Friday, October 16, 2015

LIly Tries To Muster the Troops

This week NEA President Lily Eskelsen-Garcia kicked off the union's work as a campaigning arm of the Clinton campaign by doing some damage control and trying to get the troops in line.

I knew we were in trouble when I saw this tweet:


Is it? Is it clear that educators are on the same page about the next President? Exactly which page is that, I wonder?

The link in Eskelsen-Garcia's tweet takes us to this piece at her blog. "What's At Stake" presumably lays out what the union's campaign push will be.

The piece opens with a classic call to get in line. Lily has traveled the country, read the interwebs, and listened to the many points of view that teachers have been "not shy" about sharing. And "there will always be room for debate when it comes to the next candidate to support," which is good to hear, because there certainly wasn't any room to debate about the last candidate NEA leaders chose to support. But LEG is sure one thing is "abundantly clear"-- "Educators are on the same page when it comes to what our students need from the next president."

So what do we all agree on?

Well, one guy said teachers need a punch in the face and another guy wants us to all pack heat in school. We certainly don't want those guys! This is not so much "on the same page" as 'not reading from the Big Book of Crazy,' but okay.

Instead, we must keep the focus on ensuring that every student has an equal opportunity to get an excellent education, regardless of their family’s income or ZIP code. That means smaller, less-crowded classrooms that allow for more one-on-one attention and up-to-date equipment, science labs and textbooks.

I can't tell you how discouraging it is to see the language of reformsters coming out of the mouth of my union president. That zip code line is straight out of the charter operators playbook, and I'm really tired of "opportunity" and "access" and "chance in hell" to get a good education. Can we be for providing every student an excellent education?  And can't we have a better list of specifics than that paltry batch.

To succeed as a nation, we must make college more affordable by fighting tuition increases, lowering student loan interest rates and increasing Pell Grants.

This has emerged as the Clintonian-Democrat education dodge-- a platform point that, paired with universal pre-K, makes a safe, progressive-ish place to stand on education without actually addressing any of the huge issues facing K-12 schools these days.

Also, LEG asserts that teachers must be listened to. And before the hollering about irony starts, she spends a few paragraphs asserting that the association totally spent months and months "engaging" membership about the Presidential nomination. Town meetings. Distributing political information. A website!

I am heartened that NEA’s members and its leaders have engaged in this conversation, and I agree with so many of you that there is too much at stake to remain on the sidelines.

Sigh. So when the NEA leadership rammed that endorsement through over the collective howls of many members, they were just following the will of teachers everywhere. Remember when twitter and the internet were just blowing up with people saying, "President Garcia-- we just can't wait! Endorse Hillary now! We want to get off the sidelines." You probably remember that as vividly as all that outreach NEA did to membership about who they wanted to get behind in the race. I think it was just after that weekend when the dancing unicorns beat Elvis on Prancing with the Stars.


I agree that we—educators and our unions—have been ignored by political leaders. I agree that corporate education reformers have become the insiders and the outcome has been disastrous decisions by Republicans and Democrats alike. But I disagree that the answer to changing this is to step back and silence ourselves,

And yet, by throwing ourselves in on Clinton's side, extracting nothing valuable in return, that is exactly what we've done. The first Democratic debate was pretty clear-- education is off the table as a campaign issue. Clinton isn't going to address anything of substance because she doesn't have to (and doesn't want to), and the rest of the candidates won't because they no longer have nothing to gain. Yeah, it might be nice if somebody addressed the state of public education because it's important and addressing it is the right thing to do, but I'm a big boy and I know what to expect from my Presidential candidates.

LEG now enters the Stumping for Clinton portion of the homily. Put on your hip boots.

Each candidate who participated in our process supports strong public schools. But there is no question that Hillary Clinton’s proven track record on standing up for students, coupled with her depth of knowledge on the issues important to educators, make her the best choice for president.

No, sorry, wrong. There are questions. Many questions. Huge questions. Like, will she drop her love of charters and privatization? Will she take a stand when it comes to using bad standardized tests to evaluate teachers and schools? Will she tell her long-time friends and corporate backers who have a great interest in dismantling public education so they can sell off the parts-- will she tell those folks to go take a hike? And will we stop talking about Clinton's "proven track record of standing up for students" like it's a real thing and not a fiction spun out of fairy dust and unicorn poop?

But LEG says Clinton has stood out on issues from pre-K to affordable college, and she then moves into discussing some specific examples of exactly what Clinton has done and-- ha! Sorry, no. She doesn't. Instead, we get some specific Clinton work on other issues, like working on universal health care, a couple of working class person act, and the DREAM act.

But Clinton has promised she will treat teachers like they are important and listen to them and-- can it be-- yes!! There's the table!! That wonderful table!! And next to it-- there's a seat!! For us!!!

“I know how important it is for you to be the voices of education. I believe it is absolutely imperative for you to be at the table when decisions are made, at the local, state, or national level. And that’s what I promise to you. You will always have a place at the table.”

Oh, a place. Uh-oh. The servants have a place at the table. They just don't get to sit down a speak.

Look, here's my biggest problem with all this, and as much as I hate using war images, I'm going to do it here because it makes my point. It's January, 1942. Europe is in flames, and the ruins of Pearl Harbor are still smoldering. And a guy who wants to be President stands up and says, "I know you have concerns, and I want you to know that I am deeply committed to keeping the coffee fields of Brazil safe."

Pre-K and affordable college are lovely safe issues, just edgy enough to separate the D's from the R's, but still pleasantly platitudinous. But next year, I will be voting for a Presidential candidate who recognizes that public education is under attack, that a foundational institution of this country is in crisis-- not because of foreign attack or self-destructive dysfunction, but because of a concerted, deliberate attempt to tear it down and replace it with a system that is more concerned about Return on Investment than in making sure that every American child gets a good education-- and gets it without leaving her own neighborhood.

Cheery warm thoughts might have been enough in other times, but we are in a heap of trouble right now, and I don't need a president-- not of my nation and not of my union-- who thinks we should all pick up a fiddle while our home burns. I'm afraid that John Kuhn called it with his tweet:

LEG's piece ends with a link to offer feedback or thoughts-- I suggest we all use it.



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Thursday, October 15, 2015

21st Century PSAT

Yesterday was National Support David Coleman's Cash Flow Day, otherwise known as the day that high school juniors across the nation give up a treasure trove of personal information in exchange for the opportunity to take a standardized test that is, if not actually meaningful or useful, at least a venerable tradition.

The P, as I repeatedly remind my highly stressed 11th grade students, stands for "practice." It is, for most of us, the ultimate no stakes test. If a student is perched at the very tippy top of Score Mountain, she will have a shot at a National Merit Scholarship, a scholarship program that functions much like the scholarships attached to beauty pageants-- as a sort of protective fig leaf of uplifting nobility for an otherwise mercenary enterprise. And if you have the misfortune to teach at a school that thinks there's something useful to learn from PSAT-ing every single student, then, well, it sucks to be you.

But for the rest of us, the PSAT means bupkus. Less than bupkus. Just bup.

The College Board (now helmed by Common Core auteur Davic Coleman) has been trying hard to reverse this trend by, among other things, creating more baby PSAT's-- PPPSATs-- to push the market all the way down to eighth grade. Coleman has also worked to position the SAT as an engine for fixing inequality in America, a narrative that has, if nothing else, convinced the USED to shovel a bunch of money in the College Board's direction. Oh-- and because corporate synergy should always be leveraged to foster dynamic growth, the new PSAT is also a marketing tool for AP coursework.

Note too that the PSAT begins with a 45-minute session of having students volunteer their personal information, a process that makes the College Board one of the leading vendors of student information (the subject of periodic unsuccessful lawsuits).

All of these upgrades are part of the College Board's entry into the 21st century. But their relationship with some aspects of 21st century technology are more complicated. Hence this tweet yesterday:

And boy, you would think that the combination of signing the PSAT Secrecy Pledge and this hip tweet referencing a movie that came out when PSAT takers were in First Grade-- you'd just think that would do it.

Nevertheless, #PSAT was trending on Twitter, not because of students tweeting, "My, but that was an educationally valuable experience," but because they were cranking out test-based memes. Heck, the College Board somehow failed to lock down PSAT2015 as a handle, and that account has over 10,300 followers and a wealth of test-mocking memery.

Via twitter I know that the test covered Frederick Douglass's thoughts about the 4th of July, cookies, Herminia the poetess, dinosaurs, and wolves vs. dogs. Many enterprising folks tracked down the source material for the reading passages, leading to this interesting exchange:


Probably nothing. I'm sure the College Board wouldn't violate a copyright.

Other fun tweets about the PSAT:

















If nothing else, the PSAT pumped energy into the use of smartphones and twitter yesterday. But if they're going to join the new century, they'll need to realize that their privacy pledge is stupid and they had better get used to operating in a transparent world. And this is just the PSAT, a test which everyone takes essentially on the same day. Imagine what the internet does to the SAT, given on many separate dates.

Of course, we could just recognize that the kind of test that is seriously damaged by this complete lack of security is a lousy test. But that would hurt test manufacturers bottom line. Living in the 21st century is expensive. Let's hope that Coleman can figure out how to turn a profit and still stay classy.



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Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Not Even a Bridesmaid

I have nothing to say about the Democratic debate, really. Neither does any other education blogger, though Steven Singer covers it as well as it needs to be covered. "Near silence" indeed.

So this is how it's going to be. The GOP is going to have a cartoon discussion about education, focusing on how to use charters to dismantle public ed and on how to find wacky ways to pretend that we're not havin' that Common Core stuff. And the Democratic line on public ed? The Clinton campaign locked in on their line months ago-- stick to the safe-and-easy topics of universal pre-K and accessible, cheaper-somehow college education.

That mantra is comfortable and easy. Plain folks can listen to it and hear, "Aww, more pre-school for those precious cute little kids, and a chance for young Americans to make something of themselves," while corporate backers, thirsty hedge funders, and ambitious reformsters can hear, "Expanding markets! Ka-ching!!"

The $64.50 question is, "Would education be on the front burner if Clinton had not already locked up the AFT and NEA endorsements?" Because as it is, we aren't on the front burner, the back burner, the bunsen burner, or anywhere near the stove. Well, hey-- Lily Eskelsen-Garcia suggested that once we were all in with the campaign, Clinton would be more inclined to hear our message and pay attention to it. What did Eskelsen-Garcia have to say about the debate last night?

Really? We don't want to hear anything about the disastrous policies of the last twelve years that have systematically broken down and dismantled American public education and the teaching profession? Dang, but I could have sworn we wanted to hear about that. But I guess now that the union is on Team Clinton, our job is not to hold her feet to the fire so much as it is to give them a little massage and carry some baggage for her so that she can save her strength for other issues. Important issues. Issues that aren't US public education.

Sanders, with his focus on how the rich have commandeered so many parts of our democratic society, is so close to making useful statements about the education debates, but it just doesn't happen. And I'm not sure how somebody helps it happen at this point. And those other guys? Generic Candidates #3-5? I don't know what they think about education, but I suppose now that the education vote is supposedly locked up by Clinton, they won't feel the need to go there.

Bottom line-- US public education, despite the assorted crises associated with it (both fictional and non-fictional) is shaping up to be a non-issue once again in Presidential politics. I would say always a bridesmaid, never a bride, but it's more like always the person hired for a couple of hours to help direct the car parking in the field back behind the reception hall. Or maybe the person who cleans up the reception hall after the bridal party has danced off happily into the night.

If I was harboring any dreams, any spark of hope that maybe this would be our year, that maybe, given everything that has happened, this might be the year that public education somehow became a real campaign issue, that spark has been extinguished, buried, stomped on and drowned in a bucket of tears.

Worst of all-- and this really galls me-- I might owe Campbell Brown an apology. I wrote earlier that no Democratic candidates (and almost no important GOP ones) came to her education summit because they found her irrelevant. And while I'm comfortable with that assessment of her role in education policy debates, there is one other possibility-- when it comes to public education in this country, none of the candidates actually gives a shit. I could believe that nobody went to Brown's parties because they didn't think her summits would be a good setting for a serious discussion about public education. But last night the Democrats had a chance to hold that serious discussion, and they walked right by it.



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Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Politico: Wrong about Common Core

Politico scored a coup yesterday by declaring that the war is over, and Common Core won it. One can only assume that Kim Hefling's piece "How Common Core Quietly Won the War" bumped equally hard-hitting pieces such as "The Earth-- Actually Flat After All" or "The Presidential Wisdom of Harold Stassen."

Hefling's main point is that Common Core is now everywhere, so it won. But this would be tantamount to saying that Kleenex has cornered 100% of the facial tissue market because all citizens wipe their noses on something that they call "Kleenex."

Sure, there's something called Common Core almost everywhere in education. But which Common Core Ish thing would we like to talk about?

State standards? Many states have changed the name and little else, but many states have further fiddled with the everyone-forgets-their-copyrighted standards, so that none particularly match any more.

Testing standards? A variety of Common Core based Big Standardized Tests are out there, and -- for now-- every state has to have one. But what those tests cover does not in any case correspond fully with the Common Core standards as originally written (for extreme instance, speaking and listening standards are not and likely never will be tested). And in many, if not most, school districts, curriculum and instruction are driven by the test, not the standards.

Curriculum standards? Most districts have "aligned" their curricula to the Common Core-- but that process looks a lot like taking what you already do anyway and assigning various standards to it until your paperwork looks good.

Textbook standards? One of the biggest effects of Common Core was the huge windfall for textbook publishers as schools rushed to get textbook programs with "Common Core ready" stamped on them somewhere. But every publisher has their own idea about what the standards look like when interpreted on the textbook level-- and absolutely nobody is in position to check their work, leading many analysts to conclude that many textbooks are not particularly "Common Core" at all.

Classroom standards? The final editor of all these programs is the teacher, who retains (in most districts) the ability to say, "While the Common Core Textbook/Curriculum/Script says to teach it this way, I'm looking at these kids and my professional judgment says we're doing something else, instead."

Add to these the consultants, college ed profs, and clueless politicians who all think they are talking about Common Core and you have a brand that has absolutely lost its identity. You remember the blind men touching the tail, leg and trunk of the elephant? Well, in Common Core land they're touching the leg of the elephant, a Victorian living room sofa, and a plastic grocery bag filled with steamed cockroaches.

Hefling tries to skirt the issue by not really addressing what the success of Common Core was supposed to look like. She refers to CCSS as "the math and English standards designed to develop critical thinking" which is A) baloney and B) unnecessary. Show me the CCSS standards that require critical thinking, and then explain to me why anybody needed CCSS to promote critical thinking in the first place.

She also references the idea that Common Core allows teachers to share ideas, as if that was somehow impossible before. She includes a testimonial from a Florida principal who provides the six zillionth iteration of the "Before we had the Common Core, we didn't know how the hell to do our jobs" narrative.

If the picture of success was supposed to be that everyone in the public education system (not the private schools! never the private schools!) had to deal with something that had the words "Common Core" attached to it, then yes, CCSS has won.

But if, as was actually the case, the goal was to have identical standards pursued and measured in every public classroom in the country, with teachers working in virtual lockstep to pursue exactly the same goals-- then, no-- the Common Core lost. It failed. It was a sledgehammer that was supposed to beat open the brick wall of US schooling, and instead shattered into a million different bits.

And Hefling doesn't even talk about the other promise of the Core-- that all students would be college and career ready. We supposedly have several years' worth of Common Core grads out there now-- how are they doing? Are colleges reporting an uptick in well-prepared freshmen? Are businesses reporting a drop in their training needs? Hefling and her Core-adoring sources don't address that at all. Can you guess why?


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John King's Problem

The Washington Post put Lindsey Layton and Emma Brown together to create a profile of John King, former NY Ed Chieftain and future US Ed Department Temporary Faux Secretary. It's worth reading as a compendium of what many sources have already said about King.

There is apparently some sort of federal regulation saying that if one writes about King, one must treat his personal story as The Central Thing To Know about John King, and Brown, Layton, and the headine writer have observed that law assiduously. They also repeat some of the success claims for King's Uncommon School charters uncritically, but the profile is worth reading. I just want to focus on two quotes from it because they capture perfectly what I find so weirdly disconnected about King.

First, King's oft-mentioned reference to teachers saving his life as a boy:

One of them was Alan Osterweil at P.S. 276 in Brooklyn, who encouraged King to read the New York Times and Shakespeare in elementary school. “He was sort of a crazy guy — an ex-hippie who wore two-inch platform shoes,” King wrote in the Huffington Post in 2009. “But he was an amazing teacher.”

King was in Mr. Osterweil’s fourth-grade class when his mother, a Puerto Rico native and public school teacher, died of a heart attack. “The next morning, the only thing I insisted I wanted to do was go to school, your classroom,” King told Osterweil in an interview for the oral history project StoryCorps. “It felt like the most comfortable place to be.”

And now, looking at his implementation of standards and tests in New York:

Teachers said they didn’t have the training or materials to teach what children needed to know. They also felt pressure to raise scores to protect their jobs, and parents said that their children were bearing the brunt of that pressure as schools devoted more time and resources to test prep...

He also refused to slow down, saying that the pace of change was warranted given the numbers of children who were graduating without the skills they needed, or were not graduating at all.

This is what I find incomprehensible about King-- how he completely fails to make a connection between a formative experience that shaped him, and the experiences that he is shaping for students today. How could Mr. Osterweil's classroom possibly have survived Adult John King's reforms? I have no doubt that New York is still filled with teachers who would accommodate, welcome, and care for a small child whose mother had died just last night-- but for them it would have to be an act of rebellion to say, "Screw the pacing guide and the standards requirement and the canned test prep. Let's just make sure this classroom is a safe, welcoming, and supportive place."

I imagine Young John King arriving at the classroom where Adult John King stands behind Mr. Osterweil saying, "You can't slow down. You must maintain pace."

I just don't get it. And I don't get how John King doesn't get it, either.
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Dancing Straw Men Reformster Video Festival

Now and then, amidst the noise and mess of the education debates, you will see a moment where people from several sides are able to find a means of engaging in dialogue based on nuanced looks into the issues and an honest attempt to understand the ideas and positions that motiva-- OH MY DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN!What the hell is that!!??

What the hell that is, is a new music video from Bob Bowden and his crew at Choice Media. It's called "We Don't Want School Choice," and it just totally skewers the living daylights out of a whole bunch of anti-choice positions that nobody on planet earth actually supports. But it has singing and dancing and a monster, so you know this is serious business. I'll embed this special slice of video hell further down the page so you can check my work, but I have watched so you don't have to, and really, that might be best.

It opens with a little text down in the lower left corner, just like a real video on MTV back in 1987. We pan through empty school halls and rooms while the mocking echos of the parent voices at which we're about to shake our satirical scepter. And then the beat kicks in and this jam is off and running.

Cut to five hip hoppy dancers busting moves in front of a plain white background, while the beat drops and the chorus of "We don't want school choice, no, we don't want school choice" pops in.

And now, cut to five pissed off parents. This is a well-selected group, with one Black mom, one Hispanic mom, one Ethnic dad, and a white mom and dad. And we will proceed to meet each of them pretending to present the arguments that the writers will pretend pro public education supporters present. Yes, it's all very meta and satirical.

Black mom is wearing a sweater in a well-appointed kitchen and says, "Though our public schools are losin' we still got no business choosin'" and Hispanic mom, on a comfy high-backed sofa says, "Scholarship to private school? Don't let me pick. I'm just a fool." So right off the bat, the writers will insult parents far more than any public school advocate ever did. Yes, yes-- they are saying that this is exactly what PSA's are saying to parents. But the first statement is a non-sequitor. Do the writers mean that parents should only have business choosin' if public schools are losin'? Because that would support my old point-- families don't want school choice nearly as much as they want a good school. And if a private school wants to give scholarships to families, aka find ways to pay that student's ride themselves instead of sucking public tax dollars out of public schools, I say "Hooray!"

And it just gets weirder.

Ethnic dad says, "Even if our kids got smarter, we don't want the choice of charter," and-- really? Charter schools are now promising to make kids smarter? That's pretty amazing. Those must be different charters from the ones that want to make kids more compliant and obedient, or the ones that want to just raise some test scores. But smartify them-- that would be something.

White mom is-- seriously? White mom is the cartoony one, sitting at a kitchen table with sad looking children, e-devices in hand, while white mom has her hair in curlers in a bandana, just one wardrobe choice short of looking like a Hee Haw sketch. But this is a fun device because the charter-boosting writers can insult parents all they want and just say, "Well, that's what PSA's say about you!" Anyway, white mom says "Public schools are all the same, but it's okay, my kids are lame," and I'm not even sure what the point is here. Public schools are different so we should have choice? Cool, non-lame kids don't want to go to public school? So, go to charter school-- it's what the cool kids are doing? That is some serious marketing mojo there.

And now, as angry parents bust a move, we introduce some new characters.

Did I say white mom was almost a cartoon? Well, meet Scary Schoolmarm-- high-necked blouse, jacket, hair severely pulled back, rising up from behind her wooden beaten-up desk to threaten us with a ruler. Because, I guess, every child should have the choice to not attend the same school that Archie Andrews attended in the fifties. She looks over her glasses at us. And because this character does not exist in real life anywhere on the planet, we appear to have hired an actor-model-dancer to play her, so that she looks vaguely like the too-strict teacher who's going to eventually let down her hair and turn out to be hot later in the video. I will look forward hopefully to that part.

Oh! Here comes the monster!! Descending a computer-inserted tunnel, it's the "Educational Options" monster. I wonder if he is going to eat the Scary Schoolmarm before she can turn hot? I assume he's supposed to represent what PSA's see in the "monster" of school choice, but he looks kind of fun and furry, like a steroid-addled Fraggle. Also, he's an inaccurate representation of the school choice monster; he should be knocking down public school kids and stealing their lunch (or art or phys ed) money.

But back to our points, such as they are. "Families with cash" can make all sorts of choices, "but we shouldn't choose, cause we're too poor" say white mom and dad, who are pretty much Hee Haw characters now (she smacks him in the head). This is a hilarious, nuanced look at the role of poverty in education, particularly appropriate in a video that looks as if it cost enough money to give many poor children scholarships to private schools. But I guess the parents don't want a good school for their child or for the rich folks to bear a fair share of the tax burden so that their local school can be wellfunded and fully supported. They aren't asking for a good school-- they just want to be able to have a choice.

Black mom says that since she's middle class, it's good that "smarter people protect us, so it's for our own good that they dis-respect us." The disrespect is illustrated by an as-yet-not-introduced character who knocks down charter schools, religious schools, other charter schools and chases children, with his bulldozer, into "one-size-fits-all" school. I am not sure who, exactly, is knocking down religious schools, unless it's maybe Mr. Constitution bringing up that damn no public tax dollars for religious institutions business again. This part is confusing because "smarter people than us will tell us what to do without actually involving us" sounds like a pretty common charter-choice policy model to me. I have to assume that black mom is not from, say, Newark or Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.

Now, as the wacky chorus plays (is this song going to have a bridge soon?), we see an example of why choice is good-- a store's shelves lined with boxes of Burlap Flakes. Then the dancers hold up signs-- "Tell us what to do" (Oh-- here's the bridge). We will hammer this home, because if there's one thing about public schools run by elected school boards that operate under laws requiring transparency, it's that they are far more dictatorial than a charter school run by an unelected board that doesn't answer to anyone (except, sometimes, investors) and doesn't even meet people who attend the school.

And now we have five kids, also dancing.

Now meet Snotty Rich Lady (she is also Unnaturally Large Ears Lady, but I don't think that's part of the point). She says, "We rich should pick our schools, but the poor should clean our pools," and now I'm confused, because maybe she is Eva Moskowitz or a No Excuses school operator who thinks poor kids should be trained to be compliant. It's hard to tell, because this over-the-top cartoon person isn't a good representation of any human living on the planet. But the point is, again, I guess, to say that choice is a privilege that the privileged are trying to deny the poor, except for the privileged few who are responsible for running the charter schools that they would never send  their own kids to because they don't care about having choice, they just want their kid in a good school, and you can see how the nuances of this cartoon video get kind of twisted up in the hammerhanded pointmaking.

But if you want to know who the video makers really hate, here comes the guy who was driving the bulldozer. Big, bearded, smoking a cigar, wearing a fancy suit, and talking with a gruff monster accent-- it's Teachers Union! He even has a "World's Okayest Boss" mug on his desk. He hates charters because they would cause a drop in dues. Rich lady throws in "And if their schools are failing, well, then tell them to go sailing," which I have to admit is a nice writing. But I am starting to wonder-- who exactly does Rich Lady represent? Where do we find this enclave of wealthy folks who are so carefully aligned against school choice? It sure as hell isn't me or the other folks who blog about the issue. We are not the ones who spent $12 or $4 million on a website, or whatever large pile of change was dropped on this video. I didn't see any filthy rich people starving themselves for Dyett High or walking out with students in Newark. Exactly who are these rich people bent on killing school choice? Where are the hedge fund managers announcing, "We could make a fast buck by getting into the charter school biz, but that would be wrong." Name some names!

Another example of no choice being bad-- Evil Union Guy opens a menu and sees only Stewed Liver. It's a cute move, but as with the shelves of Burlap Flakes, one has to ask-- how would this play if the choice was awesome? If the one choice on the shelves was "Golden Awesome Flakes" or the menu offering was "Best Meal Ever." Would we say, "Bring me more choices?" Where's the scene where a guy walks into his home, sees that he's only got one wife to choose from and makes a sad frowny face while the wacky chorus goes on? Do you want me to say it again? People don't want choices-- they want what they want. Choices are only appealing because they increase the odds that you'll be able to get what you want. But our focus is never on having choices-- it's on having the what we want. And if one choice is enough to get that, we're happy.

But I digress. Evil Union Guy knocks over a tripod holding a "Choice" sign, by far the least clever moment in the whole video. One of the dancers holds up a sign that says "Oh My God" and another holds up a sign that says "Tell my agent to get me a decent gig soon." Ha. Just kidding about the second sign.

The writers have been pretty canny in not trying to speak for children, but instead tell this little parable. Ed Choice Monster breaks onto the set and scares away all the grownups, and it walks away, head down, in the Charlie Brown Loser walk, but the children run up and give it hugs. Apparently they do not have the scene where the school choice monster pushes some of the kids away and says, "No, sorry. You can't be my friend." and when they cry and complain says, "Look. Choice means that I get to choose, not you." That would have been a fun scene to include.

One final shot-- everyone dances to the beat in a red wash of light (except Evil Union Guy who just stands there, arms folded, because evil) and then hits a pose on the last note.

So what do we have here. Well, on the one hand, this is well-produced. People with skills either donated valuable time or were well-paid to create this thing. Bob Bowden has a real background in television production and writing (on top of his engineering degrees from Purdue and Stanford), and while his qualifications in the education field may be, technically, non-existent, he's been playing at the charter-choice game for a while. So, like much of the charter movement, money is talking loudly here.

On the other hand, what it's saying is ridiculous. Not since the classic (and now unavailable) Cranky Idiot Grampa Complains About Common Core video have we seen such a ham-handed nuance-free straw man attack. Non-existent characters espousing non-existent arguments boil down to "The rich folks and teachers unions don't want you to have choice, so you should get it" and that just omits so many uncomforable facts and inconvenient truths that it hardly seems worth the bother (or the money they dumped on this). I would rather go back and watch the classic Petrilli and the Fordhams dance to their version of What Does the Fox Say, which at least had the home-made look of people enjoying themselves.

Also, Scary Schoolteacher never turned hot.

Here's the linkage. While I don't want to encourage them with actual views, you still might want to stop over and share your views about the video. The comments section is, so far, wide open.




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Monday, October 12, 2015

On Childlike Faith in Tests

Some blog post titles just demand your attention. Yesterday, my attention was grabbed by this one: "Tests are inhuman-- and that is what so good about them." Yes, there's an 's missing from that title, but there's a lot more than that missing from the post itself.

The writer is arguing for the value of the impartial, unbiased test. And part of her argument is solid. Teaching is most often done by human beings, and human beings are biased. Therefor it will come as no surprise that A) teachers have biases and B) if they're not careful, teachers will let those biases bleed over into their evaluation of students. This is inarguably true.

It may seem, the writer says, that teacher evaluation is nicer, more humane, but in fact the intrusion of bias can make teacher evaluation the most unkind at all, denying some students credit for their achievements and being inherently unfair. Also true.

If you want fairness, progress, equality and reliability, then human judgment may not be the best method.

Um, wait.

What other judgment is there?

Okay. You might say Judgment of God, but I believe there's a special day set for that judgment, and it's coming later. I don't think it's a significant factor in, say, ninth grade algebra.

This is what I don't get about some test devotees-- this belief that tests somehow descend from heaven on a fluffy cloud, free from human contact and cleansed of all human frailty. Impartial, perfect, and as divinely sourceless as an angel or Santa Claus.

But no. I'm pretty sure that tests are written by human beings. Imperfect, biased, judgment-making human beings.

That's fine. Making judgments is one of the most fundamental, and fundamentally necessary, human activities. We can't talk about not making judgments at all, but we can and must talk about making good judgments and about being aware of our biases as we make those judgments. That is part of what makes a teacher a professional-- an awareness of the many biases at play in a specific classroom and an ability correct for those. The "specific" part matters because context matters-- "Draw a picture of your father working?" can seem like a perfectly harmless question unless you know that Pat's father is dead and Chris's father is in prison.

In another post, this writer makes this extraordinary claim:

 I don’t think you can improve equity, teacher quality and a love of learning without some form of reliable feedback – and exams are basically the best and most accurate method of gathering feedback that we have.

Oddly enough, that in itself is a bias that would affect a classroom. Imagine a student who brings up a drawing of a butterfly and says, "How do you like this?" And the teacher replies, "Sit down, Pat. We'll have to run it through the color spectrum analysis scanner to see how you did."

A reliance on testing means that we make judgments about what behaviors, knowledge and skill is worth measuring. A belief in the perfect awesomeness of standardized tests leads us quickly to the conclusion that only things that can be measured by standardized tests are worth knowing or doing. That's baloney. And it's a huge bias.

And that's just if the tests we're discussing are reasonably decent tests. If we get to tests such as the current crop of Big Standardized Tests that ask questions requiring students to identify the single "correct" author's purpose, or select the single "correct" most effective sentence, we have now thrown in more bias about the content itself.

Sure, testing can provide useful info of some sorts on some occasion. But we are not exposing students to some perfect, bias-free, inhuman judgment. Rather, we are allowing someone else's judgment and bias into our classroom, which is perfectly okay and not a bad way to balance out our own biases-- as long as we recognize that's what we're doing.

The best way to deal with bias is to put a bell on it, acknowledge it, hear it coming, and factor it out. To try to hide it behind claims of perfect inhuman judgment is to give that bias enormous power that it does not deserve to have, and that's what writers like the blogger in question propose to do.


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