Let's Play Teacher

No other profession sees anything quite like it.

Sure, we occasionally see stories about a guy who declares himself a doctor and sets up a practice with no real qualifications. Or a person who just opens a law office without benefit of a legal degree. Or a person who finds ordination documents on line and declares himself a preacher.

We have names for these people. Charlatan. Faker. Con artist. And they generally keep a low profile because everyone understands that such behavior is wrong.

But not in education.

Consider, for instance, the Relay Graduate School of Education. Back in 2007, three charter school operators decided they needed a better pipeline for staffing, a wider pool of teachers to chose from. So they figured out a way to "make" their own "teachers." Hunter College (CUNY) agreed to partner with them, they decided what they thought teachers should know, and they proceeded to crank out "teachers." Who did they work with? Who would sign up for teacher training pioneered by amateurs with no real background in public education. Here's a sentence from a glowing 2012 tribute to Relay on Education Next:

Its students are full-time elementary- and middle-school teachers, almost all of them fresh out of college, almost none of them with a traditional teaching degree.

In effect, Relay filled a special market niche of Teach for America workers who, once in the classroom, realized that their virtually-none training was not sufficient to help them do the work of teaching with real live students.

But Relay served another market as well-- the market for Content Delivery Specialists who would implement the reformster model of teacher-proof classrooms, where "teaching" would consist of simple clerical tasks that any trained CDS could perform. Scripted lessons. Large chunks of video-fed content. And all of it built around the Common Core, the biggest Amateur's Guide To Education ever foisted on the country.

It was a simple model. Fresh-out-of-school rookie "teachers" would teach other fresh-out-of-school amateurs how to teach the reformster way, and give them actual degrees to certify them as teachers. And Mayme Hostetter came out of Harvard's Reformy Education Grad school in 2001, put in a few years in a KIPP charter classroom, and is now called the "dean." There is no research done at this "graduate school," no scholars teaching, and no apparent course of study beyond  learning how to implement scripted lessons, align with the CCSS, and get test scores raised.

Relay also positions itself on the cutting edge of teacher program evaluation, declaring that the swellness of their "teachers" will be measure by how well those Content Delivery Specialists manage to get grades up (a feat made somewhat simpler by placing their "graduates" and "fellows" in charter schools where low performing students are always encouraged to head curb-ward). Relay is now expressing interest in moving into actual public schools; we'll see how their system holds up then.

It is, in fact, one of those aspects of reformsterism that we could call a reverse illusion-- a thing that is so unbelievable when you look at it that you assume that surely there's something you're just not seeing correctly.

But no. A bunch of education field amateurs with no teaching career experience got together, made a list of things they think teachers ought to be doing (based on the work of other non-professional amateurs) and opened a school, where they award teaching degrees based on their own unsupported ideas. It is as if I opened a school in my garage to teach people to be surgeons, based on my ideas about what surgery ought to be like, and then gave them certificates "proving" they're all surgeons.

How does this happen? Three reasons.

First-- the reformster network has spread like kudzu, and with it, the cult of the well-meaning amateur. But in addition to Relay GSE, we have Teach for America and its program of "Anybody who is pure of heart can be a teacher and rescue our children from poverty." And in addition to that, we have Broad "You're a superintendent because you say so" Academy. And all of them are members of the "Traditional Teachers Don't Really Know What They're Doing, But We Can Reshape Education Into Something Beautiful" Club, and when gets a foothold, she looks for other members of the club to some transform education. TFA in particular has been hugely effective in creating "education leaders" out of temporary stints in the classroom, opening the gates all across the country for club members. There are enough of these folks out there at this point to create entire shadow education systems, and they're working on the chance to step in and replace the traditional public system (and dreaming of post-Katrina New Orleans as their perfect storm).

In other words, it would be hard to get one of my garage-certified surgeons hired in a hospital-- unless I could somehow get one of my garage-certified surgeons in charge of hiring, or surgery, or on the board. It would be a tough protective shell to crack-- but just one crack is all I would need. The reformster movement has a thousand cracks all over the nation, ready to hire unqualified amateurs and never bat an eye.

Second-- we do not know how to simply and clearly measure educational success. Myself, I'm pretty sure it can't be done. That's a problem because of the First Law of Snake Oil Marketing: when there is no simple answer to a problem, that always creates the opportunity for someone to sell a fake simple answer. There is no simple cure for cancer, so there will always be a market for fake cancer cures. Ditto for weight loss. Ditto for mass shooters in schools. People really want simple answers to complex questions. Quality education, and measuring quality education-- those are very complex issues, and they cannot be solved with simple solutions, which means there is a big market for fake simple solutions. Give students a test and use the results to measure everything so that we can fix everything is a neat, simple, sweet, absolutely bullshit solution to the problem-- but it sells better than snake oil in a leper colony.

When my garage-trained surgeon starts to kill all his patients, folks will catch on to his lack of qualifications. But reformsters can plug no excuses and teaching only a few select students and a cramped tiny view of what an education even is by just waving test scores around. They don't even have to sell the snake oil to the students and parents-- just to the policy makers and philanthropists.

In other words, because there are no simple, clear measures in education, it's not as easy to see that the reformsters have not achieved success in any of their reformy ideas-- and it's easier for them to distract the customers from their widespread failure.

Third-- well, yes. Somewhere many paragraphs ago any reformsters still reading concluded that I'm just one more hide-bound dinosaur standing up for the teacher-training status quo for no good reason. But I am no fan of teacher education as handled by some schools.

So I get angry at both sides of this. I get angry at the people who waltz into the education arena with their made-up credentials and their amateur-hour ideas about how to "fix" education. But I also get angry with some colleges and universities that left the arena door wide open for anyone to waltz through. There are two important differences, however, between the pretend teacher programs and traditional ed programs-- the people who enter teacher education programs mostly actually intend to have a teaching career, and the people running these programs mostly know what they should be doing, even if they aren't. The folks at RelayGSE and TFA may very well be doing the best they know how-- it's just not very good, and it's not designed to create lifelong career educators.

These folks want to play teacher without understanding what it actually means. Being a teacher does not mean delivering a script, it does not mean focusing on BS Tests as a measure of success, it does not mean sensing the weakest "teachers" into the neediest classrooms, and it does not mean aligning slavishly to a set of mediocre amateur-hour national standards.

Relay wants to expand, which isn't good news for anybody, except maybe charter operators who want easily managed, compliant, low-cost, easily replaced Content Delivery Specialists. Their proposed move into public schools is also Not Good News, particularly if they bring with them their pre-broken measure-by-student-test-results model.

Here are two arguments I don't want to have in response to this piece. I don't want to argue about whether the Relays and the TFAs and even the Broadies are fine people with good intentions, nor did I write anything here with the intent to attack their intentions, their brains, or their character. But if my mom is on the operating table, I want a dedicated professional and not a well-intentioned amateur.

Second, I don't want to have an argument about the problems we have in public education. I have not and will not assert that the current version of the system is working perfectly, nor will I claim that we have no problems to solve. But the severity of the problem is not a reason to leap forward with a non-solution that will not help anyone. "We have to do something" does not mean "We have to let clueless amateurs have their way." If anything, it means the opposite-- that the severity of the issues and the lack of slack means we need to choose our path carefully and thoughtfully.

If my mom is really sick, that is so not the time for me to let you play doctor. And now is not the time to let these folks play teacher.


 

ICYMI: This Week's Sunday Reading

Here's some reading for your Sunday afternoon.

Jazzman-Melhorn Dialogue 

If you have not been following this discussion, here's your chance to catch up before the final round wraps up. Dmitri Melhorn made the offer to take some, um, spirited conversations off of twitter and into a greater-than-140 medium. One result has been this rigorous and data-packed discussion with Jersey Jazzman about charters. It's ballsy (in a good way) of Melhorn to guest-write for a blog that is not his home turf, and the whole exchange is a great example of how folks in the ed debates can argue humanely but without giving up an inch. Read them all:

Part I: Melhorn opens up

Part II: JJ looks at the alleged positive effects of charters. With data! And in English!

Part III: Do charters have positive effect, and who should carry the burden of proof?

Part IV: The burden of proof, and how to read the data.

Part V is up and features some pointed questions. Read up and be ready for the finale.


The Frightening Implications of School Choice

Julie Vassilatos gets to one of the most troubling parts of the charter school movement.

The Brave New World of Teacher Evaluation

An icky new piece of tech just came out of Utah. Right now it's being sold as a training tech for teachers, but how long before it's part of evaluation. 

Charter Schools Shrink Bostonm's Vision for Public Education

Over at the Progressive, Jennifer (Edushyster) Berkshire looks at how the rise of charters leads to a failure of the Pledge of Allegiance test for schools.

Paul Thomas on Writing

One of my favorite bloggers is Paul Thomas, and my favorite subject of his is writing (okay, second favorite, right behind comics). Reading Thomas always makes me feel as if I've gotten just a little smarter just by looking at his words, and his ideas about writing instruction really resonate with me. Here are some of my favorites:

Who Can, Who Should Teach Writing?

Oh, yeah. Hard to talk about this in some buildings, but the answer to both questions is, "Not just anybody."

Technology Fails Plagiarism, Citation Tests

The pitfalls of technological tools in writing

O, Genre, What Art Thou?

Oh, come on. You know you want to read it just for the title alone.

Writing, Unteachable or Mistaught?

I'll leave you with this one, which I think needs to be taken out and passed around every few months or so. 

TN: A Broadie Amateur Takes Over ASD

Imagine a hospital where the very toughest cases, the most inoperable cancers, the most stubborn infections, the most complicated reconstructive surgeries, and the most challenging diagnoses-- those are all handed over to someone who works in the personnel office and who has no medical training at all.

Now imagine that you're the state of Tennessee. You've come up with a system for identifying your most challenging and troubled schools, the schools that require the ablest educational leadership, the deepest understanding of how to make student learning happen under the most challenging of circumstances. The last person you put in charge set audacious goals for himself-- and he failed. Then he quit. On his way out the door, he said, "Hey, this turns out to be a lot harder than we thought."

And so the state of Tennessee called upon-- Malika Anderson.

Anderson has Tennessee roots, and a family background in civil rights work, from grandfather Kelly Smith (a Tennessee civil rights heavyweight with a bridge named after him in Nashville) and an aunt who was one of the first black students to integrate Nashville public schools. So when she writes, "Creating great neighborhood schools here is personal for me," we should take her seriously.

But does Malika Anderson have the qualifications to lead Tennessee's Achievement School District?

Her LinkedIn account seems to have been abandoned six years ago. But after graduating from Spelman College in 1997, she spent two years as a senior business analyst at A T Kearney, four years as a manager of corporate planning and projects at Crystal Stairs, one year as VP of Business Strategy and Development at the National Health Foundation, two years as an owner-partner of mobileSPA, a management consulting firm in Atlanta. After that, she started 2007 as VP at WrightWay consulting.

Anderson lists as her specialties, "Strategic planning, data analysis and reporting, organizational assessment, board development, program and project management, and the development of human resources management systems." Her profile also includes a warm recommendation of her human resource services.

So after a decade, no work with or expressed interest in, education.

But in 2009 she landed the job of director of “school turnaround” for the District of Columbia Public Schools as part of the team under Chancellor She Who Will Not Be Named. And by 2012, she was in Tennessee, working as the chief portfolio officer of the ASD to farm out "failing" schools to charter operators.

So how did someone with no background in anything but management consulting and human resources end up on track to become an administrator of a major school system?

What else but the Broad Academy. Anderson is part of the 2009-2011 "residency class."

The Broad Academy is a testament to just what one can accomplish with giant brass cojones. Los Angeles Gazillionaire Eli Board decided that schools did not have an education problem, but a management problem, and so he would set up his own superintendent school, certified by nobody but Eli Broad to provide up-and-coming corporate managers with superintendent certification, also accredited by nobody but Eli Broad. It is like Teach for America, but worse. It is literally as if I set up a "school" in the shed in my backyard and declared that I was training "superintendents" and started issuing certificates. The only difference is that I am not rich and powerful and well-connected.

The Broad Academy has many distinguished alumni, like John Deasy, Chris Cerf and-- well, look!-- Chris Barbic, the former boss who plugged Anderson to be his replacement at ASD.

Broad most infamously wrote the book on how to break and dismantle a public school. And they are pretty resolute in their beliefs that A) schools should be run like businesses and B) trained education professionals don't have a clue about how to run schools properly.

Of course, it's arguable that the Achievement School District doesn't need to be run by educators because it is nothing more than a broker, a government office charged with busting up public schools and handing them over to charter operators. "Take over" and "turn around" seem to mean "farm out in general privatization move." The ASD has experienced some mission shift. For instance, their page with their mission statement used to say this:

The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the to 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students' life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.

Now that pages says this:

Error 404 not Found

I did find a mission statement on a power point slide. It now says this:

Through mutually enriching relationships with the communities we serve, we will build joyful, college-preparatory neighborhood schools that empower students to know their full possibility, to understand the path to pursue it, and to have the academic and social skills to realize it.

Anderson's letter to the public reflects the new, vaguely-focused ASD. 

Going forward, we will continue to hold ourselves and our school operators accountable to the highest levels of student achievement and growth. We will continue to go where need is concentrated, ensuring every Priority School in Tennessee is improving because we believe that families and students in these schools deserve nothing but the best. And we will continue to ensure that the power in our district is placed in the hands of local parents, educators and leaders in the neighborhoods and communities we serve because they are the ones who best know how to serve our students. We will do so with even greater transparency and deeper levels of partnership than during the ASD’s initial years. 

Anderson faces a variety of problems, not the least of which is that finding buyers for the Tennessee Failed School Yard Sale is getting harder (fun fact-- now that Race to the Top money is gone, charters have to pay the ASD central office an administrative fee).

Meanwhile, ASD's definition of "failing school" as "any school in the bottom 5% of Big Standardized Tests scores soaked in VAM sauce" guarantees that there will always be failing schools in Tennessee, and while it may have seemed to reformsters as if they were planting a money tree, I wonder if they aren't starting to see that they sorcerer's apprenticed themselves into a corner. They're like the kid who enjoyed some popularity because he threatened to kick that big guy's ass after school, but now it's after school and the big guy has shown up with ten of his friends.

Tennessee has suffered for a while from the effects of a school system run by amateurs, starting back with state ed honcho Kevin "All I Know Is What I Learned in TFA" Huffman. These folks may very well have been and continue to be well-intentioned amateurs, but they don't understand how schools work, they don't understand why VAM doesn't work, they don't understand the uses and abuses of standardized testing, and they don't understand how to make troubled schools better. They get as far as "every child of every race and background deserves a good education" and then everything that comes after that, they get wrong.

The continued existence of the failed Achievement School District and the appointment of Malika Anderson to its unnecessary head position is just one more sign that Tennessee's leaders have not wised up yet. The guy from human resources who comes in to operate on my mother's heart may have the best intentions in the world-- but I want somebody with real training, real experience, real expertise, and real knowledge of what needs to be done, and not someone who will do massive destruction because they don't know what the hell they're doing.

Social Impact Bonds for Dummies

We've been hearing about Social Impact Bonds, or "Pay for Success" programs for a few years now, but only recently have they entered the world of public education. Chicago, for example, launched one $17 million program last year for Pre-K, and last month Utah's United Way was happy to announce that Goldman-Sachs' Pay for Success program in Utah had yielded dividends.

The spread of Social Impact Bonds to the education sector raises all sorts of questions like "How are the fiduciary interests of a private investment firm balanced against social demands of education" or "What overseeing groups can best evaluate programs with a balanced view toward all involved interests."

Or, "What the hell is a social impact bond?"

On the ground, it looks kind of ridiculous, like a program that pays a Wall Street firm a bonus every time a kid is taken off of special ed rolls.

But how does that even work? How does the Wall Street firm get paid? With what money? How do you make money on an investment in something that creates no profit?

An Oversimplified Example

Here's the basic structure of a Social Impact Bond. Note: I am not an economist, banker, or investment counselor, nor do I play one on TV, so I may cut a few corners here.

My house is drafty. My windows leak and my heating bill is $10,000 a year.

My landlord goes to the bank. She says, "Banker, I would like a bond of $4,000 for new storm windows. I think they would reduce my annual heating bill by $3,000."

And the investor issues a bond for the program costs, in return for which he gets a healthy cut of the $3K saved by installing the new windows. My landlord's savings from the successful Stop Freezing My Butt Off Social Program become the bond holder's profit-- but only if our goals are met.

Typically a third party will come in to judge the result, making sure that I didn't just turn the thermostat down or it wasn't just a warm winter or my landlord didn't actually save $6K and hide it from the bondholder. Also, it's worth noting that bonds generally come with negotiated maturity dates, at which point the original loan amount is to be paid back. And remember kids-- bond holders are different from investors. An investor owns part of the company, but a bondholder is just a fancy debtor, and as such has legal priority for being paid back.

In this example, the government is, more or less, my landlord. For a more thorough explanation, we can look here. Here's the shortened version of their explanation:

In the classic... social impact bond, a government agency sets a specific, measurable social outcome they want to see achieved within a well-defined population over a period of time. ...The government then contracts with an external organization—sometimes called an intermediary—that is in charge of achieving that outcome. ... The intermediary hires and manages service providers who perform the interventions intended to achieve the desired outcome. Because the government does not pay until and unless the outcome is achieved, the intermediary raises money from outside investors. These investors will be repaid and receive a return on their investment for taking on the performance risk of the interventions if and only if the outcome is achieved.

Okay, Watch Carefully Now

From New York Times coverage of a SIB program that failed. “Social Impact Bonds offer a strikingly different way to pay for social programs. Governments, rather than tapping taxpayers, can turn to outside investors and philanthropists for funds, and reward them only for programs that work." If the program fails, the taxpayers are off the hook. If it succeeds, the bond holders are paid off with what would have been taxpayer savings of taxpayer dollars.

But the finances get muddier because in the couple of years we've been trying this, we've learned a useful insight:

“The tool of ‘pay for success’ is much better suited to expanding an existing program,” Andrea Phillips, vice president of Goldman’s urban investment group, said in an interview on Wednesday. “That is something we’ve already learned through this.”

But issuing bonds for existing programs means we'll have public and private money swimming in the same pool.

So Is This a Good Thing for Education, or Not?

There's huge cheating potential here, on both sides. The school system could pocket the SIB money and declare, "Damn, but the goal wasn't met. Guess we'll just keep your pile of cash and you get nothing." On the other hand, when a metric is as simple as moving students off the special education rolls, it's really easy to fake the results if you are so inclined. If that happens, all the money that used to be your special ed budget is now funneled straight to Goldman Sachs or whoever is holding the bond, and this whole set-up becomes one more way to turn public tax dollars into private corporate profit.

It all comes down to the third-party evaluator. That's the entity that is supposed to keep the whole game honest and determine whether the goals of the SIB-funded program have been met-- they will determine who gets a payday.

So all that's needed to keep this system honest, fair, and above-board is an entity that has the expertise to judge the program achievement but which has no interests in either side of the transaction. An independent overseer. You know, kind of like the SEC or the firms that were responsible for making sure that big Wall Street firms weren't peddling junk investments ten years ago.

It is, of course, up to government to make sure that such above-board groups are in place. So as Chicago runs forward with its SIB program, I'm sure that Rahm Emanuel will select third-party evaluators who have no ties to or interests in the investors who laid out the money in hopes of big fat tax-funded returns on their money.

You Begin To See the Problem

This is a hugely easy system to game, in part because the whole business is byzantine and twisty that by the time you get to discussion of the proper disinterested expertise of the overseers of the metrics for judging the success of the blah blah blah and now the general public thinks you sound like the grownups in a Peanuts cartoon.

That's not my only problem with this approach.

This is the kind of system that favors easily-measured results, so investments are liable to steered toward the program that is easier to attach to some easily moved metric, and not the program that is most necessary.

What difference does that make, you may ask. The money saved over here can be used to pump up the program over there. Except it can't be, because the money saved over here becomes financial returns for the bond-holders over there.

In the unlikely event that a Social Impact Bond program doesn't just become an exercise in cooking the books, the development of a more efficient or more effective school system, the local taxpayers reap no benefit from that because the cost of the district remains the same-- it's just that now taxpayers are paying off Goldman Sachs with their tax dollars instead of paying for an educational system.

Finally, when if this turns into an exercise in cooking the books, students pay the price. If our metric is getting 110 students off the special education rolls, we had better be damned sure that we don't end up with 100 students who are being denied the services they need so that Goldman Sachs can enjoy a healthy return on their bond. (Update: In fact, I've since found an account of how the above-mentioned Utah program did, indeed, lead to book cookery.)

I can understand the appeal of Social Impact Bonds in some situations. But every time we let the bulls and bears of Wall Street loose in the china shop of education, bad things happen. Maybe there's something magical about all this that I just don't get, in which case at a minimum, these guys are doing a lousy job of explaining themselves. But maybe I should just trust the guys on Wall Street at place like Goldman Sachs. After all, it's not like they've ever tried to screw us all over before, right?

NEA's Lily Eskelsen García on What Teachers Do

Lord knows I can be as critical of some of Lily Eskelsen Garcia's choices as NEA president as anyone around, but the woman can speak. Here's a quick three minutes on what teachers need and what teachers do. It's worth a view.

How Assessment Ruins Standards

Long time readers know that I do not subscribe to the whole "The standards are swell; it's just those evil tests that screw everything up" school of thought. I think there are plenty of reasons to oppose national standards no matter what standards they are, and plenty of reasons to believe that no set of national standards will ever accomplish any of the goals set for them.

But let's set all of that aside for a moment and talk about how the very attempt to assess standards-based outcomes ruins those standards.

For my example, I'm going to pick the oft-noted CCSS standards about evidence.

I pick it because it's a part of the Common Core that doesn't particularly bother me. Like most English teachers, I've been encouraging (in many cases, quite vigorously) my students to provide support for whatever idea they are trying to assert. ("No, Chris-- saying Huck Finn is a dynamic character because he does dynamic stuff in a dynamic way does not really make your case"). When I assign a paper, two of the main questions I consider when assigning a grade are 1) did you actually have a point and 2) did you support it with actual evidence.

So in this area, the Core and I can co-exist peacefully.

But this kind of evidence use is a tool, a technique, and so it can't be assessed in a vacuum, just as you cannot judge somebody's hammering skills by just watching them hold a hammer or judge their free-throw shooting skills without handing them a ball. And that's where we get into trouble.

Assessing this skill is easiest when tying it to an act of critical thinking. But critical thinking has to be an open-ended activity. (Here's a quick tip-- if your question only has a single possible correct answer, it is not assessing critical thinking skills.) In my classroom, the most obvious avenue is a response to literature, though it will also work to deal with social issues, human behavior puzzles, historical research, or evaluating somebody else's essay work. Just to name a few.

To make this assessment work, I have to really know my stuff. I have to know Huck Finn frontwards and backwards, and perhaps augment my own expertise with lots of reading of scholarly critiques of the work. I have to know the work well enough that I can give the student freedom to go where his ideas lead him without me having to say, "Sorry, but I don't know anything about that, so I can't grade it, so you can't do it."

Every area of study is like a big patch of real estate, and I need to be a well-informed native guide who knows the territory so well that no matter where the student wanders off to, I'll know the terrain. When I don't know the territory, I end up fencing students in. "Just stay on the path-- don't stray." At the very worst, I will lay rails and make everyone ride through the territory on a train that only goes where it is meant to. The train tour is by far the least interesting, the least useful, the least rewarding, the least educational, and the least authentic way to explore the territory. It rules out all discovery and invention, and it is certainly hard on any prospect for joy or excitement.

But again-- we can only scrap the train and the pathway if we have a knowledgeable native guide. That's how my juniors can do a unit built on research of local history-- because I've made myself a little bit of an expert on the subject. That's how my colleague can do a massive end-of-year project with her AP seniors about Paradise Lost-- because she knows and loves that work. If we had to trade projects, we would both be lost.

But within our areas, we are qualified to tell the difference between evidence that is really evidence, and evidence that is just a piece of camouflaged baloney.

So here's why a standardized test can't test this standard.

First, a standardized tests starts with the assumption that any person (or computer program) should be able to evaluate the student's work without possessing any actual expertise at all.

Second, the answers have to be evaluatable in a very short time span.

And that means we will travel through the territory strapped into a seat on a tightly run train.

Look through the PARCC samples. These are slightly spiffed up multiple-choice single answer questions. The new SAT essay is just a wordier version of the same thing-- look at a piece of writing, determine what point the test manufacturers think you should see, and support it with the evidence that the test manufacturers believe are the correct pieces of evidence. These folks keep coming up with more complicated ways to ask closed-ended questions. This is partly, I suspect, because it's simply faster and more efficient to have a test of closed-ended questions that can be scored by any non-expert (or non-human). But also partly because some of these folks just have a narrow, cramped, stilted view of life and the world. "I handed you a brush, a small flat surface, and a jar of blue paint. What else would any normal person do except paint the flat surface solid blue?"

But that's not critical thinking, and it's not supporting your ideas with evidence.

Now, what is often shortened to "support with evidence" in discussion of the CCSS is actually mangled pretty badly in the actual wording of the standards, but even if it weren't, the Big Standardized Tests would mangle this idea to death anyway.

What this should properly mean is, "Come up with an idea that makes sense to you, and support it with evidence that you believe backs up your idea." But the only person who can evaluate that is a classroom teacher who possesses 1) enough expertise to evaluate the student's process 2) fewer than 1,000 students so that said evaluation can occur within the next week or so.

So what the standard means in a standardized test situations is, "Figure out what idea the test manufacturer wants you to find, and then locate the details that the test manufacturer wants you to pick out."

When we talk about test prep in the ELA world, we're talking about getting students into that second mindset, about training them to figure out the One Correct Answer associated with each piece of reading and the Only Correct Evidence located as well. And then repeat it, year after year after year.

And what really sucks is that we are getting good at it, and our students are paying the price. This whole blog piece is the result of a conversation I had with a colleague, both of us concerned because, despite our best efforts, we find our students over the past few years have become progressively worse at really engaging with reading and writing. They have learned that it's not about thinking or reacting or engaging and gripping the material with your own brain. What do you think? Why do you think that? Can you convince me to agree with you? I feel like my students have only recently encountered these kinds of questions, and they aren't sure what to do with them, because they've learned that there's only one right way to do each reading and writing task, and that one right way is known by someone else, and it's up to them to figure that out.

Of course, this issue didn't start with Common Core and Big Standardized Testing, but those conjoined twins have made things so much worse. When you try to make a complicated idea something you can assess "at scale," you do enormous damage. When you write a standard specifically so that you CAN test it "at scale," you break it entirely.


 

CAP & Common Core Whack-a-mole

I have decided that the Center for American Promise has based its relentless (and senseless) Common Core promotional campaign on a game of whack-a-mole in which they play the part of the mole.

Here comes Carmel Martin, executive vice-president of policy at CAP (previously employed by the US Department of Education-- you can view her revolving door history here), writing a piece for Inside Sources, a website that seems to be a sort of clearing house for news from "policy and industry experts" aka "people who have a news story they want to have placed." But it totally worked, because the piece was picked up by Newsday.

Martin announces her intent with her lede:

The irony of the controversy over the Common Core is that proponents and opponents actually agree on much more than we disagree on.

I'm not sure what the "irony" of the controversy is, really. That Common Core backers never thought anyone would argue with them or resist? That they are being sold as higher standards that will prepare students for college and career when there's no actual evidence they do either? But hey-- let's hold hands, start strumming our ukelele, and see what it is that we all agree on.

First, "we all agree" that America's students must be prepared to thrive in today's competitive global economy. Do we all agree? Because I bet some of us think that some folks think there's something wrong with an economic vision that chews people up and spits them out. So maybe some of us agree that rather than preparing students to resist being poisoned, we might strive for a world less steeped in poisonous atmosphere. Just saying. So are you wondering yet if Martin is a parent?

As a parent and a policy leader, I want every American child held to the same high expectations as students in the highest-performing nations.

That is an interesting goal to cheer for, and it would be more convincing if Martin named just one successful nation that can credit its success to "rigorous" national standards. Heck, go ahead and name a country that has such standards. But Martin doesn't back up her assertion for the same reason that she doesn't include a pull-quote from a Yeti that she interviewed on the back of a unicorn.

Next we get a recap of the history. Let's cruise past all the landmarks. Look-- there's "A Nation at Risk," announcing that America was on the verge of collapse because of our terrible education system. That was 1983-- you all remember how the last thirty years have been marked by America's collapse and fall, right? Just how long does "A Nation at Risk" have to keep being wrong before we stop citing it as an authority.

Also, Martin adds, remediation rates. She says that only one third of students are proficient at math and reading and while she neither indicates which students or where that figure came from, she doesn't really need to because does anybody, looking around at live humans in the world, believe that only a third of Americans can handle math and reading? Also, achievement gaps, supported by more-- oh, no, wait. Still no sources or citations for any of this.

Are we getting to the parts of Common Core on which we all agree, yet? No, now it's time for the paragraph about PISA, chicken littling our international test scores because those test scores have been linked to... well, the scores on the tests.

Anyway, back before the Common Core, each state had its own standards. And that was bad, because reasons. Still nothing that we all agree on.

Now Martin shares some fictionalized history about the origins of Common Core; states recognized the problem and "banded together to create the Common Core." I always wonder what audience CAP imagines when they spin their SF PR yarns; apparently Newsday is read primarily by folks who live under rocks.

The new standards made it possible to compare results from one state to the next and enabled parents, teachers and school system leaders to know whether their students were really on track to graduate ready for college or a career for the first time in history.

No, you don't get a lick of proof for any of the absurd notion that A) such foreknowledge is possible, no matter what path a student chooses or B) that anyone has a clue how to know it. This would be a good place, now that we are so many years into Common Core deployment, for Martin to report how much better core-ified graduates are doing at colleges and in their careers. But she doesn't do that.

We do get a whole paragraph about how math is now wider and deeper and more conceptual. Then it's on to implementation excuses and noting that teachers are still "internalizing" the standards.

But the bottom line is that the Common Core addressed a vital and longstanding need to better prepare all students to graduate from high school ready for college and careers.

Yes, the premise that we all agree about Common Core stuff, the actual lede of this piece-- it didn't survive past the first sentence, and Martin does not even pretend to circle back to it for her finish. Instead she sticks with the classic reformsters formula-- there is a problem, so this is a good solution. Your spleen has exploded, so you should hold this frog over your nose under a full moon. Your house is on fire, so you should let me run a bulldozer through your living room. A bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves.

If you want to sell me a solution to a problem, don't just yammer about the problem. Show me how the solution will fix it. That's what the best salesman needs to do, and Martin, like the rest of the CAP infinite PR flackery department, fails to do that. Maybe the idea is that if they just keep peeking up their plastic heads, we'll eventually get tired of whacking away. Doesn't matter. Whether anybody hits it or not, it's still just a plastic mole head, with no heart, no guts, and no real substance hiding behind its tired plastic surface.