Kentucky has never jumped on the charter bandwagon. Some folks have been trying for years, but the legislature has always had trouble getting a bill passed, and so the charter sector has been dying on the vine. But the new governor would like to change that.
Matt Bevin, the new governor whose previous job was investment management, has repeatedly stated his intention to expand school choice through charter school expansion in Kentucky. Bevin seems to believe in the power of competition. Here he is in an interview laying out his thoughts:
There is a lot of concern about academic competition; competition is good, and for those who are quick to say that this is somehow going to come at the expense of public education – we need strong public education. That is where the vast majority of our students are getting their education and will continue to get their education, and we have to be able to support the teachers and administrators that are a part of it. So we don’t want to turn the whole thing upside down. But we have schools that have been failing for generations now. So let’s start with public charter schools. The students going there are public students, the funding comes in a similar manner, everyone will be better for this.
For Kentuckians who haven't had a lot of exposure to the issues that come with charters, this must sound pretty reasonable (Bevin buried his opponent pretty decisively). This post is for them.
Dear Kentuckians-- here are some things you may want to keep an eye on if you decide to jump into the charter end of the pool.
Transparency
Despite the use of the word "school," a charter school is much more like a private business than a public institution. You can't walk into the kitchen at McDonalds and demand to see how the special sauce is made, and you can't demand a tour of a Ford assembly plant. Likewise, charters tend to assert their right to be opaque and secretive. In one of the more famous examples, the Success Charter chain in New York went to court to prevent the state auditor from looking at their books to see what they were doing with the tax dollars the state was giving them.
You're being told that the way it works is that the state contracts with the charter operator-- the state hands over a pile of money and the charter promises to hit certain benchmarks. Are you sure that's all you want to know? Is there any other time you can think of when it would be okay for a public institution paid for with your tax dollars to refuse to tell you what they were doing with those dollars?
Local Control
Currently you are entitled to know how your district spends every cent, and while some may not be great at meeting that letter of the law, if you're unhappy with what your school is doing, you are entitled to attend a school board meeting where you are legally entitled to hear everything that goes into making decisions about your schools. If you don't like what you hear, you can say so by speaking formally or hollering informally. You can fight for the election of board members that you support.
But with a charter-- you can do nothing. You are not entitled to attend a board meeting, and nobody who runs the school is required to take your call, talk to you, or explain anything to you. They do not answer to the taxpayers, and they do not stand for election.
"I'll just pull my child out of school if I object strongly," you say? What if you don't have a child in school? Are you upset that your tax dollars are going to support a school that teaches communism is great or runs on a Sharia Law model? Too bad. Nobody has to listen to you. And if you are a parent arguing with the school after Counting Day (the day on which official enrollment is tallied), they will be happy to see you go, because the money associated with your child is already in the school's bank account.
Piles of Wasted Money
Do you think you could own and operate two homes for the same total cost as one home? No, me neither. But a charter system duplicates buildings, administrators, and a host of services that could be more efficiently in one building. Opening charters automatically must increase the total cost of education in your community.
Sucking Public Schools Dry
The classic simple charter funding model is to just have the per-pupil cost follow the pupil wherever she goes. If 5% of your high school students leave for a charter, 5% of your funding goes with them. Here's the problem-- if your school population drops by 5%, do your costs drop by 5% as well?No. You don't have 5% fewer buildings, 5% fewer buses or 5% fewer light and heating bills. You don't have 5% fewer administrators. You probably won't lose, say, an entire classroom's worth of third graders, so when you need to cut teachers to help make the budget, it's more likely to be an art or music teacher. Maybe a librarian.
And because charters are usually set up to help students "escape" the worst public schools, it is the most challenged and troubled schools that will lose the most resources. Unless your legislature decides to fully fund charters without simply moving money from the public system, this is a zero sum game where the public system must lose. And it's awfully hard to "compete" when someone keeps taking away the resources you need to be competitive.
Who Is Served?
Charter schools won't have room for everybody. Any kind of application process will favor families that understand the system and have the motivation to jump through the hoops. Even where all students have the possibility of entry into the charter, charters have many techniques for pushing out students-- particularly those with special needs.
Success?
Does any of the above really matter if charters get results? It's a fair question-- should we favor public schools out of tradition if charters can serve our children better?
Kentuckians are being told about great charter successes in New Orleans and other charter hubs around the country. These stories are exaggerations at best. Study after study finds little evidence that charters do any better than public schools. Where there are signs of success, we find that the charters are serving fewer students with greater disabilities and fewer English Language Learners. "Successful" charters also often have extra resources from private sponsors and contributors. In other words, the secret of charter success-- more resources, and only the more easily taught students-- is no secret, and could easily be applied to existing public schools-- if we were willig to change the mission of pblic education.
You should also examine the definition of success. Some charters define success very simply-- the students will score well on the Big Standardized Test. These schools maintain a tightly disciplined focus on a culture of compliance and endless test prep.
The "achievement gap" and "student achievement" refer to only one thing-- scores on standardized tests that cover math and reading. That is far too narrow a definition of success, and certainly does not represent "college and career readiness." ("We'd like to hire you because you take standardized tests really well," said no employer ever).
Stability
Charter schools are businesses, and they make decisions for business reasons. This does not make them evil, but it does mean that they are not going to keep an unprofitable school open in your neighborhood just because it's a nice thing to do. A public school cannot say, "You know what? It's just too hard to keep working at education in this community with such a tiny revenue stream, so we're just going to close up shop." A charter school can say such things-- and they often do. As of last fall, 200 charter schools had closed up shop in Ohio.
Follow the Money
The amount of money wrapped up in the education sector is huge, and charter schools have become a powerful tool for unlocking much of that. The largest chunk of investment in charter schools is not from educators or school-related industries, but from hedge fund managers looking for good return on investment. And just because a charter school operators is "non-profit" doesn't mean it's not making big money. Some charter school operators are scrupulous and ethical; some are not. And some practices are legal but eyebrow raising, like paying charter school chiefs nearly a half-million dollars, or leasing buildings from yourself.
This report from the National Education Policy Center shows the many ways in which charter schools can be used to funnel money to places it doesn't belong. Some states have instituted some stricter oversight, but states like Ohio show just how widespread scandal, fraud and waste can become when nobody is minding the money-saturated store at all (go ahead-- google "Ohio charter school scandal" and see what pops up).
The amount of money at stake means you need to be wary of people who are trying to sell you something. When a car salesman tells you that the 2016 Superwheels will change your life and make your family smart and beautiful, you would be wise to take it with a few hundred grains of salt. The money trail is often more tricky to trace when it comes to charter schools, but it is worth your while to trace it.
Watch the Big Picture
Ultimately, how Kentucky manages public education and the charter business is about more than just money (though it is certainly about that).
Kentucky is one of the states that has watched the farm industry turn into a factory model business. Farmers are now technicians who are simply meant to take orders from their corporate masters. Animals are now just product to be mass-produced with no concern for anything except their ability to be turned into meat. And the system is kept tilted in favor of the big corporations by a revolving door between corporate and government offices.
Modern education reform is an attempt to apply those same transformations to schools. Teachers are just to follow instructions and deliver pre-packaged lessons. Students are there to produce good-looking test results; their other concerns are unimportant. Charter schools are a leading edge of these transformations.
Charters represent a seismic shift. From he idea of public education as a shared good, a service provided by the community for every single one of its students, we move to the idea that schools are a consumer good, provided for a select few, and primarily serving the business interests of their investors. If you aren't careful, when you install charters, you change the very idea of what schools are for.
Can it be done?
Charter schools can potentially be a great addition to a school system, but only under the right conditions. Kentucky is in a unique position to set the rules up right from day one. If I were the Kentucky legislature, and I were dead set on starting up with charter schools, here's what I would do.
* Fund them fully. Rather than trying to run several parallel systems with the same money that previously only ran one, I would make sure that both the public and the charter systems were fully funded. That means the cost of schooling will go up for the taxpayers. If you really believe in charters, sell the idea.
* Complete transparency. Charters must operate with the same transparency and accountability as public schools. They must account for every cent they spend. They must do their decision-making in public. They must be completely and fully accountable to the taxpayers.
* Locally controlled. The people who run the charter school in the community must be there, in that community. Do not allow charter schools that are run by a board of directors in some other state.
* Fully open. The charter must be prepared to accept and serve any student who lives in that community. No creating barriers to entry or push-outs once in the school.
* Professionally staffed. Charters have often pushed for the option of putting any warm (cheap) body in a classroom. That's not okay.
* Regulated to avoid financial shenanigans. There are too many scams out there that have demonstrated all the ways in which a charter school can be nothing more than someone's get rich quick scheme. Regulators (using the complete transparency from above) should be clear and tough when it comes to making sure that charter school dollars go toward educating students and not making someone rich.
With all these in place, go ahead and set up charters where teachers and education leaders can try new, innovative and free-from-the-usual-rules educational approaches. But make sure that you are running a school and not a business. Charter boosters are going to sell, and sell hard, but if Kentuckians aren't careful, they'll find they've purchased imaginary benefits at far-too-high a cost.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Sunday, December 13, 2015
ICYMI (December 13)
Time for that Sunday reading list!
What's Your Purpose
Rob Miller has one of those posts that is great for refocusing and gearing up for the week to come-- plus a cool diagram
Shaming the Devil
Man. My hat is off-- way off-- to this blogger who decided to call out Steve Perry, the crowd-pleasing, money-grabing, self-aggrandizing reformster. Quite a tale here.
Testifying before Cuomo's Common Core Task Force
This is a throwback, but since Cuomo's Task Force offered up their recommendations this week, it seems like the perfect time to revisit Critical Classroom's account of testifying before the Task Force five weeks ago.
EdTweak
Some I had up till now missed this little diversion-- a short faux journal published every now and then in the style of everybody's favorite education news publication. Check out articles like "Reformers Address Deficiencies in Children's Screen Time."
Ex-Star Principal Tells of Her Downfall
Depressing. If you want a picture of how a principal can get caught up in culture of graft and corruption, read this Detroit Free Press article about one of the school officials caught in the federal investigation of misbehavior in Detroit.
Progressive Public School Shakedown
I've been remiss in not bringing this up sooner. The Progressive magazine has assembled a group f twelve fellows to cover education reform news for the magazine. The group includes top drawer folks like Jose Luis Vilson, Xian Barrett, Jennifer Berkshire, and Sabrina Stevens (and full disclosure-- I have also snuck into the group somehow). You can follow the project on twitter under @Progressive4Ed; the fellows offer up a new piece at least once weekly, and even those of you who may not consider yourselves in tune with the overall agenda of the magazine will find the Progressive Fellow pieces informative and useful.
What's Your Purpose
Rob Miller has one of those posts that is great for refocusing and gearing up for the week to come-- plus a cool diagram
Shaming the Devil
Man. My hat is off-- way off-- to this blogger who decided to call out Steve Perry, the crowd-pleasing, money-grabing, self-aggrandizing reformster. Quite a tale here.
Testifying before Cuomo's Common Core Task Force
This is a throwback, but since Cuomo's Task Force offered up their recommendations this week, it seems like the perfect time to revisit Critical Classroom's account of testifying before the Task Force five weeks ago.
EdTweak
Some I had up till now missed this little diversion-- a short faux journal published every now and then in the style of everybody's favorite education news publication. Check out articles like "Reformers Address Deficiencies in Children's Screen Time."
Ex-Star Principal Tells of Her Downfall
Depressing. If you want a picture of how a principal can get caught up in culture of graft and corruption, read this Detroit Free Press article about one of the school officials caught in the federal investigation of misbehavior in Detroit.
Progressive Public School Shakedown
I've been remiss in not bringing this up sooner. The Progressive magazine has assembled a group f twelve fellows to cover education reform news for the magazine. The group includes top drawer folks like Jose Luis Vilson, Xian Barrett, Jennifer Berkshire, and Sabrina Stevens (and full disclosure-- I have also snuck into the group somehow). You can follow the project on twitter under @Progressive4Ed; the fellows offer up a new piece at least once weekly, and even those of you who may not consider yourselves in tune with the overall agenda of the magazine will find the Progressive Fellow pieces informative and useful.
TFA Is Rescued!
Teach for America continues to take shellacking from people who think to ask questions like "How do you prepare someone to be a teacher in five weeks?" or "Why aren't wealthy, white districts lined up to take advantage of this awesome program?" or "How exactly does it help a high needs school to have an endless parade of untrained amateurs wandering through classrooms for just a couple of years at a time?"
But TFA fits the reformster narrative in many ways (Some people are just better than others, so they should make great teachers-- certainly better than those dopes who are in teaching as a career. Poor schools are failing because the Right People aren't there, so we'll put the Right People there and that will fix everything!), and it has allowed many people to put "teacher" on their resume as they move onto their real careers as bureaucrats, lobbyists and political appointees, so that TFA has become a multi-million dollar operation with plenty of friends in high places. Still, they also participate in another popular reformster narrative-- "Even though we are Better People and we're doing Great Things, people keep popping up to say mean things about us, and that makes us sad."
And so periodically reformsters try to fight back, and we get the bizarre spectacle of millions of dollars being spent to outfits like the $12 million Education Post or the $4 million per year the74 to combat a bunch of people who blog for little or no money.
Now TFA is joining the party. As reported by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, NYCAN (part of a network of pro-charter, anti-public school, anti-teacher union reformsters) has set up a Big Fat PR engine to combat TFA criticism. Why would NYCAN do that for TFA? Well, most likely because they are all interconnected and run by the same folks.
NYCAN has put up $500,000 to run the Corps Knowledge campaign. They have a nifty website, where they lay out their goals to rally alumni, combat misinformation, and provide a platform for alumni to share stories. Of course, that can be tricky because much of the criticism of TFA comes from its own alumni, like Gary Rubinstein, a TFA alum and critic that CK tried to take down.
And although Layton is just writing about Corps Knowledge now, they've been kicking around for a few months. Back in September they posted about the Badass Women of TFA and were unhappy to attract the attention of the Badass Teachers Association; they turned off comments and scrubbed responses (though they saved a few to mount a counter-attack).
That was back in September, and it underlines a lesson that TFA and friends have had a hard time absorbing: it's a lot easier to attack the establishment than to be the establishment, and coming up on their twenty-five year anniversary, TFA can no longer claim to be upstarts or outsiders. far better funded than any pro-public ed group and so well-wired into the reformster establishment that they can it will mount a $500 PR campaign on their behalf just because, TFA is part of the status quo. And after this many years, their track record is too well-known to be washed away by PR. They don't provide sufficient preparation for entering a classroom. The vast majority of their people don't enter into a teaching career, and by and large don't intend to. And as much as they like to claim success while being a group that "doesn’t need to tear down another group to affirm that success," their premise has been and continues to be that "regular" teachers just aren't up to the task of educating American students, but TFA recruits will fix it.
TFA has reinvented itself many times, and Layton's article contains a pretty straightforward admission of the core mission: "The program is designed not so much to groom career teachers as to inspire recruits to work on the larger issues of urban education in varied ways."
Darrell Bradford, NYCAN executive director, has one point to make that is fair, albeit ironic:
“Some of the best people I’ve ever known have worked for TFA — great, caring, smart — and it’s tough to see your friends get dragged through the mud,” said Bradford, who has $500,000 for the campaign and is aiming to raise an additional $1 million to expand it.
It's a useful insight, and one that Bradford, who is no dummy, might apply to understading the people who resist NYCAN's agenda in general and TFA in particular. Some of the best, smartest people I know are public school teachers, and it is hard to watch them get dragged through the mud by reformsters who insist that teachers are so bad that it's better to replace them with five-week-trained fresh college grads who don't even particularly want to teach. And we don't have a million bucks lying around to fight back with.
But TFA fits the reformster narrative in many ways (Some people are just better than others, so they should make great teachers-- certainly better than those dopes who are in teaching as a career. Poor schools are failing because the Right People aren't there, so we'll put the Right People there and that will fix everything!), and it has allowed many people to put "teacher" on their resume as they move onto their real careers as bureaucrats, lobbyists and political appointees, so that TFA has become a multi-million dollar operation with plenty of friends in high places. Still, they also participate in another popular reformster narrative-- "Even though we are Better People and we're doing Great Things, people keep popping up to say mean things about us, and that makes us sad."
And so periodically reformsters try to fight back, and we get the bizarre spectacle of millions of dollars being spent to outfits like the $12 million Education Post or the $4 million per year the74 to combat a bunch of people who blog for little or no money.
Now TFA is joining the party. As reported by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, NYCAN (part of a network of pro-charter, anti-public school, anti-teacher union reformsters) has set up a Big Fat PR engine to combat TFA criticism. Why would NYCAN do that for TFA? Well, most likely because they are all interconnected and run by the same folks.
NYCAN has put up $500,000 to run the Corps Knowledge campaign. They have a nifty website, where they lay out their goals to rally alumni, combat misinformation, and provide a platform for alumni to share stories. Of course, that can be tricky because much of the criticism of TFA comes from its own alumni, like Gary Rubinstein, a TFA alum and critic that CK tried to take down.
And although Layton is just writing about Corps Knowledge now, they've been kicking around for a few months. Back in September they posted about the Badass Women of TFA and were unhappy to attract the attention of the Badass Teachers Association; they turned off comments and scrubbed responses (though they saved a few to mount a counter-attack).
That was back in September, and it underlines a lesson that TFA and friends have had a hard time absorbing: it's a lot easier to attack the establishment than to be the establishment, and coming up on their twenty-five year anniversary, TFA can no longer claim to be upstarts or outsiders. far better funded than any pro-public ed group and so well-wired into the reformster establishment that they can it will mount a $500 PR campaign on their behalf just because, TFA is part of the status quo. And after this many years, their track record is too well-known to be washed away by PR. They don't provide sufficient preparation for entering a classroom. The vast majority of their people don't enter into a teaching career, and by and large don't intend to. And as much as they like to claim success while being a group that "doesn’t need to tear down another group to affirm that success," their premise has been and continues to be that "regular" teachers just aren't up to the task of educating American students, but TFA recruits will fix it.
TFA has reinvented itself many times, and Layton's article contains a pretty straightforward admission of the core mission: "The program is designed not so much to groom career teachers as to inspire recruits to work on the larger issues of urban education in varied ways."
Darrell Bradford, NYCAN executive director, has one point to make that is fair, albeit ironic:
“Some of the best people I’ve ever known have worked for TFA — great, caring, smart — and it’s tough to see your friends get dragged through the mud,” said Bradford, who has $500,000 for the campaign and is aiming to raise an additional $1 million to expand it.
It's a useful insight, and one that Bradford, who is no dummy, might apply to understading the people who resist NYCAN's agenda in general and TFA in particular. Some of the best, smartest people I know are public school teachers, and it is hard to watch them get dragged through the mud by reformsters who insist that teachers are so bad that it's better to replace them with five-week-trained fresh college grads who don't even particularly want to teach. And we don't have a million bucks lying around to fight back with.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
NCLB Revisionism
Well, that didn't take long.
Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.
Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.
In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.
Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...
As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it.
What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's bizarrely unrealistic and innumerate goal of having 100% of American students score above average on the Big Standardized Test.
[Update: Aldeman disagrees that "proficient" is the same as "above average," and there was some argument at the time about what "proficient" really meant and whether it was "just good enough" or "ready for college." Here's what the state of PA was saying in 2006:
Students are identified as performing in one of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced – meaning that they have mastered Pennsylvania’s assessment anchor content standards at their grade level.
"At grade level" is a tricky construct, but "grade level" frequently means "average."]
NCLB guaranteed that as we approached 2014, we would have only two types of schools in this country-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. Success was literally impossible. And that guaranteed that the number of failing schools would increase and that the public, as they saw the failure label hit schools that they knew damn well were good schools-- that public was going to push back and politicians were going to join in.
Aldeman notes the history of Obama waivers. And he notes the irony of the GOP's love of federal intrusion when it came to education policy.
But Aldeman is also bleary-eyed when it comes to the history of intervention in "failing" schools.
Perhaps worst of all, a strategy focused on fixing the toughest problems hinges on the desire and ability to actually do something about poor performance. The Obama administration, to its credit, did allocate significant resources to chronically low-performing schools through its School Improvement Grants program. And in exchange, it required tough and aggressive interventions in those schools. Although the results of those efforts are still uncertain, they represent a real attempt to shake up persistently poor-performing schools.
No, the results of the SIG program are not uncertain. They're a full-on failure, and all Aldeman has to do is walk across the hall to his Bellwether colleague Andy Smarick hear about it.
Aldeman is unhappy that ESSA is not draconian enough in its approach to "failing" schools. He misses the bigger problem with his aims. Neither NCLB nor the Obama Waiver program had a clue of how to accurately locate failing schools, nor do policy-makers have a clue about how to fix a failing school once they find it. All we've gotten from the last fifteen years of reformsterism is a means of using "failed" schools as a means for creating markets for charter operators and ed-related corporate money grabs.
Like many victims of nostalgia, Aldeman is sad to lose things that we never had. I can think of plenty of reasons not to love ESSA, but a belief that we actually lost some things that NCLB got right-- that does not make the list of objections.
Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.
Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.
In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.
Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...
As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it.
What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's bizarrely unrealistic and innumerate goal of having 100% of American students score above average on the Big Standardized Test.
[Update: Aldeman disagrees that "proficient" is the same as "above average," and there was some argument at the time about what "proficient" really meant and whether it was "just good enough" or "ready for college." Here's what the state of PA was saying in 2006:
Students are identified as performing in one of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced – meaning that they have mastered Pennsylvania’s assessment anchor content standards at their grade level.
"At grade level" is a tricky construct, but "grade level" frequently means "average."]
NCLB guaranteed that as we approached 2014, we would have only two types of schools in this country-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. Success was literally impossible. And that guaranteed that the number of failing schools would increase and that the public, as they saw the failure label hit schools that they knew damn well were good schools-- that public was going to push back and politicians were going to join in.
Aldeman notes the history of Obama waivers. And he notes the irony of the GOP's love of federal intrusion when it came to education policy.
But Aldeman is also bleary-eyed when it comes to the history of intervention in "failing" schools.
Perhaps worst of all, a strategy focused on fixing the toughest problems hinges on the desire and ability to actually do something about poor performance. The Obama administration, to its credit, did allocate significant resources to chronically low-performing schools through its School Improvement Grants program. And in exchange, it required tough and aggressive interventions in those schools. Although the results of those efforts are still uncertain, they represent a real attempt to shake up persistently poor-performing schools.
No, the results of the SIG program are not uncertain. They're a full-on failure, and all Aldeman has to do is walk across the hall to his Bellwether colleague Andy Smarick hear about it.
Aldeman is unhappy that ESSA is not draconian enough in its approach to "failing" schools. He misses the bigger problem with his aims. Neither NCLB nor the Obama Waiver program had a clue of how to accurately locate failing schools, nor do policy-makers have a clue about how to fix a failing school once they find it. All we've gotten from the last fifteen years of reformsterism is a means of using "failed" schools as a means for creating markets for charter operators and ed-related corporate money grabs.
Like many victims of nostalgia, Aldeman is sad to lose things that we never had. I can think of plenty of reasons not to love ESSA, but a belief that we actually lost some things that NCLB got right-- that does not make the list of objections.
The Charter Bond Time Bomb
Inspired by the stunning NEPC report on just how deeply and thoroughly charter schools are used as a mechanism for sucking public tax dollars into private pockets, I've been trying to read up on this stuff, in particular by looking through the work of one of the reports co-authors, Bruce Baker (Rutgers University). Baker operates the blog School Finance 101, and it's an excellent resource for those trying to make sense out of the arcane world of, well, school finance.
I'm dipping into Baker's work to lay out one simple progression that takes charters from vexing to terrifying in just a few steps of property acquisition, in the process setting a ticking time bomb. I'm going to try to lay this out in my own words, mainly as an exercise for myself (one of my personal and professional principles of learning is this: want to really understand something? try to write about it), but I recommend you follow the links and read the full originals. (Also, any mistakes in what follows are mine, not Baker's).
STEP ONE: Double Purchase and Zero Ownership
In this piece, Baker explains how the taxpayer buys the same property twice, and ends up with no control over it. Here's how I think it works.
I buy a house. Well, I take out a mortgage on the house. But now I'm on the hook financially for the house. I make my payments. I may even pay it off.
Then Chris comes along and proposes to buy the house from me. And Chris's proposal is that I take out a mortgage for Chris, but give Chris the deed to the property.
So now I have taken out two mortgages on the same piece of property. I have bought it twice. And it now belongs to Chris.
STEP TWO: Kick the Can and Light the (Very Long) Fuse
With schools, the device used for getting yourself in debt isn't a mortgage, but a bond.
A bond works like this: I loan you some money, and you promise to pay me regular interest on it. You also promise to eventually pay me back the principal when the bond "matures." That's why the highest-rated, most secure bonds are loans to things like municipalities-- organizations that nobody expects to vanish and skip out before the bond matures and the principal is due. That's important, because a bond is different from stock: when you buy stock, you own a piece of the company, but bondholders own nothing except the bonds.
Here is the scariest chart from Baker's recent piece on Subprime Chartering.
That's right. Billions of dollars in debt is out there, and it doesn't come due for decades-- well after the time that charter businesses have to decide whether or not to stay in the business. If I were an unscrupulous charter operator, I could float my charter on an ocean of bond money, use a variety of devices (see that NEPC report) to shovel that money into my pocket and then, when my renewal time came around, just not even apply to have my charter renewed. The possibilities are mind-boggling and remind me of nothing so much as Bialystock and Bloom in The Producers.
And even if I'm a moderately- or highly-scrupled charter operator, maybe I will do what many charter operators do-- decide that the business just isn't producing the kind of returns I need to make it worth my while, so I'm going to fold up my tent and go.
Remember that much of this debt was not run up by the charters, but "on behalf of charters." So who's left holding the bag, and how many of those bag holders eventually discover that they are holding a bag of air, that the investment has vanished.
Set the whole host of educational issues aside-- is the continued proliferation of charters creating another financial time bomb? Are investors and bankers and venture capitalists and hedge funders creating a future financial catastrophe?
Probably not. I mean, those guys are knowledgable financiers who know what they're doing. Surely the investors and bankers and capitalists would never do something so foolish, reckless and short-sighted that it would pose a serious risk to the nation's economic health.
I'm dipping into Baker's work to lay out one simple progression that takes charters from vexing to terrifying in just a few steps of property acquisition, in the process setting a ticking time bomb. I'm going to try to lay this out in my own words, mainly as an exercise for myself (one of my personal and professional principles of learning is this: want to really understand something? try to write about it), but I recommend you follow the links and read the full originals. (Also, any mistakes in what follows are mine, not Baker's).
STEP ONE: Double Purchase and Zero Ownership
In this piece, Baker explains how the taxpayer buys the same property twice, and ends up with no control over it. Here's how I think it works.
I buy a house. Well, I take out a mortgage on the house. But now I'm on the hook financially for the house. I make my payments. I may even pay it off.
Then Chris comes along and proposes to buy the house from me. And Chris's proposal is that I take out a mortgage for Chris, but give Chris the deed to the property.
So now I have taken out two mortgages on the same piece of property. I have bought it twice. And it now belongs to Chris.
STEP TWO: Kick the Can and Light the (Very Long) Fuse
With schools, the device used for getting yourself in debt isn't a mortgage, but a bond.
A bond works like this: I loan you some money, and you promise to pay me regular interest on it. You also promise to eventually pay me back the principal when the bond "matures." That's why the highest-rated, most secure bonds are loans to things like municipalities-- organizations that nobody expects to vanish and skip out before the bond matures and the principal is due. That's important, because a bond is different from stock: when you buy stock, you own a piece of the company, but bondholders own nothing except the bonds.
Here is the scariest chart from Baker's recent piece on Subprime Chartering.
That's right. Billions of dollars in debt is out there, and it doesn't come due for decades-- well after the time that charter businesses have to decide whether or not to stay in the business. If I were an unscrupulous charter operator, I could float my charter on an ocean of bond money, use a variety of devices (see that NEPC report) to shovel that money into my pocket and then, when my renewal time came around, just not even apply to have my charter renewed. The possibilities are mind-boggling and remind me of nothing so much as Bialystock and Bloom in The Producers.
And even if I'm a moderately- or highly-scrupled charter operator, maybe I will do what many charter operators do-- decide that the business just isn't producing the kind of returns I need to make it worth my while, so I'm going to fold up my tent and go.
Remember that much of this debt was not run up by the charters, but "on behalf of charters." So who's left holding the bag, and how many of those bag holders eventually discover that they are holding a bag of air, that the investment has vanished.
Set the whole host of educational issues aside-- is the continued proliferation of charters creating another financial time bomb? Are investors and bankers and venture capitalists and hedge funders creating a future financial catastrophe?
Probably not. I mean, those guys are knowledgable financiers who know what they're doing. Surely the investors and bankers and capitalists would never do something so foolish, reckless and short-sighted that it would pose a serious risk to the nation's economic health.
Friday, December 11, 2015
Can Principals Turn Around Rural Schools
Rural schools are often left out of discussions of ed reform and public schools and all the rest. I'm acutely aware of this because I teach in a rural district, centered in a small town of around 7,000 people, but spread across many townships. We don't think of ourselves this way, but if you look at the map, we are on the northern end of Appalachia, and many of the issues that are stirring the educational pot across the country play out far differently here.
So when the School Turnaround Learning Community ran a piece about rural school leadership, I was interested.
The School Turnaround Learning Community is run by the Center on School Turnaround, which in turn is "at" WestEd, an educational "research, development and service organization" that won the job of running school turnaround stuff for the US Department of Education. Its leadership ranks are loaded with professional bureaucrats and policy researchy types, so it's that kind of official government reformy thing. And they are probably scrambling a bit because managing School Improvement Grants seems to have been part of their bread and butter, and those grants have gone-- well, if not away, at least somewhere under ESSA.
This brief piece was written by Caitlin Scott, who works at Education Northwest doing researchy evaluation things on government contracts as well.
Scott has spent most of her career looking at SIG affects; you may recall that SIG were supposed to turn around schools in the bottom 5%. You might not recall that because after years of various attempts to turn around schools in the bottom 5%, not a single government bureaucrat nor reformy wonkster has shown how such a feat can be accomplished. But Scott has some ideas about why SIGs failed in rural settings (as opposed to all the other places they failed).
First-- and full marks for Scott on this-- the SIG program declared that failing schools must be turned around using one of the four permitted federal models, and those models all centered on either firing the principal or allowing students to flee to alternative schools.
Well, in rural areas, there aren't that many other schools to flee to (nor, might I add, are they necessarily loaded with the capacity to take on extra students in the first place). So rural turnaround schools tended to go with the principal replacement option.
Scott has published a study showing the difficulties in replacing principals (especially rural ones). The short form is that replacing principals rarely moves the needle. While Scott's interviews with various leaders suggest that rural schools lack the resources to attract and retain "highly effective principals who have the ability to turn around schools," my personal experience and research suggests that Scott is only half right.
Attracting and retaining principals in rural areas is hard. You have to be someone who finds this country and small town lifestyle appealing, and you have to be someone who doesn't want to make much money. Fun fact: the assistant principal in my building makes less than many of the teachers-- and that's before you factor in her longer work year. So attracting and retaining-- definitely an issue.
At the same time, Scott is on a unicorn hunt. She looks at the research and says, "Wow, almost nobody can find a principal with the magical power to turn a school around (i.e. raise student scores)." I look at her research and say, "Look! Proof that a principal cannot singlehandedly turn schools around (i.e. raise test scores)."
I would also argue that the very practice of moving principals in and out, whether by design or by inability to attract and retain, makes it less likely that a principal can change anything. If your principal has been there two years and your staff have mostly been there ten-to-thirty years, the principal is not the one setting the tone and culture of the school, and teachers are unlikely to budge much for the tourist who's just passing through, unless he institutes really earth-shattering changes.
Plus-- rural principals largely run their schools singlehandedly, without the big fancy staff of an urban district. That means the principal takes care of everything, including all the pop-up daily jobs (the kid who punched another kid at lunch, the water pipe that broke in the back hall, the angry parent who just came to complain to Someone In Charge). Rural principals often start with every intention of being hands on and in regular contact with their teaching staff, but it's not always humanly possible. "Instructional leader" often gets crowded off the top of the job description list.
Scott gets this:
Personally, I believe that school leadership does not reside in the principal alone. Instead, I believe leadership is, and should be, distributed among all the adults working at a school. In rural schools, distributed leadership may be particularly important, because these schools often have smaller numbers of staff members than urban and suburban schools. This requires many adults to take on multiple roles and shoulder greater responsibility for school success.
Scott favors an approach that turns all adults in the building into Keepers of the Turnaround Flame, and offers as an example Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement Network (NW RISE). I do not share the enthusiasm for a group that "supports" rural educators in "implementing Common Core State Standards, with the goal of improving student engagement and achievement in rural areas." There's nothing to be gained from another Common Core booster shot, unless we're talking about the brand of CCSS that is essentially test prep for the Core Big Standardized Tests-- and I see no educational, student-centered reason to care about BS Test results.
However, Scott does get one other thing right-- no turnaround model that requires rural schools to follow a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter procedure developed for urban schools is ever going to do any rural school any good (particularly since there's no evidence it does urban schools any good, either).
We will see if educrat think leaders like Scott can convince states to use some of their newly-ESSA-fied slack to develop models for helping rural schools that are actually helpful.
So when the School Turnaround Learning Community ran a piece about rural school leadership, I was interested.
The School Turnaround Learning Community is run by the Center on School Turnaround, which in turn is "at" WestEd, an educational "research, development and service organization" that won the job of running school turnaround stuff for the US Department of Education. Its leadership ranks are loaded with professional bureaucrats and policy researchy types, so it's that kind of official government reformy thing. And they are probably scrambling a bit because managing School Improvement Grants seems to have been part of their bread and butter, and those grants have gone-- well, if not away, at least somewhere under ESSA.
This brief piece was written by Caitlin Scott, who works at Education Northwest doing researchy evaluation things on government contracts as well.
Scott has spent most of her career looking at SIG affects; you may recall that SIG were supposed to turn around schools in the bottom 5%. You might not recall that because after years of various attempts to turn around schools in the bottom 5%, not a single government bureaucrat nor reformy wonkster has shown how such a feat can be accomplished. But Scott has some ideas about why SIGs failed in rural settings (as opposed to all the other places they failed).
First-- and full marks for Scott on this-- the SIG program declared that failing schools must be turned around using one of the four permitted federal models, and those models all centered on either firing the principal or allowing students to flee to alternative schools.
Well, in rural areas, there aren't that many other schools to flee to (nor, might I add, are they necessarily loaded with the capacity to take on extra students in the first place). So rural turnaround schools tended to go with the principal replacement option.
Scott has published a study showing the difficulties in replacing principals (especially rural ones). The short form is that replacing principals rarely moves the needle. While Scott's interviews with various leaders suggest that rural schools lack the resources to attract and retain "highly effective principals who have the ability to turn around schools," my personal experience and research suggests that Scott is only half right.
Attracting and retaining principals in rural areas is hard. You have to be someone who finds this country and small town lifestyle appealing, and you have to be someone who doesn't want to make much money. Fun fact: the assistant principal in my building makes less than many of the teachers-- and that's before you factor in her longer work year. So attracting and retaining-- definitely an issue.
At the same time, Scott is on a unicorn hunt. She looks at the research and says, "Wow, almost nobody can find a principal with the magical power to turn a school around (i.e. raise student scores)." I look at her research and say, "Look! Proof that a principal cannot singlehandedly turn schools around (i.e. raise test scores)."
I would also argue that the very practice of moving principals in and out, whether by design or by inability to attract and retain, makes it less likely that a principal can change anything. If your principal has been there two years and your staff have mostly been there ten-to-thirty years, the principal is not the one setting the tone and culture of the school, and teachers are unlikely to budge much for the tourist who's just passing through, unless he institutes really earth-shattering changes.
Plus-- rural principals largely run their schools singlehandedly, without the big fancy staff of an urban district. That means the principal takes care of everything, including all the pop-up daily jobs (the kid who punched another kid at lunch, the water pipe that broke in the back hall, the angry parent who just came to complain to Someone In Charge). Rural principals often start with every intention of being hands on and in regular contact with their teaching staff, but it's not always humanly possible. "Instructional leader" often gets crowded off the top of the job description list.
Scott gets this:
Personally, I believe that school leadership does not reside in the principal alone. Instead, I believe leadership is, and should be, distributed among all the adults working at a school. In rural schools, distributed leadership may be particularly important, because these schools often have smaller numbers of staff members than urban and suburban schools. This requires many adults to take on multiple roles and shoulder greater responsibility for school success.
Scott favors an approach that turns all adults in the building into Keepers of the Turnaround Flame, and offers as an example Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement Network (NW RISE). I do not share the enthusiasm for a group that "supports" rural educators in "implementing Common Core State Standards, with the goal of improving student engagement and achievement in rural areas." There's nothing to be gained from another Common Core booster shot, unless we're talking about the brand of CCSS that is essentially test prep for the Core Big Standardized Tests-- and I see no educational, student-centered reason to care about BS Test results.
However, Scott does get one other thing right-- no turnaround model that requires rural schools to follow a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter procedure developed for urban schools is ever going to do any rural school any good (particularly since there's no evidence it does urban schools any good, either).
We will see if educrat think leaders like Scott can convince states to use some of their newly-ESSA-fied slack to develop models for helping rural schools that are actually helpful.
NY: Cuomo's Common Core Nothing Sundae
They said it couldn't be done, but today NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's Common Core Task Force delivered a big old report in less time than it takes my students to complete their major research project. And it's a big ole Nothing Sundae with a few scoops of Fluff on the side, with a cherry on top.
The announcement came with the same stock photo student we've seen before, and I want with all my heart to believe that his expression of, "Heh. Yeah, this is some ridiculous baloney" is the blow struck by whatever intern had to cobble this together. But the nothing in this announcement announces its nothingness right off the bat. Here's the head of the Task Force, Richard Parsons, Senior Advisor, Providence Equity Partners, LLC and former Chairman of Citigroup (because when you want to look at education policy, you call a banker):
While adoption of the Common Core was extremely well intentioned, its implementation has caused confusion and upheaval in classrooms across New York State. We believe that these recommendations, once acted on, provide a means to put things back on the right track and ensure high quality standards that meet the needs of New York’s kids. The recommendations will provide the foundation to restore public trust in the education system in New York and build on the long history of excellence that preceded this period.
So there you have it-- the purpose of the report is "to restore public trust." Which is a little different than "meet educational needs."
But that's the PR. How does the report look? Let's just see.
Getting Started
The report kicks off with a the short summary (for those who want to skip straight to the highlights) and a recap of what the Common Core is (spoiler alert: it's exactly what all the PR from Common Core says it is, apparently, so you already know this part). From there we move to the bulk of the report, which is the findings and twenty-one recommendations. Let's see what the task force came up with, shall we? The recommendations are grouped by specific issues.
Issue One: Establish New High Quality New York Standards
Well, if you had any doubts about how deeply the task force was going to dig and how carefully they were going to probe to reach heretofore undiscovered frontiers of understanding, just look at this sentence:
The Task Force has learned that New York educators had limited input into the Common Core before their formal adoption in New York.
Stay tuned for the moment in which the Task Force learns that the sun does not revolve around the sun.
The Task Force accepted input for a whole month and heard from 10,500 respondents.But they single out the Council for a Strong America, the New York State Business Council, and an unnamed NY higher education administrator. Many people are unhappy, yet somehow there is widespread agreement that the goals of CCSS are all swell.
Recommendation One: Adopt some high quality NY standards with all stakeholders in a transparent process.
Mind you, they need to be high standards that promote college and career readiness. And they shouldn't just be a name change, and they should be New Yorky.
But-- the changes should include all the "key instructional shifts set forth in the Common Core Standards." So they should be totally different from the Core, but they should do exactly what the Core does. Got that? NY will rewrite the standards without questioning any of the foundation or goals of the standards. So, more than a name change-- there will also be wording changes. Probably fine changes, too. Just no changes to the actual goals and substance of the standards, Which will make it hard to do
Recommendation Two: Fix the early grade standards.
Well, not fix exactly. The Task Force doesn't want to lower the standards, but recognizing that children develop at different rates, they recommend "banding" to give teachers a wider time range in which to drag tony students across the finish line. They're talking Pre-K through 2. Up through grade 2, everyone can move more or less at their own pace, but by grade 3 the little slackers should be on point and meeting those one-size-fits-all standards. So what we'd like to take those special moments where live humans meet incorrectly written standards and just sort of move them to a later point in the students' lives.
Recommendation Three: Some kind of flexibility for special populations.
Basically, let's make sure that students with disabilities and ELL have more than just the option of vocational certificates instead of a regents diploma. But every student should be prepared to succeed after high school. Convene some experts and figure something out.
Recommendation Four: Ensure standards do not lead to the narrowing of the curriculum or diminish the love of reading and joy of learning.
The Task Force hasn't the foggiest notion how to actually do this, but they recognize it's an issue to many people. So they recommend that the new standards just kind of do this, somehow. It does not occur to them, for instance, that focusing all measurement of schools, teachers, and students on the results of a couple of standardized tests might have the effect of narrowing the curriculum. Nope. Like Arne Duncan, they have no idea how this happened, but they recommend that it stop happening, right now.
Recommendation Five: Establish transparent review and revision process for standards.
It's a mark of just how far the Common Core has driven us down the Crazyland Turnpike that this idea-- that there should be a way to review the standards and change what needs to be changed-- qualifies as a new recommendation. No, David Coleman saw his Creation, and he saw that it was Good, and he decreed that nobody could or should ever change it. The Task Force is not wrong, but the state of New York and a whole lot of other folks are dopes for having waiting till the end of 2015 to come up with this.
Issue Two: Develop Better Curriculum Guidance and Resources
Bzzzzt!! Wrong "issue." The issue is not, "how can the state do a better job of micromanaging classroom teachers." The issue is, "how can the state back itself up and let teachers do their jobs." But the closest the Task Force can come is acknowledging that "teachers develop and select elements of curriculum within the context of student learning goals and objectives established by state and local authorities." So while in their straightjackets, teachers are free to wiggle their noses and roll their eyes.
The Task Force also notes that EngageNY is being used as mandated curriculum in many districts, even though NYSED swears up and down it told people not to do that. Also, many people think the EngageNY modules and website suck.
Also, the Task Force is one more group that is fuzzy on the difference between standards and curriculum. For all these reasons, the following recommendations pretty much miss the point.
Recommendation Six: Educators and local districts should be free to develop and tailor curriculum to the standards.
And you can get a Model T in any color, as long as it's black. The TF actually notes that high-performing schools give teachers autonomy. And yet, somehow the recommendation "Give teachers autonomy" does not make it onto the list.
Recommendation Seven: Release New! Improved! curriculum resources.
Make a new, more better EngageNY. Oh, and occasionally collect feedback on it, just in case it's not more betterer enough.
Recommendation Eight: Set up a digital platform for teacher sharing.
Another moment of candor breaks out. "Teachers and students are not one-size-fit-all. So why are our modules?" Yeah! So let's see if teachers want to fill in the huge gaps in our materials offerings, for free. Let's see if teachers and schools want to give away materials that might help other teachers and schools beat them in the stack rankings. Using the interwebs!
Recommendation Nine: More better Professional Development
Responding to the complaint that the Core were implemented without enough explanation of How To Do It, the TF suggests that lots of super-duper PD be deployed so that people will totally know how to do it the next time. Because implementation is always the explanation. Hey, question. Do you think anybody out there is researching better ways to spread cholera? Or could it be that some things can't be implemented well because they are inherently flawed and un-implementable?
Issue Three: Significantly Reducing Testing Time and Blah Blah Blahdy Blah
Tests are inevitable and universal, we say. People apparently have complained about Common Core testing. A lot. Who knew? (Oh, wait-- everybody who's read that at least 250,000 students in NY refused to take the test). The Task Force is aware that Pearson has been replaced and that the education chief has launched an initiative to get test compliance back up, complete with a hilariously handy propaganda kit. The Task Force is aware that nobody thinks they're getting useful information from the tests. Of course, the Task Force also accepts NYSED's estimate of how much time any of this testification sucks up, and they think that the President's Test Action Plan actually said something useful and meaningful.
Of course, the way to significantly reduce testing time, a goal everyone allegedly supports, would have been for the ESSA to NOT require the same amount of standardized testing as previously mandated. But under ESSA, states that really wanted to do something about the testing juggernaut could push the boundaries of what the tests are and what they are used for (because test prep would be less prevalent if everybody's future weren't riding on test results). But (spoiler alert) the Task Force is not going to recommend any of these obvious means of achieving their alleged goal. They are like a spouse who, caught cheating with somebody they picked up in a bar, promises not to go to that particular bar on Wednesdays.
Recommendation Ten: Involve all sorts of stakeholders in reviewing the state standardized tests.
Interesting. Does this mean that teachers and other stakeholders will actually be allowed to see test questions? I don't think this recommendation will make it past the test manufacturing lobby.
Recommendation Eleven: Gather student feedback on tests.
Good idea. I suggest checking twitter starting roughly five minutes after the test is handed out.
Recommendation Twelve: Provide ongoing transparency,
They call for releasing test items (good luck with that), the standards weighting and more detail in student scores. I'd suggest adding to the list how the tests are scored, how the test items were validated (if at all), and how the cut scores are set.
Recommendation Thirteen: Reduce number of days and duration for standardized tests
Sure. Good idea. Next, reduce punitive uses of test results so that nobody feels compelled to spend half the year doing test prep.
Recommendation Fourteen: Provide teacher flexibility to use authentic formative assessment.
What?! Trust teachers to do their jobs??!! That's crazy talk, Task Force. Unless.... Uh-oh.
The State and local school districts must support the use of standards-based formative assessments and authentic assessments woven into the routine curriculum along with periodic diagnostic and benchmark testing. The goal of these assessments is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback throughout the school year that teachers can use to improve instruction and students can use to improve learning.
Okay. That could mean "let teachers teach" or it could mean "bring on the highly profitable Competency Based Education."
Recommendation Fifteen: Check out an untimed approach
Another surprising finding. When you give students a high stakes test with a time limit, they get anxious.
Recommendation Sixteen: Provide flexibility for students with disabilities.
Recommendation Seventeen: Protect and enforce accommodations for students with disabilities.
Recommendation Eighteen: Explore alternative options to assess the most severely disabled students.
These are aimed directly at the feds, who, as part of their ongoing program to make all disabilities to vanish by just expecting real hard, denied New York's request to make testing accommodations for students with disabilities. It's hard to predict how hard Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King (whose previous job, you may recall, was making a hash of education policy in New York) may push back on this, and the real battle will come down to the future Secretary of Ed.
Recommendation Nineteen: Prevent students from being stuck in academic intervention based on one test.
Once again, we are mystified by how anybody ever put sooooo much emphasis on one standardized test. How did such a thing happen? It;s a puzzlement. But a student definitely shouldn't be automatically put in a remediation just because she did poorly on the test used to rate schools and teachers. A more holistic approach is called for, with parents and teachers working together to determine what is in the best interests of the child. And nobody should ever tell a student that the student is too unsatisfactory a student based on just one test (unless it's the state making that determination based on one test, in which case it's totes okee dokee).
Recommendation Twenty: Eliminate double testing for ELL students
New York has an exam for English Language Learners to take. The feds only give a one-year exemption for ELL students, leaving ELL students often taking double tests-- during the years that they have not yet shown English proficiency. The Task Force thinks this is dumb. They are correct.
Issue Four and Recommendation Twenty-One
"The implementation of the Common Core in New York was rushed and flawed," says the task force, which does not go one to say, "because the Common Core were the rushed, flawed work of amateurs, and you can't do a good job of implementing a bad policy." So they have this half right.
But they recommend that "until the new system is fully phased in" (which will be determined how, exactly?) test results should only be advisory and not used for any teacher or student evaluating. They are assuming it will take till 2019-2020 to get everything up to speed, which is pretty awesome, because that gives many governors, many legislatures, and many various policymakers and lobbyists ample time to do God knows what in the meantime. Might as well pick any old year, since nobody knows how long such an undertaking should, would or has taken ever.
Bottom line?
So the Task Force has basically hit three areas. They have lots of ideas to clean up the administration of testing, but nothing that addresses the fundamental problems with the testing. They have several ideas for trying to clean up the curriculum and pedagogy tied to the standards, but nothing that addresses the incorrect assumptions and ideas underlying the state's approach. And they have an idea about rewriting new standards, but nothing that would address any of the foundational problems and incorrect assumptions underlying the Common Core.
So, change without change. We'll keep the same twisted frame and try to drape it with pretty new cloth. It's a big bowl of nothing, and it's not even a new bowl.
The announcement came with the same stock photo student we've seen before, and I want with all my heart to believe that his expression of, "Heh. Yeah, this is some ridiculous baloney" is the blow struck by whatever intern had to cobble this together. But the nothing in this announcement announces its nothingness right off the bat. Here's the head of the Task Force, Richard Parsons, Senior Advisor, Providence Equity Partners, LLC and former Chairman of Citigroup (because when you want to look at education policy, you call a banker):
While adoption of the Common Core was extremely well intentioned, its implementation has caused confusion and upheaval in classrooms across New York State. We believe that these recommendations, once acted on, provide a means to put things back on the right track and ensure high quality standards that meet the needs of New York’s kids. The recommendations will provide the foundation to restore public trust in the education system in New York and build on the long history of excellence that preceded this period.
So there you have it-- the purpose of the report is "to restore public trust." Which is a little different than "meet educational needs."
But that's the PR. How does the report look? Let's just see.
Getting Started
The report kicks off with a the short summary (for those who want to skip straight to the highlights) and a recap of what the Common Core is (spoiler alert: it's exactly what all the PR from Common Core says it is, apparently, so you already know this part). From there we move to the bulk of the report, which is the findings and twenty-one recommendations. Let's see what the task force came up with, shall we? The recommendations are grouped by specific issues.
Issue One: Establish New High Quality New York Standards
Well, if you had any doubts about how deeply the task force was going to dig and how carefully they were going to probe to reach heretofore undiscovered frontiers of understanding, just look at this sentence:
The Task Force has learned that New York educators had limited input into the Common Core before their formal adoption in New York.
Stay tuned for the moment in which the Task Force learns that the sun does not revolve around the sun.
The Task Force accepted input for a whole month and heard from 10,500 respondents.But they single out the Council for a Strong America, the New York State Business Council, and an unnamed NY higher education administrator. Many people are unhappy, yet somehow there is widespread agreement that the goals of CCSS are all swell.
Recommendation One: Adopt some high quality NY standards with all stakeholders in a transparent process.
Mind you, they need to be high standards that promote college and career readiness. And they shouldn't just be a name change, and they should be New Yorky.
But-- the changes should include all the "key instructional shifts set forth in the Common Core Standards." So they should be totally different from the Core, but they should do exactly what the Core does. Got that? NY will rewrite the standards without questioning any of the foundation or goals of the standards. So, more than a name change-- there will also be wording changes. Probably fine changes, too. Just no changes to the actual goals and substance of the standards, Which will make it hard to do
Recommendation Two: Fix the early grade standards.
Well, not fix exactly. The Task Force doesn't want to lower the standards, but recognizing that children develop at different rates, they recommend "banding" to give teachers a wider time range in which to drag tony students across the finish line. They're talking Pre-K through 2. Up through grade 2, everyone can move more or less at their own pace, but by grade 3 the little slackers should be on point and meeting those one-size-fits-all standards. So what we'd like to take those special moments where live humans meet incorrectly written standards and just sort of move them to a later point in the students' lives.
Recommendation Three: Some kind of flexibility for special populations.
Basically, let's make sure that students with disabilities and ELL have more than just the option of vocational certificates instead of a regents diploma. But every student should be prepared to succeed after high school. Convene some experts and figure something out.
Recommendation Four: Ensure standards do not lead to the narrowing of the curriculum or diminish the love of reading and joy of learning.
The Task Force hasn't the foggiest notion how to actually do this, but they recognize it's an issue to many people. So they recommend that the new standards just kind of do this, somehow. It does not occur to them, for instance, that focusing all measurement of schools, teachers, and students on the results of a couple of standardized tests might have the effect of narrowing the curriculum. Nope. Like Arne Duncan, they have no idea how this happened, but they recommend that it stop happening, right now.
Recommendation Five: Establish transparent review and revision process for standards.
It's a mark of just how far the Common Core has driven us down the Crazyland Turnpike that this idea-- that there should be a way to review the standards and change what needs to be changed-- qualifies as a new recommendation. No, David Coleman saw his Creation, and he saw that it was Good, and he decreed that nobody could or should ever change it. The Task Force is not wrong, but the state of New York and a whole lot of other folks are dopes for having waiting till the end of 2015 to come up with this.
Issue Two: Develop Better Curriculum Guidance and Resources
Bzzzzt!! Wrong "issue." The issue is not, "how can the state do a better job of micromanaging classroom teachers." The issue is, "how can the state back itself up and let teachers do their jobs." But the closest the Task Force can come is acknowledging that "teachers develop and select elements of curriculum within the context of student learning goals and objectives established by state and local authorities." So while in their straightjackets, teachers are free to wiggle their noses and roll their eyes.
The Task Force also notes that EngageNY is being used as mandated curriculum in many districts, even though NYSED swears up and down it told people not to do that. Also, many people think the EngageNY modules and website suck.
Also, the Task Force is one more group that is fuzzy on the difference between standards and curriculum. For all these reasons, the following recommendations pretty much miss the point.
Recommendation Six: Educators and local districts should be free to develop and tailor curriculum to the standards.
And you can get a Model T in any color, as long as it's black. The TF actually notes that high-performing schools give teachers autonomy. And yet, somehow the recommendation "Give teachers autonomy" does not make it onto the list.
Recommendation Seven: Release New! Improved! curriculum resources.
Make a new, more better EngageNY. Oh, and occasionally collect feedback on it, just in case it's not more betterer enough.
Recommendation Eight: Set up a digital platform for teacher sharing.
Another moment of candor breaks out. "Teachers and students are not one-size-fit-all. So why are our modules?" Yeah! So let's see if teachers want to fill in the huge gaps in our materials offerings, for free. Let's see if teachers and schools want to give away materials that might help other teachers and schools beat them in the stack rankings. Using the interwebs!
Recommendation Nine: More better Professional Development
Responding to the complaint that the Core were implemented without enough explanation of How To Do It, the TF suggests that lots of super-duper PD be deployed so that people will totally know how to do it the next time. Because implementation is always the explanation. Hey, question. Do you think anybody out there is researching better ways to spread cholera? Or could it be that some things can't be implemented well because they are inherently flawed and un-implementable?
Issue Three: Significantly Reducing Testing Time and Blah Blah Blahdy Blah
Tests are inevitable and universal, we say. People apparently have complained about Common Core testing. A lot. Who knew? (Oh, wait-- everybody who's read that at least 250,000 students in NY refused to take the test). The Task Force is aware that Pearson has been replaced and that the education chief has launched an initiative to get test compliance back up, complete with a hilariously handy propaganda kit. The Task Force is aware that nobody thinks they're getting useful information from the tests. Of course, the Task Force also accepts NYSED's estimate of how much time any of this testification sucks up, and they think that the President's Test Action Plan actually said something useful and meaningful.
Of course, the way to significantly reduce testing time, a goal everyone allegedly supports, would have been for the ESSA to NOT require the same amount of standardized testing as previously mandated. But under ESSA, states that really wanted to do something about the testing juggernaut could push the boundaries of what the tests are and what they are used for (because test prep would be less prevalent if everybody's future weren't riding on test results). But (spoiler alert) the Task Force is not going to recommend any of these obvious means of achieving their alleged goal. They are like a spouse who, caught cheating with somebody they picked up in a bar, promises not to go to that particular bar on Wednesdays.
Recommendation Ten: Involve all sorts of stakeholders in reviewing the state standardized tests.
Interesting. Does this mean that teachers and other stakeholders will actually be allowed to see test questions? I don't think this recommendation will make it past the test manufacturing lobby.
Recommendation Eleven: Gather student feedback on tests.
Good idea. I suggest checking twitter starting roughly five minutes after the test is handed out.
Recommendation Twelve: Provide ongoing transparency,
They call for releasing test items (good luck with that), the standards weighting and more detail in student scores. I'd suggest adding to the list how the tests are scored, how the test items were validated (if at all), and how the cut scores are set.
Recommendation Thirteen: Reduce number of days and duration for standardized tests
Sure. Good idea. Next, reduce punitive uses of test results so that nobody feels compelled to spend half the year doing test prep.
Recommendation Fourteen: Provide teacher flexibility to use authentic formative assessment.
What?! Trust teachers to do their jobs??!! That's crazy talk, Task Force. Unless.... Uh-oh.
The State and local school districts must support the use of standards-based formative assessments and authentic assessments woven into the routine curriculum along with periodic diagnostic and benchmark testing. The goal of these assessments is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback throughout the school year that teachers can use to improve instruction and students can use to improve learning.
Okay. That could mean "let teachers teach" or it could mean "bring on the highly profitable Competency Based Education."
Recommendation Fifteen: Check out an untimed approach
Another surprising finding. When you give students a high stakes test with a time limit, they get anxious.
Recommendation Sixteen: Provide flexibility for students with disabilities.
Recommendation Seventeen: Protect and enforce accommodations for students with disabilities.
Recommendation Eighteen: Explore alternative options to assess the most severely disabled students.
These are aimed directly at the feds, who, as part of their ongoing program to make all disabilities to vanish by just expecting real hard, denied New York's request to make testing accommodations for students with disabilities. It's hard to predict how hard Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King (whose previous job, you may recall, was making a hash of education policy in New York) may push back on this, and the real battle will come down to the future Secretary of Ed.
Recommendation Nineteen: Prevent students from being stuck in academic intervention based on one test.
Once again, we are mystified by how anybody ever put sooooo much emphasis on one standardized test. How did such a thing happen? It;s a puzzlement. But a student definitely shouldn't be automatically put in a remediation just because she did poorly on the test used to rate schools and teachers. A more holistic approach is called for, with parents and teachers working together to determine what is in the best interests of the child. And nobody should ever tell a student that the student is too unsatisfactory a student based on just one test (unless it's the state making that determination based on one test, in which case it's totes okee dokee).
Recommendation Twenty: Eliminate double testing for ELL students
New York has an exam for English Language Learners to take. The feds only give a one-year exemption for ELL students, leaving ELL students often taking double tests-- during the years that they have not yet shown English proficiency. The Task Force thinks this is dumb. They are correct.
Issue Four and Recommendation Twenty-One
"The implementation of the Common Core in New York was rushed and flawed," says the task force, which does not go one to say, "because the Common Core were the rushed, flawed work of amateurs, and you can't do a good job of implementing a bad policy." So they have this half right.
But they recommend that "until the new system is fully phased in" (which will be determined how, exactly?) test results should only be advisory and not used for any teacher or student evaluating. They are assuming it will take till 2019-2020 to get everything up to speed, which is pretty awesome, because that gives many governors, many legislatures, and many various policymakers and lobbyists ample time to do God knows what in the meantime. Might as well pick any old year, since nobody knows how long such an undertaking should, would or has taken ever.
Bottom line?
So the Task Force has basically hit three areas. They have lots of ideas to clean up the administration of testing, but nothing that addresses the fundamental problems with the testing. They have several ideas for trying to clean up the curriculum and pedagogy tied to the standards, but nothing that addresses the incorrect assumptions and ideas underlying the state's approach. And they have an idea about rewriting new standards, but nothing that would address any of the foundational problems and incorrect assumptions underlying the Common Core.
So, change without change. We'll keep the same twisted frame and try to drape it with pretty new cloth. It's a big bowl of nothing, and it's not even a new bowl.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)