Shame

Too much modern ed reformy stuff is built on a foundation of shame.

We are to shame the students. Put up data walls with student names so that the laggards will be held up to the world for all to see how slack and inadequate they are. Their shame at being labeled failures in front of their peers, their teachers, the janitorial staff, and strangers wandering in off the street-- that shaming will drive them to develop some grit and up their game. We build entire schools around the idea that we will shame students for every single infraction.

We are to shame the teachers. Rate and rank staff. Even publish them in the paper. Display their suckiness to all the world. Once they have been publicly shamed, they will finally get their students' test scores up.

We are to shame the schools. Let's grade them, so that those nasty D and F schools can be shamed into finally Doing Something.

The shame program fails for two reasons.




First, it assumes that every layer of education is hampered by people who know how to do more excellent work, but they just don't bother. Those eight-year-olds who can't pass the reading test yet? They're just slacking because they don't feel like trying to learn anything. Or maybe it's their teacher, who went into teaching because she doesn't really care whether students learn or not.

Everybody is just holding out, the reasoning goes. So we just need to give them a shock to the system to get them to fork over the goods (that they have had all along).

But the even-bigger issue here is the idea that shame is an effective motivator.

Shame makes people small, weak, unconfident, broken. Shame is a great motivator if you want to strip away a person's confidence or independence. That's not what we're trying to do in school.
You cannot shame people into excellence. You can not make them stronger by making them feel weak. You do not help them stand up by knocking them down.

Management By Shame is not a winning idea, not just because it's wrong to stomp on people, but because it just doesn't work. It's like withholding meals from a child to make her stronger, or running a child's clothing through a shredder to make him dress more fashionably, or like throwing people in debtor's prison to make them pay their debts.

It is deliberately trying to create a deficit in the very qualities (strength, independence, confidence) that the person needs to success. Sure, there are people who will respond to shaming by fighting back, by taking the shame as a challenge; those are people fortunate enough to have a surplus of the necessary qualities. But that is not all people; I don't believe it's most people or even many people.

The fact that some people can take a psychic beat-down does not mean it's a good idea. Some people can bench press hundreds of pounds, but that does not mean we should drop an anvil on everyone. Shame is a lousy motivator. We have known that since the days that somebody walked into a classroom and said, "Yeah, I don't think sending a kid into the corner to wear a dunce cap really helps."

It's also interesting to notice who deserves to be shamed and who does not. We rush to shame students, teachers and schools, and yet reformsters never propose that we shame the legislatures that don't adequately fund the school or the corporate chieftains who strip-mine education for profits.
If we are serious about improving education, we will stop trying to beat people down instead of trying to lift them up. The culture of a school should be all about supporting and strengthening everyone. That doesn't mean we ignore mistakes and misdeeds. But we need a better response, a better plan, than punishment and shame.

Originally posted at  View from the Cheap Seats

Stop "Defending" Music

Today I ran across one more xeroxed handout touting the test-taking benefits of music education, defending music as a great tool for raising test scores and making students smarter. It was just one more example among many of the "keep music because it helps with other things" pieces out there.

I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.

I get that music programs are under intense pressure, that all across America they are sitting hunched over with one nervous eye on a hooded figure stalking the halls with a big budgetary ax. Music programs are watching administrators race by, frantically chasing test scores and ignoring music in schools. So it may seem like a natural step to go running after the testing crowd hollering, "Hey, I can help with that, too."

Don't. Just don't.

First of all, it's a tactical error. If your state gets swept up in the winds of test dumpage and suddenly tests are not driving your school, what will you say to the ax guy (because, tests or not, the ax guy is not going away any time soon)? If your big selling point for your program has been that it's actually test prep with a horn, you've made yourself dependent on the future of testing. That's a bad horse on which to bet the farm.

Second, it's just sad. And it's extra sad to hear it come from music teachers. Just as sad as if I started telling everyone that reading Shakespeare is a great idea only because it helps with math class.

There are so many reasons for music education. Soooooooo many. And "it helps with testing" or "makes you do better in other classes" belong near the bottom of that list. Here are just a few items that should be further up the list.

Music is universal. It's a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch-- music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?

Listening to music is profoundly human. It lets us touch and understand some of our most complicated feelings. It helps us know who we are, what we want, how to be ourselves in the world. And because we live in an age of vast musical riches from both past and present, we all have access to exactly the music that suits our personality and mood. Music makes the fingers we can use to reach into our own hearts.

Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?

Music is freakin' magical. In forty-some years I have never gotten over it-- you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin' magical.

Music connects us to other humans in amazing ways. I have played in concert bands, a couple of jazz bands, and pit orchestras; I have directed church choirs and community musical theater. It is both indescribable and enormously compelling to see the many ways in which humans making music come together and connect to each other. I imagine the experience of playing team sports is something similar. You are part of something-- something bigger than yourself and more than the sum of the parts. I can't think of any other school subject that so completely fosters cooperation, collaboration, and connection between students. Students learn to help and mentor each other, support each other, lift each other up, and come together into something glorious and way, way cool.

In music, everyone's a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give everything they've got, there's just one winner. When a group of bands or choirs give their all, everybody wins. Regrettably, the growth of musical "competitions" has led to many programs that have forgotten this-- but music is the opposite of a zero-sum game. The better some folks do, the better everybody does. In music, you can pursue excellence and awesomeness without having to worry that you might get beat or defeated or humiliated. Everybody can be awesome.

Music programs give back to communities forever. See that big list of community music groups I've worked with? I am not in a large community, but all those groups exist, and they can all exist because every single person in them came through a school music program. Your community band, your church choir, your local theater-- all those groups that enrich the cultural life of your community are the result of school music programs.

Music programs can be a huge source of pride for school and community. Just like a football team, a band or choir can draw a crowd of fans who take great pride in the traditions and accomplishments of the groups. And if you're not getting your program out in front of the public to help build that following and support, you're messing up.

My high school band director is a hell of a guy, and he absolutely altered the trajectory of my life. When people talk about him, they often talk about all the music teachers and professional musicians that came out of his program, but I think his greatest success was all the students like me who went on to do something else, but whose lives have always been enriched by music.

Music is awesome. It's human. It's universal. It's big business precisely because it is something that everybody wants.

Music does not need to make excuses for itself, as if it had no intrinsic worth. It does not have to dress itself up in test-taking robes or mathematical masks. It has deep, powerful human value, and all of us who love it should be saying so, over and over and over again.

Do not defend a music program because it's good for other things. That's like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. Defend it because music is awesome in ways that no other field is awesome. Defend it because it is music, and that's all the reason it needs. As Emerson wrote, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." A school without music is less whole, less human, less valuable, less complete. Stand up for music as itself, and stop making excuses.

Betterocracy

This thread runs through many reformster ideas and many of my responses to them. I just wanted to gather thoughts about betterocracy in one place.

Many reformsters have one fundamental point in common-- they don't really believe in democracy. They believe in betterocracy.

Betterocracy rests on one simple fundamental belief-- some people really are better than others. It's not necessarily the possession of a particular quality, though Betters are usually smarter, wiser, and possessed of superior character. It's that Betters are made of the right stuff. They come from good stock. They are just better than others.

This is not a new thing. Back in the earlier days of romance and story, we find tales of princes who were reduced to tatters and penury, but whose Inner Quality always shone through, and they always rose to their proper princely place. Our Puritan forefathers believed that God had chosen certain people, and you would be able to spot the Chosen because God would reward them for being Better. Horatio Alger made a career out of penning stories of young men possessed of fine character and plucky grit, whose innate superiority eventually lifted them to the level of society to which they truly belonged.

Some folks interpret the idea of American Democracy to be, "All humans are equal."

But other folks believe that promise is, "Any human can become a Better."

We have always had signifiers of Betterness. In the bad old days, those signs that you might be a better included  traits such as Being White or Having a Penis. More progressive bettercrats have come to understand that such signifiers are unreliable, but when they talk about opening the tent to folks of all race, gender and religion, it's not that they believe that all Black Muslim women are equal to white Christian guys. They just mean they are open to the possibility that a Black Muslim woman could turn out to be a Better, too. In fact, many bettercrats are delighted to find non-white, non-wealthy, or non-men who are Betters because it proves we really do live in an enlightened and liberal age. But they still don't believe in democracy, and they still believe that some people are better than others.

Non-believers in betterocracy often imagine that Betters are simply greedhounds in pursuit of stuff and money and power and prestige just to have those things. I don't believe that's true. Bettercrats like those things because they are signfiers of Quality. They are proof that the Betters really are Better. The money, the prestige, the stuff-- why would they have all of that unless they were Better? The right schools, the right clubs, the right houses in the right neighborhoods-- these are all proof that they really are Better.

Bettercrats can actually be dismissive of the stuff. After all, they have the stuff because they deserve it, and so if fate somehow burned down the house and rabble took the money, the Betters would still get it back. They deserve it, and as long as the universe is functioning properly, the Betters will not be denied their due. Failure is a temporary glitch and only happens on a real or permanent scale to Lessers.

Betters can come in all political stripes, defined mostly by disagreements about what the signifiers of Betterness actually are. Conservative vs. liberal bettercrats mostly argue whether anyone who's not white and penis-deprived can be a Better (mostly no), and how to treat the Lessers.

Because a bettercratic country has to be organized in strata. We must sort and stack, because Betters and Lessers should be subject to different regulations, different laws, different punishments, and, of course, different educational systems.

Betters can be allowed to roam free, and while they may need to get an occasional course-correction or wake-up call, we know they're The Right Kind of People. Lessers, however, have all sorts of Naughty Tendencies and we must do what we can to hold their Lesser natures in check. So a Better who is, say, busted for drugs, shouldn't have to suffer the rest of his life for a youthful indiscretion, but a Lesser who is busted needs to be taught a lesson without mercy. Betters should be cut some slack, but if you give a Lesser an inch, he'll take a mile.

Betters occasionally need a hand or some help, and that's only right. Betters owe it to other Betters to lend a hand, and of course Betters deserve every bit of help they get. But Lessers are always looking for a handout, and to give them help is just to encourage their dependent, lazy, lesser nature. Betters who have had a hard moment or two need understanding and support, but Lessers should be allowed No Excuses.

Bettercrats are in a tizzy these days because we have a problem as a country-- too many portions of the government have been taken over by Lessers, who in turn are pandering to large groups of Special Interest Lessers. This is Very Bad, because unchecked, Lessers will do Terrible, Bad Things. In fact, they might demand money and power and other trappings of success to which they are not entitled (though Better's will use the word "entitled" to mean "thinking they deserve things that they do not deserve). They don't seem to understand that the fact they need help proves that they don't deserve help.

Bettercrats expect Lessers to know their place. After all, they wouldn't be poor and powerless if that wasn't what they deserved. After all, the nicer word for betterocracy is "meritocracy," the system in which people get what they deserve-- and not everybody deserves the best. If they deserved it, they would have it. Trying to give it to them is just violating the natural order.

So we need different education systems-- one to prepare Betters for lives of well-deserved privilege, money and power, and another to prepare Lessers for their proper role in society. Better schools are for providing opportunities and enrichment for America's future leaders. Lesser schools are for training America's future employees. In addition, in the dreams of liberal-minded bettercrats, the system should also provide a means of discovering and rescuing Betters who are, by some accident of birth and zip code, trapped amongst the Lessers. This rescue mission makes bettercrats feel more progressive. But, again-- progressive bettercrats do not believe that all humans are created equal; they believe that individuals from almost any background could turn out to be Betters (but only if rescued from the influence of Lessers).

And if the two-tier system is set up and managed in such a way that it reverse the regrettable trend of giving Lessers too much control, too much power, too much say-- well, that's a bonus.

Bettercrats know that not everybody should have a say. Betters should be in charge. Lessers should not. Letting just anybody have a vote, even if he's a Lesser, leads to bad, messy, stupid decisions. Preferable to sweep away voting rights (from electing Presidents to choosing school boards) in predominantly Lesser communities. Dump the school board, and install leadership by a Better. Do not engage or discuss with the members of the community; if they deserved to have money, power,or a say, they would already have it.

Bettercrats sometimes succumb to anger-- why don't these Lessers see that their schools suck, their children are ignorant, their neighborhoods are holes, and that their communities are awash in unworthy Lessers. Some of them don't even have the decency to feel bad about it. Man, if we could just get some solid proof that their world sucks and rub their faces in it until they finally hollered uncle and begged for their Betters to come straighten everything out for them. But some of them just keep acting like they deserve to have a voice, like they have a right to love their lives and their families and their communities.

The bottom line is that bettercrats believe that democracy is, really, a bad idea. Some people just don't deserve to have a say. Some people just don't deserve to be in charge of anything. Some people just aren't important. Some people just don't matter. Some people just can't have nice things. Bettercrats may, out of generosity and a general sense of noblesse oblige, give Lessers the nice things that they don't deserve, but those will be nice things that the Betters have selected, and Lessers can have the nice things under terms dictated by the Betters. Why shouldn't Betters have an outsized disproportionate influence on government? The fact that they have the money and power to wield influence is proof that they are right to do so.

None of this is democracy, not even a watered-down republic-styled democracy. Bettercrats mostly would not recognize democracy (they most commonly call it "socialism").

And that's why we've got the refomster programs that we have. Our Betters are trying to give the Lessers the system they deserve while rescuing Betters who have been trapped by zip codes in dens of Lesser iniquity. Our Betters are creating a system that disenfranchises Lessers (who, after all, do not deserve to be enfranchised in the first place because if they deserved to have power, they would have it). Our Betters are trying to create a system that further reinforces their own power and control, because they deserve to have them. Our Betters are even trying to get Lessers to understand that they are, in fact, Lessers.

The genius of America is that of a country that makes room for all voices and treats them all as equals, tied together and forced to create systems that accommodate all our citizens. It envisions a level playing field in which all voices and ideas can compete in the grand marketplace of thought. We have never fully lived up to that genius, but Betters do not even recognize it as genius to begin with. Right now their lack of vision is bad for education, but in the long run, it's bad for the entire country.

Facing the Truth

Chester Finn, Boss Emeritus at the Fordham Thinky Tank, took to the Fordblog last week to deliver some tough love about Kids These Days and Facing the Truth. In the process, he demonstrates just how much truth we have to ignore on our path to the truth.

Amid way too much talk about testing and the Common Core, not enough attention is being paid to what parents will actually learn about their children’s achievement when results are finally released from the recent round of state assessments (most of which assert that they’re “aligned” with the Common Core).

Finn notes that since the standards became more rigorous (a highly arguable point, but okay) and the tests raised the putative bar (also highly arguable) there has been "vast anxiety" (I prefer "free-floating miasma of dread") about the bad news "that is apt to emerge." Will parents freak out because they can't handle the truth?

There's an assumption embedded there (the news will be bad because, really, your kids suck) and Finn addresses it obliquely by explaining why the news will probably be bad-- CCSS higher standards, new assessments are more rigory, we are moving the goalposts but we have to, new tests always result in a score drop.

Finn is worried that states will soft-pedal the truth (is it soft-pedal as in lazy bike driving, or soft-peddle as in the opposite of a hard sell?). Finn is worried that states will play to "parents’ innate conviction that their kids are fine even if others aren’t." I don't doubt that some parents experience an irrational exuberance when it comes to their kids' abilities, though I also don't doubt that some parents simply know and understand their children better than teachers, schools, or guys at thinky tanks. Should we be Facing the Truth that schools and bureaucrats and policy wonks will never know students well enough to make useful pronouncements about each students abilities, skills, knowledge, and value? Nope-- that is one of the many Hard Truths that we are not interesting in facing today.

But now Finn is going to tell us a story of Why We Have Common Core.

Recall—as if it could possibly have slipped your mind!—that CCSS arose from the awareness that far too many young Americans were leaving school ill-prepared for either college or career, while too few states had set their K–12 expectations anywhere close to college and career readiness.

Oops. There goes another Hard Truth. Because I can recall this particular genesis of Common Core just about as well as I can recall the hot date I went on with Cheryl Crow in my forties. I can recall them equally well because they are equally fictional. It's true that I was not in the back rooms where CCSS was brewed up, but I know that if we, as a nation (or a loosely connected group of independently functioning states that were in no way being coerced by the federal government) had wanted to address that problem, we would have A) collected data that showed such a problem existed and B) convened a group of pre-eminent educational experts to address it. Odds that such a process would have resulted in Common Core? One in a gazzillion.

Finn's story is a sales pitch, not an origin story. The Core was cooked up to meet those needs just as surely as tobacco companies were started by guys who, staring at a blank canvas, said, "What is something we could invent that would help people feel more refreshed and manly?"

But Finn says, no-- we needed CCSS because so many young folks were graduating from high school with passing grades, and yet were so incompetent that American jobs were sent overseas. Because we will now ignore the Hard Truth that India and China were not offering superior workers so much as they were offering unregulated workplaces and worker willing to work for pennies a day.

The central mission of Common Core is to design English and math standards from kindergarten through twelfth grade such that a young person fully meeting those standards will actually be prepared to succeed in college without remediation, or to succeed in a job with good future prospects. 

And yet the Hard Truth is that there is not a speck of data or evidence to support the notion that the Common Core mission was accomplished. But that is also a Hard Truth we are not interested in today. But we are getting closer to that Hard Truth.

Causing parents and other caregivers to instead see things clearly, grasp reality, and understand the implications is no small feat. It must begin with accurate information. But what if reality is fuzzed up and its implications glossed over?

I have a harder question. What if we don't have any accurate information? What if our supposed information is just the result of a single poorly designed test given on a single day that doesn't tell us a damn thing?

Finn is unhappy with the reports being generated by PARCC and SBA, and on this I agree with him-- the reports, which we've looked at before and which he links to here, are vague pablum, no better than checking off one box on "Your child is doing A) great, B) okee-dokie, C) not so hot, or D) awful lot of room for improvement." If the goal is to tell anyone who the student is doing, they have the worst cost-to-information ratio of any instrument ever developed.

But Finn is concerned that these reports fail to tell parents that their children are dumb and not fit for college and their teachers probably suck. They don't use the words "college and career ready" (or "college and career unready") hardly at all.

Admittedly, it’s harder to make college readiness predictions about nine- and eleven-year-olds, and nobody wants to be deterministic. But parents who erroneously suppose that their child’s academic performance, like his BMI, is “about right” deserve a wake-up call much earlier than eighth grade.

The Hard Truth that we're supposed to be consulting is that our children, even our small ones, suck and Kids These Days need to be slapped awake and their parents straightened out toot suite because, dammit, the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket because your third grader isn't scoring high enough on the reading test and you are not properly alarmed about it and will probably even let the kid have supper tonight!

Finn compares the cause for alarm to a child's weight. If the kid is grossly obese, shouldn't responsible adults tell his parents that this is a future health hazard (which sends my brain on a little side track where I imagine Chester Finn at a big box store telling passing parents that their children are too fat and they should do something about it, because I bet that would end well).

There are two (at least) problems with the fat analogy.

The first is that we have scientific and medical reasons to believe that a three-hundred-pound ten year old is in trouble. However, there is not a lick of evidence, scientific or otherwise, to support the notion that a student who scores poorly on the Big Standardized Test will face real problems in the future (in fact, another Hard Truth is that one study found that about 50% of the students who scored a mere "basic" on the NAEP still completed college). He does tie this to an example of a seventh grader who is reading and mathing on a fourth grade level-- but you know what? Hard Truth-- we could spot and diagnose that kid long before anyone started wasting our time with Common Core and PARCC/SBA tests.

The second problem is that-- well, aren't Fordham guys like Finn supposed to be conservatives? When did conservatives start saying, "The government should decide what a person is supposed to be like, tell people when they aren't measuring up to government standards, and use government pressure to try to make them be the way the government says they should be." Does the fat analogy mean that Finn thinks Michelle Obama's food and exercise initiatives didn't go far enough? I grew up around conservatives and live cheek by jowl with conservatives and damned if this stuff doesn't sound nothing like what I understand conservativism to be. Just saying.

And while we are on the subject of Deeply Confused Conservatives-- are these dopey parents who can't or won't face the Hard Truth about their children the same parents that the Fordham thinks should be given a free range of choices about how to best educate their kids? Are these parents dopes when their kids are in public school, but charter schools will make them suddenly wise? Folks like the Fordham crowd seem to have the utmost faith in parental judgment while simultaneously having no faith in it at all. I am curious about how they manage the cognitive dissonance.

Finn's basic complaint is that parents aren't being forced to understand the Hard Truth that BS Tests prove that their children are dopes, and that said parents should be alarmed and upset. The Hard Truth that Finn doesn't face is that the PARCC and SBA provide little-to-no useful information, and that parents are far more likely to turn to trusted teachers and their own intimate knowledge of their own children than to what seems to be an unfair, irrational, untested, unvalidated system.

Yes, some parents have trouble facing some truths about their own children. There can't be a classroom teacher in the country that hasn't seen that in action, and it can be sad. I'm not so sure that it's sadder, however, than a parent who believes that his child is a stupid, useless loser. Finn seems really invested in making that parents hear bad news about their kids; I'm genuinely curious about what he envisions happening next. A parent pulls the small child up into a warm embrace to say, "You know, you're not that great." A parent makes use of a rare peaceful evening at home with a teenager to say, "I wish your test results didn't suck so badly. Would you please suck less?" What exactly is the end game of this enforced parental eye opening?

Okay, I can guess, given the proclivities of the market-based reformster crowd. What happens next is that the parents express shock that Pat is so far off the college and career ready trail and quickly pulls Pat out of that sucky public school to attend a great charter school with super-duper test scores. The market-driven reform crowd wants to see an open education market driven by pure data-- not the fuzzy warm love-addled parental data that come from a lifetime of knowing and loving their flesh and blood intimately, and not even the kind of chirpy happy-talk data that come from teachers who have invested a year in working with that child, but in the cold, hard deeply true data that can only come from an efficient, number-generating standardized test. That's what should drive the market.

Alas, no such data exists. No test can measure everything, or even anything, that matters in a child and in the child's education. No test can measure the deep and wide constellation of capabilities that we barely cover under headings like "character" or "critical thinking."

Folks like Finn try hard to believe that such magical data-finding tests can exist. They are reluctant to face the Hard Truth that they are looking for centaur-operated unicorn farms. The unfortunate truth is that they have dragged the rest of the country on this fruitless hunt with them.

Tucker: Time for Civil Rights Community to Reassess

In EdWeek, Marc Tucker enters the debate between educators and some civil rights groups regarding the regular standardized testing of students. It is a good summary of all the reasons that the civil rights community should reconsider their support for the reformster testing program.

This is notable because Tucker, while a smart man with a lot to say about education, is not exactly a champion of government non-interference. He's the author of the infamous Dear Hillary letter which gives us one of the earliest visions of the education system as a giant data-grabbing, Big Brothery monstrosity. It's Tucker who helped give us one of the first pictures of the cradle-to-career pipeline, a program for following every child through life with handy data scoopers. That was decades ago-- today Tucker is a champion of comparing US education to other nations that more thoroughly oversee the educations of every child.

In other words, Tucker is not one to shy away from the kind of large-scale, intrusive program represented by reformsters' beloved Big Standardized Testing. And yet, here he is, counting off the reasons that BS Testing is not actually the civil rights issue of our time.

He hears what the civil rights community is saying:

Take this requirement away, the civil rights groups say, and we will go back to the era in which schools were able to conceal the poor performance of poor and minority children behind high average scores for the schools.  Once that happens, the schools will have no incentive to work hard to improve those scores and the performance of poor and minority kids will languish once again.

None of this is true, though I am quite sure the civil rights community believes it is true.

Why not? Let's count the ways.

Things were getting better before testing.

The advent of No Child Left Behind actually slowed down the progress we were making with poor, non-white students. There is no evidence that any of the reformy stuff has helped improve performance of high school students.

There's no evidence this works anywhere.

If you're going to argue that testing every child every year will help, you need to be able to point to a place where it has been done successfully. There is no such place. There are, however, plenty of places with smaller achievement gaps but without the testing going on.

We can get the data we need less intrusively

Tucker, as mentioned above, is actually a big fan of data. But tests given to a sample of students every few years would tell us "everything we need to know" about how poor and non-white students are doing school by school. It's cheaper, less disruptive, and just as useful.

Current testing is not neutral

It's not just that BS Testing of every child every year isn't helpful. It is, Tucker argues, actually harmful.

Massive testing makes "bargain tests" most desireable.

This is an interesting point that I have not often seen. Because schools have to buy sooooo many tests, we ends up with a cheaper product. The argument for state (and, once upon a time) national tests has been that massive buying power would drive test costs down. But that's a rich person's argument. Cost per unit may be low, but the number of units is huge. Getting 500 iPhones for $100 each is a great deal, but you still have to spend $50K to take advantage of it. Tucker does not also address, but could, that testing-related expenses leave high-poverty schools with less money to spend on other materials, resources and programs that could be improving students' educations.

Tucke'rs point-- school systems need bargain tests, so we've got these bad "dumbed-down" tests.

Teaching to the (bad) test

Wealthy communities already expect their students to work beyond what the dumbed-down tests require, but poor communities need to do well on the BS Tests to survive (otherwise, it's turnaround time). So those poor and non-white students get a heaping helping of dumbed down curriculum to prepare for their dumbed down tests.

Targeting students

Tucker is slightly off the mark here in that he underestimates just how bad this gets. He argues that teachers learn to ignore the students who will certainly pass the test and the students who will never pass the test and focus all attention on the maybes. He is correct about the focused targeting, but this isn't a classroom teacher thing-- in many areas it becomes a school policy. Students find their schedules reconfigured based on practice test results, with a large chunk of students getting less time and attention based not on their educational need, but on their potential test results. He also misses that this focus on test prep squeezes out other aspects of education-- Pat doesn't get to take band or art or even history because Pat's day is devoted to test prep.

Firing teachers

Tucker asks whose interests all this serves and determines "it is the interest of those who hold that the way to improve our schools is to fire the teachers whose students do not perform well on the tests." That's the real reason for every student every year-- we need that level of data to be able to fire teachers based on test results.

Teachers are not opposed to annual accountability testing because they are enemies of their students' civil rights.  They are opposed to annual accountability testing because it is being used to punish teachers in ways that are grossly unfair and singularly ineffective.

Tucker becomes the sixty-gazzillionth person to point out that VAM is crap, and he notes that this approach is damaging the teaching pool in general and the teaching pool of poor schools in particular. Teachers will avoid poor schools because the combination of bad tests, predictably poor results, and a junk science evaluation system makes high-poverty schools career-killers.This makes it just that much harder to get high-poverty schools the top-quality teachers they need.

Bottom line

Tucker is saying to civil rights groups, "Your concerns are real and legitimate, but BS Testing every year every child not only isn't helping, but is actually hurting the very students you want to help." It's a compelling argument; only time will tell if it's convincing.

Defending the USED

And that’s one of my chief gripes with the battle cry to banish the Department of Education. It’s policy by sound bite. There’s too much of that already.

That's the closing graf of Frank Bruni's NYT op-ed this morning. It follows a thoughtful discussion of the usefulness of the beleaguered Department of Education-- ha, no. Just kidding. It comes at the end of series of sound bites from the Usual Sources. I am envious of this style of well-connected mad-libs journalism-- you get out your list of reliable contacts and fill in the blanks. "Although many critics of [topic] have said [sound bite from critic], others disagree. [Sound bite from supporter.]"

Bruni's topic is the continued existence of the Department of Education, and his piece offers all the lack of nuance and shallowness of understanding that he's complaining about in the first place. Perhaps he is offering a post-modern deconstructive criticism of criticism. But on the off chance he's not, let's look at his actual argument.

Bruni starts by noting that beating up on the USED has become a GOP primary punching bag once again, coupled with knee-jerk Common Core hatred. He cites the most recent defection of Chris Christie without noting that Christie's stated faithfulness to the PARCC test means his CCSS rejection is a deeply empty gesture. As is always required in these pieces, Jeb Bush is singled out as Common Core's BFF (Bruni might have noted that, as reported by Buzzfeed of all things, Bush's love is so great that he co-ordinated Core defense with Arne Duncan.)

But, Bruni notes, Democrats are also unfriending the department. Well, actually, one Democrat. Bruni mentions that Murray has teamed up with Lamar Alexander "to sponsor legislation that would leave the department and its secretary with much less influence over states." Why he does not explain that he's talking about the proposed ESEA rewrite that came out of the Senate Education Committe that Murray and Alexander co-chair--- well, that's just a weird detail to skip. Instead he just notes that the bill-- if it passes, which it might, because "bi-partisan support"-- the department would be a shadow of its former self.

So-- to recap-- Bruni has taken the Senate attempt to re-authorize the ESEA, and instead of placing that in the context of a bill that has been awaiting re-authorization by Congress since 2007 and has finally been tackled by the appropriate Senate committee for that tackling, he's creating a new narrative in which, steeped in an anti-department atmosphere, Murray and Alexander just kind of go rogue and float this bill created out of whole cloth just to spank the department.

So what else does Bruni want to point out in this alternate universe?

Well, goodness. Under this proposal, the USED would not have say "over how (or if)" teacher evaluation would occur. And-- Good lord in heaven-- here's a short list of Things Bruni Does Not Know:

1) Even with the USED's watchful eye, states are managing to gut the teaching profession. Current leader in assaulting the profession would be the Wisconsin, where they're thinking that maybe anybody-- even a high school dropout-- can be a teacher.

2) USED's ideas about how to evaluate teacher are stupid. Their major contribution has been to demand that teachers be evaluated by using student test scores, an approach supported by no actual research or science or even common sense, and repudiated by pretty much everybody who doesn't have financial or political benefits tied to the approach.

3) "Or if"? Come on. Name one state, one school, one corner of the country where politicians and leaders are saying, "Let's never evaluate teachers at all." Well, except for charter schools. But the USED supports charters and the charter right to make up any rules they like, so again-- if this is a problem, the USED is definitely not on the case.

4) The best teacher evaluation systems are coming from local school districts, not the feds. Time magazine is profiling a system created by UCLA schools in Koreatown (in LA-- my son's neighborhood!) that Audrey Amrein-Beardsley calls "legitimately new and improved."

But now, having laid out the basic question, Bruni is ready to deploy his parade of sound bites for the USED opponents.

Lamar Alexander (former department head, but again-- not acknowledged by Bruni as the head of Senate Ed Comittee): All we need is a leader to man the bully pulpit about education and a treasury department to cut checks.

Mitch Daniels (former governor and Bush administration person): It's not "ludicrous" to get rid of the department. We did fine without them before 1979. Also, they haven't improved anything.

No, says Bruni, they haven't.

But there’s much more at work than the failings of the education department, which contributes only about 10 percent of funding nationally for K-through-12 schooling and has only so much impact on what happens in classrooms.

You'd think that sentence would open up a considerably larger discussion, but now-- Bruni leaves the mystery of A) if it's true that US education hasn't gotten better since 1979 and B) if not, why not for some other day. He really only wants to use that to the defense of the department and the sound bites for that side of things.

Kati Haycock (head of Education Trust, a advocacy group-- Bruni doesn't mention that they are charter school advocates): When states are left alone, they don't do right by poor students.

Joel Klein (former chancellor of NYC schools, corporate shill for hire, and creator of many reformster monsters): When states are left alone, they don't generate enough failing grades for students.

"Many advocates": Bruni seems to slip into the middle of his own piece to say that we have to compete globally and so students must be educated not just for their state, but for the whole world. Because everybody remembers America's big bunch of young people who never leave their home state because they are only educated in a state-specific way??

Mike Petrilli (Fordham boss and professional pusher of Common Core, testing, charters and other great education money-making schemes): We need to right-size the feds.

Bruni also muses about the money. If there were no department, who would make sure that the taxpayers are getting their money's worth. Which speaks to Bruni's view of the department, which seems to be as the national education police. There's a whole list of things that the states can't be trusted to do correctly, and a department is needed to Make Them Behave.

Recent history is more complicated. Haycock's argument that states don't do right by their poor educationally is valid; the problem is that the USED hasn't changed that a bit. Haycock, Klein, and Petrilli are fine examples of all the folks who have used the Problems of Educating the Poor as ways to Make Lots of Money. Under modern ed reformsterism, we locate educational problem areas and mark them for strip-mining, while simultaneously depriving the folks who live in those communities of voice or vote. Reformsters did not descend upon post-Katrina New Orleans out of a deep, driving concern that the poor children of the city were being deprived of an education-- they packed up their bags and headed south because it was an opportunity, a chance to create a system that gave a whole spectrum of profiteers and investors the opportunity to get their hands on public education tax dollars.

That magical time has become the reformsters dream, and a dozen techniques for forcing disaster and failure on school districts and using that failure as a means of diverting public tax dollars to private pockets. And the USED has been a champion of the process, putting the interests of investors, hedge fund operators, charter school companies, test manufacturers, and corporate interests ahead of concerns for American students.

From Common Core to Big Standardized High Stakes Testing, the USED has become the champion of one-size-fits-all reform (though, of course, wealthy folks are exempt).

And here's the problem with strong central planning. It requires your central planner to be right every time, and no human can pull that off. But with central control, a single bad idea becomes everybody's bad idea. And when your central planner has mostly only bad ideas, you get widespread disaster.

When your system is infected with money, that only makes things worse, because central planning makes one-stop-shopping for those who want to buy themselves some friendly policy decisions.

There's a lot to discuss, but when Bruni hit his contact list, he missed a particular group of sound bite generators-- he forgot to contact any actual supporters of public education. And so his Festival of Sound Bites is lopsided and nuance-free. Let's hope that next time he collects a better class of sound bites.

When Higher Expectations Aren't

I want to go back to this post about testing from Jersey Jazzman because it so clearly hits a fundamental lie in the Common Core Testing scheme.

Go read it again. It might be the most important post of (at least) the month.

The big point-- that a standardized test is engineered to create a bell curve. Should all the students ever do really well on it, reformsters will not say, "Yippee! At last student achievement has risen! Mission accomplished!" No, should the long-awaited day arrive on which all students score well, reformsters will say, "This test is defective. Send it back."

Let's frame this another way. Let's talk about expectations.

As I ranted the other day, reformsters love higher expectations. They never tire of telling us that the magic sauce saturating their super standards is a reduction brew of higher expectations. We have for over a decade heard the mantra that we must all believe that every child can excel. Every child can do awesometastic work-- if we just have high expectations.

It's a lie.

It's a big, fat lie.

Common Core is not about higher expectations for every child at all.

Because the expectation embedded in a standardized test is that 10-20% of students will do lousy, and another large chunk will just be fair-to-middlin'.

The architects of Common Core and the Big Standardized Tests expect a big chunk of students to do poorly, and that low expectation is built into the test.

When they say, "We're going to set the bar high because that will make every student rise to meet it," they are lying. What they really mean is, "We are going to set the bar high because that will guarantee that our expectation of large-scale failure will be met."

It is possible that some reformsters don't even realize they're doing this. Under NCLB I'm pretty sure some advocates really believed that all children could be above average. But that doesn't change what they've done.

They've built the expectation of failure into the system. They have codified a program of low expectations. And their low expectations are so ingrained, that just as with their low expectations of teacher quality, they refuse to believe any results that do not confirm their expectations.

The BS Testing of Common Core is the very definition of low expectations. So the next time some reformster tosses out that baloney about higher expectations, ask them-- if the test results came back tomorrow at 95% proficiency, what would you say? Hooray? Because if you'd say "these results must be wrong," you don't ever get to lecture us about the soft bigotry of low expectations ever again.