David Coleman's Master Plan

David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core and current head of the College Board and the guy who decided he was the man to single-handedly redefine what it means to be an educated American, has spoken many times about what the long view of education reform would be. One frequently quoted speech was his keynote address at the Institute for Leadership Senior Leadership Meeting in December of 2011.

The seventy-minute presentation is a lot to watch, but I recently stumbled over a transcript of the whole mess, hosted online by the nice folks at Truth in Education. This was Coleman in 2011 delivering a speech entitled "What Must Be Done in the Next Two Years" at a time before reformsters had learned to be more careful about concealing the details of what they had in mind. The transcript is twenty-six pages long, so we're just going to skip through highlights.

The Testing Smoking Gun

It was Lauren who propounded the great rule that I think is a statement of reality, though not a pretty one, which is teachers will teach towards the test. There is no force strong enough on this earth to prevent that. There is no amount of hand-waving, there's no amount of saying, “They teach to the standards, not the test; we don't do that here.” Whatever. The truth is and if I misrepresent you, you are welcome to take the mic back. But the truth is teachers do. Tests exert an enormous effect on instructional practice,direct and indirect, and it's hence our obligation to make tests that are worthy of that kind of attention. It is in my judgment the single most important work we have to do over the next two years to ensure that that is so, period. So when you ask me, “What do we have to do over the next years?” we gotta do that. If we do anything else over the next two years and don't do that, we are stupid and shall be betrayed again by shallow tests that demean the quality of classroom practice, period.

So, there was no question, no doubt that the standards were about creating tests that would drive instruction and write curriculum.

Coleman outlines some of the issues, joshing and shmoozing his audience. You've got your new standards and your old standards and it's going to be a mess. "My friends from Texas in the back are like, 'Can we leave now and go to a bar? 'Cause we didn't even adopt these stupid standards yet." Oh, the yucks.

But Coleman promises details and specifics and evidence and support. And he'll get to that in a moment, but first he wants to offer a plug for his group Student Achievement Partners.

The Unqualified Leaders

This is the moment where Coleman famously describes his crew as a group of "unqualified people," adding that their qualification was their "attention to and command of the evidence behind" the standards. Nothing made it into the standards without support and evidence. Totally not based just on what people in the room thought students should know. Given this evidence-based approach, one wonders why the CCSS don't come with extensive footnotes delineating the exact support for each and every standard.

Coleman next goes on to make a less commonly-repeated point-- the Core aren't just about what is added in, but what is taken out. Coleman wants to be clear that it's not just a matter of what the standards command teachers to start doing, but also a matter of what they are supposed to stop doing.

SAP is composed mostly of the people who wrote the Core, though Coleman wants to remind us that teachers' unions, teachers, parents, all sorts of folks "was involved in" writing the standards. They followed three principles while doing the work--

First, never take money from any publishers or test manufacturers. Second, they will not compete for any state RFP's. Third, we won't possess any intellectual property. Which raises of the question of why the Core are copyrighted. Coleman wants the crowd to understand that any mistakes he makes are the result of stupidity, not avarice. So, no money was involved back then, though of course the companies involved seemed to have made out okay in the financial windfall of the standards, and Coleman has landed a pretty sweet job. Perhaps he meant to say, "We all agreed that our big paydays would come later."

If you've had the feeling that the Core feel like a big wet blanket thrown over any sort of creative spark, here's a quote from Coleman as he starts to talk about how Eastern Asian countries are "beating the pants off us."

They're working harder than we are, their kids work harder, they may not be quite as creative but that's only gonna last for so long, and this country's best days-- we're gonna get overwhelmed by this kind of tidal wave of harder work. 

So there you have it. Creativity is all well and good, but only for a brief time.

The Math Piece

Coleman spends some time selling the math portion with a bunch of jargonesque talk about doing more with less and fluency and how key fluencies will make math whizes, dragging learning French into the fray which leads me to wonder if learning a language the Common Core math way would mean learning only a tiny bit of vocabulary really well, which doesn't sound like fluency to me. But I digress. Coleman does say these key fluencies are basically one or two things you must learn by rote every year, and mentions that "people on the left" don't like that and, well, yes, liberals are known for their dislike of memorizing the times table.

In the end, he wants application and understanding so that (his example) when you're negotiating a mortgage, it occurs to you to get out your calculator and figure out if you're getting shafted.

Coleman next explains why current tests are bad, though his Powers of Explaining Clearly have been seriously weakened at this point. His point seems to be that since the test covers so much stuff, a student can look like they're "passing" when they haven't shown mastery of the parts that are Really Important. All tests do this? Coleman knows this? And actual math teachers don't create tests or other ways of measurement to factor into passing students on? This just seems like a huge statement, requiring Coleman to know both which math skills are the Really Important ones and what every math test in the world covers. But the picture is clear-- Coleman wanted math teachers to stop covering a bunch of extra stuff and letting students sneak by who don't know the Really Important stuff.

Coleman talks about what to do in the next two years about math, and he makes fun of the fact that publishers already claim to have aligned materials developed before the Core were even finished. So go through every grade with every teacher and make sure they know what the Really Important parts are. This should be easy because, Coleman says, and I'm not kidding, "It's like a couple of sentences long." Coleman also says that all PD should be focused only on the Really Important parts, period, full stop.And somehow we get back to how Hong Kong does better on the TIMMS.

There's now a break for audience participation, during which Coleman notes, "I find the softer I speak, the less people can argue with me."

He clarifies for an audience member that this approach doesn't really require teachers to be experts, in year one, but in year two, that should start to happen.

Now for Literacy

First, Coleman talks about "literacy" through all of this, suggesting that speaking and listening weren't really on his radar.

He opens with references to "haunting data" which amount to saying that over forty years we've spent more and more money but the eighth grade NAEP reading scores have stayed flat for those forty years. This is "devastating" because if  students don't get past eighth grade reading level "they're obviously doomed in terms of career and college readiness and all we hoped for them." Are they "obviously doomed"? As the scores have stayed flat for the last forty years, has US economic history been marked by an unrelenting downward spiral that can be traced to a nation of eighth grade readers? Coleman doesn't offer any data, but he has highlighted one of the ongoing unplugged holes of the reformy argument. If I've been eating a bagel for breakfast for forty years, and you want to tell me that I must change my diet because otherwise the bagel will give me a terrible disease, I'm going to need a little more proof than your panicky announcement because, so far, so good. That doesn't mean I should eat bagels forever just because it's what I've always done. But I have forty years of data on the effects of bagel breakfasts, and you have zero years. Which one of us is making a data driven decision?

So I want you to look at the core standards for a moment as a battering ram, as an engine to take down that wall.

Nice simile. I can't imagine why so many teachers have viewed the Core as an assault on public education. But Coleman proceeds to lay out the shifts that must happen in the next two years.

First, K-5 have to read for knowledge. Coleman finds it "shocking" that only 7-15% of the reading they do is informational-- the rest is stories. And not for the first time, I am amazed that someone who studied literature at Oxford somehow remains ignorant of the role of story in human civilization and the individual psyche. I am less amazed that someone who has no educational experience doesn't seem to know anything about how small children are best engaged to learn about reading.

But Coleman says the data is overwhelming that the knowledge and vocabulary acquired in Pre-k through 5 is absolutely essential for reading more complex texts going forward. So he demands 50% informational texts, and he equates "informational texts" with "learning about the world," as if stories do not teach anybody anything about the world.

So focusing on testing, he points out that elementary testing was reading and math, and since the reading portion was all "literature," everybody dropped science and history to spend more time test-prepping reading. He absolutely has a point, but since he's wedded to the idea of using the Big Standardized Test to drive curriculum, he comes up with absolutely the wrong solution. The correct solution was to look at NCLB's test-and-punish regime and say, "Wow, this is really screwing up schools. We should stop with the test and punish." But Coleman takes a flier and lands on, "We should test and punish a different range of things." Which I'm going equate with an abuser having the epiphany, "I kept hitting my partners with a stick, and then they'd always leave me and call the cops. So going forward I'm going to hit them with my fists, instead. That'll fix the problem."

Coleman says these standards should be exciting for elementary teachers because "they re-inaugurate elementary school teachers' rightful role as guides to the world." In this, whether he understood it or not, Coleman is dead wrong-- the Core inaugurated teachers as Content Delivery Specialists chained to crappy curriculum materials designed to teach to a test.

Coleman on Reading Across the Curriculum

I am sick of people, to be rather frank with you, who tell me that art teachers don‟t want to teach this, 'cause our kids have to be able to do it, period, for their success. And what‟s interesting about the standards is rather than saying to social studies and history teachers that they should become reading teachers, which I think is a losing game, it says instead they must–they must–enable their students to evaluate and analyze primary and secondary sources. Science teachers must not become literary teachers. What they must become is teachers who enable their students to read primary sources of the sort of direct experimental results as well as reference documents to build their knowledge of science. But what is not allowed is a content teacher to think that if they just tell their students enough content and their students have no independent capacity to analyze and build that content knowledge, that they are a success. 

I'm now going to say something shocking-- it's possible that Coleman has a point here. But it crashes directly into the wall of the Big Standardized Test, which insists that critical thinking is when you look at the evidence and reach exactly the conclusion that I think you should. Coleman's goals are not out of line, but the BS Tests cannot, and will not, test for this, so if he really wants to see this, he has to let go of his test and punish obsession. But we know he hasn't, because the new SAT that he has overseen has a writing element that enshrines this exact fallacy about what it means to examine evidence and draw conclusions.

Nor, as always, does Coleman have a clue what to do with low-ability students. And as always, Coleman seems to believe that nobody anywhere is already doing any of this, which is unvarnished baloney. Coleman remains that guy who thinks that because he just had a Big Thought, he must be the first and only person to ever have that thought.

Also, because of that overwhelming (but still to this day secret and unseen) data again, Coleman is sure that academic literacy in these areas must be achieved by ninth grade, or the child is doomed.

Evidence

Coleman's second literacy shift is to focus on evidence. This is one of his best-known hobby horses-- writing must be done within the four corners of the text, and while this is not the speech in which he said it, he comes close to his classic "no one gives a shit what you think" line about writing. He also gets in a shot at how Kids These Days are all up in the texting, which may seem inconsequential, but speaks to the thread running through reformsterism about how modern kids are just awful and need to be whipped into shape.

But here Coleman again assumes the notion that education is only about preparing for the workplace or college (which is where you go to win access to a better workplace), and we don't need that creativity shit there.

Text Complexity

Coleman's third big shift is toward text complexity, and back in 2011 he thinks that there are people who can actually measure this fuzzy and ill-defined quality of a text. He acknowledges that leveled reading is important for developing reading vocabulary and a love of reading, and see-- this is why we go back and look at these old documents because sometimes we discover things that were lost in translation. Coleman seems to be saying that core instruction has to be "complex" in order for behinder students to catch up, level-wise, but it's important that other stuff meets the students whereever they are. Which seems different from the more recent policy of making students read above frustration level all the time.

Of course, Coleman's original idea is baloney as well. The plan is we'll find the slowest runners in the race, and we'll get them to run not only as fast as the race leaders, but actually faster so that they can catch up. This seems.... unlikely.

So What To Do Now for Literacy Education?

So what are these education leaders supposed to do over the next two years?

First, be all evidence-based, all the time, and by making students cite evidence for every answer, you'll also push teachers to only ask questions that can be answered with evidence. Because opinions are for dopes. Also, this is as good a time as any to note that after all these years, we are still waiting for any of the evidence and data that allegedly supports the Core, as well as any evidence that BS Testing improves education, as well as evidence that any of these reforms have done any good anywhere. Always remember, boys and girls-- if you're powerful and sure you're right, you don't have to provide evidence to your Lessers. Evidence is for the common people (kind of like Common Core).

Second, rip all those damn storybooks out of the kids' hands and "flood" your schools with informational texts. On the high school level Coleman has some specific ideas about how to "challenge" teachers on the literacy front, and it's in line with what we've heard before. I've responded to Coleman's essay "Cultivating Wonder" before, and if you want to see me rant about his ignorance of how to address reading, you can take a look at that.

Fixing Teachers

For the umpteenth time Coleman transitions by noting that he's saying controversial things and people don't like him because of it, ha ha, and he reminds me mostly of the guy who posts on Facebook, "Most of you aren't going to read this, but--" as a way to humblebrag about how he's so special that most people just don't get him, but it's a cross you have to bear when you're awesome.

Anyway, he pooh-poohs traditional teacher eval language like "use data to inform instruction" and "plan, engage, revise" and offers his own superior plan. Focus on these five areas:

1) Is a high-quality complex text under discussion?
2) Are high quality text-dependent questions being asked?
3) Is there evidence of students drawing from the text in their answers and writing?
4) How diverse a set of students are providing your evidence?
5) What is the quality of teacher feedback?

And then Coleman puts his own severe conceptual limitations on display, worth noting not as a way of picking on Coleman, but because these shortcomings are hardwired into the Core, the Core tests, and the evaluations based on the Core tests.

To me that is a much more exciting set of criteria to engage with a literacy teacher about than, “Did you have a plan? How were your objectives? Were your students engaged?” Who can determine these things? The things I just described to you are countable. That is, in the best meaning of accountable, they are literally things you can count. And so I‟d ask you to think about literacy in this way. While literacy seems like the most mysterious and vague and kind of touchy-feely of our disciplines, I think it can be much improved by daring to count within literacy, and by daring to observe the accumulation of these kinds of facts. 

To insist that only things that matter are those which can be assigned a number is symptomatic of a tiny, tiny frame of reference, a deeply limited view of what it means to be human. But the answer to the question, "Who can determine these things" is simple-- trained, experienced, professional educators. Coleman's real problem (and that of the reformster movement as a whole) is not that nobody can determine such things, but that it's hard to put them in a frame of reference that makes sense to somebody whose cramped and meager understanding of education and humanity can only grasp numerical values and concrete nouns.

Exemplars

Coleman figures after a year you'll have a collection of exemplars, such as the legendary Gettysburg Address lesson, in which it takes us three to five days to pick apart the rhetorical tricks of the speech without ever touching the historical background or the human implications of the war, Lincoln's choices, and our character as a nation.


There is actually some discussion at the close that gets back to that lesson and the questions of scaffolding, but Coleman doesn't really add anything useful. But then someone brings up

English Language Learners

Coleman says that they expect him to address adaptations, but instead he's going to call for an ELL Bill of Rights, which basically says that ELL learners have the right to be faced with the exact same work that all the other students are learning. So back in 2011, we've already perfected the rhetorical trick of saying that we are doing students a favor by demanding they do work beyond their capabilities, a piece of educational malpractice still enshrined in federal policy.  So pretty much the same policy as Sarah Palin's "if you come to America, speak American" only with a smile and some complimentary words attached.

Enough already

I agree. That brings us to the end of the transcript. Though Coleman provides some strokes for the  events' organizers, as always, he leaves the audience with the impression that he pretty much whipped up the whole Common Core himself. And though he talks a lot about the evidence and support and data that undergirds the Core, he doesn't actually specifically mention any of it.

And if you think you haven't suffered enough, here's the actual video of the event. But don't say you weren't warned.

IBM Wants To Be Your Big Brother

IBM has bought themselves some "sponsored content" over at Slate, which means an advertisement all dolled up to look like an actual article. I imagine these are challenging to write-- exactly how to you hit the sweet spot where you are pitching to someone who is not bright enough to notice they've clicked on "sponsored content" but who is smart enough to appreciate your offered wisdom.

At any rate, IBM clearly would like to be a player in the data-chomping personalized-educating making-money-off-of-ed-biz game. So how's their pitch.

Part I: Boogah-boogah!! 

Students are dropping out! There will be a zillion dropouts in a few years, along with an equally intimidating number of jobs that go unfilled because we won't have enough college grads! And you know those numbers are reliable because they come from our friends at McKinsey. 

Businesses are so aware of America’s growing skills gap that they factor in the quality of local schools when deciding where to set up shop.

Sure. Remember that time that all those companies moved their plants to China and India? No? How about that time that Super-Mega-Corps said, "I don't care how big a tax break you offer us, we're going to a different site because we like the local schools better."

Part 2: Traditional Failure

Traditional schools are so one-size-fits-all. Large class sizes get in the way of that, and clearly the solution to that would not be smaller classes-- not when you can just open another school entirely. When I have so many packages in the back seat of my car that a passenger can't fit, I just buy a new car.

I call baloney on the one-size-fits-all thing, too. I teach at a relatively small school in a ruralish area, and we still manage to prepare students for both ivy league colleges and careers in welding.

Part 3: Data!!!!

Schools are swimming in data. IBM would love to help you collect it and crunch it. Really.

Because with all that data, IBM can help you individualize instruction and figure out exactly what each student needs. IBM has already anticipated what you are going to dislike about this idea:

That doesn’t mean that technology will replace teachers or the human insights that are so critical to understanding students’ needs.

And then they turn to an analogy that is exceptionally bold-- if you want to see how data can make the world awesome, just check out healthcare!!

Yes, the industry where your best hope is that you'll find somebody who will set down the policy manual and care for you like a person, the industry where the length of your care is determined by bean counters and non-medical personnel, the industry where the system feels the best way to help you is to reduce you to a number-- that healthcare industry.

Part 4: Our Schools 

IBM would like to tout some of their partnerships, where their all-encompassing data-gathering has allowed teachers to accomplish amazing things, like the ability to "use analytics to enable teachers to identify both at-risk students and high performers." Because teachers haven't any idea about how to do that. Honestly, there are days when it seems as if the worst stereotypes are true-- computer guys have no idea how to interact with other humans, so they just assume that no other humans know, either. Or maybe this is another iteration of the modern management idea-- management by screen, where a manager just sits in his office and makes decisions based on streams of data.

Either way, no. No, IBM, I do not need some data crunching to tell me things about my students that I, as an actual teaching professional, should be able to work out by using my powers of "looking" and "listening." Plus, by using my powers I can also develop a "relationship" with the student that can provide the foundation for helping that student learn and grow as an individual. I could help coach him forward based on "trust me" and "I know you" as opposed to "the data printout says so."     

But IBM and their data-consuming cloud have bigger ideas-- IBM would like to be your buddy on the cradle-to-career assembly line, letting you know what career you should choose and overseeing your course selection.

IBM’s analytics can also help align students with their prospective career pathways. Australia’s Deakin University, for example, is using IBM’s Watson technology to create a Student Advisor application to give students real-time answers to school-related questions.

I guess when you want to talk to your advisor at 3 AM, or without putting on pants, this would be just the thing. Most of IBM's pitch seems to be aimed for a post-human-relationship world. But the humany stuff does not seem to be where their focus primarily rests.

"The data that is available today is an important natural resource for the next century,” he said. “And education systems that leverage that data are going to be more competitive in the global economy.”

I will have to mull over the data-as-a-natural-resource idea for a while. In the meantime, I going to hold off on hopping on the IBM bus.

Implementationism and Barber

This week, the Education Delivery Institute is delighted to announce a new book/marketing initiative co-authored by Nick Rodriguez, Ellyn Artis, and Sir Michael Barber. Rodriguez and Artis may not be familiar to you, but Barber is best known as the head honcho of Pearson. So you know where this is headed.

 This is Nick Rodriguez, a personal trainer in Houston. Not the same guy.



Their new book has the more-than-a-mouthful title Deliverology in Practice: How Education Leaders Are Improving Student Outcomes, and it sets out to answer the Big Question:

Why, with all the policy changes in education over the past five years, has progress in raising student achievement and reducing inequalities been so slow?

In other words-- since we've had full-on reformsterism running for five years, why can't they yet point to any clear successes? They said this stuff was going to make the world of education awesome. Why isn't it happening?

Now, you or I might think the answer to that question could be "Because the reformy ideas are actually bad ideas" or "The premises of the reforms are flawed" or "The people who said this stuff would work turn out to be just plain wrong." But no-- that's not where Barber et al are headed at all. Instead, they turn back to what has long been a popular excuse explanation for the authors of failed education reforms.

Implementation. 

"Well, my idea is genius. You're just doing it wrong!" is the cry of many a failed geniuses in many fields of human endeavor, and education reformsters have been no exception.

Just an implementation problem. As in, don't implement these into your digestive system.





I have trouble wrapping my head around the notion that implementation is somehow separate from conception. Cold fusion is a neat concept, but the fact that it cannot actually be implemented in the world we physically inhabit renders it kind of useless. Politics are particularly susceptible to the fallacy that My Idea Is Pure Genius and if people would just behave the way I want them to, it will all work out brilliantly.

"Millions starving? Don't worry-- it's just an implementation problem."








The implementation fallacy has created all sorts of complicated messes, but the fallacy itself is simply expressed:

There is no good way to implement a bad idea. 

Barber, described in this article as "a monkish former teacher,"  has been a champion of bad ideas. He has a fetish for data that is positively Newtonian. If we just learn all the data and plug it into the right equations, we will know everything, which makes Michael Barber a visionary for the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for Barber, in this century, we're well past the work of Einstein and the chaoticians and the folks who have poked around in quantum mechanics, and from those folks we learn things like what really is or isn't a solid immutable quality of the universe and how complex systems (like those involving humans) experience wide shifts based on small variables and how it's impossible to collect data without changing the activity from which the data is being collected.

Barber's belief in standardization and data collection are in direct conflict with the nature of human beings and the physical universe as we currently understand it. Other than that, they're just as great as they were 200 years ago. But Barber is a True Believer, which is how he can say things like this: 

“Those who don’t want a given target will argue that it will have perverse or unintended consequences,” Sir Michael says, “most of which will never occur.” 

Yup. Barber fully understands how the world works, and if programs don't perform properly, it's because people are failing to implement correctly.

  


Nothing wrong with the suit. It's just an implementation problem.









Fortunately, Barber has a system for fixing the implementation issue.

Deliverology 

According to this piece in the Economist, Barber was early on inspired by a 1995 book by Mark Moore, Creating Public Value, a work also popular in the Clinton administration. Pearson went on to develop his own version of How To Get Things Done, which supposedly was at first mockingly called Deliverology, a term that barber embraced. Google it and find it everywhere, generally accompanied by some version of these steps (here taken from a review of the new book):

• Set clear goals for students, establish a Delivery Unit to help your system stay focused on them, and build the coalition that will back your reforms.
• Analyze the data and evidence to get a sense of your current progress and the biggest barriers to achieving your goals.
• Develop a plan that will guide your day-to-day work by explicitly defining what you are implementing, how it will reach the field at scale, and how it will achieve the desired impact on your goals.
• Monitor progress against your plan, make course corrections, and build and sustain momentum to achieve your goals.
• Identify and address the change management challenges that come with any reform and attend to them throughout your delivery effort.

 You're going to what with a delivery unit??









There are so many things not to love about this approach. Personally, I'm very excited about working as part of a Delivery Unit, and look forward to adding Delivery Unit to my resume. And "a coalition that will back your reforms" sounds so much nicer than "posse of yes-persons." I don't really know what "reach the field at scale" is supposed to mean, but it sounds important! Nor has it escaped my notice that this whole procedure can be used whether you are teaching humans, training weasels, or manufacturing widgets. 

But the most startlingly terrible thing about deliverology is that it allows absolutely no place for reflection or evaluation of your program. Surround yourself with those who agree. Anything that gets in your way is an "obstacle." And at no point in the deliverology loop do I see a moment in which one stops to ask, "So, is our set of goals actually doing anybody any good? Let's take a moment to ask if what we're trying to do is what we should be trying to do."

This is another problem of implementationism-- the belief that implementing a program is completely separate from designing and creating it in the first place. Implementation should be an important feedback loop. If you start petting your dog with a rake and the dog starts crying and bleeding, the correct response is not, "We have an implemention problem. We'll need to hold down and silence the animal so that it doesn't provide a barrier to implementing our rake-petting program."

No, the proper response is, "Holy hell! Petting my dog with a rake is a turning out to be a terrible idea! I should start over with some other idea entirely!"

My dates all end badly, but I'm sure it's not me. Must be an implementation problem.









Implementationism and Deliverology Misdirection

What these ill-fated approaches do is allow guys like Barber to focus attention everywhere except the place where the problem actually lies. 

If I develop a cool new unit for my classroom, and it bombs terribly, I can certainly look at how I implemented and presented the unit. But I would be a fool (and a terrible teacher) not to consider the possibility that the unit just needs to be heavily tweaked or just plain scrapped. As long as Barber and his acolytes insist that there's nothing wrong with Common Core or high-stakes testing or massive data collection to feed a system that will allow us to tell students what breakfast they should eat, they will face an endless collection of implementation problems.

 Just a little implementation problem




If the Titanic had never hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage, she might have looked like she was having no implementation problems at all. But between her bad design and inadequate safety measures, some sort of disaster was going to happen sooner or later. 

Deeply flawed design yields deeply flawed results, and quality of implementation won't change that a bit. 

Five years (at least-- depending on how you count) of reformster programs have yielded no real success stories. This is not an implementation problem, and reformsters have to look at that and consider the possibility that their beloved reformy ideas have fundamental problems. To be fair, some have. But those who don't simply can't be taken seriously. Even if they write books.

Competitive Baloney & Rehabilitating RTTT

At the Stanford SOCIAL INNOVATION Review (I don't know why the yell the middle of their name), Joanne Weiss has unleashed an astonishing stack of deep-fried baloney that attempts to retro-actively legitimize the destructive power-and-money test-and-punish legacy of Race to the Top. "Competing Principles" is truly audacious.

Joanne Who??

Weiss has a powerful pedigree. She put in years as an ed tech honcho before going to work for NewSchools Venture Fund, an investment firm for hedge fundies to get their paws in the education biz and that sweet, sweet mountain of public tax dollars. In conjunction with that gig, she served on the boards of Aspire, Green Dot, Rocketship and Leadership charter outfits, to name just a few.

All of this made her perfectly positioned to become Arne Duncan's Chief of Staff and the lead dog for Race to the Top. Are you starting to understand why that program was such a mess?

But when Weiss looks at RttT, she does not see mess, and in this article, she paints with rosy hues the many fine lessons to be learned from the administration's signature education program.

She opens with a brief fantasy-filled recap of RttT's impact (43 states now have super-magical tests that can measure critical thinking), and then moves on to the Eight Big Design Lessons of Race to the Trough.

Create a Real Competition

The administration was not sure that the initiative would be "compelling." But golly gee, 46 states ponied up to give it a try. Weiss believes that the secret was "our decision to leverage the spirit of competition." How, one may ask, does one harness this mysterious and mystical force?

First, they set a very high bar, allowed for very few winners, and offered very big rewards. She forgets to mention another important step-- launch your competition when states have just been hammered by an economically debilitating recession and are desperate for money. Weiss's spirit of competition can also be leveraged by starving some people for two weeks, throwing them in a pit, and waving juicy steaks while announcing that only one person who climbs out of the pit gets to eat.

Second, she writes, they kept politics out of the process, and I am wondering (not for the last time) whether Weiss is incredibly cynical or incredibly dense. There was a review panel of experts. No politics. Nosirree. Just a score indicating how well the states matched the definition of "excellence" created by politicians in DC.

Third, they "placed governors at the center of the application process." So, the top politicians were invited "to use their political capital." As God is my witness "no politics" and "use top politicians political muscle" appear within two adjacent paragraphs.

Weiss acknowledges, sort of, the problem near the center of this aspect-- that RttT promoted competition in an arena that should be collaborative. Weiss addresses this by saying, essentially, no, we didn't, and also, we were right to do so.

She completely ignores the huge issue at the center of the competitive aspect of the program-- a declaration of the federal government that they will only provide help and support to some states. This is like saying to your family, "I know you've all been hungry and undernourished, and we're going to fix that. We're going to feed some of you, most likely the strongest ones who least need it. For those of you who are too weakened to compete, screw you. You get nothing." The competitive grant nature of Race to the Top was an absolute abdication of federal responsibility, and the Obama administration should be ashamed of the program for that reason alone.

Pursue Clear Goals (in a Flexible Way)

Weiss admits to flubbing this one, producing a program with so many goals that no state could successfully address all of them. With a do-over, she'd recommend "leaner, more focused rules."

Tomato, tomahto. The effect is the same. If I give my students vague instructions, they'll say, "Can you give an example." Once I provide an example, they'll give me work exactly like it, because thanks to my vague instructions, my example is the only thing they know is safe to try. Ditto RttT and features like, say, Common Core.

This section does feature one more reality-defying side note. In suggesting that this really was successful because states really bought in to their new plans, Weiss writes:

In fact, even many states that did not win the competition proceeded with the reform efforts that they had laid out in their application. 

Do you suppose the explanation was that states were staring down the barrel of NCLB's punitive sanctions and hoping the feds promised waiver program was their chance to avoid trouble?

Drive Alignment Through the System

The overall goal of the competition was to promote approaches to education reform that would be coherent, systemic, and statewide.

That's why we drove each state to have all its main players sign Memos of Understanding, pledging their allegiance and compliance to what, as folks who remember those years may recall, was a fuzzy and undefined set of requirements. We just kept waving money at them.

I do remember that time in PA. The state hollering "sign these agreements" and folks like teacher unions and local administrators saying "But what the heck are we agreeing to?" and the state saying "But look! Money!! You must sign!" It was a long conversation. PA did not win any RttT bux.

Encourage Broad Stakeholder Buy-in 

Weiss has a funny idea about what "encourage" means:

First, we forced alignment among the top three education leaders in each participating state—the governor, the chief state school officer, and the president of the state board of education—by requiring each of them to sign their state’s Race to the Top application. In doing so, they attested that their office fully supported the state’s reform proposal.

 Second, they asked for signatures from district officials. Third, they waved more piles of money "tangible incentives" at community leaders. Fourth, we made state leaders come submit to personal interviews.

We imposed this requirement largely to verify that those in charge of implementing their state's plan were knowledgeable about the plan and fully committed to it.

It's funny, but none of this sounds like "encourage buy-in," so much as it sounds like "required obeisance and pledges of compliance because we couldn't trust any of these bastards." I find it oddly soothing that the administration had no more faith in governors than it had in teachers.

Promote Change from the Start

We were really pleased at how quickly states starting auditioning and sucking up for our money from even before Day One. We were particularly gratified that many actually changed their laws just for us. Yay, us.

Enable Transparency

From its earliest days, Race to the Top received a high degree of scrutiny and faced pressure to be above reproach. We decided that the best way to handle this pressure was to keep a firewall between our decisions and any of the rabble who wanted to cause trouble, in hopes that we could get the whole thing up and running before anybody had a chance to pry too much.

Ha ha. Okay, I rewrote part of that quote. Weiss is really going to try to sell her audience on the idea that transparency had anything to do with Race to the Top. And that "commitment to transparency" brought all sorts of benefits.

First, everyone did super-high-quality work because it would be under public scrutiny. Hey, have I mentioned that I have not seen Common Core mentioned once in this article? Boy, there was a piece of high quality totally transparent work that rode the coattails of Race to the Top. Well, except for how everyone was lying about it being teacher-written and internationally benchmarked. Or maybe that's the high-quality work involved in selling untested teacher evaluation based on unvalid (and at the time non-existent) testing.

Second, "participants developed a common vocabulary for talking about education reform" because nothing promotes transparency like specialized insider jargon.

Third, the Race to the Top website became a-- wait! what?? There was such a thing? Does she mean this place, with all the government PR?

Fourth, the information about RttT became "crowdsourced" (those are her air quotes) with all sorts of folks checking out and critiquing applications. Researcher "will be mining this trove of data for years to come." I'm pretty sure she's just making shit up now.

Build a Climate of Support

Yes, nothing builds a climate of support like a battle royale over zero-sum monetary rewards.

Her point is that the government was supportive of applying states, and I kind of think she means that this all created an atmosphere in which many helpful consultants and think tanks and publishers and other edubizpreneurs could descend upon states to start hoovering up some of that aforementioned sweet sweet money.

Ensure Accountability

Turns out that people in a life-or-death competition will over-promise, and while the department did its best to rein that in (including requiring a note from State Attorney Generals that the "proof" was accurate-- seriously), it was still an issue. So in the future, the agencies managing the grant money should never take their hands entirely off of it.

And that's eight.

I Need To Sit Down

Once again, reformsters provide a glimpse of some alternate reality. This is certainly a different picture of Race to the Top than, say, "We used a big pile of money to get states to actually compete for the privilege of giving us control of their pubic education systems" or "We went out and bought a bunch of friends for Common Core while bribing states to implement untested, unproven half-baked ideas about evaluating teachers."

But others have already hit the comments section of this piece of retroactive fluffernuttery.

Leonie Haimson points out that another super-duper effect of RttT was to create such a huge backlash that all versions of the ESEA rewrite include sections that tell the Secretary of Education to go sit in the corner and think about what he's done.

Christopher Chase just rips the living daylights, from secretly produced standards to the use of this all as cover for privatizing and charterizing schools. Chase's response is worth reading even if you can't bear to read Weiss's article.

At the end, Weiss writes "We will not know the full impact of Race to the Top for several more years." And that's probably true, but we can take a shot at the broad strokes.

Race to the Top kick-started the process of foisting an unproven, unsupportable standards created by amateurs, test manufacturers, and book publishers on an unsuspecting public.

Race to the Top gave the test-and-punish policies of No Child Left Behind a giant shot of steroids, promising a level of testing quality that has still not been delivered while simultaneously chaining the professional future of teachers to that unproven testing system.

Race to the Top set out to create winners and losers among the states, declaring that the federal government only needed to help some American students be educated. At the same time, it gave a jolt of support to the process of declaring individual schools losers and turning those schools into profit-making opportunities for charter privateers who echoed the new mission-- educate only some of the students, but do it with everyone's public tax dollars.

Race to the Top created a huge backlash that damaged the political careers of many individuals who realized only too late what a giant load of underthought overreaching baloney it was.

It's true we'll not find out just how much damage was done for years, but we've got a general sense of the impact of RttT on US public education, but we already know that it was similar to the impact of an falling elephant on a wounded eagle. It wasn't good, and all the pretty PR in the world won't change that.

PA: Sub Privatizing Bombs

Philadelphia schools joined the ranks of school districts that figured they could save a buck by sub-contracting their substitute teaching work to a private company. Then, Philadelphia schools joined the ranks of school districts that found out they'd made a mistake.

Philly gave the contractor a $34 million contract, and then-- well, back before school started, they had barely 10% of the bodies they needed. I didn't run the story at the time because it was before the start of school, and sub rosters always grow once people decide they really aren't getting a job this fall. But now the school year is started, and Philly still has a measly 300 subs on the roster. The company says it has maybe 500 in the pipeline. The school district says once the year gets going, the demand is in the neighborhood of 1,000 per day.

The district hired the company after only being able to get a "fill rate" of about 66%. The company is not even close to that-- and if they don't hit 90% by January, it will start costing them money. They are mystified. Reporter Kristen A Graham quotes one of the honchos

"We've hired a good number of district originals, and many of them are just not accepting jobs," Murphy said. "Frankly, we're a little unsure why."

Source4Teachers is the outfit, and they already handle about 200 districts. Operating out of Cherry Hill, NJ, their chirpy website includes some darkly ironic rotating headlines.

We need tomorrow's teachers today. 

We need them today because we didn't find out about the absence till today. The company has complained that they don't get enough lead time on what needs to be filled, though they've certainly got plenty of lead time on the 99 unfilled teaching jobs, or the maternity leaves, or the long-term illnesses. If all other Philly teachers could plan their illnesses ahead of time, that would be very helpful.

They also need tomorrow's teachers because if they get more people who aren't actually teachers today, it will help fill the ranks with people who don't mind that this outsourcing has pushed sub jobs out of the union.

Begin a great teacher career. Or resume it.

Retirees who subbed in Philly used to make $242.83 per day. Now they make less than half that. Not that $110 is peanuts, but did Source4Teachers really think that a 53% pay cut wouldn't cause some retirees-- who don't actually have to work-- to rethink subbing?

In fact, all Philly subs took a pay cut. Source4Teachers thinks the old scale was too high and that the new rates ($75-$90 for uncertified, $90-$110 for certified) are closer to the going market rate. That may be true, but all pay being roughly equal, subs start looking at other factors that make subbing at a school more or less attractive.

And beginning a career? It's true that subbing was once a way to get your foot in the door, but I can't help noticing that Philly can't even fill the positions it has. And that many other states (the ones that aren't as actively starving schools to death as Pennsylvania is) offer ample opportunity to begin a career.

In today's classroom, there's no substitute for experience. Especially yours.

There may not be any substitute for experience, but Source4Teachers is certainly looking for it, looking hard for any sorts of warm bodies to grab some clearances and get in those classrooms. And while there may be no substitute for experience, as we've already seen, that doesn't mean they're ready to pay for it.

So, what lessons here?

This seems like a pretty straightforward lesson in how the free market works. You can't find people to fill a job. You must make the job more attractive. Source4Teachers and Philly schools have, in fact, made the job less attractive.

That's particularly problematic for substitute teaching, a job that is difficult to use as a real means of support because the work is low-paid, irregular and unpredictable. If a district really, really wants dependable sub coverage, the solution is simple-- hire permanent building subs. But that would mean a real salary with benefits, and the real problem is that districts want to have a solid, dependable stable of subs without having to actually pay for it.

With its move to sub-contract, Philly wasn't looking to get a better stable of substitute teachers-- they were looking to get a cheaper one. Now they get to learn one of the oldest lessons in the book-- you get what you pay for.
 

PARCC's Cut Scores and Need To Know

The folks at PARCC have set cut scores. You just don't need to know what they are.

The one published cut score is the one that draws the line between levels 3 and 4 ("not quite good enough" and "okee dokee"). That's set at 750 on a scale of 650 to 850. The other levels of cut scores, the projected percentages of students falling within the various troughs-- that's all secret for the time being.

There are three takeaways here for the general public.

There are no standards here

When you set an actual standard, an actual line that marks the difference between, say, ready for college and not ready for college, you set it before you do the measuring.

In my classroom, the grading scale is set before the students even take the test. In fact, before I even design the test. 70% is our lowest passing grade, and so I design a test on which someone would have to display the bare minimum of skill and comprehension to get a 70%.

The PARCC folk are saying that they will draw a line between college ready and not college ready-- but not before the test has been taken. How does that even make sense. How do you give a test saying, "This will show whether you're ready for college or not, but at this moment, we don't really know how much skill and knowledge you have to have to be ready for college."

This is the opposite of having standards. Standards mean setting the bar at six feet and saying, "You have to clear this bar to be considered a good jumper." This is saying, "We don't know what a good jump height would be, but we are going to judge you on whether you're a good jumper or not, but we're not going to put the bar up until after you jump."

Why are we setting cut scores now? Do we know the difference between a student who is college ready and one who is not? Is there some reason to believe that changes from year to year? 

Transparency

We have just about reached the point where the only way PARCC could be less transparent would be for them to require students to take the test blindfolded in a dark room on computers with the monitors turned off. This has to be the worst service ever provided by a government contractor.

Useful feedback

This is why I bust a small gasket every time somebody tries to justify these tests because they provide such useful feedback to districts and classroom teachers. PARCC is providing the most useless, data-free feedback imaginable-- and the school year has already started.

Says PARCC, "Some of your students have scored a varying levels on a test that may or may not have put them on a certain level. You can't know about the questions they answered, which ones they got wrong, or what specific deficiencies they have. And we won't even tell you the simple rating (grade) we're giving them for a while yet. But go ahead and take this gaping hole where data is supposed to be, and use it to inform your instruction."

Meanwhile, PARCC is parcelling out information on a need-to-know basis, and nobody needs to know.

UPDATE 

PARCC yielded to pressure and coughed up a bit more information, including the rest of the cut scores. Mercedes Schneider has the full story over at her blog.

Strikes and Democracy

Last night I was asked on twitter if I'm embarrassed by the striking Seattle teachers.

Shouldn't I be? My position on charters has been pretty clear, and recently I've been talking about my support for the Washington court ruling that charters are unconstitutional. I've been exceptionally clear that I believe charters, as currently practiced, are undemocratic in part because they are not run by an elected board and are therefor unaccountable to the voters and taxpayers.

I believe the implication (twitter's 140 characters depend a lot on implication) was that if I believe in the swellness of an elected school board, should I not also believe that teachers are obliged to let that elected school board be their guide and not get all unruly with strikes and stuff?

The answer is no, I don't, but the challenge is to articulate why, because my critic is correct in suggesting there might be an inconsistency there. I don't think so. Let's see if I can explain.

How is a government supposed to work?

We regularly conflate the ideas of how a government is put in place, and how it functions once there.

A monarch could inherit the throne, but once on it, be scrupulous about listening to all voices and supporting the rights of all people. A leader could be put in place by a legitimate election and begin behaving like a tyrant once in office. An elected group could meet in secret and never reveal their processes to the public.

We like democracy because as processes to put officials in place go, it seems the most naturally inclined to be open and inclusive. But the fact that it's democratically put in place doesn't guarantee that a group functions in an open and inclusive way.

Democracy is messy

The openness and inclusiveness are just as important as the electing, because that's part of where accountability comes from. It's not just that you have to stand for election every few years-- it's that every time you sit down to meet about your elected position, any member of the public who wants to can come and tell you what they think.

School boards (and city councils and congress) don't always love this part, and will sometimes try to bend the law to get around it. That's why we have things like sunshine laws-- because a democratic process of election is not enough to insure a democratic process of operation.

Democracy in action bothers lots of folks, specifically the same folks who hate it when the pictures in the living room are hung in a disorganized hodge-podge and one of them is tilted. Democracy in action is messy, noisy and inefficient. It ties our fate to the fates of Those People. And it unleashes a variety of contesting contrasting contentious forces.

In other words, if you think that democracy is when we elect a bunch of people and then just sit back and leave them alone while they decide whatever they decide, you are mistaken. American democracy in particular is designed so that the majority can't just force the minority to shut up.

Democracy is not a boisterous campaign followed by an election followed by blissful, compliant silence.

Democracy and Pressure Points

Once a group (such as a school board) is elected, they have to start functioning at the intersection of many different interests. Taxpayers. Parents. Teachers. Local government. And on any given issue, the clash of interests may become vocal and even harsh. In this way, democracy provides a means test for how much folks care. Are you really concerned about how much kale is served in the cafeteria? Are you willing to give up an evening to go complain to the board? To do it several times? To call and write and walk with a protest sign? Each escalation helps the board answer the question, "Just how much do people really care about this?"

So parents come and stand at line at a board meeting to make their point. Taxpayers write letters to the editors and hold demonstrations. And teachers, occasionally, go on strike. Because that's how they show a board just how important the issue is. The elected officials, because they have to conduct their business in plain sight, have to hear about it.

See, accountability of elected officials doesn't just mean that every so many years they must stand for election. It means that all the time in between they must spend listening to their constituents, reading what they say, and feeling whatever pressure those constituents can bring to bear on them.

Democracy and CEOs

The CEO model of leadership hates all of this. The CEO model says you get one genius visionary leader-guy, and then set things up so that nobody can interfere with him as he implements his vision. Depending on his political leanings, he may be presented as someone who has only the best interests of the poor and the downtrodden at heart-- but the poor and the downtrodden don't get to tell him how they think he should do his job.

There are arguments to be made for this model in certain settings. But it is not democracy.

Democracy and Dollars

Our challenge as a nation has become the free flow of money into the process-- not just the election process, but the operating process. Money gets some people extra attention. Charter fans have been quick to point out that the judge who ruled against charters has taken money from unions (all the law would allow-- about $1,900). But of course the law that he thwarted was passed in Washington with the help of millions and millions of dollars in financing from billionaires (including some from out of state). Money gets in the way of an open and inclusive process.

Democracy and Charters

So my problem with charter governance is that it is democratic in neither election nor operation, and that effectively means that they are accountable to nobody.

Charter fans will argue that they are accountable to authorizers, and in some states must actually hit test result targets to stay in business. I am not impressed. Hitting test scores is a nearly-useless metric for determining whether a school is working or not. Do parents complain because Junior didn't score high enough on the Big Standardized Test? Certainly not as often as the express concern about learning, grades, nurturing environment, positive atmosphere, sports, etc etc etc. Parents have hundreds of concerns, and in most current charter arrangements, they can communicate those concerns to nobody.

They can't start any conversation with, "I voted for you..." and they certainly can't go speak out at a public board meeting. They can't ask questions about finances and where the dollars are going. And the list of things parents can't do is nothing compared to the list of undoable things for taxpayers who fund the school, but don't send students there. The message from charters to taxpayers is, "Give us your money, but don't ever EVER try to talk to us about anything. Ever."

Did I Mention the Mess

Schools are public institutions set up to meet the needs of the community. As such, they are required to respond to a zillion different constituencies with a double-zillion priorities and concerns. That means the operation of school districts will always be a tug of war with a million ropes, a balancing act that never reaches equilibrium. That means that some districts will be, at times, out of balance or the site of fairly brutal "discussions" about how to fix things.


The only alternative is to find ways to shut some voices out of the conversation, and while in the worst of times that can become the public school district path (mayoral control, anyone), that disempowerment is Plan A for charters. "Just sit out in the hall. Shut up. We'll be in this locked room deciding what's best for you."

The problem of democracy is that everybody gets the power to be part of the discussion. That's why we insist on educating everybody-- so that the discussion won't get too clogged with people who don't know what they're talking about.

There have always been people who thought the solution for democracy was to only allow a voice to people who deserve one. That's not democracy. It ignores our foundational documents (governments get their power from the consent of the governed). Yes, if everyone has a voice, then sometimes those voices get angry and raised and all activisty. That's part of democracy. The alternatives that we periodically consider may be neater and quieter and more orderly, but they all involve stripping citizens of their voice and their power, and that is just fundamentally wrong.