I've asked (and answered) the question before-- is there any conceivable argument that a teacher could muster in favor of the Common Core? I remain certain that the answer is, "No." But I've now read one that makes a lightly better attempt.
A friend sent me a copy of a guest editorial for the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New York State (teachers belong to all the best-sounding organizations) by teacher Michael Siuta, who wants to make a case for staying the course. Siuta is in his 22nd year of teaching, which means he counts four different high school mathematics curricula in his career. And he would like not to change again.
This is the inertia argument that is often made for the Core-- we've already come so far and invested so much. It's a weak argument, like riding in a car, discovering you're on the wrong road, and deciding that you'll just keep driving in the wrong direction because you've already come so far. And Siuta echoes the worst part of that argument:
Change is not always a bad thing; change just for the
sake of change, however, is never a good thing and does more harm than
good.
Yeah, I've heard that argument before, somewhere, some-- oh, yeah. From every single person who fought against the implementation of Common Core in the first place. It was supposedly a terrible argument then, but apparently it has improved with age.
But there is a more interesting point hiding inside Siuta's plea.
It is the nature of
education; the ever present underlying question being, “How much of this
topic do students need to know?” which leads to the next question of,
“To what depth do I need to teach it?” These are questions that can
never be answered by simply looking at a set of standards on a
piece of paper; they can only be answered by teaching the course, seeing
the state exam, revising it for the following year, seeing another
state exam, revising the course again … and repeating this pattern for
another 4-5 school years. While this is not something that NYSED,
parents, or administrators want to hear, it is reality. No amount of
training or consultant-led workshops will ever take the place of
experience, but constant change has prevented us from ever gaining the
amount of experience needed to refine our courses into well-oiled
machines. Just when we start to get a feel for the best way to teach a
course, we begin working on a new course. How many times over the past
few years have you or one of your colleagues uttered the phrase, “I feel
like a first year teacher.” That, in and of itself, speaks volumes about the state of education in New York.
But there is something that happens as the Common Core and any clump of pedagogy and content and curriculum are passed through the meat grinder of experience-- each teacher edits, rewrites and revises what has been handed them.
This has been my argument for a while now-- the Common Core, as originally conceived and created, simply doesn't exist any more. What we have is a wide range of various educational stuffs, all carrying the Common Core label and all completely different in style, content, focus, and implementation.
One of the goals of Common Core was to get everyone on the same page. It has failed, failed utterly and completely and absolutely, to do that.
A text publisher reads the core and filters it into a textbook, which come packaged with a curriculum guide attached, both representing the writers' interpretation of the Core. These are handed off to the district mucky-mucks who buy them and "implement" them by laying over them the district's own ideas and priorities. Finally these materials arrive in a classroom, where a teacher adds 'experience."
Here's what that process looks like. Open book to lesson. Teach lesson. Collect immediate first-hand data from students, and adjust accordingly. The books explanation of this sucks. These examples are bad. This test is crap. The time set is too short. Teachers rewrite these programs on the ground. Who wants to guess in how many Common Core-infused math classrooms, teachers have added units teaching students how to do certain functions "the old way" so that they can "get it."
"Implementing" Common Core was like dumping a barrel of deep red food coloring into Lake Erie. At first, it creates a shocking new coloration, alarming and disturbing. Then, as time passes, the coloration disperses, and the lake restores its own equilibrium. Now, dump in too much, too often, and the lake gets truly hurt.
But that's the implementation process. Everybody but teachers shows up with a new barrel of baloney. They dump it into the classroom, and teachers slowly but surely get back to What Actually Works. Siuta isn't really arguing in favor of the Core-- he's just pleading not to be hit with one more barrel of food coloring.
While there are topics in the standards that I do not think should be
there, and some that I think are inappropriate for a specific course,
in the end I don’t believe that really matters. I truly believe that we
as educators can handle any curriculum, but without the time and
experience needed to adapt to the change in pedagogical approach, we
will never improve our system.
So here's a real argument that UI almost buy for not "getting rid of" the Common Core (not that anybody is really doing it, but that's another essay)-- just let us keep pretending that we're implementing the Core while we figure out how to do what we know works in the classroom in spite of whatever baloney paperwork the state requires.
It's not a great argument, and it doesn't address the deeply wrong practice of districts that require teachers to stay in lockstep with a pacing guide or teaching script, or the many ways that teachers are being kept from doing what works in the name of one version of Common Core or another. Those are ultimately fatal weaknesses in the argument. But it's the closest thing to a real argument for staying the course (or at least pretending to stay the course) that I've seen.
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Eva & Charter Priorities
Yes, we're getting a little tired of the story of how Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy got some bad press and Eva went berserk, throwing a ten year old child under the bus in response.
But there's one more point I want to make.
After many critics cried FERPA rights violation and the mom in the case slapped Moskowitz with a cease and desist letter, here comes the First Amendment argument. Roughly summarized, it goes something like this: if a person bad mouths you to the press, you have the right to violate their privacy.
It's an interesting argument, and one that I'm a little familiar with. A few years back, a film-maker "featured" our school in a film about two young men who claimed to be victimized in their school settings. It had a moment, and our school took a lot of heat for it, and it was a challenging time for us because a quick stroll through the student's disciplinary file or life after the filming would have created a much different picture. In short, we could have defended ourselves by simply opening the student's confidential files to public scrutiny. But we didn't do that-- and I'm not being more specific with you right now-- because that would be the grossest kind of violation of that student's rights as well as a violation of our most fundamental ethics as a school.
As teachers and school systems, we know things about students and their families that nobody knows, and we have a front row seat to an unending cavalcade of Youthful Indiscretions. Yes, at times it can be hugely frustrating when our hands are tied and people are playing fast and loose with the truth, but the power differential between schools, with our access to a massive amounts of personal and private information, and students, who are just children-- that power differential is so huge that our hands need to be tied, both by the law and by our own professional restraint. It can be hugely frustrating to be under attack in the public sphere from which we can't defend ourselves, but the alternative is to become an institution collecting ammo to use against our most vulnerable citizens, a practice that would both poison the atmosphere inside a school, and which would be deeply, deeply wrong, on the order of a hospital that took pictures of patients when they were naked and sedated, just in case those photos were ever needed to shut a former patient up.
Moskowitz probably violated FERPA, and as a Frank LaMonte of the Student Press Law Center points out, that no school has ever suffered an actual penalty for violating FERPA in forty-one years.
Are there public schools that cross this line, public school administrators who violate student confidentiality in ways that are just plain wrong? Sure. We hear about them because everybody understands that such behavior is a serious breach of professional ethics and a violation of the public trust. Moskowitz's letter does not show the slightest inkling that she is over the line.
Moskowitz (and she did it personally, in a letter signed with her own name) violated a basic trust of any school. And in doing so, she underlined one of the problems with modern charters.
Moskowitz made a clear statement about the school's priorities, and the well-being and rights of the child come far down the list.
Moskowitz publicized the private disciplinary records of a child because the child's mother was making the school look bad. If I were a parent looking at Success Academy, I would have to ask myself-- what information would the school collect about me and my child, and under what circumstances would Moskowitz violate my confidentiality to use the information (and would she go so far as to claim it was her constitutional right to do so)? If I enroll my child in Success Academy, do I then have to hold my breath and hope it is never in her best interest to breach my confidentiality? Does the application give me a place to sign where I agree that if I ever cross her, I can expect her to come down on me with whatever information she has collected about my child during that child's time in the school?
Moskowitz didn't just fight bad PR by throwing a child under the bus. She showed just how little she understands about what it means to be a public school, just how hollow are her claims of running Success Academy "for the children."
But there's one more point I want to make.
After many critics cried FERPA rights violation and the mom in the case slapped Moskowitz with a cease and desist letter, here comes the First Amendment argument. Roughly summarized, it goes something like this: if a person bad mouths you to the press, you have the right to violate their privacy.
It's an interesting argument, and one that I'm a little familiar with. A few years back, a film-maker "featured" our school in a film about two young men who claimed to be victimized in their school settings. It had a moment, and our school took a lot of heat for it, and it was a challenging time for us because a quick stroll through the student's disciplinary file or life after the filming would have created a much different picture. In short, we could have defended ourselves by simply opening the student's confidential files to public scrutiny. But we didn't do that-- and I'm not being more specific with you right now-- because that would be the grossest kind of violation of that student's rights as well as a violation of our most fundamental ethics as a school.
As teachers and school systems, we know things about students and their families that nobody knows, and we have a front row seat to an unending cavalcade of Youthful Indiscretions. Yes, at times it can be hugely frustrating when our hands are tied and people are playing fast and loose with the truth, but the power differential between schools, with our access to a massive amounts of personal and private information, and students, who are just children-- that power differential is so huge that our hands need to be tied, both by the law and by our own professional restraint. It can be hugely frustrating to be under attack in the public sphere from which we can't defend ourselves, but the alternative is to become an institution collecting ammo to use against our most vulnerable citizens, a practice that would both poison the atmosphere inside a school, and which would be deeply, deeply wrong, on the order of a hospital that took pictures of patients when they were naked and sedated, just in case those photos were ever needed to shut a former patient up.
Moskowitz probably violated FERPA, and as a Frank LaMonte of the Student Press Law Center points out, that no school has ever suffered an actual penalty for violating FERPA in forty-one years.
Are there public schools that cross this line, public school administrators who violate student confidentiality in ways that are just plain wrong? Sure. We hear about them because everybody understands that such behavior is a serious breach of professional ethics and a violation of the public trust. Moskowitz's letter does not show the slightest inkling that she is over the line.
Moskowitz (and she did it personally, in a letter signed with her own name) violated a basic trust of any school. And in doing so, she underlined one of the problems with modern charters.
Moskowitz made a clear statement about the school's priorities, and the well-being and rights of the child come far down the list.
Moskowitz publicized the private disciplinary records of a child because the child's mother was making the school look bad. If I were a parent looking at Success Academy, I would have to ask myself-- what information would the school collect about me and my child, and under what circumstances would Moskowitz violate my confidentiality to use the information (and would she go so far as to claim it was her constitutional right to do so)? If I enroll my child in Success Academy, do I then have to hold my breath and hope it is never in her best interest to breach my confidentiality? Does the application give me a place to sign where I agree that if I ever cross her, I can expect her to come down on me with whatever information she has collected about my child during that child's time in the school?
Moskowitz didn't just fight bad PR by throwing a child under the bus. She showed just how little she understands about what it means to be a public school, just how hollow are her claims of running Success Academy "for the children."
Friday, October 23, 2015
Hillary's Teacher PAC Goes to DC
Well, not actually to DC. More like LA. But our old friends at America's Teachers are having a good time right now making connections with real DC players.
You may recall that we first talked about America's Teachers back in June, when the teacherPAC first showed up on the radar. At the time it looked like they could turn out to be a shadowy dark money funnel aimed at the Clinton campaign. But upon closer examination, and an entirely pleasant phone conversation, America's Teachers turned out to be a couple of young guys with a dream.
Naveed Amalfard and Luke Villalobos are a pair of very recently graduated just-getting-started TFA guys. You will have to take my word for it that Amalfard sounds kind of charmingly pleasant on the phone, because when you read any of his "Hey, I've taught for a year and I'm here to tell you all Great Truths About Teaching" he sounds like a self-important jerk. These two had adapted the Clintonian/Democrat approach of simply ignoring the major issues facing K-12 education and focusing on warm fuzzy things like pre-K and free college; maybe that way they could unite an otherwise world of splintered-over-education folks. In late August, they didn't seem to have gained a lot of traction.
But this week, they surfaced again. Joy Resmovits covered the boys for the LA Times, where they scored some meetings with some heavier hitters.
So how are they doing? Well, apparently they have so far raised a whopping $1,500 so as SuperPAC's go, they are more Clark Kent than Kal-el.
On the other hand, if they were hoping to keep bridging the gap between classroom teachers, the unions, and education reformsters-- well, that bridge seems to have collapsed. When Amalfard talked to me in August, he was unhappy about being lumped in with outfits like CAP and DFER, but here's where Resmovits caught up with him:
Hours after Vice President Joe Biden announced he would not seek the nomination, they joined about 30 people in the 15th-floor mid-Wilshire offices of consulting group Propper Daley. Appearing with them was Clinton advocate and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (D), and Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot Public Schools and chairman of California Democrats for Education Reform.
Amalfard is a TFA product. When I asked him where he saw himself in ten years, and if he might still be in teaching then, he said, "I surely am considering it." But he seems to understand optics. When I talked to him, he said he had turned down a chance to be an AFT union rep, but in Resmovits piece, he seems to have reconsidered and taken the job, which makes for great PR positioning. Howard Dean also appears in Resmovits piece:
America’s Teachers visited Dean in his Washington, D.C., office, and he agreed to support them because as Teach for America and union members, “they’re the perfect example of how you can work together regardless of your background,” he said.
Dean is a whole reformy story himself.
Standing in the middle of that debate is Dean, who formerly led the Democratic National Committee. “I was a total union person,” he said in an interview. But recently, he warmed to policies that have been less than union-friendly. His views evolved when he visited the school of his son, a former Teach for America teacher, in New Orleans. He started rifling through students’ papers and discovered they were “functionally illiterate.”
"Standing in the middle" would be a generous assessment of Dean's education stance, which is too bad. He has positioned himself as one more Democrat who either cannot or will not see what is going on in education.
But in the meantime, America's Teachers has opened up an internship for anyone who can answer these three question affirmatively:
Are you excited to help elect Hillary Clinton President in 2016?
Are you passionate about improving American education?
Are you skilled at online research, communications, or speaking on the phone?
Are they are real PAC? Are they real players? Are they an actual voice for teachers? On the one hand, I kind of doubt it. Nice guys, earnest guys, but no. On the other hand, we live in an age of powerful wishful thinking. Want to be a teacher? Just join TFA and say you're a teacher? Want to be a superintendent? Just go to Broad Academy and call yourself a superintendent. Want to be an important educational expert? Just get ahold of some Gates money and declare yourself an expert? Hell-- want to be a commentator/journalist about the education world? Just start a blog and get a-typing. Nowadays we can all become anything we want to be-- we just have to say it's so. America's Teachers has moved from a modest two-man operation to a modest two-man operation that gets to meet with major national players in the ed reform politics biz. It's the new American Dream!
You may recall that we first talked about America's Teachers back in June, when the teacherPAC first showed up on the radar. At the time it looked like they could turn out to be a shadowy dark money funnel aimed at the Clinton campaign. But upon closer examination, and an entirely pleasant phone conversation, America's Teachers turned out to be a couple of young guys with a dream.
Naveed Amalfard and Luke Villalobos are a pair of very recently graduated just-getting-started TFA guys. You will have to take my word for it that Amalfard sounds kind of charmingly pleasant on the phone, because when you read any of his "Hey, I've taught for a year and I'm here to tell you all Great Truths About Teaching" he sounds like a self-important jerk. These two had adapted the Clintonian/Democrat approach of simply ignoring the major issues facing K-12 education and focusing on warm fuzzy things like pre-K and free college; maybe that way they could unite an otherwise world of splintered-over-education folks. In late August, they didn't seem to have gained a lot of traction.
But this week, they surfaced again. Joy Resmovits covered the boys for the LA Times, where they scored some meetings with some heavier hitters.
So how are they doing? Well, apparently they have so far raised a whopping $1,500 so as SuperPAC's go, they are more Clark Kent than Kal-el.
On the other hand, if they were hoping to keep bridging the gap between classroom teachers, the unions, and education reformsters-- well, that bridge seems to have collapsed. When Amalfard talked to me in August, he was unhappy about being lumped in with outfits like CAP and DFER, but here's where Resmovits caught up with him:
Hours after Vice President Joe Biden announced he would not seek the nomination, they joined about 30 people in the 15th-floor mid-Wilshire offices of consulting group Propper Daley. Appearing with them was Clinton advocate and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (D), and Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot Public Schools and chairman of California Democrats for Education Reform.
Amalfard is a TFA product. When I asked him where he saw himself in ten years, and if he might still be in teaching then, he said, "I surely am considering it." But he seems to understand optics. When I talked to him, he said he had turned down a chance to be an AFT union rep, but in Resmovits piece, he seems to have reconsidered and taken the job, which makes for great PR positioning. Howard Dean also appears in Resmovits piece:
America’s Teachers visited Dean in his Washington, D.C., office, and he agreed to support them because as Teach for America and union members, “they’re the perfect example of how you can work together regardless of your background,” he said.
Dean is a whole reformy story himself.
Standing in the middle of that debate is Dean, who formerly led the Democratic National Committee. “I was a total union person,” he said in an interview. But recently, he warmed to policies that have been less than union-friendly. His views evolved when he visited the school of his son, a former Teach for America teacher, in New Orleans. He started rifling through students’ papers and discovered they were “functionally illiterate.”
"Standing in the middle" would be a generous assessment of Dean's education stance, which is too bad. He has positioned himself as one more Democrat who either cannot or will not see what is going on in education.
But in the meantime, America's Teachers has opened up an internship for anyone who can answer these three question affirmatively:
Are you excited to help elect Hillary Clinton President in 2016?
Are you passionate about improving American education?
Are you skilled at online research, communications, or speaking on the phone?
Are they are real PAC? Are they real players? Are they an actual voice for teachers? On the one hand, I kind of doubt it. Nice guys, earnest guys, but no. On the other hand, we live in an age of powerful wishful thinking. Want to be a teacher? Just join TFA and say you're a teacher? Want to be a superintendent? Just go to Broad Academy and call yourself a superintendent. Want to be an important educational expert? Just get ahold of some Gates money and declare yourself an expert? Hell-- want to be a commentator/journalist about the education world? Just start a blog and get a-typing. Nowadays we can all become anything we want to be-- we just have to say it's so. America's Teachers has moved from a modest two-man operation to a modest two-man operation that gets to meet with major national players in the ed reform politics biz. It's the new American Dream!
Eva Gets Spanked
As recently noted by several fine bloggy outlets, Eva Moskowitz set a new standard in arrogant reckless disregard when defending herself against a John Merrow piece on PBS that outlines some of the less-than-awesome practices of Success Academy.
Specifically, she defended herself by breaching the confidentiality of a young student's records at the school. I'm not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but it sure looks like a FERPA violation to me when you release everything down to excerpts from the teacher narrative about disciplinary incidents for a student who is readily and easily identified.
Well, apparently the child's mother thinks so, too. Yesterday, Moskowitz was slapped with a cease and desist letter. The letter is reproduced here at NYC Public School Parents.
I demand that you immediately remove the letter you wrote to PBS and sent to the press on October 19, that contained details of my son’s disciplinary record and is posted at [link removed] , as well as the second follow up letter you posted and sent on October 21 at [link removed.]
The mother notes that actual text of Moskowitz's letter includes the information that the parent did not consent to having her child's private records released. But Moskowitz was willing to smear a ten-year-old child with his six-year-old behavior to defend her pretty PR picture.
As I noted in an earlier post, the picture that emerges of Success Academy in Moskowitz's letter is of a place that deals with a problematic child by emotionally beating him into submission (or out the door, or both). In the past, we've seen her deal with elected offcials who won't give her her way by having her buddies at Families for Excellent Schools mount ugly PR campaigns and by having her friends in Albany beat the Mayor of New York into submission. Now we get to see if either of those techniques are effective against an angry parent with a lawyer.
Stay tuned.
Specifically, she defended herself by breaching the confidentiality of a young student's records at the school. I'm not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but it sure looks like a FERPA violation to me when you release everything down to excerpts from the teacher narrative about disciplinary incidents for a student who is readily and easily identified.
Well, apparently the child's mother thinks so, too. Yesterday, Moskowitz was slapped with a cease and desist letter. The letter is reproduced here at NYC Public School Parents.
I demand that you immediately remove the letter you wrote to PBS and sent to the press on October 19, that contained details of my son’s disciplinary record and is posted at [link removed] , as well as the second follow up letter you posted and sent on October 21 at [link removed.]
The mother notes that actual text of Moskowitz's letter includes the information that the parent did not consent to having her child's private records released. But Moskowitz was willing to smear a ten-year-old child with his six-year-old behavior to defend her pretty PR picture.
As I noted in an earlier post, the picture that emerges of Success Academy in Moskowitz's letter is of a place that deals with a problematic child by emotionally beating him into submission (or out the door, or both). In the past, we've seen her deal with elected offcials who won't give her her way by having her buddies at Families for Excellent Schools mount ugly PR campaigns and by having her friends in Albany beat the Mayor of New York into submission. Now we get to see if either of those techniques are effective against an angry parent with a lawyer.
Stay tuned.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Did RttT Jump-start Edu-Change?
At Education Next, William Howells offers a rater scholarly look at the impact of Race to the Top in "Results of President Obama’s Race to the Top." (The URL says "Race to the Top Reform"-- I wonder what editorial impulse squashed the R word from the final title.)
In particular, Howells is interested in RttT's effect on the larger world of state education policy. "In its public rhetoric, the Obama administration emphasized its intention to use Race to the Top to stimulate new education-policy activity. How would we know if it succeeded?" Howell's is really interested in just that wonky policy question-- he doesn't address the quality or basis for the policy changes, and though he mentions standards, he does once mention Common Core by name. But he does come to the conclusion that the answer is, yes, Race to the Top jump-started policy revolution in the US.
The surge of post-2009 policy activity constitutes a major accomplishment for the Obama administration. With a relatively small amount of money, little formal constitutional authority in education, and without the power to unilaterally impose his will upon state governments, President Obama managed to jump-start policy processes that had languished for years in state governments around the country.
The always-thoughtful Andy Smarick (Bellwether) thinks that Howells may be suffering from a little irrational exuberance here, and he offers nine points that Howells may have missed. I'm going to go ahead and piggyback on his list.
1) Many reformy things pre-date RttT. Smarick is right on the mark here. Common Core, charters, school takeovers, and test-linked teacher policies were already growing in a NCLB-fertlized garden Howells only mentions NCLB twice, and neither instance gives it credit for influencing ed policy. That's a serious oversight, given that RttT simply doubled down on the fundamentals of NCLB. Talking about RttT without looking at its connections to NCLB is like discussing Return of the Jedi as a stand-alone movie, or considering Paul McCartney's career to start with Wings.
2) Howells doesn't explain why RttT winners had big policy changes 2004-2008. See point 1.
3) All the money was spent by 2011. How could RttT be credited with reformy occurrences post 2011? Smarick offers possible explanations such as new state superintendents (nah), GOP political leaders (meh) and ESEA waivers (bingo).
4) Howells treats never-applying states as "controls" but also says that RttT influenced everyone. It's poor design to suggest that your control group isn't really a control group. Plus, if winners, losers and non-appliers were all influenced by something, the omnipresent influence would suggest that "something" was not Race to the Top. If even the kids who didn't eat the lasagna are throwing up, the lasagna isn't the problem. My theory? RttT was not nearly as large an influence as Race To Avoid Punitive Effects of No Child Left Behind.
5) If RttT affected all states, but affected them differently, there must be a non-RttT explanation for the difference.
6) Howells argues that the financial incentives led some states to apply, and then other states raced to keep up at their own expense, because reasons. Again, RTAPEONCLB pretty well explains this effect.
7) Howells wants to give RttT credit for every reform under the sun, even if it wasn't actually part of RttT. This is just silly.
8) Only a third of state leaders actually said, "Yeah, RttT had huge impact." And they were mostly people who won the race and scored some sweet federal funding. Smarick again points toward an alternate narrative of RttT-- that it did not really spur new reforms, but actually rewarded states that had done the most reformy stuff to comply with NCLB.
9) Howells concedes that RttT didn't have an affect on charters, even though it wanted to, which kind of shoots a hole in the claim of its wide effectiveness.
Smarick is pretty gentle and respectful about it, but bottom line is that Howells' idea just doesn't hold up. And both of them skirt the obvious (well, it's obvious to me) explanation, which is that RttT was an extension of NCLB, both in its choice of education reform priorities, its rewarding of states that were already pursuing those priorities under NCLB, and in the way that the looming shadow of NCLB punishments motivated states to grab whatever hope DC dangled before them. Credit also the recession, which made states extra hungry for cash.
Smarick frames all of this with his quest to understand how RttT was important and what there is to learn about federal grant competitions. He and I disagree about that value-- I think any system of federal funding for education based on a competition to decide which states will be denied that funding is a huge mistake. But I think the lessons and importance of RttT are inextricably bound up in its shadow-sibling, NCLB.
Look at it this way-- if there had been no NCLB before it, and Race to the Top had been proposed in, say, 1999, when state coffers were full and federal coercion of education was so much less. Would anyone have paid attention? Would the money attached to the Race been enough for states to consider handing control of their school systems over to the feds? I doubt it. Anybody who tries to explain the RttT era without a big chapter on NCLB is going to present an incomplete and inaccurate narrative.
In particular, Howells is interested in RttT's effect on the larger world of state education policy. "In its public rhetoric, the Obama administration emphasized its intention to use Race to the Top to stimulate new education-policy activity. How would we know if it succeeded?" Howell's is really interested in just that wonky policy question-- he doesn't address the quality or basis for the policy changes, and though he mentions standards, he does once mention Common Core by name. But he does come to the conclusion that the answer is, yes, Race to the Top jump-started policy revolution in the US.
The surge of post-2009 policy activity constitutes a major accomplishment for the Obama administration. With a relatively small amount of money, little formal constitutional authority in education, and without the power to unilaterally impose his will upon state governments, President Obama managed to jump-start policy processes that had languished for years in state governments around the country.
The always-thoughtful Andy Smarick (Bellwether) thinks that Howells may be suffering from a little irrational exuberance here, and he offers nine points that Howells may have missed. I'm going to go ahead and piggyback on his list.
1) Many reformy things pre-date RttT. Smarick is right on the mark here. Common Core, charters, school takeovers, and test-linked teacher policies were already growing in a NCLB-fertlized garden Howells only mentions NCLB twice, and neither instance gives it credit for influencing ed policy. That's a serious oversight, given that RttT simply doubled down on the fundamentals of NCLB. Talking about RttT without looking at its connections to NCLB is like discussing Return of the Jedi as a stand-alone movie, or considering Paul McCartney's career to start with Wings.
2) Howells doesn't explain why RttT winners had big policy changes 2004-2008. See point 1.
3) All the money was spent by 2011. How could RttT be credited with reformy occurrences post 2011? Smarick offers possible explanations such as new state superintendents (nah), GOP political leaders (meh) and ESEA waivers (bingo).
4) Howells treats never-applying states as "controls" but also says that RttT influenced everyone. It's poor design to suggest that your control group isn't really a control group. Plus, if winners, losers and non-appliers were all influenced by something, the omnipresent influence would suggest that "something" was not Race to the Top. If even the kids who didn't eat the lasagna are throwing up, the lasagna isn't the problem. My theory? RttT was not nearly as large an influence as Race To Avoid Punitive Effects of No Child Left Behind.
5) If RttT affected all states, but affected them differently, there must be a non-RttT explanation for the difference.
6) Howells argues that the financial incentives led some states to apply, and then other states raced to keep up at their own expense, because reasons. Again, RTAPEONCLB pretty well explains this effect.
7) Howells wants to give RttT credit for every reform under the sun, even if it wasn't actually part of RttT. This is just silly.
8) Only a third of state leaders actually said, "Yeah, RttT had huge impact." And they were mostly people who won the race and scored some sweet federal funding. Smarick again points toward an alternate narrative of RttT-- that it did not really spur new reforms, but actually rewarded states that had done the most reformy stuff to comply with NCLB.
9) Howells concedes that RttT didn't have an affect on charters, even though it wanted to, which kind of shoots a hole in the claim of its wide effectiveness.
Smarick is pretty gentle and respectful about it, but bottom line is that Howells' idea just doesn't hold up. And both of them skirt the obvious (well, it's obvious to me) explanation, which is that RttT was an extension of NCLB, both in its choice of education reform priorities, its rewarding of states that were already pursuing those priorities under NCLB, and in the way that the looming shadow of NCLB punishments motivated states to grab whatever hope DC dangled before them. Credit also the recession, which made states extra hungry for cash.
Smarick frames all of this with his quest to understand how RttT was important and what there is to learn about federal grant competitions. He and I disagree about that value-- I think any system of federal funding for education based on a competition to decide which states will be denied that funding is a huge mistake. But I think the lessons and importance of RttT are inextricably bound up in its shadow-sibling, NCLB.
Look at it this way-- if there had been no NCLB before it, and Race to the Top had been proposed in, say, 1999, when state coffers were full and federal coercion of education was so much less. Would anyone have paid attention? Would the money attached to the Race been enough for states to consider handing control of their school systems over to the feds? I doubt it. Anybody who tries to explain the RttT era without a big chapter on NCLB is going to present an incomplete and inaccurate narrative.
Gates Support
It is possible that the Gates folks just don't know the meaning of the word "support."
At Impatient Optimists, the Gates Foundation blog, well-traveled reformster Vicki Phillips starts out with a new twist on a classic teacher narrative trope.
Of all the teachers I had growing up, I think about Miss Marjorie the most. She was the hardcore head teacher of McQuady Elementary, the poor grade school near where I grew up in Falls of Rough, Kentucky. Miss Marjorie taught me hard work, how to treat my peers, how to respect my elders and how to hold myself accountable.
But it turns out that Miss Marjorie sucked. When Phillips got to college, she "wasn't ready." Which is why Phillips flunked out of college and failed to ever get a job. Ha! Not really. Vicki Phillips has two college degrees, spent time in a classroom, was a superintendent, and rose through various edu-supervisory positions to now act as the edu-mouthpiece for one of the richest men in the world. Damn that Miss Marjorie and the life of abject failure she condemned Vicki Phillips to.
What Miss Marjorie needed was "support." She "didn't have the tools." She wasn't "supported with high standards or insightful teacher evaluations or professional development to improve her practice."
By using our context clues and doing some close reading, we can quickly conclude that as used by Phillips, "supported" means "fixed."
This is one of the premises of the Gates Approach To Education-- teachers do not know what they're doing, and they'll never figure it out until someone 'splains it to them. And let's combine this with another Gates premise-- the definition of a Good Teacher is "one whose students get better scores on the Big Standardized Test."
The poor, dumb loser, Miss Marjorie-- she probably thought that she was teaching Little Vicki the life skills she needed to succeed in life and to become a life-long learner so that she could keep learning what she needed to know. What a dope. She should have been teaching Little Vicki how to better filter out the distractors in a multiple-choice question.
Gates has latched onto one idea-- "teacher evaluation and teacher development are the same thing." It's an arguable notion, but focusing on it causes the Gates to miss a crucial factor. The Gates Foundation has no idea what good teaching looks like, has no idea how to do meaningful evaluation, and has no clue how to promote teacher development. This is primarily because the Gates Foundation steadfastly refuses to consult, listen to, talk with, or otherwise involve itself with actual teachers.
See, "support" generally means you don't get to drive the bus. Support means that you help people achieve goals that they set for themselves and pursue on their own. If I tell my spouse exactly how she's going to make a meal and exactly how she's going to eat it and where and when and correct her repeatedly when she's doing it in a way I consider "wrong," that's not support. That's badgering and bossing. A support crew at a racetrack does not drive the car; they just help keep the car working.
You might get excited to hear that your corner of the world is going to get "support" from the Gates, because that often looks like a giant pile of money, but even there they are confused. Say what you like about Rockefeller and Carnegie (and you can rightly say many bad things), but when they decided to support a cause like universal libraries or black universities, they handed money to people who knew what they were doing, and they left them largely alone. When you get a Gates Foundation pile of money, you often get a Gates Foundation contact person, who basically stays with the money and makes sure that it is used the way Gates wants it to be used. This is not support-- this is just hiring someone to do a job and then micromanaging them.
Standing over my mechanic and giving him instructions while he fixes my carburetor? I'm just supporting him. Telling my spouse exactly what to wear and then dressing them so that they get it just right? That's just support. Hiring a surgeon to rotate my spleen and insisting that I be awake to guide him through the surgery? That's just support.
I wonder if Gates doesn't conflate two ideas. On the one hand, giving folks money is a form of support. But on the other hand, guys who run a giant corporation might get the idea that anything they spend money on is a thing they have controlling interest in.
But the disconnect between the Gates and the World O' Teachers remains the same-- Gates is just one more amateur who doesn't really understand how schools and classrooms and teaching work, but who thinks he's an expert because he was in school when he was a kid. The only difference between Gates and your know-it-all brother-in-law or the guy you run into at the Piggly Wiggly is that Gates has a giant mountain of money, and when he stands on top of it, he looks taller and bigger and more wise than he really is.
If you want to support someone, including teachers, the very first step is to ask, "What is it that you want to do?" The very first step is NOT to say, "Let me tell you what you're supposed to be doing."
If Phillips and the folks at the Gates want to say, "Teaching is messed up and teachers are broken and we have a theory about how to fix them," then say it and make your case. But the intellectual PR-massaging dishonesty of calling your desire to criticize and control, to make the teaching profession bend to your idea of what it should be-- calling that "support" is rank, transparent dishonesty. It signals, among other things, that you aren't really talking to teachers, who are in a position to know that they are being showered with something other than rain, but to bystanders, parents, taxpayers to convince them that you are Doing a Swell Thing. This is not just the language of someone who beats a child and says, "I'm doing this for your own good," but the language of a mugger telling a passerby, "I'm just helping the guy out."
At Impatient Optimists, the Gates Foundation blog, well-traveled reformster Vicki Phillips starts out with a new twist on a classic teacher narrative trope.
Of all the teachers I had growing up, I think about Miss Marjorie the most. She was the hardcore head teacher of McQuady Elementary, the poor grade school near where I grew up in Falls of Rough, Kentucky. Miss Marjorie taught me hard work, how to treat my peers, how to respect my elders and how to hold myself accountable.
But it turns out that Miss Marjorie sucked. When Phillips got to college, she "wasn't ready." Which is why Phillips flunked out of college and failed to ever get a job. Ha! Not really. Vicki Phillips has two college degrees, spent time in a classroom, was a superintendent, and rose through various edu-supervisory positions to now act as the edu-mouthpiece for one of the richest men in the world. Damn that Miss Marjorie and the life of abject failure she condemned Vicki Phillips to.
What Miss Marjorie needed was "support." She "didn't have the tools." She wasn't "supported with high standards or insightful teacher evaluations or professional development to improve her practice."
By using our context clues and doing some close reading, we can quickly conclude that as used by Phillips, "supported" means "fixed."
This is one of the premises of the Gates Approach To Education-- teachers do not know what they're doing, and they'll never figure it out until someone 'splains it to them. And let's combine this with another Gates premise-- the definition of a Good Teacher is "one whose students get better scores on the Big Standardized Test."
The poor, dumb loser, Miss Marjorie-- she probably thought that she was teaching Little Vicki the life skills she needed to succeed in life and to become a life-long learner so that she could keep learning what she needed to know. What a dope. She should have been teaching Little Vicki how to better filter out the distractors in a multiple-choice question.
Gates has latched onto one idea-- "teacher evaluation and teacher development are the same thing." It's an arguable notion, but focusing on it causes the Gates to miss a crucial factor. The Gates Foundation has no idea what good teaching looks like, has no idea how to do meaningful evaluation, and has no clue how to promote teacher development. This is primarily because the Gates Foundation steadfastly refuses to consult, listen to, talk with, or otherwise involve itself with actual teachers.
See, "support" generally means you don't get to drive the bus. Support means that you help people achieve goals that they set for themselves and pursue on their own. If I tell my spouse exactly how she's going to make a meal and exactly how she's going to eat it and where and when and correct her repeatedly when she's doing it in a way I consider "wrong," that's not support. That's badgering and bossing. A support crew at a racetrack does not drive the car; they just help keep the car working.
You might get excited to hear that your corner of the world is going to get "support" from the Gates, because that often looks like a giant pile of money, but even there they are confused. Say what you like about Rockefeller and Carnegie (and you can rightly say many bad things), but when they decided to support a cause like universal libraries or black universities, they handed money to people who knew what they were doing, and they left them largely alone. When you get a Gates Foundation pile of money, you often get a Gates Foundation contact person, who basically stays with the money and makes sure that it is used the way Gates wants it to be used. This is not support-- this is just hiring someone to do a job and then micromanaging them.
Standing over my mechanic and giving him instructions while he fixes my carburetor? I'm just supporting him. Telling my spouse exactly what to wear and then dressing them so that they get it just right? That's just support. Hiring a surgeon to rotate my spleen and insisting that I be awake to guide him through the surgery? That's just support.
I wonder if Gates doesn't conflate two ideas. On the one hand, giving folks money is a form of support. But on the other hand, guys who run a giant corporation might get the idea that anything they spend money on is a thing they have controlling interest in.
But the disconnect between the Gates and the World O' Teachers remains the same-- Gates is just one more amateur who doesn't really understand how schools and classrooms and teaching work, but who thinks he's an expert because he was in school when he was a kid. The only difference between Gates and your know-it-all brother-in-law or the guy you run into at the Piggly Wiggly is that Gates has a giant mountain of money, and when he stands on top of it, he looks taller and bigger and more wise than he really is.
If you want to support someone, including teachers, the very first step is to ask, "What is it that you want to do?" The very first step is NOT to say, "Let me tell you what you're supposed to be doing."
If Phillips and the folks at the Gates want to say, "Teaching is messed up and teachers are broken and we have a theory about how to fix them," then say it and make your case. But the intellectual PR-massaging dishonesty of calling your desire to criticize and control, to make the teaching profession bend to your idea of what it should be-- calling that "support" is rank, transparent dishonesty. It signals, among other things, that you aren't really talking to teachers, who are in a position to know that they are being showered with something other than rain, but to bystanders, parents, taxpayers to convince them that you are Doing a Swell Thing. This is not just the language of someone who beats a child and says, "I'm doing this for your own good," but the language of a mugger telling a passerby, "I'm just helping the guy out."
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Can edTPA Be Gamed?
Over at EdWeek, Steven Sawchuk is asking the musical question, "Are New Teacher Tests Vulnerable to Cheating?" I look forward to other tough-to-answer EdWeek articles like "Will the sun rise in the east tomorrow?" and "Does the Pope avoid bears in the woods?"
The answer is, "Of course." edTPA (the "new teacher test" in question) is one more demonstration of the Law of Bad Assessment-- the more inauthentic the assessment and the more removed from what is actually being assessed, the easier it is to cheat.
edTPA does not assess an aspiring teacher's teaching skills. It assesses their skills in filling out the paperwork involved in edTPA. It assesses their ability to cough up a bunch of money to pay for the edTPA process. It assesses their ability to jump through the edTPA hoops in the exact manner preferred by the edTPA assessors.
All of these tasks are far removed from actually teaching a class. They are inauthentic measures of teaching skill, aptitude and knowledge, and they are all enormously gameable, and it was utterly and completely predictable, given the high stakes involved (will you get to be a teacher, or have you just wasted four years of your life and a buttload of money), that some business would emerge to help with that gaming.
Meet edTPA Tutoring.
We can help you in any way you need to complete and pass your edTPA. We are a small company with dedicated tutors ready to work with you individually and confidentially to help you pass the edTPA. We have been in business for three years and we have a 100% success rate.
The confidentiality part is particularly tasty. There's also a part about how "the Client will handle all video cutting as requested by the Consultant." In other words, these guys will help you edit your video for best effect.
The cost? $49.00 an hour, which is pretty manageable given how much is riding on your edTPA hoop-jumping festival.
Blogger and retired teacher Fred Klonsky has had many conversations and taken much flak for his comments about edTPA as it has sunk its fangs into Illinois, but he's been right all along.
edTPA is a crock and a swindle. I haven't studied it extensively; I don't need to because what I know is enough to indict it.
edTPA is the privatization of the profession. New teachers should be evaluated and certified by other teachers. Period. The system we have, where the gateway to the profession is guarded by state-level bureaucrats, is also a crock. But edTPA is worse, because on top of bureaucratic baloney, we have Pearson using the process to generate revenue, which means making sure they evaluate new teachers fairly and accurately is not their primary concern. The entry to the teaching profession should not be in the hands of a private corporation. I'm a reasonable man, but I can't imagine anything you can say that would convince me otherwise.
edTPA is ass-backwards. The correct way to evaluate teacher performance is to go watch the teacher work. As the supervisory body, it's your job to go find out how well the proto-teacher does the job. It is backwards to say that it's the proto-teacher's job to find a way to prove herself to you. It's an extension of what I say about assessing students. And that's because
edTPA is inauthentic assessment. Again-- there is only one way to find out if somebody can cut it as a teacher, and that is to go sit in their classroom and watch them work. Period. Seriously. I don't know why we even have to argue about this. If you want to hire a cakemaker for your wedding, you go taste their work. You don't have them fill out some complex forms and take pictures of the tools in their kitchen and mail the whole thing to somebody far away who isn't even going to be at the wedding.
edTPA is highly cheatable. The hallmark of inauthentic assessment is that it's easy to cheat, because you don't have to be good at what you're allegedly being judged for-- you just have to be good at the assessment task which, because it's inauthentic, consists of faking proxies for the real deal anyway. What it really measures is the proxy-faking skills.
There is one respect in which edTPA is an authentic task for our day and age in teaching. It confronts the proto-teacher with a basic ethical conundrum-- is it okay to cheat a bogus task in order to win the chance to do some actual teaching. As it turns out, this is a problem that most teachers in the age of Common Core and Big Standardized Tests face-- do we cheat our way around a bogus, pointless, anti-education obstacle in order to do some actual educating.
If someone is holding your career hostage, is it ethical to get past the hostage taker by any means possible?
Because, unfortunately, the Law of Bad Assessment has a corollary-- just as inauthentic assessment can be cheated by faking the required inauthentic tasks, it cannot be satisfied by the use of authentic skills. Being a really good proto-teacher with promise won't necessarily help you succeed with the edTPA process. Or to look at it another way-- not only is it easier to cheat to succeed, but it may be necessary to cheat. So what is cheating, exactly?
Congratulations, young proto-teacher, and welcome to the modern, ethically murky world of teaching.
The answer is, "Of course." edTPA (the "new teacher test" in question) is one more demonstration of the Law of Bad Assessment-- the more inauthentic the assessment and the more removed from what is actually being assessed, the easier it is to cheat.
edTPA does not assess an aspiring teacher's teaching skills. It assesses their skills in filling out the paperwork involved in edTPA. It assesses their ability to cough up a bunch of money to pay for the edTPA process. It assesses their ability to jump through the edTPA hoops in the exact manner preferred by the edTPA assessors.
All of these tasks are far removed from actually teaching a class. They are inauthentic measures of teaching skill, aptitude and knowledge, and they are all enormously gameable, and it was utterly and completely predictable, given the high stakes involved (will you get to be a teacher, or have you just wasted four years of your life and a buttload of money), that some business would emerge to help with that gaming.
Meet edTPA Tutoring.
We can help you in any way you need to complete and pass your edTPA. We are a small company with dedicated tutors ready to work with you individually and confidentially to help you pass the edTPA. We have been in business for three years and we have a 100% success rate.
The confidentiality part is particularly tasty. There's also a part about how "the Client will handle all video cutting as requested by the Consultant." In other words, these guys will help you edit your video for best effect.
The cost? $49.00 an hour, which is pretty manageable given how much is riding on your edTPA hoop-jumping festival.
Blogger and retired teacher Fred Klonsky has had many conversations and taken much flak for his comments about edTPA as it has sunk its fangs into Illinois, but he's been right all along.
edTPA is a crock and a swindle. I haven't studied it extensively; I don't need to because what I know is enough to indict it.
edTPA is the privatization of the profession. New teachers should be evaluated and certified by other teachers. Period. The system we have, where the gateway to the profession is guarded by state-level bureaucrats, is also a crock. But edTPA is worse, because on top of bureaucratic baloney, we have Pearson using the process to generate revenue, which means making sure they evaluate new teachers fairly and accurately is not their primary concern. The entry to the teaching profession should not be in the hands of a private corporation. I'm a reasonable man, but I can't imagine anything you can say that would convince me otherwise.
edTPA is ass-backwards. The correct way to evaluate teacher performance is to go watch the teacher work. As the supervisory body, it's your job to go find out how well the proto-teacher does the job. It is backwards to say that it's the proto-teacher's job to find a way to prove herself to you. It's an extension of what I say about assessing students. And that's because
edTPA is inauthentic assessment. Again-- there is only one way to find out if somebody can cut it as a teacher, and that is to go sit in their classroom and watch them work. Period. Seriously. I don't know why we even have to argue about this. If you want to hire a cakemaker for your wedding, you go taste their work. You don't have them fill out some complex forms and take pictures of the tools in their kitchen and mail the whole thing to somebody far away who isn't even going to be at the wedding.
edTPA is highly cheatable. The hallmark of inauthentic assessment is that it's easy to cheat, because you don't have to be good at what you're allegedly being judged for-- you just have to be good at the assessment task which, because it's inauthentic, consists of faking proxies for the real deal anyway. What it really measures is the proxy-faking skills.
There is one respect in which edTPA is an authentic task for our day and age in teaching. It confronts the proto-teacher with a basic ethical conundrum-- is it okay to cheat a bogus task in order to win the chance to do some actual teaching. As it turns out, this is a problem that most teachers in the age of Common Core and Big Standardized Tests face-- do we cheat our way around a bogus, pointless, anti-education obstacle in order to do some actual educating.
If someone is holding your career hostage, is it ethical to get past the hostage taker by any means possible?
Because, unfortunately, the Law of Bad Assessment has a corollary-- just as inauthentic assessment can be cheated by faking the required inauthentic tasks, it cannot be satisfied by the use of authentic skills. Being a really good proto-teacher with promise won't necessarily help you succeed with the edTPA process. Or to look at it another way-- not only is it easier to cheat to succeed, but it may be necessary to cheat. So what is cheating, exactly?
Congratulations, young proto-teacher, and welcome to the modern, ethically murky world of teaching.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)