It's probably the best question I've seen someone ask in weeks, and it will be my little energizer for the months ahead.
Why wait?
Bill Ferriter may not realize it, but he pointed me at this post by Chase Mielke and this sentence within it:
If an end goal of education is to create skilled, altruistic citizens, why wait until after a student's post-secondary training?
Mielke blogs at Affective Living; he's developed a pretty strong brand for himself, and he is a master of the kind of relentless positivity that would make him an easy target for mockery if it were not coupled with plenty of in-the-classroom practicality. And while his writing sometimes turns up in some places that I'm inclined not to read, he can turn a phrase, and I always respect a well-turned phrase.
This particular piece was dealing with real-world projects for groups of students, but you can see that this question has application far beyond that.
All too often we fall into the habit of thinking that we are preparing students for the future. "I touch the future," and so on. We get to thinking that we are loading up the students brains like little backpacks that they will eventually take on a big journey-- but for right now, they're sitting here in our classroom, their journey not yet begun.
One of my pet peeves is people who "only" student activities. "Don't worry about it," they'll say. "They're only kids. It's only a student production. It's only a high school concert." Why "only"? This is so often used as an excuse not to try, not to really back the students up, not to give them the kind of support we'd give a "real" project.
If we want them to become Life Long Learners, should we not now be teaching them to learn the way a life long learner does? And do life long learners learn by getting canned assignments from teachers that culminate in bubble tests with random attainments in life depending on the standardized test results?
If we want them to be intelligent, responsible, pro-active members of society-- well, is there any reason they can't be intelligent, responsible, pro-active members of society right now? Do we want them to grow up to be compliant sheep? Because if we don't, why would we demand that they behave like compliant sheep now?
If we want them to embrace their power and exercise it wisely and well, why would strip them of all power now?
If we want them to be leaders, why would we want to make them behave like followers every day?
If we have all these qualities and attainments and achievements and qualities that we know we want them to wield as they move through the world, well-- what are we waiting for?
Why wait?
Why not now?
I'm not saying hand a five year old an arc welder or put a twelve-year-old in charge of the confidential record-keeping for the district. But isn't odd how quickly and easily that, for our own comfort and convenience, we demand of our students the very qualities that we would never want them to display as adults and deny them the exercise of the qualities and capabilities that we hope they will carry through the rest of their lives?
They are citizens of the world, right now, today. If we want them to be altruistic, skilled, responsible, thoughtful, wise, and active citizens, what are we waiting for? We have more tools available than ever to connect our students to their world and to empower them to be real citizens today.
Why wait?
Sunday, December 6, 2015
ESSA: What Is a Teacher
We knew that a theme of the week would be teasing out the ugliest parts of the ESEA rewrite. Farewell, "No Child Left Behind." Hello, "Every Student Should Succeed in Serving Corporate Interests."
One element that has become evident is the ways in which ESSA works to gut the entire process of creating teachers, and consequently the profession itself. Just as reformsters have sought to redefine what it means to be an educated person (a person who performs well on standardized testing tasks), they have also sought to redefine what it means to be a teacher.
The assault on teaching has been bizarrely two-pronged. On the one hand, reformsters have tried to make it harder to become a teacher. On the state level, StudentsFirst and similar reformy astroturfers have been pushing longer and longer waiting periods for tenure, from two or three years up to three or four or five years-- and those years should be spent proving you can raise "student achievement" aka "get test scores up." And before you can even get to that point, some states want aspiring teachers to go through costly bogus licensing processes like edTPA.
On the other hand, we've also seen a big push to make it easier to become a teacher. Reformsters have pushed for regulations that accept five weeks of Teach for America Summer Camp as perfectly good enough to make a teacher out of someone. Or why not accept a program like RelayGSE, where beginning teachers with no actual teacher education certify that other beginning teachers should be considered fully qualified.
We are rapidly approaching that point where if someone is really serious about entering teaching, the absolutely last thing she should do is enroll in a college teacher education program. No, if you really want to be a teacher, go major in business and then hit up some alternative certification program after you graduate. As Mercedes Schneider notes, a nationally board certified teacher of the year first grade teacher such as Ann Marie Corgill could not be allowed to take over a fifth grade class-- but a recent grad with a BS in computer science and five weeks at TFA is.
ESSA fully embraces this two-prong assault. Read all of Schneider's take and then, if you haven't already, read Kenneth Zeichner's blistering look at the bill. In ESSA, we find more of the same old reformster baloney.
Zeichner, a researcher who is a member of the National Academy of Education and professor emeritus in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out many of the lowlights. The feds declare that states can call, well, anything that purports to be teacher education as the equivalent of a Bachelors Degree (so go ahead and call your five-week TFA training session a BA program). And these teacher "academies" should be free from “unnecessary restrictions on the methods of the academy.” But it's not entirely the Land of Do As You Please for the private teacher factories; teacher certification should be linked to a demonstrated ability to raise test scores. Zeichner provides an apt illustration of the dopiness of these provisions:
Imagine the federal government supporting medical preparation academies or other professional preparation academies where the faculty would not be required to have the academic qualifications required by the states and accrediting bodies.
We would quickly have a two tiered system-- one occupied by Real Doctors and the other by State Certified Doctors. Really-- read all of Zeichner's piece.
We've talked before about how some research is misused to discredit college teacher programs, and about how some of the research isn't even remotely legitimate research. And I'm not going to hold the existing teacher education programs blameless-- some colleges run inexcusably slack and reality-impaired teacher prep programs, and that has left an opening for privatizers and profiteers to make this assault.
But we need to be clear-- this is not an argument about the best way to get from point A to point B. This is not a disagreement about the best way to get the excellent teachers that we all want.
This is a fundamental disagreement about what an excellent teacher is. More precisely, it's a failure of reformsters and the members of Congress to manage even a rudimentary grasp of what teachers do or how schools work. One of the most discouraging thing about ESSA is that it shows, in big bold letters and numbers, that neither the members of the education committees or the members of Congress at large really know what the hell they're talking and legislating about.
This attack on teaching, this opening for states to strip down teacher education programs to literally nothing (but a nothing that can be called a Bachelor's degree equivalent)-- this only makes sense if you don't really know what a teacher is.
We know what reformsters want teachers to be, because they have told us in dozens of ways, over and over and over and over again. For them, a teacher is a person who delivers content (that has been prepared and prepackaged) with the intent of getting students to reach higher scores on Big Standardized Tests, and a teacher only needs enough training and knowledge to perform that simple function. For them, a teacher is a person who is taking a few years to pass through a classroom, but not so many years that they earn a high salary or create serious pension costs. For them, a teacher can do her job sitting behind computer screens, sifting data and pushing out canned materials in order to deliver goals and collect data. For them, a teacher depends more on compliance than autonomy, more on implementing pre-packaged programs than exercising professional judgement. Their vision of the profession is barely that of a profession at all, so small and cramped it is.
Teaching? Professional and personal, combining experience and book-learnin' and shared understandings, deployed though relationships developed with students, all laid on a solid foundation of rich content knowledge and current knowledge of what it takes to learn and grow at the different stanges of human development. A thousand thousand data points gathered and reflected upon daily, all filtered through human judgment and understanding. Serving as a sherpa for all those students who pass through your orbit, trying to help each discover what it means to be fully human, to be fully him- or her-self, helping them find the tools to move forward into a life that they choose and develop and build and understand themselves, even as the teacher also travels that same journey, growing in understanding and knowledge and professional capabilities.
And I'm only scratching the surface, nor am I gifted enough to capture all of what a teacher is in just a few paragraphs of afternoon bloggery. Which is kind of the point. Reformsters, including the ones who wrote the bill, have grasped the elephant's tail and concluded that nothing about the rest of the animal matters, that they will just cut off the tail and use it to open a zoo's elephant exhibit. They have grasped the tip of the elephant's tail and concluded that they know everything they need to know in order to manage the entire African continent.
As I've said before, the possible saving grace of ESSA is that the language is more bribes and opportunities than mandates and requirements. States will have the opportunity to say things like, "Equivalent to a bachelor's degree?! You have got to be kidding." But as long as policy is driven by a desire to turn teachers into low-skill clerical workers, it's going to be bad policy. ESSA might as well stand for Educators must Spend Special Attention because the opportunities for state-level shenanigans is huge.
One element that has become evident is the ways in which ESSA works to gut the entire process of creating teachers, and consequently the profession itself. Just as reformsters have sought to redefine what it means to be an educated person (a person who performs well on standardized testing tasks), they have also sought to redefine what it means to be a teacher.
The assault on teaching has been bizarrely two-pronged. On the one hand, reformsters have tried to make it harder to become a teacher. On the state level, StudentsFirst and similar reformy astroturfers have been pushing longer and longer waiting periods for tenure, from two or three years up to three or four or five years-- and those years should be spent proving you can raise "student achievement" aka "get test scores up." And before you can even get to that point, some states want aspiring teachers to go through costly bogus licensing processes like edTPA.
On the other hand, we've also seen a big push to make it easier to become a teacher. Reformsters have pushed for regulations that accept five weeks of Teach for America Summer Camp as perfectly good enough to make a teacher out of someone. Or why not accept a program like RelayGSE, where beginning teachers with no actual teacher education certify that other beginning teachers should be considered fully qualified.
We are rapidly approaching that point where if someone is really serious about entering teaching, the absolutely last thing she should do is enroll in a college teacher education program. No, if you really want to be a teacher, go major in business and then hit up some alternative certification program after you graduate. As Mercedes Schneider notes, a nationally board certified teacher of the year first grade teacher such as Ann Marie Corgill could not be allowed to take over a fifth grade class-- but a recent grad with a BS in computer science and five weeks at TFA is.
ESSA fully embraces this two-prong assault. Read all of Schneider's take and then, if you haven't already, read Kenneth Zeichner's blistering look at the bill. In ESSA, we find more of the same old reformster baloney.
Zeichner, a researcher who is a member of the National Academy of Education and professor emeritus in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out many of the lowlights. The feds declare that states can call, well, anything that purports to be teacher education as the equivalent of a Bachelors Degree (so go ahead and call your five-week TFA training session a BA program). And these teacher "academies" should be free from “unnecessary restrictions on the methods of the academy.” But it's not entirely the Land of Do As You Please for the private teacher factories; teacher certification should be linked to a demonstrated ability to raise test scores. Zeichner provides an apt illustration of the dopiness of these provisions:
Imagine the federal government supporting medical preparation academies or other professional preparation academies where the faculty would not be required to have the academic qualifications required by the states and accrediting bodies.
We would quickly have a two tiered system-- one occupied by Real Doctors and the other by State Certified Doctors. Really-- read all of Zeichner's piece.
We've talked before about how some research is misused to discredit college teacher programs, and about how some of the research isn't even remotely legitimate research. And I'm not going to hold the existing teacher education programs blameless-- some colleges run inexcusably slack and reality-impaired teacher prep programs, and that has left an opening for privatizers and profiteers to make this assault.
But we need to be clear-- this is not an argument about the best way to get from point A to point B. This is not a disagreement about the best way to get the excellent teachers that we all want.
This is a fundamental disagreement about what an excellent teacher is. More precisely, it's a failure of reformsters and the members of Congress to manage even a rudimentary grasp of what teachers do or how schools work. One of the most discouraging thing about ESSA is that it shows, in big bold letters and numbers, that neither the members of the education committees or the members of Congress at large really know what the hell they're talking and legislating about.
This attack on teaching, this opening for states to strip down teacher education programs to literally nothing (but a nothing that can be called a Bachelor's degree equivalent)-- this only makes sense if you don't really know what a teacher is.
We know what reformsters want teachers to be, because they have told us in dozens of ways, over and over and over and over again. For them, a teacher is a person who delivers content (that has been prepared and prepackaged) with the intent of getting students to reach higher scores on Big Standardized Tests, and a teacher only needs enough training and knowledge to perform that simple function. For them, a teacher is a person who is taking a few years to pass through a classroom, but not so many years that they earn a high salary or create serious pension costs. For them, a teacher can do her job sitting behind computer screens, sifting data and pushing out canned materials in order to deliver goals and collect data. For them, a teacher depends more on compliance than autonomy, more on implementing pre-packaged programs than exercising professional judgement. Their vision of the profession is barely that of a profession at all, so small and cramped it is.
Teaching? Professional and personal, combining experience and book-learnin' and shared understandings, deployed though relationships developed with students, all laid on a solid foundation of rich content knowledge and current knowledge of what it takes to learn and grow at the different stanges of human development. A thousand thousand data points gathered and reflected upon daily, all filtered through human judgment and understanding. Serving as a sherpa for all those students who pass through your orbit, trying to help each discover what it means to be fully human, to be fully him- or her-self, helping them find the tools to move forward into a life that they choose and develop and build and understand themselves, even as the teacher also travels that same journey, growing in understanding and knowledge and professional capabilities.
And I'm only scratching the surface, nor am I gifted enough to capture all of what a teacher is in just a few paragraphs of afternoon bloggery. Which is kind of the point. Reformsters, including the ones who wrote the bill, have grasped the elephant's tail and concluded that nothing about the rest of the animal matters, that they will just cut off the tail and use it to open a zoo's elephant exhibit. They have grasped the tip of the elephant's tail and concluded that they know everything they need to know in order to manage the entire African continent.
As I've said before, the possible saving grace of ESSA is that the language is more bribes and opportunities than mandates and requirements. States will have the opportunity to say things like, "Equivalent to a bachelor's degree?! You have got to be kidding." But as long as policy is driven by a desire to turn teachers into low-skill clerical workers, it's going to be bad policy. ESSA might as well stand for Educators must Spend Special Attention because the opportunities for state-level shenanigans is huge.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
PA: Tenure Attack Renewed
HB 805 -- a bill to #protectexcellentteachers -- just passed the Senate Education Committee by a vote of 6-3. #HB805 #PAbudget
— StudentsFirst in PA (@PAStudentsFirst) December 4, 2015
And while the latest round budget attempts was stirring up dust, that's about as much attention as anyone was paying this week when the Pennsylvania Senate Education committee sent this direct assault on seniority in Pennsylvania back out into the world.
I last wrote about this bill back at the end of June after the PA House passed. You can skip back and see what I said back then, but here are the highlights.
The bill takes aim at two main portions of the laws regarding teacher employment-- temporary (pre-tenure) teachers, and the business of getting rid of a teacher. As I said in June, there is a large-ish amount of strike-out and new language in this, and you are encouraged to go sift through the whole thing yourself. I've read it, but you probably ought to, too.
The Small Potatoes
Pre-tenure employment used to be two years. More recently it was upped to three years. The new bill says that temporary teachers become professional employees after completing their third year. Yes, I know what I said and read before (four years), but I'm looking at the proposed language and it says that for anybody hired after June 30, 2015, "Whose work has been certified by the district superintendent to the secretary of the school district during the last four (4) months of the third year of such service ... as being satisfactory shall thereafter be a 'professional employe' within the meaning of this article."
However, the superintendent may extend that for a fourth year of temp-ness if it somehow seems that there's something to be learned about the temp teacher in a fourth year.
The Big Enchilada
The more serious issues with the bill are in the section dealing with getting rid of teachers, specifically the Why and the Who.
The bill adds another reason to jettison a teacher. The old standards were declining enrollment, cut programs, combined schools, and combined districts. Now add to that "economic reasons."
Let that sink in. It would be okay in Pennsylvania to cut teaching positions, even if everyone knows and acknowledges that such cuts are not educationally defensible. Let's also note that, given the ongoing huge problems that come with Pennsylvania's school funding system (called the most inequitable in the country) and that fact that today marks the 158th day late for our budget (supposed a deal has just been struck, but I'll believe it when I see it), the list of school district suffering economic distress in Pennsylvania includes pretty much all of them.
Now for the who.
Pennsylvania currently operates with the traditional First In Last Out system. This bill will end that. When teachers are let go, under this bill, such decisions must first consider teacher ratings from evaluations.
The bill proposes using the most blunt-instrument form of the evaluation. IOW, rather than tossing teachers based on, say, a five point difference in evaluation scores, only the category is considered. PA only has four -- crappy, needs work, pretty okay, and super-awesome. So if teachers must go, the crappy ones go first, then the needs work group, and so on. Within the groups, we revert to FILO. Also, callbacks work the same way, in reverse.
There are some fine details to go with this. The district can't suspend anybody with a super-awesome rating for economic reasons. And you are generally well-protected if two of your last three annual ratings are super-awesome (though nobody is supposed to get super-awesome ratings regularly-- we "live" in pretty good and only "visit" super-awesome). If you dump teachers because of enrollment shrinkage, you must dump an equal percentage of administrators (unless you only have five, or you get a special note from Harrisburg, etc etc).
Oh, and the bill expressly forbids districts from dumping teachers because they make too much money, which practically speaking means that districts are expressly forbidden to say out loud that's what they're doing.
Baldfaced Baloney
Practically speaking, this is a bill that reflects the baldfaced foolishness of groups like StudentsFirst. It starts with the presumption that districts are harboring large groups of terrible crappy teachers, either because principals weren't doing their jobs during the teacher pre-tenure temp period, or because awesome teachers are being thrown into the street while crappy ones keep their jobs. And as always, it rests on the fiction that administrators lack the power to get rid of teachers who can't do their jobs, and so those teachers are still there in the classroom.
It's worth noting that the folks pushing this bill have failed to come up with compelling tales of excellent teachers thrown into the street. The bill's sponsor, when he first started pushing this, resorted to a letter filled with made-up faux statistics. I'm just going to cut and paste from my earlier piece:
Here you can see a letter written by the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bloom, back in February. It contains several fine slices of baloney, including this statistic thrown out without any references:
Research demonstrates that under a seniority-based layoff system, the more effective teacher is dismissed roughly four out of five times.
What research? How is it demonstrated? And why haven't we heard about this before like, say, during the Vergara trial's work of destroying tenure and seniority in California? Those guys were clearly willing to bring up anything they could think of to make their point-- but I don't believe they mentioned this. So I kind of suspect this is not an entirely fact-based statement.
Who will be affected?
In fact, the last round of teacher evaluations found that 98.2% of PA teachers were rated Pretty Good or Super Duper-- the highest percentage ever.
The total number of teachers rated unsatisfactory in all the public schools in Pennsylvania-- 289. In charter schools-- 803.
Why do we care, anyway?
This is a foot-in-the-door bill, a bill that throws out the idea of tenure and seniority and resets the whole teacher employment model around a teacher's ability to get good test scores out of her students. Because remember-- teacher evaluations are based on one chunk test scores, one chunk school rating (which are 90% test scores), and small chunk of things over which a teacher has no control.
At the moment, this may seem like a not-big-deal; after all, it draws a target mainly on 289 public school teachers. But just imagine what would happen if legislators later say, "This isn't accurate enough. Instead of basic rating, let's set job security based on each teacher's precise rating score."
At that point we get Teacher Thunderdome, and that's not just a problem for teachers. It's a problem for schools. When teachers must compete for every small numerical advantage for job security, teachers will face a real dilemma-- share a teaching strategy that will help students, or hold onto it so that you have better odds of being able to feed your own family?
And for tough schools, underfunded schools, troubled schools, the very schools that we all want to see improved filled with the students have been most underserved and neglected-- how do you recruit a teacher to a school where it's so hard to get the numbers she needs to keep her career alive?
So if you're in Pennsylvania, it's time to email your Senator to suggest that HB 805 is a bad bill that should die a quiet death. Granted, he's probably busy not getting a budget passed and doing terrible things to our pension at the same time (but that's another story). Still, it would be huge bad news if this bill somehow slipped through during the larger drama. This does not "protect excellent teachers." It just attacks the profession, forcing teachers to treat their colleagues as enemies and their students as obstacles. This bill should never, ever become law.
Friday, December 4, 2015
ESSA Will Not Solve Anything
It's not that I don't appreciate the good parts or hate the bad parts. I'm not delighted to see social impact bonds tossed into the mix, nor am I pleased to see the doors opened here and there for performance based education. I take a bit of pleasure in seeing the ways in which the bill makes extra effort to spank the secretary of education (who has been weirdly trying to save face by repeatedly saying, "Oh yeah, this is what we wanted all along"), and I'm quite happy with the various piecesparts that defang the Big Standardized Test. It is a mixed bag, a shift of inches in mostly the right direction kind of. I think Jeff Bryant said it best with, "Go Ahead, Pass Every Student Succeeds Act, But Don't Celebrate It."
Because here's the problem. The ESSA won't actually solve a thing.
Yes, state leaders may very well say, "Thank God! Let's scrap the Common Core and replace them with real standards that we develop ourselves, and let's work up our own Big Standardized Test and let's design a way to evaluate teachers and public schools that uses authentic markers of excellence and not a bunch of BS Test baloney and let's even allow parents to opt out of testing and if the feds don't like it, they can try to sort it out in a courtroom. Screw 'em."
Or.
Or state leaders may say, "You know, all this stuff that we had to do under the Obama-Duncan-Bush-Page administrations is just fine with us, and it took a lot of time and money to get it all up and running, and some nice lobbyists tell us that it's all working great, so we're actually not going to change a single solitary thing."
Some state leaders might say, "We have a vision for truly excellent public schools in our state. Now that tests can be decoupled from the high stakes, we will embrace systems for evaluating our students, teachers and schools that support and reveal their many forms of excellence, building up a state system of education of which we are justly and deeply proud."
But state leaders might also say, "We actually share the vision of Arne Duncan and of Bill Gates and of our very most excellent good charter-operating friends over with the giant piles of money. We are pretty sure that our public schools suck with the suckage of a thousand black holes, and we look forward to breaking them down and dismantling them and handing the pieces over to our chartery friends."
The ESSA doesn't settle anything. It doesn't solve anything. Every argument and battle that supporters of public schools (and the teachers and students who work and learn in public schools) have been fighting will still be fought-- the difference is that now those arguments will be held in state capitols instead of Washington DC.
Depending on your state, that may be good news. Or it may be that the best we can say is that your state government isn't any worse, and they live closer to you.
There are definite advantages. State government officials are easier to find, to get to, to contact, to talk to. When a single state decides to implement terrible policy, they won't be implementing it for the entire country. And there are now plenty of groups that have become very accomplished and effective at making themselves heard in their home state (looking at you, New York opt outers).
Both those who love it and those who hate it, I think, missing the most important feature. ESSA replaces a great deal of the old "you must do" this language with "you may do this" language and even "you could get money for this but you have several choices here" language.
ESSA makes it possible to take many important steps forward. It also makes it possible for states to step backward. The steps that are taken will be decided state by state, and the same players who have worked hard to break down public education are still right there, still well-funded, still fully committed to the goals they have pursued for over a decade. It is absolutely critical that advocates for public education keep the pressure up on state governments. Congress has taken an unprecedented step in returning some power and control to the states; now we have to make sure that power is well used and that all students, schools and teachers receive the support and the tools needed to do the job we signed up to do.
The struggle is not over. It has just shifted venue. Get ready for the next rounds of debate-- all fifty of them. The one big change is the, unlike its predecessors, ESSA mandates relatively few things. But it opens the doors of opportunity wide to many many things, both good and bad. It's up to all of us to be vigilant about what walks through those doors.
Because here's the problem. The ESSA won't actually solve a thing.
Yes, state leaders may very well say, "Thank God! Let's scrap the Common Core and replace them with real standards that we develop ourselves, and let's work up our own Big Standardized Test and let's design a way to evaluate teachers and public schools that uses authentic markers of excellence and not a bunch of BS Test baloney and let's even allow parents to opt out of testing and if the feds don't like it, they can try to sort it out in a courtroom. Screw 'em."
Or.
Or state leaders may say, "You know, all this stuff that we had to do under the Obama-Duncan-Bush-Page administrations is just fine with us, and it took a lot of time and money to get it all up and running, and some nice lobbyists tell us that it's all working great, so we're actually not going to change a single solitary thing."
Some state leaders might say, "We have a vision for truly excellent public schools in our state. Now that tests can be decoupled from the high stakes, we will embrace systems for evaluating our students, teachers and schools that support and reveal their many forms of excellence, building up a state system of education of which we are justly and deeply proud."
But state leaders might also say, "We actually share the vision of Arne Duncan and of Bill Gates and of our very most excellent good charter-operating friends over with the giant piles of money. We are pretty sure that our public schools suck with the suckage of a thousand black holes, and we look forward to breaking them down and dismantling them and handing the pieces over to our chartery friends."
The ESSA doesn't settle anything. It doesn't solve anything. Every argument and battle that supporters of public schools (and the teachers and students who work and learn in public schools) have been fighting will still be fought-- the difference is that now those arguments will be held in state capitols instead of Washington DC.
Depending on your state, that may be good news. Or it may be that the best we can say is that your state government isn't any worse, and they live closer to you.
There are definite advantages. State government officials are easier to find, to get to, to contact, to talk to. When a single state decides to implement terrible policy, they won't be implementing it for the entire country. And there are now plenty of groups that have become very accomplished and effective at making themselves heard in their home state (looking at you, New York opt outers).
Both those who love it and those who hate it, I think, missing the most important feature. ESSA replaces a great deal of the old "you must do" this language with "you may do this" language and even "you could get money for this but you have several choices here" language.
ESSA makes it possible to take many important steps forward. It also makes it possible for states to step backward. The steps that are taken will be decided state by state, and the same players who have worked hard to break down public education are still right there, still well-funded, still fully committed to the goals they have pursued for over a decade. It is absolutely critical that advocates for public education keep the pressure up on state governments. Congress has taken an unprecedented step in returning some power and control to the states; now we have to make sure that power is well used and that all students, schools and teachers receive the support and the tools needed to do the job we signed up to do.
The struggle is not over. It has just shifted venue. Get ready for the next rounds of debate-- all fifty of them. The one big change is the, unlike its predecessors, ESSA mandates relatively few things. But it opens the doors of opportunity wide to many many things, both good and bad. It's up to all of us to be vigilant about what walks through those doors.
MA: Boston's Lying Problem
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is sad. He seems to be sad specifically because he is "taking heat" But I think Walsh may be sad because of all the lying that's going on in Boston.
About a month ago in Esquire, Charles Pierce said that Marty Walsh was going "full Scott Walker" by first defeating an opponent by accusing him of being a education reform "grifter" who was trying to destroy pubic ed. And then, Pierce said, Mayor Walsh dumped Candidate Walsh and worked out a plan to close down 36 of Boston's roughly 120 school buildings, taking the BPS total to 90-- all part of a cozy partnership with charteristas in MA.
Not so, said the mayor's office. The Esquire article was untrue and unsourced-- in other words, Pierce was a lying liar who just made this stuff up.
But Pierce's article linked right back to the blog of Mary Lewis Pierce (no relation) who posted the documents (acquired by QUEST via FOIA) that showed the driving partnerships behind the mayor's plan.
So somebody is surely lying. Maybe the blogger Pierce is lying about having the documents. Maybe she made them up. Maybe QUEST never filed a FOIA request, or maybe when they did, somebody who sent her the documentation sent her fake documents. Or maybe Marty Walsh was lying about the allegations being untrue and unsourced.
And Walsh was also sad about that number 90. True, he intended to "consolidate" some schools, but "closing" is such an ugly word. And he certainly wasn't going to do whatever it is to 36 schools.
This would fit in with Walsh's unified enrollment plan, where students fill out just one handy application and the school district puts the students in a school of the district's choice, thereby allowing the district to funnel students directly into the charter "partners" of the public system. This is a system favored at the folks at the Boston Compact, a group built on partnership between public and charter schools. What a great idea, since by its very existence, the group legitimizes charter claims to taxpayer education dollars.
The Boston Compact also has ties to the New Schools Venture Fund, a group devoted to funneling public tax dollars to private investor pockets by-- hey, wait. Where have I heard that name before? Oh yeah-- the New Schools Venture Fund is the previous employer of Jim Peyser, who explained back then how to take over and gut a public school district by "breaking down the barriers" between public and charter schools. Course that was before he took his new job-- Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts.
The public school advocacy group QUEST insists that Walsh told them privately about his intention to shutter 36 schools. This makes Walsh sad:
“The Mayor has never said, nor does he have a plan to close 36 schools,” mayoral spokeswoman Laura Oggeri said in a statement.
And that might have been true on a technicality, but Walsh has since doubled down on his denial, saying, that although the meeting happened, “There was absolutely no talk about shrinking schools or closing schools — none at all." In fact, there's a whole list of things that have never happened. He has never had discussions with anybody about co-locations. The Boston Compact is sure it has no interest in or plan to increase charter market share in Boston.
So what are we to do with all these lying liars who lie. I mean, that has to be what we have in Boston, right? It's strictly he-said, she-said, and somebody has to be lying. So either the parents and QUEST are just making things up because, I don't know-- they're bored? They want to make Walsh sad? They are looking for some made-up cause so that they can give up their spare time to raise a commotion about nothing, because reasons? Or Walsh is keeping secrets and lying because he's betrayed a bunch of constituents in order to work for big-money interests and further a privatization agenda that is widely opposed and he'd rather not have to defend it. I don't know-- which one of these scenarios seems most plausible?
Of course, I suppose it's also possible that Walsh is just sadly confused. After all, he insists that it's just a small group of parents who are raising a fuss, and the vast silent majority think this is a great idea. Does that sound familiar, too? Perhaps it's because you remember when Walsh insisted that the Bostonian opposition to hosting the Olympics was just "ten people on twitter." That turned out to be false. It also turned out that the failure to build public support was related to a failure to be transparent, open and honest with the public, as well as the discovery that the whole thing was a get-rich-quick scheme for some connected insiders.
So maybe Boston doesn't have a problem with liars. Maybe it just has a problem with officials who can neither recognize nor learn from the truth.So maybe Boston has a truth problem, which is different from a lying problem in the same way that school closures are different from consolidating takeover merger closings.
[Correction: I originally attributed the FOIA request to Pierce (the blogger), but the request was filed by QUEST. Also, somehow in the editing process a reference to a long-out-of-date article popped back in. This is what I get for writing through lunch period.]
About a month ago in Esquire, Charles Pierce said that Marty Walsh was going "full Scott Walker" by first defeating an opponent by accusing him of being a education reform "grifter" who was trying to destroy pubic ed. And then, Pierce said, Mayor Walsh dumped Candidate Walsh and worked out a plan to close down 36 of Boston's roughly 120 school buildings, taking the BPS total to 90-- all part of a cozy partnership with charteristas in MA.
Not so, said the mayor's office. The Esquire article was untrue and unsourced-- in other words, Pierce was a lying liar who just made this stuff up.
But Pierce's article linked right back to the blog of Mary Lewis Pierce (no relation) who posted the documents (acquired by QUEST via FOIA) that showed the driving partnerships behind the mayor's plan.
So somebody is surely lying. Maybe the blogger Pierce is lying about having the documents. Maybe she made them up. Maybe QUEST never filed a FOIA request, or maybe when they did, somebody who sent her the documentation sent her fake documents. Or maybe Marty Walsh was lying about the allegations being untrue and unsourced.
And Walsh was also sad about that number 90. True, he intended to "consolidate" some schools, but "closing" is such an ugly word. And he certainly wasn't going to do whatever it is to 36 schools.
This would fit in with Walsh's unified enrollment plan, where students fill out just one handy application and the school district puts the students in a school of the district's choice, thereby allowing the district to funnel students directly into the charter "partners" of the public system. This is a system favored at the folks at the Boston Compact, a group built on partnership between public and charter schools. What a great idea, since by its very existence, the group legitimizes charter claims to taxpayer education dollars.
The Boston Compact also has ties to the New Schools Venture Fund, a group devoted to funneling public tax dollars to private investor pockets by-- hey, wait. Where have I heard that name before? Oh yeah-- the New Schools Venture Fund is the previous employer of Jim Peyser, who explained back then how to take over and gut a public school district by "breaking down the barriers" between public and charter schools. Course that was before he took his new job-- Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts.
The public school advocacy group QUEST insists that Walsh told them privately about his intention to shutter 36 schools. This makes Walsh sad:
“The Mayor has never said, nor does he have a plan to close 36 schools,” mayoral spokeswoman Laura Oggeri said in a statement.
And that might have been true on a technicality, but Walsh has since doubled down on his denial, saying, that although the meeting happened, “There was absolutely no talk about shrinking schools or closing schools — none at all." In fact, there's a whole list of things that have never happened. He has never had discussions with anybody about co-locations. The Boston Compact is sure it has no interest in or plan to increase charter market share in Boston.
So what are we to do with all these lying liars who lie. I mean, that has to be what we have in Boston, right? It's strictly he-said, she-said, and somebody has to be lying. So either the parents and QUEST are just making things up because, I don't know-- they're bored? They want to make Walsh sad? They are looking for some made-up cause so that they can give up their spare time to raise a commotion about nothing, because reasons? Or Walsh is keeping secrets and lying because he's betrayed a bunch of constituents in order to work for big-money interests and further a privatization agenda that is widely opposed and he'd rather not have to defend it. I don't know-- which one of these scenarios seems most plausible?
Of course, I suppose it's also possible that Walsh is just sadly confused. After all, he insists that it's just a small group of parents who are raising a fuss, and the vast silent majority think this is a great idea. Does that sound familiar, too? Perhaps it's because you remember when Walsh insisted that the Bostonian opposition to hosting the Olympics was just "ten people on twitter." That turned out to be false. It also turned out that the failure to build public support was related to a failure to be transparent, open and honest with the public, as well as the discovery that the whole thing was a get-rich-quick scheme for some connected insiders.
So maybe Boston doesn't have a problem with liars. Maybe it just has a problem with officials who can neither recognize nor learn from the truth.So maybe Boston has a truth problem, which is different from a lying problem in the same way that school closures are different from consolidating takeover merger closings.
[Correction: I originally attributed the FOIA request to Pierce (the blogger), but the request was filed by QUEST. Also, somehow in the editing process a reference to a long-out-of-date article popped back in. This is what I get for writing through lunch period.]
Thursday, December 3, 2015
NEA on ESSA
Thursday evening NEA Government Relations Director Mary Kusler and Director of Education Policy and Practice Donna Harris-Aikensspoke on a brief conference call about NEA and the New ESSA. This will be as disjointed as my notes, and there aren't many surprises here, though a few pieces of clarifying information (I may have missed a crossed T or dotted I thanks to my phone connection.)
Richard Allen Smith opened by observing that "we can see the finish line" for ending NCLB. Then he handed the conference off to Kusler.
Kusler used the word "historic" roughly six billion times, noting among other things that this was the first education conference committee meeting since about 2008, with a full conference committee meeting further still in the past.
Who was naughty
She also noted that it was bipartisan and bicameral about a thousand times (my notes are sloppy). She did note that the bill came out of committee with just one nay vote, and that nay-voter was Rand Paul.
The language NEA keeps using to praise the bill which Kusler echoed is that every child will have access to quality education regardless of their zip code. She thinks ESSA will do that. She's apparently kind of an optomist.
Kusler noted that NEA had "three buckets" that marked their goals:
1) reduce testing and divorce it from high stakes
2) maximize multiple measures, noting that everyone loved the disagregated data of NCLB, but we should also be noting if all subgroups are getting art class and guidance counselors, and not just test scores.
3) when educators have a voice, students do better. Looking out for the profession. That kind of thing.
What next?
Senate vote next week. It will pass overwhelmingly. Rumors are that the Pres could be signing this by the end of next week. We are on the cusp of changing the federal government's role and insuring quality education etc etc every child.
Dropping her rose colored glasses for more accurate ones, Kusler noted that the President signing this bill is not the end but merely the beginning. Implementation will be key. I will give my Senator a crisp twenty dollar bill if he can work in a provision that we don't have to hear the word "implementation" in the ed world for the next ten years.
The I Word
Harris-Aikensspoke will be the NEA implementation czar. She says there's a lot of opportunity built into this bill, pushing down responsibility so that state and local education folks have to decide what assessment should look like. She notes that there are pieces that guarantee educator (by which she means more than teachers) voice will be critical.
Note too that early education and community schools play an important role in there somewhere.
NEA will be developing a suite of materials for parents and teachers will be able to use, and teachers will help make them, and I resisted the urge to ask if they would be a crappy as the junk NEA banged out in support of Common Core.
Questions?
Actually, most folks resisted the urge to ask questions. I don't know. It's always hard to ask questions when you can't read or see the room, but fortunately, Leonie Haimson was there, and she asked:
What about special ed and ELL?
The answer was illuminating to me. The old rule is that only 1% of Students with disabilities could be proficient. The new rule is that only 1% of SWD can take an alternative assessment [Correction-- h/t to Leonie Haimson. 1% of all students, 10% of IEP students]. NEA does not love that, but they feel that language in ESSA clarifies that IDEA trumps ESEA and the the IEP team has the final word on what assessment a student should take.
Waivers can be granted on state and federal level. I suspect this will all end up in a court somewhere, but NEA seems to think IDEA has gotten the upper hand.
What about social impact bonds?
Leonie asked this too. The answer is A) NEA thinks these sucks and B) that old NEA favorite, you should have seen it before we got involved. Apparently SIB references were spread like crabgrass through the bill, and now are weeeded back to only two references in some specific locations. So, bad, but could have been worse?
And that was it. Quick and over in about 30 minutes, slightly illuminating. Particularly the Rand Paul part.
Richard Allen Smith opened by observing that "we can see the finish line" for ending NCLB. Then he handed the conference off to Kusler.
Kusler used the word "historic" roughly six billion times, noting among other things that this was the first education conference committee meeting since about 2008, with a full conference committee meeting further still in the past.
Who was naughty
She also noted that it was bipartisan and bicameral about a thousand times (my notes are sloppy). She did note that the bill came out of committee with just one nay vote, and that nay-voter was Rand Paul.
The language NEA keeps using to praise the bill which Kusler echoed is that every child will have access to quality education regardless of their zip code. She thinks ESSA will do that. She's apparently kind of an optomist.
Kusler noted that NEA had "three buckets" that marked their goals:
1) reduce testing and divorce it from high stakes
2) maximize multiple measures, noting that everyone loved the disagregated data of NCLB, but we should also be noting if all subgroups are getting art class and guidance counselors, and not just test scores.
3) when educators have a voice, students do better. Looking out for the profession. That kind of thing.
What next?
Senate vote next week. It will pass overwhelmingly. Rumors are that the Pres could be signing this by the end of next week. We are on the cusp of changing the federal government's role and insuring quality education etc etc every child.
Dropping her rose colored glasses for more accurate ones, Kusler noted that the President signing this bill is not the end but merely the beginning. Implementation will be key. I will give my Senator a crisp twenty dollar bill if he can work in a provision that we don't have to hear the word "implementation" in the ed world for the next ten years.
The I Word
Harris-Aikensspoke will be the NEA implementation czar. She says there's a lot of opportunity built into this bill, pushing down responsibility so that state and local education folks have to decide what assessment should look like. She notes that there are pieces that guarantee educator (by which she means more than teachers) voice will be critical.
Note too that early education and community schools play an important role in there somewhere.
NEA will be developing a suite of materials for parents and teachers will be able to use, and teachers will help make them, and I resisted the urge to ask if they would be a crappy as the junk NEA banged out in support of Common Core.
Questions?
Actually, most folks resisted the urge to ask questions. I don't know. It's always hard to ask questions when you can't read or see the room, but fortunately, Leonie Haimson was there, and she asked:
What about special ed and ELL?
The answer was illuminating to me. The old rule is that only 1% of Students with disabilities could be proficient. The new rule is that only 1%
Waivers can be granted on state and federal level. I suspect this will all end up in a court somewhere, but NEA seems to think IDEA has gotten the upper hand.
What about social impact bonds?
Leonie asked this too. The answer is A) NEA thinks these sucks and B) that old NEA favorite, you should have seen it before we got involved. Apparently SIB references were spread like crabgrass through the bill, and now are weeeded back to only two references in some specific locations. So, bad, but could have been worse?
And that was it. Quick and over in about 30 minutes, slightly illuminating. Particularly the Rand Paul part.
The New ESEA and Content
There's a huge amount of discussion about how the New ESEA will affect policy and the flow of money and the new ways that privateers can grub for that money and just how big a hash states will make out of education, anyway etc etc etc,
But over at the Fordham blog, Robert Pondiscio has put a bit of focus where focus ought to be-- the new bill's effect on content.
Pondiscio is a reform fan who has always been willing to see what we see in the classroom-- that an emphasis on high stakes reading tests is destructive to the teaching of reading. I've made the same argument. The current theories about reading embedded in both the Common Core and in Big Standardized Tests is that reading is a set of free-floating skills unrelated to content, prior knowledge, or the engagement of the reader. The BS Tests have focused on short excerpts specifically chosen to be boring and weirdly obscure so as to guarantee that students will have no prior knowledge and will not find the excerpts interesting. All this because some reformsters believe that reading is a set of skills that has nothing to do with content, which is kind of like trying to imagine waves that exist independent of any matter through which they move. As Pondiscio puts it:
Years of treating reading as a discrete subject or a skill—teaching it and testing it that way—have arguably set reading achievement in reverse. You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to “find the main idea,” “make inferences,” and “compare and contrast.” You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.
It has been, and continues to be, a dumb and counterproductive way to approach reading. For one thing, it means that the best way for me to increase student achievement would be to never teach anything but daily three-paragraph excerpts from anything at all. Throwing out my anthology of American literature and replacing it with daily newspaper clippings would be an excellent way to get test scores up-- and a complete abdication of my responsibilities as a professional English teacher.
And professional English teachers know that. But for the past many years, we have also known that our school and professional ratings rest on those scores. So we have made compromises, or we have been commanded by state and/or local authorities to commit educational malpractice in the name of "student achievement" (the ongoing euphemism for "test scores").
This, more than anything else, is why the federal decoupling of teacher evaluation and school ratings from the BS Tests is good news.
Under the new ESEA, states will still have to test students annually, including in reading. But they have a lot more control over the way the results from those tests are turned into grades for schools. This could offer an opportunity to restore some sanity to schooling.
Exactly. States have the chance now to put an end to questions like, "Well, that's a lovely unit, but how will it prepare students for The Test?" It gives us the chance to get back to teaching students that reading (and writing and speaking and listening) are ways to engage with and unlock the wonders of the world.
Whether states will take the opportunity remains to be seen. But if they screw this up, they can no longer blame it on the feds. And if we sit in our schools and let them screw this up without raising a fuss in our respective state capitals, shame on us. The federal defanging of tests gives us the opportunity to put reading (and writing and listening and speaking) back in its rightful place, taught properly and properly used to empower student discovery of a million amazing things. No matter how I feel about the rest of the ESSA, I feel good about this.
But over at the Fordham blog, Robert Pondiscio has put a bit of focus where focus ought to be-- the new bill's effect on content.
Pondiscio is a reform fan who has always been willing to see what we see in the classroom-- that an emphasis on high stakes reading tests is destructive to the teaching of reading. I've made the same argument. The current theories about reading embedded in both the Common Core and in Big Standardized Tests is that reading is a set of free-floating skills unrelated to content, prior knowledge, or the engagement of the reader. The BS Tests have focused on short excerpts specifically chosen to be boring and weirdly obscure so as to guarantee that students will have no prior knowledge and will not find the excerpts interesting. All this because some reformsters believe that reading is a set of skills that has nothing to do with content, which is kind of like trying to imagine waves that exist independent of any matter through which they move. As Pondiscio puts it:
Years of treating reading as a discrete subject or a skill—teaching it and testing it that way—have arguably set reading achievement in reverse. You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to “find the main idea,” “make inferences,” and “compare and contrast.” You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.
It has been, and continues to be, a dumb and counterproductive way to approach reading. For one thing, it means that the best way for me to increase student achievement would be to never teach anything but daily three-paragraph excerpts from anything at all. Throwing out my anthology of American literature and replacing it with daily newspaper clippings would be an excellent way to get test scores up-- and a complete abdication of my responsibilities as a professional English teacher.
And professional English teachers know that. But for the past many years, we have also known that our school and professional ratings rest on those scores. So we have made compromises, or we have been commanded by state and/or local authorities to commit educational malpractice in the name of "student achievement" (the ongoing euphemism for "test scores").
This, more than anything else, is why the federal decoupling of teacher evaluation and school ratings from the BS Tests is good news.
Under the new ESEA, states will still have to test students annually, including in reading. But they have a lot more control over the way the results from those tests are turned into grades for schools. This could offer an opportunity to restore some sanity to schooling.
Exactly. States have the chance now to put an end to questions like, "Well, that's a lovely unit, but how will it prepare students for The Test?" It gives us the chance to get back to teaching students that reading (and writing and speaking and listening) are ways to engage with and unlock the wonders of the world.
Whether states will take the opportunity remains to be seen. But if they screw this up, they can no longer blame it on the feds. And if we sit in our schools and let them screw this up without raising a fuss in our respective state capitals, shame on us. The federal defanging of tests gives us the opportunity to put reading (and writing and listening and speaking) back in its rightful place, taught properly and properly used to empower student discovery of a million amazing things. No matter how I feel about the rest of the ESSA, I feel good about this.
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