Chicago Schools Raise Baloney Bar

The managers of the Chicago Public School system (it may be too much of a stretch to call them leaders) have managed to set a new standard in high-grade baloney with their reaction to the one-day teacher strike on April 1.

CPS has filed a complaint with the Illinois Labor Relations Board against the Chicago Teachers Union for its one-day strike on April 1. CPS CEO Forrest Claypool has characterized the strike as "illegal" but mostly he wants Chicago teachers to understand who is the real boss here.

“We think it’s important that it be clearly established that whether children are in school and being educated is not subject to the whims of the Chicago Teachers Union leadership,” Claypool said during a news conference Friday afternoon. “It is subject to clear, unambiguous state law.”

There's no particular reason to think that Claypool is correct in calling the strike illegal, but that's not the ballsy part of his action. That's the part where Claypool also announced that he wants CTU to reimburse the district for the costs of the strike. This is not just bizarrely audacious in its refusal to take any responsibility for the issues in Chicago schools. It is not just strikingly wrongheaded because CPS should have been out on the street with the teachers, demanding that the state provide Chicago schools with the resources they're supposed to have. It's not just a plate of unvarnished baloney because CTU could head off its labor issues by dealing with its teachers fairly and decently.

No, what raises the baloney bar here is that April 1st is not the first "unscheduled" day off in the past several weeks, because CPS has instituted a series of three "furlough" days-- days on which it will shut down schools, dock teachers pay, and leave students and families to their own devices. In other words, a furlough day is exactly like a strike day-- only called by the district instead of the union.

The first of these furlough days was Good Friday-- exactly one week before the one-day strike.

Why call a furlough day? To save money-- about $30 million in all.

So the cut day on March 25 saved the district a bunch of money, so teachers should suck it up and take the pay cut. But the cut day on April 1st cost the district very much money, so teachers should pay them back.

CPS managers could not do a better job of displaying exactly what kind of baloney-slinging, control-freaky, honesty-impaired goons the teachers of Chicago have to deal with. No wonder they have to strike for a day just to get a point across. Yes, in labor disputes there are maneuvers and spin and ways to leverage the powers involved. But it's hard to deal with someone whose go-to move is "making ridiculous shit up." Good luck to the Chicago union leaders who have to deal with these guys.

Moskowitz Hearts the BS Test

“I really believe in the tests – I seem to be the only one left standing,” Moskowitz said Friday afternoon, immediately after addressing roughly 2,300 Success Academy students who gathered for a “slam the exam” pep rally at the City College of New York in Harlem.

Alex Zimmerman at ChalkbeatNY talked to Eva Moskowitz about her love of testing and the horrible horridness of opting out, and what ensued was a quick medley of testocrat talking points. Let's see how many she can check off the list.

Achievement gap. The rich kids have to take the test so that we can tell if the poor kids are doing as well on the test. This assumes that the test is measuring anything worth measuring, and that getting poor students to score as high as rich students will somehow erase the effects of their poverty. This seems unlikely.

Preparation. Moskowitz wants you to remember that if your child will not be able to opt out of the SAT or the Common Application. Of course, the Common Application is not a test. And you can already opt out of the SAT by applying to one of 850+ colleges and universities that don't require SAT or ACT scores. Beyond that, does anyone seriously think that taking the Big Standardized Test in elementary school is preparation for the SAT?

Zimmerman notes that Moskowitz's Success Academies have been noted for a text-centered culture as well as "draconian" discipline and pushing out of students. Moskowitz said that SA is absolutely not a test-centered culture, but making that point in the middle of a massive pep rally for testing is a long reach. SA is famed for its high BS Test scores; less widely noted (and Zimmerman doesn't note it, either) is that SA grads don't do well enough on placement tests to get into NYC top high schools.

Moskowitz needs test scores because they remain the top marketing pitch of Success Academy. She certainly can't sell the school as a school that your child may or may not be allowed to finish, or as a place run by the highest paid school administrator in NYC-- including the head of the entire NYC school system.

How Eli Broad Operates

This would be an easy story to miss, a niche piece of coverage of interest to people who have been wondering what really happened to Kansas City schools almost five years ago.

There's a lot to sort out in Joe Robertson's story for the Kansas City Star. School board politics, a reformy superintendent, an unexpected departure. John Covington had begun overhauling the district, and then, without warning, he was out. His allies and opponents were both caught flatfooted. Accusations were made, relationships were broken, and the district was left, as Robertson puts it, "on the brink." Covington moved on immediately to Michigan to head up the EAA, the Michigan version of an achievement district, a state run (or at least state-handed-to-charter-operator) collection of "failed" schools (which is now itself doomed).

But I don't want to get into the details of Kansas City, messy as they were, because we now know why Covington left. Covington was "trained" by the Broad Academy, billionaire Eli Broad's personal pretend superintendent training program, and if you wondered how that network of graduate operates, here's the critical moment from Robertson's story.

Then came a call from one of Covington’s contacts at The Broad Foundation. Covington was a graduate of the foundation’s Superintendents Academy. Be ready, his contact told him, to receive a call from the foundation’s founder — Eli Broad.

The call came from Spain, Covington said. “He (Broad) said, ‘John, I need you to go to Detroit.’ ”

That, Covington says, is the reason he left.

Eli Broad made a phone call, and that was it. Eli Broad can pick up the phone, give the word, and one of his people packs up, breaks professional and personal relationships without a word of explanation, and leaves town.

This is the reformster approach at its most naked and ugly. Our Betters, the men with money and power, want to be free to operate our education system like their own personal fiefdom, managed by people who answer to one authority and one authority only. This is a school system run by a shadow government, and a shadow government that is run by a godfather, an emperor, an autocrat. This is the opposite of democracy, the opposite of transparency, the opposite of a system that worries for one nano-second about the concerns of the little people, the Lessers.

This is the guy who wants to take over LA schools. This is the guy who is funding dozens of charter policy initiatives. And this is how he operates. Pick up a phone. Make a call, and his will is done.

Testing Has a Mascot

The first hurdle that the Big Standardized Test must clear is getting students to actually care about the Big Standardized Test. Some schools attack this hurdle with pep rallies to get the students all psyched up for the BS Test. Some of these involve badly rewritten pop songs, while on at least one Really Bad Day, it involved watching a man accidentally set himself on fire. 

But if your school is looking for a way to get the students all pumped up for the PARCC or PSSA or SOL (best/worst test name ever), you have one other option.

Meet YoJo. The name (according to its creator) means absolutely nothing (though I do now know that Yojo is a band, a piece of Asian holistic culture, and a place you do yoga. You're welcome.) You can scan the YoJo's website for lots of info, but I'll warn you right now-- the whole thing is done in Comic Sans.

YoJo (originally named Fuzzball, so a nonsense name is a step up) premiered in March of 2000. He's the brainchild of Bromley Lowe, whose previous work included a stint as the Baltimore Oriole Bird (Lowe's best friend is, apparently, the Philly Phanatic guy, and YoJo takes an annual trip to the Mascot Hall of Fame gathering which, yes, is a thing. You're welcome.). YoJo is also an indirect result of the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike; you can read Lowe's whole story here (in comic sans).

Lowe's wife was an Assistant Principal, and Lowe set out to bring the mascot art to school assemblies. And Lowe is not afraid to set his personal bar high. The website lists a mission of being the "#1 professional entertainer for elementary school age children" and names seven larger goals including making a living at this work and getting on tv. Did I mention that Lowe has been at this for sixteen years?

YoJo has four programs, including shows about reading, treating your body right, bullying and his absolutely most popular bit, a program entitled "Ace Your Test." Here's the promo for the PARCC (there are also versions for Virginia's SOL and Pennsylvania's PSSA).

 

 YoJo doesn't just get the excitement up and the nerves under control. YoJo also teaches test-specific test prep test-taking strategies. 

Yes. To all the testocrats who insist that the new improved BS Tests are impervious to test prep, here is a video of a man doing test prep while dressed in a large furry mascot costume. You're welcome.

YoJo has loads of accolades, including statements like this one from a Maryland principal: "When other principals ask how we got some of the highest test scores in the city, I tell them that YoJo is our secret." And if you check out YoJo's Facebook page, you'll see that the big blue testing mascot has been busy.

I stumbled across YoJo because someone was on line complaining about having a big blue muppet coming to their school to sell the PARCC. But after reading up on the guy, I came away with two conclusions.

One is that this is a guy who is just responding to a market that somebody else has created. I am not excited about living in a world where you can make a living going from school to school trying to help small children cope with the stupidities of BS Testing.

But I was also struck by Lowe's professionalism. This is a guy who has spent his adult life in big furry suits, networking with other suit wearers, and learning how to work a crowd and how best to do his thing. You can see him on a local MD tv show in 2010, talking about his work-- while he clearly enjoys his work, he is not just some case of arrested development goofing around (and in sixteen years he has never set himself on fire).

In short, this is a guy who actually approaches his work with children more seriously and professionally than the edu-amateurs who are busy trying to use BS Testing to break down and sell off the pieces of public education. Given the choice, I would rather have YoJo in my school than David Coleman. Though the idea of watching YoJo wrestle with Coleman and take him to the mat in a big mascot pratfall-- well, let's end with that image. You're welcome.

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.