Common Core Still Alive in DC

Remember when Betsy DeVos said that Common Core was awful "And at the U.S. Department of Education, Common Core is dead." (It was just last week on January 14).

Turns out that even as she said those words, the Secretary or Education had already given the Core a little kiss of life. As reported at EdWeek, the Department of Education, in a letter dated on January 11, told Maryland that the PARCC test would be super-duper in meeting their federal requirements.

Imagine I tell you that our home has banned canned food. And then I tell you that the official approved Food Access Device will be a can opener. Or my state has banned cars that use leaded gas, and that all authorized gas stations will sell only leaded gas. Or I announce that the dress code for my school forbids jeans and t-shirts, and then I put up a picture of an officially approved outfit, and it's t-shirt and jeans.

That's the kind of mixed message we have here.

The PARCC test was created for one purpose, and one purpose only-- to see how well a state's schools had implemented the Common Core State [sic] Standards. That's it. That's what it is designed to do.

This is good news for the remaining PARCC users (Colorado, the District of Columbia, Illinois, New Jersey, and New Mexico) and that in turn is good news for PARCC, a test that has been dumped by sixteen states. Or as the head of the company that manages the testing product put it:

"This is really great news," said Arthur VanderVeen, the CEO of New Meridian, the company that manages the PARCC consortium. "We think this confirms that the states that administer the PARCC test, or [use] its test content, are administering the highest quality assessment that's available."

At least, that will make good PR copy. Meanwhile, let the record note that on January 14, when Betsy DeVos said that Common Core was dead at the department, the department had already given its seal of approval to a critical part of the Common Core program.

IXL: Caveat Emptor & Personalized Misery

As the computerized version of personalized [sic] learning continues to gather steam, we can anticipate increasingly aggressive marketing. Remember-- you don't win in a free market by having the best product, but by having the most effective marketing.

Marketing for these algorithm-driven software packages of mass-produced custom education belongs to a special class of marketing-- marketing that is designed to sell a product to people other than the actual end users. If your not sure why that matters, imagine if you didn't buy the car you drive, but it was purchased for you by parents. Or if the grocery shopping for your house was done by your children. How would that affect the way those products are marketed? Education has always suffered from this problem-- teachers get stuck using products that are purchased by district administrators who will never have to actually work with them.

So we get products with ridiculous levels of puffery, like this software that claims to be in 70% of all US districts. And we get a variety of other claims that are either beside the point (like software that will make the administrator's job easier, but will add more fruitless labor for teachers).

Edubiz marketeers can smell the sweet green chum of tax dollars in the water. I'm not arguing that all sharks should starve to death, but more than ever, part of an admistration's job to separate the predators from the pedagogy, to distinguish between baloney and steak. And that means paying attention, doing de diligence, and taking care of their homework.

Here's a good example.

IXL has been in the algorithm-selected digitized worksheet biz for many years, all the way back to 1998 when they were selling Quia Web, a sort of web learning platform. Nowadays, their pitch is perfectly suited to the computer-centered personalized [sic] learning crowd:

IXL helps students excel! With thousands of topics in math, language arts, science, social studies, and Spanish, there's always something new to explore. IXL sets a new standard for online learning, offering unlimited algorithmically generated questions, real-time analytical reports, and dynamic scoring to encourage mastery. Released in 2007, it has since become the world's most popular subscription-based learning site for pre-K to high school. With more than 7,000 unique and challenging skills to master, IXL offers a dynamic and enjoyable environment suitable for any learning style. Students who use IXL are succeeding like never before.

IXL's algorithm can "generate" worksheets and kick out "analytical" reports on the road to "mastering" skills, and if you start to browse, you see that IXL meets the usual standard of measuring only those things that can be measured with computer-scored questions. We'll get back to the dynamic scoring in a bit, but "succeeding like never before" is a bold piece of puffery, lacking any indication whether that's a good thing or a bad thing (Trump is a President like never before, but I'm not sure that's great news).

The content is unimpressive. Skills are pushed way down into lower levels. The 11th grade language set focuses on mechanical items that can be drilled with computerized bubble questions, but because its focus is on Things That Can Be Computerized, the material about reading and writing is largely inadequate. But this will always be the problem for any computer-centered education delivery system-- if you are delivering your "product" through a garden hose, you will severely limit what "product" can be delivered, and software is a hugely limiting delivery system.

IXL has a whole page of "inspiration" on its site, and as is usually the case, this is not so much aimed at telling teachers "this is how this will help" as it is aimed at telling superintendents "this is how much your people will like it" or "this is how much easier your job will be" or even "at last you can slap this in teachers' hands and stop worrying about whether anything's being taught or not." It stresses being "data driven" because that brings tears of joy to every administrator who dreams of sitting in their office and managing their district by scanning screenloads of data. There are videos, including a couple of teachers who make the usual self-incriminating endorsements ("Before this product, I didn't know what the hell was going on in my classroom, but now I look at these cool data screens and I'm totally on top of things.") And we are reassured that for students this is just like a computer game, and they just can't wait to play; this sort of claim always reminds me of my own students, who generally are super-excited and obsessed with a new phone app for about two weeks, after which they lose all interest. Gamification is a fool's game.

IXL has a page devoted to its privacy policies which include the usual sort-of-reassuring language (we will not disclose any of your personal identifiable information except when we have your permission or, you know, other stuff) mixed in with not-at-all-reassuring language (if someone buys us, along with all your data, we'll tell you it's happening, but otherwise all bets will be off).

But overall, when one peruses IXL, there's nothing much to alarm the average human. The materials are neither more nor less crappy than the collections of publisher-created worksheets that we used to get with a textbook series.

But there are other places to look for information about IXL.

Meet Common Sense Media.  This is a website based in San Francisco that is "dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the 21st century." They're big on tech and tech-related reviews, and they are sponsored by many of the usual suspects-- Bezos Family Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates, the Hewlett Foundation, the Broad Foundations, and many more of the same.

The review section of Common Sense takes an amazon-style look at many products and services, and the folks there have a few things to say about IXL. The reviews stretch from 2013 until 2017. There are 108 parent reviews, and 314 kid reviews. Here's a sample of some of the kid review headlines:

Do not try it! Will make your kid(s) cry!

Don't use it.

IXL is evil.

If you hate your kids...

IXL FRIKIN' SUUUUUUUUUUCKS

Haha People think this helps kids? Ahaha.

If you think you're going to achieve something, something else will smack you back down.

Who thought this was a good idea?

Well, maybe these are just the complaints of frustrated children and teens who just couldn't quite cut the mustard, who are just bitter because this website dashed their delusions of awesomeness. Maybe more rational adult voices will give us a better picture...

Poor learning website

Worst website ever

Don't waste your money

Ebola

Won't LEARN math; instead How to take Tests

Yeah, the adults all hate it, too.

There seem to be a couple of recurring complaints.

One is that the program is expensive, and like any good monetized piece of internet software, it makes its money with a steady drip, drip, drip of charges. So there's that.

But what draws the most loathing and anger is the non-teaching high-penalty dynamic scoring system. A student is supposed to earn her way to a score of 100 to qualify as a confident master of the particular skill. But as the student gets closer to that 100-point threshold, the penalties become fiercer. People repeatedly tell of being in the 90s, missing one comma or decimal point and being booted down to the 80s or 70s. And as one parent notes, "it doesn't teach you what you did wrong like a human would."  Parents and students also note that the program is very repetitive, and therefor very boring. But the frustration seems to be the most-reported emotion.

What most comments point toward, but don't really address, is the focus on gathering points. Almost none of the reviewers talked about actually learning skills or concepts, but discussed working through the program as a matter of generating the right answer in order to earn more points. Learning? Who cares-- personalized [sic] algorithm-selected mass-custom worksheet drill is about repeating the steps, jumping through the hoops, pressing the lever to get a piece of cheese. If you think a rat that has been living in a Skinner Box for months is no a well-educated rat, then using a program like this will make sense to you.

Of course, none of this appears in the happy, shiny world if IXL marketing, and if the person making the purchase decision makes no attempt to find out how the program actually works, or how people who have actually used it (that weren't selected by IXL's marketing department) feel about it, then it's more bad news for the people who actually have to use it.

This is how bad personalized [sic] learning via algorithm-selected mass-custom worksheets gets. It's a terrible way to educate actual live human beings.

Selling Choice

Selling charter and choice policy has always been a challenge.

Some challenges have been in place from the beginning. Charters are education-flavored businesses, but that's not an easy sale, so charter-choice fans have been adamant that charters are public schools. They aren't, but it's far more marketable for charters to push themselves as an extension to the public school system than a replacement for it. And by calling themselves "public schools," they can imply that they offer certain qualities and guarantees (open to all students, committed to stay open, staffed by qualified teachers, following established professional practices, etc) without having to explicitly commit to those qualities.

This has not been a haphazard process. These are businesses, and they use the same sort of market research any business would use. Back in 2013, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools hired the Glover Park Group, DC PR consultants, to help them with messaging. The result was a helpful handbook that is filled with useful advice like don't say "consumers," say "families." They also suggested stressing that charters get better results for less money, but that pig will no longer fly.

Charter marketing has been a bit of a moving target; like Common Core nd other reformy greatest hits, familiarity has not bred support. Giving public tax dollars to charter-based fraudsters and scam artists who are unable to deliver on promises of educational awesomeness has been hard on the brand.

Vouchers have also been a tough sell. While charter laws have flourished, attempts to pass voucher laws have almost always failed. 

But Betsy DeVos is in the Big Seat, and she loves vouchers, so it seems time for voucher fans to move again. And that includes hiring yet another conaulting firm-- this time, Beck Research-- to help them figure out a message.

The research was commissioned by American Federation For Children, the old DeVos choice advocacy group, and the memo was issued just last week. What did they find?

Much would seem to be supportive  Most folks like the general concept of school choice. People also like the idea of giving all students access to good private schools, and they're particularly supportive of providing such voucher opportunities to poor students and students with special needs. Many respondents also agreed that "we need to make major changes to the ways that public schools are run." But there are two problems here for voucher fans.

First, what people support in voucher policy is not what voucher fans are prepared to offer. Voucher programs don't offer nearly enough money for families to send their children to top private schools-- assuming those schools are even interested in accepting their child in the first place. Private schools are not flinging wide their doors to enroll students that offer any sort of expensive challenge (or they may discriminate for other reasons), and while voucher advocates can brand themselves champions of choice till the cows come home, the fact remains that it is the schools that get to choose-- not the parents. And while folks from many subgroups (minorities, millennials, rural folks) say yes to major changes in public schools, the only major change to come from vouchers would be public schools that are more strapped for resources. Meanwhile, the voucher schools are accountable to nobody-- if you think they need changes, you are welcome to just walk out the door. Shut your mouth and vote with your feet.

Second, Beck discovered that all of this support is tied to Things Not Called Vouchers. Support fro "school vouchers" was about 50-50-- the weakest support of any of the school choice proposals. And this is all with relatively favorable phrasing-- when the AFT asked how folks felt about "shifting funding away from regular public schools in order to fund charter schools and private school vouchers" support was weak.

So let the re-branding begin. Education Savings Accounts, Scholarship Tax Credits, even Virtual Learning draw more support. Public tax dollars are used to send some students to private schools. They are vouchers by other names, but those other names make all the difference.

So watch this week as School Choice Week celebrates the many ways that operators of private education-flavored businesses can get their hands on public tax dollars without having to account for them, without having to account for the quality or type of education they provide, and without having to account for which students they refuse to serve. It's a sales job, and like any other sales job, it's pushed with carefully chosen language recommended by well-paid messaging specialists.

AZ: How Privatizing Damages Schools

It can be hard to connect the dots between charter/voucher movement and damage to public education, but here's a video that does a pretty good job in under two and a half minutes. The speaker is the head of the Arizona School Board Association. She's also a retired Air Force Colonel, and she's seen how this business of outsourcing critical support to businesses works out in that setting. Take a look.


Linda Lyon from S4E Media on Vimeo.

We start with some fundamental problems, like the poverty-based inequity already in place by the time students get to school. Private companies promise to fix that, but they can't-- instead they siphon resources from public schools and turn the charge "public schools can't handle the problem" into a self-fulfilling prophecy, in turn creating the widespread morale issue that are chewing away at the teacher supply line. And what is true for Arizona is true for every other state.

I particularly like this line-- as Lyon encourages her audience to get involved in local politics (even-- gasp-- running for school board) she says this:

When we blame government for its problems, we're really blaming ourselves.

Maybe it's because I just got home from the Women's March in Pittsburgh, but that line resonates for me. It is necessary to act.

We're all going to see lots of noise and PR in the next seven days for National School Choice Week, much of it slickly polished PR 9and most of it paid for with tax dollars that were meant to educate children). As all that self-congratulatory puffery comes rolling out, it's good to remember Lyon's final point-- businesses, whether defense contractors, charter management groups, or ed tech enterprises are not responsible to the children or the troops; ultimately, they are responsible only to their shareholders.

That doesn't make them evil, but it does make them lousy people to entrust with the care, safety and education of valuable human beings.

ICYMI: Women's March Weekend Edition (1/21)

We're headed to Pittsburgh today, but here's some reading for you from this week.

Economists Still Think Economics Is the Best

This is an old article, and it's not about education, but I find it helpful in understanding the mindset of all those economists who think they're education experts.

The College Board Monster and Why It's Time To Slay the Dragon

From Long Island, a great op-ed calling for the end of the SAT-shilling monster

An Insider's Take on Assessment

The Chronicle of Higher Ed is talking about college assessments here, but K-12 folks will recognize all the huge problems laid  out here.

Florida's Education Reforms: A Warning, Not a Model

One more look at how Florida is not the land of reformy awesomeness its fans claim.

Stop Dismantling of NH Public Schools

New Hampshire legislator's plea to fellow legislators to stop plans for privatizing Granite State schools

Public School Administrator Runs a Side School Choice Consulting Business

Sarah Lahm illuminates a fairly stunning example of choice-related corruption

Elephant in the Room: It's the Tech Takeover, not the Common Core

Nancy Bailey makes the case that it's past time to switch our thinking about what the big threat really is

The GOPs Biggest Charter School Experiment Just Imploded

Ohio's ECOT was one of the first big cyber charters and just plain charters to hit the market/ Mother Jones has a fascinating and thoroughly researched look at how this massive scam bilked the taxpayers for so long. Your must-read of the week.

NCTQ Worries About the Movement

Kate Walsh (National Council on Teacher Quality) has created a small stir over the past couple of days for daring to question the reformster movement's new level of self-correction.

In "Has the Education Movement Lost Its Way" Walsh says that the aftermath of fall conference season left a bad taste in her mouth.

I'm struggling with the seismic shift in tone at these conferences, where education advocates traditionally assembled to give each other a pep talk. In a few short years, we've gone from thinking we were right about everything—granted, that was kind of obnoxious—to adopting a rather pathetic and unattractive lament, professing just how wrong we've been about everything. I guess I prefer smug to self-flagellation. 

I wanted a laser, and if I'm going to have a laser, let's put it on a shark

Boy, I wish I were privy to a bit more of that self-flagellation. Because, no, the self-important always-right certainty wasn't kind of obnoxious. It was extremely obnoxious. In fact, it included a lot of teacher flagellation and school flagellation and in many cases, flagellation that ended careers and cut schools off at the knees.

And maybe it is unattractive to lament just how wrong you've been about things, but damn-- you were wrong about a lot of things. Not only wrong, but wrong in the face of a whole of experts in the education field who repeatedly tried to tell you that you were wrong.

You were wrong about using a single narrow poorly-written Big Standardized Test to gather reliable data about student learning, teacher effectiveness and school quality. You were wrong about the whole idea of identifying "bad" schools and turning them around. You were wrong to treat teachers as the enemies instead of partners and frontline troops in the work to make deliver quality education.

Many advocates appear to be abandoning our once shared convictions about what it takes to lift children out of poverty, the very wellspring of the movement's power and mass appeal. For years, we had stuck hard and fast to a sensible, winnable, and research-based strategy: Improve student learning. Teach children to read. That is how we tackle society's inequities.

Oh, wait. Now I think I know what she's talking about, at least in part. Robert Pondiscio got himself in all sorts of reformy hot water almost two years ago for suggesting that the social justice and equity side of the reformster movement was pushing out the free market conservative wing. This kicked off all sorts of debate in the reformy world. Walsh makes reference, obliquely, to the notion that more reformy panels included black folks coming to yell at the white folks for not taking a broader, social justice view.

She has a problem, of course, in that reform has had a while to have things its own way, and it hasn't demonstrated any ability to teach more children to read or improve student learning. At best it has shown a skill for separating better student learners from their less able neighbors. But improving learning? Not so much. And because we have such a lousy measure of student achievement in place, what reformsters are left arguing is that if a student gets good scores on the preferred BS Test of her state, that student will be more happy and successful in life. That is a hard premise to sell. It's silly on its face, and there's no evidence to back it up.

Walsh does not agree with me on this.

It's a sure way to lose an audience these days to remind them that tests have merit, not just for accountability purposes, not just because they measure numeracy and literacy, but because they are highly predictive of the quality of a child's future. (Thank you Raj Chetty and other academic purists.) A few short years ago, reminding an audience of this connection was a rallying cry. Now our eyes avert, we squirm in our seats, and feel the sudden need for another cup of hotel coffee. 

Well, tests don't have merit. They aren't good for accountability, and they don't measure numeracy and literacy, and they are not predictive of a child's future. Also, Raj Chetty has been repeatedly debunked, his methods iffy and his ultimate results one more example of confusing correlation with causation. But Walsh is feeling frustrated:

By many measures, children's academic outcomes have improved—particularly in the charters which this movement created—but the consensus is that progress has either not been fast enough or it's not even legit. If we agree to expand our role to also tackle the social, economic, racial, and political contexts of students' lives, we'll surely be more successful...right?

There is nothing wrong with any of these goals. They're all good—but their collective impact leaves me limp and rudderless, rather than inspired. This job was hard enough. 

But there's very little charter success that isn't explained by techniques we could use in public schools (longer day, more resources, smaller classes) or by techniques that turn their back on the mission of public education (charters that only take the few students who are a "good fit"). Meanwhile, too many charters are demonstrating just how badly the charter system can be abused by con artists, frauds, and self-dealing money-grubbers (eg ECOT, today).

As for expanding the educational mission to include a hundred other issues...? On the one hand, I understand her reaction to the large set of goals. On the other hand, I understand it because that's what every public school teacher is asked to do every day of every year for as long as I've been working at this. And while some of these issues are handed to us in a formal way by one program or another ("Hey, here's a thing that we need to get out to every child, so let's have teachers do it") we also end up handling them because you cannot teach part of a child. You cannot pluck the "learning to read" part of the child out and away from everything else and just address it in isolation. Tiny humans do not work that way. Certainly there are attempts to do so-- what is a No Excuses school except a school that demands that young humans leave all the rest of their lives and selves outside the schoolhouse door. But mostly that trick doesn't work.

Achieving a complex, ambitious goal—like providing all children in this nation with a strong education—requires laser focus, determination, abundant resources, an ability to measure progress, exceptional expertise, and a strong research basis. The movement had each of these elements and still does (for the most part). 

No, it doesn't.  It has never had laser focus because it has always been a loose alliance of people with very different goals (free market education, justice and equity, chance for my company to make a buck, application of techno-enineering to a social problem, hey we could gather all the data with this stuff, etc). Determination-- yeah, I'll give you that one. Abundant resources? Well, you've had wealthy backers, but you've had real trouble getting and keeping solid human resources, and for all your talk about the money wasted in public schools, you keep discovering that running a school with all the programs you'd really like to have is hella expensive. Ability to measure progress? This is the one I find tiring, but I'll say it as many times as I have to-- you don't have that. You don't. You just don't. The BS Tests do not measure what you think they measure. They don't measure math and science achievement. They don't measure teacher effectiveness. They don't measure how well a school works. And they certainly don't measure the full breadth and depth of a students education beyond those two subjects, nor do they predict the child's future success. Exceptional expertise? Mostly, no. Mostly reformsters are a collection of people who may be experts in their own field but who are education amateurs. And two years as a TFAer don't change that. For most of the reform movement, they have worn their amateur status proudly (David Coleman bragged about it openly) and resolutely refused to listen to those of us who have devoted our lives to the work. They've also resolutely avoided listening to the people in the communities they were going to fix (which is part of the reason that some folks started showing up to yell at you on various panels).

There are people within the reformster world who have some real expertise. And there are many who are beginning to recognize that listening wold be useful, and that maybe not all their opponents are evil dopes. That's a good thing. But reformsters have mostly been unwilling to examine any of their premises (The tests are great. Competition works. Etc) and so they keep building shaky structures on the same bad foundations. 

While not shying away from our many imperfections, while recognizing that schools do not function in isolation, we can not and should not turn our back on what gave rise to this movement.

By all means-- don't turn your back on it. Take a good hard look at it. And then ask yourself if perhaps some of it was mistaken, or if some of your allies are correct to criticize. Consider if some of your allies had, in fact, vastly different aims from your own. You were all together when the tip of the spear penetrated the soft underbelly of American education, but some of you expected reform to lead to the invisible hand steering education and some of you expected it to lead to broad social programs for the poor and some of you expected it to lead to openings for profitable entrepreneurship. Some of you expected it to revitalize public education, and some of you expected it to destroy public education entirely. Some of you sincerely wanted social justice to be part of the movement, and some of you just wanted to use that part of the movement as protective cover for a Democratic administration-- cover that you no longer need.

In other words, you can't reunite the reform movement behind your laser-like goals, because you never had laser-like goals in the first place.

ME: Hope, Grit and Corporate Baloney

KnowledgeWorks is an uber-reformy Ohio outfit that is ready and waiting to jump on the competency-based education wagon train. Maine's RSU2 is a consolidated school district that has partnered up with the Nelie Mae Foundation, a super-reformy pusher of personalized [sic] learning, to set itself up as an exemplar reformster district.

"You have got to be kidding me..."

When these two cross paths, something special happens. I could talk about the various programs that RSU2 is implementing, and about the many unhealthy inroads that algorithm-centered mass-produced custom learning is making in Maine, but for the moment I'll just refer you to Save Maine Schools. Because what I really want to talk about is this explosion of corporate-style whole-beef-baloney verbage that has exploded at the intersection of RSU2 and KnowledgeWorks.

I used to work summers in the private sector, reading and fielding promotional materials for various corporate leadership development consultant seminars. And I have to tell you, this is prime stuff.

"Sustaining the Vision in a Personalized, Competency-Based System" is by Robin Kanaan, Director of Teaching and Learning for the KnowledgeWorks Foundation. She's been with the foundation for a decade, and she has really mastered the language is short, and almost no part of it is in plain English.

The first sentence is not so bad:

Fifty miles north of Portland, Maine, superintendent of RSU2 Bill Zima is working with his admin team during their weekly meeting.

But then things start to go downhill

 “Remember our purpose is to cultivate hope in all learners,” Bill says. “All of our efforts are towards that vision, and if they are not, then we are not in alignment.”

Uh-oh. Learners? Cultivate hope? Okay, cultivating hope might be good, but "not in alignment" with what, exactly?

Citing the work of author Shane Lopez in his 2013 book, Making Hope Happen, RSU2 has brought hope to the forefront of their district vision. They have defined hope as the belief that the future will be better than the present, and that we have the power to make it so. Their vision also recognizes that there are many paths to the future and none of those paths are free of obstacles.

In the corporate-speak world of language, there's a special division for the use of purple prose to elevate obvious, even banal, observations. This is primo work.

But then we get into the weird attempt to turn "hope" into a bit of personalized CBE  tomfoolery:

They also determined the core competencies of hope:

• goals
• agency
• pathways

They are hard at work developing strategies in their schools and their learning community to cultivate hope in all learners.  According to Zima, “when we reach our goals by overcoming the obstacles on our chosen pathways, our perceived ability to shape our lives, our agency, increases. Hope is a strategy and it can be measured.”

So hope turns out to be built out of grit, and if you find obstacles that are too big for you, that's because you don't have what it takes to be a first class hoper. But it's that last line that really grabs me-- hope is a strategy, not a feeling or emotional state, and certainly not a thing with feathers that perches on the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. Damn Emily Dickenson lived down in Massachusetts anyway. What did she know.

And it can be measured! Measured!! "Pat, eat a good breakfast this morning so you're all ready for your hope assessments today!" "Mrs. Gillwitty, your learner Chris has been doing great work in math and science, but we are a little concerned about Chris's hope index scores."

Kanaan is not going to tell us how that magical unicorn of a measurement is going to be made, because she is about to unleash a paragraph of corporate baloney-speak poetry. Set your translation software to "stun," boys and girls...

Having a district vision is one thing, but how it is operationalized is what really leads to success. With federal and state mandates, local context and five separate communities making up the school district, keeping the arrows aligned in RSU2 is a constant focus for the district. The team is transparent in their continuous improvement efforts around alignment: workshop models for literacy and mathematics instruction; applied learning; a guaranteed and viable curriculum with learning progressions anchored by learning targets; scoring guides and a taxonomy; learner-centered practices; and a relentless commitment to meeting the needs of each learner are all drivers of hope in the district.


Yes, I'm sure we've all had long conversations about operationalizing our vision, and keeping those arrows aligned. And if you're worried that those words don't seem to mean much of anything, then you're undoubtedly comforted to know that the "team is transparent in their continuous improvement efforts around alignment." Workshop models! Applied learning (as opposed to, I don't know, unapplied learning?). Guaranteed and viable curriculum! Really? Guaranteed to what? And what do I get if it doesn't deliver-- do I get my learner's childhood back? Scoring guides and a taxonomy! You're going to classify my learner by biological classification (my spouse and I are pretty sure our learner is classified as homo sapien)? Or you're going to set up your own classification system based on....? Relentless commitment to meeting the needs or each learner? Well, that sounds good, because my learner needs a bath and a bedtime story tonight and I have to work a late shift-- can you come over by seven o'clock? Or will your commitment be relenting earlier in the day?

And these are all "drivers of hope." Drive how, exactly? Can you operationalize a taxonomy of relentless drivers so that I can guaranteed some viable continuous improvement of my learner's hope index with all arrows aligned with the drivers, relentlessly?

Well, after that resounding crescendo of Schoenbergian word salad, all that's needed is a punchy finish--

While the challenges are many, the rewards abound when learners and teachers channel passions, interests and talents into the work.

Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. What does that sentence have to do with the rest of this article? Nothing, really, but people always like it when you throw in references to passion and learners and talents. What are the challenges? Who knows. What will the rewards be? Not clear on that, either, but they will be abounding all over the place.

I don't get it. Do people who write this kind of stuff just kind of giggle to themselves the whole time, knowing that it's nearly self-satirical argle bargle? Or are they so sunk into this stylistic cesspool that they actually think they are writing clear, communicative prose? Or have they fallen into that saddest of writing dead ends-- the belief that good writing should puff up and obscure, rather than trim and illuminate? Who do they imagine their audience might be? This is par for the course for the corporate reformsters of KnowledgeWorks, but it's sad, bad news when people who are supposed to be professional educators start talking like this, because this language can only indicate brutal cynicism or faulty thinking. Neither is a good sign for the schools of Maine.

In the meantime, let me leave you with this:

Hope is the thing with feathers  
That perches in the soul,  
And sings the tune without the words,  
And never stops at all,  
   
And sweetest in the gale is heard;          
And sore must be the storm  
That could abash the little bird  
That kept so many warm.  
   
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,  
And on the strangest sea;         
Yet, never, in extremity,  
It asked a crumb of me.