The Gates Doubles Down

Yesterday it was time for Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Susan Desmond-Hellman to roll out an annual letter trumpeting the foundation's Good Works. The missive covers several of the foundation's areas of interest, and it devotes a whole section to education.

She opens with the observation that K-12 edcation has been "our greatest area of learning." So has Gates gotten any smarter or wiser about education? Have they learned from the contentious and problematic attempt to reconfigure US pubic education?

Short answer? Nope.

Desmond-Hellman is a biotechnologist, which rather fits with the Gates model of bad education as a disease that just needs aggressive treatment. She notes that "education is a bridge to opportunity in America" (which kind of ignores all the bigger, wider bridges like being born into wealth and privilege) and cites a speech by Allan Golston, a Gates Foundation mucky-muck who once wrote a sentence that I called "the wrongest sentence ever in the CCSS debate." So we're off to a bad start. And that leads us to this one sentence paragraph:

However, we’re facing the fact that it is a real struggle to make system-wide change. 

That's the fact we're facing-- that system change is hard. Not that, say, our basic assumptions about the system are flawed, or our theory of action hasn't held up to real world application, or we haven't paid enough attention to the real experts in the field, or the programs and policies that we have pushed might not actually be very good.


No. It's that damned change-resistant system.

This, as Joanne Barkan so ably chronicles, is the plutocrat's lament. My vision is so awesome, and I am so rich, and I am so used to having things go the way I direct them to, I cannot for the life of me figure out why my brilliant square peg will not go into this round hole. If people would just behave...

Desmond-Hellman continues with a fake statistic-- "only 40 percent of students met three of the four college-readiness standards across English, reading, math, and science." This is a problem both because of the basis for saying that in the first place (a study by test manufacturer ACT-- so it's kind of like a study by Ford Motor Company on whether or not Americans have enough cars) and the implication that you're not really ready for college unless you have the knowledge base of both a science major and an English major ("Sorry, Chris. We were going to give you a full music scholarship, but your biology scores were too low").

However, I’m optimistic that all students can thrive when they are held to high standards. And when educators have clear and consistent expectations of what students should be able to do at the end of each year, the bridge to opportunity opens. The Common Core State Standards help set those expectations.

So, apparently, nobody ever held students to high standards before (and apparently few people even thought of it). But we've discussed the magical power of expectations, and my advice to folks in the private sector remains the same-- if expectations of high standards are the key to making every student succeed, then I suggest Microsoft just start hiring people at random and then expecting them to meet high standards. What's that you say? Only some people can meet those standards, and so "hold to high standards" in industry means "sorting the wheat from the chaff, and only employing the wheat"? If that's so, then where do we send the students who are chaff in public education?

Also. "When educators have clear and consistent expectations of what students should be able to do at the end of the year," that almost certainly means that we have narrowed those expectations into a one-size-fits-all model that serves few students well.

Desmond-Hellman says that we have "begun to see signs of improvement," and goes on to cite Kentucky, which is a bold choice considering recent reports that after years of Common Core, Kentucky has widened the achievement gap. Granted, I think the "achievement gap" (aka "standardized test score gap") is a lousy measure, but it's the yardstick the reformsters asked to use, and it shows them failing. So, maybe Kentucky isn't actually a sign of improvement.

Desmond-Hellman includes a nifty graphic listing the "value of Common Core," except that it includes the same old baloney like "a deeper dive into subjects" and "focus on critical thinking," though at this stage of the game, there is still no evidence that Common Core actually promotes these things. The graphic also touts that "teachers have consistent and clear expectations" of what students should be able to do at the end of the grade level, and I suppose she doesn't mean "expect to get a good score on a Big Standardized Test," but this also skips over a big big huge ginormous question  because while it's lovely that expectations are clear and consistent, they also have to be developmentally appropriate and just plain correct. I can be clear and consistent in my expectation that a two-year-old run a six-minute mile, but that expectation is still a lousy one.

Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards. We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators – particularly teachers – but also parents and communities so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning.

No. No no no no no NO no nope nope nopity nope no. No.

It was not the implementation, stupid. The standards have not crashed and burned and morphed and changed into a shapeless mass of meaningless mulch because people did it wrong. The Core don't have an image problem because people don't understand them properly; they have an image problem for the same reason nobody likes your bad boyfriend-- they're bad.

Desmond-Hallman says that "this" has been a tough lesson to absorb, but what this? Because they don't seem to have learned any lesson at all, except the same old one, which is when your square peg won't fit into a big hole, you blame it on the hole and grab a bigger hammer. And so many failures. So many! Here's just a partial listing from Anthony Cody, who has watched Gates for a while, and is, in fact, an actual teacher that tried to get the Gates to hear him. Gates Common Core based reforms continue to be the Zune of education-- and yet somehow, it's not time to pull the plug?

You've already heard the doubling down quote from many reactions to the missive, but you should see the paragraph-sized non sequitor that is its context--

One of the best parts of my job is getting to hear from educators. And no one knows teaching like teachers. So, we’re doubling down on our efforts to make sure teachers have what they need to make the most of their unique capabilities.

Boy, those teachers really know all about teaching. That's why we are going to work even harder to force our top-down non-educator-created standards system down their collective throats.

She wraps up with a focus on materials, reminding us of awesome products like LearnZillion and EngageNY, plus the work of EdReports.org to review all this stuff. These are somehow going to drive a national demand for high quality materials, because presumably teachers were never before interested in high quality teaching materials.

Had enough of the hubris yet? Let's wind up for the big finish:

Our learning journey in U.S. education is far from over, but we are in it for the long haul. I’m optimistic that the lessons we learn from our partners – and, crucially, from educators – will help the American school system once again become the powerful engine of equity we all believe it should be.

What lessons??!! What lessons?? What lesson have you learned from educators, exactly, because so far it sounds like the lesson learned "from educators" is "we've watched these educators work with our awesome stuff and we've concluded that their system is too resistant to change, too slow to recognize that we know better than they do."

And "once again become the powerful engine of equity"??!! Once again?? When was that, exactly? I confess to wanting this to be true, that there was actually some golden age when public schools leveled the playing field between wealthy white kids and non-wealthy non-white kids. But while we've held that out as an ideal, it has been a long steady slog. Public schools reflect the culture they're part of, and that means every piece of classism, racism, sexism, and other ugly isms have been woven right into the fabric of our educational system.

We have to do better. We must do better. That, to me, is the best American goal-- not to recapture some dream of a golden time that never existed, but to unflinchingly see how we are coming up short and to strive, always, to get better.

The Gates likes the classic reformster formulation. There is a big problem, so you should embrace our solution, and if you ask me to explain how my proposed solution really helps anything, I will just keep telling you how awful the problem is. But the Gates remains convinced that their vision of a national education system re-organized around a top-down imposed set of one-size-fits-all standards-- that, somehow, despite all the objections, all the arguments, all the words from actual trained and experienced professional educators, all the lousy results, and all of that, let's not forget, the fact that nobody chose, elected, asked or otherwise enlisted Bill Gates to take on this project in the first place-- despite all of that, the Gates intends to keep plugging away, hitting the square peg with larger hammers, over and over, blaming everything in the world for the damage inflicted by their relentless failure except, of course, themselves.

The Future Ready Pledge

Has your superintendent taken the pledge?

Probably not-- the Future Ready Schools pledge is yet another one of those federal bully pulpit PR initiatives that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but refused to go viral.

But the pledge, whipped up in October of 2014, is worth a look because it tells us what the USED thought the future would look like back in those halcyon days of Almost Two Years Ago.

FRS got tangled up with the Alliance for Excellence in Education in 2015. A4EE is one of those groups that exists in a magic land, the place where the revolving door between government agencies, private interests, and "advocacy" groups is spinning so fast that it looks like all three types of organizations are really just the same people wearing different party hats. A4EE is headed by former WV governor Bob Wise and includes Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford), Frederick Frelow (from the Ford Foundation), N. Gerry House (former superintendent, current big cheese at Educational Testing Services), some tech guys (amazon), and some policy wonks. A4EE loves it some reformy stew, from Common Core to digital learning.

The Alliance "partnered" with the USED to push Future Ready Schools through the first half of 2015. They sold the pledge hard, along with the various policies attached to it. What is the pledge, you ask? Let's take a look.

The opening is simple enough:

I, _______________________, Superintendent of _________________________ do hereby affirm the commitment of this district to work with students, educators, families, and members of our community to become Future Ready by engaging in a wide range of activities such as:

And then we get to the List of Goodies. 

Fostering and Leading a Culture of Digital Learning Within Our Schools.

The language here is plenty familiar. Leaders are supposed to use "the power of technology to help drive continuous improvement."

Helping Schools and Families Transition to High-speed Connectivity.

The pledging district is supposed to do analysis of tech connections, which is not a biggy. I regularly analyze my students' access to high-speed connectivity by a technique I like to call "Asking them." FRS are supposed to "work with community partners to leverage local, state, and federal resources to support home Internet access outside of traditional school hours." What do you mean, "leverage?" High speed internet connections cost money, both to pay for the connection as well as the equipment needed to connect. That equipment will have to be upgraded, maintained and replaced on a regular basis. Again, this is not rocket science-- it takes money. In rural areas like mine, a big pile of money that nobody here has to invest.

I do get tired of this vague blather about connectivity. It's not vague. It's simple. It costs money, and the companies that provide it expect to make money and keep making money. You want to hook everybody up? Go find a big money tree.


Empowering Educators through Professional Learning Opportunities.    

Sigh. This is one of my favorite dumb reformster ideas-- if we could just plug the right professional development into teachers, then awesome things would happen. Common Core tanked because we didn't plug in the right PD. Testing is a hard sell because we haven't "supported" it with the right PD. In this model, getting programs to work with the teachers we have is like getting the VCR to stop blinking 12:00.

This is the thinking of people who don't have much understanding of carbon based life forms. This is the guy who thinks that if he writes a poem and sends the right flowers, the girl will totally fall in love with him. This is the guy who, with a straight face, writes sentences like this:

Future Ready Schools districts provide tools to help teachers effectively leverage learning data to make better instructional decisions.  

Leverage learning data, my butt. This is the guy who leans over at the end of the date and says, "After careful study, I am prepared to leverage interpersonal interaction data to make better decisions about placing my lips up against yours."

Accelerating Progress Toward Universal Access for All Students to Quality Devices.

Again, there is absolutely no mystery here, and no amount of government blatherspeak will create one. If you want a "quality device" in every students' hands, somebody is going to have to pay for it. And then pay for it again every two or three years when the quality device has to be replaced/upgraded. But no-- the pledge has to talk about how we'll "develop tools to support a robust infrastructure for managing and optimizing safe and effective use of technology, so students have opportunities to be active learners, creating and sharing content, not just consuming it." And as much as I love computer tech, I will poop on this party enough to point out that all of those stated objectives can be achieved with the technology or pen and paper.

Providing Access to Quality Digital Content.

Future Ready Schools districts align, curate, create, and consistently improve digital materials and apps used in the support of learning. Future Ready Schools districts use carefully selected high quality digital content that is aligned to college and career ready standards as an essential part of daily teaching and learning. 

Not be redundant, but-- money. Money, money, money.

But we've slipped over another line here. Aligned to CACR standards? Daily? An "essential part"? Before we all try to round up a giant mountain of money to support your grand vision, do you have any evidence to offer that the vision will actually yield results worth the huge investment?

Offering Digital Tools to Help Students And Families #ReachHigher.

Oh, well, there's a hashtag, so you know this must be serious. Basically, we're talking about using internet tools to help get into college. Fair enough.

Mentoring Other Districts and Helping Them Transition to Digital Learning.

Kind of like a chain letter.

There's also a Five-Step Process (so, eight fewer than twelve) for implementing all this. Those steps are

1) Create a Future Ready Leadership Planning Team
2) Take the Future Ready District Leadership Self-Assessment
3) Gather Input from Stakeholders: Analyze Gaps and Strategies
4) Create Your Future Ready Action Plan
5) Export, Share, Connect, and Repeat

There seem to be at least two steps missing-- the step where you figure out how to pay for all this and the step where you look at the convincing evidence that the expense will be worth it and will actually produce better lives for all your students.

But there's not a lot of room for discussion in the future. Elsewhere on the FRS site, we're told that "this roadmap can only be accomplished through a systemic approach to change, as outlined in the Future Ready Framework." All must be assimilated, and all must be assimilated in the One Approved Method.

Piling model on model, the FRS looks at seven main gears all placed around the central hub-- personalized learning.

Some of this sounds like it could be exciting (Use of space and time!! Can we go back in time to study dinosaurs??!! Because that would be awesome.) but mostly it's the same batch of gobbledeegook. See the gear about budget and resources? Do you imagine that's where I'll finally get my explanation of how to pay for this in a world where state's are cutting education budgets and public schools are having their financial throats ripped out by charter school wolves? Nope.

The transition to digital learning will require strategic short-term and long-term budgeting and leveraging of resources. All budgets at the district and the school should be aligned to the new vision, with consistent funding streams for both recurring and non-recurring costs to ensure sustainability.

And so on. In plain English, "This will cost a lot of money. You should find the money. We think maybe the technology will save you money."

They recognized that data privacy is a sore PR spot, but again, the framework's advice boils down to, "You need to collect and crunch a lot of personalized data for the personalized learning. Everybody should probably try to be careful with that stuff."

By November of 2014, the White House was happily launching a whole raft of superintendents into the future, and then in December of 2015, Phase Two was launching. On that occasion, at least, EdSurge was offering a list of actual issues that needed to be addressed (like cultural competency, equity, access, and actual training that would be useful to teachers).

But the Future Ready Pledge still seems to be a-- well, not exactly a trojan horse. You know how you buy one simple tool and it comes packed in fifteen layers of plastic and packing materials and a hard sheath that you have to break through with a hatchet. This seems kind of like that, only we're packing Computer-centered Personalized [sic] Learning in layers of bureaucratic baloney. If this is the future, I'm not ready for it yet.

ICYMI: May Winds Down

Boy, it is hard to find the time to read it all. Here are a few choice samples from the week

We Must Not Be Defeated

Jose Luis Vilson reflects on where we stand on the anniversary of Brown v. Board, with a particular eye toward what we can do in the classroom. I can't really do this justice in a capsule-- just read it.

Chris Christie Loves Segregated Schools

If you are not a regular reader of Mark Weber's Jersey Jazzman blog, you should be. His gift is for making a case with actual data. Here's his explanation of what Christie is really supporting when the gov gets out his charter school pom poms.

Great Reading Must Be Felt, Not Standardized

Steven Singer makes the case for the realm experience of literature in the classroom

Are Grades Destroying My Six Year Old Kid

William Ferriter talks about watching the real impact of policies on his own child. Time to talk about how we measure student progress.

Four Things Worse Than Not Learning To Read in Kindergarten 

Makes a nice companion piece to the previous post.

Stars Reflect on Arts Programs That Shaped Their Success

There's now a Tony for arts education. Here Playbill talks to several successful theater folks about the arts education that helped them get where they are today.

What Is a Community School 

Sarah Lahm takes a look at the definition of a community school.

Being Black at America's Elite Public High Schools

If you remember how things were going in Boston during the contentious days of busing in the seventies, this article may not shock or surprise you. But This is still worth a read-- a good, solid look at how racism is still alive and kicking at even the top tier of US public high schools. Discouraging, but necessary.

Hawaii Cuts the Testing Cord

It can be done! This week the Hawaii Board of Education removed Big Standardized Test scores as a factor in teacher evaluation.

Coverage at the Hawaii Tribune-Herald was particularly descriptive of the problem the BOE was solving.

Formerly, teachers in Hawaii were beholden to curriculum and standards developed with little or none of their input by entities HSTA Secretary-Treasurer Amy Perruso described as “corporate philanthropists.” These entities, namely the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, have had sway in setting teacher performance standards, developed testing for those standards and profiting from the system, she said.

And you'll want to note Perruso's description of what had happened under the test-driven regulations:


"Taxpayers pay for public education, but an arrangement was set up where much of what used to be provided by the public education system was outsourced to consultants,” she explained. “Public money used to be used for public institutions, now it’s going to private companies. Teachers used to develop our own standards, now we pay for them. We used to do our own tests, now we pay for them.”

The move on testing became possible thanks to the opening provided by the new federal education law (ESSA) as well as a joint BOE-Hawaii State Teachers Association committee established by the last contract. That committee originated the recommendation to the BOE. BS Tests scores may still be used, but schools are now free to use a more flexible system as needed. BOE Vice Chairman Brian De Lima noted that teachers who were already found to be excellent could waste less of their time jumping through evaluation hoops while teachers in need of mentoring could get the help they needed.

I'd be curious to know how much this change was informed by Hawaii's ongoing teacher shortages; you may recall that just a month ago, the Hawaii Department of Education was off on a mainland recruitment tour. At the time they were forecasting 1,600 openings (striking because Hawaii is not, really, very big) and talking about one of the highest turnover rates in the country. Hawaii is a beautiful place, but most of it is actually very rural, and the cost of living is crushing.

In short, getting rid of teachers is not exactly the big policy challenge in Hawaiian education. So I like to think that at least one person in charge thought, "Well, we can't pay them a ton, and we can't fix the cost of living, but we can get rid of this stupid test-centered evaluation system."

Here's hoping that other states take note, and that the Hawaiian idea spreads.

Is There an Education Uber?

This week at his blog Culture of Yes, Chris Kennedy asked "Is there an Uber coming to education?"

Kennedy rattles off a list of techno-changes that have broken into business in recent years. We buy books at amazon, not brick-and-mortar stores. We talk about netflix instead of cable. Kennedy reflects on flying into Denver and defaulting to Uber rather than a cab, and how, having recently discovered airbnb, he cannot imagine booking rooms the old-fashioned way ever again.

So he wonders-- will we keep tinkering around the edges of education, or is there a major disruptor coming there as well? Is there an education Uber out there?

There are many issues to consider with such a question. For starters, sooner or later we're going to have to deal with one common factor in all of these techno-disruptions-- they are all ways for wealthy folks to get services from non-wealthy folks for less money. These disruptors have created more jobs for the Just Scraping By economy. Amazon has made the world a better place for folks who have money and a desire to get what they want to get when they want to get it, but Amazon has made the world a lousier place for folks who have taken a job in an Amazon "fulfillment center" in hopes of supporting their family. These kinds of disruptions are here, and they're unstoppable, but it will help us as a culture if we can stop pretending that they have made a brighter, shinier future for everyone.

Techno-driven disruption raises other issues as well. We're buzzing in my neck of the woods because Pittsburgh is going to get autonomous Ubers, because why pay human beings a cent more than you absolutely have to. Autonomous cars have been coming for a while, and I will be excited about that just as soon as I own a computer complete with software that does what it's supposed to do every single time. So, roughly "never." An autonomous car, like any other piece of pseudo-AI tech, is simply a way for a programmer to impose his preferences, values, and biases. Somewhere in that autonomous automobile software is some code that says, "When you have to decide whether to hit an on-coming car or the child that ran out in front of you, here's what you pick." A car-directing software package is going to make moral choices based on its programming, and I'm not saying that the prospect is horrifying or Frankensteinian-- but I am saying we have to stop pretending that computers make cool, perfectly objective choices. They do not. They make the choices their programmers tell them to make.

Both of these points have huge implications for education. Will edu-Uber be paying more attention to those who are being served, or those who are doing the serving? And since the education of small live humans is absolutely saturated with moral choices, which set of programmers will be pre-making those moral choices and value judgments for the students?

These are both big issues, but they are not the biggest one.

Kennedy's examples all have on thing in common. They are businesses. Uber's purpose is to make money (by hooking people up with a ride). Amazon's purpose is to make money (by sending people stuff quickly and easily, and by convincing investors that it will be profitable some day). Netflix's purpose is to make money (by getting content to customers).

Education is not a business. The purpose of of a school is not to make money.

Current reformster attempts to disrupt education all start-- must start-- by challenging that foundational assumption. Kennedy doesn't mention charter schools, but I would bet that many charteristas think they are the edu-Uber, and charter school's most fundamental change in the approach school is to turn it into a business, riding the wave of the Free Market and reaping piles of money to be directly (or more sneakily) diverted to the pockets of the charter operators. The purpose of a charter school is to make money (by providing an educational product to parents and students).

As always, I'm not trying to suggest that anything done to make money is inherently evil and awful and anyone who makes money at some business activity is a terrible person who should hang his head in shame.

But bringing a business perspective to public education represents a fundamental shift in the values and purposes of the institution.

In other words, an education Uber would not just change how we pursue the mission of public education. It would change our very conception of what that mission is. Uber didn't change the business of getting people from place to place-- it just changed who did it and how they were paid. But an edu-Uber would change the purpose of school.

It's Great Not To Be Needed

It is one of the best things in teaching-- that moment when your students just don't need you.

I'm the adviser for many creative, artsy, performance activities. One of my fave side jobs is stage crew adviser, which also ends up being basically the stage manager and house manager for our auditorium and related facilities. It's my job to train the students in lighting design and execution, sound work, backstage grip stuff-- everything that has to happen in order for a performance to happen on our stage.

Every May the district rents our performance space out to a local dance studio (run by one of my former students, because I teach in a small town) and my crew gets to experience being a stage crew for hire. They get two rehearsals, and then two performances. The dancers come equipped with music and choreography; it's up to us to design and execute the lighting, keep the music on point, handle everything that comes up backstage. In an average, or below-average year, I'm moving from station to station, offering advice, tweaking choices, making sure that the crew has thought everything through and that they don't have any questions. In an average or below-average year, I get plenty of exercise and log plenty of steps.

This year I sat in the lobby and kept an eye on traffic in and out of the hall.

The crew didn't need me for anything. They made their choices, executed their plans, corrected their mis-steps, coordinated their duties. If space aliens had kidnapped me from the lobby five minutes before curtain, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference to the show itself.

This is the dream. Students who have learned and internalized their learning so well that they don't just remember the specific how-to's of specific situations, but they can see the whole organizing structure of ideas and values so that they are perfectly capable of analyzing and responding to new situations. Better still, they can evaluate their own work as they do it and decide to pat themselves on the back or make better choices.

They're students, and they still like the affirmation and confirmation, so I tell them they've done a great job. But, really, they already knew that. They've acquired the most important, most valuable of educational "outcomes"-- they're own personal inner guidance system.

This is one of the things I find fundamentally troubling about test-centered accountability-- the continued insistence that without the Big Standardized Test, or the Ongoing Computerized Feedback, or whatever we're selling this month-- without all of that, the poor students will never know how well they're doing. But a constant feedback loop of, "We'll just check the computer data to see how you did" teaches them that they must always look to someone else, someone outside themselves, to know how they did. The proof is always in someone else's pudding.

Add that to the kind of no excuses systems we see in urban charters, and we are creating a system in which children are taught NOT to be independent, self-directed, self-actuating humans with their own inner guidance system.

That's just wrong. The end product of an education should be an independently functioning human being.

That's always my goal. My crew ran the show for four straight nights, did it well, and did it without needing me to get them there. Last week we passed out yearbooks (yes, that's me, too) and my yearbook students were able to contemplate the book with pride because it was their book. There are choices I might have made differently, but it's not my book. It's their book, and they took responsibility for it, using all the training I've given them over the years filtered through their own judgment and inner guidance. That includes training the rest of the staff. I always tell my seniors, "The real measure of how good a job you did is not your own book-- it's next year's book."

It's easy to give in to the urge to fiddle, to tweak, to tell yourself that you'd better stay right next to that student and keep issuing directions so they don't mess up or make a mistake. But you can't practice functioning independently if nobody trusts you. How, I keep wondering, can a child ever get to pride in their ability to read and write if they spend their whole school career hearing, "Just hold on there, buddy. I'll let you know whether you can read and write or not."

It is a great thing to look around in May and see students who absolutely do not need me. It would be discouraging and sad to see students who can't make a move, a choice or a judgment without checking with me for the data printouts. I am proud of my students, and far more importantly, they are proud of themselves. The end of the year has come, and they don't need me. It's perfect.

aPARCColypse Now

The last ten days have been a test of how diligent PARCC might be about protecting their sad test (and, yes, a test of the internet's ability to coin a PARCC-based pun to refer to this dustup). For those of you playing along at home, here's a rundown of what has happened and what issues are involved and some of the questions on the table at this point.

Events kicked off when Celia Oyler, an education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, posted an anonymous critique of the PARCC fourth grade reading exam. That post was picked up by some other bloggers, including me, but within a few days PARCC was on the case.

Initially they went after tweets that linked to Oyler's article. That in itself was an.... interesting move because none of the tweets actually included allegedly copyrighted material, but they did link to posts that did include the test prompts. This suggests its own little DMCA research project-- just how many degrees of separation from copyrighted materials can companies legitimately pursue? Apparently a link to a post containing allegedly copyrighted materials is not okay. What about a link to a source that contains a link? A link to a link to a link to a link?

The clean-up of twitter seemed to be job one, taken on so quickly that the DMCA request filed included a misspelled job title for the guy at PARCC filling the request (Kevin Michael Days, Assoicate Director, Operations). Meanwhile, Oyler got a letter, not from the PARCC legal department, but from PARCC chieftain Laura Slover herself, requiring Oyler to take down the allegedly copyright materials AND requesting that she hand over the name of the anonymous teacher.

Next up-- going after the posts themselves. Diane Ravitch's post just kind of went away overnight; Ravitch's blog is on the wordpress platform, which turns out to be an important detail. Many other bloggers who work on the blogger platform received notice that their DMCA-violating post was being turned back into a draft (basically, unpublished but not actually erased). The targeting there seemed a bit random-- some posts were hit almost as soon as they were up, while my post stayed up for almost a week before anyone got to it, though I did not get a nifty letter from blogger explaining why it was happening. It just did. I'm a little curious about exactly whether a bot or a harried secretary or an intern or Slover on her lunch break did the detective work here, because it all seems a little slapdash. (I have reposted a redacted version of my post for the time being, just to keep the record straight).

There has been speculation that twitter and blogger have been hit by PARCC and quicker on the draw because they are more "corporate" entities than wordpress. With the exception of Ravitch, I haven't run across any wordpress bloggers who have been pushed to take the post down, and in fact, this post on a wordpress blog has been up since May 11 has all the material in Oyler's original post and then some.

The blogger platform belongs to google, which adds a level of irony to all of this since google is infamous among writers for the google books project, in which google just went on ahead and made digital copies of every book they could get their hands on. I've published a couple of books and you can find them fully available in free digital format on google-- and not because google asked me, but because they just went ahead and did it and if I don't like it, I can ask them to take it down.

There are multiple issues involved here. Mercedes Schneider has raised the question of who exactly holds the copyright for these items. I suggest you read all of this-- there are several complex issues here above and beyond the fact that we taxpayers footed the bill to create the damned tests in the first place.

Many folks have raised the question of whether or not publishing and discussing the prompt items comes under the doctrine of fair use. Which takes us to the larger question of how we discuss, as a country, anything at all about the tests if nobody is allowed to talk about them, ever.

PARCC has offered their own press release on the matter, chock full of hooey about how the security of the test must be protected and keeping things fair for all the hardworking educators and students out there. I particular like the part about being fair to the many hundreds of educators who have invested thousands of hours providing input and helping to develop and review test questions, ensuring that they are of high quality, align to standards, and are grade-appropriate." In other words, we're worried about swell teachers and not proprietary corporate products. Because these teachers slaved over these super questions and then said, "Please, don't let anyone see or discuss our work, ever. We prefer to live in the shadows."

Meanwhile, the story has been picked up by Slate, USA Today, and the Progressive. And yesterday afternoon Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post provided a good summary of The Story So Far.

And now, since corporate types are home for the weekend, the story can simmer for a bit.

Issues? As a sometimes writer and hack musician, I have a great deal of respect for intellectual property rights. But to use copyright law as a way to keep a secure lock on a piece of work that virtually unprotectable is just... silly. The prompt that I originally included verbatim can be summed up easily as "Read the story Sadako's Secret and make up another story that could be a sequel to it that talks about when Sadako tries out for the junior high track team." That summing up could be done by any English-speaking human who ever laid eyes on the test, including every single child who took it. To imagine that it can be kept more secure than the launch codes or the latest episode of Walking Dead is just dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

More importantly, and I have made this point before, any test that requires that level of security is a crappy test. It is a test built on a foundation of "gotcha" and hidden tricks.

This flapdoodlery is, in many ways, a waste of all our time, even as it is necessary to push back when PARCC tries to silence any serious critique of their product. We should be talking about the test, its many flaws, and the many reasons it should be thrown in the dustbin of education history; instead, we are busy talking about corporate shenanigans and the idiocy of trying to lock down the internet. But there are important reminders here. It's a reminder to outfits like PARCC that maintaining perfect secrecy and security is a fool's game. It's a reminder to those of us in the blogosphere that the platforms and social media that we use are companies, owned and operated by corporate entities, and it is ultimately their circus and they can do what they want with the monkeys.

But most of all, it's a reminder of just how lousy the PARCC is. A test so sad and fragile that to let any part of it see the light of day will cause it to shrivel to dust like a data-sucking vampire (not the cute sparkly kind), a test so feeble that it can't withstand the most rudimentary examination or discussion. All of this is simply more proof that the PARCC is a bad test that needs to just go away.