The LA Time published further confirmation of the story they broke in August-- Eli Broad and friends would like to replace public education in Los Angeles, taking over half of the district's "business."
The confirmation comes by way of an extraordinary document-- the Great Public Schools Now Initiative. It's nothing short of amazing-- a plan to do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA.
Granted, LA schools have never been short of people willing to just go ahead and impose their will on the school district. It was just last week the Times ran the news that a group of "concerned citizens" had gotten a meeting with LAUSD school board president Steven Zimmer to tell him what they think he should do about filling the superintendent spot. How cool is that?! I think I will call the mayor of my town and tell him I want to meet to discuss my recommendations for how to make a budget. In fact, speaking of budgets, maybe I'll just summon my state's governor and some key legislators to a meeting where I'll tell them what they should do about the budget impasse. Because, you know, representative democracy is for suckers and little people-- People Who Matter just pick up the phone and tell elected officials what's what.
But the Great Public Schools Now Initiative puts the "aud" in "audacious" and the "balls" in "holy schneikes but you have a big brass pair on you!" It's forty-four pages of How To Completely Circumvent the Public School System For Fun and Profit.
The Times coverage hits some special highlights, so I am going to skate across this pond of barely frozen pig poo as quickly as possible. But just in case you think some of what you're seeing about this plan involves scrutinous depalabration (my new term for close reading-- patent pending), here are the goals of the plan in the plain executive summary English:
This effort will be structured over an eight-year period from 2016 to 2023 with the following objectives: (1) to create 260 new high-quality charter schools, (2) to generate 130,000 high-quality charter seats, and (3) to reach 50 percent charter market share.
That is, not incidentally, almost doubling the current charter capacity in LA. But the creators of this plan say that "the opportunity is ripe for a significant expansion" of charter baloney in LA.
Big Ripe LA Dreams
GPSN thinks that LA is redolent with potential, positively fecund with charter possibilities, because reasons. [Insert Chamber of Commerce boilerplate here.]
But the dream is not just to tap into the huge market of students trapped in failing blah blah blah waiting for their chance for high-quality seats (and, man, I would love to see one of these seats, sit in one of these seats, visit the High Quality Seat Factory and see how these seats are made) blah blah blah.
No, the dream is to "create a national proof point for other states and cities seeking to dramatically improve K-12 education." GPSN wants LA to be the new New Orleans, the exemplar for charter champions everywhere, as they head out to double down, buckle up, and cash in. Gosh, let's see what kind of program they have in mind, because I'm sure it won't turn out to be a hollow, costly, unscaleable, irreproduceable, unsustainable plan at all.
But first...
Background: LA Schools Suck
Urban minority students trapped in zip codes blah blah blah no change in last years blah blah blah. Poor minority students have potential for success, and that potential goes untapped because of schools and not at all because of systemic racism and poverty. Nuh-uh. Just bad schools. Which, incidentally we keep throwing money at, but they don't get any better. Also, achievement gap.
Charter Schools Fix Everything While Riding Unicorns Across Rainbows
LA is filled with parent demand for charters, plus the suckiness of LAUSD. Oddly enough, the Deasy-loving tablet-pushing reformsters behind GPSN are not going to pause to consider their own role in the LAUSD suckness. But it doesn't matter because they have the biggest charter sector in the world, and it's awesome.
Charters "have maintained impressive growth" and now show a "total market share" of almost twenty-five percent. This is because of "the success of charters to push past environmental and political factors and achieve sustainable growth over time." So success = more of them, It's almost as if we're discussing an investment business, and not a school. And indeed, we go on to discuss charter unit growth and enrollment trends.
We will also discuss student achievement, relying on API (Academic Performance Index) scores, and we don't have time right now to discuss how much baloney is stuffed into this mostly-standardized-test-scores measure. But GPSN wants you to know that the charters do better at the API stuff, mostly, pretty much. The state also has a special sauce for setting predictions of outcomes, and while I'm not super-familiar, it sounds like one more variation on "We're going to compare your students to other imaginary students over here that are more or less the same even if they are imaginary."
At any rate, charters are awesome. This report does not address the possibility that charters are creaming and skimming, nor does it discuss the value in regular, intense test prep. Charter are awesome. Awesome! And CREDO, a group that exists primarily to promote charters, says so, too, so it must be true. So many days of learning (whatever the hell that is) are added.
Waitlists
If you believe that waitlists actually provide meaningful data, we have some charts for you. Everyone else can just move on. Unless you want to look at the map that highlights some great market opportunities.
Things We'll Need Our Friendly Elected Officials To Do
The California Charter School Association has helpfully dragged the LAUSD into court so that judges can 'splain to them that they have to give us whatever we want. Kewl, because we're going to need space for all those super seats.
We made some headway on the last school board elections. We just need to get more people involved in the elected school board who will roll over and let us stomp them in the head.
The public support is growing. As proof, they offer a picture of a rally. You know, the kind where charter operators get all their parents to come, or else. The data point GPSN likes? There are now more charter parents than unionized teachers.
Any Obstacles?
GPSN spots a few.
Real estate and builders are needed to get enough snazzy charters built and filled. But the state's tax-exempt bond market is opening up to charter operators, so that's a plus.
Human capital. Yes, that's what they call it. They are going to need many, many teachers, even as the teacher pipeline in California is choking and sputtering (teacher ed program enrollment down 53%). The charters will have to compete with LAUSD for both quantity and quality (And--update-- as commenter Jack Covey notes below, the LAUSD actually got back in the game by actually giving teachers a raise, and free marketeers never want to apply the free market to teacher salaries). Charters look to "high quality providers," by which they mean TFA and Relay Academy, so it's possible they have some different definition of "high-quality"-- anyway, TFA is tanking and Relay hasn't arrived in LA yet, so charters are stuck trying to hire actual teachers with actual training. Of course, some charter outfits like Aspire are creating their own fake teaching credentials, but those don't serve the larger cause.
Also, finding principals will be a real bear.
GPSN wants to double the charter market in eight years, but by gum, they just won't sacrifice quality to do it. So funding. And closing down crappy charters that don't belong to the Right People.
Let's Talk Money
Speaking of sustainability.
Remember when a charter's selling point was that it could do more with less. That was apparently not in LA, where, if I'm reading these charts correctly, GPSN will need almost a half a billion-with-a-b dollars of outside money over the next eight years to pull this off (excluding any potential overruns, which I'm sure won't be an issue when building a few hundred new schools). In fact, late in this report, it starts to become clear that this is, in part, an investors prospectus.
That half-a-billion includes funds for building schools, "scaling" schools, getting teachers (this includes pumping up TFA and Relay), recruiting principals, organizing and advocacfy, and fund management (because you don't just stick $500 million in a desk drawer somewhere).
I am now really curious about what outside investors are spending on LA charters right now, but clearly, LA will be one more place where the effect charter schools will be to raise the total cost of the complete school system a whole hell of a lot. I'll say it again-- only charter school operators believe you can live in two homes for the cost of one.
They have many hopes, including parent groups, CCSA, and Emma Bloomberg's new Big Data group, Murmuration-- plus the United Way and other community groups who will, apparently, contribute to replacing a public school system with private profiteering.
Okay, "replace" is too strong a word. Fifty percent of LA students will be allowed to stay in the public schools, or whatever is left of them after the charters have sucked them dry. But don't worry-- I'm sure that the charters will call first dibs on the most challenging, difficult, expensive students in the system, taking on the challenges of students with special needs, English language learners, and the most vulnerable students, leaving the public school with the strongest, most capable, most resilient students in the city.
Bottom Line
I am absolutely bowled over at the magnitude of this power grab. Imagine if Broad and his friends said, "We're not happy with the LAPD, so we're going to hire and train our own police force, answerable to nobody but us, to cover some parts of the city. Also, the taxpayers have to foot the bill." Or if they decided to get their own army? Or their own mayor?
Who does this? Who says, "We can't get enough control over the elected officials in this branch of government, so we will just shove them out of the way and replace them with our own guys, who won't bug us by answering to Those People."
This is not just about educational quality (or lack thereof), or just about how to turn education into a cash cow for a few high rollers-- this is about a hamhanded effort to circumvent democracy in a major American city. There's nothing in this plan about listening to the parents or community- only about what is going to be done to them by men with power and money. This just sucks a lot.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
PA: Schools Are Starving
In Pennsylvania, we're on the downhill slide toward October, and still the capital suits in Harrisburg can't get their jobs done. The state budget is long overdue, and schools are starting to feel the money crunch.
Pennsylvania budget impasses are such a regular event that they get their own Wikipedia page. This year's giant legislative screw-up means we've had five late budgets out of the last nine. And this year's has shown no signs of solution, as new governor Tom Wolfe does head to head with a GOP-controlled legislature. There are a variety of issues out there from privatizing liquor stores to fixing the pension mess to neener neener you're not the boss of me.
But while Harrisburg fiddles, the schools of Pennsylvania are doing a slow burn. Chester Uplands made headlines for not making their payroll, but they were just the leading edge of a wave of school based disasters.
In Philadelphia, the schools have stopped hiring because they're having a capital-induced cash flow problem. Consequently, we get this story of a school with over seventy students in a class.
In Erie, the district is literally living paycheck to paycheck, with the teachers union saying they'll go short-term without pay and the district talking about shutting down until they get money again.
Meanwhile, in my own neck of the woods, my district has joined the many districts looking at setting up a line of credit, but holding off as long as possible because that will cost our taxpayers real money. And our neighboring district's board was last night absorbing the news of a rating downgrade because of the state's financial logjam.
Harrisburg can make noises about holding out on budget issues in order to represent the interests of the taxpayers, but their inaction is, at this point, costing the taxpayers money, both directly in the costs of borrowing operating funds, and indirectly in higher interests rates because of rating downgrades.
And this is on top of Pennsylvania's massive mistakes with the pension fund and a senseless, money-sucking funding formula for charters (though many districts have decided to stop paying cyber school bills until they have money to do so). Plus, given PA's famously unequal funding formula, poor districts are getting squeezed far worse than wealthy ones.
The current noises out of Harrisburg are not encouraging, though there is talk of some sort of stopgap measure to slap a bandaid on the bullet holes that the legislature has shot in local school finances, and while the temporary relief is appealing, I worry that such a move will only prolong the legislative shenanigans. I'm partial to making all legislators go without paychecks and administrative budgets until they get things fixed, but that would take an act of the legislature, so it's a non-starter. But keep watching-- we may eventually show the whole nation what happens when a state stops funding its schools entirely.
Pennsylvania budget impasses are such a regular event that they get their own Wikipedia page. This year's giant legislative screw-up means we've had five late budgets out of the last nine. And this year's has shown no signs of solution, as new governor Tom Wolfe does head to head with a GOP-controlled legislature. There are a variety of issues out there from privatizing liquor stores to fixing the pension mess to neener neener you're not the boss of me.
But while Harrisburg fiddles, the schools of Pennsylvania are doing a slow burn. Chester Uplands made headlines for not making their payroll, but they were just the leading edge of a wave of school based disasters.
In Philadelphia, the schools have stopped hiring because they're having a capital-induced cash flow problem. Consequently, we get this story of a school with over seventy students in a class.
In Erie, the district is literally living paycheck to paycheck, with the teachers union saying they'll go short-term without pay and the district talking about shutting down until they get money again.
Meanwhile, in my own neck of the woods, my district has joined the many districts looking at setting up a line of credit, but holding off as long as possible because that will cost our taxpayers real money. And our neighboring district's board was last night absorbing the news of a rating downgrade because of the state's financial logjam.
Harrisburg can make noises about holding out on budget issues in order to represent the interests of the taxpayers, but their inaction is, at this point, costing the taxpayers money, both directly in the costs of borrowing operating funds, and indirectly in higher interests rates because of rating downgrades.
And this is on top of Pennsylvania's massive mistakes with the pension fund and a senseless, money-sucking funding formula for charters (though many districts have decided to stop paying cyber school bills until they have money to do so). Plus, given PA's famously unequal funding formula, poor districts are getting squeezed far worse than wealthy ones.
The current noises out of Harrisburg are not encouraging, though there is talk of some sort of stopgap measure to slap a bandaid on the bullet holes that the legislature has shot in local school finances, and while the temporary relief is appealing, I worry that such a move will only prolong the legislative shenanigans. I'm partial to making all legislators go without paychecks and administrative budgets until they get things fixed, but that would take an act of the legislature, so it's a non-starter. But keep watching-- we may eventually show the whole nation what happens when a state stops funding its schools entirely.
OH: 200 Failed Charters
When the Washington State supreme court ruled charters unconstitutional just before the school year started, charter fans were outraged. "How can you just toss those charter students into the street? How can you destabilize their educational life?" That's a legitimate complaint. But if charter boosters feel that way about the loss of Washington's modest charter school fleet, how must they feel about the charters of Ohio?
Ohio has worked hard to establish itself as the Nation's Bad Example when it comes to charter, providing ample examples of every possible way to do charters poorly.
Earlier in the month, we were reminded of the scandal that unrolled when David Hansen, Ohio's department of education charter czar and husband of John Kasich's campaign manager, was forced to resign after it was discovered that he was cooking the books to pretty up the charters operated by big GOP donors (his defense was something along the lines of "Well, the rules are confusing and I don't see where it says I can't do this").
But the new year is barely under way and we are reminded, again, that Ohio wants to lead the nation in the vast number of charter schools that go belly up.
In East Columbus, families who thought they were sending their children to FCI Academy received a phone message the day before school was to start "reminding" them not to send their children to the school on Wednesday. Sure enough-- on Wednesday the building was locked and no officials to be found. The school turned out to be a half million dollars in debt, though that took some figuring since they also weren't keeping proper records or paying taxes.
FCI Academy was part of one more trend in John Kasich's Ohio-- religious-based charter schools. The school was headed by Tracey Posey, wife of Bishop Edgar Allen Posey of Living Faith Apostolic Church, and co-located with the church itself. The school had a history of financial issues, probably not unrelated to their employment of Carly Shye who was previously convicted of embezzling from various charter schools. FCI is not alone in its church-charter school model, which is unsurprising given Kasich's belief in churches as a replacement for the social service arm of government. Remember his school mentor program that initially required schools to partner with a church?
But there are so many, many charter stories in Ohio-- stories of corruption and incompetence and failure and if it seems like there are more stories than I can tell, more stories than we remember, a recent story from the Akron Beacon Journal tells us why.
The Beacon Journal's education writer is Doug Livingston, who does yeoman's work. In last week's story, he covers the death of yet another charter-- this time its the Next Frontier Academy of Akron-- and while the school's story is one more example of charter shenanigans, it's the context that Livingston creates that really shows how big a charter mess Ohio has become.
Next Frontier was just one more charter opened by educational amateurs; one of the co-founders appeared to want a school that he could use as a case example to sell his book about How To Fix Students. Mismanaged and unable to attract enough students, the school floundered quickly and blew through a stack of money, though as yet nobody knows how much because, once again, nobody really kept any useful records that they will yet share with the state. Their sponsor wanted to get pull the plug; the state said they could not. And, a la New Orleans, nobody is really sure which students attended the school or what has become of them since.
Livingston says that Next Frontier was one of 43 charters that opened in 2013. Today only 8 of those are still open. That's an 82% failure rate. And consider this:
Among the nearly 6,000 publicly funded agencies in operation during Next Frontier’s two-year lifetime, state audits found that three of every four missing taxpayer dollars were in charter schools — $6.3 million — among the 400 in operation.
Livingston marks 2013 as the peak year in Ohio, when the number of charters that had been opened crossed the 400 mark. And now Next Frontier has become the 200th charter school in Ohio to close. And that is a 50% failure rate.
It also represents 200 times that students, families, and communities have been tossed and turned, their stability whacked on the head, by some charter operator. It represents a whole lot of students who have been left to twist in the wind. And it represents a huge amount of tax dollars wasted.
One could argue that Ohio is particularly egregious in its lack of charter regulation and oversight, and to their credit, many charter advocates have called for better policing of charter schools (though when one operator asks the state to help clear out messy competitors, that opens another can of worms).
But it's not just that Ohio has tried to set itself up as a charter wild west; the problems in the state are not unique to Ohio, but are the same old charter school problems writ in a large, messy scribble. The modern charter industry invites people to get in the business for all the wrong reasons, so that from Day One, a new charter has priorities over and above educating students. That set of priorities (make money) in turn invites shenanigans, because like the health insurance biz, a successful charter school runs on NOT providing the service it contracted for-- the less you can get away with doing for the "customer," the more money you keep.
And while the churn and competition and winners and losers of the free market have a place in many businesses, they have no place in public education. A 50% failure rate is fine for some businesses; it is not remotely fine for public schools. You can close as many restaurants as you want, and people can still eat. But schools should be near-permanent stable institutions in a community, answerable to the community, and committed to serving them (you know-- like the public schools that charter students are dumped back into when the charters tank). Charter schools are not inclined toward any of those goals or standards. The modern business-style model of a charter school is fundamentally flawed, inherently a mismatch for the mission of public education. The scale and scope of charter failure in Ohio is spectacular, but it is not fundamentally different from the charter problem in any other state.
Ohio has worked hard to establish itself as the Nation's Bad Example when it comes to charter, providing ample examples of every possible way to do charters poorly.
Earlier in the month, we were reminded of the scandal that unrolled when David Hansen, Ohio's department of education charter czar and husband of John Kasich's campaign manager, was forced to resign after it was discovered that he was cooking the books to pretty up the charters operated by big GOP donors (his defense was something along the lines of "Well, the rules are confusing and I don't see where it says I can't do this").
But the new year is barely under way and we are reminded, again, that Ohio wants to lead the nation in the vast number of charter schools that go belly up.
In East Columbus, families who thought they were sending their children to FCI Academy received a phone message the day before school was to start "reminding" them not to send their children to the school on Wednesday. Sure enough-- on Wednesday the building was locked and no officials to be found. The school turned out to be a half million dollars in debt, though that took some figuring since they also weren't keeping proper records or paying taxes.
FCI Academy was part of one more trend in John Kasich's Ohio-- religious-based charter schools. The school was headed by Tracey Posey, wife of Bishop Edgar Allen Posey of Living Faith Apostolic Church, and co-located with the church itself. The school had a history of financial issues, probably not unrelated to their employment of Carly Shye who was previously convicted of embezzling from various charter schools. FCI is not alone in its church-charter school model, which is unsurprising given Kasich's belief in churches as a replacement for the social service arm of government. Remember his school mentor program that initially required schools to partner with a church?
But there are so many, many charter stories in Ohio-- stories of corruption and incompetence and failure and if it seems like there are more stories than I can tell, more stories than we remember, a recent story from the Akron Beacon Journal tells us why.
The Beacon Journal's education writer is Doug Livingston, who does yeoman's work. In last week's story, he covers the death of yet another charter-- this time its the Next Frontier Academy of Akron-- and while the school's story is one more example of charter shenanigans, it's the context that Livingston creates that really shows how big a charter mess Ohio has become.
Next Frontier was just one more charter opened by educational amateurs; one of the co-founders appeared to want a school that he could use as a case example to sell his book about How To Fix Students. Mismanaged and unable to attract enough students, the school floundered quickly and blew through a stack of money, though as yet nobody knows how much because, once again, nobody really kept any useful records that they will yet share with the state. Their sponsor wanted to get pull the plug; the state said they could not. And, a la New Orleans, nobody is really sure which students attended the school or what has become of them since.
Livingston says that Next Frontier was one of 43 charters that opened in 2013. Today only 8 of those are still open. That's an 82% failure rate. And consider this:
Among the nearly 6,000 publicly funded agencies in operation during Next Frontier’s two-year lifetime, state audits found that three of every four missing taxpayer dollars were in charter schools — $6.3 million — among the 400 in operation.
Livingston marks 2013 as the peak year in Ohio, when the number of charters that had been opened crossed the 400 mark. And now Next Frontier has become the 200th charter school in Ohio to close. And that is a 50% failure rate.
It also represents 200 times that students, families, and communities have been tossed and turned, their stability whacked on the head, by some charter operator. It represents a whole lot of students who have been left to twist in the wind. And it represents a huge amount of tax dollars wasted.
One could argue that Ohio is particularly egregious in its lack of charter regulation and oversight, and to their credit, many charter advocates have called for better policing of charter schools (though when one operator asks the state to help clear out messy competitors, that opens another can of worms).
But it's not just that Ohio has tried to set itself up as a charter wild west; the problems in the state are not unique to Ohio, but are the same old charter school problems writ in a large, messy scribble. The modern charter industry invites people to get in the business for all the wrong reasons, so that from Day One, a new charter has priorities over and above educating students. That set of priorities (make money) in turn invites shenanigans, because like the health insurance biz, a successful charter school runs on NOT providing the service it contracted for-- the less you can get away with doing for the "customer," the more money you keep.
And while the churn and competition and winners and losers of the free market have a place in many businesses, they have no place in public education. A 50% failure rate is fine for some businesses; it is not remotely fine for public schools. You can close as many restaurants as you want, and people can still eat. But schools should be near-permanent stable institutions in a community, answerable to the community, and committed to serving them (you know-- like the public schools that charter students are dumped back into when the charters tank). Charter schools are not inclined toward any of those goals or standards. The modern business-style model of a charter school is fundamentally flawed, inherently a mismatch for the mission of public education. The scale and scope of charter failure in Ohio is spectacular, but it is not fundamentally different from the charter problem in any other state.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Time To Breathe
I looked over the brink today. For a moment, I wanted to throw stones at a teachable moment.Context. Not an excuse, but context.
My building has been in a state of flux for the last few years. This is not all bad news-- we have made some moves that have removed toxic elements from the life of the school, and we have embraced some new opportunities. But, oh, the time.
Last year we started a new schedule. It provides a chance for teachers to meet during the day (something we haven't had for over a decade) and some other new programming activities. But to do that, the Powers That Be shortened class periods to 40 minutes, down from 45-55 minutes previously. To anybody who doesn't teach, that seems like peanuts. Five minutes is a lot of teaching time, and it adds up quickly-- 25 minutes/week, 900 minutes/year. This year we're adding a new diagnostic test, and a digitized on-line platform for doing lesson plans, unit plans, curriculum alignment. We switched the platform for the school website, so everyone has to rebuild their web pages, and we're breaking in yet another platform for classroom stuff (just give me back my moodle, dammit). My duty period is now cafeteria duty, walking around the cafeteria, and that is a great chance to see the students, but it's instead of a study hall that I can cover in my room, at my desk. Last year we launched PLC's, and now that effort has veered off somewhere, and the waves of SLO's hit. We have a new curriculum director who's trying to create a newly aligned curriculum. At the end of last year, we cut a position from my department, so we are trying to pick up the slack, which includes trying to analyze the test data from last year's Keystone exams, but so far the data are just a list of which students passed and which have to retake, with raw scores appended. And today our latest assistant principal announced that she's leaving for a new job, which means we will be suspended somewhere between old, new, and whatever is coming next procedures.
You get the idea. It's nothing special-- it really isn't. There are teachers all across the country facing real challenges, working against real issues, fighting real obstacles. What I'm talking about is just a slice of the same old same old in school settings. There's never enough time.
So we were laying some groundwork for the discussion of American literature, and we discovered that my class didn't know about the local connection to the French and Indian War, didn't know about the soldiers who fought and died probably right near the present-day site of a playground about a block from my house. I had a split second to consider giving up 15 minutes of precious time for this side trip about their own heritage, or to put my head down and plough on into the path I'd laid out for today's lesson.
I balked.
I took the side trip. When you see those faces looking at you like you have something Really Interesting to say, like they are really ready to hear it and talk about it-- well, you don't step over a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk just because you're in a hurry and you don't pass up a teachable moment because you Have A Plan.
But I balked. Not only did I balk, but the rest of the day I felt a sharp tooth of resentment gnawing at the corner of my brain.
This is one of the dark traps of teaching, one of the places we must be sure not to go. There is only so much time, only so many resources, and especially now, with so many people looking over our shoulders to make sure we get where we're supposed to when we're supposed to-- it would be so easy to see our students as obstacles in our path, to get frustrated when they demand one more precious minute.
We can't make more time appear. Well, we can, but it costs us. You might well say, "Buddy, if you feel so strapped for time, step away form the keyboard and stop wasting time blogging." But this blog is my journal. It's my venting. And on days like today, it's my message to myself, my reminder to keep my eye on the prize.
And the prize is not the finish line. It is not the prize for covering the most ground in my 180 days. It is not the prize for winning battles over Common Core or charter privatization or whatever wrangle will be going on next year (because it really will always be some-damn-thing).
The prize is watching my students grow. The prize is watching my students become more fully human, more fully themselves, growing in understanding of who they are and who they can become. The prize, in my classroom, is watching them get better at speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Nuts to my plans and nuts to my school's plans and nuts to the tests and the programs and the ticking of the clock as my chance to get One More Thing Done slides by, one quick jerk of the second hand after another.
All of those things are important. None of those things are as important as my students.
One of the lessons I salvaged from the wreckage of my first marriage was that the important things, the things that matter-- you have to recommit to those every day. But in the rush and pressure and "cloud of war" in a classroom, it can be easy to forget why you're there and what you care about.
So this is a message to me. Me, are you reading? Pay attention.
Remember why you're here, what you're doing, what your purpose and focus are. Look past the mess, stop listening to the tick-tick-tick of the clock. Don't fantasize that the challenges aren't there, but do keep your eyes on the prize. Take a moment. Breathe. Focus. Listen. Pay attention. Now go do your damn job.
My building has been in a state of flux for the last few years. This is not all bad news-- we have made some moves that have removed toxic elements from the life of the school, and we have embraced some new opportunities. But, oh, the time.
Last year we started a new schedule. It provides a chance for teachers to meet during the day (something we haven't had for over a decade) and some other new programming activities. But to do that, the Powers That Be shortened class periods to 40 minutes, down from 45-55 minutes previously. To anybody who doesn't teach, that seems like peanuts. Five minutes is a lot of teaching time, and it adds up quickly-- 25 minutes/week, 900 minutes/year. This year we're adding a new diagnostic test, and a digitized on-line platform for doing lesson plans, unit plans, curriculum alignment. We switched the platform for the school website, so everyone has to rebuild their web pages, and we're breaking in yet another platform for classroom stuff (just give me back my moodle, dammit). My duty period is now cafeteria duty, walking around the cafeteria, and that is a great chance to see the students, but it's instead of a study hall that I can cover in my room, at my desk. Last year we launched PLC's, and now that effort has veered off somewhere, and the waves of SLO's hit. We have a new curriculum director who's trying to create a newly aligned curriculum. At the end of last year, we cut a position from my department, so we are trying to pick up the slack, which includes trying to analyze the test data from last year's Keystone exams, but so far the data are just a list of which students passed and which have to retake, with raw scores appended. And today our latest assistant principal announced that she's leaving for a new job, which means we will be suspended somewhere between old, new, and whatever is coming next procedures.
You get the idea. It's nothing special-- it really isn't. There are teachers all across the country facing real challenges, working against real issues, fighting real obstacles. What I'm talking about is just a slice of the same old same old in school settings. There's never enough time.
So we were laying some groundwork for the discussion of American literature, and we discovered that my class didn't know about the local connection to the French and Indian War, didn't know about the soldiers who fought and died probably right near the present-day site of a playground about a block from my house. I had a split second to consider giving up 15 minutes of precious time for this side trip about their own heritage, or to put my head down and plough on into the path I'd laid out for today's lesson.
I balked.
I took the side trip. When you see those faces looking at you like you have something Really Interesting to say, like they are really ready to hear it and talk about it-- well, you don't step over a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk just because you're in a hurry and you don't pass up a teachable moment because you Have A Plan.
But I balked. Not only did I balk, but the rest of the day I felt a sharp tooth of resentment gnawing at the corner of my brain.
This is one of the dark traps of teaching, one of the places we must be sure not to go. There is only so much time, only so many resources, and especially now, with so many people looking over our shoulders to make sure we get where we're supposed to when we're supposed to-- it would be so easy to see our students as obstacles in our path, to get frustrated when they demand one more precious minute.
We can't make more time appear. Well, we can, but it costs us. You might well say, "Buddy, if you feel so strapped for time, step away form the keyboard and stop wasting time blogging." But this blog is my journal. It's my venting. And on days like today, it's my message to myself, my reminder to keep my eye on the prize.
And the prize is not the finish line. It is not the prize for covering the most ground in my 180 days. It is not the prize for winning battles over Common Core or charter privatization or whatever wrangle will be going on next year (because it really will always be some-damn-thing).
The prize is watching my students grow. The prize is watching my students become more fully human, more fully themselves, growing in understanding of who they are and who they can become. The prize, in my classroom, is watching them get better at speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Nuts to my plans and nuts to my school's plans and nuts to the tests and the programs and the ticking of the clock as my chance to get One More Thing Done slides by, one quick jerk of the second hand after another.
All of those things are important. None of those things are as important as my students.
One of the lessons I salvaged from the wreckage of my first marriage was that the important things, the things that matter-- you have to recommit to those every day. But in the rush and pressure and "cloud of war" in a classroom, it can be easy to forget why you're there and what you care about.
So this is a message to me. Me, are you reading? Pay attention.
Remember why you're here, what you're doing, what your purpose and focus are. Look past the mess, stop listening to the tick-tick-tick of the clock. Don't fantasize that the challenges aren't there, but do keep your eyes on the prize. Take a moment. Breathe. Focus. Listen. Pay attention. Now go do your damn job.
Worshipping Money
It's in our country's dna, this conflicted view about wealth. The Puritans believed that money and wealth and stuff were unimportant, that anything that glorified the person and not God was bad. But the Puritans also believed that God would watch over His chosen individuals, and so wealth and stuff were a sign that you were one of God's elect.
We also have a history of misplaced disdain for money, like the stereotypical Boomer hippies who could turn their nose up at money because they would never really have to do without it. It is easy to make fun of people who care too much about money when you're not worrying about how you'll get money to feed your kids this week.
But there is a difference between a respect for money and the worship of it. There is even, I'd argue, a difference between greed and the worship of money.
Greed is about the desire to Buy Stuff, to Have More Stuff, to use money for its power of acquisition. But the worship of money is something more. The worship of money imbues money with power and value that it simply does not have.
The worship of money says that money is how we keep score. The worship of money says that acquiring and having money are the only way to Be Better than other humans. The worship of money says that money is the only worthy system for sorting humans into the great, the good, the terrible.
The worship of money attributes to wealth a sort of God-like intelligence, the ability to seek out those who deserve it and run to them. "I would not be a wealthy man," says the worshipper of money, "if I did not deserve to be a wealthy man." What may look like luck, says the money worshipper, is really the Better People getting what they deserve.
The worship of money says that we judge people based on their wealth. There is literally no difference between the campaign blasts of Donald Trump and the ravings of a confused squeegee guy in any major city, but because Donald Trump Has Money, he simply must be wise. He must be a Better. Trump is the ultimate exemplar of this philosophy, because there is literally no reason to listen to him at all-- except that he has a bunch of money.
It is in large part the worship of money which has assaulted our public education system.
It's a two-pronged assault. First, reformsters have built themselves a voice (in some cases, the voice) in the education discussion by simply flashing a bank balance as their credentials. "What do you mean, have I ever taught? Do you see how much money I have??" Their money proves they're Better, and their Betterness entitles them to run the show.
Second, reformsters have been redefining the purpose of education-- well, two purposes. On the top tier, the purpose is to help position young people to get money. On the bottom tier, the purpose is to help those who will never deserve to be wealthy, to make them better able to get enough money to get by while more effectively serving their Betters.
The money-centered education reformster system can be hard to parse because the dots are never connected-- the students will score well on the Big Standardized Test, which will lead to college success, which means leaving college to get into a job that provides stacks of money. How do each of these steps lead to the next? Will getting a high score on a BS Test really lead to a great job? Well-- no. But each of these steps is a signifier that the student is Deserving. And money-worshippers believe they're still democratic because they believe in a system where the deserving few can rise up above the undeserving rabble (who should get what they deserve-- which is nothing. if the rabble deserved to have money, they would have it).
Money worshippers know that traditional public education cannot be good. The self-evident proof? Nobody gets rich from it. The people who work in it aren't rich. The people who run it aren't rich. Why should we ignore teachers? How do we know they don't matter? Because they're not rich. How do we really know that charter outfits like Success Academy are successful schools? Because they are making people rich.
When the wealthy reformsters play the "Don't throw money at schools because it doesn't matter," what they mean is that it's a crime against nature to make money flow to people who don't deserve it. You are feeding a system that doesn't serve deserving people-- neither the students nor the teachers.
Look. Money is a great tool and a great way to make civilization function smoothly. Money is nice to have; during my years as a single father with two kids, and even now, as I slowly pay off those college bills, I think money is just fine and I'm not afraid to want some. Money can provide freedom, choices, opportunities, great experiences. I do not hate money.
But when we fetishize it, center on it, worship it-- that's just messed up. When people think that the worst possible thing a government can do is take their rightfully possessed money away, something is messed up. When people think it's worse to make money flow toward folks who don't deserve it than to let those folks live and die in squalor and poverty while their children stall in crumbing underfunded schools-- that's deeply unjust and morally bankrupt. Money cannot be our only measure of success, of value, of worth. Money makes a terrible yardstick for a life well lived.
I don't claim to have easy answers. You may be shocked to read that I do not support having the government take money from some citizens to "redistribute" to other citizens; that fails for so many reasons, not the least of which we're living through right now-- a "redistribution" that ends up cycling the money right back to the rich. But our economy is messed up, and it is taking many of our most important institutions with it, including schools, and at the root of that dysfunction, at the bottom of that banal blob of festering evil, is the worship of money. When we worship money more than we love God or man, we end up tearing down the world we live in and our very hope for light and life and growth and true human success. We have to do better.
We also have a history of misplaced disdain for money, like the stereotypical Boomer hippies who could turn their nose up at money because they would never really have to do without it. It is easy to make fun of people who care too much about money when you're not worrying about how you'll get money to feed your kids this week.
But there is a difference between a respect for money and the worship of it. There is even, I'd argue, a difference between greed and the worship of money.
Greed is about the desire to Buy Stuff, to Have More Stuff, to use money for its power of acquisition. But the worship of money is something more. The worship of money imbues money with power and value that it simply does not have.
The worship of money says that money is how we keep score. The worship of money says that acquiring and having money are the only way to Be Better than other humans. The worship of money says that money is the only worthy system for sorting humans into the great, the good, the terrible.
The worship of money attributes to wealth a sort of God-like intelligence, the ability to seek out those who deserve it and run to them. "I would not be a wealthy man," says the worshipper of money, "if I did not deserve to be a wealthy man." What may look like luck, says the money worshipper, is really the Better People getting what they deserve.
The worship of money says that we judge people based on their wealth. There is literally no difference between the campaign blasts of Donald Trump and the ravings of a confused squeegee guy in any major city, but because Donald Trump Has Money, he simply must be wise. He must be a Better. Trump is the ultimate exemplar of this philosophy, because there is literally no reason to listen to him at all-- except that he has a bunch of money.
It is in large part the worship of money which has assaulted our public education system.
It's a two-pronged assault. First, reformsters have built themselves a voice (in some cases, the voice) in the education discussion by simply flashing a bank balance as their credentials. "What do you mean, have I ever taught? Do you see how much money I have??" Their money proves they're Better, and their Betterness entitles them to run the show.
Second, reformsters have been redefining the purpose of education-- well, two purposes. On the top tier, the purpose is to help position young people to get money. On the bottom tier, the purpose is to help those who will never deserve to be wealthy, to make them better able to get enough money to get by while more effectively serving their Betters.
The money-centered education reformster system can be hard to parse because the dots are never connected-- the students will score well on the Big Standardized Test, which will lead to college success, which means leaving college to get into a job that provides stacks of money. How do each of these steps lead to the next? Will getting a high score on a BS Test really lead to a great job? Well-- no. But each of these steps is a signifier that the student is Deserving. And money-worshippers believe they're still democratic because they believe in a system where the deserving few can rise up above the undeserving rabble (who should get what they deserve-- which is nothing. if the rabble deserved to have money, they would have it).
Money worshippers know that traditional public education cannot be good. The self-evident proof? Nobody gets rich from it. The people who work in it aren't rich. The people who run it aren't rich. Why should we ignore teachers? How do we know they don't matter? Because they're not rich. How do we really know that charter outfits like Success Academy are successful schools? Because they are making people rich.
When the wealthy reformsters play the "Don't throw money at schools because it doesn't matter," what they mean is that it's a crime against nature to make money flow to people who don't deserve it. You are feeding a system that doesn't serve deserving people-- neither the students nor the teachers.
Look. Money is a great tool and a great way to make civilization function smoothly. Money is nice to have; during my years as a single father with two kids, and even now, as I slowly pay off those college bills, I think money is just fine and I'm not afraid to want some. Money can provide freedom, choices, opportunities, great experiences. I do not hate money.
But when we fetishize it, center on it, worship it-- that's just messed up. When people think that the worst possible thing a government can do is take their rightfully possessed money away, something is messed up. When people think it's worse to make money flow toward folks who don't deserve it than to let those folks live and die in squalor and poverty while their children stall in crumbing underfunded schools-- that's deeply unjust and morally bankrupt. Money cannot be our only measure of success, of value, of worth. Money makes a terrible yardstick for a life well lived.
I don't claim to have easy answers. You may be shocked to read that I do not support having the government take money from some citizens to "redistribute" to other citizens; that fails for so many reasons, not the least of which we're living through right now-- a "redistribution" that ends up cycling the money right back to the rich. But our economy is messed up, and it is taking many of our most important institutions with it, including schools, and at the root of that dysfunction, at the bottom of that banal blob of festering evil, is the worship of money. When we worship money more than we love God or man, we end up tearing down the world we live in and our very hope for light and life and growth and true human success. We have to do better.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Hillary's Education Plan
So, the Clinton campaign is starting to feel a little stress. This was in an e-mail from Robby Mook, the campaign manager:
Friend --
The Republican candidates for president are all over the place, but they do agree on one thing: They know that Hillary would be the strongest Democratic candidate, so they’ll say, do, and spend whatever it takes to bring down this campaign.
Karl Rove’s super PAC just released a vicious attack ad that spreads lies about Hillary’s emails, and they’re putting it out in New Hampshire. They know the polls are tight there, and that this is their best play to try to make sure they don’t have to face Hillary in the general election.
Translation: "Bernie Sanders is the candidate of the GOP." And this evening, the twitterverse is afraid that the NEA is going to make an early endorsement for Clinton. So here's the question again (that I ask as an NEA member)-- is Clinton a candidate that those of us who support public education can live with?
There are plenty of things to discuss, but let's focus, for a second, on Hillary believes that every child, no matter his or her race, income, or ZIP code, should be guaranteed a high-quality education.
That could mean any damn thing. It could mean that she supports building charter schools on every corner and shipping every poor child out of her own neighborhood to attend them. And it doesn't help that the next sentence throws in Clinton's "decades" of work to for schools, because Clinton's decades of work aren't all that encouraging to a public school supporter. We could start with the Bush event where Clinton praised Bush as someone “who really focused on education during his time as governor in Florida, and who has continued that work with passion and dedication in the years since.”
And, as a United States Senator, she served on the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee as a key member shaping the No Child Left Behind Act with the hopes that it would bring needed resources and real accountability to improve educational opportunities for our most disadvantaged students. But the promise of No Child Left Behind was not fulfilled.
Love the passive voice, but I'd rather here her drill down a little bit. Is she willing to say that NCLB was fundamentally flaw and that she screwed up when she voted for a bill that demanded the statistically impossible goal of making all students get above-average scores on a Big Standardized Test, or does she have some explanation for why NCLB somehow wandered off the rails? An answer to either would tell us something about what she really thinks about public education.
As President, she will "fight for" policies that pursue some goals, including
*Make high quality education a priority for every child in America. This has to be one of the vaguer batch of weasel words ever strung together, but she follows them with some specifics that indicate she either doesn't understand or doesn't want to admit to what's going on now.
Hillary believes that testing provides communities with full information about how our low-income students, students of color, and students with disabilities are doing in comparison to other groups so that we can continue to improve our educational system for all students.
Nope. BS Testing does not provide any meaningful information, and certainly no information that cannot be better collected from somewhere else. And "continue to improve" the system? Exactly what improvements does she imagine have happened in the last fifteen years? I want to hear her offer some specifics.
And then Clinton tries to ameliorate that by saying, hey parents and teachers who feel the testing thing is out of control, she totally feels your pain. And that's why she wants to get teachers and parents involved in a conversation about this stuff. So, yes. We can have a conversation about pursuing policies that push for the possibility-- good lord, but this is right up there with "I'll think about thinking about forming a committee to issue a recommendation that we will discuss considering."
* Support educators. Well, no. Here's how she follows that up:
Hillary knows that the evidence on what most improves student learning all points to good teachers. Yet, we do not do enough to ensure that teachers receive the training, mentorship and support they need to succeed and thrive in the classroom. Hillary will invest in supporting our teachers, recruiting the best and brightest into the profession, and providing more teachers training with real-world hands-on learning experiences.
That is not "support for educators." That is a politely worded version of the Bad Teacher narrative. Teachers are the most important factor in student learning, so we must have a bunch of bad teachers out there and we have to figure out how to best replace them with Hero Teachers. This is the standard issue reformster Democrat Blame the Teachers rhetoric with a pretty face
* Improve student outcomes.
I don't want to hear anything about this that doesn't start with a recognition that "student outcomes" and "student achievement" have to mean more than a set of scores on a narrow BS Test. Clinton does not offer that understanding.
Clinton finishes by noting that as Arkansas first lady, she worked for higher standards, higher teacher pay, and lower class sizes.
My Two Questions
So there is nothing in Clinton's campaign site's education tab to indicate that she is not tied to the same interests as Jeb Bush, Barrack Obama or George Bush. There is no reason to believe that the priorities championed by her staff members when they were with the Center for American Progress-- one size fits all standards, deprofessionalizing teaching, and privatization through charters-- there's no reason to believe that she is not cut from that same cloth.
As I've said repeatedly, I give no attention to the crap thrown at Clinton, from Benghazi baloney to hyperventilating over her email. But as a teacher, I see nothing in her education policy that the GOP candidates would not happily embrace. All that separates her from the clown car full of GOP candidates is that some of them would try to do away with the unions, while she would prefer to co-opt the unions.
If I'm going to take Clinton seriously as a candidate, I need to hear answers to two questions:
1) What serious mistakes have been made in US public education policy over the past 8-15 years?
2) What would you do differently from your predecessors when it comes to education?
I don't insist that the answers from Clinton (or any other candidate) perfectly match my own beliefs. But answers to those questions would tell us a lot about just how well the candidate actually understands about what's really going on in public education, and what sorts of commitment to public education they will make going forward. That's important, because Clinton's plan right now just looks like more of the same reformy baloney, and I will not, I can not, vote for that.
Friend --
The Republican candidates for president are all over the place, but they do agree on one thing: They know that Hillary would be the strongest Democratic candidate, so they’ll say, do, and spend whatever it takes to bring down this campaign.
Karl Rove’s super PAC just released a vicious attack ad that spreads lies about Hillary’s emails, and they’re putting it out in New Hampshire. They know the polls are tight there, and that this is their best play to try to make sure they don’t have to face Hillary in the general election.
Translation: "Bernie Sanders is the candidate of the GOP." And this evening, the twitterverse is afraid that the NEA is going to make an early endorsement for Clinton. So here's the question again (that I ask as an NEA member)-- is Clinton a candidate that those of us who support public education can live with?
There are plenty of things to discuss, but let's focus, for a second, on Hillary believes that every child, no matter his or her race, income, or ZIP code, should be guaranteed a high-quality education.
That could mean any damn thing. It could mean that she supports building charter schools on every corner and shipping every poor child out of her own neighborhood to attend them. And it doesn't help that the next sentence throws in Clinton's "decades" of work to for schools, because Clinton's decades of work aren't all that encouraging to a public school supporter. We could start with the Bush event where Clinton praised Bush as someone “who really focused on education during his time as governor in Florida, and who has continued that work with passion and dedication in the years since.”
And, as a United States Senator, she served on the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee as a key member shaping the No Child Left Behind Act with the hopes that it would bring needed resources and real accountability to improve educational opportunities for our most disadvantaged students. But the promise of No Child Left Behind was not fulfilled.
Love the passive voice, but I'd rather here her drill down a little bit. Is she willing to say that NCLB was fundamentally flaw and that she screwed up when she voted for a bill that demanded the statistically impossible goal of making all students get above-average scores on a Big Standardized Test, or does she have some explanation for why NCLB somehow wandered off the rails? An answer to either would tell us something about what she really thinks about public education.
As President, she will "fight for" policies that pursue some goals, including
*Make high quality education a priority for every child in America. This has to be one of the vaguer batch of weasel words ever strung together, but she follows them with some specifics that indicate she either doesn't understand or doesn't want to admit to what's going on now.
Hillary believes that testing provides communities with full information about how our low-income students, students of color, and students with disabilities are doing in comparison to other groups so that we can continue to improve our educational system for all students.
Nope. BS Testing does not provide any meaningful information, and certainly no information that cannot be better collected from somewhere else. And "continue to improve" the system? Exactly what improvements does she imagine have happened in the last fifteen years? I want to hear her offer some specifics.
And then Clinton tries to ameliorate that by saying, hey parents and teachers who feel the testing thing is out of control, she totally feels your pain. And that's why she wants to get teachers and parents involved in a conversation about this stuff. So, yes. We can have a conversation about pursuing policies that push for the possibility-- good lord, but this is right up there with "I'll think about thinking about forming a committee to issue a recommendation that we will discuss considering."
* Support educators. Well, no. Here's how she follows that up:
Hillary knows that the evidence on what most improves student learning all points to good teachers. Yet, we do not do enough to ensure that teachers receive the training, mentorship and support they need to succeed and thrive in the classroom. Hillary will invest in supporting our teachers, recruiting the best and brightest into the profession, and providing more teachers training with real-world hands-on learning experiences.
That is not "support for educators." That is a politely worded version of the Bad Teacher narrative. Teachers are the most important factor in student learning, so we must have a bunch of bad teachers out there and we have to figure out how to best replace them with Hero Teachers. This is the standard issue reformster Democrat Blame the Teachers rhetoric with a pretty face
* Improve student outcomes.
I don't want to hear anything about this that doesn't start with a recognition that "student outcomes" and "student achievement" have to mean more than a set of scores on a narrow BS Test. Clinton does not offer that understanding.
Clinton finishes by noting that as Arkansas first lady, she worked for higher standards, higher teacher pay, and lower class sizes.
My Two Questions
So there is nothing in Clinton's campaign site's education tab to indicate that she is not tied to the same interests as Jeb Bush, Barrack Obama or George Bush. There is no reason to believe that the priorities championed by her staff members when they were with the Center for American Progress-- one size fits all standards, deprofessionalizing teaching, and privatization through charters-- there's no reason to believe that she is not cut from that same cloth.
As I've said repeatedly, I give no attention to the crap thrown at Clinton, from Benghazi baloney to hyperventilating over her email. But as a teacher, I see nothing in her education policy that the GOP candidates would not happily embrace. All that separates her from the clown car full of GOP candidates is that some of them would try to do away with the unions, while she would prefer to co-opt the unions.
If I'm going to take Clinton seriously as a candidate, I need to hear answers to two questions:
1) What serious mistakes have been made in US public education policy over the past 8-15 years?
2) What would you do differently from your predecessors when it comes to education?
I don't insist that the answers from Clinton (or any other candidate) perfectly match my own beliefs. But answers to those questions would tell us a lot about just how well the candidate actually understands about what's really going on in public education, and what sorts of commitment to public education they will make going forward. That's important, because Clinton's plan right now just looks like more of the same reformy baloney, and I will not, I can not, vote for that.
Duncan Cheers Failing Scores
Arne Duncan's Big Bus Tour was practically in my neighborhood as the Duncanator stopped at Carnegie Mellon to make some general mouth noises and to continue what is apparently a theme of the trip, which is, "Hooray for failing test scores on the Common Core Big Standardized Tests!"
Pennsylvania is a good place to make that pitch, because our test scores just drove off a cliff. If the results are to be believed, 70% of Pennsylvania's eighth graders are mathematical boneheads!
Speaking of boneheads, here are some of the things that Duncan doesn't understand.
“Obviously, students aren’t going to be less smart than they were six months ago or a year ago,” Mr. Duncan said. “In far too many states, including Pennsylvania, politicians dummied down standards to make themselves look good.”
Well, first of all, nobody dummied down standards. They messed with the cut scores for the BS Tests, but damn, Arne-- if you can't keep straight the difference between the standards and the tests, you can't get upset when other people don't pretend they're different, either.
But sure. The fiddling with test scores under No Child Left Behind wasn't about states trying desperately to avoid punitive measures made inevitable by a politically set stupid goal. "Get 100% of your students above average by 2014, or we will cut your federal financial support off at the knees," said the feds. This guaranteed that by 2014 there would be only two types of school districts in the country-- districts that were failing, and districts that were lying.
There are so many lessons to learn from this, and Duncan didn't learn any of them. Setting cut scores by political rather than educational means is a fool's game-- but under Duncan, that's still how the game is played. Holding schools to stupid goals set by clueless politicians is a bad idea-- but we keep doing that, too.
Duncan's unwillingness to address just WHY states messed with test cut scores and HOW the federal test-and-punish regime twists the whole system into a educational malpractice pretzel-- well, you can't fix what you don't acknowledge.
The secretary said children and parents “were lied to and told they were on the track to be successful” when they weren’t. He called that “one of the most insidious things that happened in education.”
This repeated pile of bovine fecal matter is insulting on several levels. First, using the word "lie" alleges motives and ill will on the part of teachers everywhere. Yessirree, Arne-- we all went into education because our fondest dream was to lie to students, to trick the little sonsabitches. We sit in teacher lounges cackling, "Hee hee hee-- today I convinced little Arvell McGoober that he's ready for college and he's really not. When I think of him failing at Wassamatta U I just about pee myself with chortles of glee." Yes, Arne, that's just what we're up to in our happy career as lying liars who lie.
Second, Arne, you have no idea who is on track or not. You have some figures about college remedial courses which may prove any number of things:
* colleges are so desperate to get enrollment up that they take students they know should be at different colleges, or none
* the college placement tests are crap
* colleges like the extra income from remedial courses
And all of that wild ass guessing rests on the term "college ready," a term that nobody knows the meaning of.
Of course, in Pittsburgh Arne weaseled through with the phrase "be successful." Which is spectacular, because apparently Arne knows exactly what success would be for all students, and how we can predict whether a student is on that track or not. Imagine how ridiculous it would be if the feds declared that we must know that each student is on track to be happy. How is "be successful" any better?
Duncan also discussed the "press pause" notion now out there, the idea that maybe we should take a year to get adjusted to the new tests. Because once we get used to the tests, we can better prepare for them. So the secret of the new tests is new test prep. Steven Singer has a great piece about that-- read it.
Except that test prep shouldn't matter! In fact, we were promised unpreppable tests. And we were promised that if we aligned to the standards then great test scores would naturally follow. And of course once the test scores naturally followed, that will signal that college freshmen would be super-successful because they were all so college ready. So why hasn't any of that happened? At all.
Could it be that the BS Tests do a lousy job of measuring a narrow slice of actual student achievement, and that the cut scores aren't set in any way that would reflect meaningful educational information, and that none of this has anything to do with being ready for college or success, and that the whole process is so infected with politics (which is in turn infected with the moneyed interests of book publishers, test manufacturers, privatizers, and profiteers) that it has nothing to do with education at all.
Duncan thinks failing scores mean something because they support a conclusion he has already reached-- that education is being ruined by terrible lying teachers, and that only his friends (who stand to make a mint from all this upheaval) can save the day. And Duncan isn't smart enough to know the difference between a mountain of education excellence and a giant pile of bullshit.
Pennsylvania is a good place to make that pitch, because our test scores just drove off a cliff. If the results are to be believed, 70% of Pennsylvania's eighth graders are mathematical boneheads!
Speaking of boneheads, here are some of the things that Duncan doesn't understand.
“Obviously, students aren’t going to be less smart than they were six months ago or a year ago,” Mr. Duncan said. “In far too many states, including Pennsylvania, politicians dummied down standards to make themselves look good.”
Well, first of all, nobody dummied down standards. They messed with the cut scores for the BS Tests, but damn, Arne-- if you can't keep straight the difference between the standards and the tests, you can't get upset when other people don't pretend they're different, either.
But sure. The fiddling with test scores under No Child Left Behind wasn't about states trying desperately to avoid punitive measures made inevitable by a politically set stupid goal. "Get 100% of your students above average by 2014, or we will cut your federal financial support off at the knees," said the feds. This guaranteed that by 2014 there would be only two types of school districts in the country-- districts that were failing, and districts that were lying.
There are so many lessons to learn from this, and Duncan didn't learn any of them. Setting cut scores by political rather than educational means is a fool's game-- but under Duncan, that's still how the game is played. Holding schools to stupid goals set by clueless politicians is a bad idea-- but we keep doing that, too.
Duncan's unwillingness to address just WHY states messed with test cut scores and HOW the federal test-and-punish regime twists the whole system into a educational malpractice pretzel-- well, you can't fix what you don't acknowledge.
The secretary said children and parents “were lied to and told they were on the track to be successful” when they weren’t. He called that “one of the most insidious things that happened in education.”
This repeated pile of bovine fecal matter is insulting on several levels. First, using the word "lie" alleges motives and ill will on the part of teachers everywhere. Yessirree, Arne-- we all went into education because our fondest dream was to lie to students, to trick the little sonsabitches. We sit in teacher lounges cackling, "Hee hee hee-- today I convinced little Arvell McGoober that he's ready for college and he's really not. When I think of him failing at Wassamatta U I just about pee myself with chortles of glee." Yes, Arne, that's just what we're up to in our happy career as lying liars who lie.
Second, Arne, you have no idea who is on track or not. You have some figures about college remedial courses which may prove any number of things:
* colleges are so desperate to get enrollment up that they take students they know should be at different colleges, or none
* the college placement tests are crap
* colleges like the extra income from remedial courses
And all of that wild ass guessing rests on the term "college ready," a term that nobody knows the meaning of.
Of course, in Pittsburgh Arne weaseled through with the phrase "be successful." Which is spectacular, because apparently Arne knows exactly what success would be for all students, and how we can predict whether a student is on that track or not. Imagine how ridiculous it would be if the feds declared that we must know that each student is on track to be happy. How is "be successful" any better?
Duncan also discussed the "press pause" notion now out there, the idea that maybe we should take a year to get adjusted to the new tests. Because once we get used to the tests, we can better prepare for them. So the secret of the new tests is new test prep. Steven Singer has a great piece about that-- read it.
Except that test prep shouldn't matter! In fact, we were promised unpreppable tests. And we were promised that if we aligned to the standards then great test scores would naturally follow. And of course once the test scores naturally followed, that will signal that college freshmen would be super-successful because they were all so college ready. So why hasn't any of that happened? At all.
Could it be that the BS Tests do a lousy job of measuring a narrow slice of actual student achievement, and that the cut scores aren't set in any way that would reflect meaningful educational information, and that none of this has anything to do with being ready for college or success, and that the whole process is so infected with politics (which is in turn infected with the moneyed interests of book publishers, test manufacturers, privatizers, and profiteers) that it has nothing to do with education at all.
Duncan thinks failing scores mean something because they support a conclusion he has already reached-- that education is being ruined by terrible lying teachers, and that only his friends (who stand to make a mint from all this upheaval) can save the day. And Duncan isn't smart enough to know the difference between a mountain of education excellence and a giant pile of bullshit.
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