We've had our giant round of reaction to the NAEP test results, and their woeful failure to show American school children being propelled forward into a wonderland of learning by over a decade of reformster policies. I'm not sure there's any reason to get excited about NAEP results at all, but test-loving folks do, and there's really no denying that this round of NAEP results were Just Not Good.
Oh, but what if it turned out that they were actually even worse?
RaShawn Biddle may not be familiar to you; Biddle runs a one-man media empire parked firmly in reformsterland. But his blog Dropout Nation ran some interesting analysis of some NAEP numbers.
To understand what he's about, you need to know that NAEP allows states to opt out up to 15% of their student special population-- typically students with special needs and English Language Learners. But Biddle is a good reformster, and so he believes in the simple two-step proposition:
1) Public schools are failing. We just need to prove it so we can get support for dismantling them.
2) Making students take Big Standardized Tests who can't possible pass them-- that will help with #1.
Biddle likes to talk about "special ed ghettos" and he's a huge supporter of having all the students there fail BS Tests so we can prove that their school districts suck. But he's not wrong when he points out that some states and cities are gaming their NAEP stats by controlling who actually takes the test. Biddle has assembled two Dishonor Rolls.
On the state level, the big loser is Georgia. The Peach State was the worst in the nation in excluding fourth- and
eighth-grade kids in special ed, keeping 25 percent of each group of
students from taking NAEP this year. Although the levels of exclusion
declined by, respectively, six and seven percentage points from levels
two years ago, Georgia has done far less than either Maryland or
Department of Defense to reduce its test-cheating.
Different states use different exclusion approaches to special needs and ELL. Here are the exclusion leaders when it comes to 4th grade special ed
When we look at ELL; Kentucky leaps into the lead:
Meanwhile, the NAEP is working on trial assessments of big urban districts, so Biddle needs a whole other Dishonor Roll for those Big Cheaters on the City Scale (by his count, fourteen of the twenty-three cities cheated).
Washington DC's heralded NAEP improvement? They excluded almost half of their ELL students from the test. Dallas opted out 44% of their fourth grade students with special needs, and 29% of the eighth grade. Philly and Miami-Dade managed to exclude students all across the board-- both groups, both grades. Baltimore, Houston, and Detroit also excluded huge numbers of students, making their NAEP results somewhere between "suspicious" and "invalid."
It's interesting to see so many states and cities doing their best to support the Opt Out movement. Michigan is not really a fan of Opt Out, but I guess Detroit wants to run its own Opt Out program.
And it's also worth noting that we've got one more example here of how putting stakes on BS Tests leads to people looking for ways to game the system-- even people who are the supposed official guardians of correctness and fair play.
But there's another issue here-- what exactly qualifies as "fair" or "not cheating" in this situation? Following the rules is only fair if the rules are fair to begin with, and I can't find anything to suggest that the 15% opt-out allowance is anything but an arbitrary number arrived at as a political compromise between hard-nosed test love (we must test everyone) and inconvenient reality (given students a test far above their abilities is a pointless, punishing exercise).
I'm also going to invoke my made-up 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. And its corollary-- when an assessment is so inauthentic that its demands can't be met by authentic skills, cheating is not only probable, but necessary.
That law is only amplified when the inauthentic assessment is used for no legitimate purpose. Did we need to have all the ELL and SWSN tested so that we could identify the ones who would fail? The states and cities already identified them in order to exempt them, and Biddle's critique of the states and cities assumes they are correct (he's not saying, "Boy, they would have had better results if only they'd let everyone be tested."). We all already know which students can't make this particular grade. Biddle claims to want the benefits of testing for all students. That's silly. There are no benefits to making a student take a test that she, her teachers and her parents all know is beyond her current level of ability and knowledge.
Did we need to be able to identify failing states or cities, or at least stack rank them? Why? What policy goal is aided by that information? We know where the challenged students are, we know where their schools are, and we know what they need (time, resources, and teachers). What else do you think we need to know, and how will making more students fail the NAEP help gather that information?
So what's the beef? The beef is that by cheating, the states and cities avoid being publicly caught failing and suffering the beatdown that reformsters want them to get. The beef is also that by cheating, the states and cities hid the full extent to which reformsters have failed to achieve the gains they promised us we'd see after years of their policies. And the fact that we are all unhappy is a sign of just how large a clusterfarfigneugen the whole business is.
Can we really talking about gaming the system when the system is just a big game?
If you were feeling badly about the poor beleaguered cyber schools that took a drubbing earlier this week (from both a report suggesting they are no more effective than a long nap and the many charter fans who piled on to excoriate them), take heart. Someone did run to their defense. And an alleged journalist paved the road so that the run would be easy.
The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal posted a five minute infomercial for the cybers, featuring Center for Education Reform Senior Fellow and President Emeritus Jeanne Allen. The Center for Education Reform is a full-on advocacy group for the charter school industry, used to float every imaginable argument in support of sweet, chartery goodness. Allen was there to blunt the impact of the study, and the WSJ host was there to help her do it.
"A small study on online charter schools is creating a big controversy," our hostess leads, suggesting that the study was neither large nor important, and suggesting that there is actually some sort of debate over the uselessness of cybers, and not just a whole lot folks from all across the ideological spectrum declaring that cyberschools are a big expensive waste of time.
Then we introduce Allen and lead with a question that is a softball in much the same way that Donald Trump is somewhat self-assured. Referring to the CREDO study, the host asks "Was this study conducted at Stanford or near Stanford--" with a chuckling delivery which suggests that somebody cribbed the study off the back of a cereal box and is just trying to make it sound important by attaching Stanford's name. "What exactly did the researchers study," she asks, in a tone that suggests she's pretty sure they studied newts under a full moon.
And so we are twenty seconds in, Allen hasn't even spoken yet, and we have already clearly conveyed to the audience that the study is some kind of over-inflated joke. That's some pretty awesome journalism, there!
Here comes Allen. She's stern, like she found out that somebody is stealing her kid's lunch money on the bus. She does a five-second history of CREDO and charters "who are helping, oh, about 2.5 million kids today" and that "oh about" is not searching for the answer but using the kind of sarcastic flourish with which readers of this blog are familiar.
But Allen says the report is important because every time somebody does "research" and or a "study" publishes "findings" that are negative (and kudos to Allen who manages to create the oral Airquotes of Mockery as well as anyone I've ever seen) it just scares policymakers and it makes folks confused. But how can we trust CREDO reports on charters to be valid, Allen asks, if they use these "experimental" techniques and data from states that (here Allen makes a pained face, like she hates to tell you, but you husband is kind of dumb and ugly) aren't very reliable.
The host steps in to feed another question about cyber clientele? Rural students? Homeschooled? "Who's taking advantage of" the cybers. I suppose she could mean "taking advantage" as in tricking the cyber schools into going to third base without so much as a promise of a class ring, but it seems clear she means it as in "who is getting the great benefits of these swell schools?" She is smirking and Allen is nodding as if to say, "Yes, just like we did it in practice."
Now Allen strings together a nonsense sentence about how that's a great question because the heart of whether the study is valid is who is using these schools. And, well, no. That's not what "valid" means here. But Allen plows on. Most cyber charter students "have had issues." They wouldn't be there unless they had a problem (and I can hear cyberschool folks saying, "Yeah, thanks, you can stop helping us now"). Some might have been bullied. "Many of them" (and I'm going to be careful to transcribe this because, well) "might be on the road because perhaps their involvement with a different effort." They might have been unsuccessful at academics, or they might have been too successful and turned to cybers for Big Challenges. Anyway, the heart of this, "personalization for our kids." We must kill the one size fits all world of public schools also zoning kids by zip codes and it's like the talking points are so jammed up in her mouth there's no room for the rest of the parts needed to build a sentence. Some of the cyberstudents might only be there a year while they're "getting over some kind of challenge or hump" and the study (she may have found her way back to the point, finally) did not take into account how long they were there, where they come from, how much progress they made over time, which, wait, no-- the CREDO study, which expressed everything in the admittedly bogus measure of "days of learning" was totally focused on how much growth the students showed over time, so she's kind of exactly, oh, you know, wrong.
But this big mean study damns the cybers and suggests they shouldn't be open, and in this we agree. That's certainly what the study suggests. Is she going to suggest some data that would prove the study wrong? Nope.
The host cuts off Allen's impotent sputtering to ask if there are better studies of online schools. You know, studies that prove what you want them to prove. Allen replies "Homina homina homina no." Allen does suggest that parents considering schools of choice look at the data, including the local data and the data the state supplies (she has already forgotten that state data gave her a bad attack of frowny face just two minutes ago). Also, interview teachers and administrators and other parents. Please, oh please, can I watch the process by which a parent tries to get access to a cybercharter teacher.
Allen gets in that of course states and authorizers have a responsibility to make sure charters don't suck, but "all the data out there is confusing" (she is very conflicted about the data, apparently). Education data is very difficult.
And the host cuts her off again to sum up-- "The answer seems to be don't look at this study, but the other studies may not be much better."
As damage control for the CREDO study, it was pretty weak. As an example of how journalists can avoid doing their jobs by letting PR flacks do their jobs unimpeded, it was aces.
Joanne Weiss has been about lately trying to rehabilitate the memory of Race to the Top, trying to blunt the early judgments of history which can be paraphrased as "Race to the Top was a big failure that made a huge mess."
This has prompted some conservative writers to gently suggest that there are some problems with that rearward view of RTTT, well summed up by Andy Smarick (Bellwether) who basically points out that while they feds may have done a swell job, technically speaking, of selling and launching their program, the skipped over the most important question of all-- should they have done it in the first place?
This is a problem that corporatized technocrats ported over from private industry, where management programs like ISO 9001 can focus on how well you've done something, but never look at whether it should be done at all. I've heard management consultants admit that you could get ISO 9001 certification for companies that efficiently accomplished terrible things. You could get certified awesomeness for a company that manufactured and marketed poison breakfast food, or which efficiently abused busloads of elderly folks.
In one article, and then another, Weiss makes her case for how it should have gone, with a fully-formed model for educational excellence flowing down from DC and being properly implemented. Writes Smarick:
In admitting mistakes, Weiss doesn’t cite the program’s size, ambitions,
or federal direction. The problem, in her mind, was “sequencing.” New
standards should have come first, then improved teacher feedback, then
new educator evaluations. The issue wasn’t that RTTT went too far; it
just “didn’t do enough to guide states in how to think it all through.”
In this, Weiss echoes two familiar refrains. The golden oldie is "The program would have been super if not for those darn implementation problems." The new hit most recently appeared as part of the administration's fake course correction, where they took some of the blame-- not for being too intrusive, but for not being intrusive enough. But Smarick continues
In all of the above, the underlying assumption is that the federal
government’s experts had the right answers. There’s no acknowledgement
that our centuries-long tradition of local and state control over
schools might be better equipped to produce solutions, or that “expert”
federal direction on K–12 policy comes with serious, inevitable
downsides.
In an odd piece of serendipity, as I was reading Smarick's piece, I was also reading this piece from Jay Greene (with whom I apparently share no ancestry and only some beliefs about education), which looks at how the same top-down technocratic baloney doesn;t work in the private sector either. Then Greene (not me-- the other Greene) had turned up this old piece of mine on twitter. It is the fourth post I ever put on this blog, and it says, in part I get the appeal of standardization, of lining up all the ducks in one
big efficient row. But there's one thing you must have for Central
Planning For Everyone to work-- you have to have somebody at the center
of things who knows what to do. If you're going to get everyone in line
behind One Right Answer, then somebody has to be able to reliable
provide One Right Answer every time.
That person does not exist. Central Planning fails. It always fails. And
it always fails because it creates a brittle, non-robust system that
wastes energy making people line up behind an answer that is often
wrong, because nobody can be right all the time.
Race to the Top (and No Child Left Behind) rested on two bananas assumptions-- 1) that the feds would always know exactly what should be done across the entire US public ed system and 2) that such plans, policies and ideas could successfully and faithfully be transmitted down through the many levels below that fabled Top.
Central Planning always fails, and Top Down Management always fails (particularly when the people who create your top down system don't even stick around to keep an eye on it). Even if you do those two things very well, wit great technical skill, you will not end up with anything worth having, and you will very likely leave a great deal of human damage in your wake.
I have no illusions that Greene and Smarick and I are entirely on the same side. Many conservatives like the idea of decentralized non-federated education because it ploughs the field for a charter school harvest. But today's adventures in reading were a reminder to me of why it's important to read outside your tribe, and how some aspects of ed reformsterdom are opposed by a truly broad spectrum of reasonable people. (Also, Smarick has me about convinced to get a copy of Seeing Like a State.)
It's unfortunate that Weiss and other neo-libs are trying so hard to push their vision that they can't open their eyes and ears to see where they've messed up big time. Things that come from the Top, whether they are races or policies, are going to be bad news.
New York, you may recall, was Ground Zero for the hugest impact of the Opt Out movement, with around one in five New York students choosing not to take last year's Big Standardized Test. But New York's ed department is ready to fight back, because reasons. And to do that, they have created a handy "toolkit," much like the handy toolkits that the American Tobacco Institute used to provide for informing the public about the benefits of smoking.
It's just an awesome piece of work, and I will hit the highlights now for those of you lacking the time or stomach to see for yourselves. It has many cool features, so this may take a while.
Video Welcome from Your Fearless Leader
NY Commissioner MaryEllen Elia is here-- well, she's somewhere, in front of a curtain, sitting next to a small table holding a magazine and a potted plant. It is quite possibly the laziest staging of anything ever, and I shouldn't care because presentation isn't that big a deal here, except that this is Intro To Test Propaganda, which means that we ought to be aware of what we're doing. Simply shooting it in her office would have been fine. Shooting it while standing in any random setting would have been fine. But this-- somebody clearly thought that it needed some kind of staging, but then all they could come up with was a table and a potted plant, oh, and hey, hand me that catalog over there.
I mean, this whole site is a presentation about making a presentation to win hearts and minds. So either this "set" demonstrates a lack of commitment or a lack of competence, and that is not a good way to set the tone for this enterprise.
So what does she actually say? Last years 20% of students didn't take that awesome BS Tests; her response is to explain to parents and teachers "about the benefits" of high standards and ditto tests. Also, the annual test doesn't tell the entire story, but they do provide a roadmap for teachers and school leaders to focus on so they can improve.
But if students don't take the BS Test, everyone from students up through state policy makers "miss out" on crucial information, because everyone is an idiot incapable of evaluating education without the BS Test. So if you were imagining that this site was going to advocate for a frank, honest and open discussion of testing, so sorry-- we're going to stick with falsehoods and classic talking points. Good to know that going in.
The propaganda kit is broken up into four sections, each customizable and each more awesome than the last.
FOR EDUCATORS
The state of New York can't help noticing that some of you professional educators aren't entirely on board with Testapalooza. So here are some tools.
First, a letter for Superintendents to send their teachers.
Like all materials, this is customizable, kind of in the same way that Mad Libs are customizable. Speaks well of the reformster personalization movement.
The superintendent's letter includes unsupported assertions like this:
As educators, we all have a responsibility to ensure that the greatest possible number of eligible students take the state assessments.
And odd non sequitors like this:
While this has been a period of transition for [DISTRICT], tests have always served an important role in educating our students.
The letter also notes that the BS Tests "provide an objective measure of progress" (no), and "Without widespread participation in tests, we can’t accurately identify achievement gaps or make sure that all students receive the support they need to be successful" (because we don't know how to do our jobs?)
The letter, in short, has no arguments to make that have not been made, repeatedly, before. Perhaps Elia thinks that hearing them for the sixty-gazzillionth time will make the difference, but I have to say that I'm completely unimpressed.
Now Superintendents Tell Teachers What To Tell Parents
This is a handy guide to the lies that educators should tell parents. Tell them that without the test, we have no way of identifying student strengths and weaknesses. Tell them that the new Questar test will be better without admitting that the old one sucked. Say that double the number of NY teachers will be "involved" in developing the new test, but do not let them ask how you can know anything about the new test if it isn't developed yet. Tell them that student rating of 1, 2 or 3 is really loaded with rich nuanced data. If they ask why their child's grades don't match test results, or why student scores went down this year, say "Argle bargle bargle."
FOR PARENTS
Since our primary goal is informing parents enough that they will knock off the opt out stuff. So here are some mad libs aimed directly at them.
Superintendent Letter To Parents
Surprisingly weak. We have this test we give. It's important and tests big deal stuff. No single test blah blah blah. Helps us compare your kid. The test is real fair and made just for New York and actual teachers worked on it (this is a recurring theme-- the department is determined to make this look as teachery as possible without actually letting teacher have any real power). We'll make sure your kid has time to get ready for this. And visit our mind-numbing website to give feedback on every single standard.
Parent FAQ List
There are ten questions, and zero real answers. Why should my kid take the test? Because the feds require it, NY students have always done so, oneofseveralmeasures, and it will measure college and career readiness and thereby guide instruction. So baloney, baloney, partial truth but so what, and baldfaced untruth.
Scores will tell you soooo many things. Like the ELA score can be broken into reading and writing! So granular! You can use the score to have discussions with your child's teacher! The tests are IMPORTANT! Because reasons. And only 1% of school year to take them! Scores will be used to measure school performance, but not to affect your child's promotion (or not). Teachers gave feedback on test questions! Questar is new and improved!
Parent's Guide to Higher Learning Standards
Can you guess which phrase does not appear in this section, or any other section? If you guessed "Core" and also "Common," you win! This portion does however discuss the college and career ready standards adopted in 2010, and puts the same old baloney in a pretty new chart without any evidence that any of these standards are a good idea. Also not included? Evidence that the BS Tests measure any of this stuff.
MEETING MATERIALS
The department suggests that you have a meeting with your parents in which they can be led to see the error of their ways. Start with some discussion, throw in some power point, and end with an altar call.
Sample Flyer
Whether they want to go to college or straight into the workplace, our students need to be able to think critically and solve complex problems.
That is roughly one third of the copy on the entire page. If you actually needed the state's help to design this invitation to "An Evening with Superintendent [NAME]" you should not be responsible for children.
Meeting Format
There's a handy outline for a meeting. Figure an hour, with 45 minutes to present and 15 for questions. The Superintendent should "address key issues" (it's the same stuff we've been hammering) and then a teacher or principal should speak about "his/her experience with the assessments." There's a handy list of questions to be prepared for in the Q&A, which basically match the FAQ list, though you should expect to be asked about how these figure in teacher evals, too.
Again-- the superintendent who needs this level of assistance to plan a meeting with the public should not be employed as a superintendent.
The Power Point
Here's a handy thirty-slide presentation about standards and testing. Well, actually, five of the slides are about testing. The rest are the same tired unsupported arguments for the standards. These include the same bogus claims (they will measure critical thinking!) and the same curiously repeated talking points (twice as many NY teachers will help develop them-- why is this not presented as a number? unless, of course, the number is really small, but hey, two is twice as many as one).
But you will be happy to know that the new testing whizz-bangery is "moving toward" the following;
Shorter, more effective tests
Reducing the need for stand-alone field tests
Releasing more test questions
Releasing results before the end of the school year
So they are definitely planning to move in the direction of almost doing what they actually should do. This month, try telling your landlord that you are moving toward writing a check for a portion of your rent money.
Talking Points for District
Here's a handy list of sales points for the BS Testing! And what fine points they are. "All students must be prepared for success in college and careers." Which is a true thing! And nobody in the world disagrees with it. So I am trying to imagine the moment when a superintendent tells a parent, "You know, Mr. Wallflanger, all students need to be ready to succeed in college and/or careers," and Mr. Wallflanger says, "Why, you know, I never thought about it that way, but I guess you're right. My son does need to succeed in college or a career. I guess I want him to take that big test after all! Thanks for setting me straight."
I mean, what movie is playing in the heads of the people who write this stuff? Have they told themselves these talking point so many times that they have come to believe they're compelling or convincing?
But here are all the usuals. Rigorous standards. Oneofseveralindicators. Objective coparison of students across state (because parents really want that). Very little time spent on testing (don't believe your eyes-- believe what we tell you). [INSERT BRIGHT SPOT IN STUDENT DATA THAT IS SPECIFIC TO DISTRICT]. Commissioner Elia is committed to making tests better and shorter.
Also-- and I am not making this up-- in the midst of all this test cheerleading, we find "Teachers are the experts about what is happening in their classrooms and are an invaluable resource for parents. Parents are encouraged to reach out to their child's teacher with any questions they have about their child's test results or academic progress." Mind you, we at the state department will not be reaching out to them because we're pretty sure they don't know what the hell they're doing-- that's why we've created a system to root out the many, many terrible ones that we're certain exist. Also, you can ask them about test results, but since they aren't allowed to see the questions your child answered or the answers your child gave, don't expect them to have any idea what might have caused your child to earn her vague and non-granular "2."
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT
Yup. The NY Ed Department heard that people are out there a-twittering away and posting stuff on that Book of Face, so they have included some handy materials that you can use to whip up the interwebs with your social mediums.
They offer some handy tips (most adults are more likely to engage via Facebook; twitter is more effective before 8:15 AM or between 5-10 at night). And a whole list of sample tweets that sound exactly like the kind of tweets that a state department of anything would write (Learn how assessment results provide important info for educators: https://vimeo.com/141088948). There are even some sample Facebook posts that also manage to replicate the writing style of a low-grade marketing bot.
It's just silly. Peter Cunningham, a seasoned PR professional, took $12 milion to establish Education Post and hasn't made a dent. Campbell Brown's $4 million site sits languishing in irrelevance. Jeb Bush once launched four real teachers on a twit-quest to gin up Common Core support, and it ended with neither a bang nor a whimper.
The evidence is strong that a handful of generic social media posts will not stem the tide of Opt Out.
In Fact
If I were among the parents of the New York Opt Out movement, I'd be insulted that this was all the effort the state was going to make to win me over.
This is just a bland casserole of reheated rhetoric that every opt out parent has already heard a hundred times, with a thin crushed topping of weirdly repeated talking points (New York really really REALLY wants you to know that double the teachers are going to be developing the new tests).
This package of propaganda indicates that either the New York ed department still doesn't understand what the big fuss is about, or they just don't care whether opt out picks up steam or not. I suppose there's an alternative view in which Elia is an evil genius who is seeking to soothe the federal test-meisters while subtly goading the opt out movement to beat the previous years record of refusals. But that seems unlikely. I'm leaning towards the clueless option, that the state really doesn't get that parents really do understand what's going on, and that their rejection of the test is an informed, deliberate, angry decision.
In her video intro, Elia says that in her 45-year history in education, she's found that the more parents understand about the test, the more they comply. I'd respectfully suggest that her 45 years of experience don't offer insights into what's been going on in New York since the new BS Tests landed in 2013. She needs to re-examine her assumption that parents just don't understand. I think New York opt out parents understand pretty well; it's the state education department that just doesn't get it.
It has become its own internet genre-- the "why I am quitting" teacher letter. It is apparently on the rise again, because lately lots of folks have been forwarding examples to me. And I don't want to seem unsympathetic-- it has to suck to feel so backed into the corner that quitting looks like your best option. But still, I long to read something different. Something feistier. Something more like this:
Dear Board of Education:
Just wanted you to know that I am not going any damn where.
Yes, a lot of people have worked hard to turn my job into something I barely recognize, and yes, I am on the butt end of a whole lot of terrible education policy, and yes, I am regularly instructed to commit educational malpractice in my classroom.
But here's the thing-- you don't pay me nearly enough for me to do my job badly, on purpose.
I'm not going to make children miserable on purpose. I'm not going to waste valuable education time on purpose. I'm not going to teach them that reading is a miserable activity with no purpose other than to prepare for testing. I'm not going to tell them that these big stupid tests, or any other tests, or grades, even, are an important measure of how "good" they are or how much right they have to feel proud or happy or justified in taking up space on this planet. I'm not going to tell them any of that.
Most of these new education reform policies are wrong. They're bad pedagogy, bad instruction, bad for students, bad for education, and we all know it. I am not going to spend another day in my room pretending that I don't know it.
Am I God's gift to teaching, so awesome that I never need to listen to anybody about anything? Not at all. It's a big, wide, complicated world, and I'll listen to anybody who thinks they have something to share about how children can be educated.
But here's the thing. I am a teacher. I am an education professional. I trained to do this job, and I have never stopped training and learning since I started on this path. This is my world. This is the work that I committed myself to. I live here, and that means I know more about this work than the edu-tourists just passing through.
And the work I am committed to is the education of young students, the work of having them become their best selves, of finding their best way to be in the world as they choose to be. I am not committed to a year of narrow test prep and a tiny, cramped definition of success. I am not committed to a view of compliance as the highest human virtue.I am not committed to the work of trying to force them into some box that the corporate world has built for them. My first allegiance, my first obligation is to my students-- not the board, not state education bureaucrats, not policy makers, not test manufacturers, not to people who think they need to know what's going on in the school but can't be bothered to get their butts here to use their own five senses to find out. I have no obligation to those who want to profit from my work, and I have no obligation to people who want to use my classroom to further their own political or financial agenda.
So I will stay here, and I will do what I consider-- in my professional opinion-- is best for my students and my community. When I am told to implement a bad policy, I will circumvent it by any means at my disposal. I will disregard directives to commit malpractice. I will question, I will challenge, and I will push back. I will speak at every board meeting. I will talk to every parent.
If you find this not-very-team-playery of me, you can direct me to follow orders in writing, and if I choose to follow those orders, my students and their parents will understand why I am doing it.
The best bet is that in ten years, I will still be here doing the work I'm committed to doing, and meanwhile, the corporate reformsters and the edu-crats at the capital and most of my building administrators and you, board members, whether you were elected or appointed-- all of those folks will have moved on, and I will still be here. Because-- and let me be absolutely clear-- I am serious about this work. This is not a stepping stone or a resume builder for me. I am in it for life.
Or if you like a sporty metaphor, try it this way-- this is my house. And you do not stroll into my house and disrespect me and the work I do.
Quitting?? Hell no. If you want me out of here, you will have to fire my ass, and I will make it just as public and loud as I can, so that you have to step out in front of the community and explain why you're doing it. Hell, we may all end up in court, going on the record about the crap you tried to force me to do to these children.
I mean, if I'm at the point of contemplating whether or not to quit, why not make my departure cost you a little something?
I came to teaching to work. I came to make a difference in children's lives. I came to raise up whatever students were set before me and help them become the people they were meant to be. And I came to stay. You'll have to decide how you want to deal with that. But I came to stay and teach.
Yes, I know. Not everyone is in the position to be this feisty and confrontational, and not every situation lends itself to this approach (and some fortunate few don't need it). I'm not advocating this for every single teacher up against it. And yes-- lots of teachers have adopted this "stay and fight" stance-- they just haven't written a letter announcing it.
As I said, I am not unsympathetic to those who quit. You can only take as much as you can take. But still, it would be fun if somebody, some day, forwarded me a good, feisty "Bite me-- I'm staying" letter.
His thesis is pretty simple-- strivers suffer from being trapped in classrooms that are disrupted by non-strivey students, so if we could screen for strivers and get them into a safe, striver-friendly school, rescuing them from chaotic public schools where disruptive students are, for a variety of both good and bad reasons, allowed to suck up the disruptive lion's share of time and attention.
As I said just a few days ago, when Petrilli was defending Eva Moskowitz's push-out policy, his point is not completely without merit. Every teacher on the planet has had That Student, without whom their class runs so much more smoothly. And every teacher understands the impact of the group-mind in a classroom in terms of atmosphere and what can be accomplished. And every teacher who's been working for more than ten years has seen the impact of policies that have aggressively pushed for all students, regardless of skill or inclination, back into the regular classroom.
However, I have some huge problems with Petrilli's narrative.
The Myth of the Climb to the Middle Class
In his very first paragraph, Petrilli provides a definition of a striver: Low-income strivers -- impoverished families who follow the rules and
work hard to climb the ladder to the middle class -- may be the most
underserved population in America today.
It's a nice picture, but are we still claiming that if you just work hard and follow the rules you'll become successful. Because that sounds wrong several ways.
First, exactly what rules does one follow to get to the middle class? Be born to middle class parents? Because there's research that suggests that poor kids who do everything right still don't do any better than rich kids who do everything wrong. And yes, I know there are individuals who can trot out their stories of bootstrapping their way to the middle-- but they are now grown men and women who did that a decade or three ago and that's not the world that our students live in right now.
Second, the notion that a Good Student is one who 1) works hard and 2) is compliant is not an appealing one. I don't need compliant students. I need students who have some drive and initiative and are occasionally obnoxious because they are excited about stuff. Just in general, I see a real contradiction between striving and complying. The narrative that seems much more familiar to me is that if the person who has the nerve to take risks and the safety to take them without losing everything.
Disruption Is Not a Permanent Condition
Petrilli talks about disruptive students as if disruptor status is permanently and unwaveringly a thing. The student who is a gigantic, disruptive pain in the butt on Monday may be the shining light on Wednesday. Being a disruptive student is not like being left-handed. For that matter, the student who is absolute disaster in your class may be my top student.
This is betterocracy at work, the notion that some people are just better than others, and that's just how it is, and the purpose of public institutions like school is to sort out the Betters from the Lessers, allowing the Betters to rise and the Lessers to stay in place, as if every persons level of Betterness is fixed and static, wired into their dna.
Disruptosity is not an absolute, static condition. Worse, talking about "disruptive students" is like talking about "bad kids"-- it locks a child into some sort of permanent state that colors all our interactions with him, instead of recognizing that we're seeing a particular behavior on a particular day, but that behavior is not who the child is.Because...
Disruptive Students Disrupt for a Reason
If a student is wreaking havoc in my classroom, that tells me that something is going on with that person. That doesn't mean I abandon all my other students so that we can try to sit down, hold hands, and sing kumbaya. But it does mean that I have a professional and ethical obligation to see if I can find out what's up. Petrilli's model is that I lock the disruptive kid in the room by himself and take the rest of my class somewhere else-- forever.
I may need to find a way to shut my disruptor down now so I can do my job for the rest of my students. But part of my job is to find out what is going on with the disruptor, because there's a long list of reasons that a student might act out, and all of those reasons are important to know, particular as a representative of the school that is quite possibly the only place where the child encounters caring, professional adults.
Disruptive Students Can Be High Achieving Students
Like much of his talk on this subject, his call for universal screening to look for gifted students in elementary school seems to assume that academic aptitude goes hand in hand with striverliness, while not going along with disruptorosity. That is kind of hilarious. Because nobody knows how to spread chaos, disorder, and disruption like a really smart student. Particularly a really smart student who finds himself up against a school that wants him to show how compliant he is.
Rule-following compliance is, once again, not synonymous or even always concurrent with high levels of ability. Moskowitz Is Still Wrong
You can see where Petrilli is headed. Strivers have lost patience with public schools that are in chaos because of Those Students, the Disruptors. Frustrated that the traditional public schools aren’t willing to
prioritize their children’s needs, many low-income strivers have turned
to high-quality charter schools instead. But now those are under attack,
too. In recent weeks, the "PBS Newshour" and "New York Times" had
highly critical coverage of Success Academies, charter schools in New
York City that have shown excellent results in improving student
performance. The reports focused on the academies' suspending students
aggressively and removing those who are chronic disrupters.
First, these "high-quality charters" (and you can keep calling them "high-quality" or "super-dee-duper" or "able to spin straw into plutonium" as much as you want, but that doesn't make it so) aren't under attack. They're just finally being looked at openly, instead of getting to hide behind their own carefully controlled PR spin.
Second, they have not raised student achievement. They have raised student test scores. We've had this discussion before, so I'll skip to the end which is that raising test scores is easy if you stop worrying about every other aspect of a child's development and education.
Third, they are not removing chronic disruptors. They're creating problem children, and the problem is that the children will not comply quickly, quietly and obediently. I haven't seen anybody put it better than Pedro Noguera in his account of a trip to John King's No Excusey charter:
Are you preparing these kids to be leaders or followers? Because
leaders get to talk in the hall. They get to talk over lunch, they get
to go to the bathroom, and people can trust them. They don't need
surveillance and police officers in the bathroom.
I'll Give Petrilli This
Petrilli calls for safe schools, and I have nothing to quibble with there. And he does acknowledge that the disruptors are entitled to some sort of education, somehow. Just not at the expense of the strivers.
Which leads me to this... A Proposal
It's probably fair to say that there are some students so troubled and challenged that a traditional school setting just doesn't work for them, and they become chronic disruptors. But that's a small percentage. And since they are a small percentage of the school population and charters only have capacity for a small percentage of the school population and charter operators claim to know the secrets of making all students from all backgrounds successful, why don't we do this-- let the charters have the disruptors.
The strivers will be left in disruption-free public schools, safe and freed from Those People who interfere with their education. The disruptors will be set straight by the edu-wizards of the charter world. It's perfect.
Well, unless this was all just an elaborate argument to justify charter refusal to teach difficult students, with "difficult' broadly defined as "any students who won't do as they're told." But if the whole secret of charter success is "make sure you only teach smart, compliant students who understand and follow instructions," then the charter secret is no secret at all.
But compliance and rule-following are not particularly admirable qualities, nor are they generally top qualities of top students. It's not that I want a room full of disruptive misbehaving students, but if we start with the assumption that the best students are students who do as they're told, we don't end up anywhere good. Not good for us, not good for the students, not good for society. And really, though I doubt that Petrilli meant to go there, weirdly reminiscent of comments like "If that girl has just done as she was told, the cop wouldn't have ripped her out of her seat" or "If Freddy Gray had just followed orders, he'd still be alive."
Blind obedience is not a virtue, and disruption is not always a flaw. I'm all for getting problem students what they need in a manner that allows education to continue for everybody-- I mean, I'm really all for it as in that's what I try to do every day of my career. But Petrelli isn't just barking up the wrong tree or approaching this the wrong way-- he's trying to find the cow that will give the best milk by looking for the greenest cherries on the bush next to the barn. He's trying to warm the house by setting the couch afire with a flamethrower. I think there's something fundamentally flawed with his model of how education and humans work. In short, he's just wrong.
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.
