Charter Health Checkup

It's that time of year again, I guess, for the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools to issue its annual report of the Health of the Charter Public [sic] School Movement. they're scoring and ranking states, because remember-- when you go to the doctor, it doesn't matter how healthy you are, only whether you are more or less healthy than the other patients in the office.

There is some interesting-ish information to be gleaned from the report, but the report is 180 pages long, so if you want the full effect, you are going to have to read it all yourself. This time I'm not doing it for you.

What Are We Doing, and How Are We Doing It?

To make the report's List O'Charter Swellness, states had to meet a few criteria: At least 2% of public school students had to be charter-enrolled in 2014-2015, the state had to have participated in the CREDO study, and it had to have a system for "categorizing" schools.

Eighteen schools made that cut and were then judged by four criteria. Two "quality measures" come from the CREDO 2013 report, which in turn uses data from 2011. So be warned-- a whole lot of the basis for this report's findings is not actually current stuff. In fact, unless I'm missing something, it will be exactly the same data used in last year's Charter Health Report. So to get past that, NAPCS has added two new data criteria-- has the number of top-rated charters increased, and has the number of bottom-rated charters decreased?

They also wanted to come up with a way to include innovation, because innovation is a primo quality of charters, and yet oddly enough, they have found it's to measure innovation in a standardized way. This is not the last time I'll feel as if the NAPSC had a chance to Learn An Important Lesson but just breezed on by. Yes, measuring innovative creative divergent thinking in a standardized way is basically impossible-- but we will still base most of our findings on student test scores from Big Standardized Tests. Sigh.

And, oh, look-- they're going to do it again--

Last, we acknowledge that our definition of a healthy movement is limited by what data we can collect across states. Several other elements of a healthy movement are not included here because we cannot measure them. But that doesn’t mean they are not important. For example, quality beyond test scores can be determined several ways, some of which are more qualitative in nature. A healthy movement needs to have charter schools that are not only succeeding on state tests but also knocking it out of the park on these other determinants of quality.

And so they go on to acknowledge that the whole basis of their rating system and all of NCLB/RTTT reforminess is a foundation built of rotting timbers and sifting sand, and they announce we should stop pretending that these junk ratings mean anything, and then they go on to fill the rest of the report with adult coloring book pages! Ha!! Just kidding. They say, "Well, yes, this system ignores most of the important parts of being a school, but we'll go ahead and use it anyway." That sound you just heard was my palm hitting my forehead.

Here's the weighting system they will use to rate things:

Items 1-8 are for Growth, 10-13 are for Quality, and poor little 9 with its measly two weight must represent for Innovation. So innovation, apparently not all that important after all. And we'll later learn that "innovations" include arts schools and Montessori/Waldorf schools and vocational schools and STEM schools and, for the love of God, No Excuses schools. So "innovation" can include ideas that have been around for decades, or which have quickly established themselves as bad ideas. And despite their concerns, they did manage to fit all the innovations into some standardized categories. Yay, innovation.

I'm also going to point out, as always, that the measuring of learning in days is bogus and a little bit silly. "Mrs. Bogwaller, we're happy to tell you that Chris is a full five days ahead, though we suspect all of those days are Fridays, so it may not be that great news." Is that learning-per-average day? Do we think some days are more learny than others, or is this a constant? Does a child learn the same amount on a birthday as on, say, a Sunday? How did anybody ever break learning down into days? Did somebody study a few thousand children and test them at the end of every single day to get an average learn-per-day figure? And exactly how did that researcher measure quantities of learning? Do you measure out learning by the gram, or by the liter, or by the meter, or do we measure out their lives in coffee spoons (and could we then--please-- name the learn-per-day units "prufrocks"?) Can we talk about single days of learning, or must they travel in a pack? And if we can measure that a student is a single day of learning ahead, how much further can we break that down? Hours? Minutes? Seconds?

Sorry. But the whole days of learning thing is just so silly, and proof once again that when education commentators want to be able to measure something, and can't, they will come up with all manner of solemn baloney to fake it.

So How Did the States Do?

The weights add up to thirty-three with four possible points for each, for a grand total of 132 possible points. Each state gets a score and a rank, and congratulations, Washington DC-- you are first with 106 points, leaving Indiana a distant second with a mere 88. From there we plummet down to last-place Oregon, with a skimpy 45 points. There are some interesting details here. Massachusetts, which is still enduring a wrestling match between charter-loving leaders and the entire actual public school system-- Mass comes in ahead of charter-lovin' Louisianna and Reformster Jeb! Paradise Florida. Ohio, which is either a dreamy charter wild west or a nightmarish charter trainwreck depending on who's assessing-- Ohio is way down at #13.

The report also spends some time holding the Health Checkup rankings against the State Charter Public [sic] School Law Ranking, but there's nothing earth-shattering there and watching a group looking for a correlation between their made-up ranking system and their other made-up ranking system turns out to be as much fun as watching the ink on a charter contract dry. So let's move on.

Pennsylvania-- An Example of a Health Report

The report uses the vast bulk of its pages to take a state-by-state look at charter health, and that includes the other states beside the 18 that didn't make the cut (which is not all fifty-- if you don't even have a charter law in place yet, you're not in this report. Sorry, Kentucky. Also, if your charter law was thrown out by your Supreme Court. Sorry, Washington.)

I'm going to walk through the report on Pennsylvania, because that's where I am. This will give you an idea of some of the pitfalls in the report. You can decide on your own whether you want to sneak a peek underneath your state's charter hospital gown.

I'll tell you up front that Pennsylvania's data will reflect that we are a haven for crappy cyber-charters. I'm betting that is why, for instance, the percentage of charters on the state's naughty list went from 60% to 66%. Why the state doesn't just shut down these cyber-cesspools of educational malpractice is a mystery for another day.

There are other bullet points about the Keystone state, but the report writers also have some nicely designed charts for your perusal, covering the same data in a more graphically delightful manner and following the layout of the chart above. They really have done a good job of formatting things so that it's easy to follow the same ideas all the way through.

PA has 7% of our students in charters, and those are 6% of our schools.

The comparison breakdown of race and ethnicity is, well, kind of useless. They compare the charters against the state, but in any state where the population varies as much as ours, that's meaningless. Pennsylvania is very rural except for the parts that are very urban, and very non-white except for the parts that are very white. In other words, while the state student population may be 73% white, 13% black, and 9% hispanic as a whole, I'd be surprised if you could find any community in the state that matches that demographic breakdown. So comparing charter demographics to that means nothing- the only comparison that really matters is whether or not charters are educating the same population as the local school, and one of the secrets to charter success continues to be making sure that they do NOT try to educate the same population as local schools.

Fun factoid- PA charters are far more centered in cities and suburbs than public schools. 25% of our schools are rural (a nearby district educates about 400 students in one K-12 building serving half of the entire county-- that rural) and no charters other than the cybers have figured out how to make bank serving that population. And because local districts are still the main authorizers, volunteers willing to slit their own financial throats are few and far between.

The rate of charters opening has been slowing down. The rate of closing is a little more stable, but overall rising. About 50% of PA charters have an "innovative" special focus.

Remember the report about how cyber-charters move students backwards? That figures in this report and undoubtedly really hurt charter numbers for "number of days of learning" for charters, which are hugely negative. And while the numbers for charters in the top and bottom categories of PA's school rating system are also dismal, I will give them a pass because our school evaluation system is a hot, ugly mess.

Oh, and we finish with some unscored data, including the data that 27% of our charter students are cyber-students, which is lower than I would have guessed. Now I should probably go back and remove all the places where I blamed crappy charter results on the cybers-- apparently plenty of those Philly charters are able to stink up the place all on their own.

Bottom Line

I give NAPSC credit for reporting data without trying to hide it, spin it, or obscure it behind too many piles of smoke and mirrors, just as I give some folks in the charter movement credit for having figured out that if they don't clean up their own bad actors, the whole industry is going to look worse and worse (I think "worse and worse" is inevitable for the current incarnation of the charter industry, but that's another conversation). This report has some interesting-ish data collected in one handy spot, and it's worth a few minutes to check out the picture of your state and see just how diseased you are.

WA: Yet Another Charter Solution

Washington State has been scrambling to solve its charter school problem, leading to some creative solutions indeed.

The Washington courts found the charter school law (pushed through the state with a giant ramrod made of tightly wrapped charter fan money) unconstitutional, because charter schools spend pubic tax dollars with absolutely no oversight from taxpayer-elected officials. A public school is not a public school if the only thing public about it is the public dollars given to private organizations to run it (ironically, this is a variation on the argument used by Eva Moskowitz to successfully argue that the state could not audit her charters).

Despite the ruling that they were essentially operating illegally, the nine charter schools of Washington state went ahead and opened anyway.

That led to a solution that danced around both the spirit and the letter of the court decision. In a maybe-not-technically-illegal-but-certainly-shady mechanism (described in well-documented and painstaking detail by Dora Taylor at Seattle Education), the Gates Foundation enlisted the Mary Walker School District and the office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to launder both private and public money and keep it flowing to the charter schools. It helped that Mary Walker's superintendent is Kevin Jacka, former Washington State Charter Commission member.

Meanwhile, charter fans like Robin Lake kept beating the drum for a rules change so that these outstanding schools (because the charters had somehow managed to prove their awesomeness in just five months) could stay open.

Please note-- the court ruling had made the route for charter rescue clear. The court ruled the charter law unconstitutional because charters fail the definition of public, or common, schools by having no elected public official oversight. Charters in Washington could be saved instantly just by instituting oversight by a publicly elected representatives of the taxpayers whose money is being spent.

But that, apparently, is a bridge too far for charter fans. Slap charters with whatever regulations you like, but don't ever suggest that they should be accountable to the taxpayers for how they spend taxpayer money.

And so the legislature is floating yet another solution.

The bill "aiming to fix" charter funding is actually a bill aiming to give charters a completely different funding source. According to the SeattlePI:

The proposal would re-establish a statewide charter authorizing commission and use lottery money to pay for the schools. But it would not give them access to local levy dollars.

The bill (Senate Bill 6194) that passed the House on Wednesday is close to the original Senate bill which also passed. Now they just have to iron out the bumps.

Of course, critics point out that one bump is that the bill doesn't actually address the findings of the court, since it still leaves the charter schools in the control of unelected boards. It does leave the state funding and operating two entirely separate schools systems which  is a really inefficient and wasteful creative choice.

One has to admire the massive ballsiness of Washington state charter pushers. They shoved through a law that was ruled unconstitutional, and then thumbed their noses at the court by opening their charters anyway, claiming that keeping the illegal charters open was everyone else's problem, while at the same time running a money-laundering scheme to fund the schools.

Now they will find more state money to fund the schools, which would be only medium ballsy except don't forget this-- the Washington Supreme Court last summer hit the state government with a fine because they refused to fully fund the public school system they already have. So Washington state is kind of like a guy who won't make his mortgage payments, but sells off the furniture so he can buy a second house.

But for the profiteers of Washington, the most important thing is to get that charter industry up and running. Their standing argument is that they need the charters (currently serving about 1,200 students) to meet the individual needs of the students, because obviously a large school with a large staff and a wide variety of different programs is just a "one-size-fits-all" school, while a small school with a small staff if perfectly poised to meet a wide variety of needs. But charter pushers in Washington will not rest until they can meet the most important needs of all-- the needs of charter operators to be able to set up shop and collect public money without having to answer to anyone. 

Camus's Teacher (Evaluate That)

I cam across this story on Maria Popova's unendingly swell website, Brain Pickings.

French philosopher and writer Albert Camus did not consider himself an existentialist (even though that's what my high school English teacher taught me he was); he was, however, a fairly relentless force for meaning, beauty and absurdity, arguing for "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction." Life may be hopeless, but that doesn't mean it has to suck.

Camus was rendered fatherless before he was even one year old, thanks to the Great European War, and that left him at the mercy of a mother and grandmother who were decidedly Not Awesome. But there was a teacher. As Popova puts it

In a testament to what happens when education lives up to its highest potential to ennoble the human spirit, a teacher named Louis Germaine saw in young Albert something special 

In 1957, Camus became the second-youngest to receive the Nobel Prize. Within days, he sent off this letter:

19 November 1957
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honor, one I neither sought nor solicited. But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened. I don’t make too much of this sort of honor. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
Albert Camus

Is there any teacher who wouldn't be moved by such a letter from an accomplished former student who has just received one of human-kind's highest honors? Is there any teacher who thinks that such a letter would be inspired by diligently preparing students to get a good score on a pointless standardized test?

Never doubt that teachers make a positive difference, and a difference far beyond simply preparing students to successfully complete some pointless bureaucratic tasks.

FL: Participation Points

When it comes to terrible education decisions, few legislatures can hold a candle to the whiz-bang elected wizards of Florida. Along with their the state's chief education minion Pam Stewart, they have raised fetishizing the Big Standardized to awesome heights.

Stewart and the legislature earned their Gold Medal in Being Awful for their treatment of Ethan Rediske. The state demanded that Ethan's parents provide plenty of proof that he needed to be excused form the Floirida BS Test because he was dying. Stewart accused Ethan's mother of trying to use Ethan's situation to make political hay,.because when a grieving mother has lost a long-suffering child to long-term debilitating illness, her first thought as she grieves is to get some political leverage out of the situation. Okay, maybe Stewart can be excused for thinking that of course someone would try to raise political capitol from the tragic death of a young child-- because that's exactly what legislators in Tallahassee proceeded to do.

Many testocrats have tried to sell the story that we are actually doing students a huge favor by wasting their time on BS Testing, but nobody has really committed to this unsupported claim like Florida's leaders. And here they are, at it again.

The law now says that all students must participate. And that means that the Rule of Stupid Laws now kicks in: when you create a stupid law, you end up looking far stupider trying to enforce it than anybody does breaking it.

There was a classic example years ago in Massachusetts at Danvers High School when the principal (I am not making this up) tried to ban the word "meep." Besides opening the school to universal ridicule, the entire business included robocalling the entire student body and (still not making this up) informing a lawyer that his "meep" infused letter to the district had been forwarded to the police. If you've spent any time at all around small humans, you know how this played out. Students tested every possible permutation of the rule. Would you get in trouble for saying "Mee" or "Peem" or "Peep" or, most awesomely, "Ni." I have often wondered how that story finally played out, but I can guarantee you it didn't end with the principal winning cheerful compliance and students solemnly determining they had seen the error of their ways.

In Florida, the word is not "meep," but "participate." And that means we now get to watch the state of Florida attempt to beat back all manner of tests of that law. 

If my child signs his name to the test and then pushes the test away an answers zero questions, has he participated? Does he have to answer one question to qualify as "participating"? Ten questions? Does she have to try, or is it participating if she plays ACDC on the test?

Hilariously, the state has so far declined to answer any such questions:

"I feel like answering the type of question provides more information that could be construed as encouraging students or parents not to take the test," DOE spokeswoman Meghan Collins said. "That's just something we don't want to do."

In other words, we refuse to tell you what the minimum requirement is to avoid violating our stupid rule.

The Tampa Bay Times pressed Stewart's office for an official, legal definition of participating, but they simply referred the reporter to the actual letter of the law, which is not very helpful:

"Participation in the assessment program is mandatory for all school districts and all students attending public schools, including adult students seeking a standard high school diploma under s. 1003.4282 and students in Department of Juvenile Justice education programs, except as otherwise provided by law. If a student does not participate in the assessment program, the school district must notify the student's parent and provide the parent with information regarding the implications of such nonparticipation."

So the penalty for not participating is a note home to your parents. And nobody seems to knpow what the big bad punishment might be beyond that. But still no whiff of a definition of what "participate" actually means.

Whatever it means, lots of Florida parents don't do it. Last year over 100 Florida schools didn't get their official fake grade from the state because they fell below the 95% participation rate. Probably lots of principals and teachers and students and families crying themselves to sleep over that one.

You can't brow beat people into compliance by using a stupid rule, which is what Florida has tried to do.  They now have to deal with a rule so unclear that nobody can tell when you've actually broken it or what happens to you if you do break it. I'm willing to bet that the rest of the nation's testocrats will not be looking to Florida for pointers on how to beat back opt outers.

Teacher Eval: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Thomas Toch turned up in the Atlantic this morning to argue that teacher evaluation, now given a bit of freedom in the new ESSA, should stay the course.

Toch is senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a name apparently chosen for its high degree of irony. Their emphasis is making teachers into uniform cogs in a machine that works at scale. One of their six guiding principles is "Variation in performance is the core problem to address." Their staff includes a woman with one of the absolutely best titles ever-- Director of Productive Persistence-- but their board of trustees includes many of the usual reformy suspects, including Harvard Graduate School of Education, Teach for America, and Randi Weingarten.

Toch notes that the Obama administration worked real hard to push teacher evaluation systems, even though they were opposed by the "two powerful forces" of teacher unions and Tea Party. But he is concerned that ESSA "abandoned" the work of identifying "who in the profession was doing a good job, and who wasn't."

This is a bit of a fuzzy point. There's actually a difference between trying to identify effective teachers and trying to foster teaching effectively, but Toch is going to cut several corners before we're done.

The teacher unions have dismissed the Obama strategy as ineffective, as more hurtful than helpful to the teaching profession. But over three dozen states have embraced more meaningful teacher-measurement systems under the Obama incentives, combining features like clearer performance standards, multiple classroom observations, student-achievement results and, increasingly, student surveys. 

First of all, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. Toch has put two sentences side by side that have nothing to do with each other. Have teachers unions dismissed Obama's "strategy" as ineffective and more hurtful than helpful? Well, yes-- and so have a boatload of other people. So it might make sense to ask if the system is, in fact, any good. But instead Toch says, "But hey-- lots of people implemented systems of some kind."

What Toch persistently and deliberately skates around throughout the article is that the Obama plan for teacher evaluation rested almost entirely on linking teacher evaluation to student test scores through what's usually called a VAM system, and it has been debunked and rejected by everyone from the American Statistical Association to the National Association of Secondary School Principals. There is an entire blog (Vamboozled), run by a numbers scholar, devoted to debunking VAM.

Toch very carefully avoids mentioning that Obama's teacher evaluation plan was to tie teacher evaluation to the same high stakes standardized tests that have become so controversial in a system that is widely regarded to simply not work. The test score evaluation ties come up just twice-- and Toch dismisses them as if they are something far in the past and not part of current reality, and blames them on Duncan. And to prove that he's uninterested in facts and data and reputable science, he cites the National Council on Teacher Quality, an organization that has rated colleges on programs that don't exist and once critiqued college education programs based on the handouts from commencement. They are quite possibly the least serious research group in all of education, and if Toch wants to make a serious point, he should not mention them.

He refers to some other great new ideas, like teaming up master teachers with newbies which is neither a bad idea nor a new one. He touts new systems for providing teachers with personalized "playlists" of canned lessons, as if that's a good idea (it's not). He notes that lots of professional development sucks, which is news to exactly nobody. He notes that some side-effects have been stupid (gym teacher evaluated on ELA test scores), but he signals that he really doesn't get it with an oft-repeated refrain:

But it’s clear from the many new evaluation initiatives launched in recent years that well-designed evaluation systems with a mix of measures, multiple evaluators, and a strong focus on teacher improvement can strengthen instruction, make teaching more attractive work, and raise student achievement.

This is the signal fallacy, the giant gaping maw of wrong nestled in the heart of Bush-Obama teacher eval policies-- the notion that a teacher's primary job is to get students to score well on a Big Standardized Test."Student achievement" is reformspeak for "test scores," and that's simply not the most important-- probably not even An important-- part of a teacher's job. No parent in America says, "My kid has a great teacher this year," and means "My kid's teacher helped her get some really good test scores."

The Obama-era teacher evaluation systems sucked. They collected lousy information about things that aren't even the most important part of a teacher's work. They consistently proved to be unreliable and invalid. They provided no useful information to anybody. One of the few bright spots of ESSA is the end of the federally-mandated inaccurate unreliable nonsense evaluation system. Yes, many of the old-style evaluation systems were not very helpful, but the new systems actually managed to be worse by creating the illusion that real evaluating was going on, and by forcing schools to focus on unimportant baloney instead of real teaching. Toch can go wading on into the Big Muddy, but I recommend that the rest of us turn around and get back on solid ground.

Misunderstanding the Core

In today's New York Times, Kevin Carey says that Donald Trump does not understand the Common Core. He's not wrong, but as I read his piece, I suspect that Carey doesn't understand the Core, either.

Kevin Carey is the education policy program director for the New America Foundation. NAF bills itself as a non-partisan thinky tank based in DC. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is chair of the NAF board. Their over-a-million-dollar funders include the Gates Foundation and the US State Department. He has beaten the drum in the past for the terrible awfulness of US education at all levels.

His main point is solid-- when Drumpf and the rest proclaim they will rip the Core straight out of the federal gummint, they are slinging high-grade baloney. The Core cannot be removed from federal laws and regulations for the same reason that I can't stop Shakira from sending me torrid love notes every day. The Core have no place in regulation; this, of course, is one of the advantages of pushing a policy initiative through a well-financed network of billionaire-supported organizations that push policy, create supportive PR, and credential their own operatives to move into governance and leadership roles. If Drumpf or Cruz really wanted to do something, they could swear that they would visit Bill Gates and make him withdraw every cent of Gates money from organizations that support the Core.

Carey presents a brief history of educational crisis, starting with an unironic mention of A Nation At Risk, the report that announced that the country was in imminent danger of collapse because of our terribly mediocre education system and if we didn't Do Something Right Away, there would be hell to pay. Except that the report came out thirty-three years ago, and we have still received no invoices from Hades. Carey asserts that this is because (and this is a fine line some reforminators have to walk) there has been lots of progress, but not enough progress.

Carey also argues that while local districts can set local standards and approaches, they "don't actually have the ability" because "the world around us ultimately determines what students need to learn." This would be a compelling argument if the Common Core had not been presented without a single concrete reference to what the world around us demands. But no-- some wise men (whose wisdom was because of, not in spite of, their lack of educational credentials) came up with their own idea of what students need to learn.

If Carey doesn't get that, it may be because his understanding of the Common Core isn't any better than Donald Drumpf's.

The Common Core is simply a way of organizing and articulating standards that already exist, for the benefit of students, parents and teachers, so that schooling makes sense when children move between different grades, schools, districts and states. (emphasis mine)

Nope. The Common Core were built on a foundation of unicorn's breath and rainbow seeds. Search all of the Common Core promotional and PR materials, cruise the many many many MANY David Coleman interviews, and you will not find a single reference to pre-existing standards.

Some education amateurs with rich and powerful friends wrote down their ideas of what standards all students must reach to be college and career ready, despite the fact that nobody has any proven list of "college and career ready" requirements.So what we end up with is a top-down imposed one-size-fits-all(-and-therefore-fits-nobody) standards.


Carey clearly does not want students to be "at the mercy" of local schools and local decision-maker, but what he and other Core fans still have not explained is why students should instead be at the mercy of un-elected corporately-paid federally-enabled amateur education "officials" who decide on their own that they are the ones to redefine what it means to be an educated person. And at the end of the day, the education that is delivered by a local district is still determined by the local district, anyway.

What both Trump and Carey don't understand is that the Common Core is now an amorphous mess, no longer having any single universal meaning. It means different things in different states, on different tests, in different classrooms, in different districts. In some places some version of it is enforced with iron strictures, while in other schools, a teacher can strap a laser to a tap-dancing monkey for a class project and call it Common Core aligned.

There are so many different understandings of the Core out there that we can truly say that nobody understands the Core-- not Drumpf, not Carey, not anybody. That's one more reason that it should simply go away.

Competency Based Ed for Teachers

Competency Based Ed (or Proficiency Based Learning or Outcome Based Education) is increasingly and alarmingly all the rage, but so far we've been talking about it mainly as a content delivery system for K-12 students. Well, says Patrick Riccards at Real Clear Education, why not use it as an approach to training teachers as well?

Riccards is the chief communications and strategy officer for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and he lays a foundation here of reformy building blocks. Here's the Bellwether Partners report on how we don't know how to unpack "the black box of good teaching." Here's a charmingly trusting assertion that Charlotte Danielson " has clearly identified the knowledge and skills that beginning teachers need to both succeed in those formative years and remain in the classroom for many years to come." Has she? Has she really? Why, bless her heart, and yours too, if you believe in her so hard.

But Riccards is here to argue against inputs, against the traditional teacher prep program that measures hours and lists the courses one must take.

There is nothing magical about 36 credit hours of graduate education that ensures one will be an effective teacher. Instead, it is about understanding content and pedagogy, as well as being able to put that understanding to use in a classroom of your own.

Well, no. There's nothing "magical" about 36 credit hours, just like there's nothing "magical" about studying human skeletal structure on your way to mastering physiology for your physical therapy degree. But Riccards want us to see as necessary and inevitable a shift from lecture halls to actual practice in a classroom.

Let me step aside for a moment to note that I am not the person you want to defend traditional teacher prep programs. I was trained in a non-traditional program with far fewer hours of education courses before student teaching and far more support and coursework while I was getting my classroom practice on. I happily await the day that some college education department calls me up and invites me to re-configure their system, because I have more than a few ideas.

I should also note that debating study versus practice in teacher prep strikes me as just as useful as endlessly arguing about whether there should be more hugging or kissing with your romantic partner. If you are arguing violently for mostly one at the exclusion of the other, you've lost sight of the point.

But Riccards has his eye on his own point, and his point is Use CBE To Train Teachers! He does a good job of anticipating some objections:

Yes, some are resistant to the idea of competency-based education. It is too often misconstrued as a checklist approach: anyone who is wearing a blue shirt on Tuesday meets competency 183. Such application is CBE at its very worst, and doesn’t reflect what it can and should look like in teacher education.

I'm still dubious that his Tuesday checklist is not so much CBE at its very worst as it is CBE at its very usual. But Riccards says there are several things that CBE done right will do for 21st century teacher awesomeness--

- Establishes a set of outcomes one  must attain in order to graduate, rooted in what excellent beginning teachers must know and be able to do;

- Constructs meaningful assessment tools designed to determine candidate competencies at the outset, to gauge candidate progress, and to shape each candidate’s course of study; and

- Provides a problem-based, individualized, adaptive curriculum tied to these competencies.

No, I don't think so. The "set of outcomes" that every beginning teacher must perform is a very tall order, but the "meaningful assessment tools" requirement is unicorn farming. It simply isn't going to happen, because every single candidate (at least as long as we are talking about human candidates) is a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses, which themselves play out differently depending on the young humans who are in the classroom. Those students, live and in the classroom, are the "problem-based, individualized, adaptive curriculum."

There are too many variables, too many possibilities to ever be covered by a canned program. Either the "set of outcomes" will have to be so vague as to be useless ("Teacher will keep classroom orderly and focused") or so specific as to require the equivalent of a six zillion page manual ("If a male student tends to make sarcastic fart jokes, the teacher will use one of the following responses depending on their own skill set: A) If teacher is a petite, quiet female, she will approach the student with direct eye contact and a stern tone of voice and say.... on through ZZ) If teacher is a physically imposing woman with a loud voice and an infectuous sense of humor, she will keep her distance while making the following joke..." and on and on and on). In other words, this system demands that checklist-- either a checklist too short to provide useful feedback and direction, or a checklist so long it takes long minutes to load it from a zillion terrabyte cloud where it lives.

I'm a little nervous that Riccards is dreaming of an EdTPA type of program, with videos and a set of standard behaviors that can be evaluated at a distance. That idea is a snare and a delusion. It does not work. It will never work.

This also feels like one of those attempts to remove subjective personal judgment from the process. That is also a snare and a delusion.

Teachers have to be educated by other teachers. That is why student teaching works-- daily constant supervision and feedback by a master teacher who knows what she's doing. That experience is best when it rests on a foundation of subject matter, child development, and pedagogical knowledge. It also works best when the student teacher is helped to find her own teacher voice; co-operating teachers who try to mold mini-me's are not helpful.

The computer era has led to the resurrection of CBE because computing capacities promise the capability of an enormously complicated Choose Your Own Adventure individualized approach to learning-- but that capacity is still not enough for any sort of learning that goes beyond fairly simple, tightly focused tasks. Sure-- creating a CBE teacher prep program would be super easy-- all you have to do is write out a response for every possible combination of teacher, students and content in the world. And then link it all together in a tagged and sequenced program. And then come up with a clear, objective way to measure every conceivable competency, from "Teacher makes six year old who's sad about his sick dog comfortable with solving a two-digit addition problem when he didn't actually raise his hand" to "Teacher is able to engage two burly sixteen-year-old males who are close to having a fist fight over the one guy's sister to discuss tonal implications of Shakespeare's use of prose interludes in Romeo and Juliet."

And if those examples seem ridiculously specific, just remember that at the opposite of the scale is a CBE program where there's only one object-- "Teacher will teach real good." And if you now want to say, "Well, of course, the CBE outcomes will be somewhere between those extremes," then we have to have a conversation about where exactly we intend to land and who is qualified to make that call.

I know-- I really do know-- that it's appealing to dream of reducing teaching to a set list of competencies. But I don't believe you can do it. Particularly if your dream is a list of objectively measurable competencies.

Teaching effectively (which is a much better way to conceive of this than effective teachers) is work for trained, experienced professionals. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, concert pianists-- we need their complex professional judgment to navigate complex human situations. Using a pre-fab program to substitute simplistic non-professional judgment for complex human situations doesn't help anybody. Yes, systems that depend on human professional judgment are prone to Bad Things when that professional judgment fails, but using a program to substitute someone else's non-professional judgment does not help. We do need the very best professional educators we can foster and grow, but CBE will not get us there.