Do Public Schools Take Everyone

Hillary Clinton said something bad about charters this week, and a whole lot of people lost their bananas.

What Clinton said was that charters neither take nor keep any or all students. This is pretty self-evident at this point, as we have all just emerged from a dust-up over the most recent time that Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy got caught pushing another charter student to the curb. This was followed by Mike Petrilli arguing, again, that charters should be in the mission of rescuing the deserving few from being trapped among the "disruptive" throng.

This has led us to the odd hybrid argument that throwing out problem students is a privilege of the rich. Depending on who's articulating this argument, the bottom line is either "charters that serve poor strivers should have the same privilege" or "neener neener neener."

Robert Pondiscio articulates the argument at the Fordham blog under the headline, "No, Hillary, public schools do not 'take everybody'."

He starts with the story of a student forced out of an affluent school district, and provides the budget line item of another well-to-do district that spends roughly $63K per student for various outplacement. Pondiscio and others present this as a smoking gun that public schools don't take all comers, and that is just as bad (on twitter, Pondiscio said it's actually worse).

Pondiscio is correct in suggesting that the treatment in his anecdote is inexcusable, but he's wrong in thinking that the budget figure proves his point. But he's correct in saying that public schools do not "take" every student. So let me nuance my assertion a bit--

Punlic schools must take responsibility for every student.

In my school district, we are responsible for matching every student in our district with an appropriate educational setting. For students with developmental or intellectual challenges, that means a classroom that meets their special needs. For students with emotional challenges, that means a classroom that gives special attention and support for their particular issues. For students who step too far over certain lines, threatening the safety of themselves or others, that may mean outplacement in one of several facilities that allow juveniles to continue their education while paying whatever price their infraction may have incurred.

The beauty of all these programs is that they are mostly under one roof, so that students facing particular challenges may transition seamlessly into a "regular" classroom environment.

No student change in placement occurs without due process, and the school district cannot wash their hands of any student. Whatever classroom that student is placed in, whatever educational program they are receiving, it is the school district's legal obligation to make sure that student's educational needs are being met.

And this still-- still-- different from a charter, where once the kid is out the door, charter operators can say, "Not our problem any more. Somebody else will have to worry about that kid." Somebody else is always the public system.

I think there are several other holes in Pondiscio's argument.

Perhaps there are public schools that “take everybody.” But one thing is certain: If you are the bright son or daughter of affluent parents, chronic classroom disruption is foreign to your school experience. If you encounter it all, you can be confident that it won't last long.

No "perhaps." The country is loaded with public schools that do just that. But to claim that bright students in affluent schools never experience chronic classroom discussions is an odd assertion, as if bright sons and daughters of affluent parents are never themselves the source of such disruption. But as with drug use, class and race have nothing to do with who transgresses-- only with how those transgressors are treated when caught.

This is one other difference between affluent and poor schools-- in affluent schools, the parents of students with special needs know their rights and they have a lawyer to call, but in poor schools, not so much. I have no way of knowing, but I will bet that some of that budgetary expense is not about outsourcing a difficult student, but about a parent demanding that their child be allowed to attend a specialized facility at district expense.


Further, Pondiscio makes the same mistake that Petrilli did in believing that disruptiveness is a static, stable, quality, and that we can somehow identify every child who possesses that quality and select them out, like setting up a school for only right-handed students. First, disruptiveness is in the eye of the beholder. Your idea of disruption might be my idea of the best high-energy-and-excitement day in my classroom ever. But a student's disruptiveness is a function of day, time, classroom, development, environment and the relative humidity on any given day. To imagine that we can simply identify and separate out the disruptive students-- well, that's a fantasy.

More importantly, a disruptive student is most commonly delivering a message that roughly translates as, "I need something."

To ignore that clear indicator of need is to fail as an educational establishment. It is as bad as looking at a failing grade on a test and thinking, "Well, this kid sucks." A failing grade on my test is a signal about what instructional needs that student still hasn't had met. It's not a problem. It's information.

What was most appalling to me in the most recent Moskowitz flap was the image of the six year old child, curled up under a desk, shaking and crying. How in the hell does anybody see that child and not think, "This is child is hurting and needs my help." How in the hell does anybody look at that and think, "This child has got to go."

It is an abdication of the most fundamental responsibilities of an educator or an educational establishment to turn your back on a child in need. For any school to look at a child and say, "This child needs too much. Send it away." is the most inexcusable stance a school can take. It appalls me in a public school, and much of my reaction to modern charters is because that is their stance by design-- "This child needs too much. We won't take responsibility for it." is not an admirable policy position for a school.

But I have wandered from the bottom line here, which is this-- don't students deserve a classroom that is safe  and stable and free of disruption? And the answer is yes, yes they do.

But keeping a classroom free of disruption is not best accomplished by sweeping up all the disruptive students and shipping them out. It comes from an administration that maintains a safe and stable school environment. It comes from a classroom teacher who maintains a safe and stable classroom environment. And it comes from a system that identifies student needs and meets them, whatever they might be. It's not about shipping out the "bad" students so that the "good" students can learn properly. It's about meeting the needs of all students.

Any school that instead simply throws away students whose needs it doesn't feel like meeting-- that's a failing school. When a public school does that, it is breaking the law.  When a charter school does it, they're just following policy.

This is one of the most tiresome claims of charters-- that they have somehow invented a new wheel. But a chimpanzee would be "successful" teaching a classroom of students carefully selected for their lack of challenging characteristics. This is not news. It's like a doctor who announces that he has discovered the secret to success-- turning away all sick people from his office. Yes, it makes your numbers look good-- but that's not the gig. The mission of public education is to educate all children. If you're not trying to educate all children, you may be running some sort of school, but you are not part of public education.

Here are two comments from our twitter conversation this morning:

@palan57 @MindfulStew @MichaelPetrilli My definition of equity is not "all schools for low-SES families must suck equally."

— Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) November 12, 2015

@palan57 @MindfulStew @MichaelPetrilli So goal is to beat up charters, not demand classroom conditions for low-SES kids equal to high-SES?

— Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) November 12, 2015

These are fair concerns. Pondiscio and other charter fans seem to see low-SES schools as irreparable disaster areas which some students escape by the blind luck of having affluent parents, while poor students are stuck there. What is wrong, they ask, with rescuing at least some of those students from the chaos and mess of low-SES schools? Demanding that charters operate under the same crappy conditions as low-SES schools seems counterproductive to them, like demanding that dieters must fry their low-fat meals in lard.

Charter schools-- as currently implemented-- are not a solution. If ten children are sitting at a table with inadequate meals in front of them, taking half the plate of nine and giving it all to just one is not a solution. Charter fans propose to leave the majority of low-ses students behind and justify it by saying those are just the disruptive ones, the non-strivers, the undeserving. Equity is not equally sucky schools for all low-SES families, but it also not even suckier schools for low-SES families with shiny charter schools for the fortunate chosen few. Pondiscio is right to criticize public school advocates who attack charters but do not call for better conditions in low-SES schools. Public school advocates are right to criticize charter fans who suggest that as long as a few students can get into charters, we don't need to talk about better classroom conditions for low-SES students left behind. But "access" is not enough, because it is not a plan for everybody.

In fact, if we want to look for an area of agreement in the midst of this, it may be in the belief that low-SES schools need to be better-- better supported, better resourced, better led and better staffed. We disagree about what "better" means, about where things stand now, and about what actions and policies will improve the situation.

I don't know for sure how we move forward from there, and I don't have a snappy ending to this piece (pro curmudgucation reading tip: when I'm first starting to sort out an issue, it turns up in long rambly posts that mimic the wandering of my brain). The big irony is, of course, that while we're spinning arguments off her brief comment, Clinton's spokesperson has already walked things back so that charters will understand that Clinton loves them just fine.

New Gates Study of-- Oh. Never Mind

It's becoming evident that the Obama announcement heralding the fake repudiation of testing contained some sort of dog whistle or backwards masking message that was a cue for reformsters to unleash the hounds of Competency Based Education and Personalized Learning. Lots of players have laid their bets, and we've seen new heraldry from the big kahunas at Pearson. Now comes a big report funded by the Gates Foundation and conducted by the good folks at Rand.

"Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning" reports on a study about the effectiveness of various personalized learning strategies. As always, someone has paid good money to have the report laid out and graphically sweetened professionally, and the report itself is about thirty-eight pages of report, one page of footnotes, and a dozen-plus pages of appendices.

But don't worry. I read it so that you don't have to. Only here's the thing-- as I started writing about it, I realized that I don't have to read it either. Nobody does. And I don't need to talk about the whole thing.

It's true there are nits to pick, most notably that the bulk of the experimental subjects are mostly charter schools and charter students-- so not remotely a random sampling. We might also note that some of the information is self-reported, so reliability is an issue there. And in all fairness to the report, its list of personalized learning techniques includes baloney like competency based learning, but it also includes the idea of student-directed learning as well.

None of this matters. The report is a big beautiful waste of  time.

Imagine NASA issued a five hundred page report on establishing a Lunar Base, and it talked about the engineering of the structure and the research benefits and showed a solid timeline for probably accomplishments. But on the very first page it read, "We have based all of our planning on the assumption that the moon is made of cream cheese, probably with little pieces of jalapeno mixed in."

This study set out to see if any of these techniques (or combinations thereof) improve student achievement. But the proxy for student achievement was, once again, Big Standardized Test results. But the moon is not made of cream cheese, and scores on a narrow two-subject standardized bubble  clicking test do not measure anything except student ability to take a standardized test. That's it.

So this study asks some interesting questions, and the many pages and the slick graphics and the many, many words about methodology and conclusions might suggest that something deep about education is going on here, but it's not-- this is just one more study asking, "Which of these things might serve as better test prep for the BS Tests." And that's not education. That is a NASA report that says, "Also, we couldn't travel to the moon or study the actual moon, so we just based everything on a painting of the moon in a 1942 elementary science book." This is a big shiny mansion built on a foundation of mud sitting in the middle of a river.

Somebody, somewhere, is probably going to take this study seriously. They should not. It is a study about test prep and raising BS Test scores and really, in public education, we have more important things to do, like, say, actually educating people.

Selling Competency Based Education

Lurking just over the horizon is the next Big Reformster Thing, a movement designed to take everything wrong with test-based accountability and make it even worse-- Competency Based Education, a Big Dumb Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again). And as this thundering lumox gets closer, we can start to see how it will be sold.


Here's a chatty write-up about CBE from John Baker, a guy who heads up a company that plans to make a bundle off of CBE.

John Baker likes the idea of flexibility, what techno-edu-crats have been selling as personalization. Except that it isn't, really. With CBE, we're talking about computerized learning, and that means that students can only go where the software is prepared to take them. A truly personalized journey would be somebody handing you the keys to a four-wheel-drive land rover and saying, "There's the world. Go explore whatever you want to explore." But this is about saying, "Okay, everybody is going to ride the tracks from Point A to Point Z. If you get to Point D and you need to go back to Point C again, you can do that. If you want to skip ahead and get on at the Point F station, you can do that, too. But everybody is going to ride the same tracks over the same route to the same destination."

Baker is excited about using analytics and giving students choices (play a game! do some drill!), and he anticipates objections:

This flexibility makes some people nervous. There will be those who argue that if education needs to change at all, it needs to go “back to basics.” For some, the best education system is always going to be the one they grew up with. Maybe with desks in neat rows and classrooms with chalk dust and pencil sharpeners where kids learn the reading, writing and arithmetic—or the “Three R’s.”

Maybe I'm in a super-progressive corner of the world and just don't know it-- but I doubt it. Baker, like many reformsters, argues against retaining the educational model that schools abandoned thirty years ago. "Personalized learning" as currently envisioned seems far more boring and limited than antedeluvian chalk and desks.

But Baker sees CBE as a way to save time and money, and for certain basic pieces of learning, he's sort of correct. But there's a problem with the competencies that are being tested.

This sort of module-based computer learning is already out there. In PA, we all do computer-based modules to "train" for giving the Keystone exam. It's considered a win because the state doesn't have to hire someone to come drone at us while we're all stuck together in a room. But manufacturers of the program have already learned to be cagey-- we aren't allowed to take the competency test until we've watched the instruction videos, power point, etc. Okay, technically, we're not allowed to take the test until the program has played on our computer. Some teachers-- I'm sure I don't know which ones-- let the instructional portion play while they get other work done. Then  they come take the multiple choice competency test which, when all is said and done, is an excellent measure of your ability to take the kind of multiple choice tests that come with basic industry-rules-style "training."

And that's part of the issue here-- competency-based education measures students' ability to take the kind of questions that get asked for this kind of program.

Since we're talking about a program that needs to score tests close to instantly (or else how will you know which station to travel to next), the tests are focused only on the sorts of things that can be measured by multiple-choice questions.

This was bad enough when it was the focus of a once-a-year Big Standardized Test. But look at what Pearson envisions as its "Balanced Assessment System."  Their system features six types of assessment, including formative of which they say "This happens every day!" Yes, it's all assessment, all the time. This would be somewhat ironic in that this is exactly what real live human teachers do-- assess students in a dozen ways every single day. Pearson and other CBE promoters have truly re-invented the wheel. Except that their wheel is a hexagon with an off-center axle. Because to do this kind of constant assessment with a computer, one of two things has to happen-- a teacher enters data for six hours every day, or student assessments are focused strictly on the sort of narrow, simple, surface learning that a multiple choice question can measure.

The Pearson sales pitch is that the BAS will show these results: "Monitored students feel in control of success, measured progress towards college and career readiness, students of all abilities are helped."

Instead of just a little bit of narrow, crappy data once a year, we'll be harvesting crappy data every day. It will have all the limitations of the BS Testing-- no ability to test higher order thinking, critical thinking skills, collaboration-- but it will be far more omnipresent. Instead of thinking the purpose of school is to get past That One Test, students will now be told that the purpose of school is to finish off That Next Module. And in the far future--oh, reformsters just get delirious. A giant warehouse with hundreds of students, all logged in and typing away while a handful of minimum wage monitors keep an eye on them. It will be glorious and profitable.

We've looked at this before, in Pearson's breathless position paper about an assessment renaissance, but now Pearson and Baker and the rest are in that sweet spot where people are demanding to be released from the tyranny of the annual BS Test. And somehow, test manufacturers are going to try to look like heroes for offering even larger doses of what test opponents are trying to escape. It will be a sales pitch of epic proportions, because it will be a cash stream and data mining opportunity of epic proportions. Pay attention. Stay tuned.

TeachStrong's Nine Steps (To Teacher Awesomeness)

We've already discussed who and what the new #TeachStrong campaign might be. But I still think it's only fair to look at their nine points, their nine steps to building a better teacher, and consider their validity.

Yes, it starts with the premise that teaching needs to be modernized and elevated. Teachers have certainly been beaten down over the 1.5 decades. But modernized? A bad sign that once again, some policymaker is operating under the assumption that schools haven't changed since before they were in one. There's not any real evidence for that, but let's ignore it for the moment so we can move on to our nine steps on the pathway to awesome!

1. Recruitment

Identify and recruit more diverse teacher candidates with great potential to succeed, with a deliberate emphasis on diversifying the teacher workforce.

Diversity in the teacher workforce is a critical need, although the research tends to suggest that the problem is less about recruitment and more about retention (of course the general tanking of college teacher programs means we have recruitment issues across the board). But teacher diversity is a critical problem. The racial makeup of the teacher pool is wildly out of whack with that of the student pool. So, yes-- this is a critical need, though the devil is absolutely in the details, and in the recognition of the retention issue.

2. Teacher Prep

Reimagine teacher preparation to make it more rooted in classroom practice and a professional knowledge base, with universal high standards for all candidates.

Again, what details? Universal standards is probably a dumb idea-- exactly which universal standards would fit both a high school biology teacher and a first grade teacher? Just how vague and meaningless would standards have to be in order to cover both?

Also, "more rooted in classroom practice" than what? Here the group of TeachStrong partners starts to color my perception because I know, for instance, that when it comes to teacher preparation, neither NCTQ nor TFA know what the hell they're talking about. Classroom practice and professional knowledge base are absolutely essential, it's true-- but if you believe, as some of the partner groups do, that Common Core represents a critical piece of professional knowledge, then you are chock full of baloney.

So here the details make all the difference between a useful piece of teacher building and an utter waste of time.

3. Licensure

Raise the bar for licensure so it is a meaningful measure of readiness to teach.

Sure. How about we start by declaring that people with five weeks of training, no meaningful classroom practice, and no background in the professional knowledge base be allowed to set foot in a classroom? Because I like that idea, but I'm betting partner groups TFA and TNTP would not support it.

Exactly how will we raise the bar. Because if we're talking about something like edTPA, a high-cost profit-generating "exam" process operated by non-teaching corporate stooges, that's not raising the bar-- it's taking the bar and bludgeoning future teachers about the head and shoulders with it. Here's the problem with this idea-- nobody at all knows what a meaningful measure of readiness to teach looks like, exactly, so anybody who says they do is selling snake oil.

I have heard the claim that lawyers and doctors have to pass licensure exams, and I see a slight bit of value in that-- if such exams were developed and administered by working teachers, selected by other working teachers and not policy makers or bureaucrats or corporate lobbyists. In fact, let's have an accrediting board for college teacher programs also run by teachers without any input at all from policy makers and bureaucrats or corporations. Do I think that's what TeachStrong has in mind? No, I do not.

4. More Pay

Increase compensation in order to attract and reward teachers as professionals.

Oh, that word "reward." I'm dubious, because I know many of the partner groups like the idea of scrapping the traditional teacher pay ladder and replacing it with a system that only gives you a raise when they decide you've earned it. That way they can still fund schools cheaply by giving big pay to some few teachers and tiny, little pay for the rest. Again, I would be more impressed if we were talking about retention or supporting the idea of teachers who are supported in a lifelong dedication to a teaching career. But there is no language like that anywhere in TeachStrong.


5. Support for Newbies

Provide support for new teachers through induction or residency programs.

Almost spot on. The great missing link in the teaching profession is some sort of support, development, and mentorship for beginning teachers. That said, "residency" in reformsterspeak means, again, low paid positions that help offset the better-paid master teacher spots. The concept directly contradicts the idea of better pay for recruiting, but hey-- I didn't write it.

Also, this would be a good place to step up and say something like, "Judging a new teacher or 'resident' based on high-stakes assessment would be silly, so let's make sure that such nonsense is not part of the program." And who wants to take a newby under your wing when your wings depend on test scores to keep you from getting plucked? The use of test scores to evaluate teachers poisons everything it touches, but arguably nothing is more poisoned then beginning stages of teaching careers.

If TeachStrong isn't prepared to call for the end of all evaluation-by-student-scores, then all nine points are hollow vessels filed with stale, hot air.

6. Tenure

Ensure tenure is a meaningful signal of professional accomplishment.

In other words, keep tenure, but make it harder to get. Because reasons. Seriously-- there isn't a lick of evidence to suggest that such a tough tenure system would improve anything (though it certainly would give prospective teachers one more reason to consider a different career). Of course, many of the TeachStrong partners don't see teaching as a lifelong career in the first place, so who cares about tenure?

The other red flag here is "professional accomplishment." If this is going to be more of that "you can have tenure if your student test scores look good" then you can just wrap it up in VAM rags and bury it in the backyard next to the dead turtles and the rotting leaves, because that is some anti-teacher, junk sciency baloney. The use of "accomplishment" is an oddity-- we won't give you tenure based on your quality as a teacher, but on what you accomplished. Test prep or perish, junior.

I'll say it again-- tying teacher evaluation to student assessment results is disastrous and wrong and if TeachStrong can't say so, I can't take them seriously.

7. More Time and Tools

Provide significantly more time, tools, and support for teachers to succeed, including through planning, collaboration, and development.

How, exactly? Will you create more hours in the day? Will you hire one million more teachers to reduce the workload on those that are already working? If so, how will you manage that when you can't even fill the openings you have now?

And who will decide what "succeed" looks like? And who will decide what tools and support are needed? Because the pattern so far has been for reformsters to swoop in and say, "We've decided that you need this," without listening to teachers for five seconds. Hell, many TeachStrong partners decided that one tool needed by teachers was the Common Core. This item is completely useless, pointless, and worthless without something else that is notably missing from the nine-step program-- listening to actual working teachers.

Saying "Here's the tool I think you'll need to accomplish the goals I'm setting for you in the way I want them accomplished," that is not help. It's just micromanagement. 

8. Professional Development

Design professional learning to better address student and teacher needs, and to foster feedback and improvement.

Again-- who's doing the designing? The problem with PD is not the content or quality so much as it is the underlying assumption that PD is something done to teachers by people who know better than they what should be happening in their classrooms. Or that PD is an opportunity for vendors to make a case for their wares. You want to fix PD? Give us some days to ourselves, a personal PD budget, access to people who know the things we want to find out, and then leave us alone.

9. Career Pathways

Create career pathways that give teachers opportunities to lead and grow professionally.

Again, what this generally means in reformsterspeak is this:

Rather than start at the level you are currently and just staying there, what we'd like to do is dig a hole and start you at the bottom of that. Then by the time you climb up to your current level, it will feel like a real step up in the world. In the meantime, it will let us pay everyone who's starting out down in that hole much less money.

What it generally doesn't mean is that we'll give you increasing control over your professional direction, with more and more control over what goes on in your school and your classroom so that you, in fact, have less and less need to listen to what reformsters and policy makers and bureaucrats and corporate stooges tell you you must do. No, that is not what it means.

The "career pathways" shtick also often masks a belief that of course, nobody would want to be "just a teacher" for an entire career. Surely once you've put in some years as a teacher, you'd want to move on to something better. And why should I take advice about teaching from people who can't understand why I would want to spend my entire adult life in the classroom?

So What Do I Think? 

Many of these are perfectly good goals. A couple are even laudable.

Depending.

Because the devil is in the details, and all nine of these are items that have been used as reformster dog whistles, as ways of saying what folks will assume means one thing when the plan is something else entirely. And given that the TeachStrong partners are mostly a big pile of reformsters, I'm not inclined to trust their intentions.

So my question for the Hillary Campaign TeachStrong Team is, "What exactly do you mean? How exactly do you plan to do any of this? Because if this is all about cutting costs by linking pay to student test results while stripping teachers of autonomy in the classroom and eroding job protections, then I'm unimpressed."

It all sounds like more corporate reform drivel. Or the education platform of a corporate candidate. And it's as notable for what it doesn't say as for what it does.

It doesn't call for an end to the test-driven school and profession. It doesn't call for building the profession by empowering teachers. It doesn't call for investing the kind of resources needed to make all schools appealing places to teach, or for elevating community voices over outsidecontrol. It doesn't call for putting professional education under the control of people who know what they're doing. It doesn't recognize the vast pool of knowledge and expertise that exists right now among the seven million experienced teachers in this country (but instead suggests we're all behind the times). It doesn't call for listening to teachers. It doesn't call for an end to micromanagement and punitive control by bureaucrats and corporate stooges who don't know what the hell they're talking about. It doesn't call for preserving education as a public trust instead of a private investment opportunity.

Until somebody with the campaign fills in the blanks, I have to assume this is just deep-fried baloney.

Teach Strong: Real Wrong

By now the interwebs are just abuzz with the lastest reformster super-group, a PR push called #TeachStrong (it's a hashtag, because all the kids are using the twitters these days).

TeachStrong comes with all the reformy accoutrements, including a fancy website and a snappy mission statement, and a launch piece in the Washington Post. And it comes with a truly impressive group of reformster shysters signed on for the mission. (it does not come, as Daniel Katz noted, with an explanation for why they chose branding with the unfortunate echo of the doping-disgraced #Livestrong.) They are all about changing policy, and I have a theory about what this is really about, but I'll get back to that later.

The People

Taking point on this initiative is the Center for American Progress, a group that has championed reformy ideas for years and which has been relentless in its stumping for the Common Core (here and here and here and here, for a few examples). But look at this rogue's gallery of old favorites. There are forty in all, but I'm just hitting the highlights:

Alliance for Excellent Education-- a DC reformster lobbying group

CCSSO-- of course, our old friends who helped bring us CCSS

Deans for Impact-- a group of RelayGSE and Broad-style "deans" who are education leaders because they say so

Education Post-- the reformster PR rapid-response war room site run by former Duncan staffer

Educators 4 Excellence-- the astroturf group created to provide the illusion that teachers love reformy ideas

National Council on Teacher Quality-- these are the guys who evaluate college teacher ed programs based on brochures and graduation programs (including programs that don't exist)

RelayGSE-- no surprise here, since their "dean" is a member of "deans for impact"

Teach for America-- dedicated to building resumes and providing temp solutions for charter operators

TNTP-- TFA's big brother

This list alone is enough to convince me that the whole initiative is some sort of bizarre practical joke that cannot possibly be taken seriously. And that's not the worst, the most discouraging part of the list, because the list also includes:

AFT and NEA.

Well, hey. Maybe even though this is a terrible collection of organizations, they have some great ideas. Let's check their vision.

The Program 

Sigh. Well, let's start with the assumption that teaching is in trouble. Teachers, apparently, need to "modernized and elevated." And we are also fans of having an excellent teacher in each classroom. And we have nine-step program for getting it done.

(1) Recruit more diverse candidates for (2) more strenuous preparation. (3) Make it harder to get a license, but (4) pay more and (5) provide support in residency programs. (6) Keep tenure, but make it a meaningful signal of professional accomplishment (i.e. harder to get). (7) Give teachers more time and tools (so, what? a twenty-five hour day and an extra hand?) (8) Better PD (please, now you're just making shit up). (9) Career pathways.

So, mostly the same old stuff. Make life harder for teachers in concrete ways (licensure, tenure) but try to offset it in vague ways (more time, and tools, and PD). And as always-- absolutely nothing about giving teachers a strong voice in the direction of their profession.

No, the promise here is that we will ask more of you and do more to you.

And yet there are some odd features here. For instance, much of this is not exactly in tune with the TFA five-weeks, no-real-license plan. But in her WaPo piece, Lyndsey Layton reports that TFA basically has no intention of changing what they do, they just thought this seemed like a cool initiative to join. Really? Why would they sign on to this if they didn't support the stated goals? Hmmm...

The Purpose 

So what's really going on here? I have a thought, and I'll go ahead and type it out now. If I'm wrong, we can all make fun of me later.

Let's look at the clues.

The initiative is led by CAP, a thinky tank that has also served as a holding pen for Clinton staffers since Bill stepped out of the White House. Carmel Martin, who has so far been the point person on this for CAP,  has served in both Clinton and Obama administrations.

The list has many reformster groups-- but not all. Who's missing? Well, Campbell Brown, the Fordham Foundation, Jeb Bush's FEE folks. You know-- the conservative/GOP wing.

What does the group say it's up  to? Per Layton:

Martin, of the Center for American Progress, said the campaign will include events in early presidential primary states and important swing states, as well as Twitter town halls, online events and social media outreach. The think tank expects to spend $1 million, she said.

 #TeachStrong says it wants to influence policy discussions through the primary and election season. I hereby predict that one candidate is going to be heavily influenced by this initiative and is going to stand up for this important teacher-supporting thing. I hereby predict that #TeachStrong is an organization created to help guard and support Hillary Clinton's education flank in the run-up to 2016.

I think we're looking at the eventual education plank of HRC's platform.

The Straight Poop

If I'm right, it's just one more sign that America's teachers are political orphans. The premise of this campaign (that is what they call it) is that teacher training sucks, teachers are stuck in the dark ages, and that the whole profession needs to be overhauled (because, again, the sucking).

The campaign makes no noise about listening to teachers or students or communities, and it is jam packed with organizations that have a history of listening to nobody except their donors. Why is it so hard to imagine that if you want "to build a better teacher," you might want to talk to actual teachers.

As for NEA and AFT? I don't even know how to wrap my brain around their willingness to break bread with charlatans like NCTQ or the TFA folks who have conducted a frontal assault on the profession for years. If this is the seat at the table that we've been angling for-- well, the table is a lousy table, and we should probably not be sitting at it so much as throwing it over.

The #TeachStrong launch party is today, and I'm sure we'll be learning more in the weeks and months ahead. But mostly this looks like a big steaming pile of manure. 

God Bless Vermont

This has been extensively covered, but there are some stories that just can't get too much coverage.

In an era of weaselly lobbyist-hugging education-crumpling behavior in our states, Vermont has been a breath of fresh air.

It was a little over a year ago that the Vermont Board of Education let standardized testing have a piece of their collective minds. 

While the federal government continues to require the use of subjectively determined cut-off score, employing such metrics lacks scientific foundation. The skills needed for success in society are rich and diverse. Consequently, there is no single point on a testing scale that has proven accurate in measuring the success of a school or in measuring the talents of an individual. Claims to the contrary are technically indefensible and their application would be unethical.

And their "whereas..." portion of the testing resolution contained one of my favorite phrases ever in a government document about education:

WHEREAS, the culture and structure of the systems in which students learn must change in order to foster engaging school experiences that provide joy in learning, depth of thought and breadth of knowledge for students...

Joy in learning, depth of thought, and breadth of knowledge-- man, that is a mission statement I could get behind every single morning.

And now, in the wake of SBA scores, the state Board of Education has once again made bold, clear assertions about what truly matters in education. You can find a full copy of the letter here, but some of my favorite parts--

After telling parents that they have received test results in the national consortium's format. "We are working on a friendlier and more appropriate presentation for next year." Imagine. "Friendlier." As if real humans are going to be reading it.

"Do not let results wrongly discourage your child from pursuing his or her talents, ambitions, hopes or dreams."

"These tests are based on a narrow definition of 'college and career ready.' In truth, there are many different careers and colleges and there are just as many different definitions of essential skills."

"As a parent, encourage your child to reach as high as he or she can. Let her or him know that they are worthy and capable."

"We must give every student a thorough and comprehensive education, and provide the nurturing and support that each child needs to grow into an effective, productive and self-directed citizen."

I don't know who does the actual writing for the Vermont B of E, but my hat is all the way off to that person. Simple, direct and clear-- who knew that the announcement of SBA scores would lead to a great, straightforward explanation of what education should mean for each child and for the community. It is easy to rant about what is wrong-headed and foolish about reform policies like the SBA (I should know)-- but it takes a cool head and clear vision in the midst of that baloney to keep your eye on the real goal.

God bless Vermont.

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.