WSJ: The High-Priced Death of Common Core

I've been saying this for a while, but yesterday the Wall Street Journal put it out in the main stream media-- the Common Core as a single unifying force in US public education is dead.

The actual headline for Michael Rothfeld's piece is "Financial Woes Plague Common-Core Rollout." But "plague" is a generous description of the situation Rothfeld describes.

Five years into the biggest transformation of U.S. public education in recent history, Common Core is far from common. Though 45 states initially adopted the shared academic standards in English and math, seven have since repealed or amended them. Among the remaining 38, big disparities remain in what and how students are taught, the materials and technology they use, the preparation of teachers and the tests they are given. A dozen more states are considering revising or abandoning Common Core.

In other words, the dream that Common Core would be the single educational vision of the entire country-- that dream is dead. Dead dead deadity dead.

But Rothfeld's piece lays out a not-always-recognized (at least, not by people who don't actually work in education) culprit for the demise. He lists the usual suspects-- politics, testing, federal overreach. But the article is most interested in another malefactor-- finances.

The total cost of implementing Common Core is difficult to determine because the country’s education spending is fragmented among thousands of districts. The Wall Street Journal looked at spending by states and large school districts and found that more than $7 billion had been spent or committed in connection with the new standards. 

That's billion-with-a-B (and that rhymes with P and that stands for "Probably still underestimating the total cost"). WSJ looked at all sorts of records and figures that still doesn't count things like the training budgets that have been turned into Common Core training budgets.

Rothfeld's picture of the nature of the Core is cute and quaint.

Common Core advocates hoped to make standards uniform—and to raise them across the board. Their goals were to afford students a comparable education no matter where they were, to cultivate critical thinking rather than memorization, to better prepare students for college and careers, and to enable educators to use uniform year-end tests to compare achievement. They wanted to give the tests on computers to allow more complex questions and to better analyze results.

And he allows Vicki Phillips to repeat her claims about the awesomeness of Kentucky without being challenged. In fact, Rothfeld doesn't really challenge anything about the Core, and in a way, that's what makes this article so brutal-- whether the Core is any good or not is beside his point, which is that the whole business just isn't working, and it's costing a ton of money to boot.


The plan of having everybody take the same test failed, in part because they turned out to be hella expensive (or at least charged big ticket prices). So we can't really compare results. And the adoption of the actual standards? The WSJ has whipped up a cool little map:

Rothfeld notes that people won't even say the name any more, but say "higher standards" instead. He quotes Council of Great City Schools executive director Michael Casserly insisting that Common Core still made US education better somehow, no matter how messy it has been. And then he turns back to examples of how expense sunk the whole process.

He uses Philadelphia schools as an example. The system had a large-ish grant, but then it had a financial crisis and dumped 4,000 jobs, including some people responsible for the implementation. Training is necessary but expensive (New Mexico spent $5.2 million to train half its teaching force). And now the grant money is running out, the work isn't done, and the states are already short the money they need to meet basic requirements of running schools.

We go back to Philadelphia for the most telling quote of the piece:

“It was something of a perfect storm, where expectations were rising while resources were diminishing,” says Christopher Shaffer, Philadelphia’s deputy chief of curriculum, instruction and assessment.

Dang-- it is like a perfect storm. It's almost as if someone wanted schools to fail, so that they would just have to be replaced by privately run schools set up to provide investment opportunities for hedge fund managers. But no-- that's crazy talk.

Finally, those computers that were going to allow "more complex questions" (seriously? exactly how is that supposed to work) and "to better analyze results" (yeah, we know how that's supposed to work). It turns out that buying computers for entire school systems is super-duper expensive as well-- millions of dollars for districts that are worried about new roofs and other non-frilly infrastructure.

There's plenty that goes unsaid in this piece, particularly about the actual merits of the Common Core, and in fairness to Rothfeld, that's kind of beside his point. Still, it's more likely that people will find a purchase "too expensive" if they discover they are purchasing something that is technically "a piece of crap."

And no, the Wall Street Journal does not, technically declare Common Core dead. They just describe how the body is laid out on a slab, its nationally unifying heartbeat stilled and its collective testing brain silent. Is a thing true if we describe the condition but don't say the word? I don't know. That's such a complex question that I need a computer to answer it.

Magnet vs. Charter

Once again, I had a version of this conversation.

Me: Charters are not public schools because they are not open to or committed to taking all students. They filter and cream and push out and refuse to backfill.

Reformster: What about magnet schools? Those are public schools which have stringent admission requirements. They don't educate every child, either, and they also pick and choose.

I can illustrate the hole in this argument by imagining the following contrasting conversations.

Conversation #1

Student: I would like to attend your most excellent magnet school!

School: Unfortunately, you have not met our stringent entry requirements. However, as is our legal and ethical responsibility, we will make sure to provide you with a full education elsewhere within this school district.

Conversation #2

Student: I would like to attend your delightful charter school!

Charter: Unfortunately, we don't want you. We don't have space for you. You are too old. You aren't a striver. You have educational needs we aren't prepared to meet. Or we accepted you, but now we've decided to push you out. Whatever the case, we are now done with you. Have a nice life, and good luck finding a place to go to school, because that's certainly not our problem.

Or perhaps these conversations.

Conversation A

Student: Is it true Mighty Swell Magnet School is closing?

School: I'm afraid it is, due to budgetary cuts and enrollment considerations, the district is shutting down MSMS and we won't open next fall. However, in keeping with our legal and ethical responsibilities, we have already placed you within one of the district's other schools. Don't worry. Your education will continue without interruption next year.

Conversation B

Student: Hey! This door is locked! How am I supposed to get to class today.

Charter: We closed. It just didn't make business sense to keep operating, so we are outies. Go away.

Student: But-- my education!!

Charter: Not our problem. Have a nice life.

In other words

Magnets are an extension of a district's system-wide commitment to educating every single child no matter what. Charters are not. 

NC: Queen of NCLB Takes Over University

North Carolina's conservative GOP leadership has been working hard to show the nation how an education system can be trashed quickly and thoroughly, and while we have focused lots of attention on how they are trying to gut their K-12 system, what dismantling of public education would be complete without going after the state's university system?

The writing (in big blocky letters carved out in crayon) has been on the wall for a while. Governor Patrick McCrory proposed a new funding formula for the university system just as soon as he took office in January of 2013.

It's not based on butts in seats but on how many of those butts can get jobs.

Stupid liberal arts. What universities need to be doing is providing high-level vocational training.

But the big shocker came when the state system's board of governors, led by Charlotte lawyer John Fennebresque, canned the well-respected university president Tom Ross. The firing was not well-received, and was even less well-received because Fennebresque and the board would not explain their action. Not political, they said. Doing a great job, they said. But still out of a job. The board is hand picked by the legislature, but Fennebresque swears "on a stack of Bibles" that nobody at the capital tells him what to do.

The search for Ross's replacement was quickly lost in a forest of red flags. The search was conducted in secrecy, with no opportunity for participation or input from university faculty or even many members of the board of governors. And the secrecy wasn't all that effective, because word leaked that one and possibly only one candidate was being considered-- this despite the legislature passing a rule to require the search to look at at least three.

And then in October, the board called an "emergency meeting" to consider one, and only one, candidate. It's not exactly clear what the "emergency" might have been-- UNC would be overrun with herds of unruly hamsters without a president in place? But the legislature found themselves circumvented and the faculty and half of the board of governors found themselves ignored.

And that one candidate?

Margaret Spellings.

Yes, that Margaret Spellings. Spellings is a career politician, but her career has often intersected with education, and it has generally intersected with it in the same way that a passing motorist once intersected with my open car door, changing it for the worse. She was Bush's domestic policy advisor from 2001 to 2004, then most notably the Secretary of Education from 2005-2009, where she got to lead the charge on No Child Left Behind. She had been with George Bush since he deposed Ann Richards as governor of Texas, brought into the Bush fold by Karl Rove.

Spellings has worked in everything from lobbying to political consulting. Some of her opponents view her as a culture wars combatant; she infamously called PBS to demand that they yank a children's show episode that included a lesbian couple. (Also, fun fact: back in 2007 she went toe-to-toe with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over student loans).

This profile of Spellings attempts to paint her as a balanced set of contradictions, a tough-talking good ol' girl with a heart of gold. But the sources for Spellings praise run the political gamut from A to B (Andy Rotherham to Mike Petrilli), and the list of things she does that annoy conservatives is thin (even though one might expect "help engineer the federal takeover of public ed" to make that list).

But while some might want to talk about Spellings' style or qualifications or experience, I'm mostly struck by the way that she is pretty consistently wrong about education.

Back in March of this year, she was still spouting nonsense about NCLB. She likes the narrative of test scores as part of national defense ("The success of every student in reading and doing math on grade level is vital to the future success of our nation") and she is another reformster to claim that, prior to NCLB's testing requirements, nobody knew if their schools were failing or not. Spellings has remained all in, loving not only national standards, but national standardized tests.

Last year she was in the Wall Street Journal, peering into the future, and what she sees is education as a consumer good:

Parents, for one, will have access to the flow of data, allowing them to help their children find the education that best fits them. Buyers, meaning the parents and students, will be in control of the education, selecting from an à la carte menu of options. Gone will be the fixed-price menu, where a student attends a school based upon geography and is offered few alternatives. Students and their parents can take their state and federal dollars and find an education that best suits them.

Like much of what Spellings has to say about education, this reveals a narrow and stunted view of education. In Spellings world, education is not a public trust, helping to bind the communities that provide it and benefit from it. The social and civic growth of children, the learning about how to be their best selves and how to be in the world-- all of that will, I guess, happen somewhere else, because school is just about collecting the right modules of pre-employment training. And if you've been paying attention to the renewed interest in our Data Overlords and their social engineering goal of knowing everything about everyone, Spellings' words have an eerie familiarity. Her dream of unleashing the foxes of market forces in the henhouse of education is not good news, and like many of Spellings' pet ideas encased in NCLB, long since proven to be bunk.

Spellings also has a checkered recent past with connections to predatory for-profit schools and the college loan collection industry.

Or you can watch her do this little spot with the Boston Consulting Group (one of the four investment horsemen of reformsterism) arguing how more data and more information will help us "wring out efficiencies" so we can do "more with less." We've poured money into education and gotten no returns in "student achievement." She also calls again for the kind of integrated data-collection that is scary. Note also that government can't do it without private sector investment-- so shrink government and sell off the pieces to investors. The very formula of privatization and austerity.

But then, the most troubling part of this is that Spellings was there in Texas and DC with Bush and Rod Paige, which means she had front row seats for the massive fiction that was the Texas Miracle. It was the Texas Miracle that was used to sell us No Child Left Behind, which means that anybody involved in that sales job ends up looking like either a fool or a liar.

It is the pattern of Spellings' career-- she either doesn't know baloney when she sees it, or she is determined to make a living selling it.

So congratulations, North Carolina.  You're getting a new higher education boss who has this to say about the post:

It’s a fantastic way to make policy, in a political setting, because that’s the setting we operate in.

That's from her opening press conference, filled with goodies. And who believes that the public wants "a good value proposition" in education. Issues the schools face? Affordability, access, and "responsiveness to employers." Of course the vision and goals will have to be "measurable" because accountability. She's going to get to know every stakeholder, and she knows "a good bit about the business." The first thing she'll do is "look at the data." She likes to focus on first principles; for instance, in K-12 it's that third graders must be able to read, so what's the equivalent for higher ed? She wants to set "a few very powerful, very strategic goals." We know that most jobs require higher education and without that people won't have access to the American Dream. She likes the idea of coming to North Carolina because of the people and the quality of life and the intellectual vibrancy and the arts and the sciences. She thinks there's room for everyone in the higher ed industry, including for profits, and we shouldn't be threatened by that. We can learn a lot because between computery stuff and convenience for adults, the for-profits did swell things (she didn't mention the predatory bilking of students part) like teaching us to provide a product for customers.       

Oh, and it just piles higher and deeper. She'll want co-ordinate with K-12, starting with providing super-duper teachers armed with research. The reading wars were settled by brain scientists who told us all we need to know; she doesn't explain how that fits with NC's "pass your third grade standardized reading test or fail third grade" policy, supported by roughly zero science.  

We could delve into the Spellings talky catalog at greater length, but you get the idea. Every reformster idea ever is an idea she loves. Privatize, data-collect, starve for funds, test and punish, and generally treat educating our young people as if it's the same process as manufacturing toasters.

North Carolina higher education-- this is your new boss. I wouldn't ding her for having no education background-- that's not a rare issue these days. But I would view her with extreme caution based on her view of higher education as a vocational training factory. And like most reformsters, she suffers from selective data blindness-- data is absolutely awesome and our guiding star, unless it shows things like the failure of NCLB-RTTT programs or the complete inappropriateness of flunking eight year olds based on a BS Test.

One final note. Three days after serving as conductor of the railroad that chugged Spellings into power, John Fennebresque resigned his position on the Board of Governors.

Hang on to your hats, NC. Your leaders have made a hash out of K-12 education. Now the prognosis for higher ed isn't looking too great, either.

Daylight Savings Cut Scores

The afternoon is only half over, but the sun is riding a little low in the sky. Within a few hours, it's going to get dark outside. That's because we switched the clocks last night.

Here's the thing-- it will get precisely as dark as it got yesterday, just as the sun rose just as high today as it rises every single day. The distribution of light and dark through the day, the distribution of the sun's high points and low points-- it will be pretty much the same today as it was yesterday.

What changed over night is not the distribution of light and dark, but the labels that we put on it. Yesterday we labeled this position of the sun 4:00. Today we are labeling it 3:00.

For those who don't get it, this is a fine way to explain cut scores. The distribution of student scores, the lights and darks, the highs and lows-- that stays pretty much the same. What changes is how people chose to label them. We can take the highest point of the curve and we can call it "on level" or "above expectations" or "below expectations." And the labels we use are reality-- it's not true to say that right now it is "really" 4:00. It's 3:00, today.

The position of the sun, just like the number of students who got a certain number of questions correct on a test-- that's a piece of raw data. But what we label it, whether we label it 12:30 AM or "Exceeds expectations," is just a label, even an arbitrary label, that we have slapped on the raw data to give it meaning. And we can give it any meaning we want.

Many folks make fun of daylight savings time because it doesn't really change a thing. Sun is still up for the same number of hours, and we stumble around in the dark for the same number of hours. Nothing really changes except the label we install. If I have the authority, I can make this moment 3:00 or 4:00 or 9:00 or 13:00. It won't change the reality of the moment-- just what we call it. Standardized test results, predictably draped across the bell curve, are the same. If I have the authority, I can label the parts of the curve anything I like. But it won't change reality a bit.

ICYMI: This Week's Notable Bloggery

Here are some bloggy highlights from this week.

Damaging the Charter School Brand

John Merrow doesn't blog often, but when he does, it's powerful stuff. Here's a look at the charter school Hall of Shame, complete with historical perspective and some links to egregious actors.

Moscowitz, Petrilli, and the Hard Truth about America's Schools

This is an absolute must-read. Jersey Jazzman has managed to synthesize most of the big news of the week, from Moscowitz's meltdown to the student assault in South Carolina. Read this.

Now, I hear a lot about the quantity of my output, but for the past little bit, Mercedes Schneider has been quietly cranking out at least one post a day (or, perhaps more accurately, one post a night, because it looks like maybe she's staying up till the wee hours to write these). That is far more impressive than my output because Schneider does actual research, whereas I just remove the filter from my brain and start typing. But if you are used to checking Schneider just every now and then, you may have missed some of the gems she's been putting out there. You should save yourself the trouble and just subscribe to her blog, but ICYMI...

Louisiana's High School Letter Grades

Just when you think you've seen every way to game an evaluation system, LA comes up with yet another data dodge.

The Waltons Set Out To Promote a Choice Ecosystem

Schneider dug up a piece of paperwork in which the Waltons lay out their plan for the next five years of educational reforminess, and it's not pretty. You need to see this.

“Fund for Louisiana’s Future” is a DC Super PAC Devoted to David Vitter

One more tale of how reformy carpetbaggers are trying to buy themselves some influence.

Commentary on Mathematica’s “First Study of Its Kind” of PARCC

Mathematica performed a study on PARCC testing. Schneider pulls that apart to find the real conclusions we can reach.

Finally, from Paul Thomas, a piece that reflects his usual thoughful and nuanced view of a difficult issue.

Resisting Good/Bad Teacher/Police Frame and Confronting Systemic Flaws in Education, Law Enforcement

Return of the Data Overlords

When the President and Arne Duncan took to all manner of media to pretend to stand up against standardized testing (but only, you know, the bad redundant not-so-good standardized testing), the New Testing Plan included some odd language and offers of assistance, and it all struck a chord of recognition for Peggy Robertson, an education activist who blogs at Peg with Pen.

For her, the signs point toward Competency Based Education. CPE has been floating around for a while, a kind of fig leaf for the educational dream of the Data Overlords. She has written pretty compelling and researched pieces about the whole business. Emily Talmage thinks the whole anti-test spin is a trojan horse. I don't think they're over-reacting.

We haven't heard from our data overlords in a while. When Leonie Haimson et al shut down inBloom and its dreams of hoovering up every speck of student data, too many folks heaved a sigh of relief and shrugged their shoulders. "Sure glad we're done with that." Well, we're not, and we never were.

If you doubt me, take a look at "Impacts of the Digital Ocean on Education." It's from Pearson way back in February of 2014, and it is one of many documents out there underlining the unique Pearson vision for students in the world. In fact, the textbooks, the instructional programs, the standardized tests, the huge mountains of profit-- all of those serve a central vision of swimming in the digital ocean. Here's a quote from that paper from Sir Michael Barber, the biggest Pearson Data Overlord of them all:

Once much of teaching and learning becomes digital, data will be available not just from once-a-year tests, but also from the wide-ranging daily activities of individual students. Teachers will be able to see what students can and cannot do, what they have learned and what they have not,which sequences of teaching have worked well and which haven’t - and they will be able to do so in real time. 

Got it? Even Pearson understands that Big Standardized Tests don't really get the job done, that what we really need to do is collect every piece of data from every piece of work that students do. You might argue (as I did) that teachers already do this every single day. But the Data Overlords have two problems with that. 1) Meat widgets like teachers don't record data as purely and beautifully as technology and 2) the data in teachers' heads is not easily accessible to the Data Overlords. They are more than happy to talk about getting rid of tests that will not fit in with the system they have in mind. In fact, testing isn't all that important to them if they can just capture ALL student activity data 24/7.

You can read more of the same in Pearson's eighty-eight page opus about the coming "renaissance in assessment" (or you can plough through the five posts I wrote about it after I read it. You're welcome). Again, here's just one pertinent excerpt:

Through the use of rubrics, which will define performance in terms of a hierarchically ordered set of levels representing increasing quality of responses to specific tasks, and a common set of curriculum identifiers, it will be possible to not only provide immediate feedback to guide learning and teaching but also to build a digital record of achievement that can be interrogated for patterns and used to  generate individualised and pictorial achievement maps or profiles.

Pearson is okay extending this collecting work to all aspects of the child, including "non-cognitive skills," so that the Data Overlords will not only know how good your child is at math, but how good a human being they are as well.

How would all of this work? I had a thought a few years back-- what if Common Core is not standards at all, but just a system of data tags? All the time teachers are spending "aligning" every lesson, every test, and even, in some cases, every item on every worksheet and assessment-- that's so that the results can be tagged and bagged and sorted to create a more easily crunched by the Data Overlords.

Look at this article from 2013, explaining how a symbiotic relationship between Pearson, their buddies/underlings at Knewton, and a school, would work. I can give you the gist of it in one image from the article.

Or check out this video from a Knewton honcho

That video is from 2012, at an event presented by the Department of Education.

The basic ideas here have cropped up in the world of adaptive testing, personalized learning, and anything that involves putting a computer in front of a student. The idea of competency based "badges" for students is out there (and has also been floated for teachers).

After reading pages and pages of this stuff, I think the Dream of the Data Overlords looks something like this:

From early in a child's life (maybe even their fetal days), every interaction between the child and the world is collected and cataloged. By the time the child gets to school, we already know much about her, and she is met by a computerized education program shaped by what we know about her. And every exercise, practice, comment, sentence, comma or sneeze that she completes becomes part of her fully digitized record as well as being instantly used to direct her educational program to suit her. By the time she's twelve or thirteen, we know where she should best be positioned in life, and we can shape her educational program accordingly. By the time she finishes high school (or whatever sort of teen-years education program the software deems most appropriate for her), we know all about her intellectual capabilities and skills in rich detail, as well as a picture of her soft skills (aka her personality and character). This will allow us to perfectly match her with the best vocational/career fit.

Data Overlords believe that if we know everything, we can control everything. Data Overlords are in some ways the scariest of the reformster tribes because they are mostly True Believers who don't ask two critical questions-- 1) is it really possible to do all this and 2) is it a good thing to do. Personally, I go with "no" for both. Data Overlords know that they face some obstacles (if you thought Common Core was federal overreach, Knewton will totally freak you out). But  I'll finish with a Barber quote I frequently trot out, because I think it's his most scary statement.

Barber recognizes that there are systemic, logistic and human obstacles to his grand design of a Data Overlord world. He recognizes that there are so very many details to work out. But--

Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right

At the end of the day, the Data Overlords believe that remaking the world in their own image is not merely a business plan or a great way to make a buck. They believe it is a moral imperative to impose their vision on the rest of the world. And that is scary as hell. 

PA: GOP Walks Away from Funding Crisis

As I've outlined elsewhere, Pennsylvania suffers from long-standing school funding issues. In recent years these have been exacerbated by pension funding issues and policies that allow charter schools to suck the blood right out of public systems. Put it all together, and Pennsylvania has the widest gap between rich and poor schools in the country.

But on top of all that, Pennsylvania is suffering from the flare-up of whatever chronic problem it is that has led to five budget impasses in the past ten years. We are on day one-hundred-and-oh-hell-you-have-GOT-to-be-kidding-me of Life without Budget. And in Pennsylvania, when we don't have a budget, people don't get paid. (Well, most people. In some manner that literally nobody is prepared to explain, the state has spent $27 billion of some money on some thing.)

This is not just a school issue. Right now you can't swing a cat in the commonwealth without whacking it into a service organization or government program that's having trouble meeting payroll and taking care of the citizens it was set up to serve. Senior citizens, the disabled, the unemployed-- all are looking at a patchwork of supports that appears to have been gnawed on by some very angry goat.

But every single school district in the state is getting hit. Back in August the teachers in Chester Uplands* made headlines by offering to work for free, but they were just the canary in this particular coal mine. Districts across the state are looking for ways to beg, borrow, and steal enough money to stay in business. Some have been pretty direct in their commentary-- the Erie School District asked the state to float them an interest-free loan of $47mill to keep the lights on. Districts have felt the need to announce how long they can last on cash reserves (fun fact-- in the last decade the state has passed regulations limiting how much money a district can park in its general reserve fund). Word on the street is that the state will NOT be reimbursing districts for the money they will be spending on the millions and millions of dollars they'll be borrowing to tide them over. Okay, it's actually about half a billion dollars.

In other words, on top of interfering with the stable operation of basic government services, this budgetary cockfight will end up costing taxpayers real money. Because if there's anything that taxpayers want to do, it's finance legislative logjams.

So this week, the legislature took some real action.

They went on vacation.

I'm not kidding.

Even as the State Auditor was holding a press conference about just how awful the budget crisis has become, the legislature was voting along party lines to take their two week vaca. And because our legislature is GOP-controlled, that means that our legislators have headed home to fiddle while the state burns (it also means our Democratic legislators could vote against vacation knowing that it wouldn't change anything except how they looked to the public). Or would burn, if anyone could afford matches and firewood.

Folks are loaded with creative ideas. Let's all refuse to pay taxes for the same number of days the budget is late. Let's cut legislator pay (the second-highest in the country) by a pro-rated daily amount for all the hundred-and-what-the-hell days they don't get their job done.

It is impossible from out here in the cheap seats to tell what is really happening, or not, because what plays out here is various acts of political gamesmanship. The legislature offers a "stopgap" measure which is essentially their original budget ideas for a shorter period of time. The governor vetoes it. All done with fanfare and an eye on the press releases. Pennsylvania residents can be excused for concluding that their elected leadership sucks.

And yes, I get that sometimes when negotiations are going badly, it's good to step back and clear heads. But this billion-dollar crisis is well past that point. Arguing about Titanic deck chairs is a waste of time, and "Let's take a second to clear our heads" is inappropriate when the burning house is collapsing around you.

But if you are a Pennsylvanian and this bugs you, I suggest you let your elected representative know about your displeasure. He should be easy to find. He'll be home for the next two weeks.

*corrected- I originally gave the incorrect district name here