Defining Competency Based Education

Hiding amongst the many pages of the Competency Works website is a wiki where some folks are nibbling away at a definition of competency based education. This website has been a clearing house for all things CBE for a while, so I'm going to go ahead and consider them both fans of and conversant in the CBE biz, which makes their five-point picture of the increasingly controversial educational-- what do we call it? Policy? Approach? Gee-gaw? Doo-dad?

At any rate, let's see what the CBE folks think they're onto. And not onto. Because one of the problems I'm seeing with this whatsahoozy is that it's actually several gizmos soldered together (with some of the soldering work on a par with what I did in my seventh grade shop class).

So these folks start out with their definition, which is

...a systems model in which (1) teaching and learning are designed to ensure students are becoming proficient by advancing on demonstrated mastery and (2) schools are organized to provide timely and differentiated support to ensure equity. 

Yeah, I'm not sure "systems model" is really any clearer that "dinglefutzer," but the rest of the definition is useful, particularly in what it doesn't include. And the writers get even clearer about that non-inclusion in their exclusionary paragraph:

The term competency-based and mastery-based have also recently been used by vendors to describe adaptive software. We take the position that competency-based education empowers teachers to draw upon their professional knowledge in teaching and reaching every student. Digital tools to personalize instruction should be used appropriately based on the overall pedagogical philosophy of the school and the needs of the students. A classroom cannot be deemed competency-based or personalized simply because students are learning with digital content, are using adaptive software, or have flexible pacing. (Emphasis mine)

In other words, we've got some people out there selling something they're calling "competency based education" that isn't actually competency based education, according to some experts. This is perhaps not a shock, as it has happened with every single educational idea ever promoted in the history of ever.

But the wiki goes on to list five "design principles" that may further clarify the issues for us. Let's check them out.

Design Principle 1: Students Advance upon Demonstrated Mastery

Students work at a level that is an appropriate amount of challenge. When they master a skill or area of knowledge, they move on. Their movement through the curriculum is based on when they master the material, not on spending a certain amount of time in the class. That means that students will move through school at different speeds. It also means that teachers have to "gather evidence" of proficiency.

As I've said before, this is one of the Huge Problems of CBE. Defining "mastery" is way harder than it first seems, particularly if we define it as an absolute level separate from the student in question. If we have one set level of mastery, we either end up with students finishing high school in a month or students who never get out of ninth grade. And just how proficient must one be to be a master, anyway? And can all skills be demonstrated in one clear mastery activity?

Saying, "Hey, we left her sitting in a crochet class for nine months, so she should be able to build a sweater now," is problematic, but a strictly mastery-based approach is too far on the other end of the pendulum.

Design Principle 2: Explicit and Measurable Learning Objectives Empower Students

I disagree. One of the biggest challenges I face, particularly with my high function students, is that they would like to be told exactly what hoop to jump through in exactly what way so that they can quickly and easily go through the motions without having to actually engage.

Likewise, the mark of an educated person is that they have their own internal compass, their own ability to mark and measure success, linked to an intrinsic reward system. "Explicit, measurable" objectives almost always boil down to extrinsic rewards based on externally designed and deployed goals. Sometimes real learning means figuring out how to find your way through the fog, not simply learning to follow directions and meet someone else's expectations. Is this same issue a problem in traditional non-CBE classrooms? Absolutely. But it's a problem that CBE isn't very good at helping to solve.

Now, it's not impossible. You could involve the student in setting the explicit, measurable goals. But this design principle does not lean that way. It leans instead toward asking not "what do we want to know" but instead "what can we most easily measure." The principle only argues for "sharing" the goals and measures with the students-- not letting them in on the design. It also argues for transparency, which I agree with.

Design Principle 3: Assessment Is Meaningful and a Positive Learning Experience for Students

Hey, look! We agree on something. Authentic assessment is meaningful, an activity that culminates everything that has come before, an activity that lets the student experience that pleasurable "snap" of feeling all that has come before fall into place.

That said, this design puts a lot of emphasis on "formative assessment" which, unless we're using the very loosest of definitions for "assessment," is a path to drudgery and, once again, teaching students that the purpose of learning is to complete a bunch of tasks designed by someone else in order to satisfy someone else. So, boo on that part.

Design Principle 4: Students Receive Rapid, Differentiated Support

We talk about this like it's novel and mysterious. It isn't. Good teachers have been doing it forever. Or rather, they've been trying to do it for forever. Because it's pretty much impossible if you have forty students in your classroom with no aids and a desire to have some kind of life outside school (I'm not saying a whole second career, but maybe occasionally eating a meal with one's family not interrupted by a stack of papers). And before you guys selling the whole computer-based learning platform start into your song and dance about how you can help with this-- no, you can't. At least, not yet. To actually save time with your super-duper learning management system, I have to use all your canned, pre-packaged material, which completely sacrifices my autonomy and judgment. But to "customize" your system to my students, from data entry to teacher designed materials, takes just as much time (maybe more) as doing it all myself.

You know what really helps with this? Classrooms with just a dozen students. Teaching assitants. A bunch of things that cost money, which always seems to be a problem when it comes to schools.

Design Principle 5: Learning Outcomes Emphasize Include Application and Creation of Knowledge

I'm going to assume that somebody is going to fix/edit this header at some point. The explanation helps.

Competencies emphasize the application of learning. A high quality competency-based approach will require students to apply skills and knowledge to new situations to demonstrate mastery and to create knowledge. Competencies will include academic standards as well as lifelong learning skills and dispositions.

Well, it helps a little. I'm a little curious about what a "lifelong learning disposition" would be exactly, and how we would turn that into an explicit and measurable outcome. Likewise, the business of having explicit and measurable expectations that can be applied to new situations and new knowledge strikes me as a bit of a challenge. Okay, it strikes me as a huge challenge. "Okay, Pat. Neither you nor I know how this is going to turn out, but here is exactly how I'm going to judge it."  But not an insurmountable one-- it's basically what I do with every single writing assignment. It is up to the teacher to make sure that the quest for an explicit measure doesn't squelch the whole "new" part.

I also like this design principle because it means that in a CBE whatzahoozis with fidelity to this vision, there would be no place for a Big Standardized Test, ever.

So what have we learned?

Well, for one thing, what the CBE purists keep talking about and what the CBE salespeople keep trying to hawk are not exactly the same thing. The discontinuity makes me nervous, because national standards have been repeatedly sold over the years with a pitch of "We'll just give you some standards to kind of guide you and local districts and teachers will set their own curriculum and instruction" which sounded tolerable, but what we actually got was bad amateur hour standards and instructional straight jackets like EngageNY and Common Core high stakes testing.


There are things about this purist model that I like. But at this point in my career, I view all new bangwhoodles like house shopping. I don't want to see the Model Home-- I want to see the actual house I would be living in. I don't care what the Big Mac looks like in the advertisement-- I want to see the one I'm actually going to put in my mouth. CBE is being used as the lettuce in a big reformster salad, and lettuce can be swell and salad can be swell but if you cover my lettuce with chopped liver and fried ferret butt and the road kill that even road kill is disgusted by, I do not want the salad, no matter how nice the lettuce is.

And I can't help noticing that even the Model Home version of CBE has the same fatal flaw-- the mastery thing. Until CBE fans can deal with that piece, even the model home is going to have a cracked and unstable foundation.  So I have, perhaps, a better understanding of the CBE thingy-ma-whatsis, but I am still not a fan.

FL: More Insane Testing Abuse

By way of the Opt Out Florida Network comes one more horrifying tale of a child suffering at the hands of Florida's bizarre test fetish.

Elizabeth Shea of Pinellas County is the mother of a nine-year-old autistic son. The students has an IEP and a service dog to help him cope with the stress and difficulty that come with being a nine-year-old autistic boy. Yes, service dogs for autistic folks is a thing, and kind of a genius thing at that. But because the student in question is nine years old, the law says that the dog must be accompanied by its cerified handler, which in this case is Shea herself.

Shea's story should have been simple, because she reports doing everything that sense would tell you needs to be done.

We had arranged months ago through IEP meetings, supplying all paperwork, ID, records, that the dog would report with him for any testing, both with the school district and the FLVA where he is a student.

And yet, when Shea reported to the testing site, the folks in charge simply couldn't wrap their head around the situation. The dog has to stay with the child. The handler has to stay with the dog. But the handler may not be in the room with the child while he is taking the test. It took a vice-principal and a test proctor to assert and re-assert that the child had to be alone in the room with the test.

Even when Shea and her husband proposed that their son simply break the seal and sign his name, satisfying Florida's beyond-silly rule that every student must "participate" in the test in some manner, the officials were adamant that nobody could be in the room with this nine year old boy (who was by this point was crying and hitting himself in the face) even to commit an act that would "invalidate" the child's test results.

None of this is exactly a surprise for those who pay attention to Florida, the state that hounded the mother of a dying child and the family of a child who can barely communicate.

The devotion to the test is astonishing. Officials were not concerned about the Americans with Disabilities Act. They were not concerned about the child's IEP. They were not concerned with the child's well-being. And most bizarrely, they were not even concerned with getting legitimate results from the test, for surely they couldn't have imagined that a child so agitated under such conditions would produce test results that meant anything remotely authentic. So they weren't even interested in the integrity of the test-- just bound and determined that the child would go through the "proper" test motions in the "proper" manner.

I know people with whom I disagree strenuously about the Big Standardized Test, and while I think they are absolutely wrong, I believe that some of them sincerely believe that the test is a valid instrument that accomplishes useful things for students and teachers and schools.

But this is something else entirely. This is a devotion to the BS Test completely divorced from any belief in its validity or usefulness, a fetishism separated from any functional quality of the test itself. This is idol worship, and an idol worship that sets the Test above all else. It's not just educationally unsound and abusive of children-- it's nuts!

Changing Chiefs for Change

Pity the Chiefs for Change. They were destined to be part of the superstructure of educational reforminess that would help sweep Jeb! Bush into power, then be poised to cash in on uplift US education once he got into the White House. But now the Jebster's Presidential hopes have gone the way of Betamax tapes and the Zune, and Chiefs for Change is on the last leg of a long, downhill slide.

CFC was originally spun off of Jeb's Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), a group that lobbied hard for Common Core, school A-F ratings, test-based evaluation, and mountains of money thrown at charter schools. FEE started up CFC because they thought that the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the group that holds the Common Core copyright and was the figurehead guiding force behind the core's creation-- that group wasn't aggressively reformy enough for the Jebster.

Initially, the group was to be a new nexus of reform, but they were immediately beset by problems. And I'm not counting the naming problem-- did they think that change would never come, or once the change was the status quo, were they going to just disband? I mean, if your brand is that you favor change, does that mean you just keep trying to change the change that you just implemented? Do you ever say, "Well, hell, no-- we don't worked hard to install that policy and we surely don't want to change that!" I'm just saying-- doesn't seem like a very well thought out name.

At any rate, by the time Jeb's 2013 Reformster Convention rolled around (incidentally, the 2016 National Education Summit is scheduled for end of November in DC-- I wonder how that's going to go), the Chiefs were already in rather a mess. Chief Tony Bennett had already had to change jobs because of that whole lying and cheating thing. And Jennifer Berkshire provides a great account of Rahm Emmanuel's speech, a weathervane moment that showed the Winds of Change no longer at CFC's back.

Since those not-so-halcyon days, CFC has decided to implement a little mission creep. Last year they dropped their connection to FEE, which was more than financial, but also structural and organizational. They also decided to change their definition of "chief." Previously that had meant a state-level education chief, but they had already developed a problem in that department. If we scan the list of the current seventeen CFC members, we find these:

Chris Barbic: Former Superintendent of the Achievement School District, Tennessee
Dale Erquiaga: Former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Nevada
Kevin Huffman: Former Commissioner of Education, Tennessee; Chief-in-
Residence, Chiefs for Change
Mike Miles: Former Superintendent of Dallas Independent School District, Texas
Mark Murphy: Former Secretary of Education, Delaware
Brad Smith: Former State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Utah

The other eleven members include Chis Cerf who is currently a superintendent, but is the former New Jersey Chief. The list also includes Hanna Skandera (New Mexico) and John White (Louisiana), neither of whom is exactly packing heavy political clout these days. The Glorious League of Washed-up Education Reformers  doesn't really reek of political power and influence, so GLOWER CFC has opened its doors to lowly superintendents. The six newest members, announced just this month, are

Robert Avossa: Superintendent of Palm Beach County Schools, Florida
Desmond Blackburn: Superintendent of Brevard County Schools, Florida
Tom Boasberg: Superintendent of Denver Public Schools, Colorado
Chris Cerf: Superintendent of Newark Public Schools, New Jersey
Barbara Jenkins: Superintendent of Orange County Public Schools, Florida
Antwan Wilson: Superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, California

In fact, among the seventeen members, in addition to White and Skandera, the only members who are state ed chiefs are-- oops. Hansuel Kang, state superintendent of DC schools. And Veronica Conforme, head of the Education Achievement Authority in Michigan, which has troubles of its own and is marked for termination.

Oh, and let's not forget Deborah Gist, who used to be the Ed Chieftain for Rhode Island, who was last year hired as superintendent of Tulsa, OK schools, an appointment so unpopular that teachers walked out of the board meeting where Gist was hired.

So that means the Chiefs are now a group of seven school district superintendents allied with some former state chiefs and a handful of barely-in-power education leaders. John White, the hood ornament on this busted-down bus, says that the CFC now has a new mission:

The turnover in Chief roles is incredibly high, and we know that education leadership is not diverse enough. The work we are doing together to build a pipeline of diverse Future Chiefs, and to envision new systems to support students and teachers under ESSA, is essential and exciting.

It's like they made a half-hearted attempt to crib some copy from the last couple of Teach for America reboots. "What are we doing now? Something something diversity? Fine. I'll put that down."

Chiefs for Change were going to be Educational Masters of the Universe. Now they're more like one of those padded ghost band versions of some sixties rock group playing county fairs and mall openings. Such big dreams. They coulda been contenders. Now, like many folks who were depending on the Jeb! Bush political machine, they are going to have to find a new path.

Guys & Dolls: OPTING OUT!

I don't generally do simple Hey Look At This posts, but the Bald Piano Guy has outdone himself this time. So hey. Look at this!

See You in Raleigh

I will be attending this year's Network for Public Education conference in Raleigh, NC.

It was not an easy call for me. Life has been a little crazy, and my multimillion dollar book deal has apparently been lost in the mail, and it just generally looked like a bad time to try to pull this off, and I had just sort of resigned myself to not being able to make it.

But at the same time, there were things and people well worth seeing, from Jennifer Berkshire talking to Peter Cunningham, to a panel with Mercedes Schneider, to an address by the founder of the Moral Mondays movement, to important conversations about race and community and building coalitions and effective activism and the value and support of public education. Plus, I know from attending last year's conference, the opportunity to talk to other people who get it, to meet and mingle with many people who have become my heroes over the interwebs.

It was that last part that finally convinced me. In the midst of the spring crush and some family adventures and all the rest, I knew I really needed some time with people who get it, who can actually see what's going on. That's what energized me about last year's conference, and what finally drew me back this year.

So my wife and I will make the ten hour drive down and back (because airfare is crazy expensive), which will burn a personal day that I may eventually wish I still had, but I will not be sorry that I used it for this.

I tell you all this not to impress you with the epic tale of my decision to attend, but to underline that this is how many of us come to these sorts of events, trying to somehow shoehorn them into our lives and personal resources. This is not how the other half lives; the reformsters have plenty of time and resources for this kind of thing because it is their actual job, not the thing they somehow squeeze in around the margins. Which is one more reason that those of us who care about public education need to keep finding ways to get our voices out there, and to gather together, network, talk, and draw strength and support and inspiration from each other.

Life is too short not to stand up for what you believe in, and it's too hard not to stand up with other people who share your beliefs. So I look forward to seeing the folks who can make it to Raleigh. If you see me (I'm doing a session on Saturday with Leonie Haimson), come up and say hi (though I will warn you that I am neither as dynamic nor as witty in person as this blog has led you to believe), and let's see what we all can learn and gather strength from at the convention.

Why strike?

I have been through two strikes in my life.

The first was in Lorain, Ohio in 1979, and it started about three days after I was hired. It was my first job, and the strike was ugly. The superintendent had been hired for his union-busting skills. My building rep and my principal both advised me to stay home and keep my head down. The whole thing lasted over six weeks, and it was a vicious mess. I emerged absolutely convinced that almost anything was preferable to a teacher strike, but that

The second was in Franklin, Pennsylvania in 2002. I was the union president, and it was a contentious struggle. The board opened negotiations by stripping the contract, and their chief negotiator at one point said, "Yes, we have the money to give them a raise, but they don't deserve it." A couple of our union actions are on my "If I could take back parts of the past..." list, but for the most part I thought both sides managed things reasonably well and the district came out of the whole thing with a minimum of scarring. I don't have that many years left in my career, and I fervently hope that I never have to go through a strike again.

So I absolutely recognize the arguments put forth by two Chicago teachers in today's Chicago Tribune commentary. I am not going to try to speak for the Chicago teachers' union, but I can speak to why those two teachers are wrong and why, sometimes, teachers just have to take that kind of stand.

Their very first sentence is this:

Teaching is a personal mission, not a political one.

I understand their point, just as I understand them when they later write this:

When we think of speaking out and being heard, most of us don't think about unions and politics. We think about what we need to do better to reach that child who misses too much school or struggles to read at grade level. We think about programs that we believe need to be implemented, supports that need to be in place. We want our principals to respect our assessments of what happens in our classrooms, we want our parents to understand that they need to be involved.

And I get that-- I truly do. The best teachers are absolutely clear that their primary mission is in their classroom, with their students. I have never encountered a strike or really any kind of teacher activism that did not evoke pleas of "But why do we have to get into politics? Can't we just teach?"

I get that, too. There's no question that unions sometimes get wayy too interested in politics and make bad decisions for as a result of strictly political calculus (like, say, endorsing a specific Presidential primary candidate way early, even though her education bona fides are not so stellar). And the politicized politics-playing mess that is the New York teachers union(s) is nothing to get excited about.

The problem, however, is that we teachers can decide we're done with politics, but politics is not done with us. Our work conditions, our pay, the very definition of our job and purpose-- they're all politically decided these days. And why do we hate politics? Because it's a bunch of baloney wrapped in posturing slathered with lies and soaked in bullshit dressing. It is, as P J O'Rourke once wrote, the accumulation and maintenance of unearned power.

I well remember early in my career thinking it, and during my second strike hearing my members saying it-- if we just lay out the facts and explain the truth of the situation, won't people just see what's reasonable and do the right thing? And here come our Chicago teachers:

If we want to be political, why not do so in a way that engages our communities, our politicians to truly hear what we have to say, that's not at the expense of our children?

Because most of your politicians can already hear what you have to say. In the case of Chicago, do you really think that Rahm is just hard of hearing, that he just doesn't hear you? He hears you just fine.

If we want to be political, and we are seeking more stability and funding for education, programming, schools and staff, why engage in a protest that further destabilizes, playing right into the hands of those looking for proof that the state must take over our schools and declare bankruptcy? Whom does that serve?

What any union has to ask is, "What role has proof played so far?" What willingness has the other side shown to listen to what the union, what the teachers, have to say?

As for the whom does this serve question, this is always the most important question teachers have to ask when contemplating a strike. Ultimately what you are weighing is the immediate needs of your current students against the needs of your students in the future. Teachers have a great tendency to be institutional enablers, trying to pick up the slack so that no children are hurt right now by bad policies or toxic leadership. While this is a noble impulse, it must be weighed against what will happen if the district gets no pushback on its bad policy and therefor continues to inflict it on thousands of students for years to come.

Politics run on a sort of means testing basis. You say you want X. The people with power say, "How badly do you want it? Badly enough to whine about it? Because we can stand your whining for as long as you can stand to whine? Badly enough to make us sit through meetings? Because we can sit through meetings every day. Badly enough to inconvenience yourselves and us and the people who have our phone numbers? Badly enough to draw attention from the sleepy public? Because if you're willing to go that far, then maybe we'll think about giving you a piece of what you want just to make it stop."

When the students of Boston Public high schools walked out for a day and the Powers That Be decided to re-instate budget cuts (sort of kinda), it wasn't because the PTB suddenly slapped their foreheads and said, "Oh, I didn't realize that budget cuts would actually cut peoples' budgets." They slapped their heads and said, "Oh, you actually care enough about this to make a real noise."

Striking is the last thing you want to do as a teacher. It costs you time and inconvenience, and invariably you lose some of the noble heroic shine of someone who puts the students before everything else. It can bust up relationships, destabilize a staff, and make a real mess. Nobody wants to start a fight. But sometimes the fight comes to you, and your only choice is whether you'll actually stand up for something or not. As Patrick Henry pointed out in his speech in the Virginia Convention, the war has already started-- there's no question of avoiding it, only of whether or not we'll try to stand up or just roll over and take our lumps.

You strike to make a statement. That statement is generally some version of "These policies are not okay" or "We are done being ignored" or "Better we suffer this small battle today than wait and be smashed apart tomorrow." The Chicago twosome frame it as a choice of whether "to punitively turn away or work together to move forward" but there are times when those are not the available choices and are in fact the equivalent of telling a battered wife "Why do you want to break up your family when you could get back in there and try to work on your marriage."

I say it again-- a teacher strike is my absolute last choice and there isn't a thing I wouldn't try first. But sometimes you reach a point where you have to recognize that the other party has no interest in solving problems together, but is only interested in pushing you as far as they can get you to go. At some point you have to plant your feet and say, "This is enough. We have taken enough. This cannot go any further-- not today, and definitely not for the children in the future. Somebody has to take a stand for our schools, our profession, and our present and future students. We have tried everything to work with you, but now we will make our stand."

As a veteran of two multi-week strikes, I have to say that a one-day work stoppage seems like a pretty measured and relatively mild job action. I hope that the PTB in Chicago hear what the teachers have to say.

More Ohio Charter Fakery

We've been here before. Back in January of 2015, the Columbus Dispatch reported that some charter schools in Ohio were reporting on and taking state tax money in payment for students who did not, technically, exist.

John Kasich's Ohio has been a veritable Wild West of education reform. It's a great place to open up a charter and close it right back down again, or to make a truckload of money providing "consulting" services. Most famously, Ohio is also the state that set aside an entire official government office just to handle faking charter success numbers in order to make the movement look successful, as well as mounting government moves to simply bushwack a public school system and rip the "public" right out of it.

So last Friday's news from the Columbus Dispatch should come as no surprise.

Turns out that an Akron cyber-charter has some 'splainin' to do about student "attendance."

Cyber-charter attendance, like cyber-charter homework and cyber-charter test-taking, is a nebulous thing that is not always super-clear. But the Akron Digital Academy had some problems that were plenty clear. For one, they gave students excused absences for weeks so that those students could work at jobs. Turns out "wanted to go work instead" is not recognized as a legit reason to play hooky. They also seem to have trouble counting the exact number of students with special needs (the ones for whom they get more money).

This comes on the heels of reports of yet another cyber-charter that scored almost a million extra dollars by counting students that it had no right to count.

There are students who are well served by cyber charters. But as the cyber charter industry has "matured," it has enjoyed more and more success by marketing itself as school for students who don't really want to go to school. It's only natural that such a market would appreciate a school that wasn't too strict on that whole attendance thing.

Add to this the research showing that cyber charters are bad, so very very bad, that even the biggest defenders and fans of the charter industry will no longer stand up for them and one wonders why any state allows them to operate at all outside of very strict and specific strictures. The need to clamp down on cyber charters should be obvious even in a state like Ohio, no matter how many invisible students they serve.