Core: Back Off, Parents

The Hechinger Report ran a piece with the somewhat confrontational title, "Back off parents: It’s not your job to teach Common Core math when helping with homework."

In the piece, Kathlenn Lucadamo argues that parents just need to get out of the business of trying to teach math at home. Her subheading is "What should parents do when they don't understand their kids' Common Core homework?" Her answers? Don't try to be a math guru, talk to the teacher, and teach what you know without stepping on toes.

Some of this advice comes courtesy of Jason Zimba, architect of the Common Core math.

“The math instruction on the part of parents should be low. The teacher is there to explain the curriculum,” said Zimba.

And we're not just talking about calculus.

The struggle seems to bubble in third grade, said experts, when the math becomes more sophisticated. “It’s when it looks more different. It’s not just counting beans,” said Bibb Hubbard, founder of Learning Heroes, a group for parents.

Sigh.

On the one hand, I'm sympathetic with Common Core math instructors, who have been blamed for everything from global warming to the terrible... well, everything in The Phantom Menace. There are "look at this awful math assignments" memes blaming the Common Core for assignments designed by John Dewey's grandma.

On the other hand, if your brilliant idea about how to teach math is incomprehensible to grown-ups, you may be barking up the wrong tree. And if your response to children' parents when they want to be active and involved is, "back off!" you perhaps don't understand your job.

[UPDATE: Check below in the comments, where Zimba has stopped by to clarify his quote. ]

Superintendents: Federal Failure

Gallup does an occasional survey of school superintendents, and the results from the November 2015 survey are interesting. They used a list of 11,750 superintendents, and weighted the responses from the 1,255 who actually got back to them to correct for for region and setting of schools. You can read the whole report (it's brief, with lots of tables) right here, but let me touch on some highlights for you.

Superintendents are pretty sure that parents just don't understand.

On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being total agreement and 1 being complete notional rejection, superintendents mostly rejected the statement "Parents in my school district understand how our school is evaluated by our state's school accountability system." Only 16% of superintendents gave a 4 or 5 for that one, with 52% opting for 1 or 2. 71% said that parents need more information.

Likewise, on 32% gave parents a 4 or 5 for understanding the academic model and curriculum of the district.

Test Prep Tyranny

Two thirds of the superintendents said that their schools are spending more classroom time getting ready for the Big Standardized Tests. The top reason offered was that the test have changed (64%) followed closely by an increase in the number of tests (61%) and low BS Test results in the district (60%). Increased emphasis on test results by the state was still more than half (57%).

Comparing

Is the ability to compare results a big deal? Bigger than I might have guessed

Course offerings

I'm happy to see that 79% of superintendents still offer career and technical education, though I think 100% would be a better number to shoot for, but 57% of the supers said they have plans to expand. . 62% offer SAT or ACT prep, which is discouraging (do schools really need to become part of a corporate marketing strategy?) Entrepreneurship is in 45% of the responding districts.

Feds Take the Heat

But nothing brought out the superunanimity like the feds. In response to "How would you rate the job the federal government has done with K-12 education policy in the last five years?" only 1% said "excellent," followed by a piddly 9% for "good." They did not use any kind of follow-up to indicate what exact area of policy suckage they were bothered by. But Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John "Stay the Course" King might want to consider this result while he's contemplating operating as Duncan 2.0 in the USED office.

The Core vs. Content

Since the Core first popped its tiny head out of its crinkly shell, advocates have insisted that CCSS ELA standards, demand rich content. Meanwhile, I have become increasingly convinced that the demands for rich content and the assertions that rich content must be part of Core implementation rise up precisely because the Core actually has a giant gaping hole where rich content should be.

In other words, rich content Core-o-philes are like guys looking at an automobile with no wheels saying, "Well, obviously the makers of this car intend for us to put on wheels." It's not that the wheels are in evidence; it's that their absence is an obvious fatal flaw. Or to put it another way, surely the emperor must mean for us to buy him some clothes.

But the longer the Core sticks around out in the field, the more obvious it becomes that the Core is anti-content-- particularly once you throw in the Core-based standards-measuring Big Standardized Tests.

Consider this article, written by someone whose intent is to show us how the Core is perfectly swell, even as it explains that part of the swellness is how it "eases literary classics to the sidelines."

Consider some of these quotes:

“It is true that the days for ‘Moby Dick’ or ‘Great Expectations’ might be numbered, but the question that teachers have to ask themselves is ‘What is the purpose of reading this text?’" said Mark Gardner, a high school English teacher in Clarke County, Washington.

“While it may seem like sacrilege, there are many goals that can be achieved by digging deeply into a series of well-curated selections of a text rather than all of it, and then relying on teacher lecture, lessons or even Sparknotes to fill in the gaps,” Gardner said in an interview.

 As an AP English and composition teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, Ambereen Khan-Baker has included political cartoons and shorter, more complex texts while cutting out longer novels. Using multiple texts instead of focusing on one book has allowed her to teach diverse opinions.

The article is presenting, uncritically and with a light tone of  "you old fossils need to understand the new, cool way of doing things," the idea of trimming the classics down to a chapter or two. I've encountered this more than a few times-- cover a couple of key chapters in depth and fill in the rest with a summary or even, I swear, sparknotes. 

Making such changes could be a positive thing if it provides students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of literature and the skills that can be applied to reading non-fiction, according to Gardner, who said that is a key reason the classics are taught in the first place.

This is what the Core promotes and requires-- reading as a conduit for transmitting certain skills to students, and because it's teamed with the BS Tests, the skills do not include wrestling with full-length texts in any sort of depth. And apparently we can't think of any reason that classics are classic and need to be taught. Because it's easier to work on relevant themes and skills by folding in current YA hits.

Look, there's a whole worthwhile (and generally unending) conversation to be had among language-teaching professionals about the canon and what should be in the canon and what makes a classic classic and why we teach anything that was written before our students were born and how we should teach it. But the Core's contribution to that conversation is to say, "Screw content. Just teach them the skills they need for the test."

When I write lesson plans and plug in the standards, it makes absolutely no difference what actual content I'm teaching-- the standards are completely divorced from content and I can recycle the same standards-aligned plan over and over again, just plugging in some piece, any piece, of reading.

And in turns of getting great "student achievement" results (aka high test scores) I could spend the whole year having students read nothing but newspaper extracts and single pages ripped from any current fiction. If I totally lost my mind and any sense of why I actually became an English teacher, I could crank out students with great BS Tests scores who knew absolutely nothing about the literature, history and culture of their own country (or any other).

The article closes with another quote from Gardner: "We don't read books in school so we can write papers or do projects about that book; rather, we read books in school so we can more deeply understand all of the texts – books, blogs or advertisements – that we will face beyond school.”

I think Gardner is half right-- we don't read books in school just to do projects or papers. But if we only read in school so that we can practice skills we'll need to read things later in life, what will we be reading those works later in life for? If there are no riches to be found in Great Expectations or Hamlet or The Crucible or Song of Solomon or To Kill a Mockingbird, why read them just to get some practice with reading skills? If they have nothing to say to any of us about understanding what it means to be fully human and more fully ourselves, if they have nothing to tell us about the human experience as it has unspooled throughout human history, if they have nothing to say about the power of language to communicate across the gaps that separate us, if they have nothing to say about culture, if they have nothing to say about the rich heritage of the English language, if they have nothing to say about understanding the universal and the specific in human life, about how to grow beyond our own immediate experience-- if they are, in fact, nothing more than fodder for test prep, then what the hell are we doing?

The article sets out to address the effect of the Core on the classics, but it only addresses the question of how much the standards push in non-fiction and many, multiple short texts. What the article does not address is how the Core assaults the very notion of why we bother to teach reading or writing or literature in the first place. Instead, like so many Core-ophiles, it assumes that such an assault is appropriate. Rich content fans are correct to believe that the empty head and empty heart at the center of the Core screams out to be filled with real study of real literature, but they are missing the fact that the Core itself thinks that vast emptiness is a good thing, a feature instead of a bug.

Friedrichs for Dummies

So you've been hearing about Friedrichs vs California Teachers Association, but not paying close attention. You know the unions are upset about it (but when aren't the unions upset about something), and you've heard that the Supreme Court is going to hear it, but you've put off learning more because it all seems so contentious and does anybody really want to seek out more conflict in the education world these days? Besides, you aren't in California.

But lately you've been thinking you should tune in and sort this out. Luckily for you, the Wall Street Journal gave one of the vocal-but-not-lead plaintiffs, Harlan Elrich, room to lay out his case, and we can use it as an entry point.

Elrich lays out his own teaching history, which is not unlike my own--over thirty years, local involvement, not always happy with union choices (though I suspect for different reasons).

Elrich is unhappy with the union's political bent, and though he's less direct about this, the actual direction of that bent. He doesn't want to give money to the union's political activities that work against his own leanings. By law, unions must allow members to opt-out of such contributions (here in PA, contributions for political activities are an opt-in fund separate from dues), but Elrich believes essentially that all union activities, right down to local negotiations, are political. In a sense, that's true-ish-- matters of policy that are set by elected officials cannot avoid a hint of politics, and in the world of education, that means everything.

But Elrich's definition of "political decisions he doesn't agree with" is hugely broad. He does not like that the union gets him too high a salary at the expense of either his economically struggling neighbors or conditions such as class size.

Elrich hits another recurring theme in Friedrich plaintiff complaints, which is the evils of tenure. He tells a story of a teacher who clearly should have been gone from the classroom, but because the union negotiated all these protections, he was not released. Plaintiff Friedrich tells a similar story about a physically abusive teacher who was protected by the union.

Unions are swell, Elrich concludes. But he doesn't want to forced to pay any fees to them. He is careful not to say "dues" because, in fact, the law does not require him to pay dues-- only the "fair share" of his local union's administrative and negotiating costs. And it's not just himself-- the plaintiffs don't want any teachers in the twenty-three states that allow fair share to be "forced" to pay fees.

You may be wondering how ten teachers end up bringing this case before the Supreme Court. The answer is a not-unusual bit of case-trolling, in this instance apparently by Supreme Alito. You can read a more thorough explanation here, but the basic process is this-- a justice lets it be known that he'd love to hear a case that would give him a chance to make new law or undo the old, and then a high-powered law firm goes and scares up some plaintiffs. In this case, the lawyering comes courtesy of the Center for Individual Rights, a right-of-right group that appears to see this case as a chance to toss public unions on the dustbin of history, and the skids have been greased to bring this right-to-work road show straight to the highest court in the land. The list of interested parties who have filed amicus briefs is instructive-- it includes the Cato Institute, the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation, Governor Susana Martinez, Governor Bruce Rauner, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, and seventeen states including Michigan, Wisconsin, Atlanta and Georgia (whose legal departments are presumably supported by taxpayers who may not agree with this political action).

In short, this is largely a shadow play, one more battle between the big unions and the folks who want them to go away.

So what about Elrich's claims? After all, doesn't it sound reasonable not to be forced to pay money to an organization that you don't support as a term of employment?

Well, despite his worries about strains on district finances, he's not suing the state of California for its chronic underfunding of schools. And his concern for the cash-strapped families of his district doesn't seem to be accompanied by tales of how he donates his undeserved "extra" salary for their aid. Still, that's not necessarily something you trumpet in public.

No, the real whiff of bovine fecal matter comes, as always, from the tenure-and-job-protection argument. Is it impossible to fire a teacher because of union rules? No. No, it is not. It may require administrators to do some work. Fine; that's why they're paid the big bucks. My saying remains-- behind every teacher who shouldn't have a job is an administrator who isn't doing his.

And both arguments sit on the fiction that unions somehow negotiate contracts on their own, as if the local district has no presence, no seat at the negotiating table, certainly no high-priced labor attorney there to do the work for the board (during our contract talks, I never got over the surreal spectacle of a third-grade teacher at the end of her full work day squaring off against a big-time lawyer in a thousand dollar suit who had done nothing all day but get ready to take her on).

More importantly, there is a fundamental disconnect between the two parts of Elrich's argument. He complains about the union's political activities-- and then he goes on to describe the union negotiating for wages and conditions for its members. On the first point, I fully appreciate his dismay-- few things annoy me as much as my union calling to tell me for whom to vote without a legitimate explanation of why, and I don't need my union to take stands on issues unrelated to education. I haven't contributed a political dollar to the union in years not only because I don't like having them pick candidates for me, but because they are so bad at it (Yeah, Ed Rendell and Barack Obama worked out super-great for teachers) and because they insist on trading educational interests for a useless seat at the table, and I'll just cut short my rant to say that yes, when it comes to not caring for political choices of the union, I feel ya, bro. I've been a local union president, and I get all too well that local and teacher interests do not always overlap fully with the state and national union interests.

But then the jump. If Elrich doesn't it like it when his local negotiates wages or working conditions, exactly what does he think the union should do? What union activities would not offend him? Picnics? Hors D'oeuvres on the lawn?

Elrich is objecting to having the union perform its most basic function. He objections about union activities are like objecting to cupcakes for being made of cake and shaped like a cup. "I don't want to kill unions," he's saying. "I just wish they would stop doing all the things they exist to do."

Of course, part of the genius of this shadow play is that Elrich, Friedrich and the rest aren't saying they want to kill unions. They are perfectly fine if some people want to form a union. But of course, one other basic function of a union is that it includes everybody with skin in the game. A union that only includes some members of the group is not a union-- it's just a clique with dues and a logo. And a powerless one at that.

That has to be the expectation. Neither Friedrich nor Elrich or any of the rest seem to be arguing, "Look, you guys go ahead and negotiate a contract without me, and if that means my wages get cut in half or I'm the first to be laid off, I'm okay with that because at least I won't have to pay you dues." No, the expectation is that the union will be left hamstrung and unable to wreak the unjust havoc caused by organized workers.

If the union can't convince everybody to join and pay, doesn't that just mean it deserves to die because it can't sell its product. It's an appealing argument, but it assumes a level playing field that doesn't exist. Once the union is weakened, keeping it ineffectual is as easy as letting each new hire know that his job depends on his willingness to stay out of the union. The freedom to join or not join a union equals the freedom of the bosses to cut unions off through coercion.

And that's not just bad for teachers. Proponents of teacher union-busting could score huge points by demonstrating that right-to-work, no-union-here states are leading the nation in educational awesomeness, but they can't demonstrate that any more than they can demonstrate how to teach a Yeti to ride a unicorn.

The teacher unions, particularly on the state and national level, have some real, serious problems. But here's what we know-- at no point in the history of this country have employees ever been given a concession, a benefit, or better treatment and wages out of the sheer generosity and good spirit of the employers.We know, for instance, the history of how districts behave when they hire and fire at will-- they hire and fire for reasons from race to politics to won't-give-the-board-members-kid-an-A. And now the business model for privatizing education and strip-mining public schools for private enrichment depends on busting the unions.

The legal argument is one against "compelled speech"-- that being forced even to pay fees for a union (which is, at least in Pennsylvania, forced to represent every teacher in the local school system) is a violation of free speech rights. But if I want to be a practicing Christian, I have to go to a church where I my speech might be co-opted in favor of issues with which I disagree. If I want to be an American, I am compelled to pay taxes that support all manner of crap I disagree with. If I want to be a parent, I'm compelled to pay for my kid's support-- heck, if I want to have sex, I may end up becoming a parent even though I didn't want to and being compelled to pay support.

I get that losing part of your voice by becoming part of a collective may seem anti-American, but insisting that your money can only be spent the way you want it to be and you should never have to do anything that you don't absolutely agree with is anti-grown up.

But that's my logical argument, and this will be decided in a court of law. If Friedrich and her powerful backers win, the result will be a huge step toward transforming every state into a "right to work" state. The battle is going to be fought by the lawyers, but the casualties are going to be in the schools.

The Merit Pay Lie

Every profession accepts merit pay. All people in the Real Working World accept having their income tied to their job performance. Why should teachers be any different?

That's the standard line. Only it isn't true. 

Here's a quick report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This particular piece only covers 2006-2009, but it's unlikely that the stats we're looking at have changed dramatically.

What percentage of the private workforce-- you know, that private sector where "everybody" accepts having their pay tied to their results-- how much of that private work-force is composed of workers whose earnings are tied to sales or output?

5%.

Additionally, of those identified as sales workers, only 20% were incentive-based. In other words, even in the sales world, the one sector where we might have legitimately assumed "everyone" works strictly on merit pay, only one in five workers has his earnings tied to his job performance.

We could get into the other lie here-- that merit pay actually gets better work out of people in general or teachers in particular-- but let's leave that for another day so that we can let these cold, hard statistics sink in.

Everybody in the private sector does not work for incentive or merit pay.

How SAT Saves Market Share

The College Board, manufacturers and sellers of the SAT "suite" of tests as well as AP materials, has been struggling to regain share of the lucrative college gateway test market.

Not that they're hurting. When the company brought in Gasper Caperton to help solve some cash flow issues, he announced that he didn't want to run just "a testing company." Caperton boosted fees, increased market by (among other things) getting states to punch PSAT tickets for students, and selling student information to colleges. Revenue reports for the non-profit College Board run from "$500 million to $1 billion" The College Board's Form 990 from 2013 shows total revenue of $840,672,990 with a whopping $98,894,865 left over after expenses.

The College Board is a non-profit, which means it doesn't have to share any of that $100 million profit with shareholders or owners. When Caperton left, he was making more than the head of Harvard, more than the head of the American Red Cross. Nineteen other executives were making over $300K. David Coleman, in his first full year of head honchoship after being hired mid-2012, received a full $734,192 in compensation.

Meanwhile, the SAT is battling for market share with ACT. Part of that battle has involved a technique familiar to manufacturers of soft drinks and beer-- create a larger line of products to suck up space in the store and build market loyalty among customers. To that end, the College Board has rolled out a full range of products, allowing students to start taking some version of the SAT as early as eight grade.

There has been a full court press of PR for the New! Improved! SAT, but the College Board has not banked simply on selling the SAT experience one hopeful and terrified high school junior at a time.

One of the selling points of the new test has been its alignment with the Common Core, but that's not a selling point just (or even) for individual test takers. It has allowed the College Board to pitch their test to entire states.

After all-- the federal government still says that states must give a Big Standardized Test at least once to high school students. And the test ought to be aligned to the state standards. And hey-- look at that! David Coleman, architect of the Common Core is now head of the College Board. The SAT should serve as a suitable BS Tests right out of the box!

And so last year, the College Board underbid and overlobbied the ACT to win the contract to be the exit exam for Michigan schools. The state of Connecticut has dumped the SBAC and replaced it with the SAT. Colorado is about to switch over to the SAT for its juniors. New Hampshire is also on the list, along with Delaware. (Idaho and Alaska require students to take one of several choices which include the SAT). About fifteen states require taking the ACT.

Is there some benefit in this mandatory testing? Do students get a special boost on their way out the door? Do states get a big PR edge (you know those kids from Statesylvania-- they're always better at everything because they have to take the SAT)? Is their research indicating that Big Standardized Tests, especially ones manufactured by experienced test manufacturers, are a good predictor of anything other than socio-economc background? Or should we pay attention to the research that shows that high schools grades are the best predictors of college success? Did anyone benefit from the PSAT rollout fiasco this year?

What is the actual benefit to, well-- anybody in making every student take the SAT or ACT?

There's only one benefit that's immediately clear-- the benefit to test manufacturer's bottom line. The SAT is working to claw back market share by selling their test product, in bulk, to folks in state capitols so that taxpayers can go ahead and foot the bill for students who neither want or need to take the test. It's marketing genius, even if it has no actual educational benefit and costs the taxpayers a bundle. And it's a double win for the test manufacturers-- the more students who take the test, the more data the test manufacturers have to sell off to colleges and other interested parties. Ka-ching!

The college of your choice may not care about the SAT. The experts say not to take the SAT, not this year. But in some locations, your state government says you must take the test. Because, reasons. Ka-ching.

Simple Sabotage (h/t CIA)

In the 1940's the Office of Strategic Services was the US precursor to the CIA, collecting information and taking covert action in support of US interests overseas.

Well, now you, too, can enjoy the secrets of subterfuge by perusing the 1944 OSS classic, Simple Sabotage Field Manual. I am not making this up. Last year the CIA de-classified the manual, and you can now give it a read. It's actually a brief thirty-four pamphlet-sized pages, and while I've read it, you may well want to take a look. Does it have applications in the education world? Oh, my. Yes.

First, what audience was such a manual designed for?

Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially-trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform. This paper is primarily concerned with the latter type.

No special equipment is involved; no high risk is faced. Just simple things you can do to screw up an enterprise with ordinary tools you'll find lying around the house.

The manual contains some words about motivating the civilian saboteur-- making him feel he's part of a larger cause, fighting destructive foes. But then we get to the fun-- the specific techniques.

The most simple principle is reversing thinking-- you can screw up an enterprise just by being lazy and careless. Let your tools get dull. Make dumb mistakes at work.  "Frequently you can 'get away' with such acts under the cover of pretending stupidity, ignorance, over-caution, fear of being suspected of sabotage, or weakness and dullness due to undernourishment."

But the manual has more specifics as well. There are many pages about how to mess up buildings, engines, water supplies, radio, even movies. But it's when we get to more office and managerial concerns that some of this sabotage will start to sound familiar.

The really choice stuff comes under the heading of How To Screw Up Organizations and Conferences. To make a mess out of these, you can do some of the following:

* Insist on always working through channels; oppose efficiency
* Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
* When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
* Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

Does this seem like some of the committee meetings at your school, or on the legislative level? Shall I remind you that these are the CIA's instructions on how to make committees NOT work.

If you are a manager or supervisor, you can screw up your area with the following (to list a few)

* always demand written instructions, then misunderstand them
* insist on high quality materials that are hard to get
* insist on perfect work on relatively unimportant products
* assign the worst people to the most important jobs
* destroy morale by being pleasant to lousy workers and unpleasant to good ones
* call meetings when work needs to be done
* multiply paperwork

If you are an employee, you can screw things up with these techniques

* work slowly; contrive many interruptions
* never pass on your skill or experience to new workers
* mix good parts with scrap

Of course, if you wanted to screw up a system, you could force workers to do these things.

Finally, techniques to just generally ruin morale and create confusion

* Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations
* Act stupid

Some of the manual deals very specifically with Nazi occupiers, but there's plenty in the manual that applies in more general ways, ways that may seem very familiar to some folks. The next time you are watching the actions of local, state or federal folks in education and thinking, "Man, they couldn't screw things up worse if they were doing it on purpose"-- well, now you have some support for the truth of that statement.