Testing (7/18)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Pushing back against test-centered schooling.

Standardized Tests Tell Nothing

Testy stuff experts could discuss all of the following in scholarly type terms, and God bless them for that. But let me try to explain in more ordinary English why standardized tests must fail, have failed, will always fail.

CAP: The Promise of Testing

CAP is back with another one of its "reports." This one took four whole authors to produce, and it's entitled "Praise Joyous ESSA and Let a Thousand Tests Bloom." Ha! Kidding. The actual report is "Implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act: Toward a Coherent, Aligned Assessment System."

Aldeman in NYT: Up Is Down

Another reform attempt to sell the Big Standardized Tests.

The Testing Circus: Whose Fault Is It

An attempt to shift the blame for the overemphasis on testing in schools.

The Lesson from Parks

My wife and I have just completed the trip from Pennsylvania to Seattle. We hammered our way across the country and made some hard sightseeing choices generally in favor of scenic splendor (badlands, but not Wall Drugs). Consequently, we've spent a lot of time in the car, and when not in the car looking at things like this

Spending time in national and state parks has reminded me of what a great idea state and national parks are-- and why.

Actually, what really reminded me was passing through the tourism-based communities just outside the boundaries of the parks.

Inside the park-- pristine beauty, a profound and spiritual silence, an awesome resource being shared and enjoyed by all citizens. Outside the park-- a bunch of market-based entrepreneurs jostling and fighting for a piece of the pie, garish sales pitches blocking the view, leaving citizens as customers, who must figure out for themselves what business offers a worthwhile product and which are just a money-grubbing scam. Inside the park-- a focus on preserving a resource for the common good. Outside the park-- a focus on doing whatever will help you make a buck.

Sound familiar?

The analogy to public education is not perfect, but even its imperfections fit. The park system is not without sin, going all the way back to the chunks of land (like the eastern half of Glacier Park) taken from native American nations. And in many parks there are profitable businesses that provide support for the park-- done under the supervision and guidance of the park service. Nor are all tourist trappy businesses outside the park money-grubbing scams.

But the contrast remains stunning. The park is about preserving a shared resource and keeping it available to everyone in the nation. Outside the park is about turning a profit, making a buck, and hawking goods like a hollering huckster. Inside the park is raw sprawling quiet truth. Outside the park is scam and spin and yammering sales pitches. Inside the park, nature and the citizens come first. Outside the park, nature is just a tool for extracting profit and citizens are just the folks from whom that profit just be extracted.

The free market is lousy at preserving and cherishing a public resource. It stinks at respecting the space and the citizenry. To turn the free market loose inside the park would not make the park better, unless by "better" you mean "better able to be milked for profit."

The same is true for education. Privatizing schools would not make education better; it would just make it more profitable. It would leave schools in the hands of people whose first concern is neither education nor students, but how to use education and students to make a buck.

As with parks, the system does not always do the right thing, and free marketteers do not always do the wrong thing. But the contrasting foundations of the two approaches guarantee that those exceptions will be rare.

Public education belongs inside the park, preserved and nurtured as a public resource, not sold off in pieces and parts to folks whose main priority is making a buck (and as I always say, there is nothing wrong about making a buck-- but if that's your first priority, then you're out of alignment with the main values of public education). Preserve our shared public resources.

Education vs. Business (7/17)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Why For-Profit Schools Must Stink

Dividing up the pie is problematic.

Free Market Is Bad for Students with Disabilities

And that's not just me saying it-- there's research to back it up.

The Market Hates Losers

But then, the market has only one measure for winning, and that is the production of money. The heart of a business plan is not "Can I build a really excellent mousetrap?" The heart of a business plan is "Can I sell this mousetrap and make money doing it?"

There is nothing about that question that is compatible with pursuing excellence in public education.

Choice & Cable

What cable tv tells us about market forces and excellence

Teacher Voice (7/16)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Speaking mostly to my fellow professionals here.

Trust Yourself

Teachers, we need to remember that we are the experts.

The Hard Part

Nobody ever tells you in teacher school that you will never have, never be, enough.

Should I be a Teacher?

The reasons we enter the profession

Should I Quit?

When is it time to go?

Reformster Nonsense (7/15)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Here's a few examples of the ridiculous things reformsters sometimes like to say.

The Wrongest Sentence Ever in the CCSS Debate

As a semi-professional hack writer and fake journalist, I can tell you that it's a challenge to fit a lot of wrong in just one sentence, but Mr. Golston has created a masterpiece of wrong, a monument of wrong, a mighty two-clause clown car of wrong. Let's just look under the hood.

#AskArne and Spleen Theater

In which Arne Duncan says so much baloney that my internal organs are at risk.

Gates Needs a Hamburger

Bill Gates does a tv interview about education and charters and I get spit all over my screen.

Rhee Scores a Perfect 0%

Back before I stopped ever writing her name...

Brookings Wins Gold in Most Clueless Comment Competition

"Common Core will succeed where past standards based reform efforts have failed," they boldly declare. Why, you ask? Sadly for this "fresh defense," you already know all the answers.

Fixing the Profession (7/14)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

Reformsters love to think of ways to fix teaching, except that "fix" always seems to mean "get less pay and job security."

Why Teacher Merit Pay Is Stupid

Teacher merit pay is a misnomer, a delusion, a lie. Here's why.

Without Tenure...

It's not the firing-- it's the threatening.

Tenure: Private vs. Public

Why it makes sense to give teachers the job security that other professions do not have

Dead Wood and Tenure

So you want to get rid of the dead wood in your organization. Was it dead when you hired it, or did you kill it?

Standardization (7/13)

I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.

One of the keystones of the ed reform movement is standardizing things. I'd rather not.

Same

If I had to put my finger on the one most troubling aspect of the wave of reformy stuff that is currently battering us, it would be this. The standardization. The premise that education is a big machine with interchangeable cogs. The one size fits all. The sameness.

In Praise of Non-Standardization

Standardization is safe. It's predictable. We can walk into any McDonald's in the country and it will be just like any other and we will know exactly what we will get. I am not excited about that prospect. Let me plop you into the center of any mall in the country and defy you to guess where you are. That's not a good thing.

Good versus Uniform

“It doesn’t matter to us whether our customers are hundreds of thousands of individual students and their parents in China, or thousands of school districts in America,” says Fallon. “What we’re trying to do is the same thing—to help improve learning outcomes.”

There's your problem. If you're trying to do "the same thing," for a student in the US and a student in China, and if "it doesn't matter" to you which is which, then something is wrong.

What We Don't Know about Normal

Some very cool research shows that what we think of as normal for all humans isn't at all.