The Lesson of Detroit

Last week a group of children in Detroit, Michigan sued the governor, the state board of education, the superintendent of public instruction, the director of technology, management and budget, and the state school reform/redesign officer.

The lawsuit runs over 100 pages, but the table of contents provides a pretty clear outline of the argument:

1) Literacy is a fundamental right
2) The state of Michigan's role in securing educational rights (subheadings: it has one)
3) The failure to provide access to literacy in plaintiffs' schools
4) Failure to deliver evidence-based literacy instruction and intervention programs in plaintiffs' schools
5) Failure to ensure educational conditions necessary to attain literacy (including failure to provide course selection, to maintain a decent physical plant for education, to meet students' needs, to provide a supported and stable staff, and to demand accountability with charter and school closings).
6) The state's failure to implement evidence-based reforms to address literacy

The details and accounts of the state's failure is stunning, almost unimaginable, from a "lake" in a classroom cordoned off with tape to the math classes taught by an eighth grader for a month-- and that's not because nobody was paying attention, but because that was the solution the school came up with for their staffing issue.

A lot of outrage has been expressed as the lawsuit's details have spread, supported by photographs from many sources. Yesterday, columnist Nancy Kaffer tried to explain to Detroit Free Press readers what the suit was about and just how bad things are for the largely African-American student population of the five schools named in the suit. But here's the part of her piece that jumped out at me:

Detroit's traditional public school district (the former Detroit Public Schools, now the newly created Detroit Public Schools Community District) has operated under state oversight for most of the last 16 years. The schools haven't gotten better. Nor have schools removed from the old DPS and placed in the state reform district, the Educational Achievement Authority. Nor have, in aggregate, the charter schools that were supposed to offer parents better options (at the literal expense of traditional public schools) delivered on that promise. The State of Michigan played a strong hand in the creation of this three-part system, and so the suit argues that it is responsible for fixing it.

Michigan has run the entire table of reformster ideas-- takeover of the district, creation of an achievement district, and charter operators brought in to replace the publics. Detroit is now a reformy buffet. Moreover, Detroit should be a beautiful display of how well the various reformster policies work. Except that it isn't, because they don't.

Detroit is a case study in state authorities looking at a system in crisis and saying, "Let's try anything, as long as it doesn't involve actually investing money and resources in the children of Those People." Detroit has been a city in crisis for a while now, and that has allowed leaders to say, "We have a chance to fix education in this city and let some people make good money doing it. And if we can only get one of those things done, well, let's go with the money-making one."

When a crisis happens-- a hurricane hits, the bottom is ripped out of a local economic driver-- that opens up a gaping area of need in a state, officials can respond one of two ways. They can call on people of the state to rally, to provide aid and assistance to the affected communities. Or, they can try to build some sort of firewall between the affected communities and everyone else, try to insure that everyone else is protected from any effects, any cost created by the affected communities. The citizens of a state are like mountain climbers roped together and hanging onto the side of a precipice. When one loses his grip (either because of accident, weather conditions, or because he was pushed), the others can either try to haul him back up, risking trouble themselves, or they can cut the dangler loose. If they're extra cynical, they can sell the dangler an umbrella "to break his fall," and congratulate themselves on having saved him before they cut him loose.

Michigan's leaders have treated the tragedy and decline of Detroit as an opportunity to sell umbrellas. They have stripped poor non-white citizens of democratic processes, of their very voices, while stripping critical systems like education and water for parts. The ship has been sinking and Michigan's leaders have decided to fill the lifeboats with bundles of cash rather than human beings.

Michigan's leaders have had the chance to try just about anything with Detroit schools, and they have tried everything-- except actually trying. They are a rich relatively at the hospital telling the doctors taking care of their sick family member, "Do anything it takes. Well, anything that doesn't cost any more money."

I find it striking that the lawsuit uses the language of reformsters, from "educational rights" to "evidence-based," and I do hope the lawsuit has legs (similar lawsuits have not fared so well in the past). But like New Orleans, Detroit is a reminder that what some reformsters say ("Let's try creative new solutions to provide education") and what they actually do ("Let's avoid spending any money on Those People-- at least not any  that we can't at least recoup as revenue") are two different things.

ICYMI: Catching up on your reading (9/18)

Money and race, money and race. Some weeks it feels as if that's all this is really all about. Remember to link and share and pass on the readings that speak to you. Everyone can amplify the voices they believe should be heard.

Will equity without adequacy be enough to help Connecticut's neediest children

Wendy Lecker looks at what is being done-- and not done-- to meet Connecticut's obligations to its children.

To Market, To Market 

Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) talks to Catherine DiMartino about some of the brutal realities of marketing in the education biz.

Breakdown of the Common Good

Ed Eiler writes about the threat of selling off the common good.

All Viable Solutions to Teacher Shortage Cost Money

Yet another writer reaches the not-mysterious conclusion that the teacher shortage mostly has to do with the desire to avoid spending money on education

When It Comes To Education Policy, This Is Personal

Mitch Robinson has joined the team over at Eclectablog, and that's good news for everyone.

How Gender Bias Affects Teacher Salaries

Do you suppose that teacher salaries are affected by the fact that teachers are mostly women?

Back to School 2016

Jersey Jazzman offers his back to school thoughts for this year. Made me feel better. You should read it.

Teaching the Next Generation To Spot a Con Artist

This Presidential election cycle reminds us of one of the more important aspects of education.

The Price Black Students Pay

How the no-excuses mindset hobbles young minds.

Did You Know Charter Schools "Bury Their Dead"?

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at some recent attempts by the charter industry to regain their footing after a long, hard summer, and what these attempts reveal about the flawed thinking of charteristas.

New Report on the Teacher "Shortage"

Back in the summer of 2015, we were all making noises about the coming teacher shortage crisis. (I even did a state-by-state rundown.) And it wasn't really new in 2015; lots of folks had called it sooner than that, looking at data like the college teacher program numbers.

Shockingly, things have not improved on this front. At the Learning Policy Institute,Leib Sutcher, Linda Darling-Hammond, and  Desiree Carver-Thomas last week released a study about current and future problems with teacher staffing. Their title--"A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S."-- gives you an idea of where they're headed.

There are some great features in this report. I highly recommend the interactive map, which lets you compare states on many of the salient issues with a click and a glance. For instance, the Teaching Attractiveness Rating (which rates the attractiveness of the career in the state and not how good-looking that state's teachers are) provides a quick visual answer to the question, "What would be the best state to go get a teaching job?" Oregon and Wyoming are at the top; Arizona and Colorado are at the bottom.

The full report is a whopping 107 pages, but in addition to the interactive map, there's a 16-page "brief." I recommend reading the report, but let me hit some highlights to whet your appetite.

First, the report actually gets the term "shortage" a little righter, defining a teacher shortage as " the inability to fill vacancies at current wages with individuals qualified to teach in the fields needed." Of course, that's not how laypersons understand the term-- to many folks "teacher shortage" means "not enough teachers." But as I have said many times, if I can't get anyone to sell me a Porsche for $1.95, that does not mean there's an automobile shortage. If I'm a brutally abusive misogynist, my inability to find a wife does not mean there's a woman shortage. If I prepare every meal by searing my menu items until they are black, charred, and inedible, my hunger is not an indication of a food shortage.

It never ceases to amaze me that so many acolytes of the free market refuse to see the invisible hand when it's smacking them in the face-- if you can't find enough teachers willing to work under your current conditions, that does not mean there's a shortage of teachers. You are your own problem.

Why can't we find enough teachers? 

The report considers the reasons for the "shortage."

Increased student enrollment is pushing demand for teachers all by itself. They predict a 20% growth in teacher demand per year moving forward from 2015. If nothing else were happening, demand for teachers would be increasing all by itself.

But of course other things are happening. The profession continues to hemorrhage teachers. The writers say that we're losing 8% of the teacher force per year. Of those leaving, only one third are retiring at the end of a teaching career. The rest are leaving before retirement age, " most because of dissatisfaction with aspects of their teaching conditions."

Meanwhile, the pipeline for new teachers is drying up. Anecdotally, I can report that several schools in my region, including a couple that originated as teachers colleges, are shutting down some or all of their education programs because of low enrollment. The writers say that if current trends remain undisturbed, we're looking at 200K available new hires in a world with over 300K teacher openings. And the number of re-entrants will not be enough to make up that difference.

The report points toward that attrition rate, saying that getting the pipeline worked up is not enough-- a big part of the solution is to hold on to the teachers we have (a real problem for states or districts that are still determined to fire their way to excellence).

Coming and Going (and always too soon)

The report offers four factors in recruitment and retention:

1) Compensation. Yeah, I know we're supposed to do it because we love the kids. But new teachers also want to be able to afford to have kids of their own, and teacher salaries have been backsliding since the 1990s, so that a college student looking at the future sees teaching as far less financially rewarding than other fields. Here's a brutal factoid from the report-- in thirty states, mid-career teachers who head a family of four are eligible for three or more public benefits programs.

2) Preparation. "A growing body of evidence indicates that attrition is unusually high for those who lack
preparation for teaching," says the report. This has bad implications for all the states that are trying to address staffing issues by letting anyone with a pulse have a classroom. This also gets back to point #1-- real preparation costs money, and lots of it, and prospective teachers may not want to go into debt in a field that makes it hard to pay debt off.

3) Mentoring and Induction. Really important, but requires a lot of care, time, and therefor money.

4) Teaching conditions. Teachers in high-poverty schools are twice as likely to leave, and that seems to link pretty directly to lousy working conditions-- and that doesn't mean the students. It means the resources, the materials, the physical plant, and the administrative support. "Beyond resources, teachers’ plans to stay in teaching and their reasons for actually having left are strongly associated with how they feel about administrative support, collegial opportunities, and teacher input into decision-making."

In general, the following factors are related to higher rate of teacher turnover-- being new, being non-white, having little preparation, working in a high Title I school, teaching special ed and ESL classes, teaching in high-poverty schools, and teaching in the South.

And when it comes to frustration with teaching conditions, lack of autonomy and high-stakes testing are biggies.

So what should we do?

What would a paper about the teacher "shortage" be without policy recommendations? Here are a few.

1) Create competitive, equitable compensation packages. The writers suggest that compensation be beefed up and that it be weighted depending on the students and the school. This is hugely controversial, and yet teachers actually talk about it all the time. "I'm an English teacher who takes home papers every night, while that phys ed teacher who takes nothing home ever gets paid the same. Grrr." or "I could take my science background out into a private sector job for $50K tomorrow-- why shouldn't I be paid more if I'm worth more on the open market?" We keep these discussions to ourselves because we know it's rude and that a system in which teachers compete with each other for the limited tax dollars funding the school-- well, when you talk about work conditions, nobody wants to work in teacher thunderdome.

Is there a way to do this fairly? I don't know, though I do know that some school districts pay learning support teachers a stipend for the extra hours spent writing IEPs. We know merit pay doesn't work for any number of reasons, but I also know that a teacher working in a tough urban school that serves a high-poverty neighborhood ought to be paid more than average, yet probably gets paid less.

2) Enhance the supply-- particularly in certain areas. Offer forgiveable loans and service scholarships. Work to recruit, particularly from the area that needs the teachers. Create residency models in hard-to-staff districts and schools. These are all swell-ish, but they ignore the biggest issue of all-- make teaching conditions less crappy, including giving back teachers their autonomy and doing away with crappy timewasters like the BS Tests.

When you talk about recruitment in teaching, you have to remember one thing that is unique about the job. Unlike any other profession, almost every potential future teacher gets twelve years of job shadowing. The conditions under which current teachers labor are what the next generation of potential teachers think normal. Talk to any teacher and she will tell you about the teacher who made her see how exciting and full of possibilities the career could be. However, no teacher will tell you, "Yes, I saw the chance to devote myself to bubble testing and bubble test prep, and I saw how I could have a job where I'd be a glorified clerk, making few decisions for myself, and boy, I thought, that's the job for me."

Every teacher in a classroom right now is either a recruiter or an anti-recruiter. That's why retention efforts count double-- not only do you keep a good teacher and, with some effort, encourage them to be better, but that teacher in turn becomes a recruiter of the next wave of teachers. Every teacher who leaves the classroom because she Just Can't Take This Crap Any More takes a whole raft of potential future teachers with her.

3) That's why this one-- Improve teacher retention, particularly in hard to staff schools-- is so hugely important. Reformsters who see retention efforts as a clever trick to give the Evil Union more goodies need to open their eyes and take off their anti-union rage glasses. The paper suggests stronger mentoring, better school environments, and better principals. Again, we should also get the elephant out of the room and do away with high stakes testing and other crap that robs teachers of autonomy, of the chance to actually use their professional judgment.

4) Develop a national teacher market. Probably not. The best source for teachers in a community's school is the people in that community. Yes, we need people who can bring an outside perspective-- inbred school staffs do nobody any good. But a national teacher market clearing house probably won't make a huge difference. On the other hand, the proposal of more easily portable teacher credentials and pensions would be a nice touch, as long a sit doesn't become a means of exporting the lousiest state's worst credentialling practices, which, given the number of states who are getting ready to put teacher credentials in cereal boxes, is a real danger.

Anything else?

Before leaders start complaining about how expensive this will all be, the report points out that about $8 billion is wasted each year because of teaching turnover.

I have no idea how they generated that number, but I do know that the root of the teacher "shortage" is the root of many other labor "shortages" in this country used as excuses to outsource. There is no real mystery to what it would take to Strengthen the Profession.

Money.

Not just money to pay competitive salaries (and I mean real competitive salaries and not just illusory salaries constructed to look competitive while actually keeping personnel costs down), but the money to reduce teaching loads so that teachers have time to mentor and support one another, money to make teacher training less prohibitively expensive, money to make sure that every teacher has all the resources and support necessary to be successful, and even money to provide more support staff so that teachers can teach. And, of course, sweeping away the soul-choking baloney of testing tyranny would mean that some corporations would have to give up some of their rivers of revenue generated by the testing octopus. We find millions to spend on testing, but refuse to spend any more money on schools or the people who work in them.

When a millionaire can't find a good gardener to work for $1.95 an hour with nothing but a single short hose and a micromanaging amateur supervisor and requirement to maintain the two-acre garden in just three paid hours per week, the solution is not to train more gardeners or lower the standards for the work. The solution is not out there somewhere in the world of future gardeners or factories where technicians are developing new plant seeds or in the nation's gardening schools. The solution is close at hand, right in the millionaire's wallet.

John King's Evidence-Based Revisionist History

The US Department of Education and Secretary of Education John King are out with a one-two punch of silly bureaucratic blather and revisionist history.

Friday's PR release carries the pithy title "U.S. Department of Education Releases New Guidance on Using Evidence to Strengthen Education Investments During Back to School Bus Tour" and it provides a handy link to Non-Regulatory Guidance about Using Evidence To Strengthen Educational Investments.

Punch Number One-- Some Friendly Guidance

So let's start with the blather. I'm not entirely sure what the word "investments" is doing in there, other than the Department's love for the business world. The twelve-page document is designed "to help SEAs, LEAs, schools, educators, partner organizations and other stakeholders successfully choose and implement interventions that improve outcomes for students."

The document covers two points-- how to implement this evidence-based stuff, and an explanation of what evidence-based means to USED.

The Process (and Irony)

Okay, listen carefully boys and girls, because this is some pretty heavy-duty stuff. Here's the process for implementing evidence-based interventions:

1) Figure out what problem needs to be solved
2) Pick a solution that looks like it would work
3) Get ready to implement the solution
4) Implement the solution
5) Check to see if it worked

Oh, and there's a graphic-- five balls in a circle with arrows pointing from one to the next. I think I speak for Americans everywhere when I say thank God there are federal bureaucrats out there willing to provide us with this kind of hard-hitting guidance, because God knows, we would all be out here spinning our wheel randomly. Granted, I've translated the Department's guidance into what I like to call "Plain English," but I am absolutely stumped as I try to imagine who was sitting in DC thinking that this needed to be published. Was someone sitting in the Department saying, "You know, I bet people don't understand that they should pick out solutions that will fit the problem. They're probably picking some other solution. Probably a bunch of school districts out there thinking they need a new math series to get their reading scores up. We'd better address this. Oh, and add a graphic."

Yes, there are people who mess this five-step process up-- but those people know perfectly well what the process is.

In fact (and here's the irony part), it's hard to imagine this document being produced by the process that it depicts. Which local stakeholders were consulted, what data collected that resulted in a needs assessment tat said, "School districts don't know the process for implementing programs." And then who scanned the world of possible solutions and said, "The best answer to this problem is to publish an encyclical with a graphic." And how will the department be following up on this to see if it worked.

See? The fact that you can list the steps of a process doesn't mean you can or will implement it (and there is a whole rant about the efficacy of competency based education that goes right here, but I can already see this is going to run long).

What Does Evidence Mean, Anyway?

This whole business leans heavily on the term "evidence-based," so the Department lets us know what that term means. Spoiler alert: not what a layperson would think it means. But that's not the department's fault-- the new ESSA has its own definition of evidence-based, and let's just say that it's a good thing this is not what "evidence-based" means to your doctor or a district attorney. Also, there's evidence-based and there's evidence-based, so let's consider the different varieties of evidence-based--

Strong Evidence means there's a least one good research paper that suggests the intervention will improve student outcomes (which, of course, actually means "raise test scores") or a related outcome (which means whatever you want it to). There should be no legit research that contradicts the findings, it should have a large sample, and the sample should overlap the populations and settings involved. In other words, research about rural third graders in Estonia does not count if you're looking for an intervention to use with American urban teens.

Moderate Evidence is one good "quasi-experimental study" and then all the other stuff applies. Not really clear what a quasi-experimental study is, but the department still considers moderate evidence good enough.

Promising Evidence requires a correlation study because (and this really explains a lot) even the federal government doesn't know the difference between correlation and causation. I just smacked my forehead so hard my glasses flew off.

Demonstrates a Rationale, like Promising Evidence, somehow doesn't appear on the No This Doesn't Count list. All this means is you can make an argument for the practice.

All four of these are enshrined in ESSA and the US Department of Education's heart as "evidence-based," even though a layperson might conclude that at least two of them are sort of the opposite of evidence-based. Hell, by these criteria Donald Trump is currently mounting an evidence-based campaign for the Presidency.

Punch Number Two-- And Now, John King in Bizarro World

"We have made major progress during this Administration in directing investments in education to evidence-based strategies," U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said. "Relevant, rigorous evidence must be an essential part of a strong framework for decision-making. We hope this guidance will help decision makers as they consider, choose, implement, and refine their strategies to support students."

Um, no.

This administration has given us

* support for Common Core
* forced implementation of Big Standardized Tests
* insistence that results of BS Tests be proxies for student achievement
* required use of test scores as measures of teacher and school quality
* advocacy for and investment in charter schools
* mandate for "fixing" students with special needs by just expecting them to do better
* endless push for computerized learning
* policies based on premise that students who get higher test scores will get better jobs, better life
* assertion that school districts and teachers routinely lie about student achievement
* list of approved and allowable strategies that must be used for "failing" schools
* extension of federal oversight and management of state and local school systems
* Race to the Top
* School Improvement Grants
* and other program based on the notion that competitive grants are the best way to fuel improvement


None of this was evidence-based, not even by the fuzzy definitions above. In fact, the more evidence rolled in, the less evidence-based any of it appeared to be. To call this bureaucratic basket of baloney "evidence-based" or "successful" requires a disconnection from reality that would make Don Quixote look hard-nosed. If it's a deliberate lie an act of political spinsmanship, it is a whopper of trumpian dimensions.

The last eight years ended with Congress, a body that has been incapable of bipartisan agreement on anything, bipartisanly agreeing that the Department of Education had overstepped and screwed up. I suppose we could argue that the Department was "successful" in that it pushed Congress so far that they finally got off their butts and re-authorized ESEA. But that reauthorization included an actual attempt to take power away from a federal department, something that happens roughly as often as parades of unicorn-riding yetis on Pennsylvania avenue.

The Tour

This is all part of the most recent part of the Opportunity Across America tour, in which King takes a bus ride while cheering for high quality education, uplifting teachers, and affordable college. It is a push for the idea that education will end poverty, yet another assertion that is not evidence-based. It's also doubly damaging because it suggests that the entire battle against poverty and poverty's effects can just be dumped on the schools and no other efforts need be made.

King has done several of these. I have a new theory about why he keeps taking these road trips-- I believe that King is searching for the portal back to the alternate universe that he keeps describing. I have no real proof or data to back up this theory, but I'm going to go ahead and call it evidence-based anyway.

USED: How Teachers Can Be Heard

Maddie Fennell is a Teacher of the Year from Nebraska who hooked up as a Teaching Ambassador Fellow at the US Department of Education, and she wrote what seems like a perfectly innocuous piece at Ed Week called "Hello from the Other Side" listing a few key lessons from her time there.

Some of the insights are perfectly swell. Don't put education policy on a pedestal, because it's just the product of regular biased humans? I'm all over that one, and have been for some time. When you think you've covered something enough, say it five more times. She's talking about penetrating the bureaucratic fog (specifically with the message that using student test scores to evaluate teachers is harming the profession, so good on her), but I'm pretty sure everyone working in a classroom already knows the joys, usefulness, and special hell of repeating yourself many many times to get the message to sink in. And I have to give a bit of love to someone who writes the understated "Policy writing is not always backed by mountains of expertise."

Bur I do disagree with her on some points.

While I appreciate the insight that "too many decisions are made on a political timeline instead of a realistic one," I don't believe that I don't believe that Common Core would have worked any better "if the federal government and states had only given teachers the time and materials to really understand" it. And while I agree that we should not assume that all USED bureaucrats are evil, dim-witted trolls, I still feel comfortable mixing my "frustration with bureaucracy with the people in it" because bureaucratic muss and baloney is created by the human beings in the system. If a system sucks, it's because people let it (or make it) suck.

But then Fennell landed on a really raw nerve of mine.

There aren't enough career educator voices in government.

I thought I was going to cheer, and she noted that there are lots of great career teachers out there and lots of fine folks at USED who need to hear from teachers. But then, this...

Run an orphanage like a  champion

More career educators need to apply for fellowships, internships, and experiences that put them in dialogue with policymakers. Teacher leaders need to spend time lobbying and meeting with state legislators and policymakers, insisting that educators have a genuine place at the table. I met one teacher who volunteered as a summer intern (something you usually only see students do); she learned a lot about policy and she was a valued voice at the table.

Sigh. I know she means well, but here we are at the same old place. If teachers want to be heard, they have to travel to DC and prove that I'm worth being listened to, which seems sort of reasonable and practical except that, of course, no USED bureaucrats have ever had to prove themselves to me and just in general I have had a belly full of people who want to dictate policy and procedure and pedagogy and all manner of poop to me without ever proving that there's any reason I should be listening to them.

And dammit, why is it that I'm the one who needs to leave my work and my home and my place of business to go where it's convenient for the bureaucrats. Why am I the one who has to drop hat he's doing? Where's the Bureaucrat Ambassador Program where some USED functionary comes and works as a teacher aide in a classroom for a year?  Why is this whole business premised on the notion that teachers must carry their empty bowl of policy and influence up to Mr. Bureaucratic Bumble to ask meekly, "Please, sir, may I have some more?"

Why is the dismissal of teacher voices the default?

Yes, I know that Fennell's advice is practical, that it acknowledges how the world really works. But for a while this afternoon (and not for the first time or the last), the way the world works rather pissed me off.

Petrilli: Mission Accomplished

Remember when we had a terrible, terrible crisis in the number of terribly bad awful really no good schools (filled with stinky, disastrous teachers) and we had to put the reform pedal to the scholastic metal toot de suite! Common Core, teacher evaluations, choice-flavored systems-- we had to have them RIGHT NOW and couldn't afford to wait another second because crisis crisis CRISIS! Remember all that?

Well, good news. Crisis over. All fixed. Mission accomplished. At least that's the word from Mike Petrilli (Fordham) over at the Flypaper blog. 

School failure is no longer the United States’ most pressing educational problem—mediocrity is.

 For sure, we’re used to hearing that, and some of us are used to saying it. Indeed, many schools serving African Americans (and Latinos and low-income students) haven’t been very good. Some are still failing. But the truth is that they have gotten better over the past two decades—a lot better.

What Petrilli is arguing for here is a shift of focus, from focusing on creating excellent schools rather than eliminating bad ones.

Now as always we need to remember that Petrilli is not always in lockstep with his reformy brethren (he's still pretty much alone in pushing out loud the idea that not only should charters be allowed to  cream, but that creaming is really their actual purpose). Nevertheless, cancelling the Terrible Schools Crisis represents a bit of a rhetorical shift.

So what's going on here? Let me offer a couple of possible interpretations of the shift.

It's politics.

Petrilli invokes Trump's special message to black voters-- "Your lives suck terribly"-- and backs away from it. Right now reformsters have a Trump problem; specifically, their problem is that Trump is on their side. Regardless of where you stand on education reforminess, I think we can agree on one thing-- your most beloved ideas sound so much worse coming out of Trump's mouth. I figure we can expect many reformsters to attempt the Trump dance that the GOP has been wiggling its way through for the past several months. In the meantime, Petrilli seems interested in shifting the focus of Presidential discussions of education. Good luck with that.

Admission and redefinition of failure.

You may recall that the reformster goal with those terrible, terrible schools was not just to make them better. Many states bought into the magical 5%-- we were going to just keep grabbing the bottom 5% of schools and transform them into super-awesome schools. Tennessee's Achievement School District was going to take the bottom 5% of schools and put them in the top 25%, and Chris Barbic generated some headlines by discovering that it's actually pretty hard to pull that magic trick off.

Reformsters were often critical of incrementalists who wanted to just make schools better-- we were going to see schools transformed into Gardens of Learning, miracles of free-market educationized awesomeness. Now after at least a decade, no such amazing results have been produced.

In other words, when Petrilli says the conversation should shift to the production of excellent schools, he is doing an nifty reverse assume-the-sake slight-of-hand, because for a long time, the conversation was totally about excellent schools, and how reform was going to transform terrible schools into the most very excellent ones. Instead, results have ranged from nothing special to outright failure. Petrilli's "well, now that we've made terrible schools a little better..." is basically a guy picking himself up off a slippery sidewalk while saying, "I totally meant to do that."

Mission creep and market expansion

Privatizing, charterizing, and generally reformifying was always going to be an easier sell for poor, non-white schools. Desperate for help, and lacking in most cases any effective powers of political resistance, those schools could be taken over, closed, charterfied, etc etc etc with little resistance. The problem was always going to be finding a way to expand the reformy market to wealthier, whiter schools, where parents could more effectively resist having their schools taken and their local control stripped away.

There were hopes that testing would provide a sales pitch base, like when all those suburban moms discovered their schools sucked and their children weren't so bright because of the common core Big Standardized Tests. That didn't pan out-- when those moms were confronted with BS Test evidence that what they thought they knew about their own flesh and blood was wrong, they determined that it was the test that was wrong, while reformsters impotently argued, "What are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?"

Having failed to convince suburban communities that their schools were in crisis, reformsters are going to need a new crowbar with which to open that market. So perhaps an all-around betterness argument may work.

Petrilli's love of high achievers

We know that Petrilli has a love of the high-striving achieveniks (see article linked above), and when we're looking at that population, he has a valid point. High Stakes Testing has encouraged schools to separate their students into three groups:

1) Achievement levels so low that there's no hope of getting them to "proficient"
2) Close enough to the line that many, many resources will be focused on dragging them across it
3) Achievement levels so high that there's no need to worry about them

In a test-centered school, groups 1 and 2 get the most attention. Group 3 gets little.

The next president should make it clear that our advanced students deserve our attention too, and states should send clear signals that they matter by holding schools accountable for their progress.

I don't disagree in principle, but there are a couple of problems here. One is that we have no reliable or valid method for measuring that progress. This is further complicated because "high flyers" are not always interested in staying in the little boxes set up to measure their achievement. One of the foundational elements of being a high achiever is that you are guided by your own ideas about what achievement should mean.

Final thought 

This is one of those pieces that reminds me of the huge gap between policy wonks and actual classroom teachers. Because while the focus on excellence does frequently suffer at the policy level, it's pretty much our bread and butter in the classroom. "I want you guys to be super-mediocre," said no decent teacher ever.

What do you mean? I took the test.

My class is wasting our time engaged for two days with a popular "research-based, computer adaptive assessment that helps kids learn."  It is several hours of our lives that we can't have back, and it reminds me once again of the very basic hurdles that these standardized bubble tests have trouble overcoming.

The biggest first hurdle is that the students have to care. The students have to think that it's really, really important that they give their all for these tests. The whole business makes me wonder if any of these test manufacturers have ever met an actual human, but I suspect that the real problem is that they have themselves so convinced that these tests are really important, valuable measures that it just no longer occurs to them that other people don't see reality in the same way (is there a word for when you gaslight yourself?)

But yesterday's first round reminded me of another issue, more subtle, but equally problematic.

So my student Chris (not the actual name) completes the forty-three questions in roughly ten minutes. This strikes me as improbable. SO I ask Cris, "Did you actually read the questions"

"Sure," Chris says.

"And did you read the selections that the questions went with?"

"No," Chris replies, with a subtext of "why would I do something stupid like that?"

I believe at this point I made That Face.

"What do you mean," Chris elaborates. "I took the test."

Chris was not yanking my chain. Chris believes that the task was completed. Chris and the test manufacturers and I do not share the same definition of the task.

This is not uncommon with instruments like a bubble test which reduce complex operations to a simple job. Teachers and students often have some version of the following conversation:

Teacher: Read the selection through carefully, looking for the main ideas and trying to divine the author's purpose. You should also be on the lookout for key words and phrases. See which key details and evidence support your ideas about main ideas and purpose, and if possible, look for ways to both synthesize the different perspectives included in the excerpt and prepare yourself to compare and contrast the approach to the thematic material in this work with other similarly themed works we've read. Ideally you should read the whole selection through twice so that you can catch the deep structural choices and give yourself a better chance to close read for the role of vocabulary and sentence structure to achieve the author's purpose. Do you understand my expectations for this assessment?

Student: So, you want me to bubble in the right answers for these three questions at the end.

This does not make students unusual examples of the human race. What teacher has not sat through a big high-flying staff meeting about some bold new initiative or state-mandated reform or newly-implemented program and after a few hours of full-blown juice-packed rhetoric said (out loud or to yourself, depending on your bravery), "Yeah, but what do you actually want me to do?"

It is human to translate these kind of full-blown operations down to "Blah blah blah blah blah do Task A." The simpler Task A is, the easier it is to ignore everything in the blah department. And there is nothing simpler than "Click on one of the four options."

You can argue that the students have to read the selection in order to have a better shot at clicking on the "correct" answer, but of course, once again, they first have to care if the answer they click on is correct. On top of that, in the case of crappy standardized tests (with which my juniors have much experience), students have learned that A) you often don't need to read the selection in order to answer the question and B) reading the selection doesn't help them find the correct answer anyway because the question is from crazy alternate universe in which they do not live. And in the cost-benefits analysis of my most struggling students, reading several paragraphs in the hopes that it might give you one more correct click is like plunking down $100 for one ounce of a soup that might not even taste good.

So at the end of the day, many of my students have just defined the task down. Go through forty or so questions, and click on an answer for each one. This supposed to somehow provide me with actionable data.

And at the end of the day, I resent the assessment for more than just the wasted time. I resent it for introducing the idea that sometimes I will ask my students to spend time on pointless things. I promised them at the beginning of the year that I would never purposefully waste their time. Now that promise is suspect.

And sure-- we can argue that as the teacher I'm supposed to do a better job of convincing them that this test is valuable and important and that they need to give it their all because Important Consequences rest on it. That somehow the results of forty-some standardized multiple choice questions will tell me things about them that I could not otherwise figure out for myself. But at the beginning of the year I also promised them I would never lie to them.

Yes, there are life lessons here. Sometimes you are required to perform certain tasks that strike you as pointless because people with more power than you believe that they know better than you what you need. In those situations people can require that you perform a task, but they cannot make you care. They cannot make you do it well. You always get to choose how much commitment you bring to a task.

Most of all, there are lessons here for me as a teacher. One is a reminder about the Rule of Stupid Rules-- if you invest your authority in a silly directive, you weaken your authority in all things. If you require the passengers on your ship wear blue deely-bobbers and sing nursery rhymes whenever they're on deck, you increase the likelihood that they will not pay attention to you when it's time to implement evacuation procedures. And this is also a reminder that we are challenged as teachers to design assessment tasks that cannot be easily defined down so that they don't actually require or measure any of the things we want them to. If a half-assed job actually fulfills the basic requirements of the task, then we have noone to blame but ourselves if a student can say, "What do you mean? I took the test."