Performance is on my mind lately. Two weekends ago was the high school musical (Legally Blonde) that a neighboring district runs as a co-op program with my school; I serve as assistant director for an old friend and great teacher. This weekend I'm wrapping up my own school's annual variety show (been happening since 1930 and it's a Big Deal). Both productions held auditions way back in December, so this has been a long marathon run of rehearsals and preparation.
I have played trombone in every kind of band that will put up with a trombone player since I was about nine. I've been a church choir director and worked community theater productions of everything from Annie and Sound of Music to Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Chicago.
Point being, I spend a lot of time in the world of performance, and I carry that experience with me into any discussion of performance-based assessment. Yes, they're not exactly the same kind of performance, but I think the parallels are close enough to be instructive.
Performance can be a great measure of achievement and understanding and skill-- or it can be a terrible measure.
Let's consider a high school band director. She always has a performance-based assessment built right into her course, but whether it means anything or not will depend on how she prepares her students for the performance task.
Let's say she programs a march by Henry Fillmore.
In the rehearsal process, she could teach the students about the context of marches during the era of the Big Three composers (Fillmore, Karl King, and John Philip Sousa). She could talk about how musicians made a living (or didn't) in that time period. She could trace Fillmore's own career through live performance into his development of a radio show, which in turn opens up a discussion of how media affect performers and performance, and all of it opens up a discussion of how business considerations affect what works and performers make it into mass media.
If she didn't want to wander down too many side roads, she could focus on technical issues for the musicians. What's an appropriate style for playing marches? How are staccatos and accents played differently than they're played in other styles? For younger musicians, the work might even occasion a discussion of repeat signs and dynamic markings. What sections typically occur in march composition? She could teach them a variety of musical information that would serve them if they ever again play a march.
Or she could teach them just how to play that one march.
This is the problem with performance tasks as a basis for assessment. If you know what the task is going to be before you start (like, say, perform a piece of music that is already completely written down), then you can prepare only and exactly the skills required to complete that task.
There are choirs and even bands in schools across the country where students don't even learn to read music-- they just learn to repeat the notes of particular songs by rote. That's not nothing-- but it's not everything an educational music program can provide or hope to aspire, and it certainly doesn't provide students with much that they can carry away after the concert is over.
Performance based assessment can be excellent; it makes way more sense to have my students write essays that to take tests about how to write essays. But if we aren't careful, we can narrow the breadth and focus of the assessment so tightly that very little true teaching actually occurs in the run-up to the assessment.
Just one more reason that assessment should follow instruction and not the other way around. If I teach first and then design an assessment, I'll come up with an assessment that I think captures the depth and breadth of what my students have learned. If I have the test in front of me before I even start to teach, I'll direct everything toward that final product.
So when I close out a show, especially a school show, I don't just ask if it was a good show. I ask myself if the cast and crew learned something, if they developed and grew in ways that will benefit the next performance they're involved in.
This subheading is an apology because I just realized this will be a longer piece than I thought it would be when I started it.
What I've been talking about is, of course, teaching to the test. It is teaching that has a short, limited trajectory.
What do we teach to if not the test? We've been saying that we should teach to the student. I have another idea.
When we teach a student how to perform just one specific work, one song, one arrangement, one single play, one musical, then we have prepared for a specific moment in time, and once that moment is over, the usefulness, the value, the meaning of that learning is gone.
But when, in the process of preparing a student for a performance, we increase their skill and their knowledge and their technique, we give them a host of skills that they can carry on into life. If I teach a student by rote how to sing the tenor part to "My Wild Irish Rose," that's a skill he'll only ever use if he finds himself in a situation where he wants to sing the tenor part to "My Wild Irish Rose." If I teach him how to read and interpret and appreciate and enjoy music, that will be useful to him until the day he dies. Not only that but he will have the chance to pass those same skills on to other people, so that what he's learned will actually outlive him. I know this because I'm a link in just such a chain, inspired and trained by men and women who made it possible for me to inspire and train others.
When I look back at a production, sometimes the quality of the actual show is not as important as the growth that I saw. The show is not the end of the line, the destination of the performers, but just a stop-and-check point on a larger journey, and it's the trajectory of that larger journey that is far more important than how awesome this particular rest stop turned out.
Though here's the Big Ironic Thing-- by taking this long view, I think we actually produce really good shows. Better than those produced by people who just focus on this performance as the and of the line, the whole purpose.
I like the analogy of a golf swing. Golfers work endlessly on follow-through, because somehow, the way you hit the ball depends a great deal on what you do (and intend to do) after you actually hit the ball.
What do we teach to if we don't teach to the test?
We teach to the possibilities. We teach to the strengths and weaknesses and aspirations that students have for the adults they will one day become. Our teaching is not a short arc that extends from a hand to a dartboard, but a long unending arc, like a rocket launched at the heart of the universe.
Don't teach to the test.
Teach to the future.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Charter Leeches Call for Help in PA
When the Center for Education Reform sends out a call to action, you can be sure of one thing-- somewhere, charter school legislation is in trouble.
The Center is one of the oldest charter action-lobbying groups in the country, tracing its roots all the way back to 1993.
It is the mission of the Center for Education Reform to accelerate the growth of the education reform movement in ways that make available to families new and meaningful choices, give parents fundamental power over their children’s education, and allow teachers and schools to innovate in ways that transform student learning.
What that actually means is that they push charters like Swiss athletes push bobsleds. Their stock in trade is state-by-state charter ratings which award a letter grade based on the ease with which a charter operator can make a bundle in that state. And this week they sent out an email to let everybody know that Pennsylvania was being downgraded to a C.
What's the problem? The problem is that Pennsylvania's new governor Tom Wolf has a budget proposal on the table that aims to slow the speed and severity of public education's charter leech problem.
Pennsylvania's approach to charters has never seriously claimed that it was going to save taxpayers money, which is a good thing because then charters would be guilty of both leeching and lying. In PA, we prefer the approach that comes up with a bogus cost-per-pupil figure and then just ports it over to the charter.
Running a cyber-charter in PA is like printing money. While the per-pupil figure varies by district, $10K for a student without special needs is a good ballpark (students with special needs carry a higher figure). So the cyber enrolls the student, send him a $400 "free" computer, and adds him to the bank of 200 students being handled by a single teacher. The cyber takes the thousands of dollars it didn't spend on anything, uses some of it for snazzy advertising and hiring lobbyists, and banks the rest. And the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn't even demand a careful accounting of where it all went.
The financial strain on school districts is tremendous. The district next to mine has about forty cyber-school students and they lost around a half a million dollars from their budget. My own district, the last year I looked, had sent 76 students to cybers at a cost of about $800K. That's coming close to 10% of our total budget.
Back in the day, the state reimbursed local districts for some of the public tax dollars that they handed over to charter schools. Our previous governor discontinued that practice, leading to even tougher financial squeezes for local districts. Our new governor (who has already shown himself not overly concerned about charter happiness) proposes to audit charter books, and have them to return a chunk of the public tax dollars they didn't actually use to operate their schools to the public school system from whence they came.
Charter operators are not happy. Lehigh Valley Live quotes Keystone Alliance for Public Charter Schools Executive Director Tim Eller: "What the governor proposed today is a budget that would effectively shut down charter schools across Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania Independent also has a high dudgeon Eller quote: “What the governor proposed is a budget that would effectively shut down charter schools across Pennsylvania.”
What we've run up again is the same old Giant Charter Central Fallacy-- you cannot run multiple school districts for the same cost as a single district. The model that PA (and many other states) settled on was one in which the extra costs of multiple districts were transferred to taxpayers, but done in such a way that local districts would have to look like the bad guy.
But PA's system is particularly insidious because there is a legislative cap on tax increases. Charter leeches, general inflation of costs, and the impact of the state's badly botched teacher pension system can often raise the costs of a district far beyond that district's ability to balance with new taxes. Therefor, many districts are being driven into austerity and even bankruptcy.
The argument about PA charters is about how big a slice of the pie the charters are entitled to. It's a difficult argument for them to have, because they have never really presented a convincing argument about how much money it takes them to do their jobs, nor why taxpayers should foot the bill for a duplication of the services already provided by public schools.
And frankly, I'm not sure how much the governor's proposal really moves the discussion forward. First, Wolf's budget has to get past the heavily GOP charter-loving legislature. Second, is there anybody who works with money and budgets who doesn't understand what "Use this money by end of fiscal year or you'll lose it" means? Wolf's proposal may mean a boost for lawyers and accountants, but I'm not sure that it will fix Pennsylvania's charter problems-- it will just provide the not unwelcome spectacle of charters having to fight a little harder for their slab of bacon.
The Center is one of the oldest charter action-lobbying groups in the country, tracing its roots all the way back to 1993.
It is the mission of the Center for Education Reform to accelerate the growth of the education reform movement in ways that make available to families new and meaningful choices, give parents fundamental power over their children’s education, and allow teachers and schools to innovate in ways that transform student learning.
What that actually means is that they push charters like Swiss athletes push bobsleds. Their stock in trade is state-by-state charter ratings which award a letter grade based on the ease with which a charter operator can make a bundle in that state. And this week they sent out an email to let everybody know that Pennsylvania was being downgraded to a C.
What's the problem? The problem is that Pennsylvania's new governor Tom Wolf has a budget proposal on the table that aims to slow the speed and severity of public education's charter leech problem.
Pennsylvania's approach to charters has never seriously claimed that it was going to save taxpayers money, which is a good thing because then charters would be guilty of both leeching and lying. In PA, we prefer the approach that comes up with a bogus cost-per-pupil figure and then just ports it over to the charter.
Running a cyber-charter in PA is like printing money. While the per-pupil figure varies by district, $10K for a student without special needs is a good ballpark (students with special needs carry a higher figure). So the cyber enrolls the student, send him a $400 "free" computer, and adds him to the bank of 200 students being handled by a single teacher. The cyber takes the thousands of dollars it didn't spend on anything, uses some of it for snazzy advertising and hiring lobbyists, and banks the rest. And the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn't even demand a careful accounting of where it all went.
The financial strain on school districts is tremendous. The district next to mine has about forty cyber-school students and they lost around a half a million dollars from their budget. My own district, the last year I looked, had sent 76 students to cybers at a cost of about $800K. That's coming close to 10% of our total budget.
Back in the day, the state reimbursed local districts for some of the public tax dollars that they handed over to charter schools. Our previous governor discontinued that practice, leading to even tougher financial squeezes for local districts. Our new governor (who has already shown himself not overly concerned about charter happiness) proposes to audit charter books, and have them to return a chunk of the public tax dollars they didn't actually use to operate their schools to the public school system from whence they came.
Charter operators are not happy. Lehigh Valley Live quotes Keystone Alliance for Public Charter Schools Executive Director Tim Eller: "What the governor proposed today is a budget that would effectively shut down charter schools across Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania Independent also has a high dudgeon Eller quote: “What the governor proposed is a budget that would effectively shut down charter schools across Pennsylvania.”
What we've run up again is the same old Giant Charter Central Fallacy-- you cannot run multiple school districts for the same cost as a single district. The model that PA (and many other states) settled on was one in which the extra costs of multiple districts were transferred to taxpayers, but done in such a way that local districts would have to look like the bad guy.
But PA's system is particularly insidious because there is a legislative cap on tax increases. Charter leeches, general inflation of costs, and the impact of the state's badly botched teacher pension system can often raise the costs of a district far beyond that district's ability to balance with new taxes. Therefor, many districts are being driven into austerity and even bankruptcy.
The argument about PA charters is about how big a slice of the pie the charters are entitled to. It's a difficult argument for them to have, because they have never really presented a convincing argument about how much money it takes them to do their jobs, nor why taxpayers should foot the bill for a duplication of the services already provided by public schools.
And frankly, I'm not sure how much the governor's proposal really moves the discussion forward. First, Wolf's budget has to get past the heavily GOP charter-loving legislature. Second, is there anybody who works with money and budgets who doesn't understand what "Use this money by end of fiscal year or you'll lose it" means? Wolf's proposal may mean a boost for lawyers and accountants, but I'm not sure that it will fix Pennsylvania's charter problems-- it will just provide the not unwelcome spectacle of charters having to fight a little harder for their slab of bacon.
Friday, March 20, 2015
Whitney Tilson Is Better Than You
When we're talking about the kind of hedge-fund managing, faux-Democrat, rich fat cat, anti-public ed reformsters who are driving much of the modern ed reform agenda, we're talking about guys like Whitney Tilson.
The Tilson Story
Tilson is a walking Great Story-- his parents are educators who met while serving in the Peace Corps. Tilson's father earned a doctorate in education at Stanford, which adds the story-worthy detail that young Whitney was a participant in Stanford's famous marshmallow experiment. That's an apt biographical detail. The original interpretation of the experiment was essentially that some children are better than others because they have the right character traits. More recent follow-up research suggests that a bigger lesson is that it's a hell of a lot easier to show desired character traits when you live in a stable environment.
Tilson became a big name in the world of value investing, and he has used his gabillions to fuel the charter school world. He's a big backer of KIPP, TFA and DFER. He is nominally a liberal Democrat, but he has no love for teachers and some pretty clear dislike for their unions.
He recently surfaced in an article by The Nation about how the billionaire boys club is remaking the New York City Schools in their own chartery profit-generating image. Tilson, in his weekly-ish ed reform newsletter, dismissed the article as "a silly hatchet job" and told his own version of how a bunch of Very Rich White Guys have commandeered the biggest apple of them all.
The true story here is very simple and the opposite of sinister – it’s inspiring to me: a number of very successful New Yorkers – believing in the power of education and that every kid deserves a fair shot at the American dream, and disgusted with an educational system that does just the opposite, in which the color of your skin and your zip code pretty much determine the quality of public school a kid gets, an unjust reality that goes on, year in and year out, not because the system is broken, but because it operates just the way it’s supposed to, to serve the economic interests of the adults in the system and the political interests of the gutless weasel politicians who kowtow to them – decided to donate millions of dollars, despite having absolutely nothing to gain personally, to create a counter-weight to the status quo, in which the unions historically said “Jump!” and the governor and legislature would respond, “How high?!”
Tilson likes to characterize himself as a scrappy underdog.
I’m very proud to say that we’ve been enormously successful. Despite being outmanned, outspent, and outgunned 100:1, a small group of incredible people – in part the funders, but more importantly the people on the ground – have turned the tables on the entrenched powers, in part by, yes, finding and strongly supporting a courageous ally in Gov. Cuomo.
I am not sure in which alternate reality these billionaires have been outspent or outgunned, but it is a standard part of the reformster narrative that they are heroic fighters, fearlessly taking on entrenched and powerful forces who are bent on imprisoning students everywhere in dark dungeons of desperation and failure.
It's not about the greed
I have long believed that those who explain reformster motivation by resorting to greed are likely wrong. From techno-system guys like Gates to value investors like Tilson, there's something else working. Here's a quote from that same Tilson letter
We are winning this titanic struggle (albeit in a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back way), not because we’re all-powerful billionaires, but because, to quote MLK, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Or this quote from Sir Michael Barber, head of Pearson, commenting on the challenge of remaking education into a global digitized system:
Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right
Or the Lyndsay Layton interview with Bill Gates, in which Gates is truly thrown by the mere suggestion that he's in this for the bucks.
These are all people who believe they are serving a higher moral purpose, that they personally understand how the world should be reshaped in a way that other people simply don't. And they have an obligation to circumvent democratic institutions, traditional systems and the disagreeing humans who stand in their way because they know better.
They are armed with vast fortunes and wide-ranging connections, and just like the robber barons before them, they sense that these powers are not the result of random good fortune, but the validation and proof that they really are better than other people, that they have some better, wiser grasp of the world and how it does, and should, work. They do not necessarily revel in the power; in fact, they often use the language of obligation-- it's a thing they have to do. It's, you know, a burden that this rich white guys must pick up.
Will their reforms bring them more money and power? Sure. But that's not the goal-- it's just the proof that they were right. After all, if they weren't smart and strong and better than the average person, they wouldn't be so rich and powerful.
Now, does greed help drive the ed reform engines? Certainly. But that's because once these super-powered elite form their vision of how to remake the world, there is a ton of money to be made by helping them do it, and so a whole swarm of people interested in that money travel in their wake. Philosophically, it really does mirror the symbiosis of 19th century European colonialism. Nobody could sell conquering Africa as baldfaced conquest and exploitation-- but once that colonization was sold as a way to give lesser people the benefits of superior European culture, knowledge, worldview, pants, and religion, the profiteers could adopt the proper language and spread over the continent like locusts.
In the "meritocratic" universe, there are The Right Sort of People and The Wrong Sort of People. The Betters are successful and wise, and this is evident in their success and wealth and innate superior character. They should run things. The Wrong Sort of People need accountability to keep them in line, to guide them to do the correct thing (you will note that we never call for accountability for the Betters-- they don't need it, and their success proves they don't need it).
So what's does Tilson really think?
Tilson's education views seem to have coalesced fairly early in the current ed reform cycle; in 2009 he gave a presentation in DC that was his attempt to create An Inconvenient Truth for the education biz. "A Right Denied" exists as a website, a set of power point slides, and a documentary. I worked my way through the slide show, which I think is an excellent summary (although, at 292 slides, not a very brief one) of the DFER corporate Democrat point of view.
The problem
Tilson starts by documenting the correlation between education and employment, earnings, and long-term health. I don't think many people dispute the correlation-- the argument is about what it means. The DFER/Duncan position is that education is the cause of everything else. I think it's far more likely that lower educational results come from the same place as the other issues-- poverty.
Tilson also notes that scores on some tests have stagnated, and there's lots to argue about there (can you really compare SAT results when the population taking the test has been steadily changing as we try to convince every student that she must go to college), as well as the question of what standardized tests actually measure. But it is a critical element of the DFER view that schools must be accountable, by which they mean the Help must show their Betters what they are up to.
Tilson also wants us to know that we've been spending more and more on education (he does not address the question of "on what," and consider issues such as increased mandates for more special ed teachers in schools). That's okay-- his basic point is clear. We've been spending tons of money on education and not getting bang for our buck.
Tilson knows why-- three reasons:
1) Teacher quality has been falling rapidly over the past few decades.
2) Our school systems have become more dysfunctional, bureaucratic, and unaccountable.
3) As a nation, we have been so rich for so long that we have become lazy and complacent. Our youth are spending more time watching tv, listening to iPods, playing video games.
Tilson illustrates this with two photos-- one showing neat, well-dressed Chinese youngsters politely lined up, and the other an unruly crowd of shirtless frat boys. Kids these days! He then shows some data to support his last point. Points 1 and 2 get no supporting evidence at all right now.
Some critical gaps
Gap #1. We don't send enough students to college, and too few of those finish. No idea why that completion rate is low. It would be interesting to see the numbers on students who drop out of college because they can't afford to finish it.
Gap #2. The achievement gap, by race and poverty. Starting in kindergarten and through college (this is where he shows some numbers about college affordability). But the bottom line here is that "the color of your skin and your zip code are almost entirely determinative of the quality of public education this nation provides. This is deeply, profoundly wrong." I have no beef with Tilson on this point.
The solutions
Here's where it just gets very weird, random, and profoundly intellectually sloppy.
There are too many systems "dominated by the Three Pillars of Mediocrity." Quick-- before you scroll down, can you think of three policies that make it hard to improve poor schools. Did you guess systemic underfunding, lack of support, or absence of fundamental infrastructure and resources? Incorrect. It's those damn teachers. They have tenure, a pay scale, and seniority.
Tilson says if you want to fix any broken system (because how different could schools be from any other system), you take these four steps:
1) Adopt the right strategy and tactics
2) Hire and train great leaders and then empower them
3) Measure results
4) Hold people accountable
A patronizing patrician approach is embedded here, too. Note that there is no step for consulting with the people who are already in the system. Our assumption, once again, is that some people are better than others, and you need to put those who are better in charge.
Tilson holds up Florida as an example of this type of system overhaul. And it's here that we hit a point that the Nation article really did get wrong. They accused Tilson of not wanting to spend any money on schools, but in slide #90, he makes it clear that spending more money is not a solution-- unless the money is tied to reforms. It's the fetal form of the reformster adage "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and test publishers is awesome."
Of course, you might not be able to reform the system, in which case you need to replace it, and here come a slew of slides about the miraculous miracle that is New Orleans, featuring the usual selective slices of data (incidentally, we also get the prediction that by 2016 there will be almost no failing schools in NOLA. So that's a win).
And now for a word...
Next up-- an advertisement for charters, especially the KIPP system for which Tilson sits on the board.
Those damn teachers
Did you know that teachers are the most important in-school factor in student achievement (aka test scores)? Well, here come a bunch of pull quotes from the infamous (and unsupportable) Chetty study to tell you so. And we'll throw in some Eric Hanushek baloney about firing our way to excellence as well.
Tilson boils the teacher problem down to two factors-- teacher quality has been declining for decades, and talent is unfairly distributed.
So here we are back at one of the fundamental assumptions of the DFER/Duncan worldview-- some people are just better than others, and that betterness reveals itself in All the Right Places. They will be better at school, they will get better jobs, they will do better on standardized tests, and ultimately they will make more money. So when we look for these markers, we aren't really measuring anything in particular-- we're just looking for the markers of success that signal one of the Chosen Few (and yes-- astute readers will note that modern corporate meritocrats have a great deal in common with our Puritan forebears).
So-- we "know" that we aren't getting the Right People into teaching because they don't mostly graduate at the top of their class or get the best SAT scores. Meanwhile, the schools of education lack accountability-- and in the meritocratic view of the world, accountability is what we need in order to make the Lesser Humans behave properly.
Implicit in this world view is that being a Better or a Lesser is fairly hard to change. It's wired in, like good breeding. That's why Lessers need "accountability," because only carrots and sticks (and mostly sticks) will get them to overcome their fundamental Lesser nature. This is also the rationale behind testing for students (no fourth grade for you until you pass this reading test, kid)-- only by strong actions can we force them to overcome their inherently lesser natures.
In the meantime, we need to sort out the Right Sort of People from the Wrong Sort of People in teaching and fire our way to excellence (by removing the Wrong Sort of People). This is why DFER types love Teach for America-- it selects teachers by using the markers of true excellence (wealth, good grades, the Right Schools) so that The Right Sort of People will be put in the classroom. TFA even systematically addresses one of the inherent contradictions of the DFER view-- if you really are the Right Kind of Person, you'll be doing something more successful and wealth-making than merely being a teacher, so it's okay if you only do it for a while.
Unfair distribution is more of the same. We know that the Bad Teachers are ending up in poor schools because none of the markers of Being Better are there. No high tests scores, degrees from the Right Sort of School.
And behind it all-- the damn unions, which are composed of the Wrong Sort of Person and try to protect the Wrong Sort of Person from having to be accountable to their Betters.
Goofus and Gallant
Tilson finishes with some action items, some things that you should or should not do.
You should join DFER. Ask questions of the ignorant, gutless politicians (clearly the Wrong Sort of People who have been elected by the Wrong Sort of People-- stupid democracy, anyway).
Don't allow reform opponents to define the debate (I have to tell you-- viewing myself through Tilson's eyes, I am a freaking giant). Also, don't think advocacy is cheap.
And stay positive, and don't get lost in fantasy:
It's nice to fantasize about an 18-day, Egypt-style revolution that throws out the old order, that's not going to happen. The system is much too big, too entrenched, and too decentralized to fix quickly.
Is it really nice to fantasize about public education being completely removed in a violent revolution? Interesting thought, that.
Here's one thing that is not on Tilson's to-do list-- empower the people who actually live in poor and minority neighborhoods by getting systemic barriers out of their way so that they can better have a voice in their own governance and local education. In fact, even listening to those voices is not on the list.
Tilson and the Worst Kind of Democrat Caricature
So what's the real problem? The Wrong Sort of People are in charge, and Kids These Days have turned into miserable slackers. Poor and minority students are being abandoned in the mess that comes from letting The Wrong Sort of People be in charge. We need to put the Right Sort of People in charge through any means possible, so that they can take care of the Lesser Folks who need their largesse and assistance. Having things like a Race to the Top make sense because we can then separate out the Right Kind of People from the Wrong Kind of People. The Betters will raise expectations, hold peoples' feet to the fire, and get a warm glow of satisfaction from knowing that they made life better for people who were, of course, incapable of making life better for themselves. And in doing so, they will be acting as a force for good and justice and truth in the universe (and they will be richly rewarded because virtue always leads to great rewards).
Yes, this all dovetails beautifully with the goals and aims of profiteers, the folks who just want a chance to crack open the golden egg of education and feed on the giant omelet of money that can be made from it. But when you separate the DFER-style agenda from the profiteering, you can see the kind of paternalistic elitist we-know-better-than-you cartoon Democrat that Tea Partiers and other hard-right folks deeply hate.
This is what you get when you cross real needs, real issues and real concerns (like the need to provide better schooling to poor and minority students in this country) with a particular wacky worldview that is more old-world aristocratic than American. But I'll remind you that Tilson's slides are from 2009, and they contain pretty much every single talking point we've heard from the current administration since Race to the Top was launched. While I may have Whitney Tilson outnumbered and outgunned, I'm just a high school English teacher with a blog and he's an investment whiz with the ear of world leaders. I'm pretty sure I don't represent a very big threat to him, but without ever having met me or knowing who I am, he's ready to kick my ass.
The Tilson Story
Tilson is a walking Great Story-- his parents are educators who met while serving in the Peace Corps. Tilson's father earned a doctorate in education at Stanford, which adds the story-worthy detail that young Whitney was a participant in Stanford's famous marshmallow experiment. That's an apt biographical detail. The original interpretation of the experiment was essentially that some children are better than others because they have the right character traits. More recent follow-up research suggests that a bigger lesson is that it's a hell of a lot easier to show desired character traits when you live in a stable environment.
Tilson became a big name in the world of value investing, and he has used his gabillions to fuel the charter school world. He's a big backer of KIPP, TFA and DFER. He is nominally a liberal Democrat, but he has no love for teachers and some pretty clear dislike for their unions.
He recently surfaced in an article by The Nation about how the billionaire boys club is remaking the New York City Schools in their own chartery profit-generating image. Tilson, in his weekly-ish ed reform newsletter, dismissed the article as "a silly hatchet job" and told his own version of how a bunch of Very Rich White Guys have commandeered the biggest apple of them all.
The true story here is very simple and the opposite of sinister – it’s inspiring to me: a number of very successful New Yorkers – believing in the power of education and that every kid deserves a fair shot at the American dream, and disgusted with an educational system that does just the opposite, in which the color of your skin and your zip code pretty much determine the quality of public school a kid gets, an unjust reality that goes on, year in and year out, not because the system is broken, but because it operates just the way it’s supposed to, to serve the economic interests of the adults in the system and the political interests of the gutless weasel politicians who kowtow to them – decided to donate millions of dollars, despite having absolutely nothing to gain personally, to create a counter-weight to the status quo, in which the unions historically said “Jump!” and the governor and legislature would respond, “How high?!”
Tilson likes to characterize himself as a scrappy underdog.
I’m very proud to say that we’ve been enormously successful. Despite being outmanned, outspent, and outgunned 100:1, a small group of incredible people – in part the funders, but more importantly the people on the ground – have turned the tables on the entrenched powers, in part by, yes, finding and strongly supporting a courageous ally in Gov. Cuomo.
I am not sure in which alternate reality these billionaires have been outspent or outgunned, but it is a standard part of the reformster narrative that they are heroic fighters, fearlessly taking on entrenched and powerful forces who are bent on imprisoning students everywhere in dark dungeons of desperation and failure.
It's not about the greed
I have long believed that those who explain reformster motivation by resorting to greed are likely wrong. From techno-system guys like Gates to value investors like Tilson, there's something else working. Here's a quote from that same Tilson letter
We are winning this titanic struggle (albeit in a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back way), not because we’re all-powerful billionaires, but because, to quote MLK, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Or this quote from Sir Michael Barber, head of Pearson, commenting on the challenge of remaking education into a global digitized system:
Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right
Or the Lyndsay Layton interview with Bill Gates, in which Gates is truly thrown by the mere suggestion that he's in this for the bucks.
These are all people who believe they are serving a higher moral purpose, that they personally understand how the world should be reshaped in a way that other people simply don't. And they have an obligation to circumvent democratic institutions, traditional systems and the disagreeing humans who stand in their way because they know better.
They are armed with vast fortunes and wide-ranging connections, and just like the robber barons before them, they sense that these powers are not the result of random good fortune, but the validation and proof that they really are better than other people, that they have some better, wiser grasp of the world and how it does, and should, work. They do not necessarily revel in the power; in fact, they often use the language of obligation-- it's a thing they have to do. It's, you know, a burden that this rich white guys must pick up.
Will their reforms bring them more money and power? Sure. But that's not the goal-- it's just the proof that they were right. After all, if they weren't smart and strong and better than the average person, they wouldn't be so rich and powerful.
Now, does greed help drive the ed reform engines? Certainly. But that's because once these super-powered elite form their vision of how to remake the world, there is a ton of money to be made by helping them do it, and so a whole swarm of people interested in that money travel in their wake. Philosophically, it really does mirror the symbiosis of 19th century European colonialism. Nobody could sell conquering Africa as baldfaced conquest and exploitation-- but once that colonization was sold as a way to give lesser people the benefits of superior European culture, knowledge, worldview, pants, and religion, the profiteers could adopt the proper language and spread over the continent like locusts.
In the "meritocratic" universe, there are The Right Sort of People and The Wrong Sort of People. The Betters are successful and wise, and this is evident in their success and wealth and innate superior character. They should run things. The Wrong Sort of People need accountability to keep them in line, to guide them to do the correct thing (you will note that we never call for accountability for the Betters-- they don't need it, and their success proves they don't need it).
So what's does Tilson really think?
Tilson's education views seem to have coalesced fairly early in the current ed reform cycle; in 2009 he gave a presentation in DC that was his attempt to create An Inconvenient Truth for the education biz. "A Right Denied" exists as a website, a set of power point slides, and a documentary. I worked my way through the slide show, which I think is an excellent summary (although, at 292 slides, not a very brief one) of the DFER corporate Democrat point of view.
The problem
Tilson starts by documenting the correlation between education and employment, earnings, and long-term health. I don't think many people dispute the correlation-- the argument is about what it means. The DFER/Duncan position is that education is the cause of everything else. I think it's far more likely that lower educational results come from the same place as the other issues-- poverty.
Tilson also notes that scores on some tests have stagnated, and there's lots to argue about there (can you really compare SAT results when the population taking the test has been steadily changing as we try to convince every student that she must go to college), as well as the question of what standardized tests actually measure. But it is a critical element of the DFER view that schools must be accountable, by which they mean the Help must show their Betters what they are up to.
Tilson also wants us to know that we've been spending more and more on education (he does not address the question of "on what," and consider issues such as increased mandates for more special ed teachers in schools). That's okay-- his basic point is clear. We've been spending tons of money on education and not getting bang for our buck.
Tilson knows why-- three reasons:
1) Teacher quality has been falling rapidly over the past few decades.
2) Our school systems have become more dysfunctional, bureaucratic, and unaccountable.
3) As a nation, we have been so rich for so long that we have become lazy and complacent. Our youth are spending more time watching tv, listening to iPods, playing video games.
Tilson illustrates this with two photos-- one showing neat, well-dressed Chinese youngsters politely lined up, and the other an unruly crowd of shirtless frat boys. Kids these days! He then shows some data to support his last point. Points 1 and 2 get no supporting evidence at all right now.
Some critical gaps
Gap #1. We don't send enough students to college, and too few of those finish. No idea why that completion rate is low. It would be interesting to see the numbers on students who drop out of college because they can't afford to finish it.
Gap #2. The achievement gap, by race and poverty. Starting in kindergarten and through college (this is where he shows some numbers about college affordability). But the bottom line here is that "the color of your skin and your zip code are almost entirely determinative of the quality of public education this nation provides. This is deeply, profoundly wrong." I have no beef with Tilson on this point.
The solutions
Here's where it just gets very weird, random, and profoundly intellectually sloppy.
There are too many systems "dominated by the Three Pillars of Mediocrity." Quick-- before you scroll down, can you think of three policies that make it hard to improve poor schools. Did you guess systemic underfunding, lack of support, or absence of fundamental infrastructure and resources? Incorrect. It's those damn teachers. They have tenure, a pay scale, and seniority.
Tilson says if you want to fix any broken system (because how different could schools be from any other system), you take these four steps:
1) Adopt the right strategy and tactics
2) Hire and train great leaders and then empower them
3) Measure results
4) Hold people accountable
A patronizing patrician approach is embedded here, too. Note that there is no step for consulting with the people who are already in the system. Our assumption, once again, is that some people are better than others, and you need to put those who are better in charge.
Tilson holds up Florida as an example of this type of system overhaul. And it's here that we hit a point that the Nation article really did get wrong. They accused Tilson of not wanting to spend any money on schools, but in slide #90, he makes it clear that spending more money is not a solution-- unless the money is tied to reforms. It's the fetal form of the reformster adage "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and test publishers is awesome."
Of course, you might not be able to reform the system, in which case you need to replace it, and here come a slew of slides about the miraculous miracle that is New Orleans, featuring the usual selective slices of data (incidentally, we also get the prediction that by 2016 there will be almost no failing schools in NOLA. So that's a win).
And now for a word...
Next up-- an advertisement for charters, especially the KIPP system for which Tilson sits on the board.
Those damn teachers
Did you know that teachers are the most important in-school factor in student achievement (aka test scores)? Well, here come a bunch of pull quotes from the infamous (and unsupportable) Chetty study to tell you so. And we'll throw in some Eric Hanushek baloney about firing our way to excellence as well.
Tilson boils the teacher problem down to two factors-- teacher quality has been declining for decades, and talent is unfairly distributed.
So here we are back at one of the fundamental assumptions of the DFER/Duncan worldview-- some people are just better than others, and that betterness reveals itself in All the Right Places. They will be better at school, they will get better jobs, they will do better on standardized tests, and ultimately they will make more money. So when we look for these markers, we aren't really measuring anything in particular-- we're just looking for the markers of success that signal one of the Chosen Few (and yes-- astute readers will note that modern corporate meritocrats have a great deal in common with our Puritan forebears).
So-- we "know" that we aren't getting the Right People into teaching because they don't mostly graduate at the top of their class or get the best SAT scores. Meanwhile, the schools of education lack accountability-- and in the meritocratic view of the world, accountability is what we need in order to make the Lesser Humans behave properly.
Implicit in this world view is that being a Better or a Lesser is fairly hard to change. It's wired in, like good breeding. That's why Lessers need "accountability," because only carrots and sticks (and mostly sticks) will get them to overcome their fundamental Lesser nature. This is also the rationale behind testing for students (no fourth grade for you until you pass this reading test, kid)-- only by strong actions can we force them to overcome their inherently lesser natures.
In the meantime, we need to sort out the Right Sort of People from the Wrong Sort of People in teaching and fire our way to excellence (by removing the Wrong Sort of People). This is why DFER types love Teach for America-- it selects teachers by using the markers of true excellence (wealth, good grades, the Right Schools) so that The Right Sort of People will be put in the classroom. TFA even systematically addresses one of the inherent contradictions of the DFER view-- if you really are the Right Kind of Person, you'll be doing something more successful and wealth-making than merely being a teacher, so it's okay if you only do it for a while.
Unfair distribution is more of the same. We know that the Bad Teachers are ending up in poor schools because none of the markers of Being Better are there. No high tests scores, degrees from the Right Sort of School.
And behind it all-- the damn unions, which are composed of the Wrong Sort of Person and try to protect the Wrong Sort of Person from having to be accountable to their Betters.
Goofus and Gallant
Tilson finishes with some action items, some things that you should or should not do.
You should join DFER. Ask questions of the ignorant, gutless politicians (clearly the Wrong Sort of People who have been elected by the Wrong Sort of People-- stupid democracy, anyway).
Don't allow reform opponents to define the debate (I have to tell you-- viewing myself through Tilson's eyes, I am a freaking giant). Also, don't think advocacy is cheap.
And stay positive, and don't get lost in fantasy:
It's nice to fantasize about an 18-day, Egypt-style revolution that throws out the old order, that's not going to happen. The system is much too big, too entrenched, and too decentralized to fix quickly.
Is it really nice to fantasize about public education being completely removed in a violent revolution? Interesting thought, that.
Here's one thing that is not on Tilson's to-do list-- empower the people who actually live in poor and minority neighborhoods by getting systemic barriers out of their way so that they can better have a voice in their own governance and local education. In fact, even listening to those voices is not on the list.
Tilson and the Worst Kind of Democrat Caricature
So what's the real problem? The Wrong Sort of People are in charge, and Kids These Days have turned into miserable slackers. Poor and minority students are being abandoned in the mess that comes from letting The Wrong Sort of People be in charge. We need to put the Right Sort of People in charge through any means possible, so that they can take care of the Lesser Folks who need their largesse and assistance. Having things like a Race to the Top make sense because we can then separate out the Right Kind of People from the Wrong Kind of People. The Betters will raise expectations, hold peoples' feet to the fire, and get a warm glow of satisfaction from knowing that they made life better for people who were, of course, incapable of making life better for themselves. And in doing so, they will be acting as a force for good and justice and truth in the universe (and they will be richly rewarded because virtue always leads to great rewards).
Yes, this all dovetails beautifully with the goals and aims of profiteers, the folks who just want a chance to crack open the golden egg of education and feed on the giant omelet of money that can be made from it. But when you separate the DFER-style agenda from the profiteering, you can see the kind of paternalistic elitist we-know-better-than-you cartoon Democrat that Tea Partiers and other hard-right folks deeply hate.
This is what you get when you cross real needs, real issues and real concerns (like the need to provide better schooling to poor and minority students in this country) with a particular wacky worldview that is more old-world aristocratic than American. But I'll remind you that Tilson's slides are from 2009, and they contain pretty much every single talking point we've heard from the current administration since Race to the Top was launched. While I may have Whitney Tilson outnumbered and outgunned, I'm just a high school English teacher with a blog and he's an investment whiz with the ear of world leaders. I'm pretty sure I don't represent a very big threat to him, but without ever having met me or knowing who I am, he's ready to kick my ass.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
EdReports: Almost All Publishers Fail Common Core Math
EdReports.org is a reformster non-profit set up to be the Consumer Reports of educational materials in the Age of Common Core. I wrote about them back in August of 2014, when they first hit the collective radar, and back then it looked easy to see where this was headed-- a well-connected group funded and backed by the Usual Suspects would presumably provide great "impartial" marketing cover for the major publishers.
Well, fast forward to now, and watch me eat my words. EdReports has stood up proud and tall and kicked the major edupublishers right where it hurts.
You can get the quick view in this handy chart.
EdReports looked at all the major publishers of math series. They checked for alignment with the Common Core and only one publisher met expectations across the board. Two partially met expectations, and McGraw-Hill was a winner in grades 4-5. All the rest failed their Common Core alignment test.
Holt McDougal. Fail.
Math in Focus. Fail.
Saxon. Fail.
And yes, Pearson's series only partially didn't fail.
The only series deemed to successfully align with Common Core was Eureka Math. From K-8, they are the only series that EdReports says will meet the requirements of Common Core.
EdReports also looked at Focus and Coherence, and again, many of the major players failed. Yes, including Pearson.
The executive director of EdReports is Eric Hirsch, and if you're guessing he's taking a few heated calls lately, you'd appear to be correct. Liana Heitin is covering this story in the latest print version of Education Week under the headline "Backlash Brews Over Critical Review of Math Materials," and that backlash appears to be from a whole bunch of grumpy parents who are upset that their pride and joy, their bouncing baby math books, are being stuck in the Remedial Group.
Methodology has been questioned and will be debated at length, but the rundown at the EdReports suggests at the very least that this is not a quick, ugly glance. At the very least, I'm figuring that if EdReports knew they were going to call out Pearson et al, they would make sure they'd done their homework.
This is kind of extraordinary because, again, this is not an anti-reform outfit. They were bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, as well as Hewlett and Hemsley money, and director Hirsch comes from the New Teacher Center and the Center for Teacher Quality. I think less of myself for experiencing a little wiggle of happiness when I see reformsters devouring each other; I'm going to start working on that tomorrow.
Diane Briars, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics thinks EdReports blew it. But Morgan Polikoff of USC and William Schmidt at Michigan State agree, according to Heitin, that "claims of common-core alignment are generally unfounded."
So if you're using Eureka Math, congratulations. If you own stock in Eureka Math, double congratulations. Everybody else-- it turns out you're not really doing the core after all. One more example of how the core standards are a botch as standards from top to bottom. And now they may stop working as even a passable marketing strategy.
Well, fast forward to now, and watch me eat my words. EdReports has stood up proud and tall and kicked the major edupublishers right where it hurts.
You can get the quick view in this handy chart.
EdReports looked at all the major publishers of math series. They checked for alignment with the Common Core and only one publisher met expectations across the board. Two partially met expectations, and McGraw-Hill was a winner in grades 4-5. All the rest failed their Common Core alignment test.
Holt McDougal. Fail.
Math in Focus. Fail.
Saxon. Fail.
And yes, Pearson's series only partially didn't fail.
The only series deemed to successfully align with Common Core was Eureka Math. From K-8, they are the only series that EdReports says will meet the requirements of Common Core.
EdReports also looked at Focus and Coherence, and again, many of the major players failed. Yes, including Pearson.
The executive director of EdReports is Eric Hirsch, and if you're guessing he's taking a few heated calls lately, you'd appear to be correct. Liana Heitin is covering this story in the latest print version of Education Week under the headline "Backlash Brews Over Critical Review of Math Materials," and that backlash appears to be from a whole bunch of grumpy parents who are upset that their pride and joy, their bouncing baby math books, are being stuck in the Remedial Group.
Methodology has been questioned and will be debated at length, but the rundown at the EdReports suggests at the very least that this is not a quick, ugly glance. At the very least, I'm figuring that if EdReports knew they were going to call out Pearson et al, they would make sure they'd done their homework.
This is kind of extraordinary because, again, this is not an anti-reform outfit. They were bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, as well as Hewlett and Hemsley money, and director Hirsch comes from the New Teacher Center and the Center for Teacher Quality. I think less of myself for experiencing a little wiggle of happiness when I see reformsters devouring each other; I'm going to start working on that tomorrow.
Diane Briars, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics thinks EdReports blew it. But Morgan Polikoff of USC and William Schmidt at Michigan State agree, according to Heitin, that "claims of common-core alignment are generally unfounded."
So if you're using Eureka Math, congratulations. If you own stock in Eureka Math, double congratulations. Everybody else-- it turns out you're not really doing the core after all. One more example of how the core standards are a botch as standards from top to bottom. And now they may stop working as even a passable marketing strategy.
Yelp for Teachers?
At Yahoo News (yes, that's a thing) Matt Bai, who usually blogs about politics, has a piece arguing for more transparent metrics for teachers, a "Yelp for teachers. Let's take a look.
He spins off from a suit by a Virginia parent to force the state to release "the ratings that public school teachers get based on the test scores of their students."
Bai considers the arguments, and does so in a fairly even-handed manner. In fact. he uses what I'd call a pretty good baseball analogy for why the test-based VAM scores are not exactly the best possible way to measure teachers.
Did Derek Jeter give up more runs, statistically speaking, than the average shortstop? Yes. Did you want Jeter as your shortstop anyway? Absolutely. A public school teacher who ignites the imagination (and most of us had someone like that) might just be worth more than the one whose students have demonstrated mastery of the Pythagorean theorem.
But Bai is not so much interested in techy test-based teacher tallies and how to best share them with the world. He's more interested in the matter of customer-based ratings. If amazon.com and Yelp can use customers ratings in a transparent manner, why not do the same for teachers.
Ask the parents at any bus stop which teachers have lost their energy for the job or can’t control their tempers, and you’ll find out pretty quickly that they know better than anyone else. But there’s no mechanism for parents to pool that knowledge or to make the school system respond to it.
There are a few issues with this. Some Bai recognizes; some, not so much.
First, the platform that he wants to see has been created, and more than once. For instance, check out ratemyteacher.com, which has been around for over a decade. My school is there, with thirteen teachers rated (including one who doesn't actually teach here); I have six ratings myself, placed in the system between 2004 and 2007.
And there's your next problem-- how do you get enough people to use the platform to get meaningful results? Those six ratings (assuming of course that they were written by students that I actually taught) represent approximately .5% of my customer base. Is that enough data for my employer to make decisions about my job performance, or for me to make tweaks in my teaching style?
How would we get all the parents of my district to log in and evaluate teachers, and would we get data that was useful? Voluntary participation would insure that the few who left comments would really mean what they said, but only teachers who evoked particularly strong feelings would elicit comments-- twenty-five sets of parents from my class might say nothing because they think I do a fine regular old vanilla job, but the twenty-sixth parent, who's angry about how Little Chris flunked for never doing work, might blow me up. On the other hand, if I somehow encourage parents to just fill it out, go ahead, say anything, just do it-- they may well take to heart the "say anything" implied in that sort of set-up.
I'm actually a fan of feedback. I have course and teacher evaluation forms of my own that my students fill out anonymously at the end of the year, and on more than one occasion it has changed how I do things. But there's something missing in the techy on-line customer comments model of teacher feedback, and while I'm not sure what it is, the very fact that it doesn't exist is our biggest evidence that nobody yet knows what it should look like. After all, we've made it possible for farmers to find their soulmates. Heck-- if this kind of web-based eval was really desired by parents, it would already exist as a bunch of facebook pages.
There are other problems with the customer feedback model for education. For instance, the quality of the "product" is often not evidenced for years. Every high school teacher has stories of the kid who comes back years later to say, "Boy, at the time, I hated you and I hated your class. But I want to thank you because it turned out you were right to push me." Also, parents are not the only customers-- all taxpayers and business owners and community members are also customers of public ed.
Maybe this kind of transparent open-source feedback would be useful. After all, how often are comments and rating features of websites commandeered by trolls and cranks? Well, Bia's comment section is up to 1,500 entries, and I can tell you they're not all winners. Would they be a good evaluation tool for Bia's skill as a writer?
His last line is the final stake in this idea's chest:
Shouldn’t we teach to the parents at least as much as we teach to the test?
I understand his point (isn't parent feedback at least as useful as BS Test results soaked in VAM sauce), but the correct answer is "We should not teach to either. We should teach students."
He spins off from a suit by a Virginia parent to force the state to release "the ratings that public school teachers get based on the test scores of their students."
Bai considers the arguments, and does so in a fairly even-handed manner. In fact. he uses what I'd call a pretty good baseball analogy for why the test-based VAM scores are not exactly the best possible way to measure teachers.
Did Derek Jeter give up more runs, statistically speaking, than the average shortstop? Yes. Did you want Jeter as your shortstop anyway? Absolutely. A public school teacher who ignites the imagination (and most of us had someone like that) might just be worth more than the one whose students have demonstrated mastery of the Pythagorean theorem.
But Bai is not so much interested in techy test-based teacher tallies and how to best share them with the world. He's more interested in the matter of customer-based ratings. If amazon.com and Yelp can use customers ratings in a transparent manner, why not do the same for teachers.
Ask the parents at any bus stop which teachers have lost their energy for the job or can’t control their tempers, and you’ll find out pretty quickly that they know better than anyone else. But there’s no mechanism for parents to pool that knowledge or to make the school system respond to it.
There are a few issues with this. Some Bai recognizes; some, not so much.
First, the platform that he wants to see has been created, and more than once. For instance, check out ratemyteacher.com, which has been around for over a decade. My school is there, with thirteen teachers rated (including one who doesn't actually teach here); I have six ratings myself, placed in the system between 2004 and 2007.
And there's your next problem-- how do you get enough people to use the platform to get meaningful results? Those six ratings (assuming of course that they were written by students that I actually taught) represent approximately .5% of my customer base. Is that enough data for my employer to make decisions about my job performance, or for me to make tweaks in my teaching style?
How would we get all the parents of my district to log in and evaluate teachers, and would we get data that was useful? Voluntary participation would insure that the few who left comments would really mean what they said, but only teachers who evoked particularly strong feelings would elicit comments-- twenty-five sets of parents from my class might say nothing because they think I do a fine regular old vanilla job, but the twenty-sixth parent, who's angry about how Little Chris flunked for never doing work, might blow me up. On the other hand, if I somehow encourage parents to just fill it out, go ahead, say anything, just do it-- they may well take to heart the "say anything" implied in that sort of set-up.
I'm actually a fan of feedback. I have course and teacher evaluation forms of my own that my students fill out anonymously at the end of the year, and on more than one occasion it has changed how I do things. But there's something missing in the techy on-line customer comments model of teacher feedback, and while I'm not sure what it is, the very fact that it doesn't exist is our biggest evidence that nobody yet knows what it should look like. After all, we've made it possible for farmers to find their soulmates. Heck-- if this kind of web-based eval was really desired by parents, it would already exist as a bunch of facebook pages.
There are other problems with the customer feedback model for education. For instance, the quality of the "product" is often not evidenced for years. Every high school teacher has stories of the kid who comes back years later to say, "Boy, at the time, I hated you and I hated your class. But I want to thank you because it turned out you were right to push me." Also, parents are not the only customers-- all taxpayers and business owners and community members are also customers of public ed.
Maybe this kind of transparent open-source feedback would be useful. After all, how often are comments and rating features of websites commandeered by trolls and cranks? Well, Bia's comment section is up to 1,500 entries, and I can tell you they're not all winners. Would they be a good evaluation tool for Bia's skill as a writer?
His last line is the final stake in this idea's chest:
Shouldn’t we teach to the parents at least as much as we teach to the test?
I understand his point (isn't parent feedback at least as useful as BS Test results soaked in VAM sauce), but the correct answer is "We should not teach to either. We should teach students."
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Trapped in Failing Facilities
This week I'm turning this space over to Phineas DeSiecle, of the Reformers for Reformy Reform, a group devoted to finding more widespread applications for the principles of modern education reform.
I'm writing to you today from outside Uncle Sugar's Big Golden Cafeteria, a failing lunch facility that probably exists in a city near you.
The cafeteria lacks the resources to provide an excellent high-achieving lunch for the students who eat here. The cafeteria does not have enough money to buy high-quality food. The kitchen is understaffed, and there are not enough trays to serve all the students here. Operators of the cafeteria lack the resources to keep the building heated comfortably in the winter. Also, the student group served by the cafeteria include many students with dietary restrictions, food allergies, and eating disorders that they bring with them to every meal. Many of these special needs are difficult and expensive to accommodate. In some cases the needs are daunting; the students with Celiac Disease continue to lose weight and suffer profound health issues no matter how many healthful meals of high quality bread and high achieving pasta they are fed.
Two hundred students are trapped in this failing facility. Trapped, I say. Trapped!!
Some might quibble with my use of the word "trapped." After all, the vast majority of our students and their families actually like the cafeteria well enough to recommend it to others. These people have been hoodwinked by the spectacle of caring trained professionals providing a fundamental human service. They don't understand that the operators of the cafeteria are liars and cheats, because as the customers of the service, they are fundamentally unfit to judge how well their children are being fed.
But here at RRR, we have a solution, a way to rescue those poor, trapped student diners.
First, testing. The eating gap can only be closed by more testing. We propose to take from ten to twenty percent of the food prepared by the cafeteria and instead of feeding it to the students, send it out for testing. We propose to take it to a local outdoor public facility where the food could be fed to animals, weighed, and examined for color and viscosity. This Park test would clearly tell us how well-fed the cafeteria customers are.
Once we have proven that the cafeteria is failing (because, face it, we have already decided it's failing;we just need to generate some numbers for proof) we can move on to further rescue.
Those cries of those poor, trapped two hundred students cannot be ignored. Doomed to eat their meals in an inadequately resources cafeteria simply because it's the one they've been assigned to, those two hundred trapped students must be heeded. They must have a choice.
So we propose to rescue them. Well, not all of them. Actually, we'd like to rescue about ten of them. And we'll decide which ten, thank you. We don't want to be rescuing any old random ten students—we just want our choice of the ones which we find worthy of being rescued.
The remaining one hundred ninety? Well, since we can all agree that the cafeteria is struggling because has too little food, too few trained staffers, and too little financial resource, the solution is obvious:
They should have less.
Once we take 5% of their customer base, the cafeteria will clearly be able to run the ovens 5% less, use 5% fewer light bulbs, and heat 5% less of the building. It's true that we will leave them with all of the high-cost customers, but hey-- how are we supposed to make money at this otherwise?
There are a few other solutions we can also offer. We have had some success with folks from Cook for America, a group of young adults who don't really know anything about preparing food, but like playing with kitchen tools. We did have some complaints about how bad their meals were, but they really mean well, and I think we can all agree that the only thing that matters in food preparation is good intentions.
We'd also like to experiment with a deal in which Uncle Sugar gives the cafeteria to us for our ten customers and the other 190 are encouraged to go seek sustenance elsewhere. After all, what could be more liberating, more choiceful, then being tossed out on the street?
Clearly, the one thing we can't do for the two hundred students trapped in this failing facility is to invest the resources, money and support needed to make the facility a success. Remember the RRR motto: throwing money at public service programs is wasteful, but throwing it at us is awesome!
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
I'm writing to you today from outside Uncle Sugar's Big Golden Cafeteria, a failing lunch facility that probably exists in a city near you.The cafeteria lacks the resources to provide an excellent high-achieving lunch for the students who eat here. The cafeteria does not have enough money to buy high-quality food. The kitchen is understaffed, and there are not enough trays to serve all the students here. Operators of the cafeteria lack the resources to keep the building heated comfortably in the winter. Also, the student group served by the cafeteria include many students with dietary restrictions, food allergies, and eating disorders that they bring with them to every meal. Many of these special needs are difficult and expensive to accommodate. In some cases the needs are daunting; the students with Celiac Disease continue to lose weight and suffer profound health issues no matter how many healthful meals of high quality bread and high achieving pasta they are fed.
Two hundred students are trapped in this failing facility. Trapped, I say. Trapped!!
Some might quibble with my use of the word "trapped." After all, the vast majority of our students and their families actually like the cafeteria well enough to recommend it to others. These people have been hoodwinked by the spectacle of caring trained professionals providing a fundamental human service. They don't understand that the operators of the cafeteria are liars and cheats, because as the customers of the service, they are fundamentally unfit to judge how well their children are being fed.
But here at RRR, we have a solution, a way to rescue those poor, trapped student diners.
First, testing. The eating gap can only be closed by more testing. We propose to take from ten to twenty percent of the food prepared by the cafeteria and instead of feeding it to the students, send it out for testing. We propose to take it to a local outdoor public facility where the food could be fed to animals, weighed, and examined for color and viscosity. This Park test would clearly tell us how well-fed the cafeteria customers are.
Once we have proven that the cafeteria is failing (because, face it, we have already decided it's failing;we just need to generate some numbers for proof) we can move on to further rescue.
Those cries of those poor, trapped two hundred students cannot be ignored. Doomed to eat their meals in an inadequately resources cafeteria simply because it's the one they've been assigned to, those two hundred trapped students must be heeded. They must have a choice.
So we propose to rescue them. Well, not all of them. Actually, we'd like to rescue about ten of them. And we'll decide which ten, thank you. We don't want to be rescuing any old random ten students—we just want our choice of the ones which we find worthy of being rescued.
The remaining one hundred ninety? Well, since we can all agree that the cafeteria is struggling because has too little food, too few trained staffers, and too little financial resource, the solution is obvious:
They should have less.
Once we take 5% of their customer base, the cafeteria will clearly be able to run the ovens 5% less, use 5% fewer light bulbs, and heat 5% less of the building. It's true that we will leave them with all of the high-cost customers, but hey-- how are we supposed to make money at this otherwise?
There are a few other solutions we can also offer. We have had some success with folks from Cook for America, a group of young adults who don't really know anything about preparing food, but like playing with kitchen tools. We did have some complaints about how bad their meals were, but they really mean well, and I think we can all agree that the only thing that matters in food preparation is good intentions.
We'd also like to experiment with a deal in which Uncle Sugar gives the cafeteria to us for our ten customers and the other 190 are encouraged to go seek sustenance elsewhere. After all, what could be more liberating, more choiceful, then being tossed out on the street?
Clearly, the one thing we can't do for the two hundred students trapped in this failing facility is to invest the resources, money and support needed to make the facility a success. Remember the RRR motto: throwing money at public service programs is wasteful, but throwing it at us is awesome!
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Whither Content? Wither, Content!
Here's a fun quote from the now-inactive website Core4All, from about 2012:
How do we implement the Common Core into our current units of study?
Answer:
We don’t. In order for our educational system to improve, it is vital that we change the traditional model of teaching, moving from a content- driven curriculum to a skills-based curriculum.
We don't talk about this as much as perhaps we should-- but the Common Core, despite the lovely appendices added to address the very problem I'm about to raise, really don't give a rat's rear about content.
Perhaps in math we can make the case that content and skills are closely wedded enough to be inextricably bound-- a sort of co-location of pedagogical threads.
But in English Teacher Land, we love our content. We while away hours, days, or entire careers holding forth on The Canon and what works of literature should be included. We tweak works in and out of the scope and sequence with a fairly remarkable uniformity and consistency (if you are an American who has finished 9th grade, you are probably familiar in some way with Romeo and Juliet).
We love our literature and we each have a pile of works that in our hearts we believe every student who passes through our classroom ought to be familiar with.
Common Core does not care. There are reformsters who swear up and down that CCSS requires "rich content" works of literature, but there simply isn't a word of the standards that actually supports that (they have perhaps close read the standards until their eyes crossed). Common Core does not care what the students read as long as those students can perform the appropriate reading tricks hinted at in the standards and required by the Big Standardized Tests.
This again brings us back to one of the foundational flaws of CCSS-- the notion that all academic tasks are performed in a vacuum and that relationships are unimportant. Readers need not develop a relationship with text or get to know it in any meaningful way-- just look at it quickly, and perform these simple tasks. What the text is, what the text says-- that should not matter. Hamlet, Pat the Bunny, or Gravity's Rainbow-- it's all reading stuff. If the Common Core included standards on kissing, they would insist that a kiss is just the proper application of the lips to another surface, and it doesn't matter if the surface is your wife, your sister, a stranger, or a toaster.
This fits with another foundational aspect of the Core, which is that we will only show interest in things that can be measured (and relationships cannot be measured). But if English teachers sense a little hollowness at the Core's core, it may be in part this total lack of interest in the actual content, meaning and experience of literature.
Many teachers (and even non-teachers like David "Gives No Shits" Coleman) have convinced themselves that a love of content is somehow implied or suggested or at least tolerated by the Core, but that's just one more way the actual standards have been rewritten on the ground. The test manufacturers and their publishing wings know the truth-- that the Core doesn't care what you read and certainly doesn't care what you know about literature and the great breadth of human wisdom and experience embedded therein.
You know it's true. We could all scrap every bit of traditional literature studies done in our classes, replace them with short random selections from newspapers and magazines paired with some core-modeled questions, and our test score would soar while our students said, "Who's this Shakespeare guy? Was he a writer or something?"
The Core would be perfectly happy to see literature crawl off in a field and die somewhere. CCSS has no use for it, and it has no use for those of us who care about the world of words.
How do we implement the Common Core into our current units of study?
Answer:
We don’t. In order for our educational system to improve, it is vital that we change the traditional model of teaching, moving from a content- driven curriculum to a skills-based curriculum.
We don't talk about this as much as perhaps we should-- but the Common Core, despite the lovely appendices added to address the very problem I'm about to raise, really don't give a rat's rear about content.
Perhaps in math we can make the case that content and skills are closely wedded enough to be inextricably bound-- a sort of co-location of pedagogical threads.
But in English Teacher Land, we love our content. We while away hours, days, or entire careers holding forth on The Canon and what works of literature should be included. We tweak works in and out of the scope and sequence with a fairly remarkable uniformity and consistency (if you are an American who has finished 9th grade, you are probably familiar in some way with Romeo and Juliet).
We love our literature and we each have a pile of works that in our hearts we believe every student who passes through our classroom ought to be familiar with.
Common Core does not care. There are reformsters who swear up and down that CCSS requires "rich content" works of literature, but there simply isn't a word of the standards that actually supports that (they have perhaps close read the standards until their eyes crossed). Common Core does not care what the students read as long as those students can perform the appropriate reading tricks hinted at in the standards and required by the Big Standardized Tests.
This again brings us back to one of the foundational flaws of CCSS-- the notion that all academic tasks are performed in a vacuum and that relationships are unimportant. Readers need not develop a relationship with text or get to know it in any meaningful way-- just look at it quickly, and perform these simple tasks. What the text is, what the text says-- that should not matter. Hamlet, Pat the Bunny, or Gravity's Rainbow-- it's all reading stuff. If the Common Core included standards on kissing, they would insist that a kiss is just the proper application of the lips to another surface, and it doesn't matter if the surface is your wife, your sister, a stranger, or a toaster.
This fits with another foundational aspect of the Core, which is that we will only show interest in things that can be measured (and relationships cannot be measured). But if English teachers sense a little hollowness at the Core's core, it may be in part this total lack of interest in the actual content, meaning and experience of literature.
Many teachers (and even non-teachers like David "Gives No Shits" Coleman) have convinced themselves that a love of content is somehow implied or suggested or at least tolerated by the Core, but that's just one more way the actual standards have been rewritten on the ground. The test manufacturers and their publishing wings know the truth-- that the Core doesn't care what you read and certainly doesn't care what you know about literature and the great breadth of human wisdom and experience embedded therein.
You know it's true. We could all scrap every bit of traditional literature studies done in our classes, replace them with short random selections from newspapers and magazines paired with some core-modeled questions, and our test score would soar while our students said, "Who's this Shakespeare guy? Was he a writer or something?"
The Core would be perfectly happy to see literature crawl off in a field and die somewhere. CCSS has no use for it, and it has no use for those of us who care about the world of words.
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