ESSA: All New Baloney!

ESSA has just cleared Congress, and the Department of Education is already giving us a look at the freshly sliced baloney that they will be serving at the Ed Reform Buffet. From Twitter, just now:

Let's count all the ways this is wrong, because it helps us understand just how USED's vision is messed up.

Holds all students to high academic standards?

The federal government cannot hold all students to a high academic standard. The mind boggles at even attempting to imagine how that would work. John King, Acting Pretend Secretary of ED, will stop by my classroom and go over my students' work with them? He'll engage in spirited motivational speeches to get my students to try extra hard.

The federal government is a dozen layers of management removed from interacting with students. They cannot "hold them" to anything. The most they can do is to try to force those of us who actually deal with students to prove, somehow, that we're holding the students to high standards, and then either carrot or stick us for what they think they know.

But the feds don't have any idea how to do that, just as they don't have any idea what "high standards" would really look like, and just like they no evidence that a high standardy system improves student learning or national security or the price of tea in China.

Prepares all students for success in college and career?

Again, federal law will not do this. But then, USED and Congress and the rest have no idea what "college and career ready" either looks like or means. On this point, we are right where we've been for fifteen years.

Provides more kids access to high quality pre-school?

I would be more excited about this if I thought USED had a clue what a high-quality pre-school looks like, but there is no indication that they do, and every indication that they think that four year olds doing worksheets is higher quality than four year old playing. Which is backwards.

Guarantees steps are taken to help students, and their schools, improve?

Again-- what does anyone at USED know about how to help a student learn? And the feds have been "helping schools improve" for fifteen years, with absolutely nothing to show for it. School Improvement Grants were a bust, takeover and turnaround districts have failed to get results, and charters have taught us what we already knew-- that if you have a select group of students in a well-supported fully-resourced school, they might maybe do a little better than the regular pubic school. The jury is still out on how much damage you do to the social capital and stability of neighborhoods when you take their neighborhood school away.

Guarantee steps? You can't even say what the steps would be.

Reduces the burden of testinga ,mwxkjwvin,s

Sorry. My fingers literally refused to type this baloney. ESSA could have reduced the burden of testing and it very carefully and deliberately refused to do so. The burden of testing has not been reduced, and I defy any USED employee to point to a place where the law makes any meaningful attempt to do so. It's the same old Big Standardized Tests-- plus the opportunity for daily "assessments in a can" to suck even more education out of school and pubic education dollars out of the public education system.

Promotes local innovation and invests in what works?

This is a new USED talking point, so I've been trying to unravel it. It appears to mean "We will find new excuses to funnel public tax dollars to private entities like charters and test manufacturers and alternate certification groups like TFA, because we can declare anything a Local Success that we want to. Watch us make it rain, baby."

So this is the new baloney, much like the old baloney. They have missed the one useful feature of ESSA-- a reduced opportunity for USED to inflict its delusions directly on state departments of education. We can only hope that little bit of air between the feds and the states comes into play in the years ahead, because this little bullet list shows the USED has a Grand Canyon's worth of air between itself and pubic education reality.

TeachStrong Gathers More Anti-Teacher Moss

Just a few weeks ago, TeachStrong burst upon the scene, declaring itself ready to lift up the teaching profession with its nine steps of teacher swellness.

TS represented an odd assortment of groups, apparently led by the Center for American Progress and including such strange bedfellows as NEA and TFA, AFT and EducationPost. What could these groups answer together? How should we train teachers? Do we love public schools? In fact the whole thing had a random, cobbled-together look right up to the point that any observer asked, "Which of you groups would like to back Hillary Clinton for President" at which point a new spirit of unanimity entered the room.

Well, it's only getting weirder. CAP announced that ten more groups have signed on, including DFER and Education Reform Now (two arms of the same nominally-Dem reformy octopus), the Albert Shanker Institute,  and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

DFER is the most surprising entry, as DFER and their head honcho Whitney Tilson have not been subtle in their belief that teachers generally suck more than ever before and that evil, stinky teachers unions are a huge obstacle to making schools great. (You can find both ideas in this slide show and peppered throughout Tilson's blog).

Remember that scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Cap is in an elevator, and as it stops at each floor, it fills up with more and more people who are there to kick his ass? I wonder if the wise union leaders who signed us up for TeachStrong are starting to feel like that yet.

I do not know what TeachStrong's actual agenda is, other than pushing a blandly vague education-flavored agenda that it hopes to inject into the election (by way of any particular candidate, do you think?) But whatever it's about, it becomes increasingly obvious that NEA and AFT have no reason and no excuse to be involved. If they can team up with CAP and DFER while prematurely endorsing Clinton, it would seem that there is absolutely nobody that the unions would call out for destructive anti-public ed, anti-teacher, anti-teacher union policies-- as long as those people call themselves Democrats.

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.