls that Petrilli thinks superintendents could grab are relatively small and not terribly significant ones. But of course, they're among the few balls that are still left to superintendents in New York.
On charters: don't fight 'em, join 'em
Petrilli acknowledges that his charter love might be why eyebrows have been raised to ceiling height for his appearance at the supers' gathering, but he says New York is charter territory because Albany leads the nation in production of education red tape. The awesome thing about charters is that they get to run without all that tapiness, and the superintendents should agitate for the same tapeless freedom. And if they can't get it, they should get in on the charter fun.
This third point is brief, perhaps because there are no details to add to this. How does one elaborate on these points. Ask Albany for freedom that they won't grant you in a zillion years? Join the charter game by finding millionaires to back you? Stop being so resentful that politicians, with the backing and encouragement of outfits like the Fordham Foundation, have been steadily stacking the deck against public schools and in favor of charteristas? Yes, it's probably just as well that Petrilli didn't dwell too long on this point.
Super Sardinemastery: Paying More To Teach More
If there's one thing reformsters have pursued with determination and intensity, it is the prospect of cutting payroll costs when operating schools. The fundamental problem of squeezing money out of a school system is that it's extremely difficult to increase revenue; if you want to make more money, you have to cut costs, and most of the costs in operating a school are tied up in paying teachers.
The desire to cut total personnel costs have led to some dumb ideas ("Hey! Let's just have every teacher only work a year or two so every teacher on staff is a beginning teacher only making beginning teacher wages!"), but one of the champions of the Dumb Ideas Olympics is what I call the Super Sardinemaster idea. We round up the very most awesome teachers and just jam as many students into a smaller number of classrooms. Sounds super, huh?
Well, here it comes again. Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab (because nobody brings the dumb ideas to education with such reliable regulatory as economists) offers the "paper" "Paying the Best Teachers More To Teach More Students." And if you are looking for finely packaged baloney, this paper has it in spades.
"On top of many policymakers’ wish lists is increased teacher pay." That's the opening sentence, and it serves as the writers' announcement that this is one more exercise, not in looking for or examining reality, but putting a pretty package on an ugly policy idea. Not unsurprisingly, it is one of the statements in this paper that does not come with a footnote, because who, exactly, would you cite? Certainly there are policymakers who have made mouth noises about wishing teachers were paid more. What is notable about those policymakers is that none of them have put their money where their mouth noises are. Compare the amount of money that policymakers want to put aside to boost charter schools with the amount of money they want to put aside to boost teacher pay. I don't want to make a big deal out of this point; we all knew going into teaching that nobody was clamoring to pay us Big Bucks. But when you open your paper with a lie, you put me on notice as a reader.
The writers do sort of acknowledge that a merit pay system that costs less than a regular payroll system is not going to happen, but they only do that so that they can set up their own twisted version of merit pay. Their proposal is simple-- fire all the bad teachers and jam all of their students into a classroom with the remaining good teachers. The district in turn can raise the remaining teachers' salaries because there are fewer of them.
At this point I have to tip my hat (or possibly my entire head) to Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters (and the successful battle against inBloom) for doing a bunch of my homework for me.
The big class with a great teacher idea seems to have made its public mainstream debut in a 2010 Bill Gates speech to the CCSSO. Not surprisingly, Arne Duncan was shortly thereafter talking it up.
We spent billions of dollars to reduce class size,” Duncan told ABC’s Andrea Mitchell in 2011, when we could instead give teachers higher salaries in exchange for larger classrooms, thereby attracting much more talented teachers.
That was back in 2011, and as near as Haimson can tell, nobody ever actually tried to do it. Broad "graduate" (can you graduate from a fake superintendent training program?) John Covington was going to give it a try in Kansas City Schools, but instead resigned and went to Michigan to work for EAA which played with using computers as a way to shoehorn many many students into single classrooms.
But boosting the idea all along the way has been Marguerite Roza, who is in fact the co-author of this latest work that we're now ploughing through.
The hook from which any such proposal hangs is the assertion that great teaching matters more than small class size, but even in the Edunomics paper, that's a shaky hook indeed. The "research" cited includes "research" like a paper from the Fordham Institute and research that "modeled the effects"-- in other words, not actual research on the actual stuff we're talking about.
Edunomics also has to tap dance around preferences. Parents prefer smaller classes; that's unequivocally true, but Rozas and her co-author try to get past that by citing research that says parents would prefer a 27-student class with a great teacher to a 22-student class with a random teacher. This ignores a great many things, not the least of which is that in many districts, a 27-student class would represent far smaller class-size than most teachers and students are currently dealing with.
There's also some useless research suggesting that a majority of teachers would rather have a $5K bonus than two fewer students in class. This research comes from Dan Goldhaber, Michael DeArmond and Scott Deburgomaster, “Teacher Attitudes About Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (April 2011) and we could spend some time trying to evaluate its bona fides, but really, who cares? We aren't talking about two students-- we're talking about enough students to significantly cut the teaching staff. This is like trying to argue that because you like having your back scratched with a one of those little backscratchers, you would undoubtedly like to be impaled with a rake.
Edunomics offers some specific program proposals. For instance, it might be best to implement this in a growing district where you don't actually have to fire many people-- you can just keep jamming the incoming students into the classrooms you already have. It would save money, and improve student outcomes (by some means that Edunomics doesn't even pretend to have an explanation for). For districts that aren't growing so much, the writers suggest simply not replacing teachers who leave.
The paper does offer some actual money breakdowns by state. By state. The writers do envision modest class size growth because they choose to look at the state as one gigantic school district. This pretty much renders their entire argument invalid because it does not even begin to approach the question of how this would play out in an individual district. Take my own high school-- there are six teachers in my department. Want to guess what class sizes would look like if the district canned one teacher and gave all of that teacher's students to a Super Sardinemaster (spoiler alert: the SS would get classes double the current size).
Of course, in districts like mine, we would simply redistribute the students across all teachers in the department. Cost savings to district = one teacher's salary and benefits. Super Sardinemaster bonuses paid out = $0.
This is just one of the many ridiculous fictions in Roza's paper. If we are really talking about adding two or three students to a class, no district on the planet will be offering bonuses. They will say, "It's just two more kids. Suck it up." After all-- they don't need the teacher's permission to stock up that classroom.
The Super Sardinemaster system also depends on being able to identify those top teachers, and as we keep discovering and pretending not to notice , we have no idea whatsoever about how to do that! None. Oh, don't bring up VAM-- it's a repeatedly debunked crapshoot of a system that tells us nothing useful. Why does Roza recommend that the SS system be implemented without firing teachers? Because no matter which teachers you fire, there will be students and parents standing up for that teacher and explaining why they think she's great.
And of course the Super Sardinemaster system ignores the possibility that part of what makes a great teacher great is the time and space to focus on each individual student.
But stupidest of all is the completely false choice at the center of the Super Sardinemaster proposition. Given the choice between a large class with a great teacher or a small class, virtually every parents will say, "I choose a small class with a great teacher. What do you mean, that's not a choice? Of course it's a choice."
At best, the Super Sardinemaster approach is silly and misguided, with no real basis in solid research, no foundation in common sense, and no grasp of the dynamics of teaching in a real classroom.
At worst, this is another way to attack the pay schedule, to link teacher pay to teacher load. It's not hard to imagine how quickly this could devolve to a pay system where, to get the standard district base pay, you must carry X number of students. A bonus that almost everybody gets is not a bonus-- it's base pay, and everyone who makes less is getting a penalty for not meeting the numbers.
In fact, the Super Sardinemaster system only makes sense if we look at it as an answer to the age-old reformster question, "How can I get away with paying my teaching staff less while still looking like I'm trying to run a high-quality school?" It is not a search for a better education and teacher pay system-- it is the search for a plausible, spinnable lie.
The desire to cut total personnel costs have led to some dumb ideas ("Hey! Let's just have every teacher only work a year or two so every teacher on staff is a beginning teacher only making beginning teacher wages!"), but one of the champions of the Dumb Ideas Olympics is what I call the Super Sardinemaster idea. We round up the very most awesome teachers and just jam as many students into a smaller number of classrooms. Sounds super, huh?
Well, here it comes again. Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab (because nobody brings the dumb ideas to education with such reliable regulatory as economists) offers the "paper" "Paying the Best Teachers More To Teach More Students." And if you are looking for finely packaged baloney, this paper has it in spades.
"On top of many policymakers’ wish lists is increased teacher pay." That's the opening sentence, and it serves as the writers' announcement that this is one more exercise, not in looking for or examining reality, but putting a pretty package on an ugly policy idea. Not unsurprisingly, it is one of the statements in this paper that does not come with a footnote, because who, exactly, would you cite? Certainly there are policymakers who have made mouth noises about wishing teachers were paid more. What is notable about those policymakers is that none of them have put their money where their mouth noises are. Compare the amount of money that policymakers want to put aside to boost charter schools with the amount of money they want to put aside to boost teacher pay. I don't want to make a big deal out of this point; we all knew going into teaching that nobody was clamoring to pay us Big Bucks. But when you open your paper with a lie, you put me on notice as a reader.
The writers do sort of acknowledge that a merit pay system that costs less than a regular payroll system is not going to happen, but they only do that so that they can set up their own twisted version of merit pay. Their proposal is simple-- fire all the bad teachers and jam all of their students into a classroom with the remaining good teachers. The district in turn can raise the remaining teachers' salaries because there are fewer of them.
At this point I have to tip my hat (or possibly my entire head) to Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters (and the successful battle against inBloom) for doing a bunch of my homework for me.
The big class with a great teacher idea seems to have made its public mainstream debut in a 2010 Bill Gates speech to the CCSSO. Not surprisingly, Arne Duncan was shortly thereafter talking it up.
We spent billions of dollars to reduce class size,” Duncan told ABC’s Andrea Mitchell in 2011, when we could instead give teachers higher salaries in exchange for larger classrooms, thereby attracting much more talented teachers.
That was back in 2011, and as near as Haimson can tell, nobody ever actually tried to do it. Broad "graduate" (can you graduate from a fake superintendent training program?) John Covington was going to give it a try in Kansas City Schools, but instead resigned and went to Michigan to work for EAA which played with using computers as a way to shoehorn many many students into single classrooms.
But boosting the idea all along the way has been Marguerite Roza, who is in fact the co-author of this latest work that we're now ploughing through.
The hook from which any such proposal hangs is the assertion that great teaching matters more than small class size, but even in the Edunomics paper, that's a shaky hook indeed. The "research" cited includes "research" like a paper from the Fordham Institute and research that "modeled the effects"-- in other words, not actual research on the actual stuff we're talking about.
Edunomics also has to tap dance around preferences. Parents prefer smaller classes; that's unequivocally true, but Rozas and her co-author try to get past that by citing research that says parents would prefer a 27-student class with a great teacher to a 22-student class with a random teacher. This ignores a great many things, not the least of which is that in many districts, a 27-student class would represent far smaller class-size than most teachers and students are currently dealing with.
There's also some useless research suggesting that a majority of teachers would rather have a $5K bonus than two fewer students in class. This research comes from Dan Goldhaber, Michael DeArmond and Scott Deburgomaster, “Teacher Attitudes About Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (April 2011) and we could spend some time trying to evaluate its bona fides, but really, who cares? We aren't talking about two students-- we're talking about enough students to significantly cut the teaching staff. This is like trying to argue that because you like having your back scratched with a one of those little backscratchers, you would undoubtedly like to be impaled with a rake.
Edunomics offers some specific program proposals. For instance, it might be best to implement this in a growing district where you don't actually have to fire many people-- you can just keep jamming the incoming students into the classrooms you already have. It would save money, and improve student outcomes (by some means that Edunomics doesn't even pretend to have an explanation for). For districts that aren't growing so much, the writers suggest simply not replacing teachers who leave.
The paper does offer some actual money breakdowns by state. By state. The writers do envision modest class size growth because they choose to look at the state as one gigantic school district. This pretty much renders their entire argument invalid because it does not even begin to approach the question of how this would play out in an individual district. Take my own high school-- there are six teachers in my department. Want to guess what class sizes would look like if the district canned one teacher and gave all of that teacher's students to a Super Sardinemaster (spoiler alert: the SS would get classes double the current size).
Of course, in districts like mine, we would simply redistribute the students across all teachers in the department. Cost savings to district = one teacher's salary and benefits. Super Sardinemaster bonuses paid out = $0.
This is just one of the many ridiculous fictions in Roza's paper. If we are really talking about adding two or three students to a class, no district on the planet will be offering bonuses. They will say, "It's just two more kids. Suck it up." After all-- they don't need the teacher's permission to stock up that classroom.
The Super Sardinemaster system also depends on being able to identify those top teachers, and as we keep discovering and pretending not to notice , we have no idea whatsoever about how to do that! None. Oh, don't bring up VAM-- it's a repeatedly debunked crapshoot of a system that tells us nothing useful. Why does Roza recommend that the SS system be implemented without firing teachers? Because no matter which teachers you fire, there will be students and parents standing up for that teacher and explaining why they think she's great.
And of course the Super Sardinemaster system ignores the possibility that part of what makes a great teacher great is the time and space to focus on each individual student.
But stupidest of all is the completely false choice at the center of the Super Sardinemaster proposition. Given the choice between a large class with a great teacher or a small class, virtually every parents will say, "I choose a small class with a great teacher. What do you mean, that's not a choice? Of course it's a choice."
At best, the Super Sardinemaster approach is silly and misguided, with no real basis in solid research, no foundation in common sense, and no grasp of the dynamics of teaching in a real classroom.
At worst, this is another way to attack the pay schedule, to link teacher pay to teacher load. It's not hard to imagine how quickly this could devolve to a pay system where, to get the standard district base pay, you must carry X number of students. A bonus that almost everybody gets is not a bonus-- it's base pay, and everyone who makes less is getting a penalty for not meeting the numbers.
In fact, the Super Sardinemaster system only makes sense if we look at it as an answer to the age-old reformster question, "How can I get away with paying my teaching staff less while still looking like I'm trying to run a high-quality school?" It is not a search for a better education and teacher pay system-- it is the search for a plausible, spinnable lie.
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Believing in Charters
The charter talking point of the week was believing in charter schools and charter school students, and it suggests that at some point Franz Kafka and George Orwell had a love child who went into the PR biz.
Charter boosters are outraged-- outraged!!-- that anyone would criticize or question their success, because that must mean that those critics believe that poor African-American students are victims of their circumstances and these critics don't believe that such students can succeed. But charter schools do believe. They believe in all students. Now, here's a completion sentence. Can you finish it?
Because charter school operators believe that all students succeed, they work hard to serve_______.
If you said "all students," you lose, because most modern students are not devoted to serving all students at all. They will serve the chosen few, the students that they consider worthy of being saved.
They will brag about 100% college acceptance rates, when what they should be bragging about is their ability to winnow a group down to only those students they were sure they could prep for college.
"What are you saying," they will reply. "Are you saying that those students we got ready for college couldn't really succeed?"
Of course not. That group of students, however small, represents a real success. And if I were the parent of one of those students, that success would mean the world to me. It's like the old starfish story; any success is a Good Thing, particularly to the person who succeeds.
But there are two problems with this kind of charter success story.
One is that it is not replicable. All that these charter success stories prove is what every public school teacher already knows-- any school that gets to pick and choose its own students body can be hugely successful. And it's not just picking and choosing the quality of the student body-- I just got a new student in my classroom two weeks ago, and that's not unusual. Charters that fight hard not to have to backfill empty seats never have to deal with students who start partway through the year. Charters that advertise for students and families who want a tough, challenging education get few applicants who hate that idea.
I am not saying that charter schools are evil and wrong for using many techniques for getting the student body they want. I am saying that the success they achieve by doing so is not replicable. Public schools cannot do it. We must take all comers.
In public schools, we do not have the luxury of gathering only the sorts of students we can easily believe in. We take them all.
The other problem is that school funding is currently a zero sum game. When charters take some students away from public schools, they take some of the resources that could have been used to serve the students that they left behind.
Imagine firemen showing up to a burning house. There are a hundred children trapped inside, and the fire chief announces that every one of those children deserves to be saved. But instead of saving them all, he gets handful out of the building, and he does it by having the other trapped children lie down so that the saved children can walk out on their backs.
This is not the charter schools' fault. It's the result of dishonest school funding policies. The honest solution is to fully fund all schools. If policymakers want a robust charter system, fund it. Sell it to the taxpayers, and explain why it's necessary that every time a charter school is opened, taxes must go up. Stop selling charters with the financial fiction that you can operate two homes, two businesses, two cars, or two schools for exactly the same cost as one.
But until a more honest funding policy is implemented (I expect it roughly when there's a hockey league in Hell), charter rhetoric about belief in all students is hollow. Charters believe in some students, and the rest of the students that they don't believe in they just avoid having to face or teach. Those they leave to the same public schools they are stripping of resources.
It doesn't have to be that way. Read, for instance, this rather encouraging interview with a KIPP leader from Philly (who at least seems to know what he should be doing).
But in the meantime, if Believe Is All You Need cheerleaders want me to take them seriously when they criticize educators for bring up factors like poverty and resources and funding, they can prove their point very easily. Just follow these simple steps:
1) Take a truly random assortment of students from the community in which they're located.
2) Commit to keeping those students for the long haul, no matter what.
3) For funding, accept only 30% of the cost-per-pupil figure for the local district.
I think I've been clear about what I believe about believing. But if you're going to claim that belief is all any of us in education need, then show me how it's done.
Charter boosters are outraged-- outraged!!-- that anyone would criticize or question their success, because that must mean that those critics believe that poor African-American students are victims of their circumstances and these critics don't believe that such students can succeed. But charter schools do believe. They believe in all students. Now, here's a completion sentence. Can you finish it?
Because charter school operators believe that all students succeed, they work hard to serve_______.
If you said "all students," you lose, because most modern students are not devoted to serving all students at all. They will serve the chosen few, the students that they consider worthy of being saved.
They will brag about 100% college acceptance rates, when what they should be bragging about is their ability to winnow a group down to only those students they were sure they could prep for college.
"What are you saying," they will reply. "Are you saying that those students we got ready for college couldn't really succeed?"
Of course not. That group of students, however small, represents a real success. And if I were the parent of one of those students, that success would mean the world to me. It's like the old starfish story; any success is a Good Thing, particularly to the person who succeeds.
But there are two problems with this kind of charter success story.
One is that it is not replicable. All that these charter success stories prove is what every public school teacher already knows-- any school that gets to pick and choose its own students body can be hugely successful. And it's not just picking and choosing the quality of the student body-- I just got a new student in my classroom two weeks ago, and that's not unusual. Charters that fight hard not to have to backfill empty seats never have to deal with students who start partway through the year. Charters that advertise for students and families who want a tough, challenging education get few applicants who hate that idea.
I am not saying that charter schools are evil and wrong for using many techniques for getting the student body they want. I am saying that the success they achieve by doing so is not replicable. Public schools cannot do it. We must take all comers.
In public schools, we do not have the luxury of gathering only the sorts of students we can easily believe in. We take them all.
The other problem is that school funding is currently a zero sum game. When charters take some students away from public schools, they take some of the resources that could have been used to serve the students that they left behind.
Imagine firemen showing up to a burning house. There are a hundred children trapped inside, and the fire chief announces that every one of those children deserves to be saved. But instead of saving them all, he gets handful out of the building, and he does it by having the other trapped children lie down so that the saved children can walk out on their backs.
This is not the charter schools' fault. It's the result of dishonest school funding policies. The honest solution is to fully fund all schools. If policymakers want a robust charter system, fund it. Sell it to the taxpayers, and explain why it's necessary that every time a charter school is opened, taxes must go up. Stop selling charters with the financial fiction that you can operate two homes, two businesses, two cars, or two schools for exactly the same cost as one.
But until a more honest funding policy is implemented (I expect it roughly when there's a hockey league in Hell), charter rhetoric about belief in all students is hollow. Charters believe in some students, and the rest of the students that they don't believe in they just avoid having to face or teach. Those they leave to the same public schools they are stripping of resources.
It doesn't have to be that way. Read, for instance, this rather encouraging interview with a KIPP leader from Philly (who at least seems to know what he should be doing).
But in the meantime, if Believe Is All You Need cheerleaders want me to take them seriously when they criticize educators for bring up factors like poverty and resources and funding, they can prove their point very easily. Just follow these simple steps:
1) Take a truly random assortment of students from the community in which they're located.
2) Commit to keeping those students for the long haul, no matter what.
3) For funding, accept only 30% of the cost-per-pupil figure for the local district.
I think I've been clear about what I believe about believing. But if you're going to claim that belief is all any of us in education need, then show me how it's done.
Can the Ed Reform Wars Be Ended?
Mike Petrilli has a speech to deliver Sunday about "How To End the Ed Reform Wars," and he put up a tweet this morning asking for thoughts. So I started thinking.
Step One: Stop Calling Them Wars
I have a general aversion to overamped rhetoric. We frequently resort to calling things "war" and "rape" which are not, and such rhetorical flourishes are just ways to bolster our own sense of importance. But the device is not helpful, and it's insulting to people who have actually suffered through the real thing. Go find a combat veteran and explain to him the war you're fighting over education.
Using the term "war" also embeds a bunch of useless goals. In a debate, people can work their way to clearer understanding and perhaps build some useful solutions, as well as sorting out the viable viewpoints from the posturing baloney. In war, your goal is to blast those Bad Guys Over There into oblivion.
War is particularly unhelpful for the education sector because nobody is going to be blasted into oblivion, for better or worse. Teachers and public education are not going to go away any time soon. Neither are big corporations that really want to suck up some of the public tax dollars associated with education. Neither are politicians whose bread and butter is making loud policy pronouncements covering areas in which they are personally deeply ignorant. Neither are people who care deeply about children and young people and their education.
That list of players alone is enough to guarantee that there will always be conflict around education.
Step Two: Consider the Roots of the Conflicts
We have conflicts in the education debates that stem from two basic groups of issues.
On the one hand, we have disagreements of method. For instance, in the charter arena, we have people who believe that modern charters are a success because they have managed to rescue a handful of students from problematic public schools; on the other side, we have people who believe that modern charters are a failure because they have sucked resources away from the students left behind in those problematic public schools. These groups have some strong disagreements, but they share the value of wanting to provide a decent education for children. There may be solutions possible that can make both groups happy
But there are also differences based on fundamental disagreements about values. Ed reformsters include people who believe that education would work better if it were an open market where people could make money by starting up their own schools. I (and a few gazillion people like me) think that's a fundamentally wrong approach based on a flawed and just-dead-wrong understanding of education, schools, and the free market. I cannot imagine a solution that would make both those corporate boosters and me happy, ever. I think the ongoing efforts to direct public tax dollars away from education and into private bank accounts are absolutely, indefensibly wrong, period.
Not all values-based differences are unbridgeable. I do not believe there is any value in national standards. None. I don't think there is anything inherently desirable about having the same standards in Iowa and Florida. But I can understand why some people do see standardization is valuable. I just think they're wrong.
Because money and politics have infected the debate, we've also got a problem with honest discussion. A lot of people in the reform biz have a problem with honest conversation, and honest conversation starts with an honest attempt to understand what the other person is actually saying. Trying to really grasp what that person is saying doesn't mean you have to agree with them (I have several hundred posts here on this blog demonstrating that point). But deliberately misreading someone so that you can try to control the narrative is not the beginning of honest conversation-- it's just trolling. (Ditto trying to characterize all your opponents as ignorant and evil.)
The education debate would be vastly improved if we all just ignored people who insist on that kind of trolling, no matter how well-connected or important they seem to be.
When serious people arrive at The Table and find that a meeting being run by people who are Not Serious, the serious people are inclined to go home, and the conversation at The Table becomes vastly stupid and hugely unproductive. That has been a large problem in the education debates for years. Too many seats at The Table have been given away to people who are Not Serious.
So What Can We Actually Do?
We can be civil. We can argue about ideas and not reduce the debate to questions of whether our opponents are Terrible People with Deep Character Flaws. This is not always easy; I feel certain that many people in the reformy field have motives that are not remotely pure. But if we get dragged into personality debate, we end up in the same pit of ineffectual noisemaking as our political leaders. My rule of thumb is that if you find yourself accepting or rejecting an idea simply and only because of the source, you are off track.
Judge actual merit. Education is suffering right now because a variety of ideas and programs and policies have been jammed into place without ever making a real case for their merits. Our leaders have imposed unproven standards and inflicted unproven tests in pursuit of goals that nobody has proven will be reached by these means. We have seen people try to remake American education with no more authority than their own massive bank accounts or useful political connections. And in New York (where Petrilli is speaking), we've seen a whole system put in place so that superintendents can demand that teachers stop using their own professional judgment and replace it with scripts from EngageNY because, reasons, while the governor proposes to redefine the entire purpose of teaching.
We can have actual conversations. The modern ed reform movement has tried to redefine the entire purpose of American education without ever having a single public discussion about it. Subsequently, they have been shocked and surprised that a few million people spoke up and said some version of, "Excuse me, just a minute!" Reformsters were not prepared to talk about it; they had created a program that was just supposed to put all these goals in place and it would just happen.
They got in the ring with no plan other than, "I will throw one or two punches, knock this guy out, and we'll be done." They threw their punch, and the opponent got back up off the canvas; that's the point at which reformsters started saying, "Hey, let's talk about this."
But instead of really trying to talk about education, reformsters have tried to keep tweaking their talking points and fine-tuning their PR, trying to get that narrative under control. Some are still devoted to the long game of steadily starving the public system ("the beast"), declaring a school failure emergency, and putting their programs for "rescue" in place.
A conversation? Still by and large not happening. At this point, I'm not sure how it could happen. But if the "education wars" are to ever end, or at least become calm enough that schools can more easily and effectively do their jobs, then a real conversation is going to have to happen.
Step One: Stop Calling Them Wars
I have a general aversion to overamped rhetoric. We frequently resort to calling things "war" and "rape" which are not, and such rhetorical flourishes are just ways to bolster our own sense of importance. But the device is not helpful, and it's insulting to people who have actually suffered through the real thing. Go find a combat veteran and explain to him the war you're fighting over education.
Using the term "war" also embeds a bunch of useless goals. In a debate, people can work their way to clearer understanding and perhaps build some useful solutions, as well as sorting out the viable viewpoints from the posturing baloney. In war, your goal is to blast those Bad Guys Over There into oblivion.
War is particularly unhelpful for the education sector because nobody is going to be blasted into oblivion, for better or worse. Teachers and public education are not going to go away any time soon. Neither are big corporations that really want to suck up some of the public tax dollars associated with education. Neither are politicians whose bread and butter is making loud policy pronouncements covering areas in which they are personally deeply ignorant. Neither are people who care deeply about children and young people and their education.
That list of players alone is enough to guarantee that there will always be conflict around education.
Step Two: Consider the Roots of the Conflicts
We have conflicts in the education debates that stem from two basic groups of issues.
On the one hand, we have disagreements of method. For instance, in the charter arena, we have people who believe that modern charters are a success because they have managed to rescue a handful of students from problematic public schools; on the other side, we have people who believe that modern charters are a failure because they have sucked resources away from the students left behind in those problematic public schools. These groups have some strong disagreements, but they share the value of wanting to provide a decent education for children. There may be solutions possible that can make both groups happy
But there are also differences based on fundamental disagreements about values. Ed reformsters include people who believe that education would work better if it were an open market where people could make money by starting up their own schools. I (and a few gazillion people like me) think that's a fundamentally wrong approach based on a flawed and just-dead-wrong understanding of education, schools, and the free market. I cannot imagine a solution that would make both those corporate boosters and me happy, ever. I think the ongoing efforts to direct public tax dollars away from education and into private bank accounts are absolutely, indefensibly wrong, period.
Not all values-based differences are unbridgeable. I do not believe there is any value in national standards. None. I don't think there is anything inherently desirable about having the same standards in Iowa and Florida. But I can understand why some people do see standardization is valuable. I just think they're wrong.
Because money and politics have infected the debate, we've also got a problem with honest discussion. A lot of people in the reform biz have a problem with honest conversation, and honest conversation starts with an honest attempt to understand what the other person is actually saying. Trying to really grasp what that person is saying doesn't mean you have to agree with them (I have several hundred posts here on this blog demonstrating that point). But deliberately misreading someone so that you can try to control the narrative is not the beginning of honest conversation-- it's just trolling. (Ditto trying to characterize all your opponents as ignorant and evil.)
The education debate would be vastly improved if we all just ignored people who insist on that kind of trolling, no matter how well-connected or important they seem to be.
When serious people arrive at The Table and find that a meeting being run by people who are Not Serious, the serious people are inclined to go home, and the conversation at The Table becomes vastly stupid and hugely unproductive. That has been a large problem in the education debates for years. Too many seats at The Table have been given away to people who are Not Serious.
So What Can We Actually Do?
We can be civil. We can argue about ideas and not reduce the debate to questions of whether our opponents are Terrible People with Deep Character Flaws. This is not always easy; I feel certain that many people in the reformy field have motives that are not remotely pure. But if we get dragged into personality debate, we end up in the same pit of ineffectual noisemaking as our political leaders. My rule of thumb is that if you find yourself accepting or rejecting an idea simply and only because of the source, you are off track.
Judge actual merit. Education is suffering right now because a variety of ideas and programs and policies have been jammed into place without ever making a real case for their merits. Our leaders have imposed unproven standards and inflicted unproven tests in pursuit of goals that nobody has proven will be reached by these means. We have seen people try to remake American education with no more authority than their own massive bank accounts or useful political connections. And in New York (where Petrilli is speaking), we've seen a whole system put in place so that superintendents can demand that teachers stop using their own professional judgment and replace it with scripts from EngageNY because, reasons, while the governor proposes to redefine the entire purpose of teaching.
We can have actual conversations. The modern ed reform movement has tried to redefine the entire purpose of American education without ever having a single public discussion about it. Subsequently, they have been shocked and surprised that a few million people spoke up and said some version of, "Excuse me, just a minute!" Reformsters were not prepared to talk about it; they had created a program that was just supposed to put all these goals in place and it would just happen.
They got in the ring with no plan other than, "I will throw one or two punches, knock this guy out, and we'll be done." They threw their punch, and the opponent got back up off the canvas; that's the point at which reformsters started saying, "Hey, let's talk about this."
But instead of really trying to talk about education, reformsters have tried to keep tweaking their talking points and fine-tuning their PR, trying to get that narrative under control. Some are still devoted to the long game of steadily starving the public system ("the beast"), declaring a school failure emergency, and putting their programs for "rescue" in place.
A conversation? Still by and large not happening. At this point, I'm not sure how it could happen. But if the "education wars" are to ever end, or at least become calm enough that schools can more easily and effectively do their jobs, then a real conversation is going to have to happen.
Friday, March 6, 2015
Is Early Reading a Problem?
Robert Pondiscio appeared on US News this week to stick up for the Common Core's demand that kindergartners learn to read.
He's responding to the recent report from Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Childhood. The report (which I covered here) makes a case that the Core ignores developmental experts.
Pondiscio engages in a subtle but significant misrepresentation of the criticism of CCSS's early reading requirement when he says "What critics seem to be saying is that Common Core is simply too hard for kindergarten."
Well, no. Not exactly.
I can't think of a single person I've encountered on any side who has said, "For the love of God, whatever you do, don't let kindergartners learn to read!! Don't even let them get ready to read!" Nor do I know of anyone in education who doesn't recognize the value of learning to read. I do look askance at statements about early reading success being predictive of "a child's academic trajectory" because it smells a great deal like one more person confusing correlation with causation. But even if I don't buy the usefulness of that observation, it doesn't make me value reading any less.
However, there is a world of difference between saying, "It's a good idea for children to proceed as quickly as they can toward reading skills" and "All students must demonstrate the ability to read emergent reader texts with purpose and understanding by the last day of kindergarten."
The development of reading skills, like the development of speech, height, weight, hair and potty training, is a developmental landmark that each child will reach on his or her own schedule.
We would like all children to grow up to be tall and strong. It does not automatically follow that we should therefor set a height standard that all children must meet by their fifth birthday-- especially if we are going to label all those who come up short as failures or slow or developmentally disabled, and then use those labels in turn to label their schools and their teachers failures as well. These standards demand that students develop at a time we've set for them. Trying to force, pressure and coerce them to mature or grow or develop sooner so that they don't "fail"-- how can that be a benefit to the child.
And these are five year olds in kindergarten. On top of the developmental differences that naturally occur among baby humans, we've also got the arbitrary age requirements of the kindergarten system itself, meaning that there can be as much as a six-month age difference (10% of their lives so far) between the students. [Edit: As correctly pointed out by some readers, depending on how your local district handles kindergarten registration, that age spread can be as large as a full year.]
Saying that we want all students to grow up exposed to rich environments that promote reading-- that's a great idea. Setting an arbitrary cut-off standard and then labeling everyone who doesn't meet it a failure is a terrible idea. The Common Core does not present its reading standards (developed without input from any early childhood learning experts) as suggestions; it presents them as a list of Things Students Must Know By the End of the Grade. That's what Pondiscio tiptoes around in his piece-- that we are going to tell five year olds who aren't at the standard that they are failures (and probably on a path to be failures for life).
And I'm not even starting on how the Core encourages the use of standardized testing to show how students have met the standard. What earthly good does it do to subject a five year old to a standardized test?
Giving each child the earliest best possible shot at learning to read is an admirable and worthwhile goal, but demanding that each and every child meet a One Size Fits All standard is not, particularly when that standard has not taken into account the realities and varieties of early child development.
He's responding to the recent report from Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Childhood. The report (which I covered here) makes a case that the Core ignores developmental experts.
Pondiscio engages in a subtle but significant misrepresentation of the criticism of CCSS's early reading requirement when he says "What critics seem to be saying is that Common Core is simply too hard for kindergarten."
Well, no. Not exactly.
I can't think of a single person I've encountered on any side who has said, "For the love of God, whatever you do, don't let kindergartners learn to read!! Don't even let them get ready to read!" Nor do I know of anyone in education who doesn't recognize the value of learning to read. I do look askance at statements about early reading success being predictive of "a child's academic trajectory" because it smells a great deal like one more person confusing correlation with causation. But even if I don't buy the usefulness of that observation, it doesn't make me value reading any less.
However, there is a world of difference between saying, "It's a good idea for children to proceed as quickly as they can toward reading skills" and "All students must demonstrate the ability to read emergent reader texts with purpose and understanding by the last day of kindergarten."
The development of reading skills, like the development of speech, height, weight, hair and potty training, is a developmental landmark that each child will reach on his or her own schedule.
We would like all children to grow up to be tall and strong. It does not automatically follow that we should therefor set a height standard that all children must meet by their fifth birthday-- especially if we are going to label all those who come up short as failures or slow or developmentally disabled, and then use those labels in turn to label their schools and their teachers failures as well. These standards demand that students develop at a time we've set for them. Trying to force, pressure and coerce them to mature or grow or develop sooner so that they don't "fail"-- how can that be a benefit to the child.
And these are five year olds in kindergarten. On top of the developmental differences that naturally occur among baby humans, we've also got the arbitrary age requirements of the kindergarten system itself, meaning that there can be as much as a six-month age difference (10% of their lives so far) between the students. [Edit: As correctly pointed out by some readers, depending on how your local district handles kindergarten registration, that age spread can be as large as a full year.]
Saying that we want all students to grow up exposed to rich environments that promote reading-- that's a great idea. Setting an arbitrary cut-off standard and then labeling everyone who doesn't meet it a failure is a terrible idea. The Common Core does not present its reading standards (developed without input from any early childhood learning experts) as suggestions; it presents them as a list of Things Students Must Know By the End of the Grade. That's what Pondiscio tiptoes around in his piece-- that we are going to tell five year olds who aren't at the standard that they are failures (and probably on a path to be failures for life).
And I'm not even starting on how the Core encourages the use of standardized testing to show how students have met the standard. What earthly good does it do to subject a five year old to a standardized test?
Giving each child the earliest best possible shot at learning to read is an admirable and worthwhile goal, but demanding that each and every child meet a One Size Fits All standard is not, particularly when that standard has not taken into account the realities and varieties of early child development.
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