Guest Post: No Excuse, Deceptive Metrics and School Success

Emily Kaplan is an elementary school teacher in the Boston area. She's currently teaching in a public school, but her previous experience is with one of the region's high-achieving charter chains. She has written here about both her experience and some lessons from it, and I'm pleased to publish this here with her permission.

NO EXCUSE: AN ARGUMENT AGAINST DECEPTIVE METRICS OF SCHOOL SUCCESS

           Sixteen seven- and eight-year olds sit in a circle on the floor. On the wall to their left— the first thing they see upon entering and exiting the classroom, always done in complete silence— is a list of individual “Assessment Goals.” (This “no excuses” charter network creates its own high-stress tests, which all students take at least five times per month, beginning in kindergarten.) One student´s math goal reads, “I only use strategies that I know.” All are written in the teacher’s handwriting. Others include, “I read my work over so I don´t make careless mistakes.” “I begin each sentence with a capital letter.” “I draw base-ten blocks to show my work.”

On the wall to their right is a list of the class averages from the last six network assessments (taken by all second graders across the charter network´s three campuses), all of which are in the 50s and 60s. Even though these two-hour tests are designed by network leaders to be exceptionally challenging— a class average of an 80% is the holy grail of teachers, who use their students´ scores to compete for status and salary increases— this class´s scores are the lowest in the school, and the students know it.

The teacher speaks to them in a slow, measured tone. “When I left school here yesterday, after working hard all day to give you a good education so you can go to college, I felt disappointed. I felt sad.”

Shoulders drop. Children put their faces in their hands.

“And do you know why?” The teacher looks around the circle; children avert their eyes.

One child raises her hand tentatively. “We didn´t do good on our tests?”

The teacher nods. “Yes, you didn´t do well on your assessments. Our class average was very low. And so I felt sad. I went home and I felt very sad for the rest of the day.”

The children nod resignedly. They´ve heard this many times before.

Suddenly, one child, an eight-year-old who has been suspended for a total of sixteen days for repeatedly failing to comply with school rules, raises his hand. The teacher looks at him. “I am noticing that there is a question.”

The child tilts his head. “What does average mean?” Several children nod; it seems that they, too, have been wondering this, but have been too afraid to ask.

The teacher sighs. “It´s a way to tell if everyone in this room is showing self-determination. And what I saw yesterday is that we are not. Scholars in Connecticut College” —at the school, children are “scholars,” and classrooms are named after four-year colleges— “are not less smart than scholars in UMass. But the scholars in UMass got a 78% average.”

One girl pipes up. “And we only got a 65%!”

The teacher moves the child´s clothespin a rung down on the “choice stick” for speaking out of turn. “And the scholars in Lesley got a 79%. The scholars in UMass and the scholars in Lesley are not smarter than you are. They do not know how to read better than you.” She looks around. “They do not know how to write better than you.” Suddenly, her voice rises in volume. “Scholars, what can we do to show UMass and Lesley that we are just as smart as they are?”

The children look to the list of “assessment goals” posted on the wall. They raise their hands, one by one.

“I will read my work over so I don´t make mistakes.”

The teacher nods.

“I will begin every sentence with a capital letter.”

“I will do my best work so you don´t get sad anymore.”

The teacher smiles. “Good.”

            This teacher— with whom I co-taught a second grade class— is now a high-level administrator and “instructional coach” at the school. It is her job to ensure that the school’s instructors (almost all of whom are white) to “teach” using these dehumanizing, teacher-focused tactics with their students (almost all of whom are children of color from low-income families.) The school is one of several Boston-area “no excuses” charters that receive major accolades (and many hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and prizes) for their high scores on state standardized tests. Supporters and leaders of these schools claim that the high scores extracted using these methods prove that the schools are “closing the achievement gap.” Look, they say, pointing to the score reports: poor black kids in Boston are outperforming rich white kids in Newton and Brookline and Wellesley.

            And, indeed, this data is compelling. Its very existence teaches a powerful lesson that this country needs to hear: children of color from low-income homes can outperform wealthy white children on standardized tests, which are the metrics that we as a society have decided mean…well, something.

            The problem is that standardized test scores mean very little. On the only tests that do mean a tremendous amount for these students— the SSATs— students at the school I taught at perform abysmally. Subsequently, these same middle schoolers who often dramatically outperform their wealthy white peers on these tests are not accepted in large numbers to the most selective high schools (and most of those who do struggle socially and emotionally when thrust into student bodies that aren’t upwards of 98% students of color); struggle to succeed academically in high school (81% earn high school grade-point averages below 3.0 in the first semester); and certainly do not thrive after high school, graduating from college at very low rates and, among those who don’t go to college, failing in large numbers to secure full-time employment.

Correlation is not causation, after all; the fact that those wealthy white students who do well on state standardized tests go on to enjoy tremendous opportunities, in education and in life, does not mean that these scores cause these outcomes. This fallacy, however, constitutes the fuel of the no-excuses runaway train, and leads to the dehumanization of children of color at schools like the one at which I taught. At this school, children are deprived of a comprehensive, developmentally appropriate, and humane education; instead, they are subjected to militaristic discipline, excessive amounts of testing (well beyond that which is already mandated by the state), a criminally deficient amount of playtime (in a nine-hour school day, kindergartners have twenty minutes of recess), and lack of access to social-emotional curricula— all so that the people who run their schools can make a political point.

            If we are to improve the educational prospects of this country’s most at-risk students, we need to examine our educational practices and institutions using metrics that matter. Standardized test scores are easier to obtain and compare than data which are nuanced, holistic, and, to the extent possible, representative of aspects of K-12 education which enable and predict access to higher education and opportunities in life. (The fact that we have not yet found the perfect embodiment of the latter by no means excuses the continued use of the former.) Our obsession with meaningless, deceptive standardized test scores creates schools, like the “no excuses” charter at which I taught, which seem to excel— but fail in the ways that truly matter. There is simply no excuse.

ICYMI: Sunday Reading from the Interwebs

Some reading for your Sunday afternoon leisure (if you have such a thing)

The Investment

Jose Vilson went to New Jersey to talk to teachers there. This is a piece of what he had to say.

EngageNY Math, Now Eureka, a Common Core Dropping

One feisty teacher's journey into the land of pre-packaged, not-so-great math curriculum.

Plutocrats in Plunderland

Many of us took a swipe at the TeachStrong rollout this week. This piece gives us a good look at some of the connections being worked behind the curtain.

I also recommend this take on TeachStrong from Daniel Katz.

The Strange, True Story of How a Chairman at McKinsey Made Millions of Dollars off His Maid

This piece from The Nation is not directly related to education. But it is a well-researched story about corruption in New York and how the folks in the 1%  just kind of roll over the rest of us. If you've been following the reformster world, you know the name McKinsey, the consulting group responsible for growing so much of the reformster careers. Here's a good hard look at just what sort of people we're talking about.

Dear Mark

Emily Talmage is a Maine blogger with an interesting story. As an Amherst grad she fell into the arms of Teach for America, and then decided that she's like to be a real teacher. But before Amherst, she prepped at Phillips Exeter, where her time overlapped with that of Mark Zuckerberg. Here she is, writing a letter to her old classmate about his sudden interest in "personalized" learning.

NCTQ New Report on Teacher Evaluation

It's a big report, over a hundred pages, and I've read it so you don't have to. But that doesn't mean you don't have your work cut out for you here on this blog. Let's get going.

Who are these people?

The National Council on Teacher Quality's continued presence in the education world is one of the great mysteries of the reformster era (or maybe just one of the great con jobs). This "national council" includes a staff composed almost exclusively of former TFA folks and professional bureaucrats and a board of directors that contains no teachers.

Let me say that again-- this group that has declared itself the arbiter of teacher quality for the country has no career teachers in positions of authority. None.

They have been an excellent tool for reformsters, which may be why their funders list is a who's who of reformy money (Gates, Broad, Walton, Joyce, and even Anonymous). Like other heavy-hitters (or at least heavy cash-checkers) of the "non-partisan research and policy organization" world, they specialize in putting a glossy figleaf of research study paper over the big ugly naked truth of reformster advocacy.

Their particular brand is about assaulting the teaching profession with a concern trolling spin. From their mission statement:

We recognize that it is not teachers who bear responsibility for their profession's many challenges, but the institutions with the greatest authority and influence over teachers. To that end we work to achieve fundamental changes in the policy and practices of teacher preparation programs, school districts, state governments, and teachers unions. 

In other words, teachers suck, but it's not their fault, poor dears, because they are helpless, powerless tools of Important Forces. Oddly enough, I have never come across anything from NCTQ suggesting that empowering teachers might be a useful solution.

Let me be up front about NCTQ

There are people and organizations in the reformster world that can, I believe, be taken seriously. I may disagree with almost everything they conclude, but they are sincere, thoughtful, and at least to some degree intellectually honest. They raise questions that are worth wrestling with, and they challenge those of us who support public schools in ways that are good for us. I have a whole list of people with whom I disagree, but whom I'm happy to read or talk to because they are serious people who deserve to be taken seriously.

NCTQ is not on that list.

NCTQ once issued a big report declaring that college teacher education programs were much easier than other programs. Their research-- and I swear I am not making this up-- was to look through a bunch of college commencement programs and course syllabi.

This may actually be better than their signature report ranking the quality of various teacher education programs, a program infamous in my neck of the woods for rating a college on a program that didn't actually exist. This list is published in US News (motto: "Listicles make better click bait than new stories"), so it makes some noise, leading to critiques of NCTQ's crappy methodology here and here and here, to link to just a few. NCTQ's method here again focuses on syllabi and course listings, which, as one college critic noted, "is like a restaurant reviewer deciding on the quality of a restaurant based on its menu alone, without ever tasting the food." That college should count its blessings; NCTQ has been known to "rate" colleges without any direct contact at all.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has torn NCTQ apart at great length; if you really want to know more, you can start here. Or check out Diane Ravitch's NCTQ history lesson. That will, among other things, remind you that She Who Must Not Be Named, the failed DC chancellor and quite possibly the least serious person to ever screw around with education policy, was also a part of NCTQ.

Bottom line. Everything I know about NCTQ makes me inclined to expect that any report they put out is intellectually dishonest crap designed to further an agenda of braking down teaching as a profession.

So we are ever going to look at this new thing? 

Yes, sure. I just wanted to make sure your expectations were set low enough.

State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading and Learning

That's the report, and here's your first spoiler alert: the report isn't really going to look at evaluating learning at all.

In fact, it will help to understand the report if you do not jump to the mistaken conclusion that NCTQ is asking, "Have we found effective ways to do these things?" Because the question NCTQ is really asking is, "How many of our preferred policies have we gotten people to implement?" At no point will they ever, ever ask, "Hey, are any of our preferred policies actually any good?"

If you understand the questions we're really asking (and not asking), the report makes a lot more sense.

Key Findings about Teacher Evaluation

NCTQ is happy to report that more states are falling in line. Almost all include student results in teacher evals, and some include those results extra hard. This is super-not-surprising, as such linkage was mandated by Race To The Top and the waivers that states pretty much had to try for. And we're super-happy that twenty-three states now require use of student test scores evidence of teacher results to decide teacher tenure.

Oh, but there is sad news, too. A "troubling" pattern.

The critique of old evaluation systems was that the performance of 99 percent of teachers was rated satisfactory, regardless of student achievement. Some policymakers and reformers have naively assumed that because states and districts have adopted new evaluations, evaluation results will inevitably look much different. But that assumption continues to be proven incorrect. We think there are several factors contributing to the lack of differentiation of performance:

Dammit!! The new evaluation systems were supposed to root out the terrible teachers in schools ("look much different" means "look more faily"), because if ten percent of students fail the Big Standardized Test, that must mean that ten percent of the teachers stink. It's common sense. Like if a football team loses ten percent of its games, ten percent of its players must be bad. Or if ten percent of the patients in a hospital die, ten percent of the doctors must be terrible. Come on, people-- it's just common sense.

So what do they think screwed things up? Well, lots of states only do one observation a year. Okay-- so is there a correlation between number of observations and number of "ineffective" ratings? Cause that seems like an easy thing to check, unless you were the laziest research group on the planet. Don't have that data? Okay then.

The other possible culprits are SLOs, which NCTQ suggests might be a disorderly vague mess. Well, I can't really argue with that conclusion, though its effect on evaluations is unclear, other than I'd bet lots of principals are reluctant to give lousy teacher ratings based on a technique less reliable than throwing dice through the entrails of a brown snake under a full moon.

Also, NCTQ knows that implementing both new "college and career standards" and new test-based teacher evaluation systems created an "unfortunate collision." Yeah, implementing new amateur hour standards along with crappy tests to be used in junk science evaluation schemes, and doing it all at once-- that's a thing that just kind of happened and wasn't at all the result of deliberate poorly-thought out plans of the educational amateurs running the reformy show. Honest to goodness, it will be a truly amazing day if I ever find a reformster policymaker actually say, "Yeah, we did that wrong. We screwed up. We made a bad choice and we should have listened to the ten gazillion education professionals telling us to choose better." But today is not that day.

NCTQ does think that student surveys might improve the whole evaluation thing, and boy, nobody can imagine downsides to that approach. But they are thinking basically anything that makes observations less of a piece of the evaluation, because they're pretty sure it's those damn principals messing up the system and making teachers look better than they are.

Any way, states should be "sensitive," but should not "indulge critics." And if you're looking for the part of the report that considers whether or not any of these teacher evaluation policies is valid, reliable, useful or indicative of actual teacher effectiveness-- well, that's just not going to happen.

Meanwhile, that bad old opt out movement has been all about protecting teachers from evaluations, and evaluations are much better now, so knock it off. 

Key Findings about Principal Evaluation 

Folks have figured out that we have to hold principals' feet to the fire, but states have found a wide variety of ways to do that, some of which are so sketchy that nobody even knows whose responsibility the principal eval is.

But in big bold letters, comes the pull quote: "There is insufficient focus on meaningful consequences for ineffective school leaders." So whatever system we come up with for evaluating principals, it really needs to punish people harder.


Connecting the Dots

What NCTQ would like to see more than anything else in the whole wide world is a teacher evaluation system driven by test scores that in turn drives everything else. Hiring, firing, promotions, tenure, revoking tenure, pay level-- they would like to see all of those tied to the teacher evaluation.

NCTQ credits Delaware, Florida and Louisiana with "connecting the dots" best of all. The language used for this baloney is itself baloney-- it's like the baloney you make out of the leftover scraps of baloney. But it's worth seeing, because it's language that keeps reappearing, including in places like, say, TeachStrong.

While there has been some good progress on connecting the dots in the states, unless pay scales change, evaluation is only going to be a feedback tool when it could be so much more. Too few states are willing to take on the issue of teacher pay and lift the teaching profession by rewarding excellence.

Sigh. Yes, teachers are currently holding back their most excellent selves, but if we paid them more, they'd be motivated. Because teaching really attracts people motivated by money. Of course, that's not really the idea behind various forms of merit pay. The real idea is a form of demerit pay cuts-- let's only give good pay to only the people we've decided deserve it.

Lessons for the Future

NCTQ has a whole decade of policy-tracking under its belt, so they've reached some conclusions.

States should not go too far with teacher effectiveness policy. NCTQ actually calls out North Carolina for screwing up the teacher evaluation system and trashing pay and offering ridiculous bonus pay and trying to kill tenure and just generally being a giant jerk to all teachers. While I applaud them for noticing that North Carolina has done nobody any favors by trying to become the most inhospitable teaching environment in the country, I feel it's only fair to point out that North Carolina hasn't done anything that directly contradicts NCTQ's policy recommendations. They've just done it in an unsubtle and poorly PRed manner.

Principal and teacher evals need to be lined up.

It's important to focus on the positive and not let teachers see the evaluation process as "an ominous enterprise aimed at punishing teacher." So I guess back a few pages when NCTQ was saying it was such a huge disappointment that teacher eval systems were still finding mostly good teachers, or a few pages after that when they were saying how all employment decisions should be tied to evaluations-- those were somehow NOT talking about how evaluation should be used to punish teachers? Definite mixed message problem here.

Don't forget what this is all about. The children. We're doing all this for the children. Not that we've done a lick of study to see if our favorite policies actually help the children in any meaningful way.

Finally, "incentives" are better than "force." Bribes are superior to beatings. Sigh. Okay, let's link to Daniel Pink's "Drive" one more time. 

Finally 

We get page after page of state by state summary chart showing how well each state is doing at linking teacher evaluation to every aspect of teacher professional existence. You'll have to look your own page up. Look, I can't do everything for you.

There are also some appendices of other fun things that I'm also not going to summarize for you.

What's missing?

The report includes not a word about how we might know that any of the recommended policies actually works. We are clear that the be-all and end-all is to raise student test scores. Any proof that higher test scores are indicative of anything other than scoring higher? And as we move to teacher evaluation systems, is there any proof that, say, linking tenure to test scores improves test scores or anything that are actually related to a good education?

No. So the report is left with a basic stance of, "Here are some things everybody should be doing because we think they are good ideas, though none of us have ever been public school teachers, and none of us have any real experience in public education. But you should do these things, and if you do, education in your state will be better in ways that we can't really support or specify." And it took over 100 pages to say that. But this is NCTQ, so some bunch of media dopes are going to report on this as if it is real research from reputable experts who know what the hell they're talking about. What a world.

PA: Testing Stutter Steps

Pennsylvania may or may not be close to getting a budget, or a temporary budget patch, or a deal to at least pay schools while the full budget continues to circle the drain. The news changes about every three or four hours.

But word comes out of Harrisburg that the budget talks also include discussion-- again-- of the use of the Keystone exams as a graduation requirement.

The Keystones are our version of the Big Standardized Test, theoretically aligned to the Pennsylvania Core Standards. The Pennsylvania Core Standards are of course one more version of the Common Core that are totes different from the national version because ours have the word "Pennsylvania" in the title and also don't have the word "Common" in the title, so completely different thing, absolutely. The Keystones are also our very own exam system even though I once sat through a state training on the testing in which we used PARCC materials and were assured those would work just fine. So there's that.

The original grandiose plan was for Keystone exams in every single subject area, but some problems have emerged with that plan including A) it turns out to be hard, B) it turns out to be expensive and C) pretty much everybody thinks the tests we have so far are crap.

It is C that has triggered an ongoing discussion about using the Keystones as graduation requirements. That requirement is supposed to happen for the class of 2017, which means that it's happening now because most schools give the exams in 10th or 11th grade in order to have some wiggle room to rescue the fails. People can't help noticing that a huge number of students who have are otherwise likely to complete graduation requirements are likely to be denied a diploma because of this crappy bubble test. And yes-- the Keystone is transparently the same old stupid bubble test because we have avoided on-line testing because we tried it once years ago and it was disastrous, so we are still bubbling in dots with our pencils.

Many of our legislators would like to press pause. And last summer, State Senator Lloyd Smucker managed to get a bill to pause the Keystones as a grad requirement for at least two years. This is no small thing-- Smucker is no friend of public education, but in fact has been a mover and shaker in pushing a Pennsylvania Achievement School District, a tool that Tennessee reformsters have found simply awesome for privatizing public schools. So even Smucker thinks that Keystones-as-grad-requirements is not ready for prime time. Which makes a little sense-- privatizers need to label schools as failures, but labeling actual humans as failures and denying them a diploma just creates a whole other mess of problems.

Smucker's bill passed the Senate and is currently languishing in the House Education Committee, where it is reportedly part of the larger budget debate. This may or may not be discouraging-- some days I suspect that education, employment, yellow line painting on the turnpike, and my dog's eating schedule are all part of the budget debate.

So maybe the Keystones will be graduation exams. Or maybe they are (as is oft asserted) intended to give us feedback and drive our instruction. Or maybe they're just to create data for use in teacher and school evaluations. Who knows. I mean, seriously-- does anybody know?

Meanwhile, however, Capitolwire.com in its Under the Dome report (behind a paywall) passed along the news that Data Recognition Corporation, Inc, has been awarded a contract to "continue the development, production and distribution of Pennsylvania's multiple assessments, including the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA), the Keystone Exams, End of Course (EOC) exams and the Classroom Diagnostic Tool, among others." You can read the contract details here: five and a half years, $210 million, with an option for a three-year renewal. The PSSA test (what we use for grades 3-8, because reasons) and Keystone exams used to be separate contacts; they are now combined.

So we remain committed to testing for some purpose or other, even if we can't agree on what that purpose might be. Perhaps people who work in the test manufacturing industry have simply become numb to the insanity, but how does a state go to a company and say, "We'd like to order a test. It maybe will be used as a summative graduation-requirement test, or maybe it will just be a formative instructional-feeding test, or maybe it will just-- you know what? Just whip us up some big-ass scary test that covers a lot of stuff. We'll figure out what to use it for later."  It's like going to a tool manufacturer and saying, "Well, I need a tool and, I don't know-- I might be driving nails with it, or maybe screwing in screws-- though I'm not sure what kind-- or I might need it to cut boards, and maybe mold concrete."

So maybe DRC's contract is really to create the Swiss Army Knife of tests. But I think it's more likely that in PA on the policy leadership level, we have no idea what we're doing and DRC gets to make a cool $210 mill from our confusion. Stay tuned.

More Charter Pushback for HRC

Man-- so much fuss from a couple of Hillary Clinton sentences.

After Robert Pondiscio stood up for charters, yesterday's USA Today included another pushback from charter cheerleader Richard Whitmire (Emerson Collective).

Whitmire has several charer-friendly notions that he would like to put forth.

First, he allows that charters have not turned out to be the great laboratories of innovation first envisioned-- but he blames that on public schools. Whitmire would have us believe that charters are chock full of innovative secrets to educational success, although he does not name a single lesson that public schools can learn from charters. In fact, I have never seen a charter advocate lay out lessons for public schools from charters, and I would propose that it's because there are no lessons to learn.

Spend more time on instruction. Have smaller classes. Be selective about which students are allowed to sit in your classroom, and when they can be admitted. Spend lots of money on resources and support, but don't take on any students who need a disproportionate amount of resources.

These are the "lessons" that modern charters have to teach, and they are not news to anybody. But they are also contrary to either A) the mission of public education or B) policymakers' desire not to give pubic schools anything above the most bare bones financial resources.

Whitmire cites his own book of glowing praise for Rocketship Academy, the charter system that launched the innovation of plunking students down in front of a computer screen. The Rocketship sputtered after a few years, but you can still find plenty of counter-narrative on line.

Whitmire says that public school districts ask only one question about charters-- "How can we deny them?" He might do well to ask why that is. While charteristas like to peddle that districts oppose charters because they are slaves to their teacher unions, I'd suggest that it's far more likely that under current funding systems, charters and districts are forced to compete in a zero-sum funding game and that every student who moves to a charter creates additional financial strains on the public school.

This leads us directly to Witmire's second point: "that rapidly expanding charters offer many poor and minority children their best chance of emerging from K-12 schools ready for a job or further education." This sentence needs some editing, and should read "charters offer a few poor and minority children an okay chance..." But because charters are now part of a zero-sum system, for every child that a charter accepts, many other children are left in a public school that is now trying to meet their needs with even fewer resources.

Finally, Whitmire suggests that the Democrat divide over charter schools is actually a proxy war, and that the real problem is poverty "and how schools can help children who arrive on their doorsteps from families facing difficult lives at home and families where the parents speak no English." Whitmire says that five million school children are now English Language Learners. What he doesn't say is how many of those five million charters are willing to help, and what can or should be done for all the rest. He talks about the "potential of powerful schools," but what he is proposing is a well-funded education for some, while all the rest must make do with a public system even more cash-strapped and resource-drained because of charters.

But what's really worth noting about Whitmire's rebuttal is that it does not actually address the substance of Clinton's criticism-- that charters do not accept or keep the most challenging students. It's a difficult issue for charter fans to address, because it's the truth.

And that is the real challenge for the Corporate Democrats who favor charters-- how to sell a system founded on the notion of a good education for only a few. Why would the any political party not want to stand up for a public education system dedicated to serving every single child in America?

Recognizing Excellent Schools

With all the various programs designed to recognize those who have been compliant with reformster requirements or those who have successfully offered control of their organization in return for Big Buck, are there any programs that recognize actual excellence in schools?

The answer is yes.

The National Education Policy Center is an invaluable piece of the great education debates, providing solid scholarship and a keen eye to cut through the baloney. Run out of the University of Colorado Boulder, these folks a dedication to truth, accuracy, and public education to the table.

They have harnessed all that into the Schools of Opportunity program, a program that seeks "to identify and recognize excellent public high schools that actively strive to close opportunity gaps by engaging in practices that build on students’ strengths, thereby creating engaging and supported learning opportunities for all their students." Yes, look at that. Building on students' strengths instead of beating every square peg into a pre-determined round hole. And all students-- not just the worthy strivers and deserving few.

The project is directed by Kevin Welner, of the UCB School of Education, and Carol Burris, former NY principal and current Executive Director of the Network for Public Education. It is funded by the Ford Foundation and the NEA Foundation. And it will select a school that serves at least grades 10-12 based on the following criteria:

* Create and maintain healthy school culture
* Broaden and enrich school curriculum
* Provide more and better learning time during the school year and summer
* End disparities in learning opportunities created by tracking and ability grouping
* Use a variety of assessments designed to respond to students needs
* Reassessed student discipline policies
* Support teachers as professionals
* Meets the needs of students with disabilities in an environment that balances challenge and support
* Address key health issues
* Build on strength of language minority students and correctly identify their needs
* Wise use of technology, and access to internet and libraries

Does that not sound like a school you would want to teach at or send your child to?

Last year the program was piloted in New York and Colorado, yielding five gold recognition schools and eleven silver recognition schools. These were noted with a small flourish in the media, including recognition in Valerie Strauss's Answer Sheet blog. It will not make the school rich or famous, but it will give it recognition for doing the right thing in an age where recognition seems to come only for super-duper test scores or some sort of bogus "Best of" list based on bogus measures and run by amateurs.

States are also busy ranking schools based on all the wrong things (how much product did you buy from the College Board?) and soaking them in VAM sauce.

There are so many bad metrics out there, metrics that have nothing to do with the actual quality of a school, metrics that simply use results of bad standardized assessment as a proxy for everything we want in a school. It is great to see somebody recognizing schools that achieve actual excellence.

The application is simple, and anyone can nominate their school, including administrators, teachers and students. If you don't think your school is quite there, then keep an eye peeled for the results (I'll help) because the list of recognized schools will act as an exemplar for all of us, a chance to hold something up and say, "This-- this is what I want us to look like!"

Schools of Opportunity is a hugely valuable program, not just for the schools that are recognized, but for everyone in the ed biz who is looking for real examples of real excellence to follow while we all try to navigate our way through a field crowded with reformy baloney. Thanks, NEPC, for doing the heavy lifting and providing something we all need-- a guide to real models of educational excellence.

Weingarten Explains WTH #TeachStrong

Say what you will about Randi Weingarten-- when the crowd is hollering for her head and throwing tomatoes, she doesn't pretend that it's all "Hosanna" and roses. And so just a couple of days after #TeachStrong hit the edu-verse with a resounding thud, here she is with a blog post entitled "Why the hell would AFT sign on to TeachStrong?"

NEA (my own national union) has not explained itself, but it also hasn't responded to criticism, but they also haven't spent the last days declaring, "Look!! Shiny!! Pretty!!" about this edufeast of reformy leftovers, either. But Weingarten was right there front and center in the heralding PR from the first hour, so Randi, you got some 'splainin' to do.

And splain she does. I'm not sure any of her reasons are very convincing, but here they are.

First, AFT leaders want you to now that they're skeptical, too. "Hmm," they wonder. "Why are TFA and TNTP signed up for this."Which hits me kind of like, "Why do you have such big teeth, grandma?" But AFT believes that something new is in the air.

Here’s why we signed on: The tide is turning — rejecting the blame-and-shame and test-based sanctioning policies of the last decade — but educators must have a role in what replaces that flawed “reform.”

See, there's going to be a new table. A shinier table. And we are going to get a seat at it.

Yes, DC and policymakers have pretty much ignored actual teachers. But the winds of change, they are a-blowin'.

But in the past two years, we’ve seen real movement — movement created by educators, parents and communities effectively lifting up our voices and demanding to be heard. And it’s a movement created by the ramifications and consequences of austerity, of policy driving competition instead of collaboration, of scapegoating teachers and ignoring key factors that affect public education — especially skyrocketing child poverty rates that take a deep toll on student learning.

Now, though, elected officials, community groups and education reform organizations are paying attention in a new way. We may have reached a tipping point.

Oh? Do tell.

Oops. Never mind. Weingarten wants to tell us 1) that the President just admitted mistakes in ed policy, and 2) the New ESEA is tilting away from top-down test-obsessed teacher-blamingpolicies. And that would be swell except 1) the "mistake" that the administration admitted to was not imposing enough top-down control and 2) no, not really, because all the new ESEA's still love test-driven accountability.

Also-- have you actually read the TeachStrong verbage? Because the whole premise of TeachStrong is that teachers are lousy and need to be brought into the twenty-first century because we're all stuck in our highly backward incompetent dark ages.

Are there any more reasons to think things are changing?

We’re seeing a move away from blaming and punishing educators, and some dialogue on how to recruit, retain, support and trust them.  

Where? I mean-- sputter, sputter, slap my forehead-- where exactly are you seeing this move or any such dialogue. Because out here beyond the beltway, teachers are still the cause of everything bad and only by punishing them into excellence and firing the millions of terrible ones will we ever save education. And once again-- have you read the TeachStrong materials????? Because the message there is pretty clear that teachers are a problem that needs to be fixed.


Oh, but there's a new AF task force on professionalism, and they like some of the things that TeachStrong likes, such as the creating professional pathways and new teacher support. Which is totally what the workplace task force that AFT ran with the BATs asked for, so congratulations BATs-- you've been co-opted for TeachStrong, too. (Several BATs from the QWL team reached out to be clear that they are NOT onboard with TeachStrong-- you can find a couple of them in the comments below). I'm not going to stop here, but if you want my point-by-point run down of why the TeachStrong Nine do not impress me, here it is.

But Weingarten is now on a roll.

We’re building teacher-powered schools, teacher-designed residency programs, and reclaiming meaningful recognition of the roles our veteran teachers play in mentoring novice teachers and sustaining our professional work.

Show me. Show me how. Because I find that one of the notable features of TeachStrong is that it has absolutely no language-- not a verb, not an adjective, not a comma-- that remotely resembles recognition of the need to actually listen to actual teachers. Not a bit. None. And then there's this...

Signing on to TeachStrong is about ensuring our voices and our ideas are not just heard, but are part of the blueprint of what happens next, and it’s about stopping the policymakers and elite thought-leaders from getting it wrong again.

Huh? What policymakers? What moving ahead? You almost talk as if TeachStrong is laying the groundwork for the education department in the next administration. Almost as if TeachStrong is about providing political support for a particular Clintonian candidate with an eye toward helping her set her table so that we can have a seat at it.

And if that's the case-- wait a minute. Does that mean that TFA and NCTQ and TNTP will also have a seat at this new table? Because if that's the case, this new table totally sucks. Totally. Sucks.

Some of the groups in TeachStrong may genuinely come our way as the tide turns. Others may not. If they don’t or won’t, we won’t hesitate to call them out.

Ooooooh!! Call them out! Well, that should fix everything. I bet they will live in mortal terror of being called out, because nobody in the teacher world has ever called them out before. Remember that time that the entire teaching profession called out TFA and they said, "Damn, we had better change our ways because we are getting called out!!" Or the time that the AFT and NEA called out the present administration for dismantling public education? Oh, yeah. That never happened.

But a press release about these principles or even coalitions advancing them is only a step. There are no silver bullets. We are sick and tired of people proposing the latest miracle solution. We could do everything on this list and have teachers who are both amazing and respected in every classroom, but that alone won’t be enough to help every child succeed — you know that, and we know that.

So, the TeachStrong plan is actually not important? We're just in it for the table place?

If we really want to ensure that every kid has a chance to reach his or her potential, we must provide all kids — especially kids in poverty — the resources and supports they need to succeed. 

Well, that's absolutely true. It just doesn't have anything at all to do with TeachStrong.

The tide is turning, and we have the chance to help change the narrative about educators and the role you play; to tell a different story about what works and what doesn’t in public education, based on real experience in classrooms across America. And it’s a chance to reclaim the promise of public education so that every public school is a place parents want to send their kids, educators want to work, and kids feel safe and engaged.

Man, Weingarten talks so pretty. But we have meandered a far distance away form our original question, which is why the hell did AFT sign off on a piece of reheated recycled reformster leftovers that put AFT and NEA in the same camp as some of the most relentlessly anti-teacher, anti-public education groups in the country? That's the question I came to hear answered, and I still haven't heard a satisfactory answer to it. I'm still waiting.