Sometimes it's the small market newspapers that take risks and get out ahead of the pack. But sometimes they're just extra clueless, like the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York.
Here they are making noise about how the opt-out movement is doomed. Doomed!! Oh, they had a big run last year, but that was back when there were no consequences for their shenanigans. But this year things will be different. Oh, yes, baby. Different. Because the new sherif in town has laid down the law.
The THR quotes MaryEllen Elia's recent speech about how she's armed superintendents with special parent-intimidation tool kits so that supers can make it clear that it's the law. The editorial writer underlines that with punchy single-sentence paragraphs.
That’s worth repeating.
“It’s the law.”
Well, no. It's not worth repeating. It might be worth clarifying. As in, what, exactly is the law. Because while I have not examined the relevant laws of New York State in painful detail, I'm pretty sure that what the law says is that schools must give the test. There's no law that says that students must take the test.
That's worth repeating.
There's no law that says that students must take the test.
The THR scolds mightily. This time there will be no easy peasy lemon opt-out.
Elia knows better. As the THR was threatening doom and unspecified penalties for opt-out naughtiness, Elia was "clarifying" her position in the kind of political clarification that civilians think of as "taking back that dumb thing I said and trying to replace it with something less wrong."
Elia has suddenly discovered that parents do, in fact, have the right to opt out. It's even possible that they have a point about some of the test's deficiencies (they "have problems" and are "too long"). Also her threats were totally not threats. Don't be silly. But she is going to arm her superintendents with high-powered PR tool kits because she has not yet abandoned the last hope of the reformsters, which is that folks are hostile to Common Core Testing Stuff because they just don't understand how awesome it really is, and once we finally 'splain it to them the right way, they will be hollering, "Me!! Me!! Test my kids more, please!!"
Parents in New York have won the greatest victory of all-- recognition by the state that they get to decide, and that they must be convinced-- not coerced, not threatened, and not treated like the states' low-level flunkies. It may take a while for word to get to Middletown, but the state is figuring out that they can't simply order students to take the Big Standardized Test. And that's the law.
[Update: A commenter on Diane Ravitch's blog, where this post also ran, added her comments as a specialist in NY law. Follow the link for her full explanation, but the short form is that not only is the testing requirement not the law, but much of what the regents are requiring is in violation of the law.]
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Minneapolis Terrible Reading Choices
Imagine that you are a Native American teacher, working with six year old students, and you come back to start the school year, only to discover that the district would like you to teach your students that Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, as if your own ancestors had never even existed. Or depicted them as a culturally tone-deaf cartoon. And when you tried to point out that the materials you were being directed to use were sexist, racist and just plain wrong, your concerns were brushed off and dismissed.
That's the situation that Minneapolis teacher Shana Dickson found herself in last week, as Minneapolis Schools decided to kick off their school year with a truly terrible $1.2 million choice in reading materials for its K-2 students.
The story is laid out in a compelling and invaluable series from Sarah Lahm on her blog Bright Lights Small City. The series of posts start here, and you can follow trhe links until you need to jump to this post and today's update.
I'm not going to recap all of Lahm's work-- you should go read it for yourself-- but there are details that are just kind of amazing in their foolishness.
The company providing the materials is Reading Horizons, an outfit that apparently identifies itself as Mormom with a mission, its materials intended to further its work in service of God.
The work reported on is not overtly religious, but it is certainly seriously retro in its portrayal of gender roles and various cultures. It includes a straight-from-1953 depiction of Native Americans
The reading materials are part of a program that boasts of being so scripted that "even a janitor" could teach it. District officials have been strikingly unresponsive to complaints, offering everything from the Little Books are a tiny part of the program to the ever-popular, "Look, everything else really sucked." Which is silly. My wife just finished a two-year stint as a first-grade teacher with a reading series complete with Little Books (decodeables, they're called) which I examined closely in the process of assembling a gazzillion of them, and while they are no great works of literature, they certainly weren't filled with the kind of foolishness that Reading Horizons is pushing.
At any rate, while I usually try to save and collect your must-read materials for Sundays, this could not wait. This is not about education reform or politics or anything except bad administration of a school district that doesn't involve its own trained teachers and consequently blows over a million dollars on materials that are transparently terrible.
That's the situation that Minneapolis teacher Shana Dickson found herself in last week, as Minneapolis Schools decided to kick off their school year with a truly terrible $1.2 million choice in reading materials for its K-2 students.
The story is laid out in a compelling and invaluable series from Sarah Lahm on her blog Bright Lights Small City. The series of posts start here, and you can follow trhe links until you need to jump to this post and today's update.
I'm not going to recap all of Lahm's work-- you should go read it for yourself-- but there are details that are just kind of amazing in their foolishness.
The company providing the materials is Reading Horizons, an outfit that apparently identifies itself as Mormom with a mission, its materials intended to further its work in service of God.
The work reported on is not overtly religious, but it is certainly seriously retro in its portrayal of gender roles and various cultures. It includes a straight-from-1953 depiction of Native Americans
The reading materials are part of a program that boasts of being so scripted that "even a janitor" could teach it. District officials have been strikingly unresponsive to complaints, offering everything from the Little Books are a tiny part of the program to the ever-popular, "Look, everything else really sucked." Which is silly. My wife just finished a two-year stint as a first-grade teacher with a reading series complete with Little Books (decodeables, they're called) which I examined closely in the process of assembling a gazzillion of them, and while they are no great works of literature, they certainly weren't filled with the kind of foolishness that Reading Horizons is pushing.
At any rate, while I usually try to save and collect your must-read materials for Sundays, this could not wait. This is not about education reform or politics or anything except bad administration of a school district that doesn't involve its own trained teachers and consequently blows over a million dollars on materials that are transparently terrible.
If You Want To Help Chester Uplands...
If you have not been following the story, know that Chester Uplands School District in Pennsylvania is currently so broke that its teachers and staff are working without pay. You can read up on it here, here and here.
Thanks to a commenter on this blog, I can point you to three places where you can help.
PSEA operates a fund that is used to financially assist teachers in just this sort of situation. Right now only a snail mail address is available, but on-line contributing is supposed to be coming soon.
The school district itself is actually soliciting contributions on its own page. Help out. They only need $1.5 million.
A community member has started a GoFundMe for the teachers. Again, the amount needed is staggering, but it's a way to help.
In the meantime, if you're in PA you might contact your elected representatives and say:
1) Get the damn budget done and passed
2) Fix the incredibly stupid charter funding formula that is draining public schools dry.
Thanks to a commenter on this blog, I can point you to three places where you can help.
PSEA operates a fund that is used to financially assist teachers in just this sort of situation. Right now only a snail mail address is available, but on-line contributing is supposed to be coming soon.
The school district itself is actually soliciting contributions on its own page. Help out. They only need $1.5 million.
A community member has started a GoFundMe for the teachers. Again, the amount needed is staggering, but it's a way to help.
In the meantime, if you're in PA you might contact your elected representatives and say:
1) Get the damn budget done and passed
2) Fix the incredibly stupid charter funding formula that is draining public schools dry.
PA: Charter Windfalls
The financial crushing of Chester Uplands Schools, where teachers and staff are now working without pay while legislators dither over a long-past-due budget in Harrisburg-- well, this mess has ended up dragging ugly worm into the light of day.
Here's an excerpt from the Judge Chad Kenney's ruling nixing the state's proposed relief for CUSD:
The Charter Schools serving Chester-Upland Special Education students reported in 2013-2014, the last reporting period available, that they did not have any Special Education students costing them anything outside the zero (0) to twenty-five thousand dollar ($25,000.00) range, and yet this is remarkable considering they receive forty thousand dollars ($40,000.00) for each one of these Special Education students under a legislatively mandated formula. This means the legislative formula permits the Charters to pocket somewhere between fourteen thousand ($14,000.00) and forty thousand dollars ($40,000.00) per student over and above what it costs to educate them. While this discrepancy needs to be seen in most instances as the operators of Charters taking advantage of legal mandates, it is clear that the Legislature did not mean for its averages to produce such windfalls to the Charter School industry in a distressed district.
(Hat tip to Keystone State Education Coalition)
Yes, I have to keep explaining this to people because it seems so incredible-- the state of PA has a payment system for charters that doesn't factor in anything about what it actually costs the charters to educate students. The legislature has set it up so that charters like the ones in Chester can pick up a minimum of $15,000 pure profit.
You may remember a time when a selling point for charters was that they would do more with less. That has never been the case in PA-- charters promise to do whatever they feel like with as much money as they can get. PA is a textbook demonstration of how charter schools increase the overall cost of education. Here's how it works.
We start with a public school classroom that educates 10 students for $10,000. One of those students leaves for a charter. At the charter, they know that they get the 1 grand no matter what, so their goal is to spend as little of it as possible on the student's education. Meanwhile, the public schools revenue has dropped by $1,000, and its costs have dropped not at all, so it goes back to the taxpayers and raises taxes, or if it's really strapped, it reduces services.
End result-- the taxpayers of Pennsylvania end up spending more total money on education, and getting less for it. That's how we're doing it in the Keystone State.
The ruling in the CUSD case underlines just how huge the windfall for charter operators can be (and for cyber charters, who don't have brick-and-mortar overhead and who can assign a single teacher to several hundred students, can really clean up). This is how guys like Vahan Gureghian end up with $85 million mansions.
Here's an excerpt from the Judge Chad Kenney's ruling nixing the state's proposed relief for CUSD:
The Charter Schools serving Chester-Upland Special Education students reported in 2013-2014, the last reporting period available, that they did not have any Special Education students costing them anything outside the zero (0) to twenty-five thousand dollar ($25,000.00) range, and yet this is remarkable considering they receive forty thousand dollars ($40,000.00) for each one of these Special Education students under a legislatively mandated formula. This means the legislative formula permits the Charters to pocket somewhere between fourteen thousand ($14,000.00) and forty thousand dollars ($40,000.00) per student over and above what it costs to educate them. While this discrepancy needs to be seen in most instances as the operators of Charters taking advantage of legal mandates, it is clear that the Legislature did not mean for its averages to produce such windfalls to the Charter School industry in a distressed district.
(Hat tip to Keystone State Education Coalition)
Yes, I have to keep explaining this to people because it seems so incredible-- the state of PA has a payment system for charters that doesn't factor in anything about what it actually costs the charters to educate students. The legislature has set it up so that charters like the ones in Chester can pick up a minimum of $15,000 pure profit.
You may remember a time when a selling point for charters was that they would do more with less. That has never been the case in PA-- charters promise to do whatever they feel like with as much money as they can get. PA is a textbook demonstration of how charter schools increase the overall cost of education. Here's how it works.
We start with a public school classroom that educates 10 students for $10,000. One of those students leaves for a charter. At the charter, they know that they get the 1 grand no matter what, so their goal is to spend as little of it as possible on the student's education. Meanwhile, the public schools revenue has dropped by $1,000, and its costs have dropped not at all, so it goes back to the taxpayers and raises taxes, or if it's really strapped, it reduces services.
End result-- the taxpayers of Pennsylvania end up spending more total money on education, and getting less for it. That's how we're doing it in the Keystone State.
The ruling in the CUSD case underlines just how huge the windfall for charter operators can be (and for cyber charters, who don't have brick-and-mortar overhead and who can assign a single teacher to several hundred students, can really clean up). This is how guys like Vahan Gureghian end up with $85 million mansions.
4 Bad Business Practices for Education
"Schools should run like a business" is one of the modern reformster mantras, and schools are so obviously NOT businesses that we can end up overlooking the other problem with this idea-- that reformsters often mean to incorporate practices that aren't even good business practices.
If you have friends or family in the private sector, or if you've just been paying attention, you may have noticed that businesses are increasingly run very, very badly. Many of the principles that reformsters want to apply to education are, in fact, failures in the private sector.
1) Eliminate expertise.
Take, for instance, the belief that industry-specific expertise is not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Even the robber barons rose to power by working up through the jobs of their respective industries and knowing something about how the business work, but nowadays the Cult of Management insists that the only important skill is bean counting and managerial managosity. The last guy to come in to run what used to be one of the major companies in my area had previously managed a toy company and a soup company. He was brought here to run an oil company. He had never worked any job in his life except managing stuff.
These guys frequently make stupid mistakes because they actively avoid listening to people who have worked in their industry. The history of business failures in my part of the country is the history of upper management being filled up with guys who didn't know anything about the industry they were suddenly working in.
2) Aim at the wrong target.
Reams have been written in the past fifty years about the folly of focusing on short-term financial goals instead of the long-term health of the business. Never mind where the business will be in ten years-- how can we get the stocks to trend upward in the next six months. Since the management nomads will not be here in ten years, anyway, who really cares?
This mistaken direction of the company means that the main job of the company is no longer to make a good or a service, but to make money for stockholders and management. We are awash in companies that have literally forgotten what they do, and America is not better for it.
3) Hire and fire at will
Why should teachers have job security when nobody else does? That's a dumb question, the wrong question. The better question is why does nobody have job security any more?
It has not always been this way. My father, as was typical of his generation, took a job with a company right after he graduated from college, and he worked there until the day he retired. The company, a manufacturer of underground coal mining equipment, had been the linchpin of the local economy since the 1920's. When times got tough, they had guys with the company who would go looking for work-- any kind of work-- to keep the plant going and the workers employed.
This was not abnormal in the American business world. Yes, the big marquee companies run by the robber barons treated workers like disposable meat widgets, but many mid-sized and small companies felt that one of their purposes was to keep the people in their community employed and their community healthy. The people who ran these businesses felt a responsibility to the community and their employees.
Modern corporate managers want the power to do whatever they want to whoever they want for whatever reason they want. They hate unions and government regulations the same way a toddler hates being told "no." And they want to do all this free of consequences-- they complain about the lack of employee loyalty and the problem maintaining institutional memory and continuity and the fact that consumers these days don't stay faithful to a brand. In many cases they have fired all the people who used to help the company do good and replaced them with people whose job is to make the company look good.
And corporate America has systematically turned against skill, trying to reduce every job to something that a trained chimp could handle-- not because this makes a better product, but because it means that no employee will ever be in a position to tell management what to do.
4) No community ties
Implied by everything above, but worth its own section. It's not just that corporations no longer consider the economic support of their communities a mission-- they aren't even interested in their country. We reached the point where a slogan like "What's good for General Motors is good for the USA" no longer sounds menacing and evil, but has become quaint. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were patrician, condescending, self-important, uber-controllling, worker-abusive jerks, but at least they felt some sense of obligation to make their community and their country better.
Our modern corporate overlords feel no particular sense of loyalty to their country, and their "community" is the insulated world of other corporate overlords. Communities are expendable collections of meat widgets that can be abandoned when they no longer provide the kinds of compliant meat widgets that the company desires.
These practices, with their disregard for community voices and health, their disinterest in sustainability, their warped idea of mission, and their disdain for real skill and expertise-- these practices have not made modern businesses better-- and in fact have impaired business leaders ability to even understand what "better" even means. They have not been good for business, they have not been good for communities, and they have not been good for the country.
It is the hugest kind of lie to turn to education and say, "Well, this is what all the cool kids, the big winners, are doing in the corporate world, so it's what you should do, too." These are bad ideas. They don't work for anybody (except the members of the 1%, and ultimately I don't think these practices are going to turn out well for the uber-rich, either), and they certainly don't belong in education.
If you have friends or family in the private sector, or if you've just been paying attention, you may have noticed that businesses are increasingly run very, very badly. Many of the principles that reformsters want to apply to education are, in fact, failures in the private sector.
1) Eliminate expertise.
Take, for instance, the belief that industry-specific expertise is not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Even the robber barons rose to power by working up through the jobs of their respective industries and knowing something about how the business work, but nowadays the Cult of Management insists that the only important skill is bean counting and managerial managosity. The last guy to come in to run what used to be one of the major companies in my area had previously managed a toy company and a soup company. He was brought here to run an oil company. He had never worked any job in his life except managing stuff.
These guys frequently make stupid mistakes because they actively avoid listening to people who have worked in their industry. The history of business failures in my part of the country is the history of upper management being filled up with guys who didn't know anything about the industry they were suddenly working in.
2) Aim at the wrong target.
Reams have been written in the past fifty years about the folly of focusing on short-term financial goals instead of the long-term health of the business. Never mind where the business will be in ten years-- how can we get the stocks to trend upward in the next six months. Since the management nomads will not be here in ten years, anyway, who really cares?
This mistaken direction of the company means that the main job of the company is no longer to make a good or a service, but to make money for stockholders and management. We are awash in companies that have literally forgotten what they do, and America is not better for it.
3) Hire and fire at will
Why should teachers have job security when nobody else does? That's a dumb question, the wrong question. The better question is why does nobody have job security any more?
It has not always been this way. My father, as was typical of his generation, took a job with a company right after he graduated from college, and he worked there until the day he retired. The company, a manufacturer of underground coal mining equipment, had been the linchpin of the local economy since the 1920's. When times got tough, they had guys with the company who would go looking for work-- any kind of work-- to keep the plant going and the workers employed.
This was not abnormal in the American business world. Yes, the big marquee companies run by the robber barons treated workers like disposable meat widgets, but many mid-sized and small companies felt that one of their purposes was to keep the people in their community employed and their community healthy. The people who ran these businesses felt a responsibility to the community and their employees.
Modern corporate managers want the power to do whatever they want to whoever they want for whatever reason they want. They hate unions and government regulations the same way a toddler hates being told "no." And they want to do all this free of consequences-- they complain about the lack of employee loyalty and the problem maintaining institutional memory and continuity and the fact that consumers these days don't stay faithful to a brand. In many cases they have fired all the people who used to help the company do good and replaced them with people whose job is to make the company look good.
And corporate America has systematically turned against skill, trying to reduce every job to something that a trained chimp could handle-- not because this makes a better product, but because it means that no employee will ever be in a position to tell management what to do.
4) No community ties
Implied by everything above, but worth its own section. It's not just that corporations no longer consider the economic support of their communities a mission-- they aren't even interested in their country. We reached the point where a slogan like "What's good for General Motors is good for the USA" no longer sounds menacing and evil, but has become quaint. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were patrician, condescending, self-important, uber-controllling, worker-abusive jerks, but at least they felt some sense of obligation to make their community and their country better.
Our modern corporate overlords feel no particular sense of loyalty to their country, and their "community" is the insulated world of other corporate overlords. Communities are expendable collections of meat widgets that can be abandoned when they no longer provide the kinds of compliant meat widgets that the company desires.
These practices, with their disregard for community voices and health, their disinterest in sustainability, their warped idea of mission, and their disdain for real skill and expertise-- these practices have not made modern businesses better-- and in fact have impaired business leaders ability to even understand what "better" even means. They have not been good for business, they have not been good for communities, and they have not been good for the country.
It is the hugest kind of lie to turn to education and say, "Well, this is what all the cool kids, the big winners, are doing in the corporate world, so it's what you should do, too." These are bad ideas. They don't work for anybody (except the members of the 1%, and ultimately I don't think these practices are going to turn out well for the uber-rich, either), and they certainly don't belong in education.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Middle Way
In the midst of the back and forth over her comments about New Orleans' Myth of School Makeovers, Andrea Gabor dropped this quote from Howard Fuller:
“I do believe things are better for a large number of kids than before Katrina. But I don’t want to be put in the position of saying: pre-Katrina was all bad, post-Katrina is all good. When we set it up that way, we’re negating anything that was positive before Katrina. What that tends to negate is the capacity of black people to do anything of excellence.
“The firing of those teachers is a wound that will never be closed, never be righted. I understand the issue of urgency. But a part of this quite frankly has to do with the fact that I do not believe that black people are respected. I don’t believe that our institutions are respected. And I don’t believe that our capacity to help our own people is respected…
“Its hard for me, because I do support the reforms and think there are some great things that have happened. I do have to ask the same question as Randi (Weingarten)—at what cost?
“Even if you talk to black people who drank the Kool-aide: The issue still is– this was done to us not with us. That feeling is deep. It can’t be ignored. It speaks to any type of long-term sustainability of what’s happening in New Orleans.
“When black people came out of slavery, we came out with a clear understanding of the connection between education and liberation. Two groups of white people descended upon us—the missionaries and the industrialists. They both had their view of what type of education we needed to make our new-born freedom realized. During this period there’s an analogy—I’ve said this to all my friends in Kipp And TFA. During this period two groups of white people descended on us the industrialists and the missionaries. And each one of them have their own view of what kind of education we need.
“What people have never grasped is that we want to be helped, we don’t want to be controlled. In this process, we wanted to be a critical part of defining what role education should play in our continuing struggle to truly realize freedom in America. That’s the thing that’s truly unsettled in my soul. How do I make that happen, when I’m swimming with sharks on the left and on the right. And trying to find an independent course that speaks to the pain that my people experience every single day.”
It's a bruisingly honest response from someone who has paid double dues on the front lines of education and education reform and who has been a willing voice for the privatizers and charter pushers for a long, long time. And it's a reminder of what is wrong with the most extreme narratives on opposite sides of the public education debates.
The cartoon reformster narrative: US education was hopelessly effed up in a morass of self-serving institutionally calcified failure. Our poorest, most vulnerable, and historically most underserved populations were being left further and further behind. Only a complete guttting of the system can blast loose the systemic problems.
The cartoon public school supporter narrative: the reform movement is an unnecessary attempt to gut public education, and they should go away and let us get back to what we were doing.
The challenge in threading the space between these two narratives. each side has things it needs to face up to.
Public education advocates need to recognize that there is no going back, that in some places, public schools have functioned primarily as institutions heavily embedded with all the neglect and racism and dumping on the people at the bottom of the ladder that we could possibly hate. New Orleans was, by most accounts, terrible in every way that a school district can be terrible. Many other poor urban schools were in a similar place.Something had to change.
But reformsters need to recognize that many of those districts were filled with excellent teachers in excellent schools working in communities where they were the educational equivalent of strong salmon trying to swim up Niagara Falls. And many of the reformsters of good faith (I believe there are such people) need to recognize that they opened a door that let it all manner of money-grubbing vermin who had no real interest in improving education for anybody-- just cashing in on a movement that opened up a mountain of public money to private profit.
The irony is that while reformsters recognized that some aspects of the system needed to change, they have ended up holding onto the aspect that needed the most change of all-- the continued disempowerment, disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and disintegration of the communities in which the schools were found. Folks in places like New Orleans traded a system in which it was hard for community voices to be heard, hard for community leaders to take charge, and hard for community needs to be considered-- they traded that for a system in which it is now impossible for the community voices to be heard, empowered, and responded to. In both the old version and the new version, schools are something that is "done to" the members of these communities.
And yes-- I did not represent the two sides as needing equal amounts of correction. They don't. By disregarding the expertise of professionals and the voice of the community, reformsters have put themselves far out in left field. They are not wrong about the need for change and improvement and a system that better responds to the needs of America's poor, and they have won plenty of support by showing they get the need while public education advocates have said, "Look, we're doing great. Just let us do our thing, and trust us."
But reformsters are dead wrong, and have been dead wrong nearly every step of the way, about what reforms will improve the situation. Some don't care about being wrong; they're simply focused on "solutions" that will redirect that beautiful river of money and power to The Right People, the Betters. Or they have a blind and foolish faith in The Market (which will never, ever, get us better schools). Or they have blind faith in their own superior wisdom.
But those who do care about getting it right have listened to the wrong people, and supporters of public education have made it easy for them to do so by being slow to respond to real concerns, real needs, real problems.
It's something to read Fullers words, to see a guy who's been unapologetic about taking mountains of Walton money (re: John Walton "I love that man"), say straight up that nobody on any side of the fight gets it. Not his opponents, and not his allies, either. The NOLA restrospectives taken together highlight one thing-- that all of this public education stuff is complex, and that people who believe in simple answers or explanations are kidding themselves (and lots of other people, too).
“I do believe things are better for a large number of kids than before Katrina. But I don’t want to be put in the position of saying: pre-Katrina was all bad, post-Katrina is all good. When we set it up that way, we’re negating anything that was positive before Katrina. What that tends to negate is the capacity of black people to do anything of excellence.
“The firing of those teachers is a wound that will never be closed, never be righted. I understand the issue of urgency. But a part of this quite frankly has to do with the fact that I do not believe that black people are respected. I don’t believe that our institutions are respected. And I don’t believe that our capacity to help our own people is respected…
“Its hard for me, because I do support the reforms and think there are some great things that have happened. I do have to ask the same question as Randi (Weingarten)—at what cost?
“Even if you talk to black people who drank the Kool-aide: The issue still is– this was done to us not with us. That feeling is deep. It can’t be ignored. It speaks to any type of long-term sustainability of what’s happening in New Orleans.
“When black people came out of slavery, we came out with a clear understanding of the connection between education and liberation. Two groups of white people descended upon us—the missionaries and the industrialists. They both had their view of what type of education we needed to make our new-born freedom realized. During this period there’s an analogy—I’ve said this to all my friends in Kipp And TFA. During this period two groups of white people descended on us the industrialists and the missionaries. And each one of them have their own view of what kind of education we need.
“What people have never grasped is that we want to be helped, we don’t want to be controlled. In this process, we wanted to be a critical part of defining what role education should play in our continuing struggle to truly realize freedom in America. That’s the thing that’s truly unsettled in my soul. How do I make that happen, when I’m swimming with sharks on the left and on the right. And trying to find an independent course that speaks to the pain that my people experience every single day.”
It's a bruisingly honest response from someone who has paid double dues on the front lines of education and education reform and who has been a willing voice for the privatizers and charter pushers for a long, long time. And it's a reminder of what is wrong with the most extreme narratives on opposite sides of the public education debates.
The cartoon reformster narrative: US education was hopelessly effed up in a morass of self-serving institutionally calcified failure. Our poorest, most vulnerable, and historically most underserved populations were being left further and further behind. Only a complete guttting of the system can blast loose the systemic problems.
The cartoon public school supporter narrative: the reform movement is an unnecessary attempt to gut public education, and they should go away and let us get back to what we were doing.
The challenge in threading the space between these two narratives. each side has things it needs to face up to.
Public education advocates need to recognize that there is no going back, that in some places, public schools have functioned primarily as institutions heavily embedded with all the neglect and racism and dumping on the people at the bottom of the ladder that we could possibly hate. New Orleans was, by most accounts, terrible in every way that a school district can be terrible. Many other poor urban schools were in a similar place.Something had to change.
But reformsters need to recognize that many of those districts were filled with excellent teachers in excellent schools working in communities where they were the educational equivalent of strong salmon trying to swim up Niagara Falls. And many of the reformsters of good faith (I believe there are such people) need to recognize that they opened a door that let it all manner of money-grubbing vermin who had no real interest in improving education for anybody-- just cashing in on a movement that opened up a mountain of public money to private profit.
The irony is that while reformsters recognized that some aspects of the system needed to change, they have ended up holding onto the aspect that needed the most change of all-- the continued disempowerment, disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and disintegration of the communities in which the schools were found. Folks in places like New Orleans traded a system in which it was hard for community voices to be heard, hard for community leaders to take charge, and hard for community needs to be considered-- they traded that for a system in which it is now impossible for the community voices to be heard, empowered, and responded to. In both the old version and the new version, schools are something that is "done to" the members of these communities.
And yes-- I did not represent the two sides as needing equal amounts of correction. They don't. By disregarding the expertise of professionals and the voice of the community, reformsters have put themselves far out in left field. They are not wrong about the need for change and improvement and a system that better responds to the needs of America's poor, and they have won plenty of support by showing they get the need while public education advocates have said, "Look, we're doing great. Just let us do our thing, and trust us."
But reformsters are dead wrong, and have been dead wrong nearly every step of the way, about what reforms will improve the situation. Some don't care about being wrong; they're simply focused on "solutions" that will redirect that beautiful river of money and power to The Right People, the Betters. Or they have a blind and foolish faith in The Market (which will never, ever, get us better schools). Or they have blind faith in their own superior wisdom.
But those who do care about getting it right have listened to the wrong people, and supporters of public education have made it easy for them to do so by being slow to respond to real concerns, real needs, real problems.
It's something to read Fullers words, to see a guy who's been unapologetic about taking mountains of Walton money (re: John Walton "I love that man"), say straight up that nobody on any side of the fight gets it. Not his opponents, and not his allies, either. The NOLA restrospectives taken together highlight one thing-- that all of this public education stuff is complex, and that people who believe in simple answers or explanations are kidding themselves (and lots of other people, too).
AP Notices Common Core Failure
In the midst of arguing about whose poll data supports which side in the debate about public education, AP writer Christine Amario Saturday noted that "As Common Core results trickle in, initial goals unfulfilled."
What began as an effort to increase transparency and allow parents and school leaders to assess performance nationwide has largely unraveled, chiefly because states are dropping out of the two testing groups and creating their own exams.
Common Core boosters have dealt with this big slice of failure by simply ignoring it and developing selective amnesia about the goal of having every state on the same page. But Amario offers a few reminders.
For instance, she takes us back to 2010 and Arne Duncan's promise that the tests would end the practice of having "fifty goalposts." In fact, back in the Core's infancy, Core pushers were pretty straightforward about how the whole program leaned on the testing component would push schools to adopt matching-- well, they couldn't say the word "curriculum" because a federally-inflicted curriculum would be illegal. But remember-- one advantage would be that a student moving from Idaho to Arkansas would be able to make the transition without missing a beat.
Amario even manages to get someone from Brookings to say something useful.
"The whole idea of Common Core was to bring students and schools under a common definition of what success is," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "And Common Core is not going to have that. One of its fundamental arguments has been knocked out from under it."
Of course, part of the problem was that Core fans grossly underestimated the reaction to federal overreach. And while some Americans did (and still do) support the ideas behind the Core and Core testing in practice, they found that the reality of both was far less appealing. And so the vision of a country in which every single state gave one of two national Big Standardized Tests began collapsing almost instantly. But the PARCC is down to no more than eleven states, while SBA is down to fifteen. She also notes on the comparability front that PARCC and SBA don't even give the same number of performance levels (five for PARCC, four for SBA).
Amario tries to see if the tests are actually useful, and here her work is less impressive.
Rather than paper-and-pencil multiple choice tests, the new exams are designed to be taken by tablet or computer. Instead of being given a selection of answers to choose, students must show how they got their answer. Answer correctly and get a more difficult question. Answer incorrectly, get an easier one.
Welllllll... instead of being given a selection of answers to bubble in, students must, click, or drag and drop answers. And the record on adaptive testing is mixed at best.
Amario also lets an LAUSD official drop in an unchallenged assertion that the tests are providing "richer" information, which is patently ridiculous. In most states teachers are forbidden to see the questions and get no information about student performance beyond a simple score, which tells nothing about what the students did and did not answer correctly.
She notes that many test results came in low, but she doesn't examine the issue of cut scores and how they are set, a critical point, since the average civilian would find the idea of setting passing levels AFTER you've scored the test kind of dopey and rather the opposite of having standards.
So there's plenty of work still to be done. But still-- the AP just called out the Core for a total failure on one of its original major goals. That's at least one small victory for fans of public education.
What began as an effort to increase transparency and allow parents and school leaders to assess performance nationwide has largely unraveled, chiefly because states are dropping out of the two testing groups and creating their own exams.
Common Core boosters have dealt with this big slice of failure by simply ignoring it and developing selective amnesia about the goal of having every state on the same page. But Amario offers a few reminders.
For instance, she takes us back to 2010 and Arne Duncan's promise that the tests would end the practice of having "fifty goalposts." In fact, back in the Core's infancy, Core pushers were pretty straightforward about how the whole program leaned on the testing component would push schools to adopt matching-- well, they couldn't say the word "curriculum" because a federally-inflicted curriculum would be illegal. But remember-- one advantage would be that a student moving from Idaho to Arkansas would be able to make the transition without missing a beat.
Amario even manages to get someone from Brookings to say something useful.
"The whole idea of Common Core was to bring students and schools under a common definition of what success is," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "And Common Core is not going to have that. One of its fundamental arguments has been knocked out from under it."
Of course, part of the problem was that Core fans grossly underestimated the reaction to federal overreach. And while some Americans did (and still do) support the ideas behind the Core and Core testing in practice, they found that the reality of both was far less appealing. And so the vision of a country in which every single state gave one of two national Big Standardized Tests began collapsing almost instantly. But the PARCC is down to no more than eleven states, while SBA is down to fifteen. She also notes on the comparability front that PARCC and SBA don't even give the same number of performance levels (five for PARCC, four for SBA).
Amario tries to see if the tests are actually useful, and here her work is less impressive.
Rather than paper-and-pencil multiple choice tests, the new exams are designed to be taken by tablet or computer. Instead of being given a selection of answers to choose, students must show how they got their answer. Answer correctly and get a more difficult question. Answer incorrectly, get an easier one.
Welllllll... instead of being given a selection of answers to bubble in, students must, click, or drag and drop answers. And the record on adaptive testing is mixed at best.
Amario also lets an LAUSD official drop in an unchallenged assertion that the tests are providing "richer" information, which is patently ridiculous. In most states teachers are forbidden to see the questions and get no information about student performance beyond a simple score, which tells nothing about what the students did and did not answer correctly.
She notes that many test results came in low, but she doesn't examine the issue of cut scores and how they are set, a critical point, since the average civilian would find the idea of setting passing levels AFTER you've scored the test kind of dopey and rather the opposite of having standards.
So there's plenty of work still to be done. But still-- the AP just called out the Core for a total failure on one of its original major goals. That's at least one small victory for fans of public education.
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