Successful School Reopening Plans Will Have One Thing In Common

Plenty of folks have thoughts about the conditions under which schools should be opened. The CDC thinks desks should be six feet apart. The American Enterprise Institute suggests that districts might want to get all staff members over fifty-five to take early retirement. Senator Bill Cassidy has called for aggressive testing and contact tracing.

Over the next few months, we’ll see many plans floated for opening schools in the fall. The successful ones will have one thing in common.

They will be written—or at least co-written—by teachers.

Reopening schools will be the ultimate exercise in devil-concealing detail work. A recommendation like “put all student desks at least six feet apart” is easy to make, but it will take the people who actually know the configurations of rooms in the building to turn it into a workable plan

The plans will hinge on nitty-gritty details, not sweeping policy ideas. In a district with few students who walk to school, how do you get them to the building without stuffing them into a means of transportation? If you are, as some suggest, checking temperatures as they enter the building, how do you do it without creating a crowd outside? Where are the bottlenecks in your building, and how might scheduling help reduce them? If one source of bottlenecks is, in fact, the doorway into each classroom, how do you manage that traffic issue?

How will students move from class to class? How does an elementary teacher move a line of fifteen kids, all six feet apart, through the halls? In a high school, how do you dismiss different classes at different times without a crowd forming somewhere? The many detail question are all very specific to location, to student bodies, to staff.

What sorts of supplemental services will be needed, and which students are most likely to need them? How likely are local families to cooperate with health and safety measures, and how do you build trust with the community (some of those angry protestors you see on the news have children)? What physical objects pose a transfer threat (lab equipment, a single set of textbooks used by multiple classes, etc). These are not questions that anybody on the state or federal level can answer. 

There are issues that haven’t been fully thought through. AEI and Senator Cassidy have both, in their own way, considered the exposure of teachers to asymptomatic student carriers of the virus, and while that’s an important consideration, the transfer from student to student also seems concerning. Pat might pass the virus to the teacher, but Pat might also pass it to Chris, who will then take it home. 

Teachers can also point out that once you solve the policy and physical plant issues, you still have to face the human issues. You must somehow convince carefree seven-year-olds and rebellious sixteen-year-olds to go an entire day, every day, without hugging, kissing or contact playing with their friends. You must somehow create a school culture in which Rule #1 is to never be close enough to another person to touch them. Ask a teacher how difficult that will be, no matter how few students you allow in the building at a time.

Crisis schooling at home is not working for too many families, and reopening schools will present some nearly-insurmountable obstacles. It is time for policy makers, ed tech gurus, and bureaucrats to hand the problem over to the actual education experts in this country—public school teachers and administrators.

Originally posted at Forbes.com  

Toxic Ideas

Here are two views of the word that are loose in this country:

The way the world works is (or is supposed to be) that you get what you deserve. Make bad choices? You get bad consequences. Your success or failure is completely up to you-- it's the result of the choices that you make. 

And this:

It's not about high ideals or honor or empathy or care for your fellow human. It's about power, and the people who do (or don't) have the balls to take it and use it. 

The first is more familiar, because the myth of the strong, rugged individual who makes it on his own and pulls himself up by his own bootstraps (which he carved out of a tree trunk with his bare hands) is an American favorite. It is every person who clutched their pearls when Obama dared to suggest that they "didn't build that" by themselves. It is every opponent of the social safety net believing that people who are poor are poor because it's their own damn fault. (Heck, I know people who believe that if someone is sick--any kind of sick--has only themselves to blame.) "Cut all welfare," they say, "and Those People will go get jobs and support themselves. They're just taking advantage."

Even the working poor are their own fault. If that job doesn't pay enough to live on, then get a different job. Never mind what the pandemic has made clear-- that there are certain jobs that we absolutely need and expect someone to do, but we expect those people to be poor.

The second is less familiar to us as a society, though plenty of our high level officials certainly get it. It has certainly been a guiding principle of Donald Trump's life. It doesn't matter what the norms say or the rules say or any supposed virtues dictate-- the only boundaries are what you want to do and what someone can make you do.

Combine the two, and you achieve maximum ugliness-- if you are powerless in this world, it's because you deserve to be, because you weren't strong enough to gather any power for yourself.

For people who believe these things, violations are the worst. You can see it someone like Betsy DeVos who is so very disturbed that Those People might use loan forgiveness rules to get "free money" aka "money they don't deserve to have." It's in the anger of those conservatives who rail against "takers," who are, again, people who wouldn't be poor if they didn't deserve to be poor, so letting them take things is a crime against God and nature. Taking power and money that you don't deserve, or giving power and money to the undeserving-- that's far more alarming than the suffering or hunger or death by disease of the poor. It's in a President who in the midst of pandemic and poverty and unemployment and murder and a pain so great that it spills into the street--that President who in that moment does not call for unity or empathy, but demands that governors call out the big guns, set loose the dogs, and use raw power to put Those People back in their place.  Or, as it now turns out, to sic the US military on US citizens in an attempt to install Martial Law Lite.

It takes willful ignorance to believe these things-- well, willful ignorance and a failure of human empathy. The racist version of this worldview includes the notion that there was slavery, then the Civil War, and that basically reset America and from that point on, it was a totally level playing field. It requires ignorance of things like red-lining and other real estate ricks that blocked Black families from building wealth in the same way that white families could. Or things so simple that white folks don't even think about, like being able to take an overnight trip without wondering if you can find a place to stay. And jobs. And pay. And the accumulation of social capital that occurs over generations in white families so that each new generation has a leg up before they are even potty trained. Or the systemic racism of the education system, from excessive discipline through denial of access to accelerated courses. There is just so much you have to blind yourself to in order to support the notion that all Black folks have just as much chance to get ahead as all white folks.

Power worship should be uniquely un-American; Thomas Jefferson enshrined the principle that power comes from the consent of the governed. Which we promptly forgot as we set about extending power by brute force. Jefferson, hypocritical prick that he was, could still have predicted our current mess. Stomp on people enough, and eventually they will kick back, and once you've passed a tipping point, you won't be able to stomp them hard enough to stop them.

Teachers need to understand all of this so that they don't let these toxic worldviews into their classrooms. Hint: if you think that all your students could be top achievers and the only reason some aren't is because they're too lazy or too irresponsible or "you know how Those People are," you are a problem-- not just in your school but in your world.

White students need to be taught about all of this so that they don't grow up to be the problem, and so that students of color can grow up claiming the power and history that is rightfully theirs. The roots of racism run deep in ignorance, and if the goal of education is to help students be more fully themselves and find how to be fully human in the world, then this is an ignorance that must be broken down. The anti-racist materials, the books, the readings-- they're all out there. Students need to make sense of the mess they're living through today, and they need preparation for the inevitable messes of tomorrow.

FL: Philanthropy Backs Testing

Has there ever been a time when it was more obvious that the Big Standardized Test is waste of time and money? Do you hear anybody out on the street over the last week declaring, "What we need is some standardized testing to show systemic racism, because otherwise, how will we know?" But education amateurs still believe in testing's magic power, and nowhere is the Cult of Testing more firmly entrenched than in Florida.

So here comes Bill Hoffman in the Tampa Bay Times to explain "Why we still need standardized testing."

This guy.

Who is this guy? Hoffman is the head honcho of the Florida Philanthropic Network, and, of course, has no actual background in education. He graduated from the University of South Florida in 1976 with a bachelors in Marine Biology, then got himself a Master in the same. He rose through the ranks at Associated Marine Institutes, Inc, a "$65M international non-profit education and juvenile justice organization." In 2002 he landed in the Hillsborough Education Foundation, another one of those business-and-philanthropy self-appointed school oversight groups. He was there until 2011, and if Hillsborough rings a bell, that may because it was the site of one of the Gates Foundation experiments in teacher evaluation (from which Gates ultimately pulled out, leaving his tab unpaid and the district with issues). Hillsborough entered that Gates adventure in 2009.

Hoffman moved on to the National School Foundation Association, "the industry's primary thought leader, convener, and advocate." By "industry" they apparently mean the "education foundation" industry. NSFA started a Education Foundation Leader Certification Program at National University, and Hoffman teaches a couple of courses part time for that. Also in 2011 he set up Bill Hoffman and Associates, LLC, a consulting firm, because of course he did. They offer "national level independent sector expertise" in "educational engagement strategies," among other organization things.

The Florida Philanthropic Network that Hoffman CEOs has an "education affinity group," which includes an assortment of Florida community foundations, plus, of course, the Gates foundation, Gulf Power Company, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo. Gates also funds the organization, along with the Helios Education Foundation, which is all about getting students ready for college in Arizona and Florida, and there's more to them and, as usual, we could just follow these strings all day. But let's get back to Bill Hoffman and his op-ed.

Hoffman opens by saying, yes, canceling the BS Test was the right call this year, and everybody deserves kudos for dealing with the pandemic mess this year, especially parents of young children.

But what he really wants to talk about is why we shouldn't dump testing entirely. Not all of his arguments are exactly cogent:

While in the current situation it is not appropriate to expect the same level of preparation or performance on year-end testing, that doesn’t diminish testing’s value. For those who say we did without testing in this situation so we don’t need to have tests in the future, I’d point to the fact that we are doing without a lot of societal “institutions” (such as going to restaurants, sporting events, concerts, parks, etc.). That doesn’t mean we should eliminate them in the future.

First of all, the disruption of the year absolutely reduced the test's value-- reduced it all the way to zero, which is why it was canceled. Second, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. Restaurants are going to open, so we should start testing again? A standardized test is just like a concert?

The education funders of the Florida Philanthropic Network have held as one of their key tenets (and areas of support) assuring that our students going through the Florida K-12 system are prepared to be successful in their post-secondary education and careers. There are many moving parts to make this happen: rigorous and challenging standards, excellent teaching, supportive administrators, engaged parents, and grade-appropriate curricular materials to name a few of the most critical. But even with all these pieces in place there is no assurance students are growing academically. How can you tell if you don’t measure it?

The thing is-- there's no evidence that the BS Tests measure any of this. There isn't an iota of evidence that raising your test score raises your prospects in life. And while I understand the desire for some concrete measure of how students are advancing, that's just not how humaning works. Do you want to know if a person is becoming more responsible? Do you want to know if your partner loves you more today than yesterday? You can create proxies for the things you want to measure, but you cannot directly measure what is going on in a human heart and mind. Your proxies will always be imperfect, and sometimes they will be wildly imperfect. A standardized reading and math test as a proxy for intellectual and personal growth is hopelessly, wildly, completely imperfect.

Research done by TNTP, the New York-based The New Teacher Project, that was released as the report, “The Opportunity Myth” shows that students live up to the expectations set for them by their teachers.

Nope. "The Opportunity Myth" barely qualifies as research, and what it pretends to prove is a whole bunch of other things. But you're right-- teacher expectations matter, which is why it's important that teachers hold expectations that are higher and more valuable than "get a good score on this single standardized test."

But Hoffman has fully signed on for the expectation baloney train, claiming that students who are, for instance, reading below grade level are doing so because their teachers aren't expecting more. I wonder if, in Hoffman's work career, he ever fired someone. If so, why didn't he just expect harder for that person, so they would do better work? And if he would say that firing underperformers is how one maintains high expectations in a workplace, I would remind him that teachers cannot fire students.

Hoffman thinks that these low expectations are why students struggle when they get to college. This talking point, a golden oldie, always puzzles me. If students are struggling when they get to college, can't the college professors get them past it by having high expectations? Why is the assumption that college students come with limitations that professors must work with and acknowledge, but from K-12 teachers should just expect harder and thereby magically erase any struggles or limitations that those students work with.

Look. Expectations are powerful and hugely important in a classroom. One of the trickiest arts of teaching is to calibrate expectations with the strengths and weaknesses of the individual students-- otherwise you reap either boredom or frustration. The best teachers have hundreds of "expectation" tools in their kit, and you never stop learning more about how to know which one to use with which student under which circumstances.

But the Big Standardized Test is a lousy tool for raising and maintaining expectations-- senseless; designed with the test manufacturers and data gurus in mind, not students or teachers; narrow; poorly written; and with its validity still unproven.

Hoffman has one last line that is, in its way, incisive:

[W]e won’t know they’re performing unless there are clear and challenging standards coupled with a standard means to measure the students’ growth.

But that's the challenge. Knowledge is not a performance. Learning is not a performance. Understanding is not a performance. Education is not a performance. And when you demand that someone perform for you in order to "prove" that they are educated, you run the risk of teaching them to perform rather than to know, to fake it rather than to make it. You invoke Campbell's Law. You get junk.

Hoffman's desire to have students learn at their best possible level is totally on point. But like too many education amateurs, he assumes that a standardized test is a magical device that can do all the things he dreams of, instead of recognizing it as a product that is being sold with neither guarantee nor proof of quality.

ICYMI: Hellacious Week Edition (5/31)

Well, this has been a bunch of big ugly crap, on top of the One Damn Thing After Another sundae that is 2020. Let's read.

All About the Mask

Nancy Flanagan looks at the politics and symbolism of the ongoing mask wars.

Chalkbeat Discovers Teachers on Front Lines

Chalkbeat lets a brand new charter leader lay out some obvious obviousness about teachers and pandemic response. NYC Educator breaks it down and provides a good response.

Distance Learning? Even my students will tell you that's not the future

The LA Times, via Yahoo, offers bad news for those banking on distance learning.

Vouchers hurt poor kids

The 10th Period blog responds to a pro-reform editorial about the Ohio EdChoice lawsuit. Some good response here to the classic "but vouchers help the poor kids" argument.

Good News and Bad News from Harrisburg

Steven Singer reports on financial impacts on PA schools-- and bonuses for the private edubiz guys.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Audrey Watters speaks to the impulse to deal with the fall's crisis with more automation and surveillance.

Betsy DeVos Ignores Congress

Jan Resseger takes a big, deep look at DeVos's plan to use relief money to help fuel her own pet causes.

Giving private schools federal emergency funds slated for low-income students will shortchange at-risk kids

Derek Black is at the Conversation, laying out how the DeVos plan will cut funding true at-need students in US schools.

Lawsuit Over AP Botch No Publicity Stunt  

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at the Fairtest lawsuit over the complete clusterf#@! that was the College Board's online AP test

Annie Tan: My First Year Disaster With TFA  

Schneider again, interviewing Annie Tan about her less-than-awesome experience with Teach for America.

I Just Don't Think Remote Learning Works

Susan Sciara, a special ed teacher, writes for Hechinger Report about the failure of the remote learning adventure.

Private Interests Are Wrongly Shaping Education Policy in Ohio  

An op-ed at cleveland.com looks at Ohio's messed-up history with privatization, bad policy, and business people in the driver's seat.

Teaching And The Social Contract (TL;DR)

I didn't write anything yesterday, which is an unusual day for me, but I've just been trying to take it all in. I have family in Seattle, friends in Pittsburgh. There's a lot of mess out there tonight.

It's nothing new for our country, but it's never been laid out so starkly. The woman in Central Park deliberately weaponizing her status as a white woman to, at best, put a Black man in his place and, at worst, to try to harm him for daring to challenge her right to break the rules. The armed white guys threatening duly elected lawmakers with harm and worse, because masks make them sad; met by well-disciplined law enforcement who do everything to avoid escalating the situation (reminiscent of the Bundy family's armed attack on a US facility to protect their right to steal US resources-- nobody lost their cool there, either). A peaceful protest of the gazillionth unjust death of a Black man escalated.

One of the most useful lenses I've found in the past few days is this one, from Trevor Noah



In it, he talks about the social contract, the various sorts of deals we make as a society that keeps the society working. We pretend sometimes that it's people exercising authority, like police officers or school teachers, who keep the place working, but in the absence of some kind of contract, even if it's unspoken and unexplained, there aren't enough authority figures on the planet to keep things from falling apart--it's the contract that makes the center hold.

On some level, we understand this. I'm not the only teacher who spent his first year (or two) grappling with the knowledge that if every student in my classroom stood up, threw their books down, and said, "Screw this, I'm walking out," I would be helpless to do a thing. But both the school and I enter a sort of contract. In the later half of my career, I got in the habit of making my side more explicit. "I promise, " I would tell them, "that I will never knowingly waste your time. I promise that I will demand that everybody in this room be treated with respect and like a functioning adult." And also, "Let me start by admitting that we have been lying to you for years. Teachers tell you that you have to do this or you have to do that, and you and I both know that you don't have to do anything just because I ask you to do it."

When Jefferson wrote about government needing "the consent of the governed," he was getting at the same point. Governments-- really, anything wielding authority-- offer some kind of deal. Sometimes the deal that they offer is pretty brutal-- "Do as we ask, and we'll let you live." The American deal is supposed to be more aspirational-- "Work hard, be responsible, pay your dues, and you will become successful and have a comfortable life." But that deal has never been offered to everyone in this country. And we're in bigger trouble now because the government's side was supposed to be "We will maintain a level playing field and not exercise the power we've been entrusted either to enforce our personal biases or further our personal fortunes." That part of the deal is perhaps the more history-making part of the US experiment, and it's in obvious trouble at the moment. That and the part of the contract that says, "The law will be exercised equally for all citizens regardless of status or bias."

This contract is part of the purpose of public education.

You don't learn about the social contract from your parents, not right away. Your deal with your parents, in all but the most toxic of families, is that they love you no matter what. It's at school where we start learning about the contract; we usually talk about learning socialization or social skills, but we're talking about the conditions of many social contracts. Children learn about the different contracts they can make with peers (some great, some terrible), and they most especially learn about the deal that society, as represented by the teachers and administrators, will make with them.

They learn that it's complicated, that the institution will make a contract, and each different individual teacher will also make a contract, and they will all be different.

And this is where teachers and schools can blow it.

Individual teachers may offer a wide range of contracts, and it sucks. "Sorry," we say to some of our students, "but I'm not going to make that deal with you, that deal with all the good stuff, because you are not smart enough or white enough. I don't believe you will show the kind of behavior I require for that contract, so you can't have that one." Pat gets a contract that says Pat can get all the rewards and praise and support; Chris gets the contract that says Chris can get the chance not to be hassled and made miserable on any given day.

One of the best deals a teacher can offer is that you will actually hear and see the student. This is valuable to the student, and critical for the teacher as well, because people absolutely desire to be heard, and if they do not feel heard when they speak, they will keep raising the volume until they can be heard. The answer to pearl-clutching concerns about rioting and "That certainly isn't going to help their cause" is (at least in part) two-fold. First, what would help? Because if you're at the rioting part, that means the bus already drove past a bunch of quieter, calmer options, and you chose to dismiss them. Second, why isn't this also your cause? And here in 2020, you also have to ask-- just who is doing the looting and burning and vandalizing, because many bad actors have become quite sophisticated about using peaceful protest as cover for attempts to sow chaos and delegitimize the real protestors and even, apparently, usher in a new civil war. So racism making even demonstrations against racism worse.

But still--unheard voices will just get louder, even in your classroom. The power differential between teachers and students may lead you to imagine that you can just squelch the loud voices, shout them down, shut them up. That does not work. If you want proof of how poorly it works, go back to looking at the streets that are filled with protestors in America right now.

Because-- and this goes back to what you knew when you first started in the classroom-- you do not have power, not really. What you have is a contract, a deal, and if the folks on the other side come to understand that you do not plan to honor it, that there is no benefit to them in honoring the deal, then they will stop, and all your illusions of power and control are in trouble.

If you, as a teacher, are watching what's going on right now and thinking that the explanation for the riots in Minneapolis and elsewhere is something along the lines of, "Well, that's how Those People are," then you are a problem, not just as a citizen, but as a professional. There's no way that doesn't lead to your belief that some of Those Peoples' children can't really be expected to make the bigger, better deal, and so, instead, you make a deal based on managing their supposed deficits instead of fostering their strengths and potentials.

All of this--- all of this-- is why teaching about racism, about systemic bias and injustice, has to happen all the time and not just in response to the latest outrage. The classroom should not only be where we unpack what just happened, but where we get the tools to see it before and as it unfolds.

I'm grateful to the commentators who offered this framing. It's hard to talk about Big Things like Justice, but a contract is pretty simple. I'm reminded of one of the do-overs of the famous marshmallow experiments in which the adults made a deal, a contract with the children-- show some self-discipline, and you'll get more marshmallows. Then the experimenters showed, through some other actions, that they could not be trusted to honor the contract, and so the children ignored the deal as well.

So look at the deals you're offering in your classroom. What are you offering, and what are you asking for in return, and does that strike you as a reasonable deal? Do all students have a chance to make the same deal? Have you tried to change the deal unilaterally? Have you decided you can ignore it at will and just use raw power to paper over the lapse? And as a teacher, what are you teaching your students about the social contracts they'll deal with as adults?

Who knows what the days ahead hold? Most likely a confusing push of details and debate. But the basic issues-- the racism, the failure of those in power to make a hold up a decent social contract-- will still be hanging in the fall air (right next to the other stupid virus) and teachers should be finding a way to deal.

Having said all that, there's one last important thing that doesn't easily fit in the contract frame. That's the obligation we owe to fellow humans. I suppose we can call it a debt that we owe for the privilege of being alive plus all the other privileges we enjoy, but we have an obligation to be decent and supportive and kind and human to fellow humans, particular those who because of age or race or birth or resources have been denied what we have been given. "I've got mine, Jack," is not a legitimate social contract. We can do better. We have to do better. If people raise their voices in protest, and that fails, either because of the resistance of authorities or the subversion of bad actors, what do you suppose comes next?

Betsy DeVos, the Catholic Church, and Public Tax Dollars

The Trump administration and the Catholic Church have seemed extra tight lately. And an awful lot of it has to do with public education.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan (New York) took the lead in a fun conference call last month in which Trump, along with Betsy DeVos, swapped personal admiration and what is either some quid pro quo or just a shared love for the notion of shredding public education and replacing it with private religious schools.

Soon after, the cardinal hosted DeVos on his SiriusXM show, where this exchange was reported by Matt Barnum for Chalkbeat:

In a conversation with DeVos on SiriusXM radio, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, suggested that the secretary was trying to “utilize this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done to our kids and the parents who choose to send them to faith-based schools,” including through a new program that encourages states to offer voucher-like grants for parents.

“Am I correct in understanding what your agenda is?” Dolan asks.

“Yes, absolutely,” DeVos responded. “For more than three decades that has been something that I’ve been passionate about. This whole pandemic has brought into clear focus that everyone has been impacted, and we shouldn’t be thinking about students that are in public schools versus private schools.”

None of this is new for the Catholic Church. Google your state's "Catholic Conference school choice" and in most cases you'll be taken to an entire page of school choice advocacy. In Pennsylvania, school choice is on the "hot issues" list, and there are lots of instructions on how to get involved in our state's version of education tax credit scholarships. In Michigan, it turns out that the anti-public ed Mackinac Center and Michigan's Catholic Conference are partners in pushing a state constitutional amendment to promote private school choice. And the US Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote an amicus brief for Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the case that gives SCOTUS a chance to make it totally legally okee dokee to appropriate public tax dollars for private religious schools.

It should come as no surprise that many of the voices speaking up in favor of the latest DeVosian attempt to send public dollars to private schools are related to Catholic schools. After all--where vouchers exist, their beneficiaries are almost entirely Catholic private schools. That's where most of the voucher money goes. So it can't be a surprise that the Catholic Church has been willing to be quite politically active in support of school choice, particularly in the form of vouchers, even to the point of allying themselves with one of the most spectacularly non-Christian Presidents to ever sit in the White House.

The recent reverse Robin Hood stance of DeVos, who is insisting that relief funds should be going to private schools no matter how wealthy their students are, is irksome because it's not like Catholic private schools are Mom and Pop operations with no possible source of income. They're a wing of a very large, very wealthy organization. In this respect, the Catholic Church mirrors the US as a whole-- if fully supporting and financing schools were really all that important to them, they could go ahead and do it. But instead the church would like US taxpayers to help pick up the tab (including all the taxpayers who wouldn't actually be welcome in a Catholic church).

I suppose we'll see how this shakes out. It's one more reminder that when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.

Why shouldn't high stakes testing be abandoned next year?

Testing in the fall? Let's talk about that idea.

Thomas Toch is one of those reformsters who has managed to bounce from job to reformy job. Currently, he's head honcho at FutureEd, an ed reform advocacy group that bills itself as a thinky tank, and there isn't an educational disruption that they haven't tried to make a case for. This spring they have been vocal in trying to protect the future of the Big Standardized Test, which brings us to Toch's appearance yesterday in The Hill.

"Don't abandon standardized testing in schools next year — rethink it," pleads Toch, offering a plate of weak sauce to make his case.

His opening salvo is that students are currently falling behind, and that's not particularly arguable-- crisis schooling has been anywhere from "challenging" to "a freakin' mess." We could (and probably should at some point) have a whole conversation about the use of phrases like "catch up" that imply there is some heaven-set path and some objectively correct speed for students to move along it, and they dasn't fall behind or else... well, something bad will happen, apparently. It's a problematic model for education, but for the moment, yeah, we all get that the usual progress of education is not really happening.

Which brings us to Toch's first thesis--

To catch students up, schools will need to get a handle on exactly how far students have fallen behind, and that means testing.

Nope. That's not what it means, particularly.

Now, at this point, Toch gets one thing absolutely right-- the idea of delivering the 2020 Big Standardized Tests in the fall is a super-awful double-bad idea. "Weeks-long batteries of standardized tests used primarily to rate schools aren't the way to welcome students--and teachers--back from difficult quarantine experiences."

Instead, Toch recommends a battery of "diagnostic measures of reading and math proficiency" so that teachers can figure out where to pick up. Not too many at once, and connected to local curriculum.

This is not an outrageous idea, but it makes me wonder-- what does Toch think teachers do at the beginning of an ordinary school year?

In my experience, what they do is use an array of formal and informal assessments to figure out what, exactly they are working with, to pinpoint what the strengths and weaknesses of those students might be. Seriously-- I did this every fall forever, as did every single teacher I know. Does he imagine that the BS Tests are somehow critical to how teachers deal with their new classes in the fall? Because no-- they're too late to be useful and far too limited in the tiny speck of data they provide. So I guess the response here to Toch is "Thanks for your concern, but the professional educators have this covered."

But his concerns go beyond the fall. In the spring, he wants to get the BS Tests up and running again-- just don't count the results for evaluating schools or teachers. That's not because he's worried about fairness or accuracy, but because he's watching the political angles:

There’s a big political risk in restarting school accountability too quickly. Opponents of standardized testing — led by accountability-averse teachers’ unions and their progressive allies on the left, and conservatives opposed to what they consider an inappropriate federal role in testing on the right — have been waging a half-decade-long campaign to roll back state testing systems.

On my list of reformster tropes I'm bone-tired of reading, you will find the notion that teachers and their unions are opposed to high stakes testing because they are "averse" to accountability. It's wrong, and it's doubly-insulting as it implies that teachers largely suck at their jobs and are weaselly about it. I have never met a teacher "averse" to accountability, but I have met many, many teachers who are "averse" to accountability tools that do a lousy, inaccurate, unfair and just plain bad job of evaluating teachers. But this is the endless refrain of the cult of testing-- folks oppose testing for selfish, craven reasons, and not because the whole high-stakes testing is toxic to real education while failing to do anything that it promises to do.

Toch is rightly concerned that critics see the pandemic pause as a chance to push back high stakes testing even further. This pause has provided a chance for many of us to learn there are certain things we really can do without, and high stakes BS Testing belongs on the list.

But Toch won't rest his case until he offers an old bad analogy for the BS Test that has been given new life by the coronavirus:

Just as widespread coronavirus testing will guide our return to normal life, state testing systems have a valuable role to play in helping leaders map education strategy, track progress and back the nation’s neediest students.

Nope. Not even close. For one thing, coronavirus testing (should it ever get off the ground) is a binary test-- you have the virus or you don't. There's is no educational test that looks for a binary answer (you are either educated, or you aren't). For another, any coronavirus test will have been evaluated to determine that it is a true proxy for what's really being considered-- viral infection. After decades, there is no evidence that the BS Tests are good proxies for any of the things they claim to measure-- student achievement, teacher quality, school quality, student life outcomes.

Toch's final sentence underlines where he really is-- calculating political leverage rather than considering the actual effects of the tests.

But attaching stakes to test results too quickly would play into the hands of accountability opponents at a time when we need smart testing more than ever.

It would also waste precious instructional time, waste resources, and provide meaningless bad data. Look-- if testing really worked, if it really told us all the things that guys like Toch want to claim it does, don't you think teachers would be clamoring for it? If it were an actual valuable tool, don't you think that teachers, struggling with spotty resources against unprecedented challenges, would be hollering, "If I'm going to try to do this, at least find a way to get me those invaluable Big Standardized Test!"

But no-- in the midst of this hard shot to the foundations of public education, a lot of professional educators are taking a hard look at what is really essential, what they really need to get the job done. The Big Standardized Test didn't make the cut. We don't need the "smart testing," especially since it isn't very smart anyway. We just need smart teachers with the resources they need to do the work.