The new version of ESEA is called the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is a fine sine of the sort of aspirational nonsense that legislators are capable of. Why not the Every Child Gets a Pony Act, or the Every Child Is Smart, Good-Looking and Above Average Act?
The most notable thing about the act is that it is 1,061 pages long. It is the Moby Dick Travels to Middle Earth of regulation. The second most-notable thing is that it has been spit out by committee on a fast track that allows pretty much nobody to actually look at the thing, including the people who are poised to vote on it. Make a note of this fast-track legislative prestidigitation the next time some some pundit ponders how politics got so tangled in education. Once again, politics have been hardwired into public education's dna.
I am not exactly a low-information voter on these issues, and I have not a chance to really check out those 1,061 pages. But some folks have been doing super work with it. The folks at EdWeek's K-12 have been doing super work (here, here, or here for starters) and Mercedes Schneider has apparently doing without sleep to work on this (here and here). Daniel Katz has put together a good compendium of what's out there as well.
There are things to hate. TFA, charter schools, and the folks who love social impact bonds have gotten good value from their lobbyists. The path has been leveled for Competency Based Education. And probably most hateable of all, the damned stupid Big Standardized Test is all its yearly waste-of-timeliness has been enshrined in law once again.
There are things to love. Most notably, in what may really be an historic moment, a federal agency has had power taken away. USED is told to go sit in the corner and shut up. Although there are also opportunities for it to weasel its way back into power again.
Which is part of the wonder and terror of a bill like this. Nobody knows what all is in it. And even when they figure out what's in it, nobody knows what that means. Bills like this are an exercise in committee style compromise, which is all about letting every person get in a piece of language that makes them (or their favorite lobbyists) happy-- and not at all about figuring out what the resulting language will actually mean to the people who have to live by it.
Some of this law is going to end up in court. And some of it will be... well, who knows. It's worth remembering that states have long been mandated, by law, to develop and execute a plan by which the most highly effective teachers would be moved to the most troubled schools. That law has never been enforced in any meaningful way at all. Over the years ahead, it will not just be what the law says, but what the authorities think the law says, what the courts think the law says, and what laws the People In Charge want to bother enforcing.
Bodies of regulation like this are rewritten on the ground all the time. What changes under the New ESEA is the USED's power to unilaterally write whatever laws tickle their fancy this week.
A huge number of people are deeply pissed about the bill. BATs are accused on their Facebook page of being sellouts, and conservative commentators are up in arms because the new law doesn't go far enough toward actually dissolving the Department of Education. Neither of these is the position of a grown-up who lives in a nominal democracy.
At times like this, I remind myself that this is a marathon. It is a journey of a million steps. To imagine that a legislative package can be crafted that will set public education On The Right Path or Fix All Our Problems is to engage in the same sort of magical thinking that lead reformsters to think that Common Core would "fix" schools.
The corporate interest in public education is never going away. There's a lot of money in education, and it will always draw those people as surely as cow poop draws flies. There will always be powerful amateurs who think they know the secrets of education. There will always be politicians who would like to please as many voters and well-financed election backers as they possibly can. There will always be bad ideas that become popular in education. The current struggles will always be going on.
The goal cannot be to find and fight that one big apocalyptic battle that will End It All, because that's just not happening. Those of us who are standing up for public education will win the current arguments because the reformsters are wrong, their ideas are failures, and eventually they will get bored with losing and move on-- but there will be other messes to take their place. If your thought was that we'd somehow get a great New ESEA and you'd be able to relax and stop worrying about the assault on public education-- well, I have a bridge that runs over some Florida swampland to sell you.
In the meantime, we need to speak up against what we see that is wrong and argue against what will make matters worse. I've been busy emailing my representatives and I hope you have been, too, telling them what parts of the new bill need to be improved or removed (as well as arguing for a period of actually looking at the damn thing before passing it). I'm not excited about the New ESEA, but I don't oppose its passage because on the matter of stripping power from the USED alone it is an improvement over the current arrangement. It has been handled badly, it has many terrible parts, and it sets the stage for more problems with privatizing public ed. But at the moment I see it as a small step in the right direction, and in the journey of a million steps, one step in the right direction is okay. We've still got a million more steps to go.
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Campbell Brown's Friends
Weekly Standard writer Mark Hemingway is in the December issue sticking up for Campbell Brown with the kind of PR fluff that usually costs big bucks. It's clear that Campbell Brown doesn't need friends. But it appears she's looking for something else.
In "Who's Afraid of Campbell Brown? (Teachers' unions, and for good reason)" Hemingway provides a dispatch from an alternate universe where teacher unions rule and Brown is a unjustly victimized humanitarian. It's not nearly as interesting as it could have been had Hemingway also checked out some of the recordings from the corruption trial of disgraced NY Senate Leader Dean Skelos, because those recordings give us a bit more information about Brown's friends. But we'll get back to that-- first, a look at Hemingway's piece.
He opens with a look at Brown's modest office arrangements, and as will be the case throughout the piece, uses a bit of misdirection to avoid including some details. For instance, after describing Brown's low-rent office, he writes "But don't let this modest arrangement fool you" but the next part of that sentence is not "Brown has been given a $4 million budget to run her website." Nor (spoiler alert) is he ever going to mention that Brown's site requires a reportorial commitment to never run anti-charter stories. Instead, he wants us to know that Brown is parked on the moral high road.
Brown has promised that the site won’t shy away from advocacy and opinion—which it labels “opinion”—but at the same time she insists that her mission is not political. “My whole point about school reform is it’s not partisan. It’s not,” she says. “It’s a moral issue.”
And who is standing in the way of her righteous crusade? Three guesses
The trouble is, the last thing America’s teachers’ unions want is real reform, and they certainly don’t want Campbell Brown leading the charge. Far from making education a moral issue, they’re counting on it remaining a partisan one.
Exactly what reform charge is Brown leading? So far it appears that mostly she is leading the charge to establish herself as an important player, and she's not doing well. Hemingway will offer his warmed-over claim that the union "got to" the Democratic candidates who skipped Brown's Education Summit in Iowa, but he doesn't address who "got to" the eight GOP candidates who skipped her similar session in New Hampshire (the six who showed up were Bush, Fiorina, Kasich, Christie, Jindal and Walker so she didn't squeeze much juice out of that group). Brown keeps trying to sell the "I'm so important the unions want to silence me" narrative, but it seems more likely that Brown just isn't that important. And her desire to inject education into the campaign would be admirable, if it were not so clearly attached to her privatization and teacher-busting agenda).
But in Hemingway's alternate universe, the unions' reach is long and strong. In his universe, even Obama has "appeased" unions (by killing off DC's choice program). This is because "all meaningful education reforms hinge on greater accountability and erosion of the ironclad union protections that keep bad, even criminal, teachers in classrooms" and so unions are all about the status quo (except that the status quo these days is the reformster agenda of high-stakes testing and free-range charters). But again, our narrative brings us back to Campbell Brown, Education's Joan of Arc:
Given that teachers’ unions are used to making some of the most powerful politicians in the country dance on a string, they’re not happy about the emergence of Campbell Brown as a politically influential voice in education reform. She’s well-connected, independent, and has deep pockets. Perhaps most important, she’s a former A-list broadcast journalist, and her communication skills are superb. Consequently, union leaders don’t just disagree with Brown—they feel intense personal hatred.
This is the kind of writing that's hard to respond to because I don't even recognize the reality Hemingway speaks of. In my reality, there is not a single national-stage politician who clearly stands for public education, teachers or teachers unions. In my reality, rank and file teachers are repeatedly complaining about national union leaders who gladly tie themselves up so that they can dance to whatever tune the politicians pipe. Are there people who "intensely hate" Brown personally? I don't know. She tweeted at me once. It wasn't unpleasant. But mostly I don't think much about her. In the reformster landscape, she's one more well-funded pro-charter anti-teacher shill, probably a little less effective than many.
But Hemingway marshals a list of articles that were inspired by some mysterious teacher union memo. People keep asking who is funding her! People keep bringing up that her husband is a "Wall Street figure" and neocon who helped put positive spin on a war from which he allegedly profited. Hemingway lists all these unfun questions about Brown-- but he answers none of them. This is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest moment in a piece that is not exactly awash in rigor-- if Brown, who is pushing charters like crazy, is funded by people who stand to profit from charters, that matters. If it doesn't matter, then it also doesn't matter which politicians get teacher union money and support. Hemingway cannot have it both ways, but that's what he is demanding.
Then back to Brown's crusade against tenure, which is old news at this point (as is the lawsuit that was going to make her a player, but didn't). Hemingway also re-fries the old beans of a Diane Ravitch prettiness quote (calling her a union spokesperson, which is, again from some alternate universe).
Brown bemoans the lack of someone to engage with her, and again, this does not seem to be so much about the need to fix education as the need for Brown to find someone who will give her stature by treating her like she's a Big Deal. She wants someone from the opposition to debate her thoughtfully, and Hemingway neener-neeners that they're all afraid (she should take a page from the former failed chancellor of DC schools, who became a household ed reform name while steadfastly refusing to debate anybody). I believe there are many public education advocates who fit the bill of knowledgeable and interested in progress; I'm just not sure why they should feel the need to debate a self-appointed charter advocate, any more than I can think of a reason that the Secretary of Education should give me a call just because I'm a self-appointed education blogger.
Brown via Hemingway wades into other issues like testing and Common Core, but it's clear that's not her area of passion (or at least not one where it's clear which way the wind is blowing). But then she winds back around to choice, and heats up again.
Again, Hemingway lives in some alternate universe where Obama and the unions have fought school choice. In my universe, the Obama administration has thrown plenty of money and support at charters, and the unions have been exceptionally mild-mannered in doing anything that might resemble opposition of it. In fact, the problem with much of Hemingway's narrative is that it pictures the NEA and AFT as staunch defenders of traditional public schools at the same time that rank and file members have had to repeatedly try to force their unions to do things like call out Duncan (who was only implementing Obama policies, but the unions would never, ever say anything bad about an Obama policy). In other words, there are plenty of us who wish that the union had as much power and will to oppose ed reform as he imagines it does.
Hemingway lists some of the big failures in the ed reform biz, like Gates and Zuckerberg (and even, wierdly, Shyamalan), and asks how little old Campbell Brown can hope to succeed where they have failed.
Well, a little self-awareness goes a long way. Campbell Brown understands the roadblocks thrown in front of all of the wealthy dilettantes who came before her, and she intends to defy expectations. For one thing, far from trading on her celebrity, she’d already said goodbye to her high-flying career in broadcast journalism years before starting the Partnership for Educational Justice and the Seventy Four.
Not trading on her celebrity? I'm not faulting her for it-- she is who she is-- but pretending that her celebrity isn't a thing that factors into her new line of work is just silly. In fact, let's ask someone else to chime in on Campbell Brown's celebrity:
DEAN SKELOS: "Okay."
That's a transcript from some of the government wiretaps collected for the corruption trial of Dean Skelos who, at the time of this conversation, was hunting for a job for his son (you can listen to the recordings at the link). And so he set up a meeting with Campbell Brown and some billionaire charter backers.
So Campbell Brown doesn't need any more friends. She has friends who give her $4 million a year to run a charter advocacy website and very rich friends who help her meet with influential New York politicians and friends with deep pockets and even friends who write hugely complimentary profiles for conservative magazines.
No, what Brown needs is some enemies. She needs someone to take her on in public debate, or attack her on some high-profile platform. She needs to fight the Obama administration, maybe, she thinks, except that they are for pretty much most of the things she's for. She needs the unions to really come at her (she took a weakish swipe at them this weekend, about which I'll write elsewhere) and really draw some public blood so that people can see her really fighting hard, but the national unions are kind of soft and flabby and haven't shown much inclination to really fight reformy programs and in fact have cozied up to the Clinton campaign which will probably usher in even more programs that Brown actually agrees with.
Brown has unwittingly underlined our problem. She needs somebody with Stature and Importance to be her enemy, but there are very few people with Stature and Importance who are standing up for public education and teachers, and those few people don't seem to have the time or inclination to waste energy on an ed reform bit player.
Maybe Brown can start by going toe to toe with some C-level bloggers. Or maybe the next time she's having a backroom meeting with her billionaire charter buddies, she can ask them to buy her a sparring partner.
In "Who's Afraid of Campbell Brown? (Teachers' unions, and for good reason)" Hemingway provides a dispatch from an alternate universe where teacher unions rule and Brown is a unjustly victimized humanitarian. It's not nearly as interesting as it could have been had Hemingway also checked out some of the recordings from the corruption trial of disgraced NY Senate Leader Dean Skelos, because those recordings give us a bit more information about Brown's friends. But we'll get back to that-- first, a look at Hemingway's piece.
He opens with a look at Brown's modest office arrangements, and as will be the case throughout the piece, uses a bit of misdirection to avoid including some details. For instance, after describing Brown's low-rent office, he writes "But don't let this modest arrangement fool you" but the next part of that sentence is not "Brown has been given a $4 million budget to run her website." Nor (spoiler alert) is he ever going to mention that Brown's site requires a reportorial commitment to never run anti-charter stories. Instead, he wants us to know that Brown is parked on the moral high road.
Brown has promised that the site won’t shy away from advocacy and opinion—which it labels “opinion”—but at the same time she insists that her mission is not political. “My whole point about school reform is it’s not partisan. It’s not,” she says. “It’s a moral issue.”
And who is standing in the way of her righteous crusade? Three guesses
The trouble is, the last thing America’s teachers’ unions want is real reform, and they certainly don’t want Campbell Brown leading the charge. Far from making education a moral issue, they’re counting on it remaining a partisan one.
Exactly what reform charge is Brown leading? So far it appears that mostly she is leading the charge to establish herself as an important player, and she's not doing well. Hemingway will offer his warmed-over claim that the union "got to" the Democratic candidates who skipped Brown's Education Summit in Iowa, but he doesn't address who "got to" the eight GOP candidates who skipped her similar session in New Hampshire (the six who showed up were Bush, Fiorina, Kasich, Christie, Jindal and Walker so she didn't squeeze much juice out of that group). Brown keeps trying to sell the "I'm so important the unions want to silence me" narrative, but it seems more likely that Brown just isn't that important. And her desire to inject education into the campaign would be admirable, if it were not so clearly attached to her privatization and teacher-busting agenda).
But in Hemingway's alternate universe, the unions' reach is long and strong. In his universe, even Obama has "appeased" unions (by killing off DC's choice program). This is because "all meaningful education reforms hinge on greater accountability and erosion of the ironclad union protections that keep bad, even criminal, teachers in classrooms" and so unions are all about the status quo (except that the status quo these days is the reformster agenda of high-stakes testing and free-range charters). But again, our narrative brings us back to Campbell Brown, Education's Joan of Arc:
Given that teachers’ unions are used to making some of the most powerful politicians in the country dance on a string, they’re not happy about the emergence of Campbell Brown as a politically influential voice in education reform. She’s well-connected, independent, and has deep pockets. Perhaps most important, she’s a former A-list broadcast journalist, and her communication skills are superb. Consequently, union leaders don’t just disagree with Brown—they feel intense personal hatred.
This is the kind of writing that's hard to respond to because I don't even recognize the reality Hemingway speaks of. In my reality, there is not a single national-stage politician who clearly stands for public education, teachers or teachers unions. In my reality, rank and file teachers are repeatedly complaining about national union leaders who gladly tie themselves up so that they can dance to whatever tune the politicians pipe. Are there people who "intensely hate" Brown personally? I don't know. She tweeted at me once. It wasn't unpleasant. But mostly I don't think much about her. In the reformster landscape, she's one more well-funded pro-charter anti-teacher shill, probably a little less effective than many.
But Hemingway marshals a list of articles that were inspired by some mysterious teacher union memo. People keep asking who is funding her! People keep bringing up that her husband is a "Wall Street figure" and neocon who helped put positive spin on a war from which he allegedly profited. Hemingway lists all these unfun questions about Brown-- but he answers none of them. This is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest moment in a piece that is not exactly awash in rigor-- if Brown, who is pushing charters like crazy, is funded by people who stand to profit from charters, that matters. If it doesn't matter, then it also doesn't matter which politicians get teacher union money and support. Hemingway cannot have it both ways, but that's what he is demanding.
Then back to Brown's crusade against tenure, which is old news at this point (as is the lawsuit that was going to make her a player, but didn't). Hemingway also re-fries the old beans of a Diane Ravitch prettiness quote (calling her a union spokesperson, which is, again from some alternate universe).
Brown bemoans the lack of someone to engage with her, and again, this does not seem to be so much about the need to fix education as the need for Brown to find someone who will give her stature by treating her like she's a Big Deal. She wants someone from the opposition to debate her thoughtfully, and Hemingway neener-neeners that they're all afraid (she should take a page from the former failed chancellor of DC schools, who became a household ed reform name while steadfastly refusing to debate anybody). I believe there are many public education advocates who fit the bill of knowledgeable and interested in progress; I'm just not sure why they should feel the need to debate a self-appointed charter advocate, any more than I can think of a reason that the Secretary of Education should give me a call just because I'm a self-appointed education blogger.
Brown via Hemingway wades into other issues like testing and Common Core, but it's clear that's not her area of passion (or at least not one where it's clear which way the wind is blowing). But then she winds back around to choice, and heats up again.
Again, Hemingway lives in some alternate universe where Obama and the unions have fought school choice. In my universe, the Obama administration has thrown plenty of money and support at charters, and the unions have been exceptionally mild-mannered in doing anything that might resemble opposition of it. In fact, the problem with much of Hemingway's narrative is that it pictures the NEA and AFT as staunch defenders of traditional public schools at the same time that rank and file members have had to repeatedly try to force their unions to do things like call out Duncan (who was only implementing Obama policies, but the unions would never, ever say anything bad about an Obama policy). In other words, there are plenty of us who wish that the union had as much power and will to oppose ed reform as he imagines it does.
Hemingway lists some of the big failures in the ed reform biz, like Gates and Zuckerberg (and even, wierdly, Shyamalan), and asks how little old Campbell Brown can hope to succeed where they have failed.
Well, a little self-awareness goes a long way. Campbell Brown understands the roadblocks thrown in front of all of the wealthy dilettantes who came before her, and she intends to defy expectations. For one thing, far from trading on her celebrity, she’d already said goodbye to her high-flying career in broadcast journalism years before starting the Partnership for Educational Justice and the Seventy Four.
Not trading on her celebrity? I'm not faulting her for it-- she is who she is-- but pretending that her celebrity isn't a thing that factors into her new line of work is just silly. In fact, let's ask someone else to chime in on Campbell Brown's celebrity:
DEAN SKELOS: "I'm going into the city, meeting with some billionaires ... on school tax credit stuff - "
ADAM SKELOS: "Who are you meeting with?
DEAN SKELOS: " Campbell Brown."
ADAM SKELOS: "Ohhh... "
DEAN SKELOS: "Okay."
ADAM SKELOS: "Any financial ... people?"
DEAN SKELOS: "Yeah, you know the ... uhh ...the reporter, former reporter ...a whole bunch of them(i.e. billionaire charter promoters) and I'm having lunch with a bunch of them. Then I'm going to - "
ADAM SKELOS: "Dad, you’ve gotta ...you've gotta take these names down for me.”
DEAN SKELOS: "I got 'em all. I got 'em."
ADAM SKELOS: "All right."
That's a transcript from some of the government wiretaps collected for the corruption trial of Dean Skelos who, at the time of this conversation, was hunting for a job for his son (you can listen to the recordings at the link). And so he set up a meeting with Campbell Brown and some billionaire charter backers.
So Campbell Brown doesn't need any more friends. She has friends who give her $4 million a year to run a charter advocacy website and very rich friends who help her meet with influential New York politicians and friends with deep pockets and even friends who write hugely complimentary profiles for conservative magazines.
No, what Brown needs is some enemies. She needs someone to take her on in public debate, or attack her on some high-profile platform. She needs to fight the Obama administration, maybe, she thinks, except that they are for pretty much most of the things she's for. She needs the unions to really come at her (she took a weakish swipe at them this weekend, about which I'll write elsewhere) and really draw some public blood so that people can see her really fighting hard, but the national unions are kind of soft and flabby and haven't shown much inclination to really fight reformy programs and in fact have cozied up to the Clinton campaign which will probably usher in even more programs that Brown actually agrees with.
Brown has unwittingly underlined our problem. She needs somebody with Stature and Importance to be her enemy, but there are very few people with Stature and Importance who are standing up for public education and teachers, and those few people don't seem to have the time or inclination to waste energy on an ed reform bit player.
Maybe Brown can start by going toe to toe with some C-level bloggers. Or maybe the next time she's having a backroom meeting with her billionaire charter buddies, she can ask them to buy her a sparring partner.
Naughty Union Spending
Campbell Brown's pet PR project went after some union blood this weekend with revelations about AFT, NEA and UFT spending.
The lead is that between 2011 and 2014, the unions spent $5.7 on travel and hotel expenses. That's a lot of money.
Now, when we start breaking it down, there are some line items that seem a bit of a stretch in the outrage department. For instance, the AFT spent $6,700 at Walt Disney World, which is one day's admission for about 65 adults (who don't plan to eat during that day).
But the list also includes cruise tickets, international air travel, and fancy shmancy hotels. The 74 admits that the spending amounts to a small sliver of the total disbursements by the union, and that some of the travel and expense is an outgrowth of international union connections and even some humanitarian work.
The narrative here is a predictable one for the74-- those dollars are dues dollars and union members don't want their money spent on all this foolishness. Writer Naomi Nix has a nifty quote from Jade Thompson, an anti-"mandatory"-dues activist about how much the $800 of dues would mean to a working family. "It's our money," says Thompson, who probably meant to say, "It's our money that we only received in the first place because a union helped us negotiate a fair contract." And we should go back to the sliver. The article, for instance, marks NEA as spending $2.2 million over four years on "luxury travel and hotels." At three million members, that comes to about 18 cents a year in dues money.
But my absolute favorite nominee for Journalistic Insightfulness would be this part of Nix's article:
“They might have very good explanations for this. They might not,” Stanford University politics professor Terry Moe said of the spending on hotels and travel.
Well, you know. I think that just about covers it.
Moe also claims that "if you listen to them." the unions claim they are spending it all on collective bargaining. I don't know. I've been listening to them a long time, and I never got that impression. Moe claims that union spending on politics is like some kind of secret. I'm pretty sure he's wrong.
Look, I'm the last person to defend union spending patterns. As a local president, I went to region meetings that came complete with meals. I've sat through the arguments about whether to spend local dues money on things like retirement dinners and social gatherings. And I've been the teacher grumbling over state-level union people who wear suits that are nicer than anything I'll ever wear ever. There are some items in this article that do make me cringe.
I wish the unions operated on a shoestring and everyone traveled coach and stayed in a yurt. But I also understand that teachers give up time and effort to serve, and if the only time they can meet is during mealtime, then they should eat. I understand that maintaining a stable of experts who can be sent out to any local in need costs money, bot for maintaining and sending. I understand that if I want someone to go represent me in the big leagues, it helps if they look as if they belong in the big leagues. I understand all that, and I'll still vote for Bernie and not Hillary, because I want to believe in a world where it doesn't cost money to play in the big leagues. Of course, I also want to believe in a world in which you don't really need a union because the People In Charge already listen to employees and make sure those employees are treated well.
This is a yurt
I wish my union didn't spend big bucks on fancy hotels, especially because when they do, it makes it possible for outfits like the74 to do union hit pieces that throw around big numbers to make the union look bad. But this article was a fishing expedition, looking for a way to slam unions and support the narrative that unions need to be stripped of their ability to collect dues and gain members.
The lead is that between 2011 and 2014, the unions spent $5.7 on travel and hotel expenses. That's a lot of money.
Now, when we start breaking it down, there are some line items that seem a bit of a stretch in the outrage department. For instance, the AFT spent $6,700 at Walt Disney World, which is one day's admission for about 65 adults (who don't plan to eat during that day).
But the list also includes cruise tickets, international air travel, and fancy shmancy hotels. The 74 admits that the spending amounts to a small sliver of the total disbursements by the union, and that some of the travel and expense is an outgrowth of international union connections and even some humanitarian work.
The narrative here is a predictable one for the74-- those dollars are dues dollars and union members don't want their money spent on all this foolishness. Writer Naomi Nix has a nifty quote from Jade Thompson, an anti-"mandatory"-dues activist about how much the $800 of dues would mean to a working family. "It's our money," says Thompson, who probably meant to say, "It's our money that we only received in the first place because a union helped us negotiate a fair contract." And we should go back to the sliver. The article, for instance, marks NEA as spending $2.2 million over four years on "luxury travel and hotels." At three million members, that comes to about 18 cents a year in dues money.
But my absolute favorite nominee for Journalistic Insightfulness would be this part of Nix's article:
“They might have very good explanations for this. They might not,” Stanford University politics professor Terry Moe said of the spending on hotels and travel.
Well, you know. I think that just about covers it.
Moe also claims that "if you listen to them." the unions claim they are spending it all on collective bargaining. I don't know. I've been listening to them a long time, and I never got that impression. Moe claims that union spending on politics is like some kind of secret. I'm pretty sure he's wrong.
Look, I'm the last person to defend union spending patterns. As a local president, I went to region meetings that came complete with meals. I've sat through the arguments about whether to spend local dues money on things like retirement dinners and social gatherings. And I've been the teacher grumbling over state-level union people who wear suits that are nicer than anything I'll ever wear ever. There are some items in this article that do make me cringe.
I wish the unions operated on a shoestring and everyone traveled coach and stayed in a yurt. But I also understand that teachers give up time and effort to serve, and if the only time they can meet is during mealtime, then they should eat. I understand that maintaining a stable of experts who can be sent out to any local in need costs money, bot for maintaining and sending. I understand that if I want someone to go represent me in the big leagues, it helps if they look as if they belong in the big leagues. I understand all that, and I'll still vote for Bernie and not Hillary, because I want to believe in a world where it doesn't cost money to play in the big leagues. Of course, I also want to believe in a world in which you don't really need a union because the People In Charge already listen to employees and make sure those employees are treated well.
This is a yurt
I wish my union didn't spend big bucks on fancy hotels, especially because when they do, it makes it possible for outfits like the74 to do union hit pieces that throw around big numbers to make the union look bad. But this article was a fishing expedition, looking for a way to slam unions and support the narrative that unions need to be stripped of their ability to collect dues and gain members.
Monday, November 30, 2015
CBE & The Data Bottleneck
Can you tell I've been doing a lot of reading about Competency Based Education lately?
While some proponents like to point to more human-friendly versions of CBE such as a personalized district in rural Alaska, the more common picture of CBE is of a huge data-mining monstrosity. And while CBE has been rolling steadily at us under various aliases for a few decades now, it is computer technology that has made it look like both achievable and profitable.
In fact, CBE on the ground really does look like one more variation of the old and failed teaching machines, an intent to convert the entire ed system to the failed model of Rocketship Academy or the very failed model of on-line schooling.
You don't have to dig very far for hints about where CBE is headed. One of the flagship groups leading the charge is iNACOL -- which stands for "International Association for K-12 Online Learning." You can find their logo on works like the report presented by CompetencyWorks (what the hell is it with these guys and smooshedtogether group names?) entitled Re-Engineering Information Technology, a report all about how to redesign your IT systems to accommodate CBE.
Like many CBE fans, these guys are wrestling with the challenge of collecting tons of data, crunching it, making it transparent to students and teachers, and using it to make quick decisions about what should happen next in the student's education.
I'm hearing and reading the stories from teachers on the ground, in classrooms that are in part or in full running CBE, and they all seem to be about getting data through the bottleneck. Teachers who spend hours plugging test/quiz/worksheet scores into their platform. Teachers who maintain data walls on steroids so that students can walk into the room and first thing in the morning see where they are on the standards matrix and task completion matrix. Teachers who are directed to keep the students on those iPads for a significant portion of the day.
Computers become attractive in a CBE approach not because they do a better job of teaching (they don't) or because they are more engaging for students (they aren't) but because nothing else can compare for the speed and efficiency of gathering up the data. To wait for a human to process, score, record, and do data entry on class sets of papers-- that's just too long, too inefficient (plus, if those teachers haven't been properly freed from the tyranny of a union, they might balk at being required to put in fourteen hour days just so they can handle their hours of data entry).
So once again, the technology isn't there to serve education or the students, but to serve the people who think their program is magical. Only computers can clear the data bottleneck and get that sweet, sweet data flowing, and if that means we have to design all tests and worksheets and lessons and objectives so that they are the kind of thing that a computer can easily handle as opposed to, say, the kind of things that actually educate students-- well, the needs of the system outweigh the needs of the humans involved in it.
That's why CBE is destined to be nothing but OBE dressed up as the biggest cyber-school ever. It may not be great education, but at least the data trains run on time.
While some proponents like to point to more human-friendly versions of CBE such as a personalized district in rural Alaska, the more common picture of CBE is of a huge data-mining monstrosity. And while CBE has been rolling steadily at us under various aliases for a few decades now, it is computer technology that has made it look like both achievable and profitable.
In fact, CBE on the ground really does look like one more variation of the old and failed teaching machines, an intent to convert the entire ed system to the failed model of Rocketship Academy or the very failed model of on-line schooling.
You don't have to dig very far for hints about where CBE is headed. One of the flagship groups leading the charge is iNACOL -- which stands for "International Association for K-12 Online Learning." You can find their logo on works like the report presented by CompetencyWorks (what the hell is it with these guys and smooshedtogether group names?) entitled Re-Engineering Information Technology, a report all about how to redesign your IT systems to accommodate CBE.
Like many CBE fans, these guys are wrestling with the challenge of collecting tons of data, crunching it, making it transparent to students and teachers, and using it to make quick decisions about what should happen next in the student's education.
I'm hearing and reading the stories from teachers on the ground, in classrooms that are in part or in full running CBE, and they all seem to be about getting data through the bottleneck. Teachers who spend hours plugging test/quiz/worksheet scores into their platform. Teachers who maintain data walls on steroids so that students can walk into the room and first thing in the morning see where they are on the standards matrix and task completion matrix. Teachers who are directed to keep the students on those iPads for a significant portion of the day.
Computers become attractive in a CBE approach not because they do a better job of teaching (they don't) or because they are more engaging for students (they aren't) but because nothing else can compare for the speed and efficiency of gathering up the data. To wait for a human to process, score, record, and do data entry on class sets of papers-- that's just too long, too inefficient (plus, if those teachers haven't been properly freed from the tyranny of a union, they might balk at being required to put in fourteen hour days just so they can handle their hours of data entry).
So once again, the technology isn't there to serve education or the students, but to serve the people who think their program is magical. Only computers can clear the data bottleneck and get that sweet, sweet data flowing, and if that means we have to design all tests and worksheets and lessons and objectives so that they are the kind of thing that a computer can easily handle as opposed to, say, the kind of things that actually educate students-- well, the needs of the system outweigh the needs of the humans involved in it.
That's why CBE is destined to be nothing but OBE dressed up as the biggest cyber-school ever. It may not be great education, but at least the data trains run on time.
Chugach, Alaska
As reformy advocacy shifts toward promotion of Competency Based Education (or Proficiency Based Learning-- they have really got to settle on the set of buzzwords they want to use), we are going to hear now and then about a magical place in Alaska-- the Chugach School District.
Back in the nineties, when Objective Based Education (the previous iteration of CBE) was all the rage, Chugach signed up in a big way. They developed an OBE system that is now bills itself as the first competency based school district in the country.When edutopia visited in 2007, they found a system that was the pinnacle of performance-based learning. The district had over a thousand standards, and students had to achieve mastery of each before moving on to the next. Students also design their own projects and a "school-to-life" plan. And the Voyage to Excellence program is a self-directed process with a big vocational-technical flavor. The leader of the district during the switch repeated one of the mantras of OBE:
"Time was the constant and learning was the variable -- that's the old model," says Roger Sampson, president of the Education Commission of the States, who led Chugach's transformation as district superintendent in the 1990s. "We switched. What's constant is learning. Time is the variable."
Or as is noted elsewhere in the article:
Even as globalization and media propel our culture -- and our classrooms -- toward modes of production that are bigger, faster, and more alike, Chugach has refocused on an approach to education that is smaller, personalized, and variably paced. As Douglas Penn, the districtwide principal, explains, "Our kids graduate when they're ready. We're not pumping them out the door with D's on their diplomas."
And "graduate when they're ready" means just what it says. When the district won a Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award in 2001, the write-up noted that students might graduate when they fourteen or when they were twenty-one.
The accolades have been steady. Here's a piece from the John Hopkins School of Education, written by Wendy Battino, a teacher-principal with Chugach who went on to join the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition (as well as a career as a life coach). Here's an edsurge paean. But, boy-- nobody loves Chugach like CompetencyWorks.org, which ran a five-part series in January of 2015 (here's part five).
In 2001, then-superintendent Richard DeLorenzo had this to say about the district's vision and their place in the educational firmament:
Education is in a crisis due to the fact that we must now educate all students regardless of their potential or socio-economic status to some degree of excellence. Relying on traditional methodology and practice will only lead to tinkering with mediocrity where we fail to meet the needs of individuals. In order to accomplish excellence we need to radically alter what we teach and how we teach. We at Chugach have undertaken this journey and have dismantled many of the barriers that were once thought unapproachable to reach excellence in education. We have endured many hardships and disappointments and yet we still proceed with this tiresome journey because every student deserves the chance to be successful and share the opportunity to reach their full potential.
So-- yay! Dismantling barriers. The end of "tinkering with mediocrity." I can see the appeal to reformsters. But after twenty years, the system seems to be working in Chugach Schools. Could it be a model system for the rest of us?
Well....
Here are some things to know about the Chugach School District.
* The largely rural district covers about 22,000 square miles, including some square miles which are islands.
* Number of students in the system has ranged from 150 to 300, depending. The district markets itself to students outside its geographical boundaries.
* 77% of the students are homeschooled.
* The district generally employs fewer than twenty full-time faculty.
Let's set aside the argument about "mastery learning" for a moment (at exactly what point does one declare that a student has "mastered" reading?). We'll also set aside some questions about whether Chugach really did involve all stakeholders as their Baldrige write-up suggests, or whether this researcher was correct to conclude that political maneuvering of a ham-fisted "visionary" drove the bus. Let's just check this idea for scaleability.
Let's imagine, for instance, Chicago, where students (public and charter) run around 400,000. Exactly what would a system where 400,000 students pursued 1,000 objectives independently look like? Would we, like Chugach, have 300,000 of those students home schooled, so that their families are responsible for making sure the student stays on task? Chugach requires students working on certain types of projects to contact and get advice from professionals. So if 25,000 Chicago students decide they want to do a photography project, where will all 25K turn for advice?
The system allows students to finish whenever they get there. How would that play out in a poor urban setting where there are already so many obstacles to school completion? What does a bright fourteen year old who has breezed through all the performance tasks and graduated "early" do next?
How does a staff of teachers monitor 400,000 students all working at their own pace? And how do parents react when they learn, as Chugach parents have, that at any given point, every child's report card may look different?
What does it do to the cohesion and culture of a school when students must choose between moving forward to their next standard and staying with their friends? How badly does it crush a child's confidence to be among those "left behind." I'm not asking because I'm afraid students might feel bad, but because I know these kind of blows to the ego and self really interfere with learning. With a predominantly homeschooled population, Chugach provides no window on how this kind of system affects the culture inside a building.
For reformsters who love CBE, Chugach is a model of how paradisey the competency based model can be. But to me, it's just one more example of how one size doesn't fit all, and that the continued search for a magical school approach that can be applied to any district anywhere is a fool's errand. Chugach is very unique system with very unique challenges that has landed on a very unique solution.
Chugach's approach may very well work for Chugach, a very rural district of a very few, predominantly home-schooled students. But if someone starts telling me that Chugach is a reason to believe that CBE will be awesome everywhere, I'm going to assume that they are more interested in selling snake oil than helping schools.
Back in the nineties, when Objective Based Education (the previous iteration of CBE) was all the rage, Chugach signed up in a big way. They developed an OBE system that is now bills itself as the first competency based school district in the country.When edutopia visited in 2007, they found a system that was the pinnacle of performance-based learning. The district had over a thousand standards, and students had to achieve mastery of each before moving on to the next. Students also design their own projects and a "school-to-life" plan. And the Voyage to Excellence program is a self-directed process with a big vocational-technical flavor. The leader of the district during the switch repeated one of the mantras of OBE:
"Time was the constant and learning was the variable -- that's the old model," says Roger Sampson, president of the Education Commission of the States, who led Chugach's transformation as district superintendent in the 1990s. "We switched. What's constant is learning. Time is the variable."
Or as is noted elsewhere in the article:
Even as globalization and media propel our culture -- and our classrooms -- toward modes of production that are bigger, faster, and more alike, Chugach has refocused on an approach to education that is smaller, personalized, and variably paced. As Douglas Penn, the districtwide principal, explains, "Our kids graduate when they're ready. We're not pumping them out the door with D's on their diplomas."
And "graduate when they're ready" means just what it says. When the district won a Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award in 2001, the write-up noted that students might graduate when they fourteen or when they were twenty-one.
The accolades have been steady. Here's a piece from the John Hopkins School of Education, written by Wendy Battino, a teacher-principal with Chugach who went on to join the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition (as well as a career as a life coach). Here's an edsurge paean. But, boy-- nobody loves Chugach like CompetencyWorks.org, which ran a five-part series in January of 2015 (here's part five).
In 2001, then-superintendent Richard DeLorenzo had this to say about the district's vision and their place in the educational firmament:
Education is in a crisis due to the fact that we must now educate all students regardless of their potential or socio-economic status to some degree of excellence. Relying on traditional methodology and practice will only lead to tinkering with mediocrity where we fail to meet the needs of individuals. In order to accomplish excellence we need to radically alter what we teach and how we teach. We at Chugach have undertaken this journey and have dismantled many of the barriers that were once thought unapproachable to reach excellence in education. We have endured many hardships and disappointments and yet we still proceed with this tiresome journey because every student deserves the chance to be successful and share the opportunity to reach their full potential.
So-- yay! Dismantling barriers. The end of "tinkering with mediocrity." I can see the appeal to reformsters. But after twenty years, the system seems to be working in Chugach Schools. Could it be a model system for the rest of us?
Well....
Here are some things to know about the Chugach School District.
* The largely rural district covers about 22,000 square miles, including some square miles which are islands.
* Number of students in the system has ranged from 150 to 300, depending. The district markets itself to students outside its geographical boundaries.
* 77% of the students are homeschooled.
* The district generally employs fewer than twenty full-time faculty.
Let's set aside the argument about "mastery learning" for a moment (at exactly what point does one declare that a student has "mastered" reading?). We'll also set aside some questions about whether Chugach really did involve all stakeholders as their Baldrige write-up suggests, or whether this researcher was correct to conclude that political maneuvering of a ham-fisted "visionary" drove the bus. Let's just check this idea for scaleability.
Let's imagine, for instance, Chicago, where students (public and charter) run around 400,000. Exactly what would a system where 400,000 students pursued 1,000 objectives independently look like? Would we, like Chugach, have 300,000 of those students home schooled, so that their families are responsible for making sure the student stays on task? Chugach requires students working on certain types of projects to contact and get advice from professionals. So if 25,000 Chicago students decide they want to do a photography project, where will all 25K turn for advice?
The system allows students to finish whenever they get there. How would that play out in a poor urban setting where there are already so many obstacles to school completion? What does a bright fourteen year old who has breezed through all the performance tasks and graduated "early" do next?
How does a staff of teachers monitor 400,000 students all working at their own pace? And how do parents react when they learn, as Chugach parents have, that at any given point, every child's report card may look different?
What does it do to the cohesion and culture of a school when students must choose between moving forward to their next standard and staying with their friends? How badly does it crush a child's confidence to be among those "left behind." I'm not asking because I'm afraid students might feel bad, but because I know these kind of blows to the ego and self really interfere with learning. With a predominantly homeschooled population, Chugach provides no window on how this kind of system affects the culture inside a building.
For reformsters who love CBE, Chugach is a model of how paradisey the competency based model can be. But to me, it's just one more example of how one size doesn't fit all, and that the continued search for a magical school approach that can be applied to any district anywhere is a fool's errand. Chugach is very unique system with very unique challenges that has landed on a very unique solution.
Chugach's approach may very well work for Chugach, a very rural district of a very few, predominantly home-schooled students. But if someone starts telling me that Chugach is a reason to believe that CBE will be awesome everywhere, I'm going to assume that they are more interested in selling snake oil than helping schools.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
ICYMI: Some Sunday Edureads
It will be a quickie this week-- I have both of my children home and a grandson's birthday party to attend!
Eva Moskowitz Cannot Help Herself
Daniel Katz provides one of the best overviews of Moskowitz's ongoing meltdown. A study in how privilege, money and power can make you blind to how you're behavior is playing in the real world.
How Twisted Early Childhood Education Has Become
Early childhood ed has arguably been more badly damaged by reformsters than any other segment of the education biz. Sometimes it helps to have someone take a step back, show how far off track we have gotten, and help you realize you're not crazy for thinking we're getting early childhood ed completely wrong at this point.
Competency Based Ed: The Culmination of the Common Core Agenda
A good collection of the many pieces and points of view springing up as CBE becomes the newest topic of the education debates.
Five Perspectives on Student Fragility
At Psychology Today, Peter Gray has been running a series about the increasing fragile nature of our students, including theories about the source. This latest installment is interesting because it includes the many, many reactions from various stakeholders in that discussion.
Are You Being Served?
Nobody combines humor and actual journalism better than Jennifer Berkshire at Edushyster. Here's a look at the facts of which students Boston charter schools are actually serving.
Eva Moskowitz Cannot Help Herself
Daniel Katz provides one of the best overviews of Moskowitz's ongoing meltdown. A study in how privilege, money and power can make you blind to how you're behavior is playing in the real world.
How Twisted Early Childhood Education Has Become
Early childhood ed has arguably been more badly damaged by reformsters than any other segment of the education biz. Sometimes it helps to have someone take a step back, show how far off track we have gotten, and help you realize you're not crazy for thinking we're getting early childhood ed completely wrong at this point.
Competency Based Ed: The Culmination of the Common Core Agenda
A good collection of the many pieces and points of view springing up as CBE becomes the newest topic of the education debates.
Five Perspectives on Student Fragility
At Psychology Today, Peter Gray has been running a series about the increasing fragile nature of our students, including theories about the source. This latest installment is interesting because it includes the many, many reactions from various stakeholders in that discussion.
Are You Being Served?
Nobody combines humor and actual journalism better than Jennifer Berkshire at Edushyster. Here's a look at the facts of which students Boston charter schools are actually serving.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Remember Outcome Based Education?
Because of massive technological, economic and social changes, we are challenged to boost standards of student performance substantially, especially among those who in the past were least successful. The educational sector apparently will not have more money, so we cannot expect salaries to be more attractive or other resources more plentiful. The alternative, say thoughtful observers, is to restructure.
That quote comes from Ron Brandt, the Executive Editor for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. In 1994. It comes from Brandt's introduction to the book Outcome Based Education: Critical Issues and Answers, by William Spady. More about him in a moment.
If you are a teacher of a Certain Age, you remember Outcome Based Education. OBE started popping up in the US in the early 90s. While one of its features was a certain vagueness (Brandt wrote in an ASCD overview that "OBE is more of a philosophy than a uniform set of practices"). But now that Competency Based Education is auditioning for Educational Thing Du Jour, pulling out the OBE notebook seems apropos.
OBE attracted my attention when it first appeared because it sounded suspiciously like Management By Objectives, a management technique developed by Peter Drucker. Watching old insights from MBO appear in OBE was first led to my theory that when management consultants have finally saturated the business market, they go through their materials, cross out the biz buzz words, and pencil in education jargon and voila!-- they are back in business.
But if OBE was transmogrified from the business world, so what? Was it any good?
The central philosophical shift was to move from time-based schooling to objective based. in other words, the traditional constant in school is time, and the variable is learning. We only have 180 days-- how much can we get done in those days? OBE said, "Let's list what learning objectives we want the students to achieve, and time will be the variable."
The self-proclaimed father of OBE is the above-mentioned Bill Spady, a sociologist who started pioneering OBE in the mid-eighties. He became the director of the International Center on Outcome-Based Restructuring, and continues to work in education today. If you really want to know all about Spady, a John Anthony Hader wrote his dissertation about Spady and his work.
Spady was notoriously unwilling to give exact instructions for setting up OBE, insisting that objectives had to be locally developed. But he did lay down some guiding principles, some of which are listed here by his colleague Brandt.
* Clarity of focus. Your outcome has to be focused and specific.
* Design down, deliver up. Work backwards from your objective to design programs, but work toward the objective from wherever the students are.
* High expectations. Specifically (if we heard this once, we heard it a million times) believe that all students can learn all.
* Expanded opportunities. Provide students many chances and many ways to show they have achieved the objective.
Additionally, OBE acquired various corollaries, implications, and add-ons. If we were going to insist that all students can learn all, then we had better settle on objectives that all students can learn (let the dumbing down begin). For some reason, cooperative learning became closely tied to OBE in many regions. And the prospect of wreaking havoc with the school year-- headaches! If Chris can meet all objectives by Christmas, can Chris then go home? Or does Chris just start the next "grade"? And what if Chris is still not getting it in July-- does Chris's school year continue until the last objective is met? Logistically, how does that even work? And how do you write a teacher contract that says, "Depending on how well you do, you are hired for something between 100 and 300 days." Or do you just pay teachers for piecework ($100 per every student objective met)?
Objectives themselves were problematic. This was the dawn of TSWBAT (the student will be able to...) which meant that every single objective had to be paired with some observable student behavior. This has eternally been an educational challenge (did Chris learn to understand the Iliad, or did Chris figure out how to act like Chris understands). But OBE threw its weight on the side of observable behavior, encouraging teachers to require student performance rather than teacher inquiry to assess.
OBE caught on big time, until-- and I say this with both pride and shame-- Pennsylvania broke it.
Pennsylvania was poised to weave OBE into the warp and woof of state education regulation. Many of us went to professional development sessions to prepare us for the Big Shift. But instead, this time, shift never happened.
Some of it was not Pennsylvania's fault. The OBE fans had missed one of the implications of their own work, which was the the objectives would need to be clearly measurable. Instead, various versions of OBE were peppered with what we now call non-cognitive objectives. And not just non-cognitive, but politically charged as well. Here are some contributions to the genre:
All students understand and appreciate their worth as unique and capable individuals, and exhibit self-esteem.
All students apply the fundamentals of consumer behavior to managing available resources to provide for personal and family needs.
All students make environmentally sound decisions in their personal and civic lives.
OBE programs has a variety of objectives like these, and conservatives freaked. Rush Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, Pat Robertson and most especially Phyllis Schafly were sure that OBE was here to socially engineer your child into some bleeding heart gay-loving liberal twinkie.
OBE was also vulnerable because there wasn't a lick of evidence or research to indicate that it actually worked. And because it was focused on locally-selected objectives that could be met in a variety of ways, there wasn't even any way to tell if it was working at all.
Opponents were also taken aback by the electronic portfolio. OBE demanded a portfolio system in which the many and varied objective-meeting projects of students could be gathered, but then some computer-enamored mook decided that an electronic portfolio, that could be stored in perpetuity and could follow the students anywhere-- that would be cool! Is any of this starting to sound vaguely familiar?
And because Spady and his brethren refused to give specific instructions, OBE looked like a thousand different things, some of which seemed directly contradictory. In Pennsylvania, the initial version of OBE state education regs included roughly 550 objectives. According to Hader's oral history, Spady told them they were about 540 off; the education department rapidly backpedaled while begging Spady to come write the objectives for them. Then Peg Luksik activiated her formidable army or conservatives to attack OBE, and the whole business started to collapse. Pennsylvania broke OBE, and it never quite recovered.
When I started to hear about Performance/Competency Based Education, I initially thought that it would be the reheated leftovers of OBE. I cringed, because I remember the training and the insistence that all students can learn everything and the crazy barrage of ever-shifting state directives. Pennsylvania's OBE initiative came at the end of my first decade in the classroom, and it marked the point at which I suddenly realized that the policy leaders and educational bureaucrats on the state level might not know what the hell they were talking about. But I also remembered OBE's complete and utter collapse and thought, "Well, this will die quickly."
But CBE turns out to be a different sort of OBE, an OBE with its holes plugged by sweet, sweet technology and its foundation shored up withCommon Core college and career ready standards. Where OBE was all loosey goosey with whatever standards and objectives the locals wanted, CBE will help you get a list of standards/objectives already in place-- and some vendors will throw in the assessments and performance tasks and the software to measure them as well as recording the results as well as using those results to decide which pre-packaged lesson your student should do next.
Technology also aids in the variable-time logistics problem. Now, instead of puzzling over whether behind-on-objective Chris must stay in school through July, we can just get Chris to use internet connections to make the school day fourteen hours long. Of course, we still have the puzzle of what to do if Chris completes an entire grade level's worth of objectives over the weekend.
Technology also ups the ante on that electronic portfolio, the data backpack that will follow your student throughout life. Of course, in some schools that currently means that a teacher's primary function is endless data entry. But since the performance tasks are on the computer, the teacher will be spending far less time teaching anyway.
Most of all, technology underlines the classic problem with OBE-- the notion that education is just learning to perform a series of designated tasks, like a team on the Amazing Race. Education is just working your way down a checklist, and once everything on the list is checked off-- congratulations! You're an educated person! That's all it there is to it! Of course, that also takes us back to the problem that killed OBE the last time-- exactly who gets to decide which tasks go on that checklist?
As I've said, I have my doubts about CBE's chance to take over the education world. Its resemblance to OBE doesn't improve my estimation of its odds.
That quote comes from Ron Brandt, the Executive Editor for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. In 1994. It comes from Brandt's introduction to the book Outcome Based Education: Critical Issues and Answers, by William Spady. More about him in a moment.
If you are a teacher of a Certain Age, you remember Outcome Based Education. OBE started popping up in the US in the early 90s. While one of its features was a certain vagueness (Brandt wrote in an ASCD overview that "OBE is more of a philosophy than a uniform set of practices"). But now that Competency Based Education is auditioning for Educational Thing Du Jour, pulling out the OBE notebook seems apropos.
OBE attracted my attention when it first appeared because it sounded suspiciously like Management By Objectives, a management technique developed by Peter Drucker. Watching old insights from MBO appear in OBE was first led to my theory that when management consultants have finally saturated the business market, they go through their materials, cross out the biz buzz words, and pencil in education jargon and voila!-- they are back in business.
But if OBE was transmogrified from the business world, so what? Was it any good?
The central philosophical shift was to move from time-based schooling to objective based. in other words, the traditional constant in school is time, and the variable is learning. We only have 180 days-- how much can we get done in those days? OBE said, "Let's list what learning objectives we want the students to achieve, and time will be the variable."
The self-proclaimed father of OBE is the above-mentioned Bill Spady, a sociologist who started pioneering OBE in the mid-eighties. He became the director of the International Center on Outcome-Based Restructuring, and continues to work in education today. If you really want to know all about Spady, a John Anthony Hader wrote his dissertation about Spady and his work.
Spady was notoriously unwilling to give exact instructions for setting up OBE, insisting that objectives had to be locally developed. But he did lay down some guiding principles, some of which are listed here by his colleague Brandt.
* Clarity of focus. Your outcome has to be focused and specific.
* Design down, deliver up. Work backwards from your objective to design programs, but work toward the objective from wherever the students are.
* High expectations. Specifically (if we heard this once, we heard it a million times) believe that all students can learn all.
* Expanded opportunities. Provide students many chances and many ways to show they have achieved the objective.
Additionally, OBE acquired various corollaries, implications, and add-ons. If we were going to insist that all students can learn all, then we had better settle on objectives that all students can learn (let the dumbing down begin). For some reason, cooperative learning became closely tied to OBE in many regions. And the prospect of wreaking havoc with the school year-- headaches! If Chris can meet all objectives by Christmas, can Chris then go home? Or does Chris just start the next "grade"? And what if Chris is still not getting it in July-- does Chris's school year continue until the last objective is met? Logistically, how does that even work? And how do you write a teacher contract that says, "Depending on how well you do, you are hired for something between 100 and 300 days." Or do you just pay teachers for piecework ($100 per every student objective met)?
Objectives themselves were problematic. This was the dawn of TSWBAT (the student will be able to...) which meant that every single objective had to be paired with some observable student behavior. This has eternally been an educational challenge (did Chris learn to understand the Iliad, or did Chris figure out how to act like Chris understands). But OBE threw its weight on the side of observable behavior, encouraging teachers to require student performance rather than teacher inquiry to assess.
OBE caught on big time, until-- and I say this with both pride and shame-- Pennsylvania broke it.
Pennsylvania was poised to weave OBE into the warp and woof of state education regulation. Many of us went to professional development sessions to prepare us for the Big Shift. But instead, this time, shift never happened.
Some of it was not Pennsylvania's fault. The OBE fans had missed one of the implications of their own work, which was the the objectives would need to be clearly measurable. Instead, various versions of OBE were peppered with what we now call non-cognitive objectives. And not just non-cognitive, but politically charged as well. Here are some contributions to the genre:
All students understand and appreciate their worth as unique and capable individuals, and exhibit self-esteem.
All students apply the fundamentals of consumer behavior to managing available resources to provide for personal and family needs.
All students make environmentally sound decisions in their personal and civic lives.
OBE programs has a variety of objectives like these, and conservatives freaked. Rush Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, Pat Robertson and most especially Phyllis Schafly were sure that OBE was here to socially engineer your child into some bleeding heart gay-loving liberal twinkie.
OBE was also vulnerable because there wasn't a lick of evidence or research to indicate that it actually worked. And because it was focused on locally-selected objectives that could be met in a variety of ways, there wasn't even any way to tell if it was working at all.
Opponents were also taken aback by the electronic portfolio. OBE demanded a portfolio system in which the many and varied objective-meeting projects of students could be gathered, but then some computer-enamored mook decided that an electronic portfolio, that could be stored in perpetuity and could follow the students anywhere-- that would be cool! Is any of this starting to sound vaguely familiar?
And because Spady and his brethren refused to give specific instructions, OBE looked like a thousand different things, some of which seemed directly contradictory. In Pennsylvania, the initial version of OBE state education regs included roughly 550 objectives. According to Hader's oral history, Spady told them they were about 540 off; the education department rapidly backpedaled while begging Spady to come write the objectives for them. Then Peg Luksik activiated her formidable army or conservatives to attack OBE, and the whole business started to collapse. Pennsylvania broke OBE, and it never quite recovered.
When I started to hear about Performance/Competency Based Education, I initially thought that it would be the reheated leftovers of OBE. I cringed, because I remember the training and the insistence that all students can learn everything and the crazy barrage of ever-shifting state directives. Pennsylvania's OBE initiative came at the end of my first decade in the classroom, and it marked the point at which I suddenly realized that the policy leaders and educational bureaucrats on the state level might not know what the hell they were talking about. But I also remembered OBE's complete and utter collapse and thought, "Well, this will die quickly."
But CBE turns out to be a different sort of OBE, an OBE with its holes plugged by sweet, sweet technology and its foundation shored up with
Technology also aids in the variable-time logistics problem. Now, instead of puzzling over whether behind-on-objective Chris must stay in school through July, we can just get Chris to use internet connections to make the school day fourteen hours long. Of course, we still have the puzzle of what to do if Chris completes an entire grade level's worth of objectives over the weekend.
Technology also ups the ante on that electronic portfolio, the data backpack that will follow your student throughout life. Of course, in some schools that currently means that a teacher's primary function is endless data entry. But since the performance tasks are on the computer, the teacher will be spending far less time teaching anyway.
Most of all, technology underlines the classic problem with OBE-- the notion that education is just learning to perform a series of designated tasks, like a team on the Amazing Race. Education is just working your way down a checklist, and once everything on the list is checked off-- congratulations! You're an educated person! That's all it there is to it! Of course, that also takes us back to the problem that killed OBE the last time-- exactly who gets to decide which tasks go on that checklist?
As I've said, I have my doubts about CBE's chance to take over the education world. Its resemblance to OBE doesn't improve my estimation of its odds.
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