Brookings Institute can always be counted on to come up with some confused coverage of education matters. But this time they have given David Whitman a platform from which to combat the conservative anti-Common Core hordes. Whitman was a reporter for US News who spent five years as Arne Duncan's speechwriter before jumping on Peter Cunningham's $12 million Core-boosting PR website.
Whitman is here to try to address what has to be one of the Obama administration's great frustration-- here they are implementing a set of education policies that are an extension of conservative GOP policies from years before, and suddenly conservative Republicans are lambasting it. It's like Nixon going to China and being called a Commie sympathizer by people on the left.
"The Surprising Roots of the Common Core:How Conservatives Gave Rise to ‘Obamacore’" is a challenging read, containing a pretty thorough look at the conservative pedigree of the Core that is wrapped in lots of heavily balonified conclusions.
Intro
Everybody keeps saying that conservatives hate the Core, and Whitman has the media quotes to prove it. But that's just not fair. In fact, Whitman says with the kind of shameless straight face that will exemplify his work, that the Obama-Duncan Department of Education "has substantially shrunk the federal role in advocating for anything resembling a model national curriculum, national standards, and national assessments." Which kind of ignores the whole "creating waivers that allow the Obama-Duncan department to effectively write law from the USED office" thing.
Whitman says that CCSS is out there still thriving in classrooms precisely because this administration didn't repeat the federal overreach mistakes of its predecessors, which is just... well, Not True seems like a gentle label. Let's say that this administration found more effective leverage and techniques for selling this policy, and a fortuitous time to make their move.
But Whitman is just setting the stage to say, in effect, it wasn't always this way. Once upon atime conservatives loved the whole national standards thing.
Honesty Gap
Lordy, are these folks still trying to sell this piece of rhetorical fluffernuttery? Whitman wants to remind us that fifty different goalposts will not make our students ready to compete internationally, and that many states set their standards "pathetically" low, and that while high standards are no guarantee of awesome education, low standards insure that Kids These Days will continue to suck.
Poor Misunderstood Common Core
Before we can look at Core's history, we must understand what they are and aren't, says Whitman. He lists a whole bunch of Things They Aren't which I would make fun of as silly straw men except that I've seen all of these paranoid ravings decried in print, so I know he's not making them up. Not even "Common Core will turn your kids into gay commies."
Whitman counters with the usual inaccuracies. State standards. Written with input from teachers. "It bears repeating that the federal government had zero involvement in drafting the Common Core State Standards—it neither wrote, paid for, or participated in the development of the standards." It may bear repeating, but it doesn't bear scrutiny for factual accuracy.
Whitman correctly notes that the Common Core ball was already rolling when Obama took office, but he uses the adoption was strictly voluntary line, which is disingenuous at best-- states could refuse, but they couldn't easily afford to. And he slides past the waiver business entirely. He argues that standards and curriculum were confused by opponents, but I think Core supporters can carry plenty of the blame there. But he's correct to skewer guys like Ted Cruz with his "repeal every word of Common Core" pledge (after that, he will ban all Yeti from Florida). And I love Whitman just a little bit for this line:
And owing to the maelstrom of misinformation on the CCSS, the Common Core is fast approaching a Lord Voldemort-like status for conservatives as the insidious education reform with the name that must not be spoken-- even for conservative politicians who support, and who in fact (to paraphrase Ted Cruz), are implementing every word of the Common Core.
Time for a History Lesson
Now Whitman enters into the useful and educational portion of his article. No, I'm not being sarcastic. Whitman is here to say, "Conservatives, you do not have to freak out about this stuff! It is totally your kind of thing!!"
To prove it, he goes back to Saint Ronald of Reagan and A Nation at Risk, with its call for "more rigorous and measurable standards." The desire for high standards, the interest in standards that were consistent and high from state to state-- that was a conservative thing. And Reagan's Secretary of Education William Bennett used language that Whitman finds coming out of Arne Duncan's mouth today.
Secretary Bennett in 1987 put together a book outlining " a sound secondary school core curriculum." The second year produced an elementary school counterpart. Bennett noted that the law barred him from implementing his grand blueprint, but he talked it up to conservatives and conservative governors in particular, and folks just loved it and did not freak out and scream "federal overreach."
Whitman sees the modern Core as a later draft of Bennett's work, and he is dumbfounded that conservatives have turned on it-- it has a strong element of the nation's founding documents, for crying out loud! And yet conservative critics still accuse it of being all manner of Commie loving brainscrubbery.
And now, G W Bush, who may lack Reagan's iconic conservative status, but still-- this is not some Commie simp, and Lamar Alexander was not some sort of bleeding heart liberal when he launched the America 2000 plan. Whitman dubs Alexander the Core's political godfather and Diane Ravitch their intellectual godmother; as he notes, her journey from conservative reformer to her current thorn-in-reform's side status has been well-documented in her own writing.
Whitman wants you to know that Bush's standards plan would have been wayyyyy more testy and inclusive of more fields than just English and math. Bush wanted voluntary standards, but couldn't get funding from Congress and finally did an end run around them to use grant money to get people to do the work.
The Bush-Alexander administration pushed hard for standards and for incentives for charter schools, sinking tons of money into promotion for a program intended to transform what happened in schools across the country. Alexander now says that Duncan overstepped his bounds in pushing the Core with the waivers, but Whitman wants to be clear that Alexander pushed pretty hard in his own day.
Whitman's research is relentless. Present-day GOP has renounced the Core, but 1992 GOP platform sounded a lot like Arne Duncan. Meanwhile, America 2000 finally collapsed, victim of a lack of center-based consensus and chipped away by Democrats, who didn't want to give Bush a "education President" win. By the early 90's, the standards were dead dead dead, Congress having driven a stake through their heart..
Whitman's observation is that CCSS succeeded where America 2000 failed because the leaders of the movement had learned some lessons the first time around.
Bottom Line?
Whitman finishes up with a more-developed version of the usual call for conservatives to get behind the Core and how generally wonderful it is. That's same old, same old.
What's special about this piece is that it so thoroughly makes the case for a conservative pedigree for the Core. Ravitch, who knows the conservative roots of these policies better than anybody, has often marveled that the Obama administration has so thoroughly embraced conservative education policy. But I've never seen anyone address the point to conservatives themselves quite so thoroughly (it only adds to the layers of oddity that the person doing the addressing is a veteran of the Obama-Duncan administration).
The case for the Core is as weak as always, but this history lesson underlines how our current education policies really are just an extension of the work of previous administrations as well as highlighting how frustrated Core fans are to be fighting a tough battle against people they never thought they'd have to fight at all.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Monday, September 14, 2015
Forgetting History
So it's not 9/14, a date that carries no particular power. And after sitting in the cultural silence that follows any powerful observance, I'm reflecting again on 9/11.
Friday was a day not much different from many others. The social studies teacher whose classroom shares a door with mine was playing a documentary stitched together from footage of That Day. But teachers are already aware of what civilians are slowly realizing-- students in school, right now, have no memory of that day. My juniors were two years old. Some of my freshmen hadn't been born yet. To my students, who think of me as a thousand years old and their own elementary school years as eons ago, the September 11 attacks are as distant to most of them as the Vietnam War or World War II.
And I can't decide if that's a good thing or not.
I am seriously attached to the study of history. My student teaching kept me from minoring; the state of Pennsylvania's elevation of "social studies" over history kept me from adding it to my teaching certification. My class is shot full of it. I think human beings are absolutely hardwired to do history, to try to draw a consensus on what happened, why it happened, what it means. We do it for 9/11, for Vietnam, for the Great European War, and for the fight between Ethel and Mia last night at the restaurant.
My students deride history as the most worthless class they take, a class that has nothing to do with their present or their future. My students also like to drag out and rehearse their favorite stories of Things That Happened in Grade School.
We are hardwired to do history, and yet we also seem hardwired to forget it, if we even grasp it in the first place. I've watched my students for over three decades, certain that the world sprang into existence when they were born, unable to imagine what it will do when they die, and absolutely rocked to their core when someone does die.
We're a small place, but it happens. Accident. Disease. Suicide. The school is an entirely different place for a while, and then they spring back, stand back up and move on. Fourteen years ago, they did the same. I can't deny that the forgetting, the scabbing over, the pain's loss of immediacy and reality-- it all seems to be part of the healing.
And yet, the forgetting can seem callous. When I saw Titanic in the theater, I was braced, but it still hit me hard. Those people, crying helpless, floating in the water and slowly inevitably dying-- those were not a plot device or background color, but real people who really died that miserable, torturous death, and there we were, a theater full of people who had paid good money to eat popcorn and watch their deaths acted out for us. What the hell is that?
And the lack of historical memory, of ability to place themselves historically. We discuss works like William Bradford's account of Plymouth or Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and I inevitably have to explain, "This is a little less bland and boring if you can make yourself remember that this really happened to real people. It's not just a story."
My students have a hard time getting the horror of slavery. Many are pretty sure that racism is just when white people are really rude to black people, or call them names. They can see the pictures from the days of the Civil Rights Movement, and they can see that a lot of folks were really angry, but to get them to really see it and feel it is a challenge.
I'm reminded of all of this contemplating the slow tread of years in which we've watched 9/11 recede in the school, from something they view with somber concern, just as real as the time they fell down on the elementary school playground, to something they see just like one more movie about something that happened before the world was born.
How do I help them understand? How do I help them grasp their present reality when it's so hard to get them to really see, really feel, the foundation upon which it's built, foundation upon crumbled foundation, upon crumbled foundation, each new structure taking its unique tilt and twist and even broken instability from the ruins on which it was built? How do I get them to make sense of something like Ferguson or Dyett High or their own roots or whatever is going to erupt tomorrow?
Of all the teacher tricks I try to pull off during the year, this is the hardest, but probably also the most worthwhile, because how do you figure out how to be fully human in the world, how do you figure out how to live at the peculiar and unique intersection of roads on which you stand, unless you understand something about where those roads lead from?
Friday was a day not much different from many others. The social studies teacher whose classroom shares a door with mine was playing a documentary stitched together from footage of That Day. But teachers are already aware of what civilians are slowly realizing-- students in school, right now, have no memory of that day. My juniors were two years old. Some of my freshmen hadn't been born yet. To my students, who think of me as a thousand years old and their own elementary school years as eons ago, the September 11 attacks are as distant to most of them as the Vietnam War or World War II.
And I can't decide if that's a good thing or not.
I am seriously attached to the study of history. My student teaching kept me from minoring; the state of Pennsylvania's elevation of "social studies" over history kept me from adding it to my teaching certification. My class is shot full of it. I think human beings are absolutely hardwired to do history, to try to draw a consensus on what happened, why it happened, what it means. We do it for 9/11, for Vietnam, for the Great European War, and for the fight between Ethel and Mia last night at the restaurant.
My students deride history as the most worthless class they take, a class that has nothing to do with their present or their future. My students also like to drag out and rehearse their favorite stories of Things That Happened in Grade School.
We are hardwired to do history, and yet we also seem hardwired to forget it, if we even grasp it in the first place. I've watched my students for over three decades, certain that the world sprang into existence when they were born, unable to imagine what it will do when they die, and absolutely rocked to their core when someone does die.
We're a small place, but it happens. Accident. Disease. Suicide. The school is an entirely different place for a while, and then they spring back, stand back up and move on. Fourteen years ago, they did the same. I can't deny that the forgetting, the scabbing over, the pain's loss of immediacy and reality-- it all seems to be part of the healing.
And yet, the forgetting can seem callous. When I saw Titanic in the theater, I was braced, but it still hit me hard. Those people, crying helpless, floating in the water and slowly inevitably dying-- those were not a plot device or background color, but real people who really died that miserable, torturous death, and there we were, a theater full of people who had paid good money to eat popcorn and watch their deaths acted out for us. What the hell is that?
And the lack of historical memory, of ability to place themselves historically. We discuss works like William Bradford's account of Plymouth or Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and I inevitably have to explain, "This is a little less bland and boring if you can make yourself remember that this really happened to real people. It's not just a story."
My students have a hard time getting the horror of slavery. Many are pretty sure that racism is just when white people are really rude to black people, or call them names. They can see the pictures from the days of the Civil Rights Movement, and they can see that a lot of folks were really angry, but to get them to really see it and feel it is a challenge.
I'm reminded of all of this contemplating the slow tread of years in which we've watched 9/11 recede in the school, from something they view with somber concern, just as real as the time they fell down on the elementary school playground, to something they see just like one more movie about something that happened before the world was born.
How do I help them understand? How do I help them grasp their present reality when it's so hard to get them to really see, really feel, the foundation upon which it's built, foundation upon crumbled foundation, upon crumbled foundation, each new structure taking its unique tilt and twist and even broken instability from the ruins on which it was built? How do I get them to make sense of something like Ferguson or Dyett High or their own roots or whatever is going to erupt tomorrow?
Of all the teacher tricks I try to pull off during the year, this is the hardest, but probably also the most worthwhile, because how do you figure out how to be fully human in the world, how do you figure out how to live at the peculiar and unique intersection of roads on which you stand, unless you understand something about where those roads lead from?
Do No Excuses Affect Academics?
Last week at the Fordham blogsite, Kevin Mahnken touted some meta-research about "No Excuses" schools and their affect on the math and language scores on the Common Core Big Standardized Test. Well, actually they claimed to be researching “’No Excuses’ Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement,” but when we're looking at this kind of research, it's important to always remember that "student achievement" just means "test scores on that one high stakes test that narrowly covers a standardized test version of math and reading."
I took a swipe at the research paper itself, because you know I would do almost anything for you guys. But it is tough going for those of us not schooled in the subtle art of meta-research. But I did manage to pull out a few bits.
First, although the meta-researchers started with what I believe is technically known as "a whole buttload" of research papers, through a long and laborious process, they narrowed those down to ten papers. Of those ten, four were only about no excuses schools, two were about types of charters including no excuses, and four weren't about no excuses at all. So, six paper in the meta-analysis? I'm no meta-analyst, but that seems meta-thin.
What conclusions did they reach?
No excuse schools do better than other charters at raising math and reading test scores. They are better at improving math scores than reading scores, which stands to reason as standardized math tests are a little more prepable than reading tests which still, for instance, throw in random straight-up vocabulary questions. They also suggest that no excuses schools do better at raising scores in high schools than in elementary, though they admit that the research on no excuses elementary schools is pretty thin for even meta-slicing.
Some of the conclusions are transparently bizarre even to an untrained meta-observer:
According to Hill et al.’s (2007) standards, attending a No Excuses charter schools for one year closes approximately 25% of the Black-White math achievement gap and approximately 20% of the Black-white literacy achievement gap. A straightforward extrapolation of these results suggests that attending a No Excuses charter school for four to five years could eliminate the achievement gap.
I checked for any qualifier to this astonishing statement, but could not find anything remotely like "That is, any any student who wanted to go the school, was accepted by the school, and who was not shoved out of the school for being disobedient and non-compliant. And of course these results would not apply to any students with any sort of special needs." Surely this finding is not meant to suggest that any Black student could be plugged into a no excuses school and achieve startling success.
In fact the meta-researchers note that they believe they have insured that the sample is randomized by making sure to include research about schools that are oversubscribed and therefor had to use a lottery. But as I am not the first to observe, the process of choosing to respond to no excise charter marketing and navigating the application and lottery process has already insured that the school does not have anything like a randomly sampled student body. And that sampling gets even less random as the years go by and students flee or are pushed out the door of these highly regimented schools.
The writers meta-acknowledge that the research is narrow in its focus and that there's not much out there studying non-cognitive and other effects of charters, though they make sure to note the study that finds charter students are more likely to graduate (well, sure-- because charter students who aren't likely to graduate don't stay charter students for very long and are rarely replaced).
Mahnken is positively meta-giddy with excitement over this report:
We might have expected some optimism after witnessing the stupefying results at world-beating charter networks like KIPP and Success Academy. But it’s still nice that high-performing charters have both passed the eye test of policy commentators and are consistently feted by researchers as well. Now the only question is how the little guys grew up so fast.
But for anyone curious about no excuses education in action, you might consider tales of students going without lunch or bathroom breaks or high suspension rates or teaching young black students the importance of being submissive and compliant.
All of this continues to be justified in the name of student achievement-- except that all that means is higher scores on a single standardized math and reading test. Fans keep touting this result as proof that no excuses schools know the secret of raising students up out of poverty. As soon as I hear about the hundreds of poor students who have found well-paying middle class jobs because they are such good test-takers, I will start taking those claims seriously.
I took a swipe at the research paper itself, because you know I would do almost anything for you guys. But it is tough going for those of us not schooled in the subtle art of meta-research. But I did manage to pull out a few bits.
First, although the meta-researchers started with what I believe is technically known as "a whole buttload" of research papers, through a long and laborious process, they narrowed those down to ten papers. Of those ten, four were only about no excuses schools, two were about types of charters including no excuses, and four weren't about no excuses at all. So, six paper in the meta-analysis? I'm no meta-analyst, but that seems meta-thin.
What conclusions did they reach?
No excuse schools do better than other charters at raising math and reading test scores. They are better at improving math scores than reading scores, which stands to reason as standardized math tests are a little more prepable than reading tests which still, for instance, throw in random straight-up vocabulary questions. They also suggest that no excuses schools do better at raising scores in high schools than in elementary, though they admit that the research on no excuses elementary schools is pretty thin for even meta-slicing.
Some of the conclusions are transparently bizarre even to an untrained meta-observer:
According to Hill et al.’s (2007) standards, attending a No Excuses charter schools for one year closes approximately 25% of the Black-White math achievement gap and approximately 20% of the Black-white literacy achievement gap. A straightforward extrapolation of these results suggests that attending a No Excuses charter school for four to five years could eliminate the achievement gap.
I checked for any qualifier to this astonishing statement, but could not find anything remotely like "That is, any any student who wanted to go the school, was accepted by the school, and who was not shoved out of the school for being disobedient and non-compliant. And of course these results would not apply to any students with any sort of special needs." Surely this finding is not meant to suggest that any Black student could be plugged into a no excuses school and achieve startling success.
In fact the meta-researchers note that they believe they have insured that the sample is randomized by making sure to include research about schools that are oversubscribed and therefor had to use a lottery. But as I am not the first to observe, the process of choosing to respond to no excise charter marketing and navigating the application and lottery process has already insured that the school does not have anything like a randomly sampled student body. And that sampling gets even less random as the years go by and students flee or are pushed out the door of these highly regimented schools.
The writers meta-acknowledge that the research is narrow in its focus and that there's not much out there studying non-cognitive and other effects of charters, though they make sure to note the study that finds charter students are more likely to graduate (well, sure-- because charter students who aren't likely to graduate don't stay charter students for very long and are rarely replaced).
Mahnken is positively meta-giddy with excitement over this report:
We might have expected some optimism after witnessing the stupefying results at world-beating charter networks like KIPP and Success Academy. But it’s still nice that high-performing charters have both passed the eye test of policy commentators and are consistently feted by researchers as well. Now the only question is how the little guys grew up so fast.
But for anyone curious about no excuses education in action, you might consider tales of students going without lunch or bathroom breaks or high suspension rates or teaching young black students the importance of being submissive and compliant.
All of this continues to be justified in the name of student achievement-- except that all that means is higher scores on a single standardized math and reading test. Fans keep touting this result as proof that no excuses schools know the secret of raising students up out of poverty. As soon as I hear about the hundreds of poor students who have found well-paying middle class jobs because they are such good test-takers, I will start taking those claims seriously.
Core vs. BS Tests
In US News, Robert Pondiscio of the Fordham thinky tank offers some reactions to the recent Education Trust report on teacher assignments.
Pondiscio is no dummy-- he knows the report is essentially bunk, and he says so. The report, icymi, was a survey of assignments in six middle school classrooms in two urban districts, so not really a representative sample of much of anything. The report finds that mostly teachers are not giving assignments that "reflect the higher, more rigorous standards set by Common Core," and while the "research" is tissue-thin, the conclusion feels right to Pondiscio and others.
We could have a whole other discussion about whether or not the Core standards are higher or more rigorous (as well as a discussion about what those terms even mean). But for today, I'm going to let that go so that we can talk of why classrooms have not been transformed into the wonderland of higher order deep critical thinking that Core supporters were sure we'd have by now.
Pondiscio himself hits paydirt with this:
One veteran public school teacher and staff developer worries that we are paying the price for years of "de-professionalizing" the teacher work force. "'Do these things, use these moves and you'll be successful' – that's been the message to teachers for the past 15 years," she says. "Many teachers throw up their hands and say, 'Just tell me what you want me to do' or, 'Is this the right way?'"
Well, yes. One of the Fellow Travelers of Common Core has been the notion that classrooms can be teacher-proofed, and so we've had giant pieces of poo like EngageNY and it's "If It's Tuesday, You Must Be on Page Twelve" tightly wound instructional pacing.
This has been exacerbated by the sales approach taken by Core promoters, which can be summarized as, "Teachers, you are doing everything wrong, so stop, and do things our way!" And THAT has been made worse by the top-down approach to Common Core which has all but guaranteed that nobody below the David Coleman level (and perhaps nobody at or above it, either) really knew exactly what the hell they were now supposed to do. Add to that a general background noise about how teachers just stink and anybody with five weeks-- or less-- of training can become a teacher, and teachers did indeed throw up our hands. Or maybe not so much throw up our hands as just say, "Screw it," and went back to using our own professional judgment to operate in our classrooms, and you Common Core types can get back to us when you know what the hell you want and can communicate it through some technique other than condescending PD and having non-teacher book salespersons throw manuals at us.
This created a perfect opening for publishers (you know-- them same guys who helped write the Core in the first place) to pop up and say, "No worries. We have everything you need in this box right here, now available at special bargain prices! Act now!!"
And all of that would have been bad enough, but then we throw in what has emerged as the greatest enemy of the Common Core.
The Big Standardized Test.
The BS Tests suck, and they suck in large, toxic, destructive ways. But if you're a Common Core advocate, you need to see that the so-called Common Core tests are not aligned with the Core, that, in fact, no standardized test will ever be aligned with the Core. I've written about this before, but for now, let's just use one example-- if indeed the Common Core is all about the critical thinking, there's very little critical thinking that can be assessed in a BS Test.
In fact, since the BS Tests are skill-focused and content-averse, or at least content-agnostic, the best way that's emerging as a good way to prep for the BS Tests is to just say screw content and focus on daily drill-- a short reading and some BS Test style questions. I could do a pretty good job of getting my students ready for the BS Test with a whole year of nothing but newspaper clippings and paragraphs ripped from any random novels as long as I had them attached to a barrage of BS Test style multiple choice questions (because, yes, drag-and-drop answers are still just multiple choice).
Despite the rich content crowd's insistence that CCSS just love the rich content, the BS Tests absolutely couldn't care less. So for teachers in situations where the state or local leaders are demanding high test scores Or Else, the kind of content and pedagogy that Pondiscio would like to see is highly unlikely to happen.
In other words, the mysteries of unlocking the hidden wonders of the Core and the mysteries of how to raise test scores are two entirely different mysteries, and faced with the choice between the two, many education leaders are choosing the mystery that is directly tied to their professional future. Teaching to the test never died-- it just changed its format a little, and got a whole lot more weight thrown behind it thanks to teacher and school evaluations.
Yes, I think there are other reasons for the lack that Pondiscio and the researchers think they see, and those reasons have a lot to do with the built-in weaknesses of the Core. But without even going there, I think we can explain much of the phenomenon.
Pondiscio is no dummy-- he knows the report is essentially bunk, and he says so. The report, icymi, was a survey of assignments in six middle school classrooms in two urban districts, so not really a representative sample of much of anything. The report finds that mostly teachers are not giving assignments that "reflect the higher, more rigorous standards set by Common Core," and while the "research" is tissue-thin, the conclusion feels right to Pondiscio and others.
We could have a whole other discussion about whether or not the Core standards are higher or more rigorous (as well as a discussion about what those terms even mean). But for today, I'm going to let that go so that we can talk of why classrooms have not been transformed into the wonderland of higher order deep critical thinking that Core supporters were sure we'd have by now.
Pondiscio himself hits paydirt with this:
One veteran public school teacher and staff developer worries that we are paying the price for years of "de-professionalizing" the teacher work force. "'Do these things, use these moves and you'll be successful' – that's been the message to teachers for the past 15 years," she says. "Many teachers throw up their hands and say, 'Just tell me what you want me to do' or, 'Is this the right way?'"
Well, yes. One of the Fellow Travelers of Common Core has been the notion that classrooms can be teacher-proofed, and so we've had giant pieces of poo like EngageNY and it's "If It's Tuesday, You Must Be on Page Twelve" tightly wound instructional pacing.
This has been exacerbated by the sales approach taken by Core promoters, which can be summarized as, "Teachers, you are doing everything wrong, so stop, and do things our way!" And THAT has been made worse by the top-down approach to Common Core which has all but guaranteed that nobody below the David Coleman level (and perhaps nobody at or above it, either) really knew exactly what the hell they were now supposed to do. Add to that a general background noise about how teachers just stink and anybody with five weeks-- or less-- of training can become a teacher, and teachers did indeed throw up our hands. Or maybe not so much throw up our hands as just say, "Screw it," and went back to using our own professional judgment to operate in our classrooms, and you Common Core types can get back to us when you know what the hell you want and can communicate it through some technique other than condescending PD and having non-teacher book salespersons throw manuals at us.
This created a perfect opening for publishers (you know-- them same guys who helped write the Core in the first place) to pop up and say, "No worries. We have everything you need in this box right here, now available at special bargain prices! Act now!!"
And all of that would have been bad enough, but then we throw in what has emerged as the greatest enemy of the Common Core.
The Big Standardized Test.
The BS Tests suck, and they suck in large, toxic, destructive ways. But if you're a Common Core advocate, you need to see that the so-called Common Core tests are not aligned with the Core, that, in fact, no standardized test will ever be aligned with the Core. I've written about this before, but for now, let's just use one example-- if indeed the Common Core is all about the critical thinking, there's very little critical thinking that can be assessed in a BS Test.
In fact, since the BS Tests are skill-focused and content-averse, or at least content-agnostic, the best way that's emerging as a good way to prep for the BS Tests is to just say screw content and focus on daily drill-- a short reading and some BS Test style questions. I could do a pretty good job of getting my students ready for the BS Test with a whole year of nothing but newspaper clippings and paragraphs ripped from any random novels as long as I had them attached to a barrage of BS Test style multiple choice questions (because, yes, drag-and-drop answers are still just multiple choice).
Despite the rich content crowd's insistence that CCSS just love the rich content, the BS Tests absolutely couldn't care less. So for teachers in situations where the state or local leaders are demanding high test scores Or Else, the kind of content and pedagogy that Pondiscio would like to see is highly unlikely to happen.
In other words, the mysteries of unlocking the hidden wonders of the Core and the mysteries of how to raise test scores are two entirely different mysteries, and faced with the choice between the two, many education leaders are choosing the mystery that is directly tied to their professional future. Teaching to the test never died-- it just changed its format a little, and got a whole lot more weight thrown behind it thanks to teacher and school evaluations.
Yes, I think there are other reasons for the lack that Pondiscio and the researchers think they see, and those reasons have a lot to do with the built-in weaknesses of the Core. But without even going there, I think we can explain much of the phenomenon.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
ICYMI: This Week's Recommendations
Here are just a few of the articles this week that deserve your time and attention!
Common Core "Results" Aren't Actually Test Scores
Bernie Horn provides a great explanation-- clear, simple, and comprehensible to civilians-- about why the results you read in the paper aren't what you think they are.
America's Teaching Force by the Numbers
I can't say that Laura McKenna hit it completely out of the park, but as mainstream media outlet coverage of the teacher "shortage" goes, this is not bad.
Educating Governor Kasich
New-to-me blogger Abby White comes from Ohio, and she has some thoughts about John Kasich and his approach to education.
Delivery Man
I used this old piece from the Economist earlier this week, but it's a particular direct but brief profile of Sir Michael Barber, the big cheese at Pearson.
Hansen Was Angry
Ohio newspapers have been ploughing through pages of newly-released documents dealing with Ohio's messed-up department of education. This is just one example of the shenanigans, but all of the coverage is worth folowing.
New Teachers Are Educated, Not Trained
Russ Walsh with a pointed reminder that puppies are trained, and teachers are not. Also, a fine list of what the basic elements of a good teacher education program would be.
Common Core "Results" Aren't Actually Test Scores
Bernie Horn provides a great explanation-- clear, simple, and comprehensible to civilians-- about why the results you read in the paper aren't what you think they are.
America's Teaching Force by the Numbers
I can't say that Laura McKenna hit it completely out of the park, but as mainstream media outlet coverage of the teacher "shortage" goes, this is not bad.
Educating Governor Kasich
New-to-me blogger Abby White comes from Ohio, and she has some thoughts about John Kasich and his approach to education.
Delivery Man
I used this old piece from the Economist earlier this week, but it's a particular direct but brief profile of Sir Michael Barber, the big cheese at Pearson.
Hansen Was Angry
Ohio newspapers have been ploughing through pages of newly-released documents dealing with Ohio's messed-up department of education. This is just one example of the shenanigans, but all of the coverage is worth folowing.
New Teachers Are Educated, Not Trained
Russ Walsh with a pointed reminder that puppies are trained, and teachers are not. Also, a fine list of what the basic elements of a good teacher education program would be.
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.
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.
Saturday, September 12, 2015
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.
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.
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