Duncan Remains Relentlessly Wrong

This afternoon, Arne Duncan is at the Learning Forward conference to fall on his sword deliver some comments that include his spirited endorsement of the Every Student Succeeds Act. A portion of his remarks have been released, and they reveal Duncan in fine form as he cheerily supports the bill devoted to repudiating his work, sort of.

The excerpt picks up where Duncan answers the question, "What does this new law mean for your classrooms, schools, and districts?"

He starts by saying there's a lot to be figured out, and that's about the last thing he gets right.

The new law will mean that "you can continue challenging your kids to live up to new, higher standards that you have been working so hard to implement." Which is true. Under ESSA, states are still free to embrace the Common Core, either in original form or under one of its many aliases.

"You will still measure students’ progress every year, typically with new and much better tests that offer actionable information about students’ learning."Oh, Arne. We've been hearing the promise of new tests that aren't the same old standardized bubble test crap for over a decade. They haven't come. They aren't coming. They are never going to come. No large scale standardized test will ever measure critical thinking any more than you can measure hurt with a bathroom scale. He repeats the idea that the feds are really pushing for fewer redundant tests. He is full of it.

"The action from Congress will increase investments in preschool, so that it’s more likely that the kids you teach are better prepared for school." This despite the research showing repeatedly that all early gains in learning have vanished within a few years. Okay, pre-school could be a swell thing, but not if folks insist on testing and academics.

"This bill says what we all know to be true: you can’t have a great school without great teachers and principals." Sounds pretty, but he goes on to laud the new support for alternative certification routes aka five weeks of TFA summer camp. And this is kind of cute-- he still talks as if the master plan to move the best teachers to the neediest schools, as if that isn't a thing that has been in the law and yet never, ever happened for years and years now.

"Whereas No Child Left Behind prescribed a top-down, one-size fits all approach to struggling schools, this law offers the flexibility to find the best local solutions—while also ensuring that students are making progress." Now it's just getting surreal, given that the Obama-Duncan education plan was to supplant the top-down reform of NCLB with even MORE top down reform. The President's own reflection on testing noted that the problem was that the administration hadn't top-down managed enough!

"When those key decisions are made, states will rely on multiple measures of success—because as I have always said, no school and no educator should ever be judged by one test score alone." And now we have slid into another dimension entirely. It's not this world, but it is a familiar world-- the world where Duncan is completely clueless about how the Big Standardized Tests ever ended up being the entire focus of schools. Is it worth pointing out to him, yet again, in the December of his time in the job, that tests became the focus of American schools because his policies made it so? Probably not.

Then the speech jumps to the section entitled "How the new ESEA is totally what I wanted and not at all a big raspberry for me and my work."

And here's your proof that ESSA is not exactly a huge leap forward-- he's not entirely wrong. He has a laundry list of things he wanted made into law-- college and career ready standards, punishment for schools with low-achieving students, more pre-school, bunches of data collected and tossed around as if they mean something. He got all of those.

He also has a list of things that-- what! Really? These were among your policy goals? Catalyzing new ideas and innovations from local educators? Cutbacks on excessive testing? I would challenge Duncan to point at anything he's done in seven years that would have advanced any of these goals.

But this will be Duncan's ESSA position-- he got what he wanted, so he doesn't care about the politics and power distribution of it.

I’m not saying this is the bill I’d have written myself. No compromise ever is. But fundamentally, the idea of America as a country that expects more of our kids, and holds ourselves responsible for their progress – that vision is alive and well. And it’s a vision proven by the hard work of educators like you.

So Duncan leaves as he came-- making word-noises that actually sound pretty good, but are attached to policies and a reality that does not reflect them at all. Duncan never held himself responsible for the progress of students, choosing instead to blame bad, lazy teachers and low-information parents (so long, white suburban moms) and a Congress that wouldn't behave as he wanted it to. He never held himself responsible by bothering to see if there was a lick of real research and support for any of his favored policies, from "high standards" to VAM-sauce teacher evaluations to the fundamental question of how schools could be held responsible for erasing the effects of poverty and special needs while states could not be held responsible for getting those schools the resources and support they needed. Duncan leaves as he arrived-- eyes fixed on some alternate reality while in the real world, he hacks public education to bits and sells off the pieces.


And he's perfectly okay with ESSA. That is not a good sign.

MA: Vulture Convocation

Even as I type this, up in Boston there's a day-long gathering going on that is emblematic of all the wrong things driving ed reform.

It's a conference entitled "Leveraging Research and Policy to Improve K-12 Education in Massachusetts" and it was organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (which seems like an odd name choice unless MIT has decided to create educational inequality on purpose, and say so).  The conference is going on at the Federal Reserve Bank, and it sounds like a day full o' joy.

After a continental breakfast (cheapskates) there were welcoming remarks from Robert Triest of the FRB and Sanjay Sarma of MIT. Then-- well, let me just run down through the whole program:

9:00 AM-- Alternative School Models

A short presentation about the Lawrence Public Schools Turnaround by three folks from the Harvard Grad School of Education. Lawrence has been pioneering turnaroundiness for a few years, making them beloved by the reformy classes. But they're only the warm-up act for

"Charters Without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston."  It takes three people from MIT and one from Duke to explain how New Orleans isn't so much about educating students as it is about testing takeover models. And congrats, Boston, for being lumped with NOLA-- be sure to mention that the next time Boston's Mayor Walsh complains that he is being unfairly tarred as a school privatizer. Also note that two of the MIT guys are also NBER guys-- that's the National Bureau of Economics Research, which is great news because economists have always been a boon to public education.

There's also a panel discussion featuring Christopher Gabrieli (who is somehow the head of both Empower Schools and the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education), Richard Stutman of the Boston Teachers Union, and Ryan Knight, Director of Strategy and Evaluation for the turnaround management specialists, UP Education Network (whose motto, sadly, is not "We have UPped many districts to excellence; now let us UP yours")

And all of that took just an hour.

10:05 AM-- Schools and Neighborhoods

A short presentation on a long-windedly-titled paper about the effects of foreclosure on student academic performance. That study is being presented by three people from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, because who understands student academic achievement better?

That comes with a panel discussion featuring the MA House Chair of the Joint Committee on Education, the superintendent of Chelsea Public Schools, and the executive director of Lawrence Community Works (one of those organizations where movers and shakers and business folks get together to act as if they are the elected leaders of a community).

10:45-- Break

11:00-- Accountability and Value-Added

Oh, it's getting deep and thick now. Two presentations here-- one on "Validating Teacher Effect Estimates Using Changes in Teacher Assignments" and the other on "Leveraging Lotteries for School Value-Added: Testing and Estimation" which both seem to come under the heading of "Baloney You Can Perform with Numbers." MIT, Harvard, and NBER are well-represented here, but of course no actual educators.

The panel discussion includes a Boston U Economics professor, the Executive Director of Data and Accountability from Boston Public Schools, and a person whose title is, as sure as I'm sitting here, Associate Commissioner of Planning, Research, and Delivery Systems, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. All I can say is that any organization that includes such a title should take a long look in the mirror and ask itself, "What am I doing with my life?"

12:05 PM-- Lunch and Keynote 

It's buffet time, along with Roland Fryer of Harvard University and EdLabs. Economist-cum-instant-Professor Fryer has produced some reformy gems in the past (though he is on the list of people who have proven merit pay doesn't work), including helping determine how to punish teachers more effectively and arguing for a two-tier testing system so that we can focus on Those Students. And-- uh-oh-- he's here to explain What We Have Learned from the Last Decade of Educational Research. I'm guessing that the answer, at least for the people at this conference, is Not Nearly Enough of the Right Stuff.

1:20 PM-- School Admission Policy

Christopher Walters of UC at Berkeley and NBER wants to talk about the Demand for Effective Charter Schools, and in what is sure to be interesting to Bostonians, Parag Pathak of MIT wants to present an overview of Unified Enrollment in American Cities.

The panel discussion includes the executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (puh-leeze), the Chief of Education for the City of Boston, and the dean of Boston University's School of Education.

2:25 PM-- Break

2:40 PM-- Access and Equity

MIT has a presentation on ELL and Special Ed Students in Charter Schools: Classification and Effectiveness (classification of what?). Then the Teachers College at Columbia is here to talk about Boston's Advanced Work Class and the Long Run Impact of Tracking High-Achieving Students.

The panel includes the senior director of Education to Career, the Associate Commissioner for Educational Redesign from Mass's Ed Department, the senior project director of Massachusetts Advocates for Children, and Erica Brown, whose name has the following after it: "Special Advisor to the Executive Director, City on a Hill Charter Public Schools; Founding Charter-District Steering Committee Member, Boston Compact; Chair of Teaching and Learning, Boston Charter Alliance."

3:45 PM-- Closing Remarks 

Making Research More Useful for Policy

Well, that's a hell of a title. I think I'm more interested in making research more useful for figuring out what is actually true, or not. How about making policy that reflects what we've learned from legitimate research. And to talk about this we have-- oh, lordy!

It's Carrie Conaway, the woman with the shameful "delivery systems" title from earlier. She's joined by former TFA reformster/superintendent Tommy Chang, and former vulture capitalist and current MA secretary of education Jim Peyser, whose expert vision is dismantling public schols for fun and profit (but mostly profit) we've discussed before.

After that's done, you can stick around and mingle over refreshments and an open bar, shmoozing, making connections, and just soaking up the rarified air of economists and reformsters contemplating all the delicious ways that schools can be used for economic ends. Thank goodness almost nobody was here to mar the day by bringing up things like education and students and the actual use of schools. This is the kind of special day that lets these folks spout their gibberish at each other without once being interrupted by actual educators with antedeluvian ideas about what public schools are supposed to do and who they are supposed to serve.

What a delightful day, I'm sure.

MI: Reformster District Meltdown

Michigan is one of several states to attempt an "achievement" school district, a special collection of the very bottom schools, run by the state. It was set up in 2011 by Governor Rick Snyder, but its continued existence is now in doubt.

None of the Achievement school districts have been successful (and "successful" is a relative word here, since "success" is often about taking weak schools and turning them into charter/turnaround business opportunities). The head of Tennessee's ASD resigned because the work was taking a toll on his health; his goal of moving the bottom 5% of schools into the top 25% has been a complete and utter failure.

But Michigan, which used its Education Achievement Authority as a blunt instrument to club Detroit schools into submission, has been spectacular in its dysfunction from the very beginning when they hired a chancellor who had lied his way out of his previous job.

Through it all, the messes have been chronicled by Eclectablog, an indispensable resource for Michigan folks. In fact, Eclectablog just collected up all its EAA coverage in one list of links, and it is quite a deep swamp to wade through. But if you want to see just how messy and dirty this kind of state takeover district can get, take some time and work through this "sad, predictable, outrageous and infuriating history."

But now things seem to have really hit the fan. After old chancellor John Covington departed under a cloud, the state brought in Veronica Conforme, who has not exactly cleaned things up. EAA awarded a $1.7 million contract to the eighth-highest bidder-- a company created only to go after that contract and run by Conforme's old buddies (the FBI is on that one). A former EAA principal admitted taking a bribe. EAA administrators have been caught using a ludicrous lie to avoid FOIA requests, which they were doing to hide the fact that EAA schools shove students with disabilities out into public schools. EAA got caught "colluding" with Detroit schools to get control of another sixteen schools.

And now tomorrow could be a Very Bad Day for the EAA.

The EAA exists by virtue of an authorizing agreement between Eastern Michigan University and the Detroit school district. The agreement has been costly to EMU. EMU's school of education has been shut out of involvement in EAA (because why would you want education professionals involved in your school-based money-making scheme), which is just one thing that has made the faculty grumpy about the whole business. The EAA has also angered teachers in Michigan, who have stopped taking EMU student teachers, putting some serious hurt on the EMU education program.

EMU was not feeling very friendly a year ago when EAA asked for a one-year extension. EMU said yes, but EMU also set four requirements for the continued partnership-- stronger partnership with EMU, demonstrated achievement in EAA schools, fiscal accountability, and complete transparency. EAA has failed in all four departments.

So now the very public question is, will the EMU Board of Regents pull the plug tomorrow?

On the one hand, the university faculty and student senate are putting pressure on to pull EAA's plug, and relations with the board are already rocky because of a super-secret president search. On the other hand, all but one of the eight board members are appointees put there by the governor, who loves EAA.

I'll go back to Eclectablog for the best last word on EAA.

The EAA is an unmitigated failure rife with corruption and incompetence, the exact things it was supposed to have fixed. Turning the schools over to charters is not the answer. Continued state control is not the answer. More experimentation is not the answer. The answer, as some of us have said all along, is a solid and meaningful investment in Detroit schools.

Common Core and Liver Pizza

It must be time to talk about the Core again, because I've received a couple of "What's the big deal? The core doesn't bother me at all!" notes lately. And I continue to believe that the situation regarding Common Core has changed, and I think we are all perfectly positioned to deal with the Core (or whatever the craven politicians in your state have changed the name to).

To illustrate my point, let me share my recipe for delicious liver pizza.

First, gather ingredients. Get liver, pepperoni, sausage, onions, garlic, more garlic, blends of cheese that suit you, a good pre-made crust (because I don't want to wait all night for this), and a good spicy pizza sauce.

Now we're ready to begin.

STEP ONE: Throw liver in the garbage.

STEP TWO: Make a delicious pizza.

Look, if you want to tell me that your school has had great success with Common Core lessons and you have totally aligned everything to the standards with brilliant teacher-made lessons, that's fine. Understand, I don't believe you. In all these years, no teacher has yet been able to tell me what Common Core made them able to do that they couldn't do before, nor have they explained what they would have to stop doing tomorrow if Common Core vanished. It doesn't matter. Tell me what you like about your love for the Core. What I believe is that you made a delicious liver pizza. Or you made a terrible crappy liver pizza because you didn't throw the liver out. Or your administration bought you a frozen liver pizza, which may have included the liver, or not, or skipped the liver but instead added beetle dung and horse hair.

Nobody has any idea what the hell "Common Core" means anymore. There's the Core as re-interpreted by each state and the Core that's on the tests and the Core that's in the test prep and the Core that's in the textbook series your administration bought because it had "aligned to the Core" stickers on the cover (even if it wasn't) and the Core that people blog about and the Core that consultants go out and teach about and on and on and on.  Some have extra liver and some have no liver and some have liver, but it's from a wildebeast.

So my advice to teachers in the field these days? If you're still supposed to be getting The Standards worked into your lessons, I recommend you make a delicious liver pizza. Use your best professional judgment about instruction and teaching and your students and the content and create the best lessons you know how, and just call them Common Core or Utah Core or Uruguayan Five-Alarm Core or whatever-the-hell you're supposed to pretend to find helpful. Check off all the standards on your lessons. Do whatever you have to do to be allowed to teach, and when nobody is looking, throw away the liver.

(P.S. If you believe that a liver pizza would actually be tasty, I don't even know how to talk to you. Good day, sir. I say, good day.)

ICYMI: Sunday Evening Edu-reads

Let's all gather our energy before the week gets started, because by next Sunday, we could have a new body of education law. 

Go Ahead: Pass Every Student Succeeds Act, But Don 't Celebrate It 

Jeff Bryant had my favorite ESSA piece of the week. You probably read it, but you know, just ICYMI.

SFER- 

Johnathan Pelto took a great look at Baby DFER, the astroturfed student wing of hedge fund powered reform support. Complete with many links and a bibliography (linkiography?) for lots of nauseau-inducing reading

Fund Us. Support Us. Or STFU.


Claudia Swisher blogs at Fourth-Generation teacher, and I should point out that she softened the title of this blog. But I wanted to get your attention. She's writing about Oklahoma, but the story of legislators who want to offer everything except actual concrete support or help is one that many teachers across the US can appreciate.

Guinea Pigs in an Urban Laboratory

Just talkin' crazy here, but what if somebody talked to actual students about how they feel about all this reformy nonsense? Jennifer Berkshire talks to an author who talked to actual students.

Zuckerberg Responds to Critics

Well, look at that! Mainstream media actually picked up the story of all the folks who noted that Zuckerberg's charity wasn't actually charity. And then Z responded.

FLASHBACK!!  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Test Scorer

Hard to believe that it has been five years since this classic was first published, shattering illusions about how standardized tests are actually scored-- and by whom. Can't tell you how many times I've gone back to this (and the city papers follow up). Still essential reading.

Why wait?

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?

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.